AlchemistCamp

> you'd catch runtime errors sooner

I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that you would catch runtime bugs sooner with Gleam than with Elixir (or Erlang). Erlang’s record for reliability is stronger than many statically typed languages, including even Java.

There is a certain class of errors static types can prevent but there’s a much larger set of those it can’t. To make the case for a language like TS/Java/Swift/Golang or Gleam actually resulting in fewer runtime defects than Erlang or Elixir, I’d want to see some real world data.

Programming isn't an industry, per se. It's a skill, like accounting, sales, communications or law. There are definitely many businesses for which it's a core strength, but any large company has some need for it.

Dreaming in Spanish itself is a good example of a program that doesn’t rely on text to make its audio comprehensible. Their lower level videos include a lot of context that make it possible to understand the speech without written words.

There are a number of programs that use a purely audio-lingual approach with translation, like Pimsleur or the <language>pod101 series. In both cases, when I tried them as a short term tourist, people were surprised how well they could understand me for the short time I’d been learning. These were tonal languages very few tourists tended to learn, so local expectations were low and just being comprehensible was a win.

Sounds like bad news for new entrepreneurs building a business on the side or for anyone who wants economic dynamism.

You shouldn't need to hire a high-priced professional just to sell a thing on the internet. That kind of friction just makes everyone poorer.

It's not quite an apples to apples comparison, no pun intended. I guess we'll see how it sells.

Keep in mind the minimum configuration that has 512GB of unified RAM is $9,499.

I suspect a lot of people who might otherwise go to F# are using ReScript for React.

A mac mini is pretty beefy for hosting a blog!

I’ve had a number of database-driven sites hosted on $5/month VPS that have been on the front page here with minimal cpu or memory load.

Seconded. I’m very excited for the day when/if their dev platform is opened up and it’s possible to access pass-through vision.

There’s a whole class of educational apps that could open up for people learning in the physical world. Whether it’s building physical things, sports or reading books or notes written in non-latin scripts... the impact will be enormous!

Microsoft already mastered this decades ago with a dozen different license tiers for Windows with unintuitive feature sets.

And it’s only £17 in the UK or €21 in the EU.

You can't know that.

I had memories as a toddler that I confirmed after meeting my mother for the first time in decades a couple of years ago. Specific things about where I lived, events that had happened and how someone else in our family had died. I had another conversation with an aunt that confirmed other things, including a word from another language that I knew from when I was little but didn't realize wasn't a made up word.

Memory is fallible and we have an imperfect understanding of it, but I know for a fact from personal experience that people can remember events from very early in life if the emotional impact is deep enough.

For a canvas-based app, which to be fair none of my professional work has been, you’d need to write some JS or hooks to interface with external JS libraries.

Can you give me an example of when you would need a LiveView app to spawn a thread or set up an observer via JS?

Spawning a thread sounds particularly odd given that JS isn’t running on the server. Are you speaking of web workers? Or do you mean doing something from JS code to send a message to the Phoenix server to get it to spawn a process (i.e., a green thread) on the server?

> ”Good luck writing highly interactive apps backend-only! (Like Figma or Google Docs). Even with frameworks like Phoenix and runtimes like WebAssembly, you still need a lot of Javascript to get there.”

You really don’t need to write JS directly to make a UI like Google Docs with Phoenix LiveView. You can write the whole thing in Elixir. Thanks LiveView.JS, there hasn’t been a need to write custom JS or hooks to avoid a round trip to the server for UI-only interactions for quite a while, either.

Agreed. It's just decreasing the friction, which increases the velocity.

I'm a fan of some of Twitter's newer developments like community notes, private groups, and spaces.

Quote posts are a feature I'd think long and hard about copying, though. At least in my subjective experience, they made the platform a nastier than it had been before.

Tim Ferris and Chris Sacca have both been fantastically successful as investors, but I wouldn't recommend going to them for insights about software or especially AI.

I don't think it's a Taiwanese developer. If so, he got a lot of stroke orders wrong for traditional characters as per the MOE standards.

Anytime I need to look up a character or word, I go to https://www.moedict.tw/ first. Pleco is still great for having so many add-ons (including dictionaries) and, from what I've heard, some decent graded readers.

I had yet another experience. Before Chrome existed, I learned thousands of words by hearing them before I could read them.

A lot of the pain I see in foreigners learning Chinese is that they try to tackle the written language too early. Actually, I think that's sub-optimal in any language, but it's even more expensive in a language like Chinese or Thai where word segmentation isn't a part of the writing system. I totally get it since characters are cool and curiosity about them draws many learners to the language, but it's a lot easier to take on one challenge at a time!

And yet, as a kid, I was able to go to Sakura Square in Denver on weekends and see several blocks where everything was Japanese, including a mini mall, a grocery store, book stores, music stores, etc. It's been there for generations and even has plaques written back when Japanese used katakana instead of hiragana to conjugate verbs. Another area in the suburbs was mostly Cantonese for a few blocks. Somewhere around 10-15% of my classmates spoke Spanish at home. And Denver is over a thousand miles from either border and only had a population of one and a half million at the time!

