bloak

54 ms·

661.
by bloak 5y ago
Perhaps worth mentioning that "you" is "ambiguous" in exactly the same way: it's grammatically and historically plural but can now refer to either a single person or a group. French and German also use a grammatical
662.
by bloak 5y ago
> they make the traditional "they" ambiguous and a bit confusing I'd say you're technically right. I have occasionally read to the end of a sentence and thought, "Wait, that doesn't make sense", gone ba
663.
by bloak 5y ago
The Wikipedia article seems to cover this quite well, but I'll say it here anyway: there are several kinds of singular "they". Using "they" to refer to a word like "someone" or "anyone", as in &q
664.
by bloak 5y ago
It's just as well they're still using two-digit years or it might have been really expensive.
665.
by bloak 5y ago
Three instances in the man page and one in a comment!
666.
by bloak 5y ago
Just so that Brandeis University can be deservedly embarrassed, let me quote some of this before they take it down: Oppressive Language Rule of thumb : This expression comes from an old British law allowing men to beat their wives with stic
667.
by bloak 5y ago
There's also the possibility that the leak was from people or activities associated with the lab but not from inside the lab. For example, they hire some local people to go and fetch some more bats from the bat caves in another provinc
668.
by bloak 5y ago
Bit of a tangent here: I notice he stresses the first syllable of his name. Is "McAfee" always pronounced that way, also in England, Ireland and Scotland? Wikipedia gives the pronunciation as /ˈmækəfiː/, like in the vide
669.
by bloak 5y ago
Is New Zealand much different from Germany in this respect? Or the Netherlands?
670.
by bloak 5y ago
Yes, they are different in standard British English: hover /ˈhɒvə/ lover /ˈlʌvə/ rover /ˈrəʊvə/ The bird "plover" is like "lover": /ˈplʌvə/
671.
by bloak 5y ago
The example in the article seems to expire after 48 hours: 4: 1624458597, # QR code expiry 6: 1624285797} # QR code generated 1624458597 - 1624285797 = 172800 = 48 * 60 * 60 (I would have thought they could afford to be a bit more generous
672.
by bloak 5y ago
It would presumably not be a problem for people to regenerate their QR code when they replace their ID card. They have to regenerate it every day or so anyway. (The QR code in the article expires after 48 hours.) Linking to an ID card numbe
673.
by bloak 5y ago
It seems to contain name and date of birth. Would it be better if it contained the person's ID card number, assuming they have such a thing?
674.
by bloak 5y ago
A false accusation might come from a man. A couple of scenes from a couple of films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJVXg1AHQTY American Beauty (1999) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu_xTC5Gc2U Sexy Beast
675.
by bloak 5y ago
I agree that the shut-down seems over-broad, but, at the same time, might it be too narrow? Couldn't people also use "non-data" mobile communications, like SMS or even voice calls, for cheating? If they're not stopping v
676.
by bloak 5y ago
My experience is that people remember advertisements but they don't remember even what category of product was being advertised let alone the brand. But my social circles might not be typical.
677.
by bloak 5y ago
> the nail would reach escape velocity and never come back down to earth See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth I am not a physicist, but iron is about 6500 times denser than air so that suggests that a 5 cm
678.
by bloak 5y ago
> I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography. Represent the p
679.
by bloak 5y ago
They may well be exact homophones in some/all dialects of Russian, but I'm not sure that children having to memorise spellings is evidence for that. Don't both English and German, for example, have almost-homophones that chil
680.
by bloak 5y ago
That's a good one. I like it. However, although Wiktionary gives the etymology of "grime" as "from Proto-Germanic grīmô (“mask”)", it also says: "Possibly influenced by Danish grim (“soot, grime”), Old Dutch g
681.
by bloak 5y ago
I've read a bit about what Japan did in relation to Bitcoin, and I've read a bit about what El Salvador is proposing to do in relation to Bitcoin, and I've read a bit about what the term "legal tender" means, and ho
682.
by bloak 5y ago
It's not particularly interesting where people were born, or where they died, but it is interesting where they were educated. To me, at least.
683.
by bloak 5y ago
The technical details of how this is implemented are perhaps interesting for some people. It depends on the language, obviously. It seems that currently a pronoun field is only visible when the interface language is set to English or Swedis
684.
Use Gender Pronouns on LinkedIn(linkedin.com)
1 points by bloak 5y ago|1 comments
685.
by bloak 5y ago
I remember some of the people who worked hard designing the hardware and software that went into feature phones being outraged, perhaps in a similar way, by the stupid amounts of money people were spending on ringtones at that time (about 2
686.
by bloak 5y ago
I don't think that "total number of years of human life lost" is a good general-purpose measure. Specialists could perhaps apply that measure to the deaths of old people (people over retirement age?) but it would be crazy, in
687.
by bloak 5y ago
Hungary (and Poland) have been quite clever in how they undermine freedom: almost every individual thing they've done can be justified in isolation by saying, "Look, countries X, Y and Z do the same thing!", but when you look
688.
by bloak 5y ago
I think I read the claim somewhere else on HN very recently that the "fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine" is US-only. In my opinion courts should be allowed to use all relevant evidence. Deliberately causing a miscarriage of jus
689.
by bloak 5y ago
In the Oxford English Dictionary there are 19 separate entries for "butt" with various disparate senses, including a bundle of cloth, a headland, and a funnel-shaped wicker basket. Some of those entries have complex, multiple etym
690.
by bloak 5y ago
FL is Florida, so Corvus brachyrhynchos? Someone should do a scientific study of the sense of humour of different Corvus species. It might be worth an Ig Nobel Prize.

More ›