skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the site contained a strong privacy guarantee on the front page -- basically, no data about individuals' surfing habits will be stored, but aggregate data about overall traffic will be stored unless you opt out -- I would use it if I needed it.
"PHP scales down like no other package for the web and it deserves more credit for tackling that scope."

See: http://www.welton.it/articles/scalable_systems.html
I'm certainly looking forward to what my fixed mortgage and student loan payments are going to look like 10 years from now :). Run, inflation, run!
Here, for starters:

http://www.strongtalk.org/
http://rubini.us/
http://www.cons.org/cmucl/
If you use a common language (PHP, Perl, possibly Ruby on Rails), you can get a crappy shared host for cheap (I have 1 yr of TextDrive for $100). This will let you host a web app (or several) and let you put a toe in the water. If one of the apps gets some traction, it's easy to move to beefier hardware later.

That's all you need from a money perspective. After that all you need to do is invest lots of time and programming effort. No price tag but a significant cost :)
You might try ReadyLisp for Mac OS at http://www.newartisans.com/software/readylisp.html.

It uses Aquamacs, SBCL and SLIME. Just drop the icon in the applications folder.
Does anyone here have a single example of a performance problem caused by using a 'dynamic' language rather than a 'static' language? The only performance problems I've ever encountered 'in the wild' have been down to things like database access, I/O, bad sorting algorithms, string concatenation, etc.
I, too, am very sceptical of the second claim (about training your willpower). I have pushed myself as far as I can over long periods of time without noticing any increase in the size of my willpower muscle.
I was disappointed to read that Scalr requires its own machine images. I'd prefer a generic component that I could hook up to my own existing images. (Which aren't even web servers...)
Is that really an issue? I've stumbled across NSFW sites when I had day jobs and nobody minded. People actually found it kinda funny.
Hmmm...I'm not sure if I buy that statement...is there strong correlation between income and debt levels? Any data to back up that statement? I mean basic financial advice is that everyone should maintain a health "debt to income" ratio - so according to that, debt should increase with income. That's theory...I searched for a graph of income vs net worth, but couldn't find one.

Most low income working people I know avoid debt like the plague - with the exception of car loans and house loans, which low and middle income people pretty much approach the same way, but just purchasing at varying price levels.

Just to be clear, I'm comparing low and middle income families. That said, low income people do spend a larger percentage of their money on food and energy as compared to middle income families (since everyone needs to feed themselves, keep themselves warm and go places).

I think students would be the only exception to this...but I'd guess they're an exception, as they are taking out debt because they know their future earnings are going to go up in the long run.

Edit: However I do see what you're saying in terms of upper income people losing money tied to investments due to inflation. But I'm just saying, all else equal, for a zero-debt lower income household vs a zero-debt middle income household (of which there exist many), the lower one is going to get hit hard by this.
Sources of Seed Funding
The Lisp world is fragmented. It's not just all the different Lisps, it's all the different <Lisp,OS> pairs (or even <Lisp,OS,editor> triples). They all behave differently. There's also randomness involved: I bet there are others out there complaining that they couldn't get Clisp running with Slime on Windows XP.

I doubt this will change. The Lisp universe has always been decentralized (which has been one of the secrets of its innovativeness). Its culture tends to be individualistic, which makes things more, not less fragmentary. And there's still another point - once you do get things working, they work so well that you forget about the initial pain. So the world divides into people who remember nothing but the pain (because they never broke through the threshold) and people who remember nothing about it (because they're too busy loving the other side).

The good news is that once you do get things running you will approximately never have that problem again. The differences, at least in the Common Lisp case, are greatest at the noob stage and cause comparatively little trouble later on. I realize this is no consolation to the noob.

There are enough kind and intelligent people in the Lisp world who like to help others learn, and this problem is complained about so widely and loudly, that if a technical solution were possible I think we'd have it already. Maybe in the absence of that, we need to do a better job of telling the story of why Lisp is the way it is, and of helping people get through that initial stage... maybe a social network to pair Lisp noobs with expert buddies :)

But even this would run up against the cowboy culture. I don't mean cowboy as in "cowboy coding". I mean the old west, do-it-yourself value system. In my imagination at least, old cowboys would help noob cowboys, but they wouldn't coddle them. They'd make sure you didn't get killed, but they sure as heck wouldn't make sure you didn't get hurt... they'd think it was good for you.
Tell me about it. Despite all the flack XP gets/deserves, this one time, it just worked. Apple and Linux just didn't work.
Not sure I understand your question here. Who is the intended user or audience of the metrics?
Nice beta. Nice functionality. I could see using this while I work at my desk. I will bookmark it.

