skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think your concept is sound, but I'll second the addition of a reputation system. Also, you're front page needs to let me know whats going on. If you cut down the number of auctions on the front page (maybe by only show the most active, which might also allow you to show just the best auctions), you'll have some room for a brief description of the site.
I'm on the shoes mailing list and he recently made this announcement:

Aug 3rd:
<quote>
Okay, wow, hello, I'm very behind on this list, I hope you will
pardon me. I've been away for the summer, taking a break from
everything.

Well, enough of that, time's up: I hope to concentrate strictly on
getting Shoes 3 done. While it's disappointing to see what a poor
job I've done with Shoes, I am going to try to do what I can to
aright the situation by at least getting us some more speed and
stability. (As with all of my projects, it's just a toy experiment
which is full of an unpredictable amount of both the sweet and
bitter.)

My hope is to release the final version by September 7th. Please,
if you want something fixed for Shoes 3, it will need to be filed
on github, in the issues section. Yes, I think that will work just
great.

_why
</quote>

Perhaps this is a publicity stunt to popularize the new and improved Hackety Hack?!
Needs more blink.
China: Now with more brokerage accounts than Communist Party members
a few more words: invest in the health care industry
This is actually more informative than their current site!
Apparently there's no holding period for deleted names on GitHub.

If he wanted his twitter account to be taken by somebody else, he could have renamed it before deleting it. If you rename a twitter account, the old name is freed up instantly, but if you delete an account, it is held for an unknown period of time.
I don't think it would be harmful for them to give a clue about what algorithms they use. There is so much tuning required to get these algorithms to perform the way you'd expect that I think they could still keep their IP locked up even if they gave a general hint.

With that said, I'll speculate as well:
Perhaps you'd need some type of ideal dataset, one that included departure times/arrivals and distances and weather conditions of flights that came in on time as expected. Then you might start introducing some noisy data, ie. flights that made the same trip but came in late or early with same weather conditions. Then you'd add in the effect of weather conditions and see how flights fared. I'd speculate that you could get away with doing some type of regression analysis, but maybe you'd need to resort to a more complex algorithm for classifying ("On-time", "Early", "Late") based on a series of features ("Distance","Weather","Mechanical", "Time", etc). SVM could pull this off, or perhaps even a naive bayesian classifier. For research purposes I'd probably check out RVM because it might need less information to classify. Not sure if it would be realistic to use it though...this problem is in need of a highly scalable solution.
Thanks for pointing this out. It did change my thinking on the term "social justice". To be fair, though, acknowledge that this specific topic (cheap food) is universally interesting and valuable regardless of the political ideology of the messenger.
He could have had his computer, or email hacked.. have to wait to see if we hear from him before we assume he actually cleared all the accounts himself.
That's why we have DVCS these days.
Right, but the parent post didn't seem limited to only _why's repos.
moot's identity was revealed. weev I've not seen any proof yet that he's been outed. I'll correct my post.
He got owned?
Took me two seconds to figure it out. Ignored comment.
Which is the exact kind of problem you have when scaling.
Great points. Reviews and reputation is one of the very next things to roll out(will be pushed live very soon).
Interesting. I thought one of the main advantages of Scrum was to be able to adapt to changing requirements.

From wikipedia:
"A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner.As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements."
Fantastic. Their new site is ridiculous "look how trendy we are".
That doesn't make it much better. You still can't take photos in public where there are strangers, cars, or non-governmental buildings present. So pretty much it's photos inside your house, landscapes, and clouds.
Agreed. That's one of the most requested featured. We're redesigning the homepage now with that up front. Thanks!
Does anyone have a copy of all the source code he published?

Specifically, does anyone have a copy of his Potion (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=425258) repository somewhere online?
Amazon.com avoids showdown over Kindle pricing policy
Okay folks, let's not overreact. Odds are all of his sites are running on the same host, so someone screwing around could take them all down once inside. And if his twitter account used the same password...
Not sure.

I was able to get happily hacking in one saturday.

Just copied extra/tetris and went turning it into tetcolor. At the end of day, I was able to do non-trivial things and my code worked as I expected.

Interactive development ftw: you can try your word before you write it down into source.
Agreed the competition is bad, there are more carriers in ontario, however they're either the big three, or a second brand name for one of the big three (Bell, Rogers and Telus).

Bell has access to the unlimited data plans, and now has a phone worth it (in the Palm Pre). However Bell's customer service is appalling. Basically unless you contact the BBB every time you have a problem, nothing will get done.
X-Forwarded-For Log Filter for Windows Servers
Assuming that was his account (it seems like he'd be more likely to register _why), this is consistent with him deleting his account, and someone pouncing on the now-free username -- note that this account was created today.
Man I love that under construction animated gif.

