benwerd

I strongly agree with you on a personal level, but I also think there's something to be said for a non-ideological brass tacks bottom line approach (particularly in a community like HN). I genuinely wish that the ideological reason played well everywhere, but I'm not sure it does.

As another commenter has said: both are good.

I think that's more than fair, and I don't understand why anyone would have any problem with building better organizations. The response to "women are having a shitty time in the tech industry" should be "let's fix this and its root causes, because it will make our companies better," not a lot of the sexist knee-jerk reactions we've seen.

I think this is really important. It would be very wrong to dismiss it with tone policing or other superficial commentary. The underlying point is that there are a lot of women in the technology industry who believe - rightly - that they are being mistreated.

That's not necessarily to say that the rest of us are doing it deliberately (although some undoubtedly are). But it's important to grow our own awareness and build more inclusive cultures at our startups, and continue to be aware, work on improving ourselves, and, more than anything else, listen.

I'm down with Uber for cats though. Maybe with VR and drones?

This is awesome: exactly the kind of simplicity the personal server market needs. I dropped you an email; really interested in making Known work with the platform.

They shouldn't. But right now, YouTube is a huge part of being discoverable as an artist online. There should be more of an ecosystem; more competition would result in more favorable terms. And seeing as this is the web, an ecosystem should still be browseable as a coherent whole.

My wider point is: why isn't it as easy to discover an artist's work on the wider web as it is on YouTube? Isn't this an opportunity for someone?

This seems kind of predatory from YouTube's perspective. This is the web: why can't Zoe publish her music on her own terms?

The real reason people use YouTube is discovery. I can easily find new stuff to watch, and just hit play; artists can easily be discovered and grow an audience (or at least, that's the idea). Seems like it's time for a more open alternative.

At this point, I don't believe it's possible to be in favor of civil liberties and work with contextual advertising.

I really love the "users first" stipulation. We're deliberately building a business that builds what we call respectful software.

I wrote something about those principles last year: http://benwerd.com/2013/05/24/respectful-software/

Known is either SaaS or a self-hosted software application, depending on your needs. As such, we're offering:

* SaaS subscriptions

* Support subscriptions for self-hosted users

* Enterprise support

* Software and support for deploying Known across organizations

* Customizations (eg integrations with learning management systems / enterprise software, etc)

In the future, we will offer:

* Direct sales of content to readers (think Bandcamp)

Right now we're not considering advertising or any kind of tracking-based model.

It's funny - now that I'm building http://withknown.com/ at http://matter.vc/, I don't know how I'd answer this question.

Previously, I would have said that.

I'd love to spend six months on writing a novel. I've written simple novels before, but a serious book. I have ideas that I want to pursue, but they really would need my whole brain at length. Six months _might_ cover it.

Oh wow. Remember those "submit your link to these search engines" sites back in the late nineties / early 00s? Or "site of the day" sites?

What is old is new again.

Genuine question: how many of these sites (except for resources like Crunchbase) are actually visited by real people? I'd love for someone to test the impact of submitting to all of these.

I get this. Yes, you could use the GitHub issues board; no problem. But the issues there are not inviting, and it's non-obvious to newcomers if they should pick up a task.

Here you're inviting people - literally, "please, come help us with this" - and making it super-clear that they should jump in. I think there's more to do to make open source projects friendly (better, happier documentation, for a start), but I don't think this is a bad addition at all.

Also, waffles are tasty.

They're demoing this at NAB this week; it's a pretty stale show, filled with legacy tech, so this was one of the more interesting highlights (actual exchange with a sales engineer: "what kind of APIs do you have?" "what's an API?"). The text is definitely written for broadcast professionals.

I call it the "fog of war", and it's a signal that you need to get the hell out. Not all companies have it.

You absolutely should attend college. (But there's nothing wrong with taking a gap year first.)

The difference is between thinking about the now and the rest of your life. It's true that you'll probably draw a good salary from a front-end development job; you'll also keep up to date with technologies for quite some time. However, a degree, for better or for worse, is a gatekeeper for a great many things, which are very likely to be helpful later on.

If you're truly interested in these technologies, it's not like you'll lose your skills: you're very likely to keep working on front-end web development throughout your college career. But you'll also be earning a signal that you're a long-term thinker with a rounded education who can think strategically. $60-80k may seem like a great salary now, but eventually you'll be thinking about how to grow from that. Having a degree opens up many more positions to you, but also increases your surface area for new experiences, opportunities and ideas. In turn, that will open up your opportunities for freedom, self-determination, and simply making a larger impact in your field.

