skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to extrapolate this tip into a more general rule: no meta-talk.

For the speaker, preparing the talk has been top of mind for the past N hours/days/weeks. Not so for the audience. If you think about the situation from their perspective, you'll realize they don't want to hear about how you prepared the talk or how you approached the talk (usually). They want to hear your thoughts on the topic -- the result of your preparation.

This rule generally eliminates phrases like "while preparing this talk, I realized...", "when Joe asked me to give this talk...", "I didn't really prepare for this talk...", "I get nervous giving talks like this...", etc.

In almost all cases, you can simply strike those phrases from the script and your talk will be more focused and concise for it.
Here's an example
http://fayetteville.craigslist.org/rvs/1425504091.html
That's the difference between the literal meaning of the word and the implied meaning I think.
Textual watermarking from Amazon : United States Patent: 7610382
Hi, I'm Mike from Steepster. We thought we'd share our new ratings system we just deployed with HN as we think it's relevant for products with customer reviews, ratings, etc. It's our attempt to combat the 4.3 dilemma (discussed here recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883890).

Background: Steepster is a community site for tea drinkers to share their tasting notes, get recommendations, and discover new teas.

Feedback appreciated!
Just curious, does anyone actually like when employers get cute with job postings? It seems like a move of desperation to me, most of the time. Does it actually say "developer friendly" to others?
So, does that mean you can only live in warm climates and sunny climates? Would the solar panels receive enough sunlight to live in a place that rains and is overcast a lot? Also if you do get enough energy to live, would you be able to run a heater in winters?
My "slow sense" is tingling too. I'm deadly curious to know how fast I could make that "12-hour" job using Scala or Java.

I've done extensive work with Scala, Java, and bytecodes; writing performant Scala code requires some knowledge of the JVM and how Scala is compiled, and requires sacrificing some of its power; but because the static typing and method dispatching is so similar to Java's, you can get there. From everything I've read about Clojure, it sounds a whole level less efficient.

Not trying to knock Clojure, but 12 hours just sounds way way too long without more explanation.
I first saw this on slashdot:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/28/2236235/Amazon-Patent...

To me it looks like there would be ways to circumvent it. It also looks more effective the larger the body of content, so aimed at large scraping projects. Might not be conclusive on a single article.
This is THE best implementation of a ratings system I've seen. Very good job.
I like this idea a lot. I also think that once you have some tags, you could extrapolate which movies are likely to fall into those tag categories by seeing which movies people browsed on the site at the same time. You can get this information if you offer one additional step beyond flipping through thumbnails - such as watch a preview. Then with each browsing session you collect data you can use to map genres.
This seems aimed squarely at Paul Buchheit, considering it's less than a week after Paul did exactly that at Startup School.

Interestingly I enjoyed Paul's talk more than Jason's.
Every time I see a "puzzle" in a programmer ad, I feel they are not getting the desired effect. The only effect they should want is to get the ad noticed. They should not want the effect of weeding out potential applicants that simply don't want to invest the time to solve the puzzle. If its for a company that you know you want to work for, maybe you'll invest the time. But for a startup you don't know about, its asking potential applicants to invest in an unknown.
I just used aptana to auto format it.

also JQUERY is incorrectly capitalized, they are not cool, just want to seem like it. BOOOO!
Regardless of how it comes off on prospective employees, it seems to be a good marketing scheme, seeing as this post has escalated to the top of the front page here on HN.
The issue isn't whether you prepare, but that you shouldn't tell your audience you haven't prepared.

