skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not everywhere. Many rural markets still use them even in America, to say nothing of other countries.

New technology almost always forces the old into a niche, not completely removing it. There is still a genuine demand for buggy whips for instance, its just a small and specialized one now.
That's a good point.

What I'm really wondering about is if there is no proof that the notes ever existed and amazon has no record of their being backed up how will he be able to claim damage ?

You would at a minimum have to have some proof the notes existed in the first place.

When I sign up with a hosting company there is a very explicit provision that they are not liable for information loss, and rightly so. After all they can't possibly figure out the value I assign to my data. It may be random garbage or very important stuff, it's up to me to assign priorities and to back up the stuff that I think is important to me.

I assume the same applies to the cloud, hosting your data in the cloud is not a backup strategy.
The US government really really wants to make an example of an aspie UFO believer. Just like they like to throw the book at other mostly harmless kids, Adrian Lamo comes to mind.

I'm disgusted and outraged but can't think of anything I could do that wouldn't be pointless other then making me feel like I did something.

Writing letters to my representatives/senators is not going to make them do diddly squat in defense of a "military hacker", that's the stuff political attack adds would love as fodder.
Looks like Mikey is looking for some filler for a slow end-of-week news cycle. Plus, he can continue to add more follow-up "content" on Pre & Android experiences.

Just more "jurinal"-istic pablum. Next.
I'm not comfortable labeling the concepts behind operating systems, networks, computer architecture and programming languages as either math or engineering.
Excellent point. Once they have sold me a copy of a work, I cannot then reproduce and distribute that work without permission (or waiting a very long time indeed for the copyright to expire), but there are a great many other rights that I have without any need for permission.

And that is under current law, the laws can be changed.
I still really love my iPhone but the Android is the second most attractive to me. Like you said though, the devices just haven't been that great yet.

My girlfriend has the Palm Pre and I don't think it's that great at all. It's extremely frustrating to use and the navigation is not that intuitive. My buddy also got the Palm and dropped it a 2 weeks later for the iPhone.
Are you sure the annotations weren't removed as well? Not having a Kindle, I don't know, but some of the articles covering the matter have said that they were.
I didn't have very many permissions from my sysadmin to do inserts (I'm a BI guy) but I had create temporary table permissions. I needed to take about 5000 system ids with corresponding region identifiers from one system that I could only access via screen. So I wrote an auto hotkey script to screen scrap them all and place them into a notepad file. I then opened the notepad file with excel and added a column of

"union select " 233455 ", " "usa"

"union select " 233455 ", " "canada"

Then puttied into my linux shell, opened emacs and added "create temporary table select 23456 as 'systemid', 'usa' as 'region'

Then pasted the entire csv of union selects. Did my joins, etc... Got the report out on time. I know now that I could have done it with an emacs macro, but just didn't have time to figure it out.

shudder
Road Trip Terrific Tech Shrines That Every Geek Should See
This is a bit like the welder and the diver question, is it easier to teach a welder how to dive or a diver how to weld ?

For divers and welders the answer appears to be that it is easier to teach welders to dive than the reverse, even if both are far from trivial activities.

For biologists and computer scientists the answer is probably that it is easier to teach programmers to do biology than the reverse.

(good) Programmers have something universal about the way they apply themselves to problems and that way generalizes to problems in a different domain.
Einstein joked about this http://books.google.com/books?id=U2mO4nUunuwC&q=%22I%20h... and Penrose have made an elaborate prank out of situation too, http://abstrusegoose.com/130.

That said, notations here really correspond to different ways of thinking and are important and shouldn't be ridden.
I have loved the Automobile, but now I am quitting the Automobile.

This is not an easy decision.

I was there in January 2007 when it was announced and I bought the first Automobile as soon as it was available. I happily bought the Automobile 3G a year later. I’ve proudly yelled “I Am A Member Of The Cult Of Automobile.” I’ve been an unabashed cheerleader for this mode of transportation to all who’ll listen. And I’ve scoffed at drivers who said they’d abandon the platform.

