skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. All languages need an online app like this!
OTOH, I have to believe there are many people with copies of that code.
Wow, one of the few personalities to ever remain truly anonymous on the Internet vanishes in a day. Sad sad day. :(
The Dark Cloud: malware's cloud computing platform
Quick recap - founding of SMS:

"Mr Matti Makkonen had discussed the idea of a Message Handling Service for GSM digital mobile phone in 1984 in a pizzeria in Copenhagen with two other Finns Mr Tiainen and Mr Tapiola during a conference of mobile phone communication's future.

When the development of GSM digital mobile phone standard was extended from the Nordic countries initiative to the global ETSI workgroup, the idea of SMS was proposed to be included as a global standard. "Without this international collaboration SMS would not have become a global success story", says Makkonen.

Mr Makkonen, did not receive financial payback for his pioneering work because he didn't apply for a patent. "At that time there was an open sharing of ideas by monopoly operators so we never even considered to write a patent application" said Makkonen. "We just started to spread the idea and take care of it into the specifications. The mobile system today is open source and developed from innovations by hundreds of people" he said."

http://www.bookit.net/news/en_GB/makkonen_economist/
Man - what a bum out. The talk he gave at art + code was awesome and seriously inspired me to focus more on educational material for teaching kids to program. I hope he at least gives a more valid reason for removing everything. I can understand letting something become dormant - but others can take what you have done and be inspired and or build upon it. That is not a slight to you it's just the way a system grows. Like layers of sediment upon rock upon sediment. If I ever discovered that a piece of my code/idea had made its way into something someone else had done I would be stoked not bummed out.
"When they say $1 a day they mean a $1 a day in America."

Citation required. I've seen these numbers and I've never seen one quoted in terms of purchasing power parity. The $1 a day that's often trotted around is real dollars - i.e. $1 USD.

The article authors would have had a far more accurate (and less biased towards their cause) result if they had accounted for this. By no means am I saying that $1 USD in a third world country is a lot of money, but it certainly does a lot more than $1 USD in the USA.
Iowa City, IA, USA
Is free speech a gray area to you also? What about search and seizure?

You happen to consider this one example harmless... what if they started sending out a pink police van in states where "sodomy" is illegal when someone called in a complaint?
Got the logo, which had a good concept (idea), but won't fit to mine design because of colors. So it didn't work for me.
But _why's contributions are largely irreplaceable.

Sadly this is not true for anyone.
hacked?
assuming that this is a tantrum, yes. not impressed, only really detrimental. at least have the courtesy to leave your stuff as it is for the people who have and will benefit from it, instead of scrubbing it all clean.

on the other hand, if this is a case of someone managing to crack/guess/etc his passwords and just wants to do some malicious damage, that would be too bad.
Agreed; it's really childish.
That was pretty immature, to delete the repos as well.

They were git repos, right? I am new to git, but my understanding is you pretty much have to type

git clone --i-dont-want-a-full-copy-of-the-repository-please-screw-me-over-if-the-master-vanishes

to be in a position where you are "dependent" on the code (i.e. have looked at it, ever) and do not have a full copy of the entire project extending to the mists of prehistory.

[Edit: apparently the actual command is

git clone --depth (some number)

I like my version better.]
That's my mission with http://codepad.org/
took me too long to figure out what the site is for. closed tab.
Last Night's Founder Institute: Advice from Mike Arrington on PR and More
I've used Scrum at MTV Networks and at Conde Nast. I heard from a ex colleague he was trialling Scrum at Time Warner.

Scrum worked very well for us at MTV Networks with the project I was working on. Due to us having a very experienced Scrum Master and the Project Owner being very active and understanding how to prioritize his requirements.
Good point; hopefully he's not suicidal. Anybody know the guy personally?
Yes it does. Actually it's one of the reasons I like the Ruby community.
Wow. Dick.
Domains are still up and registered to him...

Strange indeed.

