skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are some links I found helpful when starting out:

http://puggy.symonds.net/~deep/emacside.html - "Emacs as your IDE" (A quick start summary of core commands)

And if you find inspiration useful:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-save-excursion.html

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/06/shiny-and-new-emacs-22.html

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs
The English Premier League Sue Google
This is Startup News, not Slashdot. Go and post this kind of thing there. Or on Digg. Or Reddit. We're here because we want something different from all of those others.
Music has the most abstract of all useful languages, but I wouldn't say Jazz is anything special in that regard. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.
Against the Wrong Odds
I'm not sure if that explains Japan, though.

I think cultural values play a part, but I think it has more to do with the way early musical education typically works in those countries.
Qi, arc competitor?  Qi is lisp for 21st century.
This is awesome. The only problem is that there doesn't seem to be any web 2.0 mashups near me... :(
Music itself is an abstract language indeed, but over time it developed so much that composers were able to express human feelings, emotions, as well as create associations with natural phenomena. One such example is Vivaldi's Four Seasons (though Vivaldi himself was a baroque composer, but this particular piece was probably one of the first notable experiments in this regard).

I don't think anyone would argue that, for example, Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier has any association with anything at all. It's pure math and nothing more, yet we may enjoy it "as is".

Speaking of jazz, perhaps it would be more difficult to prove that jazz to pop is like Bach to Beethoven, for instance, but there is some truth in it. Take Miles' music, or Monk's or many of their followers, their music is much closer to the musical math than to anything else. No wonder the names of their albums and tunes are often rather meaningless (e.g. "This is jazz No.17").

What I'm trying to say is jazz is more abstract than many other genres. Appreciation of jazz, and the same I believe applies to Bach's music as well, aside from Paul's thesis on pretentiousness, which is true :) does require some abstract thinking.

But... let me stop here, because it would be even harder to explain (if possible at all) how this all relates to SecondLife and Flickr.
In my other reply to you I tried to explain that it's not only about musical education, but abstract thinking in general.
It sounds like you're used to editing files in Windows. So your hands are accustomed to standard Windows way of selecting text, cutting, copying and pasting. Emacs does not do things this way, not at all. You can google for "cua.el", a chunk of elisp that customizes Emacs to do that stuff in a much more Windows-ish way. It's definitely not identical though. There's also some elisp out there that makes Emacs scroll one line at a time, instead of ten lines or whatever stone age thing it does by default.

If you want the least pain in getting started with a lisp, I recommend PLT Scheme. Its editor, DrScheme, will seem very ordinary and familiar. That's not a win in the long run, but in the short run you can learn how to hack a lisp, Scheme in this case, without simultaneously retraining your hands and eyes to use Emacs. And learning a lisp is what you really want to do, believe me. I was in your shoes not too long ago, and this is what I did.

(And PLT Scheme is great.)
Very inspiring, Paul. I'm so sad I missed the talk. Here's hoping you have a gig somewhere around the time of WWDC in June!
Vote up to get Ajax-functionality on the to-do list. (Mildly irritating to make the page reload after you "Y" a story.)
Writing Tools for Digg Users and Handling the Inevitable Digg Effect
What was that live-updating AJAX domain name generation web site?
instantdomainsearch.com
The Next Advertising Revolution
It sounds to be wasting a lot of time proving things about programming, when the spirit of Lisp is usually much more test-driven and not proving things. The stated goal is so that you can go about your normal business, but PROVABLY! I'd say this is much more in the spirit of ML than the spirit of Lisp.
Y Combinator for Dysfunctional Non-Schemers
Tcl/Tk? For the 21st century?

