GertG

Yes, but like that comment, his profile could probably do with some editing and a different form of publication, like in a proper site/blog article.

There's a whole paragraph duplicated in the profile, starting with "I'm founding director". If nobody has ever noticed that, the info is probably not in the best place to be read.

Median age doesn't say much about the number of people over 40. Life expectancy in iran is around 70 [1].

Also, the last shah was overthrown in 1979.

[1] http://www.indexmundi.com/iran/life_expectancy_at_birth.html

Resident Assistant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_assistant

Do you mean "communicate"? The word "commune" exists too, but is not quite the same.

I realize the bamboo part is not the point of this post, but can anyone confirm that this is actually how (some) bamboo grows? The only references to it I've found all go back on Coelho's novel. As far as I know/knew, bamboo shoots reach most of their full length in their first year.

From that overview:

"This newer strategy...with fewer releases but more features and changes manifesting in each one...has held through to subsequent Firefox releases to date."

History sure changes fast.

"So long as it is private (probably not for long), our healthcare system will be "the best" -- in terms of quality, but not necessarily cost"

And again a overly broad claim that you don't back up with facts.

Instead of keeping slapping each other over the head with anecdotes - which, to be fair, could only prove my point and not yours, since you made those unqualified claims - let's look at what comparative studies say.

A quick web search gives e.g. [1] and [2]. The general conclusion seems to be that the US health-care system is okay, but certainly not better than that in many other developed countries.

You brought up the "you get what you pay for" argument. In fact, the only thing that stands out for the US system, is its cost. See specifically the second page of [2]. Government costs for health care in the US are higher than in any of the compared countries, even though government spending covers a far smaller part of the total costs.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/health/july-dec09/insura... [2] http://conversations.psu.edu/docs/calkins_comparison.pdf

"Our healthcare system actually is pretty great, if you do not believe me try getting a major surgery done in another country."

I'm amazed that on a website full of such thoughtful sensible people, an American would still have this world view of "there's America and there's the rest of the world, and ours is the best of possible countries".

To give a counter-example to your amazingly broad claim: in Belgium I can have surgery done, spend 4 days in hospital and have everything except 150 euros paid by our universal health-care.

Or were you implying that surgery elsewhere is of lesser quality? A lot of Americans don't seem to agree [1].

[1] 6 Million Americans Travel Abroad Each Year for Surgeries, Medical Treatments: http://news.health.com/2009/04/08/traveling-treatment/

Left middle on T, on a querty-based keyboard? And you've never broken anything? :-)

[1] has what seems to be the classic way, with t and even r being typed my the index finger.

[1] http://www.powertyping.com/qwerty.html

I propose a new law: An observation of the form "Maybe <counter-argument>, but <observation>" can probably be adequately dismissed with <counter-argument>.

From personal (European) experience, I can also recommend it. If moderately used, it's dirt cheap compared to owning a car. I spend about as much on it as just renting a garage would cost me in Brussels.

I was not a heavy car user even when I had a company car, but I do notice that I try to organize things even better so as to e.g. minimize shopping trips (do one trip for the big stuff every x weeks, use public transport or bike for the rest). And that's what the article completely misses: the system encourages behaviour that ultimately benefits the community, regardless of the individual user's noble or less noble intentions. (For the record, I certainly don't see car sharing as a temporary solution before getting my own car.)

Actually, here in Belgium my carsharing service (Cambio) tries very hard to aim at businesses too, although more for traffic between work and home/station than business trips. Since most private use is in the evening or at the weekend, this is an obvious way for them to crank up usage per car.

"Modern gadgets are meant to be disposable machines, not eternal repositories of all your stuff. "

I think that would be a better subject to get worked up about than the feeling you're getting conned because the profit margins on one (optional!) part of your gadget are higher.

I appreciate that you can't go far into technical details in an HN comment, but after a statement like that, you could at least give a pointer to those "good reasons". They might not be as obvious to everyone as you assume.

I think you're being unnecessarily harsh. Sure, that quote is not the best or most subtle summary of his own point, but in my opinion the basic insight and the clear, memorable illustration still make this a worthwhile read for plenty of people, even if not for you.

Love the presentation. Nice work. I tried it with a European City and a bogus city name. Both were processed without complaining. Maybe a validation check would avoid frustrated users that never receive a mail because e.g. they mistyped their city?

With no experience at all, I'd like to add a marketing lesson: if you write a blog post concerning your project, make sure it features an easy link to that project.

