jisaacstone

Ha! that is true. In my experience 'culture' means 'drinks microbrews and knows _all the memes_ '

I use ghostery because all I really care about is tracking. 99% of the time ads themselves are not an issue.

When I ran a retail shop in the US I never accepted AMEX because the fees were significantly higher, mostly because of the flat monthly fee and low volume of people using AMEX.

Frankly I don't know how they are still around. Since everyone with AMEX always has a back-up card there is no incentive at all for merchants to accept it.

I am reminded

I never liked anything on facebook (via a 'like' button) but I do have several likes.

Before the facebook feed , before even the facebook wall, the personal information field of your profile was a text blob. Over time facebook parsed this information and matched it to pages, giving me likes.

Now i get updates from films in my feed because 7 years ago I added them to a text field called 'movies/tv'

Doesn't bother me because I hardly use facebook anymore. But it is interesting to think how it has changed.

It is totally fair. People (especially in the valley) tend to think small is better/more efficient than big. But what are the statistics on actual failure rates?

Start-ups that 'succeed' (buyouts, etc) for their founders can still fail before making any real difference in the actual marketplace.

Nothing against Instacart, but that first picture must become like the second before history will call them 'successful'

For the curious, there is some actual data about this kind of thing over here: http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings

The United States does rank higher than any European economy (which surprised me) in the aggregate ranking, there are categories where it is well behind.

It bugs me that the hyperlinks are black & w/o underline. I was only able to figure out they were links by thinking for a minute and deciding that they must be, because what else could they be?

But they sure do look like body text.

_________

edit: Everything is fantastic otherwise. Sorry to be so negative w/o posting any of my initial reaction(which was completely positive)

Yes, I felt this was correct but I could not find anything to cite. Vague threats did not seem the correct way to go.

I just read about the Fair Credit Reporting Act and that seems to be exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks a bunch.

yes it is false but that was not my reasoning. I was merely trying to draw parallels between a time people are probably familiar, saying that there is no use comparing modern China to a developed country. It is not a modern country, but it is so "rich" and "powerful" people (like the OP) get that idea in their head and become inevitably disillusioned.

Perhaps I could have made a parallel to Brazil or Thailand?

No analogy is complete.

No, I am not sure as I don't follow closely anymore. I heard about the downfall of Bo but hadn't really considered the consequences. Mostly I was speaking of the climate when I left in 2008

False. Factories are having increasing difficulty in retaining workers and are therefore having to either raise wages, improve conditions, or bully them into submission. Supply and demand, no?

Demand is currently high.

Things are not great for workers, but there is hardly a surplus anymore.

Take a moment and conciser how a similar piece, written of the United states around the turn of the last century, might read.

Remember the 'roaring 20s?' Materialistic society, ambivalence about foreign affairs, widespread corruption, distrust of foreigners. A Chinese who owned a tea shop in a small town may well have to beg for a renewed lease, yes?

Well, China is not the United States, but lets put things in perspective. At the moment neither the leaders nor the people of China want to be a 'world leader' so why do we keep talking about it as if they do? China has its own problems and most Chinese are well aware of it.

China is not yet a rich country. Its Per Capita GDP (PPP) is about the same as Ecuador or Belize.

Right now things in China are not so great. It seems the Conservatives are back in power and so there has been some increased restrictions of freedom after a couple decades of improvement. Corruption continues to be a problem. The price of groceries, as well as property, has been increasing.

But the overall trend is upward. The author of this piece has fallen afoul of the Guanxi networks of business and politics in China. Sorry, yes, they don't play fair. But I am hopeful at the turn of the next century China will be as prosperous and egalitarian as my own United States of America.

"food, which they praise for its quality and variety (and portion size) in a tone of near-disbelief"

huh, really? Whenever I get back from traveling I feel the opposite.

Sure in places like NY you can get any kind of food. But in my mono-cultural hometown there is little besides hamburgers or pizza.

What I want from the government:

- more transparency

- more data

From the article these don't actually seem to be the _focus_ of the initiative, but it seems that they will be marginally improved as a result.

hooray

OK so this chart really bugs me:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/pix-media/TV+Categories.png

Why is the bottom line 8%? and why are the y-axis lines ate 8% intervals? No reason I can see.

Is it not obvious that starting at 0 and using intervals of 5 or 10 makes it easier for people to grasp the relevant information clearly?

</rant>

Annoyed me so much I quit reading half way through.

Not just that it is ugly, but also hard to read. ugh.

using bpython has encouraged me to write more docstrings, which I previously did not do so much for personal projects ...

(because they are right there in the interpreter)

I also think math classes could be better if they were built around an interactive interpreter.

perhaps all sciences?

Exactly what I came here to say.

Let us not forget the difference between scripting and software. Shell scripts or bookmarklets or greasemonkey/browser plugins - These can be useful to the majority of workers.

Many have a specific problem that could be made much easier by coding but never will be address by professional coders.

As a minor note, I learnt a new word today:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/therere

I had a friend in prison some years ago. He said the worst thing wan there was nothing to do. Most people slept 12+ hours a day & when they got out they couldn't adjust.

So yeah, I feel any productive activity is a damn good idea.

Damn, I never new there was a CAPTCHA.

really really really makes me suspicious. Just did a check to make sure that google does not integrate yelp reviews (it does not) since that is what I mostly use.

also worth noting that "bob" liked the company so much he cross-posted his review to google.

Rather interesting to see his google review history, as long as we are speculating . . .

http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=213714492309658467573&#...

_____

edit: also a bit of fun to compare these two reviews:

http://www.mymovingreviews.com/movingreviews/myself-and-my-f...

http://www.yelp.com/biz/royal-transportation-moving-and-stor...

agreed. to conclude "more slowly" there needs to be more than just syllable counting.

For example, would not "strengths" be considered one syllable?

I don't know about Japanese, but Mandarin has a linguistic syllabic structure that would not allow for such long syllables.

The FBI's tactics for finding bomb-makers would presumably find a bomb-laden passenger as well then?

I forget everything all the time.

I have found a great solution for this, but it is not an IDE(!)

It is the bpython CLI. (I hear ipython is good too)

When I forget some string method's name, I just type "str." and a dialog box appears with all the options. If I am learning a new module I use "help(<function>)" or "<function>.__doc__"

oh yeah, and there is auto-complete. and syntax highlighting.

This is fairly true in my experience.

I find solving puzzles at codeeval much more interesting than crafting custom cover letters, and the ease of applying means I'll more likely apply to a company there than elsewhere.

OTOH I don't think I'd classify myself as an "A" player, at least not yet. The more I learn the more I find I need to learn &tc.

(haven't heard back for anyone yet though. Probably a bunch of good applicants inundating their hiring team as well.)

yes! when I close my eyes I usually see something like a checkerbord spiral, only not rotating, and there are several of them centered around different points and intersecting.

Awesome and Awesome.

Looks like today is the day that I learn clojure! ^^

Turns out I don't seem to understand closures.

I mean I use what I think are closures in Javascript, but I thought they were to 'prevent the pollution of the global namespace' (a noble endeavor). I don't get how it relates to map, reduce(fold?) & filter.

I think the problem is not the failure to admit - most entrepreneurs would admit the struggle with honesty. It is more like an availability heuristic - success stories make the news, failures usually do not, and so many people have no idea what the success rate is.