2143

And I'd like to point out that even if I'm physically in, say Canada, I might still need a visa to go to Germany.

Unless there's a clause somewhere that says people who have a visa for Canada can enter Germany visa-free — some countries actually do that.

For example, UAE (the country where Dubai is) normally requires visa for Indian citizens, but if you're an Indian citizen with a valid US visa, then you're eligible for visa-on-arrival for UAE[1]:

> All Indian citizens holding U.S. visas, green cards, U.K Resident Permits, or EU resident permits can receive entry visa upon arrival to UAE valid for 14 days for a charge of AED 100.

[1] https://www.uae-embassy.org/visas-services/visas-for-non-us-...

What's different about those three countries?

I had a 5-year F1 visa for what would normally be a 2-year graduate course.

I was under the impression that 5 years was the norm, considering a lot of undergrad courses (in engineering especially) take about that long to complete.

Grad schools too can take that long if you're aiming for a PhD.

(Although, when you graduate your F1 expires even if there's still time left on it; so you can't continue staying in the US after graduating without obtaining an OPT, or a different type of visa, PR or whatever).

As you mentioned American and Canadian visa has a longer duration, so visa renewal is something you need to worry about only once in 10 years or so.

For Europe, I think (not sure) if you travel there frequently, you are eligible for a longer-duration multiple-entry visa [1] (the linked website is NOT an official government website). I know somebody with such a type of visa.

[1] https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/schengen-visa-types/

> Not getting very much out of Anna Karenina, supposedly one of the aesthetic and emotional heights of human expression and experience, doesn’t feel great.

Incidentally, I have very recently stalled a second time on Anna Karenina, generally considered to be a masterpiece.

I'll probably revisit it later, but it's just not for me at the moment.

Also, The Idea Factory by Pepper White doesn't seem to be very popular (or maybe it is?). I first read it when I was in college and loved it. Re-read it in grad-school and I loved it even more. I think it was because I was in grad-school and could empathize with the main character.

I honestly believe you asked this question out of your ignorance.

Despite the apparent difficulty maybe the people of China like their language nevertheless.

Languages vary widely in their expressivity.

Also, I think language (and the script) is closely related to the culture as well. The people of China might not want to let go of that.

And what about the literature and everything that's already written down in their native language? It's not just a question of translating everything. Trust me, things get lost in translation.

Also, if we're going to have everybody in the world work with the same script, there are arguably better candidates such as Arabic and Sanskrit.

In Sanskrit, for example, there's only about 50 letters (49?), it's impossible to mispronounce, the whole gender-neutralization situation becomes irrelevant (because well, things like car, village, fruit, pencil etc have genders (of which there are 3 btw — masculine, feminine, and neuter, but they aren't used in the way you would think)).

> why haven't china moved to a western (?) alphabet based writing?

By the way, here's how this appears to us non-westerners — okay here comes this Western hero who thinks the rest of the world is nonsense and should be replaced by the superior Western™ system.

Not sure exactly what you're looking for, but look up Tom Murphy and Dan Burke (of Capital Cities/ABC).

They had a peculiar frugal no-nonsense no-BS style of doing business.

Actually, I read the book "The Ride of a Lifetime" by Robert Iger, who is/was the CEO of Disney (he had originally retired, but apparently they made him CEO again).

While Igers seems like a cool person (as per his own book) I found his descriptions of Tom and Dan even more interesting. It was from this book that I first heard about them.

> There was only one school in the entire country

If you don't mind, what country was this?

Ah! Okay!

I've observed while reading Sherlock Holmes that we the reader isn't provided with all the information Holmes has. (I still like it though).

TIL "fair play" was the term for it.

Huh. Okay.

Btw, of all the languages that I mentioned above, Sanskrit is the only one that I know atleast a little of. And that was because I took a Sanskrit 101 class in college many years ago.

> There seems to be something about the English language where people think gendered language relates to gender.

This.

Sometimes when people talk about using gender-neutral terms, I wonder how it would work in other languages.

As you said, for some languages there is a gender for inanimate objects.

In Arabic for example, apparently everything is either feminine or masculine. All countries are feminine, table is masculine, and chair is feminine [1], book is masculine, and car is feminine [2].

Other languages such as French, Russian, and Spanish also seems to assign genders to objects.

The Sanskrit language on the other hand seems designed with feminine, masculine, and neuter, but some objects have a non-neuter gender anyway.

