skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Starter Pack is another effort that addresses some of the noted deficiencies in Common Lisp.

http://weitz.de/starter-pack/

Technically, the whole project including GUI installer only works on LispWorks. However, the selection of libraries makes a good approximation to a CL standard library and it's not too hard to figure out how to install all of them in SBCL or whatever other CL implementation you have. This gets you much closer to the starting point of a "batteries included" language like Python.

If every CL implementation in the world simply bundled all of the libraries in Starter Pack, a lot of the legitimate criticisms of CL would be solved.

(If you are one of those people who just say "too many parentheses", however, there is no help for you.)
Looks like pg hurry things up with getting Arc out or Qi will beat it to become the 21st century 100 Year Language. :)
Agreed. I said she was a friend, not that she had any taste in web design. She has a marketing background. That said, the book has some interesting ideas in it.
I've had consulting gigs that basically made me team leader of a 5-person startup team.

Now how is that different than being a cofounder? I got paid more, and I was able to move on to other contracts without a lot of fuss.

But most of the time, selling yourself by the hour (or day or project) sucks. You're always making somebody else's dream come true instead of your own. Having said that, money is a good thing! And over time you can get better and better at your skills. I guess there is a difference between honing your skills doing stuff for other people and honing your skills doing stuff for yourself. Sure, I'd much rather work for myself, but there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
There is at least one other JVM-based Scheme implementation out there, and it's stable and well maintained too.

The next LispNYC meeting (Tues., Nov. 13) is going to be on this subject:

"Rich Hickey Presents Clojure - A Dynamic Programming Language for the JVM" (http://lispnyc.org/home.clp)
I do contracting programming for local small businesses on their legacy systems. Has nothing to do with my startup, but is great experience anyway. Things come up that I could never envision, but I'll remember, so my software won't ever have these problems. I can dial up from home or work at their office. One client even gave me my own cubicle. I usually work at their site for several reasons: makes up for the loneliness of the other days, some projects have to be done on site (printers, phones, network, etc.), and, most of all, I want to see and hear their employees all day long. Can't get that from any book.
We use Trac at Justin.tv. The only thing that really bothers me is that it's kind of slow - up to 2 seconds to load a page.

Other than that, it seems "good enough", but I'm sure there are advances to be made that I've never thought of.
Counting Pageviews: 1, 2, 8, 15
issuesdone.com :)
How to use a blunt instrument to sharpen your saw
My question is this: where do you find your consulting gigs? Do they come to you entirely word of mouth, or do you actively pursue postings online and in papers and such?
I've used Bugzilla, Mantis, JIRA, Netbeans' bug tracker, and FogBugz and found that they all basically suck. So I'm just going to give you a list of features that I'd like to see:

1.) A clean & simple UI. Reporters should just have a text field to enter the bug description and a way to attach screenshots/tracebacks/logfiles/tests/patches. All the priority/component/version/milestone/assignee stuff should be filled in afterwards, once the development team has been notified of the bug. Reporters usually have no clue what any of that means, even if they're in the same organization.

2.) It should be possible to submit bugs without a user account, with just an e-mail for further clarification. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone to submit a bug for some open-source software and then given up when I had to complete a lengthy sign-up process.

3.) E-mail notification, both for developers and for reporters.

4.) Integration with unit testing frameworks - I'd like a way to attach test cases to bugs and then automatically run all the tests with say JUnit or Nose. When a test fails, it'd be nice if I could be linked straight back to the initial bug report, to see where the regression is. Make sure you play nice with existing conventions for where tests go, eg. the tests/ subdirectory that many Java IDEs setup or the functional-testing facilities in web frameworks like Rails and Pylons.

5.) FogBugz has a nice screen-capture utility that's very handy for desktop software..if you can get your hands on a copy, you may want to check that out.

