skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What Germany learned from Reunification is that MORE MONEY DOES NOT MAKE AN ECONOMY WORK."

There was actually two lessons for them along these lines before reunification. The first was what you mention above, during the Wiemar hyperinflation. The second lesson was that high inflation isn't necessary for economic growth, as per "The German Miracle" post-WWII
Oh wow cool
Live chat for ecommerce sites
Germany is being robbed blind? What?
Not going to happen. Europeans knows the true cost of war on our home soil -- the prohibitively high cost -- and we are quite used to small humiliations to keep the peace.
Maybe it's more about the absolute value of something than its relative value. These days, 29$ is a lot for me. That is not a statement that the book is too expensive or that I don't give it the value it deserves.

For what it's worth I plan to read the online beta then print out a bought PDF for easier reading.
Agreed, 'though people here (Portugal) will still tell you that stuff is now much more expensive due to the Euro. They don't seem to grasp the concept of inflation.
If it wasn't offered under the auspices of UW, I would have thought it a scam...
American Corporate Buzzwords By Decades
There was once a time when CHF (Swiss franc) was at least partly backed by gold. Since 2000, no such luck.

You might be well advised to study a currency phenomenon called the "unholy trinity" in regards to your opinion of speculative attacks on CHF.

Pick any two out of three: free movement of capital, control of domestic economy, stable exchange rates.

If the Swiss wanted to defend the peg, they'd have to give up one of the other two options. You can't EVER get all three.

Britain tried this with Pound Sterling, but Soros saw that their attempts to defend the currency were unsustainable. The result was predictable.

It's not beyond possible that the CHF could find itself "adjusting" the peg if the ECB decided to embark on a path of massive quantitative easing. In fact, I'd wager that lots of bets are already being made on this very hypothesis.
Those are advantages of this product. The citation (I think) should look more like the source of that 90% figure.
Of course they are - but Microsoft only knows how to make platform plays.

It seems to have forgotten that platforms are bootstrapped on the basis of killer products, and sustained by interop between a continuous stream of great products. For so long, its platform play was based on extending the Windows platform ("windows everywhere"), and it seems to have institutionally forgotten that the only reason this worked is because WORD AND EXCEL ARE KILLER PRODUCTS. If Word ceased to be the way that 99% of business users interfaced with text of any significance, and if Excel ceased to be the way that 99% of business users capture and analyze data, then the Windows platform "advantage" would evaporate overnight.

So, Microsoft's DNA is to attempt to create "ecosystems" because it considers itself a platform company, whereas most smaller or saner companies look to build great products. Heck, even Apple has to do this. Could it have created an iOS ecosystem if the iPhone was a dud?

(An aside: Android might seem to be an exception to this, because it's not a killer product in the way that iPhone and iPad were. But that's only if you think that phone subscribers are the customers of Android. They're not - the carriers are. Which is why Google's acquisition of Motorola is so interesting and yet so expected at the same time. They've gotten as about as far as they can get on the back of an "OK" product, and need to make a stellar product in order to build an ecosystem of users instead of partners. The carriers don't have it in their DNA to deliver stellar software, and the hardware guys don't either, so Google has to buy a hardware company so it can build a great integrated device.)
Agreed.

It seems to me that especially American and British led news agencies seem to deliberately try to undermine the Euro zone with anti-Euro-propaganda. I'm sick of hearing how bad it all is, while it isn't, and it's much worse elsewhere.

I'm from Austria, and we are doing just fine, with low unemployment numbers, a growing economy and general optimism for the future. The Euro helped us a lot, and we are able to help other EU states through it.

Stop listening to entities like "Bloomberg", they seem to be wrong a lot.
My biggest problem is that, last I checked, I don't have the option to prevent a Facebook app from auto-sharing things at the moment of installing it.

Instead, I have to agree to install it, then go to my privacy settings, then remove its permission to auto-share.

Nowadays I just refuse to install apps.
German banks? They did? Do you have a source for that?
Were your actual customers regular users of Yelp who have reviewed other businesses actively?

We can pick apart Yelp's model and likely should, but it does appear to discount "drive-by" Yelpers who only sign up to give a good review to a single business.
Quite so. Germany has been running an immensely profitable manufacturing-and-technology economy on the basis that demand for their goods comes from exporting to other countries, who buy on the credit they receive from German banks. Therein lies the rub: if Germany couldn't export, its domestic consumption would be totally unable to hold up its economy. They'd go into an overproduction crisis like the US and Japan.
Germany has no problems with a more expensive currency.
I always point to Canada's experience in the last 12 years. As As the CAD went from 0.60 USD to 1.00 USD, everyone was freaking that it would destroy our economy. During the rise of the CAD, income went up and unemployment went down. :)
Oracle shipping 14 patches for Java SE
Germany's economy depends a lot on exports by exiting the Euro Germany would take a huge hit in that regard possibly causing a recession. That along with the obvious conflict in political goals makes this a scenario that no one in Germany will ever seriously consider.

