josai

> Spotify - doesn't allow you to buy premium [..] if you have a non-US credit card

Huh? I assuredly have spotify premium on an Australian credit card, and I know people with it in other countries too. Spotify isn't even a US company.

But no-one said "kike". You guys regexed it out of a larger word, a totally reasonable word. My point is that no-one but you would even have that word in their regex, so it's wrong to get all upset about it.

Without wishing to otherwise get involved at all, I'd like to say that as an Australian native english speaker, I have never heard of the word "kike" or that it is apparently a slur against jews. Why would anyone else in the world know that?

I have nothing against jews, but it pisses me off that some local slang is elevated into a global "character sequence you can't use", so long as that slang originates in NYC. Imagine if every other city had that privilege; we wouldn't be able to name anything.

Aren't you forgetting the small detail that China is literally ten times the size of Japan?

Even if your claim is true, and you don't present any evidence to that effect, the order of magnitude size difference makes it rather a different ball game.

React is a library, not a framework. What's your router? What's your model? What's your buildchain, how do you deploy, how do you do ajax requests, etc etc etc?

Facetious comments like this help nobody. There's not a site in the world "just" using react + webpack. And I say this as someone who works with a react and webpack site.. oh and backbone, and gulp, and rsvp, and requirejs, and another 70 lines in package.json.

> > Apple invented the smartphone (and the tablet)

> No they didn't

While you're technically correct, the iPhone was such a leap over any previous effort that it basically redefined the meaning of the word. If you showed an iPhone 1 to someone today, they'd at least recognise it as an (old) smartphone. A blackberry from the same era? I very much doubt it, and frankly I'd agree. The word now means "iphone 1 or better".

You're right about myspace though (and friendster before them)

The article touched on smartphones, but I think missed a point - a huge part of the recent "acceptability" of public transport is that people have got something to do during their trip. In fact I kind of get the feeling people almost welcome bus/train trips now as a chance to get in some uninterrupted "phone time"! Previously, unless you brought a book, riding public transport meant a long look out the window. I think that's huge.

Interesting that no-one has mentioned weibo, the chinese "copy" of twitter (hint: it's not actually a copy). I think weibo is a fantastic product that's ahead of twitter in many respects.

Just off the top of my head, weibo has:

- the "event" grouping that dcurtis mentions and a better topic grouping system ("micro topics")

- rich multimedia as a first class citizen (photo galleries especially are very popular)

- payments built-in - you can donate to or pay anyone on the platform. This is especially used in time of disaster. Weibo escrows the money for a bit to make sure the recipient is legitimate, btw

- properly threaded conversations, easy to follow

- a much more fleshed-out verified account system and the dev integration to connect companies to the system

I'm aware that what works in china may not work for twitter, but looking at what they're doing seems like a pretty good starting point.

> I just don't believe global consumers will choose China over USA, Europe, Japan, South Korea

That seems pretty short-sighted. Maybe you're quite young, but 15 years ago korean cars had a shocking reputation, and japanese 20 years before that. 10 years ago I wouldn't have even considered a crappy cheap korean television, now LG and samsung are tier-1 brands. And subjectively the label "made in china" doesn't have the negative ring it seemed to just a few years ago.

Consumer sentiment can change pretty fast.

Quite interesting to see how different experiences people can have with Apple Music. Mine is that it's a disaster - even with the latest updates I have "synced" songs which simply won't play, synced songs which have been somehow misidentified and the track that plays is wrong, random songs greyed out in albums, band pages listing the wrong songs - I could go on and on. It's literally unusable.

I'd love to be able to use one service that "solves" music for me but Apple Music isn't even close and I'm astounded at how botched the release has been.

So yeah. Your mileage may vary... quite wildly, apparently!

> have you used Apple Music and has this feature failed you?

Absolutely. I have a number of mix CDs (above and beyond, mainly) where apple music has apparently looked up the songs by title and artist only and replaced all the tracks in a mix CD with single versions of those songs, needless to say not mixed. I also have other songs which simply refuse to sync.

The article says: If you subscribe to both iTunes Match and Apple Music, then iTunes matches your songs using digital fingerprinting - but I thought Apple Music included iTunes match. Do I seriously have to sign up for another product as well to get this working? Not very impressed.

Really? Can I get a second endorsement from someone?

I have had great luck reading books recommended on HN but am on the fence about this one.

Hm. I wonder about some of these results. That number for chicago is wild - that would be clearly visible, serious pollution. And my old haunt BKK, which I left specifically because of the awful air, 32!? The city where I would come home from work with a grey shirt that was white when I left is cleaner than zurich? From personal experience in both cities I assure you it is not.

It's anecdotal, I know, but I wonder about some of this data.

Hey, thanks for sharing your local experience. I've only visited! I thought uber black runs audis in BJ but I only heard that from a friend. Maybe I or he was confused.

Out of interest, why do you have issues sleeping with the window closed? Frankly, it would be extremely rare for me to sleep with the windows open no matter where I am.

Hm, I've had people tell me that they prefer uber (or the other app you mentioned - i couldn't remember its name) because the cars tend to be better, and with better air filtering. Maybe that gave me the impression it's more popular than it actually is.

Certainly I'd spend a couple bucks more to sit for an hour (or more!) in an audi or VW over a hyundai..