English has been my pain for 15 years - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/news/61 <comment><USER2> The recent frenzy of accent related Hacker News posts seems to reinforce the opinion I saw in a thread discussing the pg controversy:

"Dear Paul,

It's not what you are, it's what you did. At least, I hope.

I suspect this is all coming out of a desire to emphasize that communication is important when you're starting a company. It's never just about solving technical problems. Well, sure, that's true. But as Nitasha has covered rather thoroughly, your "empirical evidence" isn't some blind sample - it's a walking demonstration of confirmation bias.

The larger problem is something you've explained yourself, in your essay on "Investor Herd Dynamics". Another name for this essay might have been, "Venture Capital is a Cargo Cult". In that essay, you lay out several reasons why an investment becomes more attractive when other people are already investing in it. And here's the crux of your argument:

'But frankly the most important reason investors like you more when you've started to raise money is that they're bad at judging startups. Judging startups is hard even for the best investors. The mediocre ones might as well be flipping coins. So when mediocre investors see that lots of other people want to invest in you, they assume there must be a reason.'

Do I need to spell this out? Your bias is a cancer on your industry, because it becomes part of the voodoo nonsense that less astute investors use to pick their horses. Your decisions may seem rational to you — but if you talk about how you don't like to back people with strong accents, it becomes less likely that other people will back them as well. You can be better than this.

Look deeper."

<comment><USER3> Would PG (or his predecessor silicon valley VC) have made the same comment about strong accents 30 years ago? I don't think so. For one, the diffusion of Americanisms (idioms, accent etc.) were weaker and founders had stronger accents. It would be inconceivable to say this in public. To me this signifies, perhaps, a shift in the valley from investing in technology heavy companies toward more consumer branded companies. What I mean by this is if I look at Andy Grove and Intel (30 years ago), I don't think his accent prevented him from being successful. However today you need someone who is more US market oriented. Maybe in 10 years Silicon Valley turns into a modern day Madison Avenue, where it is filled predominantly with marketing/adverting type people who have mastered the medium of Internet and smartphones. They spend their time trying to get people to buy 'stuff'.

As for people who are standing behind PG's statement, just look outside your window. The US has had a number of immigrants who came to this country and did not speak a single word of English. Yes, they did not speak English forget about a strong accent – who built successful businesses. I think that is great. Somehow lack of the right accent didn't prevent them from interacting with customers/vendors etc. Also, most businesses are international and you can't expect to master the local accent and idioms everywhere. Does Tim Cook have Chinese accent, or German accent? Last I checked the iPhone is selling quite well in China and Germany. The idea that you need the right accent and master the local idioms to do business makes no sense today where your major customers are half a world away. You partner and figure things out. Having the right accent is not the top or even important in that list. PG is a great guy but he slipped big time this one time.

<comment><USER4> I suspect any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement would have said something similar 30 years ago (1983), or 50 years ago (1963), or 100 years ago (1913).

Long-distance communication and migration is becoming more common: native English speakers (especially in North America) are getting _more_ chances to hear and become familiar with the speech of people who do not have English as their first language. (Without familiarity, it's easy to assume that flawed grammar and pronunciation means either flawed thinking or risky cultural differences.) So I'd surmise that the heavily-accented currently have their _best_ opportunities ever to thrive in North American capital/recruiting/selling markets – and earlier generations of investors would have offered even harsher assessments about the impact of strong accents.

One of the points I was making with the _My Fair Lady_ -themed joke in another thread (the SayAfter.me accent training offer) was that this is an eternal issue.

 _Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters; condemned by every syllable she utters…_

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg)

That film came out in 1964 (winning Best Picture), based on a 1956 stage musical, based on a 1913 play ( _Pygmalion_ ). The same ideas about accent and career-success go back further, and easily translate to many other languages and cultures.

Of course, an _uneducated native_ (or _disadvantaged local group dialect_ ) accent is a different thing than a _non-native_ accent. A non-native accent is more likely to indicate someone with the education and drive to dare operating in a non-native language environment. But, it takes a bit of familiarity to internalize that understanding, and stronger accents still signal a risk of slower and more error-prone communication.

When someone honestly points out that the strongest accents have been problematic, based on significant observational experience, they haven't "slipped", they've done the listeners a favor by sharing a perceived truth. Even if for some reason their observation is in error (and here I doubt it), by sharing the lesson they're helping, not hurting, the process of describing and understanding the world.

<comment><USER3> It is interesting that you bring up examples of these Irish/English plays, to me these are societies that turned static and frozen after the initial dynamism went away and irrelevant affiliations dominated. Around the time my fair lady came out, pg's family immigrated away from England to the US. Wonder why?

In any case, we are talking about Silicon Valley here. Not society in general. What made it special is this ability to assimilate talent from all over the world. As has been pointed out by others, people with strong accents are all over the valley running businesses successfully. BTW, significant observational experience from pg is about 100 companies in an economy that has several million businesses. So, yeah not exactly significant if you ask me.

<comment><USER4> When you have observed a similar number of founding teams close up, your impressions will have similar credibility.

Until then, on the empirical issue – what _has actually been_ a predictive indicator during the YC programs – real experience, not theory and hope, matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      hey guys, you are not understanding us, we are not
      understanding what you say as well, and it is hard to find
      people that, once your understanding limits are obvious,
      will try to slow down the peace of the conversation. Often
      even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same
      sentence repeated the same at speed of light.

This is an important point. There are a number of things that native speakers of English can do to be more understandable to non-native speakers. Some things I've found are helpful: speaking more slowly, shifting your pronunciation (especially of vowels) to be more standard, using different words (e.g. if you're talking to a native speaker of a Romance language, prefer words with Latin roots over Germanic ones), and being careful to pronounce all consonants. Things that rarely help: speaking more loudly and repeating the same phrase multiple times.

Making these changes to your speech in real time is a difficult skill that must be cultivated and practiced. I would encourage native speakers to work at this skill, as it can make a big difference. I was once speaking to a couple of Russians and an American from the same region of the US as me. The Russians said they could understand me easily, but had difficulty understanding the other American. The difference was that I was making an effort to speak more clearly for them.

<comment><USER6> > Things that rarely help: speaking more loudly and repeating the same phrase > multiple times.

The Spanish do that - and it doesn't help them much, either.

Oh, and you've forgotten the "waving your arms about" bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great post.

Here's a BBC Radio Four programme where Stephen Fry talks about spelling reform, and it includes a little bit about pronunciation. The brokenness of English is a problem we know about!

([http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs))

> _The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues > communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically._

It doesn't have to be people from different countries! People in England can have very very different accents. It can be hard to understand some of the stronger accents.

Sometimes people keep a regional difference for some words but not others. I say "bath" with a short a, but "path" with a longer a.

> My advice is that if you are learning English now, start listening as soon > as possible to spoken English.

BBC used to have the _excellent_ World Service programming. It had a variety of interesting short documentary, long news reporting, and variety of British culture shows. Now it's just rolling news. Idiots who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing ignored the real "soft power" benefits of the old World Service programmes.

> I always advice people against translation efforts in the topic of > technology, since I believe that it is much better to have a common language > to document and comment the source code, and actually to obtain the skills > needed to understand written technical documentation in English is a simple > effort for most people.

I gently disagree with this part.

For creating code I strongly agree, you're right. We do need a common language.

But if I had the money I'd set up a foundation to improve the man pages and documentation for projects, and to then translate these documents into the big languages - Portuguese, Spanish, French, some form of Chinese. Etc. I feel that this is important for poor people in developing nations.

Finally, your written English is good. I knew you're not a native speaker, but I didn't have any trouble understanding what you were saying. Many people speak only one language.

<comment><USER8> > BBC used to have the excellent World Service programming.

BBC radio programmes were also at the receiving end of a wave of political correctness sweeping through the Blair years. "Classist" Received Pronunciation was out, regional accents were in (mostly so that Scottish cronies could occupy civil-servant jobs and the likes of John Prescott could eventually become plausible Peers of the Realm, but I digress). The result is such that, in 2013, I struggle to find any broadcast _at all_ that might sound like old-fashioned RP. There is now no real alternative for learning RP: either you attend Oxbridge and/or belong to certain circles, or you'll be stuck with a local accent forever.

Paradoxically, trying to make RP disappear, they made it even more exclusive and desirable.

<comment><USER9> Nah... RP is the accent all us inverse snobs snigger at. In all seriousness, there are more "neutral" and aurally-pleasing English accents than old- fashioned RP.

It's interesting to see the effects of varied accents in modern British television programming on largely self-taught English speakers in relatively isolated communities though: Burmese Cockney has to be my favourite.

<comment><USER10> Burmese Cockney eh? This I hafta listen to at least once in my lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> English isn't just the language of IT, it's become the lingua franca of science and commerce. Very little research worth reading is published in a language other than English these days. I wouldn't be surprised if there are obscure, third-rate English-language scientific journals in China that have never been seen, let alone had articles submitted to by native English speakers!

Over the years, I've worked with a lot of people who are not native English speakers. The one thing that trips me up is when one of them is so utterly brilliant at speaking English that I completely forget they're not a native speaker and start unconsciously throwing in some of the slang and colorful idioms my redneck father has fed me over the years. I always feel bad when I do this because it must sound like I go from perfectly understandable English to complete and utter gibberish in nothing flat! Idioms and slang are really horrible things to inflict upon non-native speakers. I can't imagine what it must be like for a non-native English speaker trying to work with Cockneys or newfies!

