skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A person is entirely capable of learning and mastering more than one interface. All that's required is the ability to build cognitive model of how the thing works that remains coherent as they use it. Humans are actually quite adept at learning new things,, and the tendency to assume that familiarity is a necessity is one of the things that has caused interfaces to stagnate.

What is telling is that for as long as we've had the familiar "full UI" of a "real desktop", many intelligent and motivated people still struggle with many of the conventions. Have you ever marveled at the fact that most desktop software in 2010 still defaults to destroying your work? And if you do want to keep your work, it insists that you give it a name, a name which must be unique and must not contain certain characters that the computer is entirely capable of understanding, and then it asks that you choose where in some invisible hierarchy you want to keep it (even though the answer in almost every case is is "where I can find it again"). All of this complicates something that might as well be done with pen and paper.

These are things that everyone who uses a desktop interface has to get used to, and there are some good reasons that they are the way they are, but they aren't necessary things for the task. It is possible to safely shed all of these conventions and end up with something that still gets the job done, possibly better than the traditional desktop way.
UK based Summer 09 YC seeks experienced PHP/LAMP/PHPCake coder
We are a UK based Summer 09 YC company. We are still stealth but have users and clients. We are focused on the UK so far but fully intend to launch our US service in the near future. All I can say is it’s getting interesting.

We operate in a very, very large traditional industry. We have not raised funding yet as the business is making money – yes, we’re in a very good position. There is a lot of investor interest but we’re happy bootstrapping for now.

We are looking for a talented PHP developer to join our team. A good portion of equity is up for grabs.

Core Requirements:
•	Solid PHP experience
•	LAMP
•	CakePHP
•	High level of familiarity with object-oriented programming

We are looking for high coding standards and attention to detail, unit testing experience, familiarity with source control, as well as good communication skills.

A good portion of equity is up for grabs. We can negotiate remuneration. In fact everything is up for negotiation; we’re just that type of people.

We are keen to hear from UK based people if only just to network and say hi to all the YC followers this end, even if you’re not interested in the position. Ideally we’d like a UK based coder but as we will be launching in the US, US based coders are fine also; it all depends on the person (told you, we’re flexible and very open minded).

Please send Résumé’s/CV’s to:

stealthdudes@gmail.com

Short cover letters intro’ing interesting facts are welcome.
Perhaps the source might still be emitting photons?
The official (and unofficial) Sun CEO resignation haikus
When a group (whether it's citizens with a hobby, a union, a corporation, or a church) sees that government is throwing it's $3 Trillion/year bulk around in their neighborhood, they - rationally - try to buy off the government so that it does not destroy them or do them harm.

The solution is not to restrict speech - the solution is to get politics out of so many questions by getting the government out of those issues.

Once upon a time doctors did not feel the need to lobby the government ... because the government did not feel the need to regulate the prices and conditions under which doctors did their work.

Once upon a time target shooters did not feel the need to lobby the government ... because government did not feel the need to regulate every aspect of the hobby of shooting.

Lessig is way off base here. He's a big government statist, but he doesn't want folks who disagree with him to have the power to influence the government.
I thought this was an amazing, and insightful video. I hope everyone enjoys it.
I work in the Energy/Utility field and just got back from a “Smart Gird” conference where smart meters (i.e. real time interval metering) was discussed at length. Although these types of devices are really cool to “energy geeks” like me, if you look at the energy used today at the author’s house, it amounts to less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks. So, the big question is, until electricity prices really increase (which would be a nightmare for politicians), will the average person really care? I love the device and think it is a great concept, but I wonder if it will have a very wide appeal.
You mean Dork Elvis?
I am assuming Google is going to attempt to create a virtual store of some sort. Which would be cool, but who knows.
I actually run The Lounge, the ad network in question. I would be very surprised if it was that link as most of my other publishers run the same link and it hasn't affected them in that way. It is also similar to what many other ad networks do, include a simple link back to the ad network.

Of course Justin is free to remove it just to see if it makes a difference.
In what ways do you expect the iPad to have problems with this?
I am skeptical because none of the areas that they are concerned with seem like they will lead to innovation. Do we need another Yelp app? It seems like that's the type of thing they would (of course) love to fund (and make money off of).
So you're worried about the "perfect efficiency" and not concerned about the "convert the mass to energy" bit?

It's a thought experiment.
This is a really good question. To be sure, there's a selection bias going on here, which I think explains why I have been able to reduce our household consumption by more than 50%, where in controlled studies (e.g. by utilities that have installed similar meters in their houses) observed reductions are around 15%.

