dangrossman

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The WH website switched from Drupal to WordPress in 2017.

"Show HN" posts announcing a new tech startup/tool are a core part of this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew

I see nothing wrong with this post. They're sharing something they've made and getting valuable, constructive feedback. I appreciate HN being one of few places that still happens at.

Gmail is the only product you listed that Google started itself.

Google Maps was built on the acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash.

Chrome is based on WebKit, built at Apple.

Waymo's hardware came from the acquisition of 510 Systems, and the software came from the acquihiring of the team that developed Stanford's self-driving cars for the 2005 and 2007 DARPA challenges, who brought their code with them.

Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free, taking much of the money out of the market that allowed that product to be built. Without Google giving away the one winner they chose to acquire, you'd have options again.

I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.

From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.

I remember that fondly, that was the time period when I first got online and made my own GeoCities page. I first learned HTML from a page in the Athens neighborhood, on lot 2090. 30 years and I still have that address memorized.

https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...

I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.

About 40% of lithium is "mined" from brine rather than hard rock sources, at least. Much less destructive and less carbon intensive.

A date picker widget I tossed on NPM 13 years ago gets 32,000 downloads per week. 510 a week is background activity, that's indexing bots or one org's CI system.

Confinity is the company that developed the PayPal website that survived that merger. Elon Musk was not on the Confinity side, he was trying to pivot his x.com bank into a PayPal clone and buy users ($30 per signup) faster than them until they merged to avoid running each other out of cash. The two startups were operating out of the same building at the time. After the merger, Musk was named CEO but ousted from the company just 5 months later, in part for being absent much of the time (including at the time of his firing), and in part because the PayPal engineers had circulated a petition to the board asking them to remove him. The board agreed.

"While 5 CFR 315 does permit immediate termination, it does not permit arbitrary termination. The termination must be related to unsatisfactory performance or conduct (section 804) or conditions arising before employment, which usually means something from your background investigation (section 805)..."

https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1id7ud2/comment/m9...

I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only list products that run their billing through Shopify and give Shopify a 15%+ share of all associated revenue.

I just got rid of my 2013 Microsoft Surface Pro. It was still being used daily in my workshop, 11 years old. Core i5 processor, running Windows 10. I only got rid of it because the battery decided to become a spicy pillow one night, expanding until it cracked open the case and pushed out most of the touchscreen.

You can filter this list to see 200+ GDPR fines assigned to sole proprietors, the smallest of small businesses, individuals that haven't even registered a separate entity for their business:

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

They're only cataloging the (2500+) publicly known ones, most of which have a link to a news article. As an example: some guy in Croatia emailed a couple websites he thought might be interested in his marketing services, and provided a working opt-out link in his cold emails. One of them reported the email to the Italian Data Protection Authority who then put him through an international investigation and fined him 5000 euro.

"Assuming here that the reasons expressed in the aforementioned document have been fully recalled, [individual] was charged with violating articles 5, par. 1, letter a), 6, par. 1, letter a) of the Regulation and art. 130 of the Code, since the sending of promotional communications via e-mail was found to have been carried out without the consent of the interested parties. Therefore, it is believed that - based on the set of elements indicated above - the administrative sanction of payment of a sum of €5,000.00 (five thousand) equal to 0.025% of the maximum statutory sanction of €20 million should be applied."

I followed the "Launch HN" of Yotta 4 years ago and deposited some money.

Evolve Bank says "we have determined that we are not holding your funds and you will not be receiving a payment from Evolve" (reconciliationbyevolve.com)

Yotta customer support says "According to the Synapse Trial Balance Report, your funds are with Evolve Bank & Trust".

It doesn't appear I'll ever be getting that money back. It's not enough that I'll hurt, but it'll make me think twice about trusting a non-bank fintech startup and their "FDIC insured" claims.

This is what Yotta's website looked like in 2020, where "FDIC insured" is the most prominent part of their pitch, and one of the homepage blocks is titled "You can’t lose": https://web.archive.org/web/20200630201639/https://www.withy...

Turns out, we could lose.

Look at the site in 2020, when many of those people signed up:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200630201639/https://www.withy...

The idea was just an online bank that paid interest on savings in the form of raffle tickets.

https://www.pitchdeckhunt.com/

Coincidentally, Webasto supplies the home EV charging equipment for many of the major brands including VW, Ford, GM.

