skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah! nice funny presentation.

But it breaks the rule Guy Kawasaki once mentioned. Use a 30pt font so that everyone can read it and don't stuff all information into once slide. slide-4 (especially) looks ugly because of that.

And he also gave out a formula (seems like he made that up), "find the age of the oldest person in the room and divide that by 2, thats the minumum size of font you can use. so unless you are presenting to 16 year olds, do not use an 8pt font".

This link might also help in making a better pitch. It's just a 2min video, but a good one http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1177
Lessons (or Not) When a Start-Up Misses the Mark
I still remember with fondness the first coroutines I wrote, almost 35 years ago: it seemed like a really cool hack to connect a producer of bytes to a consumer of them (both already written, just 6 lines of assembler plus a little bit of init code).
PayPal's API was actually pretty easy to implement for my subscription service.

PayPalTech has a nice script generator that outputs a simple PHP script that gets data from PayPal's API after a purchase/subscription is processed, I'm a terrible coder and I was able to get all the data I needed pretty easily.

https://www.paypaltech.com/PDTGen/
Guy's rule works great for the people in the room. However, it actually makes the experience crappy for those who are reading the slides online after, or who don't have access to audio or video.

In today's example, there were about 75 people in the room. however, the slides have already been viewed by over 1300 people online (in <8 hours).

So, if you're designing for the room -- use Guy's advice.

However if you're designing for the vast majority of people who will read your slides online, it's probably better to include most of the core material -- and that you'd be accused of reading bullets if given in the room.

so the challenge is to provide the material in somewhat complete form in the presentation, and yet still try to be entertaining/educational for the live performance.

all the above aside, i make no apologies for violating almost every rule of good presentation form & guidelines.

but then again, it works for me... and it's distinctive & unusual, and thus memorable. which achieves the design goal.
note: you're not trying to be perfectly accurate, and or flowery.

you're trying to communicate plainly, and to keep their attention long enough to get to the next slide / next pitch.

thus, sometimes taking a shortcut is imperfect, but useful.

note: "X for Y" does NOT work very well if neither X nor Y are well understood for the audience. however, it can work ok as shorthand while the person "peels the onion" and gets a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the concept.
if that's a left-handed compliment, i'll take it ;)

and i resemble that remark.
I like Chrome too and will start using it as default browser when..

- All my FF extensions are available in Chrome
&
- The ability to change what sites it's saves in my landing page. I don't want to be reminded I got RickRolled.
I can accept the fact that Firefox is a little bit slower than Chrome. After all, the Internet connection is already very slow, why bother saving some extra seconds waiting then? Plus I always start Firefox when system boots and have it wait in the background, and I seldom shut down the system (I just put it to sleep), so startup time of Firefox is not really an issue for me.

But I cannot accept that Firefox eats up 2g memory after some time and stops responding all together once in a week and kills all my tabs with it. What Mozilla should really steal from Chrome is the one-process-per-tab and sandboxing ...
Ask HN: Can't Find Old Post
A few weeks ago there was a post on the homepage about companies who are making money through selling advertising space in email newsletters. I have search all over and can't find it. I was wondering if anyone else remembered this article and any other information that would help me find this article.

The articles angle seemed to be that how in a web 2.0 world that companies were making money the old fashioned web way. It also talked a lot about how email newsletter CPMs are much higher than banner ad CPMs

Thanks.
ANWR? That's a cold place to be without clothes.
It’s no secret how bad Techcrunch is at gathering statistically relevant data about Internet traffic.

I'm thinking Arrington either didn't know he was comparing 2 different data sets (US vs. Worldwide) or he is trying to negate any bad press Facebook may get over the Hitwise data.
yeah, i agree... probably the high point (low point?) of the preso.

btw, that came out of a tweet a month back:
http://twitter.com/davemcclure/statuses/1201923856
This rings true so hard that it's almost spooky. The two main reasons I tend to avoid power electronics are because I hate getting electrocuted (this happened again just a week ago) and because I keep forgetting when you're supposed to multiply by the square root of three and when you're supposed to divide.

