Visa/MC cozied up to major national banks in different countries (not just in the EU) and offered them a sweet deal the banks could not resist: ditch the national payment network in favour of our own cards and we will give a slice of each transaction fee. The transaction fees are tiered, with one part of it going to the payment network (Visa/MC) and the bank (card issuer) keeping the other part. For cross-border transactions, there is also (of course) the exchange rate that comes into play, and this is where each bank buffs its transaction profit margin up even further (as each bank sets its own exchange rate rather than using the interbank exchange rate), so…
… banks saw big, no, BIG $$$ and lost their minds. The transition was rather swift: between the very late 2000's and approximately 2015 (give or take a few years), the transition had been complete. Credit cards became a massively profitable and booming business for the banks, with all sorts of loyalty programmes and bonuses (at consumers’ expense, of course, as the banks also jacked up interest rates on revolving credits). Note that all of this took place before national governments stepped in to regulate the transaction fees.
This coincided with the growing allergy of Western governments to owning any critical infrastructure (including payment networks) and the rising trend of outsourcing as much as possible to the private sector. As it is easy to imagine, it did not take long for the national banks already being in bed with Visa/MC to convince their respective national governments to stop investments in maintenance and enhancement of domestic payment networks and delegate the payment processing to the cartel: «they can do it better than you do».
… all of which has led us to where we are right now. Technically, national payments are still alive, but they are more in the contained mode of operation and not in active use or development.
Assuming no overtime, one day translates into 3x 8 hour shifts, or 3x engineers. Suddenly, $260k a year buys 3x engineers.
Now, assuming that the dark factory stuff can actually work as conjectured, it will work 24x7, 365 days a year, it does not require annual leave, sick leave, observance of public holidays etc. So $365k (adjusted for 24x7, 365) works out to be a cheap deal.
Quality does vary wildly because the languages vary wildly in terms of language constructs and standard libraries. Proficiency in every.single.language. used in the benchmark perhaps should not be taken for granted.
But it is an GitHub repository and the repository owner appears to accept PR's and allows people to raise an issue to provide their feedback, or… it can be forked and improved upon. Feel free to jump in and contribute to make it a better benchmark that will not be «frankly a joke» or «_really_ bad».
I'm completely alright with just having fun and hosting your own little sandboxes online, but what good does it do to post and share this with others in its current state? The picture it paints is certainly not representative, and this sort of thing has been done a million times over with much better consistency. Again, I think it's great to hack around in every language and document your journey all the way, but sharing this is borderline misinformation. It's certainly not my duty to right the wrongs of this benchmark.
Unlike Mandarin and other Chinese languages, Cantonese does not have tone sandhi and has changed tones instead.
Cantonese tones are also different from those of Mandarin, so no, it can't be adopted for Cantonese and it would require a complete rework.
> It is a surprisingly difficult language to learn.
I keep hearing this quite a bit, but I do not find Cantonese to be any more difficult than most languages[0]. Or at least we would need to define a metric based on which we could assess the difficulty. If it is the number of tones, their number (six – no, not nine) may look formidable at first, but they are, in fact, rather simple tones and broadly fall into three categories: flat, rising, and falling. As a random example, Cantonese does not even have a dipping tone.
In comparison, «fancy» tones of Vietnamese are significantly more challenging or even difficult – they can curl and unfurl (so to speak).
[0] That crown appears to belong to Archi, with honourable mentions going out to Inuit, Basque, Georgian, Navajo, Yimas and several other polysynthetic languages.
1. tones, and generally the gatekeeping of some Cantonese communities towards people who haven't gotten the tones completely right
2. the lack of learning materials relative to the number of speakers, the confusion between written Chinese and written Cantonese (and also the general lack of the latter)
As they say, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy"... I'll leave it at that.
You seem to be confusing/overgeneralizing the understandable resentment of "some Cantonese" who likely had bad experiences of postcolonialism and/or authoritarian-revanchist state policies. If Hong Kong diaspora has a poor reception towards newcomers to their local microculture, maybe it's because the people attempting to engage are not treading lightly with those actual historical legacies in mind.
