awwx

Are you using your laptop in your lap or on a desk?

I've found for myself that it's essential not to have the keyboard too high... my elbows should be comfortably at 90 degrees and my wrists comfortably straight. This means for me with a keyboard using a keyboard tray to bring the keyboard below desk height, and when using a laptop having it in my lap.

Cute: very elegant.

Vicious: I have to model all my program's data structures within Haskell's type paradigm, or I get ripped to shreds by the strict type checker.

Alternative explanation: the photo shows what I looked like after I programmed in Haskell for a while :-)

Bias: I'm a lisp programmer xD

I wonder if there's a statistical test for mob voting... a mob vote is a vote reinforcing an already extreme score, a mob voter is someone whose votes are usually mob votes?

If I were creating my own ratings for my own personal view of HN, I'd like to discount votes of people who vote opposite of me: if I downvote a comment that they upvote, then I'd prefer to take their other opinions less into account.

Or, since I'm not actually all that active on HN, I'd prefer to be seeing a view that weighted more heavily votes of people who were not voting opposite to those of people whose opinion I respect, such as pg. And probably some others that I'd be aware of, if I were on HN more.

For me to take the next step and suggest that this then becomes the default view that everyone sees seems strangely egotistical. Not for me, I mean, but that you might seem egotistical if you were giving more weight to votes from people who voted similarly to how you voted. I'd probably like the site more if you did that though :)

Allow people to turn on seeing the points if they want to, but give more weight to votes by people who aren't choosing to see the points?

Find some simple Python libraries to use, and going all Python is probably best. Combining Arc and Python would be a fun project but would distract you from getting version 1 done :-)

System administration is tedious but not very hard to learn. An advantage of doing it yourself is that when you need to do some minor tweak you can just do it and not interrupt your flow, instead of emailing some guy who does it the next day but it isn't quite right so now you've been stuck for two days and then he's had some important emergency so he can't get back to you right now... For help with system administrations issues you can ask questions over at http://serverfault.com/ if you get stuck on something.

Security is figuring out that you don't want people to be able to do X, Y, and Z and then making sure that they can't do X, Y, and Z. The simpler your system is, the easier it is for you to check. Which is another reason to avoid complicated software that you don't need.

For passwords specifically, for version 1 just do something very simple. Use OpenID if it won't confuse your users and you won't have to store passwords at all, or just collect the usual username/password and stick it in a simple file on your server. Then as you get going you can come back and take another look, but don't get hung up on it for now.

I'm "aw" on arglanguage.org, by the way.

Here's the thing with call/cc: it's a powerful but low-level operator. It can be used for example to implement throwing and catching exceptions, or generators like Python's yield. However, once you've implemented generators or exception handling, then you'd use "throw" and "catch" and "yield" directly instead of calling call/cc to do those things. So when you say "when would I use call/cc in a program", it would be for some situation that doesn't already have an implementation for it, which is probably pretty rare when most of the things that you'd use call/cc for are already implemented.

If you're interested in web programming with Scheme, I suggest taking a look at Arc (http://arclanguage.org/) which is (I find) a very pleasant language to program in and useful for basic web apps.

For the first iteration of your application, keep it as simple as you can. Don't use a complicated framework if you don't need to. Don't store your data in a database if you can simply store it in files. There's plenty of time later to say "ah, this piece needs to be faster" and move that bit into a database or whatever. By then you'll know what you actually need, instead of vaguely guessing and spending a lot of time to store all your data in a database in the hope that it will turn out to what you need.

While I suggest taking a look at Arc since it sounds like you'd be interested, I'm also guessing that Python is most likely going to be your best choice because it is a lot more mature, it does have a lot more libraries, and you already know it. But look for a way to do your project simply. Don't go off and use a complicated framework that has object-relational mapping and templates and junk if you don't need that stuff now.

I hope this helps... :-)

They touch on this briefly at the top of page 11: "The most optimistic approach is to solve requirements 2 [accelerate the black hole to keep it with the ship] and 3 [feeding the black hole with matter so that it doesn't evaporate] together by attaching particle beams to the body of the ship behind the BH and beaming in matter. This would both accelerate the SBH, since BHs “move when you push them” (see [3] p270), and add mass to the SBH, extending the lifetime."

The engineering details are left as an exercise for the reader :-)

Google has an interesting hybrid approach: http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin

If the user is logging in with an email account on a domain whose email is handled by an openid provider, it will switch over to logging you in with openid.

Though I'm dubious though about their wording suggestion of "No, help me log in" for the situation where you don't need a password because you can use openid.

A combination of your idea and Google's idea: let users login with only an email address. If the email's domain supports openid, use that, otherwise send an email with a link to log the user in.

How about opening a US bank account for your old UK business?

Edit: oh, I see in one of your comments that you weren't able to do that because your old UK business wasn't registered.

OK, so as I understand it, Apple owes money to a UK business (that in turn belongs to you), but you can't get the money because your UK business has no bank account and isn't registered.

I wonder if Apple can legally take money that it owes to your UK business and give it to a different business (your US business), even if it wanted to?

I think you need to talk to a lawyer in corporate law, and find out how you get money from your UK business that you have no bank account for and haven't registered.