Peter Christensen

Are You This Agile? Paul Graham Changes Hacker News While You Wait

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I’ve expressed my admiration for Paul Graham a number of times already in this young blog. He’s a successful entrepreneur, investor, innovator, writer, philosopher, language designer, and hacker. Most people would be happy to be as good at one thing as he is at any of those things. Today, let me add to his mystique.

I’m a regular on Paul Graham’s Hacker News site, but I had a hard time following the conversations and getting the full value of the site until I would hystry.com by Kartik Agaram. Kartik scraped all of the comments from Hacker News and displayed them with some extra formatting and features. There were some neat things like the ability to filter out conversations you were unintereested in and see all the parents any comment. But the thing I liked most was the way each comment had the article it related to next to it so it was easy to visually filter conversations.

hystry.com

Well, one day it just stopped loading new comments. I figured it was temporary and waited a day or two for it to come back, but when it didn’t, I emailed Kartik to see what was going on. He said his crawler’s email address was banned because it was putting too much of a load on the Hacker News server. That was certainly reasonable of pg to do, but I wanted to make sure he knew that I found hystry’s features to be valuable. I thought the best way to let Paul know would be to post a request on Hacker News, with a slightly inflammatory title (Reinstate hystry’s Hacker News) and a much more polite request in the text field.

What happened after that is pretty amazing. It’s worth reading through the entire thread, noting the time stamps for when things happened. To make a long story short, Paul made three changes to his running site in real time response to a dialog he was having on that discussion thread. Total time for feature request, notification, communication, two design iterations and a bug fix: 7 hours. Here’s a timeline of what happened: (note: I can’t say exactly how long this took because posts over an hour old don’t show minutes)

  • Start – I make the request to let hystry crawl again because I like the way they displayed the content
  • After 3 hours – After some other people commented on the issue, Paul explains that it was hard on his server and asks if I’d like anything changed on Hacker News itself
  • After 4 hours – I make my recommendation and Paul makes a change to the live site within the hour
  • After 5 hours – Someone recommends an alternative design and Paul implements that suggestion, again withing the hour
  • After 6 hours – I notice a bug and point it out
  • After 7 hours – Paul fixes the bug

Here’s what the new site looks like with the root link shown:

Hacker News

How did Paul make these changes so fast? Hacker News is written in Arc, his new language built on top of MzScheme. I don’t know whether the web server is his own or if it comes with MzScheme, but he has REPL access to the running server. So he made changes to the site’s code while it was running and changes were instant. Hacker News doesn’t have customers per se, but choice of technology and architecture let him provide an unforgettable user experience. This should certainly raise an eyebrow for anyone who has had deployment or downtime issues while making changes to their site.

If one of your users had a reasonable feature request, how long would it take you to publish it?

Comments at Hacker News

Comments at programming.reddit.com

First spewing-Coke-out-my-nose funny comment of the day: “Nice. Here I thought this was an article about Graham rewriting some history. I was pleasantly surprised.” -now look back at the title of the article. Thanks boredzo!

UPDATE: Several people have pointed out that this isn’t some technological miracle and you could do the same thing with X (for many values of X). I know. That’s why I spent about 5% of the article on it. I was impressed with his response to unsolicited feedback that was sent to him indirectly, and that he didn’t just slap out the change, he made two design iterations and a bug fix while communicating almost live with users. Much more of a social and business feat than technological.

Workaholics Are Just Busy Having Fun

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Once you’ve read a little of Seth Godin, you feel like anything new he writes is something you could have written. There are just two problems:

  1. You didn’t write it
  2. You’re not Seth Godin

Here’s my latest “I’m not Seth Godin so all I can do is comment” thought on his recent post “Workaholics“:

In high school, I had to write a lot of essays (thanks, Dr Yarborough. No really, I don’t remember much I learned in high school but I’m a good writer because of all those stupid essays about iconoclasm and stuff). They started us small with 500 words and worked up to where we wrote one or two 1,500 word essays a week. It was like torture. I hated it. 1,500 words seemed like was writing the entire Encyclopedia Britannica! When we had our final Extended Essay that had to be 4,000 words, I thought I was going to die. (I didn’t.)

