Is Berlin the new home for tech start-up business?  [video]  - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9739525.stm? <comment><USER5> I'm an NZ expat who has lived in Berlin for the last few years. While Berlin is cool, let me present a caveat...

I've enjoyed the music scene and cheap rent, but have experienced major culture shock. It is a very intense place, full of contradiction, i.e. extremely open-minded in some areas and absurdly conservate in others. Berlin alternatively challenges and reaffirms one's various values.

Sometimes it seems like the 'adults' have left the city and left the 'kids' in charge. At other times, it feels impossible to breathe without violating some ponderous rule. Many are sucked into what is called a 'Berlinquency' - <USER2> existence in which one is spoilt by the hedonism, looseness, and condusiveness to self-obsession this place affords.

The tech scene is ok. There are a lot of clones. Some great meetups, though. It all seems to be on the up. Watch this space. And visit for a month before deciding to move here.

<comment> k-mcgrady Any examples of what is 'absurdly conservative'?

<comment><USER6> As a New Yorker who's lived in Berlin for four years, I can't think of much.

I've noticed on certain English-speaking forums that there's a tendency to exaggerate and obsess over _incredibly_ minor cultural differences. Like jaywalking, which isn't even an issue in Berlin (people do it and nobody cares).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a young developer living in Germany. Here's my perspective. Berlin is cheap, affordable, has an international culture (I'm an emmigrant) and pretty much something to offer to everyone, so the city itself just has a good attraction for young people.

I don't know why the startup scene has started booming here but just type in "web start-up" at indeed ([http://www.indeed.de/Jobs?q=web+start- up&l=berlin](http://www.indeed.de/Jobs?q=web+start-up&l=berlin)) and you'll get 275 results. Plus the UK has cracked down on emmigration laws and Germany has opened them up, at least for engineers, etc. b/c of the "Fachkräftemangel" i.e. the fact that the Germans lack skilled laborers. So whereas before for Europeans and especially Eastern europeans the UK was #1 its now changing b/c Germany is closer and easier. Also Germany seems more open to Europeans period, the UK with Cameron is doing all it can to shun the rest of Europe. The only problem I see, is that you still need to know German to get around ( which no one studies in school), which for instance is why my brother hasn't come.

EDIT: I guess I exaggerated with the "no one studies in school" bit. My point is that english is the only language we are all pounded into learning regardless of whether or not we have an interest in languages or a talent for them, so we can at least function at some level with english. German, however, is not the lingua franca I think we can all agree on that. I'm quadlingual (if that's a word), but not all talented developers like languages as well and unfortunately whatever the germans say, you still need to know german if you want to assimilate in germany, get an apartment, go shopping, and live life.

<comment><USER8> "which no one studies in school"

In Denmark we can select German classes in both elementary and high school.

<comment><USER9> Sure, here in Finland too, but who bothers at that age? Most people couldn't care less about "learning stuff that could be useful in future", and even less ever actually start thinking that taking optional classes could be benefitical. And even less of them think so at high school, let alone elementary school. So, in essence, no one studies German in school.

<comment><USER10> When I was young my attitude was similar but in my elementary school and high school two foreign languages were mandatory (English, German or Fench) so I didn't have any other choice. I live in Czech Republic.

At that age I couldn't care less but now that I'm thinking of doing a PhD in Germany (from what I've heard a very affordable country with many great life science labs) I'm very glad that I remember at least basics even that I haven't actually spoken German for six years.

I think that learning two major foreign languages should be mandatory. Almost everybody can learn one language quite well after +/- 10 years during childhood and to learn at least basics from the second one should not be that much of a problem too.

<comment><USER11> "I'm thinking of doing a PhD in Germany"

I'm not discouraging, but once you're considering a particular position, please try and talk to previous PhD students of your prospective supervisor. Germany has hardly any fully-funded PhD positions. Instead you typically get employed as staff and have to combine that with your PhD work. The problem is, often professors take on lots of PhD students to get more funding and end up having hardly any time. I've heard stories of a professor having 8 or so PhD students that still wait on him to read their thesis and give the go-ahead for their viva (PhD defense). I'm not saying this is the case everywhere, but it's something to be aware of. So try and find out beforehand.

<comment><USER10> Thanks a lot for advice. I have still more than a year ahead before I need to make a decision so there's enough time to ask around when I narrow my choices. I haven't even made my mind whether I want to get into neuroscience or stay in molecular/cell biology.

Sadly, the situation as you decribed is almost the same with PhD students in the lab where I currently work on my diploma thesis and in some around in the institute. Having seen what I've seen (troubles with disertations and giving the PhD defense go-ahead) that's definitely something I want to avoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am a foreigner who has been working as a developer or manager in the software sector in Germany for around 10 years. For a couple of years I have been trying to move towards self-employment, with some ups and downs, but I am making progress on a project together with my wife. Last year I had the chance to switch jobs and move elsewhere so I naturally targeted Berlin. I would like to keep working in a high-paying job while funding the startup that I work on in my free time. I noticed a few things:

There are a quite a few startup jobs, but they are low end, low paying. Many pay even less than what I started on 10 years ago. They are looking for those starting their first job I think. I get the feeling Berlin startups get a lot less funding that other startups. Even the non-startup jobs that require more experience seem to pay a lot less, and even with the slightly cheaper rent than other cities, I couldn't find any attractive options. The official work experience I have on my CV is more enterprisy stuff like .NET and lots of stuff startups care less about like Scrum, Kanban, management in general and agile software development. I do have experience with things like Ruby, Python and JavaScript, but even startup employers were only interested in what was on my CV.

Not complaining or anything, just trying to help get a feel on what I found while looking there last year.

I found a good job near Frankfurt, and who knows, maybe I will end up in Berlin later, but I feel I might not need to. Frankfurt has a startup scene (and a rich financial sector). So does Cologne where I used to live.

<comment><USER13> "The official work experience I have on my CV is more enterprisy stuff"

That already is your point. You are coming from an enterprise thinking and payment structure - Berlin is everything but Enterprise.

With your kind of payment expectations, they will simply expect you to step up the game, and that probably is at least CTO if not co founder. If you want to be your specialized dev, you need to be extra good to work around this area and _understand_ what startups are about.

Also, judging by your nickname here, your name still sounds German. If you are from A / CH by definition (and if not proven otherwise on your CV and through experiences) you are not automatically startup material. Don't get me wrong: it is just about different skillset and mentality and if you cannot provide proof that you are not tainted by that obstacle, you will have an even harder time getting a job in that environment.

<comment><USER12> I am not an enterprise thinker, but I have developed enterprise salary expectations. One of my current areas of interest is helping slow old large businesses be more effective by using e.g. Lean startup ideas.

To be honest though I am not a natural entrepreneur. Or at least I may have been while younger but I have become soft over the years. I only really started thinking about startups etc maybe 3 or 4 years ago and it's hard to break out of the comfortable employee lifestyle.

I am from an English speaking country with German ancestors, but I don't know if that background makes me more or less startup material. There seem to be roughly the same distribution if entrepreneurs here as in my home country.

But I am focused now on being founder rather than employee. Already CTO of a non-profit r&d team with my wife as CEO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Home for start-up business? Yes. For tech start-ups? I don't think so. I have yet to meet one engineer-driven tech start-up from Berlin. Most founders I met and know are some business guys with oh-so-clever ideas looking for just the right CTO guy to make their plan reality. And most German developers I know also never thought about working for a start-up. They happily flock to every large German company you may know. The previous start-up I worked for had more Spanish developers than German ones.

<comment><USER15> Ableton? Native Instruments?

<comment><USER16> They're not startups.

<comment><USER17> How about Bitwig?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> On the 'fake it,till you make it' path,Berlin seems to be right in the 'fake it' part.You guys write about low costs of living,however there are cheaper places in Eastern Europe with better tech talent availability overall.You mention the nightlife and a couple of the clubs are indeed world class,but I'd doubt it that you go there more than 5 times a year.The internet in Germany is borderline third world quality,in Bulgaria and Romania you get some of the fastest internet in the world for a fraction of the price you'd pay in Germany.The women are better than in the UK,but far from the best looking in the world.

What I'm trying to say with this point is,I don't really see the advantage of being in Berlin in the early stages of your business too,when you're just a 3 people shop,busting your asses all day to move things forward

Having written all that,I loved Berlin during my few months stay.

<comment><USER19> >The internet in Germany is borderline third world quality

that may be true for rural Germany but I'm writing this from a 100 MBbit cable connection which costs me 40 EUR. You can also get 50 Mbit DSL for 35 EUR p.m. (both including a telephone flatrate)

<comment><USER18> For probably half the price in Romania and Bulgaria,you can get Gbit internet connection...not to mention that when you start out,you aren't forced with most providers to sign long ass contracts and on the next day your internet is up and running.If you ever have issues,they'll sort it out in hours.

Again,loved Berlin,it's just I always see some guys hyping it without being able to back up their points,so I'm calling their statements out.

<comment><USER13> And how many people need a gigabit internet connection at home or in the office?

Plus if you know you are not ready to move into something long term, then you simply move to a space where you can rent this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm an engineer who visited Berlin earlier this year and loved the city - it's like my home town of Melbourne, Australia which I love, but just MORE of it.

