tellarin

That would be nowhere easier.

Many languages have different names across populations. And people strongly identify to a specific nomenclature.

Also, many people speak multiple languages, languages that cross disputed borders, and languages spoken only by populations that want independence from the current states where they're located (e.g. Basque).

No organization is apolitical.

Hell, that would even solve the disputes between the USA and Canada [1]. </sarcasm>

1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_areas_disputed_by_Canad...

Edit: Just adding some context, the disputes mostly deal with islands and areas of the sea. Canada, other 163 countries, and the European Union join the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; but the USA does not.

> proven to be a failure in international law as a result of Afganistan democratically electing the Taliban and Palestine electing Hamas

I'm not trying to condone either government, but why is this a failure? If (I'm assuming this for the argument's sake) they were really elected democratically who are we in other countries to say that's wrong? Wouldn't that be the same as giving merit to a (hypothetical) North Korea declarations that the US has no legitimate statehood for whatever reason?

This is basically the same as expert systems back in the 70s, with a cooler UX.

Unfortunately it will probably fail again due to mostly the same reasons, difficulty in knowledge collection and user rejection (by medics, for example) as they feel to "proud" to be "replaced" by a machine. :-/

I agree that it's not everywhere in China that's like that.

At least in Beijing and Shanghai you can find malls full of electronic shops. But nowhere near that scale anyway.

Also, there doesn't seem to be much of a maker scene here anyway from what I can see. Just a few spread individuals.

I have a colleague here in Beijing that says Taobao is his "best friend forever" because of this kind of thing. :)

I think you're missing the scale of this here. Being to both I can tell you that Akihabara might have specialized shops, but nothing to the level of Huaqiangbei. Neither in terms of component diversity nor in the number of shops around.

And the article also mentions the direct access to actual people from the companies/factories. This alone is what makes it absolutely unique, in my view.

Sociologists have already been studying that. This "class separation" has been going on forever in countries with huge income inequalities.

There are way too many examples of what this leads too. None of them good. :(

Usually China is not that much concerned about monopolies.

And in this case, there are actually many other e-commerce sites and microbloging services here. Tencent's Weibo has more than 450 million users, for example. And Amazon.cn and JD.com are just two of the other big e-commerce sites.

Alibaba/Taobao are already huge. If they manage to make the account integration with Weibo work OK and can drive users across Weibo and Taobao...

Just imagine combining Amazon and Twitter.

Another story on the amount of cash Alibaba is moving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624887

Hadn't seen that one. :-/

Being in Beijing it is amazing how many customer focused e-commerce companies there are and the amount of delivery vehicles from them going around everyday.

Amazon.cn, Taobao, 360buy (now JD.com)... just to name 3 of the biggest.

And the feature I like the most, pay by cash on delivery! :)

Well, I can remember many times where I didn't have my phone handy and missed some great pictures.

But that's not enough to convince me of the usefulness of smart glasses.

Nonetheless, I'd love to try one out for a couple weeks and I can see me buying one for USD$ 200 if it gets to that price.

Discussed about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408767

Lots of interesting comments there.

Same as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5618716

Already discussed there. :-/

Yeah, the return of the right to the majority was weird. They were exactly those defeated on the last election after the Icelandic economy quite literally crash and burned. :-/

The WP mention was a joke.

I do agree that the account thing is pushed too much in many cases.

My point was that having an ID has too many advantages to both the phone user and the OS company (not that those two sets of advantages have a bigger intersection...) that it's hard to see their presence/usage in smart phones not happening.

Between Firefox OS devices and Jolla (http://jolla.com/) Sailfish OS ones, the next months will be pretty interesting.

Can't wait to play with both of them.

It would be even more awesome if they strongly cooperated somehow, though.

The Windows Phone ones are out there. ;)

Now, I get your point, but there are too many useful scenarios where having an online ID helps (and too many benefits for providers if you have an ID too) that I don't think this is very feasible.

Interesting example, as I actually know people at a company that have that kind of leeway. And are actually doing it. :)

While I agree that it doesn't seem to be an adequate response (the whole -0.1 to 2.2 difference looks problematic enough), they claim that their 2012 paper addresses the weighting mechanism.

So we'd need to read that paper too to then argue if it somewhat clarifies their findings.

Yes. There was even a story posted on HN about this some time ago.

The top reason is indeed Knowing Your Code Works.

Be it because requirements keep changing, new features are added, many people working on the same code, refactoring, whatever... Having good unit and functional tests catch a huge amount of problems that would be hard to find latter.

The other two points are pretty minor in my view.

And the suggestion to improve code coverage is just cheating. There's no excuse for that. Either don't track stupid metrics, don't add unnecessary catches, or properly test exception code.

EDIT: Clarified text.

Interestly quite a few use 30min and three use 45min, but none uses 15min.

I wonder why...

There is a lot that Twitter can easily cross reference that would be more work for Last.fm

Also, Twitter has many more users. But I agree that those more enthusiastic towards music probably already use Last.fm

I do find this social-music space quite interesting. Specially if your music tastes are not mainstream. And visualizing the data would be really cool.

Hope they do a better job at it then with photos and videos, though; and focus on the social part.

Trying to make something not geographically restricted would be a huge bonus!

Well, http://search/ would be different from http://search.com or http://sear.ch/ for example.

I can imagine a lot of scenarios where people could easily be tricked into accessing the wrong URI if these dotless domains become common place.

The same applies to companies whose intranets already use some common words as internal services.

At least the Supreme Court is hearing the case. Hope they take the right decision here.

I can't understand how Monsanto can make these claims with a straight face. The guys didn't license the seeds from them. If much, they could go after whoever sold the seeds to the grain elevator, but that's also quite a stretch.

Also, what happens if some other regular seed shipment is "contaminated" by Monsanto seeds in any way? Is a farmer/buyer supposed to have to pay them for not doing DNA analysis in all seeds? WTF?!

Really hope you guys have autonomy to keep it going kind of independently, specially with stuff like Open API.

Good luck there in this new path!