zeemonkee

> That doesn't mean it will never happen. The world is changing rapidly, it stands to reason that even more big changes could happen.

Rapidly compared to what ? 1900-1960 arguably saw more significant cultural, technological and political change than 1960-2010. The internet and mobile phone are about the only significant technological breakthroughs in my lifetime - in fact even they happened before my lifetime, but were not commonplace yet.

> I think "human nature" is a bit of a red herring. We don't currently have any scientific way to separate how much of how people behave is social/environment programming and how much is "human nature".

Well, we do have millenia of recorded history. Social mores may change, human nature less so.

"I believe my generation will overthrow the arbitrary and brutal authority of corporate capitalism and bigoted conservatism in favor of rationalistic, libertarian socialism driven by a scientific approach and a concern for universal social justice."

That's what my generation believed. And my parents' generation. And their parents....read some literature from 100 years ago, for example by the Fabians or other socialist writers. This little blasted thing called human nature always seems to screw things up....

Regarding the main point of the OP, I have a counterexample. I have a friend whose career has never taken off, who usually gets fired after a few months, and has never acquired any useful skills beyond blustering self-confidence. Why ? His father is a multi-millionaire who has arranged every job he's had, and bailed him out of every financial difficulty. He's never had to work a day in his life and has absolutely no ambition or drive.

That's not saying all rich kids suffer from what you might call the George W. Bush syndrome - but taking away the need to make money can also make people over-confident and lazy.

Fine if you are a huge social media personality like Scoble. If Scoble got fired from Microsoft then he'd make himself a martyr and his social cred would only increase. He'd lose nothing.

If you are a small-time schmuck with a wife and kids to support, you'd think twice before voicing a controversial comment on your employer. Part of the free speech of the web is having your opinion heard, even anonymously, without risk to yourself.

Yes, that leads to trolling - whether idiots, sock puppets of the left or right, etc. But that's the drawback of free speech - like drunken hecklers in an audience. But I'd rather have the trolls than lose the right to post anonymously or under an assumed identity if I wanted to. If I want to use my real name - fine. But that's my choice to make.

We don't have to play in Zuckerberg's world if we don't want to.

Only if you are referring to John McClane. "The man who learned better" could be Alan Rickman and all the other villains whose ass he kicked.

Having recently been forced to use one maybe I have a little bit of perspective.

The problem I believe, is, fundamentally, the need for managers to justify their existence. Whereas other roles in the organization - engineers, salespeople, secretaries - have clear reason for their existence and work they can point to (code written, products sold, paychecks processed) managers do not.

The fact that nobody reads any of these timesheets and that project estimates based on hours are a complete nonsensical fiction are really beside the point. The point is that the very production of this work is taken as proof that the manager, too, is producing valuable work.

In small startups timesheets are irrelevant because everyone has their heads down getting on with the job. Managers exist, but the company can't afford to have people who just "manage". They do other valuable roles - whether technical or sales or office admin. The sign of a company "growing up" is when you suddenly have all these new people you have to report to, with ill-defined titles like "Product Delivery Manager" - and the timesheets.

OK, but why are timesheet programs so badly designed ? The hardest thing in software development is to design something that's ill-defined - in other words, if the purpose of the program is a bad one, it's really hard to build a good program to fulfill that purpose. Simple timekeeping software isn't hard but management have so many nonsensical requirements that the software increases in complexity and correspondingly decreases in usability.

That's very true. A project I'm working on at the moment has some of the worst code I've seen. Copy and paste crap everywhere. No understanding of good programming practices or web design. A mountain of technical debt.

Yet, the company is doing well, making money, hiring people and expanding quickly.

Had they waited until their skills were good enough, or spent a fortune on experienced developers, they would not be where they are today - with a heap of technical issues sure, but also with the money to throw at these issues.

Good to hear Quixote is still going. It was my favourite framework in the pre-WSGI Django/Pylons days.

