skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good points, and in fairness, I don't know how to shut up, so I have to respond :o).

Point 1: You clearly have a better understanding of the software than I do and I appreciate the clarification. I still stand by the outcome, though. My own ignorance: has anyone managed to install firmware that eliminates the radio and makes it a simple GNU/Linux device (either generation)? That would make it more appealing to me assuming it has acceptable storage.

Point 2: Agreed that the experience is much different than an Eee. I rarely read text on paper. Most of my reading is on inexpensive, large LCDs with uneven back-lighting. The Eee display is an improvement to my eyes, though I've read on the eSlick (foxit's product) for well over 15 minutes and it is pleasant (minus the black and white which is unnecessary for books usually).

Point 3: Here's where I have to disagree: Amazon announced that the latest iteration of the Kindle would have Text to Speech, and had to back down. What I know is that if I purchase this device, I am purchasing something that I cannot control without an exceptional effort (hacking it myself, time I don't have). They own the front end and the back channel.

As to your final point: Yes. I'm a PC gamer, not an Xbox 360 guy for precisely this reason. I don't like mandatory game updates or a "sanctioned" selection of DLC. I'll concede on the iPhone comment since all mobile phones in the US suffer from the same disease to a greater or lesser degree.

The difference is that I believe Amazon has already rendered a large portion of the installed base of devices less useful via over-the-air provisioning. GNU/Linux on the Kindle aside, the GUI is the functionality and whispernet is the control when the two are married in a device. Assertions (or lack thereof) and promises are as good as the screen they're read on.

[edit] So I'll make one more point, which is that it looks like Amazon may well have removed and refunded due to fraud perpetrated upon them because they expected that the copyright belonged to the person signing the rights over.

It's nice to know that Amazon didn't respond to the whims of a publisher but tried to make a wrong right again. But the outcome was still a serious wrong for the customer.

If they had been printing copies of the book based on the claims of permission from someone who didn't own the copyright, they would have sued that individual after being sued themselves. I'd get to keep my book that was purchased in good faith.

Nobody wins here.
I wonder what the results would be if the question were slightly tweaked to.. Have you ever smoked marijuana?
And Amazon usually agrees. I wouldn't be surprised if they take a similar approach here.

I just don't like the suggestion that the customer is entitled to both the book and a refund at once.
Sorry I am still not understanding the functionality you are expecting. If it has to be synchronous, it means that the caller is interested in the result. However, the caller can stop after a specified timeout and continue, which means that getting the result is not absolutely critical to the caller's functionality.

So then why is callback not an option? After all, it is the same as setting the timeout to zero and getting interrupted (or polling) at some point in the future.
You have sex? You must be the odd one out on this site :)
That summed up my position better than I did. Thank you :-)
http://beginnersinvest.about.com/od/billgates/l/blbillgatesi...

PLAYBOY: Ever take LSD?

GATES: My errant youth ended a long time ago.

PLAYBOY: What does that mean?

GATES: That means there were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently.

PLAYBOY: One LSD story involved you staring at a table and thinking the corner was going to plunge into your eye.

GATES: [Smiles]

PLAYBOY: Ah, a glimmer of recognition.

GATES: That was on the other side of that boundary. The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don't think at this age I could. I don't think you're as capable of handling lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older. However, I never missed a day of work.

Hopefully I don't have to provide evidence of Steve Jobs's drug-using past, since that's a famous part of hacker history. The Gates admission surprised me, though: I just discovered it a few days ago from the Hacker News post about Jobs's relationship with Timothy Leary.
He was the CBS news anchor when the transition from 15 min to 30 min nightly news occurred in the US (back when there were only three channels to watch), and he held his anchor chair for around two decades. Some of his reputation is due to being the product of the times (e.g. being the face of the most-watched news show during the growth of TV news to become the dominant news source in the country) and some of it was through conscious decisions he made to "tell it like it is." He was the first major news figure to tell the American population that the vietnam war was unwinnable. His distinctive, sonorous voice was also a big help.
If you bought a car and it turned out it was stolen and the police took it without giving you anything in return, would you say "Ok..."?

In point of fact, you'd say nothing at all. You'd hire a lawyer to speak for you. Because you're at very serious risk of being charged with felonious possession of stolen property:

http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/possession-of-stolen-proper...

Note the last sentence:

A person who is innocently is possession of stolen goods will not be guilty of a crime, but generally, the goods will be returned to the owner.

So, from what I can tell, even if you are found to be completely innocent of any crime, when it turns out that your car is stolen property the police will still come and take it away very suddenly without asking your permission, and they won't give you anything in return. That's exactly how it works.

