jblochjohnson

What makes Hacker News cool is that the link is to the actual ruling, which is far more interesting than the articles about this I've seen so far. If you just glanced at the headline, I suggest you dig in...

As one of the founders involved (from Reducify), it would be great to get some feedback from the HN community on our startups!

This seems like a good first step, and I've been looking for a way to get into C. I'll check it out...

I would be tempted to agree; I've wanted at times to go and learn C, so I can know what my Ruby is really written in; but there's always more complexity underneath; I could and should learn how computers themselves work, but there will come a time when I will need to, and for now there's only so much time. Put quickly, I'm using a magical black box to type to you right now, and if I started from the beginning, I'd never have the time to use it.

It's funny to read this, 'cause in many ways I started programming (flailingly) with Ruby/Rails, and then worked backwards from there. I read Peter Cooper's Ruby for Beginners book, which ended with a little Rails, and then I read some HTML. I didn't know a lick about JavaScript for a while, and so there were all these Rails helpers and shortcuts, and they were a complete mystery! Rails has so much "magic" to it that I often found myself confronted by problems that I could not understand, because I was at a level too abstracted to really know what was happening. In an odd way, though, it was really helpful – it was like walking around in a giant robot suit, being able to make greater strides than I really should have been able to on my own strength, and then having it break down from time to time and forced to understand pieces of the nitty gritty. Eventually it broke down so much that I had to do a lot of the background reading I should have done from the start; but what's nice is that I could never imagine coding a project of any sort without some sort of strict organizational system like Rails'.

Go to a meetup for your language/area of expertise. I've found that having a network of other people with similar skills can often lead to people passing on job offers they don't have time for, which is a job for you!

Also, set up an RSS feed on a Craigslist search (check out the bottom right hand corner of the screen), and pounce pounce pounce.

Are you on Mac? I LOVE OmniPlan.

Wow, thanks for the thoughts, everyone! This might totally change how our company goes about its business – rather than three coders who try to think about market on the side, we'll be two coders being driven by someone actively interacting with the market and learning from it. I'll let you know how it goes 3 months out or so...

It sounds like all these jobs are things we can and should be doing ourselves. It sounds like a full time person once the product is "done" AND there's an opportunity for much larger growth if we were more widely known, THEN it might make sense to bring someone on.

I think we really have two options: find someone like this, or have one of our team become that person. This sounds like a good starting recipe if one of us wants to become that person themselves – Sean Ellis seems pretty awesome!

We've already got the front-end guy on our team getting a little SEO obsessed, so hurray! I think the big question was if it was worthwhile to have someone not completely mired in the coding who was working full time on customer acquisition/evaluation; it looks like based on what everyone is saying, that IS the CEO's job. Hey, good news for us – we like trying to do everything ourselves!

This sounds like awesome advice. We should be able to cover all these roles – in particular, the CEO should be doing the PM role as his main gig. Some of the engineers are already starting to get into the science behind the SEO/AdWords stuff, so I imagine that we'll be inclined to keep some MBA's hands off of it :). PR feels like it will be easy for us – we've gotten some press attention already, and in our space as long as something is an awesome product, then it can get at least some attention.

Thanks tptacek! You might have just saved us a lot of money/time/disconnectedness from our users...

It appears that the survey button at the bottom is broken...like our hearts will be? jk

Man, taucloud is at least two times cooler than this.

(also the creator of most music you remember from Warner Bros. cartoons, and inventor of the electronium, a totally analog machine that composed its own tunes, customizable by the "performer")

Somewhere Raymond Scott is smiling

Thank you; this is quite useful, and it confirms some of the same feedback we've been getting from other sources. We will definitely start a new iteration of this page using these ideas. At the very least, we can figure out a way of setting of our goal such that the instinctively "best" value is unattainable. And we will try to keep pillaging to a minimum...

We're open to suggestions for a better sixth question. Right you are, the beef one was suggested to us by a vegan, who pointed to some articles suggesting that red meat was a major cause of global warming. Our research hasn't confirmed this, and that is obviously coming through in the survey.

