skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why does WordPress dominate the market?
WordPress dominates the CMS market with overwhelming numbers (61%: http://www.opensourcecms.com/general/cms-marketshare.php). I know very well the strengths and weaknesses of WP - I worked on a single WP site for 2 years, pushing its limits every day.

My general understanding is that PHP is being surpassed by Node and Rails. I'm jumping on the Node bandwagon: the synergy between JavaScript on the front and back end seems like a game-changer. Add web sockets and its unbeatable.

So maybe a better question is, why aren't there any contenders? Clearly WordPress thrives on its massive community, and maybe its just a matter of time until a worthy opponent emerges to gain the necessary momentum. I'd like to help make this happen, and I have a lot of great ideas to do so.

Why doesn't Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, etc. etc. make their own Open Source CMS / web platform that competes with WordPress? You might say they have, and I'd be interested in looking into these alternatives, yet WordPress + Joomla + Drupal have 86% market share, which is ridiculous.

Sidebar: This is my first HN post. Comparing to the heavily-moderated Stack Overflow, I'm wondering what kind of posts are NOT okay here. Let's say I have big plans to create the next Google-scale company, and need help to get started. I need to find people who can help me discuss, collaborate, design, and develop. Is HN an appropriate place to do this? If not, is there a better place? Another forum? An IRC channel?
I don't seem to be able to reply to your reply to me further down the thread. So I'm just going to ask one question: "What is the point of asking for hard data when you're going to dismiss it since it doesn't agree with you?" If you don't believe the body of research, you are not going to agree with anyone's opinions here (unless of course they match your own).

The result has been repeated ad nauseum, it's not exactly hard science, though getting into the precise details is. Otherwise, the old mantra is, if you don't believe it, try it yourself.
I've been waiting for some way to synchronize contacts on FM for years. According to posts on the support forum, they are pretty close to having CardDAV support implemented. Fingers crossed that they roll it out soon.
You just need to find a Maxwell HSN-1000 Nuclear Event Detector. Very handy part.

http://www.maxwell.com/products/microelectronics/docs/hsn100...
Ask HN: What paid ad services should I be using?
Adwords and Facebook ads are two of the most common... Google Adwords seems to be okay for me, Facebook was a complete waste of time. I've tried sponsored blog posts too with some success.

Does HN have any secret weapon when it comes to paying for leads online?
Previous discusión (from another source): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916597 (330 points, 3 days ago, 98 comments)
HTTPS is hackable
> In really urban areas, different theaters do attract distinctive clienteles. However, out in the 'burbs where most people live (and definitely in South Dakota), it's true that theaters basically just catch everyone nearby.

The experience I drew the principle from was experience in the suburbs; its true that theaters are more widely spaced there, but since people have to use cars to get anywhere anyway (which is less true in the city), the radius of consideration tends to be much larger, too. It evens out.

Rural areas are a different issue, to be sure.
I started a blog some years ago and here's what happened: nothing.
Keen.io
Is an online forum an application where you have to worry about trusting your database? If you lose a forum post now and then, it's not a good thing, certainly, but depending on the forum, it could be an acceptable tradeoff.
How is Gawker Media getting away with their "SEO Bombs"
Very interesting read on Reddit - and how Gawker Media is gaming Google hard - to gain massive amounts of traffic.
Wow, this story makes me appreciate 'the Wire' even more.
In the last 2 seasons the cops are trying to bring down some corrupt officials and their thug cronies, using a shady wire-tap.
In the end, they catch them but it backfires because of their 'confidential source' which was also a shady wire-tap setup ...
Genuine question.

Are people actually using Atom in production projects? I found it unusably slow because it's browser-based; a generation behind Sublime Text in speed.
In response to your "hard data" reply: then point me to some specific articles to look at. "google for it" is just not good enough. You can find proof of anything by googling for it (global warming and anti global warming, creationism, evolution theory...).

