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stevula

Re:The Indo-European Family Tree on Friday August 14, 2026 @04:07AM (#49295885)
Possibly because there’s such scant linguistic evidence for the (undoubtedly many) pre-PIE languages in Europe? It’s hard to study something that didn’t leave behind much writing, if any. Basque being a notable exception to that, of course.

With that said, most historical linguists would probably kill for more data on extinct pre-PIE languages.

Re:The Indo-European Family Tree on Friday August 14, 2026 @03:56AM (#49295834)
Greek has several things in favor of it being conservative: 1. It’s been a written language for longer than most other languages 2. It’s been the language of empires 3. It’s been a liturgical language With that said, I find Modern Greek speakers tend to overstate the similarities between Modern and Ancient Greek. The spelling is conservative but pronunciation is very different and conjugation/declension patterns have been significantly simplified.

Still there’s a lot more intelligibility than between English and Old English for example, which is a good example of how much can change in about 1000 years. Similar with French or Romanian and Latin.

Re:The Indo-European Family Tree on Friday August 14, 2026 @03:47AM (#49295770)
People noticed. They just didn’t come up with a theory of a common ancestor language. Or, in some cases, they assumed other European languages were originally heavily debased forms of Latin/Greek.
Re:Our response to the US ban on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on Saturday June 13, 2026 @01:47AM (#48513740)
An LLM can absolutely center a div and then use a browser MCP or playwright to visually validate that it was centered.
I think that is how the smarter agents do things? Just like Claude/ChatGPT sometimes does a web search they can do other tool calls instead of just making a statistical guess. Of course it doesn’t always make the bright choice between those options though…
Whereas modern English only distinguishes grammatical number by singular/plural (and Old English had dual), some languages even have trial (three).

Russian distinguishes paucal (few) from plural (many). It’s not super common but there are some other languages that do it.

I thought courts martial and secretaries general (and Knights Templar/Hospitaller, et al) were Anglo-Norman/French borrowings. Do you have any examples of native English phrases following that pattern?
Most tools do, yes.
Re:How Important Was the Battle of Hastings? on Sunday March 08, 2026 @10:04PM (#47304016)
Probably “more”
There are plenty of unvaccinated people this side of the border and it seems to be a growing trend. If the government is going to intern people in close quarters then they should probably make sure to vaccinate them. I would not be optimistic about the level of medical care sick patients will have access to in this scenario.
If they paid for themselves then the DoT wouldn’t have a multibillion dollar highway budget, and that’s not even including all the state funding.
Re:Date is out, Temporal is in on Monday January 12, 2026 @02:21PM (#46592940)
To preserve backwards compatibility and not require all those old sites to update, the legacy behavior would have to be the default, with opt-in for the new behavior.
I seem to recall a scene from the book where a man is smoking a cigar in an office and prints out his computer output rather than reading from a screen. It was delightfully retrofuturist (or whatever the opposite of anachronistic is).
Re:Microplastics: No longer a "maybe" on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @01:38AM (#45897019)
Why stop there? It’s in meat, water, mother’s milk, and newborns are even born with microplastics already in them.
Re:Ask HN: How to deal with long vibe-coded PRs? on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @04:45PM (#45816237)
The problem is other people/teams making PRs to your code that you then have to maintain or fix later. It’s in your interest not to half-ass the review, creating an asymmetric amount of work for you vs them.
Re:Just Use a Button on Friday October 31, 2025 @02:39PM (#45775243)
What is the use case? It’s hard for me to think of a reason you’d want to wrap a link in a button. If you want to navigate, use an anchor. If you want to trigger JS logic, use a button with onclick handler. If you want to navigate while doing some side effect like an API call, use an anchor with onclick handler (and don’t prevent default).
Hey, leave us humanities majors out of it. Most of us have studied critical thinking skills and ethics, which could have easily been used to avoid the various geopolitical messes we’re in right now.
Re:Rails on SQLite: new ways to cause outages on Friday September 12, 2025 @01:52AM (#45219010)
The Stack Exchange link is incorrect about -ite being etymologically derived from lithos, as one of the commenters there noted. Maybe a misunderstanding of this wiktionary note or similar:

> But by the Hellenistic period, both the masculine -ίτης (-ítēs) and the feminine -ῖτις (-îtis) became very productive in forming technical terms for products, diseases, minerals and gems (adjectives with elliptic λίθος (líthos, “stone”)), ethnic designations and Biblical tribal names.