This is especially true if you _have_ prepared. Giving a talk about your experience without working on boiling down the information should be, by definition, possible without preparation.
SpecFlow - Pragmatic BDD for .Net
SpecFlow is a fresh open source project, that aims at providing a pragmatic and frictionless approach to Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD) for .NET projects today.
It's worth bringing up the godfather of technomadics, Steven Roberts. He biked 17k miles on this "bike":

http://microship.com/bike/index.html
IPhone Wolfram Alpha
True - but when we start comparing it to Windows - (disable crapware, install firefox, install anti-virus, install iTunes) vs Ubuntu (install restricted-extras) then a Ubuntu setup starts looking pretty good.
And this is why my site http://www.memengo.com has "Try Demo" button that asks no questions and gives you a full demo right away. This button is used by a lot of visitors.
Mike, great job on this. Very informative. I have 2 questions for you:

1. is your slider from the jQuery UI or other js framework?

2. in regards to combating the 4.3 dilemma, have you found the average ratings on steepster to be lower? maybe its too early to tell, but I'd love to see some sort of curve on your ratings distribution in a future post ...

thanks
Google Reader is my starting point to follow everything that's on topic. There is absolutely nothing out there that comes close. Twitter is not for full feeds, period.
It's not just that.

I've interviewed senior candidates who can't do basic arithmetic in their head. I had one project management candidate, who was doing fairly well up until that point on the interview loop, who literally couldn't multiply 600 by 3 in their head, nor on the whiteboard.
IPhone 3GS – IT HIPAA Headache or Cure?
If you haven't seen it yet, here is a highlights video which has a brief portion of Paul's talk as well as links to the justin.tv archived stream.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910426
I like it. It means that someone technical spent time on crafting the (easy in this case) puzzle, plus I happen to enjoy puzzles. To me, it speaks (softly) to the culture of the place being other than "supervise an off-shore team" or Office Space type culture.
VisiStat’s iPhone Web App Supercharges Business Analytics
I think it's Alt+21D2.
Theory AND Practice
Proceedings of the Fifth AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference
When going through group identity formation some groups distance themselves from other groups to better define their own boundary and thus their identity. "We're not those icky|stupid|smart-ass|ETC guys". This often goes hand-in-hand with fears of oppression and the like.

The particulars of ETC part are not strictly logical and instead are designed to appeal on the emotional level.
The nice part IMO about the G1's slide-out keyboard is that you get the choice of both worlds: immediate on-screen keyboard for quick input needs, and a nice proper keyboard (plus full screen space) for bigger input fields. Blackberry keyboards are painfully cramped by comparison...
Thanks, callmeed.

1. Yep, slider implementation is jQuery UI.

2. It is too early to tell, but we're definitely planning to share a follow up. As mentioned in the post, we had a simple thumbs up/down for ratings and were seeing a greater than 90% positive average, so we were definitely experiencing that bias. Just today, albeit with a much too small sample size, we're starting to see a more diverse mix of averages. We still expect to have that positive skew but because we're now operating with a 100 point scale in the UI, we hope the granularity will help users distinguish subtler differences in rating.
"This slide has my favorite joke of the talk"

"Sorry this slide has a lot of text on it, I usually try to avoid it"

Reading slides is also idiotic.
OTOH it doesn't really matter whose "fault" it is; if using Clojure causes SEGVs but some other Lisp doesn't cause SEGVs, that's a problem.
In person he claimed to have liked my talk :)

I'm not sure if anyone understood, but the "winging it" was supposed to be a metaphor for startups themselves. You can never be truly prepared.
could be cool but it looks like they're only releasing a tiny amount of data to start with as a sampler... somebody needs to tell them about wikipedia
Jbellis responds to Cassandra FUD
The Blackberry's not mentioned at all, which I think is a little sad. It's the only phone that's got a solid set of features that set it apart from the iPhone. Looking at the rest of these I basically see a bunch of me-too phones with no innovation.
Http://baycollegeplanners.wordpress.com/
Google Wave Use Cases: Education
Are there an appreciable number of crashes with the public to make this worth while?
>that you shouldn't tell your audience you haven't prepared

Why not? A presenter transfers information and emotion to the audience. If meta-talk (such as commenting on their preparation) is a device for doing that, why shouldn't the presenter use it?

