Review my photo CAPTCHA web service - <AUTHOR> http://peoplesign.com No, it does not have a "Cats 'n Dogs" theme--not that there's anything wrong with that:) <comment><USER2> By what measure is peoplesign more secure? You have 6 choices in 2 menus -- even a robot that is completely stupid will pass 3% of the time.

I know that in the past some captchas were broken at rates of 30-40% (Hotmail, I think). Is this really still the case?

<comment><AUTHOR> You answered your own question. 30-40% > 3%.

But more deserves to be said. A site like Hotmail is a big, focused target for spammers. They face pain if a bot can beat their CAPTCHA even 10% of the time. Smaller sites get spam too, but they generally get it from dumber bots looking for unprotected sites. A 2 panel peoplesign CAPTCHA is probably all they need.

With 2 panels at 6 labels each, a random guess has a 1/36 chance to pass. Fortunately, a large number of incorrect guesses is behavior that can be detected and blacklisted.

Futhermore, peoplesign can be customized to offer more security. Number of panels (and soon number of menu labels) and other characteristics can be modified. Check out a customization demo at <http://peoplesign.com/main/pickTheLabelDemo.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I downloaded the PHP plugin, and applied for a private key to use the service. The key came immediately, and I've already added the captcha to my site So far I am impressed. <http://www.backwardsparadigm.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Very cool idea. It does seem faster than most captchas I've used. Would be cool to have the option of only one image, and be able to choose the answer in one click instead of via a drop-down menu. That would make it really fast (though probably less secure)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call, in fact I'm working on this. I force numPanels >=2 because 1 panel currently causes layout issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks easier to read than most CAPTCHAS, though I suppose that you have to speak english to get past it. Could be a good way to learn a language :)

Has this stood up to any bot attacks yet? What's the significance of the image discoloration?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks JJ. You are right about English literacy being useful to pass. Soon, I will expose an option that uses picture labels instead of natural language phrases.

But don't throw the proverbial baby out with the metaphorical bath water! The literacy requirement _may_ be an effective defense against the armies of human sweatshop CAPTCHA solvers that we hear about in the news.

Regarding attacks, would be attackers have more important targets for now. peoplesign isn't yet protecting any major sites.

peoplesign images have been recolored using a "secret sauce" algorithm. Recoloring one of two similar pictures reduces effectiveness of color histogram matching. It even reduces effectiveness of more sophisticated color profile matching techniques. In short, the recoloration is defense against a particular type of attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you draw the labels onto the image (make them each one word) and make the user type them, it's still an easy captcha for a person, but much harder for a bot.

If this spreads, it will be worth making a bot for, so that you can spam any of the sites that use it -- right now that bot just needs a few hits on average, and a slightly smarter bot can space them out, so that they are conceivably like commenters.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is nice but too big for most forms that use captcha (comments, feedback, etc...).

<comment><AUTHOR> Its true that a 2 panel peoplesign is slightly larger than most text-based CAPTCHAs. However, there will soon be an option to use only 1 panel, which will hopefully make it small enough even for space conscious sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Remove the word "arguably".

You're marketing. Not the time for balanced language.

<comment><AUTHOR> So by removing that word, I'd be adding 'truthiness'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I think 'arguably' could be removed in that context without being disingenuous. Thank you for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is too hard. Why don't you have some boxes that you can drag and drop to?

</comment><comment><USER10> I found a misspelling in a label for a plane image. (The correct selection was 'striped plan' or something like that.)

Also, what turned out to be a hydrant looked to me like the leg of a moon lander. (I stared at that thing for a really long time, but I still saw the leg of a moon lander.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Misspellings are deliberate and enhance security. Note that you still knew to pick the misspelled "striped plan" and passed. Another label for that picture might be "stryped plain".

Also, you correctly identified hydrant because "moon lander" fortunately was not one of the choices:)</comment></comment>


Serverless Benchmark – An independent benchmark of serverless providers - <AUTHOR> https://serverless-benchmark.com/ <comment><USER2> When graphs are shown next to each other like this it is important to use the same scale across them. The Percentile graphs make IBM cloud functions look significantly better than the competition, despite being middle of the pack or worse.

Aside from that nit (which I see everywhere), this is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> AWS' p99 is very impressive for hot functions. Pleasantly surprised by IBM's performance here. Google seems to perform the worst of the lot. It's also odd that Google's median cold start is faster than a hot function. Maybe the concurrency is triggering some sort of back-off?

PS: Adding cost per request as a comparison would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly I've gotten much better results with workers than I have with lambda

<comment><USER5> It doesn't say where the metrics are collected from, and whether they include the network latency from whatever point that is.

