skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A friend bought a gigantic McMansion out by Concord for $600K

Can't do that anymore. Everything in Concord is over a million now. Same with Lexington & Carlisle. Bedford still has a few in the $600K range (our next-door neighbors bought their house for $615K, and the house across the street sold for $630K), but the bulk of the houses here are over a million too.

I'm amazed by the home price appreciation here. When I was a kid, in elementary & middle school, a cheap house was $60K, a pretty decent one was $200K, and you were rich if you had one that cost $400K. Now, $400K is the minimum to get anything in town, a decent house is $600K, and a McMansion is about $1.3M.
The CO2Stats calculation includes the contribution of client electricity use. In order to more accurately measure the time clients spend on a given CO2Stats-powered page, it's necessary to have the client infrequently check in.
Why is S3 different? "My data is on other people's machines" is still the case there. Encrypt it before you send out the blocks, and you're exactly where S3 is.
One of my co-workers types with his two pointer fingers and I'm sure he hits at least 80 wpm if not more. He looks at the keys on occasion, but he mostly does not need to. However, I get the impression his error rate is quite high.

All that being said, I think he could type even faster if he just bit the bullet and learned to touch type. This is why Steve is right. You might be a pretty fast typer already, but you can probably be a lot faster using all your fingers instead of just two.
Three-word summary: learn to type.
I love these kinds of retorts-to-the retorts. Let's start.

1. Yeah, he didn't miss the point though. Better weather means people take good weather for granted, and don't get all gah-gah about it. The keep working, even on sunny days. Californians on the beach? Sure, there are a few, but mostly in the dreams of people who don't live here.

2. The claim was that there are lots of better people. You're right, they aren't automatically better (did he say that?). But there certainly are a lot of great ones, who didn't get that way automatically, but did so with training and experience and exposure.

3. More options is generally not a bad thing. Someone even won a Nobel prize for showing that to be true. Who are we to argue with a Nobel prize winner?

4. Exit is an option. Again, options are good. Where did the guy say you "need" an exit to be successful? I missed that part. Oh, and speaking of prettiest girls at the dance, in Silicon Valley, well, actually, never mind, but trust me, it is just a nice part of the country.

5. Again, I missed the part where she/he said it is the "only" place where a startup can be successful. Good board members can be found anywhere, but they can be found here more often, in greater numbers, through more contacts, with a greater diversity of interests. And teleconferencing works here, too!

6. It's in the Bay Area, which is actually kind of OK in terms of attracting people. Hope the link works. To be fair, it's not a picture of Silicon Valley proper, but of the Bay Area, of which Silicon Valley is a part:

http://flickr.com/photos/22779657@N00/1697466173/sizes/l/in/...
I guess mirroring the OP, I like this concept behind C02Stats, but I am very curious as to how this is precisely calculated (or even roughly estimated.) Do CO2Stats know the power grid the servers are on? How do they account for the disparity in power usage behind different systems (a mainframe != laptop)? Without having detailed knowledge of a building, how could they possibly know about air conditioning costs or other secondary electricity use (lights, etc)?
Seriously, go talk to some real people. You're way overestimating the average user. Many of them (cough my family cough) don't know the difference between Windows and Office. Many of them don't understand that the internet doesnt consist of that big blue 'e'. Etc. They're not stupid, they just don't care.

Most people consider a computer a magic box. To them it's about as mysterious as the internal workings of a processor are to the average programmer. (Explain why you need to increase voltage as a processor shrinks, all other things being equal, for example. hint: it has to do with quantum effects.)

Also, banks not only give out the money that you stored, they don't even give it to employees. They invest it in loans and such. -- in other words, they give it to complete strangers who they suspect have a good chance of bringing it back with a bit extra.
Django-CMS - The new CMS for Django
Hey CO2Stats - A couple questions for you:

How do you account for different monitor sizes, types and brands and poor wasteful electricity in older buildings?

Thanks!
So he would have made shitty overproduced garbage with GarageBand on his MacBook Pro? I hope not
I sit at a terminal for more than 8 hours a day, but I do things other than program.

There are times when I have done productive work for 20 hours straight, but most of the time I do about 4-6 hours of work.
Joel also adds a little later, "Don't bother writing in, I will just commit suicide."

Anyone else writing him a letter now?
Ask HN: What was that Elaborate Prank by Scott Adams?
I was telling a friend of mine this evening about this elaborate joke that Scott Adams played on some bay area company. He came in as a "management consultant" for a senior staff meeting at a high tech firm. As I remember, he proceeded to tell them all sorts of off-the-wall things just to see how much they would swallow. The boss was video taping it all.

My friend asked for a reference, and I can't seem to find it on Google.

