skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been to Penny's many times. I don't necessarily disagree with your observation of the store, the point I was trying to make is that judging the dude on the visual data we have is unfair.

I don't know the guy, but I assume he's not stupid, so if what you believe is so obvious, it must have been obvious to him too. But, for some reason he chose a certain strategy and we don't know exactly why. We don't have all the data.

All I'm trying to say is that it is easy to criticize, but I don't feel comfortable criticizing someone who knows a lot more than me in a certain area.

It's fucking hard to be CEO and I don't feel comfortable being an armchair CEO.
I'm interested, please write it up
Show HN: Professional Ethics of Computer Scientists
I was discussing with my roommate whether or not Computer Science is a profession. He suggested it's not a profession like engineering, law, or medicine, because it doesn't have a code of ethics that is enforced by a professional body (ACM doesn't count).

I suggested that we have a distributed code of ethics that is codified in a massive distributed system, but that if you asked grisled computer scientists they would agree on many of these points:

* When something stands in the way of the people, hack around it.

* Edit: Do it right the first time.

* Edit: Don't do it unless you have to.

* Whoever can do the work should be able to do it.

* It should be fun. Just do the awesome things.

* Leave breadcrumbs for those behind you.

* Edit: Make things that create surpluses for all of us.

I am not quite yet a grisled computer scientist, but those were my first thoughts. Please propose additions/revisions/replacements.

I don't think that something like "Don't be evil" really belongs on the list, because it's meaningless. It exists only as a cloud of more specific shared beliefs.

In the end, I agreed with him that Computer Science is not a profession because no one credentials us. Our status as a computer scientist is between us and our reckoner.

... And I maintain that there is an equivalence there.
Processor intensive now. In 5 years? 10?
Why make a fake statement when the real one touches on the same points more eloquently?
It's stories like this that are the reason I can't wait until P2P video streaming and sharing over WebRTC become commonplace enough to replace YouTube and similar sites. You can't assert copyright via the DMCA against fair use material on a fully distributed P2P network.

Ironically, the quality of comments and discourse on a P2P network would probably be an improvement over what can be found on YouTube.
How did FedEx win their first round? They're one of my favorite companies -- at least, Express; FedEx Ground is Roadway is pretty bad. UPS isn't horrible, either.
> Same with Google, it's extremely expensive to wire a significant number of their users

Recent published estimates have been that it would about $11 billion to roll out nationwide in the US. That is a lot of money, sure, but less than they paid for Motorola Mobility recently. Not prohibitively expensive for Google.
I would never want to work for you.
How does this work? My understanding is that apps cannot see what other apps are installed on iOS unless the device has been jailbroken.
I knew about this reply but I couldn't really disprove the original post. I'm glad I'm not the only who thinks the post is fake, especially since I couldn't find mention of the fake post anywhere else on the internet.
Some folks would view "hack around it" as a lack of ethics. Ethics tends to suggest following some set of "rules" and that's kind of the opposite.
I had a Nexus S and it was really perfect in every way. I handed it off to another family member and, for a 2 year old phone, it still feels very "current."
In college I was expected to know Scheme and Java, and C and some Assembly besides. I also picked up two other languages on my own time. I can't imagine even the least capable CS student graduating knowing only Java or only Scheme.
Witty, but I'm pretty sure two adults at a bar can agree on a price without a great deal of difficulty.
“Martha is the key,” he wrote in an October 2011 e-mail to himself.

How did this make it into the article? Was it a company-wide mail headed, "Open Letter To Me"? Is this his personal note-taking strategy, and he let the Times read it?
No doubt. I even made up a little rhyming slogan to that "E.A. SPORTS. IT'S IN THE GAME" bit when I was younger. ("E.A. SUCKS. THEY'RE FRICKIN LAME", if you were curious). Still I feel like since I don't buy their products, I don't have a dog in that fight. They just make malicious or slipshod decisions sometimes and it's ok because it has nothing to do with me.

