Yes, but like that comment, his profile could probably do with some editing and a different form of publication, like in a proper site/blog article.
There's a whole paragraph duplicated in the profile, starting with "I'm founding director". If nobody has ever noticed that, the info is probably not in the best place to be read.
I realize the bamboo part is not the point of this post, but can anyone confirm that this is actually how (some) bamboo grows? The only references to it I've found all go back on Coelho's novel. As far as I know/knew, bamboo shoots reach most of their full length in their first year.
"This newer strategy...with fewer releases but more features and changes manifesting in each one...has held through to subsequent Firefox releases to date."
"So long as it is private (probably not for long), our healthcare system will be "the best" -- in terms of quality, but not necessarily cost"
And again a overly broad claim that you don't back up with facts.
Instead of keeping slapping each other over the head with anecdotes - which, to be fair, could only prove my point and not yours, since you made those unqualified claims - let's look at what comparative studies say.
A quick web search gives e.g. [1] and [2]. The general conclusion seems to be that the US health-care system is okay, but certainly not better than that in many other developed countries.
You brought up the "you get what you pay for" argument. In fact, the only thing that stands out for the US system, is its cost. See specifically the second page of [2]. Government costs for health care in the US are higher than in any of the compared countries, even though government spending covers a far smaller part of the total costs.
"Our healthcare system actually is pretty great, if you do not believe me try getting a major surgery done in another country."
I'm amazed that on a website full of such thoughtful sensible people, an American would still have this world view of "there's America and there's the rest of the world, and ours is the best of possible countries".
To give a counter-example to your amazingly broad claim: in Belgium I can have surgery done, spend 4 days in hospital and have everything except 150 euros paid by our universal health-care.
Or were you implying that surgery elsewhere is of lesser quality? A lot of Americans don't seem to agree [1].
I propose a new law: An observation of the form "Maybe <counter-argument>, but <observation>" can probably be adequately dismissed with <counter-argument>.
From personal (European) experience, I can also recommend it. If moderately used, it's dirt cheap compared to owning a car. I spend about as much on it as just renting a garage would cost me in Brussels.
I was not a heavy car user even when I had a company car, but I do notice that I try to organize things even better so as to e.g. minimize shopping trips (do one trip for the big stuff every x weeks, use public transport or bike for the rest). And that's what the article completely misses: the system encourages behaviour that ultimately benefits the community, regardless of the individual user's noble or less noble intentions. (For the record, I certainly don't see car sharing as a temporary solution before getting my own car.)
Actually, here in Belgium my carsharing service (Cambio) tries very hard to aim at businesses too, although more for traffic between work and home/station than business trips. Since most private use is in the evening or at the weekend, this is an obvious way for them to crank up usage per car.
"Modern gadgets are meant to be disposable machines, not eternal repositories of all your stuff. "
I think that would be a better subject to get worked up about than the feeling you're getting conned because the profit margins on one (optional!) part of your gadget are higher.
I appreciate that you can't go far into technical details in an HN comment, but after a statement like that, you could at least give a pointer to those "good reasons". They might not be as obvious to everyone as you assume.
I think you're being unnecessarily harsh. Sure, that quote is not the best or most subtle summary of his own point, but in my opinion the basic insight and the clear, memorable illustration still make this a worthwhile read for plenty of people, even if not for you.
Love the presentation. Nice work.
I tried it with a European City and a bogus city name. Both were processed without complaining. Maybe a validation check would avoid frustrated users that never receive a mail because e.g. they mistyped their city?
With no experience at all, I'd like to add a marketing lesson: if you write a blog post concerning your project, make sure it features an easy link to that project.
Amusing (and recognizable) that you use the long developing time as attention getter and then feel the need to point out that you're really a fast developer. O Vanity. :-) Seriously though, site and API look great. The best of luck with your business.
1. I don't understand some of the rules at all, possibly because I haven't read "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace". In particular, the that/which rules seem to detect any that or which after two words. Why?
2. With just the rules that you've implemented and from your example output, it's already very clear that this approach is too crude to be practical. It simply gives too many false positives. For example, of the 5 "smells" found by the a/an rule, 4 are false positives.
To fix this rule, and many others, in a satisfying manner, you'll need to go beyond "knowledge-free" regular expression parsing and add linguistic knowledge to the system (word lists, part of speech tagging, pronunciation, syntactical parsing etc.).
For one example where you'd really need not just annotated word lists but a proper grammar, look at the false positive for the "No serial comma" rule: "In traditional markets, buyers and sellers are responsible for making".
3. I really like the fact that the rules are easily extensible. It might be challenging to maintain that while allowing for the kind of linguistically rich rules proposed above.
4. Even in its current form, the system could do with some indication of weight and/or certainty. Obviously, not all rules are equally important, nor equally reliable. After adding linguistic knowledge, this would become all the more important, since linguistic ambiguity makes many rules probabilistic by definition.
I'm sorry to be negative, but I really can't see the use of linking to a Google Translate version of a very general German article about someone that anyone here already knows plenty about.
Well, except for a bit of a laugh, I guess... ("Earth is alien to him". Right...)
There's a whole paragraph duplicated in the profile, starting with "I'm founding director". If nobody has ever noticed that, the info is probably not in the best place to be read.