skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Either will allow you to do this. I imagine the only difference (in terms of existing features for your platform) would be 'generating JavaScript.'

CL has Parenscript http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/ which is probably more powerful than whatever JavaScript compiler/macro/generator tools you would have to hack together yourself in Clojure.

As for my own personal opinion, I would choose the Lisp that has tail call optimization.

If you are willing to look into a third option, I highly recommend HOP from Inria http://hop.inria.fr/ which is a Scheme web platform with a true JavaScript compiler.
That way lie frameworks such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio, Delphi, PowerBuilder, Oracle Developer, SQL Server Studio, various CASE tools, etc. All good products that remind us that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

While often excellent, these frameworks usually disappear (or morph to new incompatible forms) within a decade leaving behind cast-off skeletons, the underlying code they generated, to be maintained for decades to come.

Programmers seek security in a lingua franca, a common level of coding/specification that they are comfortable with and that they believe will remain useful as long as possible. The programming language level seems to be the sweet spot today. It is no accident that most frameworks generate code at the programming language level.
UNESCO World Heritage Sites added to Google Street View
The suggested gains (transparency, mostly) would not really be achieved, I think, because even if you get an 8:1 reduction in line count, it will still not look very transparent. It is still a very complicated problem.

And even if the performance of lisp approaches hand-crafted C, there will still be

More interesting is to design a different OS based on lisp using today's hardware. But what would you want it to do differently than Linux?
One of the best things about HN is precisely that there is a core focus to it, but that it touches on many related topics. Some of the most valuable areas for exploration are where one field of knowledge meets another. Each sheds some light on areas of the other that haven't yet been explored.

At 44, I'm backing up your argument. But honestly, I had already accumulated most of my eclectic intellectual curiosity a quarter century ago. Even so, I still browse the technical books at bookstores. Libraries are hopelessly out-of-date on anything technical that would interest me. I don't need the latest power users' guide to anything. I'm interested in new insights into building something that has never been done before.
I don't know if this is still the case but when I created this account there was a welcome link up where you find

[Y]Hacker News welcome | new | comments | ...

linking to this.

Edit: To be more clear I think the welcome link disappeared after a certain amount of karma was acquired like other little features on HN ( flag,downvote,topcolor ).
It's a good idea to point to the HN guidelines from time to time. I just wonder if there was a specific incident that made you submit them. Just curious.
The Skinny on Fats
I think the article serves as a call for urgency for the approaching inflation. One of Grant's biggest followers is Seth Klarman. Klarman runs the Baupost Group, which is a hedge fund comprised mostly of endowment fund money. His fund is using interest rate caps and swaptions to hedge inflation instead of using TIPS.

I don't know if calling Grant naive is correct. He has been ahead of the curve on spotting bubbles in the past and runs a well reputed magazine ($850/year subscription)
What Are Global Warming Supporters Trying to Hide?
38 and prefer HN focused on tech and the business of it.
I think Knowledge economy will flourish due to rampant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978141

Edit: oh, just answering to which incident. In the comments, iamelgringo talked about submission guidelines, so I'm guessing that's why he resubmitted them here, so yeah, I meant the discussion.
I am more curious as to whether Wave provides any functionality if you do not know other people using Wave.

Like say you get a Wave account is there any way to meet with other people à la channels (IRC) chat rooms (AOL)
On the Clojure side, definitely check out Compojure, a Sinatra-style framework.

http://github.com/weavejester/compojure
Screencasts can definitely be useful! Take the Compass screencast[1] for instance. When I first watched it I had no intention of using SaSS/Compass right then; it took me a few more months to find an opportunity to make use of it. What I did learn were the basics from a user's perspective. Sure, I could have read the API docs and browsed some example files, but why would I go to all that effort if I just wanted a gentle introduction to what it could do for me?

I've tried watching other screencasts which try to actually teach you how to do something and I have a tendency to forget them almost immediately. Take a subject like Vim: it's much more efficient to provide tips in text if you actually want to teach people how to use them. I'm not going to pause a video and try to make muscle memory for commands right then, but I might remember a tip on how to do X and reference a blog post later.

It's the difference between an "intro to X" and "how to do Y in X". Screencasts are great for gentle introductions; they're very difficult to make for anything more granular.

[1] http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass
It wasn't snappy, but it was fast enough. The speed non-issue is definitely not the first thing I'd fix.

On sites that you use ten times a day, every day, definitely speed is very important. On something like this that might be used a couple times a year, no.

The real issue is you need to get more useful information onto the front page. The "number of ideas" column is next to useless. What does it mean that a designer has zero ideas? That their head is completely empty? I doubt it. It probably means they aren't necessarily looking to work on a specific project they have in mind. But then, on the other hand, maybe there are some designers who chose '0' because they really, truly, have absolutely no ideas (and, by implication, no creativity). I would want to avoid those. How do I know which are which? I don't. And if the number of ideas listed is 1, 2, or more, similar opportunities for confusion abound. So that column is useless.