In my experience PB has a very humble and modest style, which is integral to the overall message he delivers. I suspect that part of the that style is communicated via his meta-talk.
Branding Yourself (online)
This is the post he's responding to: http://www.roadtofailure.com/2009/10/29/hbase-vs-cassandra-n....
Whether 2 is true depends on how you understand "identical". For sure, if you mean something like "synonymous", then probably "identical" things are the same in all possible worlds. But if you take it broadly enough that, e.g., "consciousness is identical with something that happens in the brain" isn't false by definition then I don't see how your argument works.

I only think 1 is bullshit if you use something like the "synonymous" definition. (Can we agree that it's crazy to say that physicalism requires believing that "consciousness" just means some particular set of brain processes?)

I think your comment about 3 basically amounts to agreeing with me that physicalism doesn't say that mental states and brain states are "identical" in any sense that makes the rest of the zombie argument work.

I agree, of course, that if 1-3 are correct then "zombies are possible" implies "physicalism are wrong".

Epiphenomenalism doesn't imply that causality is false. And if consciousness is "outside of logic" then I say: so much the worse for the notion of consciousness. (But I don't see any reason why we should think consciousness is outside of logic, whether zombies are possible or not.)
iPhone App Site Design Trends
DARPA Network Challenge
Is there a better online RSS reader than Google Reader?
Is editing the registry or hunting down drivers for a new version of Windows better? Or how about waking up to Snow Leopard having deleted your $HOME folder? Operating systems have their issues - it's inevitable...
Half way through it. Great read and the PDF is free.

Thanks!
Facebook Connect and Open Graph to become the standard for new web startups?
The explanation of a joke can be a joke itself - witness several of the "explanations". While I like XKCD, they aren't ALL successful either.
I'm thinking the best approach might be an intelligent system to scape from Twitter/Facebook and correlate location words with "What the heck is that big balloon"-type phrases...would be difficult, but such a system could be really useful for the next major disaster.
Swapclix Review, Swapclix A Scam?
In this context, it looks like the user has incentive to rate (to get better suggestions), but on rating in general:

Why even ask people how they feel?

Depending on the content, you can analysis how they use it to get a much more accurate rating. For video: Did they watch the entire thing? Did they leave after a few seconds? Did they share it somehow?

That (slightly off-topic) being said, this looks great.
Except they aren't very funny, and in quite a few cases completely wrong.
i'm not sure what to make of my situation. i've been working at my small business for a full 3 years now. i think the internet can make for a really different start to companies now. i had great attention and great sales at the beginning. then a huge lull because i changed the aesthetic and didn't realize how much that would impact my sales. so i changed it back and again sales were good. the the recession hit. and sales have been terrible. i'm still getting items up for this season and will see how that goes. but the area of the market i occupied is not good for anyone right now.

so how do i assess all this? is this a keep going and wait it out thing? am i failing or is it just the market.

i am now finally hurting for cash. i kep my overhead low through all this and was strategic about material costs too. but now that isn't helping.
Latin lives on in Spanish, Portuguese, et al.
That's why I dislike so many "comedies". Too many rely on a character acting like an idiot; it's too easy to empathize with them.
The Hallmarks of Crackpottery, Part 1: Two Comments
Isn't it your own article?
This used to be true, but a while back Sprint added in a 5G cap like the others...
And "reputable academics" would be determined by ...

... turtles all the way down.
I think they're working with the people at Freebase to release more in due time. In fact this podcast goes into more details about how Freebase is working with people like the NYTimes.
Podcast: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/ITC.INNO-...
Podcast source uri: http://bit.ly/4zJPB1
Isn't part of the point that you move during winter.
I've heard a lot of people use Clozure Common Lisp (http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html) because it has better Slime integration (better stack frame inspector, etc).

Really? I would have said CCL has worse Slime integration in general (Slime being an epiphenomenon of the SBCL-on-Linux world) and far worse when it comes to debugging. Am I missing something?

We're using CCL with Slime on OS X. The Clozure people are working on a new IDE, but I don't know how good its debugging facilities are yet. It would take a lot to get me off Emacs, but slick debugging might do it.

