The author is Christine de Pizan, an Italian-born (Venice) French court writer [1].
Fun facts, Christine married at the age of 15, now will be considered by both Italian and French law as an illegal underage marriage. The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one [2].
She had 3 children from the marriage to Etienne du Castel, (a royal secretary) for about ten years, remained widow after her husband's death.
Christine was Catholic and is often presented as one of the first feminists in history.
It’s a fun fact because it’s different from current society, and it’s nice to highlight that something now viewed as abuse was not, at the time for her specifically, a traumatic situation according to her public records. Obligatory “just because it wasn’t traumatic for her doesn’t mean that wasn’t overwhelmingly the case for others”
> For the sake of HN's guidelines (to assume good faith) I am assuming this was just you being curious and oblivious to the unintended undertones of your comment, but I'll humbly suggest going over it again.
Part of why I love Hacker News is exploring all the millions of ways people can sound like assholes without actually saying any bad words, or anything negative at all. It’s truly incredible to me and I never get tired of it.
The Chinese and Korean golden herbs ginseng is way overrated. Just consume ginger instead of the 100x more expensive ginseng for all the recipes that people been come up over the centuries and the nutritional benefits probably the same if not better. It is essentially an overpriced souvenirs for your in-laws, that's it.
Care to provide details of the stimulant effect that you were experiencing?
I'm mainly referring on the nutritional and health benefits that the in-laws perceived if they were bought as souvenir a few thousands dollars worth of 1 kg ginseng as opposed to the equivalent of 1 kg ginger worth a few dollars [1],[2].
I recommend Examine.com for supplement literature reviews which are far more in-depth than Wikipedia.
"Research indicates that American ginseng may improve short-term working memory and reaction time, particularly at lower doses, and some positive results were noted in older adults and people with schizophrenia. However, the overall effectiveness on cognition remains uncertain because no significant improvements were found in verbal memory or attention."
> The answer matters for potential applications to cryptography and communications
Someone can take this challenge to provide a more secure and reliable communication systems hopefully with more energy efficiency, very much an exciting research direction.
Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing. I've got the impression that they make in unnecessary hard so only certain people can operate the language and work in government or I call it the elite mentality. I've got the same impression about complex programming languages for examples C++ and Rust. The languages are so complex that you cannot even make the compiler fast [1].
Spoken mandarin has 5 tones but the original ancient Chinese is similar to Cantonese and it has 7 tones. The modern Chinese writing characters is considered simplified because in Taiwan they use the original and more complex Chinese characters.
Fun facts King Sejong of Korea actually get rid of the cumbersome Chinese characters for writing Korean languages and introduced new Korean characters Hangul in 15th CE [2[. It's reported Korean literacy rate skyrocketed in a very short time because it's much easier and suited the Korean language better. Another fun facts, Korean characters can be learnt overnight but you need to memorize and understand several thousands of Chinese characters just to read and understand the newspaper headlines in Chinese. I have a Chinese friend who has Chinese mother tongue and is a well accomplished senior engineer but he cannot even read Chinese newspapers since he did not has a formal education in Chinese writing system.
As Einstein famously remark you should make it simple but not simpler.
[1] Why is the Rust compiler so slow? (425 comments):
> Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing.
Is spoken Mandarin really "hard in an unnecessary way"? I think it's quite straightforward, except for the tones. The tones are difficult for anyone who isn't a native speaker of a tonal language. But they are trivial to learn as a child, and easy to learn for native speakers of say Thai (a mostly unrelated language that also happens to use tones). Uneducated people in all walks of life speak both Mandarin and their local dialect well.
Written Chinese really is objectively difficult, and it's a believable argument that before Mao it was intentionally gatekept that way to have a caste of intellectual "elites".
in addition, chinese grammar is very easy. what makes learning chinese hard is the writing because it is difficult in itself and you can't use it to reinforce the learning of spoken words or vice versa.
As much as I approve of shitting on Chinese characters, a lot of the arguments about literacy don't really apply in the modern age. Back in the 1400s when Sejong and his ministers published the Hun'ming'jeong'eun, sure, but in the modern day literacy is pretty much driven by the modern schooling system and even Japan achieves high literacy rates. It's a bunch of unnecessary extra work, but it's not an impediment to being able to read if that work is put in.
It is true that in 1400s Korea being able to read was a sign of status, and the literati argued against making it easier to preserve their station. The same applied to postwar Japan according to J. Marshall Unger.
Fun facts almost one third (1/3) of English language vocabulary are similar to French. To be exact most of the professional and legal version of the English words are taken from French. Hence if you understand English, you can read short notice or announcement in French, and understand them mostly. But if you have people spoken the same notice and announcement in French version to you without you reading it, most probably you won't understand most of the same sentences.
Plus there is another 1/3 coming from Latin which French speakers has no issue understanding either. English is basically akin to a dumbed down pidgin of French (exponentially less verb conjugation, no gender agreement, less pronouns with the thou/you merge, less articles and annoying small words, etc.) starting over a Germanic core.