I was excited when I saw this, because it's hinting that it may be a good tool... but please bring more detail to the surface. You may need to gather that detail from the users, then present it, I don't know, maybe as CSS display-on-hover windows next to each name, which is debatable as a UI, but better than having to click through.
If you look at his submissions there are quite a few and most of them of the Ask HN variety of something that really shouldn't be here
There are public waves that you can search for and join.
A post about global warming is off topic enough, but from Fox News? I hope you're trying to be ironic.
There are other people besides designers that developers need to work with. Writers and marketers are two that come to mind. But designers are a good place to start.
You have to admit that your example is pretty contrived though - usually setting priors isn't so clean.

How do you 'properly' set the prior probability that someone really has E.S.P.? That a researcher is secretly colluding with a test subject? That a researcher is flat out fabricating their results? That this is just an instance of the Hans effect? Or a thousand other possible hypotheses ...
and blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well co-medled,
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please

--Shakespeare

Prices rise and fall; durable institutions endure. It's easy for some liberal arts student to write a gloomy article poetically comparing a tall building to a needle bursting the bubble.

It's harder to really understand the economic and strategic drivers behind Dubai. I certainly don't.

My hunch is that Dubai is a durable institution. Specific players, like Dubai World, may perish or be mauled. But the buildings they left behind will probably endure, with tenancy rates and rents rising and falling as Fortune plays various tunes.
Kinda confused. The user who submitted that Ask HN is an older member, so they technically should know the rules. Or perhaps you meant the discussion taking place?
My first guess was that they used the artist.getSimilar API method. I dug around a little and found this:

"In April 2009, we crawled the website [last.fm] by starting with Beethoven, and the top 20 musicians most similar to Beethoven, provided that each has at least 100,000 listeners. We then found the top 20 most similar musicians to each of those with at least 100,000 listeners and proceed recursively. Our crawl yielded a graph with 2782 musicians, with edge weights the similarity between musicians."

- Emden Gansner, Yifan Hu, Stephen Kobourov and Chris Volinsky, Putting Recommendations on the Map - Visualizing Clusters and Relations: http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.5286

On an semi-related note, there is a wealth of information on visualizing music in the slide deck here: http://visualizingmusic.com/2009/10/22/using-visualizations-...
Ah, "deliberate practice". That's a much better term to describe it. Thanks!
Banks and Information Technology: Silo But Deadly
Actually it doesn't link to the guidelines. It links to

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

I added this feature within the last year, so none of the established users know it exists, but I think it has helped stave off decline as HN has grown.
http://haacked.com/archive/2009/12/02/t4-template-for-less-c...
I guess he's referring to this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978170
Parenscript, a javascript generator, eh?

I don't understand, why would anyone want to generate javascript from S-exprs? I understand this is fashionable in the CL world, but I've never seen any good justification for this practice outside of saying, "Now everything is in lisp."

But this isn't a terribly compelling argument. Most web applications are multi-language and it doesn't seem terribly detrimental to them. Further, the state of the art in web technology moves so incredibly fast that it seems strange and almost obstructionist to insist on a secondary library that needs to be kept in synch.

Finally, it tends to lead to crap designs. Anyone who does cross-browser implementations designs will tell you that simple CSS over a generic HTML framework is almost never enough. Frequently you need to introduce new enclosing scopes or add seemingly senseless markup to help make IE play nice (a torturous exercise many web designers still need to go through). So while CL has some awesome web libraries, I'd say their extensive work into making HTML+JS+CSS generation from pure lisp seems like a foundation built on sand. Sometimes I wonder if the whole exercise was just to avoid working with HTML, which many (more prejudiced) developers find distasteful to work with.

I don't think Clojure is at a significant disadvantage to CL in this field. If anything, it's at an advantage in web applications, as it has access to a massive number of very good web-related and utility libraries. A paucity of modern, battle tested libraries that "work everywhere" has always been Common Lisp's achilles heel.
Clojure has scriptjure: http://github.com/arohner/scriptjure

which compiles s-expressions to javascript.
How does the bot AI work? Look for a lull in the bid rates? It seems like it would be hard to know when other people aren't also sitting there waiting to pounce on the auction.
Canadian government is buying the video game industry
New Click&Clean 3.6.0.0 add-on for Firefox
Clear private data with a single click, clear private data when browser closes...
I'm not sure I would recommend investing in mutual funds in the blog post. It makes me feel cheated and sick to know that the mutual fund "managers" there (whom for the most part switch out every few years or so) get paid more for doing the same amount of "work" as the fund grows due to them taking a percentage of the fund size vs. a performance based fee.
I'd agree with you. You can be talented and create a hit early on. I think one of the points of the 10,000 hours thing, is that you have to be really dedicated to a pursuit to become an expert/top percentile in your field.

