skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this methodology is worthless in practice when the total number of examples is small in relation to the natural variation that exists among different observations

... it therefore needs to be immediately replaces by Bayesian methods, for example, which can deliver reliable measures of the uncertainty that exists

This looks like dogmatic madness, but maybe the article just makes them sound bad. Can anyone comment on how reliable the uncertainty coming out of a Bayesian algorithms is?
TechCrunch50 vs. DEMO: What do the sponor lists say about the conferences?
The sidebar feed is updated automatically in real time. You can close the sidebar at any time, and receive small notifications in the corner of your screen, or you can toggle updates off completely. I do encourage you to try it out for yourself!
Not to mention the recent AppJet stack release! ...which I guess is Rhino and Jetty. Still cool, though.

I've even been messing about with some of this fellow's stuff, including a very pretty mini-web framework: http://peter.michaux.ca/

He's working on the problem that is really holding server-side JS back: no libraries.
I, for one, welcome our new Bayesian overlords....

Seriously, though-- it is precisely these kinds of applications that Bayesian methods are aimed at. Are they really that infrequently used in practice?
9/5/1998: Google formed with "ingenuity, four computers and an investor's $100,000 bet"
Anyone else using Ubiquity who went to this site? It asked me if I wanted to subscribe to his Ubiquity commands but I don't know what they do.
do normal people want pcs for "normal people"? Like, didn't it use to be that teens wanted to be or at least look older, married men wanted to look single, 30 years old women wanted to play lolitas once again etc? But now, "normal" people just want a brown box with a stupid OS just like everybody else. Really? Are you sure?
I agree, there is a real opportunity there. The "seal of approval" businesses are great. You get paid for doing almost nothing, so it has very high margins. The customers prominently feature the seals on their sites, and pay you for the privilege for promoting your brand, giving you SEO and making your business go viral.
beginning to fail?

it has failed. big time, too. do you want a Zune? ;-)
..travel plans. The Caribbean and SW U.S. are huge tourist destinations of course.
I have a feeling that the majority of IE6 use takes place from work computers where employees don't have control over which browser is used. Therefore........ this won't work.
Aptana Jaxer (http://www.aptana.com/jaxer) is another serverside Javascript thing. What's cool about it, though, is that it runs under Gecko, so you can do all sorts of DOM manipulation craziness server-side. It's fantastic when you're dealing with user created HTML.
Rails 2.1.1 released: Lots of bug fixes
http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/contact/en-support-center/ - they have english speaking support. Also, some parts of their site is translated to english. Try pressing little english flag.

There is also http://server4you.de/. It's only in german though.
Like others have said, Cuil's failure was a huge PR push, not the release. I'm sure that they did actually get a ton of useful feedback from it that they can use to improve their service. In this case, though, it came at the cost of being branded a failure by many people.

If they had avoided the boastful claims and stuck to low profile releases, they could have gathered useful feedback without the expectation of being a great search engine. Perhaps if they had tried this they actually would have managed to get themselves up to google's level by the time the general public became aware of them.
Well, the same argument applies with regard to work computers. If enough sites are broken in IE6 -- especially work-related sites and web apps, not just time-wasting sites -- then corporate IT departments will have to upgrade.

That said, the strategy outlined in the article runs into the collective action problem: if every web developer in the world stopped supporting IE6 at the same time, all web developers would benefit. But individual web developers have an incentive to keep supporting IE6, keep their user base happy, and free-ride on the sacrifices of other sites that drop IE6 support. So it's hard for an initiative like this one to gain much ground.
> I haven't used an iPhone 3G, but people seem to think it's an inferior product in various ways.

When I complained about the lack of 3g on the original iPhone, I knew why, I understood the drawbacks, I understood the reasoning. I had prior experience with 3g mobile phones and personally knew that even with said drawbacks that it would be something I could live with. So I bought the original iPhone, then gave it up for the 3g iPhone when released. Don't regret it at all now..the only thing I want now is the mophie juice pack so I don't have to worry so much about battery (not that it's exceptionally bad in only the iPhone, it's pretty bad in most 3g phones, and iPhone more so for some of the applications). I love 3G on my iPhone.

