Hacker News Reader

llllllllllllon Everything You Need to Know About Cooking with Blood

In Cambodia coagulated pig and chicken blood are common, especially in soups and rice porridge/gruel.

I eat it daily. Pig blood has a firmer texture and a more neutral taste -- it's comparable to tofu in both regards. I strongly prefer it to chicken blood.

llllllllllllon Postgres full text search is good enough

It can be done quickly and accurately. Check out Peter Norvig's implementation of Viterbi algorithm for text segmentation.

Segmentation is typically used for scripts of languages like Thai and Khmer that don't feature word boundaries. I don't know the ins and outs of German word compounding, but it should work for breaking apart compounds too given a fully conjugated/declined word list as input.

llllllllllllon Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain

I wouldn't worry too much. I was very late learning to walk among other things and a doctor told my mom that I was "not exactly gonna be playing outfield for the Yankees". No Yankees yet but I ended up an all-state athlete, plus a two-sport college athlete. Most days I'm not totally stupid either.

llllllllllllon I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

Oh, I suppose that could be read either way but given the context you're probably right. Thanks!

llllllllllllon I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays

I'm sure you're aware of this, but the high demand from foreign language students is likely because US colleges often have a foreign language requirement. At my college it was four semesters, which is pretty common.

The effect is that you get a slew of totally unmotivated, clueless students who slow things down for everyone else. Spanish especially, since it's the "easy" foreign language for English speakers, was overloaded with students who had no desire to be there, at least until you made it to the 5th semester and beyond classes.

llllllllllllon What Should a 4 Year Old Know? (2010)

That sentence was fine.

The relevant concepts here are preposition stranding and pied-piping. These are not "mechanical transformations" in the sense you mean -- there are certain constraints on when a preposition can be pied-piped and when it can't.

llllllllllllon Dark net drug markets kept alive by great customer service

International shipping is much riskier, so people are usually advised to only order domestically. Certain countries are known for stringently checking international packages -- Australia is at the top of the list, though the US is tough too.

Good packaging consists of multiple layers of vacuum seal and some kind of visual barrier. Fake names, vacant addresses, no return address, trying to mask smells with coffee/foods, etc. are all generally thought to be criteria for 'flagging' a package for more careful review (drug dogs, x-ray machines).

llllllllllllon The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

I did that basically, but I saved up enough to move to and live comfortably in SE Asia for at least 3 or 4 years.

I spend less then $400 a month, so maybe this lifestyle is not for everyone, and it's certainly not feasible with a family, but the move has totally changed my life. Before, I felt stuck and directionless. Now though, after a little less than a year of total freedom, I've finished two big projects that I'm proud of. I have a much wider range of skills and I'd be confident walking into an interview at a tech company. I hope I never have to though!

I would absolutely recommend a similar path for anyone struggling with the full-time work grind.

llllllllllllon Why Do We Say “Big Red Barn,” But “Red Big Barn” Sounds Wrong?

Adverbs and adverbial phrases can move pretty freely in English. These all sound fine to me:

we are going to go to the airport by bus tomorrow

we are going to go by bus to the airport tomorrow

tomorrow, we are going to go to the airport by bus

we are going to go to the airport tomorrow by bus

we are going to go tomorrow to the airport by bus

The last sentence sounds a little more awkward, but if you're emphasizing when the event is occurring, it would be fine. Similarly, in the right context:

to the airport, we are going to go by bus tomorrow

by bus, we are going to go to the airport tomorrow

This phenomenon is called topicalization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topicalization

llllllllllllon Why Do We Say “Big Red Barn,” But “Red Big Barn” Sounds Wrong?

It's good practice to check your intuition on things like this against a searchable corpus. According to http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/, "most wicked" just barely edges out "wickedest" in terms of frequency, 22 to 20.

An example that strongly goes against the rule:

simpler (3185) / more simple (153)

simplest (2191) / most simple (87)

llllllllllllon Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild

In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.

And unfortunately social interaction is severely restricted and punished in K-12 education (in the US, which is the extent of my familiarity).

