srveit

I found "Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith to be an excellent book. He explains things very well. You can tell he has done extensive analyses to back up his conclusions. Free on Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300). I actually listened to the recording on librivox.org (read by Stephen Escalera):

http://librivox.org/the-wealth-of-nations-book-1-by-adam-smi... http://librivox.org/the-wealth-of-nations-book-2-and-3/ http://librivox.org/the-wealth-of-nations-book-4-by-adam-smi... http://librivox.org/the-wealth-of-nations-book-5-by-adam-smi...

Thanks for the info. I added my npm module (https://github.com/srveit/mechanize-js) to Travis

The War on Poverty is the name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty

Why?

Here is an article and HN discussion thread that was posted two months ago that describes how one man retained his rights upon re-entering the US:

http://nomadlaw.com/2010/04/i-am-detained-by-feds-for-not-an...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681721

That reminds me of my old boss expecting email to be the same as an answered phone call. There was a problem in our system that he wanted me and a co-worker to solve by working late and he sent us a both an email. The was close to the end of the day. I didn't read the email until the next morning. He yelled at me for not putting in the extra effort and leaving it to my co-worker. The really funny part was that his office was only 20 steps away from my desk and he could have dialed a four digit number to reach my desk phone. And this was back in 1994.

It looks like at least one company is trying this: https://www.banksimple.net/about/

I don't use a case for my 3GS. I always keep it in my pocket (not the one with my keys). However, I bought my wife a rubber case for hers, since she keeps it in her purse with her keys, lipstick, pens, pencils, etc.

I think the "Little yellow guy" is the Street View icon.

It uses Google's open source V8 JavaScript engine. (http://code.google.com/p/v8/) It doesn't support multiple cores AFAIK. To use multiple cores, the server would need to spawn subprocesses or run multiple servers behind nginx.

Node uses a thread pool also. From Ryan's JSConf slides:

"Blocking (or possibly blocking) system calls are executed in the thread pool. Signal handlers and thread pool callbacks are marshaled back into the main thread via a pipe."

The "slant" in this book is that he is pro-free market and anti-central planning. He states that the free market is the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources. The book explains why this is so with many varied examples.

By allowing the price of water to go up, it would encourage more people from outside to fulfill the increased demand. By limiting prices, the government is not just telling sellers they can't sell a product at a higher price, they are telling people that they cannot buy something they are willing to pay for. Prices are a very efficient way to allocate scarce resources, in this case potable water.

The changes described in the article look good. However, were they A/B tested? While Amazon.com may look cluttered, they used A/B testing to evolve the site to what it is now.

I live in St. Louis, although I did not attend WUSTL. I did some web development for two graduates from there. You may be interested in these two local groups of which I am a member: St. Louis Ruby Users Group (http://groups.google.com/group/stlruby) and Lambda Lounge (http://lambdalounge.org/). Also Alex Miller is organizing The Strange Loop Conference (http://thestrangeloop.com/) Oct 22nd and 23rd which you might find interesting.

For really accurate measurements check out http://www.physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/apollo/apollo.html By bouncing a laser off several reflectors that were left on the moon, they are able to get accuracies of one millimeter.

I got a call from this service on behalf of one of my neighbors who lost his dog. I went to look at the service and though that this was a great idea. It appears to be a fully automated service that combines a request form, a GEO database, a telephone number database, and an automatic calling service. I think this is a great example of startup that a one or two person team could build by combining several existing web services to satisfy an existing need.

Also see the HN comments here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740524

I didn't work with these, but did work on the Symbolics 3600 circa 1985. It introduced me to a lot of new technology. I learned Lisp, of course, on it. I learned Zmacs and the "Meta" key. Emacs is still my favorite editor/IDE. We had a Canon laser printer ($12K, 360 DPI, liquid toner) that I used to print a proof of my wedding program (using proportional Times Roman font). I hooked it up via Ethernet (using 10BASE5 vampire taps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap) to a DEC 11/785. I first learned TCP/IP programming using it. All of the OS source code was available to view and patch if needed. It was the first windowing GUI I ever used. It was easy to program (in Lisp) and was the most advanced software development environment of the time. We developed a research AI system (called Pilot's Associate) that interfaced with a real-time flight simulation. It was great fun.

Steve Blank writes about his learning of this phenonemon while working on electronic warfare systems in this post: http://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-h...

Are there other multi-implementation languages that have an executable language spec like this?