skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the secret is that those who type slow are picking up speed by being hasty in their code decisions.

I'm skeptical, since far more development time is spent thinking about what to do than in banging out text to implement it.

And maybe some faster typists just emit more bad, buggy code.
Take that Chrome and your faster JS engine!
Awesome. I'm 2 months into the same process. It is full of ups and downs but infinitely more rewarding than where I was.

Except that I am still waiting to get my Dropbox account.
What Happened To The 4GL?
Biologists take evolution beyond Darwin
Meh. Whatever. If you learn online or learn by buying books or fall somewhere in the middle because you do both, you're still learning. Sometimes I just want something to read where I can read away from the damn computer under the sun. At the same time, there's a tonne of stuff online that will teach me the same thing. Who bloody cares where I learn it??? When I was earlier in my career, I spend a TONNE of money on books. Over the past few years, that's fallen to zero because there's a lot of information online. Recently, I started buying again just to change the pace. It really doesn't matter as long as the outcome is the same... which it is.
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So I IM'd my buddy to say hi, and tell him that the company he works at got props by Daniel from Digg at the D.Construct conference. "Oh I don't do Geni any more, I'm working on another startup called Yammer"

Isn't life funny. I guess some people thing he's doing well. :)
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Mobile Industry Discovers It's the Software, Stupid
Wrong. "But we’re only human, and there are only three of us — and exactly one full time person (me)."

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/stack-overflow-private...

Atwood was on it fulltime. Even with one guy, I'd expect it to take no more than 3-4 weeks to finish all the features that their beta site has right now, minus the site design.
I always assumed he was referring to complicated ad-hoc queries that involve all kinds of joins and so forth.

If I understand you correctly, yes, typing "select ... from ... where id = ..." would get old very fast.
snark ≠ wit

snark includes a snide/smug element; wit rarely does
Atwood was on it fulltime. Do you really need more than 1 fulltime "rock star" coder and a part time designer to get that type of site finished?
This is nothing new; it happens all the time, though usually with smaller companies. It's quite illegal, of course.
Eating Our Way to Death, Literally
Math.random()

I don't think the numbers matter. It's just a badge to say "We're green" isn't it?
Seems like it's leveraging off the current "CO2 is evil" fad.
A Mars Odyssey » Blog Archive » The Search for the God-Particle
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Fun with Procs in Ruby 1.9
Strange how no one seemed to care how much money the War in Iraq would cost

I cared; I think it's an absurd waste of money. I think all forms of governmental spending need justification. That's what fiscal responsibility is about.
programming takes place in the mind of the programmer, typing on the screen is a byproduct

As he says in the article, the actual programming is not what requires much typing. It's communicating with others on IRC (or e-mail, whatever you kids use these days), typing documentation, writing blog posts, etc. that require typing skills.

I will agree with him on this. I don't type much when actually programming, but I do type a lot when talking with people on IRC (including co-workers, since we all work from home) and writing documentation. And writing HN comments :)
I learned something from this article; I can't touch-type numbers. After reading that part, I moved over to a friendly unused xterm and tried to type 65536. My head immediately began to bend down to gape at the keys. I tried not to look, but I couldn't do it.

Interestingly, I can type the symbols on the numbers just fine. (hello "world"). $here @are &some #sigils!
"Though never release half-baked cr@p. You have exactly one chance to make the initial splash, don't waste it."

This is absolutely not true! Release ANYTHING. A half baked product will provide you with required flexibility youll need when the market tells you what you really should be making.
The Happy Hacking Lite keyboard is nice and compact with a solid feel:

http://pfuca-store.stores.yahoo.net/haphackeylit1.html

Previously they also carried a "professional" model which featured blank keys. Not only was it "l33t", but it was supposed to improve your speed by forcing you to learn to touch type which of course is required for late night hacking sessions in the dark.

Finally, there is the classic carpal tunnel inducing IBM keyboard:

http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html
Remember that the set of "any programmer" is pretty big. It probably happens by not spending much time programming. Or by not noticing your bad habits.

I think most "kids" today can type pretty well because it's essential for IM-ing. I know that's how I learned to type quickly. Older people might not do much real-time communication, so they might not know how slow their ad-hoc typing is.
10 Startup Job Sites I've Been Using
It's not quite as bad as that. It's better to burn coal and buy a few trees than it is to just burn the coal, right?

While I don't think that carbon offsetting is going to solve any long-term problems, it is nice to plant some trees and have a bit more money poured into renewable energy research.

