skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mr. Chris Pearson , excuse me Sir, I don't want to be rude but you are an idiot, but the bad part of it: he doesn't even know it. Wordpress is GPL, everything build on Wordpress has to be GPL as the licence states. End of the discussion, he has to understand, it's not about what he wants or doesn't want, what he thinks or doesn't think, those are just the fact, you don't like it, go pick another platform. Mr. Chris Pearson , you are wrong, it's not about what you decide or not, those are the rules of GPL.
Probably because a browser is far superior in application distribution:

* Don't have to download or install anything - something that is evidently hard for a large amount of people

* Old versions aren't as much of a problem; updates can be just a refresh away

* A browser is a consistent/familiar interface - people generally know how to interact with them

* Runs on your iPhone, Android, PC, Wii, PS3...

There's many, many advantages and disadvantages - use your imagination!
So that you don't have to convince a customer to download and install an untrusted binary from your website -- the website is the product itself.
fully agree, I was impress from Matt, seems to be an extremely smart and calm Guy.
At what point does one go from the feeling that they have to do everything themselves to make sure it's right to actually taking the leap of faith to hiring someone. I feel like I am constantly bottle necking growth, but it gets scary. What experiences have you guys had with this? What does it feel like to hire your first employee?
Odd sort of item - even odder that for a piece that was supposed to be an historical review of technological status the author thought that James Watt invented the steam engine.
Soooo.... How soon can we broadly implement any of this stuff on a mainstream web site/app? ;)
Chris Pearson generally is quite the ass. Try submitting any comment that in any way mildly suggests he might be wrong to his blog - it gets deleted immediately.
A point I would make about 'Vision Over Job Description':

I think it's vital to also be open about the need for a generalist. If all you do is give someone a title (plus vision), there's going to be enough of a role associated with that title to create a set of expectations. It's easy to put someone in a position early on where they think, 'an x doesn't do y, what's going on?'

Even for a low-level employee, I would consider doing salary plus equity if they're the first on board. I've seen it work before.

Another point I think is critical is if you expect someone to come on board and wear all hats, you'd better make sure you're willing to do it as well. If you're working all hours to make your business grow it will be easier for your employees to swallow.

If they think they're working more than you they'll leave and that's hard to recover from, at least in the sort term. Losing a team member hurts everyone's morale, especially your own.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
My favorite professor was a mathematician who did her doctorate at Zürich in the 1940s. Needless to say, for most of her career she was the only woman in the department.

She would get called frequently by journalists asking her to comment on all the obstacles she faced as a woman (a request she steadfastly rejected), and also on how to get girls into math. Her routine answer to the latter was that if anyone had tried to "get her into math" she would have promptly dropped math and taken up embroidery. But my favorite story was when the controversy hit about the talking Barbie who said "Math is hard." She kept getting phoned up and asked what she had to say about this. Her response was "Barbie is right, math is hard."
Because distributing software built for traditional desktop OSes sucks. Installing trusted code for your desktop OS is the past; on-demand caching of sandboxed code on the Web is the present and future.

The success of the web browser as an app platform has little to do with HTML and Javascript as languages (though they have been a decent base to build on). The web has been successful because of the browser's sandbox and HTTP's mostly stateless and cacheable distribution model, which are incredibly valuable app deployment tools that traditional OSes simply don't have.
The OS doesn't matter. The screencast is just a clip that I'm looking to upload on YouTube that I can then send to potential clients.
Closure Library: a JS library containing a bunch of useful stuff.

Closure Compiler: A compiler that takes Javascript as input and produces Javascript as output. Removes dead code, does various optimizations, and usually beats other minifiers by a small but significant margin.

Closure Templates: a templating system that generates Java or Javascript code. Handy if you want to generate a bunch of HTML from templates in Javascript, and you don't want to write all that by hand.
The most informative thread on the Internet on this subject is probably this one:

http://www.plos.org/cms/node/75

That's an extremely informative, citation dense conversation which took place in the aftermath of the Summers/Barres imbroglio a few years ago.
Double BR's, DIVs used as containing elements... ugh. I was expecting better from Google.
The problem of all RTE remains: their HTML is fucking ugly.
While we generally have pretty decent laws down here, internet and access to technology and the surrounding community pretty much sucks.
Good points, but I disagree with this one.

> Old versions aren't as much of a problem; updates can be just a refresh away.

