skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't read the NYTimes article, but the report itself claims to "Include only studies with random-assignment or controlled quasi-experimental designs". They go on to list some remaining caveats on page xvii, and I can think of one or two, but I would imagine data suffering from the source of bias you describe was one of the first things they set out to discard.
_why explains with a new project: because
e coli in any form of meat is from contamination of the meat with fecal matter in the butchering process, is it not?

I assume cooking still kills all strains...
Working network connection when computer is asleep
A few years back I read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Somewhere in the middle of the book someone says "why the lucky stiff!"

Does anyone know what that means?
_why really deserves this tribute! he created great things and I always liked _why's idea of bringing programming to a wider audience (especially children). reading through john's post and thinking about the mystic (and very smart) person _why was, I'm really sad about the fact that he disappeared online!
But in this case we're talking about the death of a persona. It would be like me talking about the death of Kiss (the band)-- as in if they were breaking up. You wouldn't say that it was damaging because the band members were still alive, no?
Armed with this info, why would I ever buy an 85% late flight to begin with?

... I think I answered my own original question.

But wait, if historically delayed flights were delayed because of the high passenger loads and congestion effect of peak times and routes, if everyone were armed with the same historical information, would the new passenger distribution "stampede" to historically non-delayed routes, thus causing those to be delayed, or would the distribution normalize over time to help congestion overall?

I guess we'll see.
> It would only be used to help evaluate teams.

We understand that. We don't understand the relevance of what it measures.

Suppose Team A builds a great site and Team B builds a crappy one. What do you do with that information?

You clearly believe that that result contains a lot of useful information - how about spelling it out?

Feel free to add characteristics of the sites that help you make your case that this exercise provides useful information, but don't cheat.
Parsing through that led me to this: http://whoiswhytheluckystiff.wordpress.com/

Which is what Zed is referring to when he says "the second he's outed."
If cocaine wasn't illegal and costs $2 a day, would any of that happened? Was it the cocaine or the society at large that caused those consequences.
I wish there was a way to get chapter 7 aside from going onto the Wayback machine. I really dislike travelling into the past. Uncomfortable seats.
Django templates are significantly different than all the other ones you mentioned.

It was architected from the beginning to be friendly to non-programmers -- the idea was that someone writing an article for the Lawrence Journal-World (or a designer) could easily use custom templating in a constrained templating language that developers can augment with custom tags and filters.

It surprisingly works incredibly well for that use case. The templating language strictly enforces view-separation -- the template author can't do anything the developer didn't intentionally let them do.

It can be ridiculously frustrating if you're expecting it to be a normal language -- for instance __getitem__, __getattr__, and __call__ all use the same "obj.property: arg" syntax. It calls hasattr at every call site to figure this out, and you can't use () or [] even if you wanted to. Fuck, you can't pass multiple arguments to a function!
Great team and product. Keep up the good work!
I think that in Zed's case people would say "raging mad and immature."
Hi Jason - I'm putting together an online site that is specifically geared towards helping to bring together co-founders who are looking to apply to YC - Winter 2010. It's called the Italian Graffiti Factory (http://www.igfactory.com), and although we launched yesterday I know of at least one person who is looking for co-founders in the Bay Area. If you're around tonight, we'll be doing an online meetup at 7pm PST, more details about that are on the site.
Bobby Fischer was widely attributed as saying he played chess because he liked to crush the other guy's ego. That's really the attraction of it - beating someone up with your mind.
Sends the message that you aren't very eco-friendly.
Suppose Team A builds a great site and Team B builds a crappy one. What do you do with that information?

Team A is more talented and/or more determined than Team B. Whatever the case may be, Team A would be taken more seriously than Team B when it comes to quality execution.
They're made out of Meat
But Go tactics are no less hard to calculate than chess tactics.
I read about that on Wikipedia. I've never read the book, though. There's just something about text and paper that doesn't agree with my stomach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Why_the_lucky_stiff#Real_n...
The template language isn't for you.
SRI did also host the invention of the computer mouse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(computing)#Early_mice
I have a pdf that has up to chapter 6.

