The UK is replacing roundabouts with traffic lights; US is doing the opposite - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/oct/19/traffic-lights-roundabouts-way-out <comment><USER2> I don't see roundabouts as a replacement for traffic lights in the US. Above a certain traffic volume, you'll almost always want to move to traffic lights anyway. They're actually a replacement for the 4-way Stop - a ridiculous type of intersection that ought not to exist.

<comment><USER3> Or my personal favorite in Sacramento, roundabout with some stop signs sprinkled in. I hear horns and accidents daily...

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-121.4694376,3a,75y,...](https://email@example.com,-121.4694376,3a,75y,210.19h,69.12t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s3yb-E21Li76n8bfNCBpINw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1)

<comment><USER4> For true insanity you need to go to Washington DC which has roundabouts with divided lanes, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, stop signs, and turning lanes.

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+firstname.lastname@example.com...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+email@example.com,-77.0429818,3a,75y,232.54h,89.8t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1srKUH2bp97u4rkVdd67koeQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DrKUH2bp97u4rkVdd67koeQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D304.40421%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656!4m2!3m1!1s0x89b7c6de5af6e45b:0xc2524522d4885d2a!6m1!1e1)

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+email@example.com...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Washington,+email@example.com,-77.0497812,3a,75y,34.3h,86.19t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sCC1wkbIi8pfu4KAONWQjlw!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DCC1wkbIi8pfu4KAONWQjlw%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D315.16916%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656!4m2!3m1!1s0x89b7c6de5af6e45b:0xc2524522d4885d2a!6m1!1e1)

<comment><USER5> This is pretty common in France. Every major city has like dozens of these kinds of intersections (e.g. behind the Trocadero, around the Arc de Triomphe, etc)

<comment><USER4> My recollection is that the roundabouts in Paris are free for alls (a whole different kind of crazy, but it seems to work). I checked the satellite images of the circle around the arc de triomphe and it seems to be as I remember. There may be lights regulating entry into the circle, but the lanes aren't divided. And if I recall correctly pedestrians access the middle via underground walkway.

I just checked via Google street view and it confirms my memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The question should be, what is best for this particular intersection in the near future? The two designs have different characteristics.

My understanding is that roundabouts are best when traffic is low, when it gets heavy they become much less efficient. Lights, while a lot of overhead in low traffic, scale better. There's also the question of space required.

Since the UK may have too many roundabouts due to traffic growth, and the US virtually none, they could both be building the opposite and making the right choice.

<comment><USER7> One of the great advantages of roundabouts is that they're approximately "fair" whereas traffic lights are not.

What I mean is that a traffic light is very arbitrary and stops people who just barely didn't make the cutoff. Multiply that by 5, 10, or 20 traffic lights on a journey and an extra minute at each one can add up. So people have incentive to run the light and shave the 30 seconds or a minute. But then when people run the light, it slows down the cross-road who has to wait extra for the road to clear, despite it being "their turn". So then people on that side have an incentive to run the light, because they got wrongfully cutoff by the arbitrariness and the other jerks running the light first. Rinse and repeat for a few cycles and it's easy to see that this is not a good situation.

Traffic circles on the other hand don't suffer from this as there isn't arbitrariness on such a 'long' timescale. If you have to wait for a couple of extra cars it's only a few seconds, versus a minute or so. Because it's just a couple of seconds, people have less to lose and are more inclined to be nice. Which ultimately means that driving is more pleasant, even if it's not as efficient.

I also might disagree with the idea that roundabouts aren't effective at high traffic levels. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwHfibl1AoI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwHfibl1AoI)

<comment><USER8> The problem with roundabouts is starvation.

I grew up in France, which has more than 50% of the world's roundabouts. They are everywhere.

Where I am from, there is a roundabout at the intersection of a major road and a small road with little traffic. During rush hour, it is impossible to enter the roundabout coming from the small road because there is a continuous flow of cars coming from the major road. It is truly an uninterrupted flow of cars because the cars come from another roundabout...

Before the roundabout, there was no problem because there was a light that would be always be green for the main road expect when a car was detected on the small road. It was optimal.

<comment><USER9> Couldn't you just put speed bumps at the entrances to the roundabout to ensure a gap between cars in this case?

<comment><USER10> Why don't we put a light at the entrance to the roundabout to create a gap between cars only when necessary?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There seems to be no data supporting the article's assertion that roundabouts are being replaced by traffic lights across the UK as a whole. I'll add my own anecdata: many more roundabouts are being built in my area of the UK. There are also roundabouts with traffic lights.

As a driver, I much prefer roundabouts. When I'm cycling, I just prefer roads with fewer cars and can't wait for self-driving cars, since at least they won't be driven by idiots.

There are safer roundabout designs used in Holland: [http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2014/05/the-best- rounda...](http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2014/05/the-best-roundabout- design-for-cyclists.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> The headline makes it sound like it's a wholesale thing, but from how the article describes it, traffic agencies in both countries are discovering that some intersections are more useful, safer, etc if they had a different kind of traffic control. As information disperses, it becomes easier for engineers from different countries to share ideas and knowledge to figure out what the best course of action is for a certain type of intersection.

</comment><comment><USER13> _" Cyclists have a demonstrably harder time with roundabouts."_

As the text acknowledges, a lot depends on the design of the roundabout. Just last week, we got [https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/explaining- the...](https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/explaining-the-dutch- roundabout-abroad/), which explains the current thinking of the dutch on roundabout design.

Also, roundabouts have become more popular, but traffic deaths certainly haven't gone up in the Netherlands ([https://www.swov.nl/rapport/Factsheets/UK/FS_Road_fatalities...](https://www.swov.nl/rapport/Factsheets/UK/FS_Road_fatalities.pdf)).

<comment><USER14> Really? I don't find them challenging at all. Would be even nicer is they put a protected bike ring around the outer edge so cyclists only have to watch out for the part they are crossing across.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Comment I'd made[0] on a previous article about roundabouts and their potential for confusion:

I live in Victoria, Australia, and we've had roundabouts for ages. I think they are very good for a certain scale of road/traffic. Mostly intersections with moderate amounts of traffic on average, and not high-speed. e.g., the main intersections within housing estates. Having too many of them instead of give-way signs drive you a little batty (I'm looking at you, Warrnambool) while really heavy traffic, major intersections work better with traffic lights.

My daughter recently got her learner license, and she has found roundabouts one of the trickier intersections to navigate. You have to read the traffic flow. This person about to enter on your right is going straight ahead, so will block you entering the roundabout[1], but they have to wait for that person coming the other way from you and going straight through, so you can slip in the gap that creates without cutting anyone else off. As with many things it is familiarity and practice that makes them work[2]. I think roundabouts work very well here for the most part, and my daughter is getting pretty good at reading the traffic. It's not rocket science[3].

The science of roads and traffic I imagine is a surprisingly nuanced expertise involving a lot of physics and psychology. I find when I cross over the border to New South Wales I feel like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I eventually figured out it was because the signage was a different distance before the intersection compared to my home state. Once I was aware I could adapt.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10242816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10242816)

[1] We drive on the left side of the road because Australia is in the southern hemisphere.

[2] I bet the first traffic lights caused an uproar. "Why the hell should I stop just because there's a red light?!"

[3] Oh wait, actually, it is rocket science.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think if the roundabouts were large, then in fact they would always be superior to traffic lights. I could probably run the math on that, but the idea is that the lights aren't sensitive to the actual flow of traffic, and often make things backed up for no reason.

<comment><USER17> But roundabouts are insensitive to where the traffic is coming from. With light traffic, this is not a problem, but with heavy traffic, if all directions are getting the same priority, it may hurt the entrances with more traffic.

<comment><USER5> In France, you see main thoroughfares have overpasses or under-passes and signals into the roundabout that it avoids. Hard to find a map, but essentially, it is to address your concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's possible they're both being sensible. Roundabouts are certainly under utilised in the US (unlike those awful four-way stop signs which are particularly hellish for law-abiding cyclists) so putting more in is a good move.

However, as traffic at any particular intersection increases it eventually may make sense to replace a roundabout with a traffic light. Roundabouts can handle large amounts of traffic, but only if they're large roundabouts -- if you can't expand the actual road space then the traffic light is the best move.

<comment><USER19> Also, in my experience, roundabouts work best if traffic at all entrances/exits are roughly equal (within an order of magnitude or two)

If traffic flow becomes highly unbalanced, a constant flow of cars from the primary entrance to the primary exit can block all cars from entering the roundabout at secondary entrances. They have to wait for a car to enter at the primary entrance then take the secondary exit so before they can enter.

I was once stuck at a roundabout for 5min due to a sports event in a nearby town creating a constant flow of south to north traffic, when I wanted to go from west to east. The roundabout useally worked perfectly fine, but was broken by the abnormal traffic.

If that intersection had traffic lights, the impact on non south-north traffic would have been minimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow I can't even. I live in Carmel, IN - basically the roundabout capital of USA. We just built our 100th roundabout and have several more near completion. Love them. Far better than traffic lights.

