LV-426

> It is the British empire+US hegemony, since WWII/Cold War that makes English lingua franca as it is today.

To be fair, it's also centuries of important contributions from English-speaking countries in science, technology, industry, aviation, literature, etc, etc, as well as, since WWII at least, music, TV, film and other forms of popular entertainment.

From the article:

"Amazon likely has about 700 workers [in Ohio alone] receiving food stamps, more than 10 percent of its Ohio workforce"

I totally agree with this, including your 1 and 2, and the parent.

This very thread - with repeated posts about malware - demonstrates what "SourceForge" means these days to so many people.

It doesn't make sense to me that if the site is back to being one of the good guys, it keeps a name now mostly famous/notorious for bad practices.

Thanks. And yeah, that's one reason I always thought it was surprising if they didn't teach English, since it was the (primary) language of 'the enemy'. Plus whatever faults the USSR may have had, education seemed to be pretty good.

> early adopters, which take on more risk

I don't want to get into the debate on the definition of a pyramid scheme, but what was anyone risking by mining bitcoins for essentially nothing in 2009-2010?

Thanks. You may not be old enough to know from experience, but how does this differ (if at all) from the Soviet period?

AIUI Soviet citizens didn't generally learn English in (high/middle) school, which I always thought a bit surprising (assuming that's correct), and for some reason I have the idea German may have been taught in the USSR. (An idea which may simply derive from Russian being taught in East German schools.)

> English is tought as a second language (or third language in bilingual countries) in most of the world.

In primary schools, commonly?

> Can anyone outline the norms for English teaching in the rest of the region and the rest of the world?

I'd be interested in this too (or other languages, where it would be appropriate, such as the extent of French teaching in Canada, or Spanish in the USA). I suspect what Iran is apparently not doing any more is very uncommon around the world anyway.

I don't support this (more schools in every country should teach foreign languages in primary school), but AIUI from the article learning English is not now forbidden for young people in Iran, it's only now blocked in primary schools, where it didn't happen much anyway:

    The teaching of English usually starts in middle school
    in Iran, at the ages of 12 to 14, but some primary 
    schools below that age also have English classes.

> A complaint that Hacker News is a less agreeable place than it used to be.

Which makes the place no more agreeable.

> Whether that's true or not... <huge snip>

This is amazing.

I ask a question, and the only "answer" is simply an excuse to segue into a weird, patronizing, passive-aggressive wall of text that has zero to do with what I actually posted, and is nothing but a personal attack dressed up as a lecture on politeness. Amazing.

I guess you don't reach 10k karma on a throwaway by not having a gallery to play to.

Replying here, since the other post I replied to disappeared:

Despite the avalanche of downvotes burying my posts, not even one person can actually answer the question I asked:

The poster could have simply stopped typing after "Thank you for the explanation". He chose to unnecessarily add something more.

So, for everyone who disagrees with me: if what he said wasn't itself "snarky", what was it?

I disagree. Aside from the sarcastic "buffer overflow" comment, his comment was far more snide than any of the replies he seemed to be complaining about.

Since you take a different view though, as I asked in my post, if it's not "snarky" then what was it?

> which unfortunately seems to be getting rarer and rarer on this forum.

If this isn't unnecessarily "snarky" itself, then what is it?

snarky: (of a person, words, or a mood) sharply critical; cutting; snide.

Pretty funny how anti-tracking they are, in their daily submissions to HN, considering the number of resources from external sites - Google, Facebook, Medium, Twitter, Linkedin, etc - their page loads.