skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I know. I don't want to diminish their accomplishment. They did in fact scale the mountain. My point is only that they made it harder on themselves than they had to by choosing to focus their efforts on a C program. They could have accomplished exactly the same thing with a lot less effort by simply writing their code in Haskell (or Lisp or Qi) to begin with. But then the headline would have been "We wrote an OS kernel in Haskell" which would not have sounded nearly as impressive.
Ask HN: Great problems of this generation?
What is the greatest problem of this generation?

What is the greatest problem we will see solved this next decade?

What is the greatest problem we will see solved in the next 4 decades?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect .
Eulogy to _why
Haven't read the books though so I couldn't say. The show is decent, although at times it feels like watching a soap opera. Nowhere near Dexter, Breaking Bad, or Mad Men for example.

So stoked to finally be starting the next season of Mad Men! :)
I liked _why's code, his tools, shoes, hpricot I think was his (it is really a work of art, a truly great library). However I didn't find his writing helpful - never was able to learn anything from it and it mostly got in the way when I tried to search for things when trying to work out how to do something in ruby.

I guess I wasn't his audience, but some awesome libs.
That would be the Streisand effect: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Streisand_eff...
This might also be the reason that _why just upped an ran. Staying anonymous is one thing, but letting someone else take the hit for you is quite another.

disclaimer: I don't know how long the blog has been trying to figure out who _why is.
I've tried a few such solutions. Worked for some time but there was one problem: too many clicks.
If I want to use it often (and I do) even 1 click too many kills a feature for me.
So if it's going to be easy AND effective - I'll happily use it.
"Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work."

http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

This would be an errand.
One of the main assumptions behind the Django templating language is that you don't need to know Python.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/misc/design-philosophie...

"The Django template system recognizes that templates are most often written by designers, not programmers, and therefore should not assume Python knowledge."

In my experience this has often been the case.
Don't know any of these shows, but it's nice to have some new things to check out ;-)
I found his writing to be very, umm poignant, i.e: http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/diary/41.htm...
Video: Zoom Across the Universe to Distant Cosmic Cloud
why would he not be ok?!?! lets put this in perspective.
There is already a Mac app that does this (and you choose which sites to block)

http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/
By default, any field on the model that's displayed as a column in the list of objects is clickable to sort. You can also display things based on other attributes of the model (e.g., calling a method), and if you like you can specify that they're tied to particular fields to get clickable sorting for those as well.
That was the takeaway for me too: the movie was only tangentially about apartheid but it was also about slavery in the South, the Trail of Tears, the brutality that man can show to fellow sapient creatures but also the nobility and magnificence. The hostility shown by the humans -- white and black -- to the aliens hammers home the point that the general dynamic is the same throughout history, what changes is the line of demarcation which dictates who is "one of us" and who is an outsider.
"Exactly right. This is not an argument to not use Django."

No, but it might be an argument to consider frameworks that make it easier to replace parts as they become more trouble than they are worth.
Keeping software hosted is active. Let's say he waited until his domain name expired... then he could say "I'm not spending the $10" and let it go offline, and people would excoriate him then. He just chose to rip the Band-Aid off at once instead of in bits and pieces.
The surprising intelligence of infants
How to Get Past No
I would love to see people try to even attempt an Advanced Pure Mathematics course online without the aid of an instructor in case you (and you will) require some help with the material.
"this graph does shows that health care expenses are almost three times higher for those over 65 than those under 65. So - in the first graph - as the baby boomers move into the last 4 columns, the health care expenses will rise sharply."

Health care expenses will always be higher when you're close to death. When life expectancy is 75 years, that's from ~ age 60-75 (15 yrs, 20% of lifetime). But when life expectancy is 120, the expensive-age window should also slide out to 105-120 (15 yrs, 12.5% of lifetime) or to 96-120 (24 yrs, 20% of lifetime).

Actually we can't tell how different phases of people's lifetime (especially productive time) will scale as people live longer, but there's no reason to believe the article's statement either.
One of my favorite local (Seattle) musicians is Jason Webley. Every year or two he stages a big concert where he "dies" at the end in some staged way, then remains "dead" for the next 6 to 12 months, with no public appearances while he works on a major project. Then, usually on his birthday, he has another big event where he is "born" and then reveals the fruits of his labor.
Silicon Valley Elite Flock To Y Combinator Demo Day
Well, with auth I think there's an easy confusion to fall into, because we conflate a couple things:

1. The default backend stores information through the User class, persisted to the auth_user table.

2. All backends are required to return instances of User when asked to find the user who matches a given set of credentials.

So in the first case, we use the User class as a persistent object store. In the second case we use it as a consistent API implemented by records coming out of auth backends.

