skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Boston Startup Meetup: Tuesday 22 April, 6:30pm
The Boston Startup Meetup started after the first Startup School (at Harvard in 2005). We have casual dinner meetings, so you can hang out with other techie startup folks, ask questions, and get feedback from people who know what they're talking about.

Join the email list for event announcements and local startup discussion:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/boston-startup-meetup/

RSVP for the April meeting:
http://www.mypunchbowl.com/parties/240386-boston-startup-meetup

After a hiatus of a few months, we're picking up again at a new location. Contact shimon at rura dot org if you have any questions.
Someone apply this to P vs NP.
Well, at least in the long run food and energy prices are going to start to leak into other prices.

As a side note, this is really bad for lower income individuals and families. A larger percentage of their income goes towards food and energy than a higher income individual/family. Not only are a lot of them dealing with mortgage issues and tighter credit availability - now they need to deal with this.
of course you are correct. I've been a Mac user since 1984 so I am horribly biased :-) In my three attempts to get Linux to run on a PC, I had three tremendous failures so I've given up. I can run most popular free apps like OpenOffice on OSX anyway (and I do) so I don't have a need for Linux. But for cheap hardware and the ultimate ability to tinker without big brother looking over your shoulder, Linux is fantastic.
while this might be true, i think focusing on this stuff is wasted time. i'm not a lisp programmer, but from reading about it here at hacker news, i'm pretty sure that the lisp community would only be hurting itself by taking the average blub programmer into account.
Installing Slime with SBCL 1.0.12 took just a few moments under OS X. I'd consider myself a newbie, but I did have emacs already installed.

Ports can indeed be a little messed up at times. For emacs, I find it fairly easy to just grab the latest source from gnu.org and build/install it with their instructions.
web.py is a good one for learning more about Python.
Good points. Perhaps the problem is also how lisp is taught? When I learned lisp, the procedural aspects of lisp were shown, but with the understanding that they were bad, and not to be used. Probably because it was shown as a functional language, and was meant to be used as such. Similar to how, say, c++'s functional programming capabilities aren't really taught.

If the indentation is sufficient, why not just remove the parens completely and rely on indentation?

Lisp does have an advantage in being regular, which might not be worth giving up, and Algol descendants are kind of a mishmash, to be fair. To be honest, I'm not enough of a lisp user to be able to know what a good solution is for this one. Maybe changing some function names would be useful.. for example 'add' is better than '+', which I read as 'plus'. Repurposing infix symbols as prefix symbols seems problematic.

If I were redesigning the language, one of the more important things I'd change is the keywords and builtins. For example, head and tail seem a lot better to me than car and cdr. A lot of lisp's keywords and functions come from math, and I'd probably change them to reflect mainstream algorithm design instead.
1. So what do you want to do about it? Are you going to force all these smart young people to stop joining google? Pass a law banning tech companies from giving out free gourmet food?

2. What you don't seem to realize is that the existing college curriculum in almost all US colleges, including the ivy league ones, do not correctly prepare a student for a real software engineering environment. Sure it's nice to learn all about algorithms and patterns and all that stuff, but until you actually dive into being part of a million-line project, you don't really know what it's like. Google is providing valuable real-world training to these freshies, using throw-away projects, well except sometimes one of those throw-away projects becomes something real and important. They also are creating a new generation of elite programmers who are setting new expectations in the marketplace such as:

a. Only technical people should manage technical people.
b. Programmers should be given the freedom to innovate and exercise their creativity.
c. Programmers should be pampered and treated to luxury so that they don't have to worry about anything other than coding.

You say that all these Google people are likely to stay at Google -- well that will remain true only if other companies don't start providing the same types of perks and environment as Google. Empirically we can already see that Facebook is doing just fine competing with Google for quality employees. Smaller companies can be competitive too -- ask Fog Creek (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...) if they have problems attracting quality candidates.

3. There are already TONS of startups started by ex-googlers, so in short, what I see, is not that Google is sucking up all this smart talent and then wasting them on creating ad-space. What I see is Google is gathering all this untrained potential, adding engineering discipline and high expectations from employers, and then letting them loose to spawn their own innovations.

4. In my personal experience, jealousy and whining makes you feel better temporarily, but they don't really solve any problems and they just keep you stuck in your current mode so that you forget to look for real solutions to your real problems. When you are a child, if you fall down and start crying, your mommy or some other adult will come over and pick you up and make you feel better again. When you become an adult you have to pick yourself up.
I bought my first Mac in 2002, a G3 iBook. I installed GCC via the standard OS X development tools, downloaded the source code for CLisp, did configure and make, and it built and ran "out of the box" the first time.