Fast forward a decade or so and now I’m writing for fun on the internet. And now I find out that I can’t write under 1,000 words to save my life. Even this post, which was supposed to be one sentence tacked onto the end of another post, is quickly growing. My last post, which was supposed to be a simple response to some comments, weighed in at about 1,400 words and I wrote it in under an hour (including rewriting one part that got lost in a WordPress accident). What’s the difference? I enjoy the heck out of what I’m writing about!!! I’ve had thoughts like these swirling around inside me with no one to say them to. Let’s face it, you’d have a hard time having that Lisp past/present/future conversation at most university CS departments, let alone at most workplaces. Now that I realized that the internet gives me an easy way to express all these thoughts, and that people will actually listen and respond, it’s exhilirating! I feel like my hands (and wakefulness) are the limiting factor, not my mind. I have so much I want to say that I have to try to limit myself to under 2,000 words one each topic just so I can write more of them. Granted, no one has offered to pay me a living wage to do this, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Seth Godin’s right. Just because the stuff that makes you happy looks like the stuff other people do for work, doesn’t mean it’s work to you.

Responses to Lisp: The Golden Age

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I’m overwhelmed at the response to my recent article about Lisp: The Golden Age Isn\’t Coming Back, Let\’s Welcome a Bright Future! It clearly shows my blogging virginity that I’m excited about 4,000 page views, but that doesn’t make me any less excited! Not only that, there have been lots of good comments, almost 100 total, on this site, programming.reddit.com and Hacker News. I’d like to address some of the comments and criticisms in one place, here, rather than all over the place.

First, my mindset and perspective were poorly communicated and set the wrong stage going into the article. (I hate putting “WARNING” tags at the beginning of posts to set the right context, even though they are so useful!) A lot of people thought I was just another noob complaining about how hard it was to use Lisp. I mean, I guess I sort of was, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Lisp has barriers to becoming a more popular, mainstream language, and every one of them is tractable! Here are a couple of the points, along with the solutions:

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Blogging Strategy, Social News Stats

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Jeff Atwood gave the best possible advice for people who want to make a successful blog:

When people ask me for advice on blogging, I always respond with yet another form of the same advice: pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. Until you do that, none of the other advice I could give you will matter. I don’t care if you suck at writing. I don’t care if nobody reads your blog. I don’t care if you have nothing interesting to say. If you can demonstrate a willingness to write, and a desire to keep continually improving your writing, you will eventually be successful.

But success takes time– a lot of time. I’d say a year at minimum. That’s the element that weeds out so many impatient people. I wrote this blog for a year in utter obscurity, but I kept at it because I enjoyed it. I made a commitment to myself, under the banner of personal development, and I planned to meet that goal. My schedule was six posts per week, and I kept jabbing, kept shipping, kept firing. Not every post was that great, but I invested a reasonable effort in each one. Every time I wrote, I got a little better at writing. Every time I wrote, I learned a little more about the topic, how to research topics effectively, where the best sources of information were. Every time I wrote, I was slightly more plugged in to the rich software development community all around me. Every time I wrote, I’d get a morsel of feedback or comments that I kept rolling up into future posts. Every time I wrote, I tried to write something just the tiniest bit better than I did last time.

Now before you dismiss this advice, two points to consider:

  1. Take a closer look at the end of the url: blog/archives/000983.html. 983! In 2006 after I really got into reading blogs, I dove back and read through Jeff’s archives, among others, and the post numbers are almost entirely sequential. Near as I can tell, he either has written or is approaching over 1,000 posts, so he knows what he’s talking about.
  2. Take a look at the Technorati Top 100. He’s #73 and #85. (I think because you can get it at either / or /blog)

Other top computer bloggers have done the same thing: hundreds of posts over several years on a variety of topics.

