PopeOfNope

That being said, we can clearly not conclude that 'content is king', right?

In my humble opinion, yes, content is not king. But, it's more than just allowing people to put a face to the name. You have to fit in. You have to agree with the political views of the majority. You have to agree with the taboos of the majority. There's a reason Michael O'Church and Zed Shaw aren't on that leaderboard, despite the quality of the content they posted.

Something that shouldn't be overlooked is the fact the author is John Graham-Cumming and you are kelvin0. Almost every one in the top 10 leaderboard posts under their real name. They have more respect and credibility than an anonymous poster. It's one of those annoying and readily exploitable flaws of human nature.

It ought to be relatively easy. ... Seems like a fairly trivial experiment to run and reproduce.

That depends on what you're testing. "Blood test" and "health test" are ridiculously ambiguous terms. Something like red blood cell counts don't vary much from day to day, but some things, like blood sugar and cortisol, vary hour to hour.

That's something that gets overlooked in these discussions of wordpress. Wordpress has the unique ability to use a single install and backend to manage hundreds of sites. If you need content cross posted across multiple sites, wordpress can do that. If you want to pull an entire column of articles from one site to another, wordpress can do that.

Wordpress has spent a ton of time on multisite features and (as far as I know) there's no other CMS in existence that handles this stuff out of the box. That's why large media companies love it and, I suspect, why a quarter of the internet runs it still when there are faster and more secure alternatives out there.

What WP did right is to choose a platform supported EVERYWHERE

When WP was created, their options were PHP or Perl. PHP was by far the hottest thing back then, so what they actually did was use the hot tech of the day and made it work. The reason PHP is supported everywhere is for the same reason; back then it was PHP or Perl via CGI. Python was added later and was also supported EVERYWHERE.

Considering some of the people I've made wordpress sites for couldn't even figure out the wordpress interface, command line anything is a no go for a large percentage of wordpress's intended audience.

I worked briefly for a wordpress consultancy last year.

Our main workflow involved using Yeoman, Grunt, NPM, wp (the wordpress command line tool) and vagrant. Locally, we'd run vagrant just so we don't have to monkey around with environment issues (too much). Yeoman, grunt, npm and wp were used in tandem to script the creation of a new wordpress install, install any dependencies needed, run any tools needed through grunt (like sass and JS minifiers), and pull plugins and themes from their separate git repositories. We still had to import the database by hand, though, when setting up our environment as well as add lines to wp-config for however we wanted to handle debugging.

Then we'd write code and check it in via git as with any other project. If you were working on frontend anything (html,css,js) you either ran grunt all the damned time or ran grunt watch. Those of us who had a hard time with the unique programming requirements of wordpress (escaping, sanitizing, formatting) used phpcs to automate that.

As for deployment, we'd just go through the same setup on the server that we do locally. Updates were pushed via git.

The fundamental problem my company runs into with WP is that only a theme can be meaningfully checked into version control. Everything else, including installation of plugins is coupled with entries in the database.

That wasn't my experience. We separated functional features into separate plugins (so they could be disabled or enabled on a site by site basis) and had no problem using version control with them. In fact, one project had some government security problems and required each plugin to be in its own repo. I wouldn't suggest that, but it works.

the database also includes changes necessarily made on the production instance, like comments to blog posts

That was something I found aggravating that was never really addressed at the company I worked at. When new people were brought on to a project, they'd get a mysql dump of the staging environment. After that, as new features were added, you were responsible for adding your own test data to see if those features worked. As for production, the changes made that were specific to the production database were made manually in production. When a new plugin was pushed, you had to log into the production instances manually and turn the new plugin on. Luckily, there are hooks you can use to automate any setup or teardown of plugins when they get turned on and off respectively.

Please do. That would make for very interesting reading, imho.

Read Rhetoric by Aristotle. You're using what he calls Dialectic (facts and figures) to convince people. Most people either don't care about facts and figures or can't understand them. You need to make appeals to emotion, or rhetoric. As for how to effectively communicate in Rhetoric, if I knew that I'd be far more popular than I currently am. :) Maybe ask tptacek for some pointers?

Something else to keep in mind: speaking from a place of authority might help as well. On this matter, you have a serious disadvantage. An anonymous person on the internet will never be able to convince most people that NASA is wrong about space. Unless you're literally a rocket science and can prove you're an expert in the field, most people will believe NASA because they trust NASA.