> Another complaint is that third-party apps tend to crash a lot. Apple had that problem solved last year, too: They didn't permit third-party apps.

When I complained about the lack of an SDK for the phone, it was knowing that this was a brand new project (relatively) but that every single public excuse of Apple's was full of shit. I might also note that I jailbroke my phone on 1.1.x firmware and apps crashed too. Yes, Apple has some issues with 2.x (bug report time!), but a lot of the crashing is developer error. Like with any other program. No surprises there. Anyone expecting perfection in this area is completely delusional. Plus, I'd take a crash happy iPhone with third party apps over nothing. Makes my phone much more of a pleasure to use. Even if Apple ignored the third party app request, people would still be hacking away at it anyway (yay jailbreak).

> And the fact that the phone is now more expensive?

I realize the 3g iPhone is subsidized. I realize it's more expensive in the long run. But many phones are like that. I don't approve of Apple's marketing (it's "cheaper"! uh huh), but...really...just don't buy it if you don't like it, like you say.

Anyway, all this to say that maybe I'm not a typical fangirl, but there's plenty legitimate reasons to criticize, and some people are doing it understanding the whole situation.

On a sidenote, most people I've encountered complaining about 3g have nobody but themselves to blame. Yes there are some legitimate issues with 3g on the iPhone, but a lot of these people are overestimating what AT&T can give to them - i.e. it's not the phone they should be blaming in their case, it's AT&T's service or lack thereof. And personally, AT&T is the worst part of the whole iPhone experience, every single one of my troubles starting from day 1 has been with them and only once with Apple (solved in under a day with a free exchange and a store manager apologising, whoops).

edit: Lastly, there's a lot of old iPhones out there, some for cheap. I managed to sell my 8gb one for just over $220 (not so great cosmetic condition), and although prices don't seem to be dropping much, they're still out there. Wish AT&T would let people purchase the edge plan with the 3G phone though, I bet that would make you change your mind too :)
Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
Apple products have NEVER been flawless. I suspect the only reason why it seems like it's exploded as of late (or, even in the past few years) is because of the popularity of the iPod and iPhone and those two possibly driving up Mac sales.

Plus, I'm quite fond of complaining but rarely complimenting. I suspect a lot of these problems are selection bias multiplied by mainstream media mostly focusing on problems with the JesusPhone (etc).

(I've been a Mac user since I was born, and I'm on my second iPhone. please don't mistake me as some anti-apple fangirl :) )
Ask YC: What arguments would you give to convince a technophobe?
to adopt a new (to them) technology?
My colleagues and I have discussed this at length. One aspect of dropping IE support that "piques our intellectual curiosity" is thinking of it as game theory. It mightily resembles one of the four games centered on Prisoner's Dilemma (along with Moose Hunt, Chicken, and one other that eludes my recollection).

If some critical mass of vendors/web sites/providers drops IE support, we all win. But if we don't get critical mass, those that drop it lose business to those that maintain support for it.
The idea isn't a bad idea; Google isn't going to be the best search engine forever. (there are friends who swear that Yahoo has better results for them); Eventually they'll be unseated. just not by Cuil, because they did it so badly, and then killed themselves with bad publicity
the plural of anecdotes is not 'data', etc, etc.

but...

one person I know bought a MBP last year and it's been in the shop 3 times.

A different friend has given up on iPods because everyone he has bought has died within the year. He really wants an iPhone but he feels that it would be stupid to buy one given his experiences with other Apple products.

I won 2 of the clip-on shuffles in a raffle and the one that I tried doesn't work correctly. I couldn't get it to play all the music that was loaded on it and it would stop working occasionally. They are both setting on a shelf.