I already had the itch to leave my 9-5 and go somewhere for an adventure, so when I got home I set about working out what I'd need to do to head over there and how much capital I'd need for about 6-months self sustained living in Berlin (came out to about $15,000AUD, thanks to the current strong AUD).

I found out one of my close (engineer) friends was also looking to leave his job and do something interesting and exciting, so I've convinced him to come with me too. Succeed or fail, it really seems like we could be part of something exciting in Berlin! Any advice on dos and don't would be appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been back and forth from Berlin for a little while now. My company's home base is in NYC, but I sometimes work out of Berlin.

Even this year while I was there (Feb. - May), the startup scene is exploding. I liken it to the satisfaction of knowing of a great band before everyone else: there's no doubt that Berlin will be muttered in the same breath as the Valley, NYC and London. It's only a matter of time.

The German culture can be a bit harsh to outsiders, but the Berlin startup scene more than makes up for that. The folks there are very kind and always willing to entertain a good conversation.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm from Berlin, so I naturally enjoy the kind of hype that's being created since one or two years ago. However, I'd like to stress what someone in the video said: It's just budding and really not yet comparable to New York or London. There are quite a couple of cool start-ups here now, but still few with innovative breakthrough technology and also few large investors. But I see it coming, too.

I guess this will also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For ten years people have been telling how cool Berlin is and a lot creative people were attracted. Now everyone's telling about the new tech start-up scene and that will attract even more talented people - hopefully also large investors.

Interesting times ahead!

<comment><USER23> I agree on that. I've moved to Berlin together with hype and there is only handfull of really successful startups. Berlin needs more internet millionaires and more transparency. By now, afaiks most of Berlin tech millionaires come from Rocket Internet and people that spawn out of RI have different mindset from what you can see in Valley. But, I'm pretty sure that new generation of Berlin entrepreneurs are on good path to change tech scene from ground up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Berlin is a FANTASTIC city to bootstrap your project ...

reasons: 1. cheap cost of living, 2. availability of relatively well paid contract work, 3. A very supportive startup / creative community who are willing to share info and resources, 4. A very smart and creative demographic, 5. wonderful bars, clubs, and restaurants, 6. German people are actually a decent bunch :)

disadvantages: 1. over-strict regulations in dealing with Banking and Regulatory bodies (whatever you do, do NOT sign up for a postbank a/c), 2. Less than ideal weather.

Overall a win I think, which is why I continue to call Berlin my home.

<comment><USER15> > wonderful bars, clubs

They don't close. They. Do. Not. Close. As a nocturnal developer I could go out to a club, get back to my hostel at 2, write code for 2 hours and then go out again. Bliss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So if someone wanted to relocate to Berlin to start a company, or to expand a team into europe, how would they go about that?

Where do people want to live? Where to locate offices? Where do you find good talent? What are the legal steps to do so? Any pitfalls to avoid? Others should feel free to jump on this.

</comment><comment><USER26> Berlin is ramping up quickly. We get applications from all around the world. This is great and was much different just 12 Month ago. The hockey stick kicks in, now!

One comment on English: It is much easier than most non-english speaking cities and most international talent can manage the daily tasks within weeks.

check out foundfair.de and contact us in case you need help getting settled.

<comment><USER27> "Upload pitch" isn't working for me in Chrome. I think you can benefit by simply providing a link on top of page for the start-ups to apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's the international position on this? I am living/working in the UK startup scene and it seems to me Berlin could become europe early stage garage very soon. Personally i believe London might be still the place to be after P/M Fit (the place to be in europe…)

What's the US take on this ? Do people actually care outside of the german speaking areas and maybe Uk?

<comment><USER29> I'm a US citizen. My take is that if I was still single and not a parent, I would be in Berlin immediately. In some ways, it sounds better than Silicon Valley or New York. Transportation around SV doesn't sound like it's based on public transportation and housing prices are crazy. New York has great public transportation, especially with the addition of water taxies on the East River, but housing is out of control.

Learning German, if you're a native English speaker, is easy. Simple sentences in German can often sound like an oddly accented English. German is highly consistent, i.e. not a lot of exceptions to grammatical rules. You just have to get used to word order being different in some instances, e.g. verbs can appear at the end of sentence, and case endings. (Case endings are no big deal. Getting them wrong doesn't prevent the person listening from understanding you. Getting them right is the difference between a great speaker and a good one.) My experience in Germany around 1989 was that native Germans were more than happy to switch to English when I was stumped about how to say something in German. Learning the German language should not be a barrier.

For anyone thinking far enough ahead about being a parent, situating in Germany has other benefits. Germany has a better health care system and better public education. They are large costs/worries for any parent.

<comment><USER30> By the numbers, Germany's public education system is basically identical to that of the US (scoring 525 and 524, respectively).

[http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth- abou...](http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa- scores-usa.html)

What makes you believe it's education system is better? Or it's health care system, for that matter?

<comment><USER31> Your source fiddled with the PISA numbers for the USA to exclude all students of non-European descent. I'm not sure what s/he was trying to prove.

This post breaks results down by income segment and suggests that if you exclude poverty, the USA does indeed do great. Otherwise the USA as a whole is no better than average, maybe a little below average.

<http://www.schoolfunding.info/news/policy/2011-01PISA.php3>

I have to say this agrees with my anecdotal experience of the USA. If you went to high school in Palo Alto, you might be having enriching experiences that even students in rich European countries can only dream about. Or you could be like the students some friends of mine tutored in North Carolina, who were not aware of what the Duke University buildings in their city were _for_.

I'm not actually knocking the USA. It faces social challenges that no other country faces, and often gets a bad rap from critics who've never even visited and think it's populated by sociopathic Randroids. But it is a country of enormous contrasts.

<comment><USER30> _Your source fiddled with the PISA numbers for the USA to exclude all students of non-European descent. I'm not sure what s/he was trying to prove._

It's trying to prove that US schools are just as good at educating European Americans as German schools are at educating Europeans. (Sanandaji also excluded immigrants from the German numbers.)

I.e., any gaps in output between US and German schools are caused by gaps in the input, not the school system itself.

<comment><USER31> How are native Americans and African-Americans immigrants?

I said I wasn't sure what the author was trying to prove, but I do have a rather good guess.

<comment><USER30> _(Sanandaji also excluded immigrants from the_ German _numbers.)_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It all sounds interesting and I've been meaning to drop my corporate job for some time now. So is there a Berlin startup news site (preferably in English) so I could get a feel what kind of startups are there?

EDIT: <http://siliconallee.com/> seems to be the thing I was looing for, anything else?

<comment><USER13> You need to drop your corporate thinking first. I suggest you get into some projects to figure out if you are able to work in and with a startup. Note that I am saying that with a background of 15 years in corporate. ;)

Most of the startups are actually very busy doing stuff (as in they don't are yet at the point understanding what proper Communcation means _sigh_ ), but <http://hascore.com/> has a good list of links.

I will be posting an overview posting asap with additional links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Main reasons for Berlin are its young and creative culture, affordable prices (rents, food etc) and overall great quality of live. The city itself is not the prettiest though, but it has its charme :)

Ive been there a few times at pitch/startups events and always liked the locations and overall vibe.

<comment><USER34> The modern architecture in Berlin is really astounding. The city also has a lot of parks and green areas, which make it a pleasant place to live in. Not to mention perfect public transportation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In the UK there is no consent among the investors where the action should go. I was quite surprised to learn than basically every credible accelerator has it's own view of where my start-up should be based.

Oxygen - <USER3>

Ignite100 - New Castle

Seedcamp - <USER4>

I get their desire to improve local culture but hey this is just ridiculous to ask me to settle somewhere because you gave me some money. Also, start-ups thrive in a tech-savvy areas only.

This all adds to the problem and Berlin has all the odds to become the answer.

<comment><USER35> Almost all accelerators do this. YC strongly encourages you to live in the Valley.

<comment><USER27> There is a difference when YC wants you to live in SV for YOUR success and other accelerators wanting you to live somewhere for THEIR benefit, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow, timing is everything. I had booked my ticket 2 days ago for Berlin. I am finishing up my time at StartupChile and heading to Berlin after being convinced by many at SUP, that Berlin has many things happening. I needed a high quality affordable city, that was startup friendly and supported my photography addiction. Berlin hopefully will allow me the time to focus and finish my two iOS games.

<comment><USER37> I'm also finishing StartupChile and 24pfilms is flat-sharing with us in Buenos Aires right now. We're returning to London for a while but Berlin is still on our list (nowhere else in Europe is on our list).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would love to buy one of the 10,000 sq metre mills 5 mins taxi from Manchester's central Picadilly train station and turn it into startup accomodation. We're only 2 hours from London's Euston!! (So less than 3 hours from Shorditch)

Berlin however does seem to have the greatest multicultural vibe going for it for startups. It's pretty impressive, and I hope to sample it later in the year :)

</comment><comment><USER39> How is life for non white people? I'm from latin-america.

<comment><USER40> It's really hard at least in Berlin.

<comment><USER39> why it's hard?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Any city has its pros and cons. I am currently an intern in a tech start-up in Paris, the city has many co-working spaces / incubators. The start-up scene is bigger every day, and yes you won't speak french 70% of the day.

Anyway just saying the document seems to be a nice post card from Berlin but the same things are happening everywhere.

Last year it was Paris (Wired.com): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt2bHumqDFs>

</comment><comment><USER42> I enjoyed the time I spent in Berlin last year and I've considered going back there but this seems imprudent with the Euro on the verge of implosion.

