skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best speaking tips?
I love public speaking -- whether it's a presentation or a speech.

I'm also always looking to get better.

What are your tips concerning public speaking? Do you have any specific tips concerning specific situational speaking, e.g., a presentation at a conference, or a sales presentation)?

The most helpful idea for me: Always remember you are only trying to communicate X to Y people. It stops you from rambling, and also allows you to explain X really well for Y group of people, a.k.a, laser focus.

Thanks in advance for your tips!
Just a blah-blah-blah.
Ten Key Elements Make a Startup a Risky Business
Would love it as well...
Very similar to Steve Gibson's Perfect Paper Passwords scheme: https://www.grc.com/ppp.htm I wrote a Java implementation for phones (http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/10/java-client-implementation-o...). This was my one and only foray into program for J2ME. I suspect that's something you only do once unless someone pays you a lot of money.
In Russia, programmers get the respect they deserve!
Outbound VC Dialing Programs. Total Disrespect for Entrepreneurs
Testing, testing...YouTube begins trial of new live streaming platform
A Web Developer Goes Native (with Android)
Don't even bother engaging him anymore, he's just regurgitating conspiracy theories that float around in right-wing circles as a way to explain their often public embarrassments.
Graph Your Inbox - Visualize your Gmail data over time
Sort a loaded question, I don't believe they alwasy do. I feel most of the time they spot things that are 'innovative' and either acquire or copy it. I tend to think that for something to be innovative it needs to also be well received. That requires good timing.

Google Wave was impressive technically, but the world wasn't interested. Google Instant search is impressive, but would you switch search engines for such a feature? Will you even see this feature during the day? I won't, because I never go to the Google homepage to search.
they're donating their apartments to random strangers... i think we can give them a pass on lazy web design.
One of the more alarming phenomena to come out of the internet is the idea that we will continue to pay the price for our youthful transgressions, now that they're all on permanent record.

It's more than a little ironic that the founder of the world's most prominent social network is himself subject to the same attack vector.
"How profound. How exactly does that differ from current exams!? K-12 students don't have once-in-a-lifetime exams - they have less monumental tests that already take the focus away from what school is for - learning - not assessing"

Many schools today have eliminated all tests for younger children. Think about this. No tests at all, IMO, cannot be a good thing.
Just to put a little more info in the post, Gemstone (acquired in May by VMWare's Springsource http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/06/spring_gemstone_futu...) put together GLASS (GemStone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, Smalltalk) as a service for Seaside deployment.
I was toying with an idea recently to build a CNC cutter for styrofoam, and paint them by hand. For miniature based FX shots. I built a 3-axis CNC recently with a friend to carve wood and plastics (for a hobby), I don't think a wire cutter would be much more difficult, but wire lathes would provide a challenge.

Also, camera rigs for miniature work and lighting rigs for those are kind of an art that is on a verge of extinction. Which is king of a shame, because I still think miniature work looks better than CG in most cases. Because CG, in almost every shot I've seen, looks like a miniature world.
> Everyone I know is fully aware of how some groups are treated in SA.

Nope. Most people will simply not get the nuances. I sincerely doubt (no offense) that you know anything about the situation (economic, cultural, etc...) of several groups.

By the way - getting the interview under false pretenses is still unethical.

But yeah, he is now branded as a racist.

> You see TDS as a news source, and are worried that its viewers take it as news.

TDS is an opinion former. What it does is presents a warped and highly subjective view of certain complex topics.

In any case, I guess that TDS is simply the result for a demand of such programs. Just like the dumbing down of CNN is because of demand factors.

People like their news like they like their fast food: Only the juicy bits and they don't care whether it is accurate or not.
I might be coming off as naive here, but the minute I saw this: "searching for a business model", I got my skepticism on.

Why is this startup searching for a business model? Shouldn't you start with that and build your company around it?

Again, apologies if this is a naive POV.
> Thousands of years of political satire (cartoons, opinion pieces) agree with you.

