Predictive World analyses your future based on data - <AUTHOR> https://predictiveworld.watchdogs.com <comment><AUTHOR> The site actually shows what your data say about you, not necessarily your _real_ profile or future. It's based on demographic and psychological data calculated from your Facebook likes.

University of Cambridge is also involved.

Warning: asks for Facebook Connect

</comment><comment><USER2> Could have been more accurate.

I guess facebook likes are not precise enough to really describe a person. Still pretty cool though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Huge graphiks !!

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome!!

</comment><comment><USER5> Smart</comment>


Chromium Blog: Streamlining Notifications on Desktop - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chromium.org/2015/10/streamlining-notifications-on-desktop.html <comment><USER2> So does this mean Chrome will also follow the Firefox notifications behavior whereby a notification appears for 5 seconds and then just disappears without any trace? Or will notifications continue to stay visible until manually dismissed (either by the user or by the app)?

Without some kind of notification center, either approach would make for a rather poor experience for users in my opinion. The former means users coming back from idling will have no indication whatsoever that they have new notifications waiting to be read, and the latter means notifications could quickly clutter up the screen and users will need to manually dismiss each and every notification that appears (how would users be able to easily dismiss multiple notifications without some kind of notification center?).

Perhaps browsers could delegate to native notification APIs in OSes that offer them instead of building out their own implementations? This is what Chrome for Android does for web notifications and it works quite well in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope they integrate with the native Notification Center on OS X and the "Action Center" on Windows 10. This would make it more consistent with how Chrome works with the native notification lists in Android and iOS.

<comment><USER4> OSX Notification Center: where notifications go to die. Hope you were at your computer when the toast message appears otherwise you'll never know there was a notification unless you obsessively open the sidebar to check.

<comment><USER5> OS X does show the notifications on the lockscreen by default though, right? Usually when I come back to my computer I see all of the stuff I missed.

I suppose there's a short time between when you walk away and the computer locking the screen though, where the notification could be missed.

However, I feel like I've missed way more Chrome notifications because I hardly ever open the notifications menu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess I am one of the few users that appreciates the notifications. PushBullet uses the notification center to alert me of things happening on my phone.

<comment> nevi-me Me too, though because most notifications (PB, Google Now, and others) are also sent to my phone, by the time I check the Notification Center there's just the traffic and the creepy "it'll take 34 minutes to visit girlfriend" because I apparently do that most often on Tuesdays ...

The post is silent on what will happen to notifications, will they just float around and clutter the screen?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good riddance.

Chrome's introduction of notification center was incredibly obnoxious. No application (especially an auto-updating one) should put an icon in my menu bar without my permission, or at a _minimum_ without a super easy and obvious way to remove it (preferably command-drag to reorder or remove it like native menu bar icons on OS X).

Initially you had to dig into chrome://flags to disable it, then enough people complained they added a menu item to disable it.

Really they should have just integrated with whatever native notification system exists on each platform.

</comment><comment><USER8> So where will Google Now Cards go?

</comment><comment><USER9> It was quite handy, what would be the replacement?

</comment><comment><USER10> I have no idea what "Notification Center" is and how to get there (so yeah, I never used it)-

"Chrome Notification Center" searches in Google returns basically only reposts of this news.

<comment><USER11> It's a bell-shaped icon in the task bar, which also now includes Google Now style cards.

<comment><USER10> Oh. I have Ubuntu Linux, and I don't see any icon like that anywhere.

<comment><USER12> Works fine for me in Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity as my Desktop environment and using the latest packaged version of Chromium.

It only comes up if you receive a notification from a website: [http://imgur.com/lGOJrHb](http://imgur.com/lGOJrHb)

You can then click 'Chromium - Notifications' to get what I believe to be the 'notification center': [http://imgur.com/JyIVNvG](http://imgur.com/JyIVNvG)

you can try it out if you open the chromium console (f12), and enter "setTimeout(() => new Notification("Insert text here"), 2000)" and alt-tab to something that isn't chromium.

Neat feature, but hard to expect users to figure it out on their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This decision makes sense. I'm assuming that they're going with the platform native notification APIs now.

With the release of Windows 10, all three platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) now have a native notification center that supports persistent notifications that were missed or haven't been dismissed.

The Chrome's notification center was always out of place for Linux and Mac users since there was already a fully featured native notification center that wasn't being used.

<comment><USER14> I mean, Linux doesn't have a common native notification center. You have to install libnotify and have a notification server to use it. Granted, most distros will do it for you, but it's not really the same as OSX/Windows.

<comment><USER15> By the same token it doesn't even have a window system, I don't think it is a good argument. Chrome/chromium should simply depend on libnotify, just like it depends on gtk2.</comment></comment></comment>


Governor 'not allowed' to disclose which two Florida counties hacked by Russians - <AUTHOR> https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/05/14/which-florida-counties-had-election-hacks-russians-fbi-and-now-gov-ron-desantis-all-know-but-we-dont/ <comment><USER2> By who, Putin?</comment>


Mesosphere Is Proud to Support the Open Container Initiative - <AUTHOR> https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/12/08/mesosphere-open-container-initiative/ <comment><USER2> "fully commit to container technologies without worrying their current choice of infrastructure" read "without lock-in to AWS" [https://www.opencontainers.org/news/announcement/2015/12/%E2...](https://www.opencontainers.org/news/announcement/2015/12/%E2%80%8Bopen- container-initiative-establishes-technical-governance-announces-new)</comment>


Cities, Ambition, Distortion - <AUTHOR> http://www.byrneseyeview.com/byrnes_eye_view/cities_ambition_distortion.html <comment><USER2> NYC is _not_ the centre of the world's financial system. There are more American banks in London than there are in NYC, and London's FX volume outstrips NYC's by a significant margin.

The factors he applies to NYC don't in my experience appear to affect London (where I work) to the same extent, so that premise at least is flawed.</comment>


Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses - <AUTHOR> http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ <comment><USER4> The article remains western- (and especially UK-) centric in outlook, a more international business will probably find plenty others. For instance japans disprove:

* The address format is uniform across the country (Sapporo has its own, and Kyoto uses an alternative system on top of the standard one)

* Addresses go from the most specific to least (e.g. flat number to postal code), japan is the exact opposite

* Addressing systems don't change (Japan's was reformed in 1998)

* Building numbers are street-based (Japan's are block-based)

It also expands on things like "addresses will have a street": standard japanese addressing is subdivision-based so addresses provide the prefecture, the ward (~county), the district and the city block.

Except for Sapporo and Kyoto (see 1): Kyoto allows an denoting blocks as the intersection of two streets and the position relative to the intersection (north, south, east or west). One reason is that some wards have multiple districts with the same name... Sapporo uses a system where blocks are addressed by their distance (in blocks) + direction from city center, so you might be told the address is "the 4th building, 3 blocks north and 5 blocks east".

<comment><USER5> US addresses exhibit neither increasing nor decreasing specificity. Apartment numbers are usually written in the middle, like "30 Tristan Way, Apt. 107, Gwyneth VA 27384". This never seemed strange to me until I saw it being done more sensibly elsewhere.

Singapore is another good one: its postcode scheme changed twice in less than a century, and being a city-state, there is nothing useful to put in a "city" field (mail is often sent to "Singapore Singapore", or even "Singapore Singapore Singapore").

<comment><USER4> > Singapore [...] being a city-state, there is nothing useful to put in a > "city" field

Good point, which should apply to most city-states (e.g. Monaco, or the Vatican)

<comment><USER6> ...not to mention the substantial number of rural addresses that don't include city names in most countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The biggest takeaway for me here should sound familiar: don't overengineer your data model. The more decisions you make about specific properties, the more special cases you will need to handle (and those are a continuing source of frustration for both programmers and users down the line).

In this case, most of these issues can be avoided by allowing a free text field instead of dedicated fields for street name, number, apartment, floor, state, county, district, and whatever.

<comment><USER8> The typical problem with what you're advocating is that in an enterprise environment typically your application is communicating with a number of external data sources that already make a bunch of assumptions about data, whether they're reasonable assumptions or not, and they typically expect that you'll be able to return them their data at the same level of granularity as they've provided it to you. E.g. if your client's 70s COBOL application gives you a list of their customers with addresses including a postcode field and then your application filters that or something and sends back a second list, it won't be acceptable to give them back addresses with the postcode simply concatenated into a text field with the other parts of the address.

The correct way to handle this is to be able to dynamically accept and store arbitrary granularity of data (and be able to translate that into a single text field at runtime if needed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another point I'd like to add. Quite a few addresses in India tend to have popular "landmarks" listed with them. Something like: _Opposite <a popular establishment>_ or _Near <a well known park>_ etc. This makes it very easy to physically locate them!

Here's an example from Citibank India website:

         Citibank,
         No. 91, Prestige South End,
         South End Road, Opposite Surana College,
         Jayanagar, Bengaluru - 560 004

<comment><USER10> I regularly see these... petrol pumps and bus stops seem popular reference points:

State Bank of India, No.997, Opposite To Bus Stop, Service Road, 4th Cross, 9th Main, Rpc Layout, Vijayanagar, Bangalore - <USER2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am from Brazil...