Now, I don’t need to be as big as Reg, Joel, or Jeff, but I’m sort of tired of being invisible. I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring and create an online persona, and here was my strategy:

  • Like Jeff said, write a lot. I’m shooting for 2-3 posts a week (dang mental math made me realize that I need to write over 100 this year)
  • Read and respond to comments. Just like it’s nice to eat a restaurant where they owner gives a crap that you’re there, it’s nice to read a blog where the author cares about your reaction. This is especially important when beginning, and I’m going to put extra effort into it. Just like the Cluetrain Manifesto said, the internet is just a big conversation, so if you can keep the conversation going, you get more out of it.
  • Cover a breadth of topics. A lot of my writing so far (aside from my early forays into polyphasic sleep and the building of my house) have been commentary on Lisp. That’s just because that’s what I’ve had most on my mind recently. Upcoming topics include general software principles, notes on setups/configurations I make, book reviews, entrepreneur/family balance, collections of resources, education, updates on my startup, and whatever else.
  • Cover topics deeply. If I do a better job explaining or consolidating knowledge than anyone else, more people will find it beneficial and more people will read my stuff. In a Googlified “I’m Feeling Lucky” world, being the 3rd or 4th best resource doesn’t get you very far.
  • Use social news sites effectively. I’ve submitted a couple of the things I’ve written to Hacker News and programming.reddit.com and had good experiences. I put two of them up before I installed a stats package on WordPress so I don’t know the effect, but there’s more below about the stats I’ve collected so far

I’ve been a heavy internet consumer for a long time and a big blog reader for the last 18 months, but this is the first time I’ve really produced stuff that people have read. I got full stats on the article I submitted yesterday, Lisp: The Golden Age Isn\’t Coming Back, Let\’s Welcome a Bright Future and here’s what I’ve found:

  • As of this writing, exactly 2500 people had read the article
  • Of the 1500 or referrers, about 800 were from Reddit and close to 500 from Hacker News
  • Over 200 people that came from Google Reader. At first I thought that all of those people subscribed to my blog, but I realized that they’re reading someone else who linked to me (for instance, I made Raganwald’s del.icio.us feed – Thanks Reg!). Hopefully people will subscribe, but I’m not sure how to track that without using FeedBurner. Any tips? [Note: I just found the Syndicated views in WordPress Stats. There were 0] Any comments from someone who has subscribed?

2500 page views might not be much to some people, but since I consistently joke about the dozens of people that enjoy my writing, 2500 is a big deal. I’m curious to see how traffic goes in the days after the Reddit/Hacker News traffic dies down. I’m trying to keep writing to make sure people that found me then continue to find good things. Late this week or early next week I’ll have another social-news-worthy post, and this one might not even be about Lisp!

World’s Best Primer on Energy Competitiveness

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This has been in my writing queue for over a month. As part of my resolution to write more, I thought the easiest place to start would be to flesh out the ideas that I’ve already scribbled down.

It doesn’t take an economics professor or a petroleum geologist to know that energy is a big issue in all aspects of society: technology, politics, military, economics, and social issues. And anyone who follows America’s energy policy know that it’s oriented towards resource extraction, increasing energy supply, and tax breaks for producers. Lots of people criticize this approach, but one man has risen above the debate.

Amory Lovins is a founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, which does more stuff than I can even begin to summarize. The premise is that rather than viewing energy conservation as a social good or something to be done out of guilt, investment in energy efficiency can be done profitably and indeed must be done to remain competitive. Mr. Lovins charges a $40,000 speaking fee (he’s obviously not going to be at my birthday party) but thanks to the internet, you can listen to a complete 9 part lecture series he gave at Stanford. He covers energy efficiency in buildings, transportation, and industry, and the implications that this massive efficiency increase would have. Most of his claims sounds too ridiculous to even be possible, but for almost all of them he points to a real client or implementation where actual results were obtained, not just theoretical projections. It was so amazing that half the time I was either laughing out loud or my jaw was dropped in awe.

So without further ado, if you’re at all interested in the economics of energy, go to the Conversations Network and listen to all the talks in the MAP Energy Efficiency Series. It’s an amazing 10 hour investment that will change your perspective completely forever.

Lisp: The Golden Age Isn’t Coming Back, Let’s Welcome a Bright Future

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I am a fairly new member of the Lisp community, so new that most people have never heard of me. I’m one of the young programmers that have read the excellent writing from Paul Graham, Raganwald, and Steve Yegge and decided to try Lisp out for myself. I’ve had much more time available in small chunks, enough to read tutorials and articles on the internet but not enough to dive into heavy programming. As a result, I’ve gotten to know the community and history better than the language and tools, probably better than any new convert. Here are some observations I’ve made (summary then detail):

  1. Lisp is like a new language with lots of praise from important people.
  2. Lisp used to be very important but lost that position.
  3. Lisp lacks the infrastructure to get new users running quickly. The tools are there but they aren’t organized and streamlined.
  4. The Lisp community is fractured but composed of enough good people that it could develop into a positive, influential force.