Point me to some specific data. otherwise, how can I possible reply?
This + a stable Democracy really has a natural safety valve every 2 years. Elections. That, and as long as people can leave the US permanently relatively easily...the people who would seriously consider "revolting" and be effective...they end up in other countries.

If things get bad enough, people will keep kicking out incumbents until things stabilize.

That said, voter suppression is getting worse...not better. So that may slowly close off the safety valve.

Personally, I plan to stick around until/unless I think the chance of me getting arrested is greater than that of being hit by lighting. Then, I'm going to bounce and find another country.
In europe typical deployment solves this problem (EMV is quite orthogonal to this) by the fact that card data does not touch the PoS system itself. In fact any other approach is not feasible as PoS systems themselves are invariably horrible mess of accumulated kludges and backward compatibility restrictions. And there are quite powerful economic incentives to keep this state of things. Security-wise this is one of the few situations where semi-air-gapped network makes sense (for the PoS part, with card terminals having their separate network).
Same here. You found a DoS in recent browser(s)!
This is a pretty big deal. At the moment there are two main methods to communicate with the ISS, TDRSS and UHF.

UHF can only be used when the ISS is over the US.

TDRSS is a shared satellite network between several government agencies. NASA receives "allotments" of time with the network. So if the ISS is outside of UHF range, and another agency has the TDRSS the ISS goes black - we lose all comm with it.

A network of laser receivers across the globe could potentially eliminate the current "black outs" NASA has when communicating with the ISS.
A Raspberry Pi with motion detection and SMS.

I've built one using an old nokia that supports AT commands.

Pretty fun stuff and no soldering required. Next up I'll try adding a camera and send MMS messages through the mobile phone with photos when motion is detected.

Helpful links:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Emgreat-Detecting-Pyroelectric-HC-SR...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pyroelectric-Infrared-Motion-Sensor-...

http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2013/01/cheap-pir-sensors-a...

http://www.adafruit.com/products/189

https://www.modmypi.com/blog/raspberry-pi-gpio-sensing-motio...

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/13334/how-can...
New Eavesdropping Equipment Sucks All Data Off Your Phone
For those who are interested in the history of computing/computers/informatics, there is a mailing list (http://www.sigcis.org/node/19) for/by historians and enthusiasts on this topic. It is a quit list, but now and then something interesting pops up.
While I agree with some points you make, and disagree with others, you are rubbing people the wrong way by using statements like "I am sure there are loads of companies that are perfect for you, because they only require blue collar programming drones" denigrating companies/people that aren't like you.

I personally have made friends at work, but it had nothing to do if they read Spolsky, they snowboarded or listen to whatever things you are implied are a positive filter in the interview process. From everywhere I've worked, I would say 99% of the people you work with won't be your friends, and that is fine, heck, even a positive thing in my opinion and assuming that people that don't conform to your idea of a worker are just 'drones' does make it hard to agree with you on other points you make.
Porting Firefox OS
Love the video. I will definitely give it a try! Funny part is that websites could implement the feature themselves...
Anonymous Image Board for Wordpress
> It's like how a Sergeant makes more than an Lt in the Army, however, the progression in the officer core quickly outstrips the best an enlisted man can hope for.

Not in the U.S. Army. Most junior NCOs make less than even a fresh Academy graduate. The NCOs making more than a junior lieutenant have all been in the service for 10+ years.
Isn't that what they started with, and decided against? "In our infancy, we saved all product images with 10 preset sizes, and then rendered the image which was nearest in size to what we required. As we grew, this solution became unwieldy for the levels of traffic we were experiencing and nor was it appropriate for our mobile app."
Another question: how would you hire, then? Just a programming test? Ideally anonymous, so that no prejudice can sneak into the assessment?
Affect. The laser effects the transmission, but the atmosphere affects it. But not much. The laser was aimed with an accuracy of 0.01 degrees. Astronomical seeing (the distortion due to atmospheric disturbance) is on the order of an arcsecond, or 36 times smaller than this.
Javascript isn't really a fad. Server-side JS isn't going to be a fad either, hate to break it to you.
You should be able to see the demo on the homepage now
Yes, that is why I related required computation power to bitcoin. But still this considerable acceleration does not make it feasible with one laptop or even high-end workstation.
DevOps has applications for all industries
The Mathematics of Secret Sharing
Our mayor's Twitter account which has nearly 2M followers gets hacked
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

What has that to do with his comment?