Fixed that for you.
I think you're correct. In this case though, the VP said he could, but proved he couldn't.
ITunes Instant Manifesto
Demystifying the TechCrunch effect
Cross posting reply from Forrst :)

Are you going to provide PostgreSQL access? If so, are you going to run a shared database? What about database quotas, are you solving it on a file system level?

Yes, PostgreSQL. Shared-only during the beta, then later we'll offer dedicated DB servers of various sizes.

Are you going to use mod_wsgi, nginx/gunicorn, or something else?

Nginx + one of gunicorn, uwsgi, or gevent. We're still evaluating the different options.

How are you building/scaling/deploying the presumably virtualized servers needed to host users apps? Puppet, Chef, Fabric, or something else? Are you running on EC2?

Fabric at the moment, but I hope to find some time to learn Puppet during the near future. And yeah, EC2 just like Heroku.

Will there be file system access or only read-only access like Heroku?

Read-only, like Heroku. It's safer and not too difficult to work around in your apps.

How will you compete with djangy.com and other services which are in the works? (you already seem to have an advantage by not running in debug mode....: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1617691 )

We're not focusing on Django-specific deployment -- we're going for a broader target by offering WSGI hosting (which includes Django, of course).

And we have a kick-ass designer to make our user interface and documentation look good. UI matters.

How are you going to handle mail delivery? Through a third party over HTTP?

We're not touching email at all. If you want to send email, use Postmark. To get email, set your MX records to some mail host (like Google Apps).

Email is complicated and orthogonal to hosting.

What about DNS? Will you allow A records or just CNAME records like AppEngine?

We're still working on the DNS setup.

Looking forward to try the service out, but I'm not sure it will be much easier than my current Puppet setup

Once you have Puppet in place then yeah, it's pretty easy to deploy Python.

What happens when your site hits the front page of Reddit? Can you add 5 Gunicorn workers quickly? What if you're not at your computer and want to do it from your phone?
VIM: effectively repurposing arrow keys
Over a long time, perhaps, but probably not quickly. Getting bigger requires more than just attracting more applicants. It also requires hiring more faculty and staff and expanding facilities (which itself eventually requires taking up more land).
How does that gemset stuff fit in with Bundler? It's much easier for us to just keep Gemfile in the git repo, run "bundle install", and then let Bundler worry about installing gems and keeping a clean gem environment.
The idea is, that it's highly unlikely your initial business model will be successful and generate big revenue. Instead, you iterate and analyze customers/market in order to pivot and refine your business model until it's optimal. Sometimes that can mean a radical change, sometimes just a realignment.
20 Windows 7 Tips and Tricks
With tens of millions of copies sold it is safe to say that Windows 7 has been a success for Microsoft. Windows 7 is jam packed with a ton of new features, that as a computer technician you should know about. TechKing has put together 20 Windows 7 tips and tricks that will make you look like an expert while enhancing your (or the person you are helping) computer experience.
I'd never heard of the FizzBuzz problem before. Just looked it up. Do people claiming to programmers really struggle with it? That's disturbing if so.

Designing a good problem is hard. Something that's difficult enough to present a challenge but easy enough to be solvable by a good programmer in ~15 minutes or so takes some thought. But this is another reason why I appreciate a good programming problem in a posting.
True. It's mitigated somewhat by having half-stars in the reviews (not sure Apple does this but Yelp does), but it still makes it a pretty slim margin between crappy and excellent.
Sigh.

Step 1: Write a (proprietary) hybrid VM merging Hotspot and JRockit with lots of difficult-to-implement, succulent features.

Step 2: Modify the JDK 7 spec to include these features.

