skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought.

I'm not shining on you when I say this [1]: you are a good public speaker [2].

Perhaps not the best, but you're clearly better than a majority of guys who get up and try it.

Luckily, the 'um' thing is easily licked. When you catch your self saying 'um', don't. Don't say anything. Insert a pause, and carry on.

You _feel_ like you're taking forever, that we're out in the audience wondering why you're staring with a vacant look on your face like a slack-jawed yokel.

You're not. The audience doesn't even _notice_.

And you don't even have to sacrifice any thinking mojo to do this.

[1] No reason to. I'll never submit a pitch to ycombinator [3].

[2] Never seen you in person - but I've watched some videos.

[3] Unless the rules are drastically changed.
This seems like one of Armstrong's best slide decks. He seems to present the same talk repeatedly though.
The Linux Setup - Jon “maddog” Hall
Gruber is confusing two things. If someone agreed to a Windows update download and the entire UI changed then, yes, they would be surprised and rightfully distressed.

However - if they, asy, upgraded from Windows XP to Vista then they would not be. They might even be looking forward to a UI overhaul in the name of 'progress'.

Aren't we talking about the latter case here?
This problem is already (partly) solved by exchange in digital gold currency. Pecunix and e-gold are two such services.
So do you have any technical points to make, or just more dumb excuses? If you don't want interrupts, you just use them to implement polling.
When I lived in Santa Cruz, we had a day-long internet outage due to a fiber-optic cable being cut, which led to most shops not taking CCs, despite there being no trouble with the power. A few mom-and-pop shops did good business by essentially agreeing to take IOUs; they wrote down CC #s on paper and manually ran them later, although afaik that's contrary to most CC companies' policy: http://www.mercurynews.com/centralcoast/ci_12115324
Yup I'm 20 and started when I was 10. It's been a good 10 years :)
Very good point. Thank you. Your right getting people to see your work is hard, i have my dribbble account and this helps. Just need to keep practising and hope i get a break.
Agreed. You will have many more opportunities come your way if you keep pushing out good stuff. If they're unwilling to work with you over this simple thing, you probably don't want to be there anyway.
Symbian used SVG for all icons, for various screen sizes. Never looked especially good, especially so on the lower DPI screens.
And there's of course the second shoe that TouchWiz is a differentiator for Samsung (as far as they're concerned anyway, users may or may not agree): it's part of the "value" they provide, and it's (tentatively) part of keeping users on Samsung phones: Samsung also has TouchWiz skins not just for Android but for Bada (their in-home OS), for WiMo (Omnia 1 and 2, long dead) and older smart-ish phones.

So from a business perspective, Samsung considers TouchWiz important for phones released under the Samsung brand, they're not going to switch to stock Android UI.
See what a useful exercise it is to look at the actual
sentences I wrote? Gone are the claims that I consider the
extra things you can do in a talk "mere baggage"
(I said the opposite in the last paragraph) and that
"essays are baggage-free" (I said the opposite in the 8th
paragraph). Now all I'm being accused of is claiming that
having good ideas is most of writing well, and that
it is a smaller component of speaking well than writing well.

Frankly these seem such commonplace claims that I think
more people would accuse me of wasting the reader's time
with platitudes than saying things that are false.

For the sake of completeness I'll defend them anyway:

1. You can't explain something clearly if you don't
understand it yourself. Your writing may be fine at the phonetic level, but you won't for example be able to use any metaphors. Your audience will feel like they're being driven in a Ferrari over ploughed fields.

2. Who is generally considered to be better able to
cause people to believe mistaken ideas, speakers or
writers? When you imagine a demagogue, for example,
do you imagine someone speaking before an audience or
sitting at a desk writing?
For me it read like this: pg wants to become a better speaker, i.e. one who is able to better convey better ideas. But the notion of a Good Speaker that is trotted out as the ideal to strive for at places like, I presume, toastmasters et al., is just a particular kind of speaker that has hijacked the "good" qualifier.
On the latest chrome stable.

I've gotten multiple errors trying to do this.

Error: TypeError: Cannot call method 'track' of undefined
Error: Error: INVALID_STATE_ERR
Error: You must set a username before you can chat

When I first login, it says I'm in a chatroom of 1 for quite a bit, then connects me invisibly, without letting me set my username.

Would this fail with https?

On a side note, somebody that creates an aggregator for these sort of add ons, (including chats, but also the various "comment on a website" things I remember from a few years ago) might do alright.

When I finally do get in the chat, after trying to set a username, I get a random one. I'm user37695. And there is no way to change that.

Edit: okay there is a way, clicking on your username. But it's invisible.

Thoughts:
Needs to let me know I'm connecting, and if possible, indicate state. IRC tells me when I'm connecting, when it's checking identd etc. Even a little progress bar would be fine.