Ummm.. okay.
Thanks, Omar! You're the man!
Please use the Feature Requests link at the bottom of the page. People can vote up your post on that thread. Or find one of the many dupes and vote those up instead.
If you still don't have a joost invite... now you can invite yourself
Shawn,

Try emacs with slime. I think Bill Clementson's Blog has a link to a movie which shows the power of it. I use Visual Studios for my day job. And its poor when compared to emacs+slime. Not only can you goto source code of any function in list by doing Esc-. I really enjoy the fuzzy complete facility. type in a few letters and slime comes up with a likely match for functions you might want to call.
You might want to also check out a Lisp plugin for Eclipse called Cusp ( http://paragent.com/lisp/cusp/cusp.htm ). There are builds for Windows available. The other Tim that programs here at Paragent developed it, and uses it as his main development environment (I'm an emacs/slime guy). It reuses parts of slime (the backend swank server) so works in a similar manner. It also comes with SBCL, so you can get up and going pretty quickly.

Regarding SBCL on win32 - it is pretty stable, but is still missing some functionality that SBCL has on other platforms (threads is the big one).
Tcl and Tk are very nice systems, which were done in by bad marketing and leadership.

See this article:

http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html
Funny! 33 ways to increase productivity nobody talks about
A interesting consequence of ever faster computers:  TeX =&gt; TeXmacs =&gt; back to TeX (via BaKoMa TeX Word)
With faster computers, TeXmacs came along to give you a truely WYSIWYG TeX-like real-time typesetter. What you see while editing is exactly what you get in the output. Some clever programming made this possible. But with even faster computers, BaKoMa TeX Word gives us truely WYSIWYG LaTeX by simply running TeX in the background -- all that TeXmacs incremental cleverness is not so important when your computer is really fast and your document is not that long (e.g., for conference papers).

So basically, faster computers made TeXmacs possible but even faster computers may make it unnecessary!
I use Windows Lispworks' IDE, but it is disappointing. I'm going to move to SLIME as soon as possible.
The Best Web 2.0 Links Of The Week
From Qi's designer, Mark Tarver

"Why I am Not a Professor
OR
The Decline and Fall of the British University"

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm
Any competitor is a good thing. It will either cause Arc to move faster, or just be better than it. The pattern matching simplifications seem quite slick.
Hire a designer who has more than a few years experience and it able to deliver not only the Photoshop files but the front-end (standards-compliant code!) to you as well. This means this person is able to code by hand and will understand the implications of his/her design choices when it comes to developing the actual website. Also, you get kind of a "two fer" this way as you don't need to hire a second person to do the front-end code. Another advantage is the capable designer can better communicate with the back-end team.

Pay this person well as you get what you pay for. Web design like many other disciplines in the web field, is a highly lucrative job with new opportunities coming along everyday. It's important for the survival of your own company to make sure you make the hotshot you hired feel satisfied with the salary and your company.

However, if you are just looking for a junior person on the cheap, you can find that but then you get junior, cheap results. It's better to bring in junior people to work under your senior person and build him/her into a senior from there.
Yes. "Built to enjoy" startups provide no exit for the investor which makes it extremely difficult to recover an initial investment.

If you can bootstrap, do it. Venture capital is only a tool to be used in certain strategies where growth or momentum are prereqs to market profitability.
I'll be attending with a partner; we recently launched Intern-U (http://www.intern-u.com) and are excited to meet and share ideas.
Dude. Evry freaking second counts. So please save your pointless remarks. Asswer the question or skip it.
Franchise your Startup,Get bigger faster.
History on Why we have OK buttons in GUIs (web site slow, see article in comments)
Indeed. Just imagine how much money Google would have made if they'd hired an MBA, bought some superbowl ads, and refused to launch their product until they knew exactly how to make it cash-flow positive!
I agree, ML style pattern matching seems so elegant. My favorite pattern matching system is actually Mathematica. I wish more programming languages had 'em :)
Most startups fail, so anyone involved in a startup has to spend all of their waking time doing something that is probably not going to make them any money. If it's 2 AM and you haven't slept in a few days and the difference between working and not working is almost certainly $0, denial is a competitive advantage.
By the end of this year, a lot of shared hosting providers should be upgrading to CPanel 11, which has the same built-in support for Ruby as it does for PHP.
Prediction: thousands of shared web hosts will have Ruby by end of 2007
By the end of 2007, web hosts will use the newly released CPanel 11, the most popular control panel for linux, which has one-click installers for Ruby and Ruby on Rails as well as Apache 2 support, and with a sudden influx of new users, exciting things will happen.

