cjohnson318

I dunno, it's not that bad. If you focus on learning the subjunctive through a set of rules, then it becomes very intimidating. If you focus on the fact that you use it to discuss wishes, desires, and opinions, then it's a lot simpler. The command form "uses" subjunctive patterns, because you're expressing a very strong desire that someone f-ing does something right now. If you say, "hey do you want me to go to the store later?" then "go to the store later" is in the subjunctive because I'm clarifying what another person wishes to be done. Describing that in a textbook is hard, but seeing it in the wild isn't that bad because you hear the command form all the time.

I don't know as much about language as you do, but hear me out. You can pretty much sound everything out. The irregular verbs aren't that bad; they're limited to THE highest frequency verbs that you'd expect, e.g., be, go, have, see, say, do, give, etc., and they're all irregular in fairly unsurprising ways, except for caber and andar. After about 20 irregular preterite verbs, there's three irregular imperfect verbs, and five irregular subjunctive verbs. Future and conditional tenses follow a similar pattern, and have about 20 irregulars between them. Compared to French and English, which borrows Germanic AND Latin patterns, that's NOT BAD.

I'm a native English speaker and the article reads very naturally. I've been learning Spanish over the last two plus years, and I'm jealous of how regular and consistent Spanish is compared to English.

TIL playing cards were printed with a blank reverse side that people used for scrap paper, lottery tickets, business cards, birth/death announcements, etc.

I think Rails's big contribution is the idea of convention over configuration. Maybe this my own myopia, but Django feels like Rails, and NextJS also borrows from Rails. I've only managed one Rails project in production, and I had to come up to speed really fast to support it, but I loved it.

Honest question: is uv more reproducible/portable than cramming your Python project into a Docker container? I've used pyenv, pip, venv, and a couple of other things, and they all work fine, at first, in simple scenarios.

Okay, but what did you reasonably expect?

I think this is the thesis:

> By telling the world directly what your community respects, you might induce them to change what they respect, or to join your community.

I think we're all pretty clear what different communities value, by the way those communities communicate, the way they act, and who they vote for as representatives. That's how you directly communicate what your community respects, the sum total of your words and actions, and actions count extra.

The Target brand Good & Gather eggs were $9.49 in Boulder Colorado this week.

Yep.

I read a short historical fantasy novella named The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson. It was very good, and it has interested me in Venice ever since. It's from 1987 but it's very gender-bendery and fun.

These sound like great places to continue reading. I really enjoyed The Ottomans by Marc David Baer. I love that history is so much weirder (and relevant) than fiction. It's easier to connect with people, and understand where they might be coming from, when you understand some history. You can't say that for a lot of sci-fi/fantasy outside of the Snow Crash and The Lord of the Rings.

Oh man, I'm down. I have The Labyrinth of Solitude on my reading list, it's not pre-Columbian, but I think it's a cultural touchstone, and it's a Mexican writer, not some American that knows just enough Spanish.

I read Layered Money, and it talked about the VoC, but I think that's a few decades after the Dutch Revolt. I'll check it out!

If you want a wild story, read about Judah P. Benjamin. He was the descendant of Sephardic Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, he was the first openly Jewish U.S. senator (representing Louisiana), eventually a Confederate Cabinet member, and finally a barrister in England. To top it all off, he was likely gay. To put things into perspective, he was a partner in sugar plantation, a slave owner, and an prominent advocate for slavery. Usually when you hear anything about the man, it's his international resume, not the fact of his slave ownership.

Game of Thrones. I was just making a (bad?) joke about the popular conception of things that happened between Caesar and Napoleon.

Such an excellent book. I get that it's a summary of 2,000 years in one medium sized book, but every single page was new to me.

Anything off of the beaten track of Pharoahs -> Greece -> Rome -> GoT -> WWII is pretty under-appreciated. I've been reading more about Byzantium, the Ottomans, and the Persians and it's been fascinating. We never really scratched the surface of any of that in school.

I learned Spanish at a two year old level by focusing only on the top 24 verbs, in all (major) tenses first. So, ir, ser, estar, tener, haber, hacer, poner, poder, venir, ver, decir, dar, etc., in present, preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive, progressives, and perfects.

Then I learned about 2000 nouns from several lists. Then I learned some common "weird" constructions like darse cuenta, and hace falta.