But I would also say that I have done this over the course of several years, and while many reductions were ones I got with no pain or expense almost immediately, others were ones where I bought a new router, for example, that allowed me to get rid of my fileserver/router setup. I bought several BITS Smart Strips to reduce phantom load. None of these change my lifestyle in any way, but they do require some initiative.

Tom
That poses an interesting question: A certain amount of people here think that using ad-block is wrong, because you are denying that site revenue, etc. I don't want to rehash that argument, but what I'm wondering is do they feel the same about not installing flash? You're still blocking a lot of ads, but the main difference is you're choosing not to install something, rather than installing something extra to block things.
Great read, funny too. You are great at pitching largely due to your personality. Not sure that is learnable, but good tips for us mere mortals.
the founding fathers are often criticized for their preference for having only landowners (which meant wealthy white males in general) vote. painting the picture in such a simple way (it's undemocratic! sexist! racist!) is dangerous. all democracies restrict suffrage to varying degrees (we do not allow children, felons, or the mentally unstable to vote). the purpose of this is to concentrate power int he hands of the responsible. it is my belief that restricting suffrage to landowners was actually a rather clever hack. who has an interest in being well informed on issues that affect a community? its permanent citizens. the people who own land in an area have the most to lose from policies that are detrimental to that area's long term prosperity.

one of the major issues of democratic systems is that it is always in the interest of whomever is in the minority position to dilute suffrage.
Hmm, http://bit.ly/d9PAr8
>"Reiterating: Other people are only projections of your own consciousness. If you are not a friend to everyone then you are not a friend to yourself."

Well, my approach is that you can benefit of operating in this mode, but I don't take it literally. Agreed that the less "The Secret" bullshit is around the better.

It might be my naivety that just assumes a non-literal interpretation of certain passages in the text, but I suppose one should account for a literal interpretation as well. I wouldn't imagine that would be an issue here on HN.
Yes and the brilliance of the founders was creating a very limited federal government. The aristocratic senate and the house 'of the people' had to agree. The bill would get vetoed by default. One senator could stop any bill by filibustering. The bill of rights prevented state governments from gettting out of control...
A Crank among Cranks: Debating John Gabriel
I think the device is called "Alert Me", or perhaps they are using The Owl or the CurrentCost.
My 3 favorite things to say to recruiters:

1. Bartenders make more than what you are offering me.

2. According to last year's 10K SEC filing, you made $X Billion, and you can't afford me?

3. You must be accustomed to dealing with desperate people, not talented people.
You could probably also have a tree of the ~32 most common words. At the very beginning you could have a branch to choose whether you want to pick the 'word' tree or the 'letter' tree.
in a market the search for profit is the search for more efficiently serving aggregate preferences of consumers. allowing corporations to assume disproportionate control of the political process is almost assuredly a net improvement.
"our government is corrupt"

Those in power want it to be corrupt to perpetuate themselves in power. Those aspiring for power become corrupted once they get there.

Small government, local voting and decision making. Direct democracy. No politician wants a reform for they will be left out.

We must burn down the government to save it.
It's a thought experiment.

Fair enough. :)
Railroading a shoddy partial translation of their Office suite memory dump format into XML through ISO, destroying that organizations credibility as it did so. That was a dick move.
Not to spend too much effort defending IMAP (which does, to be fair, kinda suck) but... come on. It's not that hard. It works just fine, enjoying pervasive support with very high quality clients and servers available freely on essentially all platforms.

A new protocol would be ... prettier, I guess. But to pretend that the reason facebook and IM are replacing email is IMAP (and not, y'know, spam) is borderline delusional.
I can't say whether his implementation makes sense.

Regardless, I would like to see public key encryption of all email. There's no reason why messages should be plain text anywhere except at the two ends.

I realize key management would be a problem, but it's probably a solvable problem. The solution would have to allow most people to be practically unaware of encryption issues.
can never be overstated. TRADE IS CIVILIZATION! voluntary exchange for mutual benefit is the most powerful incentive against violent conflict. preventing powers from externalizing the costs of conflict onto others is the most important issue facing the world. it is holding back all other progress.
I completely disagree. Ask a non-techie friend to send you the full resolution photos from a recent weekend. Good luck. Despite the fact that it is easy to zip them, and send them by email or via a service like Yousendit.com - they cannot do it. People have very little understanding of file systems, files, the internet, etc etc.

