Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

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Writing from a German startup right now, I can't quite follow the author here. Granted - German copycats and especially the Samwer Brothers have brought some bad feelings into the community... but Berlin is getting better and bolder every day. It's basically almost all the goodness from Silicon Valley, but without the hype and craze. It's a friendly, crazy and green city with great work ethics - you don't live for working, you work for a living. Contrary to the article, accelerators, VC funding and the war for talent have long arrived here for sure - but it's all still pretty calm and well-thought out. Maybe there's still a little less innovation here, but on the other side, it's much harder to get funding without a business model that makes sense. Color definitely wouldn't happen here. We got all the cool things and conferences, but I'm pretty glad we're doing it the German way: No hire and fire, health insurance for everyone and the income disparity feels just so much more just compared to the states. I once thought of moving over to Silicon Valley, but by now I'm pretty glad that everything I want has moved over here without bringing the TSA, mass surveillance, corporate politics, discussion about the validity of evolution, a deadlocked two-party system and a growing helplessness over the unstoppable and unlimited capitalism that's ruining society already over there. All the best from Berlin - and if you feel the same, maybe it's time to come over? Dom

There are no corporate politics in Germany? That's pretty awesome.

In all seriousness though, you're cherry picking some of the bad stuff about the US. I'm sure if you wanted, you could do the same thing about Germany or anywhere else. For instance: the weather, the lack of anything remotely resembling a mountain near Berlin, and, most importantly, the lack of good Mexican food.

> the lack of anything remotely resembling a mountain near Berlin

Bavaria and Switzerland are not that far. Polish Sudety even closer and much cheaper.

> most importantly, the lack of good Mexican food.

Tex-mex is an American obsession. In Europe we have mediterranean. A doner-kebab is for us what a taco is to you, and say what you want, but kebab is a snack there's no shortage of in Berlin.

Perhaps I've been conditioned by living in Europe, but my definition of "not far" means I can ride my bike to it!

Kebabs are great (we have them here too in Italy), but sorry, I'll take good Mexican food any day:-)

> but my definition of "not far" means I can ride my bike to it

haha, well... I thought of going for a weekend, not after work. There are a few nice Mexican restaurants in Warsaw, so I know the deal, still sadly mex didn't somehow fall into the 'grab a taco and walk' category as I see on American movies, this space is totally occoupied by kebabs.

(btw, HN could display a country next to the nickname, so there's no "oh, you're not from the US too".)

The kebabs are something else in Berlin. Much more like a Taco than those greasy things you see elsewhere in the world.

Greesy kebabs with a lot of sauce 'spicy, mild or mix?' are a European invention I think. I've been to a few middle-eastern countries including Turkey and haven't seen sauce in kebab ever (still they give sauce in Berlin).

That is because they are Shwarma's and are completely different again. The kebab is a Berlin invention (according to TimeOut Berlin). Which makes sense, a marriage of the German sausage + bread culture with some dish from the middle east.

> The kebab is a Berlin invention

Wait, wat? Kebab is middle-eastern food with hundreds of years of history. 'Doner kebab' (the popular one in a bread) is Turkish. German sausage has nothing to do with it.

There are lots of ways you can serve kebab/shoarma and none of them are 'wrong' per se. The popularity of doner and roll is probably just a matter of convenience for customers and business owners. The sauce thing was just an observation, and frankly I don't know how what local influence made it served that way in Europe.

according to Time-Out Berlin. Yeah, according to Wikipedia, I'm wrong. Never trust a travel guide. I've been to the Emirates and what they have there is entirely different to what they have in Germany. Australia, France and the Czech Republic have something different, which is 'the greasy thing'.

and that's what I said. cultures mix, cuisine is imported, adapted to local preferences, exported again around other regions, that's how it works. You were only wrong saying that kebab was invented in Germany, it's just that there's where the modern well-known in Europe Turkish doner started do gain broad popularity - that's probably what your guide meant. I assume it was the saucy thing we have all around Europe.

