skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”
-Rudiger Dornbusch

If I was Greek, I wouldn't have money on deposit at a Greek bank. It surprises me that at a minimum the Greece financial system hasn't ice-nined already. We're witnessing history.
Chromebooks are just a means to an end: ever more ad impressions.
This is nothing more than a warning for the rest of the countries with "failing economies".

Banks can afford destroying people's lives to simply increase numbers in excel sheets.

Greed is human kind's drive force and it's unstoppable.
It seemed like "Google Tech Talks" used to be a thing and sometimes I miss that.
There is always a bank holiday when these things are announced - otherwise you would see real chaos!
Video costs many times more to produce, and is generally consumed only once.

Music is cheap to make and people tend to listen many times over, making the try-it-and-purchase-it model a genuine possibility that video doesn't really have.
I don't think the problem is commercialization per se; it's the short-sightedness and narrowness of the current commercialization strategies that are the source of the problem.

Google became a multi-billion dollar company by supporting and contributing to the open internet over the course of ten years; their current worrying tactics are very recent. So we know that it's very possible to be wildly successful without undermining your customers' interests (and in the long term, undermining your customers' interests is almost always unsustainable).

The problem is that we've got big players like Google and Facebook who have become risk-averse as they grown, and, having maximized the potential of their original founding visions, have shifted into consolidating their positions in order to preserve the status quo at the expense of others. This is a pattern that seems to recur again and again in the industry.

The way to break it, of course, is to be the source of the creative destruction that undermines the status quo - few large, vested enterprises are willing to do this, though, which is why we see them ultimately becoming dinosaurs who are displaced by startups operating under new paradigms.

I'd hoped that Google, given its nature, would be the one organization that might be able to avert the pattern, but I guess not; they should be doing exactly the opposite of what they're doing now, and support a wide range of products and services, and looking for innovative monetization strategies for products that aren't immediately profitable. But instead, they're going for ultra-focus on what seems to work in the here and now, and trying to entrench the status quo, which will take them down the well-trod path to eventual failure.
When you have financial consolidation without political consolidation, you get unelected bureaucrats deciding to take 10% of the bank accounts in one member nation, and there's nothing that population can do about it.

Part of the reason I think they're crazy to do this is that the above is obviously not true.

There may be nothing the population can legally do about it, but we're living in a time when governments are in genuine danger of going bankrupt, funny money isn't worth the paper it's printed on, and people are literally worrying about essentials like putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their kids' heads. Sooner or later, if we continue down this path, something is going to give, spectacularly.

Unfortunately, when that happens, it will probably come with a horrific body count and potentially even civil or all-out international war. That's the really terrifying thing about this whole mess: it is disrupting the basic fabric of society, the implicit trust we all place in our political and legal and financial systems so we can enjoy our modern, civilised lifestyles. We take a lot of things about that civil society for granted that we would miss dearly if they were gone.

We can only hope that whoever thought this blatant cash grab was a good idea will come to their senses in time to contain the fallout if they go through with it.
Where's Dodgeball?
Feedburner is next.
Even if you keep your cash in fiat currency cash (i.e. euro notes) you would be safe from this.

Keeping your money in some form of cash (whether bank notes or Bitcoin) generally puts you in a worse position than low risk (i.e. diversified) investing. An investment bank which kept accounts in Bitcoin and paid out in Bitcoin would still be at risk of government seizures (unless they operated illegally and hid their identities and location, like Silk Road - but they would then have difficulties enforcing loans, and their depositors would have very little recourse if the bank decided to default and steal all the assets).
Slightly OT, but what do you find so bad about the G+ photo experience?
That wake up call was when they strangled the Reader social community and started pushing Google+ so heavily on Gmail users: this social network wasn't going to be the kind of service you joined because you wanted to, it would be the sort which is even more hassle to ignore than to use.
I worry about the opposite--that we will lose too much information over time when everything is stored digitally.

My employer has been running at least one website for almost 15 years. We've been collecting server logs that entire time. Where are they now? With the exception of logs from the last year, I could not tell you. They were all discarded or lost.

On a larger scale, look at the problem of link rot. We can't even keep track of the public information we have.

The Rosetta Stone (the real one) survived thousands of years of neglect to teach us about our past. What digital assets will survive that long? How many digital assets from 20 years ago are still findable, recoverable, readable, searchable?
Or the "old Google" was just the first phase of embrace/extend/extinguish, and you didn't realize.
>For me, it took losing everything to remember how lucky I am.

So he did have an epiphany.
Do no evil as long as Wall Street is happy - seems to be their real motto.
Launch: Customisable Ipad style homepage project
What do you mean? Won't things described here: http://www.centralbank.gov.cy/nqcontent.cfm?a_id=8158&la... work in case of bankruptcies of these two banks?
RSS is a way for the audience to access fresh web content without having to visit the original websites. Well, Google is an ad company — it makes money selling ads on those websites. RSS was a threat to Google's core business similar to ad blocking plugins.

