- It freezes. all. the. time. For an app that I use 10+ times per day that's just not acceptable.
- When I update a shared recipe on my phone, it doesn't update for my wife. The only way to solve this is log out of the app and log back in. When you do this, you realize that not all your settings are saved, so you need to go back and fix those.
- They seem to use some aggressive caching in their UI: For instance, I update the amount of food, swipe back, and still see the old value.
- Can't do anything without an internet connection, not even look at how many calories you have left.
- Newest bug: Shared recipes don't open anymore. Just switches to the recipe screen. When I reported this to them, I got an AI answer on how to create recipes.
There are other funny things: For a few weeks now, you can collect "diamonds" when you track foods. I now have hundreds of these, but can't do anything with them.
The concept is a bit confusingly named, but that doesn't make it "bogus".
(Period) life expectancy at birth summarizes the current health status of a population, nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't make a predictions about what happens in 2078.
Yes, the target does not need to follow a normal distribution, but the target conditional on the features (which is what the original authors wrote) follows a normal distribution if you make the assumption that the errors are normally distributed. The two statements are equivalent for the standard linear regression model.
Almost - logistic regression assumes that the function is linear in the log odds, i.e. log(p/(1-p)) = Xb + e. The problem is that you can't compute the log-odds, because you don't know p.
Makes you wonder though how despite all these collective spending, Russia with less than 10% of this budget remains a huge threat and NATO should further increase its budget to account for this. Seems more like we waste our money instead of spending wisely, doesn't it?
Maybe someone should disrupt the war industry.
I think the two main considerations are the large number of countries that make up NATO allow it to seem very effective on paper, but in reality it'd be very difficult to coordinate the contributions of every country, especially considering the language and cultural barriers among members. It'd probably be incredibly inneffecient to try and lead the NATO members as a unified force. Another consideration is that even though NATO could easily win a war with Russia, member states probably want to present such an overwhelming military force that a war with Russia never breaks out in the first place.
I'm not advocating a wholesale increase in defense budget. There definitely is corruption and waste in there.
The point is that NATO members agreed in 2006 to spending 2% of their GDP equally and then didn't meet it. They agreed again in 2014 and the ball still hasn't budged.
Pledges are pledges. Whether it's a pledge to cut carbon and stop global warming or a pledge to chip in for the collective defense of everyone. Imagine if everyone decided to cut carbon and then it turned out to be all just hot air. If you don't honor your pledges it will hurt the any sort of future international effort.
It's cheaper to cause mischief than to maintain dominance. If we wanted to destabilize Chechnya, for example, we could do so for an infinitesimal fraction of the current US military budget.
it's a bit complicated, because the US is also increasing the threat that those countries are under. With a military presence in 100 around the globe, the biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons, the diplomacy of a punk band, and operations to de-stabilize multiple countries, there is a lot that get reflected on the allies.
why is it necessary, exactly? and who isn't putting in their fair share, in your estimation? and what threats might be so great as to justify high expenditure anyway?
I wasn't sure exactly but I know VDH is into this sort of thing so I searched "Victor Davis Hanson Nato Contribution" and snagged this result
"And when Berlin decides it will not pony up the promised 2 percent of GDP for its NATO contribution, other laggard countries follow its example. Only six of the 29 NATO members (other than the U.S.) so far have met their promised assessments."
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/nato-biggest-challeng...
I think an overlooked aspect of the German-English comparison is the system of tenses. In German, you can get by with basically just two tenses: the present and the perfect. The past tense can almost always be replaced by the perfect when speaking. When you want to express something that lies in the future, you can just use the present and it will in most cases be clear from context.
Compare that to English, where the mastery of the tenses (i.e. when to use which tense) is essential. Distinguishing the use of the simple forms from the progressive forms can be tough for non-native speakers. And then there are all the different past tenses: simple past, present perfect, past progressive... in many cases it sounds really strange when these get mixed up. Think of something like: I have gone to the store last night. Or: He never was in New York. (When the speaker means that he has never been.)
I agree. I'd add that a lot of people overlook the complexity of English idioms and vocabulary. It is easy to pick up the basics of English, it is much more difficult to get to proficient level for writing a book for example.
Imho as a native German I have the impression that with German it's the other way around. In the beginning it's hard. But once people attain a basic level there is not much to learn anymore.
Absolutely. When I was at school the only grammar I learnt was in Latin, French or German - wasn't taught in English. But as native speaker you read or listen and absorb the "rules".
Had a French girl friend for a time who was studying English and linguistics at Agrégation level (masters) - she would sometimes ask me was it better to say X or Y in English. I would usually prefer one because "it sounded right" but often couldn't come up with a reason as to why. Then she might tell me the rule according to her professor - and I almost always found them very convincing!
> I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information.
Such a weird perspective on language and on the agency of societies. There are tons of "useless" things in any language. For instance, why not get rid of all the tenses in English? Do we really need the past progressive?
To make English spelling more "logical" (so people need to remember less useless information!), we should again look to Mark Twain:
I recently started learning Khmer (Cambodian). It's an awesome language. No tenses (all assumed from context... if something happened in the past, you say it happened "already", and there's a single modifier to all verbs to indicate they will happen). No genders, at all (there's no "he/she/they" problem). The numbering system is simple adn consistent, and it's applied to months and hours ("one month" is a measure of duration, "month one" is January). I reminds me of reading good code; simple, elegant, with no unnecessary cruft.
It's given me a new perspective on (as you say) all the useless crap we have in English.
Oh, and I started learning German, too. TFA made me laugh.
I learned Thai, which shares Khmer's refreshing simplicity, like not having tenses.