Most programmers here assume stuff US-like in addresses.

Well, and government forms even frequently require a specific style of address (Street - building number, city, state, zipcode)

But in Brasilia (Brazil capital) it already breaks.

A typical address there for example is: Building 3, Apartment 12, Block H2, Residental Section, North Wing, Brasilia

As you can see, Brasilia does not have street-based addresses, in fact most streets there are not named at all, the city was made on purpose to allow this new type of adressing that the city planners thought it was better.

Also, zipcode precision is almost random, I lived once in a building with 20 apartments that had its own zipcode, and I also lived in a city with 150.000 people that had only one zipcode, and I know a building that has has three zipcodes.

And there is zipcodes for streets, neighborhoods, and several other random things.

And the coolest feature of all: brazillian zipcodes can start with a zero, breaking every stupid database that store them as number instead of string.

Also, streets not only can have more than one name, it is possible to the post office have the WRONG name.

I lived once in a street named "Gracia Mauro Chieni", and for many years it was listed on post office as "Graça Maria Cheni"

After nagging them a lot, they fixed...

It was now: "Gracia Mauro Cherene"

And of course, sites that used the post office company API to find the zipcode worked great with the name of that street ;) (NOT)

Oh yeah, remember the street I mentioned, the one with two wrong names in the post office? Well, in the power service registry (That in Brazil is valid as address proof and some other address related things), the name of the street is "H", yes, just one letter... It was the original name of the street when it was first opened, and they never bothered to fix it in their database.

<comment><USER12> There are US zip codes that start with 0 as well.

<comment><USER13> Which Excel loves to silently turn into integers and subsequently destroy your zip code column. Not. Fun.

<comment><USER14> Those excel "features" always seem to be breaking something. The other recent one that comes to mind is SKUs being converted to scientific notation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some additional things I've seen:

* Address encodes where the building is physically located

* It does not matter whether address is written as name, company or company, name.

* That there is some unique mapping between postal codes and geographical areas (or post offices). I've seen buildings that have different postal code depending on what shipping service you use and multiple discontinuous areas that have same postal code.

* Address has exactly one city/town (although in Czech case most such addresses does not have street)

* Address contain non-latin characters used only in one language.

* Non-latin characters in address can be mapped to ascii in non-ambiguous way.

* Address is always written in order from most specific to least specific.

* Buildings whose number differ only in letter postfix (33a vs. 33e) are near each other. Alternatively: such postfix does not matter.

* There is single building number for address. (Czech addresses have two building numbers, usually only one is written in address, but for some places you either have to write both or indicate which one you mean)

</comment><comment><USER16> I would like to add one point:

* Addresses can have accented or other foreign characters.

I ordered a package to "Fäkéstreet", but it arrived addressed to "Fäkéstreet", luckily the postman was smart enough to decipher it.

I have also run into the address length issue, even thou my address is only 54 characters long.

<comment><USER17> What's really depressing is I've had that happen when ordering from a Swedish company. I can kind of understand that US companies get it wrong, but when a company can't deal with all the letters in the alphabet of the country it's based in you know something is fucked.

<comment><USER4> One of the issues is actually that web browsers can have inconsistent encoding of the data they send, and depending on the amount of testing (across browsers) done that can yield surprises.

For instance, the "unicode snowman" is because MSIE 5-8 will _refuse_ to send a form as UTF-8 (completely ignoring `accept-charset`) if it can encode everything to Latin-1. Conversedly, most browsers will default to UTF-8 (but I believe normalization may vary). If the system was built in the early 00s and only tested in MSIE, it might well expect all input data as latin-1 (because that seemed to work at the time) and crap out when UTF-8 comes in.

<comment><USER18> What does "unicode snowman" have to do with this?

<comment><USER19> Some websites now will include a hidden input field in all forms <input type="hidden" name="snowman" value-"&#9731" />

to convince IE that it's supposed to be sending UTF-8, not latin1 (And so the site can recognize if the input was likely mangled.

<comment><USER20> It's built into Rails, except they use utf8=✓ now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another falsehood:

* Street numbers are integers.

A house near my university was numbered something like 3 1/2. It was between 3 and 5, and 4 was taken by a house on the other side of the street. I'm also sure I've seen houses with 1/4 and 3/4 in their numbers. Platform nine and three quarters doesn't need to be magical!

I once lived in a house that was numbered 50-2. A lot of U.S. websites wouldn't accept the hyphen. Fortunately, I could just truncate it to 50 because there were only a handful of houses with the same prefix and the postman knew where my family lived.

I also once lived at an address where the street number had the suffix "B".

<comment><USER22> There are a lot of 1/2 addresses here. Usually happens when a house that was originally a single address has a room (or several) divided off and rented out as a separate dwelling. So that can become "320 1/2 S. Lincoln Ave" or whatever. Sometimes though, in the same situation, separate apartment numbers will be used on the orignal adddress. I'm not sure what drives this one way or the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It seems to include one in itself, with:

> The user will know their postal code/zip code.

Which assumes that the user has a postal/zip code. For a counter example, all addresses in the ROI outside of Dublin do not have postcodes. (And most online sites won't validate Dublin postcodes either, being of the form D4 or Dublin 4 for example)

<comment><USER24> Same for the 7M+ inhabitants of Hong Kong: no-one uses postcodes, and it becomes really bothersome when most websites asking for your address insist on you entering one...

<comment><USER25> Not sure how the folk in Hong Kong handle that, but as an Irishman: I always use the province (Munster) in online forms which insist on a postcode.

Which works fine on the envelope, postman hardly notices, but leads to another one for the believing programmers: a postcode field contains a postcode

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wow. That's insane.

As a software developer, I'd like to propose some changes in the world.

1) Addresses should be the very precise lat/long of the mailbox + the name of the recipient. Nothing else.

2) There should be one time zone for the whole world and no daylight savings. Time should be 24-hour-based. Perhaps you'll need to set your personal alarm for 19:00 in the "morning". Tough.

3) Nobody is allowed to change their names.

4) Whoever keeps sawing outside our building should stop.

That is all for now. I look forward to the complete capitulation of all world leaders to my frank good sense.

Thank you.

<comment><USER27> Ah, so you could never move a mailbox?

<comment><USER28> Or have mailboxes stacked on top of each other. Has GP never visited a mail room?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The example of "GB Technical Services, Unit W7a, Warwick House, 18 Forge Lane, Minworth Industrial Park, Minworth, Sutton Coldfield, B76 1AH, United Kingdom" could still reasonably be written within five lines this way:

GB Technical Services

Unit W7a, Warwick House, 18 Forge Lane

Minworth Industrial Park, Minworth

Sutton Coldfield, B76 1AH, United Kingdom

I don't think British people would actually write it as eight lines. Does anyone have a better example of an address that does not reasonably/conventionally fit on five freeform lines?

<comment><USER29> You could compress it a bit, but the standard is to write the postcode and the country name on lines of their own, and usually the post town too (that's "Sutton Coldfield" here). So trying to compress down to five lines would require really weird formatting (and possibly confuse the automatic postcode- reading hardware).

([http://www.royalmail.com/personal/help-and-support/How- do-I-...](http://www.royalmail.com/personal/help-and-support/How-do-I-address- my-mail-correctly) specifically wants postcode on a line of its own.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One of my favorite address stories: the Russian Post Office successfully delivered a package with an address hand-written with the wrong character encoding.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Letter_to_Russia_with_kro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Letter_to_Russia_with_krokozyabry.jpg)

<comment><USER31> Another fun story, this time just involving repeated escaping and mangling of an address:

<http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/i-resemble-this-remark/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Very few experienced programmers will have these beliefs. Addresses are the most fucked up personal information that we have to deal with. Names run a close second.

Over beers a few of my mates came up with a system like DNS to map a mailing domain for an individual/organization to a physical location. But after much discussion we decided it was just easier to let the geo-challenged to lease postal boxes with saner locations.

<comment><USER33> > Over beers a few of my mates came up with a system like DNS to map a mailing > domain for an individual/organization to a physical location.

Isn't that what ZIP codes should have been?

In the UK my postcode is limited to not many addresses. (Mine is 10, but they can be more.) The Post Office database is widely used. It's not always particularly accurate. While there's no official database of addresses the Post Office database is pretty close.

<comment><USER34> In France postcodes usually span several towns, or one medium city, and only larger cities have several postcodes (three for my 300 000 inhabitants city, for example).

They are not very precise, which is to be expected since there are only about 100000 possible postcodes in our scheme.

<comment><USER5> The US used to have five-digit postcodes, now has nine-digit ones, but laypeople mostly ignore the extra four digits. Singapore used to have two- digit codes, then upgrade to four, then to six. Maybe French postcodes will grow another digit or two someday.