The meaning of that is not that -ite is etymologically derived from lithos. It’s trying to say that mineral names like “hematite” (αἱματίτης - literally “blood-red”) are originally adjectives agreeing with an implied noun lithos.

“Developed countries have reduced population growth” is a far cry from “looming human extinction”.
Originally there was no minuscule/majuscule (uppercase/lowercase) distinction in Greek writing (or Latin for that matter). They did have handwritten forms designed to be written faster, which is what the ω is in this case. Of course, those handwritten forms evolved often evolved into the forms we think of as lowercase forms today.
This is, I think, a learned distinction and not universally observed. I only learned this distinction in university.
Re:23andMe bankruptcy: With America's DNA put on sale on Monday March 31, 2025 @03:55PM (#43539140)
Of course, if your relatives uploaded their data then a lot of info about your DNA is exposed regardless of whether you uploaded yours personally.
Re:Apple iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max on Monday September 09, 2024 @04:33PM (#41493398)
Homeless are not common at any of these places. They’re mostly downtown or close to public transit and tourist spots (Downtown, Castro, Mission). They aren’t known for climbing big hills (Coit Tower) or frequenting museums. I suspect there are some in GGP but it’s such a big place I don’t remember encountering many there (and also probably not the most attractive place for them to sleep at night).
Re:‘Failure of Roman engineering on industrial scale’ on Thursday August 22, 2024 @02:17PM (#41322984)
Technically the British Iron and Bronze Ages are prehistoric since British recorded history begins with the Roman conquest in 43 AC.
Re:Why Italy Fell Out of Love with Cilantro on Monday July 08, 2024 @03:20PM (#40908541)
Supposedly it was very finicky and could only be grown in a small region of eastern Libya.
This reminds me of a story of my friend who had two cats who were brother and sister.

One time when my friend went on a trip and left his roommate in charge of catsitting, the male cat was tragically killed by a car. The roommate found the body and, not wanting to leave it on the street, put it in a duffel bag and brought it home.

Of course the sister cat smelled the bag and knew exactly what was in there. She came to her own conclusions and carried a grudge against the roommate for years (hissing, glaring, etc) until they finally moved out. It was especially peculiar because she is one of the most friendly, cuddly cats with everyone else.

Re:Why Triplebyte Failed on Monday June 10, 2024 @03:10PM (#40637300)
This might be a regional thing, but I have done probably around 100 technical interviews in my career (both enterprise and startups) mostly in the Bay Area and the vast majority of these involved algorithm questions that had no relation with the job function. Most were around the difficulty of "find the largest palindrome in a string" or "reverse a singly linked list". On the harder end were things like "serialize and deserialize a tree".
It isn’t exactly intuitive that when the sun’s light appears to be blocked it is nevertheless dangerous to stare at the eclipse because of invisible UV rays. This is something you specifically have to learn and is only relevant for a very rare event. Seems kind of harsh to consider people stupid for not knowing that. Then there are also ineffective counterfeit eclipse glasses that people unknowingly bought…
Re:ESLint v9.0 on Monday April 08, 2024 @08:53PM (#39975289)
> So in short, they're just making every single project out there that relies on ESLint go and either add a flag or rename one file

Not every project. Many people switched to the .js format a long time ago since it’s more powerful. I understand the inconvenience though, especially since I don’t remember them deprecating the rc format when they introduced the js one.

Even aside from business incentives, there are plenty of people in the workplace who act cruelly due to prejudices, perceived threat, spite/vengeance, a need for control, perceived threat, general emotional unhealthiness, or just plain old personality disorders. Some end up as managers.

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