I presume you're then free to sue the shady used-car dealer who sold it to you. But if that dealer turns out to be bankrupt because he already spent all your money on crack, I believe you are out of luck.

This Amazon situation is so shocking not because it's without precedent, but because it never used to make financial sense to treat a stolen copyright just as you would treat a stolen car. (And, after the P.R. repercussions of this move are played out, it may not make any financial sense in the future, either. ;)
I'm about 300k too, but that includes stuff that the users likely have cached like facebook connect, jquery served by google.
It also includes the ajax loaded files, so the user gets the page at 60k, but then their is another 240k to load before it is really usable.
Before anyone asks why this is on Hacker News, he was a news reporter hacker.
sunday, in mtn view, 1hr south of SF:

http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/
> all of the world's most intractable problems are basically marketing problems

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/23/18-awareness/
[edit] since I can't edit the original due to replies.

I still think they stand a good chance of a class action lawsuit. The likelihood of it succeeding is less since it sounds like the issue relates to "who really owned the copyright" and they had to take down the content due to that ambiguity or fraud.
Steven Levy is a good writer. I read pretty much anything he puts out. His books "Crypto" and "Insanely Great" are good also, Crypto is the better one.
I would add, that maybe in Japan, Germany, USA, the internet connection is very fast, but there are countries where it's too slow or expensive.

What would happen if ChromeOS uses GoogleDocs? All the people without fast connections would be ruled out? I don't like the idea to need a connection to use web-photoshop.
> business plan, exe summary, ROI, pricing, gives input for the website

sounds to me like person A didn't do much & should be thankful to get anything
Or, you put in less energy and consequently lower your metabolism and move less and feel more tired to compensate while your reserves don't change, or even increase, or the difference could be made up by destruction of muscle or organs rather than fat.

If it was as you suggest, you could eat nothing and not starve as long as you have fat reserves.
http://www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com/farmers_market.php

http://www.21st-amendment.com/ (if you're over 21 for the beer or just have a burger!)

http://www.7x7.com/ (for an even calendar)

http://sanfrancisco.going.com/
"The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier" by Bruce Sterling, should really be on on the must-read list.

Another on I highly recommend is "The New Hacker's Dictionary" by Eric S. Raymond.

Finally, although it is a bit far afield, probably every hacker should read David Kahn's "The Codebreakers".
...and hacked policy too: http://www.google.com/search?q=cronkite+drug+policy
You should always consider the cost implications. The money has to come from somewhere — it's just that on the NHS, other taxpayers are the ones responsible for your health problems.

(I'm a Brit who's had a little too much social liberalism today. Sorry.)
It would stop them from existing if they overdose or have a bad trip and don't come back.
I did some research to back your claim, searching for articles that would point out how he changed news. I failed to find the analysis I sought-after* but I did find a bunch of articles indicating that this was coming, sadly (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/arts/television/26arts-CRO...).

*Interesting that Google is flooded with reports about his death. I'm about to try Bing, but what I would expect is that such reports would be limited to news.google.com but rather, 25 pages in, reports about his death still come up. His wikipedia article is one of the few exceptions. EDIT: Bing does a bit better but still, I never realized how poorly search engines manage live content. On the one hand, they update their cache quickly and rank them correctly, but news articles should be news, not content results(?).
Reflections on a summer camp for the children of atheists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry has played its role in economic depression.
Why go to the Pirate Bay when you can download it for free from Australia?

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/

The copyright has expired here, in Canada and any number of other places. You poor Americans really got screwed by the Mouse.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go sell illegal copies of Fahrenheit 451 on Amazon...
I consider it an example of a bad business decision. Suppose I buy a bunch of content on iTunes -- soon I have about 200GB of video and music... so now I have to be able to engineer a reliable and convenient backup system for this... all because Apple doesn't make it easy to deactivate old DRM and re-download the content?

The point of DRM is that it should be able to allow Apple to risklessly let me re-download content. As it stands, and as someone else pointed out, Apple gives you one "lifetime" re-download for whatever music you own at the time. I have used mine, and incidentally I ended up losing about $50 worth of music which Apple claimed it no longer sold, even though the items were clearly still available in the iTunes store.

My point in mentioning backups was to show how unfriendly Apple's overall service is to customers. DRM is a technology which should be able to elimiate Apple's risk, allowing it to deliver superior customer service.