But I’m not going to upgrade to the Automobile 3GS. Instead, I’m abandoning the Automobile and DOT. I will grudgingly pay the $175 DOT unregitration fee and then I will move on to another mode of transportation.

What finally put me over the edge? It wasn’t the routinely congested highways, something you can only truly understand once you have owned an Automobile (and which drove my friend Om Malik to bail). I’ve lived with that for two years. It’s not the lack of parking spaces at home. I’ve lived with that for two years, too. It certainly isn’t the lack of a feed bag, that has never bothered me. No, what finally put me over the edge is the speeding debacle.

Most of you won’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll explain.

Speeding is a way to get where you're going faster than everyone else. Here’s an overview of the service if you aren’t familiar with it.

I’ve always wanted to use speeding but there’s a big switching cost - crashing your automobile and dying. Too many roads are not built well enough to operate an automobile at sustained high speeds and are too dangerous to use for speeding.

But now Firestone is planning on rolling out a new line of tires that are supposed to handle well at high-speed, so I can drive as fast as I want no matter what condition the road is in.

Or so I thought. Chevrolet and the DOT are now making speeding illegal. Why? Because they absolutely don’t want people doing exactly what I’m doing - driving as fast as they want and using their roads as a racetrack.

So I have to choose between the Automobile and speeding. It’s not an easy decision. Except, it sort of is. Firestone isn’t forcing the decision on me, Chevrolet and the DOT are. So I choose to work with the company that isn’t forcing me to do things their way. And in this case, that’s Firestone.

So what mode of transportation will I use next? Well, that decision is easy, too. I’d move to the goat because I believe it is the best vehicle out there other than the Automobile 3GS. But Firestone hasn’t created a tire for the goat yet, just motorcycle and bicycles. So for now I’m going to use the new bicycle speeding tires. As soon as something better comes out, or Firestone makes an tire for the goat, I’ll switch. And keep on speeding. No long commute to work for me.

And Chevrolet, if you ever decide to put the hammer down on DOT and do the right thing for your loyal customers, I’ll consider switching back. In the meantime, I’ll just use one of many go-karts parked in the garage to test out new roads.
"If I thought you were really pompous, I wouldn't spend the time or bandwidth."

Neither would a prospective customer or investor. I'd just always wonder what happened. Fortunately, hn provides a good safe place to practice. Thanks for the lesson, plinkplonk.
I don't understand what makes kids uniquely qualified to be more honest? It seems counter-intuitive.
"If a foreign national..."

Do you really mean "if"? It won't even be "when", it will be "for some time, now".
Same. They were in a SourceForge email yesterday evening - that's how I found out about it.
I think you meant to say 'will have no need for massive scaling' ?
Sounds marketable, especially if you include a markov chain to grab variables off the scraped page and insert them into your email (ie, "I love #{favorite_band} too!").
Google Voice ain't VOIP. Here's what it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Q9MJdT5Ds
The irony that you're talking about an Apple product and control in the same sentence is truly rich. Since when has Apple been concerned in the least with giving users full control?
Why the CrunchPad is toast
This is a little petulant, but the plot over why kill GV is interesting. Since skype is on the iphone, and GV is on other phones with AT&T, it is curious why GV was rejected.
Dan ingalls on object orientation
I'm conflicted about this. A little knowledge can be far more dangerous then no knowledge. I have seen things... things I can't unsee. Things done to software by biology and chemistry Ph.Ds that still give me nightmares.

But make no mistake, modern science is neck deep in serious computering. Not being computer literate is almost as bad as being just plain illiterate.

So here's what I think about this. Every scientists who's not a physicist, mathematician, or computer scientists needs to study more math, more stat, and more cs.