Innate talent is another requirement and will slow you down or speed you up, but I would doubt that you find any experts who are not greatly committed to their field (even if they hadn't dedicated 10,000 hours to it yet, they fully expect to).
I guess it's a start but I don't like graphics, the fact it's full screen, the lack of the chat, when multiple clients are connected I see a strange "refresh" effect like scrolling on the top then returning, and so forth. Does not feel like a solid product with a nice UI currently so I think that before to add more features you should try to improve what you already have.
The problem is that the conditional probability of the coin being biased given the observation of TTTTTH absolutely does not and cannot depend one whether you intended to flip until you saw a heads, or were going to flip 6 times. Therefore you've got a subjective factor influencing your conclusion that probability theory says should not be a factor if you are reasoning consistently.
Say a proper Bayesian who's a fan of 'da Bears' just saw the bears lose again, badly. How is he supposed to update these two beliefs:

- this season 'da Bears' will tear shit up every Sunday (fwiw assume prior on this has it as likely)

- I am usually over-optimistic about 'da Bears''s performance (fwiw assume prior on this also has it as likely)

...in light of the new evidence?

(Side note: I'm specifically not talking about bayesian analysis or statistics in a formal setting with a prespecified, finite list of allowed hypotheses (like spam or ham).

If I wrote this out in extreme detail I'd get nothing done today, I think you can charitably fill in the gaps and missing pieces of what I'm getting at; if not I'll fill them out in a few.)
One interesting thing about this UI is it rules out finding people who are already busy with projects, but who may be looking for people to join their project.

So say I'm a developer with a good ('good' === 'pays the bills') project, and need a designer, and I am not available, because I'm busy with that good project.

Now I can search for a designer, but a designer cannot find me. Maybe this is intentional; I'm sure some people would prefer it this way. Or maybe it's an oversight in the UI design. It seems like the latter.
How Flickr is handeling language detection
This is a clear way to think about it, thanks!

I think the thing about OOP is it's an abstract set of concepts and it's not easy to grasp the benefits until you practice it.
Well people would do it for the same reason they use the GWT. In that case they are more familiar with Java and GWT lets them write Java and have it compiled to javascript for client side use.
The 'welcome' link is hard to find. It does little to explain things like flagging, the karma limit to down or up voting and in general, anything at all. In fact, it doesn't even tell you the format rules the HN comment box accepts. There is conceivably some deluded notion that 'real' hackers will sort all of this out. Or they'll just call terrible UI as they see it.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/publisher/default.aspx
You're both right. I definitely should have added "design patterns" to the list though.
Clojure seems likely to be able to plug into whatever Java libraries you might want to use. CL (in particular, SBCL) is used to power a number of web sites and they use Lisp all the way down. One of my favorites is http://wigflip.com/ that has a number of fun toys. Weblocks is a good CL framework. and there is support for Posgtress (as well as mysql, etc etc) available for CL.

Check those out for that side of what you can do with CL.

I am less familiar with the Java world, but Clojure seems to be very capable in that area.
Disk space is virtually free today.
First steps towards quantum computers...!
Good points, KD. Clearly, you've been there. Is there a good writeup somewhere of the deviations from "nice" web design that are needed?
F# - Functional Approach
19 to share here, if there's demand.
'Accidental' Download Sending Man To Prison
> "Great code is easy to read"

Maybe it should have been "make it as simple to read as possible, but no simpler."?

>"Use github."
>Seems awfully narrowly scoped

It is narrowly scoped. The thing I've witnessed with newbies and SCM, is that they are so intimated by it they never get in the habit of using it(until they go to a good shop that uses it). But it takes 1 minutes to sign up for github. And 1 hour of typing "git commit, git add, git init, git push" etc to master the basics. Then building upon that knowledge is easy. But just getting started with SCM is the hardest part, imo.

> "Code is surprisingly more like English than like math."

Kind of the same point as earlier ("clear as possible, but no clearer").

My linux advice was pretty weak, I got some good emails suggesting it should have been more specific, and I agree with that. I should have said "Learn key linux programs". pipes, regexes, vim, etc.

Great feedback, thanks!
Use index funds, a subspecies of mutual funds which replaces the manager with a computer that simply tracks the composition of a particular index (and thus the overall economy, for sufficiently broad indicies -- total market funds, for example).

The idea is "Well, mutual fund managers might take in hundreds of millions a year in fees, but they don't reliably actually do better than the market average anyhow, and those hundreds of millions come straight out of the investors' money. Instead, let the computer mathematically guarantee you get the average pre-fee, and then pay a much lesser fee to cover the transaction costs."

For more on this general topic, see anything written by Bogle.
I haven't looked, but it should be fairly easy to convert.

