223 karma · joined May 24, 2010
However, Expatistan is not about finding cheap cities to work in. It's about comparing cost-of-living, independently of your income. Expats are usually not linked to average local salaries in any meaningful way, anyway.
I explain it much better in the website: http://www.expatistan.com/faq#average-salary
I do sometimes share the data with particular projects or developers on a case-by-case basis. If you are thinking about using the data for something interesting, you can contact me through the website.
We started collecting prices for different ones a while ago. We are now reaching the point where we already have enough data to include the new types of housing in the public index.
No, we are not affiliated with numbeo in any way. As far as I know, they collect all their prices in their website, just as we do in Expatistan.
That's a nasty error. Mountain View is stored internally as "Mountain View, California" and therefore the usual form of Mountain View does not match. Moreover, this error also shows that at least in this case partial matches are not recognized properly, as they should.
Needless to say, both issues are now on my list, and I'll fix them as soon as I can (I'm now on my "day job", expatistan.com is a side project).
In the meantime, as a workaround you can still use the site if you start typing 'Mountain View' and wait the two seconds that it takes the autocomplete to suggest the city. Then click on the suggestion and you should be set. Alternatively, you can just use this url the first time, and then change the second city on the boxes at the top right:
http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/seattle/...
Since most ORMs I've worked with are not really as complicated to learn as you try to make it sound, the trade-off is clear.
EDIT: fixed a typo.
I wouldn't say that the title is deceiving.
With less than an hour of work, I bet you can modify the script to make exactly what you want. Actually, it seems that most of Boomerang's functionalities could be substituted for free with a couple of Google Apps Scripts.
It does have the same problem that all the other speed checkers that I've tried. When you have a decently optimized page, most of the errors or problems it founds have to do with external services over which you do not have much control.
For example, facebook widgets and google apis (analytics, charts, ...).
It is always a little frustrating when you are told to change something that you can not really influence:
There are 5 JavaScript files served from static.ak.fbcdn.net. They should be combined into as few files as possible.
* http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/y1/r/...js
* http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yB/r/...js
* http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yQ/r/...js
* http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yg/r/...js
* http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yg/r/...js* Picasa (Picasa - Jul 2004) * Google Earth (Keyhole Inc - Oct 2004 ) * Analytics (Urchin Software Corporation - Mar 2005) * Youtube (YouTube - Oct 2006)
and probably many others from this list:
Things that are great in Prague for a foreigner (expat):
* Most people speak English, specially young people and specially in Prague. They will tell you that they don't speak English, but they do.
* There are a surprisingly big number of IT jobs for English speakers available. Even at startups (like the one I work at, 360cities.net).
* If you want to be a freelance, the tax treatment is very very favorable. Adding all the payments that you have to make to the government (including personal income tax, compulsory health insurance, and unemployment insurance), you'll end up paying less than 15% of your gross income at the end of the year to the state, in one form of another. That compares with the ~ 50% that gets deducted from employees for the same concepts.
* Life is affordable. Having a good life, I mean, not just surviving. Even on a local salary, you can get a decent apartment not too far from the center, eat out every day for lunch, have dinner out a couple times a week, go to the movies/theater/clubs on the weekends, and still have money left to save a little. Of course, those savings will not amount to much out of the Czech Republic, but as long as you are living here, they'll provide a comfortable cushion. If you get an English speaking job, you'll probably make significantly more than a local salary. You will not live like a king, but you'll life very very comfortably.
* The health system is good, efficient and cheap. So it is the public transportation (one of the best systems I've tried, and I've used a few in my life).
* The fact that even local salaries afford for a decent live means that you won't find extreme poverty in Prague. That also means that there's no dangerous areas that you should avoid (of course, in the touristic spots there are pickpockets, but I mean that there's no wrong neighborhoods that you have to avoid, like there are in Madrid or, as is said, in US cities, for example).
* Cultural life is rich and varied. There's a lot of clubs with life music, concerts, theaters, operas, … Of course, there's also thousands of pubs (almost one in every corner) that serve what I would argue is the best beer in the world. And very cheap (less than 1.5 euros per half liter).
* The city is gorgeous.
* The girls are even more gorgeous.
* You are in the middle of Europe, which means that there's a lot of places to visit within 4 hours (train or plain).
* The attitude of Czech people is very relaxed. Live and let live. Consumption of sof drugs, for example marijuana, although not strictly legal is not prosecuted by the police.
* Personally, I think another advantage is that the Czech Republic is the most atheist country in the world. 70% of Czechs declare themselves atheists when asked. That means that the interference of religion in the lawmaking or social attitudes is minimal.
