skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been speaking publicly since I was little kid. And at university my CS program required exactly one theater class, not any theater class but... you guessed it, public speaking.

There are a lot of great ways to learn how to be a good public speaker and everyone should try to improve, however I have never heard of this throat vs mouth thing.

I am not saying it's not true, I've never tried it. All I am saying is, there is a plethora of resources on public speaking and this is just one of them. If it doesn't work for you, don't get discouraged.

Another possible explanation for British vs American speaking might be cultural.

I am not sure about British school but in a lot of European schools, oral exams are just as much part of the daily curriculum as pop quizzes are in American.

Add to that a difference is how positively or negative a culture views "aahs" and "uhhms", and that can explain a lot.
Hmm, now I wonder why YouTube doesn't offer 'prettyfied' urls so we don't have to click links like:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=never-gonna-give-you-up
Which, ironically, is a different form of being validated by others. It's just that getting validated by the market can lead to worthwhile side effects, such as financial independence.
Yep, that's the one downside. It's the price you pay for keeping significantly more equity (AlphaLab only takes 3%) in exchange for more funding ($25K).

Pittsburgh's a great place to do a startup though. It's a great city, and really cheap as cities go. Whatever money you have for starting up goes a lot farther than it would in some other places.
whats your startup?
Please release a separate file without trend information, as not everyone will need it. For the data format: How about a simple CSV file with 3 fields: "domain-part,path,url". This would translate to such entries:

amazon,a, http://www.amazon.com/Geek-Atlas-Places-Science-Technology/d...

If you compress the file (or start a new file every week/month) this shouldn't be much of a burden for your server.
Artists visit virtual Second Life for real-world cash
1819: America's First Housing Bubble
They're using the word "tautology" as a sort of ironic joke.

I agree that they should have chosen "virtuous cycle" instead. "Tautology" is too cute, cute enough to be misleading. I clicked through to the article expecting it to be some kind of rant about how you Should Never Release Software Before It Is "Done".
You're right: we didn't care about the Filipinos and Bangaladeshis being mistreated in Dubai - until westerners started getting mistreated.

Yet this very same mistreatment occurs in Saudi Arabia (one of the places I've lived in), and we continue to ignore it. My suspicion is that we need their oil far more than we need justice.

A recent HN thread on Dubai: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=547553

And here is an article by some folks in Dubai that they need to diversify away from oil:
http://www.business24-7.ae/articles/2009/4/pages/05042009/04...
No problem. I could see the confusion that could arise if you were unfamiliar with the term.

Yes, by Islamic standards, Dubai and the UAE in general are more "tolerant", depending on how you define tolerance. I suspect--and especially after reading the article--that it's a veneer to lure westerners under the guise that Dubai is a modern, center-left, run-by-a-benevolent-dictator-type of society that wants it's citizens to flourish. Underneath the polished marble and 10-lane highways though, it's a repressive, feudal regime. Of course, when money is involved though, the arms and wallets open, and suddenly what was impermissible before is fine, or at least tacitly accepted.
FTA: The biggest change is that trunk must always be stable. You can work on whatever features you like, as long as you keep the trunk of the project in a releasable state. You must be relentless.

This is where distributed source control comes in really, really handy!
The world in nuclear weapons
I usually don't use the debugger when doing programming, usually using print statements except when doing Smalltalk.
Rather than saying not using a debuggers is better, maybe it is that most debuggers are just not so good. Or it could also be that most of us are just not so good with using debuggers.
I think I saw this on southpark
I wonder if we can set up a private forum for all of us this summer that develop our idea anyway. Maybe we can share ideas/thoughts and beta test each other's stuff.

At the end of the summer, if we get a lot of us, we could create a a big page for all of to show off our stuff.