http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPanelandWHM/linux/cpanel11/integration.htm

Agree?
How to Build a Web 2.0 Dating Site in 66.5 Man-Hours
Description from the article:

Let this be a testament to Web 2.0 and the effectiveness of rapid development frameworks such as CakePHP: I built a full-featured dating website, from concept to launch, in 66.5 hours. In a typical 9-5 job this would amount to about a week and a half.
Did you read any part of this thread before posting? If so, please be specific about which part(s).
Your calculation accounts for risk.
Web can ruin reputation with stroke of a key
Don't thousands of them offer it already?
Hmm, an article "placed" by ReputationDefender's pr firm.
Shared web hosting providers? I don't think so. I'd say in the low hundreds of all shared web hosts do, but not thousands. And of those, very few will offer any support. On the other hand, PHP comes with every single shared hosting installation that exists. I don't know of one that doesn't offer PHP support because it comes standard with... CPanel.

From PHP.net -- "Today, PHP is being used by hundreds of thousands of developers (estimated), and several million sites report as having it installed."
Anyone else write Lisp in vi?

Yes, I do all of my text editing in Vim. I <3 Vim.
They go on about type checking. The point of dynamically typed languages is that they're dynamically typed.
It also looks ugly by default.
Kind of like reading the Little Schemer and using Javascript. Which is precisely what Douglas Crockford advocates (http://javascript.crockford.com/little.html - he's got an example of the Y Combinator too).

Javascript's arguments.callee will also let you define anonymous recursive functions (though I realize that was not really the point of the post).
I don't like the case-sensitive symbols. Nor do I like the implicit quote on symbols...it doesn't make much sense to me but that might because there aren't many good code samples on the site.

Is it too much to ask for a nice looking website with lots of good code samples? And a reference link for all the functions that work in the language would be nice.

As much as some people dislike newLISP, it at least has a good clear/concise website: http://newlisp.org/ The purpose is clearly stated, and right away you know on what it can run and where to look for comparisons to other Lisps.

Not much of a competitor to Arc in my opinion. But pg, please show us some more Arc code :P
...exciting things will happen

Well, I'd like to believe that, but Dreamhost has had Ruby support for quite some time. I figured they're about the biggest of the shared hosting providers.

Maybe the new cPanel will make it even easier, though...
This comment was started as a thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=20012
The death of (fill-in the blank)
Hm, I'm not so sure. Rails doesn't do that well with shared setups at the moment.
You can make Emacs scroll a line at a time by adding this to your .emacs:

(setq scroll-conservatively 1)
It's definitely worthwhile watching the Slime movie. You can find links to it at http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050728.html
Meetup Reminder: Boston Meetup Tonight (7:00PM)
Thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17969
How popular can Lisp documentation be?
http://lispdoc.com/

Lispdoc, a search engine for Common Lisp documentation, is always going to be about as niche as a site can get. But it gives me something to hone my skills on and stops my brain from turning to mush while I wait for my Green Card.

I've been putting some more effort into it recently. I'd be interested to know if people here have suggestions for what I could improve. Please feel free to consider no nit too small to pick.

Some stats:

Lispdoc responds to around 3000 searches per day on average.

Its Google page-rank is 4/10

Alexa rank is 568,856 (three weeks ago it was 1,130,856. current 1 wk avg is 228,583)

A Google search for 'lisp documentation' puts lispdoc in 7th place.
A great lesson...the obvious, no matter how obvious, may in fact be the best choice.
That is a sweet site. How did you make it? (Just the basic tech infrastructure)
You know, when I first started using Windows 95, it felt weird to see the word OK on every single dialog or confirmation screen.
Hey, Paul, where do you think Viaweb would have been in 1998 had you not used a PR firm? Would you have kept your PR firm in 2007, switched to Google Adsense, or both? Also, did you do any advertising at the time, or have affiliates or resellers of your service, other than PR? I seem to remember VIAWEB banner ads. Thanks.
Of course shared hosting will offer rails. Since it's more cpu intensive they'll be able to force you to upgrade to a virtual/dedicated server sooner because of violating their terms of service.
Thanks!

