aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: Soup Map – 277 European Soups
aaaaaar's comments
aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings
I'm more leery of manufactured breads that keep forever.
aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: Russia’s Retro Lenin Museum Still Runs on Decades-Old Apple II Computers
"Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration."
aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: How Does Esperanto Sound?
Those are just two Spanish concepts that students spend days learning. Look at a table of contents in a Spanish textbook and count the concepts. Now review an Esperanto textbook. It was designed for fast acquisition. Things that you have to learn in any language - like numbers, verb forms, days of the week, time, spelling, etc - are designed to be as simple as possible.
Take a book like "501 Spanish verbs" and adapt it to Esperanto. The book will shrink down to one page, since all verbs are regular. That page will further shrink down because there are fewer conjugations. All conjugations that do exist are composable - each conjugation dimension can be applied separately. They are even consistent between parts of speech.
How many people, who are making a serious multi-year effrot in learning a foreign language, no how to say "flutter" in that language? It's not unlikely that Esperanto learners will know that word in the month or so (after they learn the word for "fly", and learn how to make diminutives). Through these mechanisms you only need to learn a fraction of vocabulary, since from a root word you can drive many others.
aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: How Does Esperanto Sound?
-phonetic spelling -no exceptions, no irregular word forms -simple grammar, few conjugations -much faster vocab acquisitions due to correlatives
These are all huge advantages. Even if word stems are 100% new, the amount of total memorization required is drastically smaller.
aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment
Planet Money had an episode about "revenue-neutral carbon tax", where all the money collected is returned back to the tax payers, to spend however they want.
The point of this tax is not to raise money, but to change behavior. This, a family that drives to work and school every day will pay more carbon tax, but this will be offset by the tax refund (or lower income tax). And a family that finds ways to reduce their carbon footprint will benefit from the tax refund and able to spend it on other things.
WA state had a carbon tax initiative but the revenues went to environmental efforts, and it failed. I think if it were made revenue-neutral, or heck, even made as an overall tax-cut to please the fiscal conservatives, I think it would pass (although it would face pushback from environmentally minded about not doing enough).
aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: Radiotrophic fungus
aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? (2015)
What is the difference? If they studied it, they now know?
Is it because as an interviewer, you are looking for knowledge by experience, not via book-learning?
aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: Dear Bureaucrat, my job wants me to lie
aaaaaar | 6 years ago | on: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them
aaaaaar | 7 years ago | on: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games
In the annual interactive fiction contest, the judges get 2 hours to evaluate ba game. So many new games aim for that to be the playing time.
From what I remember some old Infocom games like Enchanter (which takes place in the Zork universe) don't take very long to finish (definitely less than a standard $60 video game console video game).
aaaaaar | 7 years ago | on: Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model
I think out of 15 people nobody got more than 1 or 2 right, except for my manager, who somehow got about 8 right. I'm curious how the HN crowd does on this - care to post your scores?
aaaaaar | 7 years ago | on: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games
aaaaaar | 7 years ago | on: Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_%28software%29
Just rip some code out here, change some there, until it looks like a relational database :)
aaaaaar | 7 years ago | on: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing
Is it just the importance and influence by being a senator? Or is there some direct control? Or via a threat to cut funding?