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workhere-ioon Soros Says Europe Faces 25-Year Slump Without Overhaul

Who cares about the quality of life of the citizens of a nation?

Actually, many European countries, especially the Nordic ones, have so much redistribution of wealth that whether or not we experience growth means a great deal, not just to corporations. Having said that, things aren't bad at all in Northern Europe right now - quite the contrary.

workhere-ioon Ask HN: How to be a "Homo Universalis" by 2020?

Knowing history is extremely useful. You'll find that it puts everything you know about the current world into a context, and it'll help you navigate life more easily.

workhere-ioon Alleged Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Denies Bitcoin Involvement

Sort of depends on how you pronounce it. "En masse" is not pronounced like "in mass" (check http://www.merriam-webster.com/audio.php?file=en_mas02&word=...).

workhere-ioon Ask HN: Is anyone building anything big with Meteor?

MongoDB has gotten a bad reputation lately. I can't say whether or not it's deserved, but try googling or searching here on HN for comments about MongoDB. There are quite a lot of negative ones.

workhere-ioon DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

I'm surprised you say that you pick them over Linode, because Linode seems to have the features you mentioned were missing at Digital Ocean.

workhere-ioon Braintree is giving $50k in processing to every startup

I'm in Denmark. Any idea as to when Stripe is coming to Denmark?

Will merchants be instantly approved, or does it take several days/weeks?

workhere-ioon Alleged Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Denies Bitcoin Involvement

to literally show up on someone's doorstep in mass?

Hate to be that guy, but... it's "en masse" :) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/en%20masse

workhere-ioon Braintree is giving $50k in processing to every startup

As a European who was disappointed that Stripe isn't in my country yet, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Braintree is every bit as easy to use[1] (took me a half hour to set up a test transaction website), and it's even cheaper than Stripe. (Edit: Seems Braintree's European pricing differs from their US pricing. Braintree's European pricing is 1.8% to 2.6% (everything included) which is considerably cheaper than Stripe).

The only downside I can see is the approval process which in Europe takes 7-10 days.

1) https://www.braintreepayments.com/docs/python/guide/getting_...

workhere-ioon Dear HN — if php blogging platforms are junk, what do you suggest?

WordPress is not heavy when you use one of the many caching plugins.

SQLite should not be your go-to database if you want to handle "a few hundred thousand uniques a day". PostgreSQL or MySQL are much better for that purpose.

While some of the core WordPress code is terrible, WordPress is still pretty much the leader when it comes to usability and time-to-market. My recommendation: WordPress plus a caching plugin.

workhere-ioon Ask HN: Is anyone building anything big with Meteor?

I would guess that the fact that Meteor currently uses MongoDB may prevent adoption by many larger sites.

workhere-ioon 2014 Goals

I get the sense from your comment and link that there's a real risk that Persona will be abandoned in a few years?

workhere-ioon 2014 Goals

Wondering why Persona isn't on that list. It could use some marketing efforts.

workhere-ioon Ask HN: What has recently pissed you off that ideally a product could solve?

Or even better, you could order your food in a mobile app (or on a website), and the supermarket would deliver to your home later at a time you choose, e.g. between 4 and 5 PM. Several supermarkets such as http://www.nemlig.com/ do this in Denmark for a delivery price of just $3.5.

workhere-ioon Ask HN: Will webfonts ever be good enough?

do you think is good enough to leave a image to represent a heading? you might think, oh cool that look nice, but remember it affects SEO

Having an image for a logo often consumes less bandwidth than a web font (because there's a lot of CSS and a font file involved with a web font). SEO shouldn't be a problem if you use the "alt" attribute in the image tag.

workhere-ioon Why it's a bad idea to put a CNAME record on your root domain

It's not an Amazon problem, it's a limitation in the DNS specs.