(Next week I'll be working with 40 amp relays and some heavy-gauge electrical wiring. Damn it! Is there no escape?)
See "Code Reuse Considered Harmful": http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-March/0...

Rereading it, I think it was mostly right, but partly wrong. The path to massive programming productivity isn't to rebuild everything from zero; it's to reuse only the right things.
Actually... it sharpens your mind since it's much more complicated :)
Heya, lookie there, I knew name-dropping would help. For details, take a look at these (they don't seem to get votes on their own):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLA_(software_architecture)

http://piumarta.com/software/cola/

http://piumarta.com/software/cola/coke.html

Crazy neat stuff!
You can not fight the materialization of thoughts without fighting these thoughts. If enough people think X, X will be normal sooner or later, even if it was illegal. It is normal that Women and minorities have equal rights with white men now (on paper at least), in contrast to 100 years ago. Think pedophiles won't be normal in 50 years? Sounds perfectly plausible to me.
"require learning yet another crazy" -- there's your problem.
Spending N hours on a problem that's very difficult to solve is often worse than deciding to find a way to avoid solving it. There are N₂ examples in my history where I solved a problem that was much harder than necessary — or spent a lot of time trying, then failed — when I should have just stepped back to ask if it was worth it.
This is my recommended book for every programmer who wants to start learning ruby. One of the why's product.
PHome because Start.io: simple bookmarking/RSS
I love the poignant guide! It (along with Ruby being an awesome language) got me into Ruby.

It's great because you read it because you enjoy it, and then you happen to learn Ruby in the process.

It also has some interesting analogies, examples, and ways to remember things. When talking about how block variables go inside |pipes|, he says:

I like to think of the pipe characters as representing a tunnel. They give the appearance of a chute that the variables are sliding down.

Much better at helping you remember the syntax than "block variables go in a comma-separated list which is enclosed by pipes" like you'd find in a normal book.
Obviously an idea requires execution to be profitable, but there are ideas where less effort is required for execution. Those would be what I would consider the 'killer ideas.' If you have something totally new that can take the world by storm and there's no competition, that's different from breaking into an established market.
Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now
If you and your company are good enough to be accepted by YC, then it probably is, both for you and for YC. It's the classic win-win proposition. YC will probably get a return on their money, and your company will be worth enough more that your share, now 95% instead of 100%, will be worth quite a bit more than it was before their investment.
Unusual? Certainly. Best? Not for me.

I had some time this past summer and decided that I wanted to experiment a bit with Ruby. I tried Poignant three or four times, and each time I would put it down after half an hour, with the same thought - "Why is this book, widely regarded as the One True Way to learn Ruby, fucking around so much? I don't want foxes and cartoons, I want syntax, rules, conventions, and information."

Maybe it's just me, but the way I tend to learn a new language is with a bunch of docs on one screen, and an IDE/REPL on the other. I read some stuff from the doc, try it out on the other screen, and move one. After a few units of time doing that, I'll write up a trivial project to try and make the various bits I've learned work together. Once that's done, I'll have a sufficient grasp of the syntax and general themes of the language that I can dig deeper into various parts of it to learn what I need to keep going.

You know what the "best" language book I've read is? K&R, ore more precisely, K&R2. It gets to the point, and tells you exactly what you need to know about what you looked up in very clear and exact language. It doesn't hold your hand, and it doesn't make you read about foxes.

Poignant always seemed like it was designed for someone who had no idea what programming was and wanted to end up being somewhat fluent in Ruby. That's good and all - there's certainly a market for that - but not what I look for when I'm in the market for a book on a programming language.

EDIT: Why the downmod - casual use of the f-bomb or contravention of established orthodoxy?
But, of course, the problem is that even with an open wifi there are quite a few websites that are blocked by the great firewall...

