Thanks for that.

If you don't mind a follow up: how is it legal that some corporate restructuring applies differently do different investors, e.g. founders Vs angel? Like if I own 90% and you own 10% can I just go "I've decided that you own 0% now"?

How come Peter thiel wasnt diluted in Facebook?

He was.

But it’s Facebook.

Ah yes angel investing. Investing in businesses that don't make money. Ok.

This is extremely superficial.

I downloaded his letters to shareholders to an ebook reader, starting I believe in 1971 or so. Read all of it to the present, about 1500 pages (there's a lot of repetition)

What sticks out the most is what a clear thinker he is.

Would be possible for you to share it? I think would be a very interesting read. Thanks

Not them but you are replying on a thread talking about how it isn't safe in the longer future. That context was already built.

Quantum computers absolutely exist and are commercially available. They're just not very useful at the moment.

It get exponentially difficult to add more qubits so it's not a given that we will be able to build one large enough to be a real threat to modern cryptography.

“Quantum computers that break diffie hellman as easily as RSA”, where “easily” means “not at all”, do exist.

> I'd think it just takes a blessing from the dear leader to mock his rotundness in front of the evil capitalists, as long as it brings in the dough and the corporate secrets.

The Muslim fundamentalists to did 9/11 shaved their beards to look less suspicious.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this whole thread is rather silly because if this is a game of chess their next move is very obvious.

Why not just look at the area?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

There's something wrong with Duolingo in a way that I can't quite put my finger on it. I always feel like I'm learning to answer its questions and not learning the language. A key assumption of the app is that to answer its questions correctly you need to learn the language, but somehow I don't believe that's the case.

It's the same as Tinder. The business isn't about getting you dates, the business is selling you the fantasy of getting a date. Those two things are different, but for a new user, difficult to distinguish. Duolingo offers you the fantasy of speaking a new language.

Of course it is possible to learn a language using Duolingo, just like it is possible to get dates on Tinder, but it's just not a good method. If you're new to learning foreign languages, you'd be better off signing up for a course (but that costs time and money), and if this is your n-th foreign language, then you'd rather get a book and some boring flashcard app.

Part of the problem might be that no one wants to pay anymore. I'm happy to pay for a course, but there is not a single in-person language course in my city left for the language I wanted to study.

I booked the the single remaining one last year and shortly before the start they announced they will not run it anymore and instead do online classes only. Apparently the rent is too high and it just isn't viable anymore.

It sucks all around :/

You're learning words and random phrases like "My uncle takes his plants for a walk every week".

Not stuff that's actually useful.

But it still builds vocabulary and is better than nothing for the price.

Knowing what a sentence in the target language ought to feel like is very useful, though. You're learning what order the words go in, how to match genders, how to express different tenses, where to put prepositions, and so forth; the point is not to memorize the specific sentences but to absorb the structure of the grammar.

When learning languages the things you should learn first are food, health and shelter.

Just by knowing a few key phrases in the main categories and the probable answers to those in a language will help you get by a lot better than "I like to ride my bicycle in the rain on the weekends" :D

Functional fluency over grammatical competence.

Thanks - that's not a perspective which had ever occurred to me. I just assumed that learning a new language would require a long period of steady practice, and that's what Duolingo seems to be built for; but if people are often approaching it looking for something more like a glorified tourist phrasebook, I can see why they might complain about the abstract nature of the practice sentences.

A lot of the time, you aren't even learning how to translate the sentence. It's more like you've recognised basic sentence structure (in your own language) and managed to make a sentence from:

plants for week walk My every uncle takes a his

Ever thought of making a presentation about this subject and putting it on YouTube? :-)

It sounds really impressive.

I've never really dabbled in youtube. I have several projects/papers I am working on using this code, I have thought about writing some blog posts as I publish those. But a PhD is going to be a major time sink, we will see what happens.

Do you want to post it as a Show HN soon, before the PhD sucks you in altogether?

(If so, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.)

Thank you for the offer! Unfortunately the PhD has already sunk its claws in. I should have some flashy stuff to show off in a 2-3 months (I have a conference talk coming I have to prepare material for).

Drat! Well, if you ever have some cycles to share your work on HN, contact us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to help.

More importantly, good luck with the PhD and we all hope it goes swimmingly!

Looking forward to it! Good luck with the PhD! (and thanks for making your code Open Source!)