Since October 1st, 2017, more than 800 companies have moved their official address to outside of Catalunya. They tend to be larger firms. To be fair, a few have moved TO Catalunya during that same period.
Tourism bookings are down 20% on this time last year. Tourism is a significant part of the Catalan economy.
Real estate - too soo to tell. I think real estate prices probably trail events by some months.
I was in BCN a few days ago, and one year prior, as well. Everything seemed very normal, both in the touristic and non-touristic areas. The former was full of foreigners, just as it was a year ago. As for the latter area, I went to a large mall on the outskirts where seemingly only locals were, and it was also super full.
Around 1600 companies had left the area since 1 octobre. If i'm not wrong recession index are defined as two consecutive trimesters of economical decline, so we'll need to wait until June 2018 to answer correctly how (and if) this was affected the economy.
Lots of comments on here about the software, but I'm really fascinated by the hardware. Where did you get the conveyor belts and how much did they cost?
For the belt that lifts item up out of the hopper, I notice there's a little white hook (or platform, not sure what to call that) jutting out that does the actual lifting of the legos. How did you get the size of that right? Did you install that jutting-out part, or did it come pre-attached to the belt?
What tools are you using to make a computer do the actual belt rotation? I'm wondering how low-level it is - are you spinning the steppers directly or did the conveyor belts come with some kind of API? I'm guessing the belts don't have a USB port for easy control.
If you look closely at the belt you can see the traces of many failed experiments before I found a shape that worked without accidentally getting stuck on a part.
It is attached with super glue to the belt. I use the narrowest parts because that way it doesn't end up fighting with the curvature of the belt when it goes over the roller.
The belt rotation is done with a 3 phase AC motor hooked up to an inverter for the vertical belt, the camera belt is driven by a DC motor hooked up to a variable power supply.
So no steppers, that would have made life a bit easier because then I'd know (modulo some slippage) where the belt is positioned. So now I have to reconstruct that optically, hence the wavy line on the belt.
I studied a fair amount of NLP (a true passion of mine) at school and after I graduated I spent several months working on tech which did this (and other things). That was intended to be a startup, but sadly, at the time, my business sense sucked and I couldn't decide on a good product to fit the tech to (the fact that I was developing tech before I had a strong sense of my product is already telling).
I since have started a completely different (and profitable) company and the code has just been bit-rotting. I'm not sure what I should do with it. Keep it around in case I ever decide to do a business model like some of these companies (I probably don't have time for that)? Open source it (time-consuming to clean the code and what do I stand to gain from that)? I guess I could use the open-sourced stuff to help me find contracts for freelancing, but I just don't see a lot of NLP remote work being offered.
News article title extraction. News article relevant thumbnail extraction. News article text body extraction. Generating publicly traded stock symbols from business news articles. Some Techmeme-style document clustering.
I am working on a project (more of a public service than a startup) that needs this. I've looked through all of the resources linked in the articles above and nothing works as well as I need it to. The best performer is readability, so I will probably be going with the python port of that.
Currently in the middle of a re-architecture/re-write due to its flaws but something similar to this in Ruby I worked on last year: http://github.com/peterc/pismo
Decruft also has a couple bug fixes to python-readability. They both need a lot of work, though. You'll have to do some spelunking to figure out how to actually call the libraries correctly.
I found this article interesting, but I think the submission title might be guilty of "gratuitous editorial spin" as outlined in http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I wonder how frequently this will be updated. I notice several skyscrapers built over the past few months that aren't displayed yet (they only show the construction huts). So it's at least several months out of date.
This clearly has the most detail for zooming and browsing that I've seen, but for my day-to-day use I'll still be using map.sogou.com, which already has pretty good building and landmark decomposition, but has the best path-finder / ___location search of everyone in the market by far. I just made several queries on bj.o.cn that fell flat. For really hard-to-find places, I suspect I'll do my searching on sogou first, then pull up the closest landmark on o.cn and scroll over to where I want to be for a good visual description of where I'm going.
China has a huge public sector, a ton of money, and deplorable networking infrastructure. I think it has to do with the size of the country more than anything. Russia's probably not any better than the US either.
I run a b&m store and this is common behavior. A store re-arranges an existing product so that it looks a little different, puts it up as a premium product with a very high price and for limited-time only, then offers that item, and only that item, for a Groupon.