<comment><USER12> Cockney is relatively easy compared to some other local UK dialects/accents. My wife's family is from Stirlingshire in Scotland and they say stuff like:

'yer wain's greetin' -> 'the baby's crying'.

'I'm away tae get woor messages' -> 'I'm going to the shops for food'

It took my a while before I could understand them :-)

<comment><USER13> Accent and dialect are distinct. Maybe it's because I was born in Scotland, spent my teenage years in the English midlands and north, now live in London and watch TV from the states, but I've never met an English speaker whose accent I had difficulty understanding. And that includes all the heavily accented (although generally second-gen) immigrants I've met.

Dialect on the other hand means words I don't know the definition of, and sometimes there isn't enough context to intuit it.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. But it's obviously not just the accent thats at issue here. If you think about it, and try to do a good impersonation of someone talking in a different accent it has to include a bit of dialect and local grammatical idioms to make it convincing.

I assumed that the original comment about 'foreign accents' also encompassed the grammatical tics that foreign speakers often have. Someone speaking grammatically correct english in a strong accent is easily understood, but it only takes a very little grammatical mistake to change to meaning of a sentence. For example, an Italian colleague who missed out a 'to' and told me 'just a minute, I'll come over your desk' caused some admittedly slightly childish giggling in the office...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The number one rule I have taught to people who speak English as a second language is to _always_ _always_ _always_ learn polysyllabic words, especially those with 3+ syllables, to learn them back to front and _never_ from front to back, which is the natural way to approach learning long words.

Instead of learning a word like onomatopeia like this:

        on...
        ono...
        onomat...
        onomato...
        onomatopei...
        onomatopeia

Try saying it out loud this way instead:

        ...a
        ...peia
        ...topeia
        ...matopeia
        ...nomatopeia
        onomatopeia

This will almost always result in learning to pronounce the word _much_ better. I say almost because there probably are words out there that violate this rule, but I haven't come across any of them yet. The reason this approach works is because the first syllable of almost all polysyllabic words in English is pronounced in a more drawn out fashion than the latter syllables. By learning from back to front, you force yourself to learn to draw out the first syllable and shorten up the last syllable(s).

I have found that this rule is also applicable to almost all Romance languages for English speakers learning, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

If you are a speaker of a second language, I _strongly_ urge you to try this out yourself and get feedback from a native speaker on your pronunciation.

<comment><USER15> This is a fantastic idea! Do you mind if I share that with my English students?

<comment><USER14> Certainly. I have another excellent trick for you that I was able to use to teach my all my Chinese students back in the day how to pronounce the word "usually", which is a notoriously difficult word for Chinese speakers.

Exploiting the technique above, start with a word in the language of the audience that share phonemes with your target word. From there you essentially play something similar to Lewis Carroll's "Doublets" game from the end to the beginning. So for the word "usually" I would usually start with the city in China, "Guanzhou" and proceed as follows (excuse my poor man's phonetic spelling):

        Gwan-jo
        Gwan-jo
        Gwan-jo
        Gwan-jo
        Gwan-joooo
        Gwan-joooo
        Gwan-joooo
        Gwan-joooo
        Gwan-joooo-aaaa
        Gwan-joooo-aaaa
        Gwan-joooo-aaaa
        Gwan-joooo-aaaa
        Gwan-joo-a-lee
        Gwan-joo-a-lee
        Gwan-joo-a-lee
        Gwan-joo-a-lee
        joo-a-lee
        joo-a-lee
        joo-a-lee
        joo-a-lee
        yoo-joo-a-lee
        yoo-joo-a-lee
        yoo-joo-a-lee
        yoo-joo-a-lee

The repetition is performed until your student(s) ha(s|ve) properly pronounced the current temperoary utterance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> English is so horrible because it has no discernable orthography. My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis. I mean what the fuck, my mothertongue german is the king of combined nouns but this change of pronounciation on concatenation doesnt happen ever. Or phonetical difference based on grammtic use as in the verb read. Horrible. I think it should be handled like the Finns and Koreans did. Throw all the irregularities out so that the language can be read after learning the alphabet. I was always against this in German but then I realized most current spellings are just a snapshot in time, it all used to be spelled differently. So now I am dor either use the original form an pronounciation or go fully local. Computer is fine as it is still english but will and should eventually become Kompjuter. It looks really wrong to me but it is readable as a German word and much better to learn for children.

<comment><USER17> There are several major problems with theoretical English spelling reform:

1\. A purely phonetic approach means that, even within the UK, I would spell everything differently from my colleagues from Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow etc etc. Not good.

2\. English spelling tends to represent the "deep" structure of words rather than the ("shallow") representation - your "thesis - antithesis" is an excellent example of this. This is only frustrating for foreign learners learning pronounciation, but otherwise has a lot to commend it.

3\. Our historical orthography creates a link with our history and our culture; I can read Shakespeare even though Elizabethan pronounciation was startlingly different to today's.

<comment><USER18> 1\. Every other language with such a system bases it on the "standard" pronunciation, for English this could be for example BBC English. As a result you'll sometimes have youths who will write the local dialect phonetically in IM chat, but they also know how to write (and speak) the standard way.

2\. You're saying people should threat written English words like Chinese glyphs, masquerading as a non-glyph language, and that that's somehow better? My instincts tell me that knowing how to pronounce a word by reading it is more advantageous than having to learn 1000's of glyph-like words, maybe someone else has more knowledge about the tradeoffs between phonetic and glyph like scripts.

3\. This is a gimmic. How many times do you estimate the average English speaking person reads these texts in their life?

<comment><USER19> 3\. It's not a gimmick. Shakespeare is but one example of culture; he's not the start and finish of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Coming from almost the opposite background, I agree very strongly with the assertion that accent is almost beside the point. It's true that if your accent is too thick that will harm communication, but below a certain threshold native speakers will attune pretty quickly.

For me, American English is my native language, but I am also half Brazilian and learned Portuguese from childhood trips to Brazil (I didn't properly learn until I was 12). Because I was exposed to Portuguese at a young age I have excellent pronunciation and decent grammar, but I never spent enough time living there to pick up a broad vocabulary. So actually my expressiveness Portuguese is quite weak even though people's first impression might be that it is perfect until we get into a serious conversation and I struggle to come up with the right words and expressions.

I often contrast this with my mother and father who learned the language pairs as adults, but did so in a serious academic setting. I have less of an accent than both of them in their opposing language, but they both have a much stronger overall command. Sometimes I meet someone with a very thick accent that is hard to decipher at first, but they speak very quickly and with excellent grammar and vocabulary.

So it's clear to me that accent and language skills are orthogonal. Many immigrants hit a wall with their accent because it's good enough, and they get more added value from improving their grammar and vocabulary. Clearly I think pg touched on the important point that entrepreneurs generally talk fast about complicated and novel ideas, so an accent is more likely to get in the way as compared to normal interactions. However it's just the tip of the iceberg, and I think the average American lives a more sheltered life in terms of the reality of having to learn another language than any other country.

<comment><USER21> _So it 's clear to me that accent and language skills are orthogonal. Many immigrants hit a wall with their accent because it's good enough, and they get more added value from improving their grammar and vocabulary._

That, in fact, is directly in line with pg's point.

His point was that you have to get to "good enough" and not doing so is a real problem. However he went on to make it clear that if your accent does not impede communication, then it is a non-issue.

<comment><USER20> Yeah I don't think I disagreed with pg, more that I think he's focusing on the much less important issue. I would hazard a guess that the number of brilliant entrepreneurs who have perfect English but can't be understood because of their accent is dwarfed by the number of brilliant entrepreneurs who struggle with English at a more basic level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I see that the submitted article, and many of the interesting comments in this busy thread, relate to the issue of the bizarre spelling patterns of English. As a native speaker of General American English (the dialect of English I recommend to foreign learners of English ;) ), I have two perspectives on this.

1) As a parent of English-speaking children, I thought it was VITAL that they learn well the main consistent sound-symbol correspondence rules of English spelling. (This is called "phonics" in the context of teaching reading to native speakers of English.) My favorite book recommendation for this is _Let 's Read: A Linguistic Approach,_ by linguist Leonard Bloomfield and lexicographer Clarence Barnhart. All four of my children learned to read well with this book. The book is now in a second edition

[http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic- Approach/dp/081...](http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic- Approach/dp/0814334555)

prepared by a second generation of the Barnhart family. Learning to read with an approach like this is dialect-friendly (the book is specifically organized to take into account dialect differences, at least within American English) and systematic for understanding what is consistent in English spelling and what is not.

2) As for spelling reform in English, I think it was HN user gnosis who once shared a very interesting link

[http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html](http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html)

about English spelling reform by a commentator who knows linguistics well. English spelling reform is often desired by native speakers of the language, but it is a tough problem. See what the link has to say about various proposals for spelling reform.

</comment><comment><USER23> Concentrated learning for English accents is effective. From personal experience (through acting) I can tell you that sitting down with a professional accent coach 2-3x per week can have you speaking and understanding heavy, hard accents ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZU...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZUNfovLWktA#t=65)) quickly. A month of lessons will get you understanding, and fooling some people who don't have that accent. A few months is required to fool people who have that accent.

