
A story about Vienna. (an interactive narrative infographic) - bakerfreak
http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/a-story-about-vienna/#apps4austria=1/
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healthenclave
People born in any developed country have absolutely NO IDEA how lucky they
are to be born there. A Hardworking, Highly Educated and Professional born and
living in developing country can't imagine having the quality of life that -
even a college student enjoys in better part of the world.

With that said there are Tons of positive stuff happening all around .

And almost all of Europe is Amazingly beautiful

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gst
I'm originally from Vienna (now living in SF) and I wouldn't really recommend
to live there. The Viennese people all praise how well there city works, but
if you've lived in another place for a while you quickly notice all the things
going terribly wrong there.

To bring a few counter-points to the praises listed on the web site:

You want to work at a startup? Great! But don't go to Vienna then. There are a
few startups, but most of them finance themselves via part-time consulting
work, as the chances of getting "real" investments are quite low. And almost
all of the successful ones that I know move to places like London or Berlin as
soon as possible.

Salaries are low. And I mean low. If you're used to salaries at places like SF
you're probably paying more for your apartment in those places than what
you're net income in Vienna would be. And forget about stock options, even at
the so called "startups" there they are quite rare.

It feels like almost everyone smokes in Vienna. If you're ever going to a
restaurant or a bar, even if it's only a brief visit, be prepared to wash all
of your clothing afterwards. There are practically no laws protecting non-
smokers, although those are nowadays standard in most other modern cities.

It rains almost all the time. There are something like 2 months of summer and
2 months of winter. The remainder of the time is cloudy rainy weather. So yes,
there would be a few nice places where you could do stuff outside, but only
during the short summer time. And don't expect any clean parks where you just
can lie down and enjoy the sun (like in SF). Most of the city parks are dirty.
And most people don't clean up after their dogs, so you wouldn't want to lie
down in those parks anyway.

~~~
precisioncoder
Salaries aren't that low... the standard entry level right now is about $42K
USD, keep in mind that includes the mandatory Austria 5 weeks of paid
vacation. Also when calculating an offer it's important to note that you're
usually quoted a monthly amount which is paid 14 times per year. (Two months
you receive a double payment, before the summer for vacation spending and
before Christmas for christmas spending)

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kawsper
Lagging a lot on a i7 Macbook Pro Retina with 16 Gbs of RAM in Chrome. It is a
bit better in Safari, but still not smooth.

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jackalope
Wow. When I ran OS X Leopard on this 17" MacBook Pro w/4GB RAM, all the fancy
pages posted on HN used to peg my cores at 100% and made the fans roar like
jet engines. Now I'm running Slackware Linux (64 bit) on it, and this page is
running as smooth as butter in Firefox 19.0.2. It's nice to be at the other
end of the spectrum, for once. It runs almost as smoothly in Chrome, but with
a little more jitter during the transitions and a bit more CPU usage. Not so
nice in Opera, which is struggling to get all the pieces working and kind of
ruins the experience.

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contingencies
I've heard good things from other Australians about Vienna of late, and you've
probably convinced me to drop by before or after OHM2013 in August. Few tips
for internationalisation purposes...

Germanisms: _city_ bike, _public_ barbecuing.

Style: US would typically (over)use exclamations! Like, _There's loads to do
in Vienna!_ (and _BBQ_ ) AU would be _Mate, there's shit-loads to do in
Vienna!_ (and _have a barbie_ or _BBQ_ ) NZ would be _Vienna's wicked chur
bro!_ (or _BBQ_ ). OK well, those last two might be taking it a bit far. But
you can de-formalize(/Germanify) a little ;)

Best wishes from China... AU/DE/NZ guy of partly-German/Prussian descent.

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superphil0
We are austrians, not australians btw..

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damncabbage
He's saying that he's Australian, and he's heard from other of his countrymen
that Vienna is kind of alright. :)

(Don't we, we get equally worried when people mix it up.)

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jnazario
i've visited vienna twice now. once in november, once in june. vienna is a
vibrant, gorgeous and exciting city. the arts, culture, everything is
fantastic, and the people are friendly and charming. one of my favorite
museums - the belvedere - is there, and the gardens near that are also
gorgeous.

i can't wait to go back to visit. i would say go in the summer, the winter (at
least the week i was there) was dreary. i also love the cold war history of
vienna, so that was exciting.

thanks for sharing.

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franze
>and the people are friendly and charming.

hmmm, must be another city

~~~
bakerfreak
haha that's true. viennese people love to be grumpy :D

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introspectif
Nice city, but with 114% of the population being smokers...

I love Europe, but for being so developed, it's amazing how many places there
people still think smoking is 'cool,' and 'a symbol of freedom.'