But sadly Apple has gone in the other direction...
you get one per lifetime :) I used mine.
This is fucking scary. No one ever considers that this kind of thing is possible, or doesn't believe that anyone would let it happen. Sure, the deletion was fairly innocent this time, but it does not bode well for the future.
"To my mind, the question that’s much more important than how to control a software project is, why on earth are we doing so many projects that deliver such marginal value?"

I was really hoping for more insights to this in the second half, but they never came.
You get one per lifetime. I used mine already. Is it my fault that I have had two hard drive failures? How much energy should I have to put into backing up something that Apple could easily let me re-download if it wanted to?
Yeah, one of EY's services actually is semi-managed EC2 and they advertise it as such.
One of my favorites is "In Search Of Stupidity", by Merrill Chapman. It talks about the marketing mistakes that ultimately killed a lot of top tech companies.
Regardless of the position of this article, Amazon has agreed with the public that revoking these books was an inappropriate action for Amazon to take, and has said it will not take that action in the future.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showAr...

As for the enemy being DRM itself instead of Amazon, I'm not sure it's DRM as much as fragmented or proprietary 'standards' that are the problem for casual users just trying to experience frictionless media. Consider the cross-device annoyances of unprotected WMV, DIVX, or Flash, for example. I understand why Amazon and Sony want to protect their "software" sales, but am disappointed that these protected books are not cross compatible. Both ebook stores have a limited selection, yet each device meets a usability niche.

On that point, I also would argue against the final jab from the article:

"can we stop making silly comparisons between the Kindle and Sony's or whoever's two-bit book reader that no one's ever heard of?"

In December 2008, Sony said that it had sold 300,000 units of its Sony Reader since the device launched end of 2006. Meanwhile, TechCrunch says Kindle sold 189,000 units in 2008.

Originally, however, the Sony Reader was available only through Sony and Borders. Sony began selling its Reader and related accessories in Target stores at the end of 2008.

By mid-2009, Sony Readers are sold at Apple stores, Best Buy, Borders, Brookstone, Costco, Fry's, Office Depot, Sam's Club, Sears, Staples, Target, Walgreens, Walmart, and many web retailers including Amazon. It is also available in the UK in Waterstone's, Dixons, and more. The Kindle is available from Amazon.com in the US only.

Given the Sony Reader's wide retail distribution, it's unlikely "no one's ever heard of" it, and purely anecdotally, I feel I see more of them on planes.

(Disclosure: I own an original Sony PRS-500, a newer Sony PRS-505, and a Kindle DX. My leisure books are on the Sony Reader for ergonomics, battery life, and travel. My technical books and documents, both Word and PDFs, are on the Kindle DX for the screen size, though it needs to be recharged from dead every few days.)
Ask HN: What is a hacker
What do you consider to be a hacker? Some have called recently dead pop stars, tv pitchmen or even news reports hackers.
That's a ridiculous counterargument. I drive, though an accident might kill me. I work out, despite the off-chance of a work-related heart attack.

There are no overdose-related deaths in the history of marijuana. Ever. You could smoke your weight in weed and not die. Similarly, nobody's ever died from LSD (I can't think of another drug whose usage leads to "trips"), and I can't recall ever reading of a bad trip from which you "don't come back".
I don't care if the kindle store is excellent.

I don't care if amazon is good 99% of the time.

I don't care if BigPrint is the devil and amazon was coerced.

Nobody should EVER under any circumstance delete ANYTHING from my computer, even if I bought it or not, if it is pirated or not, if it is stolen or not.

If it was your mistake to allow that to happen you should ask politely and we should be able to decide what to do.

I hope Apple takes notices, I know they have a remote shut-down switch in every iphone. They better never use it.
I'd prefer "We are adjusting our software in such a way that it is impossible for us to remove books from our customers' devices".

I don't know that I'd trust the statement after the text-to-speech functionality adjustments on some titles, but it would be a start.

Hey, it's software with compulsory updates via an uncontrollable backchannel. I was furious when I first read about this situation, despite not owning a Kindle (for this precise reason), but I understand the position that Amazon was in.

Hopefully they vet their third parties better, or hopefully copyright law changes in such a way that it is actually possible to vet copyright owners better. Or maybe we just lose the classics because it's too difficult to figure out which heir or organization owns the intellectual property they didn't produce.
separate search terms with a comma, just as in email. select STATE (for all cities). select COUNTRY.

As of now I must go to Google and run a term+date site:cl.org to get results for all states. That works, but it does not send me updates.
Elance Security Breach
So is everyone who becomes famous in their respective field a "hacker"? What were his innovations? Did he come up with some clever new way of doing the news?

