smugengineer69

I've seen this argument a few times and honestly I don't get it - how do people propose we otherwise measure relative success of particular interventions -- Vibes? I've found that people who complain about how everything needs to be measured and how measurements are imperfect are often just bad at devising measurable quantities as proxies of real-world benefit. Sure it can take a bit of time to devise such measurements, and they're not inherently valuable, but if I can prove that a given variant performs better, why not pursue the preferable alternative?

It seems easy enough to say "keep the youtube we love" but how do you think this variant came about in the first place? I can assure you there have been numerous A/B tests that have led to the current feature set. And even if its a local rather than global maximum, at least there are measurable qualities by which it is preferable. Also - do you believe that everyone who says this is harkening back to the same historical reality? This is quickly approaching "make youtube great again" territory - when exactly was it great again? and why? This statement is easy to agree with and hard to prove.

It also seems easy to handle links to different variants; just supply a URL parameter. This is a non-issue.

If someone out there has a non-tea leaf divination style alternative to measuring things as a way to determine success, I'm all ears, but I don't believe in fortune tellers, and people who make software shouldn't either.

Apple’s Stringsdict approaches this exact problem, though unfortunately first-party documentation is limited. It’s a pretty mature mechanism and yes pretty freely within apple’s own frameworks. See “plural and gender support” here:

https://www.objc.io/issues/9-strings/string-localization/#Pl...

I'm glad Mr. Lazer-Walker is taking on the person corporatehood that many app-makers appear to be content with these days...

It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for WhatsApplebees.

I really disagree with the sentiments here. Like many of you, I'm on the internet quite literally 14-16 out of every 24 hours, actively using it for about 13 of those. I've had a smartphone continuously since the palm treo 600 in 2003.

But never once have I felt powerless against it. I have one simple rule: don't use it when I'm talking to people. (Unless we want to look something up on Wikipedia, in which case we do it together). This is enough. Maybe I just don't know what all you other people are doing with your phones that make them so irresistible, but I am able to move fluidly between online and offline action in the world with no second thought. If I get a notification, I take the phone out for a second to read it and put it right back away.

Many times, the phone could be anything: If I have a magazine nearby instead, I read that. Or subway map. Or shampoo bottle.

What's the real complaint here? I've seen articles like this 100 times and frankly none of them ever brings anything original to the table. I actually think this is because they derive their clickability through their vagueness. Everyone knows some jackass who brings his phone out during thanksgiving dinner with grandma, and everyone has almost run into someone who has been looking at their phone instead if the street. Is this really all you're complaining about? I'd call these minor inconveniences at best, rude behavior at worst.

Predictably, In an effort to fill the void left by actual specific examples and details, these arguments/videos take on some sort of mystical "not enjoying the world" vibe. How do they make this leap so readily? It's easy to do because everyone loves to think the rest of the world is made up of zombies. But does it even logically follow?!

That video he references has come up everywhere and seems to resonate with a lot of people. It seems to focus on the idea of savoring the moment, whatever that means. Our Galtian heroine can do it, no one else can.

I see this woman as desperately and reactionarily clinging to a past that never existed, or at best an artisan-crafted inconvenience-sporting charming paradise.

Let's get to specifics. Let's discuss specific times when we think it's not ok to talk on the phone -- at dinner, when walking on a crowded street, with grandma -- and let's give up on this high-blown pretentious rhetoric about connecting with the world and savoring the moment. It's frankly counterproductive--instead of discussing the new norms that always-connected technology dictates in specific detail, these articles have wandered into mystical, unrefutable territory that is usually the subject of religious belief, not pragmatic policy-setting.

Not to mention the mobile version literally only allows one word of text per line...I'm on an iPhone5 if that helps, but the sidebar is...over zealous, should we say

It's a poor Mandarin example also. You would likely say "there is a seminar", or "I intend to go to a seminar". Both are also perfectly valid English examples, I should add, and convey similar time information. There is also an auxiliary, the Mandarin 要, which is used very similar to our "will" in most future situations.

What we call "tense" is actually a pretty fuzzy category, and at a general level is just the "grammaticalization of time reference", meaning the transition of a word from the expression of concrete content to an abstract time-related function word. This in all languages is a constantly evolving process and can occur over a long period of time and to different degrees. English hasn't even fully grammaticalized the notion of the future, as our future and present tenses are morphologically identical.

