father_of_two

> Foreigners who have been in the following countries in the prior 14 days: Iceland, Ireland, Angola, Italy, Iran, Estonia, Austria, Netherlands, San Marino, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Slovenia, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Vatican, France, Belgium, Portugal, Malta, Monaco, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg.

Thanks for the list. Angola looks an outlier, though. Would it be Andorra instead?

Ditto. We have been hearing so many negative things about the US that it really scares even to think going there, being it as a tourist, on business, whatever.

Mugabe honest?!

I don't know about Crew but Toptal seems just like remote body shopping. Seems the freelancer gets locked in working for toptal. Not a real freelancing scheme like odesk and such.

They could just have rebranded themselves as "cheap" or "bottom" because that's what those platforms promote. I appreciate the efforts they've tried to improve the platform(s) but they're dealing with something no one was able to fix yet: solve the lack of scalability of work-people matching.

Even SV clients get as cheap as they can. I had one -- from SF bay, not exactly SV -- which agreed to pay me 75$ to create a function to write text into images at two different possible positions (bottom and centered). Ok, cheap, but it was a 1h or 2h work. Done. Then he started asking more positions, gradient backgrounds, a command line interface, then a REST interface... when I asked him JUST 250$ for the whole deal, he went nuts.

Now I'm back to consulting, where I get more than the double of that per day. odesk and similar crapy sites suck.

  In many other European countries it is difficult 
  (or impossible?) to find subscriptions with similar
  pricing.

It's pretty much leveled, give it or take it a few. Here's a current Portuguese pricing plan: €30,99/month, unlimited data, 4G+ connection (up to 300 Mbps, though 150 Mbps is a more realistic figure).

You can use one of those "world sim" cards to get cheaper connectivity when you cross the border. Check http://airbalticcard.com/ for example.

wodenokoto, don't get me wrong. I'm not even a native English speaker, let alone an US or UK citizen. But this issue is just overwhelming.

I recon that Asian countries, not only Japan and China, but also India, for example, are not so exposed to US as Europe, or America (continent) or Africa. I guess this has as much of cultural as historical -- for instance, Japan has always been a pretty much isolated culture historically speaking.

Oh the languages again. Many people don't know that it was the US, and not the UK, who mostly contributed to the spread of English -- of course one might argue that US talk English in first place due to the UK. That world-wide'fication started after the WWII. In Europe, for instance, the number of students learning English as first foreign language only surpassed French ones by the 50s and 60s in most countries (sorry, can't point now to the document in which I saw this info).

Why was it so massive? Due the huge world-wide US influence associated with the mass communication that was being established as mainstream by that time. It were the movies, the TV shows, the music. On tech it were the electronics, then computer science and then internet. Suddenly it was a snowball: the aeronautics, the navigation, the research papers, the international treaties, you name it... all in English.

We've got to a point where if a given music is in its original language, it runs the risk of being mostly unknown, but if it's translated to English, it might be a huge success (see Claude François's Comme d'habitude vs Frank Sinatra's My Way, just to name one).

No language can ever surpass English until all this shifts to that language, and that's very unlikely to happen. US made it big at the right time, now it's too late change that.

When medium articles are too long to read.

That was just kidding, though.

Click-bait alert!

This is just an US article about Europe, which falls in the same spectrum of English telling History or Silvia Saint praising virginity.

  much of Europe lags behind, with countries in the south 
  and east in particular struggling with slower, less 
  reliable 3G and even 2G 

Oh the 'lagging-primitive-corrupt and who knows what else' southern European countries again. Here's some info. Portugal has 3G since 2006 and 4G (by all ops) since 2011.

Jesus! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3kcnm2THXI

Just relax :)

Ask not why some people are so smart, ask why so many are dumb. :)

  (...) jobless builders presented her with a gift: a life-size sculpture of a 
  hand with a raised middle digit. She keeps the artifact prominently 
  displayed on a coffee table at her office in the European Commission.

Got to love the Danes :)

Another give-away against open-offices is that people who decides them usually reserve a single office for thy selves.

A real story: a given company moved to new, but existing, installations. The original facilities were organized in small rooms. The boss ordered a full redesign of the interior into a single large open space, with one exception: a closed office for himself.

This ancient philosophy of "what's good for others doesn't suit me" never convinced me. :)

I started my career working at a team room, which was exclusive for the technical people and had no more than 7 people at its peak. Then progressively went from open-office to open-office.

And man, how I hate those. I can't get focus, which forces me to bring the deep-thinking work home, proceeding on a two-shift day, similar to what Paul Graham describes on the "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html). Even simple things like sending a page-length email took more time than needed, and were high frustrating.

Yet, recently I've been working on a company which only have team rooms. I'm on a 3 persons' room, but the rooms vary from 1 to 6 persons. Furthermore they have lots of perforated plates on ceilings and rooms are (mostly) sound isolated from adjacent ones by a foam-like thing they stuff between the division separations.

When I started here I just had that -wow- moment. I couldn't believe I was actually doing software design, reading documentation and others immerse thinking tasks during normal work time. No need to carry stuff home no more.

Did I mentioned already how I hate open-offices? :)

"I have a football team, therefore I exist."

I'm sure Descartes would rephrase his famous though to something like the above, had he been contemporaneous of us (and tweet it as well).