Had you been exposed to those concepts at an earlier age, maybe you would have more of an affinity for them. Maybe not. Also, one of the concepts exposed in football is leadership and hard work. I started at the age of 8 as a lineman. When I quit at the beginning of my Senior year, I would have been co-captain of the defensive backfield. Isn't the concept of meritocracy something we espouse in the startup field?

As for the brain damage scare, it'll pass. Soccer went through it a few years ago[0]. As for the concept of social stigma for playing football, I laugh. If you actually think a concussion scare 'all of a sudden' is going to sway communities with dozens of years of entrenched culture, you're living in a bubble.

[0]: high school soccer teams suffer more concussions than high school football teams do.

You probably learned these lessons elsewhere, but I probably learned it earlier than you did and had it reinforced for 8 years (I started playing flag football when I was 8). The biggest lessons were teamwork and sacrifice. Football is unique in that it's the only sport in which all 11 players on the field have to all do their job at the same time or you lose. In every other sport, a single star or two can dominate the entire game and win for the entire team. In football, the quarterback gets his ass kicked if all 5 of his linemen don't block. A star linebacker can stop the run and short passes (if the defensive linemen do their job), but can't do anything for the sweep or long pass.

Football is also a good way to teach strategy. Unlike other sports where plays are limited due to the ongoing, chaotic nature of most sports, football stops after every play. You can sweep, pass, run up the middle, screen, option, etc. There are lots of options that may or may not work from one team to the next. You have to take a lot into account when coming up with a game plan, including the specific team you're playing. It's why coaches are so obsessive about going over game tapes. As my coach liked to point out, football is the only sport where you need an entire week to prepare between games.

And before everybody jumps on me about 'you can learn these lessons elsewhere/through video games', yes, they probably can. That doesn't negate the benefits kids get from playing football. I won't mention the health benefits you get because you get those from playing (just about) any sport.

Also, a funny anecdote, I only played 2 years of high school football before bailing. I played for 6 years for an independent organization called 'Pop Warner Football'. My coach for pop warner was an entrepreneur who owned and ran three concrete companies in three separate counties. He coached only because his son was playing. My high school coach had no idea what he was doing, which is why I didn't play my senior year.

If high school football got banned, I imagine Pop Warner will step in and pick up the slack, if they haven't already. Back when I stopped playing in the 90's, they had already expanded their program to compete with the Junior Varsity program. That's what I mean about football having too much support in the community. If the insurance premiums and lawsuits increase, they'll just have another bake sale.

We're talking about playing football, not watching it like a lemming. If you don't know what you're talking about, kindly say nothing.

Nothing I said suggests otherwise. Why the sarcasm and hostility?

I don't understand the hard on people around here have for predicting the collapse of sports. It's like the very idea of getting revenge on the jocks makes you all salivate. Revenge of the nerds writ large? Or is it an extension of the 'toxic testosterone' propaganda?

It would look like today, sadly.

To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth or oxy)

Yeah, shame.

But I think we'll see the end of high school football very soon, when the lawsuits begin and school insurance steps in.

It'll never happen. There's way too much community support for football. And thank god. There's no other sport out there that teaches you about life quite like football.

Why do you assume he stopped working? He could be working harder than ever, but his productivity dropped.

That's one of the cruelties of burnout. It feels like you're working harder than you ever have in your life, but you have nothing to show for it.

I went through almost the exact same thing working full time for a consulting company in the USA. The situation was even worse since we had to log so many hours a week due to billing hourly. The biggest difference with me is that when I was first put on the PIP, it looked like I was going to successfully complete it. So a 4 week process was extended to 12 and then I was given a new PIP that was impossible to fulfill[0] and the micromanagement was increased to ridiculous levels. I didn't even try to improve at that point and was fired a week later. No severance, no benefits, no nothing. They were nice in that they gave a glowing recommendation that didn't mention any of this. They said we parted ways amicably and that it just wasn't a good fit.

It seems the recurring theme here is if your employees are slacking, more micromanagement isn't the answer. Either give them a reason to get excited about coming to work or fire them. The PIP process is an orwellian farce. The only saving grace is I bet most companies that use them don't actually know they don't work. Or maybe it's like interviewing; they know it doesn't work, but they don't have anything better?

[0]: I won't go into details, but it required getting two or three approvals per day from managers who were already backed up with work.

