Adrian Holovaty

That's really cool, especially as I think one of the first map mashups was Chicago Crime [1], which was followed soon enough by countless others (I know I did one for my city back in 2007-ish). It would have been interesting for us to have had this type of map alongside the original "crime" maps from the very beginning, but I think relevant data was hard to come by. [1] http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/

You're absolutely right. The author of the post is just whining for the sake of whining. For every post hating on amazon there's one hating on heroku<http://www.holovaty.com/writing/aws-notes>. Best course of action is to just deal with it.

That's funny, I was just reading this blog post from Adrian Holovaty on some of the issues he ran into with deploying Python/Django on Heroku and how great AWS has worked out for him with Soundslice: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/aws-notes/ He just about had me sold. Anyway, I'm definitely in the wanting to avoid sysadmin stuff if at all possible camp. Does anyone have any thoughts on AWS vs Heroku for Django? Does Adrian's solution seem reasonable?

That's interesting, because I always think of the Lawrence Journal World (the creator of the Django web framework) and Adrian Holovaty's excellent writeup of how they thrive by excelling at local news: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/

"... I'm NOT looking for a discussion about politics. I'm looking for insights about technology and its impact on communication between local governments and its citizens ..." Adrian Holovaty of Chicago Crime ~ http://holovaty.com/blog/archive/2008/01/31/0102 and http://www.everyblock.com is probably the best example I can think of. Everyblock is going to be opensourced at some time in the future. The ability for citizens see what is really going on at street level thematically is the key benefit thus allowing the Local government to get on with governing and release the data for others to use.

An idea for new news: Start with the reddit concept: users submit and vote on links to articles, blog posts and so forth. Then, allow users to tag each link (or otherwise add metadata), and vote on the relevence of the story to the tag. Also allow users to vote on the trustworthiness of each link and/or each source or author. Could also allow users to vote on other users, to get networks of trust. Then you just take all that data and use it to generate personalised news, or whatever else you want. I also like Adrian Holovaty's ideas about a data-oriented approach to news: [http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307/] [http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/06/_future_of_journali…

I did (some of) this with chicagocrime.org in 2005... :-) ...and I've since learned the error of my ways. It's just too misleading to do these types of overly simplistic data reports. The data set is flawed in many ways, including: * Data model. The Chicago crime data only has a single date/time field. For many crimes, such as break-ins, the victim/reporter isn't able to pinpoint an exact time; they might just provide a time range. That doesn't jive well with the data model. * Data mistakes. I dealt with public record databases extensively from 2005-2012 (Washington Post, chicagocrime.org, EveryBlock). Government data sets (like any data sets!) contain mistakes, which are compounded when you do aggregate queries. * Systematic police department effort to reduce crime numbers through data trickery. See the amazing recent piece by Chicago Magazine: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2014/Chicago-crime-sta… All in all, obviously this post is harmless link bait at face value, but more thought should be given to these issues. Open govt. data is a good thing, but it's healthy to be skeptical. (Note chicagocrime.org is no longer around, as I redirected it to my other project, EveryBlock, several years ago: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/)

Maybe not "daily", but very frequently: here is a small selection of some of the small sites on my newsblur newsfeed list: [0] http://www.jamesaltucher.com : Much self-pity, but also sometimes quite funny. http://www.astrobio.net/latestnews_rss/news.xml : Is there life on other planets? http://kaygun.tumblr.com/ http://www.friday.com/bbum : Coding, hardware projects, generally interesting. http://bestyoucanbe.blogspot.com/ : Insights into the education system in regard to the raising of his neurologically non-typical son. http://blog.lmorchard.com http://ex-muslim.org.uk : Oppression of atheists in the Muslim world. http://clojurefun.wordpress.com : Clojure! http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath : Bad science, denialism. http://blog.willbenton.com : Music, logic, programming, etc. http://www.groklaw.net : Maybe not "small"; detailed analysis of important legal cases. http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal : Web design. http://www.holovaty.com/ : "I'm co-creator and co-Benevolent Dictator For Life of the open-source Django Web framework" http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones : Combines talented photography, photoessays, and study of the retina. http://lee-phillips.org : I regularly check my site to see if it's still working. http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca : Language issues; can be amusing or stupid. http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie : Freedom for women in the Muslim world. http://math-blog.com : Infrequently updated, but often…

This release brings some really great features to the table. Here are some things that affect me directly: - Lots and lots of improvements to the admin app. Also, dropped support for IE6 in the admin ;) - Better password hashing. - A cookie-based session backend that uses cryptographic signing to store session data in the browser. - A new form wizard. This is a big one for me since I needed something like this for one of my side projects. - Improved WSGI support. - Custom project and app templates. - OMG OMG OMG timezone support. "When it's enabled, Django stores date and time information in UTC in the database, uses time-zone-aware datetime objects internally and translates them to the end user's time zone in templates and forms." You could always do this manually, but it's one of those things that should be handled by the framework. Pretty nice stuff. Best part is, since I'm in very early stages of building a personal website using Django, I can start using this release right now. PS: does anyone else think activity around Django has increased ever since Adrian started spending more time on it? (see http://www.holovaty.com/writing/back-to-django/)

You just described the Adrian Holovaty thesis. http://holovaty.com/ He's the Django co-creator, gypsy guitar-playing developer of Everyblock.com His big idea is that reporters have been gathering all this data for years.....and organizing it in the worst, least helpful format ever, the "text blob." What he's doing with Everyblock is the same thing Google's been doing since day 1, converting text blobs into useful, actionable, structured data that you can reassemble into graphs, maps, interactive features, or articles if need be. He's certainly onto something. My question is whether that's going to completely blot out narrative journalism. My guess is that people who like narrative journalism are going to keep liking it while the many many people who never cared and who just read the headlines anyway will flock to Google News, sites like this and anything else that gives them something "worse" than narrative journalism but "good enough" to attract their eyeballs. Note: I did not comment on my own comment. For some reason user jaydub deleted his comment as I was responding to it.

