skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just switched the other way - from Pylons to Django - for a work project, for pretty much exactly the same reasons that he describes - inflexibility. In my case, lots of boilerplate for admin screens plus SQLAlchemy felt like too much magic. Particularly when trying to run functionality tests against my app, there were a few too many weird errors, with no obvious way to fix them (the solution was normally to move the database commit around), when the application worked fine. Django tests on the other hand, Just Work(tm).

So far I haven't run into any lack of flexibility on Django's part, and I've been using it for fairly serious stuff (mainly as a general-purpose CMS, heavy admin screen work). From the look of the original author's sites, the things that he's doing aren't too different, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Perhaps he just prefers the way Pylons does things?
The government is indeed subject to the law, much more stringently than insurance companies in fact. Try doing something nominally illegal in a government agency.

The government can pass laws, of course.. but the insurance industry can hire lobbyists. Seems like an awful uphill battle to beat those guys, based on the last 60 years of healthcare reform history. Harry and Louise can be pretty influential.

Medicare's dispute process with that of an insurance company? Well, I'll tell you one thing, Medicare doesn't spend the 20 million to deny 21 million dollars in claims like I outlined above.

We should make switching insurance companies easier, but that doesn't get us anywhere if they're all embracing the same bad practices. I don't have the option of starting an insurance company out of my garage like you could with a tech startup -- if the incumbents consist of a broken oligarchy, that's what we're stuck with, absent government action. There are so many classic incentive problems in play here, tragedy of the commons, free-rider problem.. it's frankly a wonder that things aren't broken even worse.

With government run healthcare you get the benefit of proper incentives at the cost of government-run bureaucracy, which will always be a little less efficient. That's the tradeoff.. as far as which is more effective, we could look at every other industrialized country which gets better outcomes for a fraction of the cost, or we could appeal to ideology, fears of vague things like "socialism", and absurdities like "keep the government out of my medicare".
You'll find all the information you need in this interview from Mixergy titled "Law 101 For Startups with Bill Schreiber of Fenwick & West". If you're not a subscriber, then find the video podcast on iTunes, and you'll be able to watch it there [registration work-around]. You can always read the interview transcript if you prefer. The comments are usually really helpful, so look there if you have more questions.
http://mixergy.com/bill-schreiber-fenwick-west/
Hrm. I like the points, but I get a sense of shifting goalposts. The problem's not the building, we're really OK with that, it's the stand-off zone. Except that the problem's not the stand-off zone, we're really OK with that, it's the security coverage beyond.

In London, a city covered with security coverage and monitoring. Please!
Those factors are the landscape the insurance companies operate in. The biggest problem is that I don't see any of the actual legislation doing anything about actual input costs to the system or increasing competition.
It seems wrong to do this, but in a related thought, I imagine the people savvy enough to know there are apps outside the market will realize they can also install other ROMs.
If anything, it's worth reading for the cute ending.
We have total editorial independence. They get their logos on the top on the right, and the rightto list resources in the righthand bar. We have total editorial independence on the content of the actual blog posts, and have said that repeatedly. They get to see the posts, same as everyone else does. The only thing that Sun and Intel employees get is that when they comment on posts, their comments are highlighted. But that's it.
4 Keys To A Successful Social Game That Developers Should Know
Depends on what he means by "move like men". In military FPSes, I submit that character animation still isn't subtle enough to bother with such minor differences if you're presenting them honestly. It's only something that's going to show up if you're trying to overtly sexualize the female characters, and I don't think a lack of swaying hips or jiggle physics will dismay adult gamers.
Profit margin is the important metric to look at in the context of moving to a socialized system. The stats in the linked article say that even if a public entity could run as efficiently as a private insurer there is only 3.7% surplus value to capture.
8-Bit NYC is the coolest map--ever
Style, frequently, should be personal and 'learning' it often betrays the original writers intent. However, you're right. Strunkn and White were writing, primarily, about style and in such it is more akin to a recipe book for writing rather than it is a dictionary for spelling. If the book helps you in one specific area that you yourself desired to change, then it's likely been beneficial.

Having said that, Strunk and White's book is an abomination of self-contradiction. I can tell by your writing, albeit only a small snippet, that you don't follow their teachings religiously (as some do; IE the Grammar Nazi's - a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). You use your own style for parenthesise (dashes rather than commas), likely one you picked up and liked, and one the Elements of Style suggests is wrong (at least from as much as I've managed to read of the text).
Supporting the Process of Innovation – The Maryland Way
People tend to attribute problems around them to the culture, particularly when the culture isn't theirs. And everyone wants to think his/her situation is unique, as the indication of one's uniqueness.

But as some comments indicate, some (or most) of the author's problems are actually not idiosyncratic to Japan. Although he has valid points, his problems will just stay there in different shapes even if he leaves Japan.
It seems like a lot of people get frustrated with Django because it isn't the Framework for Copy & Paste Coders Who Like to be Spoonfed.

