skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the "Mietspiegel" for Berlin (geographic overview of cost of living, click download link on the right to retrieve as PDF):
http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/wohnen/mietspiegel/

People who want to avoid getting fleeced by landlords should consider becoming a member of the local "Mieterverein". It usually costs around 60 Euro per year to be a member and they will give you free legal counsel whenever you have trouble with your landlord:
http://www.berliner-mieterverein.de/

Berlin's advantage is not just the rents but also the law of tenancy. Germany's laws are tenant-friendly, whereas British laws are -- from what I've read -- landlord-friendly.

That's helpful if you're a young person looking for accomodation or office space to found a company and want to avoid taking too many risks.

In example, period of cancellation may not be more than 3 months in Germany, security deposit may not exceed 3 months' rent, etc.
It is fairly well established that how wealthy you feel is established by how visibly wealthy you are compared to your fairly immediate neighbors. I think the core fallacy of the idea that as prosperity increased, we'd work less, is that obviously if we work less then we'll be less visibly wealthy compared to our neighbors. Our ancient hindbrains do not perceive leisure time as a visible sign of wealth.

I would suggest the continued popularity of the five-day work week is an effect, not a cause.

Work-as-religion strikes me as an explanation that flatters the biases of certain people, but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence for it. In fact as I sit here trying to dissect the idea so that I can attack it, it's just coming apart in my hands. Sure, there's some small segment of the population that may feel that way, lawyers and financiers and others making a lot per hour, but I just don't hear very many other people complaining that they can't work more. As a societal explanation for a 5-day work week it's so silly it can't hardly be attacked without the attacks sounding equally silly.
My guess is that Sonne's imprisonment has nothing to do with "dissidents" or, particularly, geeks. Instead, it's that western governments have no sense of humor or intellectual flexibility about terrorism anymore.

That is a bad thing, but it is a different kind of bad thing than the one that creates a soap opera about oppressed geeks.
Do all the shops you've included provide a datafeed for affiliates?
Tagsistant already supports automatic tagging from the metadata such as you have described. The linked article says it supports plugins that can “extract tags from file contents” in the second-to-last paragraph. So if you want to tag your movies the way you said, you just have to write a plugin that uses some library to extract that data, or wait for someone else to release a plugin like that.
Original poster suggested "just giving" instead of "sitting on the money". Implied rushed decision can be counter-productive.

Bill Gates is a good example of efficient philantropist, instead of donating to charities who spread awareness about malaria or global warming, he invests in lasers that kill malaria mosquitos and deep-ocean technologies that prevent global warming.
The internet is definitely disrupting education; especially some organizations that use it (Christensen has a chapter about it in Seeing What's Next, and in fact a whole other book Disrupting Class, specific to it http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books.html - I've read the former).

You make an interesting point: as education has become more widely available, it's lost its quality as a signal because everyone goes there; and it does appear that quality has gone down (I guess it must, if you cater for everyone). Odd: it's usually the disruptions that go down-market, targeting non-consumption. One can see the net as an extension of this downward/expanding trend of education.

But I do think it's an extremely rare person - maybe just as rare as autodidacts of years past - who has the self-discipline/interest and wisdom to use these resources. It's not easy (in fact, my PhD supervisor liked to say that the purpose of a PhD was to enable you to learn how to learn - I wouldn't go that far, and indeed haven't completed). Most people look at videos of cats online - a sort of downmarket TV.

---

BTW: If you're interested in reading Christensen's other books... they are co-authored, and he's also running a consulting business. And sadly it shows. His first book was beautifully written, forming a compelling and inspirational narrative (really), and rigorously supported by data. His later ones aren't. They are written like a cross between undigested research paper (but without data or support) and an overly casual self-help business book. I suppose it's too much to expect even of someone as brilliant as Christensen, a Rhodes Scholar, to do the equivalent of a PhD for each of his books (his first one was based on his PhD). They have interesting ideas, but they are complex and not supported, leaving me with the sense that they little more reliable than plausible ideas. Actually, they are pretty good, but just irritating, disappointing and confusing.

He's refined terminology for his theory (e.g. target non-consumption; asymmetrical motivation between poor entrants and rich incumbents) which I think is good. He also relates it back to the basics, of succeeding by meeting customer needs/wants, and generalizes. It's a bit insular, self-indulgent and inward looking, focusing on his theory instead of data in the world. Solipsistic, in a wordy word.
I've written crawler for all of the sites featured. Probably not the best/easiest way to do it but it works for me.
What is PTRE and Is It Worth Your Time?
Also, complaining about taxes is pretty standard, given that you hit 9.3% once you make $50k, and someone who does startups can easily hit 10.3% in years where stock is sold. Plus the high cost of gas, property/rent, etc.
Yeah, I didn't notice that on first read, but that definitely helps seal the deal for me. I'll probably set it up on my server tonight and at least look into hacking together that plugin.
You know what the problem is with your statement? It's not he fact that you refer to this potential employee as "non technical" but as a "friend". Yes you should enjoy to work with whomever you hire, but you shouldn't be lazy about their skill set. If the person is a designer, try to get the BEST designer — not a friend. If the person does business, try to attract the best businessperson — not a friend.