<comment><USER43> That's funny. ;)

Some Euro countries (Greece) might be on the verge of implosion, but there's no way the general currency could suffer any significant damage and Germany is the very reason for that.

The German economy is among the most powerful in the world and quite frankly you're more likely to experience an economic collapse in the US than in Germany. (Albeit that's pretty unlikely too, obviously. At least for now.)

<comment><USER44> The real risk is that a contagion effect could bring about the split up of the Eurozone, and in that case a new Deutsche Mark would make German export much less competitive (and Berlin much less cheap). It's not likely, but it's still a big risk.

<comment><USER43> There's no chance of the Euro zone falling apart. The worst thing that could happen is Greece exiting the Euro zone.

<comment><USER6> Seriously, Greece is a small and fairly unimportant part of the European economy.

The Euro collapsing is an apocalyptic scenario that requires quite a lot of things to go wrong. Much more than just Greece.

<comment><USER44> I agree that it would be an apocalyptic scenario and would require a lot of things to go wrong. But if every eurozone member only thinks about its immediate interests instead of working together and acting in a decisive manner, everything could really go wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Here's a shameless plug: Listen to the Radio Spaetkauf podcast if you want insights into life in Berlin from an international perspective. <http://www.radiospaetkauf.com>

</comment><comment><USER46> Don't mean to threadjack, but I'd love to team up in Berlin with a biz cofounder. If you're looking for an early employee or technical cofounder, please email me: yctechmgr at gmail.com - tell me something about your startup.

<comment><USER13> We forward the "looking for co founder" from the Berlin startup group to the Jobs group:

'Berlin Startup Jobs' <https://www.facebook.com/groups/395011077224173/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Does anyone know how the start-up scene in Berlin compares to that in Paris? They seem to be two of the biggest contenders for the SV of Europe.

I think Spain tried something similar with Barcelona that ended up fizzing out.

</comment><comment><USER13> One of the things we still need to work on in Berlinis connecting people better. ;)

So some notes and links.

* Introductory notes

* Entry points / sites

* Finding out about events

* Getting a job

* Got links? Please provide

 __________________ INTRODUCTORY NOTES __________________

Per se there are two different circles of startup folk in Germany. The german / Germany oriented ones, what I usually call "the victims of the language island" (everything in Germany is dubbed - movies, tv, books).

The second, more interesting level is the international mindset, the people who are mentally oriented toward silicon valley. Both group usually do not mingle and the following applies for that second group and explain part of the reason why Berlin is special.

This group has accepted english as their lingua franca and people come from all over the world, enjoying not only the benefits listed in the other comments, but the feeling of "being able to make it here". The absence of any enterprise like structure due to the past with the wall enables in many ways what Berlin is today.

There is of course an echo chamber effect for this group and once you connect, you run into the usual startups very quickly. ;)

 __________________ ENTRY POINTS __________________

Your Nr 1. starting point for meeting people ;) English speaking Berlin startup group on Facebook with ~2400 members.

<https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/>

Follow that if you are interested in meeting people and or asking questions. Hint: Do not try to post stuff which is does not have the "Berlin and startup" relevant connection and do not try to sneak in a "but in theory this is about startups ...", I will delete the post and ban you permanently.

Looking for a job / employee / co founder does belong into the sister group (<https://www.facebook.com/groups/395011077224173/>)

__

General sites to read:

<http://venturevillage.eu/>

<http://siliconallee.com/>

<http://www.techberlin.com/>

__

We also have a strong women in tech movement in Berlin:

<http://berlingeekettes.com/> is both interview site and meetup; I run <http://girlgeekdinner.de/> which will happen more frequently once I am relocated. ;)

__

Find a Co-Working spaces:

<https://www.deskwanted.com/berlin.html>

[http://www.berlin-partner.de/?id=1243&L=1](http://www.berlin- partner.de/?id=1243&L=1) is the official place from Berlin

to help people coming to Berlin, they are very helpful too with business needs

with a special attention to startups.

 __________________ EVENTS __________________

Event listings as in "is there something happening ..."

<http://berlinwebweek.de/>

Get the weekly Newsletter with new events:

<http://startupdigest.com/berlin/>

Berlin tech user groups links:

<http://co-up.de/2011/10/14/usergroup-list.html>

Monthly radio show about Berlin Startups

<http://fridayat6.de/>

Not very active but still: Berlin StartUp Employees

<https://www.facebook.com/groups/238420286238628/>

Meetup.com has tons of groups and meetups beyond startup land

<http://www.meetup.com> and then go Berlin

 __________________ GETTING A JOB __________________

If you are looking for a job in Berlin, are a Berlin based startup looking for employees or for a co founder, this facebook group can be helful for you

<https://www.facebook.com/groups/395011077224173/>

__

Job boards with a special focus on Berlin startups:

<http://berlinstartupjobs.com/>

<http://venturevillage.eu/jobs/>

<http://siliconallee.com/madeinberlin> (this is a list of some startups made in berlin + links to job pages if available.)

<http://meetfounder.com/> (if you are looking for a co-founder)

__

Finding companies to work for

<http://hascore.com/> limits itself to "Hascore is a job board focused on Product Development for the Berlin Startup Scene that provides relevant context for making better decisions" BUT because the way they list their jobs you can surf through it and find the links to lots of companies.

__

Listings mostly in German

<http://jobslike.me/>

<http://www.gruenderszene.de/jobboerse/>

[https://www.xing.com/net/pridec7dbx/startup- berlin/jobangebo...](https://www.xing.com/net/pridec7dbx/startup- berlin/jobangebote-580691/)

 __________________ Any additions? __________________

Happy to take that into the list

Also I am always looking for people to add to my

"English tweeting people from Berlin with startup affinity"

<https://twitter.com/#!/nicolesimon/berlin-internationals>

hth

Nicole

</comment><comment><USER48> Berlin is amazing; lived there for a year.

Plus records produces in Berlin include: U2 (Achtung Baby), David Bowie (Low,Heroes, and Lodger) , and Depeche Mode (Construction Time Again).

</comment><comment><USER49> feel free to drop me a mail if you want to know anything about working at soundcloud. i'm an engineer. firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER50> This seems interesting, but I have one question: what about taxes?

Any tax breaks for tech startups? what about employee/healthcare costs?

<comment><USER51> Almost no tax breaks for startups, and healthcare and employee taxes are regulated very closely to normal German laws. Shockingly, recently the govt seems to have decided that angel investors and even founders will not be eligible for certain tax breaks, and instead will be taxed on income tax level for capital gains.

<comment><USER50> And what level of taxation are we talking about?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Top 5 reasons why you should move to Berlin, now:

1\. Lowest livings costs with highest quality of living. Stay in gorgeous, perfectly renovated apartments in pre-WWII residential buildings with high ceilings, right in the middle of the center and pay a fraction of costs of any other capital (even cheaper than any Eastern European capital). No need for a car—Berlin has one of the densest subway nets and wide streets make biking fun. In addition, Germany has an amazing social health care system including health, unemployment and pension (when working as an employee).

2\. A vibrant and fast growing ecosystem of smart people. A vast number of new software talents, founders, software companies and VCs are moving to Berlin, every day (Twitter, Google, Soundcloud, Early Bird and many more).

3\. People here are open-minded, outgoing, mix well and international—no need to learn German, everyone speaks English! Making new friends is a matter of days. Visit tons of networking and startup events, every week.

4\. Easy work permissions—Europeans do not need any and can work from day one and the rest applies for the hassle-free Blue Card.

5\. Berlin's night life is unmatched, huge and changing every day (plus ridiculously cheap). Berlin has got some of the most dazzling, naughty, and original clubs on the face of the Earth.

Now, the shameless plug: Berlin is calling and getting the new tech hub of Europe. If you are passionate about building great software, we'd love to talk with you. If you don't live in Berlin yet, we could help to fix that.

=> <http://urge.io/jobs>

<comment><USER53> genuine question: if it's so great and the capital of a rich country, why is it so cheap? (e.g. what you mentioned about apartments in the city center.)

<comment><USER54> Anyone spent a winter in Berlin? It's incredibly cold. Traveling around the city on bicycle, train etc is great during the pleasant summer months but it's literally painful during the winter.

<comment><USER55> Judging by WeatherSpark's history and averages for Berlin, the winter temps basically hover around freezing at worst, while summers are very mild. That's a strictly better climate than New York, which has comparable winters, but hot, humid summers.

I live in a city that gets much colder than that in the winters, but still has plenty of bicyclists year round. It's all a matter of perspective.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Does China Download US-Only iOS Apps - <AUTHOR> I have put a few apps in the app store that target specifically the US market but have significant daily downloads from china but no usage. These apps require US phone number verification.
One guess I would have is that there is some competition research firms operating out of there. This doesn't make a ton of sense given we would likely see similar downloads in the US which we don't.
Any ideas/experience? <comment><USER2> When you say "downloads from China", do you mean the user location is in China?

Maybe you can copy the download link here and I'll help test from China.</comment>


Developer Joe Hewitt Tears Into Android's Definition Of "Open" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/developer-joe-hewitt-tears-into-androids-definition-of-open/ <comment><USER2> The Open Source Definition, written by the folks who invented the term "open source" a few months previously, doesn't say anything about the stuff Joe criticizes in Android. He's simply mistaken about the meaning of the term.

