skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wordpress had the right product at the right time with the right message.

There were other PHP blog systems. And Movable Type was, for a while, the undisputed king.

Then the great GPL kerfuffle happened. Wordpress had a pretty site and Matt Mullenweg was proactive in seeking out high profile bloggers and getting them to convert.

Add in PHP's ease of installation and the favourable situation for hosts (mod_php is closer to shared-nothing than mod_perl), and I guess it was inevitable.

At this point it's network effects and path dependence that keeps it at the top.
> WordPress benefited from the fact that PHP hosting was always cheaper (even free) than hosts that supported Perl or Python (this was a little before Ruby became popular through Rails). You could find oversold hosting plans for as little as $1,99/mo.

Why was/is that the case?
It's true...but in this case it seems the story indeed originated there and appears to have some credibility. I figured people might at least want to know what project it referenced and a minimum of a backstory.
diff in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Edward_Snowden&di...

screenshot of both diff and above-linked user page as of now: http://i.imgur.com/I6HlpPX.png
I understand why they are banned -- a lot of their stories are sourced from hear say and aren't written with professional courtesy -- that being said, they actually do publish a lot of interesting articles that others just aren't willing publish because of their ties to the valley and partner relationships. That guy Sam Biddle digs really hard (sometimes into the dirt) and sources a lot of stuff others don't.

When you drill down to it, the fact that PandoDaily's investors are also investors in a lot of the companies they report is a pretty big issue -- perhaps one that makes them disreputable? What about the fact that sometimes articles on TechCrunch are essentially large snippets of what a founder has just wrote to the writer in an email? There's a lot of bias in tech news, it just depends who's side you're looking at it from.
Disappointingly, the petition has only gained 4,500ish signatures since the last time it was on HN. Maybe this article will help..
Thanks, do share it with your wife!

I definitely need to work on my pitch more. As for search engines, I tried to target the words Online Diary/Journal (which seem to get searched a lot (1M+ queries per month)) without coming off as spammy.
> Which means fixing bugs means disassembly, hot patching, and keeping your fingers crossed.

This sounds like something with extremely high overhead, that would benefit from scale. That is to say, instead of trying to reverse-engineer and patch each module every time you need to make a change, just:

1. run the entire project through a decompiler, making sure that each generated code file on its own recompiles to something that works when linked back together with the rest of the existing modules;

2. and then use that decompiled result as the new codebase, and start refactoring.
While I haven't written it up anywhere, it's also fun to point out that I've had success talking to a Seagate drive by wiring the debug port directly to the TTL serial pins on the debug header of a Linksys WRT54G router.
I think the conspiracy is really correcting a wrong. The publishers felt they made a mistake giving Amazon so much leverage, so early in the development of e-commerce. To assume that all e-commerce should develop in the open web model is ludicrous. This has to be obvious to some in Washington.
If the Farm Bill supported welfare, then yes. The others... not so much.

But those things aren't direct effects of taxes, they're the direct result of legislative and executive action that can be, in part, enabled by taxes. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm guessing it's the "oversold" portion. There's probably quite a few "idea people" out there that are paying the monthly fee for their facetubebay[1] idea and are just looking for the right technical team to work for the equity.

Really. I bet most people that are buying a perl site are actually doing things with it and the vast majority of people that paid for the PHP site either have a static splash page or no page at all and just don't bother calling up and canceling the $2.00/month fee for that idea they had in 2009.

There's 188 million active domains. 188 million. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-s... ... if took any skill to buy a domain and pay $2.00 a month for hosting, godaddy would have been out of business a long time ago.

[1] I like that facetubebay.com is actually registered - and by the owner of a restaurant chain (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/richard-makinadjian/6/b26/477), how fitting.
Perl too 'niche', Ruby too new at the time I would presume, but pretty much every host supported/had to support PHP, if we're making abstraction of another niche, ASP/ASP.NET. However, if I remember correctly, PHP plans were always cheaper than anything else.
Postal Service Confirms Photographing All U.S. Mail
Amanda Palmer got similar flack for using some of the money raised to pay off personal debts but at least she fulfilled all of her backer's rewards.
>>People got hang at Nuremberg for less I would say.

No.

