skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a friend who is an epidemiology research for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says that the best evidence is that the percentage of gay men is considerably less than the often-said 10 percent of the population (derived from Kinsey's unscientific survey), so a small percentage of gay men in your calculation would be the most plausible. This depends crucially on the definition of "gay," but for most epidemiologically relevant purposes, an estimate nearer to 2 percent seems warranted by scientific surveys.
Good question, and yes, I should have just done a free trial. Reason I didn't is because, based on the info on their site, I was "sure" I was going to buy and keep the software. It had -- or I thought it had -- some key differentiating features. As it turned out, the Mac version does not have those features, only the Windows version. That's why. But yes, you're right, I should have taken the free trial instead of being so excited and confident I would want to keep the software. Consider my hand slapped :)
How many slaves were there that had no wives?

If the mean across all males (not just those who reproduce) is one wife, as expected by a 50/50 sex distribution, then that means King Solomon's 600 partners meant that 599 men have no wives. Dunno how that would compare with the number that had 1 wife, but I wouldn't be surprised if the former is greater.
I recently created a page on my iPhone of Google Voice icons for each of my Google Voice contacts - it's my 2nd page; click to launch their call page on GV & then click call button to call them. I wish I could just click to call but this way I train my friends/contacts what my GV # is and when they send text messages they do so using my GV # and I receive/respond using Gmail; money saver.
more interesting is david bohm's idea of the 'rheomode'

"One could say that nouns do not really exist, only verbs exist. A noun is just a “slow” verb; that is, it refers to a process that is progressing so slowly so as to appear static."

http://wik.inormous.net/index.php?title=Rheomode
Feynman Report on Challenger Disaster
I don't know how many people do this (invent word forms), but I definitely do. Here's a sample:

freak out > froke out > froken out

the plural of house is obviously hice, and toothbrush becomes teethbrush.

Of course, I have to be careful when speaking in public so I don't end up sounding like Ned Flanders.
Based upon my experience:
Open Office Draw is quite good. For greater power, you could consider InkScape. Dia is also good if you have the time to tweak to your requirements. I end up using OO-Draw for 80% of my diagrams and it interfaces with OO-Impress.
I've got lots of little sites that I'd like to monitor but that aren't that important and aren't making money. So I'm looking for a tool that has a free option but when one of my apps grows into a serious product I can start paying for more services.

For the free service, I'm looking for something that would notify me by email and SMS if the site is down or slow (within about an hour). So far it looks like http://aremysitesup.com/premium/ can do this. Pingdom is way too expensive for my needs right now.

I would love to support a fellow Hacker News reader. Does your app fit my needs?
Bear in mind, I have yet to spend a ton of time with any of these products yet, but FreeMind is my favorite (right now), although I want to spend some more time with Xmind.

Dropmind is my by far personal favorite paid product (I'm on their free trial). And their developers are super nice and helpful (we exchanged a few emails, questions, replies, and screenshots).

Which ones are your guys favorites?
Open-sourcing the whole thing should make it harder for the NSA to tap calls. (Or at least to decrypt what they intercept.)
It's very unlikely. I've seen a bit of the research in this area and all this stuff has been tried before with marginal success. Van Jacobson did a pretty good job.
Debugging Your Girlfriend
Yeah, nimbu.net does do what you're asking for and it will always be free for one site. You will get notifications by email and/or SMS and/or twitter within minutes of your site going down. The SMS option won't always be free, but you can send via Twitter and then get Twitter to SMS you for a free option.

Edit: I just re-read about having lots of little sites. I will consider a reduced-functionality (eg. as you say within the hour notification) but allowing more free sites as an option.
Ah, Hamming. Definitely a role model for anyone who wants to get out there and accomplish things. This is probably old hat to folks here, since it was mentioned in one of pg's essays, but I remain fond of this part:

I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!

