skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fundamental difference -- and this is why it can't be "trivially" added to mail clients -- is that it treats a conversation as a fundamental unit, not a message.

As you've apparently never used a desktop mail client before, here's a screenshot of what the tinydns mailing list looks like for me: http://is.gd/uumd

I have no idea what you mean by "treats conversations as units".
The same could be said for any threaded view I guess. Except that the threaded view also exposes the nesting, which is quite a bit more helpful on mailing lists than a flat view that jumps randomly between levels.

That means I see the entire back-and-forth on one page, including my replies, not a basket full of subject lines I have to click through.

Yes, that's nice and fancy for 1:1 conversations.

Once you participate in a mailing list you'll happily trade in the lazyness for a structured view with defined anchors that provides some clues about what point and nesting level of the conversation you're currently looking at.

Even just getting the replies into a thread seems beyond most mail clients that I've seen.

As you can see in my screenshot this works just fine. In fact it has been working fine for almost 30 years. Usenet is based on this mechanism.
Did "most E-mail clients you have seen" happen to be web-based?
Little Black Box Streams HD Content Like a Flash Flood
Windows XP still supports 16-bit Windows 3.x applications. Sun's backward compatibility guarantee goes back to SPARC7 (circa 1987) which was already 32-bit. Windows 3.0 was 16-bit and was released in 1990. I don't know about IBM but I imagine the situation is similar. Linus didn't even start Linux until 1991. Desktop Mac OS X was released in 2001. Microsoft's compatibility achievement there is much more impressive to me.

AFAICT, the primary reason for this compatibility mode is to run IE6 side-by-side with IE8, so that corporations don't have to upgrade their web apps all at once. Neither Linux nor Mac OS X offers that feature for free; you can virtualize XP in Linux and Mac OS X but you don't get a free XP license with them.
"Home-made" Submarine
I refuse to make you a screenshot of gmail, so I'll just ask: what are the contents of all those messages? You don't know, because your client allows you to read a message a time. Gmail lets you read a conversation at a time. Massive difference.

[Edit since I'm now on a real keyboard]

I have no idea what you mean by "treats conversations as units". The same could be said for any threaded view I guess.

What I mean is that the atom of the mail client is an entire conversation. So when I move it to another folder (or label it in Gmail parlance) all the related messages get grouped, or flagged or whatever. You can do some operations at an individual message level so the metaphor's not overpoweringly intrusive, but for general day-to-day operation, the conversation is the unit you deal with.

Except that the threaded view also exposes the nesting, which is quite a bit more helpful on mailing lists than a flat view that jumps randomly between levels.

There's nothing about conversations that prevents this. Look at Hacker News: it has both all-posts-on-a-page and nesting. Would you prefer that the comments view was just a list of timestamps and poster names and you had to individually click each one to see the comment? No? Yet that's what most mailing list clients and archives make you do.

Yes, that's nice and fancy for 1:1 conversations.

... which are the primary use of email for millions of people. I'm not sure why you're so quick to condemn something that would be such a massive leap in usability for so many email users and that doesn't exclude your preferred method of operation.

I personally prefer to read mailing lists and usenet in thread-to-page, just as I prefer to see the contents of online comment threads and instant messages all in one screenful. You may not. But as you've said, virtually every half-decent mail client of the past 30 years can handle message-level threading.

But I want more. I actually wonder if the prevalence of mailing list-centric attitudes like yours among engineers is the reason we don't have mail clients with proper conversations yet. I actually suspect that it's still simply too hard: you have to sort and search potentially tens of thousands of messages just to display one conversation, and the easier route is just to make the human do the work. But I'd far rather my (or Google's) computer did it for me.
The article mentions that we should have equal opportunities, namely people with low cognitive abilities should be able to enhance them so they can compete with those people whose nature has given high cognitive abilities. Perhaps, if cognition is something completely hereditary and nurture plays a very small role, then sure allow them to have equal capacity, but as the story of Alex clearly shows this does not create equal opportunity but unfair advantage and competition. The guy is able to go out there drink and party and then do the paper in a short time and not really gain the greater knowledge from lecturers. So he is hacking education and focusing on only these papers and gets better grades, but surely he is not a better man for the job than the person who spend his time studying and attending lectures although short of time failed to finish all the essays to a high standard.