Google Reader's role was to contain the fad of ad-free news reading, it also provided rich data about what people read.
As soon as they saw the use of RSS fading, they could finally ditch the Reader, hoping it would also further marginalize RSS. They still can mine the Feedburner data, they'll still know what people read.

Did Google also have a role in making RSS unpopular? Would RSS grow bigger if Google didn't come up with the Reader? This would be, ekhmm… a far-fetched hypothesis…
Money, as a theoretical concept, or currency as actually exists?

Because currency is made to be inflated. It's universally producible for less than its face value.

Saving cash is ridiculous.
Super Mario Bros Coin Sound (1985)
Good films have a solid replay value, i.e. you keep them in your collection to return to them later, the same way as you reread good books. And even if you view something only once, it doesn't really make DRM any more sensible than it is for something that you reuse multiple times.

For example games are hard to produce (and it usually takes a long time). Still you can get very good games DRM free, because in gaming the faults of DRM are especially apparent.

The downside of DRM - it insults paying customers, it lowers the usability of the content (restricting it to selected devices / players etc.), it also doesn't affect pirates, since the moment that DRM is broken by some skillful crackers - DRM free copies are widely distributed.

So let's see - no one benefits from DRM. Who is in downside? Paying users. So what is the point in using it anywhere?
Lets call a spade a spade -- they cannot make decisions about their currency because they are using the euro and thus do not really have control over their currency.
But some of these didn't begin as flights of fancy, but as startups acquired by Google, and I think that really highlights the problem here, which is reputation.

When you use a product created by a startup, you realize that there's some risk that they're not going to make it. An advantage that a company like Google has is that nobody expects them to go anywhere. So if they create a service like Google Reader, you might expect that it's going to stick around.

And obviously Google doesn't owe that to anyone. But I'll bet that they've benefited from people making that assumption, and I'll bet that they'll see some hurt if people realize that it's not a valid one.

After all, a company that does nothing but reader, has 10% its user base, and makes money off of those users might actually be profitable. But Google's model is to give away a thousand loss leaders, and when you play that game, you have to look at percentages. At this point, I'd be far more likely to take a chance on a small independent service than any new gadget Google puts out.
Please, you are not helping anybody. Nobody has ever paid back a loan with a bigger loan.

It's just an excuse to take your money too and blame someone else for doing so.
Yes, paper gold isn't gold. Or at least it won't be when you need it to be.
Its not like people are victims here, for the most part they've chosen the "free" privacy violating services over the paid ones every time.

If people cared about their privacy, this wouldn't be the case, they'd be willing to pay for useful services. There was a chance that a market could have developed for services that protected privacy, but thats long gone.

At this point kids growing up are used to the idea of a world withoit secrets. Its terrifying to people over 30, but it could lead to a better world, because even those in power cannot escape the watchful eye of Big Brother.
I honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about. Chrome browser will not support RSS natively, seems like they never had the intention to do so to begin with. Why are we up in arms about a product not supporting some specific feature? Why are we equating that with some evil plot?

...there have never been any plans to implement this natively in Chrome.
I don't know why this bug has been left open for years, making it look as
if we're considering this, when we're not. It just gets people's hopes
up, and then makes them bitter when years go by with no action.

This about sums it up for me, and it's completely understandable.
We've been using Cloudsponge for quite a while now - I'll be looking into this.

Out of curiosity, do the providers change their login/api mechanisms regularly, or are they pretty static? I'm just wondering how quick something like this would get fixed in the event that 'something' changed, if that's a possibility.
That's like saying HTML is for hackers: ordinary users shouldn't need to look at the raw serialization format if the service is any good. The many not hackers I interacted with on the old reader appreciated the way they could keep track of interesting things even if they were only shallowly aware of how it worked.
This article is mistitled. It should be "Tips for Entrepreneurs Seeking Investment in Silicon Valley". There are tons of ideas that don't need investment.

> A great way to find out if you have a really killer idea is to go and ask 100 random people on the street.

I so disagree. I really don't think most people know what they want until they see it. Sometimes things that sound cool in the abstract are lousy in real life, and sometimes things that sound abysmal in the abstract are actually awesome. Plus, a random sampling of 100 people may well be completely inappropriate. If you're not reaching out to the right 100 people you're going to get some very misleading results.

> You can now launch your startup via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as well as get coverage from companies like TechCrunch.

This isn't a marketing strategy! A launch is just the beginning, and probably the most insignificant portion of the uphill battle in user / revenue generation!