In fact I would go so far as to say everyone needs the equivalent of an associate degree in cs to get a Ph.D. in anything. For mathematicians and physicists this would happen almost without any extra effort, for biologists it might be quite a bit of extra effort, but well worth it.
Corollary: should Computer scientists study biology? Yes
Signing up for classes at FSU was always a huge pain. The session started at 8am and good classes filled up quickly. If a class was full you had to continually type in the registration number and submit the form to see if anyone had dropped it (there was a lot of turnover as people loaded up their schedule and then called their friends to see what timeslots they were in.)

I had just taught myself php and wrote a curl script with the classes I wanted, and the few timeslots I wanted, in order. After a brief struggle I finally realized I needed to hit port 443 instead of 80 and, voila, my initial class registration was complete. A few were full but it kept hammering the site every 10 seconds and over the next few hours I got emails whenever it successfully registered me with a class.

I actually thought about charging $5 to handle other students' registrations because they hated dragging out of bed at 8am and refreshing their browser for an hour. Somehow I decided the university wouldn't approve....
It's entirely possible if you're working with a reasonably small amount of material. Not even that hard to do. It's easier than a jigsaw puzzle. It's also possible to build a primitive crossbow out of pencils, rubber bands, and paper clips. (had a boring office job for a few years)
Working With Multiple Ruby Versions
And why is the verb for "take the derivative" "differentiate"? Both words make sense individually to describe things -- df/dx is derived from f by taking differences -- but it doesn't make sense that we use both words.

I had an abstract algebra professor, in my first year of grad school in math, who referred to operators D that satisfy the product rule D(fg) = D(f) g + f D(g) , which are not necessarily defined in terms of a limit, as "derivations". This is a natural generalization of the derivative, and apparently "derivation" is the correct technical term, but for a week or so I thought he was just not speaking English properly.

I'm not an algebraist now.
I knew I'd take a beating on this comment, but I think it's a valid point, and I'm willing to bleed for it.
I'd love to see a full narrative on #2, that sounds front-page-post worthy. I can't even imagine asynchronously overclocking part of a CPU and still being able to boot the normal OS.
How do you promote these?
Because the "cloud" is made up of something other than servers?

Am I missing something here, or is this just semantics?
Possibly, but don't forget that the person who controls your mobile number controls your mobile commmunication. The devices and towers are just the medium.
World's Largest Free Online Library
What language? What do you do best?
Beyond the Front Page of Reddit
Agreed! If you can get your hands on a copy of a university level textbook in genetics that will be some of the best time you could invest in learning something about another field unrelated to the one you are currently in.
I suppose it's all relative which is what should make this frightening for most Chinese citizenry. This is a police exam - ie people who are being let out into the world to catch cheaters and those who break the law. What makes the fifth graders likely to be more honest is that they probably have a greater reputational incentive for catching cheaters than the previous examiners did (which is in itself a more frightening thought that examiners for a police exam would think that catching cheating is "embarrassing" and brush it under the table).
Fusion Garage: Crunchpad's Coming in November. Arrington: SHUT UP, YOU DICKS
adult supervisors were found to allow some cheating during police exams to prevent officers' embarrassment

Vs. Kids who probably enjoyed getting adults in trouble.
Tax Burden of Top 1% Now Exceeds That of Bottom 95%
At last, they have hands on experience in cheating during school exams :)
According to the Wall Street Journal article (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my...) about the suit, he did not lose the notes; he is upset because the notes are no longer linked (or whatever) to the text they refer to. >>Amazon didn’t delete the file containing Gawronski’s notes on the Kindle device. But since the book text "no longer exists, all my notes refer back to nothing," he said. "I can’t really use it for much."<<

Also, they are supposedly suing to prevent Amazon from doing this again, which Amazon has already said they will not. This is just a sleazeball lawyer going for his own benefit and a teenager trying to stretchout his 15 minutes of fame.
The likelihood of the average business to adopt Non-Windows Computers seems extremely small.