From this experience I learned that the process of learning a new accent is totally separate from learning a language as most people do it. You need to master IPA as well as carry a mirror to watch your own lips and have good close-up reference material. As evidenced by all the mediocre accents in movies it's not a foolproof process, but it can certainly get you much closer to your goal.

</comment><comment><USER24> It is worth noting that the unintelligible accent issue is context dependent. A native English speaker can be the person with an unintelligible accent, and that person may need to work on their communication skills in order to have influence.

I experienced this phenomenon first hand as a native English speaker with an Australian accent. At my first hostel abroard there was a mixed group of european (non UK) people conversing in English, and I thought I'd try and join in.

me: howrya?

group: _blank stares_

me: how are you?

group: _blank stares_

me: how - are - you?

group: _look of fear_

me: hello?

This first experience was definitely a shock, and it took me some time to realise what it must have been like for the group.

In terms of learning to understand native speakers, travelling in their country for an extended period seems to work. My family has hosted many international guests through exchange programs, including adult guests who had never left their home country (but were taught English at school). Communication was sometimes very difficult, but universally the guests were able to pick up on the Australian accent over time. When exchanges move from blank looks to questions about particular words used, you can start having clunky conversations.

The exchange programs did give our family tips on how to converse with the guests. The only tip I can remember is to try and use different words. Often the longer and fancier word (e.g. gigantic, massive) is easier to understand for the guest than the short and simple word (e.g. big).

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe, we should have an international language reform to introduce a phonetic spelling system (WYSIWYHear) which would also lead to a somewhat standardized accent. The local ways of pronouncing words, can still continue in each region. There are probably many aesthetic considerations for this. But when two people across different regions speak, they can use this system.

This would require linguists to document the phonemes, and to find a minimal set of alterations of either the spelling or the pronounciation of a word so that you have a phonetic system. There are already variations in spelling (American/British English). This would be another variation which is phonetic.

Of course, even if this this work is done, it would still be yet another standard needing popular adoption. The phonemes would also be more in number than the current letters which means either using diacritic symbols (requiring change in keyboards, slower typing) or mapping a phoneme to multiple letters (longer spellings and possibly some ambiguity in detecting phoneme boundaries in spellings).

<comment><USER26> When I took an acting class on accents, I learned about the International Phonetic Alphabet ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa)). It is surprisingly handy, although most Americans have no idea it exists, much less how to read it.

<comment><USER25> Interesting. This is a very detailed effort, with encyclopaedic ambitions across different languages. The question is if there is a lightweight version of this - someway of chosing a reasonably small set of phonemes which can represent, most English words accurately. The second part is to represent the phonemes by either using a small number of new letters and diacritics (which is what the IPA already does), or to map the phonemes directly to single letters or a string of two or three letters. With the second option, there would still be ambiguity in reading a spelling (where are the phoneme breaks?). But, the accent situation would improve and one can get used to the phoneme boundaries by looking it up for each new word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, if you watch US and UK tv series regularly.

In any case this post shows perfectly how important it is to learn languages early on. In Germany you start learning English in 3rd grade and even before school there are kindergartens in which multiple languages are spoken. If you go to a Gymnasium and want to graduate with the abitur you need to be able to speak at least one foreign language or two, if you don't want to focus on sciences.

<comment><USER28> > Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, > if you watch US and UK tv series regularly.

In TV series UK people tend to talk BBC-alike English, in my experience this is not what is always talked in the streets in UK... so I'll get better understanding tv series but maybe my understanding of street language may not improve a lot.

Btw TV series definitely help a lot in general, and I used to do that, the only problem is that it is a time consuming task.

<comment><USER29> In one case a documentary serious about Scottish fishermen had to be subtitled because the accents/dialect were incomprehensible to general viewers in the UK:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_%28TV_series%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawlermen_%28TV_series%29)

What I find amusing is that as someone from the area in question it appears that most of the people being filmed are trying hard to talk "properly" \- their real accents would be _much_ thicker.

<comment><USER30> I remember seeing a new segement on BBC about socially deprived areas of Glasgow, and local youths were talking and it was subtitled.

<comment><USER31> If I remember rightly, this also happened in some regional releases of the film Trainspotting.

For the opposite problem, try reading Iain Banks' _Feersum Endjinn_ [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'd actually say that the English most Europeans learn is very compatible with British English, and I very, very rarely struggle to understand them. However I do quite regularly cause issues when speaking with Americans, as the difference between our dialects is quite large; the British in general have a very diverse array of accents and colloquialisms, and we tend to speak pretty quickly in comparison to the US (personal experience, YMMV). This I suspect also makes us pretty unintelligible to a lot of secondary-English speakers. While at conferences I've found that people from Germanic countries have very little trouble understanding me (we do have a shared heritage, after all) but anyone more eastern or southern definitely have issues when I start wittering about something.

I don't hold it against someone if they can't understand me though; the British can't even understand each other, so I can imagine how difficult it can be for people from elsewhere :)

<comment><USER28> > This I suspect also makes us pretty unintelligible to a lot of secondary- > English speakers.

That definitely can be the case, also I observed intermitting slow and very fast speeds in the same sentence in order to put the emphasis in different parts of the sentence.

<comment><USER32> I suspect a lot of the problems with British English come from how many different influences we had in the origins of the language. It doesn't really make much sense because it's a weird bastardisation of Germanic, Latinate, and Celtic languages (with a few choice French words for good luck). The pacing when speaking it can be pretty wonky because the words don't really flow together like they do in other languages.

I don't really understand the whole uproar over people's grasp of English. If someone's less proficient, or slower to respond; I wait patiently or simplify my own English to make it easier to understand. I'm genuinely impressed by how much effort everyone else puts in to learning the language that I can't hold someone's skill in it against them. The best I can achieve in another language is to describe how my car broke down in German.

<comment><USER33> _If someone 's less proficient, or slower to respond; I wait patiently or simplify my own English to make it easier to understand. I'm genuinely impressed by how much effort everyone else puts in to learning the language that I can't hold someone's skill in it against them_

If all the people in the world reasoned like you we would all live in a better place..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Over the past year I have improved my spoken English immensely, here's how:

\- I took about 30 lessons of one-on-one tutoring through Skype. It really helps to have someone who is paid to hear your bad English, and to have the patience to point to you the mistakes that you are making. This costs about 20€ per hour, but it is worth it.

\- Read out loud. There was a period of about a month where I did this at least one hour per day. I read books, articles, even RFCs. It does wonders.

\- Made a good use of the "pronounce feature" that most dictionaries have nowadays.

\- Saw youtube videos on pronunciation and common mistakes.

I also wrote a lot, about 2000 words per day (I wrote a AutoHotKey script to count number of times I hit space on any given day). Perhaps 2000 words is too much, and it tends to favor verbosity over succinctness. But you will get a LOT of practice.

It also helps to read/hear good writers/speakers. I don't like movies/tv so much, as they have a low speech to time ratio.

<comment><USER35> How did you contact your tutors? I know of some startup attempts, was it something more prosaic like a classifieds ad?

<comment><USER34> I got in contact with my tutors through livelingua.com. The first tutor was excellent, the second one was reasonable. I can't say that I really recommend the site (as the quality is somewhat inconsistent), but it did work for me.

The first lesson is free, so one can always give it a try.

<comment><USER35> Thanks, I was asking on behalf of some friends that had a startup idea about a language exchange community (say, I teach you Spanish, you teach me English). But I think they abandoned it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't understand why people are making such a big fuss about the PG article. He gave only one example of so many red hearing. Obviously being a foreigner with a strong accent doesn't help you when 90% of your time is spent communicating. duh.

What makes me sad is that by being honest and wanting to help founders, PG just got a new shit load of problems from people over-reacting. Do you really think he'll give great, but controversial, feedback in his next interviews/articles?

<comment><USER37> The problem of PG (and yours) it's the lack on empathy, simply as that. Like "antirez" says, English is not a hobby: English is pushed down the throat of a growing share of people around the world today. And they need English to live a normal life, not for fancy careers.

Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives. How you would feel if all your efforts will be worthless just because you're born in the wrong side of the world, and you sound funny.

The problem is that many English speaker have no idea how is like to learn another language, hence they lack of empathy.

<comment><USER36> First of all, I'm a foreigner, English is clearly not my native language and I have problems every day because of it. So yeah, native english speakers have it easier. But so what? Nobody said life was supposed to be easy and that everyone was created with the same skills and weaknesses. Some people are prettier, others are taller, other speak better english. Not acknowledging this is only hypocrisy. What PG said is that if you want to put the chance on your side, learning to speak a better english is a very important skill.

        Imagine yourself to be forced to speak Japanese to gain your money, because you have no alternatives.

That's life. Learn it, move on. Or I can, you know, not learn it correctly, gain less money and have it even harder.

I can understand having empathy for some people where _English is pushed down their throat_. But, for founders applying to YC and going to the Valley? Please. Why would anyone invest any money or take seriously a CEO that doesn't take his/her work seriously. (Yes, communicating well for a CEO is very important. What about a programmer that can't code?)

Imagine a Steve Jobs explaining to the world how Apple is great with a foreign accent that nobody can't understand.

The school you went to matters. Your height matters. Your appearance matters. Your family matters. Where you live matters. The amount of money you have matters. It always been and will always be. Faster you understand it and start putting the chances on your side, the better you will be.

