Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese. So Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, share the same character set (Chinese). There's also traditional vs simplified Chinese, technically; they're similar with some differences in how they're written. Japanese also has some differences which can be confusing because a lot of application developers just use the Chinese character sets for kanji: https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/
One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. Including the text makes it more accessible to a wider audience regardless of what "dialect" is spoken in the show.
> So Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, share the same character set (Chinese).
This isn't really true; there are characters that are exclusive to one or the other, like 冇. The stronger political position of Mandarin means that its idiosyncratic characters are viewed as "real" while the idiosyncratic characters required by other languages aren't, but it's a fundamentally symmetric situation.
> One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another.
The written versions of the language are also that different. The subtitles are in Mandarin, which everyone must learn to read.
(How common are hard-coded subtitles in modern Chinese media? They're on the older stuff, but it seems like a lot of modern shows don't bother.)
It's hard to acknowledge the massive cultural imperialism the PRC has engaged in with regards to Mandarin without getting "corrected" by people with an agenda. It's amazing how "fun facts" like "Everyone in China speaks a dialect of Chinese!" (they're vastly different languages, like how German and Italian aren't dialects of European) and "Everyone in China, no matter what dialect they speak, can pass notes!" (because everyone is forced to learn to read Mandarin no matter what language they actually speak) implicitly support that imperialism.
> [Varieties of Min] form the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese.
So the divergence between Mandarin and Cantonese [neither belonging to the Min branch] could be dated back maybe 1500 years. The divergence between German and Italian is much, much older than that.
English and Swedish would make a more apt comparison than German and Italian.
This might be true if the speakers were equally distant from each other and had an equal amount of contact with each other.
I've spoken Mandarin for over 20 years, studied French and Spanish for a few years each and also learned a bit of Cantonese and a bit of Taiwanese. In my subjective experience, French and Spanish are by far the closest of any two of those languages. Cantonese and Taiwanese would be the next closest and Mandarin is considerably further from either than they are from each other.
> In my subjective experience, French and Spanish are by far the closest of any two of those languages.
This is precisely what you would expect from the divergence times.
> Cantonese and Taiwanese would be the next closest and Mandarin is considerably further from either than they are from each other.
This isn't; Taiwanese is the outgroup to the more closely related pair of Mandarin/Cantonese.
It's always possible that learning "a bit of Cantonese and a bit of Taiwanese" doesn't give you a good grasp of what's going on in Cantonese and Taiwanese.
I think it twitter's case it was architectural. By treating tweets as immutable the could publish them on a pipeline and not worry about duplicate copies around the system being out of sync.
I like using paper to journal about my day or write about random thoughts I might have that I'd like to flesh out further through writing. A few inconveniences of writing it though is that you might want to selectively share some stuff from time-to-time, lack of ability to add media (though a portable printer kinda solves this problem), and having a limit of space, relying on indexing journals when they fill up. A lot of the caveats are solved by privately blogging, though I do miss writing instead of typing everything.
Something like this is almost a sweet spot of keeping the paper version as a "draft copy" while being able to enrich a digital version of your journal. As someone in the thread mentioned, being able to have private pages would likely encourage people to try it out for their journalling purposes. Otherwise, the project looks amazing!
There was a TV show in Japan where a man had to stay in a room until he managed to win $10000 of value in sweepstakes. I wouldn't say you can make a full-time job out of trying to win sweepstakes, since he ended up staying in the room for about a year.
If a naked man locked in a tiny apartment can make 10k/yr doing what is essentially admin work, then it's completely plausible that a disciplined and skilled engineer with web scrapers, computer vision, custom Python scripts and pants could make 100k+ working part time.
Don’t be so certain. These sweepers are usually entering every possible sweepstakes they can. While you might be able to automate the entries and do it in 10 minutes instead of 3 hours a day, unless you start doing fraud like multiple identities, there may simply be no more sweepstakes to enter.
If you could automatically enroll yourself in every sweepstakes legal for your locale, then you could also offer that service to anyone else interested. People could pay you 5 dollars a month to get automatically entered into every sweepstakes.
Of course, this scales badly. The more people who take your service the less valuable it will be as the odds of winning will decrease. Perhaps the natural balancing point would be somewhere where you could still profit. Might be best to charge nothing but take a cut of the winnings. That way people wouldn't be discouraged from joining by the diminishing likelihood of winning, and the chances that someone from your pool would win would only increase over time.
Like with plenty of such ideas, the answer is to do it anyway - scale it until it breaks, making sure you're always making profit yourself, and then call it a day. Enjoy your money and do something else. A while later people will forget, and someone else will do the same thing.
(The real answer is, of course, to not do this at all, because it's unethical. But that consideration doesn't stop everyone, unfortunately.)
> He started with nothing (including no clothes), was cut off from outside communication and broadcasting, and had nothing to keep him company except the magazines he combed through for sweepstakes entry forms. After spending 335 days to reach his target, he set the Guinness world record for the "longest time survived on competition winnings".
Wow, that sounds extreme.
But then again I remember there was a contest in San Diego where the participants had to stay 15 hours a day on a roller-coaster and many suffered lasting bodily injuries.
I really hope that the actual study gives more details about how this research was conducted. This article is way too sparse and seems more like a marketing post for the company that did the research.
One way I've seen discussed on HN is by sending varying amounts to N different accounts, where some are owned by you / affiliates and others are not. In a sense, paying for obfuscation of which accounts are actually owned by you.
Until one of those people buys a Tesla with bitcoin (yeah, I know they just stopped doing that) from a wallet that can be traced to that payment, and then its just the authorities following up the chain.
People like to seem like all these crypto's are totally anonymous, but every transaction ends up in some sort of public blockchain. So unless you have air-tight OPSEC and people that will never talk, no matter what kind of jail time they are facing, its always going to be traceable with enough interest.
I've always thought that the value provided was in comparison to old-school advertising techniques, such as through physical media or broadcast-style presentation formats. Nowadays, even if some Youtube ads seem like a crapshoot, it's still much more focused than television.
One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. Including the text makes it more accessible to a wider audience regardless of what "dialect" is spoken in the show.