Why Germans pay cash for almost everything - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/262595/why-germans-pay-cash-for-almost-everything/ <comment><USER2> According to [https://www.cashforless.de/ec_cash_info/Fakten_zur_Kartenzah...](https://www.cashforless.de/ec_cash_info/Fakten_zur_Kartenzahlung_in_Deutschland.png) methods for payments in stores 2011 was 57% cash, 5.3% credit card, 33% debit card ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cash)).

> "of course, [the Germans] attitudes toward currency must owe something to > Germany's tumultuous monetary history. During the Weimar-era hyperinflation > that peaked in 1923 [...]"

> "the German tendency to settle up in cash undeniably reflects the fact that > for much of the last century, Germany has been either on the brink of, in > the midst of, or struggling to recover from, disaster."

As a German I call that theory into question. Our currency has been stable for 60+ years. It would've been nice if other countries with recent disasters (war, hyperinflation, sanctions) and their attitude toward currency was compared against.

<comment><USER3> As a German

a.) I mostly pay cash because it's faster

b.) some shops that can afford it only have cash payments to save on CC costs

Not because of inflation or because something happend 100y ago.

<comment><USER4> As an american, I find it strange that cash is faster. Most people who pay cash need to wait to get the change back unless they know the total beforehand and happen to have exact change. In the US, credit card machines are very fast even the chip enabled ones.

Cash workflow:

\- Cashier tells you the total amount

\- You look in your wallet/purse

\- You spend time counting exact change if you do have it

\- If not, you take out a rounded bill/note (say $20)

\- Cashier takes the bill/note, punches in the register and then spends a few seconds giving you the change back.

Credit card workflow:

\- Cashier tells you the total amount

\- You look in your wallet/purse

\- You swipe card/insert in chip reader

\- Done

<comment><USER3> Cash workflow:

\- Cashier tells you the total amount

\- I get a 10 EUR note from my trouser pocket

\- Cashier gives back money

\- I put money in trouser pocket

\- Done

\- Home: I put all spare money in a large glass jar

Credit card workflow:

\- Cashier tells you the total amount

\- You look in your wallet/purse

\- You swipe card/insert in chip reader

\- You insert PIN number

\- You shield your PIN entrie from the people next to you

\- You tell people too close to back off

\- Chip reader did not work because of humidity

\- You insert PIN again

\- You tolerate the angry stares from people behind you who think you're either stupid or broke

\- You wait 5 sec for transaction to fish

\- You put card back in wallet

\- You put wallet back in trouser pocket

\- Done

<comment><USER5> Note for the American readers:

in the glorious lands across the ocean, chip cards of all kinds use a PIN instead of a signature, which makes way more sense anyway. Chip & sign is an American abomination.

<comment><USER6> Is this something that only triggers above a certain threshold? On the east coast, whenever I go to the grocery store, its just insert chip and press ok. I've never had to sign or enter a pin.

<comment><USER7> This is called "expedited checkout". This is a merchant option to help speed up the checkout process. However the merchant is then taking all responsibility for fraudulent transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a Swiss German I think the currency stability argument is moot. Swiss Frank is one of the most stable currencies available and we still have a similar attitude to cash as Germans. IMO it's mainly due to the following reasons:

1) CC is slow, at least in Switzerland. Like in Germany, efficiency is baked into the culture - people hate to wait on someone paying his chocolate bar with credit card. It's also not rare for people to show you that discontempt. This trains people into behaving.

2) Switzerland, as most of Germany, is a mostly urbanized place with good public transport and facilities close to where people live. Meaning, there's way less weekly mall-shopping going on than in less dense countries like the US or France. So, the average total price is lower since shopping trips are more frequent, often about every second or third day after work.

3) Security concerns. For a long time CC were as insecure as the US ones, with a simple swipe of the magnetic stripe being sufficient, and CC fraud was relatively frequent. So, many people have an instinct of only using CC when necessary, and if at all possible not in public places. Debit card on the other hand have always been relatively secure (6-digit pin code, 3 tries), so they are used more often, maybe more so than in the German example since Swiss banks have pushed them since around 20 years ago.

<comment><USER9> > 1) CC is slow

While the CC may or may not be slow. In the 5+ months I've now been living in Germany, I've noticed that people are very keen to pay with exact change if they can dig it up. This is an even slower process, but also seems to be the norm.

<comment><USER10> Also, almost every store accept touch-pay method where you just touch your CC with the terminal and it is payed without entering pin or providing signature.

Only works if the amount is less then 25 EUR but still it is much faster then cash.

<comment><USER11> This is only true for big chain things. Pretty much everywhere in Europe I've been.

<comment><USER11> Was giving it a try in Salzburg AT for 2 days now. Haven't found a single machine that takes contact less chips so far. Not even big chains

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I spent a few weeks working in Munich and was surprised when I first went into a supermarket to buy lunch. The payment process was like stepping back in time 20 years in the UK. No self-checkout kiosks, just a single cashier, and a line of people all paying in cash.

It worked, but it was a much slower process than was I was used to. I guess the stereotype of German super-efficiency made me assume they would be quick to adopt such technologies. But I think perhaps that is countered by a degree of conservatism about switching away from systems that are understood, and proven to work.

<comment><USER13> I am a German living in the Netherlands right now and find that quite annoying every time I come back to Germany, too. Before NFC I would have agreed that card payments are just much, much slower than cash. Most shops in Germany won't let you pay by card if the total amount is less than 5€, so you would always carry cash around anyway. NFC and self-checkout are quite widely spread in NL; in fact a small supermarket at a university here only has self-checkout systems with NFC.

Often heard (from Germans with some international experience and its point of view) that innovations need around two years to arrive in the heads of Germany. Skepticism towards new ideas tends to impress people more than open- minded consideration of new developments. This may change at the moment as much of the younger generation gains lots of international experience and is exposed to frequent technological developments and innovative start-up culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a German, I think ot's always intersting to get an outsiders perspective. The article strikes me as absurd, though.

There is a deep caution against technology here, especially if it's foreign technology. There were numerous attempts by German banks to reinvent the wheel with incompatible payment systems (Geldkarte, ...) none of which could be used for online payment. All of them failed. I would also counter the efficiency argument: having recently visited Norway for vacation, I'm still impressed with the efficiency of grocery shopping where everyone pays with their credit cards. Imho it's a mixture of privacy concerns and generally negative attitudes towards technology.

<comment><USER15> But I have the feeling credit cards are getting more mainstream lately.

When I moved to Stuttgart 10 years ago I only could pay with EC card at supermarkets, now I can pay with credit card.

With the RFIDs they even got much faster, I often don't have to enter a PIN or give a signature, just wave my credit card over the terminal and be done with it.

Also I can withdraw money from all ATMs of all banks without any fees.

<comment><USER16> I moved from Stuttgart to the US 5 years ago. I am always delighted to come back and see that I need less and less cash. It blew my mind when even Aldi and Lidl jumped on the credit card train.

Looking forward to the day when I can visit Germany without having to go to the ATM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> German living in UK here. I think the flaky-currency argument is non-sense. I see this argument mostly in anglo-american articles when the authors try to figure out why germans are still mostly cash-transactional.

I paid in cash back home mostly because it's faster. Cashiers are used to calculate the change and quick getting it out. CC/Debit card payments take a bit longer, since you almost only have chipped payments, get the device to work, enter pin, wait for receipt that you have to sign sometimes, etc. I was never pick pocketed on the street, so this wasn't an issue either.

I only started paying by card with the introduction of NFC/ "contactless" payments, since this one is faster.

Also, the UK coins are quite heavy having €10 worth of coins is half the volume at least compared to the old pounds.

</comment><comment><USER18> The question isn't why germans pay cash. the question is, why would you do it any other way?? I'll tell you why. In other countries we allow credit card companies to tax the masses. By creating regulations that prevent merchants from charging a different price for cash vs credit, you effectively force everyone to pay 2.5% extra for every purchase. That 2.5% goes straight to the credit card companies, even if you pay cash! So, you have no choice but to use a credit card, so you can recover 1.5% on the 2.5% tax your paying.

<comment><USER19> > That 2.5% goes straight to the credit card companies, even if you pay cash!

You're going to have to explain how this makes any sense at all

<comment><USER20> CC company charges 2.5% of overhead on all CC-based purchases. Vendor agreement prohibits passing that markup over to customers, so instead the vendor must pass that cost onto _everybody_. The net effect is that cash payers are subsidizing the credit card companies.

To encourage this arrangement, the CC companies offer a kickback to the people who use the card, like 1% in cash back or "points" or whatever.

This creates a game-theory problem where the customer is encouraged to always pay with their card, because otherwise they're wasting a percent or two.

In countries where vendor agreements prohibiting passing the fee onto consumers is illegal, stores are able to ensure that cash payers are not subsidizing card payers... But consumers may rebel at the extra fee for paying with card and choose to take their business somewhere else altogether.

<comment><USER21> Actually in France where I have a tiny hotel, our fee is 1.5%. High volume merchants can negotiate even lower rates. There is also a savings for us by encouraging credit cards. Cash is a pain in the ass in France because you have to go to a bank to deposit it and we are 30 minutes from the nearest bank.

Then there is security. If our guests paid us all in cash, I now have the very real problem of having thousands of euros in cash unless I want to waste an hour of my time going to a bank all the time. Then also in France, there is a law preventing cash purchases over €1000.