Where the confusion comes in is people assuming that, since you have to return an instance of User out of your custom backend, you must also have to persist that instance to the auth_user table. Which isn't correct; you're free to just chuck information into an instance on the fly, and Django will neither know nor care (third-party code may make bad assumptions about being able to save that object, but third-party code should be introspecting to find out where the object came from before trying that).

Any rate, this is on my list of things to document more completely, and hopefully that'll help.
A guy I know used to work at Inetz. Here's a small chat exerpt from a few minutes ago...
Confirmation that the guy that worked at Inetz is _why. Perhaps take it with a grain of salt.

emullet
you worked at Inetz right?

friend
4:20
yeah

emullet
4:20
You work with a guy named Jonathan Gillette
?

friend
4:21
not allowed to answer that

emullet
4:21
lol
why do you say that?

friend
4:21
but I've heard that a lot of his stuff "disappeared" today

emullet
4:21
ya
you know whats up?

friend
4:21
nope

emullet
4:21
its very odd
kinda cool he worked with you
Having a chat frame in your web page is really easy if you use WebSockets and can run a simple chat engine on your server (some hosting services don't allow sockets at all)

Since WebSocket is not available everywhere yet, use a Flash interface (pure actionscript, no visuals) with the same methods: onopen, onsend, onreceive, onclose, to communicate with the server. So when WebSockets is available all you have to do is replace the flash object with the real stuff.

mychat = new WebSocket(chatserverurl);
mychat.send("Hello");
mychat.send("Can you hear me?");
mychat.send("Am I getting through to you");

Don't get confused, the chat client is pure html, not flash, and can be easily spiced up with some jquery effects.
Freeman Dyson on amateur science, art, culture change, biotech ethics, &c. [mp3]
This is true specially for long-tailed distributions.
http://www.whitepages.com/search/ReversePhone?full_phone=972...
This batch of YC is impressive. Most are targeting a niche. My favorite is Listia.com.
Being actively anonymous is an open invitation for having your identity discovered and released. He knew it was coming. Deleting any trace of himself was planned, it was not done in heat of passion after being outed.
in pursuit of this new knowledge

i have discovered that every... easily accessible (so far)... copy of his poignant guide to ruby

has disappeared as well

what an eff you

i'm pretty dissapointed.

if anyone has a copy, i would love to talk... i'm certainly the intended audience.

yooshooa@yahoo
The 99 Percent: A Site About Making Ideas Happen
This can be really useful. I've gotten some good mileage out of Stealth Kiwi [1], a Greasemonkey script with a similar goal. But I find it's even better if I can improve my habits to the point where I don't need such a tool.

1. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8616
I figured that had to do with it, but it doesn't really explain why they don't just use an equivalently powerful subset of python. Better yet, allow full python like Mako does, and let the designers decide what subset of that to use in templates.
Can't even access that page. Is the site being hammered with traffic? ejohn.org is down as well.
I'm more curious why the 70-75 and 75-80 ranges take a significant hit starting around 2035 while all the previous age groups don't diminish that much. It's like around that time there are are less people making it out of the previous age ranges and into the 70-80 age ranges... It would make sense if there was a lump of people in the lower age ranges that made it's way into the 70-80, but at that point there doesn't seem to be. Unless I'm missing something.
It's been discussed a few times in the past, and always gets me thinking. Personally, I like the keep-away-caveman scenario: (somehow) engineer a structure to generate low-frequency harmonics for as long as that radioactive material's around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound

Combine that with the most evil-looking shrubbery/stone structures/whatever you can find. You'll have created a land of ghosts and demons for those future people, assuming the site isn't bingoed by a meteor.

Then, when they redevelop society to a point where industrial music is popular again, people can have raves there. They won't even need glow sticks!

(Come to think of it, I'd love to do something like that anyway. Sounds like a great landscaping project for a hunting lodge packed full of taxidermy.)
Also (too late to edit):

Why apparently went to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City: http://web.archive.org/web/20010518151731rn_1/deathstar.eng....
Though it would be considered a bit rude by many, somewhere I understand the philosophy of _why. It would be better to kill something fast than watch it wither away and die.[especially when they are close to your heart]. if _why had left the code in place, it might have withered [like say mongrel]

This post and zed shaw's tweets on the same subject are so stark in contrast.I think I finally understand why zed shaw is so unloved by many. It is because of lack of respect for someone else's choices.

Edit:
http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/3412128128

_why preached "peace & love" and "ruby's nice" and then the second he's outed he rips down gear people depend on. He's a dick.

http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html

"I believe that whatever the author wants to do with his or her works is their right. They wrote it, despite everyone telling them it wouldn’t work. They slaved over it rather than going out with friends. They debugged it, and wrote documentation for it so everyone else could use it. They may have even spent a part of their time promoting it and helping people with it. All for free, and for whatever reason they choose."
Sheesh, sorry. I fixed it, per your suggestions. Also, all tags and attributes are capitalized, and there's no quotes around attribute values.
it's the mystique, the razzle dazzle, the enigma. his fabulous body of work will live on, restored, uploaded and duplicated by hundreds of devotees and admirers. he'll be reincarnated. a _why by any other name would still smell as sweet. it's better to burn out than to fade away. ladies and gentlemen, elvis has left the building.
try http://ejohn.org.nyud.net/blog/eulogy-to-_why/
What, the guy made songs too? Incredible.
3D Realms Forums
I think that might have been intentional on the part of the GP.

