skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favourite part about this article is in the comments, where someone estimates CL's hosting costs about about $1 million a year for over 100 billion page views. But you can do that on a page load average of 6 kb. I used to work at a company whose nav images were each 50 kb.

Text-only = everyone's best interest!
SBCL isn't as happy as CLISP for w32
>On the contrary. I want really bright people to assign themselves in a way that isn't ridiculous.

That is, ridiculous to you. You want the job market to fit your idea of what people should be doing.
The source repository is here:

http://git.jrock.us/?p=Perlisp.git;a=summary

It's pretty useless right now though :) I started rewriting the reader, but didn't like any of the parsing modules on CPAN... so it's sitting at that stage right now. When I get some tuits, I'll probably just port over SBCL's reader, or perhaps emacs'.
I don't understand why Java is "hashtable-oriented"...

What design flaws of Lisp are seen as features?
I think you can use any version control system with any project. I can't understand what prevented you from using Git for your Rails projects (unless you develop rails itself).
Well, to some extent there exists a unparenthesized version of Lisp: Logo :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29

And for the names used for the keywords and builtins, I agree with you.

About the +/add, I really don't see too much problem.
Nova Spivack: “The Semantic Web as an open and less evil web”
Ask YC: Question(s) for speech technology experts.
I would really appreciate if someone working on speech technologies (speech to text or text to speech) can provide some insight on this?

Since past couple of months, I have been completely fascinated with what speech technologies (specifically speech recognition and speech synthesis) can do and how they can enhance the user experience. I decided to delve deep into speech synthesis technologies. From my research into available solutions, there is a huuuuuuuuge difference between the open source solutions and the commercial solutions available for $$$$$.

From what I have read about speech recognition, the open source solutions perform extremely poorly when compared to their commercial counterparts.

Has anyone else here looked at the possibility of improving any of the available open source speech technologies to a level where it is close to the commercial ones? Is it even possible to improve Sphinx or festival to a level where it can be commercially used without developing everything from scratch?
Is it something even worth investigating?

Is it possible for someone working in this area to articulate the challenges(technical/monetary etc.) involved?

Okay, thanks a lot for reading this. Looking forward to your comments.

P.S.:

I would really really like to get opinion from someone who has worked or is working in this area about their experiences. I am located in south bay.
I am also attending the startup school this month.
The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation but practice increases willpower capacity
Incidentally, in python 2.5 and later (probably not available in Dapper's repo), you should use the standard hashlib module for generating hash digests.
Fact of life?

Plied with alcohol, I could provide multiple anecdotes about VCs taking meetings solely to funnel competitive intel to portfolio companies; I did a pitch meeting once where a senior partner for a top tier VC literally ambushed us with a competitor in the room.
How long would it take you to redo what you did at the research lab?
Great implementation, well thought out with the music playing from page to page. Impressive.

Design-wise you should get pick up or contract a visual designer/creative director to really get you to the next level.
Perhaps the organization is the project. Haven't you guys read the Dune books?

Google is the seemingly invincible Tyrant. It had the foresight to see that computer science would soon be extinct if programmers were allowed to continue working for large mindless corporations. It hires Gholas (I mean programmers) for their skills, but who are increasingly suspicious of the uses their skills are put to. When at last the Tyrant dies, the programmers will scatter, never again willing to work for a big company.
> - choosing an implementation is a research project (clisp? sbcl? allegro?) - documentation is weaker - libraries are harder to find and install (ASDF vs Rubygems, Python eggs, etc.) - emacs/slime is an investment to learn - examples are few and far between - the language itself (the words, not the punctuation) is inelegant (mapcar, setq, cdadr)

- Exactly.

Last year I started reading about Lisp etc, and wanted to play with it a little bit.

These are the exact same obstacles I faced.

If you ask about "IDEs" for Lisp, you're met with downright hostility for not embracing the glory of emacs with open arms - anything else is just unfathomable.

Well, what if I'd like to just, you know, start using the language, and not learn a whole new world of an editor first?

"Why does emacs + SLIME have to be the only viable option?"

That's not a question you can ask, of course, but the answer would be something like "roll your own" anytime you need anything.

(Oh, and Xach is a prick. He and Krysztov(or whatever) are practically high-fiving each other on IRC every time they alienate another new would-be Lisper)

As for the implementation research, I sort of came to the conclusion that SBCL was the way to go, but documentation (for anything?) was pretty scarce, and ASDF feels like an obstacle too.

Later on, I realized that Scheme is more elegant as a language, but it's more or less in the same situation as CL.

Compared to these two, something like Python feels much more accessible to me (being a novice at all), because I get the feeling that I can just start using things whenever I want to make that effort.

But that's just it - with Python, there's only the effort of learning the language as you use it.

You learn the standard library as you go, and suddenly you notice you've accomplished a lot of things and had fun while at it.