Also, the Android development policy that Joe criticizes is essentially identical to the way Emacs was developed up until the last decade. Emacs was the example "cathedral" in the original version of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," for those who don't remember. It's well-established at this point, 13 years later, that bazaar-style development works better for a wide range of projects, but that doesn't mean that cathedral-style development doesn't qualify as open-source. It's just inefficient and frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER3> In this case, Joe is wrong.

"Open-source" simply means that anyone is allowed to read the code. We may associate certain release schedules and commit policies with typical open- source projects, but those schedules and policies are not mandatory. Or even common. Browse GitHub or SourceForge to see the typical choices - "when I can be bothered" and "only me" respectively.

I understand that Joe is in a position where he will need to deal with changes in the OS when it is released, but he still comes across as a self-entitled whiner.

<comment><USER4> I disagree. I agree that Android fulfills the license requirements of open source. But it delivers few of the practical benefits that were meant to stem from the term (control of your devices/computer, the ability to modify the software you use). So in spirit it is nothing like what we would traditionally call "open source" and it is certainly nothing to brag about vis-a-vis iOS.

I see no sense of entitlement in his complaints at all. They seem reasonable based on the difference between what I might expect from an open source project and what Google actually delivers. This is rare considering I tend not to like open source software or even the basic principle of it.

<comment><USER3> We can fork and alter the code, and deploy it to our devices. I'll grant that it is not easy on some devices, but you can't argue against the carriers' right to change the code without compromising your own.

<comment><USER5> That's just shifting the goal-posts, though.

Google touts the Android platform's _openness_ as a benefit for developers and end-users.

And yet:

As a developer, I have, if anything, _less_ visibility into upcoming changes to the Android SDK than I do into upcoming changes in iOS 4.2.

As an end-user, Android's openness hasn't stopped carriers from foisting unremovable crapware on me, or given me any more control over my Droid X than I have over my iPhone 4.

But whenever anyone dares to point out this disconnect between Google's marketing rhetoric and reality _vis a vis_ openness, suddenly "open" means nothing more than "fulfills the letter of the contractual agreements of the GPL version 2 and provides no promises of anything beyond that". It's farcical.

<comment><USER6> >As a developer

As a developer, your customers can run the app even if the app store says no.

>As a customer

As a customer, you can choose from a range of android powered devices including those not approved by Google. The nook would likely not exist were it not for Android.

<comment><USER5> As a developer, if my app doesn't make it into the main app store, I'd be throwing good money after bad by trying to run about trying to set up my own payment infrastructure and trying to convince people to buy and side-load my app (which, among other things, Android's openness would keep AT&T Android users from doing anyways). From a _pragmatic_ standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as a developer.

As a customer, the freedom to "choose from a range of Android powered devices including those not approved by Google" simply means the burden of having to perform a complicated cost-benefits analysis, deciding which specific combination of carrier crap-ware and carrier locked out features, or unsubsidized hardware from little-known Chinese manufacturers is least un- appealing to me. I have to spend an enormous amount of time researching to ensure that the official app store is supported on such-and-such phone, to find out whether tethering works freely or not or whether I can side-load or not on such-and-such carrier. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as an average consumer.

Openness is only a virtue if it has practical benefit. If Google is arguing for openness from a purely dogmatic, non-practical standpoint, then they should be honest about that instead of pretending that Android's openness is some kind of unicorns-and-candyfloss fun ride for app developers and end- users.

<comment><USER6> >As a developer, if my app doesn't make it into the main app store, I'd be throwing good money after bad by trying to run about trying to set up my own payment infrastructure and trying to convince people to buy and side-load my app (which, among other things, Android's openness would keep AT&T Android users from doing anyways). From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as a developer.

Or support it with ads?

>As a customer, the freedom to "choose from a range of Android powered devices including those not approved by Google" simply means the burden of having to perform a complicated cost-benefits analysis, deciding which specific combination of carrier crap-ware and carrier locked out features, or unsubsidized hardware from little-known Chinese manufacturers is least un- appealing to me. I have to spend an enormous amount of time researching to ensure that the official app store is supported on such-and-such phone, to find out whether tethering works freely or not or whether I can side-load or not on such-and-such carrier. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as an average consumer.

This seems no different to me than any other free market. I buy the argument that Google should simplify your purchasing decision by being more selective with the trademark, but that's an entirely different argument than the one we are having.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It sounds like the complaints against Android are [1]

 _"Steering" discussions do not take place on a public mailing list (or community input is generally disregarded)._

Depending on the involvement of the community (in actually doing instead of bikeshedding) compared to the company, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I like open development, but if the community really has enough motivation, they are welcome to fork the project. Git makes it as easy as possible to migrate patches [2].

 _Some new development does not go into the public repo right away, instead residing in a private repo until some merge window prior to a major release._

Keeping it in a separate repo is probably a good idea if the changes are likely to cause occasional breakage. Again, visible branches (and/or RFC patchsets on mailing lists, a la LKML), but they do have a rapid release cycle and the full history is available after it is merged.

 _They don't hand out commit access to the community._

Is there just no email address to git send-email your patch sets or to send pull requests? Or do they ignore patches that show up? That's just bad administration and it's easy enough to create a community fork. The specific complaint about outright commit privileges is silly, Linus does not hand out commit access to anyone (including Ingo, Alan Cox, Andrew Morton), instead he pulls from them when they are ready.

I'm not trying to defend Google, they certainly have a history of being a poor to mediocre open source citizen. But "no different than iOS" is a gross exaggeration. Note that the carriers and hardware vendors may be far more to blame for the privacy, it's likely that they require limited-time NDAs so that branches cannot be made public until a release.

[1] I don't have specific experience working with the Android git repository or trying to send patches upstream, so I don't know if the complaints are entirely factual.

[2] It's not so rare for Open Source (adhering to the strict definition, but not open development, obviously) projects to only publish release tarballs. In contrast, Android publishes their repository with daily activity: <http://android.git.kernel.org/?o=age>

</comment><comment><USER8> Before Android the mobile world was a much sadder place. There was the undisputed king, the iPhone, controlled by an increasingly ego-maniacal tyrant. Then there were all the manufacturers and carriers flailing around uncoordinated unable to respond. Google came along and offered the world a free open platform that everyone could rally around to put up a fight against the encroaching monopoly. Google makes no money off of Android but they've put massive resources into it. Their only benefit, the freedom from Jobs' capriciousness, is also a benefit to everyone else.

I don't understand the Google hate, they gave the world a free OS, what is there to hate about that? Even the most ardent Apple fan should be thankful for the competition. Yes, it's true that the carriers suck, but they would suck a lot more if they were only pushing LG feature phones or whatever, instead they get to sell a powerful worthy system to the masses.

<comment><USER9> _Google makes no money off of Android but they've put massive resources into it._

You honestly believe this? Then the must not be making tons of money off of search either. Oh but they are, to the tune of millions. And Android? $1Billion in revenue.

No one hates Google, but a kernel doesn't make an OS. Which is why Linux is known as GNU/Linux. By that logic OSX is also open source, you can even download and compile their kernel from here <http://www.opensource.apple.com/>

People are hating because they were promised open, but what they got comes with a lot of strings attached. What good is downloading the kernel and running make if you have nowhere to install it?

<comment><USER10> You've got more than a Kernel, which was already open, as Android is based on the Linux kernel.

It's interesting that it isn't a common unix or GNU. The whole software stack up from the kernel is different to anything you see elsewhere (I understand that MeeGo, another Linux-based phone OS takes a more standard approach, thus it be more comfortable to hack on, once it stops being vaporware).

But AOSP does host code for the whole middleware and a couple of applications. What is missing in AOSP are some userspace drivers, the code that runs on the radio hardware ("baseband" in iPhone speak), and the Google services and brand.

To continue your OS X analogy, it'd be like getting code for the whole OS, except for the stuff in /Applications.

The problem with Android is that this software is useless if you don't have hardware to run it. And unlike a computer, where I can go to the store, buy a PC, download a Linux distro and run it on that hardware, most phones are tivoized and won't let you run software not signed by the manufacture. So you need to buy a special dev phone (N1 included), pull the binary drivers from the installed firmware, build AOSP from source, and flash it to the phone. And then you'd be missing the Google-candy. You can also get OpenMoko, which I think have all its drivers open.

But I guess most people don't want to compile software for their own phone, just like only a few people build their OS from source. Most even never bother installing an OS, just using what came pre-installed. The hate against Android phones is from users wanting timely software upgrades, and no carrier-mandated crap. That, I'm happy to say, is mostly an American problem. Carriers sell phones the world round, but outside the US, caring customers (which are still a minority -- HN readers to the contrary, not everybody cares about what software her phone has), buy handsets from a 3rd party, and those have less limiting crap installed, as they need to satisfy the costumer, not the carrier.

<comment><USER11> Re "tivoized" hardware, I'm starting to seriously wonder if the drawbacks from the invention of asymmetric crypto have outweighed the benefits...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Open source" != "open project." This issue comes up every so often on the Lua list, and I think Roberto Ierusalimschy's explanation describes the situation with Android pretty well.

<http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-06/msg00407.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> I think there's a separation between openness (freedom) vs openness (transparency).