The build itself took something on the order of 20 minutes, but it worked without any issues.
I've read several articles about small projectors using LEDs that should be hitting the market Real Soon Now(tm): novalux.com, as well as some stuff from established companies. They should be cheaper, too: a few hundred $. I don't know when this will occur, however.
I find the issue interesting because the software the site is running on is interesting. If it was just phpbb lagging what ever, but as that is not the case I am intrigued to see the solution they come up with. (even if it is just "more hardware"). I haven't noticed slow down as much as links that go nowhere (like when you click on more at the bottom of the page occasionally it tells me the link is expired..)
"Apple wants the computer to become like a household appliance, closed to outside modification:" i think you're putting the cart before the horse, there.

i'm not sure where i read it, might have been in one of pg's essays. the author pointed out that, in the early days of the car, you had to be a car expert to own and operate one. they would break down all the time, your only hope was to know what to do when that happened. eventually cars were refined to the point where any and everybody can have one.

computers are on that same trajectory.
The Internet is actually a pretty good emulation of Pi/MonkeysWithTypewriters/LibraryOfBabel. Turns out, somebody else already talked about this:
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-82962.html
I think it would depend on the attitude of the person dispensing the cash. If it was in good natured fun, I can see it being great. If it's meant as a serious bonus/reward, I can see it backfiring.

Like I said before, I agree w/ the general idea of making a fun environment for your employees.
On the contrary, I'm suggesting that Lisp dialects do not diverge as far from each other as the various dynamic languages do. That means that the idiosyncrasies each dialect has are going to be more glaring. The other dynamic languages don't (yet) have dialects, so you don't have to take the design decisions of the interpreter into consideration - after you've decided on the language.

In that case, I think that there might be a better chance of a sub-set of Lisp dialects becoming popular if they were described as separate languages. It will be interesting to see how Arc develops from MzScheme, and whether or not it becomes more popular with non-Lispers.
There's nothing special about Google here. Sure some people want to go there purely for the culture but I bet most have enriching themselves as their top priority. Particularly higher ups like Douglas Merrill. The recent drop in GOOG prices probably left him with a ton of options that are underwater.
The User Experience of Software-as-a-Service Applications (UC Berkeley academic paper)
Actually, it might be more accurate to think of programming languages as genes rather than animals, or at least, to include programmers as an important part of the phenotype. A complication in the adaptation view is that programmers can stop certain "genes" from being expressed. So a language like Lisp might not catch on in certain environments because the features that would make it powerful, like metaprogramming, are never actually used.
One problem I have with Lisp is that there are a lot more fanatics than in other languages' communities. They are easily upset by even the mention of other languages and seem to see Lisp as the ultimate language with no room for any others. This produces blog and newsgroup posts extolling the virtues of Lisp and telling everyone who doesn't love Lisp that there is something wrong with them. People who say they know Lisp and still choose to use other languages are looked at as particularly defective. It's not just that they don't want to use other languages, it's more like they don't want other languages to exist. They spend at least as much time trying to make other languages look bad as they do trying to make Lisp look good.

I know this doesn't describe everyone who uses Lisp, but these fanatics are very vocal and the reason I stopped reading comp.lang.lisp and decided to try other languages. I am not against being excited about a language and trying to convince other people to use it. I love Haskell and tell people about how wonderful it is all the time, but I understand that they have reasons for using the tools they do. I am more interested in the theory of a language than in how good it is at solving some practical problem, but some people don't care at all about theory and just want to get things done. I don't understand why, but I accept it. I think that the most important thing the Lisp community can do to be more popular is to be friendly to newcomers and those who disagree about Lisp's superiority. There are some very helpful and friendly people, they just need to be more vocal and drown out those who are not.
In my opinion, if you don't learn Lisp at school, picking it up later in your spare time is going to be quite a task.

After reading and doing the exercises from the Touretzky book and The Little Schemer, plus some articles here and there on the 'Net my experience was:

1) Lisps have their annoyances like all languages. Lots of little non-intuitive keywords to memorize, the dotted pairs, quite the baroque computation model (variables having sub-variables, etc.), the FOR syntax, DO, etc. Not a deal breaker, but annoying. (Touretzky seems to fixate excessively on some of these weird traits of Lisp.)

2) If your Math chops are rusty, you are going to have to work twice as hard. Mine are, and I had to. If you are fresh from taking your Computability Theory course, then recursion and infix are going to be second nature. If you haven't been doing Math for a while, it's going to be hard. Another reason to learn Lisp while in college.

3) You can learn the syntax in 2 hours, yes, but to really know Lisp you need to really understand recursion, continuations, thunks, macros, multiple dispatch, all the fine points of object orientation (to understand the CLOS) and who knows what else. Basically, you need to have a deep understanding of, well, all of CS? This is not something that can be learned on your spare time unless you have lots of it.

