mdemare

Yes, IIRC, 51% of Dutch women make less than 70% of the minimum wage.

It does by no means follow that the current level of household debt must lead to any dramatic changes.

A high household debt implies that there's relatively less money left over for domestic consumption, compared to similar countries with less debt. Low domestic consumption is a drag on employment. That means that new jobs must come from the export sector, but with the current worldwide stagnation, that does not look hopeful.

I fear another decade of very slow growth, not a sudden collapse: unemployment is stable, mortgage requirements have been fairly strict, so people who can pay their mortgage this month, can pay it the next.

I don't think so; see: http://lesswrong.com/lw/q2/spooky_action_at_a_distance_the_n...

Not trusting is the default. It is up to Coinbase to prove that they can be trusted.

You mean like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignition_interlock_device ? It's operational here in nl, about 100 people a week are forced to have one installed.

I hope the development tools get some love, since they're completely borked in the last couple of releases.

Isn't it obvious? West-Virginia's well-funded coal mining lobby doesn't like the competition from Bitcoin mining and moves one of their pawns to block it.

"It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black."

It is possible for the exchanges and miners to get together and change the protocol, to mark the stolen bitcoins as invalid? The thief is probably going to dump the stolen bitcoins on the market - not exactly a good thing for the bitcoin price or the long term viability of bitcoin itself.

Especially since it will take quite some time to dump all thsoe bitcoins - the market isn't all that liquid.

The author mentions "The Fifth Discipline" a couple of times. Has anyone read it? Worth reading?

Apple's cash pile is 1/3 of their market cap. That means that is they'd use it to buy their own shares at the current price (they can't, they need to pay taxes on most of it first) their P/E ratio would drop to about 9.

Shorting and buying put options are not the same thing.

They're not priced as a growth stock. P/E is about 13, and that's including their huge pile of cash. Average P/E for the S&P is 19.

Live financial result earning conference call here: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/14pijnaefvpijbnfdbvpij...

Starts at 22:00 UTC

I wonder how well the 5C sold. I see a lot of 5Ss in the wild, but hardly any 5Cs.

Hmm, in my experience, 85 yo Dutch women are unlikely to drive a Mazda Miata. Although maybe mine examiners are more thrill-seeking than the average 85 yo. Fun!

Discussion earlier today about the first article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076121

Yes, raising the minimum wage would help, but part of the problem is that when the very poor start working, they're no longer eligible to all kinds of subsidies (food stamps, medicaid). Greg Mankiw explains it very well here: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.nl/2009/11/poverty-trap.html

This phenomenon is well known and usually called a "Poverty Trap" or a "Welfare Trap".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

One of the things that can mitigate this is the Earned Income Tax Credit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit)

Also, it is misleading to claim that "the poor don't work". This article only discusses people below the poverty line ($11,490 for an individual). If you work 1600 hours per year at the federal minimum wage, you earn $12,000. That's definitely poor in my book.

But why did it have to be Zynga's Mark Pincus...

You don't know that.

An investment is productive - buying a share in a company allows that company to increase production, which should increase their profit.

Lending money to a company allows that company to invest, and increase their profits.

Buying BTC is nothing like that. It's speculation - hoping that the price will go up, nothing more.

If you want to protect yourself against USD depreciation, buy Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS). Ultra safe, ultra boring.

But why would you want to? Inflation is bad if you have lots of money but no (prospects of) income. Retirees for instance. Most of you are in the opposite situation.

Hmm, it takes 5+ seconds to get a response, and it chokes on the same test phrase as Google, thinking "Ik hou van vette lettertypes." is Norwegian...

Why is this better than the Google or Bing translate APIs, which also offer language detection?

The vast majority of Rails apps fail those conditions. I'd say that it's not the Rails Way to follow those precepts, so I believe your comment dismisses Rails in one stroke. I'm not sure if that's a very productive line of thought.

Mostly disagree. Pure functions are beautiful and have their place, but not every function should be a pure function. And a Rails controller method is the opposite of a pure function - it has a database connection, several file descriptors and hundreds of objects at its fingertips. That is its strength, and DI has no place there.

That said, if you have a pure function, and you need to know the current time, consider keeping it pure with DI.

And the TomTom data is fine. When Apple maps fails to find a POI, I open my TomTom app, and it always knows it - offline too. Apple's screw up is giving TomTom a bad name...

Night vision might save your life - that's a lot of time right there!

But this distinguished but elderly scientist makes neither of those claims; he states that growing plants for biofuels is a Bad Idea.