josai

> Spotify - doesn't allow you to buy premium [..] if you have a non-US credit card

Huh? I assuredly have spotify premium on an Australian credit card, and I know people with it in other countries too. Spotify isn't even a US company.

But no-one said "kike". You guys regexed it out of a larger word, a totally reasonable word. My point is that no-one but you would even have that word in their regex, so it's wrong to get all upset about it.

Without wishing to otherwise get involved at all, I'd like to say that as an Australian native english speaker, I have never heard of the word "kike" or that it is apparently a slur against jews. Why would anyone else in the world know that?

I have nothing against jews, but it pisses me off that some local slang is elevated into a global "character sequence you can't use", so long as that slang originates in NYC. Imagine if every other city had that privilege; we wouldn't be able to name anything.

Aren't you forgetting the small detail that China is literally ten times the size of Japan?

Even if your claim is true, and you don't present any evidence to that effect, the order of magnitude size difference makes it rather a different ball game.

React is a library, not a framework. What's your router? What's your model? What's your buildchain, how do you deploy, how do you do ajax requests, etc etc etc?

Facetious comments like this help nobody. There's not a site in the world "just" using react + webpack. And I say this as someone who works with a react and webpack site.. oh and backbone, and gulp, and rsvp, and requirejs, and another 70 lines in package.json.

> > Apple invented the smartphone (and the tablet)

> No they didn't

While you're technically correct, the iPhone was such a leap over any previous effort that it basically redefined the meaning of the word. If you showed an iPhone 1 to someone today, they'd at least recognise it as an (old) smartphone. A blackberry from the same era? I very much doubt it, and frankly I'd agree. The word now means "iphone 1 or better".

You're right about myspace though (and friendster before them)

The article touched on smartphones, but I think missed a point - a huge part of the recent "acceptability" of public transport is that people have got something to do during their trip. In fact I kind of get the feeling people almost welcome bus/train trips now as a chance to get in some uninterrupted "phone time"! Previously, unless you brought a book, riding public transport meant a long look out the window. I think that's huge.

Interesting that no-one has mentioned weibo, the chinese "copy" of twitter (hint: it's not actually a copy). I think weibo is a fantastic product that's ahead of twitter in many respects.

Just off the top of my head, weibo has:

- the "event" grouping that dcurtis mentions and a better topic grouping system ("micro topics")

- rich multimedia as a first class citizen (photo galleries especially are very popular)

- payments built-in - you can donate to or pay anyone on the platform. This is especially used in time of disaster. Weibo escrows the money for a bit to make sure the recipient is legitimate, btw

- properly threaded conversations, easy to follow

- a much more fleshed-out verified account system and the dev integration to connect companies to the system

I'm aware that what works in china may not work for twitter, but looking at what they're doing seems like a pretty good starting point.

> I just don't believe global consumers will choose China over USA, Europe, Japan, South Korea

That seems pretty short-sighted. Maybe you're quite young, but 15 years ago korean cars had a shocking reputation, and japanese 20 years before that. 10 years ago I wouldn't have even considered a crappy cheap korean television, now LG and samsung are tier-1 brands. And subjectively the label "made in china" doesn't have the negative ring it seemed to just a few years ago.

Consumer sentiment can change pretty fast.

Quite interesting to see how different experiences people can have with Apple Music. Mine is that it's a disaster - even with the latest updates I have "synced" songs which simply won't play, synced songs which have been somehow misidentified and the track that plays is wrong, random songs greyed out in albums, band pages listing the wrong songs - I could go on and on. It's literally unusable.

I'd love to be able to use one service that "solves" music for me but Apple Music isn't even close and I'm astounded at how botched the release has been.

So yeah. Your mileage may vary... quite wildly, apparently!

> have you used Apple Music and has this feature failed you?

Absolutely. I have a number of mix CDs (above and beyond, mainly) where apple music has apparently looked up the songs by title and artist only and replaced all the tracks in a mix CD with single versions of those songs, needless to say not mixed. I also have other songs which simply refuse to sync.

The article says: If you subscribe to both iTunes Match and Apple Music, then iTunes matches your songs using digital fingerprinting - but I thought Apple Music included iTunes match. Do I seriously have to sign up for another product as well to get this working? Not very impressed.

Really? Can I get a second endorsement from someone?

I have had great luck reading books recommended on HN but am on the fence about this one.

Hm. I wonder about some of these results. That number for chicago is wild - that would be clearly visible, serious pollution. And my old haunt BKK, which I left specifically because of the awful air, 32!? The city where I would come home from work with a grey shirt that was white when I left is cleaner than zurich? From personal experience in both cities I assure you it is not.

It's anecdotal, I know, but I wonder about some of this data.

