kevin_p
Joined 14 years ago
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86
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32
Member since
Jul 16
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
It's designed for Japanese where it probably works better - pretty much all Kanji have multiple pronunciations that can be completely different to each other so it makes some amount of sense to ignore the sound and focus on the shape and the meaning. Much less relevant for Chinese where you can usually tie the character to a single sound and learn all three halves at the same time.
Comment · 2 years ago
The UK is poorer than you think. Per-capita GDP is $82k in the US vs $49k in the UK (source: World Bank), which accounts for about two thirds of the gap in ad spend.
Comment · 3 years ago
Victims of the gift card scam don't really think that the government wants you to pay your fines/taxes in Google Play money. The implication is that a government employee will make the problem go away if you pay them under the table. The victim is being made to feel that they're a participant in the scam, which makes them less likely to report it once they figure out they're getting cheated.
Comment · 5 years ago
Something similar is even built into many pinyin IMEs. To take the same example OP used, Microsoft Pinyin (the default Chinese input method on Windows computers) will let you input 榎 by typing umuxia.
(Explanation: U puts it into component mode, then mu = 木 and xia = 夏)
It's a bit more finicky than OP's version though because the order is important, uxiamu won't give you any useful results.
Comment · 12 years ago
Makes sense. The URL for Hacker News isn't related to the name, so it's harder to remember. A large proportion of searches will be people who know where they want to go but can't remember the address. This group basically doesn't exist for Slashdot, so the proportion of searches for each site's name will overstate HN's popularity (although the growth trends are still relevant)
Comment · 12 years ago
Pet peeve: "about 200 €/m² including labour" is not supposed to be accurate to 4 significant figures - and even if it was, the EUR/USD exchange rate varies by more than that from day to day. "$25 / square foot" is much better if you treat it as a translation rather than mindlessly plugging numbers into a calculator.
(Maybe I'm just being a grumpy old man, but I deal with this sort of thing all the time in my day job and it winds me up something rotten).
Comment · 12 years ago
To answer the question in the title, you should look at the purpose of the study. The study naming Singapore as the most expensive city come from the Economist Intelligence Unit's Worldwide Cost of Living Index, which is supposed to "help human resources and finance managers calculate cost-of-living allowances and build compensation packages for expatriates and business travellers" and is "based on the assumption that an expatriate has a right to live at the assignment site in the same manner and with the same kind of goods and services he would find at home" (source: https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=Wc..., http://www.worldwidecostofliving.com/asp/wcol_HelpWhatIsWCOL...).
In other words, it's comparing the price of living a Western executive lifestyle, not the cost of living for a regular person. Transport costs are high because Singapore has very high taxes on cars (more expensive than the cost of the car itself) - the target audience isn't going to be using a bus pass. Food costs are based on prices at high-end Western restaurants, not $5 worth of groceries. The housing comparison definitely isn't based on a studio apartment. And so on and so forth.
Comment · 13 years ago
Interesting - I think the same logic could probably explain the house price depreciation discussed in the article too. The accounting / mortgage rules Kohsuke mentioned above would definitely have a very positive effect on the construction industry, and the Japanese government has a history of expensive net-negative schemes to help this industry (see also: concrete rivers).
Comment · 13 years ago
I prefer the way this one preloads the story contents; I take the subway to work so I have a while without internet access. It would be nice to have comment links at least though, so there's the option to read them if it seems interesting. And the 'open all' button doesn't work for me, assuming that's what the '^' in the top right corner is supposed to do.
Comment · 13 years ago
It's meaningful in some contexts. I had a different Chinese name on my work permit and marriage certificate (in both cases transliterated without my input), and it caused me no end of hassle when I was applying for a mortgage - we got refused the first time and had to get the work permit changed to make them the same.
Comment · 13 years ago
I think the article isn't really about elected representatives, it's about the attitudes of ordinary Americans. Like the author and many other pro-American Europeans, I've been pretty disillusioned by the recent reaction to PRISM. Like drone assassination before it, most Americans aren't saying "how dare our government do this" but "how dare our government do this TO US CITIZENS".
(I'm not talking about spying on political leaders, the military etc - everyone does that to everyone else. But it seems that most Americans think it's perfectly fine to invade the privacy of ordinary people on a massive scale, just as long as those people don't hold a US passport.)
Comment · 13 years ago
I think you're missing the point. This isn't about penalising having a separate mobile and desktop site, or even automatically redirecting phone users to the mobile site. It's about penalising sites that automatically redirect all mobile visitors to the mobile version's homepage, even if they tried to visit a specific sub-page (eg an article on a news site, product on an e-commerce site etc) through Google search. Which already falls foul of Google's existing rules against serving completely different content to Googlebot and real visitors.
Comment · 13 years ago
Perhaps not for honest folk like yourself, but there are obvious ways that it could be used for evil - set up an access point with the same name and MAC address to sniff traffic and/or perform all sorts of man-in-the-middle attacks.
First, they're double-counting a lot of passengers in Japan. Tokyo subway isn't a single thing, it's a collection of independent companies, so you need to tap out of one station and tap back into another when changing lines. The JP numbers on Wikipedia are the sum of all the separate Shinjuku stations, which would count a lot of transfer passengers twice.
And second, the table is counting Tokyo's metro system but doesn't include Chinese cities' subways. There are no subway-only stations listed even though plenty of them meet the 30 million passengers/year cutoff. But that's not as big an issue as you might think because even the busiest ones are still far smaller than the big Japanese stations - The busiest is Xizhimen with 237,000 passengers per day, which would translate to 87 million per year. Beijing South Station's subway stop gets 211,000/day = 77 Mn/year, so if we added that the rail passengers it would bring the total to 318 million - but most of them would be going to/from the railway station so that's doing the same sort of double counting as I mentioned in the previous point.
Source for Beijing subway passengers: https://xinwen.bjd.com.cn/content/s684153bfe4b0380e186d0b6e....