skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But what about Netcraft?
This requires you migrate your stylesheets to a totally new syntax, which isn't a great solution.
Google's new calendar interface for mobile phones
Mozilla Manifesto: with great power comes great responsibility
Crib Sheet for Co-founder Finding
http://webpy.infogami.com/docs - documentation
http://groups.google.com/group/webpy?lnk=oa - Discussion Group

We've built http://www.barcoderobot.com using it ...
I'm currently working on a largish project using webpy (well, large for one person). In terms of getting started an barriers to entry, it's very easy to use and getting results is a breeze.

That being said, the documentation is a very large problem. When I run across issues and the documentation isn't there, it can be difficult to get a quick answer. There's a wiki of the documentation, but it has very few contributors.

I think the general problem is that the community is very split in terms of experience, with little intermediate discussion. The typical questions on the webpy board are either really basic ("how do i get started") or discussions about the project's direction. I don't think typical programmers are discouraged from participating, but there isn't enough "average" programming level discussion to make it feel like a community.

Just my 2 cents.
No, I'm not using web.py. I started out using it and switched to Pylons, because web.py was too simplistic for my needs, and because a nasty security gaffe Aaron made eliminated my trust in his ability to write secure code.
Now this is just creepy. I'm lucky enough to live in San Francisco, on one of the streets where this service is already available. I just looked up my address and all I can say is that I'm glad my blinds were closed when the Google truck drove by.

I also find it funny that Google managed to come out with this before anyone else even came out with a viable competitor for Google maps. Damn.
Gee, why didn't I think of that? I'll just feature my internet startup on the nationwide cable show that I co-host!
Perhaps the idea could be developed further to say that rather than hiring an agency to do a subtask, you should embrace PR and adapt it to become a part of who you are. That's not so far fetched given for example the item 6 in the article, or how tightly modern web startups "look like their products". Think justin.tv or the obligatory founders' blog on product sites.

Still my marketing professor put it better when she noted that although many see marketing as a type of communication or a step in product roll-out, the power is in orienting yourself towards the customer in everything you do.
another sign that google has finally jumped the shark. what's next? pizza delivery?
New updates with more ajaxy goodness
Jamba tried to replicate the model in the US, under the Jamster brand. This has failed for a number of reasons, including legal troubles. Not even sure why their shady sales tactics (tricking teenagers into subscriptions when they expected a single transaction) never faced any legal troubles in Germany.
looks like web.py has some interesting ideas and useful data munging functions. but unless there's something i'm really missing, most normal web apps (that aren't completely trivial) are way better off using turbogears or django, which provide mature and usable components (templating, object-relational mapper/query building/db access, web/WSGI server). i've built a couple reasonably large web apps using turbogears and love it (although i use cheetah instead of kid) and django seems to be winning the python framework race.

not to sound overly harsh, but web.py seems like a big case of NIH. each of its pieces seem like v0.1s of more established counterparts. mature web frameworks are occasionally big and ugly _because_ they work around that random safari bug from 2002 or the flash 8 player's uploader non-RFC-compliant MIME-multipart requests and all the unicode encoding and DB integration nits, etc. the plumbing looks gross because the surface area of the problem they solve is gross.

and with the big frameworks, thankfully hordes of others have banged their heads against and solved these issues; with a "lighter" framework, or one of the 4328429 me-too python web frameworks from 2001-2004 that didn't really make the cut, you're volunteering to blunder into and track down all these problems yourself over the next year or two -- probably not the best use of your time or problem solving skills.
I don't think the number of lines is too much of an indicator for the effort involved. Before you can write those 75 lines, you have to understand Rails well enough to be able to write them. Beforehand, you might not even now that it will "only" be 75 lines - and how long does it take you to know?
no.

switched to django
Does that help, though? I would be worried that the built in browsers all have varying capabilities, too.
He is talking about a problem which is simply not there. Spam is not a big problem, (keep track of who you're giving your address to), but most importantly spam is not unique to email: give them (spammers) a channel to reach you and they will.

Besides, WHAT IS an email? How exactly is it different from SMS if I trip&forward it to my cell? Email is not even limited to a protocol or any specific software. Any kind of technical definition of "email" that one can come up with will probably evolve around SMTP, i.e. server-side.
Myth of the Genius Designer
Carbon Offsetting Web 2.0
Getting back to POSH (Plain ol' Semantic HTML)
Importance of "View Source"
CozyBug - Where Buyers And Sellers Meet
No and Yes. I am thinking of releasing tons of code for it though as soon as I wrap up the large project I'm working on.

I highly recommend webpy.

edit: downvote?
When you have this many people on your app, this will always be true.