That was a standard on all sites for so many years...
RESTful HTTP in practice
> I like the JS load category, but it should at least be linkable. See: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/history

Wow thanks! Didn't know this plugin existed. I will add that.

As for the friendly urls, we're doing short urls for everything(just profiles right now, about to roll out for every page), as opposed to the /auction/35 style.

I am not sure where I stand on friendly urls(unless you are going for SEO in which they are key). Facebook, for instance, does .php?id style urls.
Waiting for his golden chunky bacon ticket...
Good point. "Service made simple" doesn't really explain it anymore. We're doing a new homepage now and hopefully it will be much clearer.

Thanks!
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom
Same thing here, on a 800x480 Eee PC screen...
I think anyone could have created a new account with the name _why after he left.
If you're referring to moot's supposed identity "Christopher Poole," you're wrong. There's no verification that that is his real name, and I think it's just a joke. Just look at the initials: CP. For those of you who are uninitiated, "CP" is a 4chan meme for child pornography, and is closely associated with Pedobear.
> design reminds me a lot of airbnb.

(It was influenced a lot by airbnb :).

Yes we need to add a lot more to the FAQ and general instructions throughout the site.

How are payments made is definitely a key thing to make clearer. On the completed auctions we've had a lot of questions about that.

Thanks for the feedback!
An Introduction to Lambda Calculus and Scheme
Looks like we're getting a lot of requests for a better frontpage with a clearer description and better navigation. We'll move that up the priority list.

Thanks Jake!
Daring Fireball: Android Opportunity Addenda
I came here to say exactly this...

The actual search probably takes only several microseconds and was probably trivial to write compared the to the pretty visualization.
Changing now. We had it list auctions by newest listed but by ending soon seems to make more sense. Thanks!
looks a little bit suspicious to me: http://twitpic.com/ehm2h (_why created a repository called "lol" 30 minutes ago)
no prob. payment and fees are a major issue, at least to me. it would be the thing to make or break the service for me.

don't want to start using it and find out that i owe the site 20%.
If this was a private organization, the system administrator would have been fired on the spot...
Sure, well of course if he got hacked then I am not gonna hold it against him. I just can't imagine anyone targeting _why.
Here is the link to the actual article: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601089&sid=azl....
Unstoppable hum
'Disorder' is probably a better way to think about it than energy and perhaps information (I'm weak on information theory; I know it has similar concepts though). So, if the gasses simply reversed places, there's no net gain in disorder.

But it's certainly proper to think about it in terms of microscopic, reversible processes that tend to result in the most statistically likely final states. The second law "could" be violated, it's just not very damn likely.
Wrong. "why" created that account, which has only been a member since today. "_why" hasn't done anything.
It's a webpage from the future! All of the tags are lowercase and some of them have these "style=" attributes with some weird programming language in them!
I like it, but already think of it as elance for people without marketable skills. That's probably just because the user population is low, but when the front page is littered with auctions like 'learn how to bake a cake' or 'make a cornhole toss board' I have to wonder about the usability here. I'm hardly interested in scrolling through a random list of services provided by amateurs.

I think a better method would be to put emphasis on the different types of services, and build some competition among the providers in different niches.

The site design is pretty decent, but there are some usability issues that could be improved. For instance, the Polaroid panel on the profile pages is not working for me. The persons auctions should be front and center somewhere on the profile - not parenthetically hidden behind the portfolios. Moreover, the large red button floating all alone by itself that says BID... when you click on it you are shown the auctions, not bidding. Did you not have enough room to make the button say, 'view this user's auctions'? Probably not. Also, when you click bid, the title of the page reads 'Bid on <username>'. Technically I'm not bidding on a user, I'm biding on one of their auctions. All this could be fixed by placing multiple bid buttons after the auction description.

All in all, it's got potential, but there are a lot of loose ends.
Put your online identity in for a much more interesting visualization. I used "blhack", and it was much more accurate and interesting to watch.
Right on. Currently we charge the provider a $2 fee per completed auction plus 2% of the auction price.
The buyer doesn't get any charges from us.

In beta right now obviously the completed auctions are going for low bids, and we're handling things on a case by case basis, but we think once we get going prices will rise to market rates.
Microsoft adopts dual-platform strategy to compete with Android and iPhone
Awesome, an inaccurate ruler! Just magine the possibilities!

Nice stunt though.
So, the contents of the usb are public and thus need to be encrypted, why not trade IP addresses for FTP servers on Tor?
Meet Two New Quantum Particles: Spinons and Holons
Three Steps to Kickass Customer Service - the best investment a company can make
Another good tip is to actually respond to your customers, especially when they are trying to give you more money.