Registrar..: gkg.net (http://register.gkg.net/)
Domain Name: WHYTHELUCKYSTIFF.NET
Created on..............: 03-JAN-2002
Expires on..............: 03-JAN-2014
Record last updated on..: 24-DEC-2008
Status..................: ACTIVE

Registrar..: gkg.net (http://register.gkg.net/)
Domain Name: HACKETYHACK.NET
Created on..............: 25-FEB-2007
Expires on..............: 25-FEB-2010
Record last updated on..: 24-DEC-2008
Status..................: ACTIVE

Registrar..: gkg.net (http://register.gkg.net/)
Domain Name: POIGNANTGUIDE.NET
Created on..............: 20-NOV-2003
Expires on..............: 20-NOV-2010
Record last updated on..: 24-DEC-2008
Status..................: ACTIVE
If you are doing this visualization for yourself, you can experiment with colors and thresholds to bring out the features that are important (in your view). And that’s OK because you still have all the data at hand. If however this visualization is for someone else, such as the MRI given to a doctor, anything but a faithful representation would be very dangerous. Basically, you would substitute your judgment for that of a specialist.
Windows does not belong in that list - it is much more open and plenty of companies have built large, sustainable businesses on top of it.
To me the point of police is to fight crime. This requires that they are smart and do professional police work.

If we let cops become bullies whose own discretion is OK when it comes to harassment, etc., we are throwing away quite a few rights.
Well, people will obviously plan their application in a way that makes most sense given what their preferred language makes easy, or what their language community values. A Java programmer will think "how can I make this enterprisey". A Perl programmer will think "how can I do this in one line of code". A Haskell programmer will think "what is the underlying maths". Like I say, no-one is literally thinking code. It's not that people can't think outside their language, it's just that why would you try to smush in a concept that's a poor fit?
Magazines printing, presentation folders printing
I don't know why this is, but personally I think making friendly URLs is a mark of attention to detail. So, with a little htaccess kung foo, you could make links that look like this: http://www.jobpic.com/auction/35 and http://www.jobpic.com/profile/38 instead of http://www.jobpic.com/auction.php?id=35 and http://www.jobpic.com/profile.php?id=38. Better to do this sooner than later.

I like the JS load category, but it should at least be linkable. See: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/history
Maybe he's planning for a big star-spangled blowout and is getting us ready for it? Kind of like if MJ had jumped out of his coffin at the Staples Center to start singing Thriller?
I have a feeling that this disappearing act is part of a ritualized collecting of energies that he needs to release Hackety Hack. He originally meant it to be ready for Art and Code and I have a feeling that many side-projects since then (including Potion) have been produced out of nervous energy misapplied to tasks other than his One True Project.

His feelings aren't hurt, I doubt that very much.
Facebook Morals
Not sure what your point is. There will always be people who want police to come in and mistreat their neighbors... and sometimes that desire may be justifiable, but that doesn't mean that the mistreatment is appropriate.
Really hope he's ok...
I fully agree. Food is such a fundamental (and enjoyable!) aspect of your life, why would you cheap out on it? I realize that wasn't the intent of this exercise, but given the recent number of "how I don't waste money on food" articles, I think it needs to be said.

The benefit you get from good food (which doesn't even have to be all that expensive) far outweighs whatever money I spend on it. Food is the only thing in my life that I do not set a firm budget for. I eat what I want, when I want, because food lends a richness to my life that no amount of cable TV or internet news trolling can equal.

To extend beyond this point a bit: of all the things that people really need to get rid of, it's cars. I recently moved to a new city and wondered if it was really time I got a car - nothing fancy, just your average middle-class sedan. Turns out between ownership cost, insurance, and gas, the car would be chewing up $15-20K per year (more likely $20K than $15).

And for what? So I can sit on a clogged freeway, gas-brake-honk my way to work every day, and repeat in the evening? No thanks.