<comment><USER35> The U.S. system is nice in that most people only even need 5 digits. The USPS reduces fees for their large customers that use all 9 digits, so they still end up with the majority of their mail being very specific, while those just sending a letter to a relative can just use the 5-digit code and let the destination post office take care of re-sorting it before delivery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Japanese addresses are also unusual in that they generally don't involve streets (or street numbering) at all but are instead based around city districts and blocks.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system>

<comment><USER21> Korean addresses are similar, but they're slowly transitioning to an American- style addressing system that uses street numbers and street names.

I guess the district-based addressing system made a lot of sense back when people just built houses in random locations around the town center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Should be "Falsehoods US programmers believe about addresses".

Anyhow true. I recall the "Apply for this position" form of a big player, open to remote working. A full US address was actually required to submit /facepalm

<comment><USER38> Which is two problems, since it implicitly discriminates against the homeless, who need a job to get an address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> My Adress is:

street_name 42/38/13

Yes, with slashes. It's the number of the block, then the number of the stairwell, and then the number of the flat. I cannot enter that bloody number anywhere online, every website shouts at me that it's incorrect. It's not, I think I know where I live!

<comment><USER40> My address is of exactly the same form and I can't use it to subscribe to the delivery of the magazine I read. The site doesn't alow slashes.

BTW the zip code contains the letters and the dash too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought this was about computer memory addresses. Falsehood about falsehood about addresses ;)

</comment><comment><USER41> its interesting how a lot of these are from the UK. In Germany on the other hand - every address follows the same format. The only weirdness you run into is that sometimes (Especially in former east german areas) - the numbering of buildings isnt really sequential.

<comment><USER42> One aspect of German addresses is rather strange, I find as a foreign resident. If a building is split into individual flats, each flat does not have its own number in the address. Letters are addressed to names in a building. We have to deal with the electricity company with designations like Erdgeschoss Links (ground floor, left). They also get rather confused if married people do not have the same surname.

<comment><USER43> Married people with different names is not a problem: you list all of the names on the name shield. This is also common with WGs (shared accomodation).

The common case that fails badly is where two people in the same apartment block share the same surname. There is no good workaround for this case, especially given the German resistance to putting first names in formal correspondence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Lets cross check what the United Nation has to say about NAD:

<http://www.unece.org/trade/untdid/d04b/trsd/trsdnad.htm>

As you can see, only the 3035 "PARTY FUNCTION CODE QUALIFIER", telling if this address is a buyer, a supplier, a shipper, or something else, is mandatory and everything else is conditional.

You have 5 optional lines of "Name and address description", 5 optional lines of "Party name", 4 optional lines of "Street and number or post office box identifier", an optional "City Name", several optional "Country Sub-Entity Details", and optional "Postal Identification Code" and an optional "Country name code"

I think that pretty flexible, allowing short addresses like "27321 Finkenburg, Germany" and long ones also. The main restriction is line length, so the address has to fit onto an envelope.

</comment><comment><USER45> My personal favorite is Nicaragua. Here's an example:

 _Reparto Serrano, de la Policía de Plaza del Sol 4 cuadras al Lago, Casa esquinera Managua, Nicaragua_

Translation: Serrano Division. From the Policía de Plaza del Sol go four blocks towards the lake (which is North in Managua). Corner House. Managua, Nicaragua.

Absolutely crazy. No street names at all. Addresses are really directions from well-known places (except when it doesn't exist anymore - "de donde fue" : "from where there was.."). They use the old spanish unit 'vara' - 84 cm instead of the meter to specify houses within blocks. Up and down aren't north and south; they're where the sun goes up and down (east and west).

More information here: [http://vianica.com/nicaragua/practical- info/14-addresses.htm...](http://vianica.com/nicaragua/practical- info/14-addresses.html)

</comment><comment><USER46> See also "Falsehoods programmers believe about geography": <http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187>

</comment><comment><USER47> As a complete aside about addresses and because falsehood number one needs some clarification: even when you are living on a houseboat you are required to have a mooring license unless you want to be classed as a "constant cruiser" (moving beyond the parish borders every [arbitrary interval]) and in order to get this license you have to provide British Waterways with a fixed address - which by their own account they do not check.

I'm somewhat biased against BW as my (disabled) father had his boat repossessed under a "section 8" with no warning and was made homeless because he did not supply them with a "fixed address". When confronted a few months before the eviction BW even refused to take an address my father's advisor offered during the meeting because they knew it wasn't his. Even after confirming that they do no background checks on addresses and knew full well that most boaters were using addresses that were not their own.

There are real human costs to these sorts of things and my dad was one of those people caught up in a self reinforcing loop that saw no solution. Fortunately it is an edge case, and most likely the result of corruption - <USER3> £30K+ boat was eventually sold on by BW for £5K and my dad never saw a penny. He can't even contest the decision in court because it would cost a small fortune.

</comment><comment><USER48> I worked for a US company for a while that had a satellite office in Costa Rica. The street address, translated from Spanish, was "the office above the chicken factory"

</comment><comment><USER49> Slightly off-topic, but street names in the Twin Cities metro are broken. I live in a subdivision in which nearly every street has the same name, differentiated only by the road's "last name." I.e., Maplecliff Drive, Maplecliff Circle (which is actually a cul-de-sac), Maplecliff Alcove (which isn't even a type of street), Maplecliff Curve, Maplecliff Way, Maplecliff Court...

In Minneapolis, all the streets are numbered by their distance from the center of town, and the north-south thoroughfares are called Avenue, while the east- west roads are called Street. So if someone tells you they're waiting for you at the corner of 2nd and 4th, you have 8 potential intersections to check.

Everywhere else in the cities (OK, that may be hyperbole) building addresses have something to do with intersecting streets. For example, 47 7th Avenue is going to be between 4th and 5th Streets, closer to 5th (and on the west side of the road). God help you if you try to apply that logic in St. Paul. Their numbers bear no relationship at all to their cross streets.

Finally, while my Maplecliff example above evinces a certain laziness or lack of creativity on the part of the subdivider, I think the height of laziness has to go to the subdividers who don't even bother to come up with a whimsical base name for their streets, and just name them after nearby, already-existing roads. Especially when said existing roads are merely numbered roads. You'll get road names like 172nd Street Circle or 163rd Avenue Way. And yes, I did once see a 185 Street Lane Court.

A friend from Arizona reports that in his city, NS roads are Avenues, and EW roads are Streets, but there was one road that cut diagonally through the city --so they called it a Stravenue. Abbreviated Stra, if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER50> Here in Seattle, on the opposite side of Lake Washington from the city of Bellevue, there is an intersection between streets named Bellevue Place, Bellevue Avenue, and Bellevue Court. A block away from this strange triplicate intersection you will find the intersection of Belmont Avenue and Belmont Place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Here is the State of Illinois catch-all approach to addresses (from their voter registration form:

[http://www.elections.il.gov/downloads/votinginformation/pdf/...](http://www.elections.il.gov/downloads/votinginformation/pdf/r-19.pdf)

        IF YOU HAVE NO STREET ADDRESS,
        below describe your home: list the name of subdivision; cross
        streets; roads; landmarks; mileage and/or neighbors' names.

</comment><comment><USER30> As a regular shipper, the addresses I have the biggest problem with are at colleges and universities. No address verification/normalization software recognizes things like "3948-B Engineering Wing, Richguy Hall, Anystate University, Cityville, ST, 99999". But if you force the address through, the local UPS guy will know where that location is every time and deliver the package without a problem.

</comment><comment><USER52> "The user will know their postal code/zip code. Most users will, of course." Not in Indonesia.

Also, house numbers are sometimes not sequential. Some people have "favorite" number and when they see it's not taken, they will use it ("Nobody in the neighborhood has 123, so it's mine.")

</comment><comment><USER53> The "roads have only one name" rings very true for me. I usually denote my road as "S Hwy X" (where X is a letter, not a number). But over the years the official USPS designation has changed slightly and different organizations have different naming standards, ranging from "Highway X" to "South County Rd X" etc. One time while attempting to make a credit card payment I discovered that the vendor validated the billing address against both my bank AND the USPS standard, which were doomed to never agree. Needless to say I did not end up buying anything from them.

</comment><comment><USER54> The worst is that every country has postal/zip codes. Hong Kong doesn't. When the field is required (most of the time, even for core internet companies), /(HK){1,3}/ tends to work..but not always.

<comment><USER25> Ireland doesn't

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Latitude and longitude based addressing is well-past due. Two around-10-digits decimal coordinates and a building number is all we really need these days.

<comment><USER56> Hah!

Actually, Salt Lake City in Utah is sort of vaguely like that, though with street numbers (in the usual units of 100 per block) rather than latitude and longitude per se.

The addresses are things like "250W 500S, Salt Lake City" -- which is going to be on the fifth street north of the Temple (and marked as 500S on the street signs), two and a half blocks west of the north-south street that's centered on the Temple (which is Main street, not W. Temple Street. W. Temple Street is what would be 100W if it weren't named).

I'm not sure what the history is on canonical orderings of the two parts of the address. Currently it seems to be usually the one that's the "street number" followed by the one that's the "street name", but I'm not sure if that's a result of auto-regularization by systems that assume such a thing, or if it's historical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Here's a funny UK one.