I volunteered at an elementary school for a year, and the kids there had little opportunity to socialize freely. Recess and lunch were limited to a combined 40 minutes, including transition periods to and from the classroom. Gym/physical education was a "unit", only attended one week out of every three, and much like I remembered from my own schooling, more than half of that time is spent explaining the rules to some highly-structured, barely-constitutes-exercise activity.

llllllllllllon By Using Language Rooted in Andes, Internet Show’s Hosts Hope to Save It

Studying another language, especially a radically disparate one, reveals nuances in your native tongue that are hard to come upon otherwise. If you accept even a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, then it's desirable to be aware of these nuances, as they may color your understanding of the world.

As far as the sciences are concerned, seeing alternate ways to encode information into language is extremely useful for people working in knowledge representation, ontology building, etc.

EDIT: I would also say that ""it gives us different ways of thinking" is all the justification needed for language preservation. That sounds pretty valuable to me.

llllllllllllon The Case Against Adverbs

I am not following much of what you're saying. I think you are deeply out of touch with what it is that linguists actually do -- this has nothing to do with the "needs of professional linguists".

If you don't standardize the language, then it evolves to become unpredictable, inconsistent and impossible for non-natives to learn without years of immersion.

Imagine if Ivy League universities used a complex idiosyncratic dialect

English and all other languages on the planet are idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and impossible to learn without years of immersion. You can try to prescribe away some surface irregularity ("the singular of data is datum!"), with maybe limited success among a small network of people, but that won't even make a dent in the overall complexity of a language.

llllllllllllon The Case Against Adverbs

My point is that if you think the rules we learn in school about language are the same rules that allow us to communicate and understand each other, you're failing to realize the massive complexity of language.

As for those "bi-" words, there seems to be more consistency with "biannually", than with "biweekly", or "bimonthly". Oxford only gives a single definition for "biannual":

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/biannua...

As a professional linguist, there are millions of questions about language I find more exciting than this :)

llllllllllllon The Case Against Adverbs

The rules you've consciously learned about language constitute a tiny fraction of the rules that govern our use of language. Many of them ("don't split infinitives!", "no prepositions at the end of a sentence!") fail to be descriptive.

Not that it matters, but "biweekly", "biannually", and "bimonthly" have always only had a single meaning for me. I've heard the debate about them, but I don't think I've ever actually seen them used to mean "once every two weeks/months/years".

llllllllllllon Goodbye to Sasha Shulgin, Godfather of Psychedelics

Typically ecstasy is MDMA pressed in pill form together with an amphetamine, although as you noted MDMA is often changed out for some other 'research chemical' that is cheaper to source, and sometimes very dangerous.

Yet another obvious reason to legalize all recreational drugs...

llllllllllllon Museum of Endangered Sounds

Try simultaneously playing "Typewriter", "Vinyl Turntable", "VCR Rewinding", "Windows95 Startup", "Pac-Man", and "Dot Matrix Printer".

It's beautiful. Reminds me of some of my favorite futurebeat music.

llllllllllllon A Buddhist monk confronts Japan’s suicide culture (2013)

She says people who commit suicide are losers can't apologize properly and work hard to make up for their mistake, or people who don't have the guts to weather through the hard times.

Charming attitude.

I doubt that many suicidal people have anything much to atone for, more likely they had some horrible things done to them or are just wired in a way that makes them deeply unhappy.

I don't see suicide as brave or cowardly. Depending on the situation, suicide can be in an individual's best interest -- a terminally ill patient in extreme pain who chooses to undergo a painless physician-assisted suicide would be a good example.

Even beyond terminal illness, I imagine that there are some people who have either been through such massive trauma, or are wired so badly, that suicide is a better option than living in misery. Granted, depressed individuals may not be capable of making decisions in their long-term self-interest, but I still wouldn't condemn every suicide as a "bad" decision, let alone "cowardly", "shameful", or any of the other pejoratives that come up around this topic.

llllllllllllon For Coconut Waters, a Street Fight for Shelf Space

Was it cold? Coconut juice tastes a lot better when it's ice cold IMO.

llllllllllllon For Coconut Waters, a Street Fight for Shelf Space

Do you know where the pink coconut water comes from?