There is also a guest security issue – why would you want guests to be carrying hundreds of euros in cash when they travel?

For businesses, cash handling costs money too. There is a time cost, there is a security cost as well. Rarely does an employee skim money from the credit cards, but in shops it happens all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Use of credit cards in the US really took off in 1980 when interest rates were deregulated[1], credit cards were then heavily promoted. I remember at that time, to use a credit card in a grocery store had a social stigma. But now, many people here rarely use cash.

What are the credit card interest rates in Germany? (In the US credit card interest rates can be 20-30%). Maybe there's less incentive to promote use of cards in Germany, or maybe transaction fees are regulated to make small transactions impractical?

[1] [https://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/bank/bt_9805.html](https://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/bank/bt_9805.html)

<comment><USER23> I don't even know what is the rate on my credit card. I use it all the time. I just pay back the full amount every month. I think that's the best way to use it. You don't need to carry cash. You don't need to pay interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have experimented with it too, and you may as well, leave your credit cards at home, and only use 'Cash' ... you will think twice before paying for $100 consumer item ... whereas using Credit Card, you barely had noticed the price tag .... so bottom line is, Yes, paying through Cash can 'significantly' cut your expenses on 'extravagant spendings'.

<comment><USER25> That's even more true with small spendings: with cash, you easily see the amount stocked in your wallet decrease item after item, shop after shop, drink after drink; you also need to "refill" at the cash dispenser when it gets empty so that reminds you that you have already spent the XX or XXX € you had taken 2 days ago; you also may not be bothered to refill and opt for a lower priced item, or a lesser quantity of items, or do without the item.

If you start paying small amounts with a card, it is too easy and also you don't keep track of your spending rate, you don't "feel" it, so you end up spending more.

(After all, that's the point of it, shopkeepers wouldn't bother losing time and money to offer card payment if they got no benefit from it.)

<comment><USER24> Yes that was the actual point, with CC you don't get the feel or pain of losing money ... When paying through cash you physically feel losing an amount of money. Humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think you'd have to dig deeper in the debt argument, and what it has to do with cash.

> "But the real point isn't that Germans love cash. It's that—for the same > historical reasons—they loathe debt. (Armchair anthropologists have also > long noted that German word for debt—Schulden—comes from the word for guilt, > Schuld.)"

Sweden has the same culture and words for debt. "skuld", and the saying "Den som är satt i skuld är icke fri" ("He/She who is in debt is not free").

Yet Swedes likes using Credit Cards a lot. But as the author might say we have a lot higher household debt than Germany.

But Switzerland also has high household debt. And as another commenter notes Switzerland has the same cash behavior as Germany. I'd like to see some data on that though.

[https://data.oecd.org/hha/household- debt.htm](https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm)

I do feel like an armchair anthropologist though.

</comment><comment><USER27> As a German, I disagree. I've had many discussions about the upcoming NFC payment options and the main argument was privacy.

<comment><USER28> I (German) have never used NFC payments and was curious how that would work with my bank. Turns out they want me to install an app on my phone for this, which is definitely not going to happen.

<comment><USER29> > Turns out they want me to install an app on my phone for this, which is > definitely not going to happen.

Why not?

<comment><USER30> In my case, it would be that I trust my phone much less than a single-purpose card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This seems counter-intuitive to me. The author argues it's due to hyperinflation from the pre-WW2 era, concluding that "People in countries that suffered banking crises quite sensibly often prefer to save in cash." If there really is some national memory of that crisis, wouldn't they actually prefer to actually avoid saving in cash? During the hyperinflation period your cash could lose half of its value overnight. This just doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER32> I fully agree, if anything this would be about bank runs. Also it is a cherry picked example, I can cherry pick one too. Poland had a hyperinflation episode in 1920s and another high inflation event in the 1990s; yet card adoption (and adoption of innovations in consumer banking) is among the highest in Europe.

The differentiating factor is whether a solution is supported by the merchant. If it is, you will see adoption. Merchants in Germany do not support CCs and limit debit cards, so people do not use them. They do not do that partly because they can get away with it and partly because the fees they are being charged are high (both per transaction and per POS). Naturally there is room for the government to step in here. E.g., said Poland lowered the maximum allowable fee Visa/Mastercard can charge a few years back; along with that went away minimum spending limits on transactions in shops.

This will change though as Germany starts moving to a cashless economy as, e.g., Sweden is doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Most brick & mortar stores in Germany will not offer debit card payments under 10 Euros, since the fees they have to pay are extremely high. Most clerks will frown upon small card payments for that reason, and sometimes outright decline the payment, even if that means no purchase happening.

Credit cards are rarely accepted in any store but larger ones in malls. Most Germans, and that was pretty spot-on in the article, don't even have a credit card. You can imagine how detrimental that is to building a German SaaS business. Stripe and the like have started going into the ELV market, which is pretty much a direct debit payment - and you need to pass quite a few restrictions to even be allowed to offer ELV as a vendor.

All in all, it is both a consumer, banking and a merchant issue, and it severely limits the German E-Commerce landscape in terms of payment solutions. Paypal has taken over German online payments, since it can be linked with a bank account. Credit cards? Not so much.

<comment><USER34> I can see why this is problematic for the e-commerce industry, but you seem to be saying this is problematic for the economy as a whole. If that's what you're saying, could you provide some justification for this claim?

<comment><USER33> If you want to see e-commerce as a relevant branch of the economy, it's stifling growth.

Funny enough, banks are now charging withdrawing fees for cash. So if you only ever buy things with cash, you will loose money on just acquiring it. Net loss for the non-banking economy.

<comment><USER34> > If you want to see e-commerce as a relevant branch of the economy

I don't, and I don't see much evidence that anyone outside the e-commerce industry should want to see that.

> Funny enough, banks are now charging withdrawing fees for cash. So if you > only ever buy things with cash, you will loose money on just acquiring it. > Net loss for the non-banking economy.

It's fairly simple to avoid ATM fees. Every bank and credit union I've ever banked at had a network of ATMs, and there's usually no fee for cash back at grocery stores. In contrast, credit cards _always_ charge a fee to the receiving business. Additionally, many workers receive some or all of their pay in cash, cutting banks out of the equation entirely.

I don't think you can reasonably claim that credit cards take less from the non- banking economy than cash.

<comment><USER33> Not in Germany though. Cash salaries don't exists (outside of temp jobs), cash-back from grocery stores is still new and rare. The ATM withdrawal fees are the actual problem, they have been recently introduced, and they happen no matter which network is being used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> As a german, this techno-phobic attitude was really getting to me for the longest time. It's just so incredible convenient not having to scramble for coins when taking the tram and many other examples. Living in London, I rarely take my wallet with me anymore. Apple Pay and my Mondo card is all I need.

Come to think of it, some time in the not so distant future, Germany will probably have the last laugh once the entire electronic payment system collapsed under the Next Big Cyberattack (tm)... insert coin here.

</comment><comment><USER36> " _German aversion to mortgage debt is part of the reason why the country has some of the lowest homeownership rates in the developed world._ "

That's not just because of an aversion to debt. German Banks require a much larger down payment for their mortgages. Usually 30% or more.

Banks will also look at the physical age of the borrower. They will not hand out 20-30 year loans to someone in their 60s.

<comment><USER37> In the US you are protected by the Equal Credit Opportunity Act so the bank can't turn you away based on your age. That said though - you do need to show sufficient income to qualify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> In my experience Germans use cash due to privacy concerns — they don't want anyone knowing what they buy.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's funny that Lidl, the store in the picture at the top of the article, is one of the stores I always pay with debit card in Germany. They have great NFC support and don't give a damn if I pay my 79¢ bread with card.

<comment><USER40> Chains like Lidl are competing in the ultra-competitive German discount supermarket sector (Germans loooove discount chains, there are so many in Germany, and the price of groceries is therefore cheap on average), so it makes sense they'd be quick to deploy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> They're smart.

I went all cash a few months ago for everything except hotels and rental cars. It's very liberating. Credit cards give you 3-5% incentives to spend because you spend more. Since going all cash, we spend in average 15% less.

<comment><USER42> Here in Brazil most places prefer debit or credit card and always have a hard time finding change.

Money is mostly for buying stuff on the street (bottled water, papers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I suspect the main reason is that in a safe country like Germany people feel more comfortable carrying around large amounts of cash. Japan is extraordinarily cash-oriented, but it works because people don't get mugged; even if you leave your wallet on a train you can expect to get it back with all the cash still inside.

<comment><USER44> Lots of countries that are very safe use mostly cards instead of cash. Like the all of the Nordics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > One explanation is that, as researchers have found, memories of > hyperinflation have quite a bit of staying power. People in countries that > suffered banking crises quite sensibly often prefer to save in cash [...] > For the same historical reasons—they loathe debt.

This explanation seems absurd (or at least counter-intuitive). If your fear is hyperinflation the two things to do would be to avoid hoarding cash that can be worthless tomorrow and to buy as much tangible stuff as possible with a debt you will have to pay back with this devaluated currency.

</comment><comment><USER46> I thought it was the other way around - that the reason German people pay cash is simply because shops and bars refuse to support credit cards. Whenever I visit Berlin I'm so frustrated because I have to plan my spending ahead and make sure I have enough cash in my pocket before I go buy anything.

