toretore

Thank you for correcting a pet peeve of mine: People thinking they "speak Bokmål". Everyone speaks a dialect.

Same story with Free ADSL: I used to get terrible speeds from anything on AWS (including our own services), around 100 KB/s, until very recently when suddenly I was able to saturate my ADSL line from them. Now I don't dread having to download GB-sized log files.

It didn't really make sense to me why AWS was a target of their bandwidth extortion tactics until I realized Netflix uses AWS.. So I guess thank you Netflix for paying the ransom?

There's one thing I've been thinking about that I don't see anyone else talking about, which is the role of hybrids in the decline of the ICE.

I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that most cars sold in 5 or 10 years will be at least hybrid electric. As battery prices continue to fall, it will make sense to include some electric capacity in addition to an ICE. So let's imagine a future where most new cars have a relatively modest 20 kWh battery with a range of more than 100 Km:

Most people, most of the time, drive short distances that will seldom require the use of the combustion engine and its fuel (many hybrids today come with special fuel tanks to prevent the fuel from "going bad"). Buying fuel will become an increasingly rare thing, and people will start to think of it as an expensive inconvenience. The current ICE fleet is reliant on a large, complex and expensive infrastructure to provide this fuel, and as people buy less and less of it, maintaining it will become less and less sustainable. As fueling stations start closing and the fuel prices go up (will they? I'm not sure about this point), it will become even more costly and inconvenient to fuel a hybrid, perpetuating the cycle.

At some point, the idea of a noisy, dirty ICE running on expensive, hard-to-get fuel will become so unattractive that it's no longer a viable option for most people. While this decline is happening, the cost, range and performance of all-electric will improve to the point where there really is no other reasonable choice.

"The most extraordinary things about Stephen Harding's The Last Battle, a truly incredible tale of World War II, are that it hasn’t been told before in English"

I'm quite sure I've read this story before, in English.

Rather than assuming that these soldiers negotiated truces out of purely pragmatic reasons, I think the article completely ignores that most people actually don't want to lie half-frozen in trenches killing each other. They had these "truces" because war is hell and everybody wanted a break from it. If there was nobody there to order them, most would've gone home.

It is common in Europe that owners of the phone lines must give other ISPs access to it (for a - regulated - price). This in turn stems from the fact that the owners of the phone lines are (or used to be) owned by the state.

So that's what that was. Happened to me yesterday.

I don't see anything pretentious about it. He's not bragging about being smart, just stating that he is what most people would call intelligent.

Intelligence can mean many things, but I like to think of it in terms of "brain power"; the amount of abstract thought you can hold and process, your brain's RAM and CPU power so to speak.

The term depression is very broad and probably encompasses numerous as-yet-undefined sub-categories, but his description is very much like my own experience: A dulling of the mind. It's like downclocking the brain's CPU and emotional coprocessor from 2Ghz to 200Mhz. Thinking became slow and required more effort, analytical capabilities pretty much went away and I didn't have the spare capacity to really enjoy anything. A song or a movie I knew I liked just didn't register because my brain wasn't capable of processing it the way it used to. Learning became uninteresting and a chore and problem solving became near impossible. In short, I felt really dumb. I knew I wasn't, but I couldn't "smarten up" however much I tried. Knowing this, not being able to enjoy learning, problem solving or experiencing something was the worst terror of depression.

The experience left me wondering about the immutability or genetic predeterminism of "intelligence". If we broadly define intelligence as "brain power", I know now that it can vary a great deal. I wonder how much of this brain power is predetermined through genetics and how much is affected by the environment. We know that diet plays a large role and that certain diseases affect the brain in this way. How much of a person's "dumbness" can be removed by changing the external factors? In addition, I think broader aspects of intelligence such as analytical abilities, memory and "abstract capacity" can be taught or improved through training. I know my own "intelligence" certainly has required lots of training through the years, not to mention the knowledge that plays a large part of it that had to be acquired.

I think XUL was/is vastly better then than HTML5 is today for what everyone seems to want: Actual applications (instead of web sites) that run in the browser.

XUL had/has a proper GUI toolkit with proper bindings to an event framework for user interaction. It was similar to HTML/CSS/JS but much, much better. The problem was people wanted "real" apps without having to do real work, and we're stuck with HTML which is a document language and will never be what we really want.

Oh, and it wasn't that complicated, it was rather easy.

So it's because of technical/operational and not regulatory or legal problems? What about SEPA, or is that just for "regular people"?

I'd really be interested in knowing why it's not "Stripe EU" instead. What sort of problems they had trying to do that, and what needs improvement for that to become reality.

It would be nice if we could try before we buy (globally). Also, $0.15 per lookup is really expensive.

Address verification is a pain; if I could get someone else to do that for me that would be nice.

This guy gets it. Being proud of one's nationality makes no sense. You have no right to take pride in something you didn't have a part in. Likewise, you have no obligation to feel shame for something you didn't take part in, like a country's wars or human rights abuses.

Attaching your sense of pride and self worth on something you can't control is a weakness. It doesn't matter what it is, it could be a nation, a political ideology, a religion or a football team. As long as you don't control it, you're subject to its inevitable changes whether good or bad - your sense of pride or shame is outside of your control.

To be independent is to be strong. Your country maintains secret torture facilities or spies on its citizens? Not your fault; you didn't approve of it and that's as far as your obligation goes. You can be proud of your work to oppose it, but the shame belongs to the perpetrators.

I wasn't going to comment more as I don't have much more to say about the subject, but I just have to point out the flaw in this statement:

"There is a still a much lower mobility of the workforce in Europe than what you see in the US, much because of language."

