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Maybe you meant to comment on the Backblaze blog post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7095357

Funny that you're talking about "nice charts," though. Exactly what OGS made.

sampson Writing a New Dictionary? [video]

The above is apparently not a joke. They actually have a replica of the Oval Office, complete with Octocat: http://instagram.com/p/d7YdUGwglW/

sampson Experiment: To work primarily on an iPad for a week

I've tried this recently after receiving a Surface Pro as a gift. I find myself gravitating back toward an iPad and a MacBook -- the Surface, despite doing many things right, feels trapped in a worst-of-both-worlds situation.

- It doesn't make a great laptop; the awkward kickstand-and-lightweight-keyboard setup feels unbalanced and doesn't really work on your lap, for example. The keyboard, by virtue of being a cover, is not awesome and the attached trackpad is pretty terrible. The screen is small enough that coding feels cramped.

- It doesn't make a great tablet; the aspect ratio is too tall for reading and the extra weight really does make a difference when holding it for even a few minutes.

I really like drawing with the pressure-sensitive stylus, though.

sampson LLVM 3.3 Released

I've been using it regularly and I think it's ready. I used it some time ago when even basic commands would fail with cryptic error messages, but over the last couple of months, the version that came with Xcode has improved a lot. I find that it can evaluate more C++ expressions that gdb can now and I think the command structure feels more regular. Heartily recommended.

sampson Python's sad, unimaginative Enum

OP: if you want bitmask-style enums, that's easy to code up with a derived class. The reference implementation shows how: https://bitbucket.org/stoneleaf/aenum/src/0c66e1a5ec7b76388a...

sampson Wasp's Nest: A Lock-Free Concurrency Pattern In Python

While I agree that it's generally not helpful to rely on implicit atomicity in any Python, the reality is that all the other Pythons have followed CPython's lead and implemented the same memory model for compatibility. PyPy, Jython, and IronPython all have atomic bytecodes. So, for better or for worse, this bytecode atomicity is a de facto part of the language.

sampson Sales search: Writing a query parser/AST using Pyparsing+Elasticsearch (part 2)

I've seen many parsers, from ad-hoc regexes to real grammars like this one, that attempt to process natural, human-readable query strings that resemble Google searches. (The example at the top of this writeup, `john city:"new york" last_called < "3 days ago"`, illustrates what I'm talking about.) But there's no standard definition that I know of that could make all these slightly-different implementations interoperate.

Does anyone know of any specification of a colon-style query syntax that other projects could reuse? Even something semi-formal would be better than nothing.

sampson Serve Your Music Collection Using HTML5, Backbone, and Flask

Yep, that's me! I'll send you email. :)

sampson Serve Your Music Collection Using HTML5, Backbone, and Flask

Crazily, I have also built a (rudimentary) similar project out of Flask, Backbone, and HTML5 audio (and Mutagen, of course). It's a piece of a larger music-management puzzle: http://beets.readthedocs.org/en/1.0rc2/plugins/web.html

Anyway, zx2c4's project is obvious slicker than mine.

It's somewhat crazy that all the people on this thread saying "hey, me too" are only now finding each other. I think there are some pretty clear opportunities for collaboration here. In particular, I think it would be prudent to informally standardize a REST/JSON API for music collections so these tools can interoperable. (I'll send you email about this, zx2c4.)

sampson LoJack for bikes

Bike theft is a huge problem precisely because there's no good way to track stolen gear. I'll buy one of these in an instant if it works well.

sampson Q: “How much does an app cost?” A: “About as much as a car.”

You sound like you're disagreeing with the OP, but the article explicitly calls out a $400K+ category of app development if you "do everything right". I think you're on the same page as the author here.

sampson A permalink for your MIT License

I've made a habit out of just linking to the OSI page: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

sampson [dead]

This same story was deleted a couple of days ago, with good reason. Flagged.

sampson The music classifying nightmare

It looks like the author has come to an understanding with his/her disorganized music collection, but beets makes it pretty easy to bring sanity back to a messy music library: http://beets.radbox.org

sampson SQL Injection via table names and field names. Case study.

The author demonstrates an SQL "injection" via "malicious" django-admin.py input. Is it really SQL injection if the user has access to your site's admin script?

Some input really is trusted.

sampson Fixing the Python subprocess interface

Wow -- no, I entirely missed this (and just happened to end up with the same name). Thanks for clarifying.

sampson Fixing the Python subprocess interface

Agreed. As a way to write one-off scripts that one would otherwise use bash for, this seems like a nice trick.

sampson Fixing the Python subprocess interface

It's odd that the import mechanism is abused here to make objects "out of thin air". The fact that "from pbs import ffmpeg" works only if ffmpeg is actually on the path is somewhat surprising.