Anybody else remember this?
Congratulations, Shawn! Taking the first step is huge, and you're on your way.
Agreed. When was the last time Joel wrote about programming? I don't think he ever has -- he just writes about demanding that your boss buy you an expensive chair. I hate to tell you, but the way you get good at programming is by programming, not reading feel-good essays about how great you are. (I have a cheap IKEA chair. I like it.)

Jeff occasionally has programming content on his blog, but he doesn't offer much insight. The most intelligent thing I heard him say was "XSS is bad, escape user data when embedding it in HTML!" A good message, but one that everyone should have heard about 10 years ago.

This is not the kind of stuff the elite read. LtU is.
Leave the code for a while, go back home have a rest, dinner, few beers.

Come back tomorrow and sort it...
Loopt CEO discusses future of mapping on cellphones
Nice article. I'm still surprised that institutional investors were fooled, even despite the Bberg story- that's the kind of thing a portfolio manager might react to quickly, but also get some color from a broker or specialist who handles UAL's stock.
Photoshop completely obscures the base reality of the medium of hypertext -- the document -- and directs all the focus onto surface concerns. I find that if you start by building pages like it's 1994 (but with div+span & class+id), and thinking about how to logically structure your document, the CSS can slowly fall into place iteratively.

Photoshop has all sorts of clever tools for pixel-perfection, and it's very easy to go overboard. The biggest problem is the easy delusion that the mockup is the object being designed, and the subsequent divorce from reality.

That's why I believe that if you're going to do anything outside a text-editor/browser/inspector, it should be in an unreal medium: dry-erase, crayons, cut-out construction paper, post-its, watercolors, FINGERPAINTS!
I think he means looking at the keyboard as he types. I can see how that can help a person type faster, makes sense to me.
Your Metabolic Bank Account
“The Delta plantation owners cut a deal with the draft board, and we [African-Americans] got only partial basic training, served a few months, and went back to work on the plantation,”

I didn't know that, and I usually keep up with that sort of thing. Plowmen dig my earth, I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vWL8jAWbP8
Umm, nice rationalization. But that's 2000 lines of debugged, documented code. It takes a lot more typing than just 2000 x 80 characters. The article basically describes why.

Plus he's not talking about "average."
How to get people talking about your product
Replacing regulation with legal action is absurd. Instead of providing a positive legal framework that a company can adhere to, companies have to live in fear of unlikely but enormously expensive legal retribution. While the idea of as few laws and regulations as possible is very appealing - I don't see any reason to hold laws above regulation.
Or (I can't speak for him, but this is what I took away from it) is that he doesn't believe in test driven development. For what it's worth, I think elements of it are nice, but it's often taken too far.
A Theory of Change
I think the "Shareholder Democracy" point is very interesting. Perhaps there is a startup idea here.
I don't follow. The FCC making up rules as it sees fit is somehow better than a body of legal precedent and perhaps some fixed legislation?
'Water bears' are first animal to survive space vacuum
OiNK Torrent Uploaders Charged with Copyright Infringement
Basecamp gets 220,568 comments in 48 hours of feature launch
My typing speed is about 75 wpm, which probably sucks by HN standards. I don't type nearly as fast as I think.

When I'm writing Java code, I find that my typing speed is often a bottleneck. In Ocaml or Lisp, it never is.
What do you think the chances are that Google will be the dominant search engine 20 years from now?
Do you include the CO2 stats overhead (the pinging, etc) in your calculations for neutralizing?
I enjoyed that article, and its important to note that "snark" has a long and generally successful history. They used to call it "wit" and many writers built a career around it. In the workplace, wit is often a way to rail against pointless mind-numbing hierarchies without actually assaulting anyone ;-)
That is an inspiring move. Best of luck to you.
Ah, I meant more as in, if I were to keep stormpulse.com open all the time, would it automatically refresh and update and such?
more appropriate title: "i'm in, baby"
It's pretty lofty to make any tech claims 20 years in advance. I will say that I have seen Google play their cards intelligently and also, more significantly, learn from their mistakes many a time. I'll conclude that I would not be too surprised if they were still at the top.
If Steve Yegge typed slower, I wouldn't have to read as much.
"Why is this even a question?"

Because not everyone is a physicist.
Video tour of the Large Hadron Collider
I was actually thinking of "touch typing" as being the standard method that is taught in schools and typing classes - put your fingers on the home row to begin and use all eight fingers to type.

I type by mainly using two fingers, with occasional pinkie and middle finger use. I also use my thumbs for the spacebar sometimes.