Quoting from [3] (on Sanskrit):

> "Fruit" is neuter, but "tree" is masculine! "City" is neuter, but "village" is masculine! "Army" and "knowledge" are feminine, but "action" is neuter! In truth, most nouns take a certain gender by default, and we cannot guess a noun's gender just by looking at a noun's meaning.

[1] https://blogs.transparent.com/arabic/noun-gender-in-arabic/

[2] https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/arb101/chapter/vocabulary-and-...

[3] https://www.learnsanskrit.org/start/nouns/

The basic premise is that separating content and presentation lets you focus on just the content (or presentation).

This idea is frequently used by computer programmers.

Aww, I originally meant to write "proportional" instead of "proportioned". My bad.

Did you mean you say directly/inversely "proportioned" rather than "correlated"?

(English is not my first language).

> There should be an effort to offer 50 years of security updates for Debian 12.

That reminds me, SQLite is engineered to keep working until atleast 2050 (and beyond).

https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html

Okay! That's reassuring :)

What if I go abroad for a few days and need a temporary SIM from there, but my phone only supports eSIM?

With eSIM there's a tighter coupling between the phone and carrier. Not sure if I like that.

> Apple’s move to make eSIM the only option for iPhone 14 range in the U.S. is propelling the worldwide shift towards eSIM technology.

Speaking of which, I know for a fact that the iPhone 14 sold in India has a SIM card slot (eSIM also supported).

> They also had a system where you would put your checkbook into the teller machine and it would print your credits and debits into the book for you.

That's intresting to know.

Where I'm at, we had (still have?) a "passbook", a small booklet where you could get all your transactions printed onto.

But AFAIK we couldn't do it ourselves through the teller machine though. Once in a few months or so you go to the respective bank and ask the staff there to update the passbook. They use a machine, however.

Of course, there days it's unnecessary as you can electronically download a list of your transactions for a given period from the bank's website/app.

This, ladies and gentlemen, illustrates the point I was trying to make.

Funny thing about topics like this is that people of any given country is oblivious to how other countries have solved that problem, or the challenges other countries face, or inturn the problems that they themselves face.

Regarding payment systems specifically, people generally don't realize what they're missing.

Pick anybody from anywhere and they'll tell you they've been able to do everything they ever wanted to do (with regards to payments) using the already-existing systems of their country.

> hash map, I just use tries

That's how I messed up my <big-company>-Luxembourg-office interview many years ago. At least, that's one way, out of the possibly many ways I messed up.

The interviewer asked what was in retrospect a trivial question whose obvious and straightforward solution involved using a hash table, but me being clever proposed a ridiculous solution involving tries.

Didn't get the job :)

"10" is the binary for "2"

Agreed.

If there's a 3rd party aggregator (for taxis, restaurants or whatever), the final price that the customer pays would include both the aggregator's profits + the individual service provider's profits.

If the individual service providers all came together and made an app themselves, the aggregator-profits can be eliminated, resulting in potentially reduced prices for the customers.

I think (probably wrongly) one of the reasons they don't usually come together is because by making such an app they would effectively be helping their competitor(s), which they may not necessarily want to (because they don't see the bigger picture?).

In my city (in Asia) a subset of taxi drivers realized this and even made an app, but it didn't really work well due to poor marketing and because visitors to the city didn't want to set-up a new app just for 2 days etc.

On the other hand, if all the service-providers do co-operatively make an app for their services, what prevents a cartel from developing? The government?

I guess there should be a high baseline level of trust to make it work.

> They can get away with demanding smartphone use.

> In 5 years, if you say “I don’t have a smart phone” you’ll just be denied service. Period. No questions asked.

IANAL, but I feel like that should be illegal.

Sure, they can set up an app and those who want to use it may do so, but for things things like parking there ought to be an alternate. Beach, national park etc is a predominantly offline service for which it's absurd to insist on using an app.

Especially for something that's on a "national park" — I don't really know what the "national" part indicates (not from USA) but I'm assuming that the govt is involved.

Somebody should go to court.

To a subsection of people, "the rest of the world" is a mythical place that doesn't exist.

Many years ago I daily drove Vista for about a year. Literally anything else from before or since is a vast improvement.

(I've been on *nix land for a decade now — I wish my Mac (intel) was a bit more snappier, but I'm happy nevertheless).

Me too.

So I decided to learn SICP on my own. I already have the book, so I'll watch the MIT lectures of the original authors available online, and try to make progress.

I'm not in any hurry to complete it anytime soon.

No it's not; 3600 seconds is 1 hour!

Depends on your average speed.

Similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275304