skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This may be particular to the field of biology, but I find biology talks to be much more interesting than papers. One contributing factor is that important papers in Science and Nature are subject to stringent length limitations. This limits the writer's ability to unfurl a coherent narrative. Oftentimes, years of research are condensed into a handful of figures and sentences that cannot convey the more subtle points of the argument (for that the reader is directed to the supplementary information, which is often many times longer than the actual paper).

On a more macroscopic scale, talks also allow scientists to highlight deeper themes that are often lost in the minutiae of a technical paper. This is especially important in biology because we want to find universal paradigms from experiments done on model organisms. A talented speaker can distill the most important themes from a body of research in a way that writing rarely achieves.

In summary, talks are a great medium for conveying conceptual narratives. In biology talks, the important assertions are almost always backed up by a slide that shows real data. However, if I am an expert in a particular subfield and really want to get into the details, of course I'll go read the paper.
The author goes to great lenghts to analyze transactions, yet he fails to reveal even a single name.

Bitcoin is not anonymous, but finding out who did what is damn hard.
You discredit your argument by wording it so outrageously.

The UK student you're talking about ran a 6-figure business, which he admitted publicly on his site was all about directing people to pirated movie content (the "TV" in his domain name is, of course, a red herring).

But, worse, the notion that he was "extradited under vital anti-terrorism legislation" is simply a lie. The "anti-terrorism legislation" this phrase refers to is the entire UK/US reciprocal extradition treaty, which governs absolutely all extradition between the two countries. The changes in that treaty that people are referring to when they invoke "terrorism" were proposed and negotiated before 9/11, and actually remediate an unfairness in evidentiary standards towards the US --- it used to be easier to be extradited from the US than from the UK, and now the same standards are used on both sides.

Moreover, those changes have absolutely nothing to do with this case. The crime which O'Dwyer was charged under was a criminal offense in both the UK and the US, and the evidence implicating O'Dwyer is open-and-shut: O'Dwyer, after having his domain seized by ICE, brought it up again with a fuck-you to the authorities. He admitted to UK prosecutors that he had been taking in 15,000GBP per month (!) running the site.
One added benefit of seeing a speaker rather than just reading an essay is that you can better judge the conviction in their statements. Lots of people trim their essays/articles to a state of dry assertiveness, because it's the expected style. But in person they're more likely to add things like 'and i spent a long time trying to work this out, and to be honest I'm not sure I've got it right, but my working conclusion is that...'
Researchers Band Together To Force Science Journals To Open Access
I don't disagree that most people are doing it wrong, but the issue that we're onto here is that either our product is crap, or we're treating our customers like idiots.

The point is that neither has to be the case to require a phone call. The point is that our target audience doesn't have people with both the technical skills to install our product and the authority to make the purchase.

There is absolutely no point in a 'download now' option for this type of software. There is no point in making it easy for the medium-sized customer because they will almost never buy our product. They'll buy something with half the features and much less than half the cost. They'll end up with a vendor who will charge them for every modification they require and they'll end up with a product that does most of what they want, and solves 80 or more percent of their pain. That's what things like Basecamp and Highrise do. They aren't made to fit anyone's needs 100%, except maybe 37Signals.

Our software is expensive because, while it isn't perfect, it does solve 100% of the need for more than one customer. It's a complete, entire package.

And for the record, my ego isn't even remotely hurt, nor did I mean to imply in any way that I'm some sort of big shot; I'm not. I just think that you're wrong, or more specifically, I think that you're painting us with the same brush that you'd paint EMC or Cisco, based solely on the evidence that we're selling expensive software to customers and we don't let people download it. Our competitive advantage is that we aren't them, and that we aren't approaching enterprise sales in the same traditional way that everybody else does.

But that doesn't change the fact that giving our customers access to a download link doesn't help them. Giving them access to our pricing tables doesn't either.
The whole thesis behind this essay is overly facile. A person who is a bad public speaker -- and admits it -- propounding on The Meaning of Public Speaking, its worth, and comparing it to acting (when he presumably is not, and has never been, an actor), and making all sorts of broad sweeping statements which seem to make sense in the moment the sentence passes into your brain but which, if examined for a moment, do not hold up to rational inspection whatsoever.

No citations. No references to other writers, speakers, or thinkers. Just pure, bald, superficial statement.

I can't recommend more strongly that you read this essay by Maciej Cegłowski, the founder of Pinboard:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Then this essay on classical style:

http://t.co/EmDMquOx
Awesome idea. Will add it asap. Thanks!
I think it's the same distinction as telling someone something (as in notes) and showing someone something (as in art). When you show someone something, making them experience it empathetically, it can change who they are. They can accept the information viscerally. Sometimes, strangely, just knowing new information isn't enough -- we have to feel it.