<comment><USER38> And how to show a totally lack of empathy and missing the point

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The author mentions that he spent a lot of time using English without ever listening to it. A big problem is the way English( or languages) are taught or learnt that causes these problems.

One trick/method that I used while perfecting my German accent was shadowing that I found in a lanaguage forum somewhere. I took a book that I understood in the target language, in this case it was Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links; bought the audio book ( Mord auf dem Links), then repeated after the reader at pace without looking at the text. It was tiring mentally sometimes, but it helped greatly in pronunciation and aural comprehension of the target langauge.

I did the same for movies. I remember getting the Matrix in German. Technical writing is different I guess but I hope this helps someone, at the very least, in acquiring an idiomatic proficiency.

</comment><comment><USER40> The main issue with the the usual approach of language learning is the focus on grammar, like if doing useless grammar exercises would improve your grasp of grammar and sentence construction rules. It doesn't help much actually.

I've learned more grammar watching tv series than actually studying grammar for years in school, and my pronunciation improved too. Now many things just come naturally.

And i can understand the issues he's having with pronunciation, without a constant reference to how something should be pronounced you tend to ignore the correct pronunciation of words you don't know (but you can deduce the meaning while reading) an build up a collection of words with completely broken pronunciation that you will end up using in actual conversation. With hideous results...

<comment><USER41> I agree regarding the grammar. After living in England for a couple of years, mainly surrounded by native English speakers, things just either sound 'right' or 'broken'.

Although opportunity of living here is somewhat luxurious for many. So I would say that listening to as much native English as possible is really good for grammar :)

<comment><USER40> Exactly, you can get that right/broken gut feeling just being immersed in that language for thousand of hours.

Regarding real immersion (both listening and speaking) maybe personal tutors via skype or language learning communities could be a cheap alternative, i've never really tried this approach (lazyness) but i've thought for years it could have been worth the price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Antirez is spot on describing the problems of English as a foreign language in Europe (although I don't think it has much to do with PG's remarks and I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it).

My favourite example is the pronunciation of the math symbol Pi in a European meeting in which everyone and their dog would be tempted to say something like "pih" except a native speaker. Or try asking for the nearest Ikea.

<comment><USER43> To be fair (ish) Ikea is a Swedish brand, so the pronunciation was always likely to be a bit odd.

Pi is pronounced the way it is because a bunch of people in the C16th decided to reconstruct classical Greek pronunciation & teach that to students in England. Mix with the great vowel shift (some of which was later reversed for Greek letters in the C19th, but in different ways in the US and the UK) and you end up with the odd mix of pronunciations we have today, with UK and US English disagreeing. At least according to this stackexchange post anyway: [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11363/why-are- gre...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11363/why-are-greek- letters-pronounced-incorrectly-in-scientific-english)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have a French colleague with the strangest attitude to his strong accent when speaking English. His accent is strong enough that it makes understanding him a bit tricky sometimes, and when I mentioned it, he said that this accent was part of his identity and he wouldn't be trying to improve it. He was weirdly taken aback when I said something in a 'good' French accent.

This attitude was really surprising to me.

For me, when speaking your non-native language, the aim should be to sound like a native (or with the accent of some subset of the native-speaking population).

I wonder how widespread this "X is my native tongue, so I'm going to speak English in a strong X accent, because otherwise I'd be submerging my identity" attitude is?

<comment><USER45> > I wonder how widespread this "X is my native tongue, so I'm going to speak > English in a strong X accent, because otherwise I'd be submerging my > identity" attitude is?

I hope you understand that hiding own accent is not the easiest thing and requires some effort even after lots of training. Our vocal apparatus is adapted to our mother tongue, so even if we are capable of speaking all English phonemes, not all of them are "natural" for us.

<comment><USER44> Yes, but the anecdote I wrote about was a situation where someone was deliberately not making any effort to improve their accent. It wasn't about trying but failing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Spoken English has been the major barrier for me. All these articles from this and last week resonate with me, but this one hits the nail on so many heads.

It's especially discouraging when so many job ads require hyper-ultra-mega- puts-Bill-Clinton-to-shame communication skills for software development positions. I understand the value of communication, but I've successfully done remote gigs for companies where we don't even talk to each other. Just hand me the spec and I'll build it. If I have any doubts I'll write you an email, with the added benefit of having everything in writing and being able to re-read it later.

</comment><comment><USER47> Not just Italian, same applies to Mandarin too.

Mandarin speakers from different regions (Hong Kong, Taiwan, different parts of China, Malaysia, Singapore) speak in different accents but we usually don't have problem understanding each other (yeah, sometimes we make fun of the different accents).

<comment><USER48> It's awkward to compare Italian and Mandarin to the state of English in the world. English is a language that was "exported" to America by the British Empire. It was also "exported" to Australia and many other former colonies. It's no surprise, really, that these people have difficulties understanding each other. While China and Italy inhabitants share common borders, native English speakers share only the relationship to their former colonizer.

There are other languages that suffer from the same problem. Brazilian Portuguese differs greatly from Portugal's, which is also different from East Timor's. I don't know much about Spanish and French but I assume the situation is analogous.

It's important to note that such differences between colonies and their colonizers were once a strong argument towards independence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I was born in America, raised learning English, and to this day, my written skills are nowhere near perfect. Nor are my verbal skills. I am constantly writing and rewriting sentences because the intangibles of communications, such as tone, style, prose, format, are _extremely_ important and often overlooked. Not to mention, my grammar after 29 years is still far from perfect.

I've attempted and now partially understand, read, write, and speak Spanish, Swedish, German. Having experienced all of the intricacies of other languages, I don't envy those who are far behind me trying to make it in an English.

That being said, what's the lesson learned, or probably more apt - what's the solution? This is _why_ firms like YC exist, is to provide support to founders that lack all of the acumen (and trust me, there's a lot) that is required for 21st century business leaders. There's often a meta discussion here on HN about the "technical co-founder vs business co-founder". This is one area where having a business co-founder with great communication skills is a great reason to partner up with that person. Unfortunately those who do lack communication skills often find it difficult to understand those who do have good communication skills.

I wish I could help somehow...

<comment><USER50> I don't think a "business" co-founder is any more likely to have good communication skills than a "technical" co-founder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Most of English's "problems" come from a sort of natural drift that all languages experience all the time. There's no way to freeze a language in its "most useful" form, because a billion different speakers are simultaneously pulling it in different directions. It either ends up as a sort of democratic consensus, or eventually fractures into mutually unintelligible dialects.

1\. Shakespearean pronunciation: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s)

2\. Problems that would be caused by simplifying spelling: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English- language_spelling_refo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English- language_spelling_reform#Obstacles_and_criticisms)

3\. Power of Babel: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Babel-Natural- Language/dp/00...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Babel-Natural- Language/dp/006052085X)

4\. Toastmasters speech about "Manglish": [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDanVi6byKo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDanVi6byKo) (Toastmasters has its own version of English, full of over the top gestures. Also recommended, search for Singlish on Youtube.)

<comment><USER52> Most of English's problems come from this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Your English has improved tremendously since I've known you.

You only need to launch another successful project which will in time develop a strong international community like redis, then you'll speak and write English like a native. :)

<comment><USER28> Thanks Ludo, I hope this time I'll be able to fix my English before the next project ;-)

<comment><USER54> A bit ironically, I do have a hard time figuring out how to pronounce "redis"!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> > Often even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same sentence > repeated the same at speed of light.

I'm a native English speaker and I don't understand why people do this. If you are trying to have a conversation with someone, surely you want to do what is necessary for everyone to be understood as well as possible. It is only a little effort for you to slow down and simplify your speech, but it is impossible for the other person to learn better English on the spot. I lived in Hong Kong for a while and some US/UK people still wouldn't adapt their accent, even though the locals were humouring them by speaking English to them in the first place.

Perhaps it is easier for me to empathise given I have a (now very mild) Yorkshire accent, which was consistently mocked when I moved to London, and is reasonably slow paced anyway.

</comment><comment><USER56> We all need to practice tolerance and grace. Identifying that there are non- native speakers means we all share a bit of the burden. Antirez mentions slowing down, this is one easy way to make conversations better understood. Also, we should avoid idioms or turns of phrase. These are quite difficult even for some native speakers. Finally, we need to make a genuine effort to make ourselves understood. This is the sign of effective communication.

I think the whole "accent" controversy misses the mark. Having grown up with an immigrant parent, I know how frequently he was mocked for his accent. Of course, I could always understand and act as the mediator. This has served me well in the rest of my life. If only we all had the same benefit.

</comment><comment><USER57> I think any geek interested in improving their English should check out my website: [http://www.antimoon.com](http://www.antimoon.com) especially the "How to learn English" section, which is a guide based on my own experiences and some language acquisition theory. [http://www.antimoon.com/how/howtolearn.htm](http://www.antimoon.com/how/howtolearn.htm)

I've been writing about effective language learning techniques since 2000, with an emphasis on pronunciation (which is an oft-neglected topic in English classrooms). The site is written in simple English, so if you're a native speaker of English, don't be put off by the spartan writing style.

</comment><comment><USER58> English is a Germanic language and I would argue that it is particularly difficult for Native speakers of Romanic languages to pick it up.