America is a huge country, but don't underestimate its cultural or linguistic diversity. It's had large immigrant populations from far flung places around the world for a very long time, whereas most of Europe has only become like this in the past generation or two.

In any case, your comment is missing the point. However little you believe Americans understand about the world, we get more media, cultural influence and business influence from places outside of Europe. Half the cartoons I grew up watching were from Japan, my family had Japanese cars and video games, popular business books talked about Japan and a lot of people saw it as almost a futuristic place. Hong Kong exported quite a bit of its culture through movies in the 90s and early 2000, and in recent years, Korea has become a major cultural force as well, while China has become the the key market to understand in terms of business opportunities.

How would that work? Tesla is a different company with different ownership. It would be a pretty gross violation of those owners’ property rights to seize their assets simply because of a vendetta against the CEO for actions of a completely separate company he runs.

In the case of SpaceX, it would be even less feasible in that it’s a major DoD provider and there are defense treaties between the US and EU member states.

Sure, plenty of Americans will downvote your bad ideas on HN, but you won’t generally find them discussing how bad they think xyz thing in Europe on a weekly basis. If they mention Europe at all, it will probably be in the context of a vacation someone took or is planning.

The thing is most Americans just don’t think much about Europe at all. Outside of the UK, I saw far more films from Hong Kong or Japan in normal movie theaters while growing up than all of Europe combined. It might be different for someone on the east coast but for most Americans, the EU just doesn’t have much impact culturally or in business either.

Yes. Due to higher prices, iPhones are more popular in richer countries.

And yet, the brute with the $5 wrench still hasn't gotten Satoshi's bitcoins.

There's a lot to be said for pseudonyminity.

That’s silly. When I was growing up, we always had a garage and my family was ~25% under the median income. Hundreds of millions of Americans have a garage at home and it’s not the richest 2/3 of the country. It’s basically the people outside the largest cities.

There are probably about an equal number of people living in a home with a garage in China too, though it’s wealthier suburban areas as opposed to lower and middle class people.

They’re common in Japan, too, outside of the densest few cities. And of course there are plenty of other countries where garages are common, like Canada and Australia.

Some repetition is good and children in fact often repeatedly read their favorite book or watch their favorite show. However, a key thing to keep in mind with Paul Nation's study is that "repetitions" of a word represented encountering it in different contexts.

This is important for three reasons. First is polysemy, which he mentioned. This is words with multiple meanings like fair (reasonable/just / light or unblemished / a type of public event with entertainment and vendors).

The second and in my opinion even larger issue is gaining and understanding of how the words are used and their scope. E.g., there's no word in Chinese that quite matches "nose" in English. The closest is 鼻子, but that can refer to an elephant trunk or a pig's snout, which "nose" can't. In some languages, there's a word that can be used for humans and pigs, but not elephants. In others, the same word also encompasses bird's beaks. The only way you'll learn this is from encountering the word in a lot of different contexts, not from drilling it repeatedly in the same context. Furthermore, there are a lot of words that tend to be used with or near each other but near others (collocations). In English, it's normal to say you're doing "pretty good" or "absolutely fantastic", but saying you're doing "absolutely good" would be very strange.

Finally, there are a lot of shared cultural stories each language community has. In English, these would be from Christianity, from classical Greco-Roman figures like Aesop, from German storytellers like the Brothers Grimm, other European storytellers like Hans Christian Anderson, etc. In Chinese (or Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese or other nearby countries) people are going to have a lot of shared stories from ancient China—philosophers from the Spring and Autumn era, historical stories and dramatizations of the interesting times in history such as the Three Kingdoms era, and many, many folk tales. If you don't understand at least the core of the cultural cannon, you'll regularly be confused by things in TV shows like soap operas or variety shows, even if you understand every word in transcript. Reading fiction will be even harder.

The more distant the language is from the one you speak natively, the more the second and especially third points will impact you unless you take in an enormous amount of input.

Both share of global investments denominated in dollars and the US share of world GDP have increased in the past 25 years.

A vibrant tech ecosystem is a large part of the reason for both.

Have you ever gotten to a C1 level in a language you learned as an adult that isn't close to your native language? If so, what kind of effort did it take you?

Or if you only learned closely related languages, what aspect of it was "really successful"? Accent? Writing ability? Something else?

I agree with you for language learners.

I built and ran the academic side of a language school for four years, worked on two language learning startups and also learned two languages in different language families from my native language (and from each other) to a pretty fluent level.

In all those years I’ve never met a single really successful learner who made SRS a major part of their studies, though some used it as a small supplementary practice.

The thing is that words aren’t usually discrete pieces of information in the way that names of capitals or things a med student has to memorize often are (unless your goal is just to play scrabble with them, in which case SRS is great). Meanings don’t map one to one across languages, collocations are important , etc, etc. Putting sentence cards into Anki is better than isolation words with translations but even then, you won’t get as much cultural information or even raw quantity of input as you would from extensive reading and this is a topic L2 Acquisition researchers have covered in depth.

I think part of the problem is that SRS sounds really compelling to engineers and it’s generally easy to build into an app, so that’s been the focus of most language learning apps for the past 20 years.

There are some better ones that exist mostly to help learners handle native text and audio, though. LingQ, Language Reactor and language-specific apps that do similar things are great.