skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am posting this because I feel it is worthwhile information. It is within _why's rights to yank his sites off the Internet at a moments notice. I will not begrudge him that. However, I do think when people come to rely on your tools and software you should at least respect that people rely on you, if informally.

Also, I think that, since he was hosting a lot of other sites on hobix, not just his personal stuff something could actually be wrong. So I am sharing this information. Please be responsible.

I dug up a Kylie Gillette who is the owner of snapd.net, Snapdragon Jewelry. A quick whois on that domain:
Registrant: Layered Technologies TheLuckyStiff Why 1647 Witt Rd. Ste. # 20 Frisco, TX 75034 US +1.9723987998 86a756e735644786cd09875d0acb61365fb02f36@whois.gkg.net

So there is also this: http://www.assessor.slco.org/test/cfml/Query/valuationInfo.c...

What are the chances that a Jonathan Gillette hosting a website for Kylie Gillette who posted to a ruby mailing list as _why and Jonathan Gillette in 02 and 03 are different people? If something is wrong or something has happened to him IRL people would rest a little easier knowing what is going on.
Good go players regularly count the number of points an area under contention is worth.
Sometimes the two meet: http://www.industrialorigami.com/technology/how.cfm
http://www.langorigami.com/science/science.php4

The latter link references a variety of particular interesting applications, from airbag design to laser waveguides.
> If _everyone_ did that in their own corner of the world, we'd get the result we wanted.

That's awfully naive. Systemic problems can't be fixed piece-by-piece, and it ignores the fact that there are people actively working against these kind of corrections.
Live, searchable collective intelligence that continuously percolates
I understood that massively used lower level texts provided substantial income to their authors, but I can't remember the source, it was some book I read about a decade ago, and I could be wrong.
There are many types of “fair” and equal. One thing that makes our system unfair is the failure to communicate what happens, not just how the system actually works. (You must spend lot's of time and money to find all the available tax breaks.)

With my version of “fair” you should rework the federal tax code to be as simple as possible. Everyone get’s 700$ / month from the government, free health care and pays ~35% in taxes with zero tax breaks of any kind and no minimum wage of any kind. Donate to charity or retirement and you get no help from the government. You are still protected from starvation, but there is no unemployment insurance, social security or medicare.

The real advantage is the simple system is easy to understand and does what most “social” programs (SS, Medicare, Medicaid etc) try and do. There are also just 2 numbers to debate, the tax rate and the government subsidy.

PS: A true tax code would need to be longer than that, but the goal would be something that could be printed legibly on a single sheet of paper and understood by most people with an 8th grade education.
Sure. I'll keep you in mind if things don't work out here.
I believe he did say at one point that he was working for a startup. Maybe they hit crunch time.
i'm in no point a ruby guy or involved with the ruby community, but i couldn't have missed this guys legacy. kinda reminds me of RAW.
In the SF Bay Area, commuting by car over the past 15 years, I've found that there are no generalizations I can safely make about traffic during a particular time of day, which applies to all routes and all directions.

I became an early riser for a particular job and have stayed on that sleep schedule for (arguably indirectly related) health reasons, so I'm awake by 13:00 UTC every day, which is 6am or 5am, depending on Daylight Silly Time. However, I tend to adjust my commute departure time such that I get a good overlap of being in the office with my cow-orkers.
Kylie is a relative. He hosts a site by one Kylie Gillette using the alias Whytheluckystiff. If he is NOT Jonathan Gillette he has very, very close ties to him.
I think they're worried more about Time Warner claiming rights on the original than what the White House thinks. I campaigned for Obama and have no problem with the thing, in fact I thought it was clever political commentary even though I didn't agree with the sentiment expressed.

For fun and japes, I made this: http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/entries/1362354-remix

I'm sure within a week someone will make a joker-fication website that automatically gives any image the joker look (indeed, if I knew how I'd have done it already).
I'm looking for a co-founder. I have an app in true beta stage that's going ... nowhere. I'm looking to sell what I have, or find someone with the spark to reanimate it.

I'm in MA, and not willing to relocate (have a fam/business). Don't need someone local, just someone with passion and the geek cred to make my (and soon our) vision real.
Don't look for a cofounder by stating the technical requirements -- that sounds like a job posting. If you want your technical founders to feel vested in the company, they'd prefer to hear what the company is aiming to do.
http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/the.foxes-6... :-(

Tall Fox: -Have you noticed that this book is basically written by a _lunatic_?

Short Fox: -Yup

Tall Fox: -Seriously, he's way too hyperactive. If he keeps at this frantic pace he's gonna burn out quick.

Short Fox: -Burn out? He's gonna shoot himself in the head by the time he hits 30.

