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pilaf

657 karma · joined September 8, 2013

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pilaf··on Latin American delivery startup Rappi valued above $1B
There's no Uber Eats in Buenos Aires yet though, and it would probably be a pretty dangerous endeavor given how violently taxi drivers have been reacting against Uber drivers. Any person on a bicycle or skates with an Uber logo on them would essentially become a moving target for some frenzied taxi driver to run over.
pilaf··on Generating random points inside a sphere
I couldn't see any spheres at all so I was confused by your comment, which led me to realize WebGL wasn't working, which in turn reminded me I had disabled hardware acceleration in Chrome long ago because of some bug which made browsing unbearably slow. I've now re-enabled it and it seems the bug has since been fixed. So, thank you!
pilaf··on Spanish Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law
What about "Spanish language Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law"?
pilaf··on Spanish Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law
Translation of the shutdown text:

Dear reader,

On July 5, 2018, the plenary of the European Parliament will vote on whether to proceed with a proposal for a directive on copyright. If approved, this would significantly damage the open Internet as we know it today.

Instead of updating copyright laws in Europe and promoting the participation of all citizens in the information society, the directive would threaten online freedom and impose new filters, barriers and restrictions on access to the Web. If the proposal was approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news article on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated; even Wikipedia would be at risk.

So far, dozens of relevant people in the field of IT have strongly opposed this proposal - among them the creator of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, and the Internet pioneer, Vinton Cerf - 169 academics, 145 human rights, press freedom, scientific research and technological development organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that promotes this encyclopedia, among other projects for free knowledge.

For these reasons, the Spanish language Wikipedia community has decided to shut down all the pages of the encyclopedia before and during the vote, i.e. until 10 am (UTC) on July 5. We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free publication with verifiable content. We call on all Members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the many proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge, including the deletion of Articles 11 and 13, the extension of freedom of panorama throughout the EU and the preservation of the public domain.

In other countries of the Spanish-speaking world, such as Colombia and Mexico, the Wikipedia community has recently opposed similar proposals. We ask you to keep up to date with their development and support this effort.

For more information on the campaign in the European Parliament and how to act, visit https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_vote_in_.... You can follow the communication on social networks with the tags #WikipediaSeApaga, #SalvemosInternet and #SaveYourInternet.

The Spanish Wikipedia community

pilaf··on Spanish Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law
I think it should be noted that this is the entire Spanish language Wikipedia, not Spanish as in "from Spain", so this shutdown affects a lot of people (estimated 350 million native Spanish speakers worldwide).

I haven't seen the community discussion that led to this decision, but assuming that it was democratically decided across collaborators from the entire Spanish-speaking world, I think gives the protest a lot more weight than the title may suggest.

pilaf··on Ember.js 3.1 and 3.2 Beta Released
He probably meant something like this on the second case:

Ember.assert(`calling set('${inspect(keyName)}') on a destroyed object ${inspect(obj)}`, !obj.isDestroyed);

pilaf··on What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?
In Argentina and some other South American countries bidets are standard and found in almost every bathroom. They're usually not integrated into the toilet as the Japanese type, they're a separate fixture, but serve the same purpose. You still need toilet paper though, at the very least to dry yourself up after using the bidet, but common usage is to wipe first, then use the bidet to finish the job.
pilaf··on Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
Funnily enough Yahoo! is still one of the top websites in Japan and still looks like it did back in 1999: https://www.yahoo.co.jp/
pilaf··on Show HN: A cryptocurrency news scraper inspired by Hacker News
> could care less

Bait?

pilaf··on Tokyo street fashion and culture: 1980 – 2017
There's a very well put together video about the history of Tokyo street fashion and music from the 70s till today on YouTube. Worth a watch for the visuals alone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmsxWmKz-B8

pilaf··on #c0ffee is the color
> #111135 -> LILIES

That's really stretching it.

pilaf··on The foreign words that seem like English, but aren't
At least in Argentina (not sure about other Spanish-speaking countries) "handy" is used for walkie-talkies, but not cell phones. I wonder if it comes from the German use of that word, or if both languages borrowed it from somewhere else.

Checking the Wikipedia article for walkie-talkie just now, it seems the formal name for it is "handheld transceiver", so it makes sense that "handy" would derive from that.

Edit: I was too lazy, scrolling down a bit on the same article mentions and explains the term "hand[y|ie]".

pilaf··on Our Logo Looks Like Underpants: A Case Study in Internationalization
Similarly, Mitsubishi's Pajero means "wanker" in Argentina and other Latin American countries, which is why they renamed it to Montero in those locations.
pilaf··on Argentina's voting machine system leaked?
Not mainstream by any stretch of the imagination, but we still have the strongest Bitcoin userbase in the region, with Brazil in close second.
pilaf··on Gift of the Moon, Bane of the Spanish: The Story of Yerba Mate
Thanks for the tip, I'll look for it next time I'm in Germany.
pilaf··on Gift of the Moon, Bane of the Spanish: The Story of Yerba Mate
Perhaps more surprising is that this was attempted in Argentina in the mid-2000s by Coca-Cola. They introduced a soft drink named "Nativa" based off mate with a huge ad campaign to go with it (the slogan was something along the lines of "there's never before been something so ours"). It was a complete flop, and the unsold bottles were removed from the shelves merely weeks after launch.

I'm an Argentine who enjoys mate. While in Germany I tried a Club Mate and found it disgusting. It may be an acquired taste though, much as plain mate is, and I'd gladly give it a second chance if I could get my hands on some.

pilaf··on Gift of the Moon, Bane of the Spanish: The Story of Yerba Mate
That's true of Argentina too (and most likely anywhere where mate is drunk), it's called mate cocido: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_cocido
pilaf··on Gift of the Moon, Bane of the Spanish: The Story of Yerba Mate
Simply touching it is no big deal (in Argentina at least), but god forbid you stir the yerba, then you're in deep trouble.
pilaf··on The Fermi Paradox
If AIs were taking over left and right we'd still expect to see some kind of evidence of their existence. Since they'd only be replacing biological civilizations I don't think it would count as the Great Filter, not in the context of Fermi's Paradox at least, as you'd end up with roughly the same number of technologically capable civilizations after the filter.
pilaf··on Benchmark Backs Bitcoin Secure Storage Provider Xapo
4-digit PIN for login.
pilaf··on Chip designers see dollar signs in Bitcoin miners
Most bitcoin transactions include what's called a "miners' fee", an arbitrarily small amount put there as an incentive for miners to include your transaction in the blockchain, therefore speeding up the verification of said transaction. These fees will be there even after the last bitcoin has been mined, so there will always be an incentive to mine (provided that bitcoin is still in use by then).

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

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