Nick on Quora

They’re minor things, but they’re things I keep slipping up on:

• Sometimes Golang hides the difference between a type and the pointer to the type. That doesn’t mean the asterisk is decorative. Most of the time, Golang doesn’t hide the difference, and you do need to put that asterisk in.
• It is idiomatic to assign foo, err := x multiple times in a row. Golang will let you repeat err as the second assigned variable. But it won’t let you repeat it as the first element: that’s always meant to be a new variable.
• If there’s any fluidity in your programming at all, the libraries you import will always lag behind the libraries you use.
• Strings are not byte arrays.

Compared to the smoking ruination that accompanies beginner’s errors in C, these are on the benign side, especially as they are often caught by the editor.

For Greek science and mathematics, e.g. Ptolemy and Galen, several texts survive only in Arabic translation.

The West was exposed to Greek philosophy and science via Arabic in the 1200s; the West only gained substantial access to the Greek originals in the Renaissance.

The Arabs did not, from memory, take substantial interest in Greek literature.

As a general answer, rather than an answer as to your specifics, OP:

If a user has blocked you, they have chosen to stop all communication with you. That includes apologies. It is possible in theory for the blockee to reach out to the blocker; but it is extremely risky, and frowned upon, and “let it go” is good default advice:

• There are several instances documented here where the blockee meets the blocker at Quora meetup, and they’re having a mellow chat, during which the blockee asks “So, why’d you block me anyway?” And the blocker responds, “Oh, I did?” Sometimes, the blocker then even remembers to unblock the blockee.
• I have heard of instances where the blockee reaches out to the blocker via a mutual friend. You’d have to have a mutual friend, of course, who agrees to put themselves in the path of fire.
• There’s this approach: Do you think I deserved to get blocked for this comment to Habib Fanny’s fear of being killed on the basis of racial prejudice in USA? Now, this approach did work: the blockee expressed themselves unclearly, Habib assumed he was being attacked, and Habib accepted the blockee’s explanation and unblocked him. Note however:
• The question has since been deleted.
• The OP was universally derided in answers to the question that weren’t from Habib, and many of the reactions were decidedly un-BNBR. (The OP earned himself a block from one of the respondents in fact, just for raising the question.)
• Habib Fanny is a mensch. Most Quora users are not mensches.

My own prejudice is that someone who’s trigger happy about blocking is not someone I’d want anything to do with anyway. But then, I don’t often give people excuses to block me. (Not never, but not often.)

Nope.

Australians enjoy a good reputation in the parts of the world I have been to (Europe, North America), and I have not been to the parts of the world where they might not (India, Papua New Guinea?). I have been to New Zealand, but any animus there is jocular and reciprocated. The Austria/Australia confusion did not generate any disgruntlement I could detect while in Vienna or Salzburg.

I didn’t broadcast that I was Greek while in Istanbul, but I found that it would not have made a difference: the Thaw has happened. (I still did not feel comfortable volunteering that my father is Greek Cypriot.)

There are more countries in the world where it would make sense to hide that you’re Greek than that you’re Australian, but I haven’t been there either (countries immediately north of Greece).

The Albanian lëkurë means ‘skin, bark’. The German Leder means ‘leather’.

Consulting Vladimir Orel’s Albanian Etymological Dictionary:

lëkurë ‘skin, bark’ < *lauk-urā

lakur ‘naked’ < *lauk-ura

In both cases, *lauk– is derived from Indo-European *leuk̂- ‘to shine, to be white’.

German Leder, English leather < Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/leþrą < Proto-Indo-European *létrom ‘leather’. From The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, it appears *létrom is a word specific to Celtic and Germanic.

So, doesn’t look like it.

There’s not a lot to be had in the region of course. From the Greek perspective:

• Serbs are our “brothers in Orthodoxy”—but I don’t know if that actually amounts to a positive stereotype. I don’t think relations between Greeks and Serbs have actually been close enough to rise to the level of positive stereotype.
• Albanians may have been vilified at the start of the mass migration of the 90s, but latterly they have actually become the model minority. Nationalists still hate them, but more moderate Greeks, my impression is, admire them for their work ethic, and for their readiness to assimilate.
• This is of course because there are migrants further down the pecking order now. Like Bulgarians…

A fair bit of philosophy and logic (and theology, which they were bound up with) was done in the West, and was built on subsequently. The De dicto and de re distinction is Thomas Aquinas’ handiwork, for example.