There were people at Nuremberg who richly deserved hanging and didn't get it. The allies went easy on their best new buddy in the impending cold-war. ( Edit to say what motivated this reply in the first place - You can't compare working people to death in camps with SMS fraud. not anyplace close )
You have to admire that he plans to pay refunds over time by "getting a job". I hope he sticks to that plan and I can guarantee that people will admire his character when they find out what he's doing.
Why is this newsworthy? Several senators have already issued public statements labeling him a traitor.
Android Device Manager Will Soon Help You Track Your Lost Android Phone
Personally my money is on the obvious explanation, i.e. that a bored/edgy staffer did this with full knowledge that people would notice. Prank or not, pretty great catch, which I can't credit myself for: https://twitter.com/TimKarr/status/363475470332854272
Weirdly, a jury I was on absolutely went for me arguing something was "Necessary, but not sufficient" during our deliberation. That one surprised me.
What's wrong with publishers getting more control? Don't they pay authors? We're not talking about scientific journal publishers here. Who's forcing them to reduce their prices?
may you tell us your IP address?
They didn't deface Wikipedia to claim it, though. I doubt it's Peter King having a (particularly) bad night, but we all can dream
For one thing, if you go on google trends, you are basing this on someone doing a search. Chances are, this being a user friendly CMS, "WordPress" will be in the search. While if someone using a more complex PHP framework, they might look for OOP searches or simply cURL and such. I have used google trends to decide on my future projects and found it a bit deceiving. Though I must say, Wordpress has done well and fits a niche from total noob to advanced programmer.
Lecture on how to convert Blu-ray to Audio
There is no evidence that this is a Senator or anyone in a position of power. It is more likely that it is just a bored intern.
I don't see network effects or path dependence keeping it at the top. In fact its share of the universe of free open source CMS installs, has I believe been increasing in recent years.

I think there is a shared experience out there that when you put it up against alternatives such as Joomla, Drupal, ModX, and to some extent even Magento that it's the only CMS you can ship to a client without having to field calls all day on how to use the thing.

Plus, the ease of simple templating and plugins available allow small shops to deliver products with which they can actually make a profit. I believe this reason alone is a big driver of WordPress recommendations.

I'll also mention that my comment is from the point of view of design shops, contractors, and freelancers. If someone is building, maintaing or planning a free standing product website that will have engineering resources dedicated to it then yes, there are probably better alternatives.
May be NSA can figure out who did it.
Will this make them the go to firm for YC companies looking to raise?
Let me try again. I'm talking about a national tax to divide among the states.

Federal Income tax, Gasoline tax, etc all fund the Federal Government. And yes the Feds does distribute some of the money via grants or a Congressional action (Medicaid, highway funds, etc).

But I don't see the US adopting a national use tax like VAT that is collected by the Federal government but automatically given out to the states based on where the money is spent.

Our country likes to keep things on the state and local level as much as possible.
How ironic! I'd label all the current politicians traitors as well!
Build a Blog Engine in Go
You think this is caused by Chrome switching to Blink?
You are so right. Why try new things and test new ideas. Everything we have is perfect as it is! No need for a car, walking will get you there! We don't need moving pictures, books are fine!

Do you even know anyone that works in Javascript? I happen to like JS but pull out PHP or Python or whatever I need to get the job done when I have to. And I'm not an exception.
No one's claiming that it is a Senator, but then again, is this what my tax dollars are funding?
A reminder everyone, the only thing you should ever say to a law enforcement officer is "I'd like to see my attorney."
Probably not a shocker, or news worthy, but amusing to get busted like this. Snowden has been publicly called a traitor by at least two senators, "I think Snowden is a traitor -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [1], and Kerry characterized former NSA contractor as a "traitor to his country." -- US Secretary of State John Kerry [2], and there are lots of hits in Google News [3], so there are probably others.

[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/senators-demand-repercussi...

[2] http://rt.com/usa/kerry-russia-china-snowden-152/

[3] https://news.google.com/?q=snowden+traitor+senator
My favourite sites for this, which focus on building and marketing niche sites:

http://empireflippers.com

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com
Feinstein (D-Calif.)?
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/304...
My money is on a Dianne Feinstein staffer or DiFi herself.
The latest revision reads as "American fugitive intelligence analyst".

On a side note, the user is registered to WikiPedia, and his contributions page [1] hints at his awareness of the public availability of these contributions (and of their IP address). Maybe he didn't want to hide the origin of this edit, or maybe it was a clumsy mistake. There isn't much more to tell.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/156.33.2...
So we're wrong to wish for WordPress to adopt PSR standards instead of their own idiosyncratic coding style?

I really like PSR compliant PHP code (it's almost PEP 8-ish), the WordPress standards are frustratingly opposite on some key concepts (braces, indentation). But WP is so popular, I don't see how this might ever be resolved.

https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards/blob/master/accepte...

http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/php...
honor among thieves? thats an even better reason to not do business with goldman.
Looks like the first person noticed around 5pm: https://twitter.com/schuettebop/status/363403815166296064
Mark Weiser was a professor of mine at the University of Maryland before he went to PARC. It was an awful tragedy that he died at such a young age (46). With the rise of tablets and small, powerful computers like the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino, I'm often reminded of his ideas about ubiquitous computing. He'd be having a ball today with all of the power one can now get in such tiny, efficient packages. It would be great if more of his UC ideas were to get into the mainstream of computing.
Done even better in Ready Player One http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307887448
Save your tales for the campfire. Seriously.
Even in cases of "actual" crime, the system is quite content to put away innocents.
Wow really? You'd think a country with a collapsed government and unstable social system would be building fighter jets, gourmet cuisine and cloud services, not making money with shady organized crime. The shame!
Removing this CSS fixed it for me,

