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Clojure and Heroku Predict Flight Delays

Posted by kdawson on from the fully-buzzword-compliant dept.

murphee writes "Flight delayed again? Should have asked FlightCaster, a new site using statistical analysis to predict the delay of your flight in real-time. What's even better, the services is fully buzzword compliant: it's built with Clojure, distributed with Hadoop, served with Rails, and hosted on Heroku. This interview with one of the FlightCaster developers gives the gory details on architecture, Clojure tips, and your boss a reason to let you have all the multimethods and macros you can eat. Seems like now that O'Reilly's publishing a LISP book, the Age of Parenthesus has come..."

8 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. cool story by el_tedward · · Score: 1, Funny

    cool story, bro

  2. Re:Unnecessary by Em+Emalb · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is unnecessary because they tell you at the airport if your flight is delayed.

    Back in my day you had to WALK over to a big sign and try to track down your flight information, or, even worse, you had to talk to the person standing behind the counter. And we all know that that ain't diet Dr Pepper they're drinking in that cup on their counter, no sir, that's 100% pureed baby souls. One time, I was taking a flight to Santa Barbara and I couldn't remember the airport code...well, that's not true. I could remember it, but I'd forgotten my tri-focals, so I couldn't read the blasted sign, and I had to go to that counter to find out about my flight. Well, after standing in line for close to 3 months, I finally get to the counter and the "lady" behind the counter shoots a 4 foot flame from her anus that burned my ticket to little cinders.

    Where was I? Oh yeah, I'm stoked for something like this. It beats havin' ta walk, sonny-Jim.

    --
    Sent from your iPad.
  3. Re:Heroku link broken by camperdave · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do we have to code
    in seventeen syllables
    using Heroku?

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  4. Re:What is the "Age of Parenthesus"? by irenaeous · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oh! Lisp. Yeah. I get it now. You misspelled "Parenthesis". A Lisp book author of all people!

  5. Holy schnikes by reginaldo · · Score: 3, Funny

    From the article: 'There are only two of us that have been working on the research side of things...'

    So there are 2 guys that built this machine learning process, distributed using cascade and hadoop, and they built and distributed an app to show the results using rails and heroku?

    These guys probably eat my code as a breakfast snack. Seriously, how do I become that badass?

    1. Re:Holy schnikes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      We badass scientific and architectural types think in abstractions (that's pretty Lispy), kernels (that's numerical), and codes (that's crazy numerical). We don't write programs, we design languages within which the desired program is a trivial expression, or at least beta-reduces to a trivial expression.

      Then you need an army of mortals to figure out how to package it in a way that it can be used by other mortals, but that's not really our problem, is it?

  6. Re:ask someone! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Most of us who have attempted to enjoy any kind of social interaction with anyone condemned to work in an airport have not relished in the experience.

  7. Clojure and Heroku? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 3, Funny

    I caught their act in Vegas! They were absolutely amazing!