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Exactly the same in Japan; moreover, many e-commerce sites reject foreign credit cards, even those of international brands (Visa/MasterCard).

What I heard was that payment providers charge higher fees for allowing foreign cards, so website owners (who focus on domestic business anyways) just won't bother.


>What I heard was that payment providers charge higher fees for allowing foreign cards, so website owners (who focus on domestic business anyways) just won't bother.

Here at least that doesn't seem to be the blocking issue. Or at least I often see foreign CC payment options in the list, but if you try to use the option you still need a Korean phone number in the checkout process (and they confirm with an SMS, you can't just type in whatever.)


In Japan, eSIMs are exclusive to Japanese citizen and permanent residents. Not sure about the reason behind this but I don't think they're going to change policies just because Apple is pushing.


Card companies _do_ charge interest if you pay in (usually) 3 or more installments, unless explicitly mentioned being interest-free.


Googler here, opinions on my own. While nothing prevents us from switching desktop environments (many of us do so), basically anything outside the default GNOME/X11 configuration is not supported. (It used to be Cinnamon but we're switching away.)

Bluetooth accessories are not guaranteed to work. People struggle with screen configurations all the time. Nvidia driver updates are still a nightmare. I'm pretty sure there's no secret sauce.


I'm curious about the change from Cinnamon to GNOME. Are you aware of any particular reason why? I feel like attitudes towards GNOME haven't particularly changed over the year, but that just might be my bubble.


They want to switch to Wayland eventually but Cinnamon doesn’t support Wayland.


Thanks!


So even Google cannot truly do "Linux on the desktop" right?


That’s really nice to hear, actually.


I once bought a TP-Link Wifi router as it was pretty high-speced at the time and people recommended it. I was happy with it until it hijacked my HTTP connection to tell me there's a firmware update. Will never consider their products again.


Current/past release schedule can be found here: https://chromiumdash.appspot.com/schedule


This reminds me of the Dropbox HN submission back in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863


1. You don't turn PRNG into "true" RNGs simply by picking seeds from environmental randomness. The seed is just the initial state, as long as the output is generated by a deterministic algorithm, by definition it's a PRNG. At the very best you can make a CSPRNG, but not a "true" RNG.

2. The dice roll example is not uniform distribution, I think this is a common pitfall when generating random integers of a range. `randomNumber % 6` results in a slight bias towards 0 and 1, since 2^31 % 6 == 2, there are more numbers in the range [0, 2^31-1] that map to 0 and 1 than those that map to 2...5. To make it uniform, for example, you should always discard if `randomNumber < 2` and regenerate another number for use.


#2 reminds me of Benford's Law, which I recently learned about and find truly fascinating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law


Interesting.

On first pass, Benford’s Law looks a lot like Zipf’s Law.

What differentiates Benford’s Law from Zipf’s Law?


From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law :

> It has been argued that Benford's law is a special bounded case of Zipf's law,[22] with the connection between these two laws being explained by their both originating from scale invariant functional relations from statistical physics and critical phenomena.[24] The ratios of probabilities in Benford's law are not constant. The leading digits of data satisfying Zipf's law with s = 1 satisfy Benford's law.


Thank you!

I’ll take some time to try and better understand your post.


Re 2.: OTOH, the bias is extremely tiny, there's only 2 out of 2^31 cases which are problematic, or one in a billion. A generic RNG obviously shouldn't do it this way, but for most applications it would be good-enough really.


The article claims that "it is indeed a uniform distribution" so I wanted to point it out.


To make a dice roll uniform, wouldn’t it be easier to do randomNumber % 8 and only use it if it is from 0 to 5, and discard and re-roll otherwise?

(Since we can reasonably assume that randomNumber is a binary number, and thus would be balanced over 8 values instead of 6.)


That depends on the modulus being divisible by 8, which is not always the case. A common example is modulus = 2^31 - 1 [0] which is prime.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator#...


Ah very true, an often ignored thing, thank you for sharing!


But you're not forbidden from talking about what you mentioned, that's why you're posting here, no? Try to post anything about Tiananmen on any forum based in China. To me this is the key that makes CCP strictly worse than the US govt.


This was only active until 1979; the US currently has no military presence in Taiwan.


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