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Comment by STRML | Hacker News Reader

I was in awe the entire time Lin was speaking. Not a single "um" or other verbal tic; she's an incredible speaker and was admirably lucid throughout that entire talk. That's so difficult to do. And style aside, she made understanding Fiber incredibly simple.

Just wanted to express my admiration for her work and gratitude for making this information public, available, and free.

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Absolutely. She's also responsible for a slew of other "Code Cartoons" writeups ( https://code-cartoons.com/ ) including Flux, Redux, Hot Reloading, and Relay, and she also wrote an incredibly good 6-part dive into WebAssembly ( https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webasse... ).

As someone who talks quite (very?) fast and has to carefully slow down for public speaking...

... I found Lin's style of speaking very difficult to listen to. I appreciate the professionalism of the approach (if that's what it is), but if only by a small margin (perhaps 10-20%), I found her speaking too slow to the point that I wanted to skip forward constantly and would have found it difficult to pay attention to in person. :/

Perhaps this might be about the structuring of information as well (I'm familiar with much of what's being talked about). That said however, I've historically found that when listening to really good speakers, I find it easy to sit and have explained to me things that I already know well - so I'm not sure what's happening here.

Youtube player has a setting for playback speed. I almost always watch YT videos in 2x speed or more.

There is also a minimal Chrome extension called 'Video Speed Controller' that brings this functionality to all HTML5 videos with a bit more granularity. It's invaluable.

I dunno if verbal tics are necessarily the metric to use for great presentations. I know some folks who stumble constantly but present ideas that are pretty incredible. Some people just have amazing recall and can fluidly spew out facts and conclusions. Some people can present compelling ideas they have thought of that no one else but struggle on the vocalization.

Yeah and some people use them to their advantage. For instance, notice that President Obama uses "umms" to ensure that he's never not making a sound. Makes it harder for an interlocutor to interrupt.

Huh? That's funny--I would have said the opposite. It was from watching Obama's speeches that I learned that silent pauses can be much less annoying than "umms". If you want to see someone using a lot of "umms", watch Justin Trudeau.

He speaks very differently during Q/A sessions than during speeches. During Q/A he's never not making a sound.

Your comment made me want to watch the video. And she does "uhh" at 3:50.

But I suck, this talk was great, she's a really good speaker, thanks for weirdly convincing me to watch this

Terrific presentation and speaker style - I couldn't come close - but she has at least one very common verbal tic that was pointed out in my own speaking style, and now it galls constantly. That's starting a sentence or phrase with a gratuitous "so".

I don't mind if "so" starts a sentence as long as it really means "therefore" but most of Lin's instances don't qualify.

Her "so" affliction is really pretty low compared to most public speakers, but it is there.

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