workhere-ioon Why it's a bad idea to put a CNAME record on your root domain

The article points to an AWS article on how to set up the whole thing correctly - but once you've done that, there's still another problem: You really shouldn't host public stuff with S3 at all, unless you use CloudFront in front of it. Try benchmarking it with Apache Bench: S3 is extremely slow, whereas CloudFront is fast and can take a large number of hits.

workhere-ioon The Fall Of Perl, The Web's Most Promising Language

PHP is what pushed it out of that position, not Python or Ruby

Exactly true. PHP was the thing to use in 2001. At that time Ruby was rarely used for web purposes, and most Ruby libraries, while extensively documented, were mostly documented in Japanese with a tiny, incomplete English version with horrible grammar. And Python? Well, there was no Django, Flask, WSGI, SQLAlchemy, Pyramid or other frameworks/utilities that Python programmers enjoy today, and Python was rarely used in a web context.

workhere-ioon Ask HN: How the hell is Whatsapp worth $18 billion?

We're in a tech bubble. I don't see any other explanation, because it's unlikely that WhatsApp itself will ever generate the amount it was bought for. Some years (months) from now the bubble will burst, and IT companies will be bought for a far more reasonable sum (a sum they'll have to justify to the buyer by having decent revenue. Sure WhatsApp has revenue, but nowhere near $18 billion).

workhere-ioon Bitcoin’s Value Falls 10% as Faltering Mt.Gox Exchange Continues to Implode

It's not a question of whether scams happen - it's a question of how many scams happen and how severe they are.

workhere-ioon Ask HN: What domain registration and DNS service do you use?

https://gandi.net / http://doc.rpc.gandi.net. For DNS I sometimes use AWS' Route 53 because it provides some unique options regarding S3 and CloudFront.

workhere-ioon Why is broadband more expensive in the US?

"We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight."

This should be a wake-up call for people who believe in the free market's ability to further low prices and good products. In reality it is often up to governments to prevent monopolies from forming and ensure that there is enough competition.

workhere-ioon Why Europe needs to get over its Silicon Valley envy

Discussions like this on HN always tend to bring about anecdotal evidence from people who only have experience from a single European country and extrapolate from that. So let me just take this opportunity to remind HN'ers that conditions (be they cultural, legal or otherwise) vary to an extreme degree between European countries.

In other words, don't be scared to start a business in e.g. Germany just because someone on HN says that starting a business in France is problematic. They are completely different countries with different laws and mindsets: http://soimovedhere.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/stop-generalizi...

workhere-ioon Poll HN: Incorporate in US, Canada or Netherlands?

The issue is much more complicated than the currency issue (because of taxes and a lot of other stuff), and you should be talking to lawyers rather than asking HN, I think.

workhere-ioon Why I'm going back to cable TV

Hulu is US only. Netflix has a Canadian catalog but it is a far cry from the US one.

You can easily watch American Netflix and Hulu with http://unlocator.com or similar services.

workhere-ioon What did Persona get right? Why did Persona fail to gain wide adoption?

Sure, but Facebook has a number of problems as a general-purpose login mechanism:

A. Not everyone has an FB account. B. Those that do don't always trust that logging in with FB won't mean that the website they're logging in to will spam their wall.

workhere-ioon What did Persona get right? Why did Persona fail to gain wide adoption?

Persona fails to solve a problem which either end-users or people who operate websites for profit actually have.

I disagree. The end user benefits from being able to quickly sign up to a service without having to validate his/her email address.

The developers benefit from not having to store passwords.

workhere-ioon Ask HN: Where do you register your domains?

Agree. Some of the advantages of choosing Gandi are a free SSL certificate and free email (IMAP/POP - 1 GB).

workhere-ioon Ask HN: Moving Beyond PHP for the Problem Solving Programmer

Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/) plus SQLAlchemy (http://www.sqlalchemy.org/) is a really good combination. I find that former PHP users often like Python's syntax.

workhere-ioon 135 new currencies at Stripe

http://adyen.com/ and https://paymill.com/ are also available in Denmark (although it'd be nice to have Stripe, too).