skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One point that's not fully explained in this infographic is the borrowing costs in the Eurozone countries:

Before the Euro introduction, borrowing costs in Germany, both for the private as well as the government sector, were cheap, whereas in the southern countries they were high.

With the Euro introduction, borrowing costs were essentially unified, the interest rate being set by the ECB. So Germany suddenly faced higher borrowing costs than before and the southern states faced significantly lower borrowing costs.

That lead to the debt explosion in southern Europe and it put Germany in a tougher position than before. Germany went through an economic slump between 2000 and 2005 and had to retool its economy to be as competitive as before. Germany did this with internal devaluation: German wages have now been stagnating for a decade.

Between 2005 and 2010, the roles have switched and right now Germany's economy is almost overheating, in part because the interest rate set by the ECB is super low to make life easier for the struggling southern countries.

That's why Euro critics like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard call the ECB's policy "one size fits none". However, that's not to say the Euro critics are right. The hope of Euro optimists is that the Eurozone countries' economies will eventually converge. Whether or not that will ever happen is still up in the air. The whole thing is an experiment without precedent.
I'd like to start a company that takes care of your trash
Every time I take out the garbage my heart hurts. It's painful for me to realize that I'm tossing out a plastic bag full of stuff that can potentially be valuable, not to mention harmful for people and the environment if it ends up in the wrong place.

I live in a very small apartment in a dense urban area. I don't have much room to sort or recycle trash in my apartment, and even if I did, I wouldn't know what to do with it after its been sorted. In my building, it all ends up in one pile in the trash room.

Yesterday I had a thought that I would actually be willing pay someone to pick up my trash daily, from my apartment, but only if I knew that that person/company would recycle it and make best use out of it.

I'm not passionate about trash, but I am passionate about my footprint. And I'm passionate about making the best use of things.

I would like to start a company that charges you to take care of your trash. You'll get a special bin for your home with three compartments, one for your everyday trash, one for your food waste and one for your sanitary waste. The bin wouldn't take much more space that your regular trash bin and it would come with biodegradable bags and a daily pick-up service. Perhaps there is a way to conveniently place the trash in some sort of a container right outide your door or something.

The problem is that the regular trash service is exremely wasteful and inefficient (where I live). And I believe there are more people out there like me who would like to decrease their footprint on the environment but for some reason aren't able to without changing their lifestyle (long work hours and living in a dense urban area for example).

There's so much you could do with what we consider to be "trash". We live in a waste society and it's completely unsustainable. I hope a venture like this would be sustainable environmentally as well as financially and socially.

I'm going to do some market research on this in my area. Could something like this take off? Any thoughts, advice, feedback?

Thanks, and happy holidays
Thanks a lot. However, you do have to know how to program, right? Who else is going to build your product?
jQuery makes the DOM so dang accessible that people use it as their data, which is completely backwards. Fortunately stuff like backbone has brought back some sanity.
I may just ask you in a few minutes when you get in ... but what exactly is the scoping scheme (and generated JavaScript) that you're proposing here, without "var", "nonlocal", ":=", and with shadowing?

In addition, to repeat myself elsewhere in this thread, the goals here are conceptual simplification and readability, not giving the programmer more control over scope. The final result is that hopefully:

someVariable
... more code here ...
someVariable
... more code here ...
someVariable
... more code here ...
someVariable

... in the above code, you can know that "someVariable" always refers to the same thing. With "var", the above code could allow "someVariable" to refer to three different things, each for slightly different sections of the above chunk of code.

If you really want three different values, use three different names. In all cases, it will read better than shadowing would have.
3D printing: A technology awaits its iPad moment
Tor anonymity will become illegal with SOPA acts?
Bryan Caplan has a solution for the American poor, which would probably also work for Italians. He discusses it in his essay, "Let them get roommates".

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/03/let_them_get_ro....

If wages were flexible, Italy would not have 35% youth unemployment. It would have 5% unemployment at considerably lower wages.

Italy has a GDP per capita of $30k/year (PPP adjusted). That's very far from starvation. Even if wages drop to $10k/year, no one will "literally starve."
Introduction to Thoughtful Programming and the Forth Philosophy
Doesn't the USA try and have its cake and eat it? Is federally decided economic policy a good fit for all areas?
I love it, thanks for sharing this. Added to my personal site: http://www.hecanjog.com
It sounds like you're suggesting apathy instead?

To say it's a moot issue because there are technical work arounds is pretty naive. I seriously doubt any major browser would ship with a work around to this...I don't know why you assume they would.
What it doesn't say is that the private debt was mostly contracted to fuel the real estate bubble, thus artificially increasing the price of existing goods, but not being actually invested in competitive gain.