We are pushing the distribution problem one layer down, We still need to deal with 10 years old browsers.
At last! Software patents hinder innovation and reward it unfairly. No need to worry, no end of capitalism here: this will just push everybody to wrap their treasured algorithms as services (e.g., Google, Facebook, …), but with the priceless advantage of not having to constantly worry about legal repercussions and liability. Small players such as start-ups and third-world companies (once this wonderful idea catches on) will benefit the most. Last, but not least, core applications are very likely to become joint, open-source efforts, increasing efficiency and productivity. Thank you, New Zealand! Hello, Utopia!
What's your opinion on that fair use argument? That's the only way I could see Chris having a legal leg to stand on. It seems pretty clear that Thesis is a derivative work, especially given that it extends a Wordpress class[1], but if a theme's use of Wordpress does fall under fair use, he wouldn't be violating the license.

It seems that if you buy the FSF's position[2] that linking from a proprietary program violates the license (meaning that linking is not fair use), Wordpress themes are definitely not fair use. But I'm not sure if that's been established in court.

[1]: http://apeatling.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/thesis-and-the-gpl...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL#Point_of_view:_any_linking_...
It's a pure CouchApp served behind Apache httpd for technical reasons. The site proper is run in/from CouchDB, Apache is merely used for virtual hosting and caching. We are transitioning to a pure-CouchDB setup now that CouchDB can do virtual hosts itself.
yeah, that happens to me too, about once a year, and worst case I spend a few hours on it. Let's say it's 5 hours a year I spend on this sort of problem. That's nothing compared to the amount of time I spend getting maven and spring to do what I want. Hell, it's far less time than I spend getting my IDE to run my projects!
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I hope thesis is not the only commercial theme you ever used. Themeforest, one of the premium wordpress theme market, has ~745 high quality themes with some publishers making 6 figures and all of those themes are GPL (to the best of my knowledge), I think this is also true for WooThemes.

The argument that making it GPL will break business is a very weak one. There is nothing, absolutely zero barrier, for someone to copy Thesis and sell it under another name, technically speaking.
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I really like it, but there are a couple of things:

Populate the map when you get my location, otherwise I think the app is broken.

A search for Bloomington, IN (verbatim) got me a tweet for Bloomington, IL. You don't want the same problem for cities like Brown or Jackson.

Maybe get rid of the left sidebar altogether? It's just redundant.
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Of course he has the choice to put whatever license he wants, but not when he is using wordpress. If he is using wordpress he has to abide by wordpress license the same way people would abide by whatever license he put on Thesis, if it wasn't using wordpress.
My wife works in an industry dominated by women and gay males. AFAICT, nobody in this industry thinks this is for any reason other than women and gay males being interested at the work and few straight males being interested. People get that, as a whole, gender and sexuality shape your interests. There's no scare articles about something being wrong with the industry, or large companies trying to hire straight male quotas, but where they exist, people like them and appreciate them for what is frequently a different and refreshing focus.

And as a straight male, I'm OK with this.
I was going to point you to something that's dead simple to use but ok.
We aren't necessarily stuck with SQL (for instance, right now there are LDAP or XML or RDF-oriented datastores out there with fairly open APIs and decent interop), but we are stuck with "articulation of the domain twice, once for a datastore, and once for application" unless one programming language finally conquers all the others and becomes the only platform your schema needs to be usable with.
" I have to explicitly add attribute handling code in initialize? Why?"

'Attributes' are just methods like any other. What code do you think you need in initialize?

(Encouraging people to think of some methods as 'attributes' was a mistake, but also now a long-lost battle. It breaks the concept of the "messages only" Ruby object model, even though that's exactly what's happening. )
Someone should watch the presentation again and do an analysis.
Ask HN: Typist helper for programmers?
Does anyone have experience working with a typist or junior programmer, so that you could code by dictation?

Outside of the benefits for coders with wrist injuries, I often find myself unmotivated when facing a lot of code changes that are relatively simple.
Fantastic work.

Out of curiosity, how long did it take to develop & launch? How many people were responsible for the product?
No, we're never going to show your content to other users (or to anyone else), it's private. The policy is the same as del.icio.us's, I thought it was made clear in there that we won't share anything, but I'll clarify it.