What do you guys think?
It's unintelligible to use a "class" keyword for defining classes?
The Toyota iReal looks like a better option with superb design.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nmsi/3025451321/
I'm always reminded of the words Steve Yegge once posted on his blog regarding getting rejected from a Google interview:

You should feel bad, but not meta-bad
If i'm shortening this URL: amazon.com/permalink and amazon.ca/permalink i will get both times and url with: "amazon.twi.bz"

Wouldn't be better if you allow to put the TLD/ccTLD at first? amazonca.twi.bz/x OR amazoncom.twi.bz/x

We get transparency at the cost of a slightly longer URL. I think it's ok. And will recommend your domain to friends.

Thanks for the work
Update on the FBI datacenter raid
That seems to be how Erlang has achieved its recent popularity... some big successes in telecommunications systems and ejabberd.
The best sales/marketing/mgmt people I've met are those that take a systems-focused approach. On some levels, this is very similar to designing your db layout, or the user flow through your application.

Good sales people design a repeatable process around selling. They investigate the market, build a call list, and execute through the call list. They then refactor based on results. They do not throw shit wildly at the wall and hope something happens.

Good management people design business process in similar ways. Customer service is a system. Calls come in, they are processed, logs are created, and evaluations are done quarterly of the system. Apply similar methodology to hiring, to finance, to marketing, to accounting, etc.
The hardest people to find are those with good strategic vision -- so if this is your idea, you need to be that person.

Some of these things are harder to assess than others. Look for people who use data to make decisions, who are 'doers', and who can describe to you the process they plan to take. Look for people who have a track record of these things in other, perhaps non-startup ways.
Literally, probably yes. You decrease the freedom of movement, which likely decreases the unstructured thrashing that is often detrimental. Then, you may also leverage each others' buoyancy.
This is a major point in favor of Flash. The adoption and expansion of Flash into the enterprise is critical to the future of Adobe. Thus, Adobe will continue to invest heavily on improving and expanding the Flash player, API, support and development tools.

Microsoft could drop Silverlight with little impact on the company -- it's not critical to the success of Windows at this point.
what was the reason? or was there simply no reason other than a flood of equally-or-even-better startups?
Nice! Great idea. You should look into implementing: http://sites.google.com/a/snaplog.com/wiki/short_url

cheers,

r.S.
Mac Heist 2009, cheap Mac apps, support charity.
If you are interested in current climate science and commentary on the science "Real Climate" is worth reading http://www.realclimate.org/
I don't mean to condone the modern slavery in Dubai in any way, but isn't it telling about the conditions in Bangladesh and the Philippines that people volontary leave them to go to the UAE and be treated like dirt.
We never got a fully straight answer. As best we can tell, it was a lack of excitement and knowledge of our target market, plus (probably?) other exciting applicants.
A friend of mine got rejected two (maybe three?) years ago from YC applying solo and his rejection explicitly said they were looking for teams for the program and not individuals.

Again, this was at least two years ago so things may well have changed.
quite a nasty bug if I try and shorten "omgponi.es" it says:

Sorry, twi.bz only understands http and https web addresses

I'd either make http:// be in the text field by default, or append http:// when a user enters a url.
Is reading new business books really a necessity? The few that I've read seem pretty vapid. I'm sure there's some useful advice in some of them, but surely an experienced businessperson would already have the basic knowledge and abilities down.

If a top business guy in a startup spent a meaningful amount of time reading new business books, I'd be a bit suspicious.

Your other 'warning signs' seem right on to me.
How the Internet Got Its Rules
That's basically why I use Zappos (although not quite to that extent).

Shoe shopping isn't really "fun", it's a utility exercise. The only reason you can't easily order shoes (or other apparel) online is because of the fit issue. A size X from 3 different manufacturers (or 3 styles from the same manufacturer) could vary enough to affect the fit.

So, I can go to Zappos, throw a few shoes I'm interested in into my cart and they're generally at my house the next day. Try them on, keep the ones I want, box the others up and drop the box off at the UPS store on my way to work.