I was opening an account at the Lloyd's TSB Branch in Hanover Square (<http://www.allinlondon.co.uk/directory/1063/11849.php>). Turns out their address form requires the first half of a postcode to end in a number, even though the address of the branch itself ends in a letter.

</comment><comment><USER58> Not all addresses in the US have streets, either. I grew up in rural Wisconsin at a house that only had a fire number and county. "N3042, Rock County WI" was a valid address.

I believe my grandparents only got a street assignment in the last 2 or 3 years -- and even then, the actual street is about 2/3 of a mile from their house.

</comment><comment><USER59> HL7 V3 (including ISO 21090) has a good, flexible data model for addresses. Anyone can have zero or more addresses each of which has a use code (home, work, postal, etc). Each address has zero or more parts each of which has a type (line, street, city, postal code, direction, suffix, etc).

</comment><comment><USER60> One that applies to the US, many folks have TWO addresses.

One where they live, and the other where they receive mail. Up here in Rural California, that is the case, postal delivery is not a given to most of the residences. Sometimes the only delivery option is getting a post office box.

<comment><USER61> Or said another way, the falsehood is "Addresses don't depend on delivery mechanisms." I'm also in California without home postal delivery. If you're going to deliver a package via USPS, you need to use my PO Box. If you're going to deliver via FedEx/UPS, you need my street address. If you don't tell me which way you're going to send it until the end of the order process, I have to go back and fix it if I guessed wrong.

<comment><USER62> When I was little, we had no address. We did live next to the local post office, so using a PO box for mail was nice and simple. For UPS, we had to give an address like, "the house next to the post office on the east side". It usually worked, but occasionally they'd get their directions mixed up and deliver to the house on the other side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The situation is pretty similar to email addresses. You could _try_ parsing them, but it's pointless, and usually not what you want. What you want isn't a street, 'zip code', or city name. What you want is a route from point A to point B.

</comment><comment><USER64> I live in India and most of the points mentioned are common sense stuff here - in other words just don't assume anything apart from Country and State. Just give two/three fields and let the user write his address... :-)

</comment><comment><USER65> A house will have just one postcode.

\- Not if it is a new build, had a temporary postcode during construction and has since been assigned a new postcode.

(In the UK) an address will contain a county.

\- Not if it is in London (city and administrative county).

</comment><comment><USER66> Addresses, like phone numbers, are difficult to normalize.

The best you can do is hit the 80/20 rule: provide a solution for most addresses/phone numbers out there and minimize the edge cases.

</comment><comment><USER67> I read recently that Dubai doesn't even have physical addresses. All package and mail delivery is done via detailed directions and descriptions of the destination.

<comment><USER68> In the places I have been in Dubai, they definitely have addresses, but its more like "Office X, Jumeirah Business Tower, Jumeirah Lakes, Cluster W." (I am not sure about post boxes or post codes) Sometimes the building names are arabic, so you would instead say "Building 4" in english as they are well numbered.

In some places in Africa this is definitely true, an example of an address in Mauritius would be "Second house on the right, past the hindu temple, the house with the red wall".

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> It sounds like we should just make name and address Unicode-compatible textareas no validation.

</comment><comment><USER70> Here in Ireland there are no postal/zip codes. I always have to enter 00000 on websites.

</comment><comment><USER31> So, the obvious temptation here is to say "fuck it" and just leave a textbox for users to put in their address.

I cannot help but feel, though, that this is inviting ruin and disaster. I'm currently dealing with some of this myself--what's the best solution other than just forcing people to use a five-line US-stle address and hope for the best?

<comment><USER28> I would look at what you need the address for and actually make the request based solely on that. Generally speaking, you ask for an address in order to send mail of some kind. Inside the US, you basically never _need_ the city/state: they're for error-checking (wait, XXXXX isn't actually in California; it's in Iowa). I had a friend give me an address that the postman told me didn't make sense (no city field), but it still got to him fine: I'd lay good odds that the post office people local to my friend simply had a modified convention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Next article should be about times/dates. Times and dates are F*cking hard sometimes :-)

<comment><USER72> It still annoys me that unix-time is not monotonically increasing. It was such a beautiful idea and it got totally screwed up by the lame idea of leap seconds.

<comment><USER73> Unix time is monotonically increasing, as long as there are no negative leap seconds (and there never have been). It's just not uniformly increasing, since it tracks UTC.

<comment><USER72> I think you have the concept of leap-second backwards. A positive leap-second means that the time-of-day is held for one additional second. Since unix time does not respect leap seconds there are 35 different unix time values at the resolution of seconds which refer to periods of time lasting 2 seconds instead of one.

And that means that unix time at a resolution higher than a second will _jump backwards_ at those 35 different leap seconds.

<comment><USER4> > I think you have the concept of leap-second backwards. A positive leap- > second means that the time-of-day is held for one additional second. Since > unix time does not respect leap seconds there are 35 different unix time > values at the resolution of seconds which refer to periods of time lasting 2 > seconds instead of one.

Monotonic functions can yield repeated values, they don't have to be strictly increasing or decreasing. A constant function is monotone.

> And that means that unix time at a resolution higher than a second will jump > backwards at those 35 different leap seconds.

Yes sub-second timestamps won't be monotonic, but UNIX time (or POSIX time) is only defined with a resolution of a second, so it _is_ monotonic.

<comment><USER74> This isn't quite correct, and as the grandparent applies the concept it is definitely incorrect. A monotonically increasing function may never repeat a value. A constant function is not monotonically increasing; it is monotonically nondecreasing (and of course, also monotonically nonincreasing).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley VP charged in elaborate Lego scheme - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/22/BA8Q1OLVVD.DTL

<comment><USER2> Although the scheme involved legos, the fact that they are legos had nothing to do with how the scheme worked.

It would be more proper to say this is a "fake barcode" scheme.

</comment><comment><USER3> Based on the headline, I thought Lego scheme was some new buzzword scam that I hadn't heard of yet, but no, this is really about Lego.

</comment><comment><USER4> Man, HN is slacking. This story has been beat to death on Mefi and Reddit over the last two days.</comment>


IBM Raises the Bar with a 50-Qubit Quantum Computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609451/ibm-raises-the-bar-with-a-50-qubit-quantum-computer/ <comment><USER2> If you have 50 qubit computer, where the heck is the results of trillions factorisation?</comment>


Google now pays more money in EU fines than it pays in taxes - <AUTHOR> https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3070492/google-now-pays-more-money-in-eu-fines-than-it-pays-in-taxes <comment><USER2> It clearly shows how the tax system based on taking a cut from profits is totally leaky and should be abandoned. It only results in endless cat and mouse game of tax consultants (the big 4) finding loopholes in such tax systems against governments trying to plug the holes, just with much smaller budget and efficiency than the tax-evasion consulting armies.

There are other models of tax systems. Some are even not production and consumption based (you want to maximize production and consumption for growth, not stifle it with taxes). For example land taxation proposed by single-tax movement or monopoly based taxation in general. Ie. for providing a company the privilege to be a monopoly on a market, it needs to pay a fee to those guaranteeing such privileges, which is the state.

For example big pharma lobbied for its monopoly and now it is super hard for competitors to enter the market. Let these companies pay a monopoly tax for such privileges.

Other example. Somebody appropriates for himself a valuable piece of land with oil deposits. He prevents others from utilizing that land. Let him pay for having that exclusive rights of use, since clearly the government is providing private property related services (police, courts and army to guarantee his property) for him that others (non-owners) are not getting.

<comment><USER3> You start out strongly, but then this:

> Somebody appropriates for himself a valuable piece of land with oil > deposits. He prevents others from utilizing that land. Let him pay for > having that exclusive rights of use, since clearly the government is > providing private property related services (police, courts and army to > guarantee his property) for him that others (non-owners) are not getting.

If by "appropriates for himself" you actually mean "buy", then your position basically boils down to an "all property is theft" manifesto.

<comment><USER4> Note that when you "buy" land this is quite limited. For instance anything that happens sufficiently below it (e.g. subway tunnels, mining) or above it (airplanes), you have no say in it.

Similarly a state could say, you license (not buy) land for construction/agriculture etc. use. This license does not include extracting oil, which requires a separate license. The land remains property of the state, but for specific uses (e.g. housing) you have a guarantee that you can keep the license for 100 years and/or can renew it under similar conditions. This is for example what China does: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_law)

<comment><USER5> Is that reducing the personhood of companies? (I consider that a good goal.) Saying that you must be a company to drill oil, and companies can only buy leasehold, not freehold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At the end of the day, Google probably doesn't differentiate the two very much as they're both costs of doing business. I would expect Google to work in its interest to reduce these impositions (taxes, laws+fines, etc) where they can, but we shouldn't pretend the punitive value of fines is more than a cost calculation to them.

We also shouldn't pretend that the EU justification for fines is purely about citizen protection, they see this as a "tax" as well (though that is of course not their primary motivation). Otherwise, they would work harder on non- punitive approaches towards combating the ills of Google and the like. One would hope education and encouragement of alternatives and other positive- leaning approaches might be prioritized over a gavel.