These Liberlandeers need to create a proper national football team first to be recognized. Being between Croatia and Serbia, they should have no problem in getting good players.

Almost all of these European micro-states have national football teams which compete. Even Gibraltar has a team now (their home games are in Portugal). Vaticano doesn't have a team though, and I don't remember seeing Monaco as well.

The footer alludes to that: "Peter Norvig (Copyright 2001—2014)"

I tracked the page on web archive, and it existed at least since 1998. Here is a funny edit over the years:

  1998: Let's analyze what a title like Learn Pascal in Three Days could mean:
  2009: Let's analyze what a title like Learn C++ in Three Days could mean:
  2014: Let's analyze what a title like Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours could mean:

:)

Here's a variant of the last solution the author presented, using a Counter of each word, instead a sorted list of words' chars, as normalization.

  cnt=Counter(tuple(Counter(w).iteritems()) for w in words)
  print [w for w in words if cnt[tuple(Counter(w).iteritems())] > 1]

This is just code golfing, I don't even think it's clear. The last solution of the author is nice, though.

Hey, very nice. I knew about the "new" format() but didn't know it was so powerful.

There is also scsh (scheme shell - http://scsh.net/) although not being maintained anymore.

As an EU citizen and consumer, here's my message to European Commission: SCREW YOU!

I would like to know why is it so hard (and expensive) to buy a car on a foreign EU country and legalize it on other, I don't know why am I still paying robbery-like roaming "costs", I don't how is it possible to be considered fiscal resident simultaneous on 2 different countries and why citizens has still to resort to individual country-to-country specific deals to avoid double taxation within EU.

And I could just keep going on... BUT they are worried with a freaking search engine! Piss off.

I'm not surprised with Singapore's kids being smart, but Albert and Bernard really impressed me :) Here's a solver in python (just an hack, don't unleash hate on me).

  import collections

  dates = '''may 15 may 16 may 19
             jun 17 jun 18
             jul 14 jul 16
             aug 14 aug 15 aug 17 '''

  def dups(xs,pos):
      return [k for k,v in collections.Counter(x[pos] for x in xs).items() if v>1]

  days = dates.split()[1::2]
  months = dates.split()[0::2]
  dts = [(d,m) for d,m in zip(days, months)]
  # A doesn't know, and knows B doesn't know-- cut days occurring once
  dts = [dt for dt in dts if all(not(dt[0]==d or dt[1]==m)
           for d,m in zip(days, months) if days.count(d)==1)]
  # now B knows-- cut dup days
  dts = [dt for dt in dts if dt[0] not in dups(dts,0)]
  # A also knows-- cut months with more than 1 day
  dts = [dt for dt in dts if dt[1] not in dups(dts,1)]
  print dts

"permanent PIP" -- didn't got this part, can you explain?

  that couldn't stand doing group projects in school

Hm, how did you found that about me? :-)

Not being an expert on the subject, I think the trend is to have a progressive increase rate in suicides along the age. I don't know where this 40s figure comes from.

http://goo.gl/j7pOgc -- this is a study about suicide in Portugal and Spain. If you look at "Figura 13" (suicide by age on men) and "Figura 14" (suicide by age for women), that pattern is clear (they even explicitly mention it on the text as a classical pattern).

Eurostats data ( http://goo.gl/UyTqtE ) features a similar pattern, although it seems they lack a few age groups!

Average workers' monthly pay (year/12) as of 2013 for some of the UE28 countries, in euros:

  DK 3739
  LU 3009
  FI 2622
  IE 2621 
  DE 2574
  ES 1634
  GR 1028
  PT 984
  HR 848
  PL 693
  BG 316

I started using vi in the 90s and got very used to it. It's still my standard text editor (the nvi implementation, that is).

I've never grasped vim. It was too slow at the time and the extended command set consumed all the free keys I use to have available to do my own macros (eg: 'q' 'g').

I reckon vim grew to be much more than an editor, it is now an editing plataform, capable of so many things, and contains lots of shortcuts / builtins for common text-editing situations.

The article above contains many vim-only commands. For example 'di>' ("delete inner angle-block") doesn't exist on standard vi, neither the '>aB' ("indent a Block").

Here's my own version of an iterating chunker (itertools needed imports omitted).

  def chunks_of(it, n):
    return takewhile(len, imap(list, imap(islice, repeat(it), repeat(n))))

But this library functions adds error checking and are more expressive (I wrote the above and always have to look at it lenghty to understand it).

I've not paid much attention yet to the license scheme, but if it's friendly to be used on commercial projects, I might take the plunge.

seq has the -s flag which voids the need of the paste for that command:

  $ seq -s + 10 20
  10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20

But I agree that the paste is very useful.

  # a few random samples for an IN SQL statement
  $ shuf -i 1-500000 -n 5 | paste -s -d ,
  371492,250061,266669,455846,295852

  # we can even get PI
  $ ( seq -s + -f '4/%g' 1 4 100000 && seq -s - -f '4/%g' 3 4 100000 ) | paste -s -d - | bc -l
  3.14157265358979523735

A solution in the spirit of the post using itertools:

    >>> from itertools import islice,count
    >>> sum(x*x for x in islice(count(1),10))
    385