I'm sorry if it comes off as rough, but keep your AI slop out of HN, please. Unless it's obvious that it's an agent, I'm probably not the only one who believes we need human contact on HN and not a statistical machine.
Written English makes plenty of sense, but it's really complicated because you need to know the etymology of the words to understand the logic. It's not just made-up; there's reasons for the "rules" (like why a word is pronounced the way it is, despite the spelling). But new learners don't have time to learn Greek and Latin roots and other such stuff, and under-educated native English speakers won't know much of this stuff either.
The fact is that even native speakers may mispronounce words if it's the first time they say it. For example, words that they encountered in written form only.
Or they write words incorrectly because it doesn't even closely match the pronunciation.
Yes, of course. This happens to me too: there's words I've never heard pronounced, so I don't actually know how to pronounce them (though you can usually solve this by using Google Translate's text-to-speech function).
I never said English was a superbly designed language, just that it does make sense when you look at the entire history and etymology. But yeah, it's a heavily-kludged mess, though it is pretty good at being accessible for new learners just because it's flexible and has a relatively simple grammar.
I'm sure it used to make sense when words when pronounced differently. Pronunciation changed but not the writing. Which means it doesn't make sense at our point in time.
I've been learning Greek at the same time my son has been learning to write. By my count, Greek has like 40 basic pronunciation rules; English has something like 500.
But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quite a grind.
I've learned Japanese and I understand your point completely. I can't say for Chinese but in Japanese there are some words (and even kanji) that you can read even if you see it for the first time–if you get better at reading kanji. Some words just make no sense but that's true even for native speakers–especially for place names.
They put more emphasis on the meaning of the word than reading itself. As opposed to French where you know how to read it instantly–but you don't necessarily understand it.
In English, I realized that there are words I mispronounced/misread my entire life before hearing a native person say it outloud. That's because I only ever encountered the word in its written form.
I was driven to the store, so I drove to the store. The store drove me there.
My passenger was driven to the store so he asked me to drive him to the store. So since the store was driving us to the store, I drove us to the store. We've become good friends since he was driven to the store. I'm glad the store drove us to the store.
It's like learning to read English after speaking fluently for a few years. You may only need the letter sounds and then you can guess the rest. Learning Chinese works that way. You learn some basic characters and then you can guess the rest. (Learning to write without a computer is definitely more of a challenge though.)
I've used what I consider the golden guide of salary negotiation for a software engineer that has been linked on HackerNews[1].
I've applied these guidelines in my own negotiations and it worked very well for me. I would've undersold myself by at least 15% if I went ahead and answered the salary question first. I declined politely to give a number first—even saying "it's not in my interest to answer that first, as you most likely understand".
Those guidelines work for all jobs that have high added value, I would say.
This guide has aged surprisingly well, but I’d add to this: the above response is about as good as you can get—it is firm, non-combative, and moves the conversation forward.
Don’t antagonize your recruiter. You want them to advocate _for you_ when a prospective employer is drafting an offer. Work with them to give them the ammo they need to make that happen.
Would you say I was antagonizing him with my response? Because he was an in-house recruiter (and not a headhunter) and I got along with him pretty well.
We wouldn't even need these services if instant payments were the norm. I guess we have to thank the Visa and MasterCard lobbies for this to happen at least 10 years too late.
Yeah that's pretty much the only reason people use Wero: transferring money faster than a snail between people. This was filled by the likes of Lydia before, but their shenanigans trying to become a bank pushed people to Wero (which is indeed a rename of something else I don't remember, but I used for less than a year).
The real deal is the card payment networks that your plastic thing can use at a merchant's point of sale. All the rest is moot as we already have SEPA for e.g. online payments (it does have its issue for sure, but it's something).
Is it backed with a large amount of money to hedge against the risk that the privacy or security could be flawed in some unexpected way? Are there people lobbying for its adoption at scale that can make cast-iron assurances about liability? Business people do not rely on technical proofs because they don't want to become cryptography.software engineering experts.
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