We're not going to see real change until we are out of coal and oil. Hopefully that will happen soon. (Yes, it will be painful. But the sooner the pain starts, the sooner it will be over with.)
Carriers begin to believe in data revenue, as Android’s puzzle pieces come together
The Problem of Scale (or: Why John at Tapulous is saying “Fuck the VCs”)
He should not try to hard so be funny. He is not succeeding, he's just drowing his point in superfluous words.
I don't think this is the issue. You could easily give each developer a Haskell module to flesh out, like:

foo :: Foo -> (Bar -> Baz) -> Quux
hello :: IO
this :: Is -> Starting -> To Get -> Boring

Arguably the restrictions they are bound to are much stricter than with Java.

But anyway, I don't think most Java programmers really "get" OO. So OO is not the reason they use Java -- there is something else. Probably a lot of marketing from Sun; constantly hearing about "certification" and whatnot makes the managers happy.
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VideoSurf demo nearly lives up to pre-show hype
Website Feedback :)

1. Alter typography, add a decent line height (maybe 1.6em?)
2. Background image is yeck. You'd be better off with a lighter grey than the current image.
3. Headings would look better without small-caps

Other than that, seams good! Still testing the app atm.
TechCrunch50 seems like a total farce.

s/50//.
You should cut your both arms then, so you won't have to suffer losing them should you become involved in an accident.
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Is this what online news has come to? (techmeme)
I have a great idea for a new startup! Imagine what it would be like if you could consolidate all the "has the world ended" and "is it christmas" sites into one personalized page. You could even share it with your friends. Personally, I know my friends would truly love me for the remainder of their existence if I gave them a few seconds heads-up on the world ending. "Wow, thanks jro@#$(&#3," they would say.

Anyway, can I have like $1_000_000 VC now? It's social!
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New L.A. company Yammer wins TechCrunch50
That is a different situation. It's not likely that I will ever lose my limbs. It is likely that we will run out of oil and coal some day, since we use a lot and there isn't a lot left.
"In China, text messages cost an average of 1.3 cents to send"

Pulled from:
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article419.html

I thought this line was a bit staggering "...the average cost of a text message is $0.10. Last year, mobile telephone operators pulled in $50 billion in revenues just from text messaging."

$50 billion, that's a nice racket!
Static Typing, Dynamic Language Performance, V8 and Tracing JITs
I can't see why business employees would want to use Yammer.

Because not Yammer-ing enough will look bad at your performance review. Ah, I love the corporate world.
You now have one. Check your e-mail. :)

Also, welcome to Hacker News.
> Just wait for there to be another option. Everyone will flood to this alternative

VoIP over Wimax and Wifi, with GSM as backup .. IM replacing SMS. The future is almost here, and I think a platform like Android will help it along.
I think you may be mistaken on ther enot being a lot of coal left:

"According to the widely accepted view, at current production levels proven coal reserves will last 155 years (this according to the World Coal Institute). The US Department of Energy (USDoE) projects annual global coal consumption to grow 2.5 per cent a year through 2030, by which time world consumption will be nearly double that of today."

From: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/29919

The article goes on to say that we probably don't have 155 years of coal reserves, but it should still last for some time now, unless the rate of usage sky rockets.
I can certainly agree with the first statement here.
But it'll run fast as lightning on Chrome!
So if a geo-ip lookup on my location (Which is extremely inaccurate) says I live near a coal station, you assume that I use that power and not power from some other source?
I'd expect it to take no more than 3-4 weeks to finish all the features

It's easy to "expect". It's hard to "do".
This is what I call "the Vegetarian's dilemma." Basically, you can't be a vegetarian (for moral reasons) and a capitalist, in the modern, western world, at the same time.

Say you shop at a store that sells meat. Your money helps them buy that meat, even if they make no money on the meat, as they can use it as a loss leader: they have your funding to fall back on. So you stop shopping there.

But, hold on, the employees at that shop get payed by the other customers there, right? Customers like, say, the baker and the landscaper that you use. So now you can't pay them either, as they'll go out and pay the shop, and then the shop will go out and buy meat.

Take it as far as it can go, and it's clear that you can't participate in a capitalist society that also contains immoral business transactions without rendering yourself immoral.
congratulations! The journey of a thousand miles starts with is one BOLD step! :)
have you tried pasting pg's essays inside your system? :)
quitting your day is foolish. income is income. you can always start your project on the side. now if you run low on cash you're going to have to waste time interviewing for jobs or begging for money. since you don't have a proof of concept, you're going to have a much harder time begging for money. at the least you should see if they'll let you stay on part-time (20 hrs/week or so), if not take you back full-time. get something working using your nights and weekends.
Unnecessary bloat for simple projects and inadequate for large ones (which will probably need domain specific code anyway). Does Django really need a CMS?
So Boston hasn't started to get pwned yet?

