2 points by mqt 10 hours ago | link | parent | on: Ask YC: How many hours do you sleep on average ? It's not polyphasic sleep if you've only tried it for a few days, it's deprivation. It takes weeks for your body to acclimate to this sort of thing.
Read Steve Pavlina's polyphasic sleep log if you're interested in doing it right.
3 points by mqt 1 day ago | link | parent | on: It's Charisma, Stupid At this level in politics, all candidates have "leadership qualities." Unless there is a large difference in height (5+ inches, which doesn't happen very often), no one is going to notice.
Bush is shorter than both Gore and Kerry. Guess what? He has much more charisma.
1 point by david927 1 day ago | link At this level in politics, all candidates have "charisma" too. He only has more charisma if you define it a posteriori as having won the election.
> Bush is shorter than both Gore and Kerry. Guess what? He has much more charisma.
But he lost the popular vote to Gore. So charisma understands the electoral college?
2 points by mdemare 1 day ago | link No, I disagree. There are plenty of completely uncharismatic politicians around. (John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul, Bob Dole, Bush the Elder).
1 point by david927 1 day ago | link Is that your list or the official list? The point that started this wasn't that Person X is charismatic while Person Y isn't. It's relative. Second, who judges who is more charismatic, even relatively? Again, the person above says that Bush Jr. was more charismatic than Gore, but the popular vote said the opposite.
1 point by mqt 1 day ago | link Gore did not win the popular vote by a large margin. According to Wikipedia, he was ahead a mere 543,816 (0.5%) votes. [1] It was only the third time in history that a candidate lost while winning popular vote. I don't think you should dwell on that particular point. Can you find examples in other elections where the theory falls apart?
Also, the second footnote in the essay offers the reason that Bush did not focus his campaigning on the popular vote. [2]
1 point by pchristensen 1 day ago | link None of them got elected president (except Bush 41, and he was running against Dukakis). All of the data pg used in his argument was about winning presidential general elections.
3 points by huherto 1 day ago | link I can relate to this. Vicente Fox, last president of Mexico was like that. He was fiercely attacked and he made some very stupid comments. Still his popularity remained high. But you could see that he was really happy when he interacted with poor children or old people.
His MobileTwitterific site says he's using the toolchain from the iPhone Dev Wiki. I incorrectly assumed that the headline (taken from reddit) was true since the article seemed so detailed.
3 points by boucher 1 day ago | link Anyone using the real SDK who posted this kind of article would immediately be sued by Apple. But, more importantly, the kind of people who would have early access to the iPhone SDK just would never write something like this, especially not in their name. Nobody in the mac community wants to make an enemy of Steve Jobs.
2 points by mqt 69 days ago | link | parent | on: Sixteen Languages: a journey through 16 programmin... He's spending 16 days on each language: Smalltalk, FP, Ada, Python, OCaml, BrainF*, i86 assembly, Prolog, Erlang, Forth, D, Lazy K, Haskell, FORTRAN, Lua, and Scheme.
1 point by mqt 107 days ago | link | parent | on: Ask YC: which editor to use for LISP programming? You could use vilisp.vim[1], which will basically copy-and-paste Lisp forms into your REPL for you. If you use OSX, you can try pg's method[2] of dragging text between terminals.
Better yet, you could resurrect Slim-Vim[3] if you really want SLIME-like features.
2 points by Shooter 107 days ago | link Yeah, I've seen all the Lisp screencasts. They're great, but I'm looking for a professional training product on DVD that is sequential and really takes people new to Emacs up to proficiency and that teaches experienced Emacs users new tips and tricks. Something that is unlikely to appear for free. I'd be willing to pay several hundred dollars per license for quality training.
We have 50+ developers that are using Emacs, and a dozen more that have never used Emacs but need to do so in the future. I regularly drop coin on training materials for our design staff, but there are no compelling AV materials for our developers. There is no company equivalent to Total Training for most developer and sysadmin tasks, for example, unless you want to get an MCSE or something.
I've spent over $75K on video training for our designers this year (Total Training, Lynda, NAPP, etc.), but our developers usually end up using online documentation and a few books. I think there is a market opportunity for developer-focused video/multimedia training materials. And sysadmin stuff too, for that matter.
2 points by mqt 215 days ago | link | parent | on: Your bank has a REST API now I've tried to use tools like GnuCash and Buxfer to keep track of every dollar I spend and receive. Seemed like a good idea, but I've decided that my personal finances aren't complex enough to warrant frequent checking.
The only features I want with Buxfer/Wesabe is to be able to check my balance over SMS. I don't want to enter individual transactions or manually upload QIF files from my bank's website so it should be imported automagically. Periodic reminders to pay the rent might be useful too.
Fortunately, Wesabe has a tool that retrieves your bank data and uploads it to their servers though they lack the SMS features and their site is fugly. Buxfer looks pretty good and has the SMS features, but I have to submit my bank data through a web form.
If Buxfer implemented what Wesabe has, I'd definitely use it. Maybe I'll just write something to grab my bank data and upload it to Buxfer in the meantime.
2 points by acgourley 215 days ago | link I don't think personal finance is that interesting in terms of the api. Maybe small business could use the API to integrate with something tracking their funding, but there are already traditional tools for such things.
I wonder if you can - just from the description of each transaction - decide what company is getting your money. If you know who is getting it, you can correlate that a database of the companies country of origin, type of business, location, etc. Then you can imagine a set of mashups you can do.
There might be some collaborative filtering that can be done as well, based on your purchases and perhaps rating of satisfaction of those purchases... This would require people to share (even if anonymously) their spending patterns.
2 points by mqt 238 days ago | link | parent | on: It's official: Google buys Zenter It's interesting that Zenter agreed to an acquisition before publicly launching. I don't recall seeing this too often.
Would they have survived a presentation-ware duel with Google or would they have suffered a fate similar to Kiko's?
I can't remember when I first heard about Zenter but it seems like I've been anticipating its release for a while. We generally hear that it's good to release early and update often so I'm interested in the story behind all of this.
Would it have been better for them to hold out and build a user base so they could be acquired for more money?
I recently began using emacs + SLIME for writing Lisp and revert back to vim for everything else. I've also tried vim + VIlisp.vim, which sends Lisp code to a running Lisp interpreter. It seemed pretty decent though I don't really have enough experience writing Lisp to really compare.
Anyone else write Lisp in vi?
SLIME is great, but I really miss vim sometimes. Fortunately, Slim-Vim is in the works by the author of VIlisp.vim. Here's a couple comment pages on Lisp with vi/emacs:
2 points by Mop 282 days ago | link I do use vim, too.
Debugging without slime is quite difficult however: as everything is available through slime, nobody cares about simplifying access to SBCL debugging features from outside slime. For example, having to prefix every variable access with SB-DEBUG:VAR when in the debug REPL is a real pain, and serves no purpose other than annoying non-slime users.