This quote has taunted me from the back of my head off and on for years now, but I don't listen to it as often as I should.
There are from the Verb Empowerment Society (Gesellschaft zur Stärkung der Verben). It's a bad pun, since a `strong' verb is a irregular verb in German.
1. $40MM is probably less than Amazon invested initially in AWS. That's enough to buy hardware/bandwidth/datacenter space in quantity for significant savings. It's also enough to afford to lose some percentage of money every year for a while. Definitely enough to prove to investors that you're on to something. This is the strategy Amazon used themselves. Also, I truly doubt Amazon designed or operates their datacenters as cheaply as is possible (whether they think so or not). IT infrastructure is probably a relatively small cost for their retail business. They're also surely quite bloated by legacy choices.

2. Fair enough. They certainly have a great brand name, that helps them. They're going to have an easier time getting rogue developers. That still leaves startups and other small businesses that only care about what's actually better for them. I think it's safer to bet on what's actually better winning than what has a good brand name, otherwise Google would be winning already with App Engine.

3. I agree it'd be easier to play it safe by going after some high margin niche. That doesn't mean it's "better" though. Some people want to do really big things.

I think a great team with great financial backers could absolutely wipe the floor with Amazon. Amazon only looks untouchable because they haven't faced a really serious contender yet.
It’s About Helping Your Users Become Awesome
Like speed, process, lightning vs to crawl, to last, to wait?
Yeah, and as we know all on this site no one likes to ditch their boring corporate job for a chance at something of their own.
Video: iPhone game maps with Inkscape (cocos2d/sapus)
I get like that when I'm in the same environment day after day. I got over the ideas drought by taking a notebook (dead tree variety) with me on walks, dallying in art galleries, coffee shops, park, etc. When I'm in a "different space" the creativity flows again. I then take my notes and return to the computer and implement the ideas. Rinse and repeat ;-)

Talking to people and hearing about their problems / challenges is another great source of inspiration.
Inbox (804) - hafezeku@gmail.com - Gmail
For context, cocos2d is one of the most popular free and open source gaming libraries for mobile. Sapus Tongue is a commercial open source iPhone game development platform/reference game.

List of games: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/forum/1
Almost every software job in the city was terrible.
You had a choice of which kind of terrible.
Want to wear a suit and work long hours under crummy
conditions? Take a job at a bank.

Interesting that Joel semi-praises Microsoft but didn't mention his other former employer, D. E. Shaw / Juno (and the growing number of firms similar to DESCO). They are (relatively) hacker-friendly finance companies with no suits or long hours.
I see your point, even if it is a bit over the top, but ryanwaggoner's solution does pass the "what if everyone did this" test - i.e. it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.
Whipped.
"Sketch a stick figure drawing during dinner with friends, and pass it to her" - that's quite specific advice there.
And for all the pg-lovers out there... http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
relax. browser market share is about branding and building those takes time.
"always free for 1 site" seems like a bad call. unless you have a ridiculous number of sites, is it really that much work to make a different account for each site, either with different emails or using a gmail/google apps email and putting a different +whatever in your address? I would guess that your rate of paying customers will be pretty low.
Europeans and Americans are more different than you think once you look a bit closer.
In my country (South Africa) prison rape is also common. I've read a study (not going to search for it now) that the AIDS prevalence for people in prison actually goes down (which is suprising).

A lot of sex in prison also isn't rape.

The biggest cause for the rape problem in prisons is prison overcrowding (Europe doesn't have that problem at the scale of the USA or RSA). The problem is that the USA has a much higher incarceration rate than European countries.
I have been meaning to try out http://boxedice.com
A fascinating look but it is still 3 years old...
Jeff Minter (aka Yak) at Google Tech Talk (2007)
I've used Hibernate quite a bit over the years. Here's my attempt at summarizing the slide deck:

1. Terracotta makes for a nice, highly-concurrent cache plug-in to Hibernate.
2. Hibernate has a few seemingly un-necessary synchronization blocks that can be modified at classload time by one of Terracotta's integration modules.