Hopefully, you can get scholarships to help with those college fees, but either way, because you can command a high salary as a developer, you'll be able to pay them off. They're worth it.

Gap years are good, though - I wish I'd taken one - and may help clarify your decision.

Finally, regarding those fees (and increasing your opportunity for new experiences), don't forget that you can go to college outside of the US.

There goes the Internet.

This should absolutely not be necessary in a civilized society. I don't know Richard or his work, but I donated. I'm proud to do so, and ashamed that the nation I call my home does not provide adequate support.

Wait. A feed is an API now?

Stripe is probably my favorite infrastructure startup of the past few years, and I'm delighted to see them do so well. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the _next_ two and a half years!

And thanks to whomever downvoted me for that. Guess we prefer free tools.

Points to a whole new way of making movies. I'd love to see some behind the scenes video or stories about making it - do you have anything like that?

Maybe charge for team / project use?

Do other large tech companies not realize what Google's up to, are they unable to try to compete, or do they just not care?

That was the least obvious thing ever, and you've just measurably improved my development experience. Thank you.

For sure. WordPress has a lot of legacy backwards compatibility on its shoulders. If they could shrug it off and start again, I'm sure it would be a lot cleaner.

The project I'm working on (https://github.com/idno/idno) is PHP, but explicitly doesn't support legacy versions, in order to rule out the way of working that was finally made obsolete in v5.3. I'm very happy with the language, and I can usually express what I need simply. Reflection could use a little love, mind you.

PHP doesn't insist on the array() keyword, currently. The mixing of associative and sequential arrays is ambiguous, although you can think of them all as being associative; it's just, PHP will supply some keys if you don't provide any. Whether that's kludgey or acceptable is up for discussion. (I don't mind it at all.)

Confirming that the UK does not do either, although there are some schools that are co-funded with the Church of England.

NB: I went to CoE schools for 7 years of my K12 education, and came out an atheist. I think part of it is to do with the teaching - even at a church school, we were encouraged to question everything, and had at least an hour a week where we learned about other religions in a very objective light.

I believe that on many levels, education comes down to that learning to question - and when you're told to believe things unquestioningly, you're intentionally breeding ignorance. My take is that it's not so much about schools having prayer etc, but the way they encourage thought. Kids are smart; if they're allowed to think for themselves, they will.

This is a great response.

Like the article says, it's not that the original author was both sexist and sloppy with language, although they were. The problem is that the sexism was actively reinforced in a public forum, first by a dismissive comment and then by an actual reversion. It would have taken no effort at all to make the correction; it was actually more work to reinforce the sexism. That means it was willful.

If one of my employees was being willfully sexist in public in a way that reflected on my company, I'd fire them too. Node.js is a really important project, closely associated with Joyent, and they've already seen some backlash from this. This kind of behavior could have real implications for the company's bottom line, and potentially even legal liabilities. Being inclusive is good business.

To reiterate: the original sexism, while dumb, is not a fireable offense. To actually go out of your way to be an asshole and practice discrimination while representing a company: totally a fireable offense. I'm not really sure why so many other commenters feel differently.

I'd actually kill (almost) for the schedule on the T-shirt. Which isn't to say that I disagree with the post, but the author had it pretty good!

Looks neat.

My favorite app in this genre is Poetica, which is in private beta but a real joy to use: https://poetica.com/

latakoo - http://latakoo.com/ - Austin / San Antonio, TX

We're building an enterprise video platform that's used by national broadcasters, non-profits and Fortune 500 companies. The majority of our customers are involved in the news business. People use our iPhone app to send video from places like Syria as well as all over the United States. We're also building new kinds of video codecs in conjunction with the University of Texas.

We use Ubuntu Servers, PHP, MySQL and Apache - but our infrastructure is constantly evolving. Challenges over the next year include helping to build out an international upload network for large files, as well as integrating Elastic Search, and revamping our database, message queuing and load balancing systems over the next few months.

We're looking for:

* DevOps Engineers

* Front-End (HTML5, CSS3, jQuery) Developers

* Android Engineers

* iOS Engineers

* An opinionated designer who can help us create a modern, usable look and feel across all our apps, sites and communications

It's worth saying that we put a lot of importance in well-rounded teams, and we believe that what we do is important.

Email us at: jobs@latakoo.com

(If you've got a website, source code repository or portfolio, we'd love to see it!)