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Comment by newhouseb | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but TED talks are _heavily_ edited from how they appear live on stage. TED puts an insane amount of effort into making the talks appear fluid and this is subconsciously I think partly why TED has been successful (everyone seems inhumanely perfect and articulate). If a TED talk bombs, it can be tricky to edit it into a coherent whole - I can imagine this is doubly hard with a comedian because timing is so important.

Source: I bombed a TED talk at TED 2011 in long beach. But I'm only 22 so hopefully I'll have a chance to do it again right in the future :)

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Ah, I saw this talk from a live stream! Really felt your pain but I think the audience was sympathetic. I took it as a good lesson to have a demo-fallback which also works offline, although admittedly that's not as realistic.

we did have a fallback which worked offline. the problem was that without wifi we had to rely on the iPad's compass (previously, with wifi i was proxying gyroscope data from iPod Touches tucked in the back of the iPad cases) - normally this would have worked fine. when we were onstage with so many cameras there was so much current flying around that the compasses went completely haywire and we were truly fscked. I wasn't kidding when I said on stage that if the iPad 2 had come out a week earlier we wouldn't be having any problems :)

I dunno, lots of the talks are stellar in person too... People practice a lot before they are allowed to go on.

Very true, although I think in person we're less sensitive to "um"'s and "ah"'s than we are when watching video due to the expectations set by professionally produced TV and movies.

on computer vision? (judging from your profile) Any chance it's up so that we can see how it was edited?

indirectly, yeah (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/60024/). It's not up yet (despite all my testing/preparation the WiFi didn't really work so it was a little rough) - not sure if it will go up, I guess we'll known before TED 2012 :)`

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