Cheap shared hosting with hijacked 404 pages is not very _why
(2755 mensagens novas) Yahoo Mail, smreis8762
Sorry, getting absolutely destroyed. I've replaced the blog post with a static HTML page for the time being, hopefully that helps.
Invaluable iPhone debugging help in the Xcode Organizer
Beyond the one John links to, here's a YT compilation of three others. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YReSQfSBz4k

He's unpolished, but his songs are whimsical and his instrumentation is ridiculous. I didn't know he had an album. I really want it.
Apparently the BLINK tag doesn't actually work in some modern browsers, so I had to reimplement it in JavaScript. If you'd like to use it on your own site, here's the code:

var blinkOn = 1;
window.setInterval(function() {
var blinks = document.getElementsByTagName("blink");
for (var i = 0; i < blinks.length; i++)
blinks[i].style.visibility = blinkOn ? "visible" : "hidden";
blinkOn ^= 1;
}, 500);
Consider taking 31 minutes to watch _why speak at the ART && CODE Symposium from a few months back:

http://www.vimeo.com/5047563

I'm planning to make a modern version of Logo (yeah, with the turtle) using Shoes.
"This is the true joy in life ... being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one ... being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy ... I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing on to future generations."

-- George Bernard Shaw

http://tr.im/why_burn

I lament the departure of _why. However, it looks like his flame will continue to live on, even if he would have hoped otherwise. Thanks _why
http://www.manu-j.com/downloads/site/_why.html Copy of the text if you can't access ejohn.org
The API was developed primarily around our own - and by extension, clients' - needs, which are more application and real-time notification oriented (I don't want to come off as spammy listing some of the use cases, but can do so if there's interest - some neat stuff there, IMO), rather than just focused on mobile marketing.

I haven't looked at Clickatell's offering in a while, and normally don't get past the pricing tables (https://www.clickatell.com/pricing/pricing_wizard.php) when I mean to. The relevant comparison there would be with their two-way messaging services, for which you need a shortcode (Clickatell's explication, https://www.clickatell.com/pricing/shortcodes.php, and Wikipedia's, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_code). Why you need a shortcode is another post, if you're curious.

We do run our own SMPP binds, but for most developers we offer an HTTP API, which we use internally. And we're Rails guys, if that's meaningful. SMPP would be the way to deal with SMS gateways directly, so we're just as 'direct' as Clickatell, though the most direct way is working with the carriers on your own. You can listen to Fabrice Grinda talk about how much fun that is (http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/12/vv_show_21_fabrice_grind...). The next tier down are the aggregators (http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780596515133/using_an_sms_a..., and a less charitable take here, http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/the-problem-with-sms-agg...), who abstract the carrier connections for you. Just below that are companies like ours. The differentiators at that level are pricing, live shortcodes, two-way messaging, APIs, and experience in building mobile apps. Plus dealing with carrier problems. Mobile messaging can be discouragingly complex and costly.

So our ideal client would be another startup or SMB that could benefit from having comparable binds to an aggregator, without the months of setup and at a fraction of the price. Basically, we'd like to be a company we wish had existed when we were getting started. You would have to do decent volume to make it worthwhile, so it's not for everyone. The nice thing about not going mass-market is that we can be a bit more flexible. For example, we don't cap the number of top-tier keywords we offer, so you can use them for A/B testing across, say, print ads in different newspapers. Or you can resell them to customers.

And yes, that's a Wufoo form... we have them set up on other sites, usually with a bit more attention paid to the CSS. We don't have to build forwarders and reporting tools - even a couple hours of dev time here and there add up, so we ruthlessly outsource non-core activities :)

BTW, I've used Free411, great service.
_why smashes Ruby Community Dummy Spit record
Aldor Solutions, 1647 Witt Rd, Ste 201, Frisco, TX. "Todd Abrams" is the contact.
Y Combinator announces newest class with FlightCaster, Mixpanel aboard
John Resig has posted a eulogy: http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/
MixPanel is amazing. I'm using it for a client; and the info and stats generated are extremely useful. It's a great compliment to Google Analytics; and something I would pay for.
The soundtrack is on archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20071018035725/poignantguide.net/...
"Quick, someone make an iPhone app"

They already did:

http://www.theisnort.com/isnort.html
Why put a month in on a trial that isn't useful to anyone (esp. not the stakeholders) when you can put that month into the product itself?

