andrewem (u/andrewem)

andrewem commented on Who invented the alphabet? asor.org/anetoday/2023/08... · Posted by u/diodorus

> Sure it is, continuously and gradually.

There has been no success to any attempts to regularize the spelling of English in... what, over a century now? Is the New Yorker still the only major publication insisting on using umlauts? :)

I'm not saying that English won't evolve, mind you, only that English spelling will evolve [a lot] more slowly than the rest of the language.

> IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes.

Wikipedia says it alters the sound of a, e, and o. But I would pronounce château and chateau substantially the same. I would pronounce fantôme slightly differently from fantome. Être and etre, on the other hand, would have substantially different pronunciations.

andrewem · 2 years ago

The New Yorker’s eccentric diacritic is the diaeresis rather than the umlaut.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/mary-norris-diaeresi...

andrewem commented on Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company geekwire.com/2023/former-... · Posted by u/chef-steph

robbiet480 · 2 years ago

> Clark has hired political consultants to advise him on a potential 2026 run for governor of Texas, where he resides, according to people familiar with the matter. Greg Abbott, a Texas Republican, is currently serving a third term as governor.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dave-clark-resigns-as-flexport-...

andrewem · 2 years ago

It’s weird that the Wall Street Journal doesn’t say what party he’s considering running as. People who know he hired political consultants would also know who they are and thus if those consultants are Republicans or Democrats.

andrewem commented on Car Bloat: “Huge Cars Are Terrible for Society” kottke.org/23/08/car-bloa... · Posted by u/DemiGuru

oceanplexian · 2 years ago

Kids need to be taught not to play behind a moving vehicle, the same as they need to be taught not to stick their fingers in an electric socket. "Someone else's kids" who aren't being raised properly isn't enough of a reason to force people to own a particular kind of automobile (At least this was the predominant thinking before we lived in a nanny state).

andrewem · 2 years ago

A plan which makes small children responsible for preventing their own deaths at the hands of adults driving vehicles they personally chose seems at the very least unlikely to produce good results, assuming you are trying to keep children from dying. I suppose if your metric is “nanny state impositions prevented” rather than “children being crushed to death” then it could be considered a success.

andrewem commented on Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting? · Posted by u/imadkhan

dorfsmay · 2 years ago

Thank you for taking the time to look at it and commenting.

It is indeed the nature of contracting and project work. Note that there are 3 times where I have done contracts back to back for 4 or 5 years for the same company, which should show that I don't just jump ship all the time and am able to commit for a long time.

It made more sense to highlight each project individually in an economy with a lot of need for contractors for short stints, but point taken, I'll see if I can highlight the fact that 2, or 3, or 4 consequent contracts are for the same company. Maybe even just bold the company names.

andrewem · 2 years ago

Formatting it with the company as the top-level item would make clear at a glance that you’ve been at places for a lot longer.

andrewem commented on Codictionary: A newsletter that explain tech terms in plain, everyday language codictionary.com/... · Posted by u/cristianMD7

andrewem · 2 years ago

A suggestion on your sample. It says “The librarian goes to the stacks, finds the book, and brings it back to you.

The next time you need that same book, the librarian doesn't have to go all the way to the stacks again – they can just grab it from the shelf behind the counter.”

This is missing the step where after you return the book to the librarian, they put it on the shelf behind the counter.

Then if you want you can talk about the shelf only fitting a limited number of books, and the librarian having to decide what to do if the shelf is full.

andrewem commented on To Pay Rent in Medieval England, Catch Some Eels atlasobscura.com/articles... · Posted by u/diodorus

MattPalmer1086 · 2 years ago

My dad is Professor J.J.N. Palmer, and I worked with him on the Domesday Book data used and cited in this work.

These days we are used to having all kinds of data at our fingertips, but at the time it was a lot of work to take medieval Latin and turn it into computer readable data. We had to invent our own markup language, parsers and search engines.

andrewem · 2 years ago

Very cool! I see there are biographical sketches of you, your father, and others involved with the project at https://www.domesdaybook.net/home/contact

andrewem commented on Quid Pro Crow languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu... · Posted by u/warrenm

_ZeD_ · 2 years ago

barely related, but it's funny to me how in anglosaxon countries you use the locution "quid pro quo", while here in italy we use "do ut des" to mean "a favor for a favor".

And that "qui pro quo" - in italy - means just a misunderstanding.

It's one of the funniest false friends that I've encountered while studying English

andrewem · 2 years ago

I liked that when a major person in Italian organized crime was arrested, US newspapers called him a “capo dei capi” while Italian newspapers called him a “boss dei boss”.

For example, here’s a book using that title

https://m.libreriauniversitaria.it/amp/product/BIT/978887928...

andrewem commented on TikTok Feeds Teens a Diet of Darkness wsj.com/articles/tiktok-f... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

turtleyacht · 2 years ago

You jest, but I also found it here:

https://calvert.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-calvert-t...

Maybe a typo in both cases?

Maybe it was a romanized translation of CCP, or perhaps poster wrote C++ a lot, or CPP really was associated with CCP. However, I don't yet know what it stands for.

andrewem · 2 years ago

That document says “Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” then uses CCP 7 more times. It uses CPP once, which is clearly a typo.

andrewem commented on Basic Physics of Rowing (2007) eodg.atm.ox.ac.uk/user/du... · Posted by u/slow_typist

inasio · 2 years ago

I tried to find similar distances to compare, but it might have been better like you suggested to compare around similar times. One other thing is that the conditions in an indoor velodrome are pretty ideal vs being in the water, although you also can get currents and wind (although records cannot be certified unless winds are below some threshold I believe)

andrewem · 2 years ago

The half marathon record is 57:31 for 21.1km, so it’s not too far off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_marathon_world_record_p...

andrewem commented on TikTok tracked users who watched gay content, prompting employee complaints wsj.com/articles/tiktok-t... · Posted by u/erehweb

djohnston · 2 years ago

Seems like wsj trying to make something out of nothing. Obviously there is content that can be categorised as LGBT, and obviously there are users who engage with it. Those users will be associated with the content somewhere, that's a prerequisite for a recommendation algorithm that gives you more of what you watch. What's the issue here? TikTok also tracks users who watched content about kites, airplanes, Democrats, Republicans, and dinosaurs. And pretty much any other category of content you can imagine.

andrewem · 2 years ago

As the article says: “Social-media and ad-tech industry practices, however, discourage tracking potentially sensitive traits such as sexuality, according to people who work with digital information. This data can essentially create a list of vulnerable users in parts of the world where some LGBT people face harassment and violence.”

There don’t tend to be laws against liking kites or airplanes, nor violence against people who like them on the basis of that interest.