Mediafire link (is.gd'd) :
http://is.gd/2p1Jd
Wasn't there recently that story on front page of HN about disappearing completely? Maybe _why got the idea to disappear from the article.
I guess that's something to keep in mind. When I picture myself at 65, I usually am picturing myself in terms of the state of the world today (only with me being 65), and not in terms of what the rest of the world will be like in 38 years.
I was wondering how good he is, since he never mentions a rating, but he doesn't seem to exist in the US Chess Federation database. Odd.

http://main.uschess.org/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,...
Which is why, given the choice, I would use something more like Mako.
Agree with the majority of negative comments here. I think this is also a noisy signal for a couple other reasons. If the random topic is in some group's area of expertise, they're going to destroy the demo even if they are not the most fit. If it's wildly outside of a team's interest, say if they are great 3D rendering C++ guys doing a game and the project is a web app, then they could look worse than they are. It also irritates those of us who spend our whole day working on projects we don't have any special interest in. Finally, most web apps are simple CRUD apps with minor analytics and these are relatively easy to push out - that gives no information on scalability skills or marketing ideas or anything, really.
FWIW: I've taken both regular college classes and online college classes. The online classes do not give you any credit for just showing up/attendance. Because they are viewed with skepticism, they tend to be more rigorous. In order to pass, you actually have to prove your knowledge to a greater degree than with a lot of the multi-guess tests found in regular classrooms. I have generally found online classes to be of better quality than most classes I've taken "in person".
If it's stable, by definition it won't remain cool for long.

That's why what you ask for doesn't exist.
http://rubyforge.org/projects/poignant/

It was released under CC Attribution-ShareAlike so there is no reason for it to disappear.
One of the developers just replied on his blog. They're working on the documentation, and it will be up soon.

As far as power delivery goes, off of a USB connection it can support a 3 x 3 grid, and they're working on a power supply board that will support 15 x 15.

Pretty cool.
this is clearly jack black.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Whytheluc...
Thanks rms, I'll post it in that thread as well.

I know why stories (and comments) start at one point, but your karma value is only comprised of the upvotes and downvotes by others, so that point never really counts for anything.

My main point is that when commenting on a story, the system should automatically upvote it for you, since more comments should equal a 'better' story and be moved higher up on the site. Another way to do it would be to do away with story upvoting and simply use the sum total of the votes given to the story's comments. I like HN for the discussion, and such a change in the weighting should promote more discussion.
And I happen to share my name with some one far more famous than me....
Does anyone have a copy of the code for Try Ruby? It was at http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/svn/tryruby/trunk
With an assemblage like Kiss, it's clear.

OTOH, _why is one real person who has interacted in real life as '_why'. He could be dead, and that would be more sad than a mere retraction of published material.

Has there been anything other than speculation as to the real reason for the takedowns? If so, I haven't seen it; Resig's 'eulogy' has only "I personally believe [more speculation]."

What if _why is physically or mentally sick? What if he's in a self-destructive mood?

I'm not saying Resig did anything wrong with his chosen conceit -- it's a reasonable turn of phrase -- but I also completely respect and understand the g-g-grandparent poster's declaration of discomfort.
Going there now.
Heyzap’s (YC W09) Flash Payment Platform Now Gives Publishers A Cut
Google book project far from settled
In the comic, he said his rating hovers between class B and class C. So 1600-1700 ucsf ish?
Mass Genome Crunching Rearranges the Foundation of Life
Kevin Fu from UMass Amherst named 2009 Innovator of the Year by MIT Tech Review
My bet would be schema-free databases, such as MongoDB.

Schema synchronization is just a major headache, no matter from which end you approach it (declarative -> evolution or Raw DDL -> reflection).

