skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the last several talks I've given, I've printed all my slides and taped them up to the wall.

Then I rehearse the talk once with a marker and write notes as I work out the wording.

Then I walk through the talk with someone else in the room, more explaining the slides and the narrative than actually rehearsing, taking notes while I do that.

Then I collect my notes and practice from that.

I find actually rehearsing to be incredibly difficult (it's awkward, in the same way that narrating a screencast is awkward, but magnified), and while this isn't a perfect substitute, it's drastically better than just trying to write out everything I'm going to say, or, worse, just throwing slides together and hoping.
I think Facebook has touched the lives of a lot more people than Apple. My mom doesn't know what Apple is, but she has a Facebook account. Also, Apple products are expensive, Facebook is free.
Awesome advice.

Can I include this in my next post (about practicing)?
Agreed. I would rather have him come out and say it rather than him keep quiet about it and just doing it his way anyways.
Related HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1291520
I was waiting for an RPG to come onto Google Wave as hyped, but it seemed they all faded away.
> Russia has satellites in high orbit that carry nukes.

What? There is a treaty outlawing this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weapon#Orbital_weaponry
Job Hoppers Redux: An Employee’s Perspective
No cows, no French Toast, no methane, only oatmeal and carbon monoxide; an amusing article:

"“In this case, we expected to find methane not because of the presence of life, but because of the planet’s chemistry. This type of planet should have cooked up methane. It’s like dipping bread into beaten eggs, frying it, and getting oatmeal in the end,” said Joseph Harrington of the University of Central Florida, the principal investigator of the research.

Methane is present on our life-bearing planet, manufactured primarily by microbes living in cows and soaking in waterlogged rice fields. All of the giant planets in our solar system have methane too, despite their lack of cows."

What they expected for a planet of this type and at its temperature was a lot of methane and a little carbon monoxide, but they see the reverse.

Hmmm.
Not only did I not find Suster's arguments compelling, I found many of them mildly offensive (but then, I offend easily). My immediate reaction was to find the companies he was on the board of (not too many). Speaking as an employer, hiring in this market is dreadfully hard, and smugly advertising this kind of attitude towards candidates (and by extension employees) is... asinine, is the word.
I'm a massive information addict. The problem is that there are always things that need to be done.

I'm going to google information addiction now, see you in a week.
Would be cool I agree but I am waiting for some more features from Twitter API before I try and add that.

If you go to your lists and click 'load all', then go back to your following list, you will see labels next to everyone who is on a list - so you can quickly see who is not listed.
I am embracing it. I am trying to create a life that will allow me to gather information all day long and get paid to do it.
For the first 20 minutes this post had different title (much closer to the original one). No one has voted.

I thought of a little experiment and put on much more provocative title - and what do you know! It ended up on the main page few minutes later...
True , but then let the code talk , in this day and age of github and other social coding sites - show them what you got and if the employer has any sense he will hire you.
10 million retweets later, Apple is having to explain some third party application's deficiencies

How is it a "deficiency" in CloudApp? OS X guessing at whether to use the discrete or integrated GPU is a completely new feature in the new laptops, and the CloudApp developers would have had no way of knowing how they would have been affected.

"Waa, Apple killed my battery life when I run this application at boot!"

That's essentially correct.
I think your scale is off a bit. I'm not sure what "these far off galaxies" refers to, but according to this Wikipedia page:

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

all the local group galaxies are within 10 million light years of Earth.

For that matter, some of the "life is everywhere" theories assume many space-faring civilizations within our own Milky Way galaxy, which is only(!) about 100,000 light years across.
Wouldn't it still be worth it to be with a great girl for only a few months?
Why would the broker themselves even have to know? The point isn't that the shorter and their motives should be disclosed, it's that the long side has plenty of explanations for why the short side is short other than simply taking the other side of a risky bet.

The Goldman case isn't about whether or not they should have disclosed that the short had speculative motives. It's that they actively lied about who put the reference portfolio together and why.
tlianza: check your blog, it is showing me a page of spammy pharm links. I think your wordpress is compromised.
When I saw the you can "read books" to see examples that "In other worlds, North Korea's depiction of itself is strikingly close to, say, the American right wing's depiction of North Korea as a rogue state", I was curious which books those are.

By analogy, this is like writing up an essay "How 'Bob' sees himself, and why it matters", and concluding from your research that that poor sap Bob really does see himself as our US right-wingers do, and of course Bob is not around to confirm or deny the what is being claimed about how he thinks.

Opportunity for wary skepticism, yes?
Dear Facebook: let us define the relationships
Having to register staticexample.com instead of using static.example.com feels like there's some fundamental flaw in the browser model.