<comment><USER47> Agree, such a pain. Especially in restaurants if you take a large group out and want to pick the bill up. It has got better but I have been totally caught out with this on one of my first visits to Berlin with a fairly pricey group dinner and I physically cannot take more than €250 out of the ATM a day without taking cash out on CC which involves horrendous cash advance fees.

I also don't buy this cc fee argument. It's regulated (and low) in the EU, perhaps 1-2%. This _must_ be lower than the cost of storing cash, counting cash, paying it in to the bank, transporting it, getting fraudulent notes, people giving wrong change, etc etc.

The other annoying thing is DB machines not taking visa/mastercard _and_ no notes over €10 (though this may have changed recently), which is all you get out of an ATM when you land at the airport. Such a hassle.

I hope Berlin can fix this and the BER airport situation one day.

<comment><USER48> EC cards have 0.125% fees. That's an entire order of magnitude cheaper than CC.

Of course no one is going to support CC if they can save that much money.

<comment><USER47> If your gross profit (not including rent and other fixed costs) at a restaurant is, say, 80%, do you still think 1% CC fees are silly? To me this seems like ridiculous premature optimisation. If I go to Germany and I'm having a meal with clients I'll phone ahead and see if they accept CC and won't visit if they don't.

<comment><USER48> > If your gross profit (not including rent and other fixed costs) at a > restaurant is, say, 80%, do you still think 1% CC fees are silly?

That's a question, but that's not what things look like.

Many German businesses are operating at razor-thin margins, or even at losses. From farmers (which lose around 13ct for every liter milk sold) to small restaurants (often making losses on all of the food, and only minor profit on the drinks) to any other kind of business.

If you are a 4 people company and you're trying to compete (and do so successfully) with american multinational chains, then you don't have enough profits to pay 7% CC fees. You'll be lucky if you can afford the 30€/month + 0.125% EC fees, and many businesses can't even do that.

> If I go to Germany and I'm having a meal with clients I'll phone ahead and > see if they accept CC and won't visit if they don't.

Trust me, these businesses prefer not having your business. You'd only make losses for them.

<comment><USER47> 7% CC fees? Are you crazy? The EU regulated it at less than 1%.

<comment><USER48> The EU regulated VISA and MasterCard, and only since a year ago.

AMEX still takes 7% fees, even today, and even MasterCard and VISA could take those fees in 2015 still.

<comment><USER47> Ok, don't accept AMEX then (that's common for a lot of shops to not accept in the UK).

It's definitely not 7% though, considering Stripe offers AMEX processing for 1.4% in the EU.

Can't see any reason not to accept MC/Visa now though.

<comment><USER48> > Can't see any reason not to accept MC/Visa now though.

Still 10 times higher fees than with the German card systems. If your profit margin is 1.4%, you can't afford 2.2% credit card fees. And if you increase the price, all customers go to the cheaper competitor.

German stores are in a reaaaaal close competition with these things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> In America, I would prefer to use a debit card or cash, but many credit card issuers offer 1%-3% cash back, meaning, they give back 1%-3% of the purchases you make.

That amount adds up over time.

<comment><USER50> Because you are paying much more in transaction fees. In the EU, transaction fees are capped at <<1% so there are no silly cash-back programs.

<comment><USER51> But you pay those transaction fees whether or not you use a credit card. I believe there are even laws against charging more for paying with a credit card (beyond just having credit card minimum like you see at delis and mom and pop shops).

Yet another example of wealth transfer in the US from the poor (who often don't have credit cards, or don't have the high rewards ones because they cost $150+ dollars a year) to the upper middle class.

<comment><USER52> >I believe there are even laws against charging more for paying with a credit card

not really "laws", more like merchant agreements. also, there's nothing preventing shops from offering a cash discount, which is effectively the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Maybe it is my German roots, but I share the preference for cash and dislike of personal debt.

More than 90% of my Brick & Morter purchases are in cash up to about $500. I stop at an ATM every couple of weeks and withdrawal $300-$500 dollars and I'm set. Cash is anonymous, quick, a one-time thing (no bills to pay later), and the standard method of payment in the small (rural) stores I frequent.

Credit cards are reserved for buying gas, large purchases, online transactions, and travel.

</comment><comment> david-cako Credit card stigma is interesting to me. For the individual that would otherwise be paying with a debit card, why would you not want to earn rewards on that?

Treat it like real money, pay every month, literally zero downside.

That said, I imagine rewards in the US are much more attractive than elsewhere, since credit card companies have so much profitability to distribute.

</comment><comment><USER54> I think tax is the killing factor. Most of small shops don't want to reveal how much they earn, thus resisting against electronic payments.

</comment><comment><USER55> How is Japan not on that list of countries that pay for things primarily in cash?

</comment><comment><USER56> The article is missing one key piece: how are card payments developing over time? My personal experience is that things have changed rapidly over the last years with most larger stores now accepting credit cards and contactless payments are increasingly becoming normal (just months ago cashiers might have looked dumbfounded at you when waving your card over the reader).

It is also critical to note that Germany has some of the lowest prices for groceries. Shops have hence been very slow in offering credit card payments.

</comment><comment><USER57> A few months ago, there was some construction going on just outside the busiest mall in the city center of Dresden. When they dug into the ground, they accidentally dug a bit too far and cut the internet cable for that mall (and a few more blocks around it). That was on a Friday evening, so the replacement cable could not be delivered until Monday.

The entire mall was without internet access and, consequently, all credit card terminals, EC terminals and ATMs stopped working. If I had not been able to pay cash (as I always do because of Datensparsamkeit [1]), I would not have been able to go to the cinema that weekend.

[1] Does the word "Datensparsamkeit" have a good translation in English? It's sort of an idiosyncrasy of the German language and the German people. It refers to the practice of protecting one's data by not generating it in the first place. Cash is datensparsam because it is anonymous, hence the metadata of my purchase cannot be associated with my identity.

</comment><comment><USER58> There was another article on HN this week that was attempting to predict when the stock market was going to crash. [https://isthestockmarketgoingtocrash.com/](https://isthestockmarketgoingtocrash.com/)

There's also been a number of suggestions of the kind of economy that we're existing in. The most alarming to me is that we're in a debt economy.

Germany struggled to pay it's abhorrent war debt and reparations after WWI, and I'm curious if rather than the government facing that problem if the population in the US, or China will instead? What is the big picture these pieces of information are trying to tell us?

Should we be taking a more cautious approach when it comes to using debt? (This commentor has no debt, and wants to keep it that way)

</comment><comment><USER59> I am glad, there are some serious privacy issues concerning credit and debit cards. Not to mention that bringing a third party into this causes all kinds of issues, such as their ability to block your card at any time or taking a percentage of the money.

I hope that cryptocurrencies replace cards someday.

</comment><comment><USER60> A few years ago I was working on some bank software. We had access to bank's anonymized data, and I was really surprised when figured out what information is stored with card payments. For instance, I learnt that a guy had bought a pack of cigarettes in a small town at 12:31, Monday. Then I realized how much information a bank may posses. And how dangerous it is, because we have no control on how and who process that info.

That day I decided to pay with cash whenever I can, despite inconvenience. I prefer cards or bank transfers when buying expansive stuff, like a car, furniture, a camera, etc.

</comment><comment><USER61> The "memory of hyperinflation" theory is an obvious crock, because the prediction is 100% backwards-ass wrong. If you thought hyperinflation in the near future was at all likely, you'd want to buy everything on credit.

</comment><comment><USER62> I (as others) think, that the stability reason is bogus. The things that where mentioned, happened 100 years ago. To long for most Germans to remember.

Maybe we are just more traditional thinking, than others.

Some good alternative reasons where given here.

In my experience, the cash workflow is faster in most situations than our CC workflow (maybe in other countries it is the opposite).

I want to give another reason, that is one of mine:

With money in my pocket, I have my expenses under better control. When the money is out before the month ends, I immediately see it.

With CC, it is not so.

And as we Germans are so economical, many of us like to have control over our expenses.

I also think, that there is a good evidence, that it actually works.

</comment><comment><USER63> I see Australia mentioned in second place. That doesn't marry with my experience, which is seeing card dominate cash due to the early and very widespread uptake of contactless payment without pin or anything under $100. This makes it faster than anything else for coffee, taxis, etc.

To see cash sitting at 65% simply doesn't align with my everyday experience. Maybe it's the legions of baby boomers in the suburbs? I don't know. I would've suggested Australia would've been 1/3 or 1/4 cash payment.

</comment><comment><USER64> What if Germany also has a round of Demonetization, similar to what India did in November 2016? Would the Germans continue to use cash to pay for anything after that?

I'm a fan of the Indian demonetization experiment, and I believe it has yielded positive results, at least in terms of being able to use your credit/debit cards almost anywhere.

If such a drastic measure is taken, then there'll be some aversion to cash, which will, in turn, move more people to non-cash modes of payment.

</comment><comment><USER65> Born in Germany to a Hessian mother, lived there twice for a total of 11 years. Left just before the wall came down (wish I had stayed at least for that).

In my experience, Germans have a strong debt aversion. Even the young did. My mom's friends would buy new cars by reaching into their purses and pulling out stacks of bills and counting them out in total. It never seemed anything other than weird to me.

"The slowest things to change are habits of thinking."