<comment><USER4> I did some testing a while back from servers globally (I used Postman w/ global monitoring) to test latency.

Pretty sure Postman uses some big cloud service (AWS or GCP) so you'd think Lambda would've had an advantage.

Interestingly, that didn't seem to be the case (workers had 3-4x less latency than Lambda).

<comment><USER5> That is interesting. I was trying to roughly say that Cloudflare stats might be artificially high/slow if measured from the center vs the "edge". Sounds like perhaps not?

<comment><USER4> Yeah I kinda understood what you were saying, but as I also surprisingly found out, it seems like they're fast in general regardless of where you're located.

I'll try to do more testing soon.

<comment><USER5> I made a url shortener with Cloudflare workers and their edge KV store. I did notice that it worked very fast in the US, but not so fast in Europe. The KV store seems to require a US->EU trip if it's not a "hot key".

Or basically, it seems "single master" with the center in the US. No such issue with the worker itself though...just the KV store. If I hardcoded the data, or used the regular page cache, it was fast everywhere.

<comment><USER6> Hi, PM of KV here. You should be seeing speeds improve in Europe within the next few weeks. Your intuition about the single master is currently correct, we're adding a second master in Europe soon, for exactly this reason.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hundreds of Scientists Have Published Evidence Countering Man-Made Global Warming - <AUTHOR> http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,176495.shtml <comment><USER2> The Hudson Institute = right wing think tank = press release from them is meaningless.

Just as long as these guys don't get as much power as the PNAC did, we'll be fine.

<comment><USER3> The PNAC. I still cannot get over them. A perfect storm they rode, in plain sight, documented. Unbelievable.

<comment><USER2> I find it unbelievable that a bunch of guys whose job was to sit around and write papers were able to hijack the USA and destroy Iraq.

<comment><USER3> Also unbelievable was the level of mind control that the public was amenable to. The media cheerleading, people screaming, "Shut up! Support your troops!" All the predictions the objectors had came true, and yet a large segment of the population is still drinking the Kool Aid. Scary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh, come on, don't turn this into a general news site. Save that for Reddit or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea that Global Warming may not be human caused is a radical idea these days, completely non politically correct and disruptive - hence a good candidate for YC news. I don't know anything about the source of this release, but I have read now at least 10+ scientific articles with evidence on the likeliest cause of warming being the Sun, especially given the fact that all the planets in the Solar system are also warming up at the same time (as reported by NASA), and the fact that this pattern has occurred in the past countless times.

<comment><USER2> from what journals?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the journal Nature: <http://cc.oulu.fi/%7Eusoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf>

Quotes from Scafetta, N., and B. J. West, 2006. Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900-2000 global surface warming. Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 1029/2005GL025539. [http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/03/21/solar...](http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/03/21/solar- warming/)

An article from the Telegraph citing some scientists involved in the new Solar findings: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml)

<comment><USER5> From the Nature piece: "Solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades."

About Scarletta and West: "However, they emphasized that their findings do not argue against the basic theory that significant global warming is occurring because of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases." <http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/sunwarm.html>

The Telegraph article is vague. That's an example of why rms asked for journals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is just flame fuel. We don't need to go there.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, hopefully an editor removes it soon...and submits it to Reddit to gain some karma!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If press release from this right wing institute is meaningless, then I may also say that the New York Times and Time magazine are left wing think thanks and no information from them should be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER8> in other news, 1000's of professional climatologists have amassed 10's of 1000's of peer-reviewed literature that is consistent with anthropogenic enhanced warming. oh how can i decide who to trust in this crazy world?!! won't someone please just tell me the answer, preferably one that is simple and just plain common sense? i promise i'll believe you if it seems plausible and means i don't have to change the way i view the world...

<comment><USER7> one solar explosion affects the earth more than all mankind could ever do.</comment></comment>


Python Docs for Humans. A Public Request to Kenneth Reitz - <AUTHOR> Kenneth,
This is missing.
We have __doc__ strings.
We could follow Google Python Docstring format style.
There's no simple way to generate a documentation.
Sphinx is a heavy pain for the beginner, and for the intermediate.
Pydoc seems the simplest to me, but its stylesheets left us in 1991.
Please, consider building Python Docs for Humans. :) <comment> noah-kun I developed some much improved Python docs. User-editable, with comments and examples. Individual page for each function. Unfortunately the client I was working on it for seemed to lose all interest in launching it. They wanted it to be completely closed source and private, and to make a lot of money. I said Python folks would probably not respond well to that. It's been probably 2 years. It's in React, Redux and Node.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh, right, it should be open source! :)</comment></comment>


What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ghost.org/5/ <comment><USER3> Good morning HN! John from Ghost here - Thanks for all your support over the last 5 years. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that very first blog post hitting the #1 spot of HN and getting so much attention back in 2012. That was the very first time anyone ever heard about Ghost, and everything we've built since then has been thanks to that.