Maybe I have? Could you explain your understanding of it? If it doesn't extend past the software the hardware vendor directly wrote, then it doesn't result in hardware owners being able to continue running the hardware after the manufacturer goes bankrupt, which was the purpose of the proposed "fantasy law".

Few companies write 100% of the software that runs on their hardware. If some insulin pump uses proprietary firmware licensed from Johnson & Johnson for some part of its operation, does Johnson & Johnson lose its entire firmware licensing business as soon as one customer goes bankrupt? Or are they forced to become a B2C company and manage and sell licenses to millions of people it had no relationship with before? Is it weaponizable: pick a competitor, get them to license some software to a shell company of yours that makes a token device with it, fold the shell company, and now the competitor is required to give away their firmware to the public (and you)?

Residential rooftop solar in the US already produces enough energy to cover the charging of every EV currently on the road, and we're adding capacity each year faster than new EVs are consuming it, so that'll continue to be true.

Potentially FROM 2035 only electric vehicles would be for sale on new car lots. Most gas cars already on the road will still be there for 10-20 years after that.

By then, Edison Electric Institute (a trade-group for utility companies) predicts 70-80 million EVs on the road in the US.

By 2030, 15% of US homes are forecast to have solar on the roof, which would continue covering 100% of the electric use of the nation's electric vehicles.

The average residential solar installation generates enough energy to cover a 14,000-mile-per-year vehicle's charging 3.5-4.5 times over. Each house with solar panels generates enough energy for its cars and some of the neighbors' cars that don't have solar.

I put solar on my roof two years ago. It's the average system size, taking up 2/3rds of the south-facing side of my roof. It cost 1/3rd the price of my car to get installed, it completely covers my fuel use for two cars, and it covers 100% of my home electric and heating bill 9 months out of the year.

EV electric use isn't a problem utilities need to solve so much as a solution to a lot of utilities' problems. 70 million EVs are many gigawatt-hours of battery storage that will be connected to the grid bidirectionally in the not-distant future. They can store renewable energy during the day and feed it back to the grid at night, they can power houses and businesses during peak load events so peaker plants don't need to be spun up, and lots of other things that will make the grid more resilient and cheaper to operate without significant capital expense to the utilities.

The 800,000 American homes that added solar to their roofs last year cover 100% of the electric used by every EV that's ever been sold in the US. They cover the electric usage by the EVs purchased last year by multiples. At this rate, you can do nothing and residential solar will already add much more capacity to the grid than EVs are taking from it.

They're listed as a sponsor on the PHP Foundation website.

There's a "no forking" clause in the term sheet Automattic sent to WP Engine:

https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet...

IANAL, but the WordPress license (GPLv2) says that if you attempt to sublicense the software or otherwise distribute it under different terms, you forfeit your own license to it:

    "4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance." 

Given this, is it legal for WordPress.com to continue using and distributing the WordPress software as we speak?

If Matt tells you what I just told you, will you believe Matt? Here it is on his website, wordpress.org:

https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/wp-engine/

There are approximately 330,000 web hosting companies not listed there, including a very long list that are larger than WPE, generate an order of magnitude more revenue than WPE, and host more WP installs than WPE.

WP Engine has contributed full-time developer hours to the core WordPress code base for over 10 years, is a current Five for the Future contributing member, sponsors WordCamp events globally, produces the DE{CODE} series of conferences for WordPress developers, and maintains some of WordPress's most essential and popular plugins.

To say "without giving back or adding any value whatsoever" is libel. It's defamatory and deeply untrue. You're committing one of several crimes Matt committed to start all this drama. Maybe you'll get to meet the "good guys" in person when you respond to the lawsuits in the same court system.

Why can 40%+ of the web leech on it while adding zero value except the <1% hosted by WPE?

If Matt thinks he has a legitimate trademark claim, file it in court, don't play games with 3.5 million WordPress end-users that are now cut off from security updates -- including all users of the ACF plugin that aren't even WPE customers. This blog post did nothing to explain the logic behind Matt's actions (and shifting explanations for them). The only convincing sounding explanations I've found have been on Twitter, and they all revolve around WP's stagnation and Automattic's market weakness, not anything WPE has done, and nothing that will end if WPE pays the extortion demands.