I drink it most every day straight from the coconut or poured into a plastic bag, and it always looks clear as water.

llllllllllllon The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization

I took the NYT quote from Eduardo Romano to mean that after controlling for some of those confounding factors, there was no evidence of increased risk. I posted the NYT article because the abstract didn't mention much about marijuana specifically.

Specifically, drivers who test positive for marijuana or self-report using marijuana are more than twice as likely as other drivers to be involved in motor vehicle crashes.

Without having read the study, do you know if this statistic controls for age or anything else? If so, I stand corrected.

Thanks for your polite tone, it's not every day I get called a "fucking moron" before 7 a.m. :)

llllllllllllon The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization

Many retrospective studies of crash incidents have not found an increased risk with marijuana use. In my personal experience, it's effects are slight but drivers appear to compensate for their impairment by driving slower and being more careful in other ways, hence the findings of the recent survey study below (the lead researcher is quoted in the NY Times article).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24411797 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/health/driving-under-the-i...

The study’s lead author, Eduardo Romano, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, said that once he adjusted for demographics and the presence of alcohol, marijuana did not statistically increase the risk of a crash.

llllllllllllon The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization

I'll explain it, though I didn't downvote you.

Marijuana is illegal right now. That didn't stop that bad stuff from happening to you or your sister. Turn it into a public health issue and people like your sister-in-law will have more resources to get help.

I also have skepticism that marijuana caused someone to crash into your car. It has not been proven that weed has much if any effect on driving ability, especially for those experienced with the drug.

llllllllllllon Lisp in QBASIC

QBasic was my first experience with programming too.

llllllllllllon Show HN: Star Trek DS9 Episodes Worth Watching

I urge you to give it another shot too. After I few episodes I barely stuck with it, but by the end of the 3rd season I already preferred it to TNG/DS9 and just about any other sci-fi show. I think some of the characters are intentionally painted as one-dimensional early on, so that they can grow later (Londo and G'kar especially). There are many campy and lame parts too, but if you can get in the mindset of "enjoy the good, make fun of the bad" then it's highly enjoyable. I take the same mindset with most sci-fi.

The last 1.5 seasons of B5 were a letdown though. They had problems throughout with actors leaving abruptly, imminent cancellation, etc. that threw the plot arch off track a little. It could have been a lot better. The six or seven movies that were produced after the show's run... couldn't get through more than a few minutes of those.

llllllllllllon Why Europeans Don't Refrigerate Their Eggs

Cambodia here, nobody refrigerates eggs. I've hard boiled eggs that have been sitting out for a week or two -- I can't tell any difference.

llllllllllllon On being targeted by the NSA

Good thing you put 3 verbs in your sentence then ;)

llllllllllllon Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a “waking dream,” study finds

It's legal in the US (in all but three states I believe), because the spores do not contain psylocin/psylocybin. Once you start to grow them though, you could be charged with possession of a controlled substance.

Don't let that stop you though GP! It's a fun project and very satisfying to see your mushrooms finally sprouting up after a month or two of work. The risk of getting caught is low, and even if you somehow did, it would probably still be worth the penalty if they have a positive effect on your wife's headaches!

llllllllllllon Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a “waking dream,” study finds

Really depends.

Absolutely not for a first time, you're right. For me though, as I became more comfortable with the altered psychedelic state of mind, being around people became much easier. I wouldn't want to be trapped at a party, but I've stopped in at them for 30-40 minutes, had fun, and then left to move onto the next thing.

The important part for me is to have options, whether that's a ride back home, a nearby park, someone to take a walk, an Ipod and some headphones, etc.

llllllllllllon The Death of the Urdu Script

There are plenty of extant languages that don't have an alphabet either. They will be "lost" in every sense of the word.

The # of languages currently spoken is typically pegged somewhere between 3000-6000 and it's thought that we lose around one a week. Most have almost no documentation whatsoever, and even so a couple papers written in the 1970s aren't going to capture any potential unique aspects of a language let alone allow for reconstruction at a later point.

The analogy to code is way off.