I do like Vienna, but I think I'd choose Hamburg if I had to choose a city in
the German-speaking world. Or Berlin - only slightly less cosmopolitan, but
the tech start-up scene is kind of happening, and the cost of living is
cheaper.

~~~
davidw
Depends on the country: they banned smoking indoors in Italy a while back, and
at least in the part of the country I live in, people have always respected
that ban (I was a bit surprised). In Austria, when we left, they still let
people smoke anywhere and everywhere, pretty much - the only places where it
was banned in Innsbruck, where we lived, were McDonalds and Ikea. My wife went
out with our baby daughter for cake and coffee with a friend one afternoon, to
a pastry shop, and came back reeking of smoke, because some other patrons sat
down and started chain smoking. It made my blood boil.

That said, Vienna struck me as a very nice city - very livable for its size,
although the climate leaves a lot to be desired.

~~~
precisioncoder
That's a huge problem in Austria, coming here from Canada I was shocked that
you could still smoke everywhere here. I rarely go out to bars or cafes here
due to the fact that I then have to change clothes and shower in order to get
rid of the smell of smoke.

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bmaeser
worth mentioning hackerspaces / tech-coworking in vienna:

<https://metalab.at/> <http://www.sektor5.at/> <http://vienna.the-hub.net/>

~~~
jkldotio
The metalab people are very cool. They hooked me up with some LEDs when I
needed them on short notice. When I visited they were printing a new battery
cover for an old hand-held gaming device with their 3D printer (and this was a
few years back).

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Swizec
Small nitpick: I doubt Vienna's got 20+ universities as the infographic would
suggest. It's far more likely what you meant is "faculty buildings" or
something to that extent.

I would also venture a guess that most of those belong to a single University
of Vienna.

~~~
chaz
I assume the citation from the 20 is this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_Austria...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_Austria#Vienna)

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Swizec
There still seem to be a lot more listed on the map.
<http://i.imgur.com/T9GxbPV.jpg>

Even for a city as cool as Vienna, that many _universities_ looks unrealistic.

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chaz
I assumed that it was just British English ... British seems to just use
"university" for any higher learning degree program, whereas Americans use
"university" only for schools with grad programs as well as undergrad.

<http://grammarist.com/usage/college-university/>

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Svip
Neat, but honestly I had hoped for some more than just a story; i.e. history.
Vienna's history is incredibly rich! How can that simply be ignored. People
don't talk about the Holy Roman Empire anymore!

Perhaps Austrians are still coping with 1866.

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bakerfreak
in case anyone has issues with displaying it, here are some screens about how
it should look like: <http://www.data.gv.at/anwendungen/a-story-about-vienna/>

the project is also hosted on github, if anyone is interested in looking at
the code: <https://github.com/pa7/a-story-about-vienna/>

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rumcajz
Vienna is a very nice city to live in. Yet, it is not exactly a technology
hub, so probably not a destination of preference for the HN crowd.

~~~
franze
i and a lot of other people are actively working on the technology part, i.e.:
<http://www.viennajs.org/> meetup,
<https://www.facebook.com/RailsGirlsVienna>,
<http://events.jquery.org/2013/eu/> (happened a few weeks ago, but will happen
again next year), <https://metalab.at/>, <http://www.gdg-vienna.at/>, ....

said that, if you want to live in vienna and are an experienced dev. send me a
tweet, we will hook you up with a job in no time

~~~
precisioncoder
What would you suggest for a general developer meetup? I'm in Linz and was
thinking about coming up and seeing Metalab and going to a developer meetup.
Any good events coming up you would recommend?

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franze
well, i organize viennajs.org, but well you should be into JS (or we will
convince you, last wednesday of every month), there is the web performance
meetup <http://web-performance.meetup.com/members/at/vienna/> it's about
pretty much any language & performance, there is
<http://www.meetup.com/Vienna-Perl-Mongers/> well perl. gdg <http://www.gdg-
vienna.at/> has some new organizes, so i don't know what they have in mind,
also python, symphony and ux are meeting at meetalab
<https://metalab.at/calendar/>

from your blog i see you are into php and flash, well, come by to the viennajs
meetup and lets talk about html5.

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precisioncoder
Heh, php and flash is what I use for my hobby gamedev. I'm a Java developer.
(Hides from the Java and Flash hate). I've worked with js before, html5 is
definitely interesting, I'll have to come to a meetup and let you lure me to
the cool side.

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wuest
The parallax effect on the final page was a nice touch.

This makes me want to visit Austria (and Vienna in particular) sometime soon.

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speeder
Whoa, the performance os that site is TERRIBLE, specially the parallax effect.

It almost asploded the Mac! Poor thing.

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finnp
It did crash my chrome tab..

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flyingbuttress
This thing needs some max-width action. It looks completely broken on my 27"
iMac.

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devsatish
Very slow and laggy..couldn't even read the text content properly.

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bakerfreak
what do you mean with couldn't even read the text content properly? did you
try to read it while scrolling?

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netrus
Public Transport was just a city map for me?

~~~
bakerfreak
sorry that's a known issue (sometimes when the page takes too long to load,
the pins get positioned wrongly. that's because the data is from an Open
Government Data plattform and they use another projection to save the data).
but this is how it should look like: [http://www.data.gv.at/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/storyvienna...](http://www.data.gv.at/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/storyvienna3.jpg)

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xmpir
Facebook sharing function seems broken...

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bakerfreak
what happened?

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xmpir
nothing... just loading...