</comment><comment><USER66> It might be worth mentioning, but the payment preference goes both ways. Germans' preference for cash payments sometimes means or meant that payment options common elsewhere might not be available.

This caught me out at a McDonald's in Berlin that accepted neither Visa nor MasterCard earlier this decade. Even bigger brands adapt to local culture, it seems.

<comment><USER67> I've been able to witness the change over the last 5 years in Germany. While gradual, it has been quite noticeable to see more plastic options become available, and my ATM visits have become less frequent.

It's still a far cry from home (Australia) where I hadn't needed cash on hand in quite a long time, but it in terms of convenience it's not a big deal. it certainly beats France where cheques are still in extremely frequent use vs. wire transfers.

<comment><USER68> A few years ago I was living in the UAE and I was surprised that cheques were so common. When you rent an apartment you typically give post-dated cheques for each quarter at the start of the year.

It sounds a bit crazy, but by law if a cheque bounces it was a criminal offence (I believe they recently changed it or were thinking about it).

There are a lot of interesting advantages to this, as you can effectively escrow cash without a third party. If you receive a cheque you know you can always (or should always) being able to cash it in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Paying with cash is faster.

Inserting your card, entering your pin, waiting a bit, getting some receipt printed, and finally signing it does take significantly longer than getting the right amount of change from a cashier who is used to doing this.

Paying with a debit card always makes you look a bit like a twat. It's similar to paying with a handful of coins.

</comment><comment><USER70> Pretty weak thesis I would say. Visa debit exists and is equally convenient as credit card without the debt drawback.

You can get one that is indistinguishable from visa cc to the merchant and hence works everywhere normal Visa does (unlike the one branded "visa debit" that existed many years ago).

</comment><comment><USER71> On the other side, invoices are paid with wire transfers or even direct deposit entries. I haven't seen many checks since the Eurocheck lost its guaranteed value of DEM 400.

Personally I think cash is convenient. I also use debit card and credit card but somehow cash is the most convenient was of payment in a store.

</comment><comment><USER72> accordording to this, it seems germans are really near to the europe average. [http://en.finance.sia-partners.com/cash-here-stay- question-h...](http://en.finance.sia-partners.com/cash-here-stay-question-how- you-manage-it)

</comment><comment><USER73> The why is easily explained and has nothing to do with the 'tumultuous history': it's all about the privacy. I shudder what data is available in the US (and other countries) on customers buying habbits.

Sure, with eShoping on an ever rise, this privacy increasingly vanishes.

</comment><comment><USER74> Not having to routinely verify my credit card or bank account statement with what would be easily over a hundred transactions per month saves me a lot of time and energy.

With cash I know when I was robbed.

</comment><comment><USER75> There's a lot of love for contactless payments in this thread. I would have thought the security-conscious HN audience would dislike them? Has something improved wrt security?

<comment><USER76> FWIW, for my NFC debit card the maximum for a single transaction is 25 EUR, and the card will require a PIN occasionally anyway (I assume the more often NFC is used).

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> They don't pay almost everything in cash in Germany.

They pay some more than the half in cash.

It's in Italy where we almost pay everything in cash: in Italy 83% of payments are still in cash.

The reasons are obvious.

</comment><comment><USER78> On the rare occasions I pay for high cost items in cash, it hurts. I can definitely see the value in paying with cash if you area trying to stick to a budget

</comment><comment><USER79> As a user of N26, sure I always choose cash. They always require typing stupid 6 digit pin (even for paypass). I can't switch it off.

</comment><comment><USER80> Considering everyone is carrying around wads to pay in cash. Are thieves/muggings a big problem in Germany?

<comment><USER81> I can't comment about the rate of muggings, but ATMs are everywhere which would promote holding less cash for shorter periods of time. It's not uncommon to visit a bank in the centre city where most of the 5-6 ATMs are full of people withdrawing cash (which is a stark difference between more cash- digitised nations).

<comment><USER82> However German banks like to charge you if you use the wrong machine. There are various different networks and you have to use the right one to make sure you aren't charged. This is quite different from the UK where most machines are free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> how to make a clickbait article. find some random statistic and fill an article with speculation about it.

</comment><comment><USER84> You buy less useless crap when using cash and it's just nice to have cash. It feels real.

</comment><comment><USER85> and most annoyingly apple recently removed paypal as a payment option here in germany. which means i cannot buy any apps anymore unless i go and get an itunes gift card.

</comment><comment><USER86> First, while it's true that the German "Schulden" is related to "Schuld", it's also true that one of the definitions of "debt" is "sin". I don't know if many anthropologists really have wasted much time thinking about this one, but it seems pretty irrelevant to me.

Second, the German banking system is actually very modern. While the Americans and British are still sending cheques through the post, Germans are regularly paying by direct debit and standing order, as a matter of course.

Third, I think a point that may be missing is that Germans might be suspicious of credit card payments as they leave records which can be inspected by government agencies. It's bad enough that they might be able to find out how much rent you pay and how much electricity you use, but they really don't need to know exactly which bar you got drunk in last night. I don't know if anyone's done any serious study into this one, but it is very noticeable that Germans are particularly concerned about their privacy.

<comment><USER57> > the Americans and British are still sending cheques through the post

I'm from Germany, and I have to ask this... WHY?

Related anecdote: When I was still living with my parents, I had to cash in cheques from time to time for them. The cheques came from the lottery which they were playing, but they had no realistic possiblity at all to cash them in (the next branch of their bank was over an hour away by car), but I had an account at the local bank in the small town where I lived.</comment></comment>


Why I will never have a girlfriend (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://logological.org/girlfriend <comment><USER2> Reminds me of punchline from a joke about a man who finally, after 30 years of searching for "the perfect woman - found one:

"Unfortunately, she was looking for the perfect man."

In my experience, an overlooked part of finding a good mate is making yourself into a good candidate for _your_ side of that partnership.

[edited for grammar]

<comment><USER3> The logic is similar to the old idiom: If you have to say you are a lady, you are not a lady. With dating, you have be sought after, and not chase after others. Trying to tell people that are lonely about this is, unfortunately, useless; the heart wants what it wants and we can do little to change it. For anyone out there that is male, I would suggest these posts (linked in article) to help alter the equation so that you are sought after and are not the seeker: [http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/03/31/the-3-ps-of- manhood...](http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/03/31/the-3-ps-of-manhood-a- review/) . Remember that being a _real man_ is not the opposite of being a _woman_ , but rather in not being a _child_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't believe in soulmates or perfect matches. Relationships are about working together, generosity, and graciousness. My wife and I could have made it work with other people, but we chose to make our relationship work, which is what makes it special. And we never forget that we have to keep working on it every day.

<comment><USER5> >I don't believe in soulmates or perfect matches.

So did you feel like you "settled" so to speak? If so, did you ever stop thinking that?

<comment><USER6> It's not a matter of settling. Perfection in relationships is a wrong concept. (If someone projects one on Facebook, it's to cover their insecurities) They take work. Even when you find the right person.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. It's like finding the perfect job that's perfect for 40 years. Never gonna happen. It's great to find a good job, that keeps your interest, respects you, treats you well, grows with you, is loyal, and gives back; but you're never gonna find a perfect job.

Some people find what seems like a perfect job, then after a few years, they get bought out and aren't so perfect anymore.

I played the field until I was in my mid 30s, then settled down. Never been happier. I hope it lasts, and I think it will.

Also, beauty fades pretty quickly. Not only in the object, but in the eye of the beholder. The person is much more important. Also, it sucks when everyone hits on your girlfriend / wife all the time.

<comment><USER8> Not really, I think its funny :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > ... for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall at > least two standard deviations above the norm

> ... [in intelligence] I will settle for someone a mere one standard > deviation above the normal

Yeah, that would do it. Nothing to learn here.

<comment><USER10> Annoying, unattractive nerd sets standards too high, news at 11.

<comment><USER11> I don't see the problem with setting your standards high if your fine with either outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, well, now try it if you're gay. Divide the world population in half, and then multiply that by (latest estimate) 4%. Also, remember that every other gay guy is a potential rival as well as a potential match. Every day I think about how lucky I am to have met the guy I am with, now 15 years ago.

<comment><USER13> I'm not into guys but I got hit on by a guy with a pretty good pick-up line which I would probably use if I were gay. I was standing at the finish line of a race and a guy standing next to me said, "There's a lot of cute guys here, huh?" At first I started to respond, "I... guess..." and then I realized he was hitting on me. Pretty smooth way to ferret out whether a guy is open to other guys.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure that would work too often. I'm also not gay but I notice when I've caught the eye of someone who is; it's subtle but very obvious. I imagine if I were gay it would be very likely I'd be more attuned to this than I am now. So, I doubt there's a need to be so brazen?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> ...because you're completely self-obsessed.

Forget men vs women, you know what _people_ like? They like it if you're actually interested in them and listen to them and don't have a hidden agenda and aren't silently judging them.

You can apply this to a lot, not just romance. I mean, there are other approaches to making yourself desirable (like be really rich, ridiculously good looking, famous &c) but it's notable that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both seem to be actually interested in what their wives think.