The same can't be said for companies whose actions literally end or ruin large numbers of lives. It's harder to shrug off big banks taking in billions while ruining the working class as a whole and then somehow also making them pay for the damage; I can't just say "I didn't buy a house", because I still feel for the people who did. Let's not even talk about prison companies and military contract companies. Talk about evil...
You're right. Their PR department would never let such a brutally honest response be published.

But surprisingly enough, they issued a statement very similar to the original post the last time they won the title.

"We're sure that British Petroleum, AIG, Philip Morris, and Halliburton are all relieved they weren't nominated this year. We're going to continue making award-winning games and services played by more than 300 million people worldwide."

Source - Kotaku : http://kotaku.com/5899092/worst-company-in-america-ea-says-b...
There are a couple of brands of dishwashers with drawers. The idea is that one half gets newly dirty dishes while the other half holds the clean ones. According to Murphy, the dish you want will always be in the dirty drawer.

http://www.ajmadison.com/b.php/Drawers%3BDishwashers/N~64+42...
No, I honestly don't know anything about retail or Johnson (or the OP). I guess I just was bothered by this quoted statement:

> How do these CEOs make the noobest mistake?

To me it sounds unfair. It sounds like the OP thinks he/she could be a better CEO. That feels like armchair quarterbacking to me. (But I'm wrong if OP is Tom Brady or an expert in the field.)
I think the fact that they accept as a premise that "EA makes mediocre games" would be enough to assume it's fake until proven real.
Facebook Gets a Hold on Phones
I'm trying to envision the MMO version of this, with special reference to (dungeon) raids.

"Leroy, you'll levitate the troll for 15 iterations. Zelda, you'll comment out the basilisk. Everybody, now's the time to warm up your caches. Ready check ... OK then. 0, 1, 2, 3 ... Go go go!!"
Heaven forbid bitcoin be used for anything. If you buy them just to sit on them, you're a dirty speculator contributing to the bubble. But if you use them to purchase something, well, there's something wrong with the way you did that as well. I'm not sure what it would take to impress some people.
In 10 years, Google will almost certainly have something that takes advantage of the day's computing power as well.
Sublime 2 rules! Simple, great shortcuts and just plain nice to look at. They even let you use it for free. I bought it shortly after trying it out.
Is that Thatcher?
How are you going to teach pointers or recursion in Java, though?

More on that from Joel Spolsky here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...

There is a lot to learn in a CS program, and it really requires a single language from start to finish.

There is really no single language that you can use to teach everything that a CS student needs to learn. A computer science education should teach concepts that transcend languages, and use whichever language is best suited to demonstrate the concept at hand.
I was wondering if people who voted "yes" could justify it. People aren't replaceable parts - if you're paying people based on their contribution to the business there's bound to be some disparity (in either direction).
Beautiful app. Love the custom animations. Focused and effective. Based on the apps I've worked on and the range of reviews to app downloads, this app probably has enjoyed the success of 200,000 to 500,000 downloads.
I agree. I work with Fedex a lot and have never had any issues with them. Their customer service is decent, they deliver stuff pretty well, and their tracking is also excellent.