To some degree, this is a failure of the Django community's messaging. Django is highly modular and, if anything, disassembles gracefully as you start running into more complex scenarios (even more so in 1.2 than 1.1).

It's best to think of Django as a robust set of wheels you don't have to reinvent for each new site you build, and a toolkit for building new wheels you can not-reinvent next time around.

All of the above is painfully obvious to anybody who has spent a decent amount of time with Django, but might not be so clear to somebody just finding their way or using Django in a limited fashion. I'm sad to see that somebody had a poor experience with Django, but this post is basically a lot of whining about an inability to figure things out and use the framework as intended.
Site asks public to share dirt on Meg Whitman
We are currently working on something like this. We call it "Incubator Projects". How it works is we're setting up a recruitment website, and on it contain various projects we hope you're interested in.

After interviewing (on site, on our dime, sparing no expense) and acceptance, we provide candidates with free accommodations, free car, and some sort of pay otherwise (we figured between $800 and $1000/week). Then you can come up and take a no-risk paid trial, during which you can find out if you like us and we find out if we like you.

We're still working on it, but it's very expensive and we're hoping to find other ways (hacks?) that might get us some visibility.

The thing is, we are doing really cool innovative stuff. We don't lack interesting work, we pay well... We're just in the North. It seems like that last little detail shouldn't make recruitment so difficult.
It's interesting that they're taking from Apple's Nitro (formerly SquirrelFish) rather than from Chrome's V8. If both Javascript engines are open source, and Chrome is generally regarded as the fastest (beating out Safari by at least a hair in most cases), I wonder what factors made them choose to adopt from Apple over Google?
This is probably the coolest use of water monitoring technology ever. I wonder what the electricity demand graph would look like.
I work for an insurance company.

The company makes an operational loss, but it makes a killing in the financial market, and is thus (very) profitable.

Claims don't exceed the premiums, but it's narrow.
Most definitely, I for one don't try many new programs without some sort of screenshot (if you do a screencast also put screenshots up as not everyone can always watch a video or wants to watch a video).
The place for people to share things they're willing to do for $5
Jerasure: A C/C++ library for building storage apps (Mozy, JungleDisk, etc)
From the Carbonite Backup Bouncer test:

One of backup-bouncer's tests is called "combo-tests" where it tests several
different file metadata types on the same file. Carbonite didn't restore this
file at all.

Instead, Carbonite left a file called "Carbonite_Restore_F161_G1.tmp". It's a
1-line text file that reads "gotta boogie".
Perhaps because V8's engine translates directly from code to assembly with no intermediate bytecode. It seems like it would make it more difficult to integrate tracing with that system.
This seems to be a very useful tool, one question though, what was the rationale behind choosing VirtualBox, have you done any benchmarks against Xen or Kvm or other hypervisors
I'm often a bit afraid of running some games for a long time when I hear the video card fan going ten-to-the-dozen and feel the computer case warming up. I'm frightened some part I can't afford to replace, like the graphics card, might wear out and overheat. It's not particularly rational, I suppose...
It sounds like you had issues with SQLAlchemy, not Pylons.*

If you take care to understand SQLAlchemy well, it won't get in your way either.

*(I concede that Pylons doesn't have a good automated admin feature.)
NYU Professor Scott Galloway: Ouch
I would not call it perfect: you still need a classical message authentication code to protect against a man in the middle attack.
Hunting Mobile Threats in Memory
Picking apart the new iPad TV ad . . .
As the author of Tarsnap, I'm a bit biased, so I'm going to refrain from comparing the two; but I have one question for the author: Aren't S3 per-request fees a problem? One of the reasons I have all Tarsnap data go through the Tarsnap server is to allow me to "bundle" blocks together and amortize per-PUT costs.
Agreed, it sounds like he mistakenly let the 'but' go silent because of a comma, however when the comma is part of a parenthesis (the 'sure') this rule doesn't apply. He could have resolved it with any of the following:

can't spell, sure. He knows

can't spell, sure; he knows

can't spell, sure, but he knows

It requires that extra pause that the parenthesis removed. How he wrote it should read more akin to this:

can't spell (sure) he knows

A parenthesis can, usually, be removed without an effect on the readability of the sentence, as the 'usually' in this sentence can. However, his can't because the two ends around the parenthesis aren't contiguous. I'd let this pass to a simple case of writing fast and being unable to catch the error on a proof read (if he did one). I've worked as a writer, and I can say honestly that it's surprisingly easy to miss errors when you know exactly what you mean and hence why all good authors have good editors between their manuscript and the book you buy.
VirtualBox was chosen since it is an open source, free choice which is available on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. It is simply the easiest way for developers to get started with a virtualized development environment.