</comment><comment><USER16> Also available in this book series: "Why I will never be Happy/Lucky/Content" "Why I will never be a <Important Sounding Title>" "Why I will never have a <Expensive Luxury Item>"

You might also like from this author: "Mastering navel gazing, and justifying your paralyzing inaction"

</comment><comment><USER17> Personally I just have way too high standards while no person that can fulfil these would ever like me. I can't lower them. I can't settle for someone I don't really find attractive like I can settle for a cheaper car. Because a car has a practical purpose. Even if I wish I could have a cooler car the cheap car still gets me to places. But with a partner is different. I don't have to have one. I can be alone. Sometimes I think nothing is better than something. Solitude is better than an unsatisfying relationship.

<comment><USER18> "standards are too high" is the most common excuse people give when really they themselves are akward, solitary, etc.

You admit these impressive women would never like you. Perhaps, but then improve yourself.

Choosing to go without if you can't have the very best is an excuse. Do you live in the street because you don't have a mansion? Do you die because you can't afford to dine like the upper crust? Why is it that for a partner you suddenly need the very best?

<comment><USER19> This is the one discussion where insulting the party you're replying to is considered perfectly acceptable. You can always say someone you disagree with is <insert undesirable qualities here>, and nobody wants to admit that they're <insert undesirable qualities>.

Most people work to improve themselves, yet we do not expect anyone to be perfect, except here. Most people have faults. Some faults make them less dateable than other faults. Some they may not care that much about or don't know how to fix. After all, the average person falls short of many standards up until they die, despite all the attempts at improvement. It should surprise no one that a subset will always be that falls short, or they choose a different set to focus on. Yet we demand that such a subset does not exist when the subject of dating comes up?

> Why is it that for a partner you suddenly need the very best?

I don't know, maybe because a partner is one of the most influential people in your life and they can absolutely make or break it? They don't have to be the very best, but I don't understand why, in effectively every other area, people are often commended for being picky, but here, you are perceived better if you have anyone, anyone at all, even if it crashes and burns and results in some ruined lives one is responsible for (children).

Dating is not special. It doesn't get a pass. Some people just don't like the risk. Some don't assess well or don't know how. In any other area, we consider that the person's prerogative.

This all smells of giving the dating scenario incredibly heavy weight for no other reason but that nature programmed us to feel that way. I would like to think we can think beyond that, and also get rid of all the surrounding vitriol, judgment, and gossip.

You'll certainly do better in the self-improvement department if you avoid falling into the trap of: "I don't fit a certain arbitrary and hard to assess requirement, therefore I suck". I don't agree with the author's, err, parameters, but this is the one part I agree with, and I wouldn't be surprised he's happier for it. Nothing good ever comes out of thinking like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of Tim Minchin's _If I Didn 't Have You_

 _Your love is one in a million (One in a million) You couldn 't buy it at any price (Can't buy love) But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves Statistically, some of them would be equally nice (Equally nice) Or maybe not as nice but, say, smarter than you Or dumber but better at sport or tracing I'm just saying (I really think that I would) Probably (Have somebody else)_

</comment><comment><USER21> Brian Christian did a Long Now Foundation talk about algorithms that you can apply to life. One point he made was (roughly) to find a good life partner follow this advice: until the age of 26 date as many people as you can (as in, have a relationship - not just Tinder dates). After the age of 26, marry the next person you date that is better than the best person you dated before 26.

I don't think I agree with it - but it seems like far more useful dating advice than what this guy is trying to achieve. Select from the pool of people who are also attracted to you - not all people.

<comment><USER22> You might like this TED talk on the mathematics of love: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N37x4GgDVBM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N37x4GgDVBM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Funny, but he does not need to go through 3493 dates to meet one of his 18,726 viable bachelorettes. Its probably in the double digits.

You don't meet random people within the general population, you meet random people within your environment. If you are above the normal for intelligence its almost certain that your environment is going to be filled above normal intelligence women, and to a lesser extent its likely the same in terms of attractiveness.

Also his standards are too high (especially on physical attraction - yeesh!)...

<comment><USER24> Software companies are filled with women (even of average intelligence) now?.

But yeah, two standard deviations for physical attraction is too high.

<comment><USER25> I think it's rare to find a software company where all of the employees are software engineers. They are usually outnumbered by designers, marketers, salespeople, support staff, finance, accounting, etc. There is generally a similar number of men and women working in these fields.

Yeah, two standard deviations is too high, even if attractiveness could be modelled as a normal distribution. That's the top 2.5%. Even one standard deviation is the top 15.5%, which is very picky. I don't think the average person is all that terrible.

One standard deviation for intelligence is probably ok. IQ scores are actually based on the normal distribution, where the mean is 100 and one standard deviation is 15 points. So while I don't think 115 is a very high bar, you probably shouldn't ask your date to do an IQ test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The topic reminds me of the lyrics to Ana Ng by TMBG: [http://www.metrolyrics.com/ana-ng-lyrics-they-might-be- giant...](http://www.metrolyrics.com/ana-ng-lyrics-they-might-be-giants.html)

There's a whole area of maths devoted to finding the ideal partner and related topics, called optimal stopping theory. The Secretary Problem is particularly relevant: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem)

<comment><USER27> That is my favorite song!

"I don't want the world, I just want your half."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if 17 years later statistic have triumphed or not.

<comment><USER29> Writing viral articles about your misery always helps improving your initial chances. I guess he's alright now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> When I worked for my friend John (he was a VP and a stockholder at the firm). John'd been married once and divorced in some matter of weeks and among his complaints was that he'd had three VCR's (it was a while ago) but somehow his ex wound up with all of them. Anyway, I was engaged and then newly married at the time but John was always looking for a hot twenty-something (I was in my early thirties at the time and John is a couple of years older than me).

So I switched jobs and for a couple of years I didn't run into him regularly like when we worked together but we still lived in the same part of St. Pete and one night I'm out walking my dogs and wind up in his neighborhood and there's his house for sale...it was a Thursday night and I get home and call (cell phones existed but had yet to become ubiquitous) him and am like "What the hell is going on?"

And John had met a woman who had two kids and lived in Birmingham and was getting married on Saturday and moving and taking a grunt position at a firm in Alabama and that was almost twenty years ago and their third child is going to college.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wouldn't load for me so I used this: [http://archive.is/d4J2P](http://archive.is/d4J2P)

</comment><comment><USER32> The author has missed the key point: He is trying to find someone who operates like him, from a different gender. I'm all for gender-equality but the different genders operate differently.

Once you grasp that and accept that women do no operate, think and behave like male; your success with them will sky rocket.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, I also fell into the "someone who operates like me, but of the opposite sex" trap.

For years I was looking for another engineer (I have a bachelor's in general engineering, masters in SE), or at least someone mathematically/scientifically inclined. Ambitious, constantly working on personal projects, likes to travel, go to conferences, pick up new hobbies, etc.

Now I'm married to a social worker who's had the same job for 12 years, dropped out of music school, didn't have a passport (never even considered getting one), doesn't know math beyond basic algebra, often sleeps until noon, and generally doesn't have any hobbies besides "hanging out with friends."

But you know what? I love my husband, I think we work really well together :) He was really the first guy I ever dated after I decided to get out of my bubble and stop looking for "male versions of me" and I wouldn't change anything for the world!

<comment><USER34> I'm happy for you!

I was lucky in that when I met the woman who became my wife, neither of us was looking for anything other than to get laid. Sounds crass, but I think it helped me avoid the "look for a female version of me" thing, because we are nothing like each other.

After spending the first few months pretending that we weren't, in fact, falling for each other, we gave into it and 15+ years later, still working on staying together :-)

<comment><USER35> IMHO this is the best way to go, never expect anything and you'll never be disappointed; it doesn't prevent you from getting some great surprises.. Also, any relation i had with someone i thought was the 'feminine versions of me' went to shit pretty quickly.. Although being (at least somehow a little bit) different pushes you way further forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match.

...

I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall at least two standard deviations above the norm.

</comment><comment><USER35> [https://logological.org/fan_mail](https://logological.org/fan_mail) The fan mail he later received is amazingly crazy

</comment><comment><USER37> He definitely needs to work on his strategy to find one of those 18726 girls. I would propose to go with strategy widely know in database system, namely using proper indexing. If you have a table in database and can create only one compound index for your important query you would create it in a way that most distinctive column end up on the first place of compound index. In this case that would be beauty of potential partner (only ~2% match this). Second most distinctive criteria would be to find girls who actually will like him. So most optimal strategy would be to go to places with a lot of beautiful girls that might like him (similar interests etc.) ...from there continue with linear search.

</comment><comment><USER38> [http://www.alternet.org/story/129887/why_being_smart_won't_g...](http://www.alternet.org/story/129887/why_being_smart_won't_get_you_laid) and point 5.: "By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet's inhabitants as a dating prospect" and "At this point, you have three choices:

A) Loosen up

B) Do a very thorough search all over the planet and be prepared to move to Duesseldorf OR

C) Join a monastery."

</comment><comment><USER39> Am I the only one wondering if this is extremely dry humour?

<comment><USER34> I thought it was at first, but by the end I was sure he's serious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This reminds me of a slightly more viral paper:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20100214192633/http://www2.warwic...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100214192633/http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/phd_students/backus/girlfriend/why_i_dont_have_a_girlfriend.pdf) (seems like the original has been removed)

</comment><comment><USER41> That exposition looks an awful lot like the Drake Equation :)

Anyway, I think the author should talk to women more frequently, about things not related to work.