I'd throw in a few more goodies:

- signed merchandise (box sets, t-shirts etc) for first / largest donors

- competitions (win the chance to appear as an extra/meet the stars)

- deals with networks (e.g. get Fox or HBO to agree to match 50% of funding or show season if X amount is raised)

- small trailers or pilots on YouTube/Hulu

In a sense, Star Trek did - it was a franchise rescued from obscurity after being cancelled by its huge fanbase, and went on to make the series of movies, TNG and so on.

There may be earlier examples, but it's the first case I'm aware of where the fanbase had a direct influence on the resuscitation of a show.

I wonder if there is a germ of an idea here. Crowdfunded TV shows (or movies). Somebody proposes an idea for a TV show, gets some talent on board who sign up if it gets X amount of cash, people vote with cash donations (maybe with signed merchandise and other goodies).

Maybe Kickstarter could do it, if not might be a startup in there.

So because one QA guy is bad, the whole profession is bad ? You could say that about any profession, including developers.

> If they wanted to make housing affordable, whether rented or to own they could get rid of the green belt, or encourage much denser housing. The infrastructure problems could be solved by application of sufficient money and compulsory purchase, though one would need to massively streamline the current procedures on that, and on planning. If China can build subways with stations that open in fields, so could London.

So to add to infrastructure strain, we'd have huge environmental damage.

> As to the talented young, they speak English, if they weren't going to London it's very likely they'd be going to the States.

Maybe. There are significant immigration barriers to that. The very talented, sure, but not your average educated IT guy (for example).

> Never a matter of policy. Germany was the belated nation and it's multiple centres are a consequence of late unification and being split in half and made more federal in power structure by the conquerors. (I exaggerate the German lack of agency in the choice of West German state structure)

Never said it was a matter of policy, more, as you say, historical happenstance.

I agree, it's one of those things that really hurts the UK as a whole - and it's much worse than the 1850s, when you had much stronger regional economies (think Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow....)

It hurts the South-East because it puts the infrastructure under enormous strain and property prices beyond the reach of mere mortals, while draining the rest of the UK of its talented young.

This is one thing I think the Germans do right - a much more culturally, economically and politically balanced nation (even taking the East-West divide into account).

> Seriously, did Silicon Valley step on your mother's grave or something? You sound like Oscar Wilde's definition of "cynic": someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Not bad going, two ad-hominems and not a single rebuttal of my arguments.

Oh, and my mother is alive and well, thank you.

- crushing conformity ? check.

- love of me-too and sequels ? check.

- living off the glory days of the past ? check.

- patronage and network trump talent and originality ? check.

- overwhelming sense of self-importance ? check.

- lack of common sense economics ? check.

Maybe Silicon Valley is Hollywood for startups after all.

It's not just ugly, it's unmaintained.

With Django - or any ORM it's a good idea to keep an eye on the SQL that your application is running. Use the django debug toolbar[1] and run your SQL queries against a profiler. Most of the time, that's where your serious bottlenecks will be. If a query happens to be a bottleneck, there are ways the ORM can improve performance (e.g. select_related() to reduce the number of queries in a loop, only() and defer() to reduce the number of columns in a query, and so on[2]. In some cases this may even involve using pure SQL or caching heavily used queries.

Look at using processes vs threads with mod_wsgi, which should help improve performance. Ultimately however you might find nginx a better option, particularly if you are using it for static media/load balancing anyway. I'd suggest uwsgi (also heard good things about gunicorn). Use supervisord or another process monitor to make sure the lights stay on.

[1] https://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar [2] http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets

Then prepare to be disappointed. What you happen to believe is completely irrelevant to how the world works.

There are lots of people who work hard. Immigrant fruit pickers, waitresses, WalMart greeters. I'd question whether they get what they want in life. Of course they may have other goals than material gain, but hard work won't make them materially rich.

Success requires three basic ingredients. Luck - right place and time, being born into the right country, right family and so on and so forth. In other words, the hand you get dealt in life, which you don't have influence over. Brains - not necessarily education, but wit, quick thinking, "emotional intelligence" and so on, the ability to think for yourself and apply what you know to real-world problems.

Finally, yes, hard work, but only if applied with luck and brains.

As Jean-Paul Getty said, "Formula for success: Rise early, work hard, strike oil."