So weird to see the reason we have them is due to our Mayor visiting England many years ago. Now they are going the other way. Did their mayor or someone visit us and fell in love with traffic lights?

</comment><comment><USER14> Strange. I rode the entire PBP (1200km) last month in France and many of the intersections were roundabouts. I didn't see them as any better or worse for cyclists than the 4 way intersections we have today. If anything, it makes it easier for a cyclist to be on the lookout for where a car that could hit them is coming from.

</comment><comment><USER21> I tend to hate roundabouts. They're terrifying. But for 5-ways (and more) I think they can be a better solution than the complicated signage and striping of a traditional intersection. Provided that they are low speed.

There should be a compass marking at the center of each roundabout as standard.

</comment><comment><USER22> Here is a particularly terrifying roundabout: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-1.7714704,177m/da...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-1.7714704,177m/data=!3m1!1e3)

</comment><comment><USER23> O hai. Welcome to Massachusetts, where the roundabouts have traffic lights, and getting from the Tufts campus to downtown Somerville becomes a game of multidimensional live-action Frogger. And that's if you HAVE a walk signal.

</comment><comment><USER24> Dutch roundabouts are the best. Lots of videos here:

[https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/roundabout/](https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/roundabout/)

</comment><comment><USER25> The overuse of roundabouts is US is in Bend OR. For some reason, I have seen at least half-a-dozen roundabouts there. Most cities, I visited in US have at most a couple of them. Bend OR is roundabout-ville.

</comment><comment><USER26> My town put in a few roundabouts last year and I already noticed memorial flowers at one of them, not sure if for pedestrian, bicycle or car.

</comment><comment><USER27> I could see roundabouts being an advantage on smaller one or two lane streets but beyond that it seems like it would get dangerous fast.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why not have a roundabout with traffic lights on the entrances which are turned on at peak times only to ensure even flow.

</comment><comment><USER29> I fucking hate roundabouts.

There. I feel better now. Thanks.

Wait, no the rage is coming back - multi-lanes!!! ahhh!! help!</comment>


Graphic Designer spends 7 year building a super-car and now sells for 400 BTC - <AUTHOR> http://cuda.dk/

<comment> o0-0o Great looking build on that car, but for 429 BTC that is around 650K, or roughly 10x what it's worth. I don't understand the logic. Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> 429 BTC is more like $250k

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> That's pretty awesome.</comment>


FBI: Google's driverless cars could be lethal weapons - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28344219 <comment><USER4> Autonomous vehicles offer far more benefits than they have drawbacks.

This article is mainly focused on the situation where the criminals will have both hands free. It ignores the fact that the vehicles would just stop if anything was blocking the path. Plus, the vehicles could certainly be turned off remotely during an emergency. And nothing stops law-enforcement from having autonomous vehicles that could be set to follow another vehicle with near perfect accuracy.

This is similar to the Tesla stolen vehicle. WHY would the police engage in a high-speed pursuit, risking the lives of numerous people, to catch a vehicle that has GPS in the car and can probably be shut down remotely. Law- enforcement should be partially responsible for the people injured in that situation, in my opinion.

<comment><USER5> All the police probably have to do to stop an autonomous vehicle is to turn on their lights. Autonomous vehicles have to follow all traffic laws, which would include stopping for emergency vehicles.

<comment><USER6> That's actually a grey area. Following incidences of police impersonation, it was recommended that concerned people should turn on their blinker to acknowledge the police and safely drive to the nearest populated area before pulling over.

Having your car automatically and uncontrollably pull over every time red & blue lights are observed could lead to traps being set up on any backwoods road.

Edit: I really wish the news article would link to the actual source report so I could confirm it, but I bet that the above scenario is included in the FBI's hypotheticals.

<comment><USER7> If it's really a concern, (real) emergency vehicles could stick in a wireless beacon with an API the driverless cars could query, that would respond with a {currently_an_emergency: true} signed by a government-CA-issued TLS cert. Then you'd only have to worry about _officially sanctioned_ creepy cops pulling you over on deserted roads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some people apparently don't realize that this is a part of the FBI's job: to dream up and evaluate all the possible scenarios, weigh risks, and plan for as many contingencies as possible. As the article notes, the report is not entirely negative about driverless cars, apparently mentioning as many pros as there are cons.

The point is, when the first mobster/hacker manages to turn a driverless car into an autonomous hit-and-run machine, or the first terrorist uses one to deliver a car bomb, the responsible agencies will be able to react quickly because they've already made plans for that scenario.

<comment><USER8> I thought they were supposed to investigate crimes?

Not decide what cars can and cannot do because of their speculative thinking...

<comment><USER6> > I thought they were supposed to investigate crimes?

When someone manages to figure out how to send a driverless car through a crowd of people in a mall somewhere, do you want the lead investigator to show up and say "What do you mean there was no driver?!"

Some of investigatory science comes from analyzing crimes that have taken place, and some of it comes from imagining potential new crimes. By having imagined the above scenario and being familiar with the type of car in question, they might know to look for computer logs on the car that could lead them to the perpetrator, or that autonomous vehicles rely on GPS which might have left a trail.

The purpose of the research and report is not to determine whether or not driverless cars should be legal, rather to determine what the potential risks are and how they might be mitigated with regulations and/or cooperation with the manufacturers.

<comment><USER8> That's where the forensic team would come in, examine the evidence and determine the culpability and likely perpetrator.

Pre-crime isn't a thing except in a P. K. Dick novel or a Ghost In the Shell OVA. I expect private vehicle ownership to become mostly a thing of the past once autonomous vehicles are available, and I also expect there to be a phase- change analog where one day most cars are driven by humans and then none are. I can't wait for that day observing the jackasses around me in their cars driving while they: eat, drink, apply make-up, text, talk on the phone, eat, read (!) or watch video on their in-car displays. I lost my brother to a distracted driver and I can't wait until the option to drive becomes obsolete.

And I love driving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's easy to ridicule the FBI for statements like this, but I'm glad they're considering the downside to some of these technologies. The pie-in-the-sky version of a driverless car society is tremendous, and I hope we get as close as possible to that, but it does open up some other problems.

1\. How would you go about stopping an autonomous semi truck that was programmed to drive through crowds?

2\. Will terrorists use autonomous cars as delivery mechanisms for what were formerly suicide bombs?

3\. If locations with pedestrians are sandboxed in some way, could a sufficiently skilled 'hacker' intentionally break that sandbox without a trace only to blame it on bad technology?

4\. How much privacy / 'liberty' would we be willing to give up to enable such a society?

 _Someone_ should be considering the worst-case scenarios..

<comment><USER10> > 1\. How would you go about stopping an autonomous semi truck that was > programmed to drive through crowds?

In my opinion that question is no longer important. Back in the 80s and 90s the prevalent thinking was that "bad guys" won't die for their cause. This mandated things like removing the baggage of passengers who aren't flying (which wasn't the case before).

I think we learned quite starkly in the 2000s that suicide attackers are a legitimate threat and therefore we cannot take for granted any longer than a "bad guy" won't put themselves in harms way in order to hurt others.

So if we apply that to your autonomous semi-truck example, how do you stop that NOW? Since presumably someone who wanted to accomplish that could go out right now, get in a truck and then do it. Automation doesn't really change too much.

As far as an answer: Concrete bollards supported by steel mesh (both internally and in the foundation) in pedestrian areas.

<comment><USER11> This is true, but humans scale a lot worse than automation. Now instead of convincing somebody to kill themselves, all I've gotta do is wire up 30 trucks to do what I need them to do. Didn't work? Do it again. Cars are cheap.

Discussing this keeps reminding me of Suarez's Daemon novels. Swarming changes many, many things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Stories like this are useful. Not for the details they contain, which are scant and make me think a lot of people in olved are stupid, but because they give "us" a chance to prepare for the inevitable accidents or criminal uses of this good tech. One day a child is going to be oilled by a self-driving car. That will be very sad for that one child, but we need to be able to point to the thousands of children who were not killed or maimed. Getting that message right seems important.

</comment><comment><USER13> >The report noted criminals using automated cars would have both hands free and be able to take their eyes off the road during a car chase.

They would also be remarkably predictable compared to a human driver.

</comment><comment><USER14> Would a driverless car really be ideal to use as a get away vehicle? You would be stuck in a car that obey's the speed limits and rules of the road. Hardly useful to dodge the cops.

<comment><USER15> Clearly that section is based on the question 'assuming car software could be modified in a way that made them violate the Laws of Robotic Cars, what new dangers would that pose.' Just like the bit that mentions the trailing car assumes they would have a way to know where a car is going in the future, suggesting a way to query a given car for it's direction.

The first isn't an outlandish question, modifying locked down software isn't exactly a new art. It wouldn't happen for a while likely just due to the small reward to the difficulty of execution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, the comments here are of an unusually low quality. Let's step it up.

