skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The German economy has hugely benefited from a cheap euro. This has fueled its export-driven economy, and the country has racked up a huge trade surplus. [...] Germany has benefited from a cheap exchange rate and is running trade surpluses that are more than 6% of GDP."

"Many of the benefits of European integration came from the harmonization of regulations and the steps that were taken to facilitate cross border movement of goods, services and people. My work [...] shows that there is little or no impact when the euro is introduced."

He explicitly says that the Euro does not contribute to removing the barrier. He's saying that the fact that countries with trade deficits have pressure to devalue their currencies contributes to a country like Germany with a trade surplus not revaluing its currency when it might otherwise have done so.

Edit:

Quote from the abstract of his paper:

"The Euro adoption as well as the anticipation of the Euro adoption has minimal effects on market integration."

The paper goes into more detail and is freely downloadable. In particular he says that there is a small effect from the Euro introduction in his regression model, but that it is much less significant than EU membership in explaining correlation between valuations of similar companies in different countries. The "anticipation of the Euro adoption" is intended to counter the possibility that integration due to preparation for Euro adoption might harmonise the valuation figures prior to actual adoption.

I'm a bit suspicious of the arguments he lays out for the lack of a Euro effect on integration of economies within the EU, especially in the light of his article. The paper claims:

"In addition, ex ante we would expect the process of economic market integration to be more important for equity valuations than the adoption of a single currency. This is because currency movements account for only a small part of the total variation in equity returns and the variability of intra-Europe exchange rate changes before 1999 was quite limited."

So here he's arguing that Europe exchange rates before the Euro didn't change significantly relative to each other, and using this to argue that other factors are more important for market integration than the currency. If that's the case you might then expect that getting rid of the Euro would equally have very little effect. It seems he wants to have it both ways: the introduction of the Euro has little effect on market integration, but getting rid of it would decrease harmful effects of market integration.

In general he tries hard to tease out the correlation versus causation in integration effects due to introduction of the Euro, but some of his arguments seem a little arbitrary, for example, the Euro affect that he observes is statistically explained away by introducing a "distance from Brussels" control and a "foreign language spoken" control. I could well be misunderstanding, but I think the significance of these controls needs more explaining to make his case convincing. This is the point where a lot of free time and access to the secondary literature would become helpful...
Cracking a bottle over someones head could escalate (and land you in jail anyway).
There is absolutely way they would disrupt operations at one of the top five carrier hotels in the world because you think it looks dumpy.
In short, no.

You might be interested in reading: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sex_is_beautiful

Also, don't assume that it's only women who object to sexual content in technical contexts.
I wasn't alive during the time most of the achievements you mention really hit their stride. But, I wonder, was the national focus turned on those things, or did they become important only in retrospect?

I'm sure everyone watched coverage of the moon landing, but was the entire nation or world focused on that achievement for any significant period of time leading up to it?

I guess my question is, should we be looking for big things that grab everyone's attention, or should we just be working to solve important problems? They are lots of important problems, but most of them won't hold the public's attention for very long.
You know, some people say a woman mind is a mystery, but this thread is making me think that some guys simply don't make any effort to actually understand what women mean when they say something clear and to the point...
There's something oddly perverse about the concept of a neutron bomb. You drop a bomb on a city, to kill large amounts of people, but leave all the structures intact for conquering.

If I had a magic wand, I'd have all countries have military technology no more advanced than the Romans. I understand that there are situations that call for war. But when that time comes, the people should KNOW they are at war, and have to make the sacrifices in lives to engage in that war.

The neutron bomb makes it a bit too attractive to engage in and win a war from afar.
But how do you explain this then?

> When strippers were hired to mix with people at the Saturday night event everyone attended, that made everyone uncomfortable

I suspect that there is some level of ignorance and even acceptance in the community
The same people who say "mouses" instead of "mice."
I'm wondering the same thing. Liebermann probably knows too. It's all a big show right now. As the economist said in the past few days, things have changed. You can store on a USB key the equivalent of truck loads(Stevenson would be proud ;p) of documents. It's going to be harder and harder to keep this information secure.

I hope the Government accepts this and I think the current administration does. I wouldn't be surprised if they figure out a way to use it to their advantage.

In WW2 purposely leaked information was used to confuse the Germans about the location of the beach landing on D-Day.
But the point here is surely "flirting with other boys", not the one who then assaulted her. Can you flirt? Sure. Can you wear what you like, safe in the knowledge that people still have no right to assault you? Yes, you should be able to.

I'm a guy, but when I go out I try and look nice. Sometimes I'll flirt with people. That's fine. If I flirt with someone and it's not reciprocated, I stop. Immediately.