6.) A programmatic API. There're two main use-cases I want here. I want to hook the feedback form on the website itself up to the bugtracker, so that every time a user submits feedback it goes straight into the bugtracker and sends me a notification e-mail. I also want to hook existing functional-testing frameworks up to the bugtracker, so that if a test fails and is not already associated with a bug, it creates a new bug with a description of the failing test case.

7.) Check out the Subversion integration in Trac...I've never used Trac myself (keep meaning to check it out), but I've heard some very good things about it.

There's my wishlist. I'd be willing to pay FogBugz-level prices (hundred or so per seat) for a bugtracker that was actually useful. I wouldn't be willing to pay JIRA prices (couple thousand per seat).
Excellent advice from someone already burned.

Perhaps the first question should be, "Are you sure you want to be married (in a business sense) to this person?"
What Do You Do After Nothing? An Interview with Jerry Seinfeld
Kara Visits the Offices of RockYou
Microsoft Concedes in European Antitrust Case
This came up 60 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45666
Reddit lesson #3: fuck facebook, make real friends
The China Bubble
Auctomatic launches better tools for eBay powersellers
don't--you can't do a startup on the side, it won't work.

you have a finite amount of (creative) energy. it's all or nothing.
I have a sweet deal now, where I choose my own consulting hours. The company I work for puts up with it because they feel like, because of my start up, I can keep them on the edge of cool and now. If I did not have that freedom, then I would not be able to keep in tune.

On the flip side I am always telling my self that each hour I spend on consulting, is one that I am not spending on my company.

For now, we are trying to think of ways to increase our day one revenue for our company so that we can stop consulting sooner.

We have considered other options too like offering a sliding pay rate depending on the number of hours per week we are consulting. At less than 20 hours per week, we might charge 50$ per hour, where hours over 20, we might charge 150$ for those impatient customers. Hours would be pre-booked. We have yet to try it, but WE ARE STRONGLY considering it.

Something else we have thought about, is having a consulting division to manage our time, our rate, and to increase our marketability as a group. As a company we might be able to bill out of the gate at 150$ an hour, vs. as an individual we might be able to bill at 50-75$ per hour. This would also give us a way to charge for custom features.

Some thoughts on our side, now that we did not get into YC, we need to figure out how to stick around long enough to turn a profit.

We also got an offer from a local marketing company, that is interested in what we have, but we do not yet know how to productize what we have for them and licence it.
selling yourself by the hour (or day or project) sucks. You're always making somebody else's dream come true instead of your own.

Another (potentially big) problem is IP ownership, if your paying client tries to claim that the work on your own project is really theirs.
Have you tried getting paid ads on your sites, especially the porny (er, "erotic") one?
the current consulting job i have, was via word of mouth, and it was because i was instramental in getting our local barcamps going.

i have always found bennifit in having a lot of things going on, especially in community building. people tend to want to help those that are generally fairly selfless.
You mean: "If English were written like Chinese".

Subjunctive mood, people!
I'm not being facetious: one of the O.P.'s web sites is "http://3boobs.de/" or, as he himself defines it "erotic games".

Porn-ish sites like that do attract advertisers.
Achieving Early High-Tech Startup Marketing & Sales Success
Facebooks apps now being indexed by Google et al
Hbase: Powerset's open source answer to BigTable
I just remembered the name of the other implementation: SISC, an interpreter. (Kawa is a compiler, but it does have an interactive REPL.)
I had side projects and consulting opportunities on the go but I shelved them all to concentrate 100% on my startup. Luckily, I live at home so I dont have the pressures of some people but I think outside "consulting" is not sustainable in the long run.

I have noticed since I have been 100% on my startup I have not only worked harder, Ive worked smarter. Save up from consulting and hit the startup....

Full Time
Thinking about the problem is a different skill than writing code and is usually best done someplace where the keyboard for your development computer is not within reach.
It is argueable that the notion of a 'Renaissance' or 'Universal' man is obselete, and has been since perhaps the 19th century or so; I suspect you could live hundreds of modern lifetimes and still not come close to the relative amount of knowledge it was possible to have in the 15th century.