Neither John nor I are familiar with any other virtualization platform, but making Vagrant modular enough such that this is possible is definitely a good idea for the future.

Thanks!
what exactly was I paying for here?

You were paying for not worrying about whether you would lose your data. And that's exactly what Mozy gave you... at least until you discovered the corruption. :-)
I don't track all sales law changes with my regulator.

If you break the Amazon TOS, you maybe get your account terminated, but if you break tax law, you maybe pay fines or go to jail. Don't you think you might have your attention priorities inverted?
Great... they turned their Android phone into an iPhone. Might as well just buy the real thing if you are going to AT&T for the network. (And why would you do that?)
Perceptions of computer maintenance.

Your perception
|
V
Making toast[-----------------------------------------]Brain Surgery
^
Your fathers perception |

Working with computers is more like making toast than doing brain surgery, but many people think the opposite and popular culture tends to reinforce this notion. Many people are understandably afraid. The key to helping people learn to use their own computers is to reverse this perception and give them the courage to try. Once they realize that its possible, they will quickly warm to the idea.

Edit: I chose brain surgery and toast because of their qualitative difference, not quantitative. Its easy to learn to make toast and the cost of error is cheap and easy to undo, its very hard to learn to operate on brains and the cost of mistakes are mortal. Most people can learn to make toast, most people can't learn to do brain surgery. Most people erroneously believe that they just can't learn to use their computers and so don't try.
Energizer USB Battery Charger Taken Off Market For Security Vulnerability
"Millions? Really? I don't think so."

106.5 million people in the US viewed the last Superbowl. According to Nielsen (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/survey-most-sup...) 51% enjoy the commercials more than the game. Of the ~54 million viewers who enjoy the commercials more than the game, how many have no interest in the game at all? I'd wager it's a number rightly measured in "millions".

Going back to the original point: the claim was made that people don't want to see ads. Yet ~54 million U.S. Superbowl viewers wanted to see the ads more than the game. The problem isn't with "ads" per se, but with the way advertising is conducted on the internet (which is the point the original article made.)
This blog post struck me as venemous link bait. Sad to see such a thing on the Language Log.
Abstracting 1st person shooters
Just spent a week refactoring our Django projects into apps. Nice timing.

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that the django-app is a good model for any organisation of code (not just third party reuse).

In my mind web apps consist of [parts of] pages / templates, menus, forms, and url structure and underlying models. Django forces me to separate these concerns. A Good Thing. Then it turns around and forces me to define a group (app) and lump a bunch of them together again.
Digital Camera
I don't know why you are downvoted, but this is from experience: people who don't know what they're doing can do pretty much anything they don't want with a pc without realising it. Case in point: My grandma vs. Windows. Windows is a sore, sore loser. And try as I might, all I can do to really fix it is install it again (temporary) or install linux (not going there yet)
I wouldn't single out any of Dawkins' books for reading, read all of them if you can afford the time.
5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted
Carrying that train of thought further, they should integrate with Apple's App Store. Everyone on a mac uses iTunes anyway, why should they have to install Steam separately?
I bought a new Macbook with Snow Leopard on it for the family and decided Spotlight was usable enough. My kids didn't agree, and begged me to install Quicksilver. It's easy to use, totally functional, and has even been updated to work on Snow Leopard. How is it "mostly dead"?
Companies are much better managed now than they were a few decades ago. Think about the fact that corporate raiders were able to buy large companies in the 80's, split them apart and sell their constituent lines of business for more than the companies were previously worth.

CEO pay has simply increased in line with the market capitalization of the largest public companies.
MSA to Twitpay - Startup Connections
Great summary.

I'd add that SEO is not just a ranking exercise-- it's a conversion exercise. On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should consider that the first ~60 characters of you <title> tag and the first ~150 of your meta-description are what drives people to click through to your site.

Also, all other things being equal, the first position on SERPs gets ~42% of clicks... So it's a winner take all game unless you are talking about a content business.

OH-- also do some keyword analysis. In Andrew's example-- how many people search for "fishing tips" versus "fishing advice" or "how to fish" or "intro to fishing"? Keyword analysis is about finding out what people are searching for and then digging in to see how competitive those keywords are. If you want to dethrone the #1 result for "fishing tips" you'll want to analyze their SEO. If they are a 10 year old page-rank-9 domain with 87,500 inbound links, you might consider gunning for a less sought-after search term.
That may be true, but Amazon was obviously involved in trying to get this bill stopped, or changed. Wouldn't it have been worth Amazon's while to appeal to their Colorado associates to petition their legislators on this issue while the bill was still being considered rather than waiting until after it was already enacted?
Good call on the apps. I think we can agree the idea of reusable apps hasn't really worked out. Still, I don't see how this tips anything in favor of Pylons. As for the debugger, I've been using pdb extensively. Errors thrown by templates are very annoying however, showing a huge stack trace through the template rendering scope and nothing to do with whatever caused the error. To solve this I've had this at the bottom of my urls.py (http://dpaste.de/9Emp/). It prints out exceptions straight to runserver. Also useful if you're letting project managers test your site and they come across a bug - you can just inspect it right away.
They should never have been allowed to sell an Android phone in the first place. They're probably trying to promote their cash cow, the iPhone by crippling Android in the court of public opinion.
This has become my go-to response to QC-related issues. All you need to know is in the title:

http://rdist.root.org/2008/10/24/quantum-cryptography-is-use...
Installing ROMs is not trivial unless the handset manufacturer wants it to be. Look at the Archos device, for example.
The per-request fees ($.01 per 1000 PUTs and $.01 per 10,000 GETs) aren't a problem for 2 reasons:

1) Arq packs small files (under 64k) together into "packs", a bit like git does. So instead of thousands of PUTs of tiny files (which would also be very slow) it does fewer larger PUTs.

2) Arq caches indexes of those pack files locally, and caches the list of larger S3 objects as well. So it doesn't have to do a GET to figure out whether an object with a given SHA1 is already in the S3 account. (Arq stores every object by its SHA1 hash, like git does).

The file format is open (it's your data after all): http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/s3_data_format.txt
Ask HN: How complex is image resizing?
I was talking with a friend the other day, and he led me to believe that the process of trying to shrink an image while maintaining as much of the quality as possible is not a simple thing to do.

I'm curious to what extent this is actually true. For instance, I assume there's a real difference between stretching and shrinking using Windows Paint and Adobe Photoshop, but how much of a difference? And is Photoshop 'the last word' or are there more complex techniques that can be employed?
Apple's undiscovered country: Macs in the enterprise
Looks good. What about workgroup admin?
I've seen desktop-code that does that, but nothing in JS so far.

One site I've found has been particularly full of quality material, including lots of open source projects: http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Math/Combinatorics/Software/Grap...
Why Jay-Z parody "The New Dorks" really should be entrepreneurship's new anthem
How hard and problematic is it to just install the normal Android OS on phones that come with weird kinds? And does it end up not quite fitting the specific handset as well?
It dilutes link juice--a subdomain is viewed as a separate site. Putting your blog as a subdirectory helps to build the authority of your main domain.
I think it was more that the automated web testing part of Pylons wasn't particularly well integrated with SQLAlchemy. So (eg.) it's basically impossible (AFAICT) to populate the database with preexisting data and then directly call the controllers, since when you commit the data in your controller, you can't access the database afterwards when you get back to your controller. Instead, you get lots of odd tracebacks - things like "Instance <Foo at 0x103779f90> is not bound to a Session". It also means that you can't do rollback type testing - you have to stick different data in, or blow it all away and recreate it manually.

Django on the other hand, has fixtures, which you can create from your existing database, and use rollbacks, so they're really fast. Combine that with the test client, and I can just write my test cases and forget about setting stuff up. People often go on about Django's admin interface, but I find that the rest of the framework is written to the same sort of standard, so there are lots of hidden gems (like fixtures) just waiting for you to find them.
Main page loads fine, none of the other links seem to work for me (website takes too long to respond error in firefox).
this isn't intended to sound snarky ... but this article seems pretty long, and just by reading the first few paragraphs, i don't see the relevance to HN. could somebody who's read more of it post a summary for why it's HN relevant? i think that might encourage others to actually read it.
As a Django developer myself, I totally agree with some of his frustrations. For example one very common problem I run into with Django is that a typo in a urls.py file will manifest itself as a URL reversal problem with the first attempt at URL reversal. The error always point to the same file and it's never the file with the problem, or even the same type of file. Not helpful.

While I agree that the problems could have been worked out with more knowledge of the framework, it doesn't help to gloss over the issues. For almost all of the problems he mentioned, Django's got a lot of room for improvement and especially those who love it should admit that.
they get treated as separate sites so your raking gets diluted
I have been using Arq for the last 3 weeks. It's very basic software at the moment, but it does the job. It lets me see file revisions and restore files as necessary. Unfortunately these files can't be seen directly in S3 due to the packing nature of how they're stored.. so if your mac crashes and you want a file, you'll need to find another mac and install Arq to retrieve your files.
I'm not too sure models disassemble too gracefully. I can't really take my own app, subclass a model and modify a field, to name just an example.
There are a few standard algorithms, like Bicubic, trilinear, and others. Photoshop generally lets you choose. Different algorithms work better for different types of images, and also depend on whether you're shrinking or enlarging. Photoshop has the most common ones and probably works for 95% of common cases.
Actually, it is, because I was right. At least nobody tried to make a rebuttal.