Far less hassle than going to the mall, with a far wider selection and better prices. Not really sure what the downside is, if any.
(when was the last time a hello world app got $2M in VC funding?)
I was thinking today this exactly!
For The YC & Techstars Rejects
For those of you that plan to go ahead and build your idea anyway, do you want to setup a private forum for us to mentor each other?

We can share tips, ideas and questions and maybe even help beta test each other's stuff. At the end of it, we may even have a nice little portfolio of products to show off that may get a little attention.

What do you think?
Please Feel Free to Take Our Content
It's nice to see more programs like these starting up, even if they do feel a little derivative of YC. They seem like good catalysts for cities that want to get new businesses operating in them.

The challenge, in my opinion, is that although they can be great for the communities, I think they come at a cost for entrepreneurs.

I've done a lot of things from a distance. After art school I moved away from the city to paint. I reasoned that doing so cut costs and that I could paint well anywhere. Years later I partnered in an interaction design firm in a small town employing a similar rationale. Most recently, we've been working on our startup from Vancouver, which is beautiful and a nice place to raise a family.

In each of these instances, the logic for being away from a center (be it art, design or startup) has been sound. Additionally, there are always strong proponents in these communities to keep people doing "great things close to home." No matter how strong the logic is though, it simply doesn't hold up. There are greater opportunities for those who put themselves at the heart of the "action".

You could likely start a great company in Pennsylvania, but even with low rent and more equity, you'd still have a weaker "deal". The appeal of YC, in my opinion, is that it's so close to where people think in startup-terms and is run by people who actually live in that world.

Although some will bemoan my saying so, the closer you can get to the action, the better. There are probably some great actors in Helsinki, but I bet you'll never hear anything about them.
I would suggest moving the "shorten" button to left. It is kind of obscured on the extreme right.
Ask HN: Is the HN source code available?
I have seen a few HN clones out there. Just wondering if the source code is available somewhere. Thanks!
All forms of Government = Control

Modern Liberalism is based in large part on the idea that being rich does not make the air cleaner. There are limits on the value of personal wealth and there is little difference once you cross the threshold into extreme levels of personal comfort.

The Right holds dear the idea that rich people can take care of them selves and the goal should be to maximize personal wealth.

Taken to an extreme each of these ideas break down, but IMO the left wing is closer to reality. Granted in the real world we need huge helpings of corruption, stupidity, and hypocrisy, but that's going to infect any form of government over time.

Then there are all the lies such as the republican leadership hating the idea of ever banning abortion etc. And all the liberal "think of the children" reteric that sounds great but is a pointless power grab.
Not out of anger but rather convenience. It turns out venkman is pretty much the only choice you have when developing xulrunner-based applications and for that, it's pretty darn good. My biggest complaint is that it's difficult to get venkman to break in code that it doesn't think will execute (often inside xul bindings).
Yes. When I'm dealing with a new language/framework, I usually make a URL shortener. It's simple enough to not take long, yet represents a more useful learning experience than simply 'Hello World'.
When you're first working on a large chunk of unfamiliar code, stepping in gdb is an AMAZING way to learn how the code works.

If this guy is advocating adding prints to code, then his edit-compile-debug cycle must be very fast (i.e., smallish programs). On my large-scale project, it's much faster for me to restart the program with new breakpoints than compile and run again.

The latest gdb has checkpoints. That is a significant advantage over printf-based methods.

Of course, reasoning about programs is a very very effective tactic to solve bugs. If you write you code so that you can reason about it, you reduce the need for both printf's and debugs. As somebody pointed out above, this usually means writing short methods.
"Twi.bz: the transparent URL shrinker" (or shortener, if you're tied to that name) or

"Twi.bz: transparent and short URLs"
I think that every time people suggest this kind of thing and it doesn't really work out. Just post your stuff to the main site, like those of us who simply never applied do.
With all due respect, references are worthless. The person wont give you references of people who wont give him glowing reviews.