--

From that kind of comment and the pace of his work (bouts of rabid coding interspersed with AWOL periods), I'm afraid he's bipolar. His only output (code, writing, mailing list contributions) in june was a single tweet saying that he was trapped in a labyrinth of his own design.

I sincerely hope he's alright.
Thanks for that info, Owen.
I share my name with several more famous than me. However there was a certain point around the turn of the century when it was just me. Sucks to be eclipsed.
Fascinating.

Conventional wisdom to the contrary, it's always neat to see how sausage is made.

This is why folks love police procedurals and forensics TV shows ... and its extra fun when the topic is math.
Maybe I'm too much of a geek, or not enough of one, but I got a kick out of the "a dozen or so comments" turning into "71 comments" a second or two after page load.
So you know the right way to disappear. With notice, with contact, with archives. In doing so you were much quieter than _why's "out with a bang" tactic.

Interestingly, I won an award for poetry when I was a teenager. I assure you the poem was not "turtles and goats, turtles and goats, turtles and goats are filling up boats."

Why was gifted, but like all gifted children he was also lazy and went straight for the payoff by tossing out any old random crap he knew would get the reaction he wanted. Mixed in with his genuine contributions, these annoying one-offs have been promoted to the same level as everything else. That annoys me, as does people pretending they're the same.

And I didn't insult the OP, or didn't mean to anyway. Geeze - why do you think that criticising something someone did is the same thing as criticising that person? It's not. I have nothing against the OP. I have nothing against _why. I have nothing against you! Yes, the OP did something silly, IMO. _why too. And you've said some dumb things, to me. But we're all on the same side in the final reckoning. Let's not blow it out of proportion.
It may not be the right place to discuss these matters, but it's the only place I have (with the programming reddit, but the userbase is different).
A new Erlang docs repository
Why did you choose them instead of the most popular 99designs? I'm curious.
I shudder to think how much chatter this is going to generate. Zed bashing on _why... worlds collide. The only thing that would be better is if he somehow brought up Erlang in the argument.
It was there when he wrote the chapter, with the comic section attached next to it.

There are other allusions to him leaving the scene/dying in other writings.
It was there Feb 8th 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20080208063221/http://poignantgui...
I didn't know who _why is. Here's a link for non-ruby folks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
It's a brief influx. We've had these before. Two days from now we'll all have forgotten about this.

How is this any different from, say, all the furor when Apple releases a new product, or Google unveils a future technology, or TechCrunch gets called out for doing something dumb? Social news is given shape by social waves.
Demo Day was yesterday, so I doubt PG had time to manage two accounts.
Great for zoning out and working. I've been using it so much lately that I've added it as a Fluid SSB menu item.

http://fluidapp.com/
AVATAR Official Movie Trailer Released
_why wasn't writing a poem. He was having a bit of fun on Twitter, and this dude liked it. I doubt _why thought much about what people would think about what he tweeted before he tweeted it.

Let's call it a day and go do non-flaming stuff for a while. I disagree with your perspective on _why, but that's alright, I don't think he cares much about this debate either way.
This isn't twitter, you can reply to him directly by clicking the small "reply" link under his comment.
Zed, while offending, at least cares about other people. _why does not.

Edit: Woah, controversial comment.

Let me rephrase that: Zed cares more than _why about his projects' afterlife.
Learn You Some Buddha For Great Good, Biatch, by Zed Shaw.
I'm not sure that the overlap between "twitter users" and "potential Buick SUV customers" is all that large. I doubt twitter was a huge factor in the decision.
True, but I can't think of a country that tried Communism in good faith. And in this country when people tried the system in a microcosm like a commune, it works. So maybe it doesn't scale or maybe it requires different roots than the founding of most communist countries.
My Inbox
What Y Combinator Looks For In A Startup
"When two people trade, both win. No one buys a bar a soap unless the money they’re spending for the soap is worth less to them than the soap itself."

Huge fail. People simply aren't rational actors. What about the case where an actor buys what he wants to buy, but that's not what he needs? You may want cigarettes and lottery tickets, but to say that you benefit from buying them, because otherwise you wouldn't buy them is stupidity.

To clarify, I'm distinguishing the transient benefit of "yay, I got what I wanted" from a productivity-enhancing benefit.
It may represent fewer iTunes sales but more Apple TV sales (see another rumor: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/08/20/apple_expected...).
New Mogul is great. Hope this gets resolved.

It's hosted at Godaddy. The domain is current. And it's not that he didn't pay a hosting bill - when that happens at Godaddy they make the site forward to a godaddy page.

That means that someone manually took the site down.
Anyone know of any condensed versions explaining the VMM? 748 pages would be nice to read through if I had the time
I can provide for you. As an Erlang developer for MS I've been asked to review Axum and give feedback. So they pointed me at the publicly available guide:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/D/5/BD51FFB2-C777-4...