I've personally been thinking of the negative implications of driverless cars as well. I also thought that a car with a driver could take advantage of a highway full of conservative automated cars by driving like a maniac to get to his or her destination faster while all the autonomous cars moved out of the way.

Of course, I still strongly support moving to driverless cars, but I can acknowledge that there are some unanswered questions.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is scare-mongering, likely for the purpose of reducing privacy and personal rights in using autonomous vehicles for personal transportation.

There is enough open information regarding autonomous vehicles that anyone with disregard for safety could build an autonomous car bomb now. As with other supposed terror threats, the only thing preventing them is that nobody is doing it. But that doesn't sell anti-terrorism brainstorming consulting.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pretty typical right? And your bank robbery getaway car could be orbiting the bank waiting for you to come out, etc etc. The report boils down to "gee a self driving car should would be useful to crooks." which is sort of obvious.

That said the benefits for non-crooks are a lot higher. And while roads in general benefit crooks getting away in cars, most of the people on them are just trying to get somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER19> What about a driverless car filled up with murderous clowns?

That's something we should all be afraid of and why we should stop progress immediately.

<comment><USER20> Because any suggestion that driverless cars might present any hint of increased risk in any possible scenario amounts to mindless Luddite paranoia and should be dismissed out of hand?

Who's talking about "stopping progress immediately?" The FBI doesn't appear to be saying that in this article, rather they seem to be speculating on how driverless cars might tactically change the dynamics of a vehicular pursuit, which is a perfectly valid thing for them to do. Because they're right - <USER2> can shoot at the cops a lot better when you don't have to worry about a steering wheel.

<comment><USER21> Also, the Pope is upset because unmarried people could have sex in the back seat while the car drives itself. There is really no end to the infinite possibilities.

>any hint of increased risk in any possible scenario amounts to mindless Luddite paranoia

Not any hint, but this particular one...yes. Dismissed out of hand. A get away driver (an idea that has been around for a very long time) would be far better than a computer that will stop for literally anything in front of it.

The FBI pushing such stupidity is embarrassing to me as an American. Next they'll report that if banks didn't have money they'd never get robbed.

<comment><USER20> I don't think the report (which is apparently unreleased so i'm speculating) is suggesting that the autonomous car itself presents a greater threat in traffic, but that the driver who no longer has to worry about operating the vehicle is more free to shoot at the cops and bystanders and whatnot - <USER3> would be true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I call this bullshit.

As far as I know, criminals had always a designated driver for exactly those reasons. "bad actors will be able to conduct tasks that require use of both hands or taking one's eyes off the road which would be impossible today"

Looks like the FBI is just pushing to get a real-time interface into the car control. "Algorithms can control the distance that the patrol car is behind the target to avoid detection or intentionally have a patrol car make opposite turns at intersections, yet successfully meet up at later points with the target"

</comment><comment><USER23> Passenger: "Uh, car, the bridge is out."

Car: "I know Luke" _speeds up to jump it_

Passenger: "Who's Luke"?

Car: "YEEHAW!!" _hits the rebel horn_

But seriously, FBI analysts get paid to imagine all types of future scenarios let's not hold it against them too much. It wouldn't surprise me though to see more anti-electronic gear, such as EMP, in the field as we go forward. They already have devices that can shut down a car, I imagine they'll work on these new ones just as well and the FBI simply wants to prepare for it.

</comment><comment><USER24> > The report noted criminals using automated cars would have both hands free > and be able to take their eyes off the road during a car chase.

... and guns aren't the problem?

</comment><comment><USER25> These are very valid points.

It doesn't negate the potential use of driverless cars nor is it a good argument against continued development....just things that are worth considering...

My guess? Law enforcement will try to get a kill switch they control installed in all driverless vehicles. I don't know that they should have this, but I bet they try.

<comment><USER4> The police being able to turn off vehicles should be heavily restricted and logged to help prevent abuse.

Maybe even require them to contact the manufacturer to get this done.

OnStar can do it currently can't they?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Article summary: Driver-less car leaves more hands free for evil people to do evil things.

Someone FOI the FBI's report on hands-free sets and prosthetic limbs please.

</comment><comment><USER10> I always just assumed that driverless cars would come with a remote kill switch that law enforcement and public safety officials could use.

Even if we ignore this particular threat scenario, what happens if someone has a heart attack, is passed out in an automatic car (as seen by other cars on the road), the cops/ambulance turn up but are unable to get to the person to give them aid?

Or if an automatic car somehow malfunctions and starts driving the wrong way down the freeway/motorway.

</comment><comment><USER27> Allow Law Enforcement Officials to remotely control driverless vehicles in emergency cases. There I fixed it.

</comment><comment><USER28> LOL, and how many tens of thousands die a year in accidents caused by vehicles with human drivers? Apparently over 30k according to the NHTSA.

<comment><USER29> The FBI didn't say it was a bad tradeoff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hint to FBI: Driverful cars can be lethal too.

</comment><comment><USER31> ANYTHING can be a lethal weapon if used improperly. SHUDDUP Gubmint.

<comment><USER32> That's a good reason not to use this as justification for regulation or nonsense. It's not a good reason for them not to pay attention to developments and figure out possible responses to various situations. I don't know to what degree "warns" was flavor from the reporter versus content of the statements, and I don't know the context in which these statements were made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> lol, in 100 years, it'll look like us saying penicillin should be illegal because if you fired a bucket of it through an uber powerful potato cannon, it can act as a buckshot</comment>


Nacho Momma's 10-minute Deploy: Scale, Monitor Rails App on AWS or Digital Ocean - <AUTHOR> https://content.nanobox.io/ruby-app-deployment-with-nanobox/ <comment><USER2> It's fine for local development (less memory hungry than Vagrant) but why deploying a container into production with the database in it?

Anyway, is this tied to Nanobox's services or is it possible to use it to deploy to any server?</comment>


The price of free | Talking about Open Source - g-garron http://damienradtke.org/the-price-of-free/

<comment> g-garron "The existence of free and open-source software like Linux is a modern miracle that goes largely unnoticed. We live in a capitalist-driven society, yet for the past few decades, people have been contributing source code for free to improve the quality of many different software projects. Why? Because we love software."

Also consider that in this capitalist-driven society not everybody is a capitalist-person, and not everyone agrees with the way the world is right now.

Yes, we love software, but we also love freedom, and we also love sharing</comment>


Show HN: DeckBrew, an API for Magic: The Gathering - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kyleconroy/deckbrew-api

<comment><USER2> This looks awesome! I'm at work right now but I'm definitely gonna play around with this when I get home. I wonder what else is out there that combines hacking and Magic: The Gathering. It's an interesting topic, there's for example the MTG turing machine [0]

[0]: [http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/HowItWorks.html](http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/HowItWorks.html)</comment>


Thoughts on Peer-to-Peer Matrix - <AUTHOR> https://neilalexander.dev/2020/06/02/thoughts-p2p-matrix.html <comment><USER2> Good to see more projects using libp2p to do p2p for webapp directly in the browser.

However, in my understanding, you still need some WebRTC/WebSocket server to bootstrap the p2p network right? Without network (router) level of support, like Named Data Network (NDN), it seems impossible to build pure p2p application on top of the TCP/IP network. Especially when not every device are assigned an public IP.

All the "p2p" applications I've seen (e.g. zeronet, ipfs, bittorrent) require bootstrap nodes / trackers, which may be censored by the ISP.</comment>


Media Can't Stop Presenting Horrifying Stories as 'Uplifting' Perseverance Porn - <AUTHOR> https://fair.org/home/media-just-cant-stop-presenting-horrifying-stories-as-uplifting-perseverance-porn/ <comment><USER2> Generally speaking, the mainstream media do whatever is possible to hide away serious politics and social issues under a veil of entertainment, voyeurism, or pornography. Whatever serious issue is at take is dumbed down until it's completely harmless. Healthcare. Gun violence. Plutocracy. Corruption. The death or democracy and rise of a new feudalism. Imperialism and endless war. Climate change and fossil fuel industry. All of the details of these are turned into entertaining stories, preventing people from going to the pitchforks.

You know the famous Henry Ford quote: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

<comment><USER3> This here is the exact problem. Imagine the world as an IT project, is this how anyone here would run it? Is this how ideas should be communicated? It's so obviously theatre, how so few people can see it boggles the mind.

<comment><USER4> I see you haven't seen the IT projects I've been part of. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel a lot of these stories are about people trying to survive in dysfunctional environments. The other type of story they like to publish is about the glamouros lives of rich people.

What seems to be taboo is to connect these two together. You have one group of people who don't get even the most basic healthcare or go into debt over school lunches and then you have others who have more luxury you can imagine. But somehow it's not ok to point out that maybe one has to do with the other.