- At least that's how I imagine it will be when I get around to working on my own super-secret web-startupy project.

With Lisps, you need to make a lot of effort just to get to the beginning, and that's a big problem.
If that's the case, either the business is built around a weak concept or you don't work hard enough.

That's a bit of an oversimplification. Contrary to popular Web 2.0 belief, first mover advantage is real in some sectors.
Your comment gave me a crazy idea. What if one was to respond to a flamebait with a counterargument or refutation, and then create another username and add another intelligent comment that contradicted the first one you posted? So then the thread would look like this:

1. Original flamebait

2. Congent response to flamebait (posted by you using username 1)

3. Congent response to post 2 (posted by you using username 2)

This might be slightly unethical, but it means that the original flamer will always be dissuaded from posting again, and you're more likely to get more congent discussion participants.

If using multiple usernames bothers you, you could probably just check yourself with a small counterargument at the end of post 2, and it seems likely that the original flamer would still be dissuaded.
amen on the afternoon walks... i recently kicked an 8 cup a day habit and, besides afternoon grogginess, I feel frikin' great. Getting up and walking around usually does the trick better than a bump of caffeine any day.
not too long, but the concepts would be exactly the same... wouldn't it then become, "who owns the idea?"
Why not to do DEMO or TC50
There is no such legal concept, at least not in the United States. One can own an implementation of an idea, but not an idea. If you can implement the concepts in a novel way, you're fine.
I haven't noticed too much slowness lately...but I am guessing the web application's user sessions have been reset a few times over the past two days, as I keep having to log in even though my browser cookies are enabled correctly.
This bug was the last straw for why I stopped using the pycrypto library and wrote my own Python wrappers about Crypto++:

http://allmydata.org/trac/pycryptopp
Hi JMiao, The site is loading too slow for me to try it. I will check back later in an hour or so. I tried both firefox and flock to check thesixtyone.com.
Craigslist responds to Connecticut AG's allegations that they "profit from prostitution"
1) There's lispbox for linux too.
2) apt-get install sbcl: 30 seconds
Hmm, that's odd. It's working ok on my end. Please write back if you're still running into any issues.
Some schools are really good about this. CMU for example is extremely flexible, even with patents.

But I'd also recommend looking at the terms of the contract that gave you funding.

Government funded projects usually include government purpose rights. It depends on the contract how bad the rights are for a company.

In most cases, government funding means that in a pinch, they can take all your tech and give it to another company to mass produce. The reason would probably be some wartime situation where you needed to produce a million X to fight. I think this happened to B52s in WWII.

Other recommendations about tech transfer are spot on.

You should also take this as an opportunity to network with potential investors. Go to your school's entrepreneurship center (if they have one), and talk to people there about your plans.

I know for CMU, you can meet lots of Angels that way. Lots of the associated companies have probably gone through the same process.
What if that were actually the (unfortunate) name of their startup? =P
Raises some interesting points about differences in business cultures. One thing that would get lost in the Chinese approach is having access to records of conversations -- I use email search every day to check the status of projects in various stages of development.
Expedia Gets A Homosexual Partner
Win: Google Maps was not designed for GIS. Even Google was surprised at the first GoogleMaps Mashup (Story: http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/Profile.aspx?Cand=T&...)

EveryBlock's Maps are built on the open, vector-based (read: fast rendering) standard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Map_Service

Lose: Closed API (which is ok, it's a competitive advantage)
Sun close to buying Intel would-be competitor Montalvo
Make it: 3 months full time, plus whatever amount of time is needed to become deeply conversant with all the underlying lambda calculus concepts.
I've been using thesixtyone.com on and off for awhile, it's a nice site. Only thing I would say is the site seems kind of busy at times and it's hard to pick something. Usually though I just go to it, press play .. and let it go (I don't rate or anything)
More data usually beats better algorithms: part 2
Or that there are less government-sponsored AI projects?
Will There Ever be a Viable Adsense Competitor?
That's the thing. The thing I'm working on is not difficult technically (its a web application). But it will require lots of local travel on my part (expensive) . If my idea were to get out, someone with the capital ready could easily gain first-mover advantage, which definitely counts.
I think parens would be less of a problem if the indentation conventions were easier on the eyes. Sometimes you need a ruler to figure out those 1-space indentations.
Next time, submit the original article please.
I seem to be getting logged out more frequently than usual (i.e. once a day; it used to be never). Perhaps that would explain the higher amount of anonymous requests?
I had a sense of Deja Vu reading this. Old "analysis". http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2006/2/6/craigslist-is-wor...
that's perfectly reasonable. we realize that the interactive portion of the site appeals to different people on varying levels, and that's a big reason why most of the site is accessible without having to signup (and the homepage autoplays).
> while others would tell me to low-fat milk when mixing their caramel machiattos with whipped cream because they want to lose weight.

