skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue is probably staring at the keyboard while you type, rather than not touch-typing "properly". I learned to type exactly the same way, not quite proper, but at 80-100 wpm.

I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout about two years ago. Same speed, but it feels better -- much more time on the home row, for one thing. I think it's worth trying if you're interested, but it's your life. ABCD (http://www.gigliwood.com/abcd/abcd.html) was helpful (and funny). Just dive in, give it a month or so of normal typing. The first few days will be disorienting -- very old habits are being disrupted. (Also, you can switch back and forth once you're accustomed to it, but doing so initially will probably make learning much harder.)

It works quite well with Emacs, but hjkl navigation in vi becomes a bit awkward. (I tend to use Emacs on my own computers and vi on others' Qwerty-default systems, FWIW.)
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Sorry if I mistook you, I though it was just a post based on the title.
I agree with you that Yammer has the potential to be very huge. I'm not denying that. I'm just surprised with so many innovative minds making up the panel of judges that they didn't choose someone with more of an original idea. There's a great quote from the TechCrunch comments that says "Doesn't the Valley pride itself in innovation?"
"The designing never stops."
I don't think there's anything wrong with the "hybrid" approach. Obviously, some things take a lot longer to do in CSS/XHTML, so Photoshop is the best tool to use when brainstorming or comping for a client. But at some point it can become counterproductive trying to replicate all browser behavior in Photoshop, so I just "run with it" and deal with the detail in CSS/XHTML.
Good luck. I look forward to seeing what you build.
Be frugal, hope the best yet stay focused on the bottom-line. make money seek glory. Run fast and I wish you every success.
It's just an all-around upgrade to your personal ability. We all spend a lot of time at a computer. Why not try learning? The process of learning touch typing will make you better at two finger typing, if nothing else.

http://www.freetypinggame.net/
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3552142/Typing_of_the_Dead
You ever notice that whenever you walk into a 7/11 at 2am there's always at least one carton of orange juice there waiting for you, even if you've never been there before? I think you're missing the forest for the trees, so to speak.
It's incredible that this story had such a dramatic effect on UAL. This suggests a strategy:

1. Plant bad stories about large companies.
2. Buy put options and wait.
3. Profit!
As I understand it, most of the people involved weren't working on the site full time.
Good luck Shawn :) EXCELLENT move!!

PS: Hit me up on gtalk sometime.
Looks like a more sophisticated version of:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue...

Oh, and Backpack's status updates:

http://backpackit.com

I guess it's the packaging?
To be slightly more specific - they got 23,569 comments on TODO's/milestones (which was the new feature). About 10% of the total commenting. Still a good take-up rate though.
Every company I've worked at has used some form of IM to communicate. Not sure how yammer is better than IM.
All of this is very interesting to me. I've talked to my parents and family friends about computers, none of which are computer savvy at all, but I've yet to encounter anyone that thinks computers are a magic box, thinking that IE icon == internet, etc (even though they don't understand for example that the difference between the URL bar and the google search text box).

I guess it just shows just how little I understand of the "average" user (I'm glad I don't have to design applications for them).
Maybe they did ask and Google didn't respond because they figured any idiot knows about the robot.txt file. Of course they weren't expecting the idiocy of the Tribune's web admin.
Thanks. One more regarding certificates: My guess is that a certificate subsidizes the cost of more expensive clean energy so that it equals the cost of non-renewable energy.
Is this right?

Either way, very interesting business model. Best of luck!
I thought this was going to be a post about an old Seinfeld episode.
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Pushed out this feature today. Wanted some feedback and traffic from the community.
If cutting out boilerplate to sharpen focus on the actual code doesn't help make it easier to understand, then something is seriously wrong.

Part of writing good code, whether two pages of brilliance or twenty of gradual brilliance, is conveying intent in the human-readable parts. The parser doesn't care if all the functions have names like doTheNextThing() or french_onion_soup, but it would be a slap in the face to any future maintainers.

Choosing informative names and separating a program along clear conceptual boundaries can be a greater aid to understanding than any syntactic redundancies. Well-placed comments help smooth things over, particularly notes on why a particular approach was chosen. The names themselves should be able to convey what is going on in most cases.