Which brings up another point: both English and Mandarin lack elaborate morphological change, relying on auxiliaries to convey tense rather than explicit verbal modifications. Where do we draw the line here? At the end of the day, was the collapse of the Roman empire due to the richness of the morphological tense marking of Latin?

I initially thought this was a way to sign documents by recording a video of you doing a distinctive hand gesture. I immediately did the "finger guns with a wink" move at my computer screen to simulate what this would be like. I was sorely disappointed. Seriously though if anyone is looking for startup ideas, gesture recognition has reached the point where this may well be possible. Alas, maybe one day.

I was envisioning exactly this scenario.

Nerd moment.

This reminds me of the part in The Hobbit (the book, not the movie) where Gandalf takes the dwarves to meet Beorn, the skin-changer. Before entering his house, Gandalf warns the dwarves that Beorn is tempermental, and that in order to get him to help them, they should stagger their entrances.

Gandalf initially only enters with Bilbo, but as he tells Beorn about the adventures they have had so far, he repeatedly references an increasingly large number of dwarves. e.g. "You have mentioned a dozen, yet there are only ten dwarves here!", to which Gandalf replies by having two more dwarves enter.

In the end, master businessman Gandalf gets Beorn to house all 16 in their party, by means of exactly this "nibbles"-like negotiation strategy.

I really do think Gandalf has a lot to offer the business community as an astute and personable negotiator.

Typical WSJ red scare claptrap. This paper is seriously still caught in the McCarthy era, especially when it comes to anything at all related to Asia. Sure this article seems positive on the surface, but underneath it all is a deep, abiding, white fear of being overtaken as the dominant racial group.

As a white male who has dated Asian females in the past (and is currently in a relationship with a white woman, if you must know, and to ward off the inevitable charges of "yellow fever"), I find at least part of this sentiment highly irritating. I'm really not sorry at all for "taking" something from you that you don't "own" to begin with. They aren't "your" women and they can date whoever they want to. They're not "betraying" anyone in dating outside of their race. (I use quotes not to quote you but rather others who have made similar arguments).

This basic idea, that you can't even get the women you were entitled to by your birthright, is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions.

Robot apologist here, but for some reason neo-Luddism has become fashionable again and it bothers me. Is this really a war over little pings from email inboxes? Are we truly that oppressed by the ability to find out anything about anything? Do we need a virtual Moses to part the red sea of push notifications? I find it really difficult to sympathize with this line of argument. This is either a case of misconfigured notifications or of honest Amish-like fear of technology, and neither of these make sense to me.

There is a famous Chinese four character idiom about exactly this scenario: 愚公移山 (Yu gong yi shan), or "the foolish old man moves the mountain". Here's a link to the (short) translation of this story: http://english.cri.cn/4426/2007/01/15/167@185195.htm . I particularly like the role of the "wise man " in this story, who is actually the naysayer here. The names of the people in the story illustrate the common perception of these two roles: the old man YuGong's name means "foolish old man", and "Zhi Sou" means "wise old man". Who's the foolish one after all?

What is modern Perl? Python. (I'll elaborate more here from my earlier one-word answer).

Long-time perl programmer here, until I found Python. Perl is powerful, but Perl is for the programmer, not the programmer's coworkers. It's not even for the programmer 6 months down the line. This is nothing new, and it has become a stereotype in the community.

Yes, this argument has been made and refuted many times, but I argue the reason isn't the language, but the dominant language paradigms.

Perl's "monk" ideal is not sustainable in the long term, and encourages "clever hackers" who can do things with the fewest lines of fundamentally unreadable code. Yes, the language has evolved. Yes, it is slightly easier to read now. But the goals of the community still tend toward the ideals of becoming a master of arcana who can pass his wisdom down to the less experienced.

Give me a language that the commoners can read, that a beginning programmer can feel empowered to learn because he can take one look at the source code of someone truly experienced and know at least a part of what is going on.

You can change Perl all you want, but you cannot get away from the fundamental guiding principles of the language, which encourage antisocial, clever, and magic code.

Goddamnit, startups. I should write a post of my own about this because it really pisses me off.

Here is my advice about startup names: Stop It. Seriously though, stop it. You know what I mean: the cute little misspellings, the nonsense words, the dropped schwas in your words...Stop all this bullshit before people begin to think every startup is, like yours, nothing more than hot air.

It's that simple: stupid name, stupid business. Your cutesy little letter drop / intentional, web-domain-grubbing letter substitution name speaks volumes about the probable quality of your business.