So using an open wifi doesn't solve the problem the way tor does. The other way is to have a server outside of china and use ssh to proxy through it but how many have a server they can access like that...
I wonder if the CTypes Python bindings will help out the DVCS clients such as Bazaar or Mercurial. Bazaar already has good client support for SVN. It would be nice if Mercurial would get first class support.
Indeed. You get the sense when reading it, that the author was having a blast writing it, which makes learning Ruby fun. Also, the way its written is almost like a captivating book, so you can't help but dive further in.

I remember picking up 'The Ruby Programming Language' written by Matz, got to the 2nd chapter before I hopped online and found the poignant guide. Made for a much more interesting time learning Ruby.
Infamous - "Having an exceedingly bad reputation; notorious."

What's so bad about nickb? He seems like a real nice fellow...
For once, I agree with Krugman. He is right.
But the problem of braintree is that it only works with us merchant accounts so for people like the parent who is in Australia or me whose company is in HK it doesn't work...

I found that finding good payment gateways is very easy for a us company but rather hard when you're in other countries
On my resource limited laptop, 512 ram, I will move over to chrome if its resource utilisation ends up being similar to chromium's current utilisation: firefox often takes up 50% of my ram - chromium takes up 8%.

I'll stick with firefox if it really does reduce resource usage in its next iteration. But I've heard those kinds of claims before, and nothing has come from them.
Arousing as it may be, I'm not showing porn to a VC.
how did this get 31 points? is there a group gaming the upvotes now?
Same. The first time i tried to read it I actually thought it was a joke.
"$2500 for 2 months of work comes out to 8 dollars an hour. This isn't a good wage for a programmer anywhere ..."

You're very wrong about this. I ran an outsource programming company in the Philippines for years, and $8 per hour is far higher than the highest rates I ever paid my best programmers.

Try living in a third world country some time, and get used to the labor rates they expect, before you make blanket statements about what's a good rate "anywhere".

There are literally thousands of qualified programmers in third world countries who would die for a chance to earn $8 per hour. Many of them are lucky to earn $8 a day ...
After updating my svn client on my mac and my ubuntu box to this, eclipse no longer manages to do anything with the team features....
With all due respect, if you had such trouble with Poignant, the you probably also would have had a hard time with Ruby. Not to imply that you couldn't understand Ruby or write in Ruby, but just that Ruby has a very distinct character, a personality almost, and I suspect you and Ruby would not have gotten along.

For me, it's that way with Python. Honestly, Python is not fundamentally different from Ruby except this: In Python, there is "one right way". For some programmers that's a saving grace, for others it's akin to a death sentence. To each his/her own...
For what it's worth, _why did the illustrations for Matz's book too...
Ooo, ooo are you talking about the La Brea tar pits?
if enough (democratically enough) people think that pedophilia is ok, why would it be wrong to legalize it? As a second counter argument, lot of people transiently have thoughts to kill, but its not legal even today.
This is a rather useless article that I'm guessing got modded up because of the Iphone in the title, it doesn't give much substance and seems to bash dell, a company who is spreading into other markets and learning as they go. It's not like apple went out and made an iphone in a day, why would it be any different for dell.

Anyways whats with this 'killer' trend it is rather annoying, of course nothing is going to kill another thing and if they try the most they could become is a replacement, just as no OS will kill another and no mp3 player will kill another they are alternatives.
I don't think NYTimes would have much to gain from gaming HN.
I’m not an artist. But I’ve worked with my fair share of really great artists and the impression I’ve always been given is that great art comes from consistency of vision. In other words it matters a great deal to them what shade of blue they use or how thick a line is.

This isn’t a mindset I, as a programmer, understand. But I’ve seen great art come of it and the people making that great art have told me it’s important.