Currently waiting for Libyan Spider to respond to my third ticket trying to get access to my account so I can renew two domain names I have with them. Not pleased.
Not only that, you might end up meeting some guy with an axe!
IPhone Screenshots:  Buses + GPS = Constantly Updated Arriving and Departed Info
The claim is that you must execute a Perl 5 subroutine to discover its arity. That's nonsense.

In the general case, Perl 5 subroutines have well-defined arities: they consume as many arguments as possible, either delimited by parentheses or the statically-unambiguous end of an expression.

In the special case of prototyped subroutines, the parser knows their arities as soon as it encounters their declarations.

None of this has any connection to the claim that "it's necessary to execute the subroutine to discover just how many [tokens] it will consume." If that were true, perl -c would not work.
Switched On: Toshiba and the Blu-ray Trojan Horse
A national conversation? Our neurons shout hell, no
I am very,very sad. He is one of the primary reasons I'm a ruby programmer too.
Actually this might happen, sometimes his sites go down before a new release, but what puzzles me is github.
The world's first cocaine bar
People didn't think Google was going to keep the same revenues for very long, so it was cheap for a couple of months after IPO. Then their profits started to become eBay-like, and the share price shot up. They also brought out tons of products ('beta', etc) and that also buoyed up the share price.

But the current share price depends on them continuing to grow, otherwise it could very well plummet.
I don't think that photos are the best way to choose who to hire, unless their appearance has something directly to do with their jobs. I would rather be pitched first, and then see the extraneous information, or not find out the extraneous information at all until I contact someone.
CouchDBKit: A full-featured Python library to access and manage CouchDB
A lot of the bank-bashing you see in the press is purely based on misconceptions of what banks do. The truth is that for small person-to-person loans of this type credit unions (and that's pretty much all Zopa really is by the way-a fancy-pants credit union with a website) have always been able to lend on lower margins than banks.

Now come to me when your credit union can give you a $50mm letter of credit to cover a shipment of goods from Brazil to China. In Portuguese and Mandarin, please, because the supplier and customer both want to see it. See, banks do all kinds of things that most people don't know or think about.

They get paid for doing something people want.
Running SSH on Windows
There's a phone number in his whois records for his domain names... though calling it would be a just a little creepy.
He hosted it on git, the source is still out there: http://github.com/defunkt/hpricot/tree/master
Apparently this is a frequently asked question. See #9 here:

http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/food-log/
He should probably be the one thanking us for the fish. (And we should be the ones preparing for the imminent destruction of our planet).
I resemble this remark.
I would like to think I have utmost respect for _why. I have certainly never said or done anything against him in the past, nor ever felt anything besides quiet appreciation for his efforts.

If he wanted to quit, that's his right, of course. But at least give people a day's notice before he nukes everything, right?

"The fact that you would care more about his shepherding of repositories"

Care more about them than what? What else is there? I don't know what's going on. The repos were his work, they're all I know of him.

You seem to detect this entitled, callous attitude in my words but I assure you it's a false positive. I have, or had, nothing but positive feelings for the guy. Never met him, spoken to him, or anything else really. But I have relied on his code, and in my book, when you release open source code there's a kind of implied promise that you don't suddenly delete the master repo in a fit of internet pique.

if that's "the kind of attitudes that probably helped to drive him offline in the first place" then .. maybe he should be offline because I think it's pretty reasonable.
Let's say Dr. Evil is chosen as the new CEO of Microsoft, and receives in compensation ONE BILLION OPTIONS with a strike price of 23.69 (i.e. at the market) and an expiration in Jan '11. These options are trading on the market at about $4, so if Dr. Evil sits tight and continues on the company's current strategy we can assume his compensation will be $4 billion on average. If he uses the "roulette strategy", on the other hand, his expected return is 23.69 * 18/38 * 1e9 = $11.2 billion. That's much better, and not as much work. In a company with a lower implied volatility than Microsoft, the options would be worth less money initially and the roulette strategy would look even better by comparison.

Now, the shareholder lawsuits could be a problem. So Dr. Evil will have to look for a way to disguise his strategy. Fortunately (for him), there are lots of reckless things a company can do that aren't quite as obvious as playing roulette.
It could be a dead man's switch. (But I'm really hoping it's not.)
Why are they making an android app first, and an iPhone app second?
The link I saw was removed by the poster pretty quickly, out of respect for his privacy.

I'm sure you could find it, but... why?
_why got me back into programming and into ruby, first with "Try Ruby!" in the browser and later Hackety Hack. When I asked if I could use hackety to build a web app, he steered me toward rails. I've used tons of his library, especially hpricot.