(For distilled wisdom along those lines, see _Thinking Forth_ by Leo Brodie, also online at http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/.)
This sounds kind of like http://www.chatterous.com/ to me.
I remapped my Escape key to a more convenient place on my keyboard (it's a thumb key now); as a result, when I write Ruby code in TextMate, half of it appears virtually instantaneously. The downside? Sometimes accidentally pressing Escape when typing anywhere else. D'oh!
Interesting concept. What I don't understand is why as someone running a website I should offset the CO2 from my data center, my client's homes and the networks between them.
It frankly never occurred to me that any programmers wouldn't know how to touch-type. How does that happen?
Thanks, Mwerty! That's right, RECs function subsidize the difference between renewable/non-renewable sources.
"Yes, we do that"
They're protesting now, but that won't last long. They're protesting because it's new. In terms of functionality, this new version is a step above the original, and it's also managed to prevent clutter. That's exactly what Facebook needed. Or do people forget the constant complaints here after the original apps launched?

I don't get it, but people like attacking Facebook, solely because it does what it does superbly. They make very few false steps and they constantly fine-tune what they've got. I can't think of many online companies that do the same. And, for whatever reason, that irritates Silicon Valley a lot.
I understand what they are trying to do. But the sheer inaccuracy of what they provide clearly negates the supposed benefits.

Would you donate to a charity that mismanaged or wasted most of your money, if only just because donating to charities is good? Or wouldn't that mismanagement negate most of what is good about donating to that particular charity.

I'm sure the people behind CO2Stats are not stupid. So they must be aware of the shortcomings and limitations of their service. Yet they continue to run the service anyways, calling it accurate. That is dishonest.

(and no, questioning CO2Stats does not make me a conspiracy theorist)
I started hunt and peck typing at 5 (Apple //c represent!), and had evolved to a four finger lazy-look typing method by 7th grade typing class. I didn't start actually typing without looking at the keyboard until I purchased a factory defect keyboard from a computer fair when I was in 9th grade. This keyboard had no lettering ink on any of the keys. I remember my mom being in disbelief that I could look at her and type something else quickly at the same time.

Best $10 I ever spent.

Because I learned to type this way I have rather unconventional / poor form. My hands rarely center properly on the home row, I tend to use my middle fingers for the upper inside letters, and I don't always use the same fingers for the same keys (I type the first "e" in "letters" with my middle finger and the second with the proper finger).

One other positive side effect of that keyboard while I was exploring UNIX was that there was no value in looking at punctuation either, so I learned to touch type all punctuation, not just the secretary subset, at the same time.
TechCrunch50 isn't really a competition, it's a series of product demos. This is kind of like presenting the philosophies of different religions and then voting on which one is the "best". The whole thing is subjective and there is absolutely no need to declare a winner, especially when the market will ultimately decide. This is exactly why YCombinator doesn't have investors vote on which company "won" Demo Day. I pity our american idol society that always wants a panel of judges to tell them what to like.

As for Yammer itself, I'm thoroughly unimpressed. At the least they could have made it look different than twitter. They even copied the UI. There were so many companies doing truly innovative things... TechCrunch50 seems like a total farce.
I have an ancient Northgate with delicious feel. It's huge, and heavy, with some kind of mechanical switches that snick into place in the coolest way when you press a key. Feels like an IBM Selectric typwriter, if you remember those.

I haven't used it in years, since I now use laptops exclusively. I can't bear to get rid of it, though.
Yammer is far from the first enterprise twitter app. Oracle, IBM and now SAP all even have versions in some form or another, and Prologue, the wordpress based one, has been around for almost a year.
I'm very surprised. Fitbit was seriously the only one that I said to myself: "I really want that". And more importantly, I signed up to be emailed when it was out so I could _buy_ it.
Nothing wrong with wanting to prove a point. If pg hadn't said that single-founder companies rarely work, I probably wouldn't have decided to work on tarsnap.
I bet you will come to cherish that extra 951.10.

Congrats, and let me chime in that it is the best move you can make too. You only live once, it will be great regardless of how it turns out, all those things are true.
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I'm partial to most of the Apple Desktop Bus keyboards. That my nickname here is an Apple computer is correlative, not causative. :)

My favorite keyboard of all time is: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Apple_IIgs_Keyboa...

Its keys are wonderfully weighted, tactile without being obnoxiously loud, but it's not really practical these days as it doesn't have F keys and the ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdn set, and the arrows aren't in inverted-T form, which is annoying.