The curse of twentysomethings is to hire their best friends. They feel insecure and are afraid of failure. Hire someone great that you aren't afraid to fire. By the way this doesn't just apply to tech startups — it can apply to a band or staffing a restaurant.
If Java could be redesigned from scratch, with no concern for backwards compatibility, it would probably look a lot like C#.
My most common scenario for kick-starting my creative coding is to bust open the REPL and brain dump the more difficult concepts just to see if they're feasible. I use the REPL so I can quickly debug code and see immediate results.

There's no way I could just jot down 750 words of code without having executed it at least once. Normally, I'd probably have executed my code every 10 new words of code - so like, 75 times by the time I write 750 words. I just don't see a non-REPL editor helping me in this way.

I know there are in-browser REPLs for languages like Ruby and Python, etc. Perhaps if it had one of those in it, or something, then it'd make more sense for me to try it.
The only person that I've known that bleached his hair w/ hydrogen peroxide used the disinfectant-grade stuff (though this was a while ago so I could be mis-remembering).
Her approach seems to be saving money by outsourcing less critical stuff and spending the savings on team-building trips and a more experimental culture driven by a smaller and more competent core team. That really isn't a bad idea at all.
That's not always true historically, though. It seems more like a relatively recent phenomenon, but US schools were still the best in the world a century ago. Perhaps it's more accurate that they are able to continue cementing their lead by charging so much.
A little punk, a little gritty.

Berlin is not particularly welcoming to posh types, or the kind of people who enjoy high-class exclusive nightlife. You really don't want to park your luxury car on the street.

For everyone else, I'd say Berlin is extremely free and tolerant and generally welcoming.
I'll agree that there was some level of assumption involved, but it's pretty clear this was not "the same conference and same person" given that that doesn't make logical sense.

How could she have been banned three times from the same conference, and why on Earth would she have written this post the way she did if it had been the same person three times in a row?
As time goes by, it gets tougher to 'just remember this'
SAMSUNG CHAT 335 FEATURES REVIEWS PRICE | OnlineGadgetBox
I wrote something like this using FUSE and Postgres a couple years ago. The major problem with this approach is scalability: on a large, multi-user FS, you can get TONS of tags to sift through in your root folder.

My solution, which I never got around to implementing, was to have "hierarchical" tags. e.g. "recipes:cookies:chocolatechip" is a single tag for all chocolate chip cookie recipes, all of which have the implied tags "recipes" and "recipes:cookies" (but not "cookies" or "chocolatechip"). The advantage is that your root directory will not be littered with the "cookies" and "chocolatechip" tags when these collections are fairly irrelevant.

This idea can be extended to solve multi-user conflicts (all tags are prefixed with the username) and to make sensible tags for dates -- it makes little sense to tag a file with "2011", "May", and "22", since no-one cares to find all files from the 22nd of every month; but the hierarchical tag "2011:May:22" is perfect for this situation since these files will also be present under "2011" and "2011:May".
In the east maybe. In the west there are plenty of flash cars in districts like Savignyplatz and in the outskirts of the city.
Don't ever get an idiot, period. There's no need to qualify it.

To answer the original poster, hire a person (non-technical or otherwise) when their benefit exceeds their cost by a substantial amount. I wouldn't recommend hiring a friend, though, without doing a search to see if there are better people for the role at the amount you can afford. You need the best person you can recruit - which might be your friend, but probably isn't.
http://i.imgur.com/wU8df.png

And here I was thinking it was just me...

EDIT: It's that 'LM Roman' font. Remove it and it will be fixed.
To what degree is the tech scene in Berlin international? My German isn't bad, but I'm definitely not fluent. Are there so many internationals that tech meetups etc. are usually in English, or is German still dominant?
Indeed. Java, from the programming language design standpoint, has made some very poor decisions. The following come to mind immediately:

* Lack of first class functions

* 'null' type

C# has fixed both of those.
He said Chrome, so a Firefox addon won't do him much good.
The filter by color works really well!

Especially since you mention crawling stores, would be interesting to know how the color-matching works. I'd think the metadata is not very consistent.
Ask HN: What do you do to make normal people more productive?
I've read blogs after blogs about the absolute need to hire "rock star programmers" or the "best of the best" and what you need to do to make them productive.

That's cool and all but I want to hire normal and average people. People who are just your average day to day programmer/developer/analysts/accountant/etc.