(I've also seen lousy art generated by committee which just backs up that claim)

I think that is the root of this conversation. What Doug Bowman et. al are saying is there are different ways of doing things and Google doesn’t realize that. They think everything can be done from an engineering standpoint and that’s a philosophy that kills the drive of most creative people.

So when you say "why not let an algorithm figure it out" you’re missing the creative person’s point.

(You said there "is TONS of great human-driven design" inside Google but I don’t know where you get that information from. That’s not the way I’d always heard it)
>One of the hardest intermediate steps would be developing a sufficiently large cooperative social unit.

Churches would probably be the nucleus for these. There are already numerous churches that are beyond tribal size, and they are of course geographically localized.
A world without Twin Reverbs, SVT's, tubs mic pres, and the like is one I wouldn't like to live in. (Marshalls, on the other than, I care not for...) Heck, even germanium transistors are being put to good use for audio nowadays.

This is a great example of how evolution can produce things that are still useful decades later, even as most people have moved on to the latest and greatest.
I don't believe I agree. Ruby is straightforward; I don't have any trouble at all understanding it. I enjoy _why's cartoons. That doesn't mean that reading _why's cartoons is in any way a good way (for me) to learn Ruby, which is a counterexample to your "probably".

Ruby is hardly difficult.

(For the sake of anecdotes: I find Python to be stultifyingly simplistic, with a number of negative features, and generally poor libraries. I find Ruby to be the wrong balance between dynamism and performance. I find both of them to lack syntactic abstraction.)
I help them if they ask, my grandfather learned how to use the net and email on his own and knows about the hazardous attachments that live and about spam, and I'm guessing my grandmother checks email through him, on the other side my other grandmother has no use for the internet and has no plans of ever using a computer.

My father although not in the older generation (senior) is relatively new to the internet and pretty much just knows ebay gmail and google, but one thing the it guys at his work have done is instill a good fear of opening attachments as he seems to get a large amount of virus spam.

Most just want to use email to keep in contact, send pictures, and relay internet jokes and if they ask they can get my help.

I think the best thing to teach them is about malware and maybe even show them how to do a virus scan, also show them how to send pictures and open pictures, as that is what they want to do.
Entirely true. My concept here is to provide a somewhat higher-grade alternative. It is and always will be better to work with people you know, or have some connection to. That said, it's quite common for people to need work done and not be able to find an appropriate person to do it through normal networking. The yellow pages will take anyone. I'm thinking of something a little more exclusive - the lowest levels would be filtered out.
Anyone ever read "A Canticle for Lebowitz"? I recently recently discovered it and am very intrigued.
>What is the easiest way to bootstrap technology from scratch? It would probably be a lot easier in temperate climates where food is abundant; in many parts of the world too much effort would have to be spent on just staying alive.

If technology ceased to exist today, there would certainly be a massive die-off. Farmers would not have the ability, and possibly not the motivation to feed all of the newly-useless urban dwellers. Even if it would be possible for low-tech farming to feed everybody, it would be impossible to retool and retrain millions of people in time to plant this year. California would get it the worst. How would they even get across the desert and mountains to places where food is grown without irrigation?
I don't know, I think there's a valid point here. A lot of people (usually Android supporters) assume the Cell. Phone market is going to go the way of the PC market in that generic manufacturers are going to take over. That's what Dell tried to do and their rejection shows, at least for now, that isn't a valid philosophy.