The assumption behind this statement is exactly the kind of mentality I am referring to. There is little mobility because employers don't hire the employees because there is little mobility. It's circular reasoning.

With the jobless rate in certain parts of the south skyrocketing, you'd think this would be an active hunting ground for employers in need of people. You don't think the many 25-35 year old university educated people living with their parents wouldn't jump at a chance of a decently paid job in Norway (or anywhere else for that matter)? It's like a fat man complaining how everyone is making him fat and nobody is fixing it for him. The only real barrier is mentality.

The point about language is fair; it is a concern. But if you're a startup with any sort of vision that extends beyond the narrow world view that I've spent so many words describing, guess what the language of your business is going to be? Surprise, it's English! The company founders speak it, their customers speak it and the excellent but unemployed programmer living with his parents in Bologna speaks it.

This conclusion assumes that employees have to also be from Norway, which is emblematic of the insular and narrow mindset that is the real cause of the problem.

Tech startup doesn't mean social media startup.

I am a developer and I have been impressed by other developers many times.

That being said, I don't care much for "show off" posts like "Look everyone, I made a functional web server in Brainfuck!". If you're trying to impress other developers, it is certain that you won't. It is not a worthy goal in itself.

He's got a book. Not it all makes sense, the weird things he's writing. I couldn't understand it before, because none of it made any sense on its own.

Somewhat related to #1 is vitamin D deficiency. Don't fall in the trap of dismissing it because it's "just a vitamin" (which it actually isn't), because a severe deficiency will screw you up good. Pretty much everyone is deficient, but the severity varies. Geeks who spend most of their time indoors, staying late up at night working on stuff are more at risk. Don't assume that drinking a lot of fortified milk/whatever or living in a sunny climate makes you immune, because it doesn't.

At first a deficiency will just make you feel "off", but if left untreated it will make you feel as if you're slowly dying (not exaggerating) with muscle/bone/joint pain, fever, blurry vision, insomnia and brain fog. Depression and anxiety are secondary symptoms (how can you not become depressed with all this?), but still just symptoms, not a cause (in this case).

It's a simple test that could save you (anyone) a lot of grief, because you really do not want to let it go that far, and recovery takes a looooong time (months). You may have to insist (and do insist) on getting it checked, because most doctors won't by default. Most doctors also don't know how to interpret test results properly. <30 ng/mL is deficient, and ideally it should be 60-70.

Also worth considering is taking a B-complex vitamin. But first and foremost, talk to a doctor about it.

They're awkward for you, like feet and inches are awkward for me. When I hear people say they're "five eight" I have absolutely no idea what that means.

People don't say they're "one point seven meters" tall, they say "one seventy four" as in 174cm.

It seems to me your intention here was not to point out the perceived wrongness of this particular decision, but to provide "yet another case of Brussels bureaucrats meddling in our lives". In doing that, you're purposefully confusing the lawmaking and judiciary parts of the legal system to create an imagined body which you creatively name the "Eurocracy", while this was a court decision independent of those actually making the law. In short, your intention was to rant, using this ruling as an excuse, and not to provide potentially interesting information.

As for the ruling itself, I don't see what's wrong with it. It's gender discrimination, and gender discrimination is (IMO rightly) unlawful. I have never been in a car accident, I'm a careful and relatively safe driver and I don't appreciate having to pay more just because I happen to be male.

I'm sure you can come up with statistics that show people of a certain ethnicity are more likely to be in an accident too, but insurance companies know that's a no-go. Discriminating by gender is exactly the same; it's based on something you are that you can't change, unlike driving experience and where you live which you can.

The OP deliberately wrote a rant about something he doesn't understand with an attention-grabbing headline and I called him out on it. I don't think that's unkind. I would have assumed good faith were it not for him explicitly stating he actually doesn't want to learn JavaScript but still wants to bash it.

TL;DR: I don't actually understand how JavaScript works, but I thought writing a nonsense article demonstrating my willingness to bash it nonetheless with an aggressive headline and post it on HN myself would bring me some desperately needed attention.

I remember my mom being one of the very last people I knew to insist on using checks instead of a credit/debit card, and that was more than 10 years ago.

I'm pretty sure they already learn English in school like in every other civilised country. English trumps every other language in terms of usefulness.

People who argue in favour of the Imperial system are the same kind of people who argue against renewable energy, Everything-over-IP and an eventual 10G mobile internet. They will lose, not because of some cultural or moral superiority but because what they're arguing against has been proven to be so much better than the alternative.

Remember, we all used to measure using sticks, body parts and things we find on the ground, but most of us have moved on since then. There's a reason for that.

People (and by that I mean Americans, sorry) seem to think Germany's roads are an exception. While this may have been true 20 or 30 years ago, in reality they're pretty much the same as or even a little worse than the rest of Europe. An exception might be the EU10, but they're catching up really fast.

Also, 20-lane motorways through the centre of a city is not a sign of excellency but rather that of poor planning.

Wal-Mart was also in Germany but they didn't last long for whatever reasons and sold their stores to Aldi or Lidl I think.

The point about not requiring rubygems in a library or a gem (as ironic as that may sound) is that by doing so you're coupling your implementation to your environment. This is as bad as coupling your classes to global constants, and not something you should do. Case in point: Rails allows you to "unpack" gems to make your app more portable, and it shouldn't matter if the "foo" gem uses the unpacked version or the one installed in the gem repository on the server.

There is nothing "international", technically, about flying within the Schengen zone. Airlines don't require you to produce an ID because you're flying "internationally"; you need an ID to board a plane anywhere in the EU/EEA, also for "domestic" flights.