That said, with extreme specialization being the norm these days, I think there is a dearth of inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinkers, to unify the vast amounts of knowldege divided within and between fields, and to bring perspective to the almost unimaginable technology mankind will be able to wield in the next 20-40 years.
That's a really good point. If you're moving back and forth between startups and consulting, be sure you know where all o the IP landmines are. I know I have a three-page IP disclosure sheet I include with all of my consulting projects, plus I make sure that my continuing work on my startup is noted. Even then, it can get tricky. I couldn't take a consulting gig in the same industry that the startup was in unless we had a lot of legal input. And that gets expensive.

The problem is that if you're writing Web 2.0 apps then really _anything_ could be considered close to anything else. Writing a 3-D chat program for E-Bayers? Any business with a web site might could use a chat program, and if you have access to their site and their plans, who's to say what parts of your ideas you're getting from them and what parts you're coming up with yourself?
GMail Ups Storage To 4GB
Meebo Has Ads
WiFi Safety Tips from Hacker Convention on Threat Level
Qi is far from being a 'dumbed-down' Lisp. It's got a turing-complete type system (IIRC something is of a type if it satisfies /full code/), it unifies a couple of paradigms - it's an advanced language, not a dumbed down one.
Study: Only 1 in 5 Workers is "Engaged" in Their Job
A recent study of some 90,000 workers around the world found that only 21 percent of them are "engaged," or willing to go the extra mile to help their organizations succeed.
Full-time effort >> part-time effort. However, there are cases where part time is good enough.

It varies on how much (smart and well funded) competition there is, barriers to entry, your own personal ambitions. In general, larger and stupider the competition, the more likely you can do ok with part-time effort.

Joel's post on being a Ben and Jerry's vs. an Amazon can give some insight on this topic:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
Credit Unions are pretty good if I were to give my opinion. Mine has pretty good deals like this: https://www.coastcapitalsavings.com/Business/Banking/Chequin...

I'm assuming most have similar services. (As an aside, you'll notice that website is pretty damn good too, for a bank.)
Research Libraries Rebuff Offers from Google and Microsoft to Place Books on Web
The stakes are so high for piracy now for anyone who has anything to loose to setup and run there own servers. It is a lot different now then when I was in high school and ran a 3 line "warez" bbs system. Back then it was mostly teenagers wanting to get software they couldn't afford so they could learn how to use it and games. Now it is music and movies both of which are super cheap so there is no logic to it other then getting it free.
And #FFFFFF on #000000 for the 20th.
I submitted a similar idea as a last second YC application.

Basic points of differentiation were that it would be fully extensible (add/remove any input fields), and that it would have a killer API.

The API would allow you to submit issues from anywhere you please: you could write a plugin for Eclipse (or favorite IDE) or you could widgetize it into a js include file so people could submit issues directly from your web page (think beta testers).
I'm going to second Trac. I'm using it primarily because of its easy integration with Subversion.
Crass, but probably true
What they're trying to do sounds great... but I wonder how well they really know their user base...

Scheduling: Without basic feature like scheduling, I CAN'T even test them out. Most "power seller" sell the same items over and over, so it doesn't matter how much I love the interface, if I have to sit there manually launching the listings myself, it's just not going to work...

