Hacker News Reader

zainon I just launched my bootstrapped startup. Pray for me.

Here's a screenshot of the scary sign in chrome: http://grab.by/4jd4

As you can see, it is indeed pretty scary. Definitely fix that.

The Axim was from Dell, not HP. The iPaq was created by Compaq and taken over by HP in their acquisition.

zainon Why I switched to Pylons after using Django for six months

Wow. In summary, he switched from Django to Pylons because:

  - He couldn't figure out how to modify his Pinax project
  - He couldn't get django-openid to work
  - There's no debugger on Django exception pages
  - Something about magic imports?

You don't have to fork Pinax to add/remove apps to it. You don't have to fork django-openid to use it in your project, just override the templates. Recaptcha fits into the app model very easily: it's just another auth backend. You can get a debugger on your exception pages by installing django-extensions.

zainon MixergyNotes on Gurbaksh Chahal, founder of gWallet and self-made millionaire.

Flagged as spam.

The submitter, mixergyNOTES, has two submissions total, both pointing to mixergynotes.com; also, he has four comments (two of which were killed), all of which spam mixergynotes.com and are only tangentially related to the topic.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mixergyNOTES

zainon The Django community in 2009

Your link is pointing to the article from 2007. Here's the followup he wrote yesterday titled "The Django community in 2009" http://jacobian.org/writing/django-community-2009/

zainon Comcast Internet throttling is up and running

That's fair. I wasn't saying that they were wrongly abusing their position. I was merely lamenting the fact that there's no viable competitors in my area.

zainon Comcast Internet throttling is up and running

In addition to the throttling, Comcast still enforces bandwidth caps.

Two months ago, Comcast's fraud department left me a breathless voicemail asking to call them back urgently regarding an "important matter of security."

When I called back, I was told, "We have a bandwidth limit of 250 gigabytes a month. Our records show that in August, you used 710 gigabytes." They told me that if I exceeded 250gb again, they'd cut me off for a year.

Since then, I've started tracking my bandwidth to make sure I don't go over. If Comcast cuts me off, my only alternative is 5Mbps DSL through AT&T, and I wouldn't wish that upon anybody. So, Comcast has successfully used their monopoly position in my area to strong-arm me into lowering my bandwidth usage.

I really hope Verizon FIOS shakes things up soon. It's somewhat depressing that FIOS is available in the boonies of Indiana but not in most of the Silicon Valley.

zainon OMG Ponies (AKA Best Idea: Ever)

What is sad about that?

zainon Ask HN: What is the going rate for developing an iPhone app?

I charge $65/hr, but that's because I'm just starting to get into the market and I'm not yet swamped with work. From what I've heard in the community, you can expect to pay twice that for someone established.

edit: if you'd like to get in touch with me, my email's in my profile.

zainon The SSD Improv

You're right. It appears I'm mistaken. I assumed it was more of an issue of cleanup, but it's pretty obvious that running the TRIM utility in Win7 is useless for my Mac partition.

Nonetheless, the question in my post was more of the point. I wish Snow Leopard had TRIM support.

zainon New Twitter, JTV RFSes; Winter 2010 deadline pushed back 2 days

Request For Startup.

zainon The SSD Improv

Does anyone know if Snow Leopard will ever support TRIM? It saddens me that I have to boot into Windows 7 to manually run TRIM on my drive every so often.

zainon 10 finger multi-touch UI designed to replace the mouse

You're right. It isn't the exact same device. I ran across it while doing more research on 10gui and mistakenly thought it was by the same person. I updated my post.

Sorry about that.

zainon 10 finger multi-touch UI designed to replace the mouse

There's a similar device I read about with a hardware prototype that actually works. It doesn't have the software support of 10gui but it's basically a resistive touchscreen mapped to keypress macros (copy/paste, app switching, etc).

Here's some pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauric/sets/72157616093748066/w...

zainon Critical Django security updates released (0day, exploit in the wild)

Less than four hours between the disclosure and the fix. Not bad.

zainon Snow Leopard: It's Built for the Future.

It does work, but it violates the EULA (and is practically piracy), if that sort of stuff matters to you.

zainon IPhone Provisioning: Running Development Code On Your Phone.

You still need to go through the same provisioning process to run dev code on an iPod Touch.

zainon SXSWeek 2010 (March 12-20) Panel Picker

Mine's a humorous topic :)

"The Ballmer Peak: How Alcohol Intake Affects Coding"

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3115

zainon Display your current git branch as part of your bash prompt

Cool! I've practically created my own framework in Bash to hack my prompt but I never thought about sharing it.

My prompt shows the git branch, svn revision, and active virtualenv ("workon" and "deactivate" are virtualenv commands in the screenshot below). Also, mine has COLORS! (Colors within the dynamic function are much harder than they sound)

Here's a quick screenshot: http://img.skitch.com/20090817-gtp7bgkmdn14j84ryhepa2edke.pn...

You can extend it pretty easily to show whatever you want by doing little more than adding another function. Throw this into ~/.profile if you want to try it: http://pastebin.com/f79a9af51

zainon Facebook Lite - Direct shot at twitter? (Full screenshot)

Someone snapped a screenshot: http://i30.tinypic.com/2ni4mjt.jpg

zainon Rate My App: VapURL

clickable: http://vapurl.com/

zainon Use AJAX to filter Kayak's employees

Heh. At first, I felt bad for all the people on the low end of the hotness scale, but it's actually randomly generated on load. If you reload, everyone has a different hotness level.

zainon Alleged CrunchPad Specs Revealed: Will Michael Arrington Beat the Apple Tablet?

Mike Arrington's reaction to the leak: "i'm completely ripshit mad"

http://twitter.com/arrington/status/2949113649

zainon Tell HN: How to ban url shorteners from linking to your site

None of the reasons you listed are significant to the person reading them. It is not the visitor's problem that you can't track referrers or that it slows down the web, and the fact that they're seeing this page means the shortened is working as intended. Furthermore, you're basically making it impossible to share links to your site on Twitter (where they get auto-shortened).

All in all, you're doing little more than pissing off visitors you've probably worked pretty hard to get.

zainon Business schools redefine hacking to “stuff that a 7-year-old could do” (2005)

Note, this article is from March 2005.

zainon IPhone Push Notifications for any IMAP account

I really wish they had any information about the technical details behind this. Do they mirror your email on their exchange server or something?

zainon Python 3.1 released

One of the Python GSoC projects this year is a Python 3to2 tool that lets you convert Python 3.0 code to work on 2.x. Once this is implemented, the major projects (like Django) can switch over to 3.0 without having to put work into 2.x branches, and that should provide critical mass for normal developers to switch over too.

Here's the proposal: http://socghop.appspot.com/student_project/show/google/gsoc2...

zainon Google’s “Oprah Moment”: An Android Phone For Everyone At Google I/O

Due to something related to tax, none of the Google employees attending Google I/O were allowed to get the phone.

zainon Google’s “Oprah Moment”: An Android Phone For Everyone At Google I/O

I'm pretty happy with my iPhone, so I decided to sell my Google I/O phone. If you're interested in trying it out, I'm sure others are doing the same too.

zainon Contenture Launches. Micropayment-Based Freemium Model

Contenture has made it very simple for a site to install and use their service — it’s just a small snippet of JavaScript that can turn on or off features based on if a user visiting the site has a Contenture account.

Disabling features with Javascript? I bet it's easy to write a Greasemonkey script that'll give you the paid features on all these sites.