And just updated the post to change the codename to "Reinhardt," just as a sign of good faith and before anyone else gets the wrong idea.

Hey guys -- for the past 7 years we've named every release after a jazz musician, as you can see here:

http://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/

Usually no one notices, and the codename isn't even in the tweets or announcement email, just a sentence that clearly links to the jazz musician's Wikipedia page. (It's not like Ubuntu codenames that are widely used.) We also put a fun plug for djangoproject.org to the end of the "future" section, which hopefully will also introduce some new people to their project. I haven't seen anyone tweeting the codename except to complain, so I don't think this is going to confuse anybody think we're rewriting in Python. (However much they may want that.)

That said, apologies for the unintended controversy. In hindsight, we probably should have used "Reinhardt" to have the same effect of honoring one of our favorite musicians without anyone getting confused with a fellow Open Source project.

Now to work on 3.2 Sinatra! (Kidding, Ruby folks.)

Hi Matt --

I know this really isn't a big deal, and I really don't want to be a dick about it, but in this age of Google I would really appreciate it if you'd change the name. I think if we codenamed Django 1.3 "Wordpress" you'd feel similarly, right? I really don't want this to turn into A Thing, so how about you just see this as a small favor for a fellow open source hacker and I owe you beer/whiskey/whatever?

Please feel free to get in touch personally if you want to talk further - I'm jacob@jacobian.org.

(I'm Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the lead Django devs.)

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the next best time is right now ;)

I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way.

Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we can check if things are different now. That should be possible, because news.arc has always logged vote times.

I have recently begun to realize that there are 2 aspects to "website degeneration". One is the obvious new people showing up because they heard it's cool psuedo python paradox situation.

The other comes from the old-timers themselves. I'm not particularly that old-timer, but in the 3something years I've been here, I can say I have experienced this:

I've grown.

The "5 awesome vim tips" or "super deep closure stuff" articles that today annoy me as fluff were deep and new to me back then. HN was a fantastic site introducing me to amazing things, and it is introducing a lot of people to the same amazing things now. As such, the quest for truly new content needs to go deeper, but the people who need the lighter content are greater in number and enthusiasm, ensuring the fluff rises.

When the older crowd doesn't notice their growth, or the lack of change in content (or the combo) you start to get "it's gone down-hill" type comments.

edit: I mean the quest for truly new content for me needs to go deeper, not that the site necessarily needs to go that way.

                 Quality of HN Comments Over Time
   |                   . .
   |                  .   . 
  q| . .             .     .
  u|    .           .       .               . . .
  a|     .         .          .           .       .
  l|      .       .              .      .           .
  i|       .     .                  . .               .    
  t|        . . .                       you are here -->. .
  y|                                      (that's all)
   |________________________________________________________
    N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F
       '09                     '10                     '11

(It must be that time of year again...)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871