European nationhood is mostly a Romantic era creation, but its raw materials came out of the Middle Ages. As others have alluded to, modern Western literature and art in some aspects was built on mediaeval foundations (though a lot of it was also reinvented in the Renaissance, based on classical foundations).

The Middle Ages kept a critical mass of the Classics around, although it is fair to say that they did not make as much use of the literature as they did of the philosophy (and history, at least in the East).

I’m a bit incredulous at the other reactions to this question; but of course, you’ve A2A’d the right person.

You’re right, OP. bind and band and bundle all mean similar things. A band is something that you bind things with. An bundle is a bunch of things that have been bound together. Hey, bound is the past tense of bind! And for that matter, there’s also bond, which is a binding agreement. And as it turns out, bend as well (Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/bandijaną), possibly because you bend a bow in order to bind it.

If you go to bind – Wiktionary, you’ll see that every one of those words derives from Proto-Indo-European/bʰendʰ-.

So if they’re all related, why do the vowels change?

Because Indo-European used ablaut to indicate various kinds of grammatical change. Ablaut involves vowel change in the stem, instead of using suffixes or prefixes to the stem. It is an old process, which is no longer productive; but you see it all over the place in several branches of Indo-European. You see it in the strong verbs of English: sing sang sung. You see it in the German stems underlying your three words: Proto-Germanic/bindaną, bandiz, bundą.

You’ll see it in Ancient Greek too. The related words temnō “I cut”, atomos “uncuttable”, at–mētos “uncut” are parallel to sing sang sung.

My translation (and you can tell):

Account: Traducteur de questions Quora

Question: How does the Quora Question Translator work?

Question Details: How are the questions to be translated chosen? What is the level of supervision over this bot by the site owners? What is its anticipated level of activity?

Réponse de Sihem Soibinet-Fekih à Comment fonctionne le Traducteur de questions Quora ? (Sihem Soibinet-Fekih, A2A by Jay Wacker)

We select questions internally according to a series of search filters. For example, we observe the popularity of questions asked on English Quora, and work out which could be successful or provoke interest among French-speaking users.

The questions are then submitted to a machine translation platform to be adapted into French. The translated questions may be revised if we decide that the adapted version can be improved.

Day by day, we improve French Quora to give you a version of the site most faithful to the English and Spanish versions, while bearing in mind that each audience is unique to each language, and that the site should be subject to its own cultural specifics.

Vote #1 Jay Wacker: Jay Wacker’s answer to What exactly is Wikidata and what is its relationship to Quora topics and questions?

To break down what Jay said just a bit further:

An ontology is an organisation of concepts in the world. Quora’s existing hierarchy of topics is one, contributed to by Quora askers, Quora topic gnomes, and whatever the initial seeding of it was within Quora.

Wikidata’s ontology is a rather bigger ontology. It has been contributed to by Wikipedia editors, in all the various language versions, and many other online projects.

In addition to the benefits Jay has mentioned: the Wikidata ontology has more information about its topics than the Quora one does. In particular, it has more explicit links between subtopics and their parent topics; more identification of topics as people; more identifications of topics as places, and the geographical coordinates of those places. (As well as all the information contained within the related Wikipedia articles; and the infoboxes in Wikipedia are all machine-readable by design.)

By matching Quora topics to Wikidata topics, Quora can work out parent/child topic links, which are pretty crucial to how topics are used. (You have to explicitly tell Quora that sociolinguistics is a subtopic of linguistics, and if you don’t, people subscribing to linguistics will not receive new sociolinguistics questions. Multiply that by every new topic ever.) Quora can produce maps of location topics, and work out which places are close to each other, which can also help the related topic suggester. Quora can narrow down which topics are (famous?) people. Quora can work out which topics are bona fide ambiguous, where it hasn’t already.

Questions and answers rely on a topic ontology. Quora is now upgrading from a smallish homebrew ontology, to a much bigger and authoritative homebrew ontology.