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Technology Decisions – Where to Invest Your Brainpower

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(note: inspired by this post at SecretGeek)

(note #2: SecretGeek found this fantastic post by the greatly missed Kathy Sierra)

Anyone who spends 5 minutes reading technology news sites knows that there is FAR too much for any one person to learn (there’s almost too much for one person to be aware of). Between big companies, startups, open source, and research, there are thousands of new products, libraries, languages, technologies, etc every year. Thinking you’ll learn all of them (or even a significant fraction of them) is just madness. So here’s the process I’ve used to evaluate things.

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From Stagnant to Scholar to Startupper

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One of my problems with blogging (and honestly, just about everything I do) is that I have a big, grandiose vision of what I want as an end result. Then, when I start to work on it, I directly extrapolate the time my first few steps take over the whole project, and end up thinking that the big vision will just take too long. For instance, I have several draft posts with nothing but a title and a link I want to discuss, but since writing is harder than reading, I leave them as drafts. Because of this, I end up sticking with things I know how to do well because I can start quickly, make predictable progress, and work towards a finished product. Two things where this works well: reading books (I read tons, 1-2 a week of all sorts) and programming in C#. I found .Net when it came out in 2001. I was in college programming in C++ and biting back swear words after every SEGFAULT, and I was completely tickled at the thought of a language where you didn’t have to manage memory. I started programming C# in my spare time and every job I’ve had since I graduated has been .Net related.

Fast forward to 2006 when I interviewed for a job, completely bombed and realized that I just wasn’t that good of a programmer. There was no question that I was smart and could figure anything out, but I had only worked on little problems. Some of my jobs dealt with big systems but I worked on a small, self contained part of them. My side projects hadn’t been anything significant so they didn’t stretch my capabilities much either. So I realized that not only had I not learned any Computer Science theory since I left college, but I was actually regressing as a coder (no more writing web crawlers, chess programs, programming languages, or operating systems)! I realized that this was a first class ticket to unhappiness and out of the computer profession and I decided to change.

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Top Story of 2007 – Kathy Sierra

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With that time of the year where people mail in easy posts summarizing the “Top 10 Posts I’ve Written” or their “5 New Years Resolutions”, there’s been something conspicuously absent from reflections on 2007.

Kathy Sierra, one of the best bloggers period, suddenly and completely quit blogging and vanished from the public eye because of threatening messages posted against her. It happened back in March/April, and 8-9 months is an eternity to remember something in the Internet age, but we’re talking about the disappearance of one of the most entertaining, informative, educational writers on the entire Internet! In the world of tech writing, imagine if Joel Spolsky or Paul Graham just stopped writing. Sure, they’ve already written enough to last most people a lifetime, but their new content from them got the internet flowing. Kathy Sierra was the same way, and she was in my small circle of recommended reading for aspiring developer/entrepreneurs.

Her blog, Creating Passionate Users, was a bright, sassy, well-illustrated light in a field of dim, drab competitors. In her farewell post, she gave a list of options of where she would go from there, but as far as I know, she hasn’t done any of them. I wish her well and hope that when she’s ready, I’ll get to read her work again in some format. There’s a goldmine of information already on her blog (405 posts, according to her), but it’s a real shame that mean and immature people prevented everyone from seeing more of her great work. This was an unusual and very sad story, and I can’t think of anything that had a bigger real effect this year (at least not in the internet world).

Filed Under: Fun

Updated Lisp Companies Page

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Now that Christmas is over, I got a chance to update my Lisp Companies page. First of all, I want to thank all of the people that emailed me – I got a couple dozen recommendations and added a lot of companies to the list. The updated list is sorted by geography, with new grand totals of:

USA: 11
Canada: 10
Europe: 8
India: 2
Virtual/Unsure: 3

I’ve still got to go through the big lists at Paul Graham’s site, Franz and LispWorks success stories, and weitz.de. That should take me a long time and I think I’ll write some other posts in the meantime.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed!