daa

I think Disqus is a great service, and I suspect that this business model will work fine for them, but it's obviously not ideal for everyone.

The economics of hosting comments are interesting -- there is real engineering effort in doing it well; there is product value to some degree of aggregation (spam & bot detection, etc.); the operating expenses are real especially at a Disqus-style scale, but it's not clear that many people would pay even a small subscription fee.

Makes me wonder about the viability of either a federated (not fully p2p, but "local" aggregators), either with or without actual coordination between members of the federation on spammers, e.g.. I'd probably swallow the cost of hosting comments for a few thousand "neighborly" sites, if it meant i had a good commenting system with no commercial interruptions, and be happy to subsidize "good people".

Gah. The old site and old pages will come back -- part of the shift that pmoz mentions above is that different teams ran the 2010 site and the 2012 version, and so we're learning (a bit late) how to build in permanence into the site structures).

Find a mentor who can help for free, and who will take the time to learn more about you and your startup than HN commenters can in a random thread.

This is a tad off-topic, but I'd love something that's more like django's admin UI for mongo-using projects. Not the same tool, I know. What's a good word for something like that?

This comment thread is a bit depressing, but ignoring that.

One of the bits about the piece that has me scratching my head a bit is whether the mess that is dependency management in OSS operating systems (and generally OSS software distribution models) matters _enough_. While I very much share the author's reaction of "can't we do better?", it also feels that optimizing that mess isn't just a design exercise as much as a social one, because OSS isn't really a bazaar but a constellation of connected more-or-less-cathedralish bazaars. And I don't know that this mess is deeply problematic (although the author does find some egregious issues).

Design happens at a specific scale, and some scales reward investment in design more than others. Designing a chair that can be mass-produced is more effective than designing a room, which can't. One could argue that designing a self-contained piece of software (e.g. the Python runtime) matters more than designing a deliberately open system (e.g. the ecosystem of Python libraries), and that the alternative (random competition, forking, etc.) is Good Enough.

[for carbon dating: had my first IT job in the early 80s, as a teenager]

Right -- we'll be adding JS support in a later release. That can be lesson 4 (where 1. is "what's HTML", 2. is "what does HMTL look like", ...)

It's primarily for educational purposes, indeed. The pages are hosted on Mozilla servers.

Temporary glitch, sorry 'bout that!

Yah, we suffered some issues on the cluster which caused temporary failures. Sorry 'bout that!

Thx, we'll see if we can find a good monospaced font. Although IMO it's not as important in html as in other languages, for some reason.

Nice! I've been looking for something to give me a better feel for what's going on.