The word "Kebab" describes a different dish in the Middle East and in Germany.

All dishes are different around the world - spaghetti, sushi, pizza, hamburger, etc. Sometimes a dish is luxury in one country and casual food in the other. It always differs, even across regions of one country, regional influences, etc. It doesn't mean it's a different dish by definition.

No, literally - the middle-eastern "kebab" is called cevapcici in Europe (at least in Ausria/Germany), it's a totally different dish from dönner kebab.

Cevapcici is the southern Slav word for Kebab:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%86evapi#Etymology

Döner - not Kebap - is a german (berlin) invention.

yeeeah riiiiiiiiight

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doner_kebab

Before taking its modern form, as mentioned in Ottoman travel books of the 18th century,[6][7] the doner used to be a horizontal stack of meat rather than vertical, probably sharing common ancestors with the Cağ Kebabı of the Eastern Turkish province of Erzurum.

In his own family biography, İskender Efendi of 19th century Bursa writes that "he and his grandfather had the idea of roasting the lamb vertically rather than horizontally, and invented for that purpose a vertical mangal".[8] With time, the meat took a different marinade, got leaner, and eventually took its modern shape.[7] The Greek gyro, along with the similar Middle Eastern shawarma and Mexican tacos al pastor, are derived from this dish.[9] There are several stories regarding the origins of gyros in Greece: One says that the first "gyrádiko" was "Giorgos" who brought gyros to Thessaloniki in 1900[citation needed]; another legend from a meat production company states that döner was first introduced in the 1950s in Piraeus by a cook from Istanbul.

There we go with the Mexican food again - it's a superset of Kebab:-)

If nothing else, putting kebab on pizza is pretty European ..

(Yes, including the sauce!)

though not really Mexican we have Dolores here in Berlin - as good as calimex can get!

Let me rephrase. Of course there's corporate politics here. There will always be because greed is a very human trait. The difference is that greed is something commonly seen much more positive in the US. We just fired our president because of a "corruption scandal" that would have been piecemeal for Romney or Berlusconi (we're talking about some couple thousand bucks here). It's one of the first countries with a politically meaningful and rapidly growing movement for net neutrality and liquid democracy (-> pirate party). I wasn't trying to paint things better than they actually are - I was trying to raise awareness that you can still have a great quality of life and innovation in a business climate that's full of regulation, taxes and an exhaustive social net. If I stepped on anyone's toe, I'm sorry.

>It's one of the first countries with a politically meaningful and rapidly growing movement for net neutrality

Although it does not use the term "net neutrality" (which I had never seen before about 5 years ago), the 1956 "Consent Decree" (a kind of court ruling), which resolved the second anti-trust suit against AT&T, imposed a version of net neutrality on the U.S. telephone network, and I have seen at least one writer credit that "Consent Decree" with enabling the growth of the internet beyond the purely government-operated stage (because the growth of the internet at that stage came from large organizations' leasing "dedicated copper" from AT&T Long Lines, which wanted to but was was unable to turn down requests for such leases because of the Consent Decree).

This version of net neutrality was restricted to large corporations (IBM was a very vocal advocate of this version of net neutrality) and the judicial system, and had almost nothing to do with popular opinion or electoral politics, but it was the law in the U.S.

And unfortunetly there is just as much "corporate politics" in Germany as elsewhere - might be expresed diferently and via different routes.

Berlin is awesome. I know is a question with a very flexible answer but what are the monthly net rates a Py/Django/DB expat developer can expect in an average size company (not boring bigcorp) in 2012?

Very flexible indeed. Anywhere from 30k€/y (entry level, junior dev) till 60-70k€/y (top talent with work experience and some management duties) is possible for a regular full time job - sometimes more, but extreme rates are still pretty uncommon here. (Note though that you've got around the same standard of living here than for double the amount in dollars in the valley.)

Tx. Yeah, I quite know the standard of living, I'm from Warsaw, not the valley thought, and been there a few times ;)

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