#anchor-tab.desktop .anchortab-stamp {
text-indent: -999999999px;
}
I remember ~10 years ago they were trying to get the community to learn COBOL on it's own so they'd have access to cheap programmers. Isn't that how you build a business or successful organization, by exploiting the everyman for cheap labor? It worked for the ____, so I guess not since nobody fell for it.
http://youtu.be/4Sg4AtcW0LU?t=5m3s
For me, the history of my text messages is a feature, not a flaw. I'm assuming this is "Snapchat for texts." We've already seen that Snapchat can't guarantee that photos aren't saved. The same limitations will almost certainly apply to Skim. So will this be anything more than a crippled texting app?
> could take a set of requirements

I think that's the key problem: nobody has a complete big-picture idea of what the program is doing. Sure, there are people in each service branch that are familiar with subsets of the overall technology, but I suspect that at the overlap of these subsets there is significant disagreement over interpretation & implementation that has never become a visible problem because nobody runs consistency checks.

Since compiling the mutually contradictory payroll policies into a non-probabilistic master policy would immediately shed light on these issues, it would be a political minefield. Every choice you make would be the wrong choice and nobody is simultaneously high enough on the totem pole to say "live with it" and low enough on the totem pole to actually implement it.
I've never used Dwarf Therapist (and I realize I'm in a minority there), but I also have given him money because the interface does not bother me. Enough people are doing likewise that I don't think the interface should be a priority until the game's there.
The United States government is serving as a cash funnel/legal immunity shield to corporations sometimes made by the government itself[1].

Anyone who defects from or defies them is labeled a traitor or prosecuted in full[2]. Those who attempt to collate information on these entities and persons are tracked by the sitting government at the behest of these immune corporations[3].

All the while tax payer resources are used to forcibly alter public opinion on a subject involving government conflict of interests. Great.

[1] (Project PM) http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems

[2] (Started Project PM) http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett...

[3] (DoJ Seeking Info on Project PM) http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/doj-issues-subpoe...
Why were you shocked - had you just moved to MA?

One town I was in won't pick up your garbage unless your recycling bin is out as well. No concept that someone could produce so little trash and would rather the quarter-full recycling sit the rare occasion they put out a trash bag. And of course it precludes taking the emptied bin in before the second truck comes around. And FSM help you if the guy decides to search in your bag and declares your trash demolition or construction material.

They of course had color coded water restrictions posted everywhere busybodies frequented - elementary schools etc. And I can't not mention the legislature-dictated seat belt law.

But my quarrel is that the nanny state is a symptom of how broken and autonomous our "representational" system is. One shouldn't have to give up civilization to get away from the busybodies, and escaping to NH is just a pressure relief valve. While the people doing it feel freer, this couldn't be further from reality - the ridiculousness has only become distant because other people are more distant. All types of militarized law enforcement may still freely kill them or their dogs while pretending to be heroes. Their communications are still stored indefinitely and mined for thoughtcrime. They're still prohibited from ingesting whatever chemicals they'd like. And they're still working over a quarter of the year to support these hostilities against them. But since they have an illusion of freedom they're likely to stop criticizing the entirety of the nanny state, focus on aspects they identify with, and flip to supporting it.
funny to see this post, I tweeted about this 1 year ago, saw it pop up on Timehop, and built a quick rough draft on my blog this morning. very cool library!
Well, I'd assume "Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director" is the secretary for the no. 2 at the MTC, which doesn't seem all that unreasonable. The "Program Assistant to the Director" is probably a project manager. The "Director of Cluster Development" is probably in charge of whoever is developing clusters, whatever those are. The titles are slightly overblown, but little more than I'd expect at any government department or large corporation.
Once they have root, they can use the existing resources just like you would a regular PC, but chances are they would load their own micro-kernel to do the dirty work.
Now all we have to do is pinpoint the one US Senator interested in revolvers, Islamic historical sites, people straddling the exec boards of multiple large corporations, and tiki bars in San Francisco.
More likely a semi related change they decided to make as a result of the switch. But I don't have much understanding of the core of Chrome so I could be wrong. Correlation does not prove causation.
Wordpress is not a general purpose CMS and requires no configuration out of the box to do its basic task: publish a blog.

It's a different genre of application from Drupal, Joomla et al, so they can't really be compared.

The in-genre competitors are systems like Habari, TextPattern or Serendipity.