In my case, I am starting The Seasoned Schemer now, and taking it slowly, under no illusion that I am going to learn Lisp any time soon. I may well be that I am one of those "stupid programmers" that are unsuited for Lisp. Oh well...
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Failure in the Grahammian sense of being a dead-end.

"I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language." - http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
Seems like a good idea, but why isn't Amazon providing this by default? It SHOULD be part of the service they offer.

Also, how well does SCALR actually work?
I think Perl has been relegated to short scripts and legacy code bases. I don't see a lot of new projects being developed in Perl. That's what I meant by leaving it off the list.
People like stuff that looks familiar but harder. To someone raised on C-style code, Lisp looks foreign and simpler, two big strikes.
I love it. It's the first music site I've been to that has grabbed me. I actually signed up for it, which is rare.

My only feedback is that the colors could be more subdued. Or more glaring. Actually, the colors of the headers seem a bit out of place.

But that's pretty detailed. :)
I can answer for my own startup. We're not doing any marketing for it until it's ready (although it's already useable and being used by some early clients), because we want to take the market by surprise. There's a bunch of stodgy old competitors in our niche, and the idea is that by the time they actually hear about us, they'll be hopelessly behind and might as well throw in the towel.

In fact, that's already the case - but why tell them? Let them think they still have a business, until we take it from them :-)

Daniel

Edit: Oh, it's worth pointing out that we're only applying this "stealth" to situations that might leak to our competitors - e.g. talking to people in the industry, or posting on online discussion forums :-) In person, I always explain what we do, without a second thought.
Haven't tried the firmware 2.0 (1.2.0) yet, but apparently it is very buggy and slow (exchange support broken, no 802.1X).

For the people who want to try it out just check out the largest torrent tracker in the world (wink).
Though I disagree with most of the conclusions in that essay, and in particular the expectation that Lisp (or a direct descendant) is going to be the language of the future, I still think it's way too early to call the above languages failures, even in the "Grahammiam" sense.

Python and Ruby especially are growing in popularity, and I think it's awfully premature to consider them evolutionary dead ends at this stage in the game.
I wrote about this a while back (http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/lisp-the-golden-ag...)

Basically, there are two Lisp eras - the big AI era and the new pg/Open Source era. The recent renewal of interest in programming languages, as well as publicity by writers like pg, Yegge, Raganwald, etc, have led more people to become interested in Lisp, but it's on an informal, person-by-person basis. Some of these people (like me) have chosen to stick with it and new Lisp communities have formed by gradual accretion. But this process has started later and been more distributed than other languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl).

In researching things and trying to figure out Lisp setup problems, I've noticed that there are fewer technical "How do I ..." questions now than a couple years ago but more usage questions. The technical problems are being solved and now more stuff "just works" - not completely but much more than in the recent past. I've noticed this for CLisp, SBCL, ASDF, and other tools. There's more documentation, more tutorials, etc. Now there are a couple young web frameworks (UCW, Weblocks), generally accepted libraries for common tasks, etc. Lisp is growing in popularity and is maybe 1-2 years away from being "tasteable" - ie you can try it out without a big hassle and a research project. I think that will be an inflection point, after which growth will come much faster.
OK, I'll bite;

(mapcar #'why-is-lisp-unpopular?
(list system-administration
enterprise-applications
web-applications
embedded-software
mobile-phone-apps
blogging-software
compiler-writing
configuration-files))

;)
Secret Weapons for Java Programmers
I feel there is a lot of value in a controlled launch, it takes a lot of effort and coordination (in most cases) to pull one off successfully. However, I think there is no good reason to keep your work completely in stealth, you want to be building up reputation and networking in your respective industry and you can't do that effectively with a tin foil hat on.
> My idea isn't even that novel or anything - it just isn't available as I envision it.

The "secret sauce" reference of the parent comment would seem to be directed specifically at this part. Don't bother to hide that you're making a new kind of (social network for cats|online word processor|whatever your concept is), but don't necessarily share the interesting part until you're ready to show it off.
yeah. It's the garbage collector.
All About Fonts : Part 2 : 10 Alternative Resources
yeah mzscheme is super simple to install on osx. I had similar results to the poster with clisp though. It was the reason I pretty much gave up on common lisp. I could install it and get slime working up on XP no problem, but getting anything to work on osx was difficult. This was a long time ago too and I was running 10.3, so maybe things have changed by now. I haven't tried installing any common lisp system since I've upgraded to 10.5.
Google Ad clicks are flat, the stock is falling
Thanks for organizing this. Looking forward to it.