Inventory management: The idea is nice, but guess what... I'd say 80% of the successful eBay seller will branch out to other platform like amazon & their own site. If you're only monitoring my eBay inventory, it's pretty much pointless... because the idea behind monitoring inventory level for eBay seller is so they don't over list and piss off their buyers, but unless it's synced up with my other selling platform, it's not going to do me any good...
tried it during the beta phase, didn't find it to do anything special. i have about 10 items to sell so i tried them again, and again, i find this site kind of pointless.
$250k for a first startup isn't too bad anyway.
Some people find that by writing essays in English they can increase their own understanding of whatever they're writing about. Coding can help the same way, if you're using a language that's comfortable to think in.
Ask YC: Clever ways to get a funded mobile phone?
As a below minimum wage hacker, I'm trying to come up with creative ways to finance my cell phone (and data plan). I'm about to get off of my AT&T contract and want to play with T-Mobile's UMA offering. Any advice from you clever entrepreneurs?
hey cyggie,

thanks for the feedback. to address your points:

Scheduling - yes we totally agree scheduling is a critical feature and it's at the top of http://features.auctomatic.com and we'll be working on it asap. We've found that powersellers are still happy to test out the beta and give us really useful feedback without it - that was the purpose of the first beta launch so it's not been a problem.

Inventory management - there's nothing tying inventory in the app to eBay specifically. It just happens that eBay is the first platform we're supporting but we'll be offering multiple channel support as soon as the core ebay product is ready. We'll also be tying the inventory into a backend accounts package like Quickbooks to provide a one-stop shop system for complete inventory control.

Please let me know if there's any other feedback you have - it's exactly to hear this that we launched the beta so it's much appreciated. If you have specific feature requests please feel free to submit and/or vote at http://features.auctomatic.com
Indeed. I just started using it, and it's quite good.

Has anyone experienced a speedup by not using the built in server?
Meaning = Data + Structure
Libraries felt like a problem at the beginning, but in the end have not tended to be an issue for us. So far, we have been able to either find suitable libraries, or use FFI to hook into 3rd party code. At times it seems like we have the kitchen sink in there when you look at the dependencies, but asdf keeps it pretty manageable.

The biggest issue we had was with a limitation in SBCL's serve-event implementation. It turns out it uses select, which caused some nasty issues for us when file descriptors climbed over 1024. In our case, we are handling thousands of persistent ssl connections on the back end. We were using epoll to service all of these connections, but the database library clsql was using serve-event. Under certain situations, we would end up handing select an FD > 1024, and things would go all pear-shaped.

The fix was to patch serve-event itself to use epoll. It is a pretty rough patch at this point, but it works and keeps us going.

The other area we had to punt was with our installer generation. That was as much because we are running our servers on Linux as anything else. We have a special windows server that creates the custom MSI files for each account.

Some times the power is a bit too much, as well. While patching a running server with fixes is cool, I will fully admit to a couple gotchas when we thought we were making obvious fixes that turned out to have not-so-obvious repercussions. In those cases, the problem always existed between the keyboard and chair. We do a better job of checking things offline before rolling them out.

I know #lisp has a pretty bad reputation, but there are some very smart people that hang out there, and they want to see Common Lisp succeed. In general it is a much saner place than c.l.l.
New way to view news
The most important thing he says is at the bottom or the post:

"Just don't think about these relationships through the lens of "what can you do for me?" -- not only will it doom you from the start, you'd never even guess what might happen anyway."
This is a great illustration of why exposing yourself to randomness is useful. I'd bet that all successful startups have similar stories of chance meetings that led to something great.
So where's the article?
Part-time effort always > no effort
and some ruby :)
How opinionated companies get customers to live without floppy drives...
HOWTO network without becoming a disingenuous weasel
See "HOWTO network without becoming a disingenuous weasel" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71240).
ok, all those things sound cool, but "Show me the money...". How is the equity stake? Doing cool things is always fun, but hopefully making good money out of it is even more fun.

I know some companies that say they "offer great equity", but when you look really close at it, it is really really minuscle. Some unsupecting developers will buy into it, but I think YC crowd is smarter than that.

Also, historically first employers get screwed, they don't much equity, work as hard as the founders, yet the pay is not that great.