<comment><USER42> Maybe Earth should try looking for partners in its orbital circles instead :^)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> An entertaining article but his intelligence and beauty requirements (1 and 2 standard deviations above the norm respectively) are rather silly. Unless he's actually rich and handsome to make it match. Especially so given I'm not convinced about the distribution, variance might be lower than he assumes.

</comment><comment><USER44> He also didn't take into the account the effect of publishing this article on his chances of getting a date.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's been 17 years. I think we need to know: did he ever find a girlfriend?

</comment><comment><USER46> Move to LA, be rich. That will get you reaaaally long way.

</comment><comment><USER47> Your beauty criteria incurs a 1/65 loss. This is why.

<comment><USER48> This is why I listen to Jimmy Soul[1] for all of my life's decisions./s

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NF5XU-k2Vk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NF5XU-k2Vk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's 2017, get a Tinder account.

<comment><USER50> [http://www.girlsaskguys.com/sexual-behavior/a22977-girls- on-...](http://www.girlsaskguys.com/sexual-behavior/a22977-girls-on-tinder-do- smash-a-lot)

Tinder only works if you are in the top 10% of males. If you are short (anything under 6 ft nowadays), a minority, fat, etc using tinder is an invitation to get your self esteem crushed.

There's no place for the average or below average men in the dating scene anymore. It's all about height,Wealth,penis size and overall looks.

<comment><USER51> I bet most men on this site are in the top 10% of incomes (it's only about $100k) so they're fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of these days I'll figure out why intelligent people care about appearance this much.

<comment><USER51> I can fulfill the rest of my social needs besides sex through family and friends and the part of my brain that likes sex doesn't care much about personality or intelligence or compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I wonder whether Tristan has found that girl by now, or is he still looking to this day.

</comment><comment><USER53> TLDR: He's looking for someone who's two standard deviations above the median in beauty, one standard deviation above the median in intelligence, and is trying to find this mythical unicorn by going on one blind date every week. That makes about as much sense as Google trying to find its next CEO by interviewing every single applicant it gets, without any filter, at a rate of 1-interview-per-week.

<comment><USER54> You forgot to say he is also average.

<comment><USER50> To women almost every man is average or below average in looks nowadays. Women's standards keep rising and rising.

[http://www.girlsaskguys.com/sexual-behavior/a22977-girls- on-...](http://www.girlsaskguys.com/sexual-behavior/a22977-girls-on-tinder-do- smash-a-lot)

<comment><USER54> Or attracting men are lowering standards. Any of them lead to the same results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Sounds like an asperger's MTGOW to me. Next

<comment><USER56> It's MGTOW, not MTGOW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> One suspects the real reason he's incel is that he's the kind of dude who would write this kind of article.

<comment><USER48> I find that most people who apply the "incel" label are the most rampant misanthropic/misogynist people I've ever interacted with.

<comment><USER58> What does the word mean?

<comment><USER5> "Involuntary celebecy". reddit.com/r/incel

It is a silly place, I implore you not to visit it.

<comment><USER50> It is also the reality of A LOT of frustrated young men that need a little more empathy, not contempt or ridicule.

<comment><USER5> This is true, but that subreddit is filled with sexist generalizations that don't help them at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I wonder in what partition would the author fall if the gender he's after applied similar reasoning.

Also: the world is big and "there is plenty of fish in the sea": usually, if you don't get to have a SO, chances are that there is something wrong with yourself too.

But whatever...

<comment><USER19> I never understood the view. People are not fish, and are not just looking for any fish. Getting an SO is not that difficult. Getting the right SO is a whole different story. Some people get the right SO. Most people get an SO and stick with them, and it works out or not. Some don't want to settle for any SO they came across, and stay single. The idea that everyone should always have an SO at all times strikes me as really, really strange, and it would seem to lead to all sorts of issues.

"there's something wrong with you" is such a generic statement to make that doesn't really say anything about reality and just causes neurosis all over the place. Plenty of absolutely abhorrent people have SO's, and I've met plenty nice people who can't get SO's or just don't really want them. There are some factors that affect likelihood of having an SO and they're not really aligned with the "something wrong" scale.

The issue with the OP isn't his refusal to hate himself, because that's pointless. It's his odd standards for the other gender, but, hey, maybe he just refuses to settle for less, it is his prerogative.</comment></comment>


Sell stuff on Pinterest. - <AUTHOR> http://www.pin2sell.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Evidently, Pinterest took them down in 5 hours. <http://www.facebook.com/groups/pinterestapi/> \- read thread near the top

<comment><USER2> That is a closed group

<comment><AUTHOR> just said they got cut off and were trying to get around it</comment></comment></comment>


Homespring – A Metaphor Oriented Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://xeny.net/Homespring <comment><AUTHOR> For an example of code written in this language see this hello world program: [https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/56009](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/56009)

<comment><USER2> This seems to be the easiest interpreter to get up and running.

[https://github.com/quinkennedy/Homespring](https://github.com/quinkennedy/Homespring)

`node homespring.js filename.hsg`

<comment><USER3> Be careful, though. From the spec:

> The sequences ' . ' and '. .' are _required to cause a causality paradox_ in > all conforming implementations. As such, there are no conforming > implementations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a little ticked off at how far I had to read and how much time was wasted before figuring out this was a joke. I guess I'm to blame for how long it took.

</comment><comment><USER5> If I understand correctly Homespring has chosen one metaphor, and you write programs exclusively in the terms of that metaphor. This is not really different from current languages except that the more common metaphor is of a kind of abstract machine, and theirs has to do with salmon moving in rivers (presumably the runtime is largely a simulation of the river, salmon, etc.). And in general metaphor oriented programming languages would choose some other metaphor (probably something strangely concrete), and you would express things in terms of its parts. Is that close?

<comment><USER6> Yes, I see it as a pun on e.g. object-oriented programming taken to absurdity.

Ever since learning of Homespring I've wanted to create another metaphor- oriented language around a different metaphor. Clearly the learning curve for Homespring is caused by people not knowing enough about fish farming. The right metaphor for most cultures is clearly agriculture.

<comment><USER5> Heh, I suspect you are correct—agriculture would have been much easier for me to comprehend. I'm also reminded[0] of Slartibarfast's 'Starship Bistromath'; from Wikipedia:

 _The ship is said to work by abusing the laws of 'bistromathics', which is the specific mathematics of values of various factors in restaurants, such as the bill, number of people attending, number of people said to be attending, number of people who leave and the time they all arrive. In the novel Life, the Universe and Everything, bistromathics is explained that "Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space [...], so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants."_

[0] Actually it was my sister who reminded me about Starship Bistromath after I told her about this, not my own recollection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> darmok and jalad at tanagra... darmok and jalad! at tanagra!

<comment><USER8> This is what I thought of too. Haha. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Original creator here. I hadn't thought about Homespring in years until a friend tipped me off about this post. Since it seems like people are still interested in this monstrosity, I created a web page with links to all the Homespring-related stuff that I am aware of: [http://jeffreymbinder.net/208/homespring](http://jeffreymbinder.net/208/homespring)

</comment><comment><USER10> If you're going to write a language in metaphors why not just use emoji?

<comment><USER11> Such as Emojicode? [https://www.emojicode.org/](https://www.emojicode.org/)

Though I think I prefer Emoticon: [https://esolangs.org/wiki/Emoticon](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Emoticon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't even know what I'm looking at... I love it!

</comment><comment><USER13> This actually makes Intercal look intelligible.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not even once.</comment>


A Year of MongoDB - <AUTHOR> https://speakerdeck.com/mitsuhiko/a-year-of-mongodb

<comment><USER2> This is the problem with most of the guys who go with MongoDB. Obviously, this person is very technical, so I am not flaming him nor accusing him, but this is my view of the rest of them who pick MongoDB without exactly having a clue as to why (hipsters) or when they should use a NoSQL db and when they shouldn't.

I do not hesitate to admit that I was a hipster sometime back too. I chose MongoDB for many of my projects and it went well, till it reached some kind of moderate scale where I realized it was a terrible choice going with a NoSQL db (Sometimes, I'd have to duplicate data because there were no Joins, etc). And that's when you start to realize, that NoSQL is not a pure-white solution. It is designed to satisfy very specific use-cases. Relational databases are really good enough for 99% of the use cases out there.

Unless otherwise you are COMPLETELY unable to design your schema in a relational database, you SHOULD NOT simply opt for a NoSQL database. The claimed NoSQL performance benefits will easily be outrun by a terribly designed schema, if you use the wrong db for the wrong scenario. Trust me, MySQL has had so much negativity because of these hipsters, but even something as basically relational as MySQL scales really reaaallllly well. Infact, many top guys still use MySQL till date, for a reason, in production.[1]

Next time you launch your start-up, spend some time carefully evaluating your db design decisions, as the wrong db for the wrong use-case could easily become the most expensive mistake of your startup.

[1][http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-does-Quora- use...](http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-does-Quora-use-MySQL-as- the-data-store-instead-of-NoSQLs-such-as-Cassandra-MongoDB-or-CouchDB)

<comment><USER3> All I can say is this: if the saying "Always plan to throw away your MVP" is true, then I can't see any other storage solution other than MongoDB (or a similar schema-less document storage DB) for MVPs. The speed of development and flexibility are simply worth it. Yes, it is hard to refactor a live product and move it from MongoDB to MySQL / Postgre but was done before and you only do that if you get traction, so its a good problem to have.