Unless the data is in one of the proprietary GIS formats, then you're in for a late night hellride. GDAL/OGR may be your friend, or may not.

It looks like a nice dataset, but only has center lines for rivers -- no polygon data.
REAL code katas:  ACM programming contest world finals problems
I picked my example so that the proper influence of the prior would be clear. You are absolutely right that there are many cases where different people with equivalent information have different beliefs. But being faced with complications like this makes correct reasoning more important, and not less.

When you try to sweep the proper influence of the prior under the carpet, people will manipulate their statistics to draw the conclusions that they want. Worse still, if each is using subjective techniques that they believe are objective, the unexamined assumption will lead to them talking past each other.

By contrast with correct reasoning you can show each why they continue to believe what they believe while showing them how the other side is not going to have their opinions changed. In my experience this opens up a bigger possibility of useful dialog and changed opinions.
Startup Visa - new post on TC by Vivek Wadha
profiles of deserving individuals
It really depends on you (and I say this as someone who just chose to write a huge CL webapp).

If you have experience with Java - I'd probably go with Clojure. If you have a lot of background with Lisp (i.e., Slime/ASDF don't scare you) I'd go with CL. If you don't know either - just pick what's more interesting to you (but be aware there's a steep learning curve either way).

On the CL side of things:

-You want to use Hunchentoot as your webserver

-CL-SQL for persistence

-CL-WHO if you want sexp => HTML, or html-template if you want pure HTML templates

-Parenscript is good for Javascript since code you write in Parenscript can run on either the server or browser (it makes it really easy to Ajaxify things, for example). But, if you're doing lots of really fancy JS and you're great at the language already, I'd stick with pure Javascript.

-For JSON, I personally prefer YASON to cl-json, but take your pick (they're both fine).
Good question, but for me Tech starts to look the same after you have seen so much of it. In fact, I think that the older you are, the less likely you are to browse through technical books in a bookstore/library. is really not true at all. I won't say my age, but I have been programming professionally since 1965 and always hit the computer section of bookstores first. (Sadly in apparent decline. My favorite was Borders, mainly because of their first store in Ann Arbor. It was more like a seriously overstuffed library with lots of big soft chairs and tables.) My technical curiousity is as great as it was when I was 12.

Yes, my interests are quite varied and wide, and I have places to go on the net and elsewhere to explore them. I come to hn because i look for the serious technical discussions you find here and the startup and business focus.

I am not interested in topics such as consciousness as I find them particularly undisciplined or worse. And not sure how that is influenced by our consideration of mortality.
Is it "discovered" or "created"?
If someone's interested in this, there's also a really good related paper on functional incremental parsing: http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~bernardy/FunctionalIncrementalPa...

This method is used in Yi editor to implement a parser / highlighter which does real parsing, but doesn't require reading the whole file (and can be restarted at some arbitrary point after modifications).
I (OP) agree with a lot of what you've said. I have done a lot of work in javascript, and my reason for html/js generation wasn't because I believe that everything should be lisp. I enjoy writing html, js and css from scratch.

The reason I chose it as one of my criterion is because it allows you to get off the ground _fast_ if you're coding in a single language (so basically it helps with prototyping stuff). I really enjoy the html generation libraries- I can test stuff without doing a mental switch between languages, even build a half decent UI very quickly, and that is a huge advantage. My initial scripts will not need to be run in multiple browsers, they'll be simple scripts to get the app going. Since I intend to keep the scripts small and smiple, I can replace them later with javascript as the app grows.
I'm biased - I generally prefer the Clojure way of doing things to CL (data structures, unicode, portability, library compatibility) but then the last time I seriously used CL was ~2006-2007, so things may have changed since.

But, to address your requirements:

* JSON: clojure.contrib.json

* XML: clojure.contrib.prxml

I gather there are a JS generator and an SQL interfacing library in contrib as well, though I haven't used them. Worst case you can access any Java libs for those purposes.

You also get to plug into any webserver that supports Java servlets, if that's an issue.

The killer feature for server programming in Clojure is the STM though. It means you can multi-thread your server relatively worry-free without resorting to moving all your state out-of-process (e.g. all state lives in the DB). You still need to pay attention to synchronising I/O, but compared to manual locking of everything, STM is a piece of cake.

(context on my perspective: I've delivered a Clojure-powered back-end server for a multiplayer Flash game for a customer, as well as made some minor short-lived web sites; clojure was great for all of those use cases - I'd link to them if I was allowed to put my name against them)
Eliezer's post is a good one, and this page is also a nice framing of what I also thought was the best part of his post. It is a refreshing way of perceiving parapsychology, and for once I am glad that John Archibald Wheeler was unable to get parapsychology expelled from the AAAS.

At last, with this perspective, someone has turned the pile of steaming refuse that is parapsychology into a vein of gold, waiting to be mined.