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 smaller.

First, they're double-counting a lot of passengers in Japan. Tokyo subway isn't a single thing, it's a collection of independent companies, so you need to tap out of one station and tap back into another when changing lines. The JP numbers on Wikipedia are the sum of all the separate Shinjuku stations, which would count a lot of transfer passengers twice.

And second, the table is counting Tokyo's metro system but doesn't include Chinese cities' subways. There are no subway-only stations listed even though plenty of them meet the 30 million passengers/year cutoff. But that's not as big an issue as you might think because even the busiest ones are still far smaller than the big Japanese stations - The busiest is Xizhimen with 237,000 passengers per day, which would translate to 87 million per year. Beijing South Station's subway stop gets 211,000/day = 77 Mn/year, so if we added that the rail passengers it would bring the total to 318 million - but most of them would be going to/from the railway station so that's doing the same sort of double counting as I mentioned in the previous point.

Source for Beijing subway passengers: https://xinwen.bjd.com.cn/content/s684153bfe4b0380e186d0b6e....

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 amount of sense to ignore the sound and focus on the shape and the meaning. Much less relevant for Chinese where you can usually tie the character to a single sound and learn all three halves at the same time.

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 the problem go away if you pay them under the table. The victim is being made to feel that they're a participant in the scam, which makes them less likely to report it once they figure out they're getting cheated.

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 榎 by typing umuxia.

(Explanation: U puts it into component mode, then mu = 木 and xia = 夏)

It's a bit more finicky than OP's version though because the order is important, uxiamu won't give you any useful results.

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 remember the address. This group basically doesn't exist for Slashdot, so the proportion of searches for each site's name will overstate HN's popularity (although the growth trends are still relevant)

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 day to day. "$25 / square foot" is much better if you treat it as a translation rather than mindlessly plugging numbers into a calculator.

(Maybe I'm just being a grumpy old man, but I deal with this sort of thing all the time in my day job and it winds me up something rotten).

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 Worldwide Cost of Living Index, which is supposed to "help human resources and finance managers calculate cost-of-living allowances and build compensation packages for expatriates and business travellers" and is "based on the assumption that an expatriate has a right to live at the assignment site in the same manner and with the same kind of goods and services he would find at home" (source: https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=Wc..., http://www.worldwidecostofliving.com/asp/wcol_HelpWhatIsWCOL...).

In other words, it's comparing the price of living a Western executive lifestyle, not the cost of living for a regular person. Transport costs are high because Singapore has very high taxes on cars (more expensive than the cost of the car itself) - the target audience isn't going to be using a bus pass. Food costs are based on prices at high-end Western restaurants, not $5 worth of groceries. The housing comparison definitely isn't based on a studio apartment. And so on and so forth.

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 definitely have a very positive effect on the construction industry, and the Japanese government has a history of expensive net-negative schemes to help this industry (see also: concrete rivers).

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, so there's the option to read them if it seems interesting. And the 'open all' button doesn't work for me, assuming that's what the '^' in the top right corner is supposed to do.

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 of hassle when I was applying for a mortgage - we got refused the first time and had to get the work permit changed to make them the same.

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 pretty disillusioned by the recent reaction to PRISM. Like drone assassination before it, most Americans aren't saying "how dare our government do this" but "how dare our government do this TO US CITIZENS".

(I'm not talking about spying on political leaders, the military etc - everyone does that to everyone else. But it seems that most Americans think it's perfectly fine to invade the privacy of ordinary people on a massive scale, just as long as those people don't hold a US passport.)

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 about penalising sites that automatically redirect all mobile visitors to the mobile version's homepage, even if they tried to visit a specific sub-page (eg an article on a news site, product on an e-commerce site etc) through Google search. Which already falls foul of Google's existing rules against serving completely different content to Googlebot and real visitors.

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 and/or perform all sorts of man-in-the-middle attacks.

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 common in developing countries because the credit system is less developed. Even where they do exist, they're structured as "buy the phone for $x then get $x/24 off your bill each month for 2 years" rather than the "get the phone now and pay it off over the contract period" system in the EU/US, so they're not a way of getting a phone you couldn't afford to buy outright.

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 silly, not simple question checks.

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 effect on 99%+ of bots, but it stops posts by humans from accidentally being flagged as spam.

[1] admittedly questions like "type someword in this box to prove you're not a spambot"[2] rather than actual captchas, which I agree would be rather silly.

[2] if this is what you meant by a "printed in plain text in the source code" question, remember that most spambots aren't customised to an individual site, they just roam the internet submitting their crap to anything that looks like a comment form. Sure, it's trivial to write a script to parse the page and find the answer to the question - but nobody's actually going to do that for a typical company's "Contact Us" form. Adding this sort of check cuts down on spam enormously (from hundreds a day to zero), and is way easier for humans than solving a captcha.