I think the more comfortable (and Pythonic?) way to do this would be to explicitly create these command objects:

   >>> import pbs
   >>> ffmpeg = pbs.Command('ffmpeg') # or '/usr/bin/ffmpeg', perhaps
   >>> result = ffmpeg(...)

[Edit: I really like the concept of using Python's positional and keyword arguments to construct a shell command, though. Great insight there.]

sampson Breaking CAPTCHA with automated humans

Leaving aside the ethical issues, has anyone considered building a "white-hat" CAPTCHA cracker tool using one of these services? Personally, I hate solving CAPTCHAs to sign up for stuff, and I wish there were a browser extension button I could hit that would do it for me. I'd gladly pay a few cents and wait several seconds (browsing in another tab) if it meant I didn't have to try to decipher some of the crazier CAPTCHAs out there.

sampson Vim ported to iOS

No kidding? If I just edit $HOME/.vimrc, it will start syncing? Or do I need to do something special?

sampson How Facebook Mobile Was Designed to Write Once, Run Everywhere

This article suggests that the new iteration of the Facebook app for iOS is written mainly with Web technologies and the fronted runs in a WebView, which explains why it sucks so much more than the previous version. Has anyone else noticed lots of really sluggish content loading, occasional hangs, mysteriously empty panes, etc? While the app is polished enough to seem native (kinda), it seems to be an argument that Web technologies are not yet ready to be an alternative to native UIKit development -- on iOS, at least.

sampson Python Requests: HTTP for Humans

Cool! Is there anything I can look at to see how async I/O will work? Does all the async support depend on gevent monkey patching (as requests/async.py would suggest)?

sampson Notifo (YC W10) Will be Shutting Down

This is a shame. Notifo was a great service, and to add insult to injury, I just finished adding Notifo support to my side project (http://loglet.radbox.org/) yesterday. https://github.com/sampsyo/loglet/commit/4b6923f7aaf9b076cdc...

I found the API straightforward and intelligible and signing up a new service was a breeze. I hope one of the alternatives is similarly well-designed.

sampson Of Python and Road Maps (or the lack thereof)

Thanks for this; I've often looked around for resources like this that articulate the core Python team's thoughts and near-term goals. This is the best synopsis I've seen.

Unrelatedly, whatever "mobile" Blogger theme that gets served to iPhones on this site makes it really hard to use -- while scrolling down, it's very easy to have a slightly off-center scroll misinterpreted as a left/right swipe gesture (which sends me to the next or previous article and loses my place).

sampson Bluelet: simple async I/O and green threads w/ Python coroutines

You can just yield that invocation. So saying "yield something()" will invoke the "something" coroutine as a sub-thread of the current one, resuming the parent coroutine when it finishes -- exactly like calling a function.

PEP 380 will solve this in an official way. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0380/

sampson Show HN: Denso - An Instapaper for Video

Roadshow (http://fetchsoftworks.com/roadshow/) lets you download videos to your device. I'm not sure if it's suitable for long-term storage like Pinboard is for web pages, but it might do what you want.

sampson Show HN: Denso - An Instapaper for Video

I think this a great idea, and I've recently noticed a number of people doing things in more or less the same direction. I've been collecting them:

* Deja http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deja/id417625158?mt=8&uo=...

* Squrl http://www.squrl.com/

* Plizy http://plizy.com/

* Showyou http://showyou.com/

* Roadshow http://fetchsoftworks.com/roadshow/

I even wrote a really simple way to actually use a folder called "Watch Later" in Instapaper as a video queue (only works for paying Instapaper subscribers): http://watchlater.radbox.org/ Mine focuses on trying to automatically discover HTML5-capable viewers for use on iOS.

Every one is slightly different, and this one looks particularly nice. Thanks for making it -- I look forward to trying it.

sampson Echoprint: Open-source music fingerprinting

What's the relationship (if any) or distinction between Echoprint and Chromaprint/Acoustid? http://acoustid.org/

sampson Best Customer Complaint Letter Ever

This is a paid advertisement

What do you suppose this is an advertisement for?

sampson KGPU — Accelerating Linux Kernel Functions with CUDA

I think the question is about how the kernel can use the GPU. Linux probably doesn't need to train hidden Markov models. It might, however, need to do crypto (e.g., for an encrypted filesystem).