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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.

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.


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 :/


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!


How do you get your hands on the hardware?

Most of it comes from businesses decommissioning their IT assets, but we also accept people walking in to drop things off. Most of that is "certified", meaning that we go through everything they dropped off, remove the drives, scan serial numbers, and ensure data on the drives are destroyed (either by physically destroying the drives, or overwriting them[0]). Laptops with sufficiently high specs are stacked on pallets in the warehouse area I work in, where it becomes a sort of free-for-all with my 3 co-workers there. Most of what we have is 5 to 10 years old, but sometimes there's the occasional retro piece, or electronic equipment that isn't a computer, like radars, lidars, or A/V stuff. I've been excited to pull out a laptop with a recent 14th gen (or so) Intel Core CPU, only to be let down when I discover it has a broken screen or is unbootable.

[0] https://wipeos.com/


Doesn't SK have the lowest birth rate in the world?

yes, and misogyny and south korean women's collective reaction to it is definitely one root cause. not the only, but due to garbage like this article, women there do not especially care for the men.

Women don’t care for the men because of articles like this? I would suggest that the widespread misogyny would more likely be the cause.

I feel like declining birthrates and misogyny unfortunately easily go hand in hand, causing a downward spiral. The rarer kids are, the more they tend to get spoiled and the more likely they are to act entitled towards others.

The rarer kids are, the more people don’t have kids, don’t know anything about kids, don’t care any kids, and treat them like a nuisance. Both privately and publicly.

Don't developed countries tend to have low birthrates and high status of women? Are you saying that low birth rates cause misogynistic behaviour of kids?

I read it as "garbage like [described] in this article", not an attack on the article itself.

Yes this is it. I misworded my comment in a confusing way lol.

I've never been to South Korea but I'd be really surprised if that has much to do with it. The entire Western world has had massively declining birth rates while simultaneously becoming less misogynistic. If anything there's a negative correlation. In more equitable societies women don't want to just be mothers, and society changes so that it is now difficult for them.

For example it's very difficult to live off a single income now so women can't be stay-at-home mothers, and childcare is extremely expensive in most countries.


South Korea's birth rate is extremely low even by rich Western world standards. Attitudes towards women are one root cause, materialistic culture another, but their horrible working life is probably even more significant factor. It's hard to have a family when you're busy wage slaving all your waking hours for Samsung or whatever megacorporation, just to afford a place to live.

Misandry is rampant too, which is a big part of why men are checking out or even developing resentment towards women.

This article even touches on it, for example, in that just possessing deep-faked porn is punishable by up to 3 years imprisonment. There are many men who will literally never experience a woman's touch, are shunned, isolated, ridiculed, shamed, and even hated by society. They are not bad people, their only crime is not being attractive. Who are they hurting if they get their rocks off privately fantasising about a woman with the help of AI and image editors? It's downright cruel.


Normal porn is freely available! You don't have to make deepfake porn of your classmate!

How is that "misandry"? Do you think only men are lonely and deprived of sex? Do you think only men fantasize about people they're attracted to? How did men survive so many years without synthetic porn of the woman at the office? Producing deepfakes, even for personal use, is irresponsible. Men can use their imaginations.

How is it not misandry? A law targeting men to deny them even the illusion of love and happiness, punishable by years in prison. A peaceful, albeit distasteful, fleeting solution to their complete rejection by society. I don't see why it's anyone's business, least of all the law. It's cruel. It's spiteful.

How is the law targeting men? As far as I know, it's just as illegal for women to create and possess deepfake porn.

And, again: you do not need deepfake porn to have love and happiness, even an illusion of it. I personally think better of men than to think that a fake nudie pic of the neighbor's wife would be the keystone of their mental wellbeing. If anything is misandry, it's thinking of men as a bunch of sex-crazed gremlins.


What gives you the right to claim that or police that, though?

May I decree that women do not need social media to have love or happiness so it's ok to ban it, under threat of imprisonment if they access it?

Is anything arbitrarily open to prohibition if it doesn't meet your extraordinarily high bar of being the "keystone of mental wellbeing"?

What sick joy do you derive from depriving peaceful lonely desperate men this one small outlet? It's misandry.

All porn disgusts me and yet your cruelty and total lack of empathy is so repugnant that, unbelievably, I'm here batting for coomers. Bravo.


While Men certainly can be (and likely will be) a major driver, don’t underestimate the willingness of women to target other women using the same tactics and techniques if they think they can get away with it.

Men may kill you, but women will make you wish you were dead.


Man comments like this make me a lot more fearful of random men than random women. I've seen so many more vile comments touted by men (I choose to believe the majority of them are bots!) than I've ever seen made by women on regular sites. I don't understand how people become this way.

In this scenario, random women aren’t typically the threat - it’s the women closest to you.

The reason it becomes like this is due to a fight for control, often a pathological one.

Men will make terrible comments and poison the well to try to drive women (and other men) to them for ‘safety’, as a show of force. No one wants to be on the losing/weak side. And by painting all men as scary, they undermine their competition, and by being blatantly the scariest without consequence they show they are the strongest. See what is happening in US politics. Being visibly scary is a form of marketing/recruitment.

Women will make terrible comments and poison the well to stop men (and other women) from leaving because the outside world is too scary, or the alternatives are too scary. No one wants to leave ‘safety’ to get eaten by a monster. And better the devil you know, than the one you don’t eh? Women will often be covertly scary, because their goal is usually retention, not recruitment.

You’re watching the war of control unfold.


Because it is. There is no point trying to solve, or getting depressed about it. Just walk away.

South Korea still has male only slavery in army.

There are facebook groups where female share revenge porn, "are we dating the same guy" or "does this look infected?".


misandry isn't real

the word's main useful purpose is signaling which internet comments are written by specific types of men ;)


Questioning authority is great, but the prior that whatever authority says the opposite must be true, is not.

This is a symbiosis between uneducated people and opportunists. The former can't think for themselves and the latter see an opportunity to make money by leading people a certain way.


I've been seeing a lot of articles about how Google is leading. Feels like a marketing campaign.

Yeah, they certainly aren't ahead in the IDE space. I tried Gemini Code Assist Enterprise today and they didn't bother taking the extra step to inject the code for you --like Cursor does. I'd rather not do these manual steps. All these features such as Repo context seem promising, but nothing is glued together to make things cohesive. But it's launched, so onto the next thing!

It's not gonna be affected, because that debate isn't based on facts. The debate is between people who just wanna live and let live, and people who want to dictate to others how to live. All the arguments are crafted a posteriori to the defend the position the people already started in.


So seems like the consensus is never say anything negative about the previous employer.

I'm not saying that this is bad advice, in the sense that doing so probably decreases your chances of getting an offer.

However, this reminds me employers who demand that all applicants can do multiple leetcode hards. Much like demanding that all applicants can do leetcode hards skews for people who cheat, dropping applicants because they say something negative skews for people who lie/spin/bullshit.


There's no such thing as a robotaxi, it's just called a taxi. People who want to take taxis already take taxis.

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