skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm one of the weirdos who always shopped at JC Penney.

They were always good at stocking good quality stuff at decent prices. I happen to be big & tall guy and have a terrible time finding clothes -- I can't shop at most mall retailers at all.

The problem with the transformation is that they did too much, too fast, and didn't understand the business. Johnson didn't just stay away from HQ, he never went to a store. THe shining halo of Apple conceals a lot of problems at the Apple store as well... The place is packed, but people have no idea how to actually check out. I usually see one or two frustrated shoppers give up whenever I am at the apple store.

They did things that were great ideas, like not stuffing racks into the aisles and getting rid of the cheap gizmos and merchandising. But they did everything overnight and didn't replace the dingy old carpets that were concealed by the racks. Good ideas implemented in a vacuum don't always work out well.

And, since tall guys aren't cool enough, they slashed the inventory of clothes that fit me.

I felt bad when I bought a bunch of shirts for $10 on,ine that are priced at $40 elsewhere in the big fire sale last week.
Looks like the audio latency topic is just too complicated for the company who cannot solve the task of delivering SMS to right recipient for 3 years.
Ask HN: Favorite recurring billing payment gateway?
A while back there was a thread of

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4975790

And I was wondering in the past four months, has anyone had any good experiences with any other recurring payment gateway which won't cost an arm and a leg?

I'm looking at paypal pro with enhanced recurring billing for $20 because it is the cheapest at the moment, but open to other ideas.
Raft - An understandable consensus algorithm equivalent to Paxos
"Your unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." -- Bill Gates

Success and failure are often simplistic and arbitrary judgement calls. It is common to just rejigger the numbers if you don't like what they say. So I am not sure how to engage you in meaningful and useful discussion on this topic. You haven't even really defined your terms and if you did I might fundamentally disagree with your definitions.
Apologies in advance. You may have a lot of domain knowledge that I don't know about, but...

This sounds like armchair quarterbacking. It's easy on the surface to criticize, but we don't really know all the factors that lead to Johnson's decisions. I don't think it's fair to try to boil it down so much.

It's like someone criticizing a development project without knowing the budgetary or time constraints. Yeah, it would have been better to do it _this_ way, but _that_ way assumed an infinite budget and time.
So if it's the case that the user did not infringe on Universal's copyrights, merely the agreement Universal has with Youtube does that still count towards their two strikes?
Yes. They're called women.

It is a segment that is declining overall. I think that has more to do with the legal/tax/financial framework that makes big box retail grow like a weed.
> By early fall 2011, Mr. Johnson was tackling Penney’s pricing, which he thought used too many discounts. He ignored a study Penney had just completed on customer preferences, and gave merchants a one-sheet grid explaining what prices they could use.

> “Ron’s response at the time was, just like at Apple, customers don’t always know what they want,” said an executive who advocated testing. “We’re not going to test it — we’re going to roll it out.”

Uh, OK...as others have pointed out, it's a far different game selling top of the line future-thinking tech products and selling affordable clothing...and this difference would be especially pronounced in the context of this "customer doesn't know best" philosophy.

I mean, that's partially true no matter what the price point of the product is...but the difference is that when you're selling expensive products with high profit margins, you have much more runway to deliver that special thing/innovation that customers don't yet know they want. How was that not obvious to Johnson?
VUDU office break-in. Email addresses and account info stolen
Good idea! This isn't something that I had considered.

I imagine it would be very similar to cleaning inside. An autonomous lawn mower and robots for things such as edging would be cool, but, again, it would be a sticky situation.
Most every Etherpad implementation I've seen is pretty much a direct copy of what Etherpad was. I have no idea if this is inherent to the Etherpad source, but it sure seems it. The entire point of Firepad is that you can use it for much more custom use cases, like Socrates: http://socrates.io — no crappy word processing UI, or any of that stuff. Totally custom and easy to do.
I don't think that true. I know a couple of doctors that work in some city that they consider unworthy, and fly back to NYC for the weekend.