Android is open as in freedom, you can install it anywhere you want, you can modify the source code, you can build stuff on top of it, you can root it, etc.

But it is not open in transparency as Joe points out. They are not open about what they are working on. His arguments against Android stem from that. The not allowing read/write access and the latest and greatest all relate to the fact that Google doesn't want to be transparent with the future of Android.

Either way, iOS is neither.

<comment><USER14> Actually, the iPhone dev toolkits and prerelease announcements are pretty good at providing feature information for iOS developers. No they're not available years in advance, but it's still more than Google. I think iOS is probably _more transparent_ in this sense.

Still, I think neither are completely open and a misappropriation of terms has just lead to 'open' being more marketing bullshit.

<comment><USER10> But they only provide binaries.

It's always easier to develop for a system you have the code for, even if you can't modify it.

With iOS, you get more time to fix your code, but sometimes you have to speculate why the system works they way it does; with Android, the SDK drops later, giving you less time to code, but it's easier since you can find out why the system behave the way it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Android source code is licensed under the GPL and Apache licenses and therefore is open for developers.

Most Android hardware is carrier locked, has proprietary firmware, or has proprietary services loaded on top and therefore is closed for users.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are commits from a couple of hours ago:

<http://android.git.kernel.org/?o=age>

What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER17> Mobile developer speaking here. As far as I can tell, most of the grousing about Google not being "open source" revolves around two points - one, they don't accept outside contributions, and two, you can't just install on whatever hardware you'd like / carriers do crappy things.

As far as point two goes - blame the carriers, not Google. It's not even necessarily clear that the carriers are in the wrong to do things like this - part of open source is that you are _free to modify as you see fit_. Sprint exercising this very right is why they have their own interface now. If all of the carriers choose to pull this shady crap, put the blame where it belongs.

As for point one - who ever said they have to? First off I'm not sure I'd want patches from Joe Schmoe running on my cell phone, and not even Google has all of the resources they need to review every submission they'd get. Secondly, plenty of open source projects are notoriously stingy about who they hand out commit privileges to - and the quality of the software in these cases more than justifies this policy.

If you're free to read, download, modify, and re-distribute the source code as you see fit, it's open source. If a third party intervenes to make this pragmatically difficult, then that's a different issue. Google has certainly been more open than any number of other software companies - only Apple really comes close, as far as I can tell, and they still hold back huge chunks of their code. Google deserves the press they get for being open source, because at the end of the day, they are.

<comment><USER18> Google wouldn't just take patches from any Joe Schmoe, and it certainly wouldn't be a huge overhead to deal with them. It would be similar to how a project like Rails takes community patches: people wanting to contribute strike up conversation in a bug tracking program or IRC with some core developers. They say "hey I wrote this cool patch that fixes this ticket". The core team member takes 20 minutes to check out the patch, and he merges it in to his branch and then commits it to the core repo. After this community member does this a few times, the core member begins to trust and understand their coding style, and gives them commit access.

Doesn't take a ton of resources, and it encourages an open and vibrant community. The benefits of doing this "up front work" in vetting a new committer is, well, you get a new committer knocking off tickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Android is open source. Android is not developed by an 'open community', if you will. It's a legitimate complaint, I think, but I wouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If someone wants to invest a lot of _work_ and _time_ , they can very much fork Android if they want, and develop it however they see fit.

Also, something else that isn't brought up a lot: Android has a fairly open architecture. Intents let you plug in various things in various places so that you can choose which app handles what.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Point I am trying to make is, Rubin bickering with Jobs is a farce, because both refuse to share the one thing that matters: control."

I would say the one thing that matters is a consistent and polished experience, and that the iPhone will always have an advantage over Android in that simply because Apple doesn't play this pretend "open" game.

<comment><USER21> "I would say the one thing that matters is a consistent and polished experience, ..."

Hey, as long as the trains run on time, we're all good.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the Godwin invocation.

<comment><USER23> I think the trains reference involves Mussolini, and not Hitler, so Godwin remains uninvoked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So fork it?

<comment><USER24> What's the point of forking something you can't install without voiding your warranty? Especially knowing that you can't redistribute your fork because average users won't hack their phones to install it, and even if they did your fork would lack essential applications like an email client or maps?

Android is no more open than Tivo, and in fact is the perfect example of what the GPL3 advocates were warning us about.

<comment><USER25> you're confusing hardware with software, i can download, modify, sell, distribute, edit, sell the edits, and legally execute the code for any release of android, and couldn't even begin to do any of that for any apple OS. Chromium and android are free, safari was built off of a GPL code base, but OSX and iOS are locked down

<comment><USER26> You don't know much about OS X, do you?

<comment><USER26> <http://opensource.apple.com/> Yes, you won't get _everything_ from there. But where can I get a source for Google Voice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And the Apple Fud campaign begins to take hold...

</comment><comment><USER28> We can debate whether it's open or not all day long... If one of the most respected engineers around isn't happy with Androidm Google's doing something wrong.

<comment> brown9-2 He's not happy about Apple's app store either. Are they doing something wrong too?

<comment><USER29> I would say yes, although his issues against the app store have been somewhat remediated by Apple's latest easing up on developer restrictions.

I don't see this as an either/or scenario. As a developer, I can be dissatisfied with both Apple and Google. As someone who is pragmatic and not espousing a philosophy what matters is which I'm dissatisfied with more. There's no right or wrong answer to that question, each developer has to decide that for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Joe should stick to developing..

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3077289/facebook- android-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3077289/facebook-android- intent)</comment>


Push notification + Terminal = Win - <AUTHOR> http://philyoussef.blogspot.com/2012/12/push-notification-terminal-win.html

<comment><USER2> This is indeed a win. I'm thinking of the possibility of using this to receive notifications whenever Jekins builds and runs tests after commits to our git repos.</comment>


Carsabi Opens Access To Car Data (Apparently Green Cars Are Cheaper?) - <AUTHOR> http://carsabi.com/car-data-explorer/

<comment><USER2> Is it possible to get a view that shows average price AND the number of samples (maybe if you mouse over a column) at the same time? Or maybe some info about stuff like variance, stdev, median, etc?

Trying to figure out why green cars are cheaper:

It looks like green cars are mostly from 97 to 2003 in a roughly normal curve, while most other colors are exponential (so mostly from the last couple years instead, and dropping off dramatically once you reach 2005 and older). Not counting purple, which has 8 samples and is therefore mostly useless, hah.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya, I'll add that to our list of feature requests. Would definitely like to put some more features in, to help people with blog posts or other research in the car space.

Ah yes, I would seem that green cars are going out of fashion, dunno who would want a purple car =P

<comment><USER3> If you're buying a Benz, it's a good way to save a few bucks...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Green cars aren't cheaper, but people that choose the color green also choose cheaper cars on average when compared to people that buy any other color.

<comment><USER5> Since the price of a use car is to a large extent determined by what the market will bear, doesn't that amount to the same thing?

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily. If you say "I will only buy a car that's green," and money is no object, you are likely to spend less money than if you buy a car of any other color. However, if you want a 2009 Honda Civic, a green one may not necessarily be cheaper than a blue or black one.

My theory is that there aren't many green luxury cars out there (think black!), but plenty of cheap commuter cars that are green. Another theory: younger people want green and younger people happen to spend a lot less on cars on average.

I went looking through the categories and the only time green is not the cheapest is when it's a station wagon. In that case, red is cheaper than green, but not by much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do you get the car data? I see you have data from cars.com do you have custom code that scrapes the data or do you use some known tools?

Thanks

<comment><USER7> They used to get it from Craigslist. The listings were directly linked to Craigslist listings. I see that they don't do click-outs any more so I'm curious as to where they are getting them from too. By the way, I had done the same thing about 2 years ago but had to stop after realizing that scraping Craiglist was against their terms of use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The uniformity of buying recommendations makes this seemingly useless. I looked up 4 very different make and model combinations and every recommendation was "Buy a 2009-2011 for the best value"

But it's neat that greens are cheap.

<comment><USER9> oh yeah, this has nothing to do with what you should buy - we just built the tool after a few beers this weekend because it seemed like it would be cool to easily visualize every car for sale in SF... hope its enjoyable!

also - we are building a comprehensive recommendation engine for the top 50-100 models by collecting everything from EPA & NHTSA safety data to style awards and max lifetime mileage. this is probably a month out and has required getting pretty creative about crawling a number of heterogeneous data sources

<comment><USER10> Awesome, I'm looking at getting a car and a resource like this would help a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting. Apparently for Hyundai cars green is the most expensive. :p

<comment><USER3> For Volvo, red is slightly less expensive than green. Benz and Honda cheapest in purple. A couple others have black, silver, grey and white. Not sure why this is so interesting.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most valuable remote-friendly software company? - <AUTHOR> There are clearly many developers enthusiastic about remote work, and articles about how this company I've never heard of or that other company I've also never heard of are so successful being remote-first.  It seems like the big four/five are remote tolerant but far from enthusiastic about it.  Are any of the unicorns secretly or openly remote-heavy?  Is Basecamp the biggest all-remote software company?<p>(To be clear I am not trying to pass judgment; just curious if it correlates more with lifestyle work than big exit work.) <comment><USER2> Forbes says there are quite a in the list, including balsamiq and many others above basecamp, though BC is more famous than those. Read this:- [https://www.forbes.com/sites/unicefusa/2017/03/29/yemens- war...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/unicefusa/2017/03/29/yemens-war- leaves-10-million-young-lives-falling-through-the-cracks/#2f65ec97736a)

I've personally seen most of these jobs ain't truly remote either, since they restrict core jobs to local regions mostly so that they can call employees at times.