What we might do is show lists of the ten most popular URLs, for example. Since those are indexed by many people, nobody will be able to personally identify anyone. We wouldn't even keep the page, but it's necessary for reindexing things if something goes wrong (e.g. we are thinking of changing the search engine, and it would require a wipe of everyone's history if we didn't keep the pages).

In short, no, we will never show your cached pages or even your URLs, except in very anonymized circumstances.
they decided to finish today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFDqvKtPgZo.
Hiring someone has it's own set of challenges and issues you'll need to deal with, so if it's new territory to you, I'd highly recommend getting a VA or paying for hourly assistance.

That'll make for a smoother and easier transition. Ideally you can find someone who can scale out with you, and perhaps even become your first fulltime employee.
my biggest issue was his "all businesses depend upon cold calling" statement, which is simply not true.

But yeah, in your case, that sounds like a company I might buy services from... but I wouldn't respond to a 'cold call' at least not via phone, just 'cause I find that so offensive. (I might respond if the sales pitch was soft, and it was pitched in a semi-social place. A "oh, and what do you do?" at a local hangout, sure, i might buy from that, if I thought that the method of sales wasn't adding significantly to what I'd pay (which is to say, if the product wasn't available from a 'price on the website is what you pay' type vendor.)
Dilbert on 'FU Money'
Sorry i bored you.

Hacker News seemed to be the place to post a little joy as I marvelled that I'd done a good enough job with my code so that I have nearly zero cost and it pays my rent in SF. seems like a "hack" to me.
Browsers are the platform, not the app, equivalent to OS backwards compatibility.
UI ideas: fixed in viewport
HN yellow pages (Google docs)
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The $600 billion challenge
"What does it feel like to hire your first employee?"

It's terrifying. Not just because you're changing something you're used to and giving up control, but because you are becoming somewhat responsible for someone's livelihood - they are literally banking on you to help them live, eat, support family, etc. If you run out of work, what's going to pay their rent?

I started a web dev studio in '98 with a friend. After 6-7 years, he moved to London, wanting to work there, and I was a sole trader, using a few freelancers.

Today, I have a full-timer, a 0.7ish (who cranks out stuff fast enough to be considered a full-timer) and take on paid trainees from time to time. I pay myself much less than I did when I was a sole trader but it doesn't really bother me - I get a lot out of providing fun opportunities for two young employees.

But before my first hire, I ummed and aahed for a long, long time. I made half-hearted efforts to find someone and usually bailed before committing. In the end, I gave a young, less-than-qualified but fast-learning, good-hearted kid a trial and he did well. I can't even remember reading his resumé but we met at a café to talk things over, got on fine and I can remember that he could spell "definitely" in his emails. Sounds trivial, but the HN post the other week about "when in doubt, always hire the better writer" really resonated with me - when you're letting someone loose contacting the clients you've nurtured for 5-10 years, you don't want them embarrassing you. You need to trust them and it's easier if they show care and can spell.

I've never regretted that hiring, nor my second one either. They have jobs for as long as I can keep the money coming in to pay them. Either my character-barometer is sound or I got really lucky.

Terrifying to begin with, but rewarding later.

The only problem now is that I'm still the bottleneck. At 3-5 people, we're big enough to need a production manager, but too small to be able to afford one. All the worst parts of small business magnify too - even with an accountant and bookkeeper, there are more boring and annoying parts to deal with than ever, and I have sacrificed salary to bring employees on board. But it's tough to jump from sole trader to a ten-person team, so perhaps this is just a rough intermediary step.

A few keys:

- start them on a trial
- pick someone who fits your working culture (we are all very social in this shared office) and is a good personality fit
- pick the person that can spell "definitely"
- you might need to make sacrifices to take that next step
- don't worry about running out of work to keep them busy, just roll the dice. As my friend is wont to say: No balls, no babies.
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I've found it doesn't always work that way. For instance, we have a legacy homebrew billing system that's a Lovecraftian nightmare of procedural PHP batch pipelines. We're all eagerly looking forward to just replacing it wholesale, but in the meantime nobody delves into it, partly to preserve our sanity and partly because nobody wants to be marked as "the guy who knows it best" and condemned to maintaining it. All the original developers on that part of the system quit months or years ago, but we have the last of them on retainer to recover it from its failures. That's the guy we couldn't lose.
In addition, if I purchased the Thesis theme, although the GPL would give me the right to redistribute it, I would not be able to market my redistributed theme as "Thesis", presuming that Chris has trademarked that mark.