Besides at the moment Germany is one of the most if not actually the most powerful country in the world (economically speaking). Germany currently controls the future of the Euro and with that a big part of the future of the EU and the world economy. Why give up that power?
It really depends how much of storage/apps are moved to the cloud.

The way I imagine it evolving is more that the local storage on client side devices is used as a cache for commonly used files + code and the apps and files themselves live in the "cloud", so with a fast enough internet connection using a standalone device is indistinguishable from docking your phone. Now that cloud may be a generic cloud like dropbox/aws etc or it may be something specific that is hosted and run by the workplace.

The issue with having a completely dumb clamshell is that the screen and keyboard will be worth more than the computing hardware. Let's say the clamshell costs $250 without any brains but basic brains can be added for an extra $30 or so. There is actually a lot of utility in having independant brains on the laptop.

For example if I got out with my phone , I can give the laptop to someone else to use. Or what if I want to use my phone at the same time as I want to use the laptop? In this case you will be stretching the hardware to run 2 displays at once (with different apps, as well as having 2 complete UI systems loaded into memory) as well as the physical docking being an issue. For example what if I am talking on my phone and I want to walk to the other side of the room without dragging the laptop along or undocking it?

Having everything dependent on a small , easily lose able device is a biggie too. Replacing your phone is likely to be expensive (since it has a display etc) and essentially losing access to computing because you are too broke to replace your phone until your next payday is a big issue.
Almost two years ago I commented in an HN thread about this,

"DEKA is a strange duck. They have some genuinely brilliant people there, working on some genuinely revolutionary inventions -- but they just can't seem to actually bring them to market. Or, they're not interested in bringing them to market. ... I've yet to hear of the Stirling engine / water purifier being deployed anywhere; ... I really don't "get" them. The best I can figure is that everyone (influential) there is happy just to be working on these puzzles, and they don't really care if anyone uses them or not."

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1793446)

That opinion seems to be withstanding time's test.
Haxe JS
What I meant with discipline is the general attitude towards spending. Germany has spent a lot of money, but they spent it smartly, building up to becoming one of the most powerful industrial nations in the world, whilst the southern countries built houses that now stand empty in the spanish ghost towns.
I'd offer the opinion that "people" haven't changed much over the centuries.

The fact that we still have the same problems across cultures, genders, races, and geography seems to bolster this view.

Things change, but not nearly as much as we might like, and only at the margins.
But Spain had an absolutely massive private debt, that's now crashing down. Moreover this building bubble has been extremely obvious to anyone who's ever been to Spain in the last few years. A responsible government should have been stepped in a few years ago.

What matters in terms of financial responsibility is not public debt alone, or private debt, but both.
ha, try asking them to write a program to list the contents of a directory. that'll give you an insight into their coding background...
We do own NameMage.com, but feel AidName is more straight forward for regular folks. You can still try out our free offering to see if we meet your standards. We even offer a satisfaction or your money back Assurance Kit if you want to try that out too. We appreciate the feedback!
WWI exacted a high price that people never wanted to pay again.

The fact that it is now named with a number tells you how that worked out.

Europe needs to go more than a few decades before it can declare itself the kingdom of peace.
Most countries, including Spain ran surpluses. Their public finances were in order. However governments couldn't stop the flow of liquidity from 'the Centre' - because of the whole 'free flow of capital thing'.

At the same time Germany and France recovered from euro-sclerosis not only because they reformed, but because demand for its products expanded a lot from the increased trade and growth in the periphery.

Germans should be mad at their bankers who financed the whole bubble and now demand to be bailed out with their money.

Germany being mad at Spain for bank bailouts is like New York mad at Florida for the same. We are all in this together.
I always use “let's assume roughly X/hour” as a joke.

You don't get paid for your spare time, except in opportunity cost. If someone applies 20 hours of their time at work, then yes, that's pocket change. If they apply 20 hours of their time at home, that's not time that they'd get paid for anyway, so the analogy is as foolish as the claim that every pirated copy of a movie would have been bought were it not for pirates.

Instead, I'm choosing between 20 hours of reading a book and maybe 20 hours of watching television (for example), which costs the electricity that the television consumes (since the cable or internet is paid for already). I suspect you'll find 20 hours of TV will cost less than $29. Or maybe it's 20 hours of running over the course of a couple of weeks. That's free, except maybe for the cost of the water to rehydrate. That's probably cheaper than $29, too. If you want to do the analysis in terms of how much it will earn you in the future, that's also valid I guess. But it complicates things, since it's hard to quantify how much the relaxation you get from watching TV or destressing from running is worth.