Germany not having had a real estate bubble, for many reasons (population contraction being one) is likely to be a better explanation than German virtue to their debt level being so much better.
> we're tempted to overlook the sloppy reasoning.

Not in the slightest. This is a political opinion piece. There is a negative political statement about nuclear weapons. Then about video games. Then about consumerism, etc etc

You can use anything you perceive as self destructive to show how the aliens wiped themselves out and we will too! That much is obvious without any attempt at serious reasoning.

Fast food is destroying our country. Obesity! Aliens got too fat, wiped themselves out, that's why there aren't any around. Replace fast food with any other activity which offends commonly accepted political decency.
I think this may be a good accelerator for real patent reform. Once the economy has come to a standstill because companies are suing each other left and right for silly patents people will see how ridiculous the system is. Unfortunately this will probably still take a while and be very painful.
I think what you say about users who like/don't mind G3 not talking about it has some merit, at least as far as I can tell from personal experience.

We are a Linux shop and we are about 60/30/10% split between Linux, Windows 7, and OSX. Fedora is what most of us are using now, but we have some Ubuntu. Everyone that uses G3 at work likes/loves it. I personally switched off Ubuntu to Fedora because F16 have newer G3 than Ubuntu with PPAs had.

I guess I'm also in the minority in that I think Unity is decent, especially with all these new vertically-challenges 16:9 screens. This problem becomes much worse on netbooks which typically have only 600px vertical, 768 if you're lucky. In a day and age where we have stuff like the Galaxy Nexus and retina displays, why are desktop and laptop screens so far behind in pickle density? Alas, an argument for another time, but I say "long live 16:10". I love unity on my HP netbook (which also has a magnesium chassis and a 1366x768 screen and TWO mouse buttons.)

Going back to Gnome2-style WM feels like a big downgrade to me. I hate the ask bar. I also really like the "alt-back tick" to switch between different windows of the same app in G3. That said, it needs an option to auto-hide the top bar and PLEASE LET ME HIDE THE ACCESSIBILITY ICON. I know there is a package in F16 to do the latter, but installing a package to hide an icon is idiotic.
I have a friend who took a course in Japanese, went to Japan, then mistook a hospital for a train station. He documented the whole experience, and you could watch as he went from American university fluent to real world fluent. Seeing the difference between school and the real world so clearly helped me get the most out of my two years of community college.
A mob of unruly domain registrants? Not exactly Kristallnacht, if you ask me...
Great insight. I love the "outsiders" view on programming you take. Finding out that the learning curve isn't that great is encouraging.
Startup Plays
I've always thought a bit more explanation up-front about the philosophy, the way high level components/concepts interact, and the use cases would really help with backbone. The API is decently documented, but the context is not so well documented, and sometimes that is more important than the functions themselves (I can read code, but I don't want puzzle out which things that are technically allowed are bad/good practice within the lib's architecture).

edit/note: its been about 6-8 months since I was looking at backbone hard, so this may have improved.
This came out of me needing an excuse to write some Clojure, and wanting to model a simple coin-tossing game. What started as a guide to Clojure for busy programmers probably makes a right-sized holiday hacking project.
Thats the camber and it depending on the type of wing and airspeed it can play a small role in inducing lift.

What's more important is the angle of attack. The leading edge of the wing is grabbing air and pushing it down. Camber helps by creating a low pressure system over the top that sucks the plane up. And finally, the trailing edge helps because you have laminar air leaving the plane at a particular vector, the Koanda effect.

All of these contribute to producing lift.
Aha! "The World's Writing Systems" looks suspiciously like another book I have, "Grammatology" (not the one by Derrida). Published in the 90s and similarly priced, but out of print as far as I know.

Who wrote the chapter on Chinese?
Neither of them really "solve" sync. It's still a problem for complex applications but it works for say, 80% of the solutions.

Anyways I use both and to me they aren't really competitors. Apple doesn't allow stuff like Dropbox to have tight integration with IOS - the biggest value iCloud provides is stuff like Photo syncing, which they aren't even good at.

Funnily enough, what I do is enable iCloud photostream, then store my iPhoto library in Dropbox. The idea is that whenever I take a photo on my iPhone it gets seamlessly synced AND backed up automatically OTA.
Samwer describes online furniture strategy as a ‘Blitzkrieg’
I just think the sky isn't falling that's all. I think the endless posting of articles, protesting, etc etc is a big waste of man hours.
> because every script compiled with every version of CoffeeScript is compatible with every other version, we're much more comfortable making changes to the language than we otherwise would be.