Anyways, I don't know exactly how Justin.tv is, but these are normal concerns that will pop on the head of a good developer before joining something. (btw. I am not looking for a job).
TV Links Founder Arrested for Illegal Linking
Confirmed! There is no Googlephone
I have a trac 0.94 install running on a pentium 800 through Apache and its definitely fast enough. I am not using Fast CGI though, so it could potentially be faster.
We use Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com/) and find it simple, extensible, and useful.

It covers most of your points but doesn't include bug reporting/tracking by people not on a project (e.g., users). Their API and email integration should make it easy to integrate your own "report a bug" form.
The stake I got wasn't minuscule. If JTV is any kind of a success, I'll have life-changing amounts of money. If it's a big hit, I could be set for life.

Sure, I work as hard as the others now, but they've been working this hard for months - they deserve a bigger stake. I've traded a little less equity for a much bigger chance of success.
Are you an Introvert or an Extrovert?
IMO the majority of people who will read News.YC are a Introverts to their friends and family. But when we are here at News.YC, we all become extroverts. I think we are the most bipolar people ever to live. We maitain two lives. One where people think we are reserved, not polite, not social, not interactive, arrongant, and another life here where we are open, we socialize with each otheer, heck some of us even created places online for extroverts to fully enjoy their nature. So who are we?
In real life and on a Myers-Brigg type test I usually fall dead center on the introvert/extrovert line, though usually one or two questions to the extrovert side. It's usually a willful distinction between whether I am behaving as an introvert or extrovert -- if an introvert, it's because I find that social interaction completely uninteresting.
Just bragging: I pay $35/month including taxes for a Sprint plan with 3000 minutes, unlimited nights and weekends at 7PM, unlimited text messaging, no roaming, on-phone and tethered "unlimited" EVDO, and a $50 a month credit towards all in-phone purchases (games, ringtones, songs, pandora). This is a Radioshack employee plan and the current one isn't as good anymore. I have no idea what I would do if I had to pay normal price for my cell phone plan.
sprint $32/month inclusive for 500 minutes, unlimited nights/wkds, unlimited text/sms, unlimited data, no roam, tethered data. trying to work my corp discount into this (15%) but there's some resistance.
I've become much more outgoing as I've aged, actually, and I like social occasions, as long as the people aren't boring or annoying.
so paul buchheit leaves and they start being evil.
and what about Patrick's CROMA Lisp?
I love the way Trac integrates with subversion. A friend of mine even wrote a nice plugin that allows you to close a bug in Trac just by doing an svn commit, by writing stuff like:

svn commit -m "Stopped electrocuting users, fixes #4959."
Just wanted to chime in that Roundup and trac are extensible with regards to fields, as well as actions. Both have a pretty good API, as well.
We had it running fine under FastCGI, as well as mod_python for a few quite large projects and about 30 active developers (and a few dozen moderately active users). Speed wasn't a problem in either of those modes, but I recall that when it was straight CGI or using it's own server it was close to unusable.
Trac is perfect for us. The integration of everything in the wiki and just enough database like features makes it a killer combo for small teams (5-7). Just linking to tickets and svn changesets with wiki-like syntax is great. If you use Trac be sure to visit trac-hacks.org for plugins and macros to enhance your install.
We should be able to easily split one bug report into multiple reports (for cases where one bug has multiple causes, or the reporter incorrectly perceived multiple bugs as a single bug) while keeping history of the case. And vice versa, for when a single bug is reported multiple times. Most bug trackers just let you resolve things as duplicates, which is kinda half-assed.
Interesting on the third co-founder advice... does anyone else have a perspective on this?
Social interaction can be interesting if it's actually interaction with interesting people.

Unfortunately, what has come to be known as "social interaction" is the custom of getting a bunch of people in a room, stuffing them full of bad food and alcohol, and letting them talk about themselves for several hours.

On the other hand, if it really is completely uninteresting to you, just get drunk, and suddenly that worthless slob ranting about his new lawnmower will be divulging the secrets of the universe. I suspect this is the real reason why people drink... it takes actual effort to have fun if you are sober.