Step 3: Wag tail as OpenJDK slips into obsolescence.
Apply to 50 Schools? Why Not?
Biolab Disaster - an HTML5 Game (plus Making-Of Video)
Pretty cool, three small things:
[1] Is it possible to have it on the side of your inbox?
[2] Instant version running on every subject in the current email you are reading / writing?
[3] Export the graph via email or save as PNG or better an Excel graph?
Yes, but I think there's a different type of person that regularly leaves one-star and two-star reviews. I think there are a lot of people who don't want to trash something, even if it sucks, and don't care about statistical integrity.
I found this post to be somewhat disappointing. It doesn't really have much depth to it and the claims have little backing. It's not that I don't believe the claims, they have been made before with evidence to support them, by other people. It's that I don't really see how this adds anything to the discussion.
We're looking for a remote consultant, C developer, part-time (10-20 hours a week), on-going. You would be working with NoSql data stores on a very interesting project. You'll receive founder shares for this.

Please only apply if you work quickly, have energy, and communicate readily. Send your background and rate to the email in the profile.
I'm not sure about performance and memory efficiency of the other systems you mentioned. In Redis it is possible in theory to add a command to perform this task against a sorted set, without adding prefixes. Otherwise it's also possible to run binary search directly using ZRANGE, against the sorted set. This way the sorted set can only contain the actual words without prefixes (the memory complexity will be the same but with a smaller constant factor).

I don't think we'll add such a command, nor that a more complex implementation is a good idea, because this algorithm is pretty straightforward and very fast, and can be modeled using the pre-existing API. Also in most completion systems you want to complete only frequent items, so I'm not sure if it's a memory bound problem in practice.

That said I expect the proposed solution to be able to deliver at least 10k completions per second in a small virtual machine.
> he's just regurgitating conspiracy theories that float around in right-wing circles as

Firstly, I am not "right wing". I am libertarian and socially liberal.

> as a way to explain their often public embarrassments.

This is exactly the idiocy that I was talking about. Note that you put everyone in an "us" and "them" basket.

I do not care what the content of the program is, as long as it is objective.

Unfortunately many people on the internet (such as yourself) just flock to news sources that agree with your point of view (such as Huffington Post, reddit.com, Alternet, TDS, etc...) and the right flock to their websites and programs (Glen Beck, Redstate, whatever).

In the end those programs just end up engaging in character assassination instead of having a constructive and rational debate. But I guess that is too much too ask.
Nifty. Was searching for a how-to yesterday. Thanks!
Ok, I've replaced the database with localStorage and it's all good to go - at least in FF 3.6.8, although it seems to be washing out the font colors.

Thanks for the suggestion.
Wow, a lot lower than I would of thought it would be. Do you think the quality of the article is also a factor of the amount of hits? Or just time of week?
Paypal assumes too much. And they're getting away with it.

Another recent case (just one month ago) that got a lot of attention was that PayPal froze the account of Burning Man, for no good reason at all: http://boingboing.net/2010/08/11/paypal-freezes-asset.html

They should have to do more than merely unlock the account: they ought to have to pay compensation for the damage.
Jason Mendelson, Foundry Group, on Entrepreneurs & Early Stage Venture
I agree in general terms, but it's sad that search engines are not advanced enough to do a reasonable job even if your title is not very descriptive. My non descriptive titles are lame, like "Redis weekly update number ...", but there are many artistic, paradoxical, weird-in-an-interesting way titles in the writing tradition that may disappear because search engines are not good enough.
What? It's the same explanation, at about half the wordcount of the that page, without asking for donations and is also most likely the source of everything in the 'landing page'. And you're somehow upvoted for saying something that's the exact opposite of what is actually the case. Curiouser and curiouser...
I think time of week could have been the greatest factor. But definitely if the article included a video or a screenshot, that could have piqued interest.
There was a good discussion here on this topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671599
I agree that the austrian school has more merit than it's been given but that brand of economists has been spelling doom for many years. It's not out of this world for them to be right at some point. But they are often not right (like on deflation being a good thing.)
MBA Mondays: Outsourcing
<grumble>I think it's an intelligent idea if you're providing blanket coverage and idiots are setting up their own linksys's that can't even dhcp on due to mac filtering. </grumble>
Software and Music are not exact duplicates, musicians can and do get paid to perform live.
I've been in that exact position - we kept hiring high powered sales guys and expected them to sell a product that was close, but not close enough, to what customers actually wanted.