Instead I paid a bit extra (couple hundred bucks a month) to live in a denser area with great transit coverage. Imagine what that money can do for your average individual/family. $20K of extra discretionary spending a year? Holy batman!
That's really odd. Just yesterday he had picked up on Twitter again after a several-days/weeks hiatus.
I blame this more on the average person than Prosper. They publish historic default rates; I even wrote some quick simulation models before I put my money in. The biggest problem is that people see 20% and don't realize just -what- the C grade means.

I can't speak from the borrowing side, but the lending side seemed on par with the risk of the market to me. And for what it's worth, my Prosper portfolio did much better than my 401k.
It is a good concept, but the site really needs some sort of a reputation system. Or at the very least a way to look at people's previous work.

Take this entry for example - http://www.jobpic.com/auction.php?id=99 - $25 for a business card design is like 1c for a hotdog. Makes me suspicious what it was made of :) Also I suspect that if I win the auction, these $25 won't motivate this person to actually do a decent job. So unless I can look at the track record of the submitter, I will not even bother entering the auction.
:( A sad day.
I managed to dig up a PDF copy of his Poignant Guide to Ruby over here: http://www.ember.co.nz/resources/whys-poignant-guide-to-ruby...

Anyone who hasn't checked it out yet, do yourself a favour. And for the rest of us, who would like to remember this anonymous creator of cartoon foxes.

Let's hope it's just a quarter life crisis and that he's back soon. Or that he finds something else that makes him happier than programming.
System.system can be done in all languages.
There has been some negativity about hpricot lately:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=Nokogiri%20hpricot
It's a huge concern. When a company starts hitting that $100M range, you're essentially worth a decent percentage of what Facebook is worth (maybe 5%). At that point, it starts making sense for Facebook to put a little work to competing with you and putting you out of business.

These platforms can be good if you're willing to be unnoticed in the corner. However, if you find something highly worthwhile, your landlord can copy you and shut you out.

If you're talking about a $50M buy, you have to be thinking that you'll be able to get at least triple out of that on such a risky purchase. And if a Facebook app is that worthwhile, how long until Facebook itself moves into the space?
FWIW, I noticed that all of his sites were down for a period sunday night, too. I figured he was just doing something on the server and everything was back up the next day. I didn't check his github or twitter, though.
No, his real name has been on HN before.
Do we have a solid source on either figure?
It can't, of course, so it's already gone up.
Couldn't possibly be that he's fed up with Open Source and the ruby community...
DataSF: Dataset Clearinghouse from City & County of San Francisco
How to Get Rid of  Breast Infection
Yeah, it needs a little more OT in the middle.
Gavin Newsom's introductory post on TC: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/19/san-francisco-opens-the...
Agreed. It's pretty clear the 80+ group is picking up an integration of a longer tail. You can also clearly note the exponential death rate eating away the effect of the baby boomer impulse.
Thanks for all the fish, _why!
I think Friendfeed was more purchased for the people who worked there than for the work that they had put out publicly. Facebook isn't done growing and Friendfeed had some great architects that could and will help with that growth.
Maybe you could try http://friendpaste.com :)
Even if he is, taking down ANY trace of your online presence is highly unusual.
Let's wait for the circumstances before passing judgement.
My point with this is that there is no revolution... yet. It has a loooong way to go. And since BB on ATT has google voice its not ATT who is blocking or more drastic measures will be taken. In fact if anything google voice serves the BB customers much more than the iPhone ones. The BB customers are the ones who pay for massive minutes for business conversations and need this systems more. Having unlimited talk plans like t-mobile's fave-five calling one google voice number is what is really going to hurt telephone companies.
One thing you neglected to mention: if your startup fails, you can use your startup experience to help you get a job.
It is very disappointing that Nokia and Riverbank couldn't find a way to work together. Phil (at Riverbank) has done a tremendous job of supporting Qt on Python, when Trolltech wouldn't. He has always been responsive, and attentive to details.
People liked him because of the quality of the stuff he produced. I personally haven't seen rockstar qualities from him. Most of his work (code/blog) are to the point and of high quality.
While it is true that you'd need to know fewer people, everyone would still need to know everyone else indirectly in order to be admitted in the first place. This is a requirement for the security of the network from infiltrators: someone already on the network would necessarily need to provide you with a "secret" of some form.

