How FlightCaster (YC S09) was built (RoR + JVM + Clojure + Hadoop)

This is an awesome post, would love to see more overview and analysis like this from more of the YC companies. Good stuff.

I'm curious to know what type of machine learning algorithms are being used for the prediction. Anyone have any thoughts?

I wonder if they'll be able to transition all that logic toward analyzing a different set of data if predicting flight delays doesn't prove that lucrative? I guess if they take this far enough though, the government or an airline consortium might just buy it.

Very interesting read.<p>Let's say I know next to nothing about Clojure, Lisp, functional programming, etc.<p>Could anyone suggest some resources for a beginner on this topic who is interesting in learning more about functional programming? Some tutorials perhaps?

Sounds like a great service - I'm not in the USA and don't travel much, but it sounds like some great data mining!

Wait, so... this tells me that my flight is "probably" delayed?<p>What if I take that as gospel and show up to the airport late or otherwise make plans based on that data and then it turns out it wasn't actually delayed?<p>Isn't the equilibrium action for me to show up at the airport on time no matter what?