skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The following was a real eye-opener for me, as I always thought from someone's speech, you could infer how much mental horsepower they had [1]:

"

"Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): "I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.

"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance."

We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

"

[1] Foreword, The Quotable Hitchens.
Sony Tegra 3 slate benchmarked, Tablet S successor on the way?
How am i supposed to get the experience you want?
I recently got turned down for a chance to work with a company on some new designs for their website. When they approached me they didn't know i lacked experience as they like the few designs of mine which they saw, once they found out i was a student i offered to work for FREE and if they like the designs then we could arrange payment and carry on working. This still didn't tempt them, so the question is how do i gain experience if you won't give me a chance?!
Speaking is not about information transmission. Speaking is to make people do something.

For example, Steve Jobs keynotes made you go to the Apple Online Store and preorder the latest products; Bret Victor in his "Inventing on Principle" talk makes you rant about the current state of IDEs.

The effect of a talk disappears rapidly after the speaker has left the stage. In contrast, a written text stays.
Alternative Energy Investment
PG walks around at the end of his article, but doesn't say it outright.

Giving talks is about leading. Be it rallying the staff, conveying a vision, or providing an update, the main thing is to inspire, connect, motivate and direct. Some very self-motivated people hate talks because they already have what they need in that area and would prefer just a document of instructions. Most people, however, appreciate good leadership and appreciate talks.

Talks are for implementing ideas.
Conversation is for understanding and generating ideas.
Writing/thinking is for generating ideas.
FWIW, as a speaker I use point-form (aka. "powerpoint", although I do them in LaTex) slides for exactly this reason -- if someone gets distracted and misses a few sentences of what I'm saying, it helps them "resynchronize" with me.
This has been tried a dozen times. The chicken and egg problem is especially hard in real time. And in general, chat is dead. It's boring. The web has more to offer than it did when chat rooms were popular.
no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. That may be what public speaking is really for

By this standard, I'd say PG is an excellent speaker regardless of any superfluous "ums". I recall back in 2006 at the first Railsconf, I was at lunch with Martin Fowler (arguably one of the best speakers in our industry who happened to be keynoting at that Railsconf) and some other co-workers. The food was was taking to long to come out so Martin Fowler left because he didn't want to miss PG speak. I had no idea who PG was but figured I shouldn't miss his talk if Fowler thought it was worth skipping lunch for.

I remember PG literally up there, head down, reading the easy (http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html) for his keynote. It didn't matter that the audience didn't laugh or that he was visibly uncomfortable. What mattered was how our thinking was influenced afterward. It certainly "motivated" me enough to send my life on a completely new trajectory.
User Experience Vision for Startups
>Of course, "subject to US law" is a bit of an exaggeration - you subject-ness extends only as far as .com address is concerned, AFAIK.

No, as the article says, you can be extradited to the US to face trial.

Another story: http://torrentfreak.com/pirating-uk-student-to-be-extradited...
So in summary: When you have a great idea, translate your intended statement of "we can improve things by doing X instead of Y" to the question "why are you doing Y?".

And again: Paper prototyping. Sticking an interactive bit of paper in front of a user is an effective and inexpensive way to get him to explain the holes in your great idea, and you can adapt it there and then and maybe come up with something that fixes the problem that you were hoping to solve, without creating a ton of other issues.
There are just too many websites around for this to be useful. Not to mention if i go on a website, the last thing i am going to be thinking about is chatting with other people who happen to also be browsing it.

Also the logistics of moderating a potentially infinite amount of chat rooms for every website on the internet are mind boggling to say the least.
The parent means pseudonymous. Bitcoin is certainly not anonymous.
Better speaking ability may not help with better ideas, but it does help with the introduction of ideas. I think most of us on HN are living in a bit of a microcosm, where people who we need to influence can objectively break down what we're trying to do.

When we need to expand our ideas to the masses, however, the focus becomes less on what the idea is, and more on how it's delivered. Preying on emotion, sequential logic, and subliminal notes, sometimes even the worst of ideas are promoted as good ideas.

In accordance with the last point of your essay, I'm not sure either, that speaking is used more for good. But if that's the case, now that we have so many people with good ideas, perhaps it's time to focus on delivering good ideas, and making the world better that way. (hmm... I just had an idea)
Hand over our God given internet to some foreigners?

In other news - Britain has announced that all letters sent with a postage stamp come under UK jurisdiction.
The factor that makes ideas better (or in some cases worse) is thought, which comes with time. Speaking is very engaging at least for some people... (I notice this when I am in the car and talking to someone). It consumes a lot of attention, attention which can not be used to think about the problem.
The same occurs when I have a discussion with someone. When I walk away after the discussion I get a lot of: "Oh, I forgot to say this, oh I forgot to say that", because you start direct your focus on thinking instead of talking.
But I guess talking/thinking is not an "exclusive or" for some people.
not technically an Ultra book but I've been a huge fan of the Thinkpad X series for sometime.

Currently have an X220, works great, the X1 is also nice and some of the Ideapads are more "consumer grade" but would fit nicely into the "Ultra Book" territory. With Thinkpads you never really (or I haven't ever) run into issues with *nix due to the amount of love they seem to garnish from the tech community in general.

Between the cozy keyboard and the overall durability of the Thinkpad line I keep coming back to them year after year.
Why can't a thief force you to transfer money electronically just like the money was transfered for the church donation? (I am not saying that the church donation was coerced.)
I must say that this is a very interesting project. Any hope for an android version?

The problem with making a editor that enforces "correct" coding is how to make the transitional writing work. At least for me, I tend to write things that wouldn't work, jump to some other place and fix up some related issue, and then jump back to where I was to finish that fragment. If you only allow "correct" code that wouldn't work. Also, saving code that is in a half-finished state might be an issue.

Marking the offending s-expressions, though... that would be a neat feature.
MathJax 2.0, probably the nicest way for showing/writing math on the Web
It's lazy when your platform still has mandatory polling decades after interrupt driven programming was invented.
Never seen someone deride speaking like that.

I think one of the best things about speaking is that it allows you to emphasize the parts which are important.

The important distinction is in writing you are giving out ideas to the audience and let them decipher all. But with speaking you get this additional power using pauses, emphasis etc. to notify the audience what are the important points and wherethe whole talk/presentation is revolving around. Maybe PG's audience is very smart most of the time and he just need to float the ideas and let them measure everything.

And not to forget if the language of communication is not exactly your native language (or your not that good at it) then your writing could end up making your whole essay a pile of shit (e.g. this comment ;) )
Ridiculous!! I would guess this is a PR stunt.
"Some languages lack words to describe certain situations, and other languages are much more direct in describing them."

It's called code-switching in linguistic terms.
This doesn't apply only to servers hosted in the US. The US is claiming that because .com domains must ultimately be registered by a US registrar (since they have ultimate control of the DNS) then even if you have no servers in the US, no customers in the US and no links with the US - you are under US jurisdiction.

It's like France having jurisdiction if you use a French word in your product.
I've noticed that audiences laugh a lot and that most of what they laugh at is actually not very funny. Most people wouldn't normally laugh at the same things, unless they were really nervous. No doubt social proof is a big part of this: people laugh because others are laughing, as the essay says. Audiences are their own laugh track. But something has to start the ball rolling. I wonder if it's related to authority. The speaker is in an authoritative position, the audience is subordinate. One thing I learned from hypnosis is that most of us are a lot more ready to submit to authority than we seem - far more than we believe we are. If the speaker is known to be famous or powerful, the audience will automatically project this on to them; but even if they aren't, all they have to do is just assume a manner of authority and the audience will automatically project it onto them anyway. Then just about anything they say that is jovial will seem funny and the audience will laugh. And I bet if an audience laughs a few times, they go away saying "that was a good talk".
Thanks for posting. The source code is going to help me improve a key-powered project I am working on.
Our company recently started using alternative domain handles such as .nu, .es, .se and so on in response to one of my rants. It is the interests behind legislation that continue to halt innovation. We could evolve much faster if we had brighter minds leading our country. In the meantime we decided to contribute by not using .com domains.

I believe URLs are bound to disappear.

Wired also published a related article on March 6: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-...

We completely agree with the UN's statement: “no single government should have a pre-eminent role in relation to international internet governance.”
There are 2 issues here:

(1) The US gov't is getting more active in shutting down US-based domain names, sometimes legitimately and sometimes mistakenly. This is obviously very bad when it's not legitimate.

(2) Don't use GoDaddy. A Secret Service "request" should not have shut down JotForm -- they had no legal basis for doing so. GoDaddy has shown themselves time and time again to go above and beyond their legal duties and shut domain names down without any reasonable due diligence. (see http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2011/12/godaddy-a-glimpse-of-...)
Fixed, and thanx :)
I just got myself a Dell v131. Very happy with it. Small, slim and fast enough, with easy access to expansion. Not a Macbook, of course, and not an ultrabook, but half the price.
nothing :)
100% client side
I think this shows even on teams. Typically on teams there is a core or 1-2 people that seem to be driving the innovation/product forward.

I think it is inherent in our nature to be different and nature lends itself leading to individuals seeing things a different way and getting these ideas/inventions that they share with a group rather than teams creating things solely.

For instance Jonathan Ive, you think he would be better at designing with Bob Smith also helping, design by committee? Products and innovation are individual, production of those products is a team effort. Same with the Woz, Jobs or Bill Gates/Paul Allen, all very individual or core team members or 'lone genuis'es.

Creativity is just individual, it can be inspired by external but it really is more individual or unique otherwise those ideas would just be known by the masses and it wouldn't be creative.
PG, since you publish your "talks" as essays anyway, why don't you use your talks to tell interesting stories (from YC or other times of your life)? As you already pointed out, it's better for the audience too to read your essays and think carefully about the ideas, rather than react in a linear fashion with the rest of the crowd.

Stories, on the other hand, like "How YC started" would be much more engaging to hear from you than read. The content of the stories should be interesting enough ("Never a dull moment?"), so that you don't have to make any extra effort to seem interesting.
The Midwest Mentality
"Speaking is not about information transmission. Speaking is to make people do something."

I couldn't have put it more succinctly myself.

Motivation is speech's primary function. Getting you to vote, or buy something, or work harder, or learn something. Everyone who is trying to get a group of people to do something is using speeches at some point.
Well then he should have said that and not tried to argue that people who can speak cannot think!
Long but good article.

Glad he got into (and linked to the excellent article about) font hinting, because that is of course the solution. A simple vector format is not enough, you need to define what parts should scale how, which are rigid, which are elastic.

I don't think higher resolution displays actually help, because the real limitation becomes the human eye. Though the new display could use the 'old' normal sized icons as small ones, your eye couldn't distinguish some of the details that worked before.

Anyways, it is an interesting problem and one that I don't envy designers for.
Glassmap’s founders get clear about online privacy
No, it's exactly like if I registered a .fr domain name. France has jurisdiction over that domain name, and can shut it down if they'd like.

The US has jurisdiction over the .com domain.

If you have no US customers, no servers in the US and no other links to the US -- you may have your domain shutdown, but that's it.

I very much doubt you would be extradited to the US in that situation as it does not involve the US at all. But the US having extradition abilities with other countries' foreign nationals that it finds to be criminals is a separate issue entirely from their jurisdiction over .com, .net, .org etc.

[edited for clarity]
This has been my experience as well. Grew up speaking English and French, am 100% bilingual, could not tell you which I think in. I think thoughts occur at a level of abstraction one step above language.

When I started learning Chinese I also wasn't constantly translating, I just had a limited breadth and depth of topics in which could express my thoughts through Chinese.
But is it because the needs haven't changed a bit, or because it's good enough and it'd cost too much to replace it? Because if software was always tored out, that would only accentuate the latter problem.
I went to chessable.co.uk on my phone (less typing without the www. and the https://) and I got a security warning. I presume you're redirecting http://chessable.co.uk → https://chessable.co.uk → https://www.chessable.co.uk and the warning is for the middle address.

On this page --- https://www.chessable.co.uk/players --- the whole grey box for each chesser should be a link, not just their username.
State of Technology #50
I agree with most of it. But it seems he is implying that learning to become a better speaker is linearly proportional, even inversely proportional to improving your ideas or your writing. I agree you probably make a better use of your time improving your ideas rather than your speech. But don't you think there are diminishing returns to how efficient use of time it's to improve ideas vs speech? Isn't there a point, after which, your idea is already good enough. That it's more efficient to spend time improving your speech instead of your ideas?

I believe so. And sometimes I think, maybe, pg crossed that line.
Maybe the first place to start is to stop calling it the Irish tech scene and start to refer to it as the Dublin tech scene?
[non-constructive criticism]
By one benchmark at least, we are probably halfway through the (r)evolution
Swede here, and as paranoid as the next person. I moved from Gmail due to privacy concerns. I block a lot of tracking domains at DNS level.

However, those are trade-offs with very little negative impact in my daily routines. A slightly worse UI for my email is nothing like moving from cards back to cash. It would be like moving from the Internet back to snail mail because email is insecure, or perhaps to Stallman type email/wget web browsing. Simply not worth it.

Speaking of snail mail, I send a handful of those a year and barely know where to put the stamp. I handle my taxes, student loans, banking, social insurance (for my kid), etc, online.

I would love better regulations for usage of consumer data, but cash? No way.
I totally agree with this essay, esp. in regard to ideas that are 'new' and are still being dynamically formulated.

There is an opportunity cost associated with different 'top ideas' or perhaps in this case 'top attitudes' in one's mind. If one's interest is in delivering a great speech, that does impugn upon great thinking.

However, the key is just don't give talks on ideas that are too fresh (unless you plan on using the feedback and dialogic nature of talks to your advantage -- but that's less 'talks' and more 'conversations' or Socratic dialogues, etc.). If the goal is to deliver a great speech, you have to have an idea that is fixed so that you can spend your energy applying it to the audience's situation.

Yes, in rare situations one can do both (dynamically eval and dynamically apply), but they are somewhat overlapping, competing tasks.

ETA. One more quick thought -- making this a long post:

I think a lot of public speaking is giving the audience opportunities to 'latch on' to what one is saying. And it's easiest to do this by repeating yourself in various different ways that may interest the listener (different listeners latch on based on different shared life experiences, etc.).

Essay writing is similar. But in that form, you give the reader an opportunity to pause at any time and re-read or just think about the material. This advantage in turn means that less repetition (however artfully enhanced in speech) is required.

People are also better at skimming to what they think is important in essays. So they will skim over structural 'ums' (style that they don't find helpfully repetitive). Whereas, in speech an audience will tend to latch onto whatever is repeated.

Hence, if you choose behavior that focuses on formulation of thoughts repetitively in waves, extemporaneously speaking is more natural. If you choose behavior that insists on sifting towards the truth (and I've seen that recording of PG writing an essay), then written words can be more natural. Everyone can do both with practice, but they are different I think.

It's incorrect to say one is more 'truthful' than the other. In aggregate, knowledge among #'s of people in the universe can be about the same with both (e.g., great speaking brings a lot of people a little bit forwards; great essay writing and thinking can bring a more limited set a little more forward -- but the total area may be the same at the end of the day... -- note, these are generalized examples based on a perceived average type of speech and average type of essay).
India: Funding Startups Could be Classified as Income
Petition to oppose this clause, India startup envt.

Details: http://capitalmind.in/2012/03/angel-investors-beware-funding-startups-could-be-classified-as-income/
Digital Media Fundamentals
It's like France having jurisdiction if you use a French word in your product.

No it is not. This policy will not be beaten back with silly analogies such as this.

If you are interested in this topic and advocating a change in policy I highly recommend that you become familiar with the legal theories underlying establishment of jurisdiction.
I call this the "Godfather" demeanor. It's common among powerful males. I once read an article about a big gang leader in prison and the writer noticed that he had to lean forward to hear what the leader was saying.

They will talk very quietly and unclearly without regard to whether you can hear them or not. When the room is silent and everybody is listening intently, you can't help but think that what they have to say is very important. More so than if they were to speak loudly and solicitously.

It's interesting that Talib is consciously advocating this affectation.

I guess there is a certain kind of leader who gains credibility through actions rather than speech. Some leaders try to rouse you through speech -- e.g. Barack Obama definitely leans on his oratorial skills. Others do the opposite -- Larry Page for example. He mumbles, and he doesn't care to repeat himself. It's everyone else's job to figure out what he's saying.
Just so you know, the Asus 1225b is out and has the E-450 at (I think) the same price.
is it a rule that every time there's something new on daringfireball, it makes it to hackernews?
I enjoy getting up in front of a crowd of people and helping them learn new concepts in an entertaining fashion. I have taught classes, delivered presentations, recorded video podcasts with millions of views, traveled as a motivational speaker, and performed standup comedy all over the U.S.

What I like about speaking that you don't get from writing:

1) Seeing people's reaction in near real-time. This is a good feedback loop when you're working on how to explain a new product or feature before producing an on-demand recording that could be viewed by 1000x the people in the audience. It's like a focus-group or a series of live A/B tests.

2) A chance to convert the less-dedicated into customers/fans/subscribers. It seems a lot of people are too lazy to read long articles let alone books these days. A good video can go a long way. I watched a lecture by Eric Ries and immediately acquired The Lean Startup for my Kindle.

I think speaking is a great way to get people excited about a topic and teach them a handful of concepts. If my talk is successful, I will have inspired many to drill in on the topic later or become a fan of my product, my podcast, or my standup comedy. I always try to accompany my talks with easy-to-remember URLs or QR codes so that it minimizes the friction between their interest for more information and taking the next step.
Einstein. Newton. Leo Szilard. Good day, sir.
Verisign is the registrar for .com, and they are based in the USA. So the registration of a .com domain is (currently) under US jurisdiction.
According to a new rumour, the upcoming Galaxy S3 will feature two launchers: Touchwiz and stock ICS. http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/r1m7a/my_friend_wor...