"Taiwanese lectures Hong Konger about Hong Kong" is a recurring meme on Threads among local Hong Kongers. I didn't expect I'd experience one here.
I mean, I know I am supposed to refute your point with rational points, but I really don't know what to say except that you're wrong, and you're confusing the cultural divide between Cantonese speakers and non-Cantonese speakers, and the political tensions between Hong Kong and mainland China.
Note that I never said "Hong Kong" in my comment because the majority of Cantonese speakers are actually in mainland China.
Given that linguistics does not have a concept of what makes a language «hard» or not, the language hardness classification is highly subjective and perceptional.
I have already commented on why I do not think that Cantonese tones are hard, so I will leave it at that – it is the first, oft repeated myth that is not based on facts.
> 2. the lack of learning materials relative to the number of speakers […]
On the subject of the availability of learning materials, there would have been a strong case for, e.g. Wu (Shanghainese), Min (Hokkien), Hakka etc – for all of which the learning materials virtually do not exist, and that is true.
With Cantonese, it is a remarkably different situation. My local bookshop has two large shelves stacked with Cantonese textbooks and dictionaries that suit a range of people from vastly different age groups – from toddlers starting to babble to serious advanced learners and anyone in between. More is available online, e.g. Virginia Yip's Routledge series, which includes a comprehensive book on the Cantonese grammar of rarely seen quality and coverage, Robert Bauer and Victor Mair's «ABC Cantonese-English Comprehensive Dictionary», and many more. There are online resources, an open-source, cross-platform «Jyut Dictionary», Google and Apple support the Cantonese keyboard etc.
If their printed versions are not easily locally available, they can be purchased as Kindle books as well.
Granted, Mandarin surpasses Cantonese in terms of the quantity of learning materials, and that is a dry fact.
> […] the confusion between written Chinese and written Cantonese […]
Many languages have quirks or come with a wealth of idiosyncrasies when it comes to how the language is spoken and written down. Burmese, Thai, and Tibetan, for example, are written according to extremely archaic pronunciation rules to the point that spoken and written languages have to be learned separately.
Written Cantonese has existed since at least the Ming dynasty[0][1], but the reasons why there are two distinct forms are entirely different as they go back to replacing Classical Chinese, which had become incomprehensible to anyone in the late 19th century without years of dedicated study, with a modern standard written standard based on northern Chinese varieties.
> […] (and also the general lack of the latter).
This is the second often repeated myth. Many Cantonese speakers believe that Cantonese can only be spoken but not written down, which is patently false – if a language has a writing system, it can be written down with it. When pressed with question «why do you think so», there is typically no answer or «because we have been told so». 口語粵語好容易用漢字寫低，就好似書面粵語咁。 There is a real issue of some native Cantonese words not having dedicated Chinese characters for them, but it is more of a philosophical disgreement between the academics rather than an insurmountable problem.
So, in reality – at least in Hong Kong – since formal literacy has long meant competence in Standard Written Chinese, not in a full Cantonese-written system, schools and institutions tend to penalise written vernacular Cantonese forms in formal contexts – entirely for non-linguistic reasons as explained in [2].
To sum it up, I do not find any of the counterarguments to be compelling, persuasive or supported by linguistic facts which would make Cantonese a «hard» language.
You both are in violent agreement and it is amusing to see in the wild.
As an 外國人 who learned Cantonese as an adult (I moved to HK) I'm jealous of the quantity and quality of materials that exist for learning (not Cantonese). That being said, there are _enough_ materials so it's nowhere near as rough as e.g. Shanghainese.
My opinions on hard language reduces to "is this the first language you're learning from a particular language family?" If so, it's hard to learn. But "is ontologically hard" isn't something that I think is really worth ranking. Any four year old can speak their mother tongue just fine.
But the perception of "hard to learn" did work in my favor for learning Cantonese: as a 鬼佬 who speaks Cantonese I was given lots of latitude to be bad while learning because of that perception. And now I could go back and learn Mandarin now and it would be _much_ simpler than the task that I had in learning Cantonese.