90% of people in general are not net savvy.
You can live that kind of lifestyle on a very high salary working in the financial industry. What that kind of money doesn't buy you is total financial independence for life. That's the biggest prize in my book.
Hopefully the phrase "jumped the shark" will jump the shark too.
It's interesting to see how starting a social site is really done -- you need massive hits to get started. It's not something you can do without being able to bring in the traffic unless your app has a lot of inherent utitlity.
It would be amusing (and annoying, of course) if Google started adding virtual billboards to these street-level views and selling ad space on them. Say with an algorithm that would pick out large enough pieces of blue sky from the images, and paste in realistic-looking billboards that would obscure only the sky so as to not render the views totally useless...
A cell phone made for an ignored set of consumers
You beat me to it!

I feel there are two options: reduce the number of emails you care about, and get through the emails you care about faster. Xobni is working on both.
You would think a tech investor would realize AOL email is ancient. Gmail trumped Email a while ago.
Google Releases Mapplets - Widgets for Maps
Whoever said you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Looks like grandaddy google still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Will Zucks and his merry band of 20-something API'ers be able to counter 30-something Serge and Larry's 3-D maps? Only time will tell.
That clip struck me as Kevin being really shady. He acts like he is a completely objective third party ('they', 'they', 'they'). I bet a lot of people wish that they could promote their site to millions of people for free.

Anyway, promoting something like that and not making clear it is yours is dishonest, imo.
I wasted 2 weeks on web.py. Why a waste? No documentation and you outgrow it VERY quickly. As soon as you realize you need a feature (e.g. caching), you'll have to implement it yourself.

The sooner you switch over to Django, the better and easier your life will be.
news.yc is broken
Microsoft sells millionth Zune
The future of the music business
I think we should all thank Mr. Graham for this oasis from the (inevitable) decline (and popular ascension) of reddit. But, I think that the website is imperfect and looking to reddit for inspiration may be helpful.

The feature I miss most from reddit is the automatic marking of open links. Looking for new stories on news.yc is tedious. One needs to read each headline and try to recall whether the story is old news. I think that adding this functionality will be easy

I also would like the ability to save links.

I think that it may be useful to give users the option to display and rank the links they think are most important in their profile.
A man with a 5% stake seems more like an employee than a co-founder.
Computer World Interviews Digg's Jay Adelson
I'm using web.py. I really didn't want something like Django or even Pylons where it feels like you're programming to the framework and not to the language. In my experience (with other frameworks), this leads to a really quick 80%, and then you get really screwed over as you try to complete the remaining 20% and have to fight the framework all the way.

I am finding that as my project evolves, I ditch progressively more pieces of web.py. I ignored the form processing library and custom template library from the start, because plain old web.input() and Cheetah are fine for my uses. I ditched the DB library after a month or so - a single global DB connection prevented us from unit testing, and will prevent us from replicating or sharding the database. I'll probably ditch web.py's interface to Cheetah in the near future in favor of precompiled templates (necessary for i18n), at which point I'll just be using the request dispatching features. May end up ditching those too eventually as we've got our own dispatcher on top of web.py, but for now it provides a useful substrate.

That's the main benefit to web.py: it lets you get up-and-running very quickly, with little extra code to weigh you down, so you can see your startup running and adjust from there. It's basically a prototyping tool.

IMHO, startups should not be using any framework. The whole point of a framework is to abstract away common usage patterns so you can benefit from what other projects have done before. The whole point of a startup is to do something new that hasn't been done before. Once a problem domain has been studied enough to build a useful framework, it's too commodified to make any money off of. After all, if it was easy for you to build, it'll be easy for a thousand other startups to build.
There's value in using a v0.1. It hasn't had a chance to get large and complicated yet, so it's easier to learn and less likely to break.

Good third-party components should solve a problem with a large surface area and present an interface with a small surface area. I don't really see that with most frameworks: instead, they seem to solve a problem with a fairly small surface area and present an interface with a large surface area. Not really a great combination.

I'm all for libraries and standards, though. There's no way I could've built my app without Cheetah, PIL (despite installation headaches), Markdown, DBAPI, and WSGI. These solve the real hairy problems, yet provide a small, often trivial interface to learn.
Justine is certifiably hotter than Justin. =P
That security gaffe was in Markdown - a piece of junk that I've been pointing out flaws in for the past year.
It will be interesting to see if web.py jumps on the facebook apps bandwagon before its competitors Rails, Drupal or Cheetah. Is Aron the next Zuck?
$1M a year is a good bit, but it's still not fuck you money. That's what I'm aiming for.

