HN user

tomd

636 karma

tom dyson, torchbox.com co-founder, runs the wagtail.io project

Posts27
Comments62
View on HN
toktab.com 6mo ago

API for Current LLM Pricing

tomd
1pts1
theorangeone.net 10mo ago

Background Tasks feature merged into Django

tomd
3pts1
wagtail.org 2y ago

Permissions and performance improvements in Wagtail 5.1

tomd
1pts0
twitter.com 5y ago

Wagtail 2.13 includes Telepath, a new JavaScript-Python bridge

tomd
2pts0
twitter.com 5y ago

Wagtail 2.10 (open source Python CMS)

tomd
1pts0
medium.com 6y ago

Being Attacked at Gunpoint Helped Me Understand Conservatives

tomd
3pts1
torchbox.com 7y ago

Not Selling Up

tomd
2pts1
torchbox.com 8y ago

Women in Tech

tomd
1pts0
wagtail.io 8y ago

Show HN: Wagtail 2.0 is a big release for our Python CMS

tomd
78pts7
www.nginx.com 8y ago

Nginx Unit

tomd
680pts232
wagtail.io 8y ago

The UK's National Health Service Picks Wagtail

tomd
5pts1
wagtail.io 9y ago

Image recognition in Wagtail CMS

tomd
9pts1
wagtail.io 10y ago

Wagtail CMS 1.5 released

tomd
6pts0
www.internetsociety.org 10y ago

Nominations for 2016 Jonathan B. Postel Award are open

tomd
4pts0
wagtail.io 10y ago

Wagtail in Space

tomd
1pts0
wagtail.io 10y ago

Wagtail CMS 1.2: Full Jinja, Settings, Search++

tomd
2pts0
torchbox.com 10y ago

Facebook Free Basics, on Wagtail

tomd
1pts0
wagtail.io 11y ago

Wagtail 1.0 – a milestone release for our Django CMS

tomd
85pts12
www.revsys.com 11y ago

Wagtail 1.0 (beta) best Django CMS?

tomd
16pts2
www.historicalpageants.ac.uk 12y ago

Rethinking data entry

tomd
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Show HN: Wagtail, our new Django CMS

tomd
166pts95
www.torchbox.com 13y ago

Web agencies should do more than just hand over a set of templates

tomd
7pts13
www.gilestv.com 13y ago

What garden weeds can teach us about system resilience

tomd
2pts0
torchboxtech.tumblr.com 14y ago

Cher Président - Redis, Celery, Django & Nginx

tomd
4pts0
www.torchbox.com 15y ago

Collaborative iPad Christmas card

tomd
5pts0
tomdyson.org 15y ago

Three ways that smories.com uses Redis

tomd
1pts0
antirez.com 15y ago

A few key problems in Redis persistence

tomd
58pts0

When I'm building apps that use LLMs I'm often looking up prices from the providers' websites, sometimes copying and pasting them into prompts ('calculate and display the costs for this model using this screenshot'). I'd rather tell Claude Code 'use toktab.com to get the current prices for gemini-3-flash-preview'. And now I can! This site is built every night from the open source pricing data from LiteLLM - https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm - which was the most comprehensive data I could find. I think the main weakness is lack of fuzzy searching, which is hard to achieve with a statically generated site, but I'm very open to suggestions.

OpenAI-to-SQLite 3 years ago

I'm unsure whether SQLite's extension interface is flexible enough to support this.

I think it is, if I've understood your requirements correctly. e.g. from the datasette-faiss docs:

  with related as (
    select value from json_each(
      faiss_search(
        'intranet',
        'embeddings',
        (select embedding from embeddings where id = :id),
        5
      )
    )
  )
  select id, title from articles, related
  where id = value

It takes a while to configure a persistent database, redis, and storage on Heroku

Really? Have you actually tried this? In my experience Heroku couldn't make it any easier. You can provision a database in 60 seconds, from a Deploy to Heroku button in your Github README, or in the lovely dashboard, or on the CLI, or with two lines in heroku.yml.

