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mbowcockon GE will move headquarters to Boston

GE chose to leave Connecticut because of a tax increase on profits made in other states by corporate subsidiaries. They're not the only corporation in Connecticut that's unhappy about the tax. Anti-business or not, it's not exactly a draw for corporations with subsidiaries across the country. The money that Boston threw at them was to keep them from moving to New York.

mbowcockon Ask HN: Where to host Static single page website and cheap?

AWS http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/website-hosti...

Costs me about $0.50 a month to host a simple, static site.

mbowcockon Startup idea list

Earth Class Mail http://www.earthclassmail.com/

I don't know who else saw it, but there was a show called Startup Junkies that profiled this company for 8 episodes. http://www.mojohd.com/mojoseries/startupjunkies/about.jsf

mbowcockon High-risk video game venture has Rhode Island, Curt Schilling reeling

My understanding is Kingdoms of Amalur was work in progress at Big Huge Games, 38 Studios acquired them and they modded the game to fit the world of Amalur. Which is supposed to tie into their next game.

mbowcockon I only know PHP. How do I write a Web application in Python?

It seemed you were arguing against using transactions by default because they didn't roll back a call to a web service. I meant to point out that the issue in your case seems less about db transactions and more about the code and error handling.

mbowcockon I only know PHP. How do I write a Web application in Python?

The transaction is internal to the database. It's essentially a list of operations to perform, if something goes wrong it provides a list of things to reverse. If the db transaction fails, then there would need to be some code to handle rolling back operations outside of the database. I don't think db transactions were to fault in your situation.

mbowcockon Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign registrar

It's not transactions with the .com that's at issue. It's the fact that a company operating a business the government considers illegal is making money in the US and moving it overseas.

It's all about the money. Not .COMs.

Running a gambling site on an .so domain and hosting the servers overseas while profiting in the US will still get you indicted. The government might not have the authority to shut off your internet presence but I'm sure they could turn off finances in the US. And certainly make travel to certain countries an issue.

mbowcockon Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign registrar

That was only one of many charges.

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/02/ccips....

mbowcockon Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign registrar

The US government has always had dominion over .coms (and .nets). Verisign manages .com's through a contract with the US Department of Commerce. That's where they get there authority.

mbowcockon Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign registrar

But that is already an issue - whether or not you have a .com domain name. The domain name is just an asset and the government routinely seizes assets when filing criminal charges.

mbowcockon Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign registrar

This seems to be the same issue as megaupload. A company outside the US, marketing a service that's illegal in the US to US citizens. Money paid for the service is then moved overseas. (I understand there may have been users in other countries, like megaupload)

While not something I necessarily agree with - I don't think this particular move indicates all .COMs are now threatened.

mbowcockon Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

I believe all lithium-ion batteries have a low-voltage threshold that once crossed they can not be charged again. It's similar to a fuse - once tripped - there's no* getting around it. This protection is to guard against shorts in the internal circuitry. With the current technology there is no way around it.

* Edit. Missed the 'No'.

mbowcockon Microsoft needs Wizards: A 1984 Microsoft job posting

decvax was DEC unix engineering groups vax on uucp/usenet. I believe it was the first system to move email in realtime. Microsoft must have been linked through this vax.

mbowcockon OCaml for the Masses

http://matt.might.net/articles/best-programming-languages/

This write-up describes the basics of ocaml and haskell and some of their individual strengths. (along with scala and scheme)

mbowcockon OCaml for the Masses

Seems like financial/quant computing would be a natural fit. The author mentions ocaml being well suited for general programming needs - Anyone using ocaml (or haskell/f#/etc.) for real production code?

Edit: should have mentioned this earlier for an example - xmonad is written in haskell

mbowcockon WSJ comes out for SOPA

For some reason this sentence jumped out at me:

"Some lawmakers have noted that PIPA and SOPA would not affect anyone of the Web sites participating in the blackout."

I assume the argument being made here is that they're domestic sites and would not be affected by the legislation. And since they're not pirating anything what do they have to worry about. I could see someone reading it and thinking this is much to do about nothing. But this bill really puts pressure on domestic sites to comply and as we all know will just push the pirate sites to find ways around the law. So really, the sites most affected by these laws will be domestic and law-abiding.

mbowcockon 4chan "blacking out" (or, "spoilering") all comments as SOPA protest

"I suppose it's possible there are a lot of intelligent people with the emotional maturity of a 10 year old."

I think this sums it up correctly.

mbowcockon Typing at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000

I had the same thought. Maybe for short burst where something is well thought out in your head and all your doing in transcribing. For most coding I find my typing to be more than sufficient. Maybe for something like documentation (but who writes that anyway?).

mbowcockon John Carmack's .plan file

As an aside I just saw this a couple of days ago and while activity seems to be slow to non-existent this looks like an interesting project.

Webfinger - http://code.google.com/p/

Basically finger 2.0 for the web

mbowcockon Why don't they implement Python and Ruby on the web browsers?

This is an interesting implementation of python in the browser. It's a python interpreter written in JS, so you wouldn't need any new software on the users end.

http://www.skulpt.org/

mbowcockon What Tools Developers Actually Use

I'd be surprised to see a large number of 'rock star' devs using Eclipse.

mbowcockon Show HN: Let's end the Programmer Salary Taboo

HN Salary Pool

http://salaryshare.me/230acd5ff2df1bf8cb03f403aabd45be

If any ones interested.

mbowcockon Surviving a traffic surge: Three techniques to scale your site fast

Do you run your site with keepAlive set low all the time or only when needed?

mbowcockon Damn Cool Algorithms: Levenshtein Automata

I wasn't familiar with the site but found this post interesting. After digging around for a while there is a lot of good content.

mbowcockon Show HN: 5factsabout.me

http://5factsabout.me

mbowcockon MIT OpenCourseWare programming lecture videos (in Python)

This is another good resource for similar content. http://academicearth.org/

mbowcockon Running Pure Django Projects on Google App Engine

I missed that when I copied the link. I can't edit it now.

mbowcockon Ask HN: "Restrained C++"?

I don't know what John Carmacks definition of 'restrained c++' is but this might interest you - http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tom/c++example/

"...a 25 page document outlining the most important aspects of C++ and steering you around those aspects of the language that would need to read an 800 page manual to understand."

Edit: Found this from John Carmack. Mostly c++ convention stuff.

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/doom3/source/CodeStyleConventions.doc