The good thing is, it is growing; the not-so-good thing is it is still being looked down upon and not considered as the best option when organization grows or achieves X amount of revenue. You know what I mean.

I work as remote developer, or remote a dev agency for my customers (mostly in the US) and they also strive for having their own On-site team once they raise big funds, no matter how good we work from our location; so some hard realities are also there. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response - not sure if that is the link you meant to include, though?

<comment><USER2> Of course not, seeing copy and paste; let me search and share the right one.</comment></comment></comment>


Nick Szabo: "The Singularity" is an incoherent and religious idea - <AUTHOR> http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/01/singularity.html <comment><USER2> Whilst I agree with he author that there are religious aspects to the whole Singularity with a capital S movement, it seems to me his arguments are equally unsound.

First of all, this is not an attack on the singularity idea, but on the "strong AI" idea.

With respect to strong AI, Nick is very close to the problem, and that's the issue. Like any good engineer/scientist, he sees problems everywhere. Yes, there are many problems before we get to strong AI. That's not news. There were many problems to resolve before people could pay a small sum of money and let a giant metal tube take them through the air to a destination halfway round the world without killing them - but those problems got resolved, one by one. Many problems do not amount to an impossibility, only a damn hard problem (which we knew strong AI was anyway).

As for his other assertion, that the concept of the singularity is a fantasy, Nick's main argument is that the singularity will only last "for a time", and that it will turn into a classic S-curve. He waves Feynman's name around as supporting evidence, but does not address the fact that intelligence (and artificial intelligence in particular) is not subject to the Malthusian laws which have caused other phenomena to follow S-curves. Yes, we only have access to so many particles, but the whole point of exponential AI is figuring out better ways to use the same number of particles. There may be a theoretical limit to how efficiently we can use those particles, but even so there are a lot of particles, and if we can manufacture even just human-equivalent computing matter in factories, that's already enough to achieve a singularity.

So, in summary:

\- Yes, there is a problem with Singularity stuff being quasi-religious (I've been to a Singularity event and agree - though the proportion of kooks was relatively low, there were certainly a few, some of them on the podium speaking)

\- No, this article is not a convincing argument against either strong AI or the potential of a singularity-like event to occur.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Belief that strong AI is _never_ possible is also religious. If the human mind is simply a chemical computer (and, science currently says it is), it can (eventually) be simulated with sufficiently powerful hardware.

<comment><USER4> I haven't yet heard any critic of Singularity religion claim that strong AI is never possible.

What we are skeptical of is that we need just a little bit of development and strong AI will take-off just like that without any regard to physical world constraints.

<comment><USER3> Well, one critic I usually hear about singlularity subjects is that "you can't upload your mind into a computer because the emotional/soul/bla aspects of a human being could never be emulated"... which is obviously religious. Yes, it's very very hard but certainly no reason to call it impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe the Fermi Paradox[1] is very compelling evidence that the evolution of computation is logistic[2] and further that saturation comes before practical interstellar travel. Otherwise I feel it's likely we would have already seen evidence of Clarke's Overmind[3].

That intelligence becomes increasingly specialized rather than general is a reasonable explanation for why such saturation may happen (in a hand wavy way).

I also think that much of the discussion about the Singularity, downloading brains, etc, makes many anthropomorphic assumptions that are entirely unjustified. I suspect it's more likely that we'll have better luck building artificial chemical brains than we ever will simulating some captured representation of the state of a human brain on a digital computer.

On the upside, if computation's growth is logistic then certainly we're in the exponentiation portion right now, which means humanity still is likely to see generations of at least near linear improvement. We may be essentially trapped in this solar system, but we'll likely have quite astounding information processing capabilities.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function>

2: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox>

3: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhoods_End> (a good book if you forgive it a few mystical characterizations of psychic powers)

<comment><USER6> How is the Fermi Paradox evidence for evolution of computation being logistic? Does the logistic function appear somewhere in the Fermi Paradox?

I have a feeling you are not using very strict logic here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> His one good point is that "The Singularity" is a bad name for a concept that doesn't refer to a single event, which makes it easy to dismiss with the "rapture of the nerds" strawman. Aside from that, it's mostly an argument from personal incredulity, which is even less valid here than usual. I wouldn't have believed you a year ago if you told me that a search and advertising company had self-driving cars roaming around Mountain View, but here we are.

 _Despite all the sensory inputs we can attach to computers these days, and vast stores of human knowledge like Wikipedia that one can feed to them, almost all such data is to a computer nearly meaningless._

IBM's Watson might disagree ([http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/13/technology/ibm_jeopardy_wats...](http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/13/technology/ibm_jeopardy_watson/index.htm)). But of course responding to natural language questions (er, answers) will be moved to the "not real AI" category once it's commonplace.

<comment><USER8> it's not real AI. Read "Fluid concepts and creative analogies". If you ask a human, abc is to 123 as abd is to... The human would probably say 124.

Ask watson the same and it would answer "jackson five".

<comment><USER9> Which would be a very clever answer and even hint at some sense of humor.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=abc+is+to+123+as+abd+is+to)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first problem with "The Singularity" is that nobody can actually agree on a definition. For instance:

1\. The first comment on this article: _The singularity refers to the time in human history when computers first pass the Turing test._

2\. Wikipedia: _A technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future after the singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict_ \-- hey, y'know what I call the point beyond which the future is hard to predict? I call it "the present".

... and I'm too lazy to keep looking up other definitions, but they're definitely out there.

The second problem with the idea is that some folks seem to have this flawed logical chain in mind:

1\. Assume that a human brain can make a computer smarter than itself.

2\. In that case, the computer smarter than the human can make a computer smarter than itself, which can in turn make a still smarter computer, and so on, leading to vastly smarter computers very quickly.

This ignores the fact that if we ever _do_ make a computer smarter than a human it will either be via (a) reverse-engineering of the human brain or (b) some kind of evolutionary algorithm. The slightly-smarter computer is then no more capable of building an even-smarter computer than we are, since it _also_ has to fall back on one of these two dull mechanical processes.

<comment><USER2> The human brain doesn't need to build a smarter brain. It just needs to build something of equivalent smartness (which should be theoretically possible, there's no reason to believe the human brain is the upper bound for all generalised reasoning ability) on a substrate like silicon which is subject to Moore's Law (and thus gets inherently faster with time) and which is immortal and duplicable.

Build 1 functioning brain in silicon, and:

\- 18 months later you can build one that's twice as fast using the same principles

\- duplicate this brain and get the power of multiple people thinking together (but with greater bandwidth between them than any human group)

\- run this brain for 100 years and get an older intellectually functioning human than has ever existed before

\- duplicate whatever learning this brain has accumulated over 100 years (which, say, brings to the level of an Einstein) as many times as you have physical resources for (so, clone Einstein)

All those are paths to super-human AI from the production of a human- intelligence brain in a non-biological form.

So, if a human brain can make a computer brain, which is a reasonable assumption, then a human brain can make a brain smarter than itself.

<comment><USER11> _Build 1 functioning brain in silicon, and [...]_

That reminds me of Chesterton's definition of Western science: "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain everything else." :)

Edit: Wish I could remember where I originally got that. Googling it digs up not Chesterton but Terence McKenna.

<comment><USER2> But (part of) the point is, building a human brain in a non-biological substrate is not a miracle. It would be a miracle in the same way that transistors and penicillin are, not in the way that Jesus' resurrection is. I.e., a fantastic, happy, unlikely but possible event that will change the world for the better.

After all, we know that human brains can be built in some way: we have the evidence for that claim inside billions of skulls. The question is then not to push the theoretical boundaries of computational capability beyond some theoretical level - but merely to achieve it again artificially.

We've managed to copy birds, fish, we've sent people to the moon, we've sent probes outside the solar system, we've beaten countless diseases, we've extended our own lifespans by decades, we've created monuments of human culture... why assume that we won't achieve this too?

<comment><USER12> > After all, we know that human brains can be built in some > way: we have the > evidence for that claim inside billions of > skulls

Exactly. Skulls. With connection to living and feeling flesh.

> After all, we know that human brains can be built in some way: we have the > evidence for that > claim inside billions of skulls

We cannot even model the brain of the simplest worm…

<comment><USER9> > Exactly. Skulls. With connection to living and feeling flesh.

And, unless you claim there is something inherently magical and miraculous in that, it can be reproduced or abstracted.

> We cannot even model the brain of the simplest worm…

I don't believe that's true. I am quite sure we have some models of varying accuracy (as in "good enough") for those. Maybe we cannot run the most accurate ones (modeling the chemical processes within individual neurons) in real time, but, by 2012, we'll be able to run them twice as fast as we do now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Article Summary: attack the very premise of achieving general intelligence by attacking _narrow AI_ techniques such as machine learning and their obvious inadequacies, and then acknowledging that they have not in fact, accomplished general intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is, typically, yet another diatribe that generalizes various "the Singularity" concepts and denigrates them in a single fell swoop.

