Hacker News Reader

ashleneyon When did dogs become our best friends?

This kind of thinking very much reminds me of those parents who view the children they chose to have as nefarious evil leeches.

ashleneyon The Eval Game

pretty sure the point is that it's supposed to be in one line

ashleneyon The Eval Game

Seems very fun but the instructions are really unclear.

There's no indication of the class having to be defined in the scope (though it makes sense). The password isn't really clear on being in the filesystem (at first I assumed it's in the actual github repository for the game) and "no __builtins__" sounds more like you can't use the literal string "__builtins__".

I feel like it would've been so much more fun if you could see how the rules are checked instead of having to figure it out.

ashleneyon Are any words the same in all languages?

Quickly glossing over index diachronica, there's no common sound change of p<->d, but p<-b->m with the medial b has instances. (sorry for the syntax, no idea how to express this)

ashleneyon Are any words the same in all languages?

Worth noting they evolved from papa and titi.

ashleneyon Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter (2019)

I always get excited when there's a linguistics post on hackernews only to get disappointed by yet another analysis of the vowels of English dialects.

ashleneyon New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

It is very hard to predict how fast a language will evolve even for linguists.

I'd like to recommend a video https://youtu.be/evJ_E7k1pvY

ashleneyon New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

Languages tend to lose grammatical features (english gender) but also gain them (english habitual tense). A common way you can see languages get complex is due to sound changes making grammar irregular (english past participles).

ashleneyon New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

Languages that lose cases will replace them with adpositions which can then again develop into cases. I unfortunately can't think of any PIE languages but Hungarian has 18 cases while proto-uralic only had 6.

PIE languages are currently in the process of losing cases and we can statistically expect some of them to start gaining cases again sometime in the next few millennias.

ashleneyon New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

What is your proposed theory? It is understandable to be sceptical considering the scandal that was proto-altaic, however there is evidence in form of successful reconstructions of PIE languages.

ashleneyon Nailing jelly to a wall: is it possible? (2007)

Love the human verification with figlet.