Alternatively, I often think that maybe we should just take the time to make sldb do what we want. But it's hard to take precious resources away from one's main project.

If anyone feels the same way and is interested in hacking on this, email me - maybe we can work something out.
The other thing is that you clearly didn't completely wing it. You had prepared slides, as a start.
I think this is absolutely on point. I'm working on developing electronic medical record software and lowering the initial learning curve is my primary concern. After that comes additional features, but in the beginning you need to be able to demonstrate that your product will actually make you customers' lives easier in the short run.
I guess that's the thing, if Paul was winging it but has a great deal of experience doing the same thing, that's totally different from Joe Random turning up at a (paid-for) conference without slides or script and saying 'Er, well, I didn't prepare...'. Unless Joe Random is a celebrity of some sort, people will get pissed off.

As a total aside, winging it can be great. I far prefer that style to people who are clearly reading from a script of sorts. My performance background's in improv so I'm biased, but I strongly recommend anyone who wants to take up public speaking spend some time in improv workshops. Once you can structure a longform narrative from nothing but a word shouted by an audience member, giving a talk is easy.
Id just take the risk and watch for the relevant hash tags rather than filtering other keywords :)

Besides sounds like they want pretty specific lat/long.
Proof that not all lawyers are evil
such as? android is way more interesting than bb. much more owerful os
Two points:

1. Using the phrase "new fangled" instantly paints you as a clueless Luddite.

2. John C. Dvorak.
Exactly. I think the tick marks are the killer feature here. Great idea!
Well, this has finally motivated me to buy the XKCD Volume 0 book (http://store.xkcd.com/).

It will be a birthday present to me from my wife, so I used her credit card. I had previously been concerned that purchasing it from her and for me would have required me to explain every, single comic. Now I can send here this link instead.

She can also tell her friends she bought me "a subversive book on gender relations" rather than "a comic about that Linux thing".

I think for some reason I'm going to go and make her a sandwich.
I recall something about ICANN changing the rules to prevent this from working anymore, no?
Ugh! I get the same feeling reading this as I do reading this: http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
The genius is adding some previous scores. I always struggle to rate stuff fairly without anything obvious to compare it with.
Pre-Order DROID today through Best Buy
Johnny I'd say you followed the head sheep. Now you're in a cubical wearing khaki pants to work spending your day on ycombinator news, dreaming about what could have been.
Inkjet printer cartridges/Gillette Fusion razors/battery-powered electric toothbrushes/etc. (all the same model in different guises)
I think I do (or maybe they're talking about something else entirely).

I've worked in companies where the organization is profitable, stable, and old - in these situations invariably you will get a camp of people who are just there for the paycheck and benefits, being that the crazy roller coaster startup days are over.

I've had negative experiences working with these sorts of employees - and I suspect that's what "corporate lifer" is referring to. Generally they will oppose anything aggressive or innovative in a risky way - after all the purpose for them is to prevent any and all things that potentially can rock the boat. Whatever preserves the status quo best, and keeps the paychecks rolling in, is good, and whatever might inspire change and risk, is bad.
> the use of "force" was clearly in terms of market forces

This market isn't free - the price is forced by govt. You remember govt - they're folks who shoot you if you don't do what they want. (They're not the only folks who will do that, but ....)

Without that threat of force establishing a price, there would be a lot less investment.

You may like the price established, but that doesn't change the fact that the price would be different without the threat of force, and there would be a lot less investment.

> ridiculously irrational devices of rhetoric

Since when does pointing out how govt mandates work qualify?
Scott that's an really interesting perspective.
Carbonless NCR Forms Are Unbeatable Printing Products
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=761235
which links to
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10309051-38.html
Do you really want to argue that the Cougartown comment was rational? If not, why is replying in-kind unreasonable?
IIRC, ITA Software (one of the biggest Lisp houses in the world ...) uses SBCL for their main QPX project. A few years ago when they were starting the new Polaris project, they decided to go with CCL instead of continuing with SBCL.