Perhaps past employers might work, but I think what you say about their track record is really the only way, outside of just knowing someone or a referral from someone you trust.
Most of them are very fluffy. Even the good ones, with a unique idea (say, Innovator's Dilemma) have to pad the good stuff to make a book out of it. And hence, a side project of mine, Squeezed Books.
More info on the Segway website:
http://www.segway.com/puma/
I tried it on my start-ups domain. The result is interesting :)

"The web address you entered was http://rockingrackets.com/.

This has been converted to http://rockingrackets.twi.bz/a You can copy and paste it from here.

Your original web address had 26 characters, and the converted version has 30 characters."

I can see how this will always happen with the document root of any domain, so maybe you can refuse to shorten those, or make it a kind of in-your-face suggestion that it's silly to shorten a relatively short URL?
1. http://amazon.com/permalink converts to http://amazon.twi.bz/f

2. http://amazon.ca/permalink converts to http://amazon.ca.twi.bz/a

Note that for non-.coms the TLD is preserved.
I kind of like Clojure but several things I find a bit disturbing:
1. A very subjective one - not enough parenthesis - take fo example "cond" operator - it accepts pairs condition-operation without extra parens around each pair. Well, it looks nice for small "cond"'s but for bigger ones it is both inconvenient and error prone - if off by 2 exprssion, fo some reason - yo'll get completely crewed up behavior. There several other syntactical things I find artistically impressive but technologi cally justified.
2. Another thing - I miss "setf" - in somke places mutability can be a way for smaller code especially in case
of VM without tail-recursion.
3. It is way biased towarda concurency, it was in fact engineered for concurency - well I sometimes a lot more dirtiy but fasterr solutions.
4. I think that great attractivenes of Lisp's is that you can craft your own in less then a month. No pain with lex/yacc, antlr etc. Just make a simple reader and focu on semantics.
And didn't it also say: "Since the original web address is, in this case, shorter than the twi.bz version it's better to use the original. "?
Australia announces a new national broadband network
Adblock helps. The page was a clean read for me, not a single ad.
Early Twitter Buzz: Star Trek Has Secret Premiere in Austin
One of the links about the Segway/GM project included the design concept. What you're looking at today is basically just the "chassis".

The iReal looks more like the product from T3, and suffers the same basic issues as the T3 product and the Segway PT itself: single rider, un-enclosed design (which also limits top speeds in the US for crash-test reasons).

This GM/Segway project is designed to address a need for short-haul commuter uses (as it appears to me). Where a limited top-speed and range do not create a real-world limitation on the usage of the product.

For example, most weekends the wife and I and our 3 dogs go to a weekend retreat. My F-150 SuperCrew holds the people, dogs and various other items we bring quite well, but then is really too huge for getting around town. Something like this would be more applicable, holds two people, a small bit of cargo room and would have the range and speeds needed to get around nicely.
You know, I'm not sure if all those things mattered that greatly. Our application made it past the first round of screening (we got an interview invitation) and our demo broke when they were viewing it (we checked the logs). We committed code the night before without testing it and although a simple fix, it broke something else.

We didn't have recommendations, we were a small team of 2 (no designers -- we did our own design, ugly but not horrible). The entire YC application form was done in basically 5 hours at a local coffee shop. It took us forever to do the video, for some reason it's hard for me to talk to a stationary camera. We don't have users or investors lined up. We didn't even have incorporation documents yet. We probably have a good 4 months of hard work before we can even consider a private alpha launch (and we've already been working for the last 7 months on it).

Neither of us actually even considered applying to YC, we just didn't think our app was ready for anyone to see it yet, but surprisingly they didn't think so, or maybe they saw something about us that they didn't see in others.
I would say yes. Thirst for knowledge is a common trait I have noticed amongst the repeatedly successful, and usually manifests itself by having read most of the literature on ones topic.

Perhaps you are overestimating how long it takes to read a business book. Most can be finished in a few hours due to their padding, and reading 10+ new books per year shouldn't be hard even for the uber-busy. It's not like reading a tome on prolog.
I use GDB for C code, if only to get the nice backtraces, but other than that I find its easier to just think things through and put a few debug statements in.