It's the classic mistake of confusing sales (selling an existing product) and marketing (finding out what people really want).
"Intellectual Property" is the dam that keeps the waters of commodification at bay (where you have products with a negligible cost of replication.)
Hey guys, if any one else has other data points it will be great to know if their experiences match mine (as far as getting covered by TC is concerned).

My key lessons:

* Sent less traffic than I expected

* Converted less than average site traffic

* Engaged with site more than average site traffic

* Generated some indirect interest in the company/product
Well, Trumbull is just a cut above. Hands down.

I still want a computer setup like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or a tape scanner like the one from Brainstorm (a very underrated movie btw)
"Are you proposing we replace the free market of authors and readers"

We don't have a free market of authors and readers. Readers don't currently pay authors, this is what needs to change.

"How would these people filter through all this content, on what basis would they judge it, and how would they be funded? How do we protected against government meddling and political bias?"

Not sure.

"This is a pretty big problem you're creating to replace a system which, basically, seems to work fine."

I don't think it works fine at all, judging by the fact that all of our biggest problems are marketing problems. In any given area of society the science is between 25 and 100 years ahead of the status quo.
Sorry, I don't read Andrew Sullivan. Supported invasion of Iraq, no mea culpa, wrong about pretty much everything else too.
Let's assume for a second that the author is correct and that correctly-executed HFT systems are generally a non-issue. Even with that core assumption, there is still the significant question as to what happens HFT systems misbehave (either due to suboptimal algorithms, bugs or a lack of adhering to stock trading good practices), which is the allegation that NANEX makes (http://www.nanex.net/20100506/FlashCrashAnalysis_Intro.html).

Obviously, that isn't the subject matter that this paper is covering, but it definitely seems to be making an attempt to
paint HFT as a Force for Good in the marketplace (or at least dispel attempts to paint it as a Bad Thing), and in my mind as a software developer, even more than impacts when things are Working As Intended, the bugs are what scare me.
Imagine today one of your employees quits on the spot, tells you he's quitting because his car was clamped.

You have no idea who manages the parking lot, but now you just lost a resource on your project.

How did your manager end up reacting?
The author makes use of a dataset of trades from major exchanges annotated with which parties were "HFT". Besides the definition of "HFT" being very unclear, deciding if a trade was executed by an HFT firm (even by what he defines as a HFT trader) is very hard to determine.

The author utilizes the Market Participant ID (MPID) to try to determine the underlying firm for a trade, but this is not reliable. It is very common for many many firms to share a single MPID for "tier aggregation" since fees are calculated by MPID and the fees exchanges charge improve with higher volume. This means that many firms (HFT and not) can share a single identifier. Also, many large banks have a single MPID for all their flow, which may include HFT proprietary trading as well as non-HFT flow. He notes these flaws, but I am not sure he realizes how pervasive these arrangements are in the marketplace.

Even if he was able to determine the underlying firm for each trade, there is no rolodex of HFT traders. The author makes a valiant attempt using firm websites and such, but this process is somewhat error prone.
How many Americans are fit for working as investment bankers? OK, you would also need a handful of plumbers, hairdressers and real estate agents to accommodate for the needs of Wall st. Is that it?

Also, where the confidence that Chinese would continue to need American investment advice comes from? If they get the majority of capital and trade along with industrial base, wouldn't these jobs simply follow the money? Americans certainly didn't need any external help back in the day.
Steve Blanks' "Building A Business Model" is the idea that you iteratively develop your startup based on what you discover about your customer's needs. Ie. your first attempt at a project is almost never what your potential customers will actually end up paying for.