I don't have an axe to grind with Apple. I've gotten really crappy PCs before. But the only positive reviews on Apple products I've gotten from friends/acquaintances has been the fawning/religious kind.
I would also add that if you aren't re-locating, then you're missing at least 50% of the value of YC (probably more). They'd be doing someone a favor to pass on their company over this question...because the company wouldn't be getting a very good deal. Good investors don't invest when they know they can't provide good value to the company, and YC is a good investor.
depends too much on the technology you're trying to push. trying to convince someone to adopt something simply for the sake of it being new or technology is inherently fallacious and will fail.
Does 'Open Telecom Platform' mean that there are devices I can actually use OTP on at this moment in time?
use an rss feed.
Kudos for all the hard work he's put into JRuby. He's very passionate and has obviously put in a tremendous amount of effort into this project. Definitely the spirit of a true hacker!
As a hacker with a sense of aesthetics, I find that the hacker community often underrates superficiality to its own detriment.
most people in developing countries aren't going to be able to afford a $300 iPhone. They're going to be getting a cheap phone with basic functionality.

In 3-5 years, a "cheap phone with basic functionality" will have the same basic feature set as an iPhone (though not the slickness, that costs extra).
Techtalk: Python Internals
I agree that most workplaces have no control over it. For example, we have IE6 where I work and I don't see it changing anytime soon.

However, by dropping IE6 support, its not to say everything on the site will be broken if you drop support. It'll just mean that from here on out, its possible things don't look or work quite as advertised, and it is suggested you upgrade your browser. It won't happen overnight, but it'll be better than having 25% market share for a browser thats a decade old in a couple years.

For me, I'd much prefer the web to slowly move forward than not at all.
New service to help out journalists
There is zero risk and infinite risk. Betting your company on another company and having no exit strategy available (or possible) may be lucrative, for some time, but, in the end, may prove quite painful.

My advice would be to manage the non-zero risk and ride the other company for as long as you can, but keep Plan-B always in hand.
But here's the problem: How many people do you know who have Apple products also raved about them? Or had no problem?

I can come up with a huge list of my friends that have problematic Apple products. But if I gave it some consideration, I could also come up with an even longer list of friends who've had almost no problems with theirs as well.

Yes, I've had to go through the trouble of having my retarded iBook G3's logic board replaced multiple times. But I can counter that with my three MacBooks being perfect until I sold/traded them off. The one I have now has had no problems. My second MacBook had a power adapter that died after one year, but nothing else. Et cetera.
I like your game theory interpretation, but I think that there are subtle differences that rule out using the prisoner's dilemma as a model. A really good strategy in the prisoner's dilemma is Tit-for-Tat. So the logic goes that if your competitor drops IE6 support then you should too. But here's the trick. Since you may have multiple competitors and (I think I'm right about this) only one iteration of play, there's no really good strategy to follow; so it's not really quite the prisoner's dilemma.

Most importantly, unlike the prisoners' dilemma, you can communicate with your competitors. Perhaps what you can do is collude with them to drop the support simultaneously since it would save you both money and aggravation. You might want to keep a backup site that does have support enabled in case they don't all hold up to their promise so that you don't get burned. I don't imagine that anyone would agree to a contract on something like this, so plan B is essential.
This service has actually been around for nearly a year. We interviewed the founder, which resulted in an interesting little exchange in the comments with its established rival, PR Newswire:

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/22/source-source-cou...
How did the TC guy get both storms on the same map? Every link I click only ever shows one storm at a time...

I wanna track Ike and Hanna on one map like he did...
Three wise men puzzle
I agree. I'm constantly recommending Tufte to founders.
usually the percentages you see are different: "would you rather have 20% of 10 million or 100% of 0"
Ottawa, Ontario - you should be a bureaucrat

Mexico City, Mexico - pretty much like New York
There is a BugMeNot Firefox extension. And if I'm not wrong even a bookmarklet.
PD is not the only game in the family, there are four games that differ in the relationship between the payoffs. Which game it might resemble depends on how you evaluate the payoff matrix.