I always find the most value in detailed critical feedback. In that spirit:

There is a lot of subtle visual dissonance on your website. It looks like you put some effort into the design, but it fails because of small details. It's a shame to have a promising functionality masked with so much ugly.

The blue yellow and pink text is ugly. It draws the eye away from your app. It's hard for me to switch between reading text of different colors. When I look at those bright colors, your app and the light green text just fades into the background. I think the green and orange are nice cool colors. Stick with cool colors like that. Subtle is better.

Do you want round corners or square corners? I think you should round them all to soften the page. You are locked into squares for the album covers, but all square is too aggressive, so you should make the rounding more subtle. You have giant rounding that is dissonant with os x and album cavers and half the site. Use tiny little rounding so it blends with the OS X apps and the square corners on the album cover. Again, subtle. I shouldn't notice corners, here I do.

Your growl clone belongs top right of window, not bottom right.

It shouldn't beep and say stupid things. We are listening to music and beeps suck if you are listening. They are not 'fun' just superfluous. Assume your audience is more intelligent then the mtv crowd. Real listening requires focused attention and the beeps are insulting to the music of the artists you host. It's not consistent with the goal of allowing people to discover awesome songs, because a lot of awesome songs require careful listening. Listening to a great song with those interruptions is like looking at a van gogh with kids stickers on it. Let your artists control 100% of the audio experience from your site. Slightly shaking the growl would be an acceptable alternative.

Incidentally, I heard many really kick ass songs.

My impression of the site is positive. The engine is good, it's functionality is good, it's design was overall good, but details were weak despite honest effort, and it's music is good. Hire a geek with a minimalist aesthetic to fix your designs small details.

I'm looking forward to an iPhone app of this.

Aside from this starting a business stuff, I'm a musician, and I would love for a site like this to replace MySpace as the default for musicians.
There are enough kind and intelligent people in the Lisp world who like to help others learn, and this problem is complained about so widely and loudly, that if a technical solution were possible I think we'd have it already.

A technical solution would be 1) click to download, 2) unzip, and 3) drag to applications folder. On top of that, the lisp that does this should be easier to find, and lisps that are more difficult to deal with should be harder to find, lest a noob tries to install them.
Gotcha. Well maybe you could do this asynchronously, after page load? Once the page is done loading, extension fires off for info about links on the page? Assuming this didn't take to long, it might be doable before they clicked a new link.

Also, extensions have access to cookies per domain? Maybe the extension could use this to cache results for a given page client-side?
Right. There are some network effects in this market, but they're not that strong. Offer more money, and people will jump. It's not like the MS Office market where people have to be dragged kicking and screaming to a free alternative.
Ask YC: Hosting your source code outside, it's really secure?
I'm seeing a lot of people who host code outside. Maybe to get aditional functionalty or as a backup solution.

If you are a small startup, and your code is your life, because u worked so hard on it, its really a good idea host it outside? Using Lighthouse App, or any other service?
hrm. I do all of my real work on linux and am writing this comment on my linux workstation - so I'm far from a linux basher.

But, getting fonts that don't suck ass takes a lot of dingy work on linux (fedora, ubuntu, arch, you name it - in my humble experience). And even after that work, the fonts are still ugly compared to either windows or osx.

And personally (being an old bsd guy), I find macports makes far more sense than yum (what a pile of crap), apt isn't so bad, but I still prefer a port tree.
If nothing on the page I linked seems suspect to you, I don't think anything I say will help, either. And this isn't the place to talk about politics, anyway. I just thought many fans of The Economist here would be shocked to see that a writer they trust also writes that in his spare time.
Traversing the entire DOM on page load and rewriting all links for large pages would also slow down the page though.

Also rewriting links seems too intrusive for my tastes and means I cant "Copy link location" which I frequently do. I like the idea, but I personally would have just used a single "click" event handler on the entire page using the capturing phase and hijack links to redirect through your site first, rather than doing a rewrite for every link in the dom
China's Instant Cities
This essay was great it really gave me an insight to a programmers mind and actions!!!!
You seem to have missed my point. I'm not saying a technical solution is hard to describe. I'm saying it's hard to implement - perhaps much harder than it seems. You'd have to do it for all Lisps on all OS's. As your own post indicates rather clearly, getting it to work with one Lisp on one OS isn't enough.

As for how to ensure that one thing is harder to find on the internet than another, I suppose we can leave that as an exercise to the reader.
Instead of rewriting the links, can you asynchronously (without holding up the browser) check all the external links after the page loads and mark all the nsfw links in red or something like that? This way, privacy concerns can be addressed to a certain extent (if you can also don't store the current url that I am on).