--

Anyway, my pedantry aside, this article provides a healthy dose of realism that so many people, especially those seeking investment, sorely need.
Not gonna happen. Several countries moreover already have withdrawal limits per day / week / months to precisely prevent bank runs. Those limits have recently been lowered (for example in Italy). Laws are passed nearly on a daily basis to lower the maximum amount of "physical" money (bills) you can use to buy stuff.

What is going to happen is lots of politicians blatantly lying and saying: "Something like this is unthinkable in our country, even if we're in the eurozone our situation is not the same as that one of Cyprus".

Just as politicians from Cyprus blatantly lied throughout all this week when that option was mentioned: they said it wouldn't happen.

And people didn't bank run.

Cyprus is too small (0.2% of the GDP) to be detonating factor.
Dude don't play stupid. They don't want people to separate content from form (which would you classify ads as?) which at end of the day means cutting out rss except for twitteressque tidbit links.
Please stop polluting discussions with your own agenda.
And where is Google's "Knol" - the encyclopedia only the upper 1 percent could edit?
RSS isn't for hackers, it's for infovores. The same people who make the majority of pageviews on the internet, oh and also make most of the pages on the web. It's for a minority, but that minority is the very tip-top of the most hardcore users of the web. It's not going away.
But if everybody keeps thinking like that, in a few years time in the place of "Greece, Italy, Spain, or Ireland" you will read "Germany, France and UK".

It's just a worldwide poker game, the banks are winning and the small guys are being forced out of the table.
No grave for Google Power Meter? I feel like the only person on earth who used it.
This tax only affects residents living in Cyprus.

This is already a crazy tax but if they're confiscating money on private companies' bank accounts they'll be killing the economy.
Of course your physics professor (and their books) definitely knows everything in the world without needing to venture outside or do any real world experiments. And they certainly couldn't be a fragilista[1] nor could they possibly have God Complex[2].

Seeing as your professor is all knowing, maybe they could finally tell us all how lithium polymer batteries work [3]?

1: http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/...
2: http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford.html
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5124170
Reminds me of this standup set bit :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhP4pHTpra0
So what do you propose? We sit back and do nothing?
Ghostery takes care of most such things, including blocking the major spying tricks by the likes of Google and Facebook.

A decent ad blocker like AdBlock Plus will go some way to helping as well, though it's more of a side effect in that case.

There's also BetterPrivacy, which mostly deals with the non-cookie cookies like Flash LSOs.

Unfortunately, for reasons I can't fathom, even generally privacy-friendly browsers like Firefox still seem quite happy to send vast amounts of fingerprint-friendly information that serves almost no legitimate purpose to anyone who cares to listen. However, there are clearly people thinking about this, e.g., see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fingerprinting.
The rich are getting richer for each year that goes,
Middleclass are therefore relatively getting poorer compared to the rich. Yet we bail out the banks that supports the debt money of the super-rich. Thus we save the rich and put austerity packages on the poor.

There is not money for the principal in the current economic system.

Almost all money is debt. Less than 5% of banks assets are cash, the rest is debt.

The current economic system is a gigantic Ponzi scheme, were wealth is transferred from the working class to rich. Since there is not money for the principal the system will crash by itself since its inherently instable, but no we keep saving the debts the rich has created.

If central banks did not create at least 2% inflation
new money in its goals, since there is not money to pay the interest principal in the system, all banks would eventually go bankrupt.

We should create a new economic system with debt free money.
This. It's a wall of text. I guarantee you, 90+% of people who go to your page are going to hit the back button long before they finish getting to the “sign up” button.

-Condense the value proposition into a few sentences, or better yet, one.

-Use pictures, include screenshots or drawings of what it does. People don’t like reading a wall of text.

-Use multiple sign up buttons. Top, bottom, and between the text. See how http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ does it.
A condensed list of titles... which opens to reveal a ridiculous waste of vertical space, including two rows for social media and, ironically, a massive title which can take up 2-3 lines.
I can't agree with your last sentence. We've all had the profits of having banks providing liquidity (common, all that Russian money into the Cyprian economy has been great for all of Cyprus). Now that system has failed and the big guys aka the banks are just as clueless as the little guys.

Do we need to rethink how our economy works? Yes.
Do we need to help Cyprus, Italy, Spain? Yes. Partially because it is in out best (Dutch) interests, but also because they are European brethren.
Is it okay to ask the locals for a sacrifice themselves? Yes.

I know I'm living in one of the richest countries in the world. I don't mind helping another country. I understand that losing 6.75% of your savings hurts.
If it's open source, the code will be visible and noticed. In a closed source environment, you could still have the exploit, but it'd be behind closed doors.
Have you finished anything yet?
When Did I Do Something Hard
That's been standard procedure for issues getting a lot of off-topic comments, or have the potential for the same, for some time, and it's definitely welcome when trying to track the status of popular features/bugs. The point of issue comments is to contribute to getting an issue fixed or resolved, not to act as a discussion thread. It's quite clear this was a done deal for some time and there's nothing further to discuss in that issue.
Let's just hope that this bank run will lead to a chain-reaction worldwide bank run, which in turn will lead to a much needed society's hard reset.