However, it has "classifiers", which are used when counting things. In English, you might say "Three children", in Thai you would say "Children three persons", where "person" happens to be the correct classifier for children. Makes sense in that case, but in general it's weird (and somewhat comedic): for instance airplanes and bamboo share the same classifier ("long hollow things").
There are about 80 classifiers, and part of learning the language is learning the correct classifier to go with each noun, much like learning genders in German. Same as with genders, if you get the classifier wrong, you'll still be understood, but considered uneducated (or badly in command of the language).
BTW, and programmers will love this: this situation means that when counting things of disparate types, you need to typecast!
Funny (to me, anyway) story: my wife was simultaneously telling off one of our sons, nicknamed "O", and one of our dogs, also nicknamed "O". Since they don't share the same classifier, she cast their classifier to the made-up-on-the-spot classifier "O" so it would both be factually and grammatically correct.
Yeah, it's weird, Thai and Khmer are very similar, and share some words, but also very different. Khmer isn't tonal, and has really simplified grammar.
They used to share an alphabet, too, but the Thai opted to simplify it (westernise it) while the Khmer opted to keep their original alphabet. Written Khmer is hard for us westerners to deal with because of this. They have lots of vowels and consonants that we don't have (I always struggle with the consonant between 'b' and 'p', because it doesn't seem like there should be any room for another consonant in there).
But English has a consonant between 'b' and 'p' ('pʰ' in IPA) as well. Just consider the difference between 'ban', 'span' and 'pan'. The 'p' in 'span' is not as forceful as the 'p' in 'pan', and they're actually different consonants.
To continue with my coding analogy... German is like Java (huge, sprawling, full of conceptsextendedwaypastthepointofsanity), English is like C++ (mashed together out of two different languages and made to work, mostly), Khmer is like Go (favouring simplicity over expressiveness).
It does rely a lot on context. If you don't share a context with your listener, it's easy to get confused. Given the cultural gap with the West, it can mean that you're fluent in Khmer, but still miss a lot of the meaning because you don't share the same cultural context. Essentially culture-wide in-jokes.
But then, I had to explain British rhyming slang to my German gf the other day, and she thought it was crazy. I guess there's nothing that unusual about culture-wide in-jokes.
It's the “agency of societies” that helped English lose its gendered nouns. One theory is that Old English society found them useless because there was overlap between endings, causing noun ending inflection to “collapse” into a single neutral form, which started in the North of England and progressed to the South.[1]
Societal changes are already influencing gendered nouns in Germany[2]. Some dialects of German (Niederdeutsch) also use de instead of der/die.
I'm a British national living in Austria. I've spoken with Austrian natives about the difficulty of learning German noun genders who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. The local dialect here slurs some noun endings so it's almost ambiguous, just as Old English once did.
There's no place for reinforcement of gender stereotypes via language (it is hard to find gender-neutral phrases in German - you are either a male programmer or a female one). Two languages that gender the same noun differently also have societies that use a different class of adjective (feminine vs masculine) for the word.[1]
To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society.
> "I've spoken with Austrian natives [...] who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. "
I can guarantee you, that your sample of Austrian natives is not representative of the majority of native speakers. Not even remotely. As a native speaker you will barely notice it, unless foreigners remind you of it.
> "To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society."
I can hardly imagine a force strong enough to change the way people speak to such a fundamental degree, as would be the removal of noun genders in German.
Advocating such force comes with a stench: It may have more todo with projecting power over the people you interact with and less with interacting itself. Which is why proponents of gender-neutral language in German often fail to not come across as snobbish. Which is why the only people in German speaking countries that speak gender-neutral are politicians or ideologues in academia.
Thanks for sharing - it's good to hear other opinions on this, and it's very likely the group of five or so people I was speaking to are not representative.
Thanks for taking my response the way you did and not as an insult (honestly, you're a rare exception these days on HN for not just downvote and leave as soon as the topic touches politics)!
>I can guarantee you, that your sample of Austrian natives is not representative of the majority of native speakers. Not even remotely.
Agreed. I find it hard to imagine how something can possibly sound old fashioned when there is no more modern alternative.
My German may not be perfect, but I have never heard anyone fudge definite articles in a way that makes them indistinguishable from each other (or drop them altogether).
> I find it hard to imagine how something can possibly sound old fashioned when there is no more modern alternative.
Exactly. Who'd be insulted by the moon being male in German and the sun being female? The sun, men or the moon?
Languages represent a form of continuous application of voluntary cooperation. Which is why almost no native speaker will think of his words he uses as an insult (either to a gender or that gendered word) but as a means to deliver information.
Using gender-neutral German in every day interactions will automatically make you come across affected. It is a linguistic Clinton-Thumb.
"Whenever the subject comes up, someone is sure to bring up […] Shaw's ghoti-- a word which illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee."
In English, the writing has become detached from the writing to the point where it is not possible to write a word upon hearing it the first time or to pronounce it upon reading it.
Fixed how? By revising the orthography to accurately reflect pronunciation? (If so, whose?) Some English words have major variations in pronunciation in different regions (of the world, or indeed just of England). Should the revised spellings differ between regions?
- It freezes. all. the. time. For an app that I use 10+ times per day that's just not acceptable.
- When I update a shared recipe on my phone, it doesn't update for my wife. The only way to solve this is log out of the app and log back in. When you do this, you realize that not all your settings are saved, so you need to go back and fix those.
- They seem to use some aggressive caching in their UI: For instance, I update the amount of food, swipe back, and still see the old value.
- Can't do anything without an internet connection, not even look at how many calories you have left.
- Newest bug: Shared recipes don't open anymore. Just switches to the recipe screen. When I reported this to them, I got an AI answer on how to create recipes.
There are other funny things: For a few weeks now, you can collect "diamonds" when you track foods. I now have hundreds of these, but can't do anything with them.