Hey, thanks for sharing your local experience. I've only visited! I thought uber black runs audis in BJ but I only heard that from a friend. Maybe I or he was confused.

Out of interest, why do you have issues sleeping with the window closed? Frankly, it would be extremely rare for me to sleep with the windows open no matter where I am.

Hm, I've had people tell me that they prefer uber (or the other app you mentioned - i couldn't remember its name) because the cars tend to be better, and with better air filtering. Maybe that gave me the impression it's more popular than it actually is.

Certainly I'd spend a couple bucks more to sit for an hour (or more!) in an audi or VW over a hyundai..

Oops, right you are. Corrected.

Pollution in HK is nowhere near as bad as beijing, though. SZ's better but does have its moments.

It's not everyday, but when the 'Jing has a bad day, it's really something else. I don't know how people live there, it's terrible and you can just feel it damaging your lungs. It encourages this positive feedback loop too - the pollution is so bad you want to take a car everywhere, which of course contributes to the pollution!

I wouldn't be surprised if a fair portion of uber's success in CN is due to people not wanting to walk in the toxic smog. Would be interesting to see a graph of pollution index vs. ride numbers.

[edit: positive not negative]

> Could this be used as initial propeler to raise a rocket high enough to use this technique as a "first stage engine" in flying object out into space?

I don't really see how. You'd need some kind of gigantic and fairly stable platform to shoot the jet from - if you have that, it would be easier to just launch the rocket from that.

And you're forgetting the fact that we seldom just launch stuff "into space" - we want it in orbit. Only about 20% of the delta-v budget of a typical launch to orbit is the "vertical" component, the large majority is spent on attaining angular ("sideways") velocity. So you'd be doing an awful lot of work just to cut down that 20% by, say, a quarter - it's simply not worth it.

Well, I agree, but I think that horse has bolted long ago. The article discusses the risk of extended loud listening with headphones, which employees buy themselves (I've never heard of an employer buying headphones).

My point was that as long as you're buying headphones anyway, buy some good noise-cancelling ones, and you'll mitigate a lot of the risks in the article. It does suck that it's on employees to do this, but here we are.

A pair of Bose QC25's has been my most objectively productive purchase this last year. I highly recommend anyone in an open plan office to buy some, or something like them - they're expensive but worth every cent.

> have not seen one yet

Perhaps that's because the kind of person who has this kind of attitude, and who'd create an account called "tddfuckwitz" to come and spout it on HN, doesn't make a very good impression on the kind of rails devs who do know what they're doing, so you don't win them as clients.

- signed, a professional rails dev who takes security and code quality very seriously indeed

Just because it's not yet the worst police state ever doesn't mean people can't voice concerns.

The guy I was replying to was arguing against SRP and proposing his own ad-hoc solution.

> ...Which is why I said "over a secure connection".

... and how do you set up a secure connection without a pre-existing password?

Your solution has a chicken-and-egg problem.

This account doesn't have enough karma to downvote anyone :-P

Your comment was also a ridiculous over-simplification. My reply was a bit facetious, which was probably silly of me. But whatever. We both fail at arguing; I have not influenced you nor have you influenced me.

Anyway, it appears that I'm now treading on people's toes so that's enough from me.

I'm sorry to hear about your experiences, I mean that. But I don't see how that has much to do with what we're talking about.

I wish you'd step back from your personal trauma and look at the big picture. You say this "terrorist" group caused the rise of a dictator and the loss of free speech and democracy. Why didn't free speech and democracy stop such instability in the first place, if they're such a panacea like you seem to think? Because that's exactly what I'm talking about - the ingredients of a stable, wealthy, secure and fulfilling society.

Of course, the irony is that that would have never happened in Singapore.

I've lived and worked extensively in singapore, thailand and china, all with speech controls. They all have their pros and cons and I'd be hard pressed to categorically state they're better or worse than my home country of Australia.

> you dont have to live in such a place

True, and neither do they. Singapore's a first world country; its citizens can settle elsewhere with relative ease. And yet they don't. I wonder why?

And just to turn your rhetorical device against you, what I've heard "so many times" is these self-righteous rants by people who have never even visited the place they're criticising, but they're oh so sure they're right anyway. And for what it's worth, the USA is an experiment too, and from an outsider's perspective I'm not sure it's working out too well.

I am sick of seeing "free speech" treated almost as religious dogma, as if it is axiomatically good. It's not - it's just a theory that unrestricted free speech will lead to a better society. Frankly, I don't think that is anywhere near proven yet (nor do I think even democracy has been "proven" to work long-term).

I actually like that there's lots of little experiments going on, trying any number of positions on all the little dials of society. Time will tell which ones work.

> unlike the British or continental European sense of nausea, dread, anti-semitism, nationalism, requiring one's brother to be one's keeper, and so on

What utter nonsense.