Keyboard and mouse computers are not designed around our natural abilities, they are an acquired skill. If a system can accomplish the same tasks (email, word processing, calculations,...) without requiring a training and indoctrination program, then that is better and should be the end goal. The iPad (and future tablets and augmented reality devices) is going to do just that, and that is a very good thing indeed.
A Conversation with the President (powered by OFA and Disqus [YC S07])
What about when they tried to bribe the Standards committee and get their XML Document format approved? That was only a year or 2 ago?
more, smaller governments (competition forces better customer service) is an easy win for liberty. unfortunately smaller governments can't resist black swans as effectively (napolean running through the italian city states like butter).
"All idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary." - Nietzsche
I tried the WSound demo at the exact same time my UPS lost power and started beeping. I nearly spit my drink out! How did they do that?! Then reality settled back in and I thought myself an idiot.
I think the folks at WattVision would concur completely. It's kind of crazy, and the idea of Smart Meters would eliminate the light sensor and wire part of the deal. I would guess that WattVision and the others in this growing market are banking on the idea that 1) the electric utilities in the US move incredibly slowly, and 2) it's not just about electricity, and even if you got a smart meter for electricity, those of us who live in cold places tend to heat with natural gas and oil -- in my house our electricity use is only 20% of our total energy use (kWh of electricity compared to kWh of gas).

In other words, this market may be like the fax machine, which was made obsolete by the Internet almost before it was introduced three decades or so ago ... yet, they're still around :-).
I guess it costs energy to send that energy up the tower. Why wouldn't it?
IBM Wants to Patent Semantic Tag Clouds
If Facebook really wants to improve performance, they should look into dropping Apache in favor of a coroutine-based server.
The description for #8 sounds more like long polling to me. For push email, I'd envision something like registering a location to send notifications to (web hooks).
While registering my domain for Google apps for domains, i noticed that they do not accept business or domains (the domain is a .com registered on godaddy and hosted on rackspace slicehost) from China at the moment. I have got this as an error message "Google Apps does not currently support domains in this country."
If you take an old idea an adapt it to a new device with new possibilities (GPS, compass), then it's possible to innovate.
That's what I thought too. I am very energy conscious. But I have been monitoring electricity for several years now, and I am still finding things that I can change. Often I find that my kids have left on the electric heat in the basement. I recently learned that I can do one dryer load with two loads of laundry and it takes only a bit more power.

I assumed there was no way I could use less electricity. I was completely wrong. Think of it more like a thermometer or a clock.
What's stopping you from doing this? If you can get enough people to sign to be profitable from the start it seems like you don't have much to lose.
Perhaps, but it's also an opportunity to clarify or even redefine the job description. If you include only things you want to work on and they pass on you, you've weeded out a potentially bad placement. Too many people are willing to accept a job offer, then say "Okay, now what?".
As a non American: Is it not obvious that a politician accepting money to mould policy is bad for the bottom line?

Also slightly related - why is it acceptable to persuade a court to release suspects by simply paying them bail money in England and America?

Money walks all over morals.
Related discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101508

(And my comment which probably is more salient here: from Reason.com - "Stop the Car, Larry. I Want to Get Out", excerpt: "While the folks at Cato would respond to special-interest lobbying by reducing the size and scope of government so less of life is politicized and there is less to lobby about, Lessig would respond by amending the Constitution to restrict freedom of speech.")
To my knowledge, our government was never meant to be a Democracy. Republic innit?
Someone needs to start an Education suite of tools for the IPad. I would love to pass my kids an IPad and let them go at it.
Even with those massive disincentive against me, I still dream of changing the world through my games and getting rich in the process.
Can you trust American computer equipment? As far as i know, there are KNOWN backdoors in Cisco routing equipment.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/57070
While I too have doubts about WattVision's monthly subscription model, I can assure you that an energy monitor has surprised most of the people I know who also have them -- they become ingrained into your life.
Can someone explain the difference between a digital meter and a smart meter?
If by "operating in this mode" you mean having a generally positive attitude and being aware that your perception of reality is subjective, I'm more or less in agreement. That said, I'm willing to bet the author meant those statements literally, as do a surprising number of people. I always wonder why they choose to write anything at all, though, as by their theory they're only telling themselves things they already know.

Addition:
NiN's song "Only" could be interpreted as subjective reality (though it's almost certainly metaphor), and it explains why they choose to project me (and Hitler) into their world:

Yes I am alone but then again I always was
As far back as I can tell
I think maybe it's because
Because you were never really real to begin with
I just made you up to hurt myself

[x2]
I just made you up to hurt myself, yeah
And I just made you up to hurt myself

And it worked.
Yes it did!

Taken from: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nineinchnails/only.html
Oh gosh how could I neglect a mention of type_app, the type which represents function application itself?