You're basically just rephrasing the "she was asking for it"argument there. And it's crap. So don't.
Hmmm. I'm frustrated, because I think the author is making a very important point in a very, very poor way.

Gender issues are important. They are important everywhere and they are especially important in industries like ours where the gender ratios are so unbalanced.

That being said, I find it extremely difficult to take this author seriously. I don't think I can critique her writing in a way that doesn't either come off as mean or completely expose me as the curmudgeonly bastard that I am, so I will just say that I found her style distracting. It's her blog and she should by all means write however she wishes - and to be fair she may not have expected the attention she is getting - but it's disappointing to me to see this issue represented in this way.

Hopefully, though, people will be able to see past that and realize that it's pathetic and rude to collect someone's personal contact information under the guise of business networking with the intent of calling them later for a date.
this was one of his most interesting responses:

"Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit inorder to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases."
You can easily manipulate symbols without understanding what's happening. The problem is it's hard to progress significantly past your understanding using this approach. Not that Math really has levels as such, but if you don't get Calculus at a fairly deep level DiffEQ ends up being fairly meaningless.

PS: It's a common thing for most calculus classes to redirive old formulas. Not because they stoped working, but rather because you really should understand why it's 4/3 pi * r^3.
But are more people going to boycott them for not hosting WL than would have boycotted them for hosting it?
Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?
Hi everyone. I'd like to sort out a screencast for the upcoming beta of minklinks (http://www.minklinks.com/) before I launch. It's a fairly easy tool to use, but I wanted people to see what it looks like before signing up. What do you use for screencasts and why?
I'm not sure were you got that. I've been with 3 startups in 9 years. One of them continues to this day (and has been quite successful), one flamed out (1 year), and the current one (3.5 years old) is doing tremendously well (well into 7 figures yearly revenue).

I can't help but feel like you didn't really read my comment. It's a matter of triage. It's knowing the difference between a true emergency (the site is down and we're spending money to drive traffic) vs something that can wait (feature X has stopped working). Far too often the workaholics in the startup world are panicking to fix issues that can truly wait. It may be ugly and it may slightly torque off your customers, but it's not the type of issue that needs my immediate attention. In those cases (which are far and away the majority cases) I'm not going to stop my life down to fix those.
Who are these idiots?

In this day and age, I don't care how well intentioned you are, you need to publish a specification for your document format BEFORE you even release a viewer.

And once you publish the specs for your document format, it better have a very good technical reason to exist; inability to print is not one of them.

Now that you have a good reason, make sure your document format is XML-based, or is a superset of another public, and well known one (tool reuse.)

Having done that. Release libraries for processing your format, preferably in MIT or BSD license, and send it up stream to productivity software developers, or offer conversion tools.

Right now these guys fail on all counts. Horrible idea. No spec. Requires binary installation of viewer. Viewer is Mac only. And .. it's raison d'etre is to restrict users and play prohibitionist in their own damn computers, instead of educating them.
Congrats Joel - looks like it's come a long way since I first took a look when you guys told me about it last year.
Well it may be selfish, but I like hardcopies. Actual books and CDs have a tangible value and I like that, it is part of the reason why itunes and kindle books are so hard for me to justify buying when I could be getting that for free.
Regulations aside, you would be mad to tear this thing down. Relocating all the DCs (and I'm guessing exchanges) in there would be ridiculous. And... 'dumpy' isn't exactly the right word for this building. Another article (from the same site! with the same paragraphs!) shows how f'ing huge this building is.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/09/14/111-8...

Go to the bottom.
Summary: HTC refers to body induced handset signal loss as inevitable with respect to their own device after previously calling it shoddy design in the iPhone 4.
You bring up good points, but mental multiplication is a bad example. That's certainly more related to an inadequate notation for the task than any trend in human intellect.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1954217
Yea ok, it's your company, you decide. (But don't give me the 'would have been shut down', I really doubt Lieberman would have shut down Amazon).

But then we, as consumers, shall decide not to do more business with your company.

Quite timely this happening now -- I would have bought a lot of Christmas presents on Amazon. Now I'll be taking my business elsewhere.
My concern here is lumping flirting in with sexual advances. A big part of the problem is men see the first and assume the second, or worse, promiscuity. That's the bad path.
Given that this is Obesity research, I'm just a little more inclined to believe all the claims of the NIH syndrome and biased analysis as described in Good Calories, Bad Calories.
In my opinion she's anything but clear. She doesn't explain, for example, when she gets asked out on a date (is that exactly what she's suggesting these men are doing -- it's again not clear) why can she just not say "no thanks" and leave it at that?
Http://3.14159265.com/
Going for a kiss when someone has made no sign that they're in to you? When there are no signals that this is perhaps fine? No that's not cool!