You're an important part of this community, _why. I hope you're not saying goodbye.
The top text blinks.... Plus 1000 points
I'm not going to spoil things, but it is findable.
_why does as he wishes, and he has never seemed like the kind of person who lives with regret.
thanks Josh. this is really, really good feedback. we definitely need to get more service providers on there and we are pounding the pavement now to do it.
Well thanks to github, there's branches of a bunch of his work. I have a fairly recent copy of Potion:
http://github.com/adamsanderson/potion/tree/master
Sony Ericsson Yari Unlocked
Sony Ericsson Yari is unique in this respect outside of Japan, and give examples of tennis and boxing as the types of game you might play.Yari’s 5 megapixel camera that comes with autofocus and LED flash, which consumes a lot less battery energy.
i don't understand how the nokia n900 phone running maemo linux can be totally ignored:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/19/nokias-maemo-5-tablet-sho...
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/08/nokia-rx-51-tablet-captur...

rumored specs:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/08/nokia-rx-51-tablet-captur...
Johns Hopkins investigating potential source of resistant pathogens: US farms
Try here: http://github.com/adamsanderson/potion/tree/master
There might be a more recent one, but that's within a week.
Twitter's "Tweet" Trademark Torpedoed
It is a really nice project not only to go deeper into certain math, number theory areas but also explore new programming languages.

Just curious, how many HN folks have attempted proj euler and how many problems have you solved ?

I am at Level 3 (103 problems).
With all the small, actually-have-a-business-plan startups we're going to be seeing in the next several years, I think there's a huge demand for more press coverage like this.

Daily articles, audio and video from knowledgeable reporters and interviewers that really dive into the business, technology and lifestyle of small startups (even more so than this video, which is more 30,000 ft).

Of course, then you'd have an awesome little media company with great, original content that still had to make its money via... advertising. Ugh.
Really? I understand the idea of bidding on these people to do some sort of work for me, but beyond that, it's not clear how any of it is supposed to work.

What does it take to bid on somebody? Do I need a credit card? If somebody has a city listed, does that mean they can only perform their task within that city? Within 50 miles of the city? Do I go to them? Can I cancel a bid? Etc. etc.

I know that some of these questions are answered, because I happened to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and click on FAQ, which appeared in very faint green letters in what's typically a blind spot anyway.
Google Upgrades Enterprise Search
Every time you buy a used CD the RIAA kills a kitten.
@emmett I am disappointed by your comment. Xenophobia? Really? I am merely hoping for consumer and corporate accountability. I am using decades of observation that have brought me to a completely rational conclusion. I suspect you are reading things between the lines from my statement that aren't there. Stereotyping? Yes I grouped people together. And Yes I made a statement about that group. Trying to denigrate my point because of this is I hope seen as it should be, a superficial criticism.
I had a copy of Potion cloned on my machine, so I stuck it on Github. If someone has a newer one, please post it, or let me pull from you or something: http://github.com/randrews/potion

_why had a lot of projects, we can probably preserve most of them just with people pushing stuff they had cloned.
Not in the programming world, which is sad.... but hopefully that isn't the only place we live in.
Where did you find his music? I remember seeing on his Wikipedia article before that he made music, but I was able to find very little about it.
Interestingly enough, even an interview of his has disappeared, while others on the site continue to work:

HN post re: inteview: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=483207
http://_why.usesthis.com/
http://usesthis.com
Some say that Jake 2 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake2 ) actually ran faster than Quake 2. Of course there are a number of points to consider here, like the oldness of the Quake 2 code (thus a lack of optimization for modern computers).

Anyway, just a curiosity :)
Even without git, everyone has a local copy of the source on their machines, at worst we can get Hpricot back up without the commit history... but that's not the issue.

The problem is GH was hosting all the Hpricot wiki HOWTO docs, which frankly, were invaluable resources to anybody using the library.

It's perfectly fair to leave the community. Destroying the ability for others to use your past work, however, is pretty lame. I'm hoping this was a hack for the benefit of my respect for him.
I like the design. I knew immediately what it was. It might be nice to be able to list a job that I need done as well, instead of hunting for a someone that I think could do it.
http://github.com/wmoxam/potion/tree/master
Yeah, I read that. As a matter of fact I think he's a very smart guy but somewhat wrong about this. Marketmaking is of positive value to society so they get paid for that. The marketmaker is being paid to take some risk and when you hit the offer to buy a share you're paying a little bit to the MM for taking some market risk for you.

Any other trading functions can be thought of as picking up alpha that other, less nimble, market participants are leaving on the table. That's the redistributionist part he's talking about there, but actually this is positive for society also because it increases liquidity also and makes the market more efficient. I also think that in general it's positive for society for the smartest and best people in a particular endeavour to be well-rewarded, because that gives a strong incentive to other smart people to step into the field.

Most of the carping about HFT comes from people who are losing business because they can't compete. Instead of moaning they should hire a roomful of brilliant programmers and write their own winning algos.
I'm 28. I'm dubious I'll ever be able to retire, especially if there's another slump/recession/depression in about 40 years.