Item — HN Reader

I am sorry. We have already given up building the site and were ready to let the idea wait for another year, but then our co-prankster, who didn't read the e-mails where we communicated our decision to postpone, called us on the phone and said the press-release was already on its way to tech publications all around. Then I had about one hour to write all the text you see in the cover, a couple news items excepted, while my other co-prankster was buying the domain, setting up hosting and uploading the HTML skeleton and designing the logo. I was sitting in a café waiting to pick up my wife while I banged this page.

From that OMFG moment, the denial-anger cycle that followed, to uploading the last touches, we made it all in about three hours.

We will plan better for next April. I promise.

BTW, the Slashdot submission is still pending. We may even be able to see it re-boom in a couple days.

2 comments

"we had alreaday"... That's what you get when you are writing this late into the night.

So when will Kanamit be up and running?

Well... You know that all the major hard to do components of our little imaginary framework already exist: there already is a Lisp-based web server that could handle HTTP requests (we assume it would stand behind a cache such as Varnish) and there must be at least a good few RDBMS persistence mechanisms for Lisp by now. As for the template engine, I would tend to go for something like ZPT (Zope Page Templates) as mixing code in the presentation layer does not hit me as particularly fancy. AFAIK, there is no implementation in Lisp, so, it would have to be done. For the rest, the glue connecting the HTTP to the persisted objects, it would be rather easy to do patterning after Rails or Django.

So, I think if we decided to really do it, even without full dedication, we could have it ready for release in about a year.

And it would be cool to launch it on April 1st.

Personally I wouldn't risk announcing anything that's not a joke within 24 hours of April 1st...

Gmail? :)

You'd rather rush a product out the door than cancelling a press release?

Not only that... The other co-prankster (the one with the press release) had already done their own co-prank (a book on the framework that went on sale the same day)... It wouldn't be nice from our part to leave him alone, so we had to play along.

In the end, it sorta worked.