I used the Hunchentoot web server, running on SBCL on an Ubuntu server (1GHz Athlon, 1GB ram, residential cable connection).

The data-sources are html files, which are sucked into memory when lispdoc starts up. The various indexes are kept as hash-tables in memory - there's no need for a database since everything fits in ram.
I think the "long tail" of shared hosting providers use CPanel, with no support for ruby. Including Ruby in CPanel means every Linux host will be able to offer it, and it also means that Ruby on Rails will become a standard, the same way PHP is. That's a huge difference from where Rails is at today. Most won't deploy it, but having built-in support for Perl, PHP, and Rails shows just how important the language is, even though most people outside startups don't use it currently.

Although, if somebody just wants a quick script, they will probably use PHP. Ruby on Rails is more for somebody who wants to create an entire database driven web-based application. So, maybe Ruby on Rails is a niche. What do you think?
It's a myspace clone. The nudge thing is the same as facebook's poke and OKCupid's woo. There are no dating-specific features and I really don't see anything novel about copying the Myspace browse option.

It looks better than those websites maybe, but obviously people don't care about the looks of a social networking site.

Other than that, it's awesome that he got a copy-cat site up and running 66.5 hours using PHP.
He should stick to his 9-5 job...
Actually, plenty of people at Microsoft know Lisp.
Reminder: Boston YC meetup: Tonight 7pm Espresso Royale
see you all there!
A Ruby on Rails app built in 14 days doing about 800000 unique users a day and only 14 bugs so far... isnt Ruby Awesome
What is your experience with Hunchentoot so far? It sounds pretty impressive from the specs.
Interview with Amie Street
We're sitting in the front with a cluster of 5 tables... Excited to see everyone!
Hunchentoot is awesome - very comprehensive and very easy to work with. Web development has never been so easy (before I switched I was using Araneida for most things, and mod_lisp for a few others).

I can't say I've tested it with huge loads, but it's been very stable so far.
If I just want a quick script, I'll just use Ruby without Rails. Plain erb. Or Nitro, or Merb. There are several options for using Ruby for Web apps/sites without having to take on the Rails stack.

Rails may be a niche tool, but it's not the only Web option for Ruby developers.
The "other mobile data"
Cambridge Incubator -- pay per person
Inc Magazine: "Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies."
Haha, yes. Fertik, the guy running Reputation Defender, has been getting a ton of PR bashing autoadmit.com.
hey bill :-)

"I've been putting some more effort into it recently. I'd be interested to know if people here have suggestions for what I could improve. Please feel free to consider no nit too small to pick."

cltl2?

lispdoc is a great resource, btw
I have this in my .emacs file so I can easily search lispdoc from within emacs

http://paste.lisp.org/display/40846
Very nice article named aptly for "dysfunctional non-schemers." :)

For the functional schemers/lispers out there, how close to the real picture is this? The same thing can be done in PHP, using a similar syntax, although it's probably more efficient to use switch/case (I say this because I recently rewrote some variable function names into switch/case).
cough spam
Tripod's Accidental Business Plan:

1. Hire Smart People

2. Employees Create Idea + Company

3. Sell Zero-Value, 1 million user startup for 60M$

4. New stock goes up 10x further

5. Sell half a billion in stock 3 months before the crash

6. Invest it all in real estate

And the author says, it's all luck. He doesn't have an ego.
"In 1991, as a college freshman, I had an idea for an online service offering "real life" education to college students: practical advice about jobs, personal finance, and health. I made the simple observations that no one was teaching us these subjects in the classroom, and that computers -- rather than books or TVs -- had become the primary medium of communication and entertainment."

That in itself is extraordinary for a college freshman in 1991.
Your cup of Kool-aid is still full?!
Web Application Blood Supply
This article is insanely good. It's not a three paragraph blog post, it's a four page article from somebody who was there. Keep reading! :)
Sounded interesting, till I clicked on "pricing" and found they wouldn't tell me the price. You have to call and talk to a salesman. How lame.
Nerd TV Archives
Thanks for the article. Bo Peabody is the newest addition to my list of awesome people.