It seems to me a lot of these stories are about telling poor people "stop complaining and be as resourceful as the people we are writing about. And certainly don't ask your boss for more money or your politicians for doing a better job"

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of whenever someone creates a Gofund me for health reasons. It seems a bit alien to me still as a European that people need to go beg on the internet in order to not be financially ruined by healthcare costs. :-(

<comment><USER7> It's probably alien because you haven't looked around. In quite a few European countries you can easily end up in a situation with no healthcare available to you other than the ER (eg if you're unemployed but don't get unemployment benefits). It's also not unheard of that people just can't afford treatment for their illness or even worse - the treatment just isn't available.

<comment><USER8> Availability of ER is still incredibly important. Nobody will refuse to be taken to hospital if they're in serious condition.

In my experience from Poland, people who lose health coverage find a way to get it back if they really need it. Get _any_ legal job, enrol in school, apply for disability, etc. Sometimes pleading with the staff to skip the eligibility check works, too. And if everything else fails, the out-of-pocket costs aren't insta-bankrupting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of these are tied to lack of healthcare. We need a universal healthcare system in America, I'm tired of arguing with people who claim that we can't do what almost every (if not every) other western country has already done.

<comment><USER10> I'm a supporter of universal healthcare. But the fact that Germany or Denmark can do it doesn't mean we can. Copenhagen is building a fully automated circle line subway beneath downtown for the same money it's costing us to build a shorter light rail line through the DC suburbs. Moving a bit further afield, our schools are terrible despite our per-student spending being near the top of the OECD. We already spend as much public money on healthcare as most Western European countries do, without achieving universal coverage. Our non- military government spending per capita is slightly higher than Canada's, and we get fewer services for it. Americans are uniquely bad at government compared to western countries.

Look at it from the other side. If European governments were as inefficient at providing public services as Americans are, would Europeans support mass transit and universal healthcare? If it was going to cost $6 billion to build a light rail line through the suburbs, mightn't the Danes say: "fuck it we'll build a freeway?"

Concrete example on the healthcare front. In Europe, universal healthcare is typically paid for with social insurance taxes primarily imposed on people making under $70,000. If you look at the proposals for Medicare for All that have been proposed by Democrats, you see two remarkable things:

1) Nobody proposes taxes to actually fund the expected cost;

2) Nobody proposed the level of middle class taxes (VAT and social insurance) typically imposed in European countries to find universal healthcare. Sanders' proposal comes the closest, but is half the level of say France's.

There is an important political observation here: there is little support for European-style healthcare in the US. What would happen if we had a straight up/down vote on Germany's healthcare system? Or France's? Or the UK's? The support that exists in the US is for universal healthcare that is paid for by billionaires and corporations rather than the middle class. That's a system that exists nowhere in Western Europe. It's completely unprecedented.

<comment><USER11> >But the fact that Germany or Denmark can do it doesn't mean we can.

Where is the evidence of this? Healthcare is not the same as infrastructure. Medicare and Medicaid do a better job controlling costs than private insurers: [https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20190211/NEWS/19021...](https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20190211/NEWS/190219996/medicare- medicaid-contain-costs-better-than-private-insurers-study-says)

<comment><USER12> The entire second half of the comment you're responding to addresses this. You don't have to agree, but you can't reasonably rebut the whole comment by pretending he didn't address it.

<comment><USER11> The second part of OP's comment deals with the funding sources for public healthcare. I'm responding to the allegation that our government couldn't provide it in a cost effective manner in the first place. Where in the second half is this addressed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The glass isn't 95% empty, it's 5% full!

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get it - the media companies didn't create these bad situations - they're reporting people trying to do the best they can with the hands they're dealt. What should they do? Criticise people trying to help because it could be better elsewhere?

Home Depot employees can't change national attitudes to healthcare but they can build someone a walker, so they're bad people?

<comment><USER15> Well if you read the article, they say that the media should take these stories as opportunities to discuss pressing social issues instead of skating around them. Reporting is about bringing cohesive context to information, and these stories do the opposite.

<comment><USER16> > _Reporting is about bringing cohesive context to information_

 _Policy discussion_ is about bringing cohesive context to information. Reporting is about reporting information.

<comment><USER17> Do you really think reporters just state facts and call it a day? How do they know which facts are the important ones to say? Why not list the shoesize of everyone they interview, along with the name of their dog? Obviously, I'm making a point:

Facts tell a story. The reporters for these stories are choosing what facts tell the narrative they think people want (triumph over adversity) without mentioning the facts that they think people don't want (acknowledging that the healthcare system in the US is broken for most Americans).

<comment><USER16> There's a subtle difference between sorting based on priority and compiling facts to suit a narrative. If you start with a narrative, you will fall prey to things like confirmation bias. There's nothing wrong with prioritizing the most important information, but it's very bad to say "today I am going to prove that XYZ" before going around prioritizing all the facts that would make XYZ seem real. It's a fine line between journalism and opinion pieces.

To get a better perspective of this, imagine a reporter that earnestly believed something you disagreed with. You'd probably want them to stick to the facts instead of tying every world event to their favorite policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even worse is the first example is definitely an ad for home depot. It's radical consumerism masquerading as hope.

</comment><comment><USER19> > _" Millennials move from job to job in order to climb the ladder…. For baby > boomers and other generations…loyalty and dedication to a single company or > career drove, and still drives, much of their working lives."_

Can someone tell me where the companies are that will return such loyalty? I've been looking and they don't seem to exist any more (if they ever really did).

<comment><USER20> Look for a company that provides a defined benefit pension plan. It's basically impossible to find but really the only way an employer could convince me they care about tenure

<comment><USER4> So government or public-private partnerships are your options

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is one of the things I hate about the American Ninja Warrior. Look at all the hardship and trials and tribulations this person has done to get here. Not about they exercise mind you, but the circumstances of their shitty existence. Rejoice that these mere mortals have the opportunity to run this obstacle course that is a metaphor of their shitty little lives.

</comment><comment><USER22> People seem to love human interest stories. The nightly news on the majors usually ends with one.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human- interest_story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-interest_story)

</comment><comment><USER23> The world is a pretty miserable place, and there is no shortage of coverage (local nightly news, anyone?). I for one don't mind a few pieces focused on an uplifting part of any otherwise sad story.

</comment><comment><USER24> Huh. I hadn't heard of Fair.org before.

I'm going to add them to my RSS reader for a while. If they realy are 'fair', it should be a breath of fresh air.

</comment><comment><USER25> There was a comment on a good news story today basically suggesting there should be a minimum percentage of good news stories.

I guess these are the types of stories we'd get!

</comment><comment><USER26> Stories about families and communities coming together to help each other out are "horrifying" because that's supposed to be the exclusive concern of government?

<comment><USER27> These people end up with solutions that are sub-optimal exposing them to more suffering than would have been necessary in a civilized country.

The horrifying part is that the overton window in the US is so out of whack that somehow people consider these stories uplifting.

<comment><USER26> I dunno, that Home Depot walker doesn't look "sub-par" to me. And I speak from personal experience with Actual Medical Equipment.

<comment><USER28> The horrifying part there is of course that the subject of that story doesn't have access to sufficient medical care and equipment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This article doesn't present the case that this is something wide spread or increasing in frequency. It just contains links to various articles but gives the reader no idea of the relative numbers of this type of reporting versus other types and whether or not this type of reporting is increasing in frequency. This is a complete non-issue if these are the only 10 or so articles in the last 3 years.

</comment><comment> GuB-42 No matter what created the horrible situation, getting out of it by perseverance and cleverness is good.

Sure better health care or whatever could have prevented the situation, but that's not the subject. We don't live in a perfect world, and these stories tell you that even if you can't change the world, you can still solve your own problems.

And if such articles are a problem than what about celebration of war heroes. Do we need to forget their resolve in the face of adversity just because war is essentially state sanctioned mass murder?

<comment><USER30> "...these stories tell you that even if you can't change the world, you can still solve your own problems." I think part of the criticism is that this statement is false in many cases.

The psychological benefit of such stories is that we can comfort ourselves by telling others that if they didn't manage to cure their own leukemia and run a marathon while supporting three children and a disabled spouse, they just weren't creative and perseverant enough.

A similar criticism can legitimately be made of glorifying war heroes. It makes it easier to pat ourselves on the back for sending them into a situation in which they can prove their resolve by avoiding death for a while, and we can ignore all the dumb schmucks who just got blown up right away -- they simply didn't show much resolve, did they.

It's all sort of the converse of "the personal is political"...</comment></comment>


Google Chrome to display audio indicators in each tab - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/100132233764003563318/posts/ifuevV626cX

<comment><AUTHOR> Found this here: <http://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/196vkm/></comment>


The world's two worst variable names - <AUTHOR> http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/post/the_worlds_two_worst_variable.html <comment><USER2> I think this is a little off the mark. I use the variable name data all the time but it's almost always in a relativity simple function where the context is well understood. I used to make sure the names contained in a function were very specific to the context in which I was first using the function but would later find that I wanted to use the same function but in a slightly different context and those "very good" variable names became "very confusing" variable names. (i.e. a parameter named "data" might be better then "spectralData" if the function your writing might be conceivable used for some type of data other then just spectrometer readings). The more general your functions possible use cases are the more general your parameter names should be.</comment>


Is there a Stripe for printing and mailing? - <AUTHOR>

In other words, is there a service that does printing and mailing with a nice RESTful API and good documentation? <comment><USER2> [https://www.lob.com/](https://www.lob.com/)</comment>


Forget About Photoshop: 5 More Ways to Stop Using Images in Your Designs - <AUTHOR> http://www.cherrysave.com/web-design/forget-about-photoshop-stop-using-images/

<comment><USER2> Amusing: the fact that the author uses images to demonstrate the intended results of each example.