This attitude concerns me. I can't just say "oh, that's CoffeeScript 1.0 stuff, just trash it, the JS still works". I still have to update the CoffeeScript to upgrade the version. There's no less risk in breaking backwards compat with CoffeeScript than any other language.
The money sounds great for two guys out of school. So why not be pro-active and enroll both of you, a team, in some business courses or motivation coaching, say as a gift. You are a very good friend to him, so keep working with him. You could also get him a virtual assistant to keep him on-task.
Ah, sorry. In that particular example, all of the highlighted strings: "change", "create", "update", are all JavaScript strings.

We should fix the Model#save paragraph to make it clearer that the strings are the potential values of the "method" parameter.
Nice to see wind being integrated nicely into the power grid.

Sadly this article is a straight up press release, including the promotional artist rendered image.
Trivial, I agree.

But I don't know what is sadder: Apple patenting this, or the fact that very few (if any) phones did it before the iPhone...
Multiple instances of Cassandra on the same server?
Canadian-developed HIV vaccine approved for human studies
Well, yeah, or your co-founder does.
Practice recreating site designs that you consider to be good, then practice creating your own.

You'll have to devote a lot of time to this.
If you really favor protection from errors, then the correct choice is to require 'var' for new declarations but forbid shadowing (it's an error). Shadowing a la Scheme is a source of errors, too -- you can intend the outer variable, failing to notice it's been shadowed. Of course, if you really favor early detection of errors, you'll also have static name binding.
Hover offers promo code for transferring too. 10% off
http://twitter.com/#!/hover/status/149887742778683392
You said it yourself you don't use a blackberry, so your comment doesn't exactly reflect on reality. I use a blackberry and I can confirm it's the worse phone I have ever had. It's missing features that my other 5 year old phone has, almost pathetic. To tap this, their prices are over the top. Personally, I don't think that article exaggerates anything.

I don't know why people want RIM to fail but I bet they will fail if they won't make a drastic change.
German Court Says Chances of Galaxy Tab 10.1N Ban Slim
This is great news, wanted to buy this for a long time, now there's no reason to do it.

On a linguistic note, though: this small mistake exposes an interesting rift between what's understood to be "sexist language" in the US and in Europe. People are hypersensitive about this issue in the US, typical example is using constructs like "he or she" or just always using the feminine pronoun, with the argument that (I'm simplifying it, of course, so that the margin can hold it) consistent use of "he", say in scientific writing, discourages women from participating.

What always amazed me is that in European countries with a solid track record of feminism, such linguistic issues do not matter. In German, the use of "Mann" is common, there are many female nouns derived from the masculine forms, e.g. "die Hackerin" (discussed on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908972, akin to the -ess ending in English), etc. In French, even if there is only one male in a group, it is referred to using the masculine plural. Many more examples can be given (the "your son" vs "your child" mistake in the title being another one), which to the US ear would be cases of sexism. Yet, this "sexist usage" does not seem to have the negative consequence on female performance in Europe.

What gives?
Because the US shows that wage flexibility by itself isn't particularly effective?

In that case [1], Keynesian economics is wrong and we must discard it's conclusions.

Absent Keynesian economics, we have no reason to believe austerity will cause "criminal levels of capital waste" (to borrow gizmo's language). So therefore, there are no drawbacks and we should pursue austerity. Right?

[1] I don't actually believe this, I'm going along with it for the sake of argument. My actual view: the US did not cut the wages of government workers during the recession, nor did it reduce real wages (on the employer side) by cutting benefits (e.g., SS contributions, subsidies for health insurance, etc). In fact, during the current recession, the US increased wage stickiness by raising the minimum wage.
Actually, I find the whole thing a non-issue.

I was just mocking similar responses prevalent in a lot of HN comments...
HTML5 is the future. The future isn't today.

Am I still excited about HTML5? Yes. Does it solve all my problems today? No.

Dominating means replacing and outdoing.

HTML5 can't do everything flash does in every browser, often without killing the computer. It reminds me of the Flash 1-3 days. Seriously. Look it up. I know it might sound crazy. HTML5 doesn't have the Flash quality development tools yet either (I hope someone makes it).

I think it's a bit premature to say HTML5 dominated Flash. Most of these types of statements are from people who actually haven't used HTML5, or Flash in the trenches.

HTML5 WILL do a ton inthe next few years, until then not much offers the one codebase / one execution on any platform.. unless RIM actually keeps building the Flash Player for mobile.
Sounds like a good reason to not go with those guys from Croatia

I think this notion that you have to suck up to investors and tailor what you do to jump through their arbitrary hoops is toxic.