For starters he was referring to the East German Stasi.

Nothing to do with Nazis, Hitler, or the third Reich.

In addition: Many people think that whenever Nazi (or equivalent) is mentioned you lose according to Godwin's Law.

This is not so, however, when the reference is actually related to the discussion. For example: You may bring up Nazis in a discussion about totalitarian regime, or Fascism, without falling into Godwin's Law trap.

And to conclude: In a discussion about a device, which enables snooping on a large scale a referenced to the GDR's stasi is certainly not out of line.
I've done this lots of times. On my phone, volume up and power are on opposite sides. I've often tried to turn the volume up without looking and wondered why nothing happened.
Viral Media Is Not Dead: Distractify Gains New Investors
I think it's a weak signal. It should be a nice-to-have, not a deal-breaker. The article's signaling is even weaker in my opinion, and those are deal-breakers of the most superficial kind. It's too easy to gain significant credibility for so little actual work.

>Well I initially said "if somebody doesn't know Joel or Graham, I would probably count it as a minus", not a deal breaker.

Oh, sorry. I still think it can swing opinions too much being what it is.
Checks are only for big purchases, with vendors who know me well. Last was in 2008, for a washer and dryer bought from a GE dealership who's building was purchased from my family decades ago.

If there's a potential for a line, or a vendor who doesn't know me from Adam, as when I bought a water softener, I do use a credit card.

I personally think the overhead for routine use of cash is roughly equivalent to routinely using a credit or debit card, e.g. I don't have to keep track of all those purchases to reconcile them with my monthly statement. Carrying cash is no problem, counting change ... well, I grew up before credit card usage was routine, so it's second nature, and reorganizing the bills etc. takes very little time. It helps that I have a standard load out that's makes refreshing my wallet easy, as well as making change, at least half the time I provide exact change, or an amount that makes my return change easy. Doing the mental math also has its advantages.

Don't know how I've managed it, but I've never needed to do a charge back in 31 years of using credit cards. Certainly there's not much potential for fraud in my face to face translations.

My youngest bother and his wife used to regularly shop at Target; that turned out be a significant hassle due to the recent breach. Hmmm, and only I can quantify the value of increased peace of mind by limiting my exposure to credit card fraud.

Credit and debit cards also "lose".
My recent favorite reminder of why I need others in order to program well is the list of things I am unqualified to say about my own work, including, but not limited to

- Is the user interface intuitive?

- Will this library be efficient for its most common uses?

- Have I given the simplest explanation for what this thing I wrote does?

It helps to be able to say, "I can't know that yet, not until I ask someone." That might happen in use cases, watching over someone's shoulder, showing a conference poster, or getting complaints on a message board two years later, but it's always collaborative, even when I have my act together.
Is that you Mrs McConigle?
Ideally you get a "coalition of the losers" which pushes the open option, but currently in smartphones you have two strong winners (Android and iOS) who see no reason to change and a few terribly weak losers (Windows, Firefox, Tizen) who have no hope of shifting the needle.

On the other hand smaller battles (like mobile browsers, open maps, open location data etc.) might be won.
Awesome, I'd love to see how I can help out. If I can answer any questions, feel free to shoot them to anthony@salesinvaders.com.
How True Entrepreneurs Make Themselves Accountable
Alright, since we're apparently in the "no data needed zone", I'll go off of my daily life:

I bike two miles to work, I work, I bike home. I walk or bike to a grocery store, and carry my goods back. I walk or bike to bars, and come back.

If a car is absolutely essential for getting into work, either you or your company is doing it wrong.