Less amusing: after bemoaning the "(awful) state of standards-compliant browsers," 3 out of the 5 tips rely on proprietary/non-standard css. See related article, "5 More Ways to Break Your Site"

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't use any of these on a production site.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have to admit that there are some nice CSS hacks there like the gradient and drop shadow effects but it's dependent on proprietary CSS which should be avoided if possible. If you start to rely on proprietary CSS then you are setting yourself up for problems. Isn't this part of the reason why we hate IE because we are forced to use CSS code like this?

I have to think that all these effects will eventually be incorporated into the CSS standard but until then you can achieve all of those effects with small image files and simple CSS.

<comment><USER5> First: it's not "propriertary CSS" it is called "vendor extensions" and are allowed in CSS.

Second, and more important:

<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/>

<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-background/>

<http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-images/#gradients->

<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-2d-transforms/>

<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-3d-transforms/>

<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-transitions/>

<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-animations/>

Third: IE is pretty much the only browser showing now signs of support for some of the above.

<comment><USER4> Good CSS 3 links and I have to assume that the Webkit and Gecko based browsers will follow suit eventually.

In regards to proprietary vs vendor extensions terminology. I would agree that "vendor extensions" would be the official name for them but I used proprietary as an adjective to describe the type of CSS that it is. If it's not an open standard and if it's closed to a certain platform isn't that proprietary?

I'm also not saying that you shouldn't use them, it's based on the interface you are trying to implement and your coding preferences. All, I was trying to say that I would prefer to use images and standard CSS before I would consider using a vendor extension.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Regardless of how well these tricks work, I'm all for reducing the number of image dependencies in my sites. I like to make use of widgets like YUI buttons ( <http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/button/> ) as much as possible so that I don't have to ask a designer to re-recreate button images for me, or shill out money for Photoshop / Illustrator.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ooooh sideways text! My readers are going to LOVE that.</comment>


All German newspapers just signed up to this micropayment startup - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/blendle-signs-up-german-major-national-newspapers-2015-6?r=US

<comment><USER2> Still waiting for them to come to the USA...

I was just talking to a coworker about paying for good journalism. I do hope Blendle and similar services get going in more locations soon.</comment>


Docker revs up Engine, hits 1.1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/05/docker_revs_up_engine/ <comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone actually used more than 512 PIDs in their docker container? I am curious if the new limit will impact anyone.</comment>


Pair Programming Might Be Great - <AUTHOR> http://posts.dynamictyping.org/how-pair-programming-might-be-great

<comment><USER2> I agree that pair programming has it's place and can be a positive workflow for some, but for the way I work I just find it extremely intrusive and I easily get a third of what I would get done. I'm a big advocate of peer reviews, but pair programming just takes me out of my workflow and impairs my creativity and performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my work environment I find "pair programming" to be useful the 5% of the time someone is working on a Hard Problem. Most time during the work day is UI tuning, debugging, and generic implementation of straightforward features.

Pair programming doesn't need to be a policy because it precipitates naturally out of someone asking for help on a Hard Problem. That 5% of the time you're working through a tasks key algorithm, or discovering the best User Interaction for a complex feature.

I find Pair Programming to be a important sounding label for something which is actually quite mundane. It's called working together™.

It's a waste of my time to sit and watch someone implement the 95% of software that is mundane.

<comment><USER4> I agree with your dislike for relabeling the mundane, but "pair programming" is used to indicate a specific form of collaboration which includes the the three points mentioned in the post.

The sort of collaboration you're referring to is what I'd call brainstorming. Pairing with someone only for brainstorming purposes would be wasteful.

<comment><USER3> So when does putting two people together for mundane tasks have any benefit?

<comment><USER4> First, let's agree on the definition of mundane as used here. To me, your use of mundane suggests the task of writing a program after high-level questions, what and why, have received high-level answers. Everything but initial brainstorming.

The hypothesis introduced in the article is that pair programming is beneficial because it improves individual skills and code quality. I'm not sure how clearly that's communicated.

Individual skills are improved by understanding your current problem-solving process and upgrading it as necessary. This isn't only about picking up skills by observing others, but reasoning about the steps you take and updating as appropriate. Pair programming isn't necessary for this, it just facilitates it. This whole being mindful thing deserves a post of its own.

I would expect that code quality would be improved because design flaws and bugs are more likely to be caught early. Therefore there's less time spent rewriting or debugging.

I'm treating this foray into pair programming as an experiment. It was literally a week ago that I began to see how pair programming could be efficient and even enjoyable. I do not plan on doing 100% pairing forever, it's impractical and probably inefficient. Right now I'm thinking that 50-75% pairing might be an optimum in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are paired with the right person I believe this has the potential to drive you forward and keep you motivated. I experienced pair programming when I was still studying.

We had a lot of team assignments and when I worked with my best friend, instead of splitting the work like most of the other students, we just sat both in front of one computer and went through all of it. The one guy writing the code is always getting double-checked by the other guy and that way you eliminate most of the little bugs that slip past your judgement when you code alone.

Certainly a most enjoyable method of programming, although whether it is an economically viable strategy I could not tell.

<comment><USER6> On my dayjob we did some experiments on wether or not it was economically viable. So we tried classical programming and pair programming. We found that classical programming was more productive, but not twice as productive. However there were a lot less bugs found after an iteration of pair programming. When we factored that in, pair programming did end up being the better choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Like 10 years ago my best friend and I used to sit at the same computer and do the coding and UI design together! It was not all the time but it was a significant part of the day. We were developing mostly ASP pages and he was the UI designer and I was the backend coder and it made sense to go do our part then get together and merge them and then go back to do our part again. I really miss that time very very productive we were.</comment>


Ask HN: Best practices for transferring ownership of Google Drive files? - <AUTHOR> I work for a small company and am curious about best practices for transferring ownership of Google Drive files after an employee leaves. The options I have found are:
1 - Do nothing and don't delete the employee's email address. Only downside to this is continuing to pay for an unused email address.
2 - Change the old employee's sign in name and email address (username) to the new employee's. This should maintain ownership of all of those drive files? Are there any unforeseen issues with this?
3 - Transfer ownership of all the old employee's Google Drive Files & Folders to an employee who isn't leaving. There are lots of horror stories about this-- losing file structure, lost data, etc.
How have other people handled this? What's the best solution and what drawbacks are there? <comment><USER2> Are you using Google Apps for business (GCloud?) If so, you can transfer ownership that method. I've not heard anything about this causing issues, however, if you're concerned you could up your subscription to include Vault service?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are using GCloud, but that's the 3rd scenario I described above. There are stories about people losing the file structure and all transferred documents getting dumped into the new owner's root folder.

I'm thinking about using Google App Scripts to transfer all the folder ownerships and then cycle back through and transfer the file ownerships. But that might cause unknown problems. So far #2 is feeling like the best option (since we do not want to keep paying for an unused email address).</comment></comment>


Do civilisations collapse? - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-idea-of-civilisational-collapse-says-about-history <comment><USER2> tl;dr "people lived through these times and employed their coping strategies – they selectively preserved aspects of their culture and rejected others"

Another example that has been on the front page a lot recently is the Romans. The academics moved from the western capital (Rome) to the eastern capital (Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul). That's like saying if California got bombed, people would move over to New York. Then after 1000 years, the eastern capital was invaded, so they moved back to Rome and started the "Renaissance". The idea that the civilisation fell and rebuilt is a western bias.

Right now we live in a time where communists in China tried to destroy thousands of years of history. Most of the valuable items were taken to Taiwan though, and are preserved in the National Palace Museum.

There are a few empires that destroyed everything in their path (e.g. Genghis Khan), but most of them integrated conquered empires into their own.

"Now you fear punishment and beg for your lives, so I will let you free, if not for any other reason so that you can see the difference between a Greek king and a barbarian tyrant, so do not expect to suffer any harm from me. A king does not kill messengers." \- Alexander the Great</comment>


Show HN: Dyna-Kinematics – A 2D physics simulator with some unique features - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/diegomacario/Dyna-Kinematics <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone!

I'm the author of this project. I wrote it because I was very curious about physics simulation, and also because I wanted a reason to study a few libraries that I had never worked with like Qt.

In the readme I tried to explain all the details of how the simulator works. If you don't have time to read it, at least take a look at the GIFs in it. They showcase everything that the simulator can do.</comment>


Arabic, a great language, has a low profile - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/10/20/arabic-a-great-language-has-a-low-profile <comment><USER2> I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Arabic, and the dialect factor multiplies this problem.

