bone_frequency's comments

bone_frequency | 7 years ago | on: Beleaguered Didi Is Said to Lose $585M in Just Six Months

Didi drivers will very, very often call you. I deal with this problem by having a pre-baked message explaining that I don't speak chinese, and where do I want to go. As soon as didi assigns me a driver, I quickly send this message through the messaging feature of the didi app, then I use one of the predefined messages of the app (which appear in english on my end) to determine if my pickup location is correct, or if I want him to follow my GPS bead instead. Should the driver call me anyway, I just send him the aforementioned message through sms a couple times.

It is not perfect, but this method allows me to move around easily with didi without speaking chinese. I had no urban mapping problems, but I do test whatever address I want to go in baidu maps first, or any other chinese map app. That way, in case of problems, I can just show him the location or use whatever voice guidance, but I rarely needed this.

bone_frequency | 8 years ago | on: Japan’s Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women

I do believe they don't need to be replaced, they need to fix their birth rates instead.

bone_frequency | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is it sane to ask for a non Apple PC when starting at startup?

Speaking as a department leader myself, we all use mac computers here because we find them to be fantastic allrounders that need a minimal amount of maintenance, but if we had a newcomer with the request of a pc computer, we would have no problem with that as long as:

1. He gets the work done. 2. His choice of hardware/OS does not become a timesink.

In other words, in my department you can use whatever you please if you know what are you doing and you are going to properly deliver the work.

I personally have not seen any company with a mac only policy, but depending on the size or even the mood of the people in charge they might be annoyed at the fact that the newcomer does not like a seemingly perfect computer and they have to buy a new one, so I suggest a bit of caution.

If you are not sure about how will they take it and it worries you, why not just dual boot whatever OS of choice in that computer, or go for a VM for now until you can figure them out?

bone_frequency | 11 years ago | on: Apple’s Dev Agreement Means No EFF Mobile App for iOS

Probably unrelated, but it is interesting to know that they received a $1 million donation from google in 2011 for (quoting wikipedia here) "lobby for or to consult for the company".