[edit:oops, just noticed that Husafan comment says pretty much the same thing.]
Google Guice, it's the bee's knees:

http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/
As far as I can tell, you're talking about your experience of what's easier and harder. Your experience is not "the brain".

Certainly if you're habituated to the object-model style of programming, other forms of abstraction may seem weird. The irony here is that twenty years ago, the people making your kind of argument were directing it all against objects.

As a side note, treating programming objects as if they were physical objects works as long as there's a good fit between the two. As soon as you need the objects to behave in ways that physical objects don't (and believe me, in any complex OO system, you will), you find yourself tied up in knots that it will take a lot of thinking to extricate yourself from. (Speaking of complexity that isn't intrinsic to the problem...) Not accidentally, the tools that people reach for then tend to be ersatz versions of metaprogramming (reflection, code generation), and Greenspun is off to the races...
I did, and I didn't.

The "I did": It seems very sensible to use s-expressions for everything. That lispy syntax meant that I started seeing ways to encode almost everything as lisp. I even started keeping a todo list in s-expressions;

(do
(buy bread)
(tidy (kitchen living-room bathroom))
(get life))

The classic XKCD cartoon had it perfectly: "I felt a great enlightment. I saw the naked structure of Lisp code unfold before me. The patterns and metapatterns danced. Syntax faded"

I didn't: when it came to actual common lisp, cracks started to appear. The crazy mini-language for looping. The arbitrary-sounding names. The feeling that, if I ever wanted to do anything remotely windows-specific I would face years of horror.

I've blooged about it more at http://www.stevecooper.org/2008/02/13/impractical-uncommon-l..., if you've got too much free time. ;)
I love distributed version control: before Git I used darcs extensively. Darcs is really nice, and was developed by one of my high school classmates (a fellow physicist), but it seemed that its bugs and performance problems would go perpetually unfixed. I started to look for a replacement.

Git was the leading contender. Yes, Git rocks, but there's more to it than that. When your SCM of choice also hosts the Linux kernel (and, indeed, was developed for that very purpose), you know it will never be abandoned. No serious bug can last for long. That risk mitigation is worth a lot, and it's one of Git's biggest strengths.

I realized about three months ago that Git was going to win. I'm not sure what tipped it, but it made me happy: partially because I felt proud to have figured it out, but mostly because it meant I could stop agonizing about which SCM to use.

Viva Git!
Lighthouse is actually for issue tracking. The company that makes Lighthouse also makes Warehouse, a similarly elegant system that developers install on their own servers.
I could do that.
"Otherwise, the features you mentioned are basically available elsewhere; Visual Basic has closures. C++ has multiple inheritance. Python has multimethods. Ruby has class redefinitions."

Exactly. Common Lisp is close to a superset of the features of other programming languages.

Even in cases where Common Lisp lacks a feature, if it's something that can be expressed by changing syntax, macros can get you pretty close. I remember a thread on comp.lang.lisp where several people had a go at adding pattern matching to Common Lisp, for example, and were able to get a pretty long way towards that goal in a short amount of time. Another example: seems like half of the Lisp books out there present an implementation of Prolog in Lisp.
It is amazing how people always diss stuff they haven't even tried.
I could do that.

I had decided against it earlier due to the potential lag.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153491
or may be offer both? People who want speed but aren't concerned about privacy can use the current set up. May be this can be a monetization idea too... the more private path = $5 per month "a small insurance against getting fired"
Objective-C?
"And what about CLOS? Does not make Lisp, in your words, a "hash programming language"?"

I think in the "hash" languages, you usually consider the method to "belong" to an object in some way.

With multi-method dispatch, the relationship between objects and methods is more fluid. So I think there is a difference here, too.

It's not that "list" languages only use tree structures for everything, just that trees are the more "natural" choice in those languages.
The Letter Project
You can host on port 80 on your home DSL?
You can screen scrape nsfw.reddit
Mouni Sadhu (kind of a new-age crackpot, but a very to-the-point and convincing writer) wrote about this in his book Samadhi, which I think was published in the 50s. He talked about starting off restricting small aspects of your behavior (like eating dessert), keep at it for 8 weeks or so at which point it becomes habitual, and then move onto tougher restrictions. But, if you start to ease back into the things you've already conquered, believing that "oh i'm strong enough to do this in moderation now", your tower of willpower will collapse. I don't know his methodology for getting this info, but it probably wasn't rigorous.
Won't that choice become too technical ?
And is it acceptable to charge for privacy ?
Ask PG: Why the cookie change?
Seems like in the last week or so, I keep having to go back to the login page. It didn't use to be that way.