I make 6-figures in a small city doing IT. It is absolutely possible. I'm not working for Google, but that isn't something that I lose sleep over.
Do they mean unsuitable for speakerphone calls?

Because why not a bluetooth headset?
The game feeling looks like more a modern LOGO game than a World of Warcraft game. The quest seems to be about moving a stone from A to B. It does not seems the player will become more and more powerfull while he grows its own library.
It will be so fun to craft its set of functions ang go cast it in some PVP events. Maybe the Notch's new game (http://0x10c.com) will provide this king of "Master of Hackers" feeling.
With preliminary support for Android and iOS.
VEVO is not owned by Google or YouTube.
I'm glad you like the site. It's been quite the undertaking...

And I agree, our Members-only section is definitely hokey right now! But give us a few months to get it fully up and running, and I hope it will become a useful resource for the intense cinephile and/or Ebert fan, something like ESPN Insider for a fantasy sports aficionado.
> Learning on an interpreted language [...]

Interpretation or not is a property of the implementation, not of the language. And it's a sliding scale as well, as you can see with Java.
Really?

Have you been in a Pennys? It's about as upscale as Dennys, and as hip as the dentist. On the other hand, it did offer consistent value and a consistent shopping experience. He tried to do in a year, what needed ten years or more to do, and failed. His failure is not unsurprising to any of us who have been in the store. Pennys, was so un-hip it almost became hip, but it rightly so had a image of dowdy women wearing housecoats shopping on a Tuesday.
Yeoman beta
I'm sure TWC will now prioritize Austin as one of their first DOCSIS 3.1 deployments so they will likely be doing 300-500Mbit/sec at minimum by then.
I get GSM quality calls on my Nexus 4 (at minimum) via cSIPsimple, pbxes.org, and Google Voice, usually over a mediocre repeated WiFi connection. If there's interest, I'll write it up.

Mild configuration hassle but reliable. Helps to move Google Voice to an account where where you never IM.
we also have a rule that when possible (like you've opened up an old file with whitespace issues), that you should clean it and do a whitespace changes only commit before getting to work. It makes everyone's life easier if they're not looking for the "real diff" in your commit.
Dishwasher should be integrated with dish cabinets. You put dirty dishes in the bottom part and after they are washed they should be autoatically transfered to the top part where you can get clean ones from.
It's like the swearing machine in demolition man:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz4HEEiJuGo
It's not so much courses teaching languages, it's the lack of software engineering in general. There's one course here which is a joke and not taught until your second to last semester. And then people turn in absolute barf code in their homework.

Then people graduate and start a job, and they can't code their way out of paper bag, but they sure can write the tuple relational calculus for some given query.

Another example is my OS class. We just spent half a semester going over concurrency problems. Now we're rushing through everything else that goes on in an OS. We spent one day on filesystems and I/O. Not once have we said anything like "well this is how Linux or FreeBSD does it".
I just polled some friends on chat:

- iPhone + Vodafone Bangalore - SMS notifications - inconsistent frequency

- Galaxy Y + Airtel Bangalore - SMS alert only

so it seems carrier/plan dependent to me!

> it sends whenever there's 3G transaction and the usage period ends

Sure - what I was guessing is that sometimes the phone is on a "single" 3G connection all day & there's no alert, and some days the phone makes "many" 3G connections & there are lots of alerts. (or perhaps it does not work this way & there's some other cause - not a telecom expert!)

[EDIT: oops both friends say they get SMS not USSD alerts]
You have to enter the hard drive password when you boot.