The only reason to buy Apple would be to woe the employees, at a significant cost. Linux would probably not make many employees happy, and would not save that much money either. So which companies would make the switch? Except for designer shops, of course.
All of them married to the same man?
A new way to recruit for (and find) startup jobs
This is not a very impressive hack compared to the other submissions here. But still here is my 'hack', if you want to call it that way.

When I was doing my graduate course in Computer Engineering, we had to submit loads of assignments each semester for each paper. "Assignment" means something that we should write by hand (print-outs not allowed) on any arbitrary topic provided by the lecturers. There was no problem solving ability required here, it was just answering questions like "What are the features of Java?", "Explain the layers in the TCP/IP model" etc.

As you can assume, this was a rather boring and useless exercise. In the first two years I made some girls from my class to write the assignments (which I am not interested in) for me in exchange for helping them in the computer lab and projects (which they were not much interested in).

By the end of second year, I found out another way to do this. I wrote a program that wrote the assignment for me. Here is how it worked: I will fetch the data from websites like Wikipedia etc and paste it in the program and the program will make it look like my handwriting. I click print and it will print the result to A4 sized papers and I submitted those.

I scanned my handwriting and separated each character and made it look like natural when paragraphs etc were constructed with this program.

The results were so impressive that later when I told this story and showed an assignment to one of my lecturers, he thought that I was just joking!

This hack even though trivial, saved me a lot of time in college.
This reaction doesn't make any sense to me. I think it's become fashionable (especially on HN) to bash on the startup world's "paper of record" with pretty poor evidence.

So we end up with comments that start with:

"I hate Tech Crunch as much as anyone else but,"
"Arrington pushes startups he invested in"
"Everything's about twitter"
"I don't read Tech Crunch because of their focus on x but,"
"Tech Crunch doesn't break real news"
"Tech Crunch needs a real editor"
"Tech Crunch only does favors for friends"
"Tech Crunch only wrote this as linkbait"

And now, with no relevance whatsoever to a meaningful discussion about the article, we get a knee jerk, play to the haters, "I quit Tech Crunch!".

In this community, I feel there needs to be a base line of respect for entrepreneurs and the people that help them. And make no mistake, Michael Arrington is both. If you have a legitimate gripe, write something constructive. There is little or no value, however, to reinforcing this idea that everything Tech Crunch does is wrong or bad.
I would think they are less likely to empathize with a cheater and think that revealing him would cause him embarrassment or career. I have experienced that kids of that age are more likely to call out people's bs without really thinking of social consequences of that.

PS. if this is an examp for high official jobs, I would think the adult supervisors might intentionally overlook some cheaters to get on their good side in the future when they get powerful posts.
Which would be appropriate, except the guys in the story didn't "take from others". They analyzed the system, found a flaw, and told the city about it. Moreover, they are not telling other people how to hack SF's specific system, nor does the story imply that they are continuing to make or use the "free" cards. If it turns out that other people are already secretly using this technique, the researchers may have saved SF and other cities a lot of money.
Place to go for product comparisons between two products that have yet to see the light of day and which are entirely unfamiliar to the reviewer. Just what was the point of this post?
Interesting - that announcement was just immediately prior to the eBay Skype IPO announcement (which was April 14 according to a quick Google..)
- iPhone developer suicide

- Google Voice fiasco

- iPhone SMS virus that can overtake the phone

Bad news for Apple all the time.
I agree, but only up to a point. Astronomers need to understand telescopes, but astronomy is about studying distant objects. The same applies to biology -- biologists are not bioinformatics specialists.
I'm surprised at the lengths some people will go to save a few puny letters on "because" and "with" while otherwise using perfect spelling.

(Achtung!)
This article is timely for me, having recently started a new job in bioinformatics. Specifically, building a centralized database (warehouse) for a variety of cancer research study data.

I'm coming from the opposite direction - a computer science background to the biology. A huge challenge for me is rapidly learning enough of the biostats and process to understand how to allow researchers to leverage having all this data in one place, easily accessible, and with a front-end that makes "sense" to the those MD/PhD types. A starting point is understanding what type of questions researchers can ask now that they have all the different data in one spot.