Look at Chinese search engine Baidu （百度）. Startups of the world, I want you to read this shit: http://ir.baidu.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=188488&p=irol-homepr... .

In fact, thee of poor orthography, you read this shit twice: http://ir.baidu.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=188488&p=irol-homepr... .

You fucking soak that shit in because this is the best goddamn company name on the planet: "The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles". And this is China's most popular search engine.

You know why this is a goddamned great name? Because it took more than 10 seconds to make up. This name is so far removed from cutesy it is absurd.

If the only way, in this infinite plain of possibility that is the entire fucking English language, for you to find an unregistered domain is to misspell already-existing words, I feel supremely sorry for you and your business.

Sometimes in musing about the Turing test I think: this shit works two ways. This is not a test of computers at the peak of their creative intelligence, but of man at the lowest point of his machine-like worst.

You want a dime-a-dozen bullshit startup name? Go here, press a button and BAM: http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html

Does the fact that a machine can make up your business's name in a matter of sub-seconds at all scare you into realizing the cheapness of it all? "Oyodo", "Topicpad", "Rhysero"...

Worthless, reproducible, empty.

Take a look at Apple, even. A soft, fleshy, human, fruit. When it first started, who was it competing against? IBM. DEC. Cincom -- Ugly, faceless, consumer-hostile.

If you've learned anything today, let it be this: take your goddamned time. Your rush to buy a domain name has clouded your vision of what your company is and could be. You have cheapened the potentially meaningful creation of goods and services by, ironically, thinking of things in purely monetary terms. The next time you're on the verge of dropping that silent 'e' and calling it a day, think about Song Dynasty poets and creative visionaries. Think about the entire history of human thought and the struggle to give meaning to a confusing planetary existence, and ask yourself: Wouldn't my name, which appears to be a cross between the words "Rhinoceros" and "Serotonin", be out of place here?

EDIT: any reason for the downvotes? Sure there was cussing, but what are the grounds for your disagreement?

Yes, there are regional variants of Modern Standard Mandarin, but the ways in which these deviate from the proscribed standard are predictable and in fact generally internally consistent. Note, this is a separate matter from the dialects themselves, which are usually not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, although they influence the regional character of the Mandarin itself spoken there.

The thing is, subtitles are everywhere in China (Watch any movie or newscast), because it is difficult if not impossible to understand dialect speakers, and beyond that, to understand the non-standard mandarin that has been influenced by the these dialects.

The problem with the sentiment "I can get by just fine without tones"(obvious paraphrase) is that "get by just fine" and "without tones" are both statements that need further qualification.

I maintain my central point: Tones are obviously important in a tonal language, and the extent you can be understood without using them is determined almost entirely by the skill of the listener, as well as their acquaintance with other non-standard speakers and/or foreigners.

The reason for my tone in these posts is that I think this sort of attitude speaks badly for all foreigners studying Chinese. It betrays a sort of borderline arrogant exceptionalism that says "I can learn Your language, but on my terms. And in English, there are no tones". The reality is that Chinese speakers have come to expect very little from foreigners who are studying their language...and ironically this just continues the cycle, and these cocksure foreigners receive affirmation for simple, atonal phrases that native speakers must work hard to understand.

This is completely wrong...Do not listen to this person. I have studied Chinese my entire life and I can assure you, tones are extremely important. Tones are not "dropped", even in fast speech. The problem is actually that the above poster cannot hear them.

This idea, that tones are not important, is an extremely widespread misconception, and as I see it, relates to three factors:

1) the general poor quality of western Mandarin education, which allows foreigners to get by without properly learning tones because teachers are too nice to say anything about it,

2) The idea that Mandarin and English are massively and irreconcilably different has led to general ignorance about the language, which in turn leads to amateur-level hacks becoming "experts" by merely knowing more than the absolute minimum about the language, and

3) general politeness shown to foreigners in large Chinese tourist destinations.

Once you get beyond novelty party Chinese, you realize that to be properly understood it is absolutely imperative that your tones are correct. Or, barring that, that you make an effort. And even then it requires greater effort from the hearer to run through the often massive number of possibilities to find the correct utterance.

Please, if you are considering learning Mandarin, don't listen to anyone who tells you that tones do not matter. The above post betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about how the language is spoken.

  What if you wrote a program and you couldn't market, sell or support it?

People do this all the time, it's called open-source software and people come upon it by merit of the quality of the code. It doesn't need buzzwords, jargon, sales, and demographics numbers. It's the closest we've got to a vacuum sometimes and I'm proud of this.