He espouses that you should build a minimal product based on your idea. Then iterate over the following points seeking traction and revenue

1) "Get out of the building" and go talk to a lot of your potential customers

2) Based on what you learn from those people: Reevaluate your idea and decide if you should iterate more, or start a new direction

3) Develop #2

4) goto #1

Think of it as the scientific hypothesis/experiment cycle for startups

[edited to add the below]

As usual, Steve says it more succinctly and powerfully than I. I guess that's one reason why he gets to teach at Stanford :)

Here's how he puts it [1]

Your startup is essentially an organization built to
search for a repeatable and scalable business model. As
a founder you start out with:

1) a vision of a product with a set of features,

2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the
business model: Who are the customers/users? What’s
the distribution channel. How do we price and position
the product? How do we create end user demand? Who are
our partners? Where/how do we build the product? How
do we finance the company, etc.

Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the
model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your
model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers
don’t behave as you predicted.

...

How do you know your business model is the right one?
When revenue, users, traffic, etc., start increasing in a
repeatable way

[1] http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...
Only if HN were to give members a fixed number of upvotes per original posting -- or per day, hour, week, etc. -- and let the members dispense those upvotes as they see fit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting#Use.
One could also argue that if it's really that hard to tune your benchmarking system to get the optimal results it's not really relevant to any real-life task...
The next time that somebody tells me that Flash is dead and that HTML5 is its replacement I will show them this game.
If nothing else, it reveals a remarkable hubris.
Don't read the slides. Your slide bulletins should act as an aide memoire for the things you're trying to get across.
Instant Search on Google, YouTube and Google Image with Results Split too
So, you think tibias a bad thing for peoples purchasing power to go up, and for there to consequently be fewer people at or below the poverty line? And for those above the poverty line to have more disposable income to invest in long term or short term needs is also a bad thing?

Yet, somehow, the opposite, where everyone is poorer and a lot of preventative maintenance is avoided because it simply can't be afforded, is somehow better?
A great addition to this post is the "Sales Learning Curve" paper written by Mark Leslie. What's great about the SLC is Mark gives some actual data and a framework for how to think about who/when to hire sales people. http://altgate.com/blog/2007/07/sales-learning-curve.html I recommend it to every entrepreneur.
How Eminem Stayed Relevant  (And Why it Can Save Your Blog)
GE closes last US factory making incandescent light bulbs
I thought this was all just a scam to turn off TweetAdder, or at least force TweetAdder off the API.
Make sure you've chosen men you wish to become like; you do become like those you associate with. Make sure they're just, reasonable, and not buffoons or asses.

Past that, joining a Fraternity is one of the easiest ways to learn some of the soft skills of adulthood, including asking out women, enjoying the company of strangers, learning storytelling, learning smalltalk, and completing project involving the motivation and leadership of other men.

Some of them are a also a good way to learn poor habits with alcohol or distasteful treatment of women: Make sure you aren't in one of those.

Additionally, many of them do bad things to your grades (however on average, most greeks do better than non-greeks gradewise). Make sure you're in one who has one of the higher 2-3 grades on campus with stringent grade standards.

Usually in most fraternity organizations, you get a guide/brother assigned to you; bring up some of your doubts with him and you may find out he will have some suggestions for you and be able to help some.
http://www.redmondnatural.com/redmond-natural-conditioner.ht...

We use this stuff for our animals. On occasion, I will fill a couple of gel caps with the stuff and take some myself.

I take the glowing testimonials with a grain of salt (ha!), but the stuff seems to have a good reputation. Most ranchers tend to neglect their herds (likely more out of ignorance than malice), so I'm not surprised to hear that adding this supplement would yield huge improvement. Anecdotal accounts on various forums have been positive.

For all I know, this stuff could kill me in the long run, so don't come blaming me if it kills you should you try it. Consult your physician, dietitian, lawyer and all that standard disclaimer stuff.