I can only wince and wonder where I even start?
And here:

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/departure.p...

"Ha! I was right! He flipped his lid! He's all burned out and he's going to shoot himself in the head!"

On the bright side, from the little psychology and the little about _why's author that I know, he doesn't seem to fit a psychological profile of someone who would kill himself. I'm sure he works a lot, and his work is curiously personal and I'd imagine exhausting, but his work is also well recognized and celebrated. Many artists don't have that luxury in their lifetimes.
Would you set a deadline on it though, say 5 months if nothing happens, more, or never?
I don't know why everyone thinks all of _why's code is gone, which is Zed's main complaint. He left his Rubyforge page up, with all of his code, and anything your project depended on can still be installed. He also had it all on github, so anyone with a checkout has full commit history.
Hopefully he's okay.
What matters exactly?
Those of _why's disappearing, presumably, and of the work he left behind.
I think it's exactly the right place to discuss it. This is Hacker News, _why is a great hacker. This is the one place in the web where him disappearing is considered important. Those who prefer to read what Julia heard that Scoble said to Arrington about Twitter have the whole Hyposphere for that.
I liked the part where Zed suddenly thinks it's important to play nice.
Cambridge, MA mobile startup here. Our dev team is located abroad, graphic designer in Silicon Valley, and we could use the additional dev help (front-end/server-side) in Boston to work on the next iteration of our app. New platforms, new servers, new features, and plenty of challenges to keep us busy. Userbase is about 10K at this point, and we're working on a business model. We've been a top 30 free social networking app on iTunes a few times since launch. Funding from friends, family, and fools (the founder). Looking to contact with co-founders in the Cambridge area.
Not necessarily in the spirit of the article, but one of my favorite nasty tricks (in theory; I never actually did it) was:

vi stdio.h

#define if(x) while(x)
The point isn't to limit the designer, but to constrain complexity creep.

Additionally, a good template language does not require knowledge of coding. I've had considerable success with providing front-end HTML writers with templates based on purely declarative custom HTML/XML tags.

Programmers write and document the tag libraries, HTML developers use them, and the HTML templates themselves are simple, easy to read, and generally declarative.
> That means that someone manually took the site down.

Since the News.YC code (which NewMogul also uses) runs in a single Scheme process, it could have shut down for any number of reasons: it might have crashed, failed to start after a server reboot, been killed by the OS or hosting provider due to a memory leak, etc.

I don't know what kind of monitoring nickb might have set up, but if he's not responding to personal email or phone calls, it seems reasonable that he simply doesn't/can't know that the site is down.
Corn syrup isn't addictive. I think the cigarette market would be fine without subsidies. Of course, I agree completely to remove those limits.

I find it's like solving global warming like painting a roof white, or working from home - extremely cheap and obvious ways to change things. That governments don't choose these options is likely because their goal is power, not progress.

Removing subsidies, lowering regulation, legalizing pot, etc., would all be revenue generators and add to the public good.
Is there any activity outside US? =)
Odd. I generally only pull in a few comments a day—and most of those are fairly constructive—even when they are critical. Something was wrong.

half of the comments on that post are just stuff like "great post. thank you.". To the other half he replies with snark. Somehow this blog post is the opposite of the ideal HN discussion.
I believe the paper the author is referring to is

Franks, John. "Flow equivalences of subshifts of finite type." Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems (1984). 4:53-66. Cambridge University Press.

Also, minor errors in mathematics papers are not uncommon. Usually, they are fixed and included in a later edition of the journal as "Errata to [name of paper]." The main purpose of the refereeing process is to detect game-breaking errors such as a missed condition on a theorem used or a misapplication of a tricky technique (usually from another field of mathematics). Interestingly enough, from what I've seen, budding mathematicians actually make a lot of errors that are similar to that of novice programmers (e.g. off-by-one errors in induction, forgetting about boundary conditions).
Hacker News full of Erlang articles
Zed Shaw trying to leverage more attention on the back of _why's mysterious disappearance. It's as saccarine and transparent as Crystal Pepsi.

[Edit] I'm being downvoted into oblivion. Answer me this -- Shouldn't Zed Shaw be contacting _why directly and privately first, rather than posting this publicly shaming and incredibly presumptuous article? What possible benefit is there here?

Given that Zed offhandedly switches between _why and 'Jonathan', he must know _why, right?
Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich.

That's a poor criterion for deciding whether or not something is an intrinsic human desire. Whether or not something can be universally achieved is orthogonal to the question.