I don't think PG / YC judges feel they can't differentiate between a good applicant and a bad one.

Also, this would disproportionately assist the startups who are independantly wealthy / homeless / etc. Other folks have to make money -- YC is supposed to be a bridge to help them do that. It shouldn't be a requirement before application.

edit: JP's comment sums it up best.
Thanks. It was a really enlightening post. That song he made was actually quite impressive for what was presumably just a hobby.
Also missing the punch-the-monkey banner.
Thanks for that, John. A very eloquent eulogy that captures how I perceived _why to be.
seems like every single one of the companies listed already launched and had coverage...wasn't demo day in the past the time for that first look?
Both front and rear ABS are very helpful in braking as hard as possible, and no more. From all I have heard, the modern systems are very good, if a little heavy. Ironically, it's the weight and size that keeps ABS off most bikes than can endo in the first place.
If anyone's about to mirror the stuff on his web sites, it might be wise to act quickly. Wayback Machine always checks the current robots.txt for a given domain, so it's possible to block files that have already been archived.
What a beautiful piece of writing.
How about if they make it part of the interview? Instead of giving you a month to do it, how about a weekend?
Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, and CNN Clips Coming to YouTube
Wait, so... this tells me that my flight is "probably" delayed?

What if I take that as gospel and show up to the airport late or otherwise make plans based on that data and then it turns out it wasn't actually delayed?

Isn't the equilibrium action for me to show up at the airport on time no matter what?
There're a lot of jokes making _why and Zed out to be foils today, and in a lot of ways they're true.

Zed's very no-nonsense. He's spent a lot of time manufacturing an image of himself. He lets himself get carried away and angry and he's been searching for a community he likes, butting heads all the way.

_why, on the other hand, was truly bizarre. I never got into his blog, for instance, because it seemed frequently nonsensical and more than a little rambling. Despite that (or, more likely, because of it), he seemed almost always happy with whatever it was he did. I only ever really got into TryRuby and his Poignant Guide, but they were the only two guides to programming I've played with. There was a giddiness in his work that I haven't found in other coding. It's comparable to the moods of artists in other fields.

Zed's argument against _why is that what he did was impractical and unproductive. That's what made _why as a persona, though: Zed is a hacker, _why was more of an artist, pretenses and unreliability and all. It's left-brained versus right-brained; it's also why there's a definite rift between the people who like _why and the people who think the guy was raving mad and immature.
I'm working hard so that I can present at the next one :)

Besides the obvious networking and investment potential, I just think it would be a lot of fun to go and talk with everyone there!
Are there other companies operating in stealth mode?
The biggest problem I can see with this approach is that to some societies and individuals, dangerous material might be desirable.

Knowing that there is dangerous material at the site, future generations might want to disturb the site anyway, for the purpose of getting weapons.

The warnings are all about the things buried in the ground making people sick and killing them, which is precisely what people looking for effective weapon-making material would want.
Each X Machina module has a 72 MHz processor (currently an ARM chip), a solid state drive of 16KB and 128KB of storage in an EPROM (erasable programmable read-0nly memory) chip. There’s also an LED for display output.

These are not going to suck down much power. They have around 1/1000th the processing power of a 3Ghz quad core chip and 1/250th the RAM. If you want to build a useful mesh like this then cooling is going to be the first concern, followed by latency. The best design would be a back plane with these cards inserted into the side. Add power at the top and cool down the sides with the back plane for communication. But that's what a standard motherboard with PCI-X slots look like so it's less interesting.
Pics: Facebook’s Sexier New Inbox Starts Rolling Out
There used to be one down the street from my apartment, and there is a magazine article about it:

http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n1/htdocs/kokies.php?country=...

The first? Or is that just its name? Could work. I know a chinese place named The New Good One.
YCombinator compete among themselves for the attention of the investors to which they present. Launching early and gaining users gives you an edge up on the competition. I would imagine this batch of YC companies (24, bigger than ever before) has learned from past groups and are responding as such.

This is merely a guess -- PG or a current YCer could comment more accurately.
My desktop is set up the way I want it. Otherwise it wouldn't be set up this way. Duh.

If a site doesn't work with my preferences, I click my back button and never come back.
By "rock star" I just meant the lone, dedicated, popular, and generally charismatic developer that has a lot of people talking about how great he/she is. A personality.

Again, I don't travel in Ruby circles, so I don't know of _why and can't speak about him personally. I just seem to hear about specific developers from the Ruby circle more than, say, C#.
Turned off less than an hour ago?

curl: (7) couldn't connect to host
Isn't it more likely that a relative simply requested LinkedIn to delete the account? A LinkedIn account doesn't seem relevant to keep online at all after the person has passed away. Facebook, on the other hand, leaves pages up but with most features disabled except for the wall and photos - something I'm unfortunately familiar with.