It's annoying, and when you combine it with the new ClickPass option, it looks a lot like a "push" towards using that service.

Is there a technical reason for the new behavior? Is it related to the server slowness we had a while back? Apologies if somebody else has already asked this question.
Lua? It is very simple language. Unfortunately, there is a performance penalty with dynamic langues, which wont go away.
I'm pretty sure it's because they've been rebooting the server(s) more frequently. It's related to that slowness that we were experiencing the other day.

You'll notice that the first time you view your comments after a reboot, they get loaded into memory, and the page takes forever to load.
Yes. You are thinking of dynamic langauges merely on the function of being used on web apps. Embeded programming, programs in mobile applications, Javascript, Actionscript in flash.... you name it. Performance is important, especially on applications that are intesive (computing wise), and not i/o wise.

Eg. Games: A lot of games use something like Lua for scripting their UI, but for the hardcore game engine they use C or C++
This is something I have recently been very curious about. The services offered by Beanstalk and Github are very alluring.
If you can't maintain your large scale PHP projects, more blame lies with you than it does the platform.

Unfortunatley, the ease of getting PHP scripts up and running leads to the bulk of its poor implementation. Is the lesson to make setup just difficult enough to scare of the novices?
Interesting... I haven't tried anything but apt, but everything I've ever need has always been on it, and of a relatively latest version with hot updates.

Regarding fonts, it's subjective matter of course, but you can look at my desktop (I just did a screen shot) with my font settings. Here we go, no text file editing, just adjusted my font appearance in "Fonts" tab in Gnome:

http://kontsevoy.com/gutsy.png

My wife has been envious about this "punchy" font rendering for quite some time (until she got a Mac), but my colleagues at work still are (they're still on Windows).
"I am saying that working with objects and methods requires less high-level cognitive processing than macros and continuations, not that you don't have to think about them. This is because the brain can treat the objects largely as if they were physical objects. With macros that is much harder."

It's not. It's just a matter of practice. Most people find OO modeling natural (even when it is extremely tortured and difficult) because they've acquired a comfort with it born of many hours of practice. You might argue that you're not referring to familiarity with the paradigm, but I think you are, and don't realize it.

I assure you that a functional style has equal power to abstract as a OO style. You're right, our brains have a good ability to think of things as sets of objects. But the lisp style leverages the linguistic propensity to give words special significance. We're also very good at learning languages and parsing sentences in context, so the lisp linguistic style leverages similar natural cognitive abilities.
Well, you have to put it in a different way :-)

IMHO you have to offer the more private option (regardless of your monetization plan) just to get the early adopters who usually are geekier than the masses and hence care about privacy.
Tacoda, revenue science, blue lithium?
anyone have any experience running ads with these guys?
Thanks for the inputs.

I had anticipated privacy concerns, but in all fairness, this is an early prototype.
> was only talking about the code itself, the primary metaphor of the programming language, not what the language actually represents. Most langs that I've encountered are structured as semi-formalized strings (i.e. C-derived langs), where as Lisp is structured in "physical" lists.

Huh? Let's review.

>>>If that's true, it follows list-oriented languages are inherently inferior to their hashtable-oriented brethren.

Javascript code is semi-formalized strings or ASTs.

The careful reader has noticed that lists that represent code are ASTs with context-dependent field names. Since the nodes provide the context, said dependence isn't a big deal.

I don't know how many javascript programs manipulate their ASTs. (Lisp programs with macros are manipulating their ASTs.) The vast majority of javascript hash table operations are on data. (Yes, lisp code can be data, but not all lisp data is code.) In that, they're no different than any other language that has decent hash tables, such as lisp.
PHP apps are something that you can generally put on a $3/month shared hosting account without having to babysit and admin everything. $20/month or more plus admin overhead just to have a blagoblag you have control over is more than a lot of people are willing to invest.

I don't think anyone has ever accused PHP of not scaling down, though.

My biggest beef with the PHP community is their lack of concern for security.
Yeah, Ubuntu now comes pre compiled with the patent violating good font rendering. I run with no font smoothing and full hint. Much better than when you used to have to recompile the kernel. Doesn't look like Apple is going to sue anytime soon.
Usability sucks
>Obviously, a product that dramatically simplified programming to the point where anyone (or "Bob") could do most of what they need, would be valuable.

You are attacking a strawman :) My claim pointed out specific types of problems that are solved by workflow software, and solved in substance, not in form.