I would start with MongoDB, get a grip on what on earth the product is doing, finalize the schema on the fly based on A/B tests, customer feedback and analytics, only once the schema is finalized move it to a SQL database if needed.

If you are not using a good ORM + DB migration system, then MongoDB will make perfect sense when you are quickly iterating through ideas and trying to find a product / market match. You really have no clue how your data schema is going to look like in the end, why confine it at the start? the vast majority of startups sadly won't get even near the phase where they really reach scale related performance issues, so choosing MongoDB for prototyping your business absolutely makes sense to me.

<comment><USER4> You make a VERY big "if" in your first sentence, one that (admittedly anecdotally) I've very rarely seen hold true in tech companies. Much more often, the MVP becomes the product, and all those shortcuts and poor design decisions come back to kill your productivity when it becomes necessary to refactor foundational tech/designs that have metastasized throughout the codebase.

I am curious if this is other folks' experience as well, or do you actually throw out the MVP and start all over at some point? If so, at what point do you make the break?

<comment><USER5> In real life, you are totally true. The initial test that succeeds becomes/continues to be the real product. I agree with the parent poster that Mongo is awesome for testing, if not awesome for scale. I think the point here is that tech co-founders/leads need to make it clear that this is a debt that will need to be paid if things take off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a little blown away by the total lack of technical understanding when it comes to MongoDB. This person is obviously very technical, so why would he have chosen MongoDB in the first place? It isn't like MongoDb's technical shortcomings are a secret. The description of how MongoDb does sharding and distributed queries should have immediately raised red flags to any who has even a modicum of CAP understanding. If it sounds complex, a total hack and impossible to manage it probably is.

For gosh sakes, even the 10gen guys admit MongoDB lost data a year(!) ago. [1] If a database lost data in a single server configuration, why would you trust it as a cluster?

1: <http://www.dbms2.com/2011/04/04/the-mongodb-story/>

<comment><USER7> Because developers without significant database / data store experience are choosing where to put their data because its "easy to use".

Yes, RBDMS and similar approaches are difficult to work with [1] and introduce "impedance mismatch". Yes joins can be slow. Yes scaling can be difficult and or expensive. But, when choosing where to put data without understanding (or accepting) _why_ the above is difficult is only asking history to repeat itself.

[1] "Database guy here". I know databases and SQL. I would not consider choosing what language to implement a web application tier on, because I don't have enough relevant experience. I focus on what I have battle experience in.

<comment><USER8> "Easy to use" is a perfectly legitimate criteria to optimize for. For most startups performance/scale is a total non-issue, most of the time even something like berkleydb would do. At most early stage startups developer time is the single biggest bottleneck.

If you make a non-optimal choice upfront you can always migrate to another database later on (database migrations are painful but in practice is something you have to do sooner or later in any case).

(obviously this applies to the scaling argument; if you need transactions you should pick a database which supports them)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few comments on the problems:

* CPU bottleneck. The mongod is no usually bound by CPU except for building indexes on existing data (which shouldn't really happen in production). The issue he's talking about is contention between the web server (or workers) and the mongos. This isn't anything unexpected. It's recommended to put the mongos onto the application server and then you scale this by adding CPUs initially but then by adding multiple application nodes and using a load balancer. Or perhaps splitting the mongos onto dedicated nodes?

* Virtualisation: VMs are notorious for having variable performance because you have the overhead of the hypervisor but more importantly, are sharing resources with others. We run performance critical apps on dedicated servers and reserve VMs for tools or things which aren't high throughput e.g. a MongoDB arbiter.

* EBS: This has had known performance issues for years. It's fine as a basic file store but should never be used for databases. PIOPs are the way around this but local instance storage is also an option.

* No transactions: MongoDB has never had them. This is known.

* Schemaless != no schema design. It makes it easy to play around but you still need to think through things carefully. See [http://blog.serverdensity.com/mongodb-schema-design-pitfalls...](http://blog.serverdensity.com/mongodb-schema-design-pitfalls/)

* No joins. Again, it has never had joins. This is known.

<comment><USER10> "[EBS is] fine as a basic file store but should never be used for databases."

Doesn't Heroku use EBS for all of their postgres databases?

It may be the case that postgres works better on EBS than mongo does. Postgres has a traditional write-ahead log that minimizes (and spreads out) block writes and hides latencies. Mongo does not.

<comment><USER11> WAL only helps so much, since you also need seeks for reads. Cassandra has a WAL + log-structured storage + no read-before-update design, so it basically eliminates seeks on writes entirely, and EBS is still ass for workloads that don't fit in cache. Which, if you're bothering to use C*, is almost all of them.

<comment><USER10> That's ideal, but many kinds of updates require some kind of read.

I agree in general though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Completely off-topic (well that's my nickname) but I'm seeing on HN more and more _beautiful_ slide decks, from a purely esthetical point of view. This deck has beautiful fonts and a beautiful color scheme, and it is nicely designed.

My question is: how are they made? Keynote, Powerpoint, HTML...? Are they made with the help of a graphic designer? They look completely outside of the reach of the average technical developer. Or do they use a pre-made theme?

<comment><USER13> Zach Holman has written about this: <http://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design- for-developers/>

In fact, this slide deck was extremely reminiscent of his style, down to the font and some other details. I wouldn't be surprised if the person who designed this deck was influenced by some of Holman's previous presentations.

<comment><USER14> eh.. Mitsuhiko is known to have good eye for design. see his Flask website etc.,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As I clicked forward in the slideshow, I kept expecting to find something to disagree with but it never happened. Mostly I nodded to myself.

I have a huge investment in MongoDB at this point, both financially and in equipment - over 200 machines dedicated in various separate clusters - and a pivot to another datastore at this point would be a significant re-engineering effort.

All the people talking about changing databases after the MVP have clearly never had to deal with a typical hockey stick growth profile and having to allocate engineering resources based on need - either making the product better, or wasting time changing your database and losing traction.

Anyway, I'm hoping posts like this can dissuade people from choosing MongoDB for anything destined for high throughput Enterprise-level production environments.

I just wish there was something I could easily put in to replace MongoDB, but none of the available options quite fit the same document store model, but make better use of available resources and provide much better performance.

</comment><comment><USER16> Who is still surprised by this? I feel that after 2-3 years of the litany of stories and cases like this, it should shock absolutely no one anymore.

<comment><USER17> He is a relatively popular programmer so people will still comment on his presentation (even if it is a little redundant at this point). Unsung database veterans like Tony Marston have been saying things like this for years but few people took them seriously.

<comment><USER18> Yes, his web site is definitely not cool, but thank you for linking to it. I'll have to brew a decent coffee or three over the next week and take some time to read some of his stuff because it looks pretty good. Discounting the animated spiders and mention of COBOL!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In all of these discussions about MongoDb on HN, I always wonder why aren't people talking about the 1 % use cases for which it's good for. Maybe it is too obvious for most folks , but anyway I will just regurgitate the use cases Mongodb folks have documented officially. Here: <http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/use-cases/>. They have literally like three major use cases.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds like rethinkDB would be the answer to our prayers. How close is it to being "ready"?

<comment><USER21> Seems RethinkDB is still relational. Meh.

If you're using C#, I'd recommend RavenDB.

<comment><USER22> RethinkDB sounds like it's document oriented from their site: "RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn."

Also not sure why relational == Meh.

RthinkDB does sound promising though not ready for primetime. The following (critical) features are still in the development pipeline: Secondary indices, a db backup tool.

<comment><USER23> Definitely, we're leaving the production-ready tag off until we've built in some of these features.

Secondary index support is ready to go, we'll be releasing v1.5 with it in a few days.

<comment><USER22> I read your site and your system sounds very promising as I said in my previous post. It seems like you've identified some of the key problems with earlier noSQL implementations and that you're trying to solve them. Schema free was always a feature I could understand but "no joins" always sounded like an anti-feature to me. The promise of consistency and automatic sharding / replication is very nice but I'll remain skeptical until I hear about some production implementations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well my 2 cents to the discussion.

We really tried to make Mongo work over the last 1.5 years. We decided to go for mongo mostly because of JSON and geospatial indexing.

We became to realize that for our business case it is not the right tool. That said, and I work with databases now for 20+ years, I don't see what problem Mongo solves.

</comment><comment><USER25> I can confirm that the map-reduce thing does not hold up to any performance- wise expectations.

<comment><USER26> I assume your experience was on version < 2.4?

Now that 2.4 is out I'm interested in seeing how much the switch to multithreaded V8 has improved that. <http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/release- notes/2.4-javascript/>

<comment><USER27> I've run quite a few m/r queries against 2.4.2. The performance is still poor enough that'd I'd say it's only usable for occasional ad hoc work.

More seriously though running queries against a master node will regularly (maybe one in two queries) cause it to failover and elect a new primary. You'd think you should be able to run the queries against a slave, which you sort of can. Unless the result set is bigger than the maximum document size (16megs), in which case you're limited to the master as you can't write to a collection on a slave.

We're using Mongo fairly successfully but it has a lot of issues, particularly around administration tasks. Map reduce work gets done in Hadoop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My first thoughts when I read this:

1\. It's easy to screw up a relational database. I've seen more than a few mature relational databases... Most of them have plenty of sins, near- crippling performance snafus and other horrible legacy. _Any_ database that is big enough and growing enough is a beast to manage.