Worst case, I'll fall short and still do well.
CenterNetworks - Startup Video Reviews
CenterNetworks are reviewing the startups that entered their startup video contest. There is some pretty cool ones...
We can: politics for the Facebook generation
Amazingly this politician truly gets the potential of the web and is the Secretary of Rural Affairs for the UK!
"Microsoft Surface" - multi touch screen table
Exactly. Webpy is for programmers, django for people who want to feel like programmers, but are really just walling themselves into pre-defined ultra-boring patterns.
Thanks for the suggestions, but it keeps the site cleaner if people submit feature requests through that link rather than as individual stories.
you lost me with that last paragraph, to put it nicely.

your innovation as a startup will not be reinventing wheels -- building and debugging frameworks that, fortunately for you, others have put [tens of? hundreds of?] thousands of man hours into, solving seriously unsexy problems like browser incompatibilities, security nits and writing init scripts. i can't see how it's faster to tackle all of these things _and_ your application code than just, um, building your application code leveraging one of the very solid foundations that already exist.

while your competitors are solving problems that matter to your users, you'll be running around feverishly putting out fires when someone types an é into your application, or starts getting funny with strings involving apostrophes, semicolons and "drop table", or script tags in comments.
btw, cough, someone needs a <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type" /> (or equivalent) in their <head> section :)
Anyone else think this article is purely masturbatory? Yes, 1MM/yr is nice -- but I don't need a blog post to tell me that.

Let's bring every 20-something reading this article down to earth for a bit: creating the sort of wealth discussed in this entry IS NOT EASY. It's damn near impossible, in fact. We're raised in a culture that teaches us life will be handed over on a platter and I think it's seriously wrong to fuel those ideals with fictional "what-if" scenarios.
That's not the security gaffe I'm talking about.

http://groups.google.com/group/webpy/browse_frm/thread/2fcbcb60a99a1c79/

Aaron's mistake is at post #4, my response is post #5.

Yeah, that's from a while ago. That's about when I stopped using web.py, too.
Which suggests to me that you have to start desperate with a purely social site. You have to, have to, have to reach a critical mass or you're boned. Free stuff or promises of it, guerilla PR, outright paying users, spam-like invitations -- whatever it takes, you need to consider it.
he has options to buy up to 40% stake
DHH was a PHP dev before he built Rails. Go read his blog. It's not surprising that some of their stuff is still in PHP.
Sharing and communicating are key
Sunk Costs: Irrational decisions in Project Management
Yes, I understand your concern. For sure, aaron was on drugs when he mentioned this quick, non-secure fix -- even though the asker most definitely had very loose security requirements given that he was using nothing more than CGI.

\But\ from the beginning, everyone using webpy has seem to know flup sessions to be the recommended way of doing sessions:

http://webpy.org/track/wiki/SessionsWithFlup

Let's look at this another way though. If you really need security, then which is better: a simple, quickly verifiable codebase like webpy, or a massive, magical code base like django and turbogears? Do any frameworks make any guarentees of security?

I have seen several high profile sites within the last two years with major, obvious security problems. As hard as this is to believe, I no longer think that security is what will determine the success of most any web app -- at all. Unless you have special needs, feelings of security should not be your primary metric in evaluating a framework.
Microsoft Announces Surface Computer
Which language is news.ycombinator.com and reddit written in?
The chances of becoming financially independent from the sale/IPO of one startup are very low. First of all, most startups fail because they run out of money. If you're trying to work within the traditional VC world, there will be pressure to grow at an insane rate that may or may not be the best thing for your company. The more people you have working for you, the higher your burn rate, and the more beholden you are to the desires of your VCs.

If you shoot for a sustainable business instead, you can work for less than 10 years in 1-2 companies you found and be pretty well off. Most people don't get filthy rich from a couple of years of work. Shooting for sustainability gives you a higher chance of success than being forced to grow your company to a size where it'll get your VCs the return they want (or doing so of your own volition).

I agree that financial independence is the goal to shoot for, but I think the method the author describes can get there at least as often as the traditional VC route.
Can you explain to me how unsexy problems like browser incompatibilities (yes a major pain) lie anywhere within the scope of webpy? Those seem to lie within the scope of the templating system and js library that you choose.

A larger, more complex framework does present serious problems when you have to architecture everything in strange ways to meet scaling needs or otherwise.

Note how much the twitter guys were so scared by ROR's complexity that they resisted doing the most trivial modifications? I want to understand my framework "all the way down." This is much the same reason I use linux.
I'd say it's easy compared to building a company that will get acquired by $LARGE_TECH_COMPANY. There are plenty of people going down the route the article describes. They just don't get written about on Techcrunch because the target audiences are usually smaller and there's no huge round of funding to announce.

Anyway, most of the stuff discussed on this site doesn't fall within the realm of possibilities that could be described as down to earth. Everyone here is a little crazy. In a good way.
It seems as if you have to press "Yes" to start a phone conversation - not THAT intuitive, if you ask me. I don't see the advantage over other phones green button with a telephone receiver on it. Although thinking about it, the receiver is weird because it soon will not even exist anymore, so how will future generations understand the symbol?

I also think the complexity of modern phones is a bit of a myth. It is true that any extra features are unusable, but making basic phone calls works well enough with the average mobile phone.