I'm not sure why this is making the front page of HN now. It's been around since 2012 and it's predecessor was around for a year or two before that. When they started, they advertised it as markdown for script writing (in fact, it extended a format literally called 'screenplay markdown'). It's not really a standardization of anything. If anything, it's a vast departure from the standard way of formatting scripts (which is to just use Final Draft). One of the driving forces behind fountain was the ability to write screenplays on the iPad. This was back when Final Draft was dragging their heels about releasing an iOS version.

Anyway, I doubt they have a plan to 'foist' this on anyone. It's another way to write screenplays that still produces what everybody expects to read: pdfs and final draft (fdx). There are a number of other formats that do this. I used a LaTeX extension at one point (but I don't recommend it).

how else would you have any idea about what happens around the world?

Since there's nothing I can do about anything anywhere else in the world, why should I care? Furthermore, if very little the news establishment publishes is correct, how can you say you have any idea what's actually happening around the world? You don't. With the readiness with which the news establishment will publish absolute junk, what makes you think they won't publish what they're told by their corporate owners or the government? When nobody does any fact checking, it leaves them (and you) vulnerable to manipulation.

Do you see no value whatsoever in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Economist?

None.

Had it not been for the articles in Svenska Dagbladet, how would the shareholders ever find out about this misuse of the company's resources?

Wow, you had to go all the way to Sweden to dig up an example for this? We're talking about the American news establishment. I have no comment on or exposure to European news. In the American media, investigative journalism is a dead art. The disclosures we see in the news are mostly done because we have a (more or less) open market which gives an incentive for all sorts of people and organizations to profit from these sorts of disclosures. That part of the system would work just as well without journalists.

I had a slightly different takeaway: who asks a candidate to perform a slideshow presentation at an interview?

This is the point: if there ever was a baby in that bath, it's dead now. Read what Patio11 wrote again and realize his situation isn't an isolated incident. It's the norm.

Tell me, cpach, why did you feel the need to defend the news establishment? You obviously think there's some value they're bringing to the table. What is that value?

Journalism is a high-prestige field which, to re-use Michael Creighton's observation, we understand is virtually never right about even the simplest consequential facts about things we actually understand, but we trust it to be accurate with regards to consequential facts about other fields, and this trust endures through every report that we have about journalists being catastrophically wrong.

There is some threshold of evidence that causes us to accept the BuzzFeed hypothesis, right? Right? God help me, I know I sound crazy, but I think I'm there.

Welcome to the ranks of conspiracy theorists. Anyone willing to admit difficult truths eventually winds up here.

Is there a time in the history of journalism where journalists were ever right about even the simplest consequential facts? That would at least explain why they're still considered a high-prestige field. Anyway, I'd love to find out how such a worthless field earned and continues to maintain it's prestige.

It's the lack of anything better

That's ridiculous. That's like saying 'I know drinking sea water will kill me, but, being stuck out at sea, there isn't anything else to drink and it's better than nothing.' It's completely false. There are better alternatives and yes, blogs are one of them, but even if there weren't, reading/watching nothing is better than reading/watching the news.

Ditto. I learned the media wasn't a reliable source of information when I was 10. What baffles me is so few people feel this way, even here on hacker news. A large percentage, if not most, of the submitted links on HN come from media outlets.

You hear that? That's the sound of a million security researchers simultaneously shouting 'Challenge Accepted!'

How would you find the drone owner and/or operator, exactly? I can see this being used to further erode the right to not be stopped and frisked without probable cause. Now, a drone flying overhead in a public place is probable cause to stop and search everybody in sight.

Sounds interesting. It's too bad you only hire in SF and NYC.

This needs to happen.

But it won't. After generations of people like you persecuting those who make more money than you, they've learned to dodge the ever higher taxes you would levy against them for the crime of being good at business.

Even if the laws were passed to raise taxes on the 1%, they'd find a loophole.

After watching the kickstarter video, I think it's terrific if they can pull it off.

This is their killer feature: A computer where you don't have to do backups, don't have to set up a new system when you upgrade, don't have to worry about losing any of your data? Just buy a new machine, login and BAM! You have the same environment you had on your other machine? Yes, please!

But, I do have concerns. Chiefly, I don't see how this product could ever generate a profit. Storing every user's data on the company's servers at all times can't be cheap. That's a lot of data to store per user. The subscription fee would have to be massive to cover the overhead. And then there's the apps. The lack of individual app pricing isn't going to make developers eager to make apps for this device. It also cuts out a potentially lucrative source of revenue for the company.