#include "node.h"
#include "type_app.h"

static struct node *reduce(struct node *parent)
{
struct node *curr = parent->LEFT;

while (curr->type == parent->type)
{
struct node *self = curr->LEFT;
struct node *next = self->type->reduce(curr);

if (next != curr)
{
hold(next);
drop(curr);
curr = next;
}
}

parent->LEFT = curr;

return curr->type->reduce(parent);
}

static struct type type = { reduce, clear_pair };

struct node *make_app(struct node *f, struct node *x)
{
return make_pair(&type, f, x);
}

That "while" loop you see there is essentially the only loop in the entire core of Fexl. (Obviously "plug-ins" can do their own loops.)

That loop keeps reducing the parent node as long as it's still of type_app. Then the loop ends and it reduces whatever the parent node has become as a result of the evaluation loop.
First the solution doesn't really fulfill all of imaps use cases (especially push mail) but that is unimportant.

What is important is that the IMAP protocol isn't difficult, and I don't think that is what limits "email innovation." It is more so that it has been around since the 70s and email clients haven't been able to remove themselves from their past. It isn't the protocol limiting them from moving forward, it is the shear number of other clients that wouldn't support any of the "innovations" one would try to bring to email.
http://jerakeen.org/notes/2010/01/yay-more-email-clients/

The Android GMail client is a perfect example of what a client looks like in this world. It talks to the (secret / private) GMail API, it does offline mail reading, and queues actions so you can archive / filter / whatever mails while offline and it’ll push changes later. You can read and write mail. It doesn’t try to do anything clever, because anything clever done on one client isn’t reproduced on any other client. And if I don’t have a client on my current computer for GMail, I can use a web browser, and still get all the features of the server. I use the web gmail interface for everything anyway, because it’s better than any GUI client I’ve got.

I dont know - this guy makes for pretty convincing arguments on why email should be done right on the server rather than the client. Which effectively means a new protocol.
The last few days we were hit with a couple of issues, but prior to that the site was fairly solid for a number of months. There really is no comparison to our uptime on Rackspace compared to what it was on EY.

That said, we've hired additional people to mitigate the issues we've seen recently and we'll continue to make sure it stays up. If it's any consolation, the backend team hasn't slept much these past few nights trying to bring the site back up as quickly as possible.

Thanks for sticking around!
Why Publishing Won't Go Away Anytime Soon: A Deeply Slanted Play in Three Acts
The BlueLine PowerCost monitor (same as the Black and Decker version) both have sensors that, in addition to reading digital meters, can read the black line on the analog meters. There's no reason that WattVision couldn't do exactly the same thing. It's primitive, to be sure, but it works.
The big decrease in poverty in Brazil in the last few years is due to a similar policy. The government in handling a salary to people living under the poverty level. It really has been the best investment that the government ever made.
We can also assume that his job in technical support did not use 100% of his time. So some of the costs were already there to begin with.
While interesting, some aspects of the article are misleading or meant to incite. For example, the section talking about student aid mentions the current administration's plan to increase student aid, but fails to mention the proposal of doing away with the bank subsidies completely and thus providing more aid instead of lining the pockets of bankers (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/President-Obama-M...) contradicting the counter point to his argument.
It's worth noting that the Wayback Machine stopped indexing your site on August 22, 2008:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.codethinked.com/.

Do you remember making any changes around then? Your robots.txt file seems fine. Maybe you implemented an application firewall, or some other filter?
This is not about making it easier to write email clients or servers, it's about making it easier to write email apps. Currently, you either have to write a plugin for an email client or interact with IMAP directly. Opening up email to mainstream developers means ditching IMAP/MAPI/etc as the API.
Fusion Garage says JooJoo tablet is on track for Feb launch
IBM embraced open source after they lost their stranglehold on corporate IT. They seem to have benefited tremendously from this. If MS could do the same, they might have a brighter post-monopoly future.
I'm busy with my own startup. :D If I had more time, I'd like to though.

I already do this to some extent, on a small scale, e.g. I share a dedicated server with several other people, so it is much cheaper, but it would be great to commoditize raw bandwidth on a larger scale.
"Also slightly related - why is it acceptable to persuade a court to release suspects by simply paying them bail money in England and America?"

You get it back if you make all of your court appearances. it's way to help ensure that people charged wth a crime don't flee.

"Money walks all over morals."

How so?

Would it be better to keep people in jail simply because they've been accused of a crime?

If everyone was trusted to show up for court after being charged I think we'd have a whole other set of issues.
Binary search in unbalanced tree with shorter branches to more frequently used letters will be probably best (this is really huffman coding, isn't it?