My understanding is that the two major motivating factors for this decision were that CCL compiles faster and has better debugging support.

This is all based on my memory of conversations that took place about a year ago, so it's entirely possible I'm mis-remembering or what used to be true no longer holds. I have no first hand experience with CCL so if you do, I'll take your word for it ...
The Stonemaker Argument: Science Fiction
This removes many of the features I use regularly. Generally the only reason I use the web interface is to search, to mark items read, and to mark all those junk messages which my desktop email client already classified as junk.

So this removes 66% or more of the features I actually use.
I don't think his statement helped his talk at all. It would be best to be explicit about it: "I don't think explaining a list of lessons learned is useful for you, so I've put together a few short slides to talk about my experience without presuming to prescribe an action for you"

There is nothing in that statement that implies the speaker doesn't care about the audience.
akamaka, I can understand how my blog might come across as self-important - I know I can be over the top, but that's part of the idea (see the tag line of my blog).

The thing is, I'm writing for a general audience from the point of a general audience. I'm a designer not a programmer. And though I've read lots of articles in wired and on tech blogs about the netflix algorithm, I haven't heard much discussion about viable alternatives to the five star system. Yes, there are articles talking about how the rating system is faulty, and they talk about how to best "work around" the faults of the five star system. But I'm trying to brainstorm alternatives - scrap the system entirely and build an algorithm on something else. I'm sure the ideas are out there, I'm just indignant that as a general audience, we haven't heard about them yet. I'm getting great feedback already. Thanks greatly appreciated.

For such a little UI pattern, the five star system plays an enormous influence on how we see the internet, and the effects of it have a tangible impact offline as well - for example, restaurant traffic influenced by yelp reviews. I've heard a lot of people question how five star reviews influence the range of products that we're exposed to. It seems like an important question to ask. Look and now we've got a good brainstorm going.. Maybe think of my post as a challenge and request for a detailed article from someone who knows their stuff about rating systems and how they effect our everyday life. Cheers -
I'm glad FB is opening up.. now we'll see some cool FB mashups :) I'd love to see 2D visualizations of the people in my networks.. like an FB-touchgraph [http://touchgraph.com/navigator.html]..
Windows 7, good luck
Does math have big scary teeth or something?
This sounds tailor-made for an iPhone app. Perhaps Foursquare could award a badge for finding one of the balloons.
What I find funny is that Randall fell victim to exactly what he accused Jim Davis of a long time ago. Early XKCD was, if not necessarily brilliant, unexpected and often very clever in its jokes. I know one of its earliest influences was Achewood, which, for those of you who don't know, is the Webcomic To End All Webcomics, against which nothing but the best print comics compare. It was more effortless and came across as a comic trying to say something.

His nerd jokes were occasionally actually really good. When they weren't, they came across with the air of "Fuck you, I'm not putting these comics online for you." Occasionally he'd hit upon a nice riff with his heartbreak comics, too, and his whimsical outlook towards life was a lot more sincere and less forced. Then he homogenized, began repeating joke concepts, and started spitting out a lot of derivative work, with only the occasional truly clever idea. It's never gotten worse than mediocre, but it's very frequently mediocre.

I guess what I'm trying to say is all of you should read Achewood instead. The nerd jokes are better (http://achewood.com/index.php?date=09232002), it's funnier than any comic I've ever read (it's the comic that topped Calvin and Hobbes after seventeen years on the top of my list), and it's a real start-up, selling monthly premium updates rather than relying on any advertising whatsoever.
Startups Rise From Wreckage of NYC’s Financial System
I like using Google Reader on the iPhone, it works better than any of the dedicated apps I've tried and I don't have to reconfigure a new app with my list of feeds.

I also don't think Twitter is ever going to replace RSS feeds. RSS covers in-depth information from sources that I follow while twitter may occasionally direct me to the same sources that isn't its primary use.
LoJack for children