So I think they create unfair competition and advantage hence should be banned.
I've been through several phases in regards to TV.

When I was younger, I enjoyed following a lot of shows and comparing notes with my friends. Then I got older and found I had a few favorite shows that I watched whether friends were watching them or not.

I then went through a phase where I felt TV was important for cultural intelligence -- knowing what's popular and what isn't. Sort of a cheap way to fit in with popular society without actually having to meet people.

Then I went through a History Channel/Science kick. I found you could watch all kinds of cool science-related stuff on cable almost ad-infinitum. Curious as to what the world would look like if people disappeared? Cable's got that. Want to know the role of tanks in WWI? Cable's got that too.

It was all kinds of stuff that appeared to have some science value. I could justify it by saying, "Hey, I'm learning important facts about the migratory patterns of African Swallows here."

For the last couple of years I've been in the "I control the input" stage. That is, I watch only things that I have planned to watch ahead of time and only on Tivo/DVD. I hardly ever watch "unprotected" TV -- just me and the remote.

Finally, because of this board, I've decided to cut out TV entirely except for movie-watching every other weekend or so. After a couple of months of doing this, I can attest that it is one of the better decisions I've made in my life -- assuming I can keep it up.

TV is just so much bullshit. All of those years, and all of those tens of thousands of hours, accomplished me exactly nothing. I'm not even sure they were relaxing as much as it was simply anesthetizing. TV watching for peer groups was great if you wanted to fit into peer groups that chatted about American Idol. Favorite shows became dated. Cable was just a big time suck -- like one of those bug zappers except for idle minds. Pop science is eye candy and over-generalizations. In fact, the conclusion I reached is that TV is something where you will automatically find some kind of reason for watching whether it really provides value or not. It was all just rationalization.

When I stopped watching TV I had an awful thought -- what would I do now? I was used to feeling just slightly bored and pushing a button and being entertained. I had been trained that feeling bored was somehow abnormal, instead of a natural impulse that makes people do new things.

If you spent ten thousand hours staring at a stump there would be something wrong with you. But you can take that same time and watch all the episodes of the popular shows for the last ten years and accomplish exactly the same thing: nothing. And by doing that somehow that makes you "normal"
From your review, I see that you have only read one book out of the BC trilogy. In this case, I'm pretty sure you can't dismiss it without reading all of it. After finishing BC, do a careful re-read of Cryptonomicon. You will find a lot of things that seemed inconsequential on the first read, have a huge backstory behind them and they mesh as smoothly as a planetary gearbox. This is Neal Stephenson at his best. You can really tell that he had the whole story in his head, he just chose to tell the modern-day one first. I really hope he picks up this storyline again. I liked Anathem but I really have burning desire to know more about the families in BC.
It's not a fast read and you need to pay attention but the reward is there, IMO.
While that sounds fantastic, I'd venture that your plain email client is inadequate to take care of most of this. Which I think was the point of the article.
Totally a matter of taste. I, for one, completely disagree. :-)
Hitler's Mein Kampf Seen As Self-Help Guide For India's Business Students
How men and women use the internet differently
http://rapidshare.com/files/208150867/Segundo.avi
Code Coverage of Clojure Code
The U.S. Is Losing Its Lead in Patents
If they like Mein Kampf, then I enthusiastically recommend Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince.
The machine that can print off any book for you in minutes
A monad tutorial for Clojure programmers (part 1 oif 4)
Yahoo re-enabled OAuth but tells people not to use it
The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu_(disambiguation)
A Cocoa Twitter search client depending on Growl for display
And you don't have to watch stuff according to a schedule that someone else controls.The whole idea of broadcast TV, where everyone watches the same thing on a channel at a time, doesn't make sense except for news and live sports.
Swine Flu May Be Named Event of ‘International Concern’ by WHO
Yeah. The authors best bet is to use filters for now. From the looks of it, he wants AI. Or an advanced Natural Language Processing. I mean going through the mails, checking them all to see if they are bills to be paid and then generate a report. Looks really cool. But too complex with what you can achieve with technology right now!
Rather than virtualization, I'd prefer to see something like WINE. You would think that Microsoft would be able to write translation layer without the overhead of a virtual machine.
I believe GMail adds things to the header to help it track the conversation. This along with time-based subject matching allows it to handle most cases easily.
So soon?! So nice!
Mobile startup ideas
Marcel Reich Ranicki DVD
Das Leben von Marcel Reich Ranicki bald auf DVD
They're not willing to do what ubuntu does for security eg ... release analysis tools

