hamstercat

I can't comment on Cantonese, but I've heard that most people never truly learn Japanese unless they went to school in Japan. Apparently you can learn the basic in a year or two if you immerse, but learning the more complex stuff can take a decade or more.

CRA (Canadian's IRS equivalent) says bartering creates a taxable event, be it Bitcoin or turnips. Whenever you do the trade, you're supposed to calculate the value of what you're offering in Canadian Dollars. So buying in Bitcoin is not very different than buying in US Dollars.

It's pretty much the opposite you have to be afraid of. Netflix is a big player and can force anyone to play ball with them. The problem is that anyone not named Netflix will have a much bigger hurdle to reach you.

Imagine you're a startup trying to compete with Netflix, and on top of having to create your business and media content, your customers have to pay their ISP a fee to access your website (or have better bandwidth, or have it not counted in your allocated data plan). No one would be able to compete with them. Now replace Netflix with any <Google, Facebook, Uber, any incumbent really>... and yeah you get the idea.

In my day work we're using Angular 2 (Angular 4 technically), and while I prefer React it's not necessarily bad, just not as good in my opinion. That being said, backward compatibility is crazy non-existant. I had a library that required me to update to the latest version, would have been a minor bump. It wouldn't work with my current version, but then I upgraded and other libraries started breaking because they wouldn't work with anything higher than their current version. Turns out some services got changed between those two minor versions.

The main reason I've heard for using Angular 2 at my work is that it's made by Google, but it's not like they use it themselves. I don't see how that's a good reason. On the other hand React is being used in production right now by some of the biggest companies of the world.

Next time you're forced to deal with JavaScript, try out TypeScript. It's a subjective subject, but it's pretty fun to use and it compiles down to JavaScript. There are a lot of tools around this ecosystem, but as for anything experience helps.

Most people I know have one, and are not looking at updating ever until it breaks. For browsing/email/facebook, you don't need the latest one. Even the iPad 2 is enough to do those tasks. I feel there's much less urgency to update than on the iPhones and the Mac.

The biggest difference I see is looking at your phone while crossing the street is dangerous for your life. Looking at your phone while driving is dangerous for everyone else's life.

From my point of view, seeing through bullshit is not about being intelligent, but rather having experience. After you have lived through different situations, some of them shitty, I believe you can get better at identifying them from the get-go. I'm not old myself, but I definitely understand things now that would simply go over my head when I started out.

There's no silver bullet of course, but usually a company should strive to have a mix of both experienced and less experienced workers. Less experienced workers cost less and will be more willing to "deal with bullshit", but more experienced workers bring knowledge with them that can prove invaluable to a company. They've lived through different situations, and they've seen success and failures. Finding the good balance depends of each company's situation of course.

This is purely an anecdote, but in my city it's hard to cross a road as a pedestrian even when there's a stop or a priority light for pedestrians. I've been honked and yelled at for "not crossing fast enough" or whatever. Of course it's not the norm and most drivers are respectful and doing just fine, but even a couple of those in a month gets annoying.

I shiver at the thought of having to cross any of these if there was only a yield sign. The principle that I have priority is not important enough over not getting hit by a bad driver.

TL;DR: I agree 100% with your point, but I do think bad drivers should be taken into consideration.

IMO, finding a job you like is so much about finding a place where you'll be able to tolerate the bad sides. Negative reviews are the best places to find that.

It's a fact of life that there are no perfect jobs, and the difference between happiness and soul crushing is often about how you can deal with the negative sides of your job.

It's great to see Dreamhost standing up for the right of their customer's website visitors. They don't have any financial incentive, but they still made it right. Makes me feel secure to know where they'd be ready to go for their own customers if you ever got targeted by an unlawful request.

You can either change your job, or you can change job.

There are no perfect jobs, so you have to find one where you'll be able to live with the downsides. Is having no career progression a downside you can live with or not? How about having to do lot's of overtime? Or being underpaid? They are all questions only you can answer.

I don't think having a big house or a yard trumps having more time with your parents (as a child).

In a previous job, my team was responsible (among other things) of the company's newsletter. Nothing great but nothing spammy either, and we made sure to follow anti-spam law by having the newsletter subscription being opt-in and having a clear and easy unsubscribe flow. We didn't send the emails ourselves, but rather used a big player in that area.

What I learned is that sending emails and not getting treated as spam by any of the big email providers is an absolute mess of tinkering and hoping it'll work. Not all of them would categorize our emails as spam, but Outlook.com started doing it out of the blue, and even a year later we didn't have a clue as to why or how to make it stop. Support for email senders is as good as for users, meaning getting anything else than a canned response wasn't happening.

I'd be interested to know what 3 times more mean. If your chance of brain damage is 0.5% normally and jumps to 1.5% with moderate drinking, that isn't too bad. If it jumps to 10% to 30% that's another story.