Let me just say, I don't think people should complain about the price of a good book when it's <$50-100 (depending on material). But the X/hour analogy only works if you're taking work time, and then many companies will often be willing to refund you that money anyway.

Last note: this isn't $29 for a book. It's $29 for a video course (though admittedly a non-HTML version of the book is thrown in at the end). The book itself is available for free, which is all that the OP was pointing out.
You cannot blame the bank for your debt after requesting your 12th credit card!

Why not? I can and do blame banks for lending money to people who they know are submerged in debt. That does NOT mean those people aren't to blame too. Blame can be attributed to more than one party.
If it were rich people's property, perhaps.

But what's the average net worth of a Megaupload user?
I think this misses the point. You build on someone else's platform because they provide distribution. Without their platform, you don't get their distribution. So what does that get you?

This is akin to saying, "don't sell at Walmart." Yeah, I risk Walmart taking my profits away and risking my business - the very profits and business that Walmart's distribution has provided.

Distribution is king. Live with it.
Agreed; but with freelancers search engines like http://jobreapr.com/ there are damn cheap developers with fixed prices to try. YMMV
Nobody in Europe would want to pay that unless the alternative was even more expensive.

The alternative that is seriously feared right now is the complete dissolution of the Euro.
Another argument against what you are saying here is that when you look at the Eastern vs Western Roman empires, the Eastern Empire had more progressive tax policies, and was more effective at imposing and collecting taxes on the wealthy than the Western Empire was. As a result the tax base in the Western Empire was very narrow, and this contributed to its collapse (at the time the Goths overran, the Western Empire was collecting less in taxes than the Eastern Empire was spending on defence).

The relationship between taxes and prosperity is a complex one, but if we go by that example, it seems that an active policy of reducing concentration of wealth is the best way to ensure common defence and joint prosperity.
"The problem with it is the same problem with messianic religions in general; for people who are not flipped into true-believer mode by any given one, it will come off as at best creepy and insular, at worst nutty and potentially dangerous (and this remains true even for people attached to a different messianic religion)."

I fit into neither of the caricatures of either a 'true believer' or someone scared of RMS. I see him as someone who truly believes in something and has stood by it no matter what. His 'fanatical' language of evil etc. is because he truly believes those things to be evil. I've always used the GPL for licensing my open source code specifically because it ensures that it stays open and that improvements are given back. On one occasion I've been persuaded to use another license so that $CORP could use the code (http://gmsl.sf.net/) internally and I see that the non-fanatical position helped $CORP but I'm not sure it helped the greater cause of open source.
How can that be an erosion? A referendum was never necessary. There is an European parliament. For major decisions the Bundestag remains decisive.
Unfortunately yes. We are seeing a stunning, but slow-moving coup of an unelected administrative class.
Thanks for the suggestion, I actually did sign up to kaggle a couple of days ago and am working on some of their problems. I was looking for something more internet related as getting in data from the internet and grouping or ranking it feels more immediately fun to me.
"The big surprise for us was when we tried to contact Airbnb" to complain, said Thieme, a writer and editor...

Not mentioned is if they tried to talk to their neighbour.
NASA prepares to launch new black hole hunter: The NuSTARX-ray telescope
An argument between RMS and ESR over who's the bigger fanatic is not likely to produce very enlightening results...
> The real question is why there's a news story taking her side in this.

You also have to wonder why HN upvoted it so that it appears in the top 5 threads.

The news story is probably just looking for a sensationalist headline that will get them hits.

What's our excuse? :)
Why does it have to be boring? A good science teacher and method can make all elements fascinating. I'd reference the Feynman lectures as an example of this.
Actually the Euro was introduced to keep Germany under control

This is the essential part that is overlooked by most commentators. The Euro is predominantly a political instrument that is going to be kept alive at almost any cost necessary. Therefore its interpretation should blend out most of economic "rationality" but consider instead underlying goals such as the equalization of the standard of living across the European states.
One possibility would be to allow users to manually flag reviews, instead of trying to do it algorithmically. They could also have some sort of confidence rating for reviews, or possibly a reputation system for reviewers. From looking at the hidden reviews for a couple of stores while I've been trying to find a place to get new glasses, they seem to be hiding a good number of legitimate reviews with their current system.
>His 'fanatical' language of evil etc. is because he truly believes those things to be evil.

Any fanatic truly believes themselves to be right.

That said, I'm a free software advocate. I see where the guy is coming from. I agree on most points. The one that I absolutely cannot get behind is that not releasing the source is evil.
A geek with a hat » Flotr2 – my favorite javascript graph library
Representatives of a country aren't exactly magicians that can hide the anemic growth and money pissing (particularly in Public-Private "partnerships") that countries like mine - Portugal - had.

