father_of_two's comments

> Foreigners who have been in the following countries in the prior 14 days: Iceland, Ireland, Angola, Italy, Iran, Estonia, Austria, Netherlands, San Marino, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Slovenia, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Vatican, France, Belgium, Portugal, Malta, Monaco, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg.

Thanks for the list. Angola looks an outlier, though. Would it be Andorra instead?

Ditto. We have been hearing so many negative things about the US that it really scares even to think going there, being it as a tourist, on business, whatever.

Mugabe honest?!

I don't know about Crew but Toptal seems just like remote body shopping. Seems the freelancer gets locked in working for toptal. Not a real freelancing scheme like odesk and such.

They could just have rebranded themselves as "cheap" or "bottom" because that's what those platforms promote. I appreciate the efforts they've tried to improve the platform(s) but they're dealing with something no one was able to fix yet: solve the lack of scalability of work-people matching.

Even SV clients get as cheap as they can. I had one -- from SF bay, not exactly SV -- which agreed to pay me 75$ to create a function to write text into images at two different possible positions (bottom and centered). Ok, cheap, but it was a 1h or 2h work. Done. Then he started asking more positions, gradient backgrounds, a command line interface, then a REST interface... when I asked him JUST 250$ for the whole deal, he went nuts.

Now I'm back to consulting, where I get more than the double of that per day. odesk and similar crapy sites suck.

  In many other European countries it is difficult 
  (or impossible?) to find subscriptions with similar
  pricing.

It's pretty much leveled, give it or take it a few. Here's a current Portuguese pricing plan: €30,99/month, unlimited data, 4G+ connection (up to 300 Mbps, though 150 Mbps is a more realistic figure).

You can use one of those "world sim" cards to get cheaper connectivity when you cross the border. Check http://airbalticcard.com/ for example.

wodenokoto, don't get me wrong. I'm not even a native English speaker, let alone an US or UK citizen. But this issue is just overwhelming.

I recon that Asian countries, not only Japan and China, but also India, for example, are not so exposed to US as Europe, or America (continent) or Africa. I guess this has as much of cultural as historical -- for instance, Japan has always been a pretty much isolated culture historically speaking.

Oh the languages again. Many people don't know that it was the US, and not the UK, who mostly contributed to the spread of English -- of course one might argue that US talk English in first place due to the UK. That world-wide'fication started after the WWII. In Europe, for instance, the number of students learning English as first foreign language only surpassed French ones by the 50s and 60s in most countries (sorry, can't point now to the document in which I saw this info).

Why was it so massive? Due the huge world-wide US influence associated with the mass communication that was being established as mainstream by that time. It were the movies, the TV shows, the music. On tech it were the electronics, then computer science and then internet. Suddenly it was a snowball: the aeronautics, the navigation, the research papers, the international treaties, you name it... all in English.

We've got to a point where if a given music is in its original language, it runs the risk of being mostly unknown, but if it's translated to English, it might be a huge success (see Claude François's Comme d'habitude vs Frank Sinatra's My Way, just to name one).

No language can ever surpass English until all this shifts to that language, and that's very unlikely to happen. US made it big at the right time, now it's too late change that.

When medium articles are too long to read.

That was just kidding, though.

Click-bait alert!

This is just an US article about Europe, which falls in the same spectrum of English telling History or Silvia Saint praising virginity.

  much of Europe lags behind, with countries in the south 
  and east in particular struggling with slower, less 
  reliable 3G and even 2G 

Oh the 'lagging-primitive-corrupt and who knows what else' southern European countries again. Here's some info. Portugal has 3G since 2006 and 4G (by all ops) since 2011.

Jesus! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3kcnm2THXI

Just relax :)

Ask not why some people are so smart, ask why so many are dumb. :)

  (...) jobless builders presented her with a gift: a life-size sculpture of a 
  hand with a raised middle digit. She keeps the artifact prominently 
  displayed on a coffee table at her office in the European Commission.

Got to love the Danes :)

Another give-away against open-offices is that people who decides them usually reserve a single office for thy selves.

A real story: a given company moved to new, but existing, installations. The original facilities were organized in small rooms. The boss ordered a full redesign of the interior into a single large open space, with one exception: a closed office for himself.

This ancient philosophy of "what's good for others doesn't suit me" never convinced me. :)

I started my career working at a team room, which was exclusive for the technical people and had no more than 7 people at its peak. Then progressively went from open-office to open-office.

And man, how I hate those. I can't get focus, which forces me to bring the deep-thinking work home, proceeding on a two-shift day, similar to what Paul Graham describes on the "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html). Even simple things like sending a page-length email took more time than needed, and were high frustrating.

Yet, recently I've been working on a company which only have team rooms. I'm on a 3 persons' room, but the rooms vary from 1 to 6 persons. Furthermore they have lots of perforated plates on ceilings and rooms are (mostly) sound isolated from adjacent ones by a foam-like thing they stuff between the division separations.

When I started here I just had that -wow- moment. I couldn't believe I was actually doing software design, reading documentation and others immerse thinking tasks during normal work time. No need to carry stuff home no more.

Did I mentioned already how I hate open-offices? :)

"I have a football team, therefore I exist."

I'm sure Descartes would rephrase his famous though to something like the above, had he been contemporaneous of us (and tweet it as well).

These Liberlandeers need to create a proper national football team first to be recognized. Being between Croatia and Serbia, they should have no problem in getting good players.

Almost all of these European micro-states have national football teams which compete. Even Gibraltar has a team now (their home games are in Portugal). Vaticano doesn't have a team though, and I don't remember seeing Monaco as well.

The footer alludes to that: "Peter Norvig (Copyright 2001—2014)"

I tracked the page on web archive, and it existed at least since 1998. Here is a funny edit over the years:

  1998: Let's analyze what a title like Learn Pascal in Three Days could mean:
  2009: Let's analyze what a title like Learn C++ in Three Days could mean:
  2014: Let's analyze what a title like Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours could mean:

:)

Here's a variant of the last solution the author presented, using a Counter of each word, instead a sorted list of words' chars, as normalization.

  cnt=Counter(tuple(Counter(w).iteritems()) for w in words)
  print [w for w in words if cnt[tuple(Counter(w).iteritems())] > 1]

This is just code golfing, I don't even think it's clear. The last solution of the author is nice, though.

Hey, very nice. I knew about the "new" format() but didn't know it was so powerful.