What techniques are there to make NORMAL people more productive in their jobs?
I could list a dozen scenarios that easily would lead me to choose a stand-alone web app. "Technopolitics" or my personal opinion of Apple has nothing to do with it.

I'd be curious to know what those scenarios are, and whether your choice would actually be user-experience driven rather than based on developer preference or business constraints (such as insufficient resources).
Some pretty good observations in this article, especially about the app store. Most mortals, when asked what type of computer they should buy, don't respond "buy some parts from NewEgg, build your own, and put Ubuntu on it." So, I tend to question why fellow geeks, when asked what tablet or smartphone to buy, would recommend anything other than Apple.

Recommending a mere mortal purchase any of the Android tablet options is about the same as telling them to buy a bunch of parts from NewEgg and build their own computer. Maybe this will improve in the next year as software becomes available for Android. I certainly hope so. 5,000 Android developers just got Samsung 10" Galaxy tabs at Google IO so my guess is new apps will be here in 3, 2, 1...
Off-the shelf hydrogen peroxide is 3%. The tooth-whitening stuff is 10-30%.

It's water with some extra oxygen, folks. Let's not get too bent out of shape over this. Saying you can clip some wires while owning tooth bleach and nail polish remover does not exactly make you the criminal mastermind of the century.
Personally, I see it as the same 'bad thing' that happens all of the time. Law enforcement doesn't like to be challenged, so they set out to 'teach a lesson' to the person that challenged their authority.
I'm coming at this from a marketing point of view but the site feels very generic — more discount bin than "high street". Why not go back to your original concept and create an aggregator that's just focused on maternity (which is a valuable SEO play)? Also I'd design several looks and do some A/B testing (including selection of clothing for the front page which is critical).
Titles are like clothes, and context is important.

The sole proprietor of a one-person company should call himself CEO without hesitation if it helps him get what he wants. The person in charge of a thousand-person company should reject the CEO title when it gets in the way of his goals.

At the last small (~5 employee) startup I ran, I used the CEO title when dealing with media companies and large organizations and the co-founder title when doing marketing to developers. Worked out fine.

If someone's used the CEO title in front of you and you've thought they were foolish, they've either misunderstood the context or you've come across something you're just not the primary audience for.
Yeah, you can get away with being old, boring, settled, and moderately wealthy in Charlottenburg. But if you're moving to Berlin for Berlin, it's probably not where you want to go. (Judging from the Toytown crowd, it seems to be full of people who are forced to be in Germany for their jobs and hate it.)

The outskirts are really suburban more than anything, and completely different.
My guess is zero. My guess is that they are the normal sunday-morning newspaper-readers that think they have a 1 in 10 chance of being blown up by a terrorist every time they step into an airport. As such, someone talking about chemicals scares them, because bombs and illegal drugs are also made from chemicals.
Great idea ;-)

I'd also love an explanation as what you're doing on the crawl to collate it all?
I disagree. How many features are there that are 1) not high priority enough for a full time employee and 2) high priority enough to justify bringing aboard another person, train them in the code base, have them code the feature and let them go after coding is complete?

I think Jessica Mah is misunderstanding the purpose of contractors to her and her business' detriment. Hiring contractors because the team isn't able to accomplish its tasks in a timely fashion is disastrous in the long run. What happens is that the contractors will write code in the most expedient fashion possible, without care for the long term harm to the code base. The team then sees an inexorable decline in its ability to iterate, which causes the business side to think that even more contractors are required. This self-reinforcing cycle inevitably leads to a codebase that's almost impossible to change or improve in any way; it leads to a place where moving a logo is a three week project (don't laugh, I've been there).

There is another way of approaching contracting that is more valuable for both the team and the contractor. Instead of thinking of the contractor as a hired gun whose sole responsibility is to finish a feature or fix a defect, the founder should think of the contractor as a teacher or a coach. Hire contractors when your team needs to learn a new skill or improve some aspect of their development cycle. Approaching contracting with this mindset ensures that each successive contractor hired improves, rather than degrades the team's skills. Otherwise, your team becomes trapped in a maze to which they don't know the exit, and you wonder why every new version seems to have fewer improvements and worse performance than the last.

EDIT: After further reflection, there is another way that contracting can improve the business in a sustainable fashion. I know of a few companies that practice "contract-to-hire". In other words, you're brought on as a contractor for a period of 6 months or so. During that 6 month period, you and the company have a chance to evaluate each other. At the end of that period, the company makes an offer to you if you've managed to prove yourself as a good fit for the company.
Apparently you are surprised or dismayed that someone could draw that conclusion about you based on what you've written here.

I don't have any remorse about considering that someone who's response to "I was asked to have sex with a conference organizer or leave, and it was a deeply humiliating and infuriating experience" is to be glib and interrogative -- feigning curiosity with pointed and IMO malicious questions --

I don't have any remorse about proposing that such a person has deep issues understanding the emotions and motivations of other people.