I'm German and my experience has always been that English is a very simple language and yet versatile enough to allow for very nuanced expression.

<comment><USER59> English is, as far as I can tell, the most Latin of the Germanic languages. I sometimes like to see how close I can build two sentences, one in Portuguese (my native tongue) and one in English. For example:

      I redacted a  text, removing the froufrou.
      Eu redigi um texto, removendo o frufru.

French also helps a lot in bridging the gaps.

<comment><USER60> English is the 'most Latin' of the Germanic languages because of the norman conquest ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England)). Since then, you could almost say that english has a double vocabulary; one anglo-saxon (germanic) and one norman-french (romanic). This is why english has so many synonyms and allows for very nuanced expressions (as mentioned by the parent post).

<comment><USER59> I know, I receive Webster's Word of the Day and most of them are Latin words: really easy for anyone who speaks a Romance language. The last five were: incipient; indissoluble, indoctrinate, infantilize, inscrutable. So maybe Webster should have two mailing lists. One for anglo-saxons and one for speakers of Romance languages.

<comment><USER60> Funny, I was just googling for that :). The best I could find: [http://www.quora.com/English-language/Is-there-a- thesaurus-t...](http://www.quora.com/English-language/Is-there-a-thesaurus- that-includes-only-Anglo-Saxon-synonyms)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Ed Rondthaler on English spelling (video) [http://vimeo.com/17561068](http://vimeo.com/17561068)

</comment><comment><USER62> "If you don't know English, get a teacher and learn it, if you don't do that you won't succeed."

This is one of the first things one professor said to us at his first lecture when I went to faculty.

</comment><comment><USER63> Broadcast this morning on BBC Radio 4, and quite pertinent: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs)

</comment><comment><USER64> Technical comment, ignoring the Paul Graham drama (which seems like a non- controversy to me):

English is definitely phonetically-inconsistent (it's almost funny how many different sounds vowels, diphthongs, etc. can make). I realized this a while ago, and suddenly felt sorry for people learning English.

However, to dismiss the difference between spoken English and "textbook English" as some problem endemic to the English language is superficial. Colloquial versions of languages are almost always different than what is taught in standard coursework.

Further, arrogantly claiming that English is broken because he, a non-native speaker, can't understand UK English is idiotic - I can barely understand a Caribbean Spanish accent, compared to a "textbook" Latin American one, but that doesn't mean Spanish is "broken." I can understand a UK accent pretty well, as can most native speakers.

Most languages have really weird problems and seem completely illogical (just from what I know personally, Russian has a phonology which can get complicated, due to the stress system), and mastering any of them is very difficult and usually sucks. It's been my experience that many people who tout the number of languages they know or claim to be a "polyglot" are actually very unskilled in day-to-day use of the language. No matter what you see in movies, a character who could intuitively speak, read and write 6 diverse languages on a colloquial level would be an exceptional human being.

</comment><comment><USER65> A need that I can see is for a class (or at least a few videos) for native English speakers to effectively communicate with non-native speakers, and a way to practice.

The crux of the issue is that by repeating themselves a little louder and at the same speed, a native speaker is treating the (non-native) listener as a linguistic equal. If my brother doesn't understand what I said, it is almost certainly due to the volume of my speech relative to our listening environment, not my content. To assume otherwise would insult his intelligence. If I'm speaking to a non-native speaker, my natural instinct is to extend the same courtesy. It isn't laziness or a lack of empathy. (You could argue it was lazy to speak that way in the first place, but to rephrase it after the fact would be condescending)

I used to work for a company based in Tokyo and, through practice and frustration, learned how to modulate my idiom-laden, Missouri-accented, high- speed, low-volume drawl into something at least partially intelligible to my Japanese colleagues. It required a lot of effort and still sounds strange out of context. If I spoke to my father the same way, he'd laugh at me.

As an American, I think it would be really helpful if part of our education included speaking (and listening to) English as it is spoken by non-natives. We should have to practice listening to and understanding various common accents (South Asian, Chinese, Nigerian, etc), practice making ourselves understood, and learn how to graciously ask for (or give) re-phrasing or clarification.

</comment><comment><USER66> Offer three days ago for people to improve their accent:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6304783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6304783)

(I'm not affiliated.)

</comment><comment><USER67> I don't know about US English but I know how to speak "TV English" perfectly however when I came to the UK I had a hard time adjusting to the different accents around London for a couple of months.

Scottish, Irish or just about every accent out there sound like weird sounds the first time you hear them and you actually have to focus hard to figure out what the f __k that person just said.

Written English may be the same everywhere but spoken English varies greatly from region to region.

</comment><comment><USER68> This sentence is so true "My brain is full of associations between written words and funny sounds that really don't exist in the actual language."

<comment><USER69> Heh, I grew up speaking English and still had that problem just because my reading vocabulary surpassed the vocabulary in usage in the country where I was.

<comment><USER70> I'm 23 and a native Australian English speaker and I still run into this problem for the same reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I have the same problem. I've learnt English from programming manuals and old CRPG games pronouncing words in my mind like it was Polish (it has regular phonetics too). It's very hard to undo the damage now.

I watch a lot of English movies without subtitles, so I can understand (at least American English), but I'm afraid of speaking, and I have troubles with pronouncing even basic words.

<comment><USER72> This, pretty much. "Cancel" is always going to stay [kuh-ntseh-l], "OK" [oh-k] and "Delete" [deh-leh-t].

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> My mother tongue is russian.

At childhood I was astonished by spelling scene in translated american film:

      - Как пишется "кот" # How to spell cat?
      - К О Т # C A T

It's quite a dumb question on russian. There is no difference between spelling and pronunciation. Yet repeating word character by character shown as a mark of intelligence.

Later on I've learned english by reading. Direct mapping to known phonemes gives very rough accent. To change it one has to be aware: things are not as they seem. Reading hidden language helps a lot:

      $ curl http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html | htmlfmt | espeak --ipa -q
      dˈiəɹəst kɹˈiːtʃəɹ ɪn kɹiːˈeɪʃən
      stˈʌdɪ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ pɹənˌʌnsɪˈeɪʃən
      aɪ wɪl tˈiːtʃ juː ɪn maɪ vˈɜːs
      sˈaʊndz lˈaɪk kˈɔːps
      kˈɔː
      hˈɔːs
      and wˈɜːs
      aɪ wɪl kˈiːp juː
      sˈuːzɪ
      bˈɪzɪ
      mˌeɪk jɔː hˈɛd wɪð hˈiːt ɡɹˈəʊ dˈɪzɪ
      tˈiəɹ ɪn ˈaɪ
      jɔː dɹˈɛs wɪl tˈeə
      sˌəʊ ʃˌal ˈaɪ
      ˈəʊ hˈiə maɪ pɹˈeə

<comment><USER74> Another opinion here. I've had to learn Russian and the pronunciation was presented easy only at the beginning. Russian has:

\- Diacritics that do not usually appear in the broad case writing. One example that I happen to remember now is «ё», which most of the time is written only as a plain «е» (but is still pronounced differently).

\- Broad range of similar pronounced letters, like the group «и, й, ь, ъ» (Ukrainian also adds «і» and «ї» to those), which becomes very complicated and even ambiguous when someone has to write on dictation. I still didn't get it to distinguish «ь» from «ъ» case other than just learning parrot-fashion how the words are written.

\- Unregulated accents. There is no universal rule for which vowel receives the accent in a given word. You have to just remember the words. Learning to read the alphabet is not enough.

\- Different pronunciation for the same letter. One example is «о» which is pronounced sometimes like "o̞" and other times like "ɐ", but there are lots of other cases. So try «Как пишется...» providing only phonetic transcription to a learning-Russian person and see what comes out.

<comment><USER75> Accents is not big problem in Russian - even with wrong accent other people will understand you in most cases, but it will sound a bit odd. In some cases in different regions (or even social groups) accent for same word will be different (and a few native speakers know which variant is officially proper).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Regarding the problems to pronounce words easily: These two poems resonate strongly with me and seem to be related to what the author describes:

1: [http://www.futilitycloset.com/2007/08/30/ough/](http://www.futilitycloset.com/2007/08/30/ough/)

2: [http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/09/19/o-u- g-h/](http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/09/19/o-u-g-h/)

Yes, english between non-english speakers works quite well. Listening to UK english (especially accents. The TV series Misfits was funny not only because of the weird story..) is hard, following people from the US is easier but still full of traps.

I'm confident that I have a huge number of 'english' words in my vocabulary that I never pronounced right (only read them, trying to pronounce them by guessing. See the poems..) in my whole life.

</comment><comment><USER77> Why would anyone even think about learning 'British' English instead of 'US' English? We Brits do talk a tad funny at times.

Indeed, the OP mentions that US English is somewhat easier to follow and that's what we should be listening to, the Brits are just a distraction.

The key is that I think it's important to know the language in which most publication is done. Which for IT issues is currently US English. So more ABC and less BBC is my advice.

This book by John Honey from 1997 is an interesting read on the subject but it's a long time since I read it so might be a little dated now: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Power-Professor-John- Honey/...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Power-Professor-John- Honey/dp/0571190472/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378135820&sr=8-1&keywords=john+honey)

</comment><comment><USER78> I think this is especially true for native speakers of languages derived from latin. Why ? Because in classical latin to pronounce a word you just pronounce every letter in the standard way. So you tend to associate the written word strongly with the way it is spoken. However in the real world languages are spoken first, and the way words are written only follows later (or does not always, which can cause a whole lot of problems, like in French).