That being said I still write in 口語. Slowly learning 書面語 as I read more and more of it.
(Not sure if you remember or recognize me from this handle. I was with Chaak on the words.hk project . Also Jon spoke highly of you for helping with the tough problems on the fonts :D )
You're absolutely right in theory and in linguistics.
The issue is that among the more common languages that people (outside of language nerds) tend to learn, what I said still holds true for the average learner who's there to learn and whom face the practical difficulties of learning a language, and none of your totally correct linguistic facts really make them less real.
> > […] (and also the general lack of the latter).
> This is the second often repeated myth
The size of written Cantonese corpora was abysmally small up until recent (<10?) years, and much of the content was interwoven with Standard Written Chinese. You still generally can't find written Cantonese on printed materials. Until recent months, LLMs couldn't even write a proper children's story in Cantonese without inadvertently code switching to SWC.
Trust me when I say I'm one of the many people who worked hard to make this "myth" not true (not in linguistic theory but in practice). I never knew it would be thrown back to me like this as a lecture on a random forum lol.
There's a lot more to be done to make Cantonese an assessable language for learners compared with the other major languages. You can compare the linguistic properties of languages all you want, and you'd be absolutely right, but that doesn't make a difference to the prospective learner at all.
> Australians are able to buy solar panels […] but the cost equation is shifting very quickly.
As of now, Australia has some of the lowest costs of solar panel installation in the world – the federal and state/territory governments have been providing subsidies to households to increase solar energy uptake across the nation, and, as a result, the popularity of solar panels has exploded, driving the costs down.
> If anything I'm surprised that this is happening in an area that hasn't benefited as much from dramatic reductions in electricity costs (places with Wind + Solar without large tariff regimes) rather than Australia […]
Energy costs from a conventional grid have actually more than doubled across Australia (in comparison to 2008). With solar, there was a perverse situation in Australia for a while when households connected to the grid could export the solar-generated electricity and get paid for it, but that did not lower consumer electricity prices, which kept on climbing instead.
More recently, though, paying to export – a limited feature that applies only under certain network tariffs and/or certain retail plans (especially wholesale pass-through plans during negative price periods) – has been introduced, but the battery technology has also caught up.
So with the advent of new battery technology, households have now become awash with an abundance of electricity that they can now use to, e.g., run air-conditioning if not 24x7 then very close to it, which has been a great boon for the last couple of summers when Australia has gone through bursts of severe hotwaves across the country (temperatures varied between mid-40's and as high as +50 degrees Celsius last week in some parts of Adelaide, South Australia).
> If I buy a used vehicle for example, I have exactly zero relationship with the manufacturer. I never agree to anything at all with them. I turn the car on and it goes. They do not have any authorization to touch anything.
Generally speaking and most of the time, yes; however, there are a few caveats. The following uses common law – to narrow the scope of the discussion down.
As a matter of property, the second-hand purchaser owns the chattel. The manufacturer has no general residual right(s) to «touch» the car merely because it made it. Common law sets a high bar against unauthorised interference.
The manufacturer still owes duties to foreseeable users – a law-imposed duty relationship in tort (and often statute) concerning safety, defects, warnings, and misrepresentations. This is a unidirectional relationship – from the manufacturer to the car owner and covers product safety, recalls, negligence (on the manufacturer's behalf) and alike – irrespective of whether it was a first- or second-hand purchase.
One caveat is that if the purchased second-hand car has the residual warranty period left, and the second-hand buyer desires that the warranty be transferred to them, a time-limited, owner-to-manufacturer relationship will exist. The buyer, of course, has no obligation to accept the warranty transfer, and they may choose to forgo the remaining warranty.
The second caveat is that manufacturers have tried (successfully or not – depends on the jurisdiction) to assert that the buyer (first- or second-hand) owns the hardware (the rust bucket), and users (the owners) receive a licence to use the software – and not infrequently with strings attached (conditions, restrictions, updates and account terms).