They were either fully aware or extremely incompetent, and the latter isn't plausible.
It wasn't "legal" for countries to stray from the stability pact either, but they did! We're in the realm of making stuff up as we go along here. Or the Greek government could declare it illegal for Greeks to hold bank accounts elsewhere. Certainly it's not tenable for the average Greek to squirrel away all his or her money in German banks, waiting for the "grexit", then cashing in.
The problem is getting the politicians to give up their favorite features in the process of removing these bugs. ;-)
Robotic Sewing Systems Could Decimate Labour-Intensive Sewing Industry
I agree that keeping your own data on your own property is a worthwhile endeavor. I speculate though about how proficient most people are at keeping truly decent security for that data. If I build a small server rack at home and allow all of my mobile devices to connect to that server from out in the wide world, and if then lots and lots of other people do that as well, how does the nature of security change?
I don't think it would be much more expensive, considering the raspberry pi project managed to make a complete computer for $25.

I guess we will see both options and the market will sort it out, it's basically a case between having one "do it all" system vs 2 specialized systems.

Historically though, things such as laptop docking stations and laptops with detachable tablets have never really taken off and I imagine this could be a case of the same.
A more accurate headline: Get a Certificate in Data Science in 9 months.
I could hardly believed there was a fixed screen resolution (and such a low one) for WP but wikipedia[0] seems to agree (although a citation is needed).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone#Hardware
According to Michael Lewis (in both The Big Short and Boomerang) Germans banks were famous worldwide as being an excellent source of "stupid money".

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec11/makingsen...

"The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made in the last 10 years. They invested in Icelandic banks. They invested in Greek government bonds. They were heavy into Irish banks, big into Irish banks, and they bought U.S. subprime mortgage bonds."
Detecting Postgres SQL Injections
You don't even need to leave the US to find a state with a longer coastline. Maine's comes in at 4,568 miles
Will The Fancy be Zuckerberg's next Facebook acquisition?
Early access to RecThing.com + other goodies
Google webmaster tools is helpful. You'll see errors when google bot tries to crawl a page that doesn't exist (for example, because you deleted it and there is a link to it somewhere). Keep an eye on it, and it will help point out problems. It also provides a partial list of incoming links to start with - as good or better than any other free tool I'm aware of.
ESR doesn't strike me as particularly fanatical from what I know of him. Are you thinking of something in particular?
Also http://us.amovens.com/en, which does both long road-trip rides and daily commutes. Also has an iphone app.
Thank you, that sounds like a good idea. I may start looking into the HN api. I have been working to build a search engine for reddit using their api for a week now (not very mature, I have only started to build a database of tags for the posts) but I believe this idea will work here as well.
For what reason? To say thanks?

And, yeah, email me and I can send you my PayPal address.
That is probably true, but I think the goal of the certificate would be to become a data scientist.
I think C being a practical joke was one of the oldest unix culture "jokes".
As I mentioned in reply to notatoad, you can connect bluetooth devices to your iOS device.
The trackpad, is the interesting thing though. I don't think iOS has a concept of Mouse...
"interfacing languages is a mess"

The little bit I have seen of multi language code would say that that holds, especially if the languages involved are not C and something else(What does a Python dictionary look like in Haskell? Answer: Crap unless you do a bunch of translation work). Debugging tools don't tend to work across language boundaries. etc. Maybe I gave up to quickly, but multiple languages in one executable just doesn't seem worth it. Writing components in different languages and have them communicating over some sort of shared bus, web services, whatever is simple and fairly effective.
In what world does runtime speed and compiled size have anything to do with turnaround (or programmer productivity, as I read it)?

C is a great language for many reasons, but let's not conflate benefits.
That saying annoys me to no end. Sure, time has value, but just because something took $x hours does NOT mean it had an opportunity cost of $x*$rate.
True, but we weren't knee-deep in the cloud in 2007 like we are today.
SSH, Vim, Google Documents on 1GHz machines? You could get some actual work done now with a dock.
Of course Facebook can ignore the result / set impossibly high hurdles. It's Facebook, not a democracy. I'm boggled that they bothered with this thing in the first place.

We all agree that 270mm people is impossible, but many other things manage to rack up low numbers of millions of users on Facebook, just from users sharing with their friends. Why couldn't this one put together, say, a million? Unless there's something I'm missing, three hundred thousand implies the public wasn't buying what was being sold.
True, but by working for "roughly X/hour" you've established that the typical exchange rate for your time is roughly X/hour. If I were to ask you to do some work for my during your off time, I would have to pay about X ± X/2 depending on how you guarded your time. So what if someone only values their time at X/4? That's still $200 worth of spare time.