Once your number of databases exceeds 1 you are in trouble either way.

The implicit assumption that a schema definition would ideally be set in stone once and then never changed is a legacy carried over from the very early RDBMS days. And it's one of the biggest albatrosses to date.
internet/_why
#=> SystemStackError: stack level too deep

I remember reading on his twitter something like, "a caller asks: should I use hpricot or nokogiri? If you're not me, use nokogiri. If you're me, then stop being me"
thanks, I will try to attend that
The feedback button on the olark homepage directs to a getsatisfaction page set up under their previous domain name, hab.la.

Aside from this, anyone else like the name hab.la much better than olark?
He was (understandably) a bit sensitive about new works displacing his. He almost seemed to suspect some sort of conspiracy against Hpricot:

"Clearly, the benchmarks you see on Ruby Inside are skewed to favor Nokogiri... Why not treat Hpricot fairly and use it properly in the benchmarks? It reeks of something."

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/181699
Jeff Yates' disappearance is the similar case. He is JavaScript developer, books author and creator of PBWizard, one of the very first WYSIWYG editors. He had site pbwizard.com with many articles. However only one of these article can be found in web today (http://www.dotvoid.com/2001/03/using-the-range-object-in-moz...).
http://www.whitepages.com/search/ReversePhone?full_phone=972... shows a Layered Technology person also at that number, so...
A year is too long to wait for funding, specially for a tech startup. If you have something working, don't hesitate to unleash it into the wild, you might be surprised at what you find.

Good luck.
Not much of an explanation.
Get through to a human
Hm, maybe I chose the wrong word. I meant that since comments are a discrete piece of information, I think they should have unique URLs, not just anchor tags or, worse, nothing.

I really like how this site enables linking directly to an individual comment - I've used that functionality many times to point friends at one I've found particularly insightful.

And who knows, maybe having their direct linkability emphasised in this way will act to increase the quality.
It's just someone squatting his account. Nothing to see here.
This is part of the theory behind PCIe - there is a spec for a PCIe "external cabling". The idea is that you'll have your lanes cabled, and you can build a computer out of modular parts (i.e. modular bricks).

(although the main driver at the moment seems to be the ability to plug a decent video card into your laptop).
I like a lot of the startups I've read about in this batch. So many address clear needs that people have, and almost all of them have at least one obvious business model (with presumably some good non-obvious ones too.)
It's ready for iPhone chat out of the box? K, this is exactly what I've been waiting for.

I understand there are other developer-friendly chat services out there, but for a 'content guy' like me this is a dream. Not the first time a Y Combinator startup has empowered the everyday schmo to do business better. I truly appreciate YC and the companies it funds for that.
Bobby Fischer was not exactly your typical chess player. Even other chess players generally consider Fischer to be immature, obnoxious, offensive, and mentally ill.

I would not use Fischer as a gauge for anything but genius and madness.

There are literally millions of chess players, and the source of their enjoyment of chess likely varies from player to player as it does for any other human activity.
Private Equity Trumps Venture Capital
Where the marquee at??
I have to say Heyzap seems to have one of the most promising online business models I've seen on a long time.

Well done guys.
Ask HN: What do you do for bookmarking?
Hello, fellas.

What do you guys prefer as a bookmarking tool? Do you use your browser bookmarking? I've been searching for better ways to remember and organize some sites, and I'm unsatisfied with local bookmarking.

I've been trying del.icio.us lately,

I wish to know from you if I you know something else I can try to make my experience better. What do YOU use?
I turned the eulogy into a Caring Candle: http://www.caring.com/caring-candles/loss-of-programming-ico...
I'm not sure if an explanation is necessary. I think we're forgetting that _why isn't a person - it's a pseudonym, a persona, an experiment, a work of art, a character, a story. Stories end. Anonymity was part of this story, and so this one might have been forced into ending earlier than it otherwise would have, but there's no harm in that. Vanishing without explanation even seems the most appropriate ending for such a mysterious character.