On my ThinkPads, I set the power-on password and the hard drive passwords all the same. Then I enter the power-on password and it feeds that password to all the hard drives too. (I have three SSDs in my W520.)
You better buy now, Nexus 5 will contain even more bugs considering the process of dealing with them at Google.
Me too. It was fat (tall) people clothing that was more conservatively styled, which far better suits my personal wants than the chain fat peoples store.
Well according to my wrestling with it, that book is out and called "The Art of Computer Programming" by don knuth.
Improvements to the Blogger template HTML editor
Lockin and unlocking. I should have a ring on my hand with rfid chip and the reader should be on the doors near the handle so the dors would unlock as I grab the handle and lock as I release the handle after closing them.
Tech Startup, Tweaky.com take vow of sobriety.
Tech Startup take a vow of sobriety until they reach profitability. Takes them 9 months! http://www.shoestring.com.au/2013/04/tweaky-zero-to-profitable-in-9-months/
Definitions of Successes and Failures are subject to your own discretion--that's the beauty of these terms.
Awesome work by the Tweaky.com team!
Sears - maybe.

Pennys was more middle of the road, more like Macy's for the lower middle class.
But as a matter of practice any major restyling is almost certainly going to involve changes to the structure, organization and even content of the HTML anyways.

With smaller changes it seems trivial either way. If I just want to do subtle restyling to a Bootstrap based website I don't really need to throw the baby out with the bathwater do I?

Now correct me if I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "semantic" here but basically you're saying the HTML has no influence on layout or design. That just doesn't make much sense to me.

In this way all design has to be done strictly through CSS. Everything kind of "thing" will require a complete set of specific styles because it's "semantic" even if it reuses elements of other things.

I mean this in the end is the reason so many people like working with Bootstrap it allows things to be built with some efficiency. Major components are defined and reusable. Semantic HTML to me is a bit like having to hand craft every individual widget, and cog when all I really needed was some off the shelf parts and maybe build customized dashboard and add a bit spiffy paint.

Honestly, I am on the fence on this. I love the idea of purely semantic markup but always seem to see this tradeoff in reusability whenever persuing it.
Show HN: Pre-Order my first eBook: Your First 3 Months on AdWords
> I know a couple of doctors that work in some city that they consider unworthy, and fly back to NYC for the weekend.

These sorts of anecdotes don't really mean anything to me. If you don't like small towns to the point that you're going to fly to NYC every weekend, then yes, it would all seem a bit pointless working in one.

> I make 6-figures in a small city doing IT. It is absolutely possible.

I never said it wasn't possible, but it isn't even remotely normal, unless you have a different idea of small city than I do.

Let me give you an example: for a bit my dad did IT for a local school system (elementary + high school) and made a little under $40k. And he wasn't underpaid for that job in the area. The "top" IT guys with bigger clients would pull about $60k, which was considered a very good salary for the area (and indeed it was, when a nice house could be had for not more than double that).
A Vagrant plugin to install Chef cookbooks using Librarian-Chef
Horrible Bosses: The Uber Micro Manager
It’ll take a lot more than AMS to find Dark Matter
I think life is a little more complicated than that. But I doubt you want to discuss it in earnest, especially not with me -- which is probably for the best as I probably should learn to shut up.

Cheers!
California supplies a lot of Canada's food too.
Thy this: http://evernote.com/clearly/

And you are welcome. :)
>A local storage device has some number of failure modes, and probability of failure: A. The cloud had additional failure modes and vulnerabilities: B. The outcome is A + B.

That's funny =)
I feel it gives a good tradeoff between:

- typed languages that are too low level to start (C/C++)

- scripting languages that are high level, not typed, and therefore do a lot of things under the hood (Python, Ruby, Javascript)
You BUY PUT options -- you buy the right to sale at a given price for some period of time. The most you can lose is what you paid out for the put option. If the price of the underlying commodity falls below the strike price, you essentially get the difference -- you buy at the new lower price and sell at the higher price.
Not everyone is a fan of jewelry, so maybe a thumb scanner would be more effective? The most important part is that only appropriate parties are aloud to open the doors. The same techniques could be applied to windows.
IIRC, he did have a stint at Target, revamping a lot of their merchandising, so it's not like he had no experience with commodity/dept-store stuff.
>But if a lawful subpoena comes down, the owner of the files is required to unencrypt and provide the requested materials, the existence of which is obvious from their online presence, even when encrypted. For local storage, a medical institution can say the files don't exist or are inaccessible. This option doesn't exist for online records.

