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mqton [dead]

If you're concerned with efficiency, it may be worth your time to hire a whore. That way, you can cut out all of that wasteful foreplay.

mqton Homeless: Can you build a life from $25?

Escaping materialism can be a very difficult gift to receive. I think rebuilding after losing everything is a beautiful thing -- rejuvenating yet humbling.

Thank you for sharing, I really appreciate honest sentiments like this.

mqton Homeless: Can you build a life from $25?

This is a contrived example of the "American Dream." You're not truly suffering unless you feel the emotional pains of poverty. The depression from the uncertainties of tomorrow is the real killer.

I'm not surprised that he achieved mediocrity with the confidence of education and safety-net of a credit line and a weathy family. You could do similar by working at McDonalds. This sort of thing is possible in many Western countries. Infact, you are probably better off in a welfare state than in America if great wealth does not interest you.

mqton Ultimate N00b SLIME/Emacs Cheat Sheet

Brad Beveridge abandoned development on both vial and slim-vim. He conceded and now uses emacs+vimpulse. [1]

Many people that come to Lisp from vi tend to be very hesistant to use emacs. I spent weeks trying to use vilisp.vim and viper-mode but eventually learned to live with emacs. It was worth it.

http://www.lispniks.com/pipermail/slim-vim/2007-May/000556.h...

mqton 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.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

mqton It's Charisma, Stupid

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] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_200...

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html#f2n

mqton 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heights_of_United_State...

mqton It's Charisma, Stupid

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113864

You only have two choices. He's saying that the candidate with the most genuine smile is likely to win; past elections are evidence.

mqton It's Charisma, Stupid

Also, "What Charisma Is"

http://www.paulgraham.com/recharisma.html

mqton "So you’re going to write an iPhone app…" Tips from a dev using a preview of the SDK

You're right.

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.

mqton [dead]

I found an Upcoming event posting[1] that indicates this was given as a talk at PARC on May 4, 2005.

There are draft notes at the bottom so I'm not certain if this was the final version.

[1] http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/18619/

mqton Sixteen Languages: a journey through 16 programming languages in 361 days

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.

Everything he writes is in a subversion repository: http://16languages.googlecode.com/svn/

More information on the format: http://16languages.blogspot.com/2007/09/rules.html

mqton Hackers' screen shots

http://www.csh.rit.edu/~apox/images/screenshots/20071031.png

My four desktops merged into one image. I'm using FreeBSD+ion.

mqton 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.

[1]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=221

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72863

[3]: http://wiki.alu.org/Slim-Vim

mqton LispCast - a series of screencasts of Common Lisp development

Marco Baringer's SLIME tutorial screencast is quite good. Other than that, I haven't seen much else that's worth watching.

Bill Clementson's post about the movie: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050728.html

mqton 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.

mqton 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?

mqton Which editor do you use for Lisp?

pg mentioned that he uses vi with a REPL ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=587 ).

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:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/1cij7/comments

http://www.lemonodor.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=689