I can't till the housing market reverts to normal prices and all the people who drove it up get shredded. Manhattan has been slow to come around, but when it does, I'm expecting pure beauty.
I did two and a half months of that two years ago. Rented a private office and had all day every day to work on my idea.

Today I don't even know how those months just disappeared, except that I got nothing substantial done at all. I do remember a few 'small distractions' from an earlier client that needed 'a little' work done. Then there was the sleeping in and the internet procrastination. Oh, it was also really lonely and weird.

My advice is to be acutely aware of your opportunity and cease every second like your life depended on it. Plan which things you need to get done, with priorities and estimates. Also, try to have someone else involved in the effort, if only a couple of hired gun programmers. That's how I am going to play it when the next time rolls around (real soon now).
What about reading code? Isn't studying good, possibly open source, code more enlightening than drooling over hype filled blogs?
Thanks.

I left out the quotes.
Incidentally, Steve brought up an interesting topic. Musicians practice by playing fast, then slow, then medium. Fast, slow, medium. Over and over. That seems like a good way to write software.

You first try to implement your idea as quickly as possible, stopping to think only when necessary. The goal is to not spend too much time overthinking the implementation -- you want to find out if your idea is worth executing on.

If you decide that your idea isn't worth it, then you move on to your next one. Otherwise you take it slow, going back over your code and refactoring it. (I personally don't believe in "make one to throw away", but rather that it's possible to refactor an ugly design into a succinct one.) At this stage, you should meditate on the best way to accomplish your engineering goals. It will pay off in the long run to spend extra time here.

Then comes the final stage in your project's lifecycle: medium. The core structure of the design has solidified, and you need to add the flourishes that make software truly great. But you have to take your time to ensure that the codebase stays clean. At this point, the design of the various smaller subsystems should flow naturally from the architecture you decided on in the "slow" phase.

Repeat for each core feature.
the china study is not scientific. the major difference between the american diet and others is sugar intake.
I'm reminded of some K guy (Stevan Apter?) posting working code to the newsgroup from a WebTV. The language is that terse. 1 line of code == 1 page of explanations.
I agree with you. If your bottleneck in development is typing speed you're doing something terribly wrong.

If it's a "lines of code" contest, then sure, learn to type fast, but if it's about producing good concise code I don't think typing speed makes much difference. If you want to program enough, you'll naturally become fast enough.
Not looking at the keyboard as you type is important for secretaries who have to copy text off a hard copy. For a programmer I'd say it makes little difference.

But hey, don't let that get in the way of smug superiority.
Congratulations and good luck Shawn.
I'm on the same journey but two months behind you. Yet the end of the tunnel is in sight :)
Meet the Law Firm That Acts Like a Startup
It's amazing the amount of deference we pay to "authority".
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Speed not top priority - Microsoft on IE8
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No measurement of this type is ever going to be perfect. Do you think, because of that, that it's not even worth trying?
In many ways I find this article both interesting and scary.

The author suggests that Quinn Emmanuel are shaking up the legal practice, but their method seems like a corporate version of the ambulance chasers methodology.

A no win, no fee approach seems to make law both more accessible and less accessible at the same time. The problem is it moves the availability of lawyers from something based on need and cost, to something based on chances of winning. Winning a case doesn't necessarily imply the moral imperative.

That said since they are doing solely corporate law this is less of an issue with me, and I'm very happy to see someone disrupting the legal profession.

Like YC's free legal documents for A-funding this kind of thing is probably a step in the right direction to make the law more accessible to smaller companies.
Although I already had a computer I was taught to touch type "properly" on a typewriter. It really did take just a few weeks to get totally proficient and it's been handy ever since.

The only time I've managed to make a significant boost was when I bought a Das Keyboard. Not having any labels on my keys means I have learned to absolutely never peak at the keyboard. It's improved my speed overall, but especially with the number row.

I have known a lot of programmers who don't type fast. I don't think it's a massive impediment, but I do think there's a strong correlation between bad programming and lack of typing ability.

I don't think any of the people I personally know and consider uber programmers type really badly. Certainly could be though and I just haven't noticed.
yeah it does sound like ididwork but I can see why TC went crazy for Yammer. Yammer sold its self as a communication tool while ididwork sold itself as a sort of Rescue Time/punch card/productivity tool.