Data point: Microsoft released a security assessment tool - they even open sourced it (note: title is misleading): http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/22/147202
I remember listening to an interview with one of the original Doom developers. He said that one of the ways that they keep players interested in a game where players can go anywhere they want was by hiding secret power-ups and prizes all over a level. By rewarding a player who goes exploring, it communicates to the player that the developers want you to be interested, and that exploring can be fun.

Linux is sort of like that. You can't use all of it without exploring, so it's good to hide little customizations and treats all over so when somebody stumbles across it, they say "This is so cool!" and keep looking, learning. :)
Curiously, I first read that quote in the page of a bodybuilder trainer. It really is famous.
My father was a union factory worker. Had he ignored the union's work rules, we would have found his headlights broken after his shift.
In a binary blob that can't be easily accessed without the system being booted up... at least not that I know of.
I'm sure that the mere mention of "P2P" is a taboo at Microsoft (management). A lot of people have probably already suggested it, since the developers aren't stupid, but management probably can't do it for marketing reasons.

On the other hand, maybe they are leaking the RCs over bit-torrent early on purpose... puts on tinfoil hat
Even sooner, even nicer: http://www.ubuntu.com/

;)
The emails from twitter, facebook and many mailing lists, have a specific format and some services(posterous) responds to a certain kinds of mails.

Thus, first step toward what Alister says, could be done by defining patterns and associate gmail filters and searches to it.

AI and NLP could have to be used sometime in the future. But for now import and export of filters should do quite a bit of it.

Literally each gmail user has to set filters for himself. Rather if it could be configured via a workflow and associated with user inbox, it would be a long way for a better email client.
Stack-orientation isn't a axis on this chart, nor is macro support. So: next to Pascal and C.
This comment is a positive example of what I want to see here on HN. It's not just commenting or adding an association one had. It's developing the material further. He really said something. That's good.
So, if you define 'active user' as the user who did a file sync today, 10% of your users are active users?
It's interesting that I didn't get the one answer that I was fishing for - that entrepreneurship involves a desire to make the world a better place. I guess that is debatable.
Tap to scroll and rotation lock are the big problems with the iPod Touch when laying on my side - as you said. Also, it doesn't "feel" right when reading at night.

I'd prefer holding this Curve or something lighter.
Even now, basecamp uses basecamphq for the url.

With google toolbar installed, all it takes is to enter - drop box - on the address bar, anyway!
I learned coding because I read a book. The book was a novel about a young hacker who wanted to own his own "pineaplle" computer but was to poor to afford one. I had nothing to do with computers at that time, literature-geek, writing not math. But than this bok showed me how computing works and that I could do my own VR. This was a strong motivation for me, strong enough for me to learn small-c on a cp/m machine.
The usual thing to do in this situation is or any competition to mirror the API twitter provides, and then to provide features on top of that. Then the developers just have to change a few API configs to use the new service (as opposed to using a new library, or something like that)
Open Source Warfare
Well, if you want to compare Twitter and IRC, then you could consider Twitter to be a really neat user interface (both graphical and logical) that allows people to be in a bunch of giant, ad-hoc, asynchronous, high-idling, low-frequency IRC rooms.