Otherwise I prefer laptop keyboards (50/50 between Dell's current-ish stuff and the traditional ThinkPad design). I'm more than happy to be more gentle in order to extend the life of my fingers and wrists.
Good luck palish :-)
I have flaged this, it does not belong on Hacker News.
http://web.mit.edu/jcb/humor/scott-adams-mgmt-consultant

I just googled for

scott adams 'management consultant'

and it came up as the top hit.
Good luck! This is the best decision you'll ever make!
I use Photoshop as my thinking tool. Designers think too, not just programmers. Designers don't just make things look pretty.
I just found epoll() much easier to work with than select() (been there, done that, rather not go back to it) or poll(), and the fact that you avoid scanning an array upon return.
I don't think Google really cares about the tiny percentage of people who use tools that reduce Google's ability to collect data or display ads. If Firefox started bundling the extensions referenced in the article by default, Google might get worried, but their business is about volume, not a few Firefox power users.
The LHC safety report (http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html) makes the good point that whatever LHC will do, Nature has already been doing for billions of years. Cosmic ray collisions have far higher energy, and over the lifetime of the Earth, about a million LHC lifetimes of interactions have taken place. Si if the Universe should be destroyed, Nature should have taken care of that by itself a long time ago.
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Congrats and good luck :)

I'll join you one of these days...
Talk all about the regulation and leave out the massive subsidies that were given to broadband providers to build out their networks...
IE6:IE7 :: MS Office:GDocs is not the best analogy. Lots of people stick with IE6 rather than go to IE7(or FF or Chrome or..) because, for what they do, IE6 is 'ok'. I'll hazard a guess that lots of average web users don't even care about tabs leave alone CSS implementation details. And so, IE6 is 'ok'.

One could argue that MS Office 'sucks' just by costing more than GDocs which is free. If Google wasn't so opaque about what their plan for GDocs is... maybe they should go at it more whole-heartedly and promote it and then see what happens.
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Hmmm. I want to hear from some great programmers who are often here on HN. Do you guys type quickly? Paul Graham and Patrick Collison, are you speed typists? How about Ryan Davis and Jey Kottalam? Suggest some more great hackers, too.
This: http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php tells me I type at about 55 wpm with about one error. Apparently this sucks. Damn it.
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"But the sheer inaccuracy of what they provide clearly negates the supposed benefits."

How? Do you understand what it is that they do?
Wow do I wish betting markets had that title as a wager.
So congratulations are in order! First off, kudos on the willpower to save $15k. That's no small feat. And secondly, remember this, for every low point there is an equal and opposite high point.

You are a complete idiot. You left a perfectly good job for the dream of a lifetime. Relish that every day from now on will be amazing. And possibly just a tad horrible.
Last year's mint was actually revolutionary, yammer seems like a twitter clone for a small niche...is this really the best company of the thousands of start ups that submitted? There must be really a lot of crap out there if this is the most innovative startup
Atlanta is not a city to consider.

I started to write an argument, but then I found someone already wrote it for me: http://blog.jeffhaynie.us/whats-wrong-with-the-atlanta-start...

Some other observations about non-The-Bay-Area places:

A: You don't have immediate access to important companies. The huge companies are largely open out here (minus Apple). You can go to a meetup, talk to people from Yahoo and Google about improvements to their products within reason then see your change show up fairly soon.

B: You don't have a large concentration of brilliant people. By large I don't mean a campus, but rather a 50 mile stretch of smart people working on projects and products the rest of the world consumes daily.

C: Your startup dinner doesn't cost $90 per person: http://startup2startup.com/

You can have all the YouTube meetups and ATDC events you want, but the next Google isn't going to decide "hey, let's base ourselves in Atlanta."

(Also, a Tweetup, Stammy? Really? Tweetup?)
You've already done the hardest part. Even if it doesn't work out, you've stepped up for what you believe in. Lots of people reading this wish they had the courage to do what you're doing.

Best of a luck,
a stranger
Be frugal and execute like a madman.

Godspeed.
Interesting use of Skitch - one of my favourite and most used apps.
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Congratulations!

(one of my favorite things about this community is that the appropriate response to "I quit my job" is "Congratulations!")
People pay them to offset the carbon footprint of their site. Except if they are paying them an amount based on an inaccurately calculated footprint, that's a problem.

If you wish to continue drinking the Kool-Aid, go ahead! It sure is tasty! But don't blame me when your teeth fall out.
Do you?

I think that's his point.
it's not about that form of communication though. IM is sustained communication. yammer is about "working on the login form problem, ticket #241" so all coworkers know what everyone is doing. it's not 1:1
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While I agree text message rates are absurd, we have an economy in shambles, a rapidly worsening energy issue, a very expensive war, and a large hadron collider defense system to build. Senator, please tell me you aren't wasting much of your time on text messaging rates.
Amen, brother. Proving once again the old adage that raw output doesn't amount to much by itself.
Startup success isn't about product innovation.

Google was yet another search engine. iPod was yet another MP3 player. Doing something better (or for the right audience) is often what it takes.

