ewolf

Very nice, clean overview! Please add an RSS/Atom feed so I can add you to my Google Reader :)

That's a very narrow-minded way of looking at success. The success of a state is much more than just attaining wealth — it's about serving the people and giving them all possible opportunities to pursue their dreams and live a happy life. Money is just a means to be able to carry out these tasks.

And there are enough statistics out there to prove that money is far from leading the list of things that matter most to the happiness of humans.

PS: (And in a country with as many immigrants as Singapore, I'm sure the issue of foreign languages is self solving :-)

The three ethnic groups in Singapore get in touch with each other quite well, that's true, but contact with any other culture such as European ones is rare (expats just stay amongst themselves). Furthermore, learning a language requires more than just knowing native speakers.

While Singapore may not foster a startup culture as it can be found in many parts of the USA, a population of 5 million (with 1/3 immigrants) is certainly hard to compare to 308 million.

True, the article certainly leaves out a lot there. I would, however, attribute Singapore's success to their own good leadership. The Brits certainly were not the ones who developed it to what it is today.

This is a very simplified view of the education system in Singapore. Of course education should be important, but it can also go too far.

I've been in Singapore for 1 year as an exchange student. While I managed to cope well, many slightly less talented students suffer from the great workload and have almost no free time. In a middle class secondary school, about 95% of the children need tuition to keep up with school. Weeks or even months before their exams, all free time is eliminated and dedicated to studying.

The learning itself isn't perfect either. It's heavily focused on memorization and involves no oral participation. Foreign languages are almost never taught; math and natural sciences matter the most. Competition is promoted instead of teamwork (not only amongst students, but also amongst teachers and civil servants in general). The teachers are ranked according to their students' results, which does work as a motivator, but discourages them to explain any background information or topics that are not required from exams.

Parents urge their children to get the best degree they can in order to be able to take up the best paying job they can find. Money is the measure and not personal satisfaction. Arts, therefore, are not very popular.

I'm highlighting here all negative aspects to contrast the posted article; of course it is good that Singapore does promote education and the education system certainly works better than the ones of most other countries. Also, this is not directly related to Singapore, but represents the Confucianist mentality that one can find to a lot extremer extents in Japan, China and Korea.

It is a productive purpose, but a very obvious one — designing a 3D object requires 3D display.

We keep seeing impressive 3D interfaces for regular everyday tasks in sci-fi movies, so I was just wondering whether this way of displaying information actually is useful.

I agree that market share is important, but I think Microsoft will face some serious issues turning market share into profit. Both Apple and Amazon skim the profits off their huge ecosystem here, but Microsoft doesn't have any equivalent.

Certainly a cool demo — but has anyone already seen a use of 3D in CSS/WebGL for a productive purpose? I'd be really interested in that; showing the atoms/molecules in 3D, as it is the suggested in one of the comments in the link @mmahemoff posted, for example, seems like a great idea.

My thoughts exactly — Microsofts didn't invent the PC, the GUI, the internet, etc. but neither did Apple. Ideas don't matter, execution does.

The Surface, while not as perfect as it perhaps should have been, certainly is a promising device, and I thus wouldn't yet write Microsoft off as doomed.

What would be the exact reason that less cars would be needed?

Are you referring to multiple cars in one household becoming superfluous? This would, of course, only be the case if driverless driving would be permitted entirely — I can very well imagine a prolonged transition phase where a human being needs to be able to intervene at all times.

Or are there already plans for automatic car sharing? This could be easily opposed by promoting the opinion that having an own car that is customized to your personal needs and where you can leave your belongings bears an advantage big enough to buy one.

Of course, ecologically, it would be great if both of this would be permitted, but my point is, autonomous cars could be introduced without car manufacturers incurring any immediate losses.

I currently see Google taking the lead in the development of driverless cars, so I suppose car makers will be left with no choice.

I noticed the issue with the GitHub icon — it seems that my hoster is caching something. I'll fix it asap.

Thanks :)

Unfortunately, almost no website has a push API for notifications (or anything else). In the app I mentioned below, I'm gathering notifications from Facebook, Forrst, StackExchange and unread emails from Gmail — I have to poll for every one of those.

Finally! I've been waiting for this :) In case anyone of you likes to get notified about new issues, issue comments etc. on his homepage (like I do), you might want to have a look at http://updatified.com/ ;)

I love how number 1, 2, and 4 are Singaporean :D Nerd country!

That's one awful lot of parantheses for a hello world.

I agree on some points, yet I believe the author exaggerates during most of his article.

PushState, for example, is not a bandaid, and for those not-so-modern browsers there are hashtags (let's be frank: 99.9% of users don't care about how beautiful or ugly their URIs are and even less about one particular character).

In many cases such as WYSIWYG editors, which he mentions, Javascript is the only way (HN users might prefer Markdown, but for most average users, that's already too complicated). New HTML5 input types are awesome, but they are in this case the advanced fragile technologies that currently lack a broad support base.

I particularly disagree on the last two points: These days, Javascript and CSS is minified, sprites are used on basically all popular sites and content is gzipped. Many people even use a CDN for their JS frameworks. Loading time optimization is a topic more important than ever before. The same goes for mobile versions: I see a lot of people even offering a mobile-optimized version of their portfolio.

He is certainly right saying that these aspects are all very important, but I don't really see the lack thereof in practice. Any examples, perhaps?

Those data are "calibrated against a baseline score of 1,000 (which is the score of a single-processor Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz)".

The score of 629 for the iPhone 4S and 766 for the iPad is "calibrated against a baseline score of 1,000 (which is the score of a single-processor Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz)" (see http://browser.primatelabs.com/ios-benchmarks) — not that big a difference, thus.

They certainly contributed to the web, even if part of their contribution was rather counter-productive (IE, we're looking at you!). But you have to admit that it's quite embarrassing for a company as well-known and large as Microsoft to finally use HTML5/Canvas on a website and still not being able to draw smooth curves.

"A collaboration with Internet Explorer" and everything's jaggy on a big screen — can't deny the irony. When will Microsoft finally learn how to properly use web technology?

Regarding the link copy issue: They could've just added an automatic redirect/URI change on page load. Too bad they didn't think of that.

Schopenhauer is not entirely ironic about the unrelatedness of truth and argument. It is true that usually, both parties believe to know it and therefore, it is unknown most of the time. It is also true that, just because you are not able to reply to one of your opponent's arguments, that does not mean that he is right and you are wrong. Countless other arguments for your position may still convince you and thus, some tricks can be useful — especially, if an audience is to be convinced.

It's somewhat sarcastic because Schopenhauer states that there is no relationship between the art of debate/convincing and the truth or seeking the truth. His advice, however, is perfectly valid and can be used and, to some extent, is used intuitively, every day.

I'd recommend reading the entire essay, though - the summary on Wikipedia is very brief and also, this is the only essay written by a philosopher I've ever read that actually made me laugh.