And, if anyone is looking for a place to live, I'm planning to organize a "startup house":
- 6 to 8 hackers rent a big house and live together.
- You have to be working on a startup either full time or on the side
- You have to be interested in having hacker get-togethers at the house twice a month or so.
- Either Silicon Valley or San Francisco depending on people's preference.

If you're interested, drop me a line (email on my profile) and tell me what your preference is (SV vs SF) and if I get enough interest I'll let you know how the project progresses.
How do I startup if I don't own the code?
I was recently approached about commercializing some software I created while working at an academic research lab. I was paid with research grants so I'd assume the school owns the code.

I'd love to turn this into a startup... What's the best way to do it considering I don't know who owns the source?
Lisp n00b here too, and it's VERY frustating. Makes me remember the days where installing apache with php meant one day of reading docs and another afternoon of compiling. It's one hell of a learning curve, and it's mostly unnecessary: it's not about programming or system architecture, just about luck and getting it right.
Right now i'm having trouble connecting emacs to a remote slime for the first time. Started slime, created the tunnel, tried to slime-connect to localhost and... a strage error. I'll dive into it again on monday, but it'll probably be days before I either figure it out or go around it.
And the first time I tried lispmod with clisp on linux? Had to recompile the apache module with a line commented. Bad ideea anyways, since clisp doesn't have multithreading.

Don't get me wrong, i can't wait to start making software in lisp, it's just ... it's taking months to get there.
Craigslist Valuation: $80 Million in 2008 Revenue, Worth $5 Billion
I never had any trouble getting clisp running under OS X. MacPorts is nice as long as the port you're after actually works. Although, now that I think about it, I do recall the clisp port being broken at some point. I just downloaded the tarball and ./configure;./build'ed it myself, though.

PLT Scheme is much easier, though. I'd highly recommend it for any variety of noob. I've installed it with no issues on OS X, Windows, and FreeBSD.
"I've tried really hard to learn lisp, and it turns out that actually, while there may be some platonic lisp that IS great, actually programming common lisp, now, is a massive effort in struggling in the dark."

The weedout process has worked its magic again ;P

You usually get rewards proportional to the effort... I don't think lisp is beyond anyone's reach if they work faithfully on gaining proficiency in it for 3 months, maximum. 3 months is nothing if it makes you a much better programmer, and/or you get to use this awesome language.

I think it's important to first research lisp's benefits. Of course you won't be willing to spend the necessary efforts if you're not convinced... I know I just couldn't resist the appeal of closures, macros, CLOS (multiple inheritence, multimethods, class redefinitions) the condition system (restarts in particular), generalized variables and a bunch of other fun stuff.
http://www.amazon.com/Severe-Tire-Damage-Might-Giants/dp/B00...
The Economist's coverage of Eastern Europe is worthless, at best. Their Eastern Europe correspondent, Edward Lucas, also writes for The Daily Mail. You can see his work here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/dmsearch/overture.html?in_p...

He has a book out, called The New Cold War. And he's selling it, both to idiots who read The Daily Mail, and the fine (if not very well informed on this particular subject) people who read The Economist.
I actually think this is a task better suited as a layer for the interim. As per their new features last week, Amazon is clearly focused on the really hard stuff. What they should probably be announcing next is a guarantee of S3 and EC2 placement within a specific data center. Then things get really interesting. Maybe Amazon could integrate this project in their services at some point... but for now, it seems best on its own.
Social Networks threaten Friendship?
Do you notice how we've started to use "friend" as a verb...like, "Yeah, I'm going to friend you".
So it's become a verb, adding to it's meaning the social actions taken on the web.
Does this added meaning threaten to change the definition of the word "friend"?
I was paid with research grants so I'd assume the school owns the code.

I don't know what school you went to, but many (most?) large engineering/research institutions have a technology licensing office (e.g. http://web.mit.edu/tlo/www/) that can check that assumption definitively for you.
Talk to the University's tech transfer office.
Actually, waiting until the last minute to apply for a summer internship is often a good idea. You'll be competing against fewer applicants if a new spot opens up at the company. It worked for me both times I applied late much better than applying early.
I'd bootstrap it by focusing on one dorm or class at a time.
And what about CLOS? Does not make Lisp, in your words, a "hash programming language"?

Really I don't get the difference you state between list/hash programming languages, I've work a little with EcmaScript and I don't know anything about Io, but I'll put it in my to-do list. Can you, please, extend it? What's the main difference between them?

Because you say that the primary abstraction of a "list" programming language is a tree, which I think not. Since a tree is a directed graph without cycles, you wouldn't have loops. So, at least is a directed graph. But then, which property has the "hash" language graph that the "list" language graph has not? It's an undirected graph? It think it is not possible, because if it's undirected how do make your program to go "forward" and not "backward"?

I hope I'm not too obfuscated and my questions make some sense.