Under common law, however, even if a software licence exists, the manufacturer does not automatically get a free-standing right to remotely alter the vehicle whenever they wish. Any such right has to come from a valid contractual arrangement, a statutory power, or the consent, privity still works and requires a consent – all of which weakens the manufacturer's legal standing.
Lastly, depending on the jurisdication, the manufacturer can even be sued for installing an OTA update on the basis of the car being a computer on wheels, and the OTA update being an event of unauthorised access to the computer and its data, which is oftenimes a criminal offence. This hinges on the fact that the second-hand buyer has not entered into a consentual relationship with the manufacturer after the purchase.
A bit of a lengthy write-up but legal stuff is always a fuster cluck and a rabit hole of nitpicking and nuances.
I don't really understand the legal arguments here:
> the manufacturer can even be sued [...] This hinges on the fact that the second-hand buyer has not entered into a consentual relationship with the manufacturer after the purchase.
Wait, but the first owner (presumably, for the sake of argument) agreed to this. Why isn't it the first owner's fault for not disclosing it to the second owner? Shouldn't they be sued instead? How is a manufacturer held responsible for an agreement between parties that they could not possibly be expected to have knowledge of?
Because common law is not a general «duty to disclose everything» bludgeon for ordinary used-goods sales, and the «why not sue the first owner» argument can only work in narrow fact patterns.
For example, if the first owner actively misrepresented the position (for example, they said «no remote access, no subscriptions, no tracking» when they knew the opposite), the second owner might have a misrepresentation claim against the first owner. But that is pretty much where the buck stops.
> «How can a manufacturer be liable for an agreement it cannot know about?».
That is not the right framing. The manufacturer is not being held liable for «an agreement between the first owner and the second owner». The manufacturer is being held liable for its own conduct (access/modification by virtue of an OTA update) without authorisation from the _current_ rights-holder because liability follows the actor.
It happens because, under common law, 1) the first owner’s consent does not automatically bind the second owner, 2) consent does not normally run with the asset, and 3) a «new contract with the second owner» does not arise automatically on resale. It arises only if the second owner consciously assents to manufacturer terms (or if a statute creates obligations regardless of assent).
So the manufacturer is responsible because it is the party _acting_. If the manufacturer accesses/modifies without a valid basis extending to the current owner or user, it owns that risk.
I am not saying that «every unwanted OTA update is a crime». All I am saying is that the legal system has a concept of «unauthorised modification/access», and the contention is over whether the access or modification was authorised or not.
Thanks for explaining. I just don't understand how society is supposed to function if laws work like this.
For example suppose I ask someone to come demolish my fence next week when nobody is home. And then I sell the house in between. So is the company supposed to run a title check the moment they arrive, because the owner may no longer have the authority they once had prior to that moment?
Or say I click Accept on an agreement, sleep/hibernate the device right as installation is about to start, and then transfer the rights to the device. Now the vendor is responsible for not running a title check or asking for confirmation a second time before the first confirmation? And I'm in the clear because I never claimed there's no installation pending?
I can't imagine the law really works this way... these sound absurd. Surely there's gotta be much more to it than what you're describing?
It is the clear separation of property and contractual rights, which I find to be pretty logical.
In fact, the separation of concerns actually makes things simpler as the property rights do transfer with the property sale (a car, a house, a computer, etc.), and the contractual obligations do not travel with the asset (unless the law or a properly formed new agreement makes it travel – jurisdiction dependent). It is also important to note that the contract between the former owner and the manufacturer does not automatically lapse with the property sale.
Let's pick the two examples apart.
> […] I ask someone to come demolish my fence next week when nobody is home. And then I sell the house in between. So is the company supposed to run a title check the moment they arrive, because the owner may no longer have the authority they once had prior to that moment?
They are not required to, but it is very prudent of them to ascertain that the person who signed the contract happens to be the current owner of the house before they commence the demolition works – unless dealing with a litany of lawsuits is their core business. By doing so, they save time and money.
Now, imagine that, as the previous owner of the house, you also instructed the company to demolish the fence and demolish the entire house after. It is hard to imagine that the new owner would be delighted or feel ecstatic about finding their newly acquired house to have been wiped out of existence.