I'm really excited about String enums. I've been avoiding enums in TypeScript until now, since every time I've wanted to use them, I realized that a literal union was easier to use when the times come to log or persist the value. But with this you keep the string representation, and get a typed constant at the same time.

Dynamic imports is pretty huge too, that should come in handy for a lot of people.

My boring answer: none directly, though an index fund I invest in has a small share of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook. I already work in tech, both at my main and side jobs, so not being too invested in tech seems wise even if I don't see it blowing up again.

Indeed you couldn't. Technically you still can't, but now you can buy a game token with cash and then sell that to other players on the auction house for gold.

I don't have the source, but I've read that the amount of Chinese money in Vancouver's real estate is usually blown out of proportion. The latest number released by the province I've seen suggests that foreign investments in the housing market is close to 15% in Vancouver (still way more than anywhere else in Canada by a wide margin). Not to say that it has no effect, but still a thing to keep in mind.

Also, the stock market historical average of annual return is 6-7%, whereas it's lower for real estate. As with anything, diversification is the most important point.

It's definitely a choice and I wasn't implying it's a bad one. Everyone has different priorities, like you said it could be kids or something else. All I'm saying is that it's those choices that make urban sprawl a thing and reduces the effectiveness of living car-free. I'd buy a car in an instant if I had to, and I consider myself lucky not to have to right now.

Not all suburban cities are equal either, some makes it possible not to have to commute by car (at least near where I live).

There are many factors, but IMO it has a lot to do with urban sprawl. I'd never consider living somewhere where I'd have to own a car to be able to do my groceries and to go work. In the same idea, I'd never take a job that requires me to do more than a 30 minutes commute by public transportation/biking distance. That makes me a perfect candidate for biking, unfortunately I'm more of an outlier. Most people, including my own family, would think that this way of thinking makes no sense. They all own a car (or two) and have an hour commute each way to be able to afford a bigger house/different lifestyle than they could in the city. Just look at any suburbs: the inhabitants clearly disagree with me.

Find local hackathons in your city. In mine I can find some on http://meetup.com. That way you get together with strangers, work on something for a day or a weekend or whatever, and there's no pressure after that. You'll get to learn new things and make connections at the same time.

EDIT: thanks for the correction, it's meetup.com not meetings.com

Not following/having a proper exit procedure for employees with a lot of access is being negligent. Wiping servers of your ex-employer out of spite is criminal (and being pretty bad at that whole being a human thing).

My only advice is don't go overboard with it, but keep sticking to your plan. Spending more money doesn't automatically bring you more happiness, even if a large part of society makes it seem so. Buying a new car seems fun, and it may be for a couple of days, but the fun wears out after a while. Eating out at a restaurant can be a great experience, unless you do it everyday and it becomes a routine.

It's hard to not sound fake when your main announcement is about adding a Toy Story watchface to a watch.

Some countries with public health care disallows private medicine practice. Where I live health care is neither the worst nor the best in the world. If you're dying then you'll be taken cared of with low out of pocket expenses (mostly drugs). On the other hand if what you have isn't life-or-death, it can take months or years before it'll be taken of.

More recently, they started allowing private practice but there are rules for how much time a doctor can work vs in the public system. Tbh I'm not sure I how stand on it, it's a complex problem with many variables. The only thing I'm sure of is your wealth shouldn't affect your chance of living or dying, and for that we're better off with a public system. Should a private system also exist in parallel? Time will tell I guess.

Is there no way to buy/sell a house without a realtor in the US? Here in Canada we have a couple of companies that charge a flat fee (from a couple hundred to a couple thousands depending on what you choose) in exchange of professional photographic service, listing and DIY documents to facilitate the selling. There's no commission to pay at the end so prices are usually a bit lower than houses sold with a realtor. Of course a lot of people are still using realtors, some of them because of a lack of time and others for the sense of security it brings.

The biggest ad company in the world gets to decide what is and isn't acceptable for an ad and actively censor it in the most popular browser in the world? It's funny how some things turn out in the long run. I don't see the situation getting better anytime soon. At this point, Chrome is the new IE6: whatever they choose becomes standard because of their huge market share. Ho well, at least it doesn't break all of my sites.

It's pretty fun to use in React/React Native. Can't talk about Flow since I haven't tried it, but TypeScript definitely beats out plain JavaScript. What I like best is that it doesn't forces you to write your code differently than you would in JavaScript, it simply augments it with type information.

That's one way of doing it, but there's no one-size-fit-all solution. Some do what you said and just stop spending anything. Not everyone retires either, it's just that they do work they like because they can afford it rather than having to.

It's really a personal experience, I know myself I don't feel like my life is missing anything even if I'm putting money aside to my future. I'm still traveling at least once a year, and I eat pretty good food all the time. At the same time, I don't have a car and rent one whenever I need one.