<comment><USER7> Works for me. If Google is happy to avoid taxes however they can, we should be extracting as much out of them as we can in other ways, such as fines. Not sure why we should be content with them not giving a shit about anything but themselves. Companies like Google only act out of pure greed. They don't respond to "positive reinforcement" and "education". They know perfectly well how to pay more in taxes, it's the default - they go out of their way to avoid it. They pay millions, tens of millions to lawyers to make sure they do exploit whatever loopholes there are. They aren't passive, innocent actors here.

<comment><USER8> No. Fines exist to dissuade illegal behavior. The loopholes that Google (and Apple, and many other multinationals) should be abolished, and any tax evasion should be prosecuted. Antitrust fines do not exist to punish tax avoidance. They exist to penalize companies who use their size to prevent competition and distort markets.

I have many issues with Google's business practices, but punishing them is not worth throwing out the rule of law.

<comment><USER7> > Fines exist to dissuade illegal behavior

This is just your preferred interpretation. Fines also exist to reduce or disincentivize unwanted behavior.

<comment><USER9> How is that different? The behaviour is made illegal, precisely because it's unwanted... that's pretty much the definition. I don't think there is another source of law in healthy cases/systems.

<comment><USER7> Not all unwanted behaviors are illegal. Some countries tax soda in order to reduce soda consumption. A behavior is not unwanted iff it's illegal. A behavior is illegal iff it's unwanted. It's not necessary for a behavior to be illegal in order to be unwanted. Illegal behavior is just a subset of the other.

But aside from that, and in this case, I feel the barriers to making it illegal are far higher than fining companies in other ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The EU allows a couple of its countries to act as tax havens. Ireland and the Netherlands are probably pretty pleased that EU citizens seem to direct all their outrage at the companies that do the obvious thing instead of at their tax laws.

<comment><USER11> You should check out the tax havens in the US before complaining about EU. Wyoming, Nevada etc [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/the- world...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/the-world-s- favorite-new-tax-haven-is-the-united-states)

<comment><USER10> I'm not complaining about the EU or comparing with US, I'm just pointing out that if the rage many EU citizens feel about the taxes of large corporations should be addressed by the EU somehow instead of hoping companies start paying some moral amount of taxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They need to make these fines "per user". It shouldn't be the case that for a company sufficiently large that a few billion in fines is simply another cost of doing business.

<comment><USER13> I believe the number of users affected is one of the factors considered at the time the fines are levied. The EU seems to be happy to substitute fines for taxes, so companies treating them the same way isn't too surprising. Structure your activities to avoid {fines, taxes} as much as possible, but at some level they are unavoidable.

<comment><USER14> >The EU seems to be happy to substitute fines for taxes,

When I think at EU fines I think At MS, Intel and Google, in all this cases this companies abused the markets. Can you provide a citation of a company getting a big fine but that did everything legally?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is hardly surprising given Google's tendency to evade taxes and exploit loopholes in taxation of international corporations.

<comment><USER16> So if Google paid more taxes than necessary (legal loopholes), there would be no fines (for bad privacy etc.)? That sounds wrong.

I don't support the legal tax loopholes but don't think there should be much relation between legal taxes and fines for bad practices (unless ofcourse the bad practice is illegal tax evasion).

<comment><USER15> I was merely suggesting the "more fines than taxes" bar in this article was artificially low because of their artificially low tax rate.

Note that I am fully in support of the EU's fines for both Google's antitrust violations and their privacy abuses, and agree that they should have no bearing on taxation.

<comment><USER16> This version of statement I can agree with (since its just facts). The original statement didn't read anything close to this imho :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Create an account" wall to read more than the headline, nice. Shimmying around this led me to [https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ansfle/google_n...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ansfle/google_now_pays_more_money_in_eu_fines_than_it), where the commenting just made my day:

\- "So I get what the EU is trying to do with these regulations, but this basically just means Google is paying to break the law at this point."

\- "Any law punishable only by fine is legal for the rich."

\- "At least it can deduct the fines off its taxable income."

</comment><comment><USER18> I really wonder what will happen if Google/Facebook becomes unprofitable in EU due to regulations? It's clear that these companies work on user data and will not gain enough data/users/money if it is paid, specially social networking sites. Will they block it like China for exactly the opposite reason?

<comment><USER19> The interesting part about this is both google and facebook rely on network effects to ensure that they offer better services than competitors.

Even running at a loss may be worth them continuing to run in the EU to stop the rise of competitors and to keep the better service that having more users grants them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The owner of this website (www.computing.co.uk) has banned the country or > region your IP address is in (RO) from accessing this website.

</comment><comment><USER21> For a second I thought they revived "Google Now".

</comment><comment><USER22> This will continue until we fix taxes globally.

</comment><comment><USER23> Another source of income :)

</comment><comment><USER24> the EU uses fines as a way of levying tariffs without explicitly being called out for it.

<comment><USER25> The EU has some rules that companies need to follow, same as any other democratic country does. Like it or not, EU regulation usually does a good job at protecting consumers from untamed companies, as happens in other places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Completely disingenuous representation. ALL of EU has Value Added Taxation, that takes money from every transaction to/from corps. For instance, buying ads on Google would automatically incur these taxes.

What EU really wants is double/triple taxation where:

1\. They tax your transactions as VAT

2\. Income post these taxes are counted as revenues, and costs (excluding VAT) are deducted to calculate profits.

3\. Profits from #2 are further subject to corp. income taxes.

This article would be half genuine if they listed the VAT dollar amounts Google has raised for the EU

<comment> shaki-dora First of all, VAT is collected by the vendor. But the entity actually taxed is the customer. That's why VAT is an explicit line item on any bill.

Second, almost all customers of Google Ads are businesses, with the resultant right get refunds for any VAT paid.

Third, because of [second], most customers likely take a shortcut: if you add your VAT registration number to your account, Google does not even charge VAT.

<comment><USER26> > First of all, VAT is collected by the vendor

VAT is collected by the government. Just because VAT appears as a line item on a bill, doesn't mean the vendor gets to book that as revenues.

> Second, almost all customers of Google Ads are businesses, with the > resultant right get refunds for any VAT paid.

You mean, the business itself might charge a VAT from it's customer, and deduct the VAT it pays to vendors as "cost" during taxation. There are NO REFUNDS of VAT from the government!!

> if you add your VAT registration number to your account, Google does not > even charge VAT.

Doesn't mean the transaction has 0% VAT fee, the EU/government GETS it's VAT on valid transactions, one way or another. If you somehow avoid VAT reaching the government, you're violating the law! AND, Google is NOT the beneficiary of VAT, regulation typically requires a seller to charge VAT and pass it on to the government.

Let's talk VAT numbers the EU gets from Google (as both a seller, buyer), and income taxes paid by GOOG employees before demonizing them

<comment><USER27> VAT isn't refunded, but since Google's clients are typically directly deducting the VAT paid from their corporation tax bill and not many people buy ads for personal use, the _net_ benefit of VAT paid on Google Ads to governments is pretty minimal.

The case for income taxes paid by Google employees is better, but then most of them would also be paying high income tax if working for businesses that didn't use elaborate schemes to repatriate their profits.

<comment><USER26> Unless actual numbers are cited, discounting government's VAT income from Google's operations is not useful. We need a number to understand whether or not Google's contribution to the coffers are actually lesser than the fines it pays.

<comment><USER27> Unless actual numbers are cited, it is not useful to credit Google with paying taxes which (i) are actually paid by Google's customers if at all and (ii) are generally directly deducted from those customers' own tax obligations and thus generally net to zero.

<comment><USER26> What in my statement implies Google directly pays VAT taxes. I make it amply clear that "discounting government's VAT income from Google's operations", i.e. owing to the actual operations that result in transactions with Google, under EU law, subject to EU VAT, regardless of who pays it!

On (ii), ANY and all costs incurred in operating a company, including paying VAT, can be deducted from revenues while calculating profit. That in NO WAY takes away from the actual VAT being paid to the government!!! HOW exactly does that "generally net to zero."? It certainly reduces profits, but unlike other "costs" that reduce profit calculation, VAT cannot be viewed as tax avoidance, if anything, the resultant profits post VAT are still subject to corp income tax, constituting double taxation. No CPA will advise a company to pay more VAT as a tax avoidance strategy, so I'm still trying to understand why booking VAT payments under "costs" net to 0, and for whom?

The entire premise of VAT is to guarantee a certain income for the government, as a % on EVERY transaction that happens in the economy. Hence, the mere existence and operations of Google in the EU resulting in transactions, is a source of VAT income for the government. Google can always move ALL incorporation out of the EU, and buyers can make "American" transactions to an American company that completely circumvent EU VAT. By choosing to have an EU entity subject to EU VAT, Google is contributing to EU coffers.

Unless there is an agenda to malign Google, ignoring government income from Google's operations seem convenient, and click-bait-ey.

<comment><USER27> Your claim that it is "completely disingenuous" and click-bait-ey to note Google avoids so much corporation tax on its European operations it actually pays more in fines rests on a completely disingenuous claim that VAT on Adwords should be counted as "dollar amounts Google has raised for the EU", despite them generally resulting in zero net change to company tax bills as they're fully tax-deductible for VAT-registered businesses.