Focus on making your business so awesome that investors see value and can't resist the opportunity. Everything else is hand-waving and cargo-cult thinking.
I've worked at a company that had these deployed. They were actually quite nice. In the rare event they failed, it was quickly resolved as everyone could see the LED that would turn to green/red/yellow that people nicknamed "the worm".
http://www.steelcase.com/en/products/category/integrated/col...
I think it is because while government spending is hard to do, wage flexibility is much closer to impossible.

First of all, once you strip away all the protections for workers at all levels of government to deal with this one event you will never be able to put them back again. (Hard-core libertarians might view this as a great victory but they are very much in the minority.)

Then, you need to let all sorts of long-term contracts be broken, (legally somehow) between suppliers up and down the supply chain of all sorts of complex industries to allow for the "gains" from the wage drops to be enjoyed by the whole system instead of just going into the pockets of the capital-owners who slash their work-force pay and hire nobody.

And so on... so you end up radically changing on what will be a permanent basis a modern economy the functioned reasonably well for quite a while to fix a temporary problem. (Probably destroying the economy really, all the legal wage protections being removed would be very, very bad.)
<script src="//goo.gl/OCK7V"></script>

Really?
FIU on HN? Ha, go golden panthers!
> IIRC, the City of Los Angeles did a similar evaluation, yet they shuttled a migration to Google due to security concerns.

Actually most of the city is using Google Apps and the contract has been renewed. The LAPD decided it wanted additional security and hasn't migrated yet.
Oh sweet. I was just saying to my coworkers that what we REALLY need is another javascript templating engine.
The header the script has makes it harder to do a search because it covers the search bar, here's a link with search results - http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=sopa

* part of a redesign I am planning includes a more traditional search bar in the middle of the page for the home page.
The Persistence Layer with Spring Data JPA
Persistence with Spring 3.1 and Spring Data JPA. Focuses on removing the DAO implementation, manual and automatic custom queries, transactions with Spring Data and configuration.
Yes, undeniably, as proven out over the past century of growth. Is there a serious argument to the contrary? No, federal policy isn't "equal", but pretty much everyone (even the "losers" in wealthy states like California) agrees that the country is economically stronger as a union.
> you can't reasonably support an "open internet" in all instances. There have to be some exceptions.

Why? I am fine with the internet not blocking anything at all, even though I accept limits on free speech.

To drag the "speech" analogy further, I can shout whatever I want and I'm ok with the fact that in some cases this can bring consequences.
I'm sure they are lossing money when you use a coupon to get the domain down to $1.18.
There's not much point in basing an analysis of what's wrong with the world's economy on the economic (pseudo-?)principles that got us into this mess.

It would also be good to note that the US is pretty much just as insolvent as Europe. Individual states are going bankrupt, but no one seems to care, at least as long as there's something else to talk about.

The real problem is too much greed & corruption. That sounds simplistic and vague, but that's what it all boils down to.
Finally: Evernote Launches Skitch for iPad, iPhone App Coming Soon
Do We Really Need Choices?
You've missed the point. This is an internet hate mob formation. The facts aren't important.
Not sure what prices you're paying with godaddy, but the absolute base cost (assuming godaddy don't have deals with verisign) is $7.52. If I go to the godaddy site now I can register a new domain for $5.02 (current converted) and I don't believe I have ever paid over $7.99 for a domain at godaddy, most of the time I get it below $7. They also routinely do ($1 + $0.18 ICANN fee) domains as others have mentioned
No, that's right. The best you can hope for is that you recognize the phonetic (typically the right or lower element of the graph), and match it to a word you already know from context. At best the radical is just a hint, a way to distinguish between multiple uses of the same phonetic character.
And they're doing very well. It's very rare to pick up a device that does just one thing -- the days of the wristwatch and one-function cell-phone are gone. Now everything you touch is competing to take up all your braindwidth. Information is not passive any more; it's sticky. As a consumer you are not a entity who receives services from a webapp.

This removes human agency, and it's only true if we, as individuals, want it to be true. (I'm 28, wear a watch, and use a paper notebook (http://jseliger.com/2011/05/11/eight-years-of-writing-and-th...) in addition to having an iPhone; but the iPhone only takes up as much mental bandwidth as I let it).

My brain is not a passive entity that is "being sucked up." People either let themselves be sucked up, or they don't.

EDIT: Also, if you want an interesting exploration of some of the trends you're describing, see Neal Stephenson's "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out,": http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17stephenson.html?... .