Me and PG's Code | Hacker News Reader

Me and PG's Code

38 pointsmarrone10 comments

I accepted a job with Yahoo for which I will be starting very soon. The position is with the Small Business, which encompasses various Yahoo products. One of those products happens to be Yahoo Store, formerly known as Viaweb.

So I am looking forward to possibly having some contact with some of PG's work!

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Let me know if you have any questions.

The original Lisp version of Store is still there, btw. I know because I use it for paulgraham.com. The new rewritten version was sufficiently different that you had to choose to "upgrade," and I never have.

I keep worrying that one day they'll shut it down because I'm the last user, and I'll have to write another web-based site builder. At least then I could support css.

What would you do differently from Weebly?

Be able to hack the source. I miss that.

If they've completely rewritten the source code, do you think they would be willing to let you have the rights back to the original version again if/when they decide to shut it down?

> "Let me know if you have any questions."

I will hold you to that. I have a question for you right now actually. Are there any tech skills you wish you had learned, but so far have not?

I think they rewrote Yahoo Store in C++ or something like that. Sorry. They might have the code in a safe somewhere or something.... ask them and let us know.

Congrats on the job, what does PG's work mean? Is PG a person?

PG stands for Paul Graham, a guy who posts to this site a lot. You'll get to know him if you hang around here more.

Yes. PG is famous for writing pithy and insightful comic essays about the indolent British upper classes(1). He speaks with a slight lisp(2), having once bitten his tongue while eating breakfast(3). His writings are also noted for abundant citation of references(4).

  (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse
  (2) http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
  (3) http://paulgrahamatebreakfast.infogami.com/
  (4) See (4).

Congrats to the job!

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