It's a bit rich to accuse others of having an agenda to malign an organization when you started off with claims about what the EU wanted based entirely on your own ignorance of how VAT on business expenses actually works. (It's actually a rare example of a tax designed to avoid "double taxation")

<comment><USER26> Ah! If VAT is not a tax, and Google's operations inside the EU doesn't contribute to EU coffers, you must be all for moving Google's EU subsidiaries offshore, and saving whatever VAT Google's customers pay?

Google recorder $40B in EU revenues in 2017. About 20%, or $8B was the VAT related revenues that EU received. Let's move all that away from the EU, since it's all one big non-tax.

Also, let's abolish VAT, as my "ignorance of how VAT on business expenses actually works" is being exploited by big-evil Google for tax avoidance. Everyone knows that paying VAT is the #1 way to reduce tax liabilities, translated, "let's all pay taxes on transactions, as a way to avoid taxes on income! Hurrahs all around for the genius CPAs".

VAT is an evil tax on revenues (transactions), that sellers conveniently pass on to the buyer. Whether you agree or not, every seller is also a buyer, and VAT merely increases the cost of doing business, while also effectively acting as a double-taxation ploy, as profits are subject to income taxes. Who ends up footing the VAT bill is immaterial, as VAT goes under "costs" that were previously $0, unless you're a company that buys nothing to sell something. And whether it's booked as "costs" or not, it's a tax that the government receives on transactions under it's jurisdiction. Buying ads from a US company as a US transaction doesn't incur a VAT cost on an EU company, hence, Google's EU presence is a net positive for EU coffers!

<comment><USER27> I suspect that Google ceasing to do business in the EU would be considerably more harmful to Google's revenues than to the EU (actually that whole argument works better the other way round. If Google is truly struggling to make any profit at all on all that investment they make in the UK, why don't they just leave?)

Please do yourself a favour and educate yourself on what VAT _is_ before you Dunning-Krugersplain what the EU wants from it, how much you think it is worth to the economy and what you think an accountant would recommend a business does (I can recommend a good search engine as a starting point!). The entire point of VAT that it's a tax _on the consumer_ of the final product only, and that businesses get to deduct all the VAT levied on intermediate goods they've purchased to make and market the final product. That's literally the most basic, definitional aspect of VAT that sets it apart from traditional sales taxes. Since Google Ads are bought almost exclusively by businesses, EU member states (the EU doesn't actually levy VAT itself) receive a net tax benefit from VAT paid on Google Ads only on ads bought for personal enjoyment or by VAT exempt organizations, which must be a tiny proportion of their sales. Now there's an argument that Google's customers' customers would buy fewer taxed goods and services if they didn't see the ads, but that's a very different argument and certainly not something you could object to journalists not counting as "government income from Google's operations"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gain 36K followers in Ten Years - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/gain-36k-followers-in-ten-years-8be4bc9568af <comment><USER2> Some nice points, in the age of cutting lines and hacking sales, nice to get some old-school that says it's good to learn skills :)</comment>


SF police at its worst. Thanks god for camera phones. - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep47pM4mtms&feature=related

<comment><USER2> "A second gunshot wound entered the right side of Harding's neck and the bullet remained in his head. This bullet was removed and released to the San Francisco Police Department Crime Lab. Medical Examiner's staff also found a second, unfired cartridge (.380 caliber) in Harding's right jacket pocket. This cartridge was also released to the SFPD Crime Lab.

The San Francisco Police Crime Lab conducted analysis on the bullet recovered from Mr. Harding's head. It was determined that this bullet was of caliber .380/9mm and shared similar characteristics with the unfired cartridge located in Harding's jacket pocket. San Francisco Police Officer's are equipped with .40 caliber handguns. The bullet that was recovered from Mr. Harding's head could not have been fired by police officers. "

<comment><AUTHOR> quick Google brings that in the SFPD they have several models in use, among them is SIG p226 chambered in 9mm

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> He was a murder suspect who evaded and shot at the police. Let's not go overboard here.

[http://www.sf-police.org/index.aspx?recordid=84&page=376...](http://www.sf- police.org/index.aspx?recordid=84&page=3763)

"The presence of gunshot residue on Harding's right hand supports statements from witnesses that Harding held the gun in his right hand as he fired at the police officers."

<comment><AUTHOR> >He was a murder suspect who evaded

Exactly. You see a young black man not paying the $2 bus fare and you immediately treat him as a murder suspect who evaded. "Being black is a probable cause" - seems to be true.

> and shot at the police.

according to the last police version he shot at himself. I guess the next version will be a good theory combining everything together - he shot at the police through his head.

>Let's not go overboard here.

Unfortunately we're already there.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> They shot the man and just let the man lie dying loosing blood after that. No help. Not allowing others to help. The first official version - he was armed, we just can't find the gun. The second official version even better - he shot himself.</comment>


The Death of Advertising - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/the-death-of-advertising-8b90d0b9b66e#.enrgt0gdj <comment><USER2> While I agree with the initial observations, I disagree with the concluding thoughts.

The headline is click-bait; I would love a world in which ads, useless things which only annoy me, cease to exist. They do not offer me utility or value. I already know what I want, and when I don't I /then/ use a search engine.

Brand names are also a form of consumer protection. In that respect I believe they shall remain.

<comment><USER3> You know what you need, not what you want. When new products come out, how do you find out about it? Without advertising, do you hope to discover their store on the Internet randomly?

<comment><USER4> In the many years I've used the internet, I don't think I've ever seen an add where I've been like "I didn't know I wanted this", and the increasing invasion of privacy from advertisers is not worth the incredibly vague promise of "ads for things you didn't know you wanted".

Much like OP, if there's something I want, I go and research it, or use a community or activity related site (Reddit, BikeRadar/Polygon etc), where there's community discussion and conversation on what's good, bad, relative differences etc. For the most part, this means you get the actually better product, not the one with the biggest advertising spend _.

_ No it's not a perfect system, but it's far better than being spammed with ads for things I "don't know I want", which is a spectacularly absurd concept.

<comment><USER5> Let's take a step back. I want to see how you think I should solve this problem...

I have a startup with a new product. No one knows about the company or the product, but they have a basic desire. That desire can currently be fulfilled with other options. But our offering is vastly different, in fact it's never been done before, and the only way you can realize you need it is by experiencing it. That's why we started the company. How do I get the product to them?

They don't know that they want this product.

I can assure you though, once they experience it, they don't know how they lived without it. Although they never thought to ask for it because it was literally an unknown unknown.

This isn't a hypothetical, this is a real-world example from my brother's company. And I can tell you, targeted advertisement was insanely effective.

I'm open to hear other possible ways to get the same ROI using another method.

<comment><USER6> > and the only way you can realize you need it is by experiencing it.

That is part of the problem with modern advertising: hyperbole. By definition, if people have survived this long without knowing about Product-X then they don't need it. The OP's perspective was that he'd rather _not_ know about Product-X ahead of need-time.

If he identified a need or desire for a solution to a problem he would search for "grill-thing that keeps leaves out of drain" or "brace that keeps daffodils upright in the wind" and he'd stumble across your brother's product. So the product marketing strategy would be to place Product-X in places where it would likely be found by people pursuing that particular need or desire.

I found myself doing that recently for what transpired to be called a 'tamping rammer'.

I appreciate that's not ideal from a corporate perspective when the goal is to 'make' a market by leveraging perceived need, but that's not the primary concern of those who are fatigued by advertising.

<comment><USER5> > So the product marketing strategy would be to place Product-X in places > where it would likely be found by people pursuing that particular need or > desire.

That's like... the exact definition of good advertising. And that's what we did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this article completely fails to consider the human element in consumerism and advertising. Big data will never replace human decision making. It is a nice observation from someone figuring out the world...but is very early in that discovery process.

Brands are more than just a tool...they are a direct byproduct of how our brains perceive and recall things.

Human nature hasnt changed since the caveman days and never will. It can evolve and manifest itself in different ways, but our core drivers are fundamental to our existence.</comment>


Ars reviews the 12-core Mac Pro. Worth it for the intro image alone - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/10/tri-screen-cpu-monitor-ars-reviews-the-12-core-2010-mac-pro.ars

<comment><USER2> My "base" early 2008 mac pro is still fast enough that I havent felt a need to upgrade. It really is the first 5+ year PC that I think I have purchased... I think the expense can be justified in those terms...

<comment><USER3> I'll agree with you here. I bought my wife a Mac Pro the same time I built myself a PC. I paid about 1/3 for the PC and it feels _really_ dated. Her Mac Pro, meanwhile, is still incredibly fast. It plays SC2 on max settings without slogging while my PC slogs on Medium (and enough Marines running around).

<comment><USER4> But you paid 1/3 for it... If you had paid the same for a PC, I can pretty much guarantee you'd be getting better performance on the PC. Mac's are nice, but gaming isn't their specialty.