That being said, Fedex Freight leaves something to be desired. But even they are pretty good.
Agreed. It strikes me as disingenuous. Getting hired at Facebook is probably harder (in terms of years of investment in acquiring skills) than landing a comparable job in i-banking. Yet, no-one seems to be under the impression the latter is within reach following a 6 month program.
That sounds very interesting. What is the URL for the site? A preliminary Google search didn't turn up anything...
This is a reasonable view, but I want to point out that Python and Ruby are strictly typed, just not statically typed. You must still understand primitive types and casting, in contrast to JavaScript or PHP, which are both loosely and dynamically typed (a frequently dangerous combination).
Ask HN: Is college for everyone?
College definitely isn't for everyone in my opinion. I know for a fact it isn't for me, however my parents tend to disagree. My co-founder and I just applied for the summer session of Y-Combinator last week after beginning development on our mobile app and website. However, attending college while trying to form a company tends to be rather difficult. All I want to do when I wake up is work on our company, read techcrunch articles, and fix designs. Sitting in a lecture hall learning about macroeconomics is the last thing I want to do. My parents on the other hand see college as a "sense of security” -which is understandable. But I know that if I dropped out of college and worked day and night on our company, along with my co-founder, we can really make it big. My parents don't seem to buy that and think that it's just a little project on the side that we do when we have time. However, what they don't know is the one-hour of sleep we get every night and the minimal amount of effort we put into school, while putting 110% into our company. After negotiating with them for several weeks, they agreed that if our team is accepted to Y-Combinator, they will let me drop out of college and let me pursue my dream. I'm really hoping this works out, knowing internally I just can't return to college next semester at NYU and do this all over again! I just really want to work on the company we are creating 24-7. I find pleasure in knowing that one day everyone with a smartphone and cash will be using our app (teaser). So here are a few questions for you:

What do you think about dropping out? What if you had kids? Would you let them? Cheers!
Apple is probably one of the most locked-down-as-a-matter-of-course companies on the planet. I guess he took that philosophy with him.
VEVO has a deal with Youtube where they get their own-branded player (with a VEVO logo in the corner instead of Youtube), and I think there's a way to search for only VEVO-brand videos on Youtube or something.
Hmm, my experiance may have been a bit different since mine was a 5 year program with a solid year and a half of courses before graduation without break. Most of what you are describing got at least two or three quarters of treatment at my school, depending on what tracks you took.

We also had a Software Engineering major which a lot of people in CS took courses from. The only required (non-track) CS courses in our suggested 4th/5th year were software engineering classes though. I think the coverage there was more than adaquate. Honestly it got a bit too "vocational" for my tastes.

On the other hand, most of my peers (70-80%?) took the AI/Games track; they probably got closer to the sort of coverage on the other topics that you're mentioning. IIRC only two arch classes (MIPS), no OS to speak of, and a single 3-month quarter of concurrent programming. I don't think that is satisfactory, but the last I have heard most of them have been doing fine in the real world. That stuff is neat and good fun, but I don't think it will really effect your ability to perform in the industry.
born & raised in Austin, just might have to move back (from Silicon Valley) :)
> There's already a github for 3D models, it's called Sketchfab

Sketchfab doesn't have native support for git repositories. You could upload a tarball of a git repository, but that's seriously missing the point.
> There's nothing wrong with breaking a EULA, and their legal enforceability is worrying.

Luckily they're not legally enforceable (at least in the U.S.) under many circumstances, though you may not want to take it to court since you could get unlucky: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enfo...
FDA takes fresh look at robotic surgery
Why I decided to learn programming
What is product management?
The video isn't made by the Summly founder. It's just a random person reviewing the app.
How a Leafy Folk Remedy Stopped Bedbugs in Their Tracks
I wrote my compiler in Python, and I know perfectly well what a compiler does.

It slows down development. :)

Pointer math and garbage collection are lessons better taught in C++, lessons about the stack make more sense in assembly, and it probably helps to learn about high level design patterns using a simple syntax (like Ruby or Python). Lisp, so I hear, teaches you pure enlightenment. We can play this game with any language we like.

Java, for its part, taught me a lot about installing a massive IDE and scouring pre-existing libraries full of absurd design decisions with nominal documentation. (To be fair, this is probably an enormously important lesson for working on large projects.)

Despite the fact none of these languages hits all of these notes, if we had to choose one, Java would be last on my list. Because in Java, there's a risk that you will never learn the most important thing about coding: that it can actually be fun.

http://xkcd.com/353/
Combo washer/dryers are probably more common in Europe than separate machines, and come in a big range of capacities. It's just hard to make a big one work on a North American 120V 15A circuit.

