Reminds me of that one Microsoft search site that was interactive with some lady at a desk, used to launch Bing or something. From 2008 I believe. it was http://ms (name of chick).com I remember.
Has been working great for years here, no bugs to speak of across 3 browsers and 3 OSes. Notifo notifications are amazing. UI is second to none. Flawless local/offline sync, so no downtime ever. Tagging system works great, and it's how I know what to do next all day.
My only gripes are
1) no mobile version (it works on my iPhone, but it's not the optimal experience to have to drag left and right. a dedicated app would be better imo)
2) there's no faqs/documentation/getting started guide/features/nada. No help desk if you're stuck or having problems. Despite all this, it has lots of users still apparently. Contacting the developer valentin shergin (yandex guy) is a shoot and miss. Development seems to have slowed down a lot, but there's some new features popping up here and there. Mostly active in Russian community.
Original story[1] by jsrfded (also creator of site) which didn't get enough traction.
I think it's particularly useful nowadays considering how slow and sluggish HN has been (at least for me). Plus there are some real gems that pop up every time you refresh.
As he says:
The other day I "ran out" of stuff to read on Hacker News. I had looked at everything that interested me, and had even checked out page 2 (I was getting desperate).
I realized that there were thousands of great HN threads that I hadn't seen because I hadn't been paying attention to the site when they were ranking.
So I pulled together a little db of the top 10,000 HN threads (loosely defined; a thread with >1 points, 1> comments, and some web link rank).
I put these into a random shuffle so that reload would give me 30 fresh threads that I (probably) hadn't seen before.
I'm pretty happy with this. Lets me scratch my HN itch when I've exhausted the main page, and it's often interesting to see the old material again.
Well, he was right. The Reddit frontpage and vast majority of the new users (new being under 2/1 years old accts) have turned it into a complete idiocracy. On the other hand, the niche and smaller subreddits about specific pursuits and topics are doing pretty decently. Hivemind think and other stupidity still leaks in, but it's not too bad. The problem is as subreddits grow, they turn to crap. Look at the problem with the starcraft subreddit or plethora of marijuana subreddits.
I particularly like the subreddits that aim for better signal/noise ratio from the get-go and the good folks that help police them. One particularly outstanding fellow is blackstar9000, mod, creator, and prolific poster/commenter of several nice niche subreddits who has helped keep things in line. If there's any one who deserves some kudos in that regard, I'd nominate him/her for the honor.
Extremely unusual. Last.fm has one of the best uptimes of any large site with lots of constant traffic that I know of. I hope it's something benign and not some catastrophic event.
edit: no irc channel found for veracity-scm, does it exist anyone? also, I found the piping method they used to get their PGP key was causing issues with sudo, just wasn't accepting my pass with two sudo statements like that for some reason. It worked when I separated them.
My result[1] isn't too bad but there's still quite a few words I can learn especially at the end. I did cheat a little since I learned a few of the more curious looking ones when this showed up on /b/ 2 nights ago.
Thanks for collecting these all, but I must say, what a shitty and needlessly obtuse way to go about it with all these heavy spreadsheets everywhere. Surely there must be a simpler and better way?
They weren't designed to be in tandem or work together at all, but maybe some enterprising hacker can get their name out there by finding a way to use the Docs API to scrape the data from all these and host it on a pretty ajaxified site (like say, hnsheets.com or something) with a MongoDB backend and all the code on Github?
Or maybe just put it up on a wiki somewhere. Are there any other better solutions than these slow-crawling and large spreadsheets on Google Docs that anyone else can offer?
edit: how about metahn.com with subdirs or subdomains of:
/directory
for listing of persons and meta info about them, history of work done, availability for contract work, availability for starting a startup, etc
/jobs
with the different internships and jobs posted every month listed and searchable/ordered by different fields/categories
/misc
with the other links and/or editable fronts to the data like the listing of TED talks or just links to the other static documents you mentioned.
There's already a few spread out hn-related sites like hndir.com[1] for students and hnofficehours.com[2] for general help and consultation between HN'ers but maybe there's room for one more.
Are you insane? Redhat has tons of patents. They have a position of not offensively using these patents against the community, "a promise" as it was termed when I took a tour of their North Carolina facilities a few years ago. Here[1] is a link to their patent policy and reasoning behind it.