Schaulustiger

I thought we preferred the alliteration "Winzigweich".

It is not. Quake had "Excellent" for two kills in short succession, but nothing else if you chained kills after that.

I have been working with the Tink API recently as well and wasn't super impressed. Maybe it was our use case, but I noticed a few gaps in their documentation and am not a big fan of how they handle permanent users.

Then we had to integrate with a hot-shot European startup banking provider and I started to appreciate Tink's API a bit more. God, that one was a clusterfuck of misleading/wrong documentation and horribly inconsistent API design.

What are you talking about? Ever since the first big Munich cohort, Germany has done extensive testing and scientists like Dr. Drosten have confirmed multiple times that we've been testing from a very early point on and are probably closer to the number of actual infections than many of our neighboring countries.

Mask shortage is a global problem and will remain so for some time since we'll have to limit making them available to where they are actually needed (hospitals, doctors, nursing homes).

All in all, I think Germany has dealt with SARS-CoV-2 in a responsible way, and the numbers so far seem to agree.

Regarding your question about if we might accidentally test for flu or other, already existing corona virii:

This was a topic of discussion in yesterday's talk [1] with Dr. Drosten, a virologist who played an important part in the development of the currently used PCR test. He said that there were extensive studies done with hundreds of samples from both flu patients and patients infected with other corona virii and none returned a positive result. The only other positive results were from corona virii that are special to certain animals (bats, some cows IIRC), but none of those are present in humans. So the accuracy of our current PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 seems to be extremely high.

[1] (transcript in German) https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/16-Coronavirus-Update-Wi...

Here's a quick (and slightly condensed) translation of the relevant parts: "There was a big validation study [for the PCR test]. We tested with a big number of patient samples from patients with flu/cold diseases and other corona viruses. Not once did we get a false positive. [...] It is true though that [the current PCR test] would yield positive results against the old SARS corona virus, but that hasn't been confirmed in a human for 16 years. And theoretically, the test would give a positive result on some bat corona viruses, but they do not affect humans."

Interesting, I didn't know that. What's the legal status of a cyclist on the road then? Are they normal participants in traffic?

I generally find the tone of the discussion about cyclists here surprising. I'm from Germany, and while there is animosity between cyclists and car drivers, both are equally accepted on all roads (except the autobahn, of course). There's a movement in big cities towards more and more specific lanes for cyclists. I don't own a bicycle myself, but with regards to a car's emissions and the omnipresent wasteful parking slots, I'm all for strengthening the status of cyclists on roads.

Huh, so you paid for the road and the cyclist didn't? I'm not an American, but I don't think there's a road tax for car owners in the US.

Blendle is nice in theory but their article pricing is really off-putting. I know that it's the publisher's choice to set prices for individual articles, but I'm not going to pay half of the actual paper price to read one single article.

I use it to read a select few things that I'm really interested in, but I'd love it to be more of an individual aggregation of stuff (think Flipbook) where I don't mind reading lots of articles because they're essentially cheap enough for me to not care. Not going to do that, though, when a 300 word article costs up to 1€.

It's interesting to see how no one even seems to try. In Europe there's Blendle [1], but that's only an aggregator and you still have to pay for each article you read (with hilarious differences in pricing). I've always wondered if they'd be more successful with a flat fee for complete access to all articles for all their papers and zines. But I guess the publishing houses don't consider this viable as it would hurt their subscriptions (who's gonna subscribe to just one paper when there's access to ten more for roughly the same price?).

[1] https://blendle.com

I was looking at buying an ultrabook and had the same problem (but living in Germany). In the end I decided on a Lenovo X1 Carbon, though, but faced the decision to either get one from the Lenovo store (which allows you to get a US keyboard) or buy with an education discount from a retailer. Since the discount for the latter was really steep, I saved 500€ and settled on a DE keyboard, although its layout is a major pain for programming. But I couldn't justify shelling out 500 bucks more just for the different keyboard. It's a shame but I guess we're really a minority.

It's closer to just being Hypezig.

Source: am from Leipzig.

I don't think "You don't know JS" is good for a beginner, either. It delves very deep into some JS core mechanics and explains them with a lot of foo/bar/baz code that a beginner can hardly relate to since he's not likely to encounter those use cases or patterns until he is more advanced.

I've always been baffled by the absence of lookbehinds. Made a lot of regex searching unwieldy, so I'm glad they finally added it together with named capture groups.

Can anyone comment on the quality of the books? A lot of the covered topics are of interest to me (Docker, nginx, git) but I'd like to know if those books are worth the read.

I think it's more a reaction to a usage pattern of their star system. YouTube abandoned their five star rating system citing that most people voted only 1 or 5 stars with almost nothing in between. [1] I'd guess a vast amount of Netflix users do the same.

[1] https://youtube.googleblog.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-r...

Well, YouTube abandoned its 5 star rating system citing that almost everyone votes either 1 or 5 stars [1]. It might be that that Netflix is seeing a similar usage of their voting system, so it would make sense to instead implement a like/dislike vote.

It sucks for those of us who used the finer nuances of the old system. I for sure know that it'll give me quite some headaches when I have to rate a well thought out but flawed film.

[1] https://youtube.googleblog.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-r...

To be honest, I don't think that NodeSchool intends to give a primer on how to build a production-ready balance manager. They want to teach the basics of JS, that's all.

I agree, though, that those learning services give the impression that it's just about learning how to code and maybe use some design patterns. You won't find a security/authentication course on FreeCodeCamp or one about codebase maintainability, which is a shame.

Yep, same problem trying to get the free tier here in Germany: I have to create a business account. Well, no GCP for me. I hope they reconsider this unfortunate restriction.