I adhere to many of the arguments put forth by Ray Kurzweil, who many dismiss as a crank. However, unlike any (at least, most) other self-declared prophets Kurzweil has a solid history of predictions going back at least 21 years. While of course not all of the things he has said have come to pass, or they come to pass at slightly different time periods, more than not they have been spot on.

Of course, some nutcases really _do_ subscribe to The Singularity as a faith. These people don't pay attention to the various sub-disciplines of biology, computer science, and materials science that are among the core fields generally related to The Singularity.

Folks like myself who think that something like TS is ahead of us base our reasoning on the rapid advances that humanity is making in the core fields, not on some religious belief. I'm an atheist and don't believe shit without proof.

Its easy to tear down, but much harder to make a valid argument. Nick Szabo's stating that something will never happen because it hasn't happened yet. I suggest he start listening to what's going on in science.

<comment><USER8> "Kurzweil has a solid history of predictions going back at least 21 years"

[http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/01/kurzw...](http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/01/kurzweils-2009-predictions/)

Confirmation bias. You're not looking hard enough at the stuff he says that didn't come true.

Even so, "past performance is no indicator of future success. You could have said the same thing about the goldilocks economy in 2001 but the notion that the economy could continue exponentially forever was pretty dumb. All I have to say about believing in exponential things, is, please, please consider the bacterial growth curve.

[http://faculty.irsc.edu/FACULTY/TFischer/images/bacterial%20...](http://faculty.irsc.edu/FACULTY/TFischer/images/bacterial%20growth%20curve.jpg)

(that's a log graph) See, if you were an intelligent e coli during growth phase, you might notice that everything was exponential and hunky dory, and there was no end in sight.

<comment><USER15> Luckily as humans we can fight the logistic death phase after the singularity 'period'. Fight it with more and more superior AIs; perhaps something like what Adams envisioned.

But we'll most likely lose to ourselves. It's a M.A.D. world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it would be religion to not believe that it is theoretically possible to build a device which emulates the human brain - sort of like the belief that it was impossible to make 'organic' compounds out of compounds from 'inorganic' origin because they lack the vital force.

Whether it will ever be possible to do it on a physically possible Turing machine in real time is perhaps slightly more debatable.

<comment><USER8> when (and if) we will do it is even more debatable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Whether or not we reach "The Singularity" doesn't matter much to me, I just want us to reach a point where there are hundreds of thousands of nanobots aiding our individual immune system along with preventing degradation of our internal organs, is that too much to ask? According to all the research we shouldn't be too far off from that, though probably not in my lifetime. Whether or not we reach an AI singularity doesn't matter to me, so long as we have our nanobots.

<comment><USER3> Whether or not we reach "nanobots" doesn't matter much te me, I just want my flying cars! Is that too much to ask?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hm. It appears Blogspot ate my comments. So I guess I'll just paste it here.

\---

> The "for a time" bit is crucial. There is as Feynman said "plenty of room at > the bottom" but it is by no means infinite given actually demonstrated > physics. That means all growth curves that look exponential or more in the > short run turn over and become S-curves or similar in the long run, unless > we discover physics that we do not now know, as information and data > processing under physics as we know it are limited by the number of > particles we have access to, and that in turn can only increase in the long > run by at most a cubic polynomial (and probably much less than that, since > space is mostly empty).

Yes, but the fundamental limit is so ridiculously high that it might as well be infinite. Look at Seth Lloyd's bounds in <http://arxiv.org/abs/quant- ph/9908043> . He can be off by many orders of magnitude and still Moore's law will have many doublings to go.

(Incidentally, the only quasi-Singulitarian I am aware of who has claimed there will be an actual completed infinity is Frank Tipler, and as I understand it, his model required certain parameters like a closed universe which have since been shown to not be the case.)

> As for "the Singularity" as a point past which we cannot predict, the stock > market is by this definition an ongoing, rolling singularity, as are most > aspects of the weather, and many quantum events, and many other aspects of > our world and society. And futurists are notoriously bad at predicting the > future anyway, so just what is supposed to be novel about an unpredictable > future?

WHAT. We have plenty of models of all of those events. The stock market has many predictable features (long-term appreciation of x% a year and fat-tailed volatility for example), and weather has even more (notice we're debating the long-term effects of global warming in the range of a few degrees like 0-5, and not, I dunno, 0-1,000,000). Our models are much better than the stupidest possible max-entropy guess. We can predict a hell of a lot.

The point of Vinge's singularity is that we can't predict past the spike. Will there be humans afterwards? Will there be anything? Will world economic growth rates and population shoot upwards as in Hanson's upload model? Will there be a singleton? Will it simply be a bust and humanity go on much as it always has except with really neat cellphones? Max-ent is our best guess; if we want to do any better, then we need to actively intervene and make our prediction more likely to be right.

> Even if there was such a thing as a "general intelligence" the specialized > machines would soundly beat it in the marketplace. It would be very far from > a close contest.

And the humans? If there is a niche for humans, that same niche is available to the general intelligence, and since it can be self-improving and graft on the specialized machines better than humans ever will, it ought to dominate.

The economic extinction of humanity? Seems like a Singularity to me. (The economy was driven by human desires before, but what do the machines compete for when the humans are gone? I certainly can't predict it.)

> Nor does the human mind, as flexible as it is, exhibit much in the way of > some universal general intelligence. Many machines and many other creatures > are capable of sensory, information-processing, and output feats that the > human mind is quite incapable of.

And pray, how do we know of these feats? How were these machines constructed? (Whether I kill you with my bare hands or by firing a bullet, you are still dead.)

5678:

> The null hypothesis would be: there does not exist an algorithm and a > computer which achieves the goals of AGI. I await the proof, or a modicum of > scientific evidence to support this.

Shouldn't the null hypothesis be the Copernican hypothesis? - there is nothing special about humans.

Every success of AI, every human function done in software, is additional Bayesian evidence that there is nothing special about humans. If there were something special, one ought to observe endless failure, much like trying to trisect the angle or prove the parallel axiom; but instead, one observes remarkably rapid progress. (Where was chemistry after its first 60 years? Feel free to set your starting point anywhere from the earliest Chinese alchemists to after Robert Boyle.)

Kevembuangga:

> More to the point, some singularitarians pretend to have a definition of > "Universal Intelligence" which curiously enough isn't computable. :-)

If you have an actual argument, please feel free to give it and not just engage in mockery.

Were you aware that uncomputable algorithms are useful and can easily be made computable?

(You can solve the Halting Problem for a Turing machine with bounded memory, for example. And every static analysis like type-checking, by Rice's theorem, is attempting something Turing-complete, but they're still not useless. When employing theorems, beware lest you prove something different from what you think you are proving.)

</comment><comment><USER19> I think of it as kind of an inverted religion. Instead of having faith that something magical happened in the past, a singularitarian has faith that something magical (or maybe terrifying) will happen in the future.

</comment><comment><USER20> That someone would claim to "debunk" the entire Singularity concept without showing any indication that they've ever read anything written on the topic by Eliezer Yudkowsky is laughable (in particular, Szabo doesn't appear to really grok the difference between the time scales of exponential growth in Moore's law and the exponential growth we envision when we talk about an intelligence FOOM).

Yes, if what you mean by "Singularity" is "that thing that Kurzweil says will save us all, and it will happen by 2029 because Exponential Curves Are Awesome And Go On Forever", then sure, it's a religious and borderline psychotic idea.

The rest of us realize that exponentials don't last forever, that strong AI is a hard problem, that brain-scans won't solve the whole problem even if we _did_ have the tech to do them, which we won't for quite a while, that the ML algos we have today is not strong enough, that even defining a metric to optimize against is extremely difficult, etc. We got it - we live in the real world, AI is _really tough_ , and we haven't solved it yet. Further, we're mostly _worried_ about the prospect of AI, rather than naively hopeful for some geek rapture, because self-improving AI is likely to turn out quite badly for us unless we're exceptionally careful.

"Faith" only enters into this when deciding whether you believe the probability that we can build self-improving AI any time soon is significant or not, and I'd argue that it's not so much faith as slightly-educated guessing (predicting the probability of a tech breakthrough is an extremely difficult thing to do, so sure, there are high margins of uncertainty). You may disagree as to whether that probability is 1% over the next 20 years or 1% over the next 100, but we're hardly talking about the odds of virgin-birth here, so I find it completely unfair to call the whole idea "religious"...frankly, either of those probabilities is, IMO, worth worrying about, given the stakes. And you're flat out delusional if you don't admit a 1% chance of strong AI within 100 years.

I was going to more specifically tackle the other claims in this post, but ultimately, it's not worth it. When it comes down to it, Szabo assumes that the main thing that would make strong AI "easy" (or at least relatively easy), the existence of a general algorithm for reasoning, doesn't exist. If you take that as gospel, then sure, it's going to be pretty difficult to construct AI. I can even see why he'd think that, having used genetic programming and other ML techniques and finding little success (IMO we haven't pushed the genetic programming paradigm anywhere _near_ far enough, but that's a story for another day).