Harsh but that rings true. In it's defense i'll point out that English is exponentially more useful in the modern world and even French has started borrowing nouns from English. Also English has more words then
any other language which in my mind makes it the best. (to clarify i know a little of other languages and i understand that there are concepts which English is not even equipped to express properly but i stand by what i write)
I'm still learning, English is huge and it can be a delight to discover.
Most words in foreign languages that most people believe don’t have an English equivalent often do, but the English word is so obscure that almost no native English speaker knows it, and as you point out, English vocabulary is so large that no one will ever come close to learning it all. English is the C++ of human languages.
What interests me is the prominence of words in foreign languages that have an extremely obscure equivalent in English. Like, why do they devote common vocabulary to it and what does it mean that they do?
I have been conversational in languages almost no one learns from parts of the world no one cares about. They are full of words like this and I still use those words in English because that was the first word I learned for the concept. But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does. Ironically, it is safer to assume that my ignorance of the English language (my native language) is more likely than the lack of a word in English for a thing.
That's exactly what I'm alluding in my other comments thread but referring to Chinese language and writing system complexity rather than English for the C++ and Rust, but on second thought Rust probably be the Chinese equivalent.
> But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does.
It's the same happen with C++ that has been ripping up Dlang features for quite sometimes now including its new module system [1].
[1] Converting a large mathematical software package written in C++ to C++20 modules (42 comments):
During the Norman Conquest, England was ruled by the French... and that is when those words entered the language.
Also from that time was many culinary words. The word for the meat in English is the word for the animal in French (the word for the animal in English is likely germanic in origin). That was in part because the when the French speaking nobility wanted boef (French for cow), they didn't want a cow (German Kuh) - they wanted the meat of a cow. So English got beef. Pork? French asked for porc, but didn't want a swine.
While ~29% of the dictionary words come from French, in any written or spoken sentence the number falls dramatically. All the small joining words we use and the core of our grammar is Germanic.
Fun fact, in your first sentence there is approximately 30% of the words which are not Germanic.
(my separation of the words, which may be slightly off:
While of the words come from, in any written or spoken the falls. All the small words we and the of our is
//
dictionary French sentence number dramatically joining use core grammar Germanic
)
It seems that in order for robotics and automation to work properly, AI models including LLMs, YOLO, RL and others need helps from their distant cousins namely logic, optimization and constraint programming that can be attributed as intelligent automation or namely IA [1],[2],[3],[4].
[1] Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) [video]:
>Palestinians are genetically closer to the jews that populated those lands centuries ago. The reality is palestinians ancestors were mostly jews who decided to convert to islam.
Thank you for pointing this fact, if this is true it makes the Israel govt as self-hating Jews, and is very sad and ironic at the same time. The Israel govt should perform thorough DNA test on the Palestinian people. Potentially many Palestinians can have higher Jews ancestors percentage than the emigrants themselves.
I highly recommend the book by Prof. Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, from the academic perspective of the situations. His relative was once the mayor of Jerusalem and he's the Editor of the reputable Journal of Palestine Studies based in the US. The book begins with an examination of correspondence from 1889 between his relative Yusuf Diya ad-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, and Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism [1],[2].
Although the book was published back in 2020 prior to the current conflict, he correctly labeled the many years siege on Gaza by Israel as the act of war against Palestinian people, and it turn out to be manifested in the all out war in 2024.
>When you have things like macros, advanced type systems, and want robustness guarantees at build time.. then you have to pay for that.
Go and Dlang compilers were designed by those that are really good at compiler design and that's why they're freaking fast. They designed the language around the compiler constraints and at the same managed to make the language intuitive to use. For examples, Dlang has no macro and no unnecessary symbols look-up for the ambiguous >>.
Because of these design decisions both Go and Dlang are anomaly for fast compilation. Dlang in particular is notably more powerful and expressive compared to C++ and Rust even with its unique hybrid GC and non-GC compilation.
In automotive industry it's considered a breakthrough and game changing achievement if you have a fast transmission for seamless auto and manual transmission such as found in the latest Koenigsegg hypercar [1]. In programming industry however, nobody seems to care. Walter Bright the designer of Dlang has background in mechanical engineering and it shows.
[1] Engage Shift System: Koenigsegg new hybrid manual and automatic gearbox in CC850:
It isn't an anomaly, it was pretty standard during the 1990's, until C and C++ took over all other compiled languages, followed by a whole generation educated in scripting languages.
Fun facts, Christine married at the age of 15, now will be considered by both Italian and French law as an illegal underage marriage. The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one [2].
She had 3 children from the marriage to Etienne du Castel, (a royal secretary) for about ten years, remained widow after her husband's death.
Christine was Catholic and is often presented as one of the first feminists in history.
[1] Christine de Pizan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_de_Pizan
[2] Biography of Christine de Pizan, Medieval Writer and Thinker:
https://www.thoughtco.com/christine-de-pizan-biography-41721...