Magic milk! :)
I'm listening in from northern Thailand and it seems great so far. I like how responsive the UI feels, and the way the player stays out of the way and lets me browse all over the site.

* Can I bump a song by clicking somewhere in the mini-player that sits in the top of the screen? that part confused me a bit.

* It'd be nice to have standard pause/next buttons in the mini-player. I'm not used to having to click a text link "next" to advance songs, and it's such a small text link it's hard to click without thinking.

* Sometimes it seems weird to have all the notifications come up in the bottom-left. It's a sort of cool concept, but when I click "What's this?" I think I'd rather see placement more akin to a tooltip (right by the mouse-pointer) instead of having to look down at the corner of my window.

* I first thought that "+add" would add a song to my playlist. Actually I'm not sure how the whole playlist thing works here (how I can know exactly what's coming next and how to modify that list?).

* Under "my music" I don't seem to be able to do anything with the songs/artists except drag them. I can't click to view their page, or listen to the song, etc.
Oh, figured it out now - but still not sure why 2 steps are necessary here. Why not have the song in the table expand in-place? (and include a play button even before it's expanded?)
Oh, one major issue I've noticed with thesixtyone is that it lags firefox (2, or Beta 5) when I am listening. Not all the time, just has random jolts of slowness. Not sure why, I've run Firebug on the site and it doesn't seem to be any AJAX queries, looks like it's the "Ever-loading" JS and Flash files
you're not a sales guy
My tentacles have only found two decent hashtable-oriented languages: JavaScript >~1.5 and Io.

I'm not sure whether or not you'd find it "decent", but you might consider adding Lua to your list. It's small, relatively fast, and uses hashtables as its composite data structure. It also has some other neat stuff, like tail-calls and coroutines.
You're assuming your conclusion. Obviously, a product that dramatically simplified programming to the point where anyone (or "Bob") could do most of what they need, would be valuable. The question is whether these products really do that, or merely appear to.
There is a long and ignoble tradition in the software industry of vendors who prey on the ignorance of managers and executives to sell expensive tools that allegedly eliminate or reduce the need for programming. Executives fall for it because they know that programming is hard and expensive but not why it is. The prospect of a tool that will eliminate their dependency on programmers is very seductive. What programmers produce is usually late and over budget and works like crap. They themselves tend to be weird, geeky, and erratic. Who wouldn't want to be rid of them? Meanwhile, the vendors with the magic programmer-replacement tool are wearing nice suits and know all about the problem. They are full of stories about how great it would be if business people - normal people - could "just" make the computer do what it should. "Defining business processes" shouldn't have to require programming, after all. Normal people know about business processes.

This is a sales job made in heaven. At no point in the process - the sales process - is it required for the tool to actually work. All they need is enough of a demo to convince the stakeholders - who already want to believe - that it will take away their pain.

At this point the well-chosen trivial visual example inevitably makes its triumphant appearance. Who can look at the diagram the post cited (http://secretgeek.net/image/NXTCode_small.jpg) and take anything associated with it seriously? Yet people do. Important people.

In this dysfunctional dynamic, a new crop of tools that will work "this time" makes a predictable appearance every 5-10 years. One reason this persists is that it's in no one's interest to publicize the failures. When such tools are purchased, rolled out, forced on organizations, and result in an even greater clusterf--k than what was there before, who's going to say so out loud? Obviously neither the vendors nor the executives. And only programmers listen to programmers.
I get the "unknown or expired link" error almost every time I comment... probably because it always takes me 10 minutes to sift through the muddled essay I write to myself before figuring out what I actually want to say.

Anyway, the error is annoying as hell.
Thanks very much for the link to the documentary. It shows what a monster this industry has become due to deregulation and lack of oversight. Reminds me of Enron when they found loopholes and toyed with California energy prices. Like minting money.
Wait, when did they start speaking German in Austria? :-)
strange world on how facebook is worth 3 times more than CL?
People always seem to make the same mistakes in their thinking, again and again.

Few years ago no one thought that IBM can be crushed. It looked like an eternal company that nearly monopolized the market. Then, Microsoft appeared and changed the computer industry we know. After few years, everyone recognized Microsoft as a giant forever. Of course, it didn't take too much time to Yahoo! to appear, and then, to Google to appear.

Other thing we can learn from the history is that today's market doesn't matter in the long run. You don't innovate by fighting their own game, but by creating your own, with your rules.
Monster Savings from Virtualization on Sesame Street
I think this is a feeble excuse. That is, it's an excuse generated by a lazy mind. The first time I saw Lisp, I was not "primed" to dislike it. It was early in my programming education. I was fresh, as they say. It looked no more cluttered than Pascal, the main language being taught at the time.