What seems most comforting to me is that whoever created _why is in no way the kind of person to stop creating things - we might not know who he is or what he's working on, I think we can all rest assured the energy and talent that brought _why into being is not gone, simply put to other uses.
The Big Draw of a GPS Run
Early review of the TypeKit Web font service: Yes, it costs money.
Browser bookmarking with TagSifter in Firefox.
The ultimate insult in an online world?
AdWords: Conversion doesn't vary by position
Talo (biología) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
I enjoyed the difference between my real name (Jacob Aldridge) and my HN name (jacobaldridge) - the latter felt more accurate, though I support the various comments here about the arbitrary and unexplained sorting of the data.

Would imagine most HN users, whose name here is very different to their real name, would see a bigger discrepancy.
No, they couldn't, without violating their fiduciary duties to the other members of the credit union.
Love the idea and design of this site. The irony is that I'd be most likely to visit while procrastinating on a project.
My article. Yes I would do it again. I would probably take Spanish instead of Latin. That would have been useful.

All those things are good things to do in themselves--and many will be useful in the future. That said, It's a rough time for a lot of people graduating now--and it's ridiculous to see older people pretend that they're having trouble because they did something wrong.
Wow the Techcrunch comments aren't very Techcrunch-like (this is a good thing).

I'm excited to see the 13 startups that were off the record.
Upvoted for recommending the wonderful Hikaru no Go.
delicious, pretty much since the day it started. Probably would not be using it that heavily without the Firefox plugin. Ctrl-D is one of my more used actions.
...which is odd, since it was hardly the "second he's outed". The post was made over a month ago. We have no guarantee the post and his disappearance are actually related.

Curiously, an old Wikipedia edit identifies the same place of employment, three years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Why_the_lucky_stif...
I'm glad we have the code; fortunately most of it was in git. (Wasn't it Torvalds who claimed his method of backup was to release his code and let other people mirror it for free?)

But... do we have the writing?

If this is an elaborate practical joke designed to make me really glad that I own a dead-trees version of Nobody Knows Shoes and that I physically printed out a copy of the Poignant Guide... it's working really well.

Also, this isn't the kind of press I'd like to see for github... but, man, is this a clear demonstration of why DVCS rocks.
That's actually way slower because you're doing a comparison within an iteration. That's putting an if statement inside a loop while the result is the same for every iteration.
I have found that repeatedly hitting # will cause most phone trees to direct you to a human pretty quickly.
I tried delicious for a while but it never really clicked for me. I now use Xmarks with Firefox and love it. It keeps my bookmarks the same on my several personal and work computers with different views for each, not to mention it syncs usernames and passwords.
The wikipedia page shows an image of him apparently giving a public speech. If his privacy was so precious to him I don't think he would do things like that. Hence I would say this was just a little game - and he lost.
i've taken the python path instead of the ruby one, but _why's poignant guide is simply amazing. the only programming book i know of that's both psychedelic and actually useful. well not as a reference, but great for expanding your mind. _why, if you're reading, blessings to you. i thank you for enriching my programming life, and i hope we hear from you again.
What I have found more useful is the gethuman.com iPhone app (free): http://www.gethuman.com/iphone/

Since usually when I need a site like this I'm on the go!
Does John Lewis offer a revolutionary way forward for big business?
That's the point: it's so hard that playing is less calculation and more like visual conversation.
I'm sorry, but these points don't play in the real world. The concern is fair but over-simplified and thus moot.

If your business' prospects depend primarily on the outward appearance of your investors, it really shouldn't exist. And a VC that depends on another VC to "pick the winners" should just turn over their funds since they have abstained from their purpose.
The examples I was thinking of were all either CS, Math, or hard sciences - a lot of them chose to go to grad school, though.
I'm actually innately risk averse but I wind up looking wildly devil-may-care to some people because my life circumstances have consistently put me in a position to choose between the safe, secure path of certain doom or the risky, unexplored path of possible doom. Given that scenario, "possible doom" is the conservative risk-averse choice.