Just because you're good at something doesn't make you a "hacker".
MRI scans of sushi: the diff between expert, apprentice & bot sushi
an innovator
"This Amazon situation is so shocking not because it's without precedent, but because it never used to make financial sense to treat a stolen copyright just as you would treat a stolen car. (And, after the P.R. repercussions of this move are played out, it may not make any financial sense in the future, either. ;)"

Precisely. It's not a stolen car, it's a technicality of overly complex copyright law that resulted in a bunch of paying customers having something removed from a device that they thought was as safe as their bookshelf.

Scale is important here. If I purchased a ten dollar book from Barnes and Noble that was later determined to be part of a hijacking of a delivery truck, they wouldn't go through the trouble. Paper is cheep, books are stolen and you'll sell more.

On one hand you have the scale of distribution that is much greater than what could be attained by jacking a delivery truck. On the other hand you have a pile of customers that have just discovered that they don't actually have any guarantees that the things they purchased on their Kindle are going to continue to be there when they wake up in the morning.
The impact of shutting down one spam-friendly colo
I think too many people often confuse creativity with a controlled state of madness.

Just this morning, I found myself singing "Alouette" while dancing the robot after I just got out of the shower (true story) with no explainable reason why I was doing it... I just was.

Shortly after, I thought I was just being creative. Now I'm currently questioning my sanity.
"I'm sorry, but we sold you a book that we didn't have rights to and violated copyright. Can we please have it back?"

Doesn't work like that. If you're a major digital salesperson and somebody's transmitting data illegally, as they were in this case, then it's your responsibility to withdraw the book. Amazon should have been much more polite about what was happening, but letting people keep illegal content was out of the question here. I understand that.

If this had been a legal publisher of 1984 suddenly switching positions, I'd agree that the user should have the choice. Considering it wasn't an authorized publisher, Amazon did the one thing they could.

Nobody should EVER under any circumstance delete ANYTHING from my computer, even if I bought it or not, if it is pirated or not, if it is stolen or not.

Really? Because I've always thought that deleting pirated content would be a great punishment for piracy. If I've stolen something, I have no right to it. That's implicit in the idea of piracy. Deleting the stuff I pirated seems like a harmless punishment.
You spoke of LSD in the GP and that is what I am speaking of. Of course there are no stories of overdoses of marijuana, but that's a straw man because, again, you spoke of lsd.

Did it ever occur to you that those who trip and dont come back can't tell you what they did because they're gone? A large number of mentally destablized homeless in the San Fran area from the Haight-Ashbury era seem to suggest that there are serious long-term effects with the ingestion of LSD.
I agree with your analogy, and it indicates the right thing to do here. Give the refund and ask people to delete the ebook themselves.

The doctor wouldn't break into your house and take the pills out of the medicine cabinet.
I did a heck of a lot of research before I tried drugs at age 19, and then had a lot of fun on drugs for a few years before giving it all up entirely. My main issue with most drugs is that you can get most of the positive effects of the less addictive drugs with training, without the nasty side effects. My favorite was hashish, which I found cleaner and more clear thinking than marijuana, though it's less readily available in America. I did most of my using in Amsterdam.

The exception is probably hallucinogens, which offer some interesting experiences that are probably hard to get elsewhere, and there's some that are largely harmless. I'd advise anyone to be really, really careful about the drugs that are both chemically addictive and tolerance building. Chemically addictive means withdrawal symptoms if you're not using, tolerance building means you need progressively more not to get to the same point. Nicotine, actually, probably gives you the least bang for your buck with a pretty brutal chem addictive/tolerance building mix. Anything that does similar you need to be wary about.

As for the most commonly used things - alcohol and THC (marijuana, hash) - you really, really can get the lower inhibitions, relaxation, creativity, etc. with some mental training. Quitting alcohol was surprisingly easy for me because eventually, I was doing much worse socially on it than without it. When you're comfortable saying and doing what you think sober, alcohol just messes up your reaction times and coordination and makes you fat and sick. The hardest part about quitting was the social aspect, but after about six months when people got the message that I was really done, that fell off too. I always tell everyone drink around me, use, whatever you please, but it's surprising how many of my friends who go out with me eventually quit. It's like a hell of a lot people drink because they're expected to more than because they actually like the effects.
I would say it's anyone who finds a creative way to use something in a new and interesting way. This may include producing an entirely new thing or simply reworking some other thing -- or combining lots of different things together to serve a new purpose. Traditionally it applies mostly to technology but I don't see that as a restriction to the term at all. The first guy who figured out you could chip flint stones into very sharp spears to hunt with was a hardcore hacker.