EDIT: Ah yes, and this is in probably one of the sprawliest, least bike-friendly cities in the US.
Yeah. To give an example of these agencies being stuck in the stone age, in Melbourne, the transport timetables still haven't been offered to Google. You can't choose the public transportation option on Google Maps at all. It's an absolute embarrassment for a city just 800km from where Google Maps was created.

If you're a visitor accustomed to using Google Maps to navigate transit systems in a new city, the extensive tram and train network of Melbourne will be useless to you.
Don’t Run From Perfect Forward Secrecy
Seeking Investors for Your App or SaaS business? Here’s What We Look For
Minimum wage clerk is not liable due to many laws that protect employees from wage abuse without a judgement in court[1] but they can surely get fired for negligence in reporting suspicious activity.

[1] http://www.seyfarth.com/dir_docs/publications/NEHT01120810.p...

>As a practical matter, the Court’s
decision means that employers can-
not safely take deductions for theft
or damage to property unless fault
and value have been determined by
a court of law or government agency.
Detailed guide on how to promote a new WordPress plugin
Inches are a defined construct, not an absolute. They are convenient chunks so we dumb humans and communicate with some level of accuracy.

Dollars are exactly the same - assigning value lets us communicate and relate otherwise abstract concepts in a meaningful way. While we can't eat gold, we can imagine how much food gold can buy, with all the caveats about exchanges and locations in place. The important bit to take away is providing a framework for common understanding.
I set myself a target to use it for a day, but it slowed me down far too much and I ditched it within three hours. I'm going to try again when there is more stability and speed.
github, we want atom on linux
Keys to Copy that Delivers Your Message – Not Just Your Email
Stow can do that if you only need files to be replaced, not sections of files. Let's say you want to manage the file ~/test/.gitconfig, you can create this structure:

$ cd ~/gittest
$ tree -a
~/gittest/
├── gitconfig-home
│ └── test
│ └── .gitconfig
└── gitconfig-work
└── test
└── .gitconfig
$ cat ~/gittest/gitconfig-home/test/.gitconfig
git config 1
$ cat ~/gittest/gitconfig-work/test/.gitconfig
git config 2
$ stow --no-folding --override='.+/.gitconfig' gitconfig-home
$ cat ~/test/.gitconfig
git config 1
$ stow --no-folding --override='.+/.gitconfig' gitconfig-work
$ cat ~/test/.gitconfig
git config 2

If you need to manage sections of files, take a look at dotdee[0] or update-dotdee[1]

[0] - https://launchpad.net/dotdee
[1] - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/update-dotdee
There's a similar app called SafeTrek:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/safetrek/id716262008?mt=8
I went to a guest lecture by Michael Macy on network autocorrelation. its not fair for me to tell you what he was saying (so look him up if you want), but I will summarize.

there is a lot of research done with surveys, and most of these surveys have an inherent assumption: that the people live on an island and are not autocorrelated.

so he created a false network of people with random fake political views, etc and added network autocorrelation. they found that random views would cluster with demographics and were very statistically significant - but the views were random.

in a similar experiment, a music sharing website to collect data on its users separated users into 'worlds'. users could see what songs were downloaded by other users within the world. and each world had its own popular songs despite being made up of random people.

problem with networks (people) is that even a few missing nodes makes analyzing the network almost useless.
Why the Dutch are so tall
I can think of a ton of programmers that have single handled changed our profession, Linus, ESR, DHH, Doug Cutting, Brendan Eich, James Gosling.. I dunno, I don't think it's really that rare at all.
> DDoS attacks like this wouldn't be so easy if governments actively fixed backdoors in hardware and software instead of creating and stockpiling them.

The same thing keeping government from regulating the Internet is the same thing keeping government from simultaneously fixing every flaw in every router, switch, and TCP/IP stack.