If you define "touch typing" as not having to look at the keyboard, then I guess I do touch type and I apologize to the author. I was mostly taking offense to the idea that there is only one correct way to type.
I go by Andy Hertzfeld (Apple)'s credo: Your productivity can be measured in how many lines you REMOVE that week...

This is especially true with Lisp - you compact it down like one of those trash compactors.

[folklore.org]
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Definitely. Reading other people's code is great advice in the long term (like, Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" long term), but you generally need to put some real time into it before it becomes rewarding, so it generally isn't very helpful when a deadline or sudden bug is the problem.
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Except its 2 days later and still lots of typos. Though they seemed to have gone through and changed JS (which is what they had for Jason Calacanis's initials) to JC. Probably because he whined.
Federal Judge Finds Microsoft Guilty
"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing."

—Philip Greenspun,
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2005/03/07/how-long-is-th...
If that machine creates a black hole, it will be the mass of two protons, and have an effect only on other objects within a length of a few protons. It will cease to exist within seconds, the only evidence being a slight change in the speed of protons passing nearby.
Typing is by far the most useful thing I learned in school.
Someone on slashdot wanted another old article to rise up in forums.

Yesterday's drop in UAL stocks, then followed by GOOG drop all because Google's news bot noticed the old story since it had been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper.

Then there was no date stamp on the news article.

This article might rise the temperature.
Bad "most popular" algorithm led to United Airline's stock collapsing.
Very awesome - best of luck to you on your journey!
Really? Not math and/or English?
Startup Fights Greenwashing With Data Sent to Your Phone
I can see his point, but most of my "typing" consists of pressing two or three keys, followed by M-/ so how much would it really help to touch-type?
Yammer Wins TechCrunch50
I'm kind of surprised by this. It's just Twitter on a private network. Thoughts?
good luck! persistence and hard work!
Our all in burn rate is roughly 3k per month in the Boston area. All else equal, in SF it'd be close to double that.
Yahoo Site Explorer
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think the business / enterprise world works that way with updates about what people are doing and all.

Maybe some companies will "claim" their names on the site, just to reserve their name.
I don't get it. No matter how you spin it Yammer is just a Twitter for businesses. Companies like GoodGuide and Swype were much more deserving of the grand prize.
Maybe I'm missing something -- if you're I/O-bound why would it matter whether you use epoll() vs poll() other than CPU usage?

From what I understand (and how I've used it in my work), one uses epoll() specifically because they're NOT I/O-bound and so need to come up with strategies for using the minimum amount of CPU and RAM per simultaneous I/O so as to avoid becoming CPU- or RAM- bound.

Hence my original point -- if one is I/O-bound while using poll(), it doesn't really matter whether the CPU is spinning on that or epoll(), since I/O won't happen any faster.
I'm a two-fingers-and-a-thumb, look-at-the-keyboard, what's-the-home-row? typer, and I can still hit 70+ on a bad day. Still not sure what that has to do with 1) my ability to code, 2) my ability to communicate.
Release early and iterate, stay hanging around here, don't be afraid of negative feedback. And don't give up!
Good luck!

(also, thanks for using Dropbox...)
I find that when I'm doing Java, I'm not thinking or typing as much as I am hitting ctrl-space for the IDE to autocomplete superLongMethodNamesFactoryStubHome().

In Ruby, it seems I think and type in equal parts.
I don't do the home row touch-typing stuff, either. Nothing formally taught, all organically grown typing from using computers since I was a teenager. I'm typically in the range of 80-100 wpm depending on the test.

Primarily only using the index fingers, thumbs for shift keys, spaces and sometimes the other fingers will hit keys in the farthest reaches, depending on what the index fingers are doing.

It's kinda neat-- I discovered I type different words differently. For example, if I type "provide" my left hand index finger hits the "v", but in "forever", my right hand index finger does. Not a beat skipped-- they just do it.

I think typing with fewer fingers does put a maximum on my typing speed, but I'm perfectly comfortable with ~100 wpm.

This site says I type about 93wpm at top speed: http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php
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Here's the list of finalists:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/10/yammer-takes-techcrunch...
Fuck yes. Congrats man and keep us all posted. If you have a beta, please sign me up: dan[at]ticketstumbler[dot]com.

Friday is going to be one of the best days in your life.
Inspect the data that their "complex heuristics"-based widget sends back about the client. I'm positive that you'll be pleasantly surprised at the breadth of information.... or, it sends nearly nothing. And nothing of relevance to actual consumption. But c'mon, CO2Stats is totally legit, guys... really...
Congrats, and good luck! The road begins now...
I had typing class in 6th grade. So I'll restate it as the most useful thing I learned in school, from 6th grade on.
I don't think the idea's all that bad. A friend of mine in the Berlin scene recently suggested something similar and I do in fact notice myself using Twitter these days to keep our 2.0-ish-customers and co-founder appraised of what I'm working on.
Creating a killer appendix for your VC pitch deck
someone mention what his startup is for noobs? (good luck!)
A Stock-Killer Fueled by Algorithm After Algorithm
"... Yeev noticed that one of the electives, surely placed there by mistake, was Typing. Like, on a typewriter ..."