That being said.... I dunno if Yammer captures the motivation for USERS to "yam" (tweet?). I can see why people use twitter. I can see why businesses would want Yammer. But I can't see why business employees would want to use Yammer.
Good luck dude! I'll raise a drink to you this Friday!
"... It's huge, and heavy, with some kind of mechanical switches that snick into place in the coolest way when you press a key. Feels like an IBM Selectric typwriter, if you remember those ..."

My last IBM model died. The Selectric model was good. Big & heavy I used these in undergrad for creating camera ready artwork. Are the laptop keyboards you use any good?
Ah yeah that's Jeff's post. That caused some noise here, things are changing for the better after that post.

Don't hate on tweetups. Drinking beer with tech nerds is what it's all about right? I mean, what do you do after work?
I agree. I think that a lot of the people using IE6 are in corporate environments and they can't upgrade until senior management make the decision. When they do upgrade, I reckon the majority won't be to Chrome, but to IE7, as there will be too many corporate Intranet apps that will "just work" on IE7 but take extra time to get functioning on Chrome or Firefox. The risk and cost will be too high for them to change.
> Release early

Though never release half-baked cr@p. You have exactly one chance to make the initial splash, don't waste it.
"... I'm partial to most of the Apple Desktop Bus keyboards. ..."

I'm pretty tempted to look at Apple kb's next time my MS bendy board lucks out.

"... I prefer laptop keyboards (50/50 between Dell's current-ish stuff and the traditional ThinkPad design). ..."

What is about laptop kb's that's better?
While I'd agree with Lisp and Haskell, I not sure how SQL could be considered that dense. I often find myself frustrated that a split second thought takes so long to express as a query, and I type a decent 80wpm or so.
actually it sounds like ididwork to me
yes man, its goin to be one of your best days
I also have a 'modified style' when I use qwerty... via legacy of learning it on my own before being taught.

When I switched dvorak I figured I might as well do it right. As a side effect, my hands no longer hurt like they did with qwerty...
"but if you want public funding, you will have to put up with questions about whether this expenditure will actually make the world a better place for ordinary people."

Strange how no one seemed to care how much money the War in Iraq would cost, or whether spending that many trillions is justified, but 4 billion to do what is vital for our existence, that of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, needs justification.
Congrats I am now going on about a year and a half since quiting my job on less than what you have. I am sure you will find ways to make it work.

It is a great and crazy ride.
So, the Tribune put an undated story on their front page under "top stories" and blames Google for not figuring out that the story was old? How would a human even realize that, let alone a bot?

If accounts of the story are accurate then the only party that screwed up was the Tribune by a) using an absurdly naive "top story" algorithm and b) not dating their stories (pathetic for any site in this age, but a newspaper!?)
Careful, if you start comparing the spending for Iraq to pretty much anything, the opportunity cost of Iraq is enough to drive you insane. You can take some solace in the knowledge that even without Iraq, science would have been underfunded.

For the cost of Iraq we could have skipped a couple generations of particle accelerator. At this rate of Science funding it'll be 100 years until we build the planetary scale accelerator to test string theory.
Congratulations and good luck Shawn! It's incredible!
If you need to type that much, to where whether or not you can touch type matters . . . you are doing something wrong. Saying touch typing matters amounts to stating that programming is actually carried out ON THE SCREEN YOU ARE TYPING ON and I could not disagree with that more . . . programming takes place in the mind of the programmer, typing on the screen is a byproduct.

I can't wait to see how his argument holds up once we have brain to computer interfaces that allow us to skip typing altogether.
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"This fee helps AT&T recover costs associated with providing state-to-state and international long distance service, including expenses for national regulatory fees and programs, as well as connection and account servicing charges..."

It's a regulatory fee that AT&T gets hit with, so they pass it on to customers. Other than the fact that I'd prefer they absorb the cost, I don't see how it's unethical in any way.
Gratuitous cutesy terminology bothers me. As for what I do after work, I signed an NDA with myself so I can't talk about it.

But, Atlanta still can't compare to out here. You mention "things are changing for the better after that post," but one post can't change an entire region's attitudes and expectations about startups. Any change you've seen is a result of a localized echo chamber effect.

If you hang out with the right 20 people, change appears to be happening. The systemic issues of the region not understanding startups or being technologically inclined enough isn't fixable in any reasonable timeframe.

Of course, none of this matters if you go ahead and be successful anyway.
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Funny... I keep checking the site to see if it changes. I'll have to subscribe to the feed.
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Here's the Sun-Sentinel approved story:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/sfl-flzunited0909sbsep0...

Apparently, we're supposed to guess article dates by reading the copy or look at the dates on the comments. Nonetheless, they appear to be dating all of their stories now.