Stockpiling has nothing to do with it by itself, as they are stockpiling individual numbers of bugs in an entire frothing sea of bugs. NSA didn't even know about Heartbleed, and that's one that could have enormously aided NSA in doing what they do.
Scott Meyers: Why C++ Sails When the Vasa Sank [video]
The "worker drone" description was in reply to "And I for one don't really care about having dinners with my coworkers, going clubbing together and similar nonsense. You're paying me to do a job for you and I will deliver my end of the deal."

What else than a worker drone environment is that?

My talk about musical taste or whatever was just a random example, because it is something people often talk about in the initial stages of getting to know each other.

What I mean is: why should it be a bad idea to hire based on how much you like somebody (given that you checked the required skills)?

If it really is a bad idea to hire based on who you like, then it seems to follow that ideally hiring should be done by a computer? Has any company tried that yet? For sure many already have automated filters on application, is that a good thing?

People here some to think I suggest a checklist including "same musical taste" and hire based on that. That is not at all what I mean. I just think it is ridiculous to recommend that you should hire people you don't like.
I've been in both kinds of environments and I much prefer diversity. It's way too easy to burn out in a monoculture. I like working with people that have hobbies and passions both within and outside of work. It's just better on all sorts of levels to be in that kind of environment instead of one where people just parrot whatever is on the front page of HN. You learn more and consequently grow more as an individual in that kind of environment. That's all anecdotal but I'm not sure what you'd search for to find actual research on the matter. Micro studies show diverse groups often come up with better and more creative solutions when faced with novel problems.
Google Blog search killed it.
Scalable Machine Learning Framework by Etsy
I think its a really great idea, my only concern is that the sales staff you hire won't be as dedicated, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable about my product as I am. Sales is a core aspect to a company, and while it may be possible to outsource sales in an existing company after you've established processes, a young start up won't have that yet. Its a job the founders SHOULD be doing because you're still trying to get a feel for the market.
Who says they are oblivious? Maybe they just don't like to hire people who don't drink. Why should they be obliged to hire them?
>I wouldn't be surprised if many people in the service industries still see this type of multi card roulette daily.

Worked as a cashier about 10ish years ago. Never once saw multi card roulette.

Of course once in a while some people would say "20 on this card and 10 in cash." Never seen it with more than one card though. I almost never saw people get declined, I think it happened like 5 times total. It would be highly suspicious to me, especially coming from the same person!
We get plenty of thunder here in the North East as well, even the occasional instance of thunder snow. Lightning is much more common in a majority of the US, excepting much of the lower west coast and southwest.
Glenn Beck: 'Liberals, You Were Right' About Iraq War
At scale, processing thousands of highly granular items (images) in any way is an embarrassingly parallel task even in its most crude and naive implementation.

So claiming "fast", ok, but claiming "scalable" feels like a redundant buzzword, a bit hand-wavey.

When you make such generic claims, be quick to explain what you mean, or people will not treat you seriously.
True, working fast is not an excuse to be sloppy. Your questions are just better than mine but one can still answer many of them before they are asked.
Why Amazon's Fire Phone Won't Succeed
Heh you are not supposed to judge people based on such superficial traits. Programming skill is all that counts (according to the people who dissed me in this thread anyway).
But at least in the latter case, not incrementally by much for my cash purchase. Every cash purchase does require a bit more work in counting the bills, but the time to deposit the cash doesn't change if it's to a night depository, and again just a little if face to face with a teller.

Unless the purchase is small, there's also a time cost in getting the signature, although that's small if the company is big enough to collect it with their POS terminal, and there's also back end reconciliation work to be done, manually if the place is small, like a non-chain restaurant.

No payment method is free of overhead and friction.
I think the author wanted to play up the difficulty of doing this and saying "and then they licensed the excellent HERE mapping solution from Nokia (which they got when they acquired Navteq)" made it all sound too easy.

Similarly: "Without this Google layer you really only have a featurephone". Yes, and without the battery it's basically a shiny brick. Luckily Amazon has been shipping near identical devices, with apps and maps for several years now, so we don't really need to fully explore this fascinating counter-factual.