2\. From the slides, I think this guy took "Schema-Less" as a cue to stuff completely arbitrary data into MongoDB. No wonder his indexes went crazy. You still need to think about the data you're storing & the relationships. You need a design whatever database you use.

3\. Any relational databases I've seen at scale have a lot of flattening. I've seen intra-day transaction dbs that are completely flattened. If your next port of call is a highly normalised relational database, you're going to hit another wall fast enough.

4\. Two Phase commit. Seriously. Forget it. I've spent half my career in financial institutions. Quick, fail-fast processing with a reconciliation process is _by far_ the most common approach. 2PC actually slows you down and introduces another component that gets in the way. It's used very sparingly (and even then, usually causes a world of pain).

</comment><comment><USER29> I think that some people misunderstand the primary purpose of Schema-less design. It's not about typing, it's about document flexibility. It's about getting rid of EAV tables (read: Magento) and storing document-specific information. Typing obviously comes into play, but is only half the topic.

If you are building a system where the schema is the same for all records, then you really shouldn't be using Schema-less design.

<comment><USER30> In a few projects I've worked on in the past year and a half, I've used EntityFramework C#, and added a Data NVarChar(MAX) field to each table.. then I added a base class that has a UseData(Action<JObject>) method that will pass a Json.Net based JObject in to be able to manipulate... adding additional properties that don't need to be indexed, and handling default values then becomes fairly easy with getters/setters. I also have a TempData table that is pretty basic where the core data is JObject based.

It's not the fastest option, but has worked pretty well for me. It did work out pretty well for holding temporary values, or other values that don't need to be indexed, or where the shape can change dramatically. I tend to store transaction details (credit-card, vs paypal, etc) in JObjects, since the shape can be different, with a key that can pull the right properties out via .ToObject<ConcreteInstance>()

In other cases, I've mirrored data to Mongo, so display versions of records can be pulled up denormalized from a single record/authority (the source records are across 30+ joins, and fairly expensive with a 50:1 view:edit ratio).

I will say that using MongoDB with NodeJS has to be the most seamless combination of tools I have ever worked with. I've written a few services based on this combination and love the development output. Fortunately my needs have been limited enough, that I have not hit too many walls. Most of the issues I have experienced relate to geo-indexes combined with other data, and the limits on multi-key indexes, and no secondary indexes.

I think more people need to consider how their data is shaped, and used and go from there.

<comment><USER31> I'd love to see a blog post on your Entity Framework JObject implementation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> After 6 intensive months with MongoDB to build my MVP, I just love it.

For sure, it's not perfect. Lack of joins is a shame, but can be quite easily solved outside the database.

But the ease of use and speed of development are such a HUGE advantage. Not having to break my schema into normalized relations and define it in the DB saved me literally days of work.

I can imagine a case that 1 year from now, when our product will be more mature, we'll be leaving mongodb for another SQL or No-SQL database. Doesn't matter. The benefit that mongodb gives us now justifies the costs the may be incurred years from now.

<comment><USER33> Totally agree, and not just because of your last name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> These guys are lucky they didn't try Cassandra. That's really Mongo's problem: it's too close to a regular SQL solution. You have a sharded NoSQL data store that performs in-store filtering and sorting? You can run aggregation queries? Compound indexes? Amazing! Tell me more.

Moral of the story is unless you can justify a NoSQL datastore for your particular solution and you can live without joins, stick with a regular SQL db.

<comment><USER35> "These guys are lucky they didn't try Cassandra." Could you explain that further? I'm currently using Cassandra for a new project, so this sentence caught my eyes.

<comment><USER34> Just like with Mongo or any NoSQL/non-traditional solution, you have to understand how the trade-offs and capabilities of the database relate to what you're using the database for. You also have to design your data storage with these tradeoffs in mind.

For example, joins. There are no joins in Mongo or Cassandra and anything working around joins is simply not going to be as fast as a traditional database's join. If you need to do joins all the time, you will be in pain. So the answer is to deduplicate your data, such that joins are not necessary for frequent operations.

In particular, with Cassandra, while it's great at many things, such as write speed and write availability, you have to be very careful with your data design to get the results that you need. And you have to be cognizant about the querying that you need to do.

Cassandra has really weak in-store aggregation and filtering, as in there is almost no in-store aggregation and there is no filtering other than by a prefix of a column or a key (prefixed subset). So if your column names are made out of a composite parts A:B:C, you can scan for A:* or A:B:* (or A:[some value of B to some other value of B]), but you can't do _:B:_ or *:B:C.

The advanced trick is to use ordered rows, which are so strongly discouraged (because you can shoot yourself in the foot with a key distribution hotspot), which allows you another axis of prefixed subset filtering. But only one more axis.

Sorting? Cassandra doesn't sort. Cassandra project leadership thinks that sorting should be done in the client. If you want to filter a subset of keys in the shape of A:B:C, e.g. get all keys of a certain value of A and sort B:C, you have to do the sorting yourself. If you wanted to do a top-N report, you have to retrieve all that data to your client and then sort.

The only sorting in Cassandra is the hierarchical column (and optionally key) ordering. So if you want to have quick top-N reporting functionality on values A and B from an A:B data tuple, you end up maintaining two indices (i.e. precomputing query results). One such index has columns that start with A and another starts with B.

But then the indexing support is particularly weak. Secondary indexing is only done on values, so if you want to index portions of your keys, that's not natively supported. Also, only in Cassandra 1.2 is indexing finally "write- only," instead of "read-then-write." (Write-only performance is much faster.)

There are no triggers, so you can't write custom indices where you can atomically perform "read-then-write" operations to maintain an index. Instead, you have to write all such custom indexing logic yourself and take a hit for the transmission of all the indexing mutations over the network wire. This hurts particularly bad when you have a cluster distributed over geographical regions (i.e. slow/expensive link).

Cassandra does have the ability to count the number of columns, but only in one row (w/ only the same prefixed subset filtering available). Counting columns in multiple rows is not available, even if these rows are co-located on the same node.

Map-reduce is available, but it is not suitable for frequent queries (not meant to be run quickly, just like map-reduce in Mongo is not something you want to be hitting very frequently).

So, of course, whether these are issues for you depends entirely on your data design. There are many things that Cassandra does well and certain data shapes for which it is just diesel. It's quite ops-friendly, rolling full-uptime upgrades are reliable and are a key priority for the Cassandra team.

So Cassandra is even more specialized in terms of its uses than Mongo. If the original author of the presentation tried to use Cassandra for the same kind of data he used for Mongo, he probably would've written an even more scathing article.

<comment><USER36> Cassandra and many other NoSQLs are designed primarily for OLTP workloads, not OLAP. OLTP is almost exclusively "find me sth by primary key" (see the TPC-C benchmark used for RDBMSes). Sorting huge amounts of data, top-n queries, skyline queries, aggregation, joining huge data sets, complex filtering belong to analytics world, not OLTP. Unless your whole database is very tiny, let's say 10MB, those operations are pretty expensive even in RDBMSes. That's why those features are deliberately not included in Cassandra. Contrary, MongoDB took a different route - they include some of those features and then seriously underdeliver on many of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not totally related to the article, but every technology has its use. I get really annoyed when people ask me why I don't use ruby or mongodb at my job. I hate this movement towards "blog technologists" that basically read something in a blog, maybe (probably not) try it out themselves for something small and assume it is the best for everyone and if you dont use it you are stupid.

</comment><comment><USER38> What version of Mongo and pymongo is he using? The connection client looks old (not using MongoClient) and the compound index selection (or lack of with $and) doesn't exist in 2.4.1. I'm curious as to how many of issues have been resolved...

</comment><comment><USER39> I just submitted a related article on Hyperdex which, although it's not Python, has a very good Python interface.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5686973>

<comment><USER40> Hyperdex looks quite interesting indeed, but after getting burned with new products claiming too much, I'm perhaps overly cautious. Also, it doesn't appear to be able to change schemas after creation, which is a significant issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is there a video somewhere of the actual talk?

</comment><comment><USER42> The question I think is fundamental but that I didn't see asked nor replied is this: if we had a data store that had full performance, full scalability, etc., would we design it as a relational database or not? Said otherwise: the debate about NoSQL, is it an optimisation issue or a design issue? (Keep in mind pg's article about what would be a language in hundred years)

</comment><comment><USER25> Slide 56 states: "Schema vs. Schema-less is just a different version of dynamic typing vs. static typing."

Wrong.

If anything, it is a different version of weak typing vs. strong typing. That is totally orthogonal.

</comment><comment><USER43> The problem with most of these databases is that they are trying to do too much.

Either the database is great for ad-hoc queries and flexibility or it's great for performance and scale.

</comment><comment><USER44> Why the URL are not working from the SpeakerDeck document? Captain Obvious here: But isn't that the purpose of the Web? It's the WEB... make those links work!

<comment><USER45> I think this is a fair comment. SpeakerDeck focuses on preserving the presentation layout with absolute fidelity, and does that by using static images. It's a trade-off. It's certainly possible to implement some kind of link-detection, I hope they are working or plan to work on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I feel like there is a lot of context missing for some of these slides. Will there be video available of the talk?

</comment><comment><USER47> Sounds like 90% of your problems could have been solved if you'd spent a day or two researching what you were about to build your entire company around.

Sounds like the "We Fail" slide might be the most accurate one there.</comment>