Ok, now I know you're trolling.
> This sounds like armchair quarterbacking. It's easy on the surface to criticize, but we don't really know all the factors that lead to Johnson's decisions. I don't think it's fair to try to boil it down so much.

Uh, are you suggesting that Johnson was forced to conduct actions that are consistent with moving JCPenney's to an upscale bracket? Because usually that kind of move costs much more money than maintaining the status quo.

It's fair to sympathize with a CEO had no options but to keep a slowly sinking ship from sinking faster. However, I when a CEO accelerates the sinking by his own initiative, it's fair to scrutinize his decisions.
I would like shower temperature just right. As I enter the shower temperature of my skin should be measured and the water temperature adjusted so it causes me minimum discomfort. Also the water should be additionally electrically heated in the faucet so that even first drops of it that fall on me should already have designated temperature.
Does anyone have any idea about how this compares to Google's btree?

https://code.google.com/p/cpp-btree/
JQuery Best Practices
If this is actually true, then the schism is truly a tragedy.
Here's the rub: A lot of people keep their dishes in a cabinet above the counter, so there is empty space between the dish washer and the cabinets where the dishes should end up.

I can't think of a way around this at the moment except the possibility of in-wall dishwashers. In-wall ovens exist, so why not change dishwashers, washers and dryers to do the same?
How Prozac entered the lexicon
So use separate accounts if a Google Account has any value.

The problem is that you get the infraction not for "breaking the law" but for breaking whatever private agreement Google signed with big music labels.
Long overdue. I've done some research on trying to short Bitcoins and could not come up with anything better than a naked short position or something with tremendous counterparty risk. I'm more interested in Bitcoins as a legitimate means of exchange rather than as an investment, and a service like this would enable me to protect against volatility, the same way similar services in existing ForEx markets protect borrowers and lenders in foreign markets.
I've had great support from the team at http://www.chargebee.com (Hooked into pin.net.au) for handling my recurring payments for my SaaS
Agreed, at least for independent projects.

I could use all sorts of git tricks that could do the same thing, but sometimes it's nice to just keep an easy, version controlled text file I can knock things off of.

That said, I frequently sprinkle in '//TODO: ...' or '//XXX:' in source code comments when I'm in the middle of hacking. It's pretty easy to aggregate those back into my main todo list when I'm done.
Panic debuts their new App -- Status Board
Another consideration is that you might want the temperature to increase over time. I love hot showers, but I don't want the water to scald me as soon as I turn it on.
I disagree. Not to get too pedantic here, but since we're discussing the meaning of words, the dictionary definition of humane is relevant: "characterized by tenderness, compassion, and sympathy for people and animals, especially for the suffering or distressed." There is no reason that the "unnecessary destruction of lives for the sake of profit" could not be done in a way that is accurately described by that definition. In fact, I believe the video I linked is a perfect example of someone behaving in that way.
This whole thread about their use of Java completely misses the point of this project. Maybe people shouldn't be so hung-up about what language is being learnt? I'm sure the students will be learning a whole range of languages.
Any chance that you'd package the site up and submit it to the Internet Archive once its been polished?
I'm not sure if this letter is real, but as much as I dislike EA, I do have to agree with what the letter says.
You find it odd that Sublime Text is so widely loved? Seriously? It combines the greatness of some of the best editors out there into a single one that is approachable and sexy and you can't see how it appeals to the masses?

Let's list out some of my favorite features of Sublime Text (please keep in mind I switched FROM vim to Sublime):

1.) VIntage mode that allows for 99% of day-to-day vim stuff
2.) A plugin system that uses Python and offers a full-featured API (vimscript anyone? pfft)
3.) Full mouse/windows support (i.e. it's not ghetto mouse support thrown over a terminal window from the '70s)
4.) Textmate-style themes that even allows tweaking to the UI
5.) Native Linux, MacOS, and Windows versions

The only negative is that it isn't open-source, which I hate, but the licensing is very reasonable (it's per person, not machine, so you can install it on as many devices as you use)

I'd really like to see you give a real-world example of how it's slow compared to vim/emacs, because maybe I'm missing something. I've been using Sublime Text for over a year and have only had to break out vim a couple of times for some crazy vim-style search/replacing or to quickly open some super-large text files (I think better large-file handling is in the works for sublime though...).

