Hacker News Reader

stseon Ask HN: Python framework advice

I'm also in the hunt for a python framework. I've had a look at several, most have already been mentioned here, like Flask and web.py. Personally I'm probably going to go with custom framework built on Werkzeug or modifying Flask.

I think Tornado Web (http://www.tornadoweb.org/) might be an interesting option for you. Should be highly scalable and is being used by FriendFeed. There were some things that I didn't like about it, but I've seemed to have forgotten what exactly.

stseon The Pirate Bay up again - bandwidth provided by Swedish Pirate Party

If you really want to know peoples motivation for downloading copyrighted material, or wanting copyright reform, there are countless of resources on the Internet and elsewhere. This isn't the '80s. Piracy has been common place for at least a decade now. There just isn't any reason nowadays not to know about piracy, even if you don't support it, other than ignorance.

stseon The Pirate Bay up again - bandwidth provided by Swedish Pirate Party

This is of course a political move. The Swedish general election is in four months and the Pirate Party's greatest threat is not getting enough attention. As the other political parties in Sweden doesn't really understand technology and won't actively engage in these issues. In the EP election last year, two unpopular laws had gone into effect the same year and also the Pirate Bay trial had just been held months before the election.

This time around technology related legislature seem to have been postponed and the continuation of the Pirate Bay trial has conveniently been placed just weeks after the election. If the Pirate Party's ISP now decides or get forced to cut off the Pirate Bay from the Internet, they will also censor the Pirate Party, which (of course) is a political party. Sparking a lot of outrage and controversy, which previously has shown very effective for the party.

stseon Google To Buy Global IP Solutions For $68.2 Million In Cash

What's up with all the video chat companies "from" Sweden? Skype, Marratech and now GIPS. Might have something to do with broadband proliferation I guess.

stseon Early 1900s in Colour

If I'm counting correctly these photographs still retain copyright to the end of the year (in Sweden), as Albert Kahn died in 1940. Copyright in Sweden is generally uphold up until 70 years after authors death.

stseon Spotify becomes a "total music management platform"

You're right, doesn't work for everyone. Does seem to work to transfer the binary from someone else though.

Edit: Cnet reportedly has the new version: http://download.cnet.com/Spotify/3000-2141_4-10912348.html?t...

stseon Spotify next generation explained

The workaround [1] seem to work pretty good so far. No crashes, but it does go into a (recoverable) loop if you pull the slider to the end of a track.

[1] http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/spotify_under_wine...

stseon Spotify becomes a "total music management platform"

"So how do you get the new version? We’ve started rolling out the update to users today, however, it will take us a number of days to get it to everyone."

You get the updated version if you (re)download Spotify from the website.

stseon Soldier in Wikileaks video of 2007 Apache attack reveals what happened that day

The thing is that it worked. I never seen any Wikileaks story get so much attention in the news or "virally" on the Internet. Here in Sweden it was a top story on all the major newspapers websites and on the evening news, but put into context. The second part with the hellfire missile, where they didn't provide much commentary, in comparison got a lot less attention. More people than usual do seem to have watched the full material and read the related reports etc. to get the full story.

I never really got upset about Wikileaks providing commentary, because I never had the illusion that they were going to be impartial. Don't be lazy, apply some critical thinking, listen to different sources. Leaks are in their nature untrustworthy. Even intelligence agencies with all their highly educated analysts get things wrong.

Finally if you stop supporting Wikileaks because you don't like that they provide commentary, editorialize, make propaganda or whatever your view are of it. I don't really think you get what their doing or what's at stake.

stseon Soldier in Wikileaks video of 2007 Apache attack reveals what happened that day

I think it came across quite clearly in the video that the guys on the ground were a lot more attached to the situation. You could here it in their voices. An important part of this story that sadly won't get much attention is how badly the soldiers are treated. The sergeant could potentially have saved this guy a lot of trouble by letting him see a "mental health person".

stseon Women in tech - Stop talking, start coding

The US isn't exactly the most gender equal country in the world, so I'll be pretty surprised if women aren't being discriminated against in the tech industry.

stseon How Not to copy your SSH private key to your servers

Like with the whole "sniffing tor exit nodes" thing [1], you do wonder if it's actually the original owners who fails to protect their data, or if it's someone else [2].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2007/09/security-expert... [2] http://pastebin.com/f4b10cc33

stseon HW Hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang on The Setup

The Microsoft Natural keyboard is surprisingly good for its price. Despite being to wide I really enjoyed it before getting the Kinesis Advantage.

stseon European air tracker adds volcano ashes layer

Most parts of the northern European airspace was closed 1-2 days ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_travel_disruption_after_the...

stseon Ask HN: Open-source PDF Viewer for my Website?

Don't know if I would call it really good, but pdf2swf might be a start.

http://www.swftools.org/

stseon Stack Exchange 2.0

I think your reading to much into this. To me it seems like the stack exchange sites just got too little traffic to reach critical mass. Ask Metafilter is an exception to a lot of other communities which became awful as they grew.

stseon Ask HN: Can we finish with the Apple 3.3.1 Policy submissions?

This is how a news site like this works. If somethings get popular a lot of people will get interested in the topic and post stories about it. Then more people get interested in the topic and so on. It's also a reflection what other sites write about. I don't think somehow limiting how long a topic can be discussed will be good, as a lot of insightful stories will be posted some time after an event occurred. It will fade naturally with time as it becomes less topical.

There's always going to be people that don't find a certain topic interesting, but if something is upvoted it means that other people are. So just read the other stories that you feel interested in and when something you are interested in comes up, others can return the favor.