I think a more realistic solution to fully automating laundry would be something like the LG TROMM Styler. It's a wardrobe that dry-cleans clothes.
It's not much different than any other currency in this regard. You can trade USD cash for goods directly in person, which is easy and works fine, but you can also choose to use any of various financial services built on top of USD, like credit cards.

Bitcoin is still superior to USD cash in many ways, however, because the "direct P2P" transactions are virtually immune to fraud (e.g. counterfeiting) and can be done online. Of course, the financial services for bitcoin are relatively new, which means there aren't any particularly experienced and trustworthy options. It takes time and a long transaction history because the average person will trust a financial service provider—remember that credit card companies used extensive advertising campaigns in their efforts to get people to think of them as normal everyday USD transactions.
> How are you going to teach pointers or recursion in Java, though?

Pointers, okay sure, but what's the problem with teaching recursion in Java? See, e.g., http://danzig.jct.ac.il/java_class/recursion.html
10,000 Bitcoin Pizzas
Before Jobs agreed to go back to Apple, he made sure he could pretty much do anything he wanted and never get fired. A lot of the changes he made were just as disruptive, if not more so, than the ones Johnson made.

Johnson tried to do that, and ran into two problems.

1 - He's not Steve Jobs, nobody is. He simply didn't have that 6th sense to make business decisions blindly and almost always be right.

2 - He didn't have that much freedom. Jobs would have stayed in power until Apple went bankrupt. They were that desperate and he had that much power.
This looks really interesting, especially the AppleTV support (a great device to use for digital signage/etc. applications)
Fake or not I agree with EA. And since I don't see Verizon on this list, the whole thing is bullshit anyway. Not to mention health insurance companies. You want to talk about legal murder?
We are selling our website www.jackpotbuddy.com
Interesting that it has a panel where you can provide your HTML. I'd have thought that would be against Apple's rules (haven't looked into how restrictive the HTML renderer is)
Basically, yes. Some combination of Walmart, Target, Costco, and Amazon (and I'm sure others that I'm leaving out) have basically taken over the inexpensive department store market, where price is the #1 purchase-decision factor. At some point, you end up in a logistics competition, where your margin is dependent on whether your supply chain is cheaper than someone else's. Within tech, the demise of Dell illustrates the perils of being a commodity supplier.

There's plenty of profit to be had in the higher end, selling "the experience". Nordstrom, for instance, is doing just fine. Being able to walk into a store, talk with knowledgable salespeople who can get a feel for your style and desires, then recommend products that suit them is a value that some customers are willing to pay for.

Johnson's background with Apple was in creating the latter sort of experience, but it simply did not match with the priorities of the JCP customer, and was driven by the notion of "build a better store, and the customers will come", without enough research into where potential gains and losses were.
A college girl who decided I needed better clothes dragged me off to Nordstrom the other day. I can't imagine they do badly at $150 per t-shirt. We also bought a pair of $2,000 shoes at Neiman Marcus nearby for her. I guess these profit margins are what the guy was going for, but he would have been better off just dumping the old brand and building a new one, I suspect. No one goes to JC Penny for upscale clothing.
I would love to know the rationale behind that move, was he trying to foster some type of competition or something?

Can you change one of these beasts? I maybe just attempt to rebrand them?
Because that would upset their competitors in other cities that they're not supposed to compete with. Google's already disrupted the Austin market so it's fair game now.
This is a great idea. The feeling of being able to do anything combined with reasonable limitations (ideally invisible) to focus the player's energy is extremely engaging--perfect for teaching.

And I've always thought of magic spells in fantasy as a kind of hack using a secret, natural programming language. :-)
What is your point? Only CEOs can criticize CEOs now?

It didn't seem like he knew what he was doing. Most people knew that he was going to land on his ass. He duly did. Criticism fully warranted, armchair or not.
His very last review - To the Wonder.