Maybe that will change if, in the future, phones become interchangable and providers lose the power they have over the industry. But for now the PC model doesn't work.
Agreed. It takes maybe a half hour of experimenting to know enough of the syntax of a language to start being mildly productive, and the rest of the time is spent trying to learn the standard library and language specific idioms -- which can take years. This is one reason why I've always found the PHP.net website to be useful, despite the fact that PHP has a significant number of serious warts. Admittedly, it could use a lot of work, the comments are less than spectacular, and some of the things it suggests are downright dangerous, but it's an excellent reference for the list of functions, how to use a function, and often times when to use a function -- unlike many language intro and function reference works. Let's say I want to do a DNS lookup. The PHP docs for dns_get_record are overly complete, you're well on your way to starting to use that (the problem with PHP is deciding _which_ of the four or five functions that do the same thing you should use, not a walk in the park either, I know). At ruby-doc.org, the docs for Resolv::DNS don't appear to include any examples, and the method prototypes listed link to the code for the method. Why would I want to see that?! I'm using a library so I don't need to know how the code works. I learned perl and a lot of other languages from complete, working programs, not samples a handful of lines long that performed contrived actions just for the sake of having an example.
Benchmarking programming languages
any other information that would help me find this article

http://searchyc.com/

or

http://www.google.com/search?q=email+newsletter+site%3Anews....
Can you get prepaid internet access though? Otherwise, each phone has to be linked to a social security number (at least in the US), which seems like it would put a damper on the whole thing.
I don't know about the post, but Carsonified used to / still has a product that did exactly that.
I wish it was as easy as finding a lawyer. It's not hard getting a good reference from your divorce attorney for someone who does personal injury. I've reached six or seven programmers in my search for a web developer and none of them could put me in contact with someone can do what I need. Not to mention someone enthusiastic for a new start-up. Lawyers are always open for business.
That's good to hear that the recurring billing is as pleasant experience. I pretty much assumed as much, given how smooth Auth.net is for single transactions.

Honestly, I'm quite pleased with using Auth.net and would indeed recommend it, moreso in hearing that their recurring billing is a simple process.
I can't figure out where you're coming from here. People I know use "infamous" facetiously all the time, and I almost never hear it used literally.
Poignant is fun. That's all.

Probably the best book for really learning Ruby is The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. Hal clearly gets Ruby.

The book is thorough (although possibly a little out of date now), introduces a lot of idiomatic Ruby, and has just the right amount of geeky inside jokes.
"<well known company/product> is dead. You read it first here!"
Hard to believe this hasn't been posted before; I was just reading a few of their publications (http://vpri.org/html/words_links/articles_ifnct.php) recently. There's some great stuff in there. The STEPS tech report is great reading, and the reusable objects paper is pretty neat too.

Luke Gorrie is doing some work on COLA on the OLPC which is worth keeping an eye on too: http://lukego.livejournal.com/
If you like this learning style (as I did), and you are interested in haskell, BONUS' Learn You a Haskell for Great Good is a good intro as well: http://learnyouahaskell.com/
Regarding ads, the big advantage of AdBlock is that the request is never made to the ad server. Ad includes can get pretty bulky so it makes a difference.

Regarding Chrome, I agree that having one process per window is a great idea. I have to ask though, what are you doing that is best accomplished with 92 browser windows open?
GlimmerBlocker is a nice ad-blocker for OS X that works across browsers. I'll let the website do the explaining: http://glimmerblocker.org/

IMHO, these guys need to do some more marketing.
I enjoyed the unrelated sidebars in _why's Poignant Guide, but I don't think I really learned anything useful from it. The pickaxe book was more helpful for me. I've been using ruby for more than 3 years now and I really enjoy it, so I get along with it OK.

To this day I still sometimes think that I should trudge through all of the poignant guide, but then I remember what a tedious time I had and decide not to.
Cappuccino might be a good start, as it's pretty cognant to Objective-C, and also provides the same kind of graphics primitives as you'd be using on the iPhone.
Is it possible to suck up more than this?
Agree. I have a alot of fun add-ons, but I need my AdBlock. The internet just looks funny with all those adds.
Exactly; my instinct is that it would increase initial perceived value, but it wouldn't have a permanent impact.
I think that if you're designing for the people who read your slides online, you're not serving either audience - neither the people in the room (who undergo death by powerpoint) nor the people online - who are forced to look at powerpoint bullet points rather than an actual written document with sentences, paragraphs, etc.