A good talk can make someone feel emotional, as if they arrived at the information on their own, and that they "owned" the new knowledge. And that's a very powerful thing.
Love is a verb, not a noun.

Love isn't desire for possession of something.

Love is action, not bottled and shown around.

Painters shows love for painting, by painting.

Writers show love for writing by writing.

Designers show love for designing, by designing.

Coders, too, show love for coding, by coding.

Deeper loves come from deeper connection with your art. Deeper love comes from developing your connection with your art in all ways.

Coders shouldn't just code, but love understanding everything that is around it.

Painters seek to understand deeper, and then express the world around them.

Writers seek to understand deeper, and then express the world around them.

Love is seeking, spreading, creating, providing, support, love, for the sake of love. Love is choosing possibility over doubt. Love is choosing creativity before logic and finding a way. Love is protecting creativity and ideas so much so that they may quiver towards the sky, much like we quiver in relationships involving love.

To put it simply (and still not scratch the surface); love is creating, experiencing, for the sake of creation, experience, and learning.

0.02
I have another hypothesis: Maybe they don't want to make it so blatantly obvious that only a small portion of their handsets, excluding even phones introduced in 2011(1), will actually get the Android 4.0 update. So they might want to downplay the significance of Android 4.0.

(1) Like the Samsung Galaxy S Plus, which has faster hardware than my Nexus S with ICS.
I agree it was a fascinating look at the problem. However, the assumption in the article is pixels. Let me sum up.

Scaling artifacts occur because at smaller sizes the quantitization of the unit pixel overwhelms the details of the image. When I was a system programmer at the Image Processing Institute at USC (you know the source of that Lena picture :-) this was characterized as the frequency response of the display. So if you were to take a horizontal line across the pixels, and then plot their intensity vertically along a line (so x becomes the position in the line, and y is the intensity of the pixel at position x) then you can then do an FFT across those pixels and see the distortion in the visual signal from the source material to the displayed material.

Now the part that gets confounded in articles like this one is that the UX designer doesn't really want a 16 pixel icon, what they want is an icon that has a certain size with respect to the whole screen. Working backwards, lets say the icon ended up being 16 x 16 on a 1024 x 600 screen which had 72 pixels per inch. The icon is about 1/4" on a side (.22" but you get the picture). Now on a screen that that has 240 pixels per inch, that icon at 16 x 16 pixels is only .06" or nearly impossible to see, but if you keep it at 1/4" you get 60 x 60 pixels to work with.

So lets bring two things together, you do 'hinting' because the artifacts that are created by the quantitizing effect of pixelation cause you to lose information. As screen resolutions get denser the information lost goes down (less quantization, or more signal bandwidth is available) so once your signal loss from a straight mathematical shrink is acceptable in all required sizes your done.

Bottom line is that this won't be an issue when the minimum icon size is being rendered into a field of 128 x 128 pixels or more. Might take one more generation of screens.

The second thing is that while a designer can poke pixels to get an icon that looks good, so can the computer. One of the things you can do is compute the frequency 'footprint' of the image, then change the render until the render foot print is as close as you can get to the original. HP did this for their ink jet printer half-toning algorithm. In a 16 x 16 pixel space you could almost exaustively search it on a modern machine.
Why then do they not have people remove the batteries from their watches? Can't they also be unintentional radiators?
SVG fonts are a failed font format, which is why Mozilla refused to support them. They had a brief use as iPad fonts but that's dead now.
It's worth pointing out that Samsung isn't necessarily keeping compatibility with Gingerbread as they are keeping compatibility with their own TouchWiz version of Gingerbread. For the most part, this is old news. It's reasonable to assume that if Samsung is going to saddle Gingerbread with proprietary UI "improvements", they're going to do the same with ICS. The fact that it lessens the difficulty of switching from one version to the next is an unintentional side effect.
I don't know you personally. I've read the majority of your essays. Your essays are well thought out and that what you write is purposeful. However, it isn't entirely unreasonable to think that you may[2] you have conveyed something in your writing that you didn't intend. Such a thing must occur occasionally.

I agree with the person you responded to that your essay did come across as having as an undercurrent that good speakers tend not have as much depth in what they say. What you say about spending time on delivery coming at the cost (sometimes!) of content makes sense when I think of politicians and salesmen. I'm don't agree when it comes to more cerebral settings.

[1] edit: Changed "It appears..." to "Your.." because your essays are well thought out and purposeful. It's not just an appearance.