(BTW, let me know if you find any more typos or grammatical errors, I'm seriously concerned about that.)
I originally tried analysing the colours in the images and picking out the most common colours used.

In the end, I just ended up using the colours mentioned on the pages when I scrape them.

It works well generally but throws a few false positives.
"If I could guess, 100% of the people are male."

Thank you for making a testable prediction. Your hypothesis is thereby falsified.

"Polyamory is usually one guy and more women and is usually quite the sexist thing. "

Good heavens, what sort of culture-free hole were you raised in? Do you know anyone polyamorous in real life?

"Seeking life extension is at the current point of science not really rational."

And there you have it. If you're anti-fun, you're probably also anti-life.
Exactly ! In fact, I know of people (myself included) who look at C# in envy !

I think Microsoft has managed the language really well, even taking painful decisions like backward-incompatible versions to properly support generics. Kudos to the team !
Goliath Helping David: How Microsoft Helps Startups Thrive
> Hundreds of movie celebrities come to mind.

If they're not signed up for cryonics, at their income level, I don't buy that they're actually consumed by anything remotely resembling a quest for technological immortality, as opposed to merely trying to grab onto their fading youth using conventional and uninteresting methods.
That's a great overview of data mining. I am wondering if you can somehow insert multivariate analysis into this flow chart.
Multivariate analysis may be a good substitute for clustering methods.
Thank you for providing such a clear picture.
Well put together.

Just wondering:
Do you have any concerns regarding copyright use of text, images etc. of the products being sold?

Have you looked into possible Google penalties regarding duplication of text from other websites?
Tower ( http://www.git-tower.com/ ) is a commercial Git GUI for Mac OSX that, by all accounts, is pretty excellent; don't know much about the team, but I believe it's their first product and doing OK.

I think you'll find more desktop-app-focused startups in Apple-land, largely thanks to the impetus to Obj-C & Cocoa programming that the iPhone has given.
German may be easy to "pick up" because of all the cognates, but I've found that the German grammer is both complex and not very "English".

French, on the other hand, has significant vocabulary overlap with English and it's grammar rules are either easier to learn, or easy to fudge when speaking.
No way. English certainly has germanic roots but it was more recently influenced by french. We have over 17k french words in English where as in german the word might have a german root but it's no longer recognizable in most cases (e.g. enough comes from the root genug. They don't look alike but the enough came from the french not being able to make the ch sound that genug had on the end at the time).
Business idea: recommendation system for physical stores
Definitely by the end of the year, if not sooner. I'm getting close to having a full functioning beta (likely in 3-4 months), and will likely do a private launch with some testers shortly after.
I've tried it on variety of different servers/hardware using both my server+apachebench and netperf as benchmarking tools.

* On EC2 I've tried the c1.xlarge and the giant cc1.4xlarge. With cc1.4xlarge, I saw maybe a ~10% increase accept() rate.
* Two separate, virtualized servers at the office.
* A private, virtualized server on Rackspace was briefly tested as well.

A compilation of netperf results are available at https://gist.github.com/985475
"This thing means I don't have to carry a phone anymore." An iPad 2 with Skype is a far less expensive way to stay in touch than an international cell phone.

This is interesting because Skype, effectively the global VoIP standard, is now owned by Microsoft.

In light of what happened with Office and Mac in the '90s, Apple is probably doing their best to avoid a situation where a Microsoft product becomes perceived as a crucial part of their platform's value proposition... IOW, Apple certainly doesn't want people to actively think of iPad + Skype as a killer combo because they don't control the other half.

But what can they do? FaceTime has no chance of catching up with Skype in global adoption. And considering the iPhone/Android squabbles, it's unlikely that Apple would turn to Google for help against Skype. Hmm.
IMHO for all this class of problems, that is: need to log big amount of data over time for years, the way to go is not Riak, nor Redis, nor <put your preferred DB name here> but, simply writing to files in append only mode (and when you can, using a fixed size record for fast access later).

There are good reasons IMHO for writing a small networked C server doing this work.
Honestly, no I haven't looked into any of this.

I have noticed, however, that most, if not all of the sites offer product feeds that include the images. So I'd assume that there is no issue there.

Regarding Google, I honestly don't have a clue. I shall put some time into looking into it though
If you're looking for fast on-boarding I would recommend Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com). It's built for reducing project setup overhead which can be an expensive proposition if you're juggling resources as she suggests in the article.
I was really surprised that he struggled to activate the iPad because I just assumed people would have/understand iTunes. Definitely was one of those moments where you remember how important it is for a developer to watch their users.
This cracks me up very creative!

The blindfolded Frogger game made me think this might be great for disabled individuals who want to connect with their peers. It's probably not where you guys were going with the idea, but thought I'd give my 2 cents.