Setting a DEBUG constant is usually pretty handy - I surround any debug output with an 'if (DEBUG){}' - it makes it easy to turn on/off the extra verboseness.
Not to be totally facetious, but if they did it'd be much harder to Rick Roll someone.
Someone made a terrific comment in response to Ron Garret's post earlier: the way you get productive in today's environment is primarily through libraries.

I think that was me. FWIW, I find CL's libraries to be adequate in many cases, but certainly not as good as Perl's.

(I have done a few Java projects, and I don't consider their libraries adequate at all. You are either stuck with full-stack frameworks, or a legacy API from 1995. I've also found that most Java programmers that write libraries don't know what OO is, and that makes the libraries painful to use. YMMV.

Slime is also vastly easier to use than Eclipse, even with "emacs emulation" turned on. Again, YMMV. :)
Or:

"Twi.bz: Short, Transparent URLs"
Basic Happstack Blog App
This is a cool idea. The host name in the URL goes a long way.

But there's still some trickery that could be used with redirection, e.g. "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google URLs and the like.

Also most malicious URLs will include the payload in the request parameters. You can still do a lot of damage with a GET request. (Ask Goolge bot if you don't believe me http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/746 )

What I'm trying to say is, there's no substitute for seeing a full URL. Especially for security conscious users like the HN crowd. For the average user though this might be enough information.
If your mom has trouble opening large links, she's probably not the type to be comforted by a subdomain. If the link is from her son she's going to click it.
kudos for through so far - they must have seen something awesome in you guys. I'm instantly excited to see what you're upto :)
Well unfortunately not everyone can get into YC or save up enough money to go move to the bay area to fund themselves while developing connections.

If Google had been started in Pittsburgh, they still would have been successful. I heard about Google through IRC back in the late 90s and immediately switched from Altavista because Google was so damn good.

Incidentally, AlphaLab is new, but Pittsburgh/PA has had seed funding through InnovationWorks and IdeaFoundry for some time. It used to be more like "here's $100,000 and you are on your own." AlphaLab is trying to develop a community. Again, I think it remains to be seen how these seed funding ventures turn out. Admitting SV is the only logical choice is premature. Give it time.
Just being picky, but you say on page that

"Instantly you know you'll be taken to Amazon.com and that the link is safe to click on."

but further down, you say:

"twi.bz doesn't warrant that a link is safe"

Otherwise, I'm glad you implemented this idea. It's nifty :)
I have a feeling that YC tries to fund the companies that change how people perceive and use technology. Others are just the me-too examples.

Is that the case with what you do?
As a designer, I can copy sketches or make high resolution versions of any logo and claim them as my own pretty easily.
That would not work as proof that I'm the creator.

I believe metadata on the files can help. -I'm no lawyer though- or emailing a copy of the logo to yourself like you said.
Whatever money you have for starting up goes a lot farther than it would in some other places.

That depends entirely on your model. Sales in midwest/south can be problematic for startups becuase the communities they live in do not adapt to change as fast as the coasts. I found this out the hard way. In addition, if growth of your startup depends on building a community, its going to be harder to get the word out if you arent on the coasts.

The cost savings are true, and they are significant, but if you cant grow your service organically, and you cant sell to prospects easily, it wont really matter in the long run, because you'll get to spend all that saved cash in marketing.
It seems to me that url transparency is an issue for the clients to solve. Why can't Twitter (or whatever you're using) decode the short url and supply a javascript pop-up or something to tell you where its going?
If the original is shorter, just return the original. You can make a note as to why you gave back the original, but I think we can safely assume the user wants the shortest he can get, so give it to him.
Are you a faster programmer compared to when you used a debugger?
which is clearly a sustainable rate...
What about removing all vowels except the first one? That way it is still shorter but transparent.
Just stop communicating with them.