Not everyone has the time to learn yet another language.
Besides, learning a language to understand content like this takes a lot of time.
(I speak 4 languages already.)
Authors addendum: This post was a mistake on my part. Please downvote this post. Thank you! I would rather have a retract option, but there is none here on HN.
Original post:
Apologies to you on behalf of people who made you feel uncomfortable.
Full disclosure:
I had (still have?) negative biases/sentiments/stereotypes towards Americans: being ignorant, self-absorbed, reckless, careless etc.
And this almost made me have a knee-jerk reaction to the expressed desire to make the content in question available in English. As if I am tired of you Americans Americanizing everything you touch[2]. This sentiment is also expressed in Ramstein's song "Amerika"[3].
But that's why it is called a "stereotype". I shouldn't stereotype a population of +300 m out of a small sample size (that includes YouTube/Twitter too). I lose a lot of potential good/bad experiences if I continue to do that. And even if, for the sake of the argument, 90% match my silly stereotype, I still should have an optimistic modus operandi.
Pessimism/cynicism is a counterproductive trait. You should be an optimist[1].
But putting all that aside, what makes you think that the inquirer is an American? He could be a French person knowing Japanese and Russian besides English.
Anyhow, we shouldn't follow protectionist policies. Nothing good comes out of that. We should be thankful/appreciative to people who are willing to share content with others (open source, creative commons, etc.).
My apologies. Yes that was perhaps a little weird from me.
(But I am a socially awkward person anyway. :))
My intention was to inquire why person X came to that conclusion. Many people have different experiences throughout their lives. Some rich people wouldn't be perhaps able to empathize with poor people (making less than 10k a year). Some of them don't know (most of the time) what it is like to live with 10k a year and trying to make ends meet.
So why did I come up with the "rich people example"? Well, I am trying to illustrate that we all have our blind spots somewhere. Different people, different experiences (and with that different levels of empathy/understanding).
Anyway, thanks for your input, paulcole & ploika! I think, I can see your point/sentiment better now.
I think HN would benefit if more people would hop on board from different walks of life (doctors, lawyers, artists, moviemakers, photographers, manual laborers, philosophers, historians, economists ...).
So it is good to have you here.
All you need here is basically curiosity and friendliness.
Python is so cool and old (1991) or let's say "battle-tested". I really like minimalistic languages like C (1972) and Python.
It seems like minimalistic languages have higher chances of survival.
That sentiment is shared by a significant amount of people[1][2][3][4], it seems.
I am also sympathetic to minimalism in life (owning essentials only) and in many of my (programming) projects (single-header libraries[5], minimal dependencies).
I think I would be content with C, Bash, Python and SDL alone, if I wasn't so dependent on the need to "exchange my time for money". (And perhaps Rust as well.)
"All links to Amazon, Safaribooks and O'Reilly get extracted once a week from Hacker News posts. We then rank the links based on how often they are mentioned and the karma of the user on Hacker News. So books mentioned several times by different people having high karma tend to rise to the top."
If we had "benevolent monarchs" (riches, people of power) who have always our best interest in mind, I would agree with you. But these "monarchs" aren't benevolent they simply do not care about us other than manipulating us as "dumb sheep".
And I still believe that the majority of people (us) are decent. Yes we can be like sheeple, but the best cure for that is education and/or political prevention mechanisms against our ills (lobbying, populism and gullibleness).