I don't doubt #1 and hope to one day try out Terracotta as a distributed read-write DB cache. [And, more importantly, as a write-behind cache!]. #2 is interesting to me, but most corporate systems developers have bigger fish to fry than trying to suck additional performance out of a caching implementation. Those doing high-volume websites or very low latency financial apps might think much differently, however.

Infinispan is JBoss's (Owner of Hibernate) closest competitive offering:

http://www.jboss.org/infinispan

Infinispan does not currently support persistent distributed objects, so its use is more limited than Terracotta. However, if you are using Hibernate, you are persisting to a RDBMS anyway, so what do you care?

One interesting point about Infinispan:

"Inﬁnispan is JTA compliant so it plays nice with ongoing transactions"

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/infinispan

From a Terracotta forum post six weeks ago, "JTA is now on the roadmap":

http://forums.terracotta.org/forums/posts/list/15/2340.page

Most people use Hibernate along with JTA to provide painless transaction roll-backs. Caching makes this more difficult because an aborted transaction can result in a dirty cache unless the cache also participates in the transaction. Hibernate's caching policies allow a developer to state his/her comfort level with this risk in exchange for performance improvements. A huge percentage of Hibernate users care more about correctness than absolute transaction speed. An extra 10% improvement isn't worth a few support tickets/week, especially if (A) those bugs appear transient and (2) they cause user distress beyond just a broken app (an insurance policy quoted at the wrong rate, etc.).

An interesting point implicit in this slide deck is that Hibernate is long overdue for a refactoring. Integration with Spring isn't as easy as one might hope. Instantiating IoC-injected entities ought to be an out-of-the-box configuration, but it requires AOP or some yucky Hibernate hacks involving statics. I have run into several other IoC-unfriendly practices as well. Cleaning up the various means of customization would yield significant developer benefit.
I admit it, I got fired up and got on a rant :)
Ask HN: What does Shout Out do?
What's the startup shout out do?
Link just takes me to my GMail...I don't think you can share your e-mail with random viewers on a website.

BTW, 804 unread messages is nothing. I've had coworkers come back from vacation with 3000+ new threads in their inbox. On my work e-mail, I get about 150 new threads/day (and I'm on the low side), so it only takes 3 weeks or so to get up to 3000.
Making a nice place to work was our primary objective.

Maybe I'm a little old fashioned, but I still have a tough time understanding any goal != "maximizing our customers' success".

I once went to a sales seminar for technical people and we had to introduce ourselves and describe what our companies did. The first 15 people described their products. Then on my turn, I said something like, "We provide our customers tools to help them succeed." The instructor remarked that I was the only one who mentioned "customers" in his introduction. I didn't even think about it at the time; that's just the way I was trained.

It took almost ten years, but I think we finally got the mission for the next ten nailed.

Good for you, Joel. In your business, I imagine it's a fine line between an employee and a customer because they're both programmers. I would expect that sooner or later, focus must revert to the customer.
His first company, now ecnavi.co.jp, owns several internet services such as price comparison, video portal, social bookmarking, game avatar, and encyclopedia. This according to google translation http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&tl....
There's no non-developer release yet, and the browser isn't feature-complete on non-Windows platforms. For example, on Ubuntu I can't open links from other programs with Chrome, and asking it to restore tabs when opening the browser doesn't work.

I'm sure once they make official versions the situation will change, I've been happy having it as my secondary browser on all three platforms despite the hiccups.
I recently realized that between FogBugz (which my company uses for bugs, to-do items, and wiki) and Kiln (which my company is now using for Source Control/Code Reviews), the Fog Creek products are emerging as a Bizarro-world version of Microsoft's TFS.