Amusing (and recognizable) that you use the long developing time as attention getter and then feel the need to point out that you're really a fast developer. O Vanity. :-) Seriously though, site and API look great. The best of luck with your business.

I like the idea, but have some remarks/questions:

1. I don't understand some of the rules at all, possibly because I haven't read "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace". In particular, the that/which rules seem to detect any that or which after two words. Why?

2. With just the rules that you've implemented and from your example output, it's already very clear that this approach is too crude to be practical. It simply gives too many false positives. For example, of the 5 "smells" found by the a/an rule, 4 are false positives.

To fix this rule, and many others, in a satisfying manner, you'll need to go beyond "knowledge-free" regular expression parsing and add linguistic knowledge to the system (word lists, part of speech tagging, pronunciation, syntactical parsing etc.).

For one example where you'd really need not just annotated word lists but a proper grammar, look at the false positive for the "No serial comma" rule: "In traditional markets, buyers and sellers are responsible for making".

3. I really like the fact that the rules are easily extensible. It might be challenging to maintain that while allowing for the kind of linguistically rich rules proposed above.

4. Even in its current form, the system could do with some indication of weight and/or certainty. Obviously, not all rules are equally important, nor equally reliable. After adding linguistic knowledge, this would become all the more important, since linguistic ambiguity makes many rules probabilistic by definition.

I'm sorry to be negative, but I really can't see the use of linking to a Google Translate version of a very general German article about someone that anyone here already knows plenty about.

Well, except for a bit of a laugh, I guess... ("Earth is alien to him". Right...)

Which, to be fair, is her second bullet point.

I use Cambio for car sharing here in Belgium, and it works great for me. The price for one trip may sometimes feel steep, but overall it works out a lot cheaper for us than owning a car. Even when I had a company car, I paid more for it in taxes than I pay now in an average Cambio month. Also, getting to and from the closest pickup point is often faster than the time my neigbours spend looking for parking spaces.

So I'd recommend looking into it to anyone who doesn't need a car on a daily basis. (Personally, I'm lucky enough to live within a bikeable distance from work.)

I think the article sufficiently demonstrates the relevance, interpreting this as a rare glimpse of the habitual censorship used to misinform the people of NK.

23% of all US car accidents are caused by cell phone use. [1] That's 1.3 million crashes per year. I'd call that a big problem.

[1] http://www.nsc.org/Pages/NSCestimates16millioncrashescausedb...

Actually, studies really show there's no difference between hands-free and hand-held. See e.g. http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/DrivingIssues/2006083010503...

I assume the obvious physical limitation makes at least some drivers more aware that they should keep some focus on the road.

That's actually too rosy a picture of the situation in Europe. While indeed many people have no objective need to own a car, most families do own at least one. We might not have quite the ridiculous amount of cars as the Americans, but large parts of Europe are not that far behind. [1]

More importantly - since this discussion is about driver behavior - if you look at traffic deaths per vehicle, per driven kilometer, or even per inhabitant, the US do better than a lot of European countries. [2] I'm sure that the total disregard for the existing bans on cellphones [3] for drivers is a factor here.

Also, regrettably, Europeans are repeating the mistake that I hear some US cities are now regretting: building giant shopping areas outside the city centers, thereby destroying commerce in those centers and worsening the traffic situation. In one particularly megalomaniac example [4] they want to build a giant shopping center right next to one of the busiest roads in Belgium (the ring around Brussels), less than 10km away from several existing and perfectly fine city centers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_p... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re... [3] http://www.cellular-news.com/car_bans/ [4] http://www.uplace.eu/Default.aspx?PageID=166&Culture=nl

In that case, maybe ghostery.com is more suitable for you.

Also, those numbers actually suggest that by far the most active language group (relatively speaking) on twitter are the Dutch speakers, who are almost all Europeans. Actually, I thought the number and growth for Dutch had to be a mistake, but other sources [1] do suggest the same trends. I'm still sceptical about the numbers though, especially German being hardly used seems at odds with older data about twitter usage [2].

[1]http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/4/T... [2]http://blog.sysomos.com/2010/01/14/exploring-the-use-of-twit...

Usability and design considerations aside, I find it more worrying that this year's campaign seems to be entirely centered around him and that in general Wales is acting more as the face of Wikipedia than he used to. All that can lead to is making the project more vulnerable through personal critique on Wales, like happened with WikiLeaks/Assange.

In Belgium it is indeed illegal to send unsolicited mails, IF it is sent for publicity reasons. The law includes a definition of publicity, the gist of which is "promoting goods, services or a company". It's the sender's task to prove that promotional mail was solicited.