Fred Brooks said something like "computer scientists are toolsmiths." We build tools for user needs that simplify and strengthen the user's work. This requires the ability to somehow understand the user's needs, communicate with them effectively, and implement usable tools for them.

I sometimes feel like it is a failure on our part as builders to make it necessary for people who need software tools to build their own. I'm more than happy for other fields to add more CS type education to their required courses, but I'd rather be able to give researchers tools so that they stay on their critical path, rather than having to learn enough to hack together their own full solution.
This is a lame hack, but I used to play lots of Red Faction on the LAN with my buddies. They where all better than me and I got tired of it so I hacked the config file and changed the power of most of the common weapons and gave myself a homing rocket launcher that you could basically fire and forget. On the open maps you cold fire it up in the air and maybe 30-40 seconds later it would see somebody and you'd get a kill.
Which Linux do you use? I bought a MB for iPhone Dev and was hoping to run Linux on it. But I gave up for the time being when the Mousepad was unusable with the Ubuntu Live CD.
Obviously I mean 'they are all married to women', but your interpretation is much more amusing.

Too much sex with women leads to marriage with men?? LOL
I'd have thought that the security services, NRO for example, have software that receives scans of paper strips and does edge matching to reconstruct the page.

It doesn't seem too hard algorithmically (to this non-programmer) to do that, something like: take all strips and analyse them for position of edge markings; take all edges and compare the edge-marking positions giving a matching score by pair, match up the best scores and display to a user for final arrangement.

If you were looking at fragments of paper I'd probably go with a letter matching based on pre-analysis of the font used (by machine). use the letter matching to arrange the fragments as if they were strips and proceed from there.

I'd be amazed if such things don't exist.

We shred and compost if more security is needed.
Because, presumably, the program wasn't written as one big main() function, and at least one of the exit()s wasn't in main() — hence the use of longjmp() to jump out of all the layers of function calls back to the caller of the `library'.
If you take and give back you're a friend, if you don't you're a thief.
Seems like a humbling experience for the test takers to be supervised by 12-year-olds, and when you get to a position of power a humbling experience or two are useful. For kids on the other hand it puts cheating into perspective. I wonder if it will make them less likely to cheat in the future or, in opposite, give them ideas how to do it better.
I admit I don't have much to go on, but it seems like biology is a full load of study, whereas at least undergraduate 'computer science' ie programming can be picked up by a smart person almost incidentally. I've seen that done, and I think it /is/ done more often than the other way around. As for writing /good/ code, that can come from practice and aesthetics. But knowing biology (or another science) takes real study.
I wouldn't mind using this initially for checking email and web browsing .... if I could edit code remotely & productively via sshfs or similar in something like Bespin. It's not something that's "better" than a traditional desktop ... but if the license is permissive the desktop becomes so much more flexible, hackable, and personal.
Invented languages and their long history of failure.
Opening port 0 on NT4 would lock up the machine, I wrote a script to do it to all the dial-up ISPs running NT at 18:03
> Apple's marketing machine is stronger than CrunchPad'

That alone is probably enough.
People think of shredding as destroying a document, but in fact it's just scrambling it. And with enough time, someone will be able to unscramble it. Documents which truly need to be destroyed should probably be burned or pulped.
But, why not just jailbreak the phone? The article is so hyperbolic... 'i quit tech crunch' is the best one sentence critique of Arrington i've seen yet.
Time Sort (Noguchi) Filing System
Fixing "Star In Their Eyes" with "an amazing response to our internet voting" to choose the winner.

That was lulz
I think (please correct me if I am wrong, always glad to learn) that one key difference would be that learning computer science would (mostly) need books ,the internet and the time and willingness to buckle down, while a proper study of biology would involve serious lab work, with a need for costly equipment and instructions.