My uninformed prediction of what's next: a hosted CI service like CruiseControl or TeamCity, both of which are useful (I would say indispensable) but can be intimidating to set up and start using.
I had this wierd thing where I'd flip to Chrome, and it'd draw its screen line by line, like a broken Amiga. I switched to Firefox after that. [I was using Chrome because of wanting to use Google Wave).
The site is AJAX so all files (HTML, JS) are static. I am perfectly fine copy-pasting the hashes manually each time I roll out the new version, like this file:

file1.html 123112
scripts/script1.js 333222
scripts/script2.js 444555

The dynamic part of the site comes from a database, but there is no logic in it - only code, and thus possibility to inject malicious sctript, odd behavior or offensive visual through hacking the web site is vastly reduced by verifying hashes and alerting me about any changes.
Well, this guy works at Facebook on Hive. If there's no hope for him, how much hope do the rest of us have ;-)
50%? That seems ridiculously high compared to my (incomplete knowledge, sample size of one) experience, and I live in the Bay Area...
This sounds like a more formalized version of Thomas Jefferson's "I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
Fertility and living standards: Go forth and multiply a lot less
Also, Cassandra is a Dynamo clone? Someone should tell them that...
Why world's post offices are ailing
LuaJIT2-beta1 has been released
aremysitesup.com is free for five sites, not one, so they are offering me a better solution for my particular problem. The next step up, $35/year, is also low enough to not drive me away. I also see that nimbu.net says, "At the moment nimbu is free to use with a limit of 3 websites." and I have more than 3 I want to monitor right now.

As you can see, you have a lot of sites competing with you (which means you have a market!). Now you need to distinguish yourself.

I'm having trouble finding a service that does the following:

* Offers me a free service that's suitable for sites that aren't that critical.

* Once I need a higher level of service, offers me a way to gradually turn up the service and payment.

Maybe I'm expecting too much out of a free service.

EDIT: I realize what my expectations are now. I think Google has spoiled me. Here's what I expect (and I think the web monitoring service that can offer this solution will likely win):

* Monitor an unlimited number of websites at a frequency of not more than 60 minutes. Will send an SMS and an email if the site is unavailable or too slow. (Maybe there is a cap on the number of SMS messages per month.)

* Offer very gradual price increases for increased service (gradual like this: http://site24x7.com/site24x7-pricing.html)
I just signed up for your service. The interface is quick, clean and intuitive - frankly, it's a relief to use it. I also have to give you props for having an SMS setup that works internationally. A handy addition for me would be DNS monitoring.
From the article:

Psystar copies the hard drive of a Macintosh computer containing Mac OS X (as depicted above on the left side of the diagram) onto its "imaging station" computer (shown in the middle of the diagram). This is the first unlawful copy.

Psystar then modifies this copy of Mac OS X to create a "master copy" that wil run on non-Apple computers. Psystar next uses "hard drive imaging" to install copies of its "master copy" of Mac OS X from the imaging station onto each computer it assembles. This is the second unlawful copy (a process repeated many times).

Finally, every time Psystar turns on any of the Psystar computers running Mac OS X, which it does before shipping each computer, Psystar necessarily makes a separate modified copy of Mac OS X in Random Access Memory, or "RAM." This is the third unlawful copy.
Nice.

6 Virtual Features
11 Multimedia Features
6 Personal Tools
6 Interactive Graphics
8 User Submitted
5 Applications

Some of them are _too_ good. For those of us online all the time, it's pretty hard for us to justify a subscription to the Times Reader after we see how good the "article skimmer" is (And the article skimmer includes Tables, unlike the Times Reader)

http://www.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer/

I'm willing to wager that the "Article Skimmer" will turn out to be a premier feature of the MacTablet when it comes out in January - It's perfectly designed for that form factor.
I've listened to the audio edition of Anathem at least 15 times. Heck, I'm listening to it again as I'm writing this. I can say that a lot of my perspective of the world in the last year has switched to a mathic viewpoint of the world. It's very rare that a work of fiction has affected my worldview as much as this book has.
I guess Jefferson's way of saying it is the same concept.