Now I don't know about Italian, but a non-native speaker who has learned French as spoken in Paris will more than likely not understand a native French speaker from Québec or Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). So I don't think this problem is specific to English.

Although it is true that if you learn English from the Internet, you'll be very surprised the first time you hear an Englishman :)

<comment><USER28> > but a non-native speaker who has learned French as spoken in Paris will more > than likely not understand a native French speaker from Québec or Côte > d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). So I don't think this problem is specific to > English.

That's true but French is kind on an exception among latin languages, it is a phonetically complex language compared to Italian or Spanish.

<comment><USER79> Yeah. Spanish does have regional phonetic differences, but they don't tend to be hard to understand. Vocabulary is much more likely to cause misunderstanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> So what can we do?

As a native English speaker, I freely admit that our spelling is horrible and our grammar has some sharp edges. Furthermore I freely admit that it's unfair that the burden of making communication work lies so heavily on others and so lightly on people like me.

I could try to learn Italian, but even if a third of English-speakers did, it wouldn't really change Antirez's situation, much less that of his Chinese analogues.

I could try to write more phonetically, but at a cost of ease-of-reading for existing English speakers. And an uncoordinated effort would only produce chaos. Perhaps PG would care to serve as a schelling point?

I could try to learn to understand thick accents better. I don't know where to start. Likewise I could try to learn to read foreign-grammared English better. I actually think I'm pretty good at that.

<comment><USER81> Simply try to avoid this: "Often even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same sentence repeated the same at speed of light."

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Its worth noting though that the grammar is a piece of piss. It works well as an international language because its easy to learn yet hard to master.

(for the record, I'm trying to learn Icelandic and that language has crazy rules)

If anything we just need to be cautious of judging people who don't have native-level English.

</comment><comment><USER83> Not quite the main point of the article, but this stuck with me: "I don't know most of the words needed to refer to objects you find in a kitchen for example"

I grew up in the Soviet Union; I learned the names of trees, and birds from my grandma, and the names of tools in a shop from my dad. We emigrated to New York; It's been 20 years; I am fluent, I speak with a slight accent, but no one ever claims they can't understand me; yet, only now, barely, have I started to learn things like names of birds, trees and tools. I, of course, don't mean the basic ones like "owl" or "pigeon", or "wrench" and "screwdriver", but things that are slightly more obscure like "bluejay" or "vicegrip" eluded me for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER84> "Introvert or extrovert": this is a huge deal when learning and living among foreign speakers. I went through this when I moved to Turkey and I called it an "Identity Crisis", the way other people perceive you is totally different than what you are used to.

</comment><comment><USER85> Interesting point between English and Italian - when I was diagnosed with dyslexia the specialist at great ormand street commented that if was an Italian I would have had much less trouble with writing and grammar as Italian is a very regular language compered to English

</comment><comment><USER86> PG has been off his game in this discussion. It is important to be fluent both in understanding and in communicating, both in English and in techspeak. I threw together [http://www.strategicmessaging.com/fluency/2013/08/30/](http://www.strategicmessaging.com/fluency/2013/08/30/) to spell that out, and it's the first time ever I've just banged out a post that much improved on what Paul Graham wrote.

antirez adds to the discussion further, by pointing out that there are various different kinds of language fluency. Excellent observations.

</comment><comment><USER87> > _So starting from 1998 I slowly learned to fluently read English without > making more efforts compared to reading something written in Italian. I even > learned to write at the same speed I wrote stuff in Italian, even if I hit a > local minima in this regard, as you can see reading this post: basically I > learned to write very fast a broken subset of English, that is usually > enough to express my thoughts in the field of programming, but it is not > good enough to write about general topics. I don 't know most of the words > needed to refer to objects you find in a kitchen for example, or the grammar > constructs needed to formulate complex sentences, hypothetical structures, > and so forth._

Well, have you tried to properly study English, as in, with a teacher and a course book? From your description I understand that you merely tried to casually pick up English.

If so, it's not particularly fair to assess the difficulty of English compared to your own language (that, besides, being your native language, you were taught it's grammar and syntax for years on end at school).

I've studied English for several years and have no trouble speaking or reading it -- despite not having had many opportunities to speak it with native english speakers until much later in my life. Reading a lot of books/magazines/etc helps a lot. Reading for like 1-2 hours per day.

I found out I could pick a specialized subject I was interested in, like, say, electronic music production, and just by reading the magazines (Future Music, Electronic Musician, Keyboard etc) for a couple of years I could go from a total newbie to understanding all the specialized vocabulary used (from simple stuff, like "knob", "fader" and "slider" to "dither", "LFO", "frequency cutoff" etc).

Watching movies and tv series without subtitles also helps tremendously. In Italy this is even worse, because they don't just add subtitles, they usually dub the whole thing with Italian actors (ugh).

(OTOH, ho studiato Italiano per tre anni, in un gruppo picolo, e questo e tutto che lo ricordo, ho dimenticato quasi tutti gli parole e la majorita de la "syntax" e gli tempi -- damn, that got bad quickly)

<comment><USER28> Hi coldtea, I tried to study English more formally, to start at high school, but the level of English teaching is not great in Italian schools most of the times. I tried it again from time to time, but now the barrier is the free time. With a busy work and a family it really is not an option for me to spend another one/two hours to watch films and/or study English... probably a simpler approach could be to travel more, and instead of refusing all the invitations I get for confs, to attend more events where there are many English speakers. Your italian is still understandable :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> I'm more intrigued about his statement "in 10 years I'll likely no longer write code professionally".

I wonder if it's a personal choice, or if he thinks that there is age limit for the profession.

<comment><USER89> It could mean a number of things.

* He expects eventually to burn out, a risk for any programmer.

* He expects to write a best-seller and retire young.

* He expects to eventually no longer be able to keep up with changes in the software business.

* All of the above. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> We need a standard technical document describing a subset of the natural language English, which is suitable for increasing clarity of technical documentation and discussion. Maybe evolve it like we do so many software projects(in a revision control mechanism, with an issue tracker).

I know somebody is going to say "But there's ASD-STE100!", unfortunately ASD- STE100 is a closed standard, and it's not even exactly clear how one might get a copy(without working for a DoD contractor or some similar).

Revised Report on the natural language English(RRE) maybe. ;)

</comment><comment><USER91> I hope antirez never stops coding to move into management. I first came to know him during the Engine Yard Hamming Distance contest (2009). I've read and followed his work ever since.

</comment><comment><USER92> I'm a native English speaker, but I sometimes have a problem with pronouncing words that I've read but either not heard spoken, or heard but didn't realize it was the same word. I'll make up a pronunciation in my head and then use that in conversation and confuse whoever I'm talking to.

My wife catches me saying a new one every month or two, and she thinks its hilarious (but she also helps me pronounce it correctly, so I can't complain too much.)

</comment><comment><USER93> Last time I expressed my thoughts[1] here about the same thing I was brutally word-raped by the angriest people on earth, now everyone is saying what I was saying all along and it's all well and good.

You need to know English: put in the effort, watch a shitload of movies and read even more books. That's it, you can't just ignore it.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6239371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6239371)

<comment><USER7> > You need to know English

No, you really don't. You only need to know English if you're selling to English speaking people. You'll probably need to learn English for a number of professions. But apart from that you can live and work perfectly well without using English at all.

English isn't the main language on the Internet any more, it is just one of them. The fact that you happen to think that English is the major language used on the Internet is possibly just a vicious self-reinforcing cognitive bias.

<comment><USER93> It's not about the language of the internet, it's about the language in which the most influential books and papers are written. If you can't read ACM papers or IEEE specifications you're at a disadvantage whether or not you're selling to English speakers. If I were to build a car and the best resources were written in Japanese I'd be at a disadvantage even if I was working for, say, a Swedish outfit.

Since most researchers relocate in the states and subsequently publish their findings in English there's no doubt that the best sources of knowledge are written in English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Does anyone know of software that does speech to IPA (or any phonetic representation)?

If such a thing exist then it should be possible to write a program which compares the users pronunciation to the official one and gives tips and exercises on getting closer to the proper way of speaking. I can see some difficulties with differences depending on the speakers native language and the target language.

What do you think?

</comment><comment><USER95> I'm good reading and listening English but when it comes to talk with somebody it feels like I forget it all I have to think twice before talking and I my pronunciation sucks I've been practicing that .. if there are good sources for improving this please share it , I'm currently using livemocha but I already lost interest on it, I also recommend listening to podcasts.

</comment><comment><USER96> > My long term hope is that soon or later different accents could converge > into a standard easy-to-understand one that the English speaking population > could use as a lingua franca.

I'm puzzled by this comment. The generic midwest accent that most people on television use would seem like a good, obvious candidate. Even newscasters in Europe seem to target this when using English.

</comment><comment><USER97> I read a lot of technical docs in English, and watch a lot of movies without subtitles to force my brain to catch the words, it worked pretty well so far.

I'm starting to read non-tech literature, is another league but I like it, is cool reading a book in its original language. (Robinson Crusoe right now..)