Is there a better fix that browsers and servers can start with now? Maybe in a year or so time, there will be no need for such kludges.
Thanks Mark. Commented on your post there.
> I agree that generalization from one instance is wrong. But you can't assume that every case is different because if you did that then science could not exists. If you would assume that each subsequent item would fall different way there would be no point in searching any universal law of falling.

Yes. But plural of anecdote is not data. How you use music is simply not good enough to base such a huge "theory" on.

> Namely: Music helps you the same way that glass of whiskey helps some doctor, cop or worker of printing press to deal with dull and stressful job. In my opinion it creates an illusion that it's beneficial for you, same way as you feel better after drinking coffee or alcohol.

This would assume that I need the constant distraction because my job is particularly dull or stressful, and I need the pleasure derived from music to be able to bear it. But how does it compute into your theory that 1) I don't need it to be music, or in any way pleasurable. Anything that contains more parseable data than the A/C hum is good enough -- when I still worked in an office, the constant background "chatter" was good enough to keep me sane. 2) This does not apply to me just at work, but on anything and everything I do. To take a very extreme example, I am not able to derive pleasure from sex without something keeping me distracted enough to stay in my mind.

> You get accustomed to music, listening to it makes your brain addicted to such stimuli and when you abstain from it you have trouble concentrating. That's why you have such trouble concentrating without music.Music gives you value. It only satisfies your addiction. You can argue same way that nicotine gives you value.

This assumes that what I want is music -- but this is not just true. I'm fine with anything I need to spend some thought on parsing. A lot of the distractions I commonly use to keep myself grounded are in fact in no way pleasurable.

Now you have been provided with more data, please update your theory. :)
Hi Dantheman, you are right. It's not a perfect analogy. There's not really any closer analogy, though. I state this later in the post, if you read through the whole thing (including saying "like a Ponzi scheme"):

"Yet, their value and growth continues because they
can use that money to grow their user-base more and assert
profitability (in this sense it's not quite entirely a ponzi scheme, but there is no closer idea). It's possible that they do not even realize that they are like a Ponzi scheme."

Moreover, I recognize that Facebook isn't necessarily doing this on purpose (whereas in a real ponzi scheme a competent accountant has to scheme willfully).

Nevertheless, I hope you agree that the positive feedback, the bubble effects, and the deceptive illusion of growth all have analogs to Facebook (if you assume the premise, of course).

I think you are right that I should have used "like a" Ponzi scheme throughout the post, but the writing and the point would have lost a lot of its effect in explaining that. The metaphor is better than the simile.

My main motivation was to make people think about the reality of Facebooks revenue. It may be less solid than social proof makes it seem.
I'm definitely not criticizing the developers. Developers are often pressured to release half-baked features for the sake of a PR push on a particular date.

However, I don't believe a company should be able to enjoy massive PR attention unless they've also delivered the product they've claimed.

As developers, we also shouldn't sell our own time short. Based on the comments here, the low quality of this release has cost several of us some hours/frustration hacking away on a broken platform.
So what are you arguing, exactly? If Paulson had to approve it, and it wouldn't have existed otherwise, how could Goldman possibly represent it as being independently selected by ACA and not be guilty of fraud?
One of the quiet secrets of the format war is that most people would have been perfectly content with DVD-9 in conjunction with the new codecs, even for 1080p HD.

Videophiles might have noticed a few things on long, action-packed movies, and a new format isn't all bad anyhow (I'd love a BD-burner for some backup stuff that is getting annoying on DVD-5, oh look, DVD-9 media is getting reasonably priced), but the Great and Terrible Need for a new optical format was somewhat oversold. 9GB really is a lot of data.
Of course aliens could do that, but would they? The evidence so far says that humans in possession of a superweapon, at least, don't annihilate one another simply because of the possible threat of superweapon acquisition posed by the other - otherwise we would have annihilated the Russians and/or Chinese in the 40s and early 50s.

At any rate one would think that aliens would at least understand the concept of mutually assured destruction and realize that we would not destroy them if they were capable of retaliating in kind...
Ask HN: Page Load Time Feature 
Mashable has a nifty feature where all the images don't load when you log on. Instead, they load up one by one when you scroll down, significantly speeding up the page load time. How do they do this?
Don’t believe the hype on GM’s loan repayment
Manipulating images in PHP
In a knowledge worker economy the workers own the means of production. In effect, the factory walks out the door when they do. The only way to prevent it is to make sure the knowledge is shared very well among all workers, no one person is a gatekeeper, code is well maintained and high quality, and firing anyone who purposefully tries to "own" the knowledge before they can own it. That's the only way I've found to make sure the factory stays at your company.

It also means that you have to now treat programmers as the "talent" and not the "workers". Think movie star not factory worker and you'll do a lot better. It may seem retarded, but if you want smart creative people to work for you then treat them like smart creative people. Not like a rivet puncher at a factory.
Hi Mark,

Your follow piece is very helpful.