[2] edit: Added the word "may".
True, I take it for granted that everyone knows marketing is the most important thing you need to know, no matter what product or service you provide.
Actually, a far more direct "charitable reading" of that is:

A. regardless of how good someone is at public speaking, it is largely independent of their writing skill.

An additional possible inference from the article is:

B. they may/should find it significantly more efficient to impart those or even more ideas in writing than in speech. That is, some aspect of writing itself is simply more efficient than speech for transfer of idea information.

However, I do agree that pg's article does seem to gloss over,

1. the binding effect of emotion to ideas. Emotion is far easier to impart and create via public speaking due to intonation, pauses, story-telling, comedy, body language etc (not even going to add side channels like slides, though they are likely important). Several studies have shown that, for example, comedy is an extremely strong means to reinforce the transfer of new information or complex ideas due to the body's physical and biochemical response.

2. audience interaction does not have to be negative or neutral, but can often reveal how much is new information or what those participants value the most.

Of course, ultimately, to expect pg to cover even a fraction of the full dynamics of public speech and language writing in one blog article maybe is asking a little too much :)
Don't spend money. $50k is a hell of a lot of money to spend to build a prototype. Depending on what you're trying to do, it should not cost that much. Just get your minimum viable product built, whether you're building it yourself after spending a few months learning enough code, or if you pay a contractor to do it now (get someone to work for equity or just remove features until it's affordable to have them do it).

One way or another the experience will be valuable (learning to manage/work with engineers is just as valuable as coding IMHO), but again - don't spend that much to do it. You could build the prototype, only to find that it's not a service people are interested in using. That would suck, but not as much as losing your entire savings to learn the same thing.
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In general I agree with the premise that talks are more about conveying a vision, illicit emotion, and are prone to mob reactions. However, I wonder how much of that is changing due to the fact that most talks are now available to view online. Once you can view talks at your own leisure, you can spend more time thinking about the speaker's points (via seeking and pausing) and you are also not susceptible to the reactions of those around you.

I wonder how much the availability of talks in this way affects their content. I would think that talks are moving more in the direction of writing since the speakers words can be heard and thought about without external influences -- which in turn can be used to generate new ideas.
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Way to go, society.
Who would buy the toxic parts?
The point you're implying here is unclear. Can you expand on it?
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Small community banks still exist. Mine offers online bill pay, and just about every other "fancy features" that larger banks do.

So, yeah, there are options other than huge bank or crippled credit union.
"much of the new management either came directly from the military or from executive positions at other major retail companies such as Pepsi Cola, Best Buy, Home Depot--basically ANY line of business OTHER than banking. These people had no experience in banking, and that was ok, because BANKING just became RETAIL. Money and debt became a commodity to be sold to clients instead of managed responsibly."

I use a bank whose initials are very close to WtF. When I listen to their managers and "bankers" (the employees who sit at desks rather than stand at counters), I hear them refer to their branch as a "store," e.g. "Hi this is Zachary at store number 1243 ..."

Stores don't manage money, stores sell things, and I am very weary of being upsold to buy car insurance, home insurance, or to be snagged into their bill pay service any time I go in to do something face to face.

Banks are not banks anymore, they're generic retail outfits whose management and executives can be swapped generically with 7/11 or Best Buy, and whose employees have similar functions and upsell responsibilities to those more explicitly retail businesses.
Maybe it's the 150 iPads vs. one they're concerned about.
That's not how extradition works. It depends on the treaty, but most of them stipulate that extraditable crimes must be recognized by both jurisdictions. You obviously can't be extradited to Pakistan for being an atheist.

Because we hear so often about legal proceedings against piracy in the US, I think we have a cognitive bias that suggests piracy is more criminal here than in Europe. That's mostly not the case. For instance: the UK's criminal copyright infringement laws, which date back to the late '80s, are just as stringent as ours.
I'm not sure, but from reading the article this feels more like AWS-SDK's seamless integration with Rails rather than Rails' seamless integration with DynamoDB & S3. Please correct me if I misunderstood.
It's a fair point. It also leads to the enterprisation of otherwise commodity software. Jive, for example, takes software that everybody has easy access to, adds enterprise features and enterprise class support, and sells them to the enterprise.

Need a blog? You could use Wordpress, for free, or you could pay Jive a large bundle of money, have them come in and install it, have active directory and oracle support, and somebody to blame when it doesn't work.

I know for a fact that if somebody would clone Evernote and allow it to operate within the Enterprise (instead of storing data in public cloud), there are at least three government agencies that would buy it for $10,000 or more.