For example, in "Chicken," coöperating means turning aside and defecting means driving straight. The payoff is very big for the person who defects while the other player coöperates, but there is a big penalty if both players defect simultaneously. Same game mechanics, different payoff table.

But all of the games have the property of having two basic choices: coöperate and defect. In this case, coöperating is dropping IE support and defecting is maintaining IE support.

Of course, these are n-player games and the matrixes are more complex because the payoffs depend on how many "players" defect.

I don't think communication matters for these games. It's always explained that you can't communicate, but teh really essential deal here is that you have to make your decisions simultaneously, no player sees the other player's decisions before making their own decision.

In that respect, real life is different: there can be early stage players like 37 signals that get "opinionated" and laggards can watch what they do before deciding.
The Design Of Everyday Things (mentioned above as well) is one of my favourite design books.

But will reading books help? What is your intent in suggesting such books to them?
do you know what TRUSTe actually is? its nothing. it doesn't say what a privacy policy should support, only that such a policy should exist. whats in the policy? irrelevant. TRUSTe is completely meaningless, which is what you would expect from industry self-policing measures.
http://rimuhosting.com now have a datacentre presence in the UK (London). I find them very useful but best of all they have very, very good support. They are NZ based.
You can find cheap dedicated servers in france at www.ovh.com . They have a lot of OS distributions and if you can manage your own servers it's a good choice. I work in an spanish ISP and we exchange traffic with them at AMS-IX so it should be properly connected to all the important european ISPs.
The comic was nice, but here's the meat: Chromium design docs
This is very true - I've been in and out corporates for years and most environments are locked down.

I mildly disagree with one assertion in the article:
-Another reason is many internal IT systems were built to use IE6 specific features-

This is somewhat true. However, the real reason that corporates don't upgrade is the cost of rollout.

In a big corporate you'll have literally 1,000s or 10,000s of desktops. This is compounded by the fact that a browser isn't a single application - it could be hundreds of applications.

Something like a bank is generally going to be very conservative, so they'll only attempt that if it's properly regressed and tested... The cost and risk of this (let alone if something does break) is generally not enough.

Only a couple of years ago I was at large bank that was still on Windows NT. They only migrated when the risk of being out of support outweighed the migration risk.

Even then, corporates have a fair bit of muscle and very often arrange extended support. A lot is of made of when products come out of support, but the reality is they are supported on these kinds of specific deals well beyond those timelines (and generally for a very tidy profit for the vendors).
There's also UI design docs: http://dev.chromium.org/user-experience
the next ten years will not be defined by any web company

if anything, i predict major contraction and consolidation in the web industry. i suspect five years from now you will see links like:

"Ask HN: what best second career choices now that web programming is a bust?"

your buddies working on next-gen power technology, water management, ultra-cheap advanced medicines, and renewable energy are the ones who will define the next ten years
but there's plenty legitimate reasons to criticize, and some people are doing it understanding the whole situation.

True enough. And, in fact, I was wrong to call the consequences of the 3G redesign "bad". They're arguably bad for me, because what I want isn't necessarily the same as what the majority wants. But lots of people are very happy! Because they criticized the product, and Apple listened!

Whether or not the 2G-to-3G design changes are bad or good isn't my main point. The point is that these changes were made in response to intense customer feedback -- Apple customers are scarcely apathetic -- and that just about all of the problems highlighted in the original article are side effects of this attempt to give customers what they asked for as quickly as possible.