Now I can read paperbacks on the plane without a dictionary, and follow the plot. I can communicate simply, and send pretty good texts. I have a lot of trouble with TV and radio, but it's progress. This took 2 years with mainly self study and Duolingo for accountability. I don't think an app alone would do the trick.

I'm not sure why this has been downvoted so much, this guy states something that might upset some people, but then goes on to provide a pretty sober list pros and cons. This is the kind of content that we want to encourage on HN.

Yeah, I know one kid that threw a chair in school. We use public education because I think it's good for kids to be independent at an early age. It can't be healthy to spend 16 years within bluetooth range of your parents at all times.

To underscore your point, I've met 5 black engineers in 13 years as a software developer. To put this in perspective, my high school was 50% black, and my college was 30% black. Somehow I got where I am, but almost none of my classmates were able to do the same. I don't know what the solution is.

Very important to be able to read the room on this one. Some people love to talk about themselves, and are turned off if you do not engage with them. Others are very private and don't want to discuss anything outside of work. A fair number of people are right in the middle.

A good strategy is to listen to other person, read what they want to talk about, and ask follow-up questions in that direction. Is the person only talking about work? Fine, talk about that. Did they mention their favorite team, or offer up an anecdote about their partner? Then follow up on those.

I find this all very difficult. I don't like asking personal questions because it feels like prying. I don't like talking about myself or my family until, like, at least a year goes by. But, everyone is different, and it's important to meet people halfway, not just wherever you are, on the social spectrum.

We just talked about my development experience and management style. Gang of Four never came up, so the OOP thing was unexpected and confusing.

I'm 40; you're fine. I put down Instagram last year, and I never even think of it anymore. Your mind evolved over millions of years, "short form content" is not going to rewrite that. Once you delete that stuff off of your phone, your brain will immediately free up that headspace, like Instagram never even existed.

I don't know about my concentration. I've got more non-negotiable responsibilities now, so I have less time to work on things, but I work on them harder, and I take advantage of the off time to let solutions bubble up.

True that. I just got some "honest feedback" that I didn't agree with at all. I'm all for criticizing myself, but this feedback totally missed the mark. I didn't have deep enough experience with "object oriented programming". What does that even mean? I've been creating and using objects every day since 2007. I literally... don't know what to do with that feedback. It's like the carpenter interview, "Have you ever built brown houses? Our client is very interested in brown houses."

I'm more interested in how and why Avedis III decided to immigrate to America, the Armenian Genocide happened only a few years later. Either he saw the writing on the wall, or he picked a very, very lucky time to move a 300 year old business to another continent.

I've been contracting and taking care of legacy software this year. My initial parallel steps are to ask questions, read the code, write tests and literally any kind of documentation, all while trying to implement features. You can spend months trying to understand some software, and never really get anywhere because there's no requirements/documentation, your manager doesn't know, and no one who wrote that code works there any longer, or they're just too busy. It's a hot mess.

(I'm not even a Test Driven Design evangelist. There's just no other way to "prove" that things kind of, almost, sort of, work in a possible environment.)

You can have small languages, sure, but then you run into awkward extended clarifying clauses. The thing that makes languages difficult is that almost all vocabulary is sparse. The "Top N" words in a language are always pronouns, prepositions, articles, and the conjugations of the top 12 or so verbs: to be, to have, to do, to go, to come, to say, to give, etc. This is the reason that "Top N Words of Language X" and "Learn the Top 50% of Words in Language X" listicles/videos are always disappointing.

> There's a bit of hand waving around installing Ruby (which is still more difficult than it needs to be).

For real. I put together a simple Jekyll blog, and figuring out gems and this and that after not looking at Ruby for 15 years was a real slog. A lot of that was my fault for being out of the Ruby loop, and being unfamiliar with Jekyll, but I feel like the process could have gone a little more smoothly.

Anyway, this made me excited to try Ruby again.

There's nothing more annoying than putting my cursor on text, and then having a pop-up block that text.

Dude, flying snake is my favorite. I've had a pretty bad week, and this really made my day. I miss the weird internet, with sprites and CMYK bright green. Great job.

> I suspect that the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease thinking in places like Red America might not be nearly so strong.

I think the anti-vaxx crowd will fight back much harder against vaccines in any future event, at least at first. They made it through Covid fine, the ones that are alive, why not the next plandemic?

I was just thinking today what a total shit show Covid was between shortages of masks and vaccines, the misinformation online, and the chaotic messaging from the government. It was a circus. I really don't want to go through that again.