The fact that at least two independent sources have come to this conclusion is an indication that it may not be a fabrication of my erratic mind. Thanks for bringing it up.
I would love to drill into this topic because it is related to the main thread. There are some networks and providers who care about the issue of pushing bad ads, while others turn a blind eye since they have no incentive to keep these ads off your site. Don't be surprised if the current series of TC posts eventually lead into discussing ad networks.

For now, please email me (nik at tc) if you do see these ads popup, we dislike them as much, if not more, than the readers do.
When were the investments made? Which of these VCs (if any) has a controlling position on the Board? It's not like a VC can say "Oops" and demand the money back after a company turns unethical.

That said, writing to the VCs might indeed be an interesting strategy for handling ethically iffy startups. In fact, probably the most effective I can think of offhand. I'd just strongly recommend a polite "Please look at what this company in your portfolio is doing... I respect your group and I know you'll want to talk to them about this", not a "You! You're to blame! Damn profiteering bastards!"
It's hard to see originality in this.
Just google "who would've thunk".
Innovation: Hurdles facing America as a center of tech
Which is why BRK's "retail" businesses (like Borsheims, or See's candy, or Geico) or, hell, even the Fechheimer Brothers uniform company, all have top-shelf web presences.

I get the sense that a lot of people commenting here don't really understand how BRK works.
Thanks for the great feedback, it's always good to hear! I'll add DNS monitoring to the list.
That's funny, I always thought fogcreek was about making loads of money by selling over-priced and over-hyped web apps.
Hahaha Joel how about a start up discount for your make better software training. $1595 for four videos is a nice idea but too rich for my blood.
SAP Join Apache
Thanks for the detailed response. It is useful to hear real-life requirements and I'll bear this in mind when thinking about pricing options. I must admit though the number of options on site24x7 is a bit off-putting to me, I was thinking about much easier 'packages'
Facebook caring what Arrington thinks? On what planet?
You make a good point and I've thought about that a lot but competitive sites offer free accounts so it would be hard for me not to have a similar option.
If I'm not mistaken, these verbs are called "strong verbs" and are a nice holdover from Old English. Stink, stank, stunk. Drink, drank, drunk. Sing, sang, sung. Etc.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_a_strong_verb

For people who love where words and such came from, I can't recommend highly enough the Teaching Company's "History of the English Language"

http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=2250
No, this is only an approximation of the TSP.

(Edit: parent post sort of got me thinking about
if we could practically resolve P?NP
to P=NP and the implications of that although it would be
much like P=NP.)
Priced at 2x-4x of a web hosting plan? No alternate DNS management? Crazy.
You're welcome. Now you have another data point. :) I'm not sure if I'm a typical user, though. Best of luck.
Why isn't his browser anti-aliasing the text?
I'm posting this from Chrome on the Mac. It works well enough to use for daily use. There're still some glitches, but in general I've found it better than Safari or Firefox (both of which I also have installed...web developers need everything).
I just want an Aeron chair.
http://www.montastic.com
Cheap ugg, ugg boots, ugg boots sale
Not a very good analogy. The content on Pandora is licensed so every copy in the chain is completely legal and adheres to the license terms agreed to by all parties involved.
UGG Bailey Button Sale,UGG UK Sale-31% off,
Doug Crockford Talk on JavaScript
Why Malthusianism refuses to die
This is obviously more of a legal statement than a technical statement. If you go into it with the assumption that Apple's license agreement is valid then each time they touch Apple's bits without legal right they would be committing violations. If your legal goal is to prove damages you would obviously want to document each infraction. Not being a scummy lawyer myself it seems sort of similar to the damages awarded for piracy. I may only break the DMCA once by distributing one copy of a CD online however the damages reflect the number of subsequent infractions that occurred due to my failure to adhere to the license terms.
In his book he mentioned DE Shaw nanomanaged and power-tripped on programmers.
How To Play LAN Games Using Hamachi
In this tutorial i will show you how to play LAN games with your friends using the Hamachi software.