kevin_p

6 ms·

1.
by kevin_p 1y ago
I spent a while looking into this and it looks like it's mostly legit. Japanese stations really do seem to be bigger. Having said that, there are two big caveats that make the gap smaller. First, they're double-counting a lot of p
2.
by kevin_p 2y 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 a
3.
by kevin_p 2y 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.
4.
by kevin_p 4y 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 tab
5.
by kevin_p 5y 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
6.
by kevin_p 12y 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 doe
7.
by kevin_p 13y 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&
8.
by kevin_p 13y 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 &q
9.
by kevin_p 13y 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 construc
10.
by kevin_p 13y 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 interest
11.
by kevin_p 13y 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
12.
by kevin_p 13y 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 P
13.
by kevin_p 13y 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 redirec
14.
by kevin_p 13y 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.
15.
by kevin_p 13y ago
I know you're mostly talking about cheap phones, but I'm still going to quibble with the other half of your "subsidized/cheap smartphones" point. Subsidised phones are much less common in developing countries because the credit system is le
16.
by kevin_p 13y ago
Updated to be clearer about this. I meant that fake captchas like the one in the OP (which put HTML text on top of a confusing background image to make it harder to read) were silly, not simple question checks.
17.
by kevin_p 13y ago
Just because something is checked client-side doesn't mean it's only checked client-side. I've used JS checking on anti-bot questions[1] quite deliberately: it doesn't have any effect on 99%+ of bots, but it stops posts by humans from acc
18.
by kevin_p 14y ago
There's a picture in the article - it's in a dock, almost vertical but leaning back at a slight angle, which makes it look a bit like a speaker. Direct link to the image: http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/bb2e144a-7653-11e2-8e...
19.
by kevin_p 14y ago
You can't yet. "The Firefox OS Marketplace does not currently support paid apps or in-app payments. We hope to enable this feature for testing late in the first quarter of 2013." ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Submitting_an
20.
by kevin_p 14y ago
It draws subway lines on the map (in a similar way to the 'traffic' layer)
21.
by kevin_p 14y ago
I like the way the translations are at a sentence-by-sentence level. I think it makes you more of a language learning tool, rather than a social translation site like Yeeyan where the major goal is just making a translation of the whole art
22.
by kevin_p 14y ago
#1. For us, the top 3 are GoAPK (anzhi.com), GFan (apk.gfan.com) and Tencent App Center ( http://android.myapp.com ). Between them, they're >90% of Chinese 3rd-party app store downloads. #2. The biggest hurdle is that everything is in C
23.
by kevin_p 14y ago
Taobao doesn't charge any commission; most of their income comes from advertising on the home / category / search pages (you might not have noticed they were ads because they're all for Taobao stores or products sold through Taobao), and yo
24.
by kevin_p 14y ago
Sounds pretty stupid, but it sounds like you should be able to get round it by sticking everything in a scrollable wrapper div (height:100%; overflow:scroll) when fullscreen mode gets activated. Or just do things the old fashioned way and t
25.
by kevin_p 14y ago
China's situation does have something to do with it (you can't buy paid apps on Google Play here, YouTube is blocked and Google search frequently has 'technical problems'), and that's probably Samsung's excuse, but other manufacturers manag
26.
by kevin_p 14y ago
They already did in China. My wife bought a Galaxy S2 in January, and it came with Samsung Apps instead of Google Play, no Google Maps, no Gmail or Google Talk etc. Yes, it's a legitimate Samsung product, not some Chinese knockoff. She's hu
27.
by kevin_p 14y ago
To be honest, you don't need any php at all. People upthread already mentioned using ajax to get the next/previous quotes; why not go a step further and send it all to the user in a straight js file? Think about it: you said you scraped the
28.
by kevin_p 14y ago
And vice versa. If you're in China, you only get the most basic details for other countries - my hometown Oldham in the UK (population ~100,000) doesn't appear at all; nearby Rochdale is there but has no roads. And there are no satellite ma
29.
by kevin_p 14y ago
Update: The page did eventually load and worked properly. I looked at your page source and found Facebook and Google Plus, which are both blocked here - that would probably be what was stopping it working before. Perhaps you should load the
30.
by kevin_p 14y ago
Might not work properly for users in China. It's telling me I don't have JavaScript enabled, when I do (Firefox on OSX, no weird extensions), and based on the tab bar icon is still loading after >2 minutes. Perhaps you're loading some b

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