Nobody uses them. Why? Because nobody uses them.

Tell me again about how it's not network effects or path dependency.
Interspersing.

I'll admit I didn't do a whole lot of mucking with the actual styles of the bar. I removed, and tweaked elements, but thought surely the CSS itself wasn't the culprit.

:/
Actually, a McCain wedding was at that tiki bar: http://sfist.com/2013/06/03/a_very_sf_mccain_wedding.php
Great to see such a quick response! Definitely a cause for pause. I plan to sit down with the paper tonight to fully understand the implications.
The main problem I have with this is that they are taxing information work that is clean, to fund /freeways/.
Way to go, 20'th century!
There are a lot of people out there who could write a CMS that's as easy to use as WordPress, and which is as easy to write plug-ins and templates for. But nobody's really trying to beat WordPress at its own game because the network effects are too strong — even if you make it ridiculously easy to write themes in your non-WordPress CMS, WordPress already has thousands that are already written and an army of programers dedicated to churning out more. It will always be easier to find a WordPress theme than one for anything else.
So much hate on HN these days. Thanks for sharing, that's definitely a very useful and productive stack that I keep going back to again and again for every projects. Will give it a try next time.
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Although it might fly against the prevailing opinion online, I would not classify a one-word edit like this as a defacement. Whether Snowden is a dissident, traitor, or some other word (patriot?) is really a matter of opinion.
I spoke of the "MEAN" stack today - cool to see others using to a tee - with Mongoose and Passport.

Two other nice packages:

Nodemailer - for emailing - npm install nodemailer

Moment.js - for time/date formatting, and a ton more (manipulation, etc) - npm install moment
I love Angular and have never found it to slow working with even quite complex directives and tons of filters. API responses take longer than Angular does to load.
No facts were harmed in the making of this snark.

Sure, not everywhere in NH is like that. But one can't spread libertarianism by proposing to dismantle the fire department.
> "traitor to his country."

Because for them country=government. He is a traitor to a corrupt and power hungry government. So that description is accurate.
Show HN: IsItDownFor.Us, a simple notification when your site is down
Governments usually try to work around that, including the staple food exception you mentioned, but that makes the whole system a mess of exceptions and exceptions-to-exceptions.
The "resignation beyond sorrow" - what a phrase! It's such a Kierkegaardian phrase I was surprised to google it and find it was not an allusion but original.
There are 5,590 results in Google for "teledildonic". Wat
Yes, your tax dollars are funding this, but they are funding much worse. In terms of the useless: a friend ordered a $25,000 computer with 192 GB of RAM because he had a research grant for computer hardware that he had to use up. In terms of the horrifying: Extrajudicial murder of civilians.
PHP was popular way before Wordpress. I remember working on sites upgrading to php3 (with the file extension php3 no less!)
Except we have no evidence to cast doubt on them, so Occam's Razor says we shouldn't.
Honestly, this is the most likely answer. I doubt it would be a Senator.
well, some people don't use them because there's a limited ecosystem of plugins and themes. While some people might say "i wouldn't use X because no one uses it", most people I know who make those decisions aren't as general, and will specifically point to themes/plugins/books and community support as the reasons to choose one tool over another. Those are the net effects of having a large network of users, hence the network effect you point out (and I agree with). Just people I know and meet won't be so general in their rationalization.
What do you mean the user is registered? If the user was registered, it would show the username instead of the IP address.
Love the video mentioned in the slides:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0
What do you think the broadband community outreach coordinator does?
I've wanted to get into Go for a while now. This looks like it will be a good reference. Thanks!
CBS blackout on TWC: Now Blocking Web Content
You could get "good enough" support for PHP just by turning on mod_php. PHP was literally made for this. It was a little more work for hosts to get the same out of Perl or Python or Ruby.
STEM talent: It’s a distribution problem
First of all, thanks for for getting this out there.

The Length Hiding piece protects all content, but only really slows the attack (as you mention!).

The problem is this implementation breaks Rails' Conditional GET (Actually Rack's) -- which returns 304 Not Modified if the content is the same. Now that the content varies, normal usage will get a 200 and the full response every time.

It depends on the Application, but in most cases this will be a reasonable increase in overall bandwidth (for normal use, not the attack). Probably more of an increase than you'd encounter by turning off gzip - which completely defeats the attack rather than just making it more difficult, as Length Hiding does.

The workaround is to use ETags (See: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Conditio...), which will use the tag rather than the content to determine 304s. I'd suggest this should be recommended if you're using Length Hiding.

Edit: Actually another workaround might be to put your Middleware after the relevant middleware Rack::ConditionalGet, Rack::ETag. Right now it's at the top of the Middleware chain.
Looks simple enough, which is good. I signed up a site of mine, but I'm not going to test if it works :P