I think public school and other bureaucratic institutions help shape people in the direction of expecting bureaucracy as the "norm"....I mean, it seems to me it's a culture and a mindset and a lifestyle and if you grow up with it, it's more comfortable than being out on a limb by yourself. My sons were homeschooled for a long time and they are a lot less intimidated than I am about plans to become entrepreneurs. I have long been torn between wanting to strike out on my own and wanting more conventional success. I'm wired (and probably also trained) to want the perceived societal approval that goes along with making it in a large bureaucracy (big company, federal government...etc) But I just don't fit in.

I currently have a corporate job and that has given me some degree of satisfaction that "Yes! I can make it on those terms!" But I've also been languishing in an entry-level job which doesn't begin to compare to the kind of recognition/success I've had in other (non-monetary) endeavors. I've been very torn between wanting to pursue a career at the company and wanting to strike out on my own. But recent events at work have convinced me that striking out on my own is the more risk-averse path. I can't control what the folks in charge at the company are doing and recent developments concern me. I've also seen that working a regular day job doesn't buffer me from the vagaries of the market as much as I thought it would. It just gives me less control over how to meet the latest challenges than I would have if I ran the show.

So I believe I will end up out there on my own. But I believe it will be a logical progression, step by step, rather than a radical departure.
Infiltrating a Botnet - A Conversation With a Botmaster
Benefits of Rising Early, and How to Do It
And a powerful reminder of the profound differences between the minds of each and every one of us. I can no more understand this kind of obsession than a dog could understand calculus.

Not saying it's bad, mind you. Rather the opposite, I enjoyed it immensely. Just that .. I'm always struck by a sense of forboding by this kind of thing. I could never be like this, and the fact that someone is .. has implications I find unsettling. If such variation is possible - who's to say it's not the norm? Maybe being obsessed with chess is the norm and I was just dropped on my head one too many times as a baby or had alcohol in my blood-surrogate and I'm the sub-gamma who is too stupid to see the fascinating brilliance of chess.
misuba on HN said his first name is Michael: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=683061
Clean. Seemingly lightweight.

Using Chrome I had some issues with the resize handle of the input field. I could drag it to the right, out of the container, and off my screen where it became lost forever.

Also, I know that Chrome adds the resize handle itself, but having it on the lower right of the input text box is pretty counter-intuitive when you have about 15 pixels range for the cursor to control the height of the box.

Overall, though, well done. It looks like the Google Talk widget in GMail. That's a good thing.
Amazing. This is one of those 'where was this when I needed it!?' sites.
Oh, missed that. B is 1600-1800. C is 1400-1600.
I might try that sometime. I've been on at least one phone system where pressing 0 repeatedly will cause it to hang up on you.
A combination of Instapaper for PDFs and the like, with Delicious for everything else.
it means why is probably in a remote, hidden mountain village in Colorado.
Vonage makes free international calls standard
Seeking answers... confused
Here are some general good tips:

1) Repeatedly press 0

2) and #

3) and *

4) Repeatedly say "agent"

5) and "operator"

6) and your favorite mainstream swear word

7) Respond to a voice prompt with loud baby noises

Most systems are programmed to put you through to an operator if you demand one, indicate your frustration by swearing, or when presented with an accent that the software can't interpret (hence the baby noises).
> What do you think about HN automatically up-voting a story once you've commented on it?

I think it is a bad idea. If we wanted this place to be Reddit, we'd do what you're describing. To make the "karma" be a useful metric, we'd need to break them out into comment vs post karmas just like Reddit.

> If a story is worth commenting on, shouldn't you want others to see it?

I tend to read the comments as well as the stories. Sometimes the comments are far more interesting than the stories.

I also know that I fall for the trap that is mocked in this comic: http://xkcd.com/386/