What would really impress me would be if the iPhone would make it easy to create call conferences. I never figured out how to do it with other phones (mobile or stationary).
Internet retailer (Amazon) connects with TextPayMe
Many extra kudos for the displays. Most companies I have contracted for give their developers one 17'' screen. I never understand it, given the low price of better screens these days.
11 golden tips to cut costs when launching a startup.
cheers imp
thanks david. ideally this would be the end result, i was just wondering if there was a way to purchase the experience quickly while on the learning curve without getting ripped off.
Oxford to Silicon Valley, part 3
Thanks folks for your thoughts..
That would be somewhat shortsighted of us :)
News.yc is written in arc, which to my best knowledge is a functional lisp like language.

Reddit is written in Python using web.py as the framework. It was originally written in lisp but they changed to Python for various reasons.
This: http://searchengineland.com/061229-084131.php

says that Google maps has less than half the marketshare of MapQuest. I'd love to see an article explaining why that is. First mover advantage?
Or end up with Friendster.com
Oy, is that really the ideal we're supposed to aspire to? The American Dream?

Think about how many people in need one could help with 1 million per year...
His food ordering examples are funny because many restaurants and karaoke bars in Japan have had touch-screen digital menus for quite a while:

http://digidenki.com/wordpress/wp-content/pictures/_Image017.jpg
You must be new here. You see, this is a site about starting businesses. People start businesses to make money. Businesses that make a lot of money are generally better to start than businesses that don't.
I did some "testing" on both of them yesterday, and once again it seems like the second take is the winner. In FlashElementTD, you're throwing towers at the sides of a death row trying to shoot to death heaps of pixels representing children and pets and what have you, while they run down the corridor.

On the contrary, in DesktopTD you have to be creative in designing a fortification with your limited resources to protect your desk candy from the alien invasions. I was genuinely surprised of the results of some of the strategies I tried. Then there's the whole social part of challenging your friends. I looked at some of the winning designs and was positively surprised again.

I take it both of the games have their fans but to me it's obvious if the second one is more liked.
CBS acquires last.fm for $280m
Three pages filled with off-topic crap outside of the article. Read the print version instead: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=292772
A timely post ... we're just about to release a biggish site running on web.py. Check out our blog, which I just released today: http://blog.micropledge.com/

We like web.py for its minimalism. It means we did have to write a database layer for it, but we still feel it was better than using Django as we've got more control. This app's big enough that we want it to run the way we want it to -- web.py lets us do that. And when it doesn't, it's small enough to hack.

As for docs, web.py's size means that the limited docs it does have are pretty much enough. When they haven't quite been, we've found the web.py group pretty helpful: http://groups.google.com/group/webpy/
Quite. It's an international audience on here. I'm English and I've no idea what he's on about. (No, please, don't tell me.)
Sure. What does that have to do with what I said?

Maybe I come off as morally smug, or something... I should be more careful about it. I meant to say that I feel much more motivated by reading rms's dream to cure HIV ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9736 ) than some guy's dream of owning a Mercedes.
24 hrs w/out internet&cellphone. What would you do?
You could pay for a day/afternoon. The people out to rip you off will be looking for long term contracts, to milk you, whereas someone on the level ought to be happy to try and impart as much knowledge as possible in a short time frame.
What is the best way to learn flash?
(*But* is &#42;But&#42;.)
I do not know where to start. I have basic programming knowledge in python and vbscript.
Luckily I don't use a massive, magical code base like Django or TurboGears. I use Pylons, which is small enough that you can understand it all, large enough that you can actually do useful things with it, and written by some very smart people.
Q & A with Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike.com - the no 1: Facebook platform app
I know there are a lot of Microsoft Hate-ers (MH) out there but; maybe just maybe you MH can bring yourselves to admit this is really cool.
How To Get Rich Programming
Do you mean Flash animation or ActionScript? I learned Flash/ActionScript and PHP at the same time by reading Foundation PHP 5 for Flash. But I already had an understanding of animation programs like Toon Boon and Autodesk Animator Pro.
Actually I wanted to learn both of them.
I somehow don't think Microsoft believes that they created the concept of the touchscreen. What they are introducing is the interface they've built. It's not your typical finger-as-mouse interface that touchscreens generally have.
Which version of Flash do you own? I'd start by learning the animation aspect first. Learn about key frames, the timeline, layers and suchlike. There has to be a tutorial online somewhere. I remember when I was learning I turned to Google many times.
Our bug fixer is suggesting you add a post to the "Feature Requests" thread, http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=363 , in case that isn't clear. There's a link of the same name at the bottom of some of the site's pages.

Isn't this one of the things that should be spelt out on the submission page? I'd link to my previous post on it but the "threads" link only goes back so far with no paging so I can't be arsed to find it.