Username selection seems to fail for me. I'd suggest a prompt, after connecting, for the username.

edit: indicating that clicking the username allows you to change it, or a menu button, would be helpful.

There is no way to close the window without losing the page.
> Aren't we talking about the latter case here?

From a technical point of view probably, but from a user point-of-view, if the update can be delivered OTA? That's more questionable.

Furthermore the difference between Ginger/TouchWiz and ICS is arguably far larger than that between XP and Vista (ignoring Vista being half-baked and half-broken on release).
In New Zealand, we use cards for _everything_. Taxis, corner shops, bars...

However, cash still pays a massive part in our economy. Mostly for people who want to remain anonymous with their transactions. Heaps of livelihoods depend on cash; farmers markets etc.
I'd like:

1. native support for optional manual hinting vector icons

2. native support for optional auto-hinting vector icons

Auto hinting is not the ultimate solution, but it can get you part way there, just like with fonts.
Not to most users. Most users have no idea about versions of operating systems on their phone.

They bought a phone, they _may_ know that it's an Android phone, or they may just know they bought a Samsung phone. They probably don't even think about it having an operating system as such - it's a phone, not a computer, as far as most people are concerned.
Yeah that was the idea :)
This really has nothing to do with the US government. While the US worries the hell out of me in general, it is merely asking for these people. The real problem is the various other governments who, like the UK government, seem to bend to the will of the US with out a squeak.

What I don't understand is that the first job of a government has to be protecting its people. But recently, the reverse seems to be true. Why? Why are we the people suddenly the enemy of government? Why are our governments so happy to sling any one they can in to the weird and unjust legal system? How did that happen? Who the hell elects the US the world policemen and court?
> Android (like other languages) is on the roadmap once the iPad scheme version is working smoothly.

Cool, I guess I'll just have to be patient then...

> Your point about the intermediate state between a blank file and working program is true, but for example in TouchScheme you could never have a simple parentheses mismatch error such as (display (+ 1 2) as it takes care of that part of the S Expression for you. This does not however sacrifice any flexibility in what you can write.

Yes, that's true. But the grand-grand-parent wasn't only talking about such simplistic error-checking. At least that was my impression. Say that you were to start writing a lambda expression, and then realize that you need to change something else:

(lambda (x

With automagic paren-balancing you'd get

(lambda (x))

which is still an invalid form. You could make the editor auto-insert a nil (or is it #f in scheme? I always get those mixed up), but that would be a dangerous route to take. Or you could mark it as an invalid form and make the user fix it before the editor even considers evaluating the program (or just that fragment).

That said, you have a very interesting program and the ideas I see here are very interesting as well. I hope that you plan to post more updates on this to hacker news!
People should simply design something small that satisfies a niche. If it doesn't have enough features for some person, rewrite it. When software is small you can rewrite as much as you want. Software engineers labour in the delusion that their creations are so fantastic and amazing that it can only accomplished through huge complexity.
Neither did i actually .

And yes thats what i felt too, thats why posted it there :)
Germany's unheralded computer inventor
Everyone is free to ignore whatever block chains they want to. I can refuse to honor blocks built off what I consider fraudulent block chains.
dunno about layout, but the choices should work now, can you please try and lemme know?
The intro text isn't as clear as it should be. ICS for devices that shipped with TW and Froyo/Gingerbread looks the same as the OS that shipped with it. For new devices, it seems and is likely that ICS will look more ICS-y. If you excuse the acronyms.
+1 ...more importantly, it's probably the only way to beat the chicken/egg problem mentioned above.
most non-casual users (ie geeks like us) would know how to get what we want (vanilla ICS). I don't see a problem, they are keeping the casual users happy with no major changes, but know that the tech savy will easily manage to just install a pure ICS if thats what they want.
Nope: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How non-government actors have removed accountability: Consent of the Networked
I write fairly well, and I doubt if I could say the same about on stage. I have to have aids to sum up my thoughts beforehand, and even then I tend to ramble.

When I write, I almost always have a clear train of thought much ahead, that I take my reader along for. I can afford to fork at times, where as on stage this runs the risk of alienating the audience or losing them completely.

I tend to go back and edit a number of times before I publish. Almost always something I feel is a cogent explanation comes across less so, at a later read.

None of these, I am able to do when I am on stage. I have to keep pushing ahead and if I ramble, if I lose my train of thought, then I have to at times jump a few stops to get back on track. And by then, the punch line that I had in waiting is almost always half so effective.