</comment><comment><USER98> Another hopefully interesting discussion on another HN thread here (Accents, English, Arrogance, Success): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6316826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6316826)

(disclaimer: I am the author of the original article)

</comment><comment><USER99> That's the reason they've invented Lojban, a logical language, which is way easier to learn than those natural languages: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban)

</comment><comment><USER100> I wonder if using a screen reader for the blind, with the language set to English, would help non-native speakers learn pronunciation. For example, use VoiceOver on OS X (enabled by pressing Command+F5) to read blogs, HN, etc.

</comment><comment><USER101> In Belgium you often need 3 languages to operate (depending on the company location, and how big the company is): Dutch, English and French...

</comment><comment><USER102> Paul Graham talks about the "founders", not of the whole "IT workers" community.

</comment><comment><USER103> English is the QWERTY of languages.

</comment><comment><USER104> Could be worse. Like say German. der/die/das would cause many suicides.

</comment><comment><USER105> besides, I feel that I'm wasting too much time. I know that is important, but still, it is just a tool. Not even a challenging one. It's just a boring tool to learn.

</comment><comment><USER106> English would appear to be the Javascript of spoken languages.

</comment><comment><USER107> Listen to audio books. Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER108> While pg's comment may have seemed insensitive to some, it has helped bring to light some of the anxieties that foreign-born founders may themselves have (for instance, about the way the local culture they're founding a company in will perceive them due to their accent, not forgetting their ability to communicate anyway).

Posts like this one are a sign that cultural phenomena such as this will be more visible, and won't just disappear into the detritus of forgotten blogs. Do some foreign-born founders struggle with their accents? Yes. Is a strong accent a barrier to communication? Quite likely, yes. Is it worth it for a founder to do what it takes to communicate her message exactly, and nothing else? Absolutely.

Shouldn't the goal be to either: 1) become excellent communicators, or to 2) find excellent communicators, and get them on "our" team?

Now we can focus on, with our characteristic laser-like ability, and talk about why accents may hold somebody back, as a community, and how we can help people succeed anyway.

Some ideas: \- Schools to help founders communicate better? \- An additional service within accelerator programs to help founders with strong accents become effective anyway? (Maybe YC could just take this and run with it)

Solve that problem and move on to the next one. Isn't that The Rule?

Let me take the opportunity to focus on what, imho, started this whole controversy. While I consider pg's position to be valid, he should probably have explained it better, through his usual channel of the essay form, before talking about it in the media, where his words were much more likely to be taken out of context. He didn't, they were, and we're left picking up the media-transformed pieces of what would have been an otherwise instructive take on what might hold some foreign-born startup founders back. pg seems to have forgotten why he writes essays (explore ideas as fully as possible, while leaving room for improvement), and now he has to pay for that mistake with a (possibly -- I have no way of knowing if he'd prepared an article about this) quickly written piece of damage control, published in the middle of a frenzy of accusations and hurt feelings. The "Founders' Accents" essay is weaker than it would have been if he'd written it before he did the inc.com interview, as the interviewer would have had a more self-contained source to reference, counter-arguments and all.[0]

I must conclude, therefore, that his comment may have done more harm, in the short-term, than good. It remains to be seen whether we can turn this around for the good of all.

We should remember, though, that we're in this together, and pg is not the only one who has a responsibility to make sure the people that matter don't miss out on opportunities because of something that can be fixed. Which is not to say that its trivial. Fifteen years is a long time.

[0] For one, I don't think the discussion surrounding it would have devolved into accusations of racism, though that probably says more about my view of people than about pg's detractors in this case.

</comment><comment><USER109> English is to spoken languages what Javascript is to coding.

</comment><comment><USER110> Some simplifications were made by Noah Webster.

Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he began writing a three volume compendium, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The work consisted of a speller (published in 1783), a grammar (published in 1784), and a reader (published in 1785). His goal was to provide a uniquely American approach to training children. His most important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue" from "the clamour of pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation. He complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation. Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and Latin must precede the study of English grammar. The appropriate standard for the American language, argued Webster, was "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions". This meant that the people-at-large must control the language; popular sovereignty in government must be accompanied by popular usage in language. Slowly, edition by edition, Webster changed the spelling of words, making them "Americanized". He chose s over c in words like defense, he changed the re to er in words like center, and he dropped one of the Ls in traveler. At first he kept the u in words like colour or favour but dropped it in later editions. He also changed "tongue" to "tung"—an innovation that never caught on.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster)

<comment><USER9> Webster's choice of modifications has always puzzled me: he picked on perfectly harmless words like "defence" (but _not_ it's cognate "fence") and that you'd struggle to mispronounce or misspell whilst leaving abominations like "Wednesday" alone, and reverting some of his better changes like "wimmen"

That said I think English would be much more useful as an auxiliary second language if someone as bold as Webster was willing to actively promote a distinctive "International English" with a more consistent orthography (I quite like Valerie Yule's, but even fixing though/through/tough/cough/bough would be a start)

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> "[...] in the attention zone [...]"

Are you serious, dude?

Politics and the English Language.</comment>


Show HN: Firebase2graphql – Migrate from Firebase to GraphQL on Postgres - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/tree/master/community/tools/firebase2graphql <comment><USER2> Hi HN! We wrote this CLI to explore migrating from Firebase to Postgres as easily as possible.

We use Hasura[1] to generate the realtime GraphQL API on Postgres automatically. The CLI tool's work then mostly boils down to 2 things, which we do in phases:

1\. Phase I: We migrate firebase data nodes to Postgres tables in a fairly naive way. We setup automatic IDs and parent-child tables and set up relationships between the tables. This gives you a write-many type GraphQL API on postgres. Realtime GraphQL with subscriptions and live-queries replaces firebase realtime

2\. Phase II: As an optional next step, we try to normalise data by detecting overlapping data between tables. We delete "subset" tables and set up relationships to the superset table.

I've written up a blogpost with more details here: [https://blog.hasura.io/firebase2graphql-moving-from- firebase...](https://blog.hasura.io/firebase2graphql-moving-from-firebase-to- realtime-graphql-on-postgres-4d36cb7f4eaf)

[1] [https://github.com/hasura/graphql- engine](https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine) , [https://hasura.io](https://hasura.io)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do real-time subscriptions also work on sorted, filtered lists?

E.g. If a new item is added to the list, will it appear in the list in real- time? Also, if an item's property is changed so that its position in the list changes, will this update the list in real-time as well?

If so, how does it prevent over-fetching?

<comment><USER4> Yes they work with filters, ordering etc.

> ... prevent over-fetching

This is handled server side. Subscriptions are more like 'live queries'. The server sends the data to the client only when the result set for the given 'live-query' changes.

<comment><USER3> It sounds like the server has to keep track of all active live-queries. Does it need to re-fetch all of them on every update?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this Hasura GraphQL Engine open source? What's the business model? Are there any features missing if you don't pay anything?

How does it get notified by PostgreSQL when the result of a query changes, since AFAIK PostgreSQL has no such built-in functionality? (it works if other apps change the database, right?)

<comment><USER6> That's a great question. I've been considering Hasura for an upcoming app and have been prototyping things with great success. I hadn't really considered how it implements the subscriptions, and had assumed it worked only by observing mutations that came in through GraphQL. However that doesn't really explain how it works with subscriptions against a view.

I dug into the code a bit and think it all happens here: [https://github.com/hasura/graphql- engine/blob/master/server/...](https://github.com/hasura/graphql- engine/blob/master/server/src-lib/Hasura/RQL/DDL/Subscribe.hs) Which if my fledgling Haskell is correct digs into the subscription to find the sources and then adds a trigger on them.

On a related note, I've been very impressed with the Hasura GraphQL server. In particular how the authentication works with a JWT token and it's access restrictions seem pretty well thought out and flexible.

I have not yet used it in production but :fingers-crossed: it performs as well there as it has in testing and development

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How do you secure this data in Hasura? The article does not seem to mention security.

<comment><USER2> We provide an access control layer as a part of the GraphQL engine.

We took inspiration from Postgres's RLS and basically implemented it at the API layer so that the permissions/access control system is driven by your application auth and not your database auth.

This allows Hasura to give you role-based column/row level security integrated with any authentication provider or even a JWT.

More at the docs here: [https://docs.hasura.io/1.0/graphql/manual/auth/index.html](https://docs.hasura.io/1.0/graphql/manual/auth/index.html)</comment></comment>


Reading the Ruby Source to Understand Rails Idiosyncrasies - <AUTHOR> http://pivotallabs.com/reading-the-ruby-source/

<comment><USER2> Well, first of all, you aren't reading the Ruby source to understand _Rails '_ idiosyncrasies, you're reading the Ruby source to understand _Ruby 's_ idiosyncrasies applied to Rails.

Secondly, this article is far more verbose than necessary when compared to the succinct 5-paragraph explanation provided by David Flanagan in "The Ruby Programming Language" p. 69-70 [1]

It's great that you took a chance to dive into the source of Ruby. Nonetheless, it's times like these when I wish people would understand that the best way to learn a programming language is by example AND by documentation (whether official docs or books). Those that ONLY learn by example fail to understand or unlock the true power of a language until it's too late.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Programming-Language-David- Flanag...](http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Programming-Language-David- Flanagan/dp/0596516177)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was going to write that this was a failing of the Ruby documentation. But actually, it's pretty well documented if you take the time to read it ([http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Range.html](http://ruby- doc.org/core-2.0/Range.html)).