Your point is definitely solid though, but the process that the enterprises are used to following are the ones that will win. If you hired a seasoned enterprise sales team, you could probably make a killing selling Wordpress, or something similar, to prevent people from overpaying for the existing enterprise solutions. You'd just have to know how to get in, and how to follow the sale.

The product itself has nothing to do with that.
Isn't it possible that 300 passengers using devices at the same time could pose substantially more risk than just a handful of people using devices?
UK law is like that too! People have attempted to have US citizens found civilly liable under the UK's (much stricter) libel laws in exactly the same jurisdictional razzle-dazzle as is being applied here.
Interrupts are stateful on the server side; that creates problems in terms of scalability, both due to increased memory usage and by being less flexible (either you have each user "locked" to a single process, or you have to implement state sharing, which adds overhead).

It can also be extremely wasteful - if I leave a tab open for hours or days, you'll have to waste your resources and mine to keep pushing me stuff I won't see, while now I just hit refresh when I want to see new content.

In terms of usability, it's often jarring to watch content change when you're interacting with it - that's why even sites that implement real time notifications often have a link or button that you have to press to update the UI. In many cases, doing that completely negates the benefits of pushing.

Also, see the thesis on "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures": http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

Polling is a good default for the web; it fits most use cases (content that rarely changes) in a simple and economical way. WebSockets are useful for the exceptions.
BAC is up 76.26% YTD. Pretty much everything the article says makes sense, and I'm happy I closed my BofA account years ago, but at $5 I had to snatch up some of that stock. I hardly regret the decision.
Bayesian filters with Go
what email solution do you use? I've been thinking about a change too
"why is no one talking about breaking up these "too big to fail" institutions into companies that are small enough to fail?"

Because they're too big not to lobby.
Konrad really is an unsung hero. Had he been able to publish his work and interact with others in the field I don't doubt we would all know his name.
I find it interesting to contrast this to the requirements for the YC application video:

Please do not recite a script written beforehand. Just talk spontaneously as you would to a friend. People delivering memorized speeches (or worse still, text read off the screen) usually come off as stupid. Unless you're a good enough actor to fake spontaneity, you lose more in the stilted delivery than you gain from a more polished message.

Footnote 2 seems relevant. I'd guess that most YC application videos are also made of spolia.
This raises an interesting issue of what I will call "the lender" effect.

In an old business where I had to apply for loans I was always in contact with the bank officer. Never the person who made the decision which the officer called "the lender". If I got the loan I would hear the "the lender approved" if not the opposite. "The lender" could have been a person or a group who knows.

Anyway I remember thinking about that and I came to the conclusion that the bank may have been purposely separating the person wanting the money from the person who could make the decision about giving money. Why?

Because (I think) "the lender" just looked (read) at the cold hard facts. Their opinion of whether to loan money wasn't colored by anything the person wanting the money said or of course how they appeared.

This more or less goes along with what PG is saying. The question is if this is the case (and I believe it is based upon years of this happening) it might explain partly the VC success rate. Since they put much weight on individuals and teams and not on the idea. Perhaps some of the weight they put on the teams is colored by rhetoric that they should be removing from the decision making process. (And yes I know the first thing people do in YC is fill out an app and then get to pitch.)
Investors are savvy enough to realize that a large part of the value they bring is diversifying risk -- otherwise paying market salaries would be a point of contention. So the words "should" and "argument" really do enter into it. It's a debate over what is reasonable compensation for the equity on offer.

Considering that the market is generally non-frothy for companies without revenue and pretty damn frothy for those with cash and growth, this sort of thing is to be expected: there will always be companies that can't or don't take funding until the founders can insist on stronger terms.
Read the ati support list before buying an still closed source driver board.

Nvidia may seem better because they only have close source drivers. Compare it with catalyst, and they are pretty much the same (except you will not get dual monitor easily with Nividia)
I like it! Color scheme could be a bit more refined though.
no, I can't, because I don't want to configure the IDE and then the style checker. And the the commit is rejected where it shouldn't have been because it could have been well formatted from the beginning and nobody cares about that because the editor does it for us (it's not totally true, since it doesn't remove useless endlines)

As far as I know different editors can't be made to produce the exact same code on automatic reformatting. And enforcing code style still doesn't help people switching keyboard, reading code or stuff like that. It's a team I'm building, not managing insulated people.

I enforce that everybody uses the same editor, if I find myself in a team where the majority votes for emacs, they'll just use emacs (and I guess I'll resign). Our last change was initiated by a team member.
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You havent seen some of the failure cases in ssd then, months not years. Do not use raid 0.
Ethernet? I can live without. But page down key? Backspace and delete? F keys? Mouse buttons? Price?

And that's the superficial stuff.