So if I tried to redistribute the theme as "Thesis", Chris could (1) sue me for trademark infringement. He could also (2) file a DMCA claim against me (or sue me for violating his copyright), if my product included his copyrighted CSS/JS/images/etc.

These remaining trademark and copyright protections are why Matt asserts that applying the GPL license to the Thesis theme would not hurt Chris' business.
Inspired by Kent's initiative ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514803 ), I've decided to scale this up a notch -similar to the earlier cofounder google docs. To quote Kent:

"...Often times I need someone to talk to when I need to bounce an idea around and I don't have another programmer / techie in my area. I also don't work in an office and find IRC a little cold. So, let's go remote, I will be your proxy desk neighbour.
."
Nah, no official API, just parsing the site. It's possible that they'd choose to block it, though I've gone out of my way to give them no reason to. PadMapper's CL crawler is built to be as light as possible on their servers, and the crawling is constrained to a very small subset of the site. If it gets blocked, PM has other sources, but it would definitely suck.

If you tried to make something that crawled the entire site, I would imagine that they would block you pretty quickly, though, if only for the load it would cause.
Fair enough if that's what the band wants, but who are you though to decide how the band should use it's IP?
You're welcome, if you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it.
... hereby proving my point that PHP's default conversions are a bit... strange.
Inspired by this thread, let's scale it up a notch -Google docs here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517198
Apple generated 2x device profit - as the rest of the industry combined.
the niche has potential, but what's the deal with domain name? it could use some imagination and 24 characters is just little too much
in such case, from usability standpoint, why not design login screen with Google ID in epicenter and other login options as secondary. would be less confusing to average non-techie
Import and convert MOD to iPhone(iPhone 4) on Mac OS X
MOD is a recording format for use in digital tapeless camcorders including JVC MOD camcorders, Panasonic MOD camcorders, and Canon MOD camcorders. If you want to import MOD footage to your iPhone, say, iPhone 4, you need iPhone Video Converter for Mac, which provides optimized presets for your iPhone so you don't need to worry about the settings for your iPhone (iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4).
It does actually go deeper than that, but really that's beside the point. Function calls into the WordPress code is enough.

WordPress has a public API... several of them, in fact. A theme doesn't use those, it makes direct calls to internal WP code, and it uses WordPress internal data structures. This is enough to make it a derivative work.

From http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#Me... :

"Combining two modules means connecting them together so that they form a single larger program. If either part is covered by the GPL, the whole combination must also be released under the GPL—if you can't, or won't, do that, you may not combine them.

What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).

If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.

By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program."

Ultimately, it is a matter of interpretation, but all previous interpretation, including those made in courts of law, pretty much universally agree with Matt on this one. It's very difficult to consider a theme to be a "separate program" when it's deep-linking to internal functions and data structures and it also cannot run independently.
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Newspapers take out the breaking the law step by providing all their content online. I think if newspapers collectively as an industry refused to do this then their content would be pirated.

I think a key difference is that each newspaper has something slightly different to offer, the same stories are written different in each. Whereas people are only interested in a song by one artist generally not the same song sung by many different artists. The point being that you would think that music subscription services would be even less successful than written content ones because written content on the same thing can come from many different angles and styles, music doesn't share that trait so it's easy for a pirate bay ect to provide everything a subscription service would.
My first thought was "finally working wysiwyg editor! It's from Google, it must be good!". After seeing the HTML output, I'm seriously disappointed. The editor is totally unsuitable e.g. for CMS, where you have to publish the generated HTML as such. So, back to looking for the holy grail of HTML editor.
Ask Disporia on HN: Are you building a system or an application?
Does anyone have a good idea if Disporia is building a system or an application?
I took what i could bare at their blog, but no email contact , only join our email list.
Better said, Are they building a system of applications or an application that supports other application?
Anybody who buys it now can share it for free. You can get online, right now, and find a copy of thesis and download it without paying a dime.

People who are doing this sort of thing aren't going to be stopped by text in a license.
That's not really the point. They probably spent in excess of $3000 on computers for him over the years.
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He said significant digits. Not minor ones :P

(sorry, couldn't resist!)
"If you make a theme that does not use any existing wordpress code, it wouldn't be considered a derivative work."

I personally would consider that to be impossible, however, you are basically correct.

In this specific case though, that does not apply. Thesis makes heavy use of WordPress code.