One thing I find contradictory though, is that he says that amazing things happen when smart/inspired people get together, yet Village Ventures funds programs away from VC-filled cities, so companies can work from their local towns. While the argument for the "home setting" is there, this is the direct opposite of YC's mode of operation, and I cannot help but agree with YC more on this one.

Nevertheless, great guy, much respect. He'd make a great speaker not only for entrepreneurship but also life in general.
I was just going to point to the Max Levchin interview, which I rewatched last night and thoroughly enjoyed, but there are far too many great interviews there to just do that. Bill Joy, Bob Kahn, Dan Bricklin, Dan Drake, Tim O'Reilly, Brewster Kahle, Andy Hertzfeld, all well worth watching (the shows come in .ogg as well).
Just FYI,

as a freshman in college 1991, he was about 21 years old. That's from wikipedia, which, by the way, is only a few sentences long. Talk about a low profile multimillionaire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Peabody
I'm waiting to see notes on this one! Post them when available please :)
The Spirit of Openness
uStream.tv interview with angel investor Chris Yeh Mentions Justin.tv
This guy's behind Village Ventures. Would've never known.

Small world:)
I posted in dhouston's post, but again, I hope to see reports/notes on this event, so please post when available!
"It turns out he wasn't noticing the space between the 'o' and the 'I' in 'Do It'; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital 'I' looked very much like a lower case 'l', so he was reading 'Do It' as 'Dolt' and was therefore kind of offended."

"He [said], 'I'm not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?'"

It's a good thing they resisted the urge to make the obvious joke, and just changed the software.
Let's say it's 5k per company plus 5k per founder. Lucrative!

Seriously though, it sounds like a clever profiting model, as you can control the kinds of tenants very well, plus you can claim some credit for any successes.
Try http://grabagooddomain.com/ they charge $100, but they have a money back guarantee, if you don't like the names they suggest.
I think he got a lots done for 66.5 Hours. I couldn't build something like this in that timeframe
Thanks for fixing the title.
I don't know. Jazz is still pretty popular in the US. Look how many Jazz Clubs are in NYC: http://www.ny.com/clubs/jazz/

The US invented it, and produced people like Ornette Coleman (the David Lynch of Jazz). The US still produces the lion's share of Jazz recordings too.
I didn't examine each function in detail, but it looks like totally the real picture. If you have lexical scoping and anonymous functions, you have the Y combinator. I don't know if PHP has true lexical scoping and anonymous functions yet, but if it does, then yes, you can implement the Y combinator in PHP.
Interesting observation.

Even more interesting, from entrepreneurial point of view, I think, is that there is an opportunity here. One problem with people of the BBM type (what the author calls "brilliant bipolar mind") is that they get depressed before they finish things although they might have a brilliant idea. So you the opportunity is for non-depressive folks to finish the tasks and offer something that the community can use.
Let's see: who here identifies themselves with a BBM?
Great. What's their svn login info?
This might be a typical profile of a Lisp programmer, but not everyone is like that. I think my own intelligence is right in the sweet spot -- smart enough that I don't get stuck, but not so smart that I get bored and can't finish things.
I'd maverick and say that the Well-Tempered Clavier is full of metaphors. Consonance, dissonance, ascending sequences, descending sequences, 'voices,' and subjects are all human, intuitive associations and descriptions of music. Music has had active metaphors ever since natural language was used to describe it.

But you're right, this is getting really off-topic and comparing Jazz to mainstream Pop is at least O(JP). So I'll just link an Essay that came to mind the first time I read "Taste for Makers." It's similar, but takes an "only the best audience matters" point of view.

http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html - Milton Babbitt, "Who Cares if You Listen?"

http://faculty.cbhs.org/pbolton/54-babbit.mp3 - excerpt from "Philomel," by Milton Babbitt.
I'm no lisper but it seems to me that the implicit quote and the resulting need to use square brackets to delineate lists would make it more difficult to write macros.