Brought the passes on herself? No. You can flirt with someone, if they don't reciprocate, it's not cool. First move = kiss is not flirting, it's massively inappropriate.
The end of a single global namespace?
The concept of click-less browsing is interesting and might have some potential.

This specific implementation is closed (Flash-based), heavy on my bandwidth, slow and generally not too appealing.
None of the incidents described carry any hint of sexual deviancy. The worst of them are "just" cases of someone making unwanted sexual advances - being (way) too quick to go beyond flirting and too slow to back off.

This can be due to a lack of respect for women in general, but also due to a mix of social ineptness and sheer desparation. And you can't tell me the latter is not statistically more likely to occur in geeks.
I think a lot of the stock exchanges have their data centres in Jersey now, iirc?
That high GDP # is the real estate bubble about to burst. Unfortunately most of my erstwhile countrymen (including the bankers) thought it meant spending power. I find it painful to read about, honestly.
Yes, that is exactly the purpose of LWN's subscriber links. It lets subscribers share content with non-subscribers in a "controlled" manner, which I guess means LWN can track usage and so on. I think it's awesome; thanks for sharing, rythie.

See their FAQ: http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks.
I think context is important. If she is getting phone calls from guys asking for a date straight off then sure, I'd be annoyed too.

But if you develop a business relationship with someone it seems fine to ask if they'd like to go on a date - just like you might as something in the office.

From my observation, though, the former is probably more common than the latter ;)
Ya... exactly that really. After all, if I rent a car and it breaks I'm not the one fixing it:)
That dumpy looking building to you is actually pretty nice looking on the outside and inside in person. It's also the third largest building by square footage in Manhattan, the main carrier hotel in the city for providers like Realty Trust, Equinix, Telx and home to a ton of high profile companies like Nike, Deutsch, Armani, Spotify among others.
Hopefully, though, people will be able to see past that and realize that it's pathetic and rude to collect someone's personal contact information under the guise of business networking with the intent of calling them later for a date.

Sure, it's underhand, but she hasn't said anything to suggest that they're not interested in her both personally and professionally.

This is agreement with you: she's very unclear.
A little disappointed to see this behaviour from the American government.

Correct me if I am wrong but didn't Obama administration promise full transparency?
Damn, just bought a Kindle.
Good article on different tools:

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/general/how-to-create-scree...
Or the Finnish Sauna?:)
Signalling such things is, in fact, not professional. Of course, neither are most after-hours parties...
In the context of this discussion it is worth mentioning preyproject.com

From first-hand experience, this project is amazing.

A thief stole my laptop from our office. In less than 24 hours I received all the necessary information I need so I could call the police, and chase down the perp.

this message was written from said laptop, which is back in my possession
Possibly because people are flagging them as fast as possible to avoid being swamped by the wikileaks flood. Or possibly, as with TSA stories, there's currently a penalty being applied to them.

I count between 30 and 40 wikileaks stories submitted in the last 24 hours, and around 130 to 140 in the last 5 days. Personally, I think it's too many, but I'm just a grumpy old man who thinks technology stories, and stories about people in business, are more interesting, and more relevant to HN.
Yep, I have to agree the only way to half way decently debug IE is with VS and that is still not as pleasurable as Firebug or Chrome's debugger.
I thought that was interesting too. I'm not sure I believe it though. It seems more likely to me that they made up this story after they were kicked off.
Terrorism is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The fundamental goal of a terrorist is not to inspire terror in itself; it is to inspire terror for the purpose of weakening public support for a policy the terrorists consider abhorrent. The IRA wanted Britain out of Northern Ireland; the ANC wanted the Apartheid government out of South Africa; Hamas wants Israel out of Palestine; and so on.

We can agree or disagree over whether to support the goals of a given terrorist group, just as we can agree or disagree over whether their methods are legitimate (for the record I do not condone violence, even in pursuit of a legitimate end). However, it's hypocritical to decide whether someone is a terrorist based on the goal of their terrorism.

Like all terrorists, the founders of the USA used both violent and nonviolent means, including property destruction, sabotage, assaults, propaganda and so on, for the purpose of overthrowing the government and establishing their own rule in is place. Again, we can agree or disagree over the legitimacy of both their motives and their means, but the facts of their actions are not in dispute.
Don't you mean 16us?
Unprofessional women still shouldn't be groped. And it's a (rather informal) after-hours even after a (rather informal) conference...
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com
It depends on how much other code is depending on the code you're changing. The more that depends on it, the higher the stakes for making large modifications on it, and the higher the degree of implicit assumptions which are very hard to fully capture in tests and specifications.