It also encodes ideas very inefficiently for multiple reasons. 1. It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages; 2. Due to geographical and cultural separation from the West, the vocabulary is just not adapted to modern life, so "workarounds" need to be used to refer things that have become common in our daily lives. I can recall a humorous TV ad that made fun of this, which involved a wife asking her husband for "the thing" and him being confused about what she was referring to.

If we're to compare it to a programming language, I'd describe it as PHP ecosystem/stdlib/development practices combined with Rust syntax.

<comment><USER3> I'm a polyglot, and what keeps me from trying to learn Arabic is precisely that.

Back in the day I worked in a very international environment, two Tunisian colleagues spoke Tunisian to each other, but when the Moroccan or Lebanese guys from the other teams came to ask some questions, everybody switched to French. If was small talk, they would stick to Arabic with the Moroccan though.

It's pretty amazing that Arabic, technically spoken in a contiguous region from Morocco to Saudi Arabia isn't mutually intelligible with itself, whereas English, French or Spanish, separated by oceans for centuries, even if they grew different variants, stay intelligible.

<comment><USER4> The Quran and its language ("Modern Standard Arabic") may be what binds the "dialects" together under one umbrella label "Arabic". Chinese is in a similar situation, whose writing system unifies the mutually un-intelligible "dialects" like Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese as one "language" called "Chinese".

Such is an advantage of separating written and spoken forms of a language: as the spoken form inevitably mutates over time and fractures over space, having a stable written form means people who would otherwise consider each other foreigners may (1) share a common understandable set of historical and cultural documents, (2) communicate with each other at least in letters, (3) identify each other's language as but a "variation" of the standard written form.

English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese remain largely uniform across the Oceans because they are spread across the Oceans only recently, that is, not long before centralised nation states, compulsory education, sound recording, radio broadcasting, and YouTube.

<comment><USER5> The parallel to post-Roman Europe is interesting, where Latin lived on for quite a while as the language of writing. It gradually gave way to written forms of the various spoken languages, derivatives of Latin or others. During this time of parallel usage Latin, just by being there as an alternative for the elites to show off pedantry, may have helped establishing a tradition of keeping the new written languages continuously aligned with their permanently changing spoken counterparts.

Keeping Latin while it was helpful as a shared language when the scholar density was low and then moving on once local intellectual networks became stronger and mass education required efficiency may have been one of those "guns germs and steel" factors where Europe just happened to be lucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "Idle Words" blog, home to the infamous "Dabblers and Blowhards" takedown of Paul Graham, also has a good article on Arabic ([http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm](http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm)).

Opening paragraph:

I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute, where young men and women learn how to eavesdrop on the nation's enemies, provided that the enemies speak slowly and limit their conversation to hobbies and the weather.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link, it is an excellently written article, which manages to poke fun at Arabic's various weird quirks, and convey author's enthusiasm about how cool the language is, both at the same time. Very good read!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a typical American who mostly just speaks English, the #1 most useful language I wish I also spoke is Spanish. It's pervasive, both in the US and elsewhere. I'm currently in Barcelona for a conference and this is the third time in 1.5 years I've been in a Spanish-speaking country for a conference.

The only other language that can have a similarly credible case for learning it would be Mandarin, but unlike Spanish, that's only good for one country. For anyone living in the Sinosphere, that would obviously be the best choice, but for someone living in the US, Chinese isn't nearly as important. Plus, Spanish is way easier to learn, given that it shares an alphabet, similar pronunciation, and through casual exposure you likely already have a start on a basic vocabulary.

As for Arabic ... yeah, that's far down the list. I've only ever been to one Arabic country (the UAE), and more people there speak English than Arabic. Obviously that's atypical for Arabic countries, but way more westerners are likely to go the UAE than to, say, Egypt.

<comment><USER9> That's a rather US-centric worldview. Looking at the official languages of countries, French and Arabic are probably the most useful worldwide, with Spanish third and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China.

[https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a- native...](https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native- english-speaker-which-two-further-languages-would-give-me-the-most)

<comment><USER8> The better stat to use is # of speakers worldwide, not official languages: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers)

The top 10 list is, in order, English, Mandarin, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, French, Malay, Russian, Bengali, and Portuguese.

English we already speak. Mandarin is primarily useful in China and not so much otherwise. Hindustani has the same problem but for India, and there's also a good amount of overlap with English there too. Spanish is the next language in the list, above Arabic and French. Incidentally I speak some French, and didn't find it that necessary for navigating the two French- speaking countries I've visited so far. English was widely spoken and understood.

And I have to point out the irony here of being accused of being US-centric when I'm talking about _Spanish_ , and of visiting other countries where Spanish is dominant (Spain and most of South/Central America).

<comment><USER10> The interesting statistic is to look at languages with much higher L2 speakers than L1 speakers. English, French, Malay, and Swahili are the main languages in this category, with Russian and Hindi having roughly as many L2 as L1. What these statistics are telling you is which languages act as lingua francas among non-native speakers. By contrast, languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese are spoken by a large number of natives but don't have much use for non-native speakers. It's less useful to learn those kinds of languages unless you specifically want to talk with those speakers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article was hailed by Language Log as being mostly right in its scientific treatment of language[1], which is unfortunately pretty rare in journalism.

[1]: [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40379](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40379)

<comment><USER12> Interesting that he says MSA is further from region arabic than Latin is from Spanish. Provides useful context for people familiar with European languages.

<comment><USER13> It's a somewhat misleading comparison because nobody uses Latin today. MSA however is the language of the news, media and academia so everyone can understand it.

<comment><USER14> People did use Latin even into the 1800s for a similar purpose in western countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Duolingo has been postponing its launch of Arabic for English speakers for a while. Now, next date is March 1st 2019. [https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic- Online](https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online)

<comment><USER16> Duolingo only teaches vocab and shows you example sentences to teach grammar. It doesn't have any explicit teaching, which means it's less effective the further the language is from English. But, they just like advertising their 30 or however many language options.

<comment><USER17> I disagree. I'm using it to learn another language that is far from English, albeit one with much simpler grammar. I find it more effective than a grammar heavy course. You can know every rule of a language and still not be able to speak it at all. What you need is internalization of those rules via practice, which Duolingo provides.

<comment><USER18> It depends heavily on the language course. Duolingo's Italian course actually manages to teach grammar and usage through their standard translation setup, while their Japanese course does nothing of the sort. It does not work very well for the latter, I've been through most of it by now and it's just translation-translation-translation, which doesn't teach you much at all, because the translation to English really doesn't work with Japanese. For example, they keep translating 'itadakimasu' (いただきます in Hiragana) to "Let's eat!", but that's not what it means. Otherwise the taxi driver wouldn't ask you '1980 yen itadakimasu'.. :) (and that's just one, there are so many.)

<comment><USER19> Are you sure you don't mean "gozaimasu" in the taxi driver example? I learned what little Japanese I do know from Duolingo and it was somewhat useful on a recent trip to Japan. Our tour guides were mostly impressed and certainly didn't point out any glaring issues with it (although that could be Japanese politeness).

<comment><USER18> I'm absolutely sure - I've lived in Japan, and my wife is Japanese. 'gozaimasu' is a word you add to a sentence to make it (even) more polite. E.g. 'Arigatou' \- thanks. 'Arigatou gozaimasu' 'Thank you very much' (or whatever way you want to think about it). Same with phrases for 'good morning' etc. As for the taxi driver phrase, it goes like this: Normally when you ask for something in Japanese you would use for example 'kudasai' (=> 'give me', to the extent that it can be translated). But the taxi driver is _serving_ the customer, and then that word is out of the question. Instead he is thanking for being given, which is basically what 'itadakimasu' means. And that's why that word works as something you say just before eating, but also why it does _not_ translate to "Let's eat!". And working through phrase after phrase in Duolingo with only that kind of translations just doesn't work very well. And then months of comments and questions from users where they take the translation literally and figure they can use the same word as a metaphor in Japanese, the way the _English_ translation can be used as a metaphor in English.. sigh. You don't learn how the language works that way. It can work as a (small) supplement when learning the language with other better tools, but I will state that you _can 't_ learn Japanese through only Duolingo. While you can actually learn Italian that way.

<comment><USER20> Any free alternatives to DuoLingo's Japanese offering or general advice?

<comment><USER18> An easy one is to start with Human Japanese (Windows, Android, or iOS). The 'light' version is free on Android and gives you the first chapters (seven, IIRC) to give you a taste of it. After that there are lots of resources.

<comment><USER20> Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Language buffs should also check out Maltese, which is basically a form of Arabic written in a Latin script with a heavy admixture of (mainly) Italian and English loan words

</comment><comment><USER22> "But Western students who sign up for a class in it soon discover that nobody speaks this "standard" as a native tongue; many Arabs hardly speak it at all. "

This is not completely true! I'm a native Arabic speaker and MSA is the official language of newspapers, news segments, and legal documents, governments speeches even wedding invitations and not to forget the Quran and the Arabic bible. So it's spoken and written widely but people tend not to use it that often because it's easier to use shorter words that most of the time sum longer sentences.