> " If I’m looking at a stack of resumes and have to quickly whittle them down I usually eliminate resumes where people switched too many times and didn’t have a single place that they stayed for 3+ years "

Is a lot more reasonable than the original title (when I see it with people), especially when applied to those ten or fifteen years into their current career (edit: originally I said "30+", but then I realized age is an illegal question and that there may be people who switched careers at a later age e.g., by going back to college for a CS degree at 25).

> Again, this is totally fine. I recommend to people that you put on your resume the reason that you changed jobs.

It would make sense to do this for 6 month stints, but not for 18-36 month ones. One reason is that this question is already asked on most employment applications. It can be confirmed through a reference check (I am still surprised when companies don't do this prior to making an offer). Having reasons stated all over the resume can be perceived as excuses and as bad mouthing (in public, given that the resume is read by many and may be publicly posted) former employers (e.g., if one put down "insufficient challenge" or "inadequate compensation").

When hiring engineers, resume screening should be done by engineers (or at worst, engineering PMs). I know they will hate it, but remind them that they will hate working with bozos a lot more.

I can find a lot better heuristics: do they just list keywords, are there obviously technically inaccurate things, are descriptions full of "wank words" vs. concrete, measurable, achievements. Asking candidates to submit an answer to a _simple_ randomly chosen question along with the resume (e.g., "in C what's wrong with this code: int* foo (void) { int n = 3; return &n; }", posting puzzles (like Facebook does) or doing a "fizz buzz" test over Etherpad are much simpler filters.

If there are red flags on the resume (and I agree that lack of 3+ year stays ten years after the person has graduated college is a red flag), the place to address them is either right before an in-person interview (after a phone screen) or right after (before making an offer). It's the role of the hiring manager, team technical lead and company HR to do this.

As an engineer conducting an interview or a phone screen, I already have a tough issue on my hand: give a binary answer after only forty five minutes with the person; time spent asking about their life's story (other than asking them about specific projects) is better spent finding information that will help me tell me whether they're technical and cultural (in terms of their ability to communicate, passion for software engineering/computer science, etc...) fit for the position or not.
A cookie has a domain field, that applies to subdomains. So, eg, domain=example.com is used for static.example.com, but domain=www.example.com would not be. So the "solution" would be to not use the root domain for dynamic pages.
Cogent: "If you're a job hopper that will translate to how you view entrepreneurship." This is so off the mark it hurts my brain. Let me explain why.

As an entrepreneur there is one benefit that ranks above all others. Stability and a big paycheck definitely aren't it. It's a sense of ownership. It's a sense of owning your own destiny. I've talked to a bunch of other entrepreneurs and they share that feeling.

If you ask job hoppers why they left some of their jobs the story will be the opposite. They left because they weren't given enough ownership. They weren't included in vital decision making processes. When you have the ability to improve your workplace, you have no reason to hop jobs.

Most jobs don't actually give their employees this chance. They're filled with bureaucracy and ridiculous power struggles. That's exactly the opposite of the startup and entrepreneurship experience.

This really resonated with me. The most frustrating jobs for me, the ones that ended in me leaping for my life or being defenestrated, were the ones where I was under extreme pressure to deliver, but the schedule and spec were subject to capricious, unpredictable shifts out of my control. The ones where I had little say in the composition of my team or the methods we used to deliver results.

Ultimately, accountability for the outcome without the authority to manage the effort is about as frustrating as life can get.
compelling may have been a poor choice of words on my part. clearly, i felt strongly against his position to write about it. the filtering technique was what jumped out at me as plain wrong. not to mention the fact that it was coming from a completely polarized perspective. with all that said, i think i can see where he was going with his post. he's gotten a ton of shit from the community for it, which might have forced him to write his latest piece. have you seen this? : http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/25/job-hoppers-re...

what do you think about it?
Perhaps "easily categorizable" is the wrong way to put it. I suspect that there are lots of long tail demographics that are online, but still exceedingly hard to reach or market to unless you are an insider. In terms of groups that I am a part of, Facebook doesn't broaden my reach. It only acts as an address book. If Facebook advertising could effectively give access to a lot of insider's address books, I'm still not home free. I still have to figure out a message that will reach everyone without coming across intrusively.
From the abstract of the paper:

VMKit furthermore has performance comparable to the well established open source MREs Cacao, Apache Harmony and Mono, and is 1.2 to 3 times slower than JikesRVM on most of the DaCapo benchmarks

Going through VMKit to get improved JVM performance seems a little redundant.
You can use a Macbook in closed-lid mode to use only an external display. Also, if you open the lid afterwards, you can hit 'detect displays' to wake up the internal display. No reconnecting necessary.
I don't ever recall being influenced through Facebook by anyone I'm a fan of.
I subscribe to an ideology in which not drawing pictures of Muhammed is blasphemy. Who am I to say that my ideology trumps your rights?
I also read that having X11 running apparently switches to the discrete GPU. Now, I have no idea why it would do that (GLX extension?) but that kind of sucks given that I spend essentially 100% of my time in an xterm. (If anything, X11 graphics is so slow anyway that I don't see the point of ever switching to the discrete GPU for its sake.)