<comment><USER4> If you're setup as a non-profit and you reinvest all profit, what do you do if you get to the point that you are making more profit than you can reasonably reinvest? Build up a large cash reserve?

<comment><USER3> Fantastic question. So the obvious answer is grow the company, right? That's pretty much what Amazon did for 20 years. Eschew profit in favour of reinvesting in building the company as big as possible. Not really our style, we'd rather keep the company small, but there's definitely still room to grow quite a lot from where we are now.

Beyond that point, we can spend money on anything which reasonably furthers the mission of the organisation - which has many aspects but the main ones in our case revolve around creation and education for journalism and open source software.

Some pipedream ideas we throw around from time to time:

\- M&A (boring/obvious answer, but valuable)

\- Create either grant-funding, or sensible investment funding (like indie.vc) for other open source projects and publishers.

\- Create an independent media company, reporting on issues and stories we care about (running on Ghost)

\- Buy some land and build a collaborative space for us and for others to work on open source, journalism and social good projects

<comment><USER5> _> Buy some land and build a collaborative space_

So, a ghost town?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We use hosted Ghost for our blog. For the most part, it's been great.

My biggest complaint is that Ghost doesn't yet have a built in SSL/TLS option (e.g. Let's Encrypt). Their recommendation is to use Cloudflare. It's fine for hobbyist or personal blogs, but as a corporation it's basically prevented us from using SSL.

We're in a regulated industry and need to do appropriate vetting of vendors. Onboarding a blog platform is very, very easy because of the relatively low risk nature of a blog. Onboarding an infrastructure vendor, like Cloudflare, is very complicated. Making it more complicated is we'd have no interest in actually paying for a Cloudflare service so it's impossible to get resources to complete the vetting process. On top of all of that, last year's Cloudbleed incident cast some real doubt on Cloudflare's security practices and ability to properly protect potentially sensitive data.

We will likely eventually self-host so we can get proper SSL support. I'm really disappointed by this since it will be more expensive than paying our Ghost subscription for several years.

<comment><USER3> We do have all of those things :)

For self-hosters, Ghost-CLI has deep Let's Encrypt integration. The tool will automatically guide you through provisioning an SSL certificate during the install process.

On Ghost(Pro) we have full end to end SSL support (you're right we used to only support CF's UniverSSL but that is no longer the case) - so anyone who uses a custom domain with Ghost(Pro) will automatically have an SSL cert provisioned and deployed for them in the background. For business customers who require the use of their own, custom certificates, there a few extra steps but we support that too.

<comment><USER6> Heyo. Would you look at that! That must be pretty new?

\----

This is great. That was my only complaint with Ghost so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the post, its great to hear that Ghost is doing well - I love using it.

> [Github] has become too transactional - more support tool than collaboration

I strongly agree with this. I wish Github "Issues" were relabeled "Comments" and need not be "Open" or "Closed". Issues need action, comments do not. I've been burned many times now by solving someone's issue and then finding out they use my code for their business and just wanted free support from me.

<comment><USER8> Why not just close the issue and direct the person to stackoverflow, superuser, etc. if you think it falls into that category?

<comment><USER9> Then you get a reputation as a rude developer, whether or not that's fair or warranted.

<comment><USER8> You could create an _issue template_ that explains the rules. If people still file support issues, you close those with a friendly reminder text (copy/paste) in which you explain the reasons why this is not the place for support. If people still think this is rude, they have personality issues which shouldn't be of your concern.

<comment><USER9> Aye, and you'd be well within your rights to do so, but I am doubtful that this approach will preempt the majority of people assuming rudeness on your part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was a Ghost user for ~3 years (from Jan 2014 to the best part of 2016) and eventually switched to WordPress. I loved Ghost minimalism and its usage of Markdown, but there were several issues that made it a no-no. I was kinda sad to let it go actually.

I took the time to write to the Ghost support email with my thoughts on the switch and my main issues (namely no categories, lack of i18n, editor live- view performance with many images, no search -- this was middle 2016, maybe they have these features now but they didn't then)

They took the trouble of answering my email, I found it rather nice.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would love to switch to hosted ghost, but the pricing makes very little sense for a personal blog. An article will make the front page of hn or some larger subreddits and I'll get 30k views in just a few hours. I'd have to pay close to $200/mo to get the same number of page views I can get with a $10/VPS that I ssh into maybe once every 6 months to patch.