<comment><USER3> That shows the perception between quality, though. So many people fight the fight with regard to price -- which I did, and failed. Now I have a PC which isn't really upgradeable because the CPU Socket (AM2+) and RAM-type (DDR2) are obsolete.

<comment><USER4> True, the perception is probably more skewed than reality. For gaming, PC's are still definitely the way to go, but Mac's aren't quite as marked up as most people think. They do use quality parts.

<comment><USER5> Apostrophes indicate possession, not pluralization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who actually buys these? I was buying myself a new work machine last week, and wound up going for the 27" iMac since I really couldn't think of any possible justification for the Mac Pro.

The price gap is really quite significant, for what doesn't seem to be much of a gain in performance.

<comment><USER7> People who need to run OSX and need multiple cores and lots of RAM or support for hardware expansion cards. Think high-end RAID cards, graphics cards, specialized AV cards, etc.

If you don't know you need it, the Mac Pro was not built for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fundamental reason: Apple doesn't release old, bottom of the barrel, price compromised junk.

Go find a laptop that compares, feature to feature, with a MacBook Pro. Once you're totally frustrated at being unable to find IPS displays, firewire 800, optical digital out, and the same weight target, I can guarantee that the comparable models will be about the same price points.

That said, if all you want to do is play SC2 on a cheap 18 bit display and don't need the features mentioned above, go for it.

That all said, Apple could and should put better GPU's and pay more attention to game developers than they currently do.

<comment> old-gregg _Go find a laptop that compares, feature to feature, with a MacBook Pro. Once you're totally frustrated at being unable to find IPS displays, firewire 800, optical digital out, and the same weight target, I can guarantee that the comparable models will be about the same price points._

MBPs are TN film, not IPS. Their color gamut is pretty pedestrian, certainly pales in comparison to my ThinkPad T510. Their panels are low-DPI too, which makes text much harder to read (you should see Linux/Freetype on 15" Full HD - blows my mind every day).

MBPs don't have a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard, hence are not typist-friendly, they are not nearly as rugged (flaky lids), their screens also don't even open at 180 degree angle and MBPs don't have mouse buttons under your thumbs. They also run twice as hot (and loud) than Thinkpads. Shall I keep going? I can: the keyboard is crippled and not waterproof, hard drive is not easily swappable and Apple uses cheap fans that get quite noisy after a couple of years.

The bottom line: fanboyism is silly.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, the MBP high resolution option isn't exactly low-DPI. It's lower than FHD on a T510, but not by much.

MBPs also have battery life I wish I could get out of my T400. Sitting through an afternoon of lectures, I would have to crank my screen all the way down to get through with my 6 cell, while my neighbours with their MBPs could happily cruise their with their screens nice and bright.

Still love my T400. (And I'll admit, sometimes I wish I didn't have those mouse buttons right under the space bar. Sometimes having a giant trackpad is sooo nice)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I love the reviews, I just wanted to point this awesome page out, it's my go-to page soon after a new Mac's release:

<http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Credit to John Siracusa for the title of this post.

<comment><USER11> The intro image alone was not worth it.

Please don't copy linkbait.</comment></comment>


Yelp Users Bemoan Disappearing Recommendations, Adding to Company Troubles - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-13/yelp-review-purge-adds-to-woes-from-investor-pressure-sales <comment><USER2> Yelp puts about 75% of reviews into not recommended, the problem with that is when people find the reviews are not showing they have no motivation to post more reviews.

<comment><USER3> Do you have thoughts on why they put 75% of reviews into not recommended?

<comment><USER2> I started a new company and had two friends review it on Yelp. I also had 3 customers review it. Yelp marked the customers reviews as not recommended but kept the fake reviews from my friends.

Whatever Yelps algorithm is... it is wrong in my case 100% of the time.</comment></comment></comment>


Best ways to learn a foreign language - <AUTHOR> http://domenicodefelice.blogspot.it/2013/06/best-ways-to-learn-foreign-language.html <comment><USER2> Professional translators often do "shadowing", which is listening to source material from the language you're weaker at and attempting to just transcribe it in real time. You can start with source material which is easy, such as dialog on TV shows, and move to source material which is hard, such as news broadcasts. (Newscasters speak much much quicker than characters in fiction and employ large and often unpredictable vocabularies, whereas most popular culture is dominated by the ~200 words at the head of the zipf distribution for that language.)

It's totally free and, when you're at intermediate proficiency, both stupendously effective and the most maddening exercise you'll ever do. (What happens when you're thrown off the deep end into a newscast about nuclear power plant issues and you're deeply out of your depth with regards to the required vocabulary? You try your best, jot down the five words every 3 sentences you actually catch, and then break out a dictionary later to figure out why _houshasen_ and _shiyouzuminenryoupuuru_ seem to be so key to the topic.)

("Radiation" and "pool (for storage of) used (nuclear) fuel", respectively. And there, now you understand 5% more of that conversation.)

<comment><USER3> A small thing I've noticed about seeing news from France and Switzerland.

Swiss newsreaders seem to speak more slowly. I don't know if it's a peculiar Swiss behaviour, but I wondered at the time if it was connected to the fact that Switzerland has four official languages, some of them having overlapping linguistic footprints.

To make a Swiss French broadcast accessible to Swiss Germans who have rudimentary French, it would make sense for the presenters to speak more slowly.

Meanwhile, over on France 2, the appallingly videogenic presenters of _Le 20 Heures_ drive a swishy gallic stereotype through the paper thin limits of my understanding.

<comment><USER4> The French have this stereotype of the Swiss being slow-spoken (some go as far as to claim they are slow-witted). So it's not just newscasters, but the general public as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Learning a language isn't just a process of learning words out of context (with spaced repetition systems like Anki, or products that piggy back off of it like Duolingo). I don't mean this in an unkind way, but I get the impression the author hasn't ever learned a foreign language very well as an adult.

Until I became an engineer recently, my entire career revolved around learning and teaching foreign languages. I strongly recommend looking at what L2 acquisition linguists have learned before hitting bloggers for language learning advice. One great resource is Dr Krashen's website. The video on the front page does a great job of showing how context and comprehensibility matter more than brute memorization algorithms: [http://www.sk.com.br/sk- krash.html](http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html)

And if you _must_ learn from a blog, pick a blog of someone who has learned a lot of languages well (e.g. Steve Kaufmann) over one who talks of his "learning hacks" but doesn't any videos of himself speaking a foreign language in an unscripted setting. That's my 2 cents.

<comment><USER6> I completely agree with this.

I've created the site Readlang ([http://readlang.com](http://readlang.com)) to allow learning vocabulary _in context_ by reading uploaded content, translating, and using SRS flashcards which include the original context.

It's in public beta and would love to get feedback if anyone tries it out.

<comment><USER7> I checked out your site about the time it was announced on Reddit. I really like the idea although I noticed some problems using it for my target languages (Spanish and Hebrew). For inflected languages like these, you really need a good stemmer/lemmatiser (either one, I'm not an expert, but you get the idea). I haven't tried Readlang recently though, when I do I'll be happy to give you more feedback.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, yes I'm relying on Google Tranlsate at the moment, but eventually I'd like it to recognize word families and verb conjugations. I use it for Spanish and regularly edit the generated verb flashcards to indicate the correct conjugation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of what works for some individuals.

However, pointing out the common problems, shared by everybody, is also informative. Here are some:

* The factors in learning a new language are age (adolescence is a threshold), innate skill, motivation (and guilt), effort and similarity of the languages.

* Sounds are not listener-independent: your Chinese friend does not hear the same sounds as you do, so don't expect that they know which sounds you are correcting in their English when you repeat the word for the tenth time. Same the other way around. I have seen this leading again, again and again to absurd "are you deaf?" situations between otherwise attentive friends and teachers.

* It might be helpful to discuss metalanguage: direct objects, word order, verb transitivity, nouns vs verbs, parsing, etc. This is something you learn in school in France, Spain, Germany, some Arab countries, etc, and if you studied Latin. But if you went through a standard English-speaking school system you might want to catch up with that.

<comment><USER9> >don't expect that they know which sounds you are correcting in their English when you repeat the word for the tenth time.

This phenomenon is probably the most interesting thing I've found out in my life. The fact that some people simply cannot hear certain sounds goes against everything we would like to think.

When people talk about varying tone inside words (such as in Chinese or Thai), while I obviously hear that something is happening, I cannot for the life of me reproduce what I hear or even retain the tonal information. For me , tone is a separate aspect to vocabulary and I can't assimilate the two.

Inversely, seeing the plight of poor Japanese people, who get taught English from an early age through the limited japanese syllable system (not sure the exact name), unable to repeat words properly, and sometimes going completely off the mark.

This just accents the need for everyone to be exposed to as many languages as possible as a child.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would disagree with much of this article. While Duolingo in particular is popular, its main focus is on teaching translation. It's hip, but it's not about teaching how to speak and understand a language. Similarly, the focus on vocabulary study in the other tools has similar limitations.

Self study needs to be augmented or driven by spoken conversation practice in the least. Your brain is a neural network to learn language as audio input. While challenging, it's the most effective way. Google doesn't support this due to the link popularity of a lot of software-driven methods.

