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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Flattr is not rare on German sites and those who use it seem to be doing reasonably well if they are fairly well known.

Tim Pritlove, for example, (a podcaster) is making close to 2.000€ per month (chart and German blogpost: http://tim.geekheim.de/2011/04/14/ein-jahr-flattr/).

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The european/american thousands separator always manages to confuse me for a second: "Two Euros a month? Who gives a crap?"

I hear a lot of people saying that. Interesting, however, is that I, as European, don't even think twice about it[1]. My brain must be wired to look at the context primarily.

Why that is, I can only take a stab at: I guess we see a lot more from you guys on the other side of the pond than you see from us. :)

[1] Comma overload -- my English teacher would kill me.

I think the difference is that most Americans simply aren't exposed to various ways of writing dates, times, currencies, numbers, etc. on a regular basis.

Even within Germany, there's no consensus about where to put the Euro sign (before or after). Americans don't write times like 20:00 and say "eight" aloud. After several years in Europe, I'm fairly adept at accepting all inputs.

Your comment inspired this thought: Imagine a Firefox extension or Greasemonkey script that localizes web pages: converts dates, times, currencies, separators to the user's preference. :)

Google Chrome will translate web page languages, which is a much more difficult problem.

Oops. I normally try to use the correct separator. I don't know why I didn't this time. Strange how the brain works sometimes, I remember typing a comma, deleting it and thinking "No, I have to use the other separator on HN."

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