Viewing profile — kevin_p

I spent a while looking into this and it looks like it's mostly legit. Japanese stations really do seem to be bigger. Having said that, there are two big caveats that make the gap …

It's designed for Japanese where it probably works better - pretty much all Kanji have multiple pronunciations that can be completely different to each other so it makes some amoun…

The UK is poorer than you think. Per-capita GDP is $82k in the US vs $49k in the UK (source: World Bank), which accounts for about two thirds of the gap in ad spend.

Victims of the gift card scam don't really think that the government wants you to pay your fines/taxes in Google Play money. The implication is that a government employee will make…

Something similar is even built into many pinyin IMEs. To take the same example OP used, Microsoft Pinyin (the default Chinese input method on Windows computers) will let you input…

Makes sense. The URL for Hacker News isn't related to the name, so it's harder to remember. A large proportion of searches will be people who know where they want to go but can't r…

Pet peeve: "about 200 €/m² including labour" is not supposed to be accurate to 4 significant figures - and even if it was, the EUR/USD exchange rate varies by more than that from d…

To answer the question in the title, you should look at the purpose of the study. The study naming Singapore as the most expensive city come from the Economist Intelligence Unit's …

Interesting - I think the same logic could probably explain the house price depreciation discussed in the article too. The accounting / mortgage rules Kohsuke mentioned above would…

I prefer the way this one preloads the story contents; I take the subway to work so I have a while without internet access. It would be nice to have comment links at least though, …

It's meaningful in some contexts. I had a different Chinese name on my work permit and marriage certificate (in both cases transliterated without my input), and it caused me no end…

I think the article isn't really about elected representatives, it's about the attitudes of ordinary Americans. Like the author and many other pro-American Europeans, I've been pre…

I think you're missing the point. This isn't about penalising having a separate mobile and desktop site, or even automatically redirecting phone users to the mobile site. It's abou…

Perhaps not for honest folk like yourself, but there are obvious ways that it could be used for evil - set up an access point with the same name and MAC address to sniff traffic an…

I know you're mostly talking about cheap phones, but I'm still going to quibble with the other half of your "subsidized/cheap smartphones" point. Subsidised phones are much less co…

Updated to be clearer about this. I meant that fake captchas like the one in the OP (which put HTML text on top of a confusing background image to make it harder to read) were sill…

Just because something is checked client-side doesn't mean it's only checked client-side. I've used JS checking on anti-bot questions[1] quite deliberately: it doesn't have any eff…

There's a picture in the article - it's in a dock, almost vertical but leaning back at a slight angle, which makes it look a bit like a speaker. Direct link to the image: http://im…

You can't yet. "The Firefox OS Marketplace does not currently support paid apps or in-app payments. We hope to enable this feature for testing late in the first quarter of 2013." (…

It draws subway lines on the map (in a similar way to the 'traffic' layer)

I like the way the translations are at a sentence-by-sentence level. I think it makes you more of a language learning tool, rather than a social translation site like Yeeyan where …

#1. For us, the top 3 are GoAPK (anzhi.com), GFan (apk.gfan.com) and Tencent App Center ( http://android.myapp.com ). Between them, they're >90% of Chinese 3rd-party app store down…

Taobao doesn't charge any commission; most of their income comes from advertising on the home / category / search pages (you might not have noticed they were ads because they're al…

Sounds pretty stupid, but it sounds like you should be able to get round it by sticking everything in a scrollable wrapper div (height:100%; overflow:scroll) when fullscreen mode g…