In the end Yammer looks fun while ididwork looks scary.
Digg's nickb
So your argument is that the human race will be wiped out in 155 years, so we don't need to worry?
I suspect there's not much more over what Django-admin provides already but I reckon it would be good for people to maintain their own simple site without having to do any programming.
I agree it's a good idea to get something going while still employed. I disagree it's "foolish" not to though. I think the #1 cause of failure for most startups is never taking a plunge at any point. I know too many people who have dreams that remain dreams for so long they're eventually forgotten. It can be really hard to do a good job on a side project if you're the kind of person who tends work really intensely on one thing at a time.

Better to take the risk (if you can) and have a real shot at success than always be waiting until "tomorrow". He's forcing himself to succeed or fail. People are capable of a lot when they don't have an easy out. How many successful companies were side projects? Maybe 5-10%? That's a damn low number if you realize how many people have side projects they wish they had the balls to turn into companies.

My big concern is that $15k just isn't that much cash. Unless you're living somewhere ridiculously cheap or rent free (parents) that's probably just a few months. Not enough to get the profitability for almost anyone. YC companies only work because they get 3-4 months free, can spend their own money after that, and have a really good shot at getting funding.

Hats off to you, Palish. Good luck.
Why the need for a non-GPL implementation? - Just curious, I'm not a GPL zealot
> Today I don't even know how those months just disappeared...

Could it be that you were a bit burned out? I know it used to take me about 2-3 months between contracts or jobs before I got relaxed and hungry enough to want to dive back into really hard work. A longer runway than 2.5 months is definitely a good idea if you're starting from ground zero.
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"the firm takes some cases on contingency"

The key word here is "some". Who knows what the real percentage is, and that is the number that correlates with bottom-feeder lawyers.
Is this firm really acting like a "startup"? I'd say they're just acting "different".

* 100+ partners at $3million in revenue each? Not exactly bootstrapping (though it sounds like they used to).

* Working late hours? I highly doubt that's any different than any other group of business litigation lawyers.

* Agressive approach? Again, it seems as if they are known as more aggressive since they only do litigation.

* T-shirts, jeans, Starbucks in the office? Sure, that's a startup stereotype now.

I would argue that they're a highly focused firm that's a bit relaxed in their actual office environment, and a bit more collaborative than their peers. I don't think that's exactly acting like a start-up.
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Welcome Shawn.
9. Read other people’s code - You want to be a better developer? Read code. Read bad code. Read good code. Read your code. Read my code. Code reading is a skill that many developers skimp on.

I have NEVER liked this advice. Why? I've never found it the least bit helpful. Either I didn't understand the code or it sucked so much, I was too ill to work the rest of the day. Better: find something cool (on the outside) and figure out how to code it yourself. Ask for help or suggestions if you need it.

Your advice is bad. Programming is like writing -- you get ideas from reading. Did you learn to write by "figuring things out", or did you learn to write from imitating what you've read?

Personally, I think the #1 problem with programmers is that they are afraid to read other people's code. They treat libraries like they are magic. They aren't, they're just like the code that your app is written in. Finally, if everyone else's code looks really different from yours, you are probably doing it wrong.

If you have time to blog, then your project isn't big enough. Code now, deploy, and blog later. Frankly, I don't want to read about your "adventures in development" until you're done and have something to say about your (completed) work.

But you have plenty of time to get 12000 karma here?
Kinesis advantage pro. The keys are placed very well, and require little movement to register. A small speaker goes off when it registers the stroke, so you know when you can stop pressing.
Am I alone in feeling that search is just about perfect as it is?

Aside from machine translation, all of these ideas strike me as solutions without problems. The mobility thing is a problem with mobile computing in general, not search. And the thing that searches for everything you say is.. frightening.
I love the title for this submission :) I wonder if Digg's top user is an alter ego of Kevin Rose.
Good luck.

See you in a few months.
i just realized that i may be a fast typist, but i use only 4 fingers. Left pinky for shift, ctrl,alt, left index for left letters, right middle finger for right letters, right thumb for space(sometimes left). I can type with a descent speed in two languages(English, Bulgarian) and i can even mix em and still type pretty fast. But i look at the keyboard pretty often and i my backspace key is the most clean one. This blog post has inspired me to just load KTouch and practice(KDE 4 came with a fast typing teacher, cool). I don't actually have a problem, because i make many mistakes, but i got really good at correcting them fast, so i still have a pretty good WPM count, haven't measured it, but its descent for a person who types a lot. I hope KTouch can help. After just 20 minutes with it i feel uncomfortable typing the way i used to, seems inefficient.