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Epenthesis

361 karma · joined February 18, 2011

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Epenthesis··on Love seems like a high priority
I'm certainly an outlier, but it seems intuitively likely that I'm experiencing a subset of what other people experience, rather than a disjoint. Ie, other people feel the socio-emotional component as well as the lust component, with me lacking the latter.

However, it might be difficult for most people to orthogonalize these two components, since for them they occur simultaneously. That's the relevance of my asexuality to my comment: I suspect it allows me to experience the socio-emotional component without also experiencing the lust component, and thereby more easily see them as different.

If it's true that there's both a lust and socio-emotional component, it still seems inaccurate (or at least, idiosyncratic) to refer to the combination of the two as "lust".

Epenthesis··on Love seems like a high priority
I'm not sure that's true.

I have little to no sex drive (am "asexual" as the kids say), but I've had intense crushes/obsessive feelings about individuals with no associated desire to have sex with the targets thereof.

I imagine that for people with normal sex drives, both components play a role in initial relationship formation; ie, there's an emotional component in addition to "lust" as conventionally defined.

You could quibble that these (relatively short lived) intense emotions are "lust", as opposed to the "love" of a longer relationship, but that seems to be playing a semantic game that doesn't really concord with how we generally use those words.

Epenthesis··on Why does anyone use Angular in production?
It's interesting how different "bubbles" of software development can be.

For me, as an engineer whose worked across FAANG and YC startups in San Francisco, Angular has had absolutely zero mindshare for at least the past 6-7 years. Every company I know uses React and every engineer I know knows React. So it's interesting and somewhat alien to hear it being treated as the default option.

Epenthesis··on Organ transplant patients may not get dementia
That's what the first image in the article is purporting to show (~33% of people in the general population over 85 have dementia)
Epenthesis··on Conspiracy theories bypass people’s rationality
While it's true that the article indicates FB views comments as positive signals, that's definitely not the primary focus of it, which is about likes vs "higher intentionality likes + other emotions".
Epenthesis··on Conspiracy theories bypass people’s rationality
It's weird to me that that article's headline emphasizes "angry emojis" have 5x higher score than "likes (and repeats it in the first paragraph) and then only lower down explains it's in fact that any emotion emoji (including "love", "care" and "haha") produce a 5x higher score than a simple like.

And it doesn't even explicitly state it, instead saying first "A person was able to react with emojis that correlated to “angry,” “sad,” “haha,” “love” and “wow.”" and then "If a person reacted with an emoji instead of the “like” button, the Facebook algorithm would see the post as five times more valuable and push similar content.", requiring the user to draw an inference that all emojis were treated equally, despite the priming that it only refers to "angry" earlier in the article.

This feels, ironically, like an intentionally inflammatory framing.

Epenthesis··on Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin
Put in 3 M$/yr and you'll get 50.7%.

Not a lot of people hitting that regularly, but I imagine it can sting a little if you've got a more proletarian salary normally and are hitting that region just once because of say, a start up liquidity windfall

Epenthesis··on The Coronavirus Is Here Forever
Roughly 0.6% of NYC has died from COVID, so it's impossible for its IFR to be 0.2%
Epenthesis··on Just how far can you travel by bus from London in 24 hours?
Is Derby pronounced with the first syllable rhyming with "car" or "her" (/dɑ:bi/ or /dɜ:bi/)?
Epenthesis··on Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011)
I imagine this depends on what circles you run in. I feel like in silicon valley, the modal image is of a FAANG employee making 400 k$/yr.
Epenthesis··on Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011)
It is a protected title in Canada, requiring a license, but not in the United States.

In the US, the title "Professional Engineer" is roughly equivalent and similarly requires a license.

Epenthesis··on Are dynamic languages going to replace static languages? (2003)
He was right in a sense, the 00s and 10s were the era of the dynamic languages. In momentum if never quite in absolute usage.

But my sense is that we're gradually swinging back around to static typing via gradual typing + mainstreaming of ML style features like generics, unions, records that are more expressive than the C/Java model.

Epenthesis··on How to boost your popularity on OkCupid using CSRF and a JSON type confusion
My impression as a 30 year old het guy in SF is that the big 3 are Tinder/Bumble/Hinge, roughly sorted in order of "casual" to "serious relationship".