Also, I do think there are some "less than optimal conditions" at HN, especially for new stories. But I don't think something becoming "overly" popular is because of those conditions.

stseon New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

It does make a difference. Linux needs more users, both active and passive. I'm actually surprised how many people that would be the target audience for Linux have come to use OS X instead.

stseon I'm quitting the Internet. Will I be liberated or left behind?

When I need to I've found that separating different activities helps me from getting "caught up" in the Internet. I use a HTPC to watch tv-series/web-tv and listen to music, an android phone for connecting with friends, e-reader to read books and documents. If I do need the computer I mainly use my laptop without wifi, and plug it in when I need to access the Internet briefly.

I do use my desktop computer for gaming, surfing the web and other purely recreational activities, but at least I'm not kidding myself when I do. Before I would tell myself that I was doing something useful, while I would get into the "loop" you're talking about. Now I read and watch video less, but I read and watch things I actually like.

stseon Last week's news

There's also newspapers that isn't as focused on analysis as The Economist, which release on a weekly basis. Some newspapers even have international or weekly editions like The Guardian[1]. It does seem like this was a lot more common before the breakthrough of the Internet.

Also I think there's an issue with the format. I personally enjoy magazines like The Economist more in print, while it's the other way around with daily newspapers.

[1] http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/

stseon The Thrill of Flying the SR-71 Blackbird

What makes me sad is the disproportionate amount of money and efforts that the US seem to spend on military projects instead of civilian ones(1). Surly the US did and do great civilian projects, but maybe it's greatest achievements are in space where there's also military motives. While it's European countries and Japan which have developed efficient and high speed civilian transportation.

(1) I mean engineering oriented projects like train, cars, telephone networks etc. not academic research where the US clearly is great.

stseon Wikileaks has really misled the public

It's at least more likely that the two guys at 3:50, is carrying an RPG and an AK, then any of the other guys I see in the video. Their behavioral pattern doesn't really match the rest of the groups. At 4:46 you can see something that resembles a magazine sticking out from the striped guy. And the weight of the lift at 3:57 more matches my experience.

To me the chopper crew is just sloppy and they shouldn't be. I get why some grunt storming buildings may accidentally shoot someone holding up a broom or something. But these guys should have the discipline and training to be able to stay cool and wait things out. There's clearly not a full blown street fight going on at this location. And what happens at 5:13?

But frankly I'll always be on the side of war corespondents after reading "My war gone by, I miss it so" and seeing "War Photographer".

stseon Wikileaks has really misled the public

I think 3:38 looks more like a camera strap. An AK is quite heavy and not something you wave around like that. The quality is quite bad so it might be a weapon, but I don't think you can "clearly see an AK-47".

I would be very very surprised if the device at 4:12 is an RPG. It looks and behaves like a long lens camera. At 4:15 you can see a space between the device and the body of the person. An RPG is also quite heavy and has a distinct shape and you wouldn't generally turn it around a corner.

As there also according to wikileaks were photographers on the scene. It's just far more likely that it's one of the front two guys who carries something that picks up his camera and take some pictures. If that is the case, then I would have to question the chopper crews ability to recognize weapons on the ground.

stseon Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?

In my opinion the Commodore/Amiga and later the PC computers created a lot more programmers than the Nintendo Entertainment System did. The North European game industry (DICE, Starbreeze, Remedy, etc.) was more or less based on the demoscene i.e. hacking for fun, not math education. Sure, the NES inspired a lot of people. But the real questions is: What if the NES would have been hackable?

stseon Ask HN: would you give us feedback about our saas directory ?

Implement the standard "community" things like rating, tags and comments. Make it sortable by paid/freemium. Create a "suggest a service" form to replace the email adress, and put up some contact information. I like the overall design, but maybe the logo "style" seems a bit out of place.

stseon In support of the Startup Visa

That's awesome, getting downvoted and commented on for the one word I put inside quotation marks. I was referring to hackers as in Hacker News i.e. the "startup community". Also it's pretty much impossible to do anything political, especially in the US, without the help of influential people. I could tell you the details of how it's done over here, but something tells me you're not interested.

stseon In support of the Startup Visa

What I personally think is most exciting if this gets adopted, is not the bill itself but that US "hackers" see that they can influence politics. I've always been impressed that you, even early on, had organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons. But when you talk with Americans today in regards to things like the Pirate Party, you're mostly meet with overall disappointment over the US political system. So hopefully you now get the chance to find a different way to do something similar.

Edit: If there isn't already one, someone should make a site for forming and joining interest groups.

stseon Apple iPad? How about a little German innovation instead

That's very subjective. It's true though that Apple has been able to sell products that generally have lower specs then their price equivalent. But if that is because of marketing, killer applications, user experience or something else isn't really clear. They're definitely not dominating any market based on number of devices though.

What I'm most curious about in the tablet space is if Linux, with Android, MeeGo, Chrome OS etc. will be able to shine. As many tablets will be ARM based, there will be less competition from Microsoft. With a decent distribution platform we might see a situation where developers will be able to reach more devices with Linux than with iPad/iPhone OS. Especially from a global perspective.

stseon Responding to jacquesm's challenge

I think it would be more interesting if the "guesses" would actually take into consideration how successful or unsuccessful the method is with the data available. For example, how likely are each of the names he mentioned and how likely is it that it's any one of them?

Edit: If someone here has a background in intelligence I would love to here their take on the challange.

stseon A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

First I want to say that I don't agree with publicly disclosing the "identity" of people who doesn't want to be found. I also don't think doing so "originates" from any good personal quality. That being said, I do remember this [1] talk from last CCC to be interesting from a technical standpoint.

[1] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3468.en.h...