In other words, it's a different thing. Just because there are similarities doesn't mean it's the same.
THis is the kind of joke I could tolerate around HN, because it is not only a (lame) joke but also makes a point about HUI.
I know that a lot of people say this, but I don't know a single professional security practitioner who --- when push comes to shove --- actually believes it. I'm not being glib or dismissive, but I'm also not going to argue the point anymore.
What is so special about the twitter API that it can't be duplicated and extended by another service?
If I wasn't on such a limited coputer, I'd go looking for the improvements in windows 7 - I think there's a local caching feature for accessing files over a WAN link so that other clients can get files from their peers quickly instead.
That makes more sense on some of the stuff, but the auto gc and non-fast-forward server options are both older than that. If it was done that long ago, I can't find any mention of it in the paper, and people will use this, being from an authority like Google to enforce wrongful beliefs about the systems. If the document is that old, it should have been prefaced with that information - it looks to have been posted no more than a day ago.
Ask HN: What would be your ideal API for news content?
There are APIs like Daylife, NYTimes, Guardian, even Zemanta.

What would your idea API for the news look like? What's missing in the existing solutions?

Images? Video? More customization? More analytics and number crunching abilities?
The text is a somewhat incoherent string of words, but as far as I can tell, the author managed to extract an iPod's bootloader by encoding the raw bitstream in audio and emitting it via the piezo sound generator and then recording and decoding the result on a PC to reconstruct the binary data. Nice. Reminds me of acoustic couplers.
Be a Part of the Conversation
Ubuntu 9.04 Review
Ubuntu sponsors, Canonical , announce the release of Ubuntu 9.04 destop version that can be downloaded for free now...
art lebedev's optimus maximus

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/
While the region as a whole is not as prepared, there are many facilities that take the quake threat very seriously. I know nothing of Slicehost's space, but there are many buildings that meet California earthquake standards in the Midwest. (The affected region around the New Madrid is much larger due to the clay-based nature of the soil.)
You don't need lots of cash to do a web startup - for many anyways. What's hard to find is the time unless you want to drop everything and focus on that. My other main problem is finding people. It is a herculean task to find someone willing to work on a startup and I don't even mean for equity. I can't even find talented people who I would pay who would do work on some tasks for my startup. Most people, really talented people, are content w/ their day job and dont have time to humor startups.
This is pretty old, but a decent read. Notice that the link is to archive.org, not the original site.
No longer made? Unicomp (http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/) bought the rights and the tooling. I love mine. (And no, it doesn't have the windows key!)
Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (to which A Deepness in the Sky is a presquel). I didn't like Rainbow's End though.

Agree they're more coder-fiction.
There exist some tools for decoding cassette games from some older computers. I wonder if he could have used C64 tape format for example, although I suspect it might not work because the piezo quality isn't good enough to produce the sounds.
I fully recommend you read Infoquake and Multireal (the first two books of the Jump 225 trilogy) by David Louis Edelman.
It has everything you're looking for.
Founders at Work,

Stealing the Network Series (1st two are great :) ),

Startup.com - the documentary
def getNews():
return _("Sorry, nothing has happened yet today, why not try %s while you're waiting?" % todo.next)

;)
I like reading little personal accounts like this by programmers. Have a problem, try a hack, fail. Sleep. Bring in some good friends. Things improve. Happen on some software or third party lib or blog post that opens your eyes. Succeed.
it's hard to see Microsoft's operating system competitors taking advantage of it.

Wine.