Oh, and one of Sublime Text's best feature? It doesn't come with the elitist attitude that a lot of vim and emacs users seem to get... :)
Did you consider braintree or spreedly at all?
I started at age 7 with BASIC on a C64. Then moved on to reading C and C++ books once I could read English. Yeah, I had to learn English before learning how to program. It makes me crack up every time I think about it. Anyhow, I had a, uh, rather interesting phase were I was into reverse-engineering programs and systems. Luckily, I did not have internet access until the end of that phase. Still remember having some fun learning stuff on IRC. By the time I was 20-ish, I was heavily into robotics. But back then the Arduino was not a reality, so it was mostly using PIC16F84 chips and 555 timers. And then I had another BASIC phase, which led me to discover Python. Then Lisp. Then Visual Basic, C#, and the .NET framework. Had too much fun with Python and Lisp. Love them both. Went back to them. I mostly do Python these days, but love writing Lisp whenever I can.
Norvig himself commented on one of those type threads in support of a guy who had taught himself to program in 12 weeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3271866
Ouch! It's a bad sign when you starve your team of useful data!

"He revoked access to Penney’s sales data for all but the top executives. But that took away valuable information: the buyer for, say, men’s big and tall could not see how women’s plus size was performing."
Using a Linksys Wi-Fi router? It could be ripe for remote takeover
There's also DOCSIS 3.1 on the horizon for cable providers. It will allow for a quick and dramatic increase in download speeds over existing cable HFC infrastructure. All the big market cable ISPs will be offering 1Gbit/sec download speeds in the next 2-3 years at least in some competitive markets. Within 3-5 years it will be pretty widespread. Within 5-7 years it will be fairly universal to have multi-gigabit/sec broadband just about everywhere in the country that is serviced by cable ISPs.
On companies deleting web pages they don't like and a site that stops them.
They nuked the entire "Ask the Movie Answer Man" section, which was one of my favorite things on the site. Even the old archives are gone. A search turns up links, but they are all broken. :-(

UPDATE: I found it!

http://www.rogerebert.com/answer-man/

But I don't see any easy way to search for really old Answer Man stuff in the archives.
Thus, anyone who learns a first language other than Java is setting himself up for failure?

My first language was Basic on an Atari 800. My second was C++. I've made a respectable career from programming since then, in both serious and "lite" languages alike, including Java. I seem to have avoided these dire consequences. :-)
Here's his actual response: http://www.ea.com/news/we-can-do-better
Shazam For Clothes Identifies What TV Characters Are Wearing
Cute, but definitely not real. Here is the actual statement they released:

http://www.ea.com/news/we-can-do-better
I think it's because the Sun Times paid the costs of running the site, but I'm not 100% sure.
That is satire, not an actual response from Peter Moore, although it's not far off from his actual response to the tournament which can be found here: http://www.ea.com/news/we-can-do-better

I would have had a lot of respect for him if he actually released that satirical response although it would not have been very professional. The popular summary of his actual letter is "EA blames worst company win on homophobia"
Security? Client-side encryption.
While you can definitely say calling EA the worst company on earth is a tempest in a teapot, they are still assholes, and they suck.
That is all.
So how does Google get away with "legendarily bad" customer service while EA cannot? I guess in a way EA charges a good bit for the games and good support is expected, but still. I paid $300 for a Nexus 4, I should get something more than a message board.
Yeah, that one really stuck out to me as well. Maybe it's just a matter of perspective, but if I were runny JCP, I'd make sure everybody down to the janitor had access to that stuff. And everybody, including the janitor, would have a channel to make sure their ideas could make it all the way to the top and get heard, if they had merit.