Disclaimer: My business in the online language learning space.

</comment><comment><USER11> +1 to watching TV with subtitles, and even better repeating out loud the sentences you find more interesting. That way y * It will be easier to remember and * You will improve your pronunciation

<comment><USER12> I have a language learning site[1] which started out as text translation, but I'm also experimenting with videos, the idea being it's helpful to see captions in both languages simultaneously as the video plays.

Examples here[2], here[3], and here[4].

[1] [http://www.macaronics.com/](http://www.macaronics.com/)

[2] [http://www.macaronics.com/article/6e9812608f0b4dcdba8cfab3e6...](http://www.macaronics.com/article/6e9812608f0b4dcdba8cfab3e6fe6730/?lang=en)

[3] [http://www.macaronics.com/article/9540f24d080241dd9b27f7939c...](http://www.macaronics.com/article/9540f24d080241dd9b27f7939c7a0772/?lang=en)

[4] [http://www.macaronics.com/article/a6ab2c3d8c364ad38401d6dba3...](http://www.macaronics.com/article/a6ab2c3d8c364ad38401d6dba3190804/?lang=ja)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> you need a repetitive stream of natural language. then brain automatically analyzes it.

usually, you pick one 30 minute to 60 minute video, and watch it every day, 6 days a week. make sure you take a break every week. you watch it to the point where you can mimic what they are saying as the video is playing. you don't have to know exact meaning of your utterance. but you already have some sense. then, you transcribe it on paper (you need to learn writing system by this time). maybe use dictionary to learn actual words. rehearse with the video. if have friends, rehearse with them. memorize it. move on to the next video.

start with sitcoms then maybe news broadcast, reality shows (court shows are great), movies...

video is just one example. if you're learning a language where you can't find suitable videos (there might be no production in the language), make friends who speak the language. record their conversations. play repetitively until you can follow along with a loud voice. transcribe.. etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Didn't see any references for us Classicists so I'll add my two cents:

I'm still struggling with classical Latin after 8 years. The problem being that it's a "dead" language and immersion/conversation is difficult to achieve on a modern era time schedule.

Over this time I've come to the conclusion that you need to start "speaking" in any language as soon as possible. The approach of learning grammar for a year and translating sentences on pen-and-paper is not effective enough.

My current toolbox for learning Latin is:

1\. Supermemo (Anki is a free equivalent) for vocabulary and anything that needs to be committed to memory permanently. This takes away the burden of worrying about anything that needs to be remembered.

2\. Follow Evan der Millner's "Comenius" Latin project, which attempts to teach you Latin the way school children were taught back when they were expected to speak, read and write it fluently. This is a reconstruction of the way Comenius would have taught children. [1] project overview, [2] reading of the texts. [3] Oral lessons, so you can start Skyping other Latin speakers and talking as soon as possible. (this is not "church" or Italian pronunciation, but the received Classical reconstructed pronunciation). Everything you need is available for free off the either Google books, Evan's YouTube videos and archive.org.

3\. Know and use Diogenes ([http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/](http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/)) for Windows or Linux.

4\. Install the "Language Immersion for Chrome" extension and set it to Latin so you're forced to read the Internet in Latin as you browse ;)

[1] [http://latinum.weebly.com/comenius- project.html](http://latinum.weebly.com/comenius-project.html) [2] [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMH5SfME31ZKYChsIWSp_D...](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMH5SfME31ZKYChsIWSp_DkEb2k6jPBka) [3] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0NIMm2eM8c&list=SPC6E7F1C5D4...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0NIMm2eM8c&list=SPC6E7F1C5D4F96ACC)

I'm attempting Attic Greek this way (Evans has started an Oral ancient Greek course on YouTube too) and can't wait to enjoy reading Plato, the Iliad and the Odyssey aloud in the reconstructed native tongue in my old age some day :)

<comment><USER15> I have downloaded and tried to play with Diogenes several times. I can never seem to get it to do anything. As best as I can tell, you need to provide it with data sets as well. Do you know where you can get these?

<comment><USER14> You don't need the data sets unless you're interested in exploring the Greek or Latin texts. On it's own it's useful for entering dictionary words in their declined/conjugated forms and it finding the correct entry(ies) in the dictionary.

For the data sets: In all honesty, just torrent it. What you're looking for is TLG /PHI/ Cd-rom_E, which is the Thesaurus Linguae Gracae and the Latin texts.

<comment><USER15> Wow, you're right. It does come with some data out of the box after all. Its UI isn't all that it could be, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _One of the best ways to improve your expressing skills is to talk with > natives._

Go to the foreign country and don't speak one sentence in your native language. Jump in at the deep end (BTW, I had to look up that phrase because I never lived in an English-speaking county).

</comment><comment><USER17> Having a general interest in languages, I've tried many things to improve my language learning. The thing I was probably most impressed with though is the Michael Thomas method.

</comment><comment><USER18> The submitted article had some interesting tips, and several of the previous comments are quite good too. I've been developing a FAQ on language learning as this interest is mentioned on Hacker News from time to time. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

[http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...](http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm)

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032)

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics)

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

[http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html](http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html)

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

[http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html](http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html)

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese- language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

[http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional- Reference-...](http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference- Grammar/dp/0520066103/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar- Grammars...](http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar- Grammars/dp/0415150329/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English- Language...](http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English- Language/dp/0582517346/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English- Language/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English- Language/dp/0521431468/)

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

</comment><comment><USER19> Getting an ear for a foreign language is quite difficult - getting to the point where you can separate the words out (without necessarily knowing what they are) so that you can learn them. I have quite good reading French (I can read proper full-length books) pretty poor written French and bloody awful spoken/hearing French. Listening to a lot of French pop music on Spotify really helped me get an ear.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hack 0 should be to find a good motivator to learn the language. Only then do tools matter.

I got bored learning Kanji. Had I known that 300 of those were enough to read a food menu -- and what they were, I would have prioritized them and learned them in a month. Instead, I stopped after thinking it would take too much time to ever get to 2,000.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm quite happy with rosetta stone. do you have any particular reason not to like it? (beside paying?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi bigd. I've only tried the free demo of rosetta stone and it was too short to make me form a useful opinion about it. Anyway I would prefer free material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find that using mnemonics is an efficient way of learning words. The only problem is to find good mnemonics, which can be easy if the word sounds like something you already know, and hard if it reminds you of nothing and the word represents a very abstract concept.

Memorizing something like the top 1000 words used in everyday conversation, with little grammar exercises sprinkled in, seems to be a good strategy. I've only got to memorizing something like 500 words (give or take 150 words...) so I haven't put this method quite to the test yet.</comment>


Ask HN: Am I getting screwed? RSUs in dollars vs shares - <AUTHOR>

I've got an offer for employment from a startup that is issuing restricted stock units in a dollar amount. From the research I've done, they can be expressed in a dollar amount or number of shares with a price. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, accepting dollars vs shares+price seems like an easy way to screw over your employees. Let me illustrate with an example:
Scenario 1: $10,000 in RSU that vests over 4 years.
At the end of 4 years, I'll have benefitted $10k regardless of how well the company does (assuming it has IPO'ed)
Scenario 2:
1,000 shares of RSUs priced at $10/share that vests over 4 years. At the end of 4 years I'll have 1,000 shares of public stock regardless of the price (whether it is a penny stock or something like $50/share). Assuming it is $50/share in 4 years, thats $50k (don't know how the original share price works into this formula).
What am I missing? It seems like RSUs in dollar amounts are a bust (almost identical to the cash equivalent) and not tied to how well the company does post-IPO (don't care about the tax implications, I'm sure thats a whole nother topic).
Can anyone shed some light on the dollars vs shares RSU scenarios? <comment><USER2> Scenario 3: the startup hasn't done a 409a pricing of its stock yet. They're committing $10k of RSUs at whatever the valuation ends up being. If it's $10/share then you receive 1000 RSUs. If it's $5/share, then it's 2000 RSUs. If $100/share, then 100 RSUs.

You need to find out if they're literally granting $10,000 in stock to you, or if they're waiting for a valuation and until then literally don't know the number of shares.

A dollar amount is not all that unusual…I received a grant equal to 25% of my income vesting over three years from an already public company. That is, they calculated the number of shares equal to 25% of my then income. That didn't seem to be a lot but the stock split twice during the vesting period (this was in the 1990s) and ended up being a nice sum.

<comment><USER2> Also: you need to find out what the tax implications are of RSUs. If it's considered to be $2500 in income each year you may end up paying tax on that even though the RSUs are not liquid, and will only have value if the company has a liquidation event.</comment></comment>


Trevls Tesla Car Rental - <AUTHOR> https://www.trevls.com/ <comment><USER2>
      No Gas Refill Charges - Ever!

Um, I would hope not.

What the site does _not_ say is if there is any energy use charge, whether you have to return the vehicle with any given amount of battery life remaining, or whether all vehicles come to the renter fully charged in the first place. Those are pretty big holes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not at all associated with this company, just heard about it and thought it seemed like an interesting business.</comment>