Can I write really ugly and hard to visually parse Lisp? Yes. Bad code can be written in any language.
That will be interesting to see. I really don't think Pownce gets anything close to reddit's traffic
apt-get install sbcl
This could be one of those new layers of abstraction that accelerates the entire field.
Microsoft is to Release Open-Source Compatible XAML/WPF Specs
"The weedout process has worked its magic again ;P"

Please don't call me a weed.

You point out that the more effort you expend, the better you get. The problem is the rate of reward. Getting a productive lisp environment is hard work. Competing implementations, sometimes-compatible libraries, very little documentation -- these are things that make lisp, holistically, hard to adopt. Every other production language makes it easier to get to the programming. I can't think of a worse-supported production language than lisp.

Also, the benefits you mention are either not that uncommon, or that valuable. The only thing lisp has as a unique feature is it's macro system, thanks to it's syntax. It's the only thing that can't be adapted straight into another language. Otherwise, the features you mentioned are basically available elsewhere; Visual Basic has closures. C++ has multiple inheritance. Python has multimethods. Ruby has class redefinitions.

The thing is, I wanted to believe. I stocked up my library with PCL, SICP, the little schemer, and On Lisp. I learned emacs. I stuggled with asdf. What I found, though, did not seem to live up to the promise of a hidden pearl.
As you seem to be just starting out, I would suggest a ground up approach to learning how to build web apps, choice of language being rather secondary here. Have a look at:

http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/
You're saying nobody can become proficient (not "deeply conversant") in lisp in 3 months because I can't become deeply conversant in lambda calculus in 3 months?!

nobody, proficient, lisp.
I, deeply conversant, lambda calculus.
You're comparing apples and oranges.

I learned lisp (pretty deeply, I'd qualify myself as intermediate then and now) in what... 5 or 6 months? And I was alone. And I didn't know emacs. With some coaching and pointers I'm pretty sure I could have made it in 4. Aren't you happy?
Thanks for the tip. I've heard some good things about Lua, but never gone further than Wikipedia.
Terracotta Builds Java Clusters
While lisp code is represented as lists, other user data can be represented with hash tables, vectors, arrays, classes, etc, including lists. (Yes, the name "lisp" refers to lists, but the language has grown since the name was picked.)

Also, it's easy to represent arbitrary graphs with lists, in much the same way that you'd do so with hash tables, structs, etc. Yes, the way that a node refers to other nodes differs but there's no restriction on the relationship of the nodes or the overall structure. (The difference between different kinds of graphs has nothing to do with how one node refers to another.)

And, macros have nothing to do with any of this because they are "just" code that turns code into other code. Perhaps another code representation would be better than lisp's, but since few languages have one, and some of those that do break it with every release....

In short, Gordianknot's thesis and examples are wrong, he doesn't understand graphs, and he has no idea what macros do.
Parenthesis fade into the background with experience (especially if your code is well-formatted), in the same way you start to group things by curly braces in C or Java over time.

No one looks at C code the first time and thinks it's clear to understand.
Really what are classes other than sugary hashtables?
Ditz is a simple, light-weight distributed issue tracker
"Please don't call me a weed."

Sorry :(

"You point out that the more effort you expend, the better you get. The problem is the rate of reward. Getting a productive lisp environment is hard work. Competing implementations, sometimes-compatible libraries, very little documentation -- these are things that make lisp, holistically, hard to adopt. Every other production language makes it easier to get to the programming. I can't think of a worse-supported production language than lisp."

I agree.

"Also, the benefits you mention are either not that uncommon, or that valuable. The only thing lisp has as a unique feature is it's macro system, thanks to it's syntax. It's the only thing that can't be adapted straight into another language. Otherwise, the features you mentioned are basically available elsewhere; Visual Basic has closures. C++ has multiple inheritance. Python has multimethods. Ruby has class redefinitions."

Well, it's uncommon and valuable to have all of them in a coherent language. Especially since they're pretty orthogonal features that complement eachother well. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

"The thing is, I wanted to believe. I stocked up my library with PCL, SICP, the little schemer, and On Lisp. I learned emacs. I stuggled with asdf. What I found, though, did not seem to live up to the promise of a hidden pearl."

I'm sorry that you've come to the conclusion lisp is not right for you. Maybe in a couple years you can try again and most implementation/library/documentation/etc issues will be resolved?
Boeing Flies First Ever Hydrogen Fuel Cell Plane
Some additional opinions...

Ask Hacker News: What Python web framework should I use?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=129121
I'm not sure if you are referring to me (the post's author) or not. In any case, what I was trying to say, is "where is the viable AdSense competitor?" and not "that there will never be one." In fact, the post casually argues the opposite, i.e. that there should be one already!

Or are you trying to say that it is a waste of time to chase AdSense and instead one should concentrate on some end-run around it? To that I would say, well, both! There seems no no reason to forgo billions of dollars in yearly revenue for the foreseeable future.
>That taught me a lesson.

To test stuff ? Yup.