There's absolutely no need to go hitchhiking in the C source in this case.

<comment><USER4> While I agree that it's documented well enough that once you hit the situation and read the doc you should be able to figure out why without diving into the C, I think the documentation still fails in the sense that it doesn't give you any guidance as to why or when you would choose which one.

That said, I really don't consider this magic as another subthread suggests. include? just has an optimization for numeric ranges, but otherwise behaves exactly as Enumerable#include? should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If there's only one thing I've learnt from trying different languages out: the less magic, the better.

<comment><USER6> This is an easy and thus superficial bit of insight to add. A more reliable truism would be that "unnecessary magic is bad", but that brings us no closer to evaluating Rails. Ultimately, you have to be able to point to specific magical behaviors and make a case for what makes them gratuitous.

<comment><USER7> Without turning this into a debate about particular bits of magic, my general conclusion from using Rails (especially when projects are in maintenance mode) is that it frequently makes it overly complicated to do things differently than how the framework wants you to, making you resort to monkey patching and other magical strategies of your own.

It's wonderful for prototyping but I'm becoming increasingly wary of it for production systems that are going to have a long life (at which point the whole perf/scaling thing comes into play too).

Which is all a very roundabout way of saying "use the right tool for the right job," I suppose.

<comment><USER8> > my general conclusion from using Rails is that it frequently makes it overly > complicated to do things differently than how the framework wants you to

I can't agree with this at all.

Rails has default and reasonably sensible idioms for expressing common concepts. They work in most cases, but there are of course situations where you want to implement something in a way that results in an impedance mismatch with the framework.

In these cases, it's embarrassingly easy to compose different behaviours, or indeed to write entirely custom ones, in order to achieve the functionality you require. At the end of the day, it's Ruby with some helper libraries, and developers are free to use as much or as little of these as is required.

If there's a problem in this vein with Rails, it's that the magic makes it almost too tempting to twist apps into the "Rails way", even when it's not appropriate. Good developers will be aware of this, and use the correct approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if looking up the source is really necessary. I did some tests with Rails console just now. It seems that Ruby and Rails are handling the case quite logically.

"3.days.ago" at least by default is a TimeWithZone object in Rails.

      3.days.ago.class
       => ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone

And then the way Ruby iterates Range is through the "succ" method. So even this will give you a wall of errors:

      (3.days.ago..2.days.ago).to_a

Sending "succ" to a TimeWithZone object will print a warning because the method is deprecated. So basically a warning will show for every second in the range.

Calling .include? should be equivalent to .to_a.include? in effect.

</comment><comment><USER10> One uses a loop and one doesn't? Not sure if there's so much to get out of this post.

<comment><USER3> `cover?` uses the comparison operators to check if the value is within the range. `include?`, on the other hand, will behave like `cover?` only if the range values are "numeric". If they aren't, it will iterate through the range to see if it contains the value. This is possible because range values are required to implement the `succ` method which gives the next value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, I learned about the cover? Method, so that's a big plus for a typical Saturday...but I'm confused as to why include? for ranges doesn't just act as an alias for cover?

I can't think of a Range that is _not_ meant to be continuous...I would test out some cases right now if my computer weren't grinding away at a database insertion process...

edit: OK, tried it out....as I suspected, Ranges that consists of Strings will have different behavior:

        [16] pry(main)> ('aa'..'zz').include?('c')
        => false
        [17] pry(main)> ('aa'..'zz').cover?('c')
        => true
        [18] pry(main)> ('aa'..'zz').include?('cc')
        => true
        [19] pry(main)> ('aa'..'zz').cover?('cc')
        => true
        [20] pry(main)> ('aa'..'zz').cover?('cccccc')

<comment><USER3> Ranges are always continuous, but `cover?` uses the comparison operators, while `include?` iterates over the items in the range in some cases. `include?` is practical in cases where you don't want to implement the comparison operators.

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6076608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6076608)</comment></comment>


Evidence Based Scheduling - <AUTHOR> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-scheduling/ <comment><USER2> > Over the last year or so at Fog Creek we've been developing a system that's > so easy even our grouchiest developers are willing to go along with it. And > as far as we can tell, it produces extremely reliable schedules

Sounds like it's worthwhile to at least try this. Has anyone attempted a similar approach? Did you get consensus with all the developers on your team?</comment>


The GNUnet System - <AUTHOR> https://gnunet.org/grothoff2017habilitation <comment><USER2> Is anyone knowledgeable that can tell me the difference between

IPFS, GNUnet, Zeronet, freenet or even something like i2p, tor and urbit .. as well as probably others.

Actually I know this question is asked all the time and I do know how these differ, to some extent at least, but I just don't understand why there are all these competing standards since it's all driven by the same-ish vision.

Whenever someone accomplishes this vision though it'll be a huge game changer. IPFS feels closest to it as of now .

<comment><USER3> super tldr...

ipfs and zeronet (and dat project) are distributed file stores (think bittorrent), some have some special browsers n top that let you build applications

freenet is a distributed, secure content network.

i2p and tor are secure overlay neworks - run on top of the existing internet to provide secure connectivity - designed to obscure where traffic is going to and from.

gnunet and cjdns are also secure overlay networks but more like point to point vpns.

<comment><USER4> I'm actually reading the paper...

> GNUnet is an _overlay_ network, as it is initially supposed to primarily > operate _over_ the existing Internet network. However, GNUnet does not > assume that this is always the case. For example, GNUnet can also operate > directly over WLAN or Bluetooth to create an ad-hoc wireless mesh network, > and with the GNUnet "PT/VPN" subsystems we can run TCP/IP _over_ GNUnet. So > in this configuration, GNUnet would be an _underlay_ network, a bit like > MPLS or B.A.T.M.A.N. [NAL07]. In reality, we in fact expect to see both at > the same time: some peers will run over the existing Internet, while others > may connect to GNUnet on Layer 2.

<comment><USER5> ah yeah, youre right. cjdns has that too, you can build mesh networks with it:

[https://tomesh.net/build-a-node/](https://tomesh.net/build-a-node/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, I'll bite.

Suppose I want to download a tarball of the GNUnet file sharing application. (I chose file downloading because the GNUnet Wikipedia page says file sharing is the primary application atm.)

What are the steps I need to follow in order to fire up GNUnet's filesharing application and download that file?

To whomever responds: you make the file available, and I'll try to download it.

Edit: it doesn't have to be a tarball of the app. It can be any file which I can find a hash for on clearnet. But somebody has to vouch that they are making it available over GNUnet while I try to download it.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is the biggest barrier or challenge for these network systems to succeed? Hardware? Infrastructure? Users?

<comment><USER8> Adoption. Users want convenience. They want to click a thing and go, not install a desktop app, configure it, learn about the networking model, etc.

Then when we've all sunk into all these convenient cloud services and "easy to use" disposable devices, we'll have lost all of our privacy and power. The corporations will get regulated, and then the government will have access and control of the systems.

And yet we'll have people argue that these open source and federated/distributed systems are "too confusing" and "not practical" and that we shouldn't even try to avoid this future.

<comment><USER9> I don't buy that it's impossible to deliver decentralization and usability. It just requires a lot of developer effort.

The real problem is that everything has to be free. That means there's no money to pay developers to do the stuff that is not fun. UI/UX is a painful slog through a long tail of tiny little issues, not to mention many iterations on design. Developers don't do that unless they're getting paid.

<comment><USER7> Coming up with new an innovative ways of doing things is reward in and of itself. Examples are Wozniak with Apple I, Berners-Lee with HTTP server. Breakthroughs lead to big things.

I think we are on the precipice of a decentralized network paradigm shift.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > We note that outside of TCP, the client-server relationship is often > described using the terms "master" and "slave". These terms more aptly > describe the social roles the client-server paradigm produces.

Best quote I've seen in a while...

</comment><comment><USER10> > GNUnet is an alternative network stack for building secure, decentralized > and privacy-preserving distributed applications. Our goal is to replace the > old insecure Internet protocol stack.

Sounds like a PhD thesis run amok.

This just isn't going to happen. Who are they kidding? Even the transition to IPv6 is proving agonisingly slow.

GNU really need to pick their battles more wisely.

<comment><USER11> Choosing file transfer as the first goal seems like a great decesion to me. File sharers are willing to adopt anything.

<comment><USER12> > Choosing file transfer as the first goal seems like a great decesion to me.

True. We still don't have a good way of doing this[0].

[0] [https://xkcd.com/949/](https://xkcd.com/949/)

<comment><USER13> Actually, there is: if both users are on gmail, you can attach big files to your mail, and it's automatically uploaded on Drive (and retrieved seamlessly by recipient from mail). If recipient is not using gmail, you can still use Drive to upload your file and share it. And obviously, there are many Drive competitors, like dropbox and Box, to name the biggest ones.

<comment><USER14> Unless something has changed each of those still require an existing account on the senders side. With an account on an appropriate service or the right program sending files has been a pretty solved problem for ages. Not sure this really solves super well either since both people would have to download, install and configure GNUnet.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, it requires auth. The xkcd page nor grandparent were mentioning not requiring auth as a requirement :)

I didn't get this is something GNUnet would allow. I guess it could be a thing... if using GNUnet is easier that registering a drive/dropbox/whatever account.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>