What an elective? Mine was compulsory complete with manual typewriters and battle-axe teacher. One thing I do miss about those old clunkers was the solid feel the keys had. You had to learn to position your index fingers at 'F' and 'J' remember where each key was positioned and hit hard. So letters like 'P' and 'q' required a greater force than say 'v' or 'n' (because my index fingers are stronger than pinkies). Keyboards these days have no resistance so typing fast leads to random hits.

What's the most solid keyboard you have used?
Congratulations. Truly.

You've chosen to actually do instead of just pipe-dream, and you're taking a huge risk all for the reward of working on something you actually love doing. This is what life is all about.

Even if this attempt fails, you've already won.
But Chris, you left us hanging at the end your your blog entry. What was your reply? It was snarky, right?
Shawn, welcome to a rewarding , frustrating, jaw-dropping, wonderful, scary, awesome part of your life. Taking risks may be risky but the alternative is to never know what might have happened... looking back I feel worse about the chances I didn't take, than the chances I did take.
Good luck man, and congrats on meeting your goal!
Please come back and let us know how you're doing, we'd love to continue to inspire someone who's living a dream
Sweet, congratulations!

Remember to have a backup plan. You will appear smarter to corporates, once you are outside, but don't burn bridges.

Good Luck with your plans! (I just did the same thing, but, at least my wife is still working)
I saw the title and thought it was someone bitching about HN content going downhill and leaving the site and was ready to tell you good riddence, but the actual post was a welcome alternative. Good luck!

I still remember the drive home on a Friday when I left for the last time -- an inexplicable feeling. When I pulled the pin about eight years ago I had about $25K put aside and it went a lot faster than I thought it would!!!

Either way, you're in for a wild ride. Enjoy it!!!
What's wrong with being "just" something?

When Twitter launched people said it was "just" a place for people to post what they're eating and that it wasn't nearly as worthy as feature rich services that had come first (Upoc and Dodgeball).
B.B King is one of the few celebrities I would actually really like to meet.
I thought I heard the idea for CO2stats somewhere before...

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

Oh yeah, that's it.
Haha :)
I ended up writing the blog entry, and by the time I was done, my snarky inspiration had somehow transformed into something resembling diplomacy.
It seems so obvious, yet Twitter has been around for a several years now and no one has done it yet.

I do think there were other "cooler" companies, but this could be huge. Right now Twitter mostly consists of a relatively small group of web/tech people. Just like what happened with Facebook and colleges, if Yammer gets critical mass in a few big companies, it could explode.
"Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt."
"Tribune said it asked Google to stop using Google to crawl newspaper Web sites but Google continued to do so."

Wait, really? I find this disingenuous to say the least, coming from the same Tribune company that created a skunkworks project six months ago explicitly tasked with co-opting and "gaming" online communities of note (Digg, twitter, flickr and others.) They're desperate for pageviews. How many readers would they lose if the Googlebot actually kept out?

And can't they just block it out with a robot.txt file?
LHC Rap (straight from CERN)
The Psychophysiology of Fear
In India, the cost of sending a text message is 0.006 - 0.02 United States $ (0.30 - 1 Indian Rupees), depending on your plan. No charge for receiving a message.
Shawn - congrats. You'll never regret this decision.
Yammer Takes Top Prize At TechCrunch50
Maybe you should wait another day...its probably bad karma to do this on the anniversary of 9/11
Thank you

Edit: why is learning to type a dirty little secret?
Maybe for Starship Enterprise.
RubyConf Registration Open
There is no way they could account for the types and brands of the monitor, the efficiency of the individual computers, etc.

They also cannot make an accurate assumption about where the power is coming from because there is such a thing as an electric grid, which draws power from a variety of sources.

Furthermore, the calculations to determine what goes in to processing a page have to be almost comical. For example, if it was Google, one search request can take thousands of machines, not to mention all the crawling required to produce those pages. Good luck getting that information.

There are so many holes that need to be filled here that their calculations cannot even be remotely accurate.

CO2Stats is bogus. I hope they don't charge anybody, because that would be fraud.

Perhaps they should publish their algorithm, to provide a little transparency and openness.
ya,lame- yammer not that new, just evidence that hey twitter for corporate could be cool
Stop! Yammer time: http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/yammer-time/