According to friends, OkCupid seems to be baaarely limping along in queer/poly circles.

Epenthesis··on Some career advice (2019)
Eh, luck + effort beats luck, but luck by itself pretty often beats effort.

I'm a good deal wealthier than some much harder working + smarter friends of mine because I lucked into joining some (moderately) successful startups.

Epenthesis··on Google Translate pronounces 'rooster' in Spanish
Seems to use the same uh, emphatic pronunciation so long as "gallo" is at the end of the translation sentence. Any text with something after "gallo" sounds more normal.
Epenthesis··on Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
I believe it's true for most of the sprachbund, including my native language Kannada (which is a Dravidian language very much unrelated to Hindi)
Epenthesis··on Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
Oh wow, my mistake!

I personally have the merger, and so I misunderstood which direction the split went.

Epenthesis··on Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
The goal of pinyin was not to make Mandarin words pronounceable to English speakers, but to be a consistent means of representing the sounds of Mandarin to Mandarin speakers.
Epenthesis··on Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
Thanks for the suggestion. It was difficult for me to think of an example without resorting to IPA, since my own American accent is fully cot/caught + father/bother merged.
Epenthesis··on Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
* Spanish: "hacer"

* French: "pas"

* Italian: "casa"

* Mandarin (written using pinyin): "bàng"

* German: "katze"

* Japanes (written in romaji): "arigato"

* Bahasa Indonesia: "bahasa"

Note that the sounds in these various languages are not exactly the same, but the "au" in "caught" is the closest sound in the native phonological inventory of a General American speaker (given said speaker pronounces "caught" and "cot" differently).

Epenthesis··on Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
A good addition might be to point out good first guesses for the vowels in non-English names (Examples used assume a General American accent):

* "A" as in "ah" (like "ah, I see")

* "E" as in "e" in "pet", or the "ai" in "pain"

* "I" as in the "i" in "pit" or the "ea" in "peat"

* "O" as in the "o" in "cot" or the "o" in "cone"

* "U" as in the "u" in "put" or the "oo" in "doom"

(Americans might notice that this approximately reflects the sounds those letters represent in Spanish)

Exception/refinement: If you know the name is from an Indian language, read "a" as the "u" in "putt"

(Edit: Improved the example given for "a")

Epenthesis··on Alcohol-free beer is fizzing
The article alleges that sodastreams produce weaker fizz than commercial carbonated water.

I personally haven't found that to be the case, but it seems like there's dozens of sodastream models and maybe I happened on a good one.

Epenthesis··on Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
My Hindu American family "celebrates" Christmas (tree/lights/presents/big meal)
Epenthesis··on “Great resignation” wave coming for companies
Of course it's unusual. If you're in SF and work in first tier startups/FAANG, your social circle is going to be mostly people in similar situations. It's a very unusually high earning and unusually rapidly high earning career path.

I would be shocked if in that specific cohort the median net worth at 30 was less than 500 k$. And if less than 1/10 were millionaires at 30.

Epenthesis··on Ask HN: What to do as a software engineer that cares more about what to build?
The easiest way to do this is to go to a small company where everyone wears multiple hats. 50 people is probably the upper limit.
Epenthesis··on America has a drinking problem
I personally like it a lot. It's my go-to at a bar when I don't feel like drinking

That said I also like plain seltzer and bitter flavors generally (dark chocolate, black coffee, IPAs), so YMMV.

Epenthesis··on Initial Stress-Derived Noun
American English speaker here, born and raised in Dallas, Tx. The stress goes on the second syllable for the verb for me ("I absent myself").
Epenthesis··on Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
As someone who's never used Discord, what's it do better than Slack? Superficially other than aesthetics/integrations, they seem basically identical
Epenthesis··on A movement that cannot be criticized cannot achieve positive goals
The case was filed more than 2 years ago, but I can't find any follow ups.

Does anyone know if there have been more recent developments? t the very least, has UVa issued a response of any sort?

Epenthesis··on Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged
I think the PagerDuty trio (Alex Solomon, Baskar Puvanathasan, Andrew Miklas) were 26-27 when they started it.
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