Arch Linux uses Python3 as the default system Python, which I found a bit daft as almost every Python library I use relies on Python 2.x.

SQLAlchemy is ported at least, don't know about all the low-level drivers though.

Simple. Charge customers who insist on IE6 for the extra development work required to support it.

The argument seems to be BigCorp vs. startup. You can also work in a relatively sane, small-to medium sized stable business.

I use Fabric at work, with South for migrations.

One useful technique I've found is to have Fabric deploy to a "staging" install on the target server (we still use SVN). It runs unit tests in that install, and if the tests fail, it stops deployment. If they pass, fabric will then complete deployment to the production server (and run tests again for good measure).

Of course that depends on having good testing practices and coverage, but it helps reduce the number of stupid last-minute mistakes that creep into the repo. Fabric is also useful in numerous repetitive small tasks that you need to run without going through the rigamarole of SSH.

Generally though we avoid running South through Fabric - changes to data schema are run very carefully after backing up etc. South is great, but any migration tool should be used with due care.

I do it for my day job (and my last few day jobs).

I have built a few of my own, but nothing with the intent of making money. The real impediment for me is not the technical side (I can do that myself, and I know enough people in the business to help with gaps in my knowledge) it's more coming up with good ideas.

Ideas are cheap, but really good ideas - the ones that make you think "why the hell didn't I think of that" - that light you on fire and push you to do 24 hour non-stop coding sprints because you just want to see them work - are few and far between, and much harder to come up with (at least for myself) than people realize.

Current debate aside, just like to say thanks for Pinboard from a happy customer. Good example of something that "just works", so you must be doing something right :-)

I can understand the obsession. As pointed out, the UK is massively centralized around a single city. Media ? London. Finance ? London. Politics ? London. And so on. There may be local centers of excellence elsewhere - and devolution has been an improvement - but if your startup relies on, for example, shmoozing clients or investors in the media or finance sectors, then London is where you want to be.

Personally, I think that's one thing (well that and our antiquated infrastructure and class system) that's holding the UK back, and it didn't used to be the case. But that's the situation we have.

However, there is no reason why people who don't need to shmooze with clients need to live in London or the Home Counties. If your job is coding, then remote working is a viable - and cheap - option, with the occasional company meeting every other month. A lot of companies have a lot of success with this model and, well-managed, it works well.

I think a lot of startups are still attached to some "Social Network" romantic ideal of a hackers' playground where we sit in Aeron chairs and eat pizza doing all-night coding sprints in between Nerf gun fights. However that has absolutely nothing to do with success or failure of a software project. A startup needs to adapt and economize and a huge office in central London is hardly the best way to do either. First, you are paying through the nose for office space you don't need, and second, it's hard to get people to work for you.

I suspect most Americans have annoying personal requirements like bills and mortgages to pay same as Europeans.

College students don't have these overheads, but they don't have experience either - so coding for next to nothing is a good exchange for experience and resume padding.

However, if you're an experienced developer and you work for nothing without a huge chunk of equity or ownership in the business then you're a fool. Look up some of the job offers on Craigslist - you'll be very much in demand.

Best in the world ? Try Inverness, Scotland.

If I'm going to work for nothing, I'll work for myself, or as a fully-vested partner.

If I'm going to work for a salary, I'll work for at least the going market rate for my skills. I don't care if you're Joe McStartup or IBM. It's your dream, not mine.

I do get a fair amount of job offers from startups in London, but they are very inflexible about remote working (I'm in Scotland). Want me to move to London ? Sure, double whatever salary you're offering and I might consider it. Otherwise it would be a big drop in my standard of living - nice big apartment up here for cardboard box down there.

There is a lot of good talent in the UK, the problem is we have a massively over-centralized economy, which is bad for London (way too expensive to live for average workers, and infrastructure straining under excess population) and bad for the rest of the UK (no jobs). Contrast with Germany, which has a more distributed (and far healthier) economy - Berlin, Munich, Hamburg etc.

Remote working would help redress the imbalance but some startups for good and bad reasons are reluctant. And no, I could care less about twin monitors or aeron chairs.