And even from the reader/listeners perspective, though a speech has the rare opportunity to evoke the strongest of emotions, I find it more so in the case of written word. With a page of text, there is more clarity, less noise, its just you and lines of clear text, reader to the author. With a speech, the second time is almost always less effective, the tone may be monotonous, the visual medium almost always brings along other noise, which combined steals the clarity of thought.
I might agree with this statement if the web had produced anything like a "conventional UI" that is consistent. Every website is completely different. Just look at Facebook. This is a horribly confusing website and most of the features are the kind of self-justifying nonsense I'm talking about. Nobody wanted Facebook until Facebook came along and convinced people to turn photo/comment sharing into a sterile game.
Thanks, no problem at all.
> Auto hinting is not the ultimate solution, but it can get you part way there, just like with fonts.

Even without auto-hinting, it still boggles my mind that "desktop" vector formats don't seem to support hinting at all: I recently discovered there is no possibility of hinting in SVG, therefore SVG fonts (fonts described using SVG shapes) can not be hinted at all, that's completely insane.
I haven't noticed this at all, except for the public transportation. If anything, there are plenty of businesses that won't accept cards under a certain limit (usually 100 crowns, or about $15).
Ask HN: How do you manage perfection?
We work in an harsh industry.

Computers demand perfection. Code must be perfect or code doesn't work as intended. As Douglas Crockford once said, we humans are awful at being perfect. There is no "good enough" in code - there is only perfect or a product that doesn't work as intended.

Perfection can drive people crazy. So how do you guys do it? How do you guys manage perfection? Or are we all just a bit crazy :)
The only reason I'm still with BofA is because of their ebill service that automatically pays my bills after receiving a statement electronically. I have maybe a a dozen services set up that don't offer automatic payment themselves.

I'd be gone in a heartbeat otherwise.
Blackberry devices do this. It is infuriating.
EC2 On-Demand vs Reserved Instance Cost Savings Calculator
Minor sugg: s/better start/better to start/

In the sentence: "If you want to engage an audience it's better start with no more than an outline of what you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences.".
In that post, you wrote, "DotTEL is not at all limited, as long as you can transition to the mindset of decoupling your content from its address."

Care to elaborate? I thought tel stores no more than phonebook data. How could you use it to serve a web app?
He still has to worry about the bottom line. He gets paid a salary and would certainly benefit from registrations in .nz even if a non-profit. Non-profit revenues pays his salary. No different then the head of PBS saying why pbs is superior to non-public tv.
Probably

"... described in natural language and/or generated preemptively."
They're typing parenthesis in the video. You can't type parenthesis on an iPad without switching the key set. That, plus the small targets and odd autocomplete (missing close-parenthesis, by the look of it) makes me wonder if they've actually used this to a significant degree on an iPad instead of in the emulator...
An idea will almost always arise in one individual before another based purely on chance. That does not make one a "lone genius." The idea of creative individualism as practiced by modern society is unrealistic and promotes marginalizing others for the sake of creating heros.

The message is clear: you too can be a hero! One person can be 10000x more valuable than another!

I disagree with you completely in your claim that it's well acknowledged that lone geniuses build off previous work. The general population credits lone geniuses with work they didn't even do. For example Steve Jobs and multitouch or Edison with much of Tesla's work. It's a huge problem and one that needs addressing.

The majority of scientific and technological advances are the last step in a huge collective work explored by many people over decades or centuries. Even in one of the most popular examples of genius, Albert Einstein, this is the case. Consider his famous thought experiment about riding on a beam of light. Almost completely buried in history is that Camille Flammarion came up with this idea first, as well as some early ideas about space time. Einstein put the required last steps to form the theory, but still built on the work of others.
Along the same lines, read Borges' "The Library of Babel", from 1941.

Quoting from the Wikipedia description: "Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair."
I voted up this thread because of this comment. (Bit tired of Taibbi, but your inside history is very interesting.)
I try to make the strongest claims I can that are true. If I believed something as extreme as what you claim I said, I'd say it. Which means if I didn't say it, I didn't say it.

Though the difference in meaning between what you claim I said and what you're able to quote me as saying may seem small to you, there is a critical difference between them: what you claim I said is false, and the sentences you quote are true. I think we both agree on that. Or do you think any of the sentences I actually wrote are false?
YES. Given how long we've been building up to resolution independence, given the already long standing real-world examples of vector object hinting provided by fonts... it's amazing that there seems to be little work in this area and less work in terms of actual standards/implementations.

This is an area Apple is perfectly, ideally positioned to execute and lead on.

EDIT:
I wonder if one could implement vector icons as fonts in order to properly hint them.
The solution is in SVG itself. Set the id='s properly, and we can then do a simple map of existing hinting terminology directly into the DOM. Want less density at lower resolutions? Create a low-res layer within the SVG specifically for this case. The strength is entirely in the language used to declare the hinting; this can be directly incorporated in SVG, and thus made accessible to designers immediately (Inskcape -> Ctrl+Shift+X, start your engines..)
just fyi, wait until your logged in, then you can change your username by clicking it.
PDF, please? Or at least a JPG that wasn't set to 50% quality?
This is insane!

Indian Government will tax startups 32.5% on any angel funding received. But, they give tax holidays to larger companies under SEZ scheme.

It can be cheaper and more viable for Indian startups to incorporate in Singapore or US.
I get what Gruber is saying here, but I disagree. Now to be fair, I think the problem of consistency is real, and I think this is something Android needs to be better about.

Now, that said, I don't think the solution is to have manufacturers build proprietary visual interfaces. That's clearly at least as motivated by Samsung wanting to lock users into their user interface as it is motivated by a desire for consistency.

Full disclosure: I work for Google, but probably don't have much more to do with Android than you do. I don't speak for either Android or Google.
Removing the "ums" (a distraction) is a far cry from going to the dark side of public speaking ("vacuousness").

One insight I had into public speaking was that good speakers pause. There is white space in their delivery. These are typically the locations where a less experienced speaker puts his verbal tics.

Just as we prefer well-spaced, paragraph style coding over wall-of-text maintenance nightmares, we should work towards removing our fear of "dead air" and let our presentations breathe a bit.
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At what point did you offer to work for free?

If they liked your designs, you shouldn't be offering to work for free, even for the experience. Show them your value.

Like the other say, don't let this one experience affect you, it is likely a one off.

I'm working with a bunch of start-ups in an incubator at the moment. Send me your portfolio and I'll pass it around and see if we can get you some experience. pete kitchon
Could you use this for controls in a javascript game? :-) Thanks. I am starting to make games, and want to use keyboard keys now.
Sure consistency is great but it doesn't trump everything else. If that were the case we would still be using Nokia style interfaces from the 90s.

Samsung might benefit from adopting the Android 4.0 UI. If they did, assuming other vendors do the same, there would be a more unified UI throughout all Android smartphones, not unlike iOS. And people complain about Android fragmentation...
Related: a repo called killer-talks [1] appeared a few days ago on GitHub. I've not watched them all but the few I have seen (especially the Rich Hickey talks) are prime examples of exceptional speakers communicating important, novel ideas.

[1] https://github.com/pharkmillups/killer-talks
The recent EC2 pricing change presents a compelling case for switching to reserved instances instead of on-demand instances. Provided you have the capital available to manage the upfront cost (and the confidence in your ability to pay for at least 1 year), the cost savings of switching to reserved instances are substantial. Hopefully this tool will help some of you save time when making the comparison.
Excellent post, Dan. Enjoyed getting your perspective.

--

One of the hardest things about identifying what you love is acknowledging that it is rarely black and white. Yet people + media romanticize a notion of "perfect" love that has no lows or flaws, and the average person buys into this. As a result, we often feel as though we still haven't found what we love because it's not an unequivocal love.

With hacking, there will always be frustrating bugs and grunt work.

With romantic love, there will always be ugly fights and unappealing compromises.

And so on.

It would be disingenuous for people to say that they love commenting their code or that they enjoy every bit of arguing with their significant other. But having the wisdom to know yourself and accurately "measure" the extent to which you love something relative to other experiences in life is tremendously powerful.
Have you tried clicking on your (default) username to change it? That worked for me.
Do any other beginners / wannabies get really depressed when hearing about such a head start? :) Keep rocking.
I am also working on a set of iOS tools that allow you to view, edit, and commit your Github projects on the go.

If you are interested in coding from your iPad, check out http://jackalope.me to sign up for early access.
Software to slice bread
This is assuming that when you put those devices in the same area, there will be no interaction between them, no amplification, no cancelling out, etc.

A better question to ask would be probably: should they test multiple devices in addition to single samples in order to catch more interaction patterns?
No. com/net/info have always been US domain names from the beginning. It's a big reason why others were created. When you run a .com, you are running a US domain name.

There are no international domains -- can you imagine how disastrously messy that would be?

Domain names are under the jurisdiction of one country. It just so happens the US domain names are popular, but that certainly doesn't mean you are forced to use them.
Microsoft Hacking Code leaked from security info-sharing program
original source: http://sonic840.deviantart.com/art/Computer-hardware-poster-...
So the US won't give them visas and India won't let them take investments. Where are Indian startups destined for now?
Small companies can't lobby the way large companies do. This is why many democracies aren't pro-business as they would let you believe. They're pro-big business. An important distinction.
In the second decade of the 21st century, this sh*t still passes for "re-invention of coding" ???

On a touch device, coding should not have ANYTHING to do with typing out paragraphs of text unless it's actually a text string that is needed for some widget.

We're still stuck in the mind-ghetto of text editing and we just can't seem to break free of it. And yes, I know, Apple and its app store policies are a bitch, but who's stopping anyone from making a super awesome widgety, draggy/droppy, stretchy/connecty programming interface on the Android platform?