From the legal perspective, the demolishing company would be trespassing on the property that now belongs to somebody else, and they are in no position to proceed as the contractual rights stay with the previous owner and not with the property [0]. So in this situation, it creates a dispute (and – not unfathomably – a legal action) between the previous owner and the demolishing company, which the new owner is not privy to. Again, such a separation appears logical to me. Otherwise, the new owner would inherit a barrage of clandestine or dodgy contracts that the first owner might have signed in the past.
> Or say I click Accept on an agreement […]
Same separation still applies:
1. The vendor’s contract with the first owner can remain on foot.
2. That does not automatically authorise a post-sale access/modification of the second owner’s device.
In real litigation, what happens next turns on how «authorisation» is evidenced and managed. If the system is designed so that the physical device is still cryptographically tied to the old account, a court may treat that as strong evidence of practical authorisation, but it is not the same as legal authorisation by the current owner if the current owner never agreed. Practically, however, the new owner simply wipes the device out or resets it, and I do not think that it is commonplace for new owners to sue the manufacturer for merely applying an update, although the possibility is there.
All of the above segues into… the practical implications of separating property and contractual rights. Especially in the case of computing hardware (and EV's as well!), they have become particularly important in today's world, where vendors have been increasingly trying to move towards the rent-seeking model, where they want the device sale to be seen as a lease or a licence to use but not the right to own the device.
Common law insists on the separation between property rights in the physical asset and contractual or statutory rights governing any assented or connected services (including the software). Vendors/manufacturers may market modern computing hardware as an inseparable «hardware–software package» and frame the transaction as a licence to use rather than ownership, but that characterisation does not, by itself, displace the purchaser’s ownership of the tangible chattel (e.g. a car or a laptop). The line common law draws is therefore real, but the contemporary contest is about how far licensing and service dependency can be used to diminish the practical incidents of ownership.
[0] Unless the new owner has acknowledged and agreed to the demolishing works in a separate contract.
This is the kind of nitpicking that I love to see on HN, it is establishes the boundaries of the relationship between manufacturers and owners and tries to lay bare the need for (informed) consent and what the legal basis for that is.
The issue is that XSD came along much later, and its use did not become binding in XML validation scenarios, hence partial success, even when the XSD-based validation tooling was available at the time.
XSD provides a clean abstraction for the technical validation that sits separately from the application / business / processing layers and dramatically increases the chances of a «clean» request reaching the aforementioned layers without having to roll multiple defensive checks in there.
Granted, an XSD can become complex very quickly, especially if indulged in too much, but it does not have to be.
AT&T did not ship with the kernel source code, but they often shipped with the compiled object files of the kernel and a command line utility that allowed to change the kernel configuration parameters, after which the kernel would get re-linked into a new one.
Not open source by any definition, but it was a viable way to obtain a new kernel image. The practice has become obsolete after the adoption of loadable kernel modules across nearly all UNIX flavours, with the exception being OpenBSD (if my memory serves me well).
You have just described OSF/1 (and later – Tru64) – a certified UNIX with a hybrid kernel operating over a Mach microkernel, BSD userland, POSIX conformance etc.
… banks saw big, no, BIG $$$ and lost their minds. The transition was rather swift: between the very late 2000's and approximately 2015 (give or take a few years), the transition had been complete. Credit cards became a massively profitable and booming business for the banks, with all sorts of loyalty programmes and bonuses (at consumers’ expense, of course, as the banks also jacked up interest rates on revolving credits). Note that all of this took place before national governments stepped in to regulate the transaction fees.
This coincided with the growing allergy of Western governments to owning any critical infrastructure (including payment networks) and the rising trend of outsourcing as much as possible to the private sector. As it is easy to imagine, it did not take long for the national banks already being in bed with Visa/MC to convince their respective national governments to stop investments in maintenance and enhancement of domestic payment networks and delegate the payment processing to the cartel: «they can do it better than you do».
… all of which has led us to where we are right now. Technically, national payments are still alive, but they are more in the contained mode of operation and not in active use or development.
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