There are also some disadvantages, of course:
* The hard long winters.
* Service in restaurants and pubs, although improving slowly, is still not comparable with more western countries. Unhelpful or plain rude waiters and shops assistants are very common.
* The food lacks variety, and specially vegetables, fruits and seafood (like most Central European kitchen).
* Some rules in the administration are plain stupid. And civil servants will be, generally, unhelpful. A lot of the old socialist mentality can still be found in the government's employees.
* The language is very difficult to learn. Most people speak at least some English, but really fitting in is difficult without speaking Czech.
* When you want to travel abroad, everything is suddenly very expensive.
* You have no description meta in any page (even at the home page). Help the search engines to show a good snippet of your page by adding it.
* The urls of the particular listings look like http://tekbob.com/freelancer/68573 Would be much better (and descriptive) if you had something like http://tekbob.com/freelancer/experienced-rails-mongodb-devel...
* I haven't found a single <h1> element in the whole website. Give some meaning to your markup, and start using descriptive tags. <h1>, <h2>, <th>, <strong> will help the spiders understand what are the important things in the page.
* None of your image seem to have an 'alt' or 'title' attribute. You should add these attributes to all your images, both for spiders, and for people that can not see your images.
* It would help your users (and the spiders) if you add some pages with all the tags or categories that you have. If they are too many, use at least a tag cloud.
* It seems that there's no robots.txt or sitemap.xml.
* Using YSlow on your page give also a number of hints of basic improvements to do (combine your js and css, enable gzip in your server, ...)
Also, there is no "About us", "FAQ", "Contact" or any of the usual sections that a user may want to check before posting a listing, or using your site, to see who is behind the site and whether you are serious or not.
Having a field that says when did the freelancer joined, how many contacts he has actually answered and whether he is active or not would also be nice, in my opinion. There's plenty of listing sites out there with a few entries that you do not know if are still active, or stale. They could have been entered 4 years ago, for all you know.
[Edited the format, to make it easier to read]
It's a matter of YOU having a phone to make an emergency call to 911 when/if you have the need.
When I saw the title of the article I assumed that they already got the 10,000 sign ups and were explaining how did they manage to do it.
As I was reading through their list I was getting more and more skeptical. Some of their points make sense, others, simply don't ring true.
I then checked their Twitter account and saw that they had (at the time of writing) 93 followers. Really? 93? Not that I think that Twitter followers is the most useful metric as a measure of interest in a web-app (or that Twitter is really useful as a marketing tool for that matter) but for people that claim to be riding the waves of the viral marketing and that seem to put a lot of value and effort into increasing their Twitter and FB numbers, 93 followers sure looks a little low.
I had to come back to the comments in HN and to read carefully the title of the submission again to realize that they don't actually claim to have the 10,000 followers yet. Only that they want to reach that number. And they hope that the steps outlined in the article will help them to get there.
This misunderstanding may well be because English is not my first language, but even so, it still smells like link bait to me. I'm pretty sure that almost everyone around here will have his own opinion on how to get 10,000 sign ups. Until that opinion has been proven to work in real life, it's still a hunch, not all that useful.
"sugru is like modeling clay when you take it from its pack. Once it's exposed to air, it cures to a tough flexible silicone overnight using the moisture in the air. [It] is designed to stick to as many other materials as possible. It forms a strong bond to aluminium, steel, ceramics, glass and other materials including plastics like perspex. When sugru cures, it's flexible rather than rigid. Which means that you can repair things that need to be able to move like textiles, cables, or shoes."
"The 68% revenue share for AdSense for content applies to all online publishers, and is not an average revenue share. If you're showing AdSense for content ads on your pages, you're receiving 68% of the amount advertisers pay for those ads. While the revenue share can vary for some major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts, these amounts are not in any way averaged together. Also, there isn’t anything additional taken off the top. You get 68 percent, period." [http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...]
My original skepticism was unfounded.
What I understand from the article is that 68% of the aggregated revenue generated by all the publishers is payed back by Google to the publishers, probably not evenly.
If the figures given are simple averages (TOTAL_AD_REVENUE / TOTAL_NUMBER_OF_PUBLISHERS) then it is not an useful figure for individual publishers. For example, it may mean that a handful of huge publishers are getting a revenue share of 90% but the vast majority of medium and small publishers are getting 20%. You would still not know how much is the typical publisher getting.
Until I see more information about how the 68% and the 51% figures were calculated and about whether all publishers get the same or similar rates, then I will still have no idea what the effective rev share for a typical small publisher (less than 1,000,000 pageviews/month) is.