If I was them, I wouldn't be interested in copying it, but I would be interested in seeing how things were actually done (to confirm inferences as well as resolving puzzles.) But I believe that even seeing code leaves you open to a copyright infringement suit, which is why people do clean room reverse engineering. So, I wouldn't even look at it if I was them - despite my interest :-(.
Thanks for all the great comments on the article everyone. As an aside, for those interested in customer development I wrote up an article a while back with a ton of links to blog posts, podcasts, etc.

http://jonbischke.com/2009/03/20/customer-development-the-de...

Hope this helps some folks.
Mauritius Luxury Holidays
Whilst I was struggling the other day to find the details for the perfect honeymoon I came across the website Free2 luxury holidays and honeymoons. It does exactly what it says on the tin and is fully ATOL protected.
I don't buy that explanation. In the 1-2-3 example, there isn't much innovation. It's basically a new UI and scripting support. Most people have no use for the latter and the first is a matter of taste.

People always look to explain the past in a way that makes sense. However, that leaves no room for contingencies, even though contingency is a powerful force that plays an undeniable role in shaping the future. Machiavelli didn't spend a chapter on the subject because he was such a superstitious guy.

If you launch a new product and it has the good fortune to create a positive buzz, then you can take over a market simply by being newer and being liked. You don't need to be better, just different. Without a proper data and a thorough analysis of why people actually preferred 1-2-3 over VisiCalc, this bit of anecdotal evidence is meaningless of the future of Twitter.
Swine Flu 2009 - Google Maps
I was more interested in seeing how they solicited input from Growl, but apparently they only use it for query results.
I would not use the patent system as a metric anymore. There are so many dubious and outright laughable patents. There is so much misuse of patents to (ironically) hamper real innovations in competitors. And so much important work is difficult to have any meaningful patent on, like software.

Here are things that have caused a loss of innovation leadership. Lousy education. A ridiculous immigration policy. A tendency for companies to...outsource R&D, and generally take short-cuts on things that are important enough to not be half-assed in the name of "cost savings".
Particularly dissing all of digital recording based on comparing a Bowie LP (engineered to be an LP) with a compressed version of the same music, presumably ripped from a CD pressing. I don't know anything about that particular album, but the world is full of old albums that were poorly transferred to CD in the rush to get CDs out in the early days. Many of which were then re-released on CD using crappy over-compressed mastering 15 years later so they would "sound better".

You want to do a fair analog versus digital comparison? Play that record album on that uber-fancy stereo and record it using a high-end digital recorder patched into the system. (You can get excellent ones for less than the price of his freaking power cord.) Then compare playing back that digital recording with playing the album.
Is it the spector of a "What microsoft is to control over OSes, Google shall become to web experiences?"

You mean we will be able to ignore Google most of the time and use one of many viable competing products? That doesn't sound like too bad a situation to me. If you don't trust Google, all you really have to worry about in my opinion is data lock-in and privacy violations.

Switch to local services and competing web services and you should be fine. You could probably continue using Google for the forseeable future and just keep backups if you wanted to.
The amount of people creating products around it.
"Easy hooks into Disqus (and competitors) so each tweet can be the beginning of a conversation."

In my humble opinion, I can't imagine a worse addition to Twitter. Well, I can imagine a few, but the beauty of Twitter is its simplicity and the fact that there's a single way of doing things.

If each 140 tweet can become the topic of a threaded discussion, then suddenly I have to start checking comments for each tweet and getting closure would be an order of magnitude much harder.
Personally, I think the blog-post author deserves the traffic. He through the trouble of putting up that PDF (which is excellent, btw) and will bear the cost of the bandwidth. Would you have dug it up otherwise?
For me a 10 gig account for less money, e.g. $39, would be perfect, I only sync documents but am reaching my limit now, and $99 is somewhat a lot especially because I don't need the offered 50 GB...

For people with the need for more storage there is a 100 GB plan I think...
Python Google Analytics Client: How to use it and how you can help make it better