The pricing levels simply do not offer enough page views.

<comment><USER12> I was thinking like you but they say they compute usage on a 3 month rolling average basis. So an infrequent hit should not be an issue.

<comment><USER11> It's not really infrequent though. It's like once a month.

<comment><USER13> You average around [ed:2M] views a month?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congratulations on your 5th aniversary :)

I was a backer in the kickstarter campaign, but various "issues" eventually led me to look elsewhere.

Ghost is (was?) rather good, but the thing that ultimately sold me on it back on kickstarter was the much hyped dashboard, which never made it.

Before Docker it was a pain to manage dependencies and keep everything up to date, but with the official Docker image, things got better - until a flurry of almost daily releases to the 1.x branch made it a chore again.

The final nail in the coffin was dropping PostgreSQL support. While it wouldn't be much of an issue if starting on a clean host, with a clean slate, i run all of my other stuff in PostgreSQL, and i much prefer to only administer/backup one DMBS.

I'm currently on Hugo, and i really miss the online editing/publishing from Ghost.

</comment><comment><USER15> > The stuff which is actually hard, nobody ever asks about. For instance: How > do you know when someone is in a bad mood? How do you deal with loneliness? > How do you foster camaraderie? How do you achieve urgency? How do you ever > get to know people outside of work when you never spend time with them > outside of work?

I for one would love to hear more from the Ghost team on how they approach solving these very essential problems - any insight is welcome!

</comment><comment><USER16> > _The best marketing we 've done has been to launch, over and over again._

That's my favorite takeaway from the article. Seems like a difficult thing to do in practice, but also something I've been considering lately.

Anyone else have experience with doing repeated launches that they'd be willing to share?

<comment><USER17> [http://www.piedpiper.com/#company](http://www.piedpiper.com/#company)

;-)

<comment><USER18> Am I the only one that's disappointed that I can't actually buy pied piper coin?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > We wanted to know: What would it look like if you built a technology startup > which could not make anyone rich. If you eliminated all the promises of > wealth from the roadmap up front, and tried to build a good company, how > would that affect the product, business, customers, and every little > decision in between?

...

> We're currently looking at testing an affiliate program whereby we'll pay > out a 30% commission every single month on the lifetime revenue of anyone > referred to Ghost(Pro).

...

I believe this is called colocating your money and your mouth. I'm inspired.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's very impressive that you need only $600k/year. How many people are there in your team (including everybody, not just developers)?

<comment><USER21> looks like 8 people total [1].

[1]: [https://ghost.org/about/](https://ghost.org/about/)

<comment><USER22> Seems like they haven't updated that page, since [https://blog.ghost.org/year-3/](https://blog.ghost.org/year-3/) mentions 9. Or maybe the ninth person wants to remain... a ghost ( _ba dum tsh!_ )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was on board from the beginning! What a great product. Too bad they dropped support for Postgres at some point, otherwise it would still be my platform of choice!

<comment><USER24> I've seen a couple comments about this issue, as well as it's mention in the article. What about Postgres is appealing to the point that it is a deal breaker not to have? Is it familiarity or a specific aspect like scaling or ecosystem?

<comment><USER23> I prefer Postgres because of its (in my opinion: better) features and my familiarity with it. It wouldn't be a challenge to setup a MySQL/MariaDB database if I wasn't already running a largerish Postgres instance where I want to store my stuff. So the deal breaker here is me not wanting to have two DBMS running on the server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Our biggest marketing failure has been our documentation and resources. ... > We're actually _hiring right now_ for someone to help us fix this and make > using Ghost a really fantastic developer experience.

Putting user docs as part of a _marketing_ role is not lining things up for a good result. :(

How about putting it under _engineering_ instead?

<comment><USER26> User docs are customer-facing, and therefore entirely fitting to be under marketing. Of course building the documents requires engineering contribution for technical details.

<comment><USER27> Yes, user docs are customer-facing, but the problem is that if they're under the control of marketing, then documentation priorities will be set as if they are marketing materials. And, possibly worse, a writer who works in marketing will by and large be treated by engineers like, well, somebody who works in marketing. (Without getting into sordid details, I'm speaking from personal experience of having been a tech writer under engineering at one company and under marketing at another.)

<comment><USER3> That's cool, but we literally don't have a marketing department. So whoever gets hired will report directly to me, no matter what their title is.