I should mention that the main emissions issues with cows that we are aware of are from methane and nitrous oxide. The former comes both from the cow itself and its manure; the latter from its manure and from the fertilizer used to make its food. There's some issue with CO2 and land use changes (e.g. cutting down forest for cows to graze), but that's not as big. Methane and nitrous oxide are 20 and 300 or so times as strong greenhouse gas as CO2 on a 100-year time scale. However, we clearly didn't find it to be nearly as significant as the other categories.

We wanted to include some question about a type of consumption that wasn't about home energy or transportation, because a significant part of one's emissions does come from the supply chains that lead to one's purchases. It may be that there is no one question that would be very useful in this regard. Perhaps we should ask something about which car you drive, or something else to help refine one of the already mentioned questions.

I'm optimistic about our ability to develop technology that addresses climate change, and perhaps some sort of function based on increased efficiency (or the development of new technologies altogether) should be introduced – some sort of constant growth of technological breakthroughs. That's a legitimate criticism.

However, I take issue with the idea that people shouldn't try to dial back (or change) their consumption now to deal with the issue. Until someone invents that car (very low emissions energy, for instance), we still have the horseshit piling up, and there's no guarantee the car will be invented any time soon. I don't want to simply sit around watching it accumulate until someone invents a car, especially when its accumulation could potentially have large negative effects that would be hard to undo (a whole other technological problem).

We do want to help introduce people to these technologies as they emerge (reduce your load of horsecrap, drive a car!) – we just also want to allow people to try to deal with the problem with the tools at their disposal.

PS: Our site is written mostly in slide rule.

Just wanted to add that we've updated three figures for average consumption of Americans based on errors you guys pointed out:

- average electricity and natural gas use were mistakenly per capita rather than per household

- beef consumption didn't include beef eaten outside of the home

You're right – this is an error. We divided the average monthly bill by the number of people in the average household, which we needed to do; really the average is a little more than $100/month. Thank you for catching it!

1) That's a good point about beef – we hadn't realized that! 2) I can't find anything wrong with the airline methodology either (barring the fact that like everything else, there are assumptions that introduce a lot of uncertainty, like average flight speed). It does seem a little low, though...

Got to love the US Consumer Expenditure Survey...

Yeah, I don't think the current framework we use for helping people think about their impact is very good. It is not very motivating to show people a bad consequence even when they are obviously doing nothing to cause it. Even when it does show them a bad consequence, it is not one that will actually happen (considering that most of the world will not consume nearly as much as your average American, which is who our surveys' written for).

We're trying to find better frameworks, and one of the ones we've been considering is not to worry at all about talking about the size of our users' footprint, but rather to talk about the benefits of various types of changes in consumption if they were widely adopted. That way the negative situation presented isn't some confusing, oversized and hypothetical scenario, but simply the one we think is happening; and the benefits of one's changes aren't hypothetical, but potentially part of some larger (if unlikely) movement.

We're looking for the best way of presenting information about this issue and the benefits of actions people can take. If you or anyone reading this have any ideas about you'd want to see someone do this, we'd love to hear them.

This is because of two things; the first is what Aditya pointed out (emissions from the past continuing to have an impact) and the second is that because we were only working with 6 questions, we didn't have room to address some areas of consumption (like most food, or goods and services in general), so we just assumed a basic amount of emissions for those categories.

EDIT: tl; dr: the people who made this want you know it isn't ready for prime time.

Hey folks, Jonah here from the Almanac. Although Aditya very kindly published our survey, it's still rough as everyone here has pointed out. We assumed it wasn't going to be seen by too many people at this stage, but of course one should always be careful publishing information to the web, especially about something as contentious as global warming. However, given that it IS now out in the open, I might as well take this opportunity to respond to people's thoughts.

The main thing I would caution is that part of the point of this survey is how inadequate six questions is to cover a persons' footprint (thus that huge other). The main service we want to develop goes into a lot more detail about peoples' consumption, and will track this information automatically.

Thanks for digging these up. His tone and his arguments are two different things; I find his tone hard to take, but can any JS coders weigh in on his arguments?