<comment><USER23> There are many places on the margins of the Arabic world where people lack an _active_ command of MSA (as opposed to a merely passive understanding), and where newspapers may well be in French instead of MSA. After all, an active command is learned through formal schooling, and regrettably there are places in the Arabic world where children do not get much formal schooling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm turkish and because of hidden arabic imperialism and assimilation rooted deep in islam, I refuse to use even arabic words which are common in turkish.

<comment><USER25> You'd have a hard time doing the same in English: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabic_origin)

Some quite common words are on that list: jumper, cat, fanfare...

<comment><USER26> this is not a fair comparison. arabic words when spoken, are always assumed to have religious connotations first whereas english is always assumed to have contextual connotations first. it is a huge distinction

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Somehow the sound of Arabic accents are quite harsh among all languages I know to my ears. Only German is somewhat harsh - I have a lot of pleasure with Rammstein the metal/rock band sound in German. I always thought metal music would sound quite nice in Several Arabic accents as opposed to let's say a softer language like Italian. In short metal/hard rock in Arabic would sound wonderful whereas in Italian not.

<comment><USER28> There is a great punk band from New York with all Arabic lyrics: [https://haramharam.bandcamp.com/](https://haramharam.bandcamp.com/)

<comment><USER29> Wow - they are great. Thank you for that link! And I don't think it sounds any harsher than other hardcore punk in English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would disagree with the articles analogy of MSA to arabic dialects is like Latin to Romance languages. The difference is not quite that stark with Arabic.

<comment><USER31> It's pretty stark. I speak Laventine and I struggle to communicate with my North African friends and often end up supplementing with english.

I'm not sure I'd go this far but some scholars make the case that the dialects are not really dialects, they are there own language that were influenced by Arabic.

See for example Taleb's argument on Lebanese being a language [https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and- ge...](https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/no- lebanese-is-not-a-dialect-of-arabic-e95320c164c)

Historically it makes some sense because North Africa and the Laventine didn't have much in common with Arabia before Islam so they must've had their own local languages (say Berber or Aramaic) that was influenced by Arabic.

<comment><USER32> Plus you get the influence of colonial powers like France in North Africa. Tunisian for example is... challenging if you come at it from the perspective of something like Kuwaiti Arabic.

<comment><USER31> Certainly. In Jordan, 5-10% of our words, when we're speaking Arabic that is, is English.

<comment><USER33> This morning someone shared with me an article on cnbc that a guy and a girl from Jordan raised 4.5 million and now I see you here, congratulations :)

<comment><USER31> haha only on HN. And thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Urdu is a language which I speak and admire - for the reason that the Hindi- Persian mix along with the Persian syntax/alphabet gives it the ultimate flexibility.

You can capture any sound/accent in Urdu. What I mean is you to take any word in any language and if you wanted to write it as-is in Urdu syntax, you can do so with 100% accuracy.

<comment><USER35> Disagree. I am a native speaker of Urdu, and Urdu is effective only with significant English loan words. The Persian alphabet also makes little sense - we pronounce seen and suad the same way but write them differently thanks to the Persian alphabet being forced on a language that wasn't meant for it.

<comment><USER34> regarding seen and suad, please check out: [https://www.quora.com/What-is- difference-between-se-%D8%AB-s...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-difference- between-se-%D8%AB-sin-%D8%B3-and-swad-%D8%B5-in-the-Urdu-alphabet)

And as for the using persian script for urdu, without going into political stuff, I think it is a huge advantage - Persian script is not only used for Persian and Urdu, even Balochi, Daari (Afghanistan), and Pashto uses Persian script. Moreover, by virtue of knowing Persian script, it becomes immensely easy to pick up Arabic (at least reading it).

Then there are few other languages such as Sindhi (Pakistani Sindhi) which have a Persian-based script (few other characters on top of Persian which are specific to the language).

Which means, if you can read Urdu, with little effort, you can start reading Arabic/Balochi/Sindhi which means you can read literature from Pakistan all the way to Morocco.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Chinese also had the same "issue": it is more of a family of languages rather than a language. But the Chinese government has been pushing pretty hard for Mandarin over the past 100 years, such that it has now become _the_ Chinese language. It has cost them a lot of linguistic diversity, but they probably think it pays off in the long run.

<comment> village-idiot France is doing the same with French.

<comment><USER37> French was a minority language in France until the 20th century. The other languages were basically beaten and shamed out of school children.

<comment><USER38> Same situation with Italian.

The introduction of the radio and the television played a big part in the shift to Italian and French becoming the normal languages for their respective countries over the multitude of regional languages.

<comment><USER39> I really enjoy that Napolitan and Sicilian dialects are kind of still being spoken.

<comment><USER40> Sicilian is still spoken a bit in the New York Metro area - a lot of New Jersey Italians that speak fluent Italian have trouble communicating with people in Italy, because it's Sicilian!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It is a great language to learn. I speak a bit of Khaleej Arabic, and maybe twenty years ago, could read the characters (I'd struggle a bit now) so could read anything that was transliterated.

But it's logical and very easy. Well worth learning even just the fundamentals. There are a few sounds that us English speakers don't necessarily use natively, but on the whole, it's a lot easier to learn (I find) than say a tonal language.

<comment><USER42> Kaif halach? As a Muslim who gets to hear Arabic several times a week in the mosque and who lived in the Khaleej, too, picking Arabic has been a not so easy thing for me. I think any other language not formally read would still be difficult for me. However, I can read Arabic though still can't speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Peter Hessler wrote a wonderful New Yorker story about Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, mixing history and language history, politics, and his personal history in Egypt. It goes into much more detail.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning- arabi...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-arabic-from- egypts-revolution)

Some random quotes:

> Over time, Arabs came to associate any encouragement of vernacular writing > with colonialism. By the nineteen-fifties, allegiance to fusha was critical > to pan-Arabism, because the language created a bond across the Arab world.

> At public universities, math, medicine, and some hard sciences are taught in > English. Centuries ago, Europeans needed Arabic to learn medicine, but > nowadays even Egyptian medical students don't use Arabic texts. "What > happens is that you reserve Arabic for traditional knowledge," Doss said. > "And it becomes more conservative."

> After the Chinese, textbook Egyptians seemed remarkably uninspired by > development. There were no production quotas, no economic plans, no > infrastructure projects. The word "factory" did not appear in the book. > People said things like "Ya hag, I'm an engineer and after five years of > university, I'm working as a waiter in a restaurant."

> The language is wonderful for Wanderwort. Arabic imported "shah" from the > Persians, and then the phrase al-shah mat—the king died—was introduced to > English as "checkmate."

> Translation into fusha can clean up a politician's words. For example, in > April, 2016, President Sisi discussed political reform with representatives > of different sectors of society. Speaking Egyptian, he stumbled: "The ideal > shape that you are calling for, that idealism is in books, but we cannot > take everything you think about with paper and pen and then ask the state > for it, no, it won't happen . . . but we are on a pathway in which we're > succeeding each day more than the day before." In Al-Ahram, the quote > appeared in fusha as: "Idealism exists in books, but we're walking the > pathway of success, and we will succeed day by day."

> During the last century, publishers sometimes rejected books that used > Egyptian, and even novels about everyday life, like Naguib Mahfouz's "Cairo > Trilogy," featured fusha dialogue that no Egyptian would ever speak. > Egyptian Arabic still lacks a standardized orthography, but its use has > become more common during the past fifteen years, in part because of the > Internet and texting. Nowadays, a writer like Rakha can publish in Egyptian, > but to some degree it's too late, because people rarely read Arabic books of > any sort. For Rakha's third novel, he's writing in English, primarily > because he wants to attract readers.

</comment><comment><USER44> Also there is a poor support in software, for example in console tools: [1]

[1] [https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17](https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17)

</comment><comment><USER45> Arabic's grammar system should also be fascinating for any computer scientist. The majority of MSA vocabulary is generated by predictably transforming "root strings" of 2, 3 or 4 letters. Beyond just English style conjugation, this means that every verb can predictably be transformed into a set of nouns, every noun can be traced back to to its original root verb (the same for adjectives and adverbs).

For example

Root: KTB Kataba (he wrote) Kitaab (book) [thing you write] Maktaba (bookshop / library / office) [place you write] Kateb (clerk, writer, author) [writer] (and so on for words that don't translate directly into English)

Root: AML Amala: (he did / worked) Amal: (~action) [thing you do / make] Mamal: (factory) [place you do / make] Amel: (~worker) [doer, maker, worker]

So on for words like (kitchen = place where you eat, pilot = person who flies).

The previous comment arguing that Arabic is too rigid for new vocabulary overlooks how this rigidity allows for a very well structured grammar, that ability to express thoughts and ideas thag just fall out of a result of the combinatorics.