Feels like he wrote that knowing it was his last one. Amazing resolution to that review.
There's a pretty solid argument to be made that if JCP doesn't go upscale, or at least some sort of mid-scale, they're going to go kaput, because they have zero chance of winning a supply chain competition with the Wal-Marts, Targets, and Costcos of the world.
Google Adds Non-Profit Information To Knowledge Graph
I saw it demoed today. Hekaton is an announced and public feature of SQL14.
Right, but there is a slight difference. Credit cards work as virtual money and enable credit as an extra service attached to them. Direct bitcoin transactions are more similar to debit cards (rather than cash) in a sense that they enable virtual money and you pay from what you have (except that you don't need any service to back that up, unlike the debit cards which require banks to enable them). I.e. ideally in the bar example, one wouldn't need to use any financial services, but would still be able to pay with virtual money a la just using a card, of course for that the circulation of bitcoins needs to be more active, so bar could actually use them, instead of opting for instantaneous conversion.
It looks great, but its pretty cost-prohibitive.

After all the problems with Coda 2, I'm hesitant to fork out money up front for something from Panic that looks fancy, but I have no idea how reliably it performs.
Its stealth startup idea!

Run with it!

(it was a joke in response to the GP's being upset that great minds were being wasted on improving the Airport pickup experience.)
> But those houses come with a minimum of a 30 minute commute, one way, by car.

Remember, we're in the middle of a discussion about telecommuting. If you don't actually "commute", it's not that bad. :)
You don't even need SNI if all you want is some SSL goodness for a side project. Just make your web server listen to a different port for each HTTPS site. Most of your users won't care about the port as long as there's a padlock somewhere, and the ones who know better will probably know that any port is as good as port 443.

1st site: https://www.firstsite.com:12345/
2nd site: https://www.secondsite.com:24328/
3nd site: https://www.thirdsite.com:37712/
etc.

You can have thousands of HTTPS websites on a single IP address while fully supporting every browser.
Ubuntu 13.04: What's New, What's Not From New Linux
Ubuntu 13.04 ("Raring Ringtail") is nearly here. Ah, April: Cruel though it may be, it's the month where spring finally comes to stay, and I get my tax return. Even better, it does markCanonical's unveiling of Ubuntu 13.04. And with the final beta release now out, it's time to take stock of what the latest and greatest iteration of Ubuntu has in store.
$10 is cost prohibitive???
Oh, this looks wonderful. Impressive that there's already third parties catering to it: http://www.stathat.com/docs/statusboard
The last commit is two years old and points to: https://github.com/jeffWelling/ticgit
As someone who works in online dating, it has absolutely changed. Online dating is more or less accepted in all major urban centers of the country, in fact becoming a core part of how people date in some (larger) cities like NYC, SF, and DC.

The attitudes re: online dating a few years ago vs. now are like night and day.
All over this.
It's totally acceptable and very common: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit...
Http://technobb.com/Google/newly-redesigned-Google-play-store-released-today/
I think you are correct that Google wants everyone to have fast and high bandwidth internet connections as it benefits their core search advertising business. Google Fiber is just one of many efforts including Chrome/V8 and Spdy.

However going head to head with AT&T in Austin will NOT help this effort. AT&T is signaling Google and, more importantly, other potential gigabit internet service providers that it will compete with you and thus reduce your margins in a very capital intensive (i.e. risky) business. Anybody considers something similar in another city will think again.

Does anyone think the timing is a coincidence? If not why is AT&T doing this?

I would speculate that AT&T cannot handle any more capital spending and the debt it would require. They can barely keep up with the spending on mobile and their landline business is dying. Internet service over their existing (i.e. paid for) infrastructure has got to be their best business (certainly on return on capital). Google Fibre does them no good.
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.

I think that in JC Penney's case, excessive discounting may not have been a merchandising strategy but rather a symptom of allocation mismatches in their supply chain, leaving them with excess inventory (and associated costs). Their mistake was hiring a merchandising guy who didn't get this and tried to eliminate the discounts without fixing the underlying allocation problems.