alangou

It works. And it's written by someone who's (a) learned multiple languages himself, (b) done the research on human language learning and memory/expertise to condense an immensely effective method into a book.

He's gathered a vast amount of material for French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and more on his website, https://fluent-forever.com. I've used his pronunciation trainers for Spanish and Japanese, and it's obvious the enormous effort he's put into all of his materials. Wyner obviously loves his work.

Learning a language has no shortcuts - only different methods with varying levels of effectiveness, i.e. fluency gained per hour of work put in. I can say that of all the apps and methods I've tried, from Pimsleur to Rosetta Stone to Duolingo and Memrise, Fluent Forever is by far the most effective one.

I used it to learn Spanish for a few weeks - his approach of learning pronunciation first, then basic vocabulary, seems counterintuitive at first, but it really, really works. Which I found out to my pleasure when I went to Spain on vacation with my friends. Even though they'd studied Spanish all throughout high school, both my pronunciation and my fluency were miles above theirs. I couldn't employ advanced tenses, but as he explains in the book, it'd be impossible for me to fluently internalize more advanced grammar before the simpler forms for any language, anyways.

I've moved on to Japanese for now, since I have a much longer trip there coming up. This will take much, much longer (it's a Category V language versus a Category I language), but so far it's been just as effective at teaching me pronunciation and hiragana/katakana (their phonetic lettering system).

I highly recommend the book - it's practically free at that price. Compare it to the $300 you'd spend on Rosetta Stone and don't hesitate.

I'd certainly be very impressed if cryptocurrencies reached the point where they could affect the economy that much in the near future. The current market capitalization of all cryptos comes out to under $200 billion [1], while the US housing market was nearly $30 trillion as of last December [2]. So it would have to grow 150x somehow.

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/ [2] http://zillow.mediaroom.com/2016-12-30-U-S-Housing-Worth-Rec...

Toutiao is solving the Internet's current most pressing consumer-facing problem - the discovery of relevant content.

It's a problem orthogonal to what Google solved earlier in the millenium, which is roughly "How do I find an answer on the Internet to a question I already have in mind?"

As the Internet has developed, the cost of content creation and data have decreased dramatically. And so the sheer quantity of content has exploded. Every consumer tech company has partially recognized this problem - Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Instagram, Snapchat, and Medium all want to recommend you relevant content, all have adopted feeds of articles and posts and pictures, and all desperately want your continued attention.

At this point, there's likely good content on the Internet for every single person's taste (like Anu said, there's a very long tail of content creators). The service that provides the most relevant selection of it will win consumer interest and usage at the largest scale.

And it certainly seems that Toutiao has leapfrogged everyone else in this regard. I'm very excited (but also a little wary) to see what they come up with in the future.

This is a great move by Walmart.

It is targeted directly at competing more effectively with Amazon. I don’t believe either company is worried about dilution of their respective brands.

What Walmart needs is to keep leveraging its existing strengths — logistics and supply chain, as well as immense amounts of capital — while invigorating its online retail division so that over the next 20 years, they can appeal and sell to their target demographics (which is what millenials will become) with the same stickiness that Amazon does.

Bonobos is popular among young male professionals that are relatively fashion-conscious. There are many workplaces in New York where the majority of new grads and millenials buy most of their wardrobe from Bonobos. The key — Bonobos is often the first place they look at. Andy Dunn has demonstrated he knows how to build a business that’s both sticky and appealing.

He’s joining an online retail division headed by Marc Lore, and a Walmart that is shifting gears to face the Amazon behemoth.

Purchasing Bonobos is part of their strategy of capturing audiences and market-share in the short-term, and of building a portfolio of brands that they can continue to expand for the long-term.

Bonobos (as well as other recent acquisitions), and Jet.com, which Walmart acquired August 2016, are brands that were born online and grew online. These acquisitions mean people like Marc Lore and Andy Dunn, well-versed in the art of courting a customer base through primarily-online channels, are now at Walmart. And I foresee this trend continuing as Walmart’s ship slowly but steadily steers towards the age of online retail.

I would say that's a misreading of his intent - informing developers about the contract law governing their employment is to help people not get burned at a later date because they were iffy about the details of this or that clause.

Of course, being informed about it may very well discourage some people from pursuing side projects. But then this comes down to whether you'd rather have developers continue with their side projects oblivious to the potential consequences of doing so.

Difficult-to-use software is most often the fault of bad design - and "software is everywhere" is precisely the reason we should care about making things easier and more accessible. The dozens or hundreds of engineering hours to revamp a feature or a set of controls could save tens of thousands of user hours over the lifetime of the software (especially if you have a significant number of useres).

And gives you a leg up on the competition.