Top all-time · #1012
Adrian Holovaty
Personal blog · holovaty.com/writing · on HN as adrianhprogrammingdatawriting
Adrian Holovaty's personal blog at holovaty.com covers programming, data and writing. Since 2007, 65 different Hacker News readers have linked it 96 times, most often “A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change (2006)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 37 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of Django, writes about local news and data, Chicago tech, Soundslice, machine learning projects and the EveryBlock shutdown. HN readers link these posts for his views on those topics.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called 'good insights' on an ML project, 'really interesting' on Chicago tech, 'excellent' on local news, 'still relevant' after eight years, and a favourite bl
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 37 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change (2006)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-12-06
- RIP EveryBlock, by Adrian Holovaty4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-02-07
- The history of ‘this website is well-crafted’ hints4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-04-29
- Why Chicago needs to stop playing by Silicon Valley’s rules4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-01-24
- /writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-09-14
- Everyblock founder adrianholovaty leaving acquirer MSNBC4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-08-15
- Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-07
- Back in the Django saddle3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-11-28
- Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-05-18
- Thoughts on my first machine learning project3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-11-11
What Hacker News says?
From https://tonsky.me/blog/gaslight-driven-development/ today: > Any person who has used a computer in the past ten years knows that doing meaningless tasks is just part of the experience. Millions of people create accounts, confirm emails, dismiss notifications, solve captchas, reject cookies, and accept terms and conditions—not because they particularly want to or even need to. They do it because that’s what the…
Comment linking /writing/chatgpt-fake-feature/
on “Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists”Submitted Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists as a story · 1299 points
HN discussionCreator 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/
Comment linking /writing/machine-learning-thoughts/
on “Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]”Submitted Let websites framebust out of native apps as a story · 430 points
HN discussionFor folks who don't know the Django world: Malcolm was one of the most prolific Django contributors. If you use Django, you use code he wrote. I wrote a remembrance here: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/malcolm/
Comment linking /writing/malcolm/
on “Goodbye, Malcolm”Submitted Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup as a story · 404 points
HN discussionThis is HUGE! I'm using the AWS stack for http://www.soundslice.com/ and I've been using MySQL instead of Postgres, purely because my hatred for MySQL is less than my hatred for being a sysadmin. It was a tradeoff, and I miss Postgres dearly every time I use MySQL. This new Amazon offering solves that. I wrote a little more about my AWS setup here: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/aws-notes/
Comment linking /writing/aws-notes/
on “Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL”Submitted In defense of <canvas> as a story · 294 points
HN discussionAn 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…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307/
on “Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund”Submitted Adrian and Jacob retiring as Django BDFLs as a story · 265 points
HN discussionThis 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/
Comment linking /writing/fundamental-change/
on “What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by coders?”Submitted Back in the Django saddle as a story · 212 points
HN discussion> 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…
Comment linking /writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/
on “How prostitution and alcohol make Uber better”Submitted Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing as a story · 183 points
HN discussionThat'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.o…
Comment linking /writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/
on “Mapping Police Violence”Submitted Moving Django to GitHub: the postmortem as a story · 101 points
HN discussionSoundslice 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/286…
Comment linking /writing/soundslice-sheet-music/
on “Soundslice – Living Sheet Music”Submitted Using HTML5 prerendering to speed up a multi-page registration process as a story · 99 points
HN discussionI've been working on Soundslice full time since I left EveryBlock at the end of August 2012: http://www.soundslice.com/ (blog post: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/goodbye-everyblock/ ) It has nothing to do with local news or journalism -- it's a music thing. The main thing it has in common with EveryBlock is that it's fundamentally about creating structure from chaos, which is what I like to do.
Comment linking /writing/goodbye-everyblock/
on “Farewell, neighbors”Submitted Introducing the YouTube Insult Generator as a story · 63 points
HN discussionYes, 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,…
Comment linking /writing/goodbye-everyblock/
on “Farewell, neighbors”Submitted Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI am super bummed about this. :-( I wrote some thoughts on my blog: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/rip-everyblock/ Adrian (EveryBlock founder)
Comment linking /writing/rip-everyblock/
on “Farewell, neighbors”Submitted Crash Tags as a story · 25 points
HN discussionFounder'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.
Comment linking /writing/goodbye-everyblock/
on “Farewell, neighbors”Submitted Google+ and YouTube tech disaster report as a story · 24 points
HN discussionIt was: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/rip-everyblock/
Comment linking /writing/rip-everyblock/
on “Justin.tv ending archiving, deleting all archived videos after June 14”Submitted Chrome’s web audio change is bad news as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI'm hoping this will fix some of that: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/back-to-django/
Comment linking /writing/back-to-django/
on “Django 1.4 Beta 1 Release”Submitted Using automated screenshots to test Canvas and user interfaces as a story · 19 points
HN discussion