Wish AT&T would let people purchase the edge plan with the 3G phone though

That would indeed be great -- although in my case the real stumbling block was the fact that I scored a spectacular own goal: back in January I switched to AT&T without buying an iPhone at the same time and locked myself out of the subsidy. In retrospect, that was foolish -- I assumed that the second-gen iPhone would be sold on the same terms as the first one, without a carrier subsidy. Until AT&T announced their subsidy policy, months later, I planned to buy a 3G phone, higher monthly price and all -- the cost differential isn't that big once the subsidy is included. The fact that I'm perfectly happy with my 2G phone is a serendipitous discovery.
Do AndroidGuys Dream of Google Phones?
My friend whose MBP has been in the shop 3 times still won't speak ill about it. That causes me to discount his opinion a little when he talks about how much he loves his Mac.

Another co-worker, whose wife works for Apple and therefore gets discounts, is spilling over the top with praise but he can't quantify it, he can only seem to describe it using the words 'cool' and 'awesome'.

I'm sure the problem is with my sample size (very small).
Slicehost is wonderful ... they aren't a "managed" company but their support is great. They reply to tickets fast and have a support chatroom. They also have some great articles for getting slices prepped for php/rails/django apps on different distros:
http://articles.slicehost.com/

I wont name names, but I've had better support from Slicehost than a managed RoR hosting company that costs 5x.
"Open telecom platform" is powerful set of erlang libraries which allow you to create fault tolerant systems easily. It's not an OS or device. It's something which runs anywhere erlang runs.
I can recommend Hetzner, very good network, very good administration utilities (free web-reboots, remote console if you need it, recovery system), excellent service.

server4you however is a provider focusing on the "I need a cheap root server!"-segment, I would not recommend putting all your trust in them, they have a history of failures here in Germany.
Science proves exotic cars turns women on
I second rimuhosting, using them with both my companies (Soocial.com and eightmedia.com)
The thing is, despite all the racket about 3g, it was something that was going to be inevitable. It was only going to be a matter of time, especially if Apple planned to sell it overseas. Customers probably pushed it, but the iPhone 3G's popularity may just well be responsible for AT&T making network improvements in general. It would make sense to say that companies were waiting for 3g to mature in the US to introduce more 3G phones, but that wouldn't really happen until more people adopted it...you get the idea.

Also, I'm surprised that your situation happened. I don't know much about upgrading and subsidies for AT&T, but in January? I guess that would mean you bought a subsidized phone back then?
That would be great if they had hooks in the invite code to automatically deny inviting *@techcrunch.com or something.
Well, maybe your friend isn't speaking ill about it because the reason why it's been in the shop 3 times is because of a mistake on his part? Things do break.

I had a neighbor a long time ago whose computer overheated and died quite often. She kept buying new ones and complaining about them all the time about how unreliable they are. The one time she told me about this I had to go take a look..the inside of her computer then was chock full of dust and animal hairs. Needless to say, she no longer has to buy computers so frequently..filters and some regular cleaning do the job well. :P
A periodic table of visualization methods
It's always a size problem! ;)

I hear ya though, I have had a few close friends with mac books, I know they've had problems (batteries, speed, etc.) but they still wax poetic any time they talk about apple.

My desktop has been going strong for 5 years now with hardly a hitch, but I don't feel the need to say a word about how much I love it: it's a dang computer.
"It will make your life better."

If that's not true, then there's no reason for them to adopt the new technology.
Also, consider when the original codebases were written. There was nothing to borrow when Netscape/Mozilla first took a crack at it, in many of these cases.
A guide to vertical rhythm in a web site
I liked the line: _We build a layer on top of that shim that better exercises Ruby's potential, or we help build a new wrapper to replace the old._

I think this is a great idea - it's the ultimate technical jujitsu. Take the weight behind Java and use it to give you a leg up.

The org I'm at is attempting something similar at the moment.

Course. Getting the wrapper/interface right becomes pretty important, but this is always the case.
Wish I was going to NIN today =(
If a single bus works for large numbers of processors, why are data centers wired differently?

For many problems, bisection bandwidth is a key constraint.
The "Telecom" refers to the fact that it was originally developed to support the software on Ericsson's telecommunications switches. So yes, for all you know, if you make a phone call, an Erlang-based switch may have routed your call.