But if you have solid tests and spec for the area, I fully agree: be bold (I wrote earlier: http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/07/be-bold.html). But it's not always possible, and you need balance when the issue requires more responsibility.
All she's complaining about is not that she gets hit on, but that she keeps getting hit on in the wrong way. She gives her contact details out to men whom she thinks want to be business contacts, who then wind up calling her for dates.

It's a simple rule: if you meet a woman and you're interested in her in that way, then hit on her properly and ask her for her number in a way that makes your intentions non-ambiguous. If you're interested in her professionally then by all means exchange business cards. If you're interested in her in both ways then... well, choose one.
I found this SO much more helpful than other essays and blog posts on harassment I have seen lately (and I've been looking around a lot). I think we can relate to this better because we share some mental and social structures with the writer. Its a lot easier to relate to her though patterns, and the suggestions seem both desirable and realistic.

I doubt other groups would find this so compelling, because a lot of intelligent, engaged, perceptive people have been writing about this for a long time and I've never seen something like this from a non-technical writer.
Talk is cheap, though.
http://blog.nerdchic.net/archives/418/
Unexpected API benefit – Reflect feature requests back at requestors
Dumpy compared to what? I think it's a fine example of classic New York Art Deco.
Nice how does one add an image, I don't see any ways to add one. As well another nice feature would be the ability to group notes. So that when a user adds an image they could drop sticky's on it and then group them so that they move together.
An underlying factor behind traction
I think the my first paragraph pointed that out that there are two types of things happening here. One guys aren't aware that they over steps some bounds.

But putting your hand down a females underwear and hitting someone's bum unexpectedly. Normal people don't do that.
Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
I've used Jing for short (under 5 minute) screencasts, and it's been great. I think if you go over 5 minutes, you need to upgrade to the paid version.
I played Prologue after having played a lot of FM3, and being a long-time GT4 fan, and found it to be terrible. There was a demo out at one point released some 8 or 9 months after Prologue that was leaps and bounds ahead of it. I haven't yet played the final product but I'd assume it's more in line with that demo that's no longer available.
If you want it to be secure and compatible, you'd have to download implementation of the language in form of bytecode for a virtual machine.

We've had that already, and it didn't go too well:

<applet>

Also, until all current browsers (including IE9) die, any such script will be unusable or will have awful performance nad slow start caused by compatibility shim.

We're stuck with JS, because it happened to be first one that's good enough. Cost/benefit of having multiple built-in run-times (that won't be more mature and interoperable anytime soon) or adding a VM is too large.
It's apparently pretty common - you can also find them on e.g. reddit. I don't think they'd mind, or they could just limit to, say, 100 clicks.
Hang on, GP is addressing a different issue, not the groping. The article complains that "sexualized environments" are bad, but Noirin sought out - and actively participated in - a sexualized environment and had no problem with it (the groping was a separate thing). Obviously there is a distinction to be made, but it's not clear what the distinction is...
No idea. Could be very wrong.
Good grief I'd be hammered. Admittedly, not my area of expertise, but still. Bad for the ego. Which in turn is good for the drinking, so... Bartender, line some shots up...
Future Location-Based Services
That's because Ireland has low corporation tax (12.5%) so multinational companies export their profits there and artificially inflate the GDP.
Not even sure if anyone has written the driver for win? I thought it was only coded for certain linux distros so far. Could be wrong though!
I am surprised that none of the commenters so far have compared Amazon's actions with Wikileaks to the opposite actions that they took with that Pedophile book.
As long as the posting of subscriber links in places like this is occasional, I believe it serves as good marketing for LWN - indeed, every now and then, I even do it myself. We just hope that people realize that we run nine feature articles every week, all of which are instantly accessible to LWN subscribers.
Hmm... good question. Maybe this site just happened to be on an IP block that had a ton of torrent sites since I'm pretty sure that's what ICE targeted, and got caught in the cross-fire?

I think the saddest part of this is that the music industry is already in enough turmoil without the govt. seizing their internet marketing opportunities.
Resentment News
Amazon can't win.

It was only a few weeks ago they were facing threats of boycott from the public because of an e-book they were hosting that was deemed wrong by many. They buckled to the pressure and removed the book.

Now, once again, Amazon are faced with hosting something that people disagree with. But this time they are facing threats of boycott because they have taken the content down.
Microtest instead of Unit Test
The paid version doesn't give you more then 5 minutes, it just lets you save the raw video rather then a flash player. They do this because the company that owns Jing (TechSmith) sells a high end screencast software.
You beat me to it - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966038
Latency: Security vs. Performance or How to fix latency bandit applications
Make a whole site about Pi

Image is useless.