By contrast, with a more standard sneakernet, you'd need to know everyone you're in direct contact with -- but that number is typically kept fairly low for social reasons anyway. Data would be distributed more widely by passing through several intermediaries: Bob copies all of Alice's data, then Carol copies Bob's, and now Carol has Alice's data without necessarily having met. This is how people used to pirate software before network access was so common, and it actually worked pretty well.

Want to know who to blame for all the old games asking you to "look up this word in the instruction manual"? It's people doing this.
Where is Charlie?
Sounds like a great service - I'm not in the USA and don't travel much, but it sounds like some great data mining!
--depth does have some benefits... one of my friends tried to do a 'git svn clone' of his work's svn repo... he gave up after the process had been running for a full 3 or 4 weeks.

That said --depth doesn't have too much use when it comes to native git repos though. Unless you have a ton of binary files in the repo and don't want the full history of all of them...
An unexpectedly good site.

These sites about eating very cheaply show up now & then. But in my experience, most of them end up pushing very unhealthy diets. This one at least makes an attempt at variety and health. Still, if you look at the menus, their meals are starch, starch, starch. Not ideal, but at least they tried.

What I'd really like to see is someone who is trying to eat as cheaply as possible, with a diet that is lower in grains.
Designer Joey Roth Scavenges and Builds Show Booth with Discarded Materials
District 9 is not an apartheid allegory
STATS: Email Sharing’s Not Dead Yet
Codepad is such an awesome site. I use it all the time to test/assess the results of a little bit of code on its own.
Someone has already edited his Wikipedia page to mention his online disappearance.
Too bad about being in Canada. Canadian data plans suck compared to the US ones. The US doesn't have that much competition for cell plans, but Canada has even less (2 carriers; Bell or Rogers).
That's silly - I can ftell_i64 on this 32-bit machine, so it's not the OS, it's them not coding in the 64-bit file access APIs that are available, at least in Windows XP.
_why just posted a new repo on github: http://github.com/why/lol/tree/master

EDIT:
Weird, the repo description is "wtf adam, are you this slow". Hope he didn't get hacked.

EDIT 2: original link is dead.
i disagree. this is a great project. the project demonstrates the ability to quickly cull information from different spaces and combine that information via some algorithm for presentation.

what i see are two separate achievements here. collection and analysis. the collection looks good and they have implemented some algorithm. the efficacy of their algorithm may leave something to be desired in terms of accuracy, etc. nevertheless, the algorithm may be tuned/replaced/compared going forward.

i wont even go into the many many applications that something like this can have.
The Hpricot wiki is still live on github, and the website is still up too.

http://wiki.github.com/why/hpricot
http://hpricot.com/

One of the most thoroughly documented libraries that I have used.

It's interesting that he gave a talk in 2005 called "A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever" (from his Wikipedia article)

Anyone know anything about what he said about the Polo Champ in the talk?
There's a new repository up on his Github:
http://github.com/why/lol/tree/master

Description: wtf adam, are you this slow

I'm guessing he got hacked.

Edit: Nevermind, the repo's been deleted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold
Minor Lessons from A/B Testing: MicroISV on a Shoestring
-= sequoia capital =-
_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.
If you're listening _why; don't stop being generous - don't disappear without a trace.
What about moot and weev? They're not members of the open source community, but they are notorious.
_why has always been an unusual guy. He has always prized his pseudonymity online, so I'm honestly not entirely shocked to see that he has decided to simply pack it up and move on.