Plenty of people see things differently, and think that a general purpose intelligence algorithm is within our grasp; I'd argue that there's some loose evidence that human cognition largely owes itself to exactly such an algorithm, though in our case it's probably a bit more complex than we'll be able to come up with from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER21> So he basically says that there will be no "general AI" because he studied the field and can't see how it can work, duh! :)</comment>


N.S.A. Said to Search Content of Messages to and From U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us/broader-sifting-of-data-abroad-is-seen-by-nsa.html?hp&_r=1&

<comment><USER2> An article worth re-reading now: _Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S. (2008)_ [1]. The graphic shows (at the time) what percentage of regional Internet bandwidth passes into U.S. & Canada [2]: at the time, 70% of Latin American traffic, 50% of Asian/Pacific traffic, 20% of Europe's traffic, and some African traffic (most of which actually goes through Europe).

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/business/30pipes.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/business/30pipes.html)

[2] I'm guessing this is highly representative of pipes going into the U.S. alone

</comment><comment><USER3> As an american living abroad whose job to a large degree is to talk to foreigners, I find all of this totally frightening. And I don't know what I can actually do about it.

<comment><USER4> Can you clarify that statement? I am not sure if you are frightened that people are now by passing the US for network traffic which will make the NSA moderately less effective. Or rather are you frightened for the underlying reasons that are driving them to do so, which is quite reasonable?

<comment><USER5> Did you even read the article? The article says nothing about bypassing network traffic. It talks about emails from americans to foreigners being sifted for keywords.

<comment><USER4> Actually in this instance I did not. I often times enjoy reading the comments more then the articles as the opinions here give better insight into the topic. So this time I was caught with my pants down so to speak, thanks for pointing it out lol ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: E-Learning Startup - <AUTHOR>

After being linked to this thread [link at bottom] on reddit which describes many college/university students anger at how bad the "blackboard e-learning" suite is I started to think about my experience with blackboard at my university. If you haven't used it, imagine web appplications from the late 90's!
This got me thinking, there are no 'really' good contenders in the e-learning market, of course blackboard has a few competitors in the open source and propietary markets but none of them are a great deal better.
I'm pretty sure me and a couple of guys from my comp sci school could create something significantly better than the current market leader (blackboard) within the space of 3 months (summer holiday).
Unless we go all out and run this like a startup business it will obviously go nowhere, do you think this is something we should run with or would getting other schools to use it be to much of an uphill battle?
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/81bk3/i_submit_a_paper_on_blackboard_called_hw_2docx/ <comment><USER2> I administer Moodle for a private college (~1500 clients) and find that it works very well; one free / open source package gives us web-enabled classes (of course I also spend a lot of time training and supporting the instructors to make this a success).

What shortcomings have you found in Moodle and other FOSS offerings? Maybe improvements and support to one of those is a good business model.

If you do start coding from the ground up, I recommend targeting private schools where you _might_ find less bureaucracy/resistance.

</comment><comment><USER3> How would you compete with Moodle, which is Open source, free, and has a lot of momentum? It's also pretty crappy, but I'm not sure that matters in this case - don't forget it isn't the users of the software who are the buyers.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think you'll find two major problems with a blackboard competitor.

1\. Low value of products to users

Blackboard, WebCT, and other similar 'Learning Management Systems' are products of a standard response to new technology in an established area. Essentially attempting to copy the existing way of doing things into the new mode and thus make them more efficient. Moving from the existing systems to internet systems might reduce costs by half or so, if you have a really good system, but it isn't 'disruptive'. This isn't spreadsheets or email. It isn't 1000 times better than the alternative.

2\. Institutional inertia

Mentioned by others already, you're going to have a hard time selling to institutions. You're competing against a bunch of giant vendors with existing relationships, and FOSS solutions which are backed by and used by multiple universities. My university struck a committee of a dozen people with little to no knowledge of eLearning and spent probably $50,000 in employee time before deciding to maybe try moodle, or just stick with WebCT.

If you've got an idea for how to meet the real needs of educational users several times better than blackboard go for it. Personally I'd love to see something blow the existing junk out of the water, but think carefully about what people actually need and how you can serve that need don't just make a better blackboard.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would caution you against looking at e-learning as a single market - there's the K to 12 market and then the post-secondary market. You also need to look at geography and the educational direction of countries, regions, states, etc. For example, the UK market is very different than the US or AUS markets, and potential clients in each country are looking for very different things.

Blackboard doesn't really play much in K to 12, but virtually owns the post- secondary market in North America. I think you could spend a lot of time and effort trying to build a Blackboard competitor and not get very far.

However, if you take a look at what teachers are doing with Moodle <http://moodle.org/> or Joomla <http://www.joomlalms.com/>, there's probably a niche there to get your hands onto.

In reference to some of the sales comments - if you can connect with teachers, professors or curriculum oriented staff and get them excited, there's a good chance to find some budget.

</comment><comment><USER6> I worked on an e-learning app for a while, and may return to it after some time. Here is what I've learned: if you really want to create a killer e-learning app, you have to approach it from the UI point of view: make it _really really really_ easy to teach and to learn. That, imho, is the biggest roadblock to an explosion of innovation in the education space. Once you have that, you can scrape open education content into your app, open it up to users, and they'll take it from there. Feel free to contact me if you want to chat more.

</comment><comment><USER7> As a TA forced to use such systems for course management, I agree that they are ugly and inefficient.

Unfortunately, I believe the leader in this market has sued a bunch of competitors for "patent-infringement."

</comment><comment><USER8> Now is a very ripe time for disruptive innovation in the e-learning space. This is especially true as the raw stuff of learning - think video lectures, wikis, forums - is increasingly accessible for free, while college tuition rates keep rising.

However, the key phrase there is "disruptive innovation". Perhaps you may be able to serve the lower end of the market, such as tutors and individual students, schools be damned. And once you do manage to get some traction, you're likely to have a lot more success down the road with institutions.

The preeminent scholar in the field of disruptive innovation has actually just published a book specifically about education:

[http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Disruptive- Innovation...](http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Disruptive-Innovation- Change/dp/0071592067)

I've been reading it in the last few days and publishing some of my favorite passages to my blog:

<http://bit.ly/mad82>

<comment><USER9> Im actually in the process of working on a site for this at the moment, theres a couple of sites already up and running but in my opinion still much more work needed to offer a compelling all in solution

Hopefully I will be back here in a month or so to demo it!

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking more in the way of creating a product that would be installed on the universitys server and hosted on their intranet, just like traditional e-learning suites.

I can't imagine many schools would want to keep their data on a third party server.

<comment><USER10> Maybe post the idea on Mark Cuban's open source funding page - see what he thinks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing to keep in mind - educational markets are like enterprise markets - very difficult to sell to. Products don't generally catch on and spread virally there - you'll need a salesforce. The decision makers aren't the users of the product, but its administrators.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I can't really think of a way to break into the market. That could just be because I'm not in marketing?

I just have a picture in my mind, cold calling university administrators, it just wouldn't work.

<comment><USER10> Cold calling will work, to some extent, but there are just so many decision makers involved, and they in turn have to get buy in from so many teachers, administrators, etc, that each sale just takes a long time.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. You will have sales cycles of > 1 year, with references, demonstrations, visits, proof of concept delivery, tenders etc etc..

It's hell.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alan Kay on "the single most amazing thing that computers have made possible?" - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Whats-arguably-the-single-most-amazing-thing-that-computers-have-made-possible?share=1 <comment><USER2> tl;dr? /me sets mode: -verbose article</comment>


Show HN: Liber Brunoniana – Hacking a Better Encyclopedia - <AUTHOR> http://liber-brunoniana.github.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> I haven't had much time to study history since I started a CS grad program, so this side project was my way of scratching that itch. It far exceeded expectations, and University Archives has expressed interest in making it the official distribution of Encyclopedia Brunoniana.

There's a technical write-up of the project covering everything from processing, compilation, and design. [1] This iteration of Stiki, the static wiki generator powering Liber Brunoniana, is mostly written in Bash, but a past version was written in Racket (with article authoring in markdown) and I'm looking at extending Pollen for the next iteration with deeper version control integration.

[1] [http://liber- brunoniana.github.io/Articles/Liber%20Brunonian...](http://liber- brunoniana.github.io/Articles/Liber%20Brunoniana.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is cool.

As a Brown alum: this is really really really cool. Thank you for sharing.

<comment><USER3> PhD'04 here (from Charniak's NLP research group), and likewise.

Which research group are you in? Is the NLP work tied to your research, or is this entirely a side thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! PhD in the PLT group; I still know virtually nothing about NLP. In fact, if this had been an NLP project from the get-go, I probably wouldn't have started it.

This project began with me creating wiki software for the campus history interest group I run, realizing that a wiki with no content was _very_ lonely, and importing Encyclopedia Brunoniana as a remedy. From there, it was hard to resist the temptation to try to structure the documents. I threw an hour at it or so every Friday night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why your logo/header have to be 3MB?</comment>


Is flying an ultra-cheap airline worth it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/Is-flying-an-ultra-cheap-airline-worth-it-9173843.php <comment><USER2> Some good analysis. I find that for me, flying as a mode of transportation is never discretionary -- I need to get across the US in less-than-three-or-four days to attend a multi-day event, business or leisure, so every other form of transportation is out -- so to start every trip with a bad cross-continental flight is a sure recipe for an awful time.

Luckily, I can afford a slightly higher economy fare in exchange for lowering -- but not eliminating -- my risk of an unpleasant flight.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that there's no such thing as a pleasant flight these days, at least if you're flying economy. The race to the bottom online fare comparisons kicked off has led to things like baggage charges, tiny seats, etc. becoming standard across all carriers.</comment></comment>