urlwolf

I'll contact you. But if you want to skip the first step, just reply to the update, and tell me:

- What tech you'd like to work during the retreat (or book to go through, or project to work on).

- Do you have a github/bitbucket?

- Do you want to do the fulltime or extended weekend version?

Thanks, will contact him.

Also, 35 to 40k sounds really on the low end. I don't think I know anyone making that little. And this is Berlin, where salaries are lower than in the rest of Germany. 50k seems to be rock bottom for a seasoned front-end engineer, more for backend, even more for specialty stuff such as data science.

That's not 1/3 of that 35 to 40k. The employer pays the fee, not the employee. This is very important. We don't want you to make less money; in fact, if that was the case many people who are already in highly paid jobs would not do it (myself included).

Funded startups that are looking for the top talent, at any cost, are the ones that I assume will benefit the most. For them, 1/3 of the 1st year salary is an investment. Better pay that rather than having to have the position open for 6 months (time is money). Hiring is extremely hard, and the people you want to hire... are by definition almost never looking for jobs. These are the same people that are attracted by the idea of spending 3 months mastering a bleeding edge technology.

AFAIK, this is also how Hacker School NY works. I'm not a recruiter, nor want to be one :). I've never been recruited either. It sounds like a lot of money to me too, but it's the industry standard. On top of consuming all my free time the last 2-3 months, flying/hosting residents, paying for office space, etc is a significant cost. We hope that after the first batch, people are so appreciative that they will find it criminally bad if there's no next edition of the retreat. Making some money will give us the freedom to fly the best people, and provide the best experience possible. This is not a non-profit, but it's not run with the only intention of making money.

That's correct. Should be within a few hrs :)

If you worry that your interests will not match machine learning/functional, ... Ed, one of us, is a kick-ass all-rounder (back-end and front-end). He also designs. The entire site design is his idea. Berlin has huge JS and front-end communities, too.

We'll post the details when everyone is ready. Some of them are coming back from vacation, others want to test the waters first... and of course there are some who have committed already. Some are in but don't know yet when and how long they'll come.

All in all, very impressive people.

If you would like to be a resident...

We have sponsors, so we'll be able to pay travel and lodging given the right circumstances.

The way it works is that we get some advanced people (residents) and invite them to stay with us and share what they know. There's no structure; if you come, you can work on whatever you want, as long as you help other people. Maybe some would become contributors to some of your projects. Hacker School NY managed to get Peter Norvig as a resident.

Weekends and Mondays are busier, because then the two editions are in the same room. During the week it's only the fulltime people, who are just a handful, but the most dedicated.

Yes, the increased flexibility is something to highlight...

- We have an 'extended weekend' edition. That's weekend plus one day if you can convince your employer; If not, then just do > 14 weekends.

- We'll have a rolling release; you can pause the retreat, and come back. We know life interferes sometimes.

--- We also seem to have a bit of a functional/machine learning bent, at least on this first batch. I'm a data scientist, and my network reflects that. Limist is a more serious clojurean, he has a talk on euroclojure coming.

We also have a couple of people from the top 5 HN posters coming on this or some future batch.

Just a quick note with more details...

- The starting date is Oct 1st.

- We have some incredible residents already, and are looking for more.

- Please contact us if you want to be a student or a resident, or know someone who is a perfect match.

The story: This is inspired by Hacker School NY. When I saw they got Peter Norvig as a resident, I almost jumped into a plane straight. But I have a girlfriend, a dog, and a baby, so I cannot leave Berlin.

So, in the most unadulterated hacker spirit... I made my own :)

Berlin has some serious advantages over NY:

- It's dirt cheap to live here. Maybe 1/3 of NY prices

- There are plenty of talented people, and user groups.

- There are some desirable startups, and a shortage of hires (as anywhere else, really).

Edit: formatting

This is exactly what R does. It's a huge timesaver. Best. docs. ever.

Surprisingly good writing. I'm going to start reading the Baffler because of this article. The guy displays empathy off the charts.

I like how he divided boostrapped and Post-Product Market Fit. The difference in marketing strategies is huge. Post-Product Market Fit may well focus on killing it on adwords alone (ecommerce mostly), whereas content marketing is working wonders for boostrapping companies, and is hard to replicate for bigger ones (maybe it just doesn't work at scale?).

The skillset are so different that "what took you here won't take you there":

Post-Product Market Fit: modeling, optimization, hiring and firing. Letting data decide.

Boostrapped: writing well, being active online, jumping on early trends fast, listening to customers, growing a list. Often there's no data to justify decisions.

49 kg, too heavy to use it as a normal bike. This means people will use always use it in electric mode. Hmm, this takes some of the appeal away...

This is the most scary news I've read in the past week. Makes Stallman's 'The road to Tycho' a conservative, unimaginative piece on the power of governments.

Would this work with StatET?

Idea: a subreddit or subHN (if that existed) for bootstrappers?

Same here. It's not obvious one has to scroll!

I use a static site generator (docpad) and deploy to github pages. I've had bad experiences with both, so I'm looking for alternatives. I have my own servers, but somehow I assumed for a homepage gh-pages would be best. I was wrong.

Amazing idea. With today's technology, anyone with enough motivation can write music for an orchrestra from a bedroom. What we see is many newcomers realizing they are going to need some music theory an harmony if they want to be any good (myself included). I think there's a market for this.

How do you plan to monetize it?

You can have a pretty close approximation on chrome with this plugin (fauxbar): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fauxbar/hibkhcnpka...

It searches your history and bookmarks too, which is what the awesome bar does.

Doesn't work for me either. I wanted to do this with midi files (after transposing them to a common key). And apply some dimension reduction on top (LSA). Never got around to do it.

This post helped me reach clarity. Thank you.

I don't care so much about the job market, but I want to know what would give me a wider range of apps I can put together quickly, given I invest X hrs to learn the technology.

Can anyone enummerate the apps that are 'as of today' better suited to RoR/Django?

The funny thing is that the django tutorial uses a poll app. This is an app that is ten million times easier to do, and more effective, in say meteor. But I'm sure other apps are not.

I'm using gnome shell and I love it. I moved to it from awesomewm, so that gives you an idea of the type of user that I am. They made some bold moves on UX, and I was surprised I was agreeing with them. There's a tiling wm extension, shellshape, that has advantages over awesome (!). I'm happy with the move. This is just to say that gnome is not targeting grandmas and teenager with their redesign. If you were used to gnome 2 desktop (which I hated) give 3 a serious try.

I have an ergonomic keyboard (maltron) and a standing table. Both are not exactly portable.

In any case, I highly recommend NOT to work on your laptop's keyboard. It's a sure recipe to screw up your hands.

I just got a Maltron keyboard that has symbols in non-standard places. Was thinking on using clavaro with code fragments when I saw this. Great job! I'll probably use it till I get 40 wpm at 100% accuracy on colemak. I'm at 20 wpm 100%.

I'm sort of happy that these things (bitching about your OS) happen for OSX too.

I'd recommend to have a look at gnome shell. I was pleasantly surprised, many good UX decisions there. I switched to it from awesomewm.

Now, if I wanted to use this often, I'd need a keyboard shortcut. I haven't found a way to add a keyboard shortcut to an extension that doesn't have one. Ah! but I can trigger the bookmarklet with this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shortcut-manager/m...

If anyone has a way to trigger extensions, please share.