Really, Apple needs to fix this. If the application requires < x resources, or if the frame drawing time is < y, then stick with integrated graphics regardless of API used.
While I empathize with employers that loose good people quickly (< 2 years) I have the following thought: I own my own life. I don't have to stay in Toronto if I don't want to. I don't have to continue to take bullshit for a cheque. I can go off and become a resort hand in Tiji if I wanted to, this is Canada for goodness sake. I am FREE.

Unless I took a signing bonus, both the employer and myself put a lot of effort into bringing me on board. I don't remember getting a cheque for all the interviews I've gone to.

Suster can go ahead and self select for stayers, this is capitalism after all, but he is going to lose out at the margin. Someone can actually get a ton of work done in two years and really and the 10 year employees I've met are rarely rockstars in their field.
We have a client right now who is in the real estate sector; they ran ads leading people to a free guide which itself eventually leads them to the clients sales people. They had a home sell on the first couple of thousand of FB adspend (~10 days) and this way outperformed adsense.

YMMV for all of this stuff; I have often thought the same as this author with respect to adsense and other PPC.

What isn't figured into "many, many people who have" is their ability to make decent PPC ads, landing pages and other creative solutions to making clicks work for them...
Here's a screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-vote.png
This made my morning.
To be honest it would be nice if HN was less like Reddit.
Choice quote:

> I did describe this to Steve Jobs the night of the iPad introduction and he said “so it’s no big deal.

If Steven Jobs does not think that firing someone is 'a big deal' then he's a really lousy employer. Firing someone, especially when it is over an issue like this is always a big deal, even if only to the person fired, and you can't just make light of it like that.
How are you doing it? Care to elaborate?
Given, but he could at least learn a few basic steps, enough to get around the room. He'll also get the exposure to something new, which is most important (and probably what he's looking for).
If you see no evidence that Goldman lied, you're not paying attention. Haven't you read the complaint yet? There are emails between ACA and Goldman where Goldman specifically says Paulson's going to go long in the finished product.
The premise of _The Killing Star_ is that relativistic weapons wielded by star faring civilizations can make first strike the only viable opition. If you can't see them coming, and if they can wipe you out with the first strike, then there is no Mutual Assured Destruction. There's only a first mover advantage of apocalyptic proportions.

No warning + no survivors = no retaliation = no MAD.

Also, the historical evidence is that we've been dangerously close to nuclear war on too many occasions for comfort.
Well, 25GB BD-R blanks are going for around $2 a pop, so the format is still more expensive per MB than DVD-R. That will hopefully change by the end of this year. If you're only interested in using it for data, and don't care about the convenience of consolidation, you might do well to wait just a bit longer until the blanks and drives come down further in price.

That said, I've been getting great use out of my BluRay burner, and it's really done a lot to convince me to switch completely from buying DVD movies to buying BluRay, as I can now make backups and keep them protected.
Great idea, I want it at Penn State.

You should get data that links textbooks to courses. Then all you do is enter your current schedule. When you pick the next semester's classes, students get matched up.
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

– John Wanamaker
Michal is way cool. If you are interested in his manufacturing process take a look at: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/guerrilla_cnc1.html
I think he's gone from saying something asinine to something that is common sense. Everybody worries about people who never stay at jobs for longer than 12 months, accumulating long chains of short job tenures.

But that's not what he said. He said:

* Never hire job hoppers. Never.

* You don't have to be a lifer. 6 years is fine.

* If they've had 5 jobs of 2 years or less, buh bye [sic].

* If you're 30 and have had 6 jobs since college, you're probably disloyal, you don't have staying power, you're in it for yourself instead of the company.

Six years! 6-7 years may make sense for the Sr. Managers of Strategy Consulting at Accenture, but it's totally out of step with the industry we work in.

There's still no debate here.
It's a maintenance issue for the driver folks though. 2 OpenGL drivers with subtly different behavior and sets of bugs means at least twice as many headaches if you want to keep things looking the same.
To elaborate a bit, I did look into SimpleGeo for http://mopho.to but one of our biggest needs getting started was access to existing place data which GeoAPI has available right now. I've been keeping an eye on SimpleGeo for news about their upcoming market place where you can purchase data sets, but it's been a few months and it's still unclear when it will be available. I haven't done any comparative benchmarking yet since GeoAPI met our needs and SimpleGeo wasn't ready yet.
Um, how do you get rid of a rabid dog? I don't see how this comparison is helping resolve the issue at all.