I should have known the magic here would be completely missed by much of the Hacker News audience - same thing happened with the comments on my blog. The whole point was that it WASN'T about the technology - it was that he's so in touch with his audience that within 4 hours of it coming to his attention, he was able to do two iterations, get feedback on both, and fix a bug. It took 4 hours because we were communicating asynchronously on a message board, but I'm pretty sure he could have done it live if I had him on the phone. Simply put, I was more impressed that he gave a crap than that he could push a code change.

I am at one of those "average" shops, as are most people (by definition, although maybe not in the HN community). I know this stuff is possible but we can't do it here, and neither can most sites.

To put it in perspective, if you found a bug in your bank's website and told them about it, how long would it take for them to fix it? Even worse, what if you suggested a way to make the site work better? Would anyone with decision making power ever even see the suggestion? Just try telling someone WHO'S NOT A GEEK this story and see what they say. I wrote the article because when I told my wife what happened, her jaw hit the floor.

"To put it in perspective, if you found a bug in your bank's website and told them about it, how long would it take for them to fix it?"

To put it in perspective, this is a very simple, small application with a relative handful of users that ... publishes links.

Would it be impossible for larger, more "serious" websites to try harder?

Not to mention that such serious websites will have more resources available.

Not to mention that such serious websites have more at stake and most likely have a team of developers that learned the hard way not to change product code on the fly.

Fair enough. I guess we do have a system for making rapid changes in place, and I'm just used to be able to do that sort of thing regardless of the language.

No kidding. I would love for my company to have a process for deployment that's as smooth as the one you're describing.

We are consultants here in Bangalore and we have routinely done this on a Python/Django social networking web app and a Ruby on Rails web app. code-test-svn commit - svn export , pretty much. With a lot of java experience, I can say that it is more elaborate and laborious in Java than python or ruby. The erlang movie (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5830318882717959520) shows off the same, for erlang.

It's also true that I assume these things are just like that partly because I founded a company that handles build and deployment... http://www.electric-cloud.com