You may be interested in "Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists" https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chatgpt-fake-feature/ (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44491071 (1299 points | 5 months ago | 435 comments))

Some interest notes on the custom machine learning model they built for this feature here: https://www.holovaty.com/writing/machine-learning-thoughts/

Reminds me of chicagocrime.org back in the day. Everything seems to cycle every twenty years. Enjoy the ride, kids. https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/

Creator of Django did an ML project last year and has a lot of good insights - general web / programming know-how is really useful for building custom tooling to manage / observe datasets and things like that. edit: forgot to include link :) http://www.holovaty.com/writing/machine-learning-thoughts/

I appreciate BuiltInChicago as an effective way to promote knowledge about the Chicago tech scene and I looked there the last couple times I was job-searching, but this list is really uninspiring. Uber for [moving, dry-cleaning, beauty needs], clones of better-known startups, clones of startups that have already failed. There should be more focus on what Chicago's uniquely good at, and what makes us not just a worse-SF: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicago-bootstrapping/

EveryBlock tried to be that gathering-together service, but it got shut down: http://www.niemanlab.org/encyclo/everyblock/ + http://www.holovaty.com/writing/rip-everyblock/ "We showed you nearby public records (crimes, building permits, restaurant inspections), pointed you to automatically indexed articles (newspapers, blogs, forums) and provided a sort of "geo-forum" that let you talk with people who lived near you." It's sort of maybe being revived: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/09/02/comcast-b…

I thought Adrian Holovaty's take on Chicago's tech scene was really interesting: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicago-bootstrapping/

This article, incidentally by one of the creators of the Django Framework, still seems relevant, even 8 years later: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/

Soundslice is a service where you can transcribe music easily. Many sites that offer "guitar tabs" use either an ASCII-based format or files for GuitarPro and similar programs. Soundslice allows you to transcribe directly from a YouTube video, so you get the original sound together with the tabs, looping, slowing down and the ability to transcribe songs yourself. Here's an example: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/2865/adrian-holovaty-everything-means-n… Now they've launched a sheet-music player that's featured on the homepage. Adrian has posted an article about it on his blog: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/soundslice-sheet-music/ Currently, only they transcribe the sheet-music, via their Pitch Perfect program: http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/

Braintree is a Chicago company. Adrian Holovaty (of Django fame) recently caused a stir here when he argued in front of a group of investors that Chicago is an ideal place for bootstrappers: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicago-bootstrapping/

Maybe they found it performed better, like Adrian Holovaty found for soundslide: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/in-defense-of-canvas/ (see "stacking canvases")

it may be a honeypot. I sometimes set up a bogus form under /admin/ which logs attempts. adrian holovaty on the other hand, redirects /admin/ to django docs http://www.holovaty.com/writing/admin-easter-egg/ //edit: oh, now I see somebody thought of my idea too https://github.com/dmpayton/django-admin-honeypot

Does anyone here use two-phase template rendering[1], or know of a good library for it? There is phased[2], but it seemed to impart too much of a performance hit for me. 1. http://www.holovaty.com/writing/django-two-phased-rendering/ 2. https://github.com/codysoyland/django-phased

Yes, he blogged about his leaving: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/goodbye-everyblock/ FWIW, he left in August 2012, which would be three years after a summer 2009 acquisition. Also, he founded it back in July 2007...so when he says he "developed an uncontrollable itch to do something new", he probably meant it. Before Everyblock, he's been a pioneer in utilizing data and non-traditional journalism with news sites, most notably at the LJWorld.com...so he's been in this local online news business for quite a while. I don't think this is your usual case of a founder jumping ship just out of profit motive.

Founder's been gone since August of 2012. I wish they'd given more of an explanation behind closing. As of this blogpost: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/goodbye-everyblock/ it seems they were optimistic. Sad to see his writing about acquisitions within today's context.

Not sure if it exists in other platforms but with Django, some people have experimented with two-phased template rendering as described here: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/django-two-phased-rendering/ and there's a permissive license (BSD, I think) implementation: http://codysoyland.com/projects/django-phased/documentation/tutorial.h…

I'm hoping this will fix some of that: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/back-to-django/

> Am I missing something here? I believe so: the importance of open data. This finding is a perfect example of the fascinating insights you can get when you combine big, seemingly disparate datasets. I'm not sure where you would go to get an equivalent dataset for "restaurant reservations". In the sense that it uses readily-available crime data to make inferences about possibly correlated phenomena, this analysis is another iteration on Adrian Holovaty's original mashup: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/

Hah, it's crazy how the things we saw in science fiction are becoming a reality! Interestingly enough, the (unattributed) background music in the video was played/recorded by Adrian Holovaty, one of the original creators of Django: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/mario-gypsy-jazz/

Also at http://www.holovaty.com/writing/everyblock-acquisition/ with some more personal details from Adrian