I don't doubt that we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible, but here's the thing: when we say that "society says foo", what we mean is that a large percentage of individuals are saying foo. Lots of individuals say "rich is awesome, poor is terrible" because they actually believe that they prefer the one to the other, not because some external "society" (I place it in scare quotes because any society does not have an existence independent from individuals) forces or tricks or brainwashes them into it.
This is Your Brain on Neurotechnology
2010 may turn out to be a great year for hardware sales
So, let me get this straight:

1) Some young graduate is bitter because he didn't fall into an awesome job right out of college.

2) His blog post about that was somehow worth someone linking it here, and people getting pissy about it.

3) He's followed it up.

4) That follow-up is somehow worth a huge debate here between people who can't meaningfully discuss libertarianism and people who can't meaningfully discuss libertarianism.

Seriously?

"Graduate unhappy about not being given job" is not news. Complaints about the "young generation" are not news. Talk about how the "old system" that handed out jobs has "broken down" is not news.

These are stories that are older than many of the people posting here.

Maybe a discussion of why anyone in 2009 goes through life with 1950s-vintage ideas of how the world works is in order, but that seems under-examined.
What makes Erlang so great
I'm in the UK. North East to be precise. I'm not new to business, nor programming, but I'm looking for a co-founder for a Python related app related to brand monitoring.
The whole point is that I don't need to be protected from myself. I understand the benefits of an MVC architecture, so I don't need to be limited by the templating language. Just because I want to use python in my template doesn't mean I'm going to start throwing database accesses in there...
It certainly depends on who's listening. The catch-22 is the Dunning and Kruger effect. If a person sounds like they know what they're talking about, it's either because (1) they know what they're talking about or (2) you're an idiot. But there's a range of ignorance in which the more confident you are in (1), the more likely (2) is.
That may be true, but tryruby.hobix.com is GONE, and that is a travesty of the highest proportions.

That was the page I learned my first bits of Ruby on. That was the page I introduced 8 friends to Ruby for the first time. It was the page I single-handedly got our contract renewed, by proving a piece of functionality was possible and easily done.

I think for many, it was an easy way in to Ruby. Someone must replace this immediately.
Your comment has 19 points! That -has- to confirm it!
Most cancers preventable? Lung cancers maybe (and only maybe), but on the whole (and as far as we know) cancer isn't affected all that strongly by lifestyle factors.
Seth Shostak: Pro Alien Hunter
I'll email him again, but I don't see much more than that being in any way appropriate. If I had been to his house, maybe, but I haven't.
Except that Zed isn't "bashing", he's making an intelligent, measured well thought-out argument - for once. Perhaps the only thing that will happen is the brains of those expecting insanity will explode...
There was a reference to the Russian helicopters windshields not being bulletproof in Afghanistan in a sci-fi or geek-y book I read a few years ago. I haven't seen Rambo III, so I know it's not that:) Possibly a Neal Stephenson book? Not sure. Also couldn't find any facts about it online.
The PsyTrance tag has only two members and I didn't even see a goa tag. Is that just because the site is new and there aren't enough taggers yet?
I think twitter is fine. I'm reminded of Spolsky's comment about how the Spanish Steps is an example where the environment drives behavior. Twitter's short posts create an environment that drives behavior, short and to the point. If someone is going to blog about their cats, I want them to be restricted to 140 characters.
Indoor plumbing matters, as does garbage pickup and food and water safety.
This article reminds me a lot of conspiracy theorists and their "anomaly hunting" - throwing out as many anomalies as possible leaving little chance to consider/rebut them before moving onto the next thing, and claiming victory when no one bothers. I'm not an expert on many of the things listed, but many stick out as just not making any sense:

First of all, holy special pleading batman! Pretty much right at the beginning he redefines health care to exclude things he admits work - diet, exercise, sleep, not smoking, etc. Who does he think figured out that smoking was bad? Or how much exercise and sleep is enough, and how much is too much? Or what foods are good for you and which are bad?

He also claims that there are "dozens of studies of the aggregate health effects of medicine", but most of the studies he describes are very specific - several only studying the last six months of people's lives, ignoring how many cases of people living extra years because of medicine? He also admits that increased social status improves health while claiming that increased medical spending does not. But it's well known that the rich can afford better health care, and doesn't explain how to (or cite any papers that) control for this.

Lastly, he only considers length of life and totally ignores quality of life. I take an antidepressant for my anxiety, and while it probably will not affect the length of my life, it sure as hell is worth every penny in improving the quality of my life!
Surely, he can be both!
Ask HN:  Would you consider an online education?
There has been so much talk lately about online education. I'm wondering what the hacker crowd thinks here.

If you could redo your education in today's world, would you spend a ridiculous amount of time and money on a formal college education, or do you think you could mostly self-teach yourself using mostly the web? Would you allow (or prefer) your children to educate themselves online before/after high school?

Second question: Is anyone here working on an online education technology? Website?
Yea About 75% of the content is not tagged yet.