Similarly, this means that contrary to previous comments, Arabic is also /very well/ encoded for many tasks. Once you know your roots, is very easy to reverse engineer what a lot of commonly used words mean. What's more, you can (and people have) exploited this to write very efficient semantic compression algorithms for Arabic text.

You can't see it in the English letters but these transformations are super algorithmic, you do them by just doubling consonants or adding vowels and it's very intuitive for native speakers.

There are only about a total of 6000 lexical root words in Arabic, so on a computer you can represent each word by encoding it's lexical root, and the grammatical transformation on it. This results in compressed text which is also still very easy to analyse for meaning and sentiment.

You can check out the literature on Arabic natural language processing to see more like this, and a lot of them double as helpful tools for learning Arabic. Google once made an API which would take written Arabic text and infer the locations of all the pronunciation marks from the context and vocabulary, so you can turn text into a form that's easier for beginners to read. Yamli is a popular tool which automatically transliterates Arabic that has been written phonetically in Roman characters back to correctly spelled Arabic letters, so if you've heard a word but don't know how to spell it you can still Google it. I'm sure there are many other cool things I don't know about too.

There may be a lot of spoken dialects, but written Arabic is potentially one of the most standardised and carefully encoded languages there is.

<comment><USER46> It's certainly interesting in theory. But in practice, how do you distinguish between a bookshop, library, office and desk when all of those things can be referred to by "maktab"?

And does inferring / generating words this way actually work? For example, can I say "makra" (مقرأ) for "Library", a place where you read? Based on the verb "yakra" (read).

<comment><USER47> > But in practice, how do you distinguish between a bookshop, library, office > and desk when all of those things can be referred to by "maktab"?

Bookshop: matjar/dukkan (shop/store) kutub (books)

Library: maktaba

Office: maktab

Desk: maktab

The difference between office and desk is found from context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I learned MSA and some Egyptian and there really are things you can say in it that are almost impossible to express in English (or the other European languages I know). This is true of any pair of languages of course but structurally the root system allows much more nuance and overtone than more workmanlike languages like English. I believe Hebrew (which I don't speak!) has a similar structure though I've been told by Hebrew+Arabic speakers that Hebrew in practice is less so.

It's a real shame the contemporary literature is so small.

<comment><USER49> Have you got some examples?

<comment><USER50> I have very limited knowledge on the topic so take what I say with some skepticism, but one thing is that most words are formed by a variation of a three or four letter root word. So this gives a lot of flexibility and subtlety to the language. Context is everything. A root word for example made up of the letters d - r - b in its most basic form means to hit. But that same root can be used to mean depress (as in a pedal) or separate things (sort) or ring a bell or to agree on a time and place for a meeting, to be unrealistic, to make and example or analogy. The dictionary entry is multiple columns. And this is common in the language.

Further to the competent speaker this results in no difficulty understanding the language give the next point which is its grammer. Words and therefore phrases and scentences have their grammatical role signified by Vowels.

<comment><USER51> This isn't exactly an unusual concept; you can see the same thing in earlier English, preserved in different forms like "rise" (present) / "rose" (past) / "raise" (causative).

This was once considered significant enough that a distinction was drawn between "strong" irregular verbs that inflect through a vowel change (rise / rose; grow / grew; swim / swam...), and "weak" irregular verbs that derive their irregular past form from the regular one (bend / bent; sleep / slept...).

<comment><USER50> Yea it goes further than that in Arabic. In the example of r s e only vowels were modified for tense in Arabic you will add consonants to radically change the meaning. Same in hebrew as another commenter showed much better than I did

<comment><USER51> Changing the vowel to form a causative verb from a base verb goes a little farther than "only vowels were modified for tense".

It's a productive system in modern Arabic and a fossil of earlier times in modern English, but it's not different in kind.

<comment><USER48> The root properties of Arabic go far beyond the example you gave of schwache Verben in germanic languages or the historical PIE/PIG roots that give us names like Rhine/Rhône (i.e. Fluß).

For example the word (as written) k-t-b (كتب) means "write" but could just as much mean letters, writer, books etc; these stems are really how you think of the word at a much deeper level than you get out of English etymology[+] or (IMHO) Hanzi radicals. Arabic has some limited case, but the grammar is quite different from PIE languages, lacking a "to be" verb and adjectival/adverbial distinctions (a fast car and a car that was swift are differentiated only by the article).

<comment><USER48> Oh I forgot my footnote

[+] I really love that English is pretty conservative in spelling so that you can often tell the meaning of the word by looking at how it is written. Languages like German that reform their spelling periodically to match pronunciation shifts snip those connections away (while French goes the other way...there's a reason why a spelling bee can be prime time television in France).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It is on my list of languages I want to learn! Because I think it will be the second most spoken language in Europe. But as others already wrote: the dialects are very strong and different.. So, not sure which one to learn :)

Any advise? Or maybe prediction which will win the "language" war in Europe?

<comment><USER53> > I think it will be the second most spoken language in Europe

Arabic has 4-12 million speakers in Europe depending on how you count. If we take the most generous estimation (12 million) which compares 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants to native speakers it's at best the 13th most spoken language in Europe[2].

Why do you think it'll displace all the languages that are currently ahead of it?

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#Immigrant_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#Immigrant_communities)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#List_of_la...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#List_of_languages)

<comment><USER54> Parent is extrapolating from the trend.

<comment><USER53> Such an extrapolation doesn't make sense. You could also assume that all of New York would be speaking Italian by now given historical immigration rates.

Foreign languages only tend to have staying power until the 2nd or 3rd generation. All these immigrants are going to public schools in their respective countries where the official language is spoken, it's expected that they speak it at their jobs etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Having learned Arabic because my ex girlfriend was Jordanian I can say it is a difficult language, but anything gendered is frustrating and difficult. Its the writing that gets me, the right to left thing is entirely a new way of thinking.

<comment><USER56> As someone who studied elementary Arabic as a child temporarily living in an Arab country, the only bits that are left with me is the script. 25 something years later, I can still read elementary Arabic words I see on the internet or in TV, but I have forgotten most of the vocabulary and grammar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I find the general throatiness and swallowing of sounds in Arabic to be far from melifluous.

<comment><USER58> Common misconception. Arabic sounds lovely [https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU](https://youtu.be/WEwgafTDrOU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> not to mention the most beautiful (imo) and has some pleasant Farsi spoken in Iran.

<comment><USER60> Farsi is an Indo-European language. Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language. Farsi is genealogically closer to English than Arabic.

<comment><USER59> im a fucking idiot.

<comment><USER60> No, it's a fairly widespread misconception. People also think Turkish is also somehow related to Arabic and/or Farsi whereas Turkish belongs to a yet another language family (Turkic Languages) and is genealogically entirely unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Arabic is a horrible language both written and spoken. Turkish on the other hand is a beautiful language and it should be more popular.

<comment><USER62> Any arguments as to why that is so?

<comment><USER61> Turkish is regular and straightforward. Arabic, not so much. As for speaking, you have to speak like something stuck in your throat and it doesn't sound that pleasant to be honest.

<comment><USER63> I think Turkish lacks consonants so it was tough for me to learn it with vowels flowing freely like there is no tomorrow. That throat sound, they call it glotral and it is there in many languages such as Spanish German and Irish and Scottish. kh' as in Scots 'loch' or German 'mach' but the Ein sound is toug: Ayin the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʿayin Phoenician ayin. Hebrew ʿayin ע, Aramaic ʿē Ayin.svg, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> To me Arabic seems to have two dialects mainly. Egyptian and the rest. Egyptian being so different as to sound like a separate language.

And as for Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf, Arab or rest of North African Arabic -- those are more or less the same. And if you learn MSN you can cover those.

<comment><USER65> > And as for Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf, Arab or rest of North African Arabic -- > those are more or less the same.

This is very wrong. The is a massive difference between North African and the gulf arabic. So massive that the speakers will have to revert to the standard arabic to be able to communicate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Except for arabic numerals. All of science, in every language, uses arabic numerals. That is a really big deal we rarely even mention.

<comment><USER67> I've been struggling some to describe numerals and Mikey's to my small children, and it often feels like they area backwards. As you describe this I wonder: are we literally writing them backwards?

<comment><USER48> In Arabic numbers are written in the same order as in, say, English, Thus Arabic is little-endian.

I grew up with the Hundu digits (and the European ones!) which look more like the digits we use here than the actual arabic ones.

<comment><USER68> Is the Hindu and English ordering the same? If so, it's gone through two endian changes from India to Europe!

<comment><USER69> Yes, everyone writes the tens to the left of the ones on the page.

Most of their names (at least in Hindi) are recognisable from enlish/latin/greek. Looks like that's not the case in Arabic, unsurprisingly really... unless 7 = سَبْعَة = sabʿä = sabbath counts, but I suspect we got that from semitic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numbers_in_various_lan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numbers_in_various_languages)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>