jerryszczerry

I don't know if you can do it in Norwegian, but in colloquial Polish it's possible to specify how much time will pass until the next full hour without specifying what hour it is.

So, it's possible to say, for instance: „Jest dwadzieścia po” [It is twenty past X] or „Jest za dziesięć wpół do” [It is ten till half X], regarding your first example.

> […] In an Asian country the Sallies could set up fried rice or noodle stalls selling cheap meals to the Joes, for the equivalent of a dollar or two. They've set up a mutual trade for mutual advantage, and they're both better off.

> In a Western country Joe and Sally are banned from making this trade, ostensibly to protect Joe's interests. If Joe wants cheap food, his only option is to go to McDonald's, where they've made everything hyper-efficient and standardised to provide cheap food, while meeting minimum wage laws, hygiene regulations, and so on.

So, if Sally can provide food cheaper than McDonald's, that means:

a. she is more efficient than McDonald's, she being a single woman, they being a multinational corporation, or

b. she doesn't conform to the same hygiene and nutrition standards, making less valuable products.

Which one seems more probable?

> I consider PDF viewers to be superior to the experience offered by ebook viewers. For example, Having to tap the left and right side of the screen to move between pages is a pain compared to swiping up or down in a fluid motion.

> […] On the same device PDF viewer will zoom text to use the entire screen with a double tap of a paragraph.

I believe there are shortcomings of the ebook viewing software, not the ebook format.

If/when that becomes feasible, I assume moving the fetus to the artificial womb would become a more humanitarian (if more expensive) equivalent to getting an abortion.

Wow, finally a good orthography for English!

How many uses can you find for Fortran 77 besides legacy systems?

Not using a feature X yourself means you might still need to deal with code written by somebody who uses the feature.

> Because Python 3.X is not backwards compatible and we have millions of lines of production code in Python 2.X.

I believe the common subset of Python 2 and 3 was created to ease that transition.

> Python 2 is like FORTRAN. It might not be sexy anymore but it's not going anywhere.

Except Fortran is, and is going to be, further developed. (So, if a new useful programming concept appears, or a major design mistake is discovered, it always can be patched.)

Python 2 is going to be abandoned in 2020. Python 3 will supersede it.

I think 1000 is a more realistic estimate of how much words you need in a language, than 100.

Toki pona is nice in concept, but too restrictive in practice.

> I've seen very prominent NN-course, suggesting Python 2.7 for all assignments and code samples, and quite useful library (also NN-related), supporting 2.7 only.

Oh, that's plain silly. Isn't the whole point of Python 2.7 to facilitate the transition to Python 3?

And this is making Java look good how exactly?

It was already fixed back when domain names had to be plain ASCII.

It was West-centric, yes, but it allowed for a unique and legible ASCII identifiers. And encouraged non-ASCII languages to create a unique (or, mostly-unique) Latin representation of their scripts — which is, in general, a good thing. It encouraged unification, using ASCII as the common ground.

Allowing for Unicode characters opened a new Pandora box, creating a situation that is unsolvable — either we keep the new names, making almost every string of characters potentially ambiguous, or we return to the state where ASCII-only names are the only ones usable.

Also, differentiating between ASCII and non-ASCII names doesn't solve the thing. Imagine what if the legitimate address is already in a non-ASCII script.

> I could go in and set up a dot/non dot email address to people I know and just wait until I receive an email that was supposed to be for them but now goes to my email account.

Err, you can't do that?

The fact that somebody's email address is johndoe at gmail.com, and the fact that Gmail strips all the dots from the username, imply that john.doe and john.d.oe and so on… are taken as well.

You just can't register as e.g. john.doe and get johndoe's mail redirected because for Google, these two aliases are the exact same username!

(An exercise for the reader: if you have a Google account, try to log in by putting random dots in your username. Then, try to create a new account by putting random dots in your login.)

Depends on the human.