It's a sad day for all of us, but I hope and trust that he has good reasons for this decision. His contributions to the world of Ruby and programming-as-art will not be soon forgotten.
BTJunkie - Latest
Why the Lucky Stiff has become Why the [deprecated] Stiff. http://twitpic.com/ehkoy
My quick take, from playing around with it a bit a few months ago: you can put much, much cooler stuff on the stack. Closures, for instance. (Or at least the Factor equivalent of closures.)
Use EXPLAIN ANALYZE?
Loved his neat work why's poignant guide to ruby though I'm not a ruby guy. :(

But why he'd commit a virtual suicide like this?
Very sad. No more chunky bacon??

I invite everyone to enjoy a video I set to some of his music, and reflect on his priceless contributions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YReSQfSBz4k
That does not appear to be the same 'why' account as before. 0 followers, created today.
Have a little respect. Unlike most of us here, _why never profited directly on his online celebrity status. If he chose to remove himself from the 'net, it seems only reasonable that he would want to shut down public repositories he managed, if only to avoid the inevitable deluge of complaints about them going stale, requests for commit rights from other people, etc.

The fact that you would care more about his shepherding of repositories which have been available to everyone else all along speaks volumes to me about the kind of attitudes that probably helped to drive him offline in the first place.
I don't know that he's necessarily blaming the older generation so much as he's pointing out that the older generation made all sorts of promises such as, "Unless you get a university degree, you'll never get a good job" and "Once you have a university degree the job market is smooth sailin'" which are obviously not true. And now the older generation is complaining that the younger generations -- raised on such 'truths' and promises -- are saying "Where's this cushy job I was supposed to get with my college degree?"
Nobody knows much about _why. He's always been a mystery.
Searching by City would be pretty clutch. Nice site, though.
And hpricot is the only living remnant of _why.
No <marquee>? I'm disappointed.
Name some circumstances which justify pulling down a broadly-used open source project like Hpricot. At a certain point it must be admitted that a project has a life beyond its author.
Well true, and he likely cultivated his anonymity for just such an occasion...

His legend will only grow...
_why has never really made "products" -- in fact, as far as I know, he's never made money from any of the stuff he shared online. (Sales of physical copies of the Poignant Guide may be the one exception to this, but IIRC, he priced it exactly at his cost in order to insure the widest possible distribution.)
programming is rather thankless...

Maybe he read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771057 in Re: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771013 ?
Wow, I really miss the days of black text on a gray background. * sniff
Probably some guy just registered the username after _why deleted it.
Getting beyond hyperlocal
I went there, wasn't sure what the site was about, nor why I should use it. Then I saw your explanation...

But if you need to explain it here, then your site doesn't work. Put this explanation on your site. Make it brief, make it clear.
Casio EXZ75 - Digital Camera | Modern Gadgets
Yeah it does. It's a bit like Linux-land has more interesting personalities than Microsoft-land or how skateboarders tend to be more exciting than WalMart workers.
Judging by this, it looks like his account was hacked: http://twitpic.com/ehm2h.
> That's how the people in the air-conditioned offices like it, don't they?

Yes, all Social Security advocates work in air-conditioned offices, and all people in air-conditioned offices are Social Security advocates. I love it when the world turns out to be black and white after all, instead of those messy shades of grey...
Change the sort order of the "End Date" for listings. Since it's an auction style site, let me see the listing that is "about to end" at the very top, not waaaaay down at the bottom.

Looks good!
Tell HN : JetBlue All-You-Can-Jet Pass Sale Ends Today
Which is why I love Zed Shaw's response:

"Hmm, I think it's more possible that _why got hacked than he pulled a me." http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/3409334842
I don't know about that. I think _why was his online identity... only sometimes he ventured into the real-world to talk to people.

So, perhaps it is accurate, since it seems like the online persona has vanished, so in a way _why is no more.

Maybe the real person needed to escape from the persona... who knows?
Do you have a link for this, as far as I know, no one knows his real name, job, etc.
None of _why's projects were that big, so in this case it's kind of a moot point.
Smalltalk had it's share of personalities. I am witness to drama at OOPSLA that would have made for some damn good movie scenes. But all of this predates YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, etc...
Wow, trendy stuff. I'm going to have to start using that window.status trick they're using.