Perhaps we have different expectations of what we think should appear on Hacker News.
I come here to find out about cool new stuff that hackers elsewhere in the world are working on. To me, an individual learning a fundamental AI algorithm isn't all that interesting. Particularly as the OP in this case has nothing to add to the discussion; he's just crowing to the world: "Look! I implemented someone else's idea!"
That's retarded. 90% of the articles on the homepage at all times are garbage tech gossip. I don't see you insulting those authors. You're either a troll or just a jerk.
Wtf? This is a news site. How is somebody learning something fundamental news? Would you like to see a front-page story every time some kid completes an algorithms assignment? I don't. Not because the learning is unimportant, simply because it's most interesting to the person doing the learning.
All I'm saying is this: if you've learned something cool, and you want to tell the world about it, you need to present it in a way such that your learning contributes something to the learning of others. For example: explaining a complicated idea in really simple terms that anyone can understand (such as this cute example of the Halting Problem proof: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.html).
Another way to make your learning interesting to other people is to present an implementation that provides insight into the subject. The author tried to do this but I argue his execution is poor. I learned nothing from his app and nothing from his documentation. No implementation insights, no analysis, no beautiful code, nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. It's just a web-based A* implementation. Of which there are zillions.
I come here to find out about cool new stuff that hackers elsewhere in the world are working on. To me, an individual learning a fundamental AI algorithm isn't all that interesting. Particularly as the OP in this case has nothing to add to the discussion; he's just crowing to the world: "Look! I implemented someone else's idea!"