I've seen Jason critique a lot of pitches. I have to say, it's hard for me to believe your description of the situation is giving the full story.

Yes, Jason probably had some brutally honest feedback about the presentation and how to make it better. But in my experience, his feedback is always spot on.

I've personally been on the receiving end of such feedback, and it can feel harsh at times. But this is one of Jason's greatest strengths: he has the ability to listen to a pitch once and then make it way stronger by improving a few key things. This is why almost all of the pitches at Launch are exceptional.

1. I always ask folks -- in private and group meetings -- "do you want the red or blue pill?"

2. Founders have asked for the brutal truth of the 'red pill 'every single time. No founder has ever asked for the blissful illusion of the blue pill. Not once!

3. I've coached 700 startups for TC50, LAUNCH Festival and the LAUNCH Incubator (27 and growing!)... never had a complaint. Not one. That includes Dropbox, Yammer, FitBit, CafeX, Clicker, Brilliant.org and hundreds more.

[ background: The person making these claims is close friends with my former partner on TC50 -- that partner was accused of some very nasty things. ]

I'd be interested in what issues you've had. Did you open Github issues for them? Thanks

A github issue (#34) was opened, and you released a changed version soon after, but it remained unusable for me (in the meantime I upgraded to 12.04 and did not test drip since then).

You're right. Facebook (and Wikipedia) have to deal with this same problem. This is why tr8n provides a mechanism for translators to vote on the quality of translations. And there are also admin tools for suspending translators, adding a vote threshold for translations to go live and a block list as well. Also, users can report a translation, which immediately puts the translator on a watch list.

Also, don't forget, in a crowd-source environment, there will almost always be more language protectors than vandals.

Any thought to integrate with Mechanical Turk? Some sites with lower visitor counts may not have the user base for this to work. I've written a Rails gem that makes Mechanical Turk integrations fairly trivial for Rails apps. (https://github.com/aantix/turkee) Hopefully this could help.

Good, you've thought of smartarse response like mine. But I personally would still be wary.

ClojureQL works fine with postgresql or any other database supported by JDBC.

Is there a way to tell it to use different syntax for take/drop for databases (like Sybase) that use the "select top X * from foo" syntax rather than "select * from foo limit X"?

Not yet. Currently we try to follow the SQL standard as closely as possible, but some operations like OFFSET/LIMIT provide challenges.

Would be fun to see if we could do some kind of SQL templating where users could supply their own templates.

if the point is length of code, then:

  SELECT p.*,b.* FROM employees p JOIN employees b ON (p.manager = b.id) WHERE (p.name = 'John')

is only 8 characters less than:

  (join (select (table {:employees :p}) (=* :name "John")) (table {:employees :b}) (=* :p.manager :b.id))

but that isn't the point. the point is composabilty. you can take 8 simple functions (select, project, join, rename, aggregate, take, drop, sort) and build any query you want. these queries can be passed around your code, reused, modified, and refined, in a way that plain SQL strings cannot.