But it won't.
Just curious, but isn't this what ScraperWiki does?
Don’t Let Your Hype Write A Check That Your Product Can’t Cash
> no one up voted you

This is a problem with HN. I've submitted 6 stories with this account, all of which seem like they're definitely interesting material highly relevant to HN's audience, and rather similar to stories that have made the front page.

But they've gotten at most 3 upvotes, as of this writing. Heck, I have single comments that get more upvotes than all of my submissions combined.

I don't want to think about having the success or failure of a product riding on HN's ability to find my submission and upvote it.

If you want to personally do something about this, next time you read through the front page and still want to procrastinate, look at the New feed, and upvote some stories that don't already have a big group of people looking at them!
Not the first time I have read about this, but I am always curious about the costs. NYC has some significant tax burdens, and property is difficult to find and costs are high, correct? Does the professional population density offset these costs?

Disclaimer: I love NY
This makes me even more reluctant to switch to Chrome from Opera.

I hope Opera continue to evolve their platform, WebKit engine or not. :/
Looks like you'll have to switch. All these features are present in Android and Apple is to going to add these to iOS anytime soon.
I think your solution would suffer from the tragedy of the commons--it would only take a few defectors to ruin the whole scheme.

My guess is that the only durable way to increase digital privacy protections is through law. To achieve what you want, you would need to get Congress to pass a bill, or the Supreme Court to hand down a favorable decision, or maybe both.
Agreed regarding traction... Zuckerberg had plenty of traction on Facebook before moving to the Valley. I look at that as a good model if moving wouldn't be affordable or easy.
Once a decision is made, further discussion is waste of everyone's energy. If the decision weren't final, the bug would remain open. People can post angree screeds elsewhere, like on their blogs' RSS feeds.
I'd say that the movement from print news to digital news and per-author and per-article consumption and the resulting "curation" craze means RSS is more relevant now, not less.

It's just that companies like Facebook and Google are trying to lock in users on their own platforms.

Makes you wonder what is ahead for Blogger. It will probably be assimilated eventually.
also:

- Lua (as a language) is for the most part better designed than JavaScript
Why do people keep mentioning Twitter? It's not even vaguely related to what RSS does, any more than, say, a digital radio station you could tune iTunes to.
RSS has always been a threat to Google's core business. From Google's perspective, RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads. Ads are Google's only product business-wise.

They've closed the threat containment phase (Reader) and are finally openly out to kill it.
Really? Strange timing then, don't you think?
Would the money be safe in Germany? I think I much prefer to have my money (little as it is) in a bank outside of the Eurozone. Perhaps in one of the South-America or BRIC countries if at all possible.
And it doesn't preclude the implementation of Chrome extensions which provide that functionality. It's merely a statement that it won't be integrated into the browser.

(Which is fine by me. Chrome doesn't need to try to be everything to everybody. For that, there's the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite.)
Stanford Ignite - Bangalore. Application Deadline: May 15 2013
It is easy to feel overachieved when the deadline is tight. What we fear is to under-perform when given ample resources, when "it's on".
Dissatisfied with webkit? Why not gecko(firefox)? =P
You're forcing them to redistribute wealth from the individual to the banks.

If you lose sight of the individual in all this, then I suppose it isn't a punishment. But I don't think it's appropriate to do that.
The demo is painfully close to working within mobile safari on an unjailbroken iPad 2.

So close...so very, very close!
That's what annoys me about the modern web. I don't mind sites leaving a cookie on my computer when I visit them but unrelated sites shouldn't be doing that or tracking me.
There is no conspiracy here. That feature wasn't going to be brought back to Chrome, and should have been closed a long time ago. Shutting down Reader shined a light on this issue, so if they hadn't closed it before now is a logical time to close it.

Cutting off comments make sense as well as there isn't going to be constructive discussion at this point. Constructive discussion has already been had and a decision was reached. Having comments open at this point just inviting people to grind their axes.
Lip service to their citizens' rights only. They've already determined it is 'ok' to kill a US citizen with a drone purely on the presidential whim, and hold you indefinitely without trial.
Ainol Novo 7 Mars Benchmarks
It is worth mentioning a large part of the reason RSS is so reclusive is that none of the browsers kept the "subscribe via RSS" button in the nav bar Firefox had 6 years ago. Back then it was one click to add feeds to the browser, and anyone could use it. Now you have to go out of your way looking for it.