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.ft-static.com/content/images/bb2e144a-7653-11e2-8e...

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." (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Submitting_an_...)

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 the major goal is just making a translation of the whole article.

Being able to show the whole translation history of a sentence as soon as you click on it is also a good idea (is that what you're doing? I didn't notice any sentences with more than one previous translation, so I can't confirm it).

Here are some changes I would make if it was my site (just some ideas, they might not be particularly good):

* A bilingual/comparison mode, like Yeeyan's 左右对照 view, so you can see both the original and the translated articles at the same time

* Default to the latest translation when you click 'translate' on a sentence that's already been translated, instead of a blank textbox (I think most changes will be relatively minor corrections rather than re-translating the sentence from scratch)

* Continue to show the edit history of a sentence even when you've clicked 'translate'; also have a way to copy an old translation to the translation textbox for editing (just click on it?)

* Edit summaries for translations (optional, of course), so you can see why the translator thinks the new translation is an improvement over the old one

Also, I haven't really studied Japanese much so I might be wrong about this, but might it be better to show the kana as ruby instead of as a big long string below the sentence? That way it's easier to know what pronunciation maps to what word. Or perhaps highlight the appropriate kana when you mouseover a word. And is it normal to convert katakana to hiragana in that section, that seems a bit weird to me.

I created an account, but my Japanese isn't good enough to take part in this sort of project. I'll definitely be interested when you launch the Chinese version.

#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 downloads.

#2. The biggest hurdle is that everything is in Chinese. I'm not sure how hard it would be to get paid if you're not in China, but as athgeo says, Chinese users really don't like to buy paid apps - even in the iOS app store our free-to-paid ratio for China is literally 10 times worse than the US, and Android is even worse because the users are less likely to have money. So it's probably best to concentrate on ad-supported apps.

#3. If anyone has good advice on this, I'd like to hear it.

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 all for Taobao stores or products sold through Taobao), and you can also pay to add extra features/customization to your Taobao store page.

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 gets activated. Or just do things the old fashioned way and tell the user to hit F11 (or apple-shift-F on mac) to put their browser into manual full-screen mode, which supports scrolling.

China's situation does have something to do with it (you can't buy paid apps on Google Play here, YouTube is blocked and Google search frequently has 'technical problems'), and that's probably Samsung's excuse, but other manufacturers manage to keep Google services on their phones (although often alongside their own or another 3rd-party app store). I think it's just Samsung taking advantage of the situation to avoid paying Google's fees, not a case of gapps being legally banned in China.

They already did in China. My wife bought a Galaxy S2 in January, and it came with Samsung Apps instead of Google Play, no Google Maps, no Gmail or Google Talk etc. Yes, it's a legitimate Samsung product, not some Chinese knockoff.

She's hugely disappointed with it and refuses to buy any more Samsung products. (It doesn't help that she refuses to let me root it and install CyanogenMod, but you don't expect to have to do that if you're paying the equivalent of over $600 US for a phone)

To be honest, you don't need any php at all. People upthread already mentioned using ajax to get the next/previous quotes; why not go a step further and send it all to the user in a straight js file?

Think about it: you said you scraped the data, so it's not like it's going to be constantly updated - when it changes, it will all change at once and you can update the versions of your data files. And there's only a fairly small amount of data, especially compared to the size of your css and background images (1000 short quotes with title/author/image/url will be well under 500kB, and the compression ratio will be much better than images).

(hmm, 500kB might actually be too big - perhaps have 10 separate .js files with 100 quotes each, and download a new block when needed? If you shuffle the order of the blocks and then within each block, it will appear "random enough" to users)

So, far less server load, and much faster for the user too. Makes the forward/back problem someone mentioned much easier to solve too - the browser can remember everything itself, and you don't need to track anything server-side.

And vice versa. If you're in China, you only get the most basic details for other countries - my hometown Oldham in the UK (population ~100,000) doesn't appear at all; nearby Rochdale is there but has no roads. And there are no satellite maps at all for anywhere outside China (except Taiwan and other places claimed by the PRC).

Update: The page did eventually load and worked properly. I looked at your page source and found Facebook and Google Plus, which are both blocked here - that would probably be what was stopping it working before. Perhaps you should load these asynchronously, instead of waiting for them to load / time out before updating the information?

Might not work properly for users in China. It's telling me I don't have JavaScript enabled, when I do (Firefox on OSX, no weird extensions), and based on the tab bar icon is still loading after >2 minutes. Perhaps you're loading some blocked-in-China script that's preventing your page load event?