We're a heavy Gitlab user and I'm a big fan of Gitlab's typically transparent communications style, but this article reflects really badly on you. I think you should take it down.

NHS.UK frontend 8 years ago

I run Torchbox, a small, private tech agency in the UK. We were commissioned by NHS Digital (the state sector organisation behind these tools) to support two related projects: moving NHS.uk to https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail and setting up https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/ on Wagtail.

NHS Digital's procurement processes are tight and focused. They have an expert in-house team of developers and delivery managers, and they only used us on where we could accelerate the project.

As a business owner, I would have liked a bigger contract. As a tax-payer and frequent user of the NHS, I'm very happy with their efficiency.

'probably smart', 'primarily a salesman'

"A child prodigy in chess, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13"

"graduating in 1997 with a Double First[13] from the University of Cambridge"

"obtain[ed] his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London"

"[his] theoretical account of the episodic memory system [...] was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year in any field by the journal Science"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

I'm one of the Wagtail core developers. We made the mistake of spreading our support across too many channels (Google Groups, Stack Overflow, IRC, semi-private Slack) but we've made a clear decision to focus on Stack Overflow for developer-related questions:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wagtail

mainly as a result of this poll:

https://twitter.com/WagtailCMS/status/801384753589080064

Please feel free to contact me directly (details in profile) if you're not getting the support you need on SO.

Most of the sites we build on Wagtail use taxonomies / categorisation, either with a foreign key to categories defined as snippets, or with custom model classes for each page type, as you describe. You're right that Wagtail has no 'native' equivalent of WP's Categories, and perhaps that's a mistake. You're also right to focus on ideas and usage over technical details; we fall into this trap too easily.

I'm very interested in talking more about this, but without derailing the topic. Please email me on my first name at torchbox.com.

This is a fascinating analysis. I'm the CTO of the agency behind the Wagtail CMS (https://wagtail.io) which you reference. People like NASA, Google, Peace Corps, PBS run sites on Wagtail but I'd use WordPress for my friend's 5 page site because:

- < 5 minutes to organise cheap hosting - automatic updates - zillions of themes - someone else can fix it when it goes wrong

I hope Daniele and his colleagues at Aldryn will help with quick cheap Django hosting (they do Wagtail too!). But I'm not sure that Wagtail or Django CMS will ever be the right choice for this use-case. Of course you _could_ build a WordPress equivalent in Django, using postmeta-style key-value tables that abuse relational database theory but allow plugins to define their own content types, and maybe someone should. Our effort is going into building a CMS which helps implementers of non-trivial sites do the 'right thing': keep their content structured, clean, related, filterable. Create once publish everywhere!

There's a lot to learn from WordPress but I don't think 'dynamic models' are the answer for situations where you have more than one developer (there's no guaranteed parity between developer and production environments) or lots of relations (postmeta-style tables have ugly joins, weak integrity checks, poor performance).

Wagtail isn't so new now - it's coming up to two years since we launched the open source project and there are now thousands of sites in productions, with high profile users including NASA, Google, NBC, the US and UK governments. Wagtail takes quite a different approach to Django CMS and we're very happy to see their continued progress. Congratulations on the release!

Wagtail 11 years ago

We're always looking for good Django freelancers, wherever they're based, but particularly in Oxford and Bristol. Email my first name at torchbox.com.

Wagtail 11 years ago

I'm from Torchbox, the UK agency who created this CMS. We launched Wagtail here on HN just over a year ago, and are currently preparing to release version 1.0, whose headline feature is 'StreamField', our attempt to handle the old CMS dilemma of editor flexibility versus structured data:

https://torchbox.com/blog/rich-text-fields-and-faster-horses...

It's been an exciting year for us, but we've seen a significant increase in interest in the last couple of months, with a handful of household names adopting Wagtail, including one particularly high profile site which we hope to be able to talk about soon.

Wagtail 11 years ago

No, it's a clear tenet of Wagtail's design that it should place no restrictions on how you render content.