The primary function of the role is to do writing, not engineering - and the success of the role will be measured in terms of marketing, not engineering - so to me the title we went with makes the most sense. I can definitely understand the discussion here though :)

<comment><USER25> > the success of the role will be measured in terms of marketing

Err... trying to grok that, and failing. Are you ok to flesh out what you mean? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> All I got to say is that Hannah Wolfe is a beast (in a really good way!).

Check out her number of commits compared to other contributors: [https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/TryGhost/Ghost](https://chart.ly/github- dashboard/TryGhost/Ghost)

Keep up the good work guys!

<comment><USER29> Without trying to offend… what's the quality of those commits?

I have a co-worker who commits 6x more changes than me, everyday, but only because she commits many errors in the morning and have to fix them during the day after multiple code reviews. She often forgets to run the test suite before pushing her changes up. Even after the creation of a Git hook to pre- test the changes after every commit, she still manages to break things when they fall outside the scope of the automated tests.

The number of commits mean nothing if the quality is low.

<comment><USER3> Given that she's the CTO of the company, lead developer of the project, the most senior engineer on the team, literally one of the top JavaScript developers on all of Github - [https://github.com/erisds..](https://github.com/erisds..). what do you think the answer to that question is? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ghost is already 5 years old... I'm getting old! I remember the first post...

</comment><comment><USER31> After the cell provider selling location article, this was a much needed encouraging read. Thanks for sharing and good luck Ghost in your next 5 years!

</comment><comment><USER32> > How do you pay people if they live in different countries? What about > contracts? — The things people ask about most often all have straightforward > answers.

Really? I just read a comment from the CEO of HashiCorp who has a very different take:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563)

Unless all remote employees of Ghost are just contractors...

<comment><USER3> Yes they are exactly that.

Same with Automattic, Zapier, Buffer - and most of the other big remote companies. In fact, we all use the same set of contracts. They tend to get passed around founders.

All 3 of those other companies are USA based, so for anyone in the US they do standard employment contracts - and anyone outside = self employed contractor on a retainer. We're based in Singapore and don't have any staff in Singapore, so effectively everyone is a remote self-employed contractor.

Our retainer contract looks a lot like an employment contract, practically speaking, and builds in all the same sorts of provisions as you would expect. We also cover expenses, where applicable, for team members to get independent legal and accounting advice to make sure everything is set up correctly for them.

Mr HashiCorp has gone way too far down the rabbit hole, by the sounds of it. It makes sense to set up a subsidiary when you have a larger group of staff in a single location. For instance, Automattic have a subsid in Ireland because they acquired a company there and as a result have a lot of staff based there. But otherwise it doesn't make sense to set up a full blown subsidiary in every country when you're a tiny startup just trying to contract a couple of people.

<comment><USER32> Thanks for the insight!

> In fact, we all use the same set of contracts. They tend to get passed > around founders.

Care to share? ;)

<comment><USER33> seconded! Early days still for our startup but we are also interested in pursuing the remote working route and we are incorporated in Singapore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been rereading this article for days. Thanks so much for taking the time to share the sorts of insights that rarely see light.

My company is looking into our options as to what sort of structure would be best. We've considered being a worker-owned cooperative, a B Corporation, an a non-profit. We have the same goals of developing the best products we can an never selling out.

I wonder if you had any insight or suggestions on where to learn more about these options and the consequences. What do non-profits offer to funders? Everybody wants equity.

</comment><comment><USER35> I remember looking for better alternatives for WordPress(i felt they alienated the bloggers largely) and came across an article about Ghost. I was instantly hooked to the whole thing to this day. I just wish the non hosted versions get a better way to update to the latest version as well as a (official) script to automate the install easily.

<comment><USER36> I think this is what you're looking for: [https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost- CLI](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-CLI)

I've only used it for a local install when playing with my site theme, but it worked great (albeit quite picky about the versions of the dependencies).

<comment><USER37> When they launched ghost cli with ghost 1.0 I moved over to it a few days after it had launched (small blog, not much readership). It was really easy to move over to it, and updating ghost is a single command. I update it every time there's a feature I want or once every few months. It's not without its issues, but they're being actively worked on and it's improving each time I update the cli as well. I'd recommend it to anyone self hosting a single instance blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I signed up for ghost when it was at its kickstarter phase. I was very excited by the promise. A year later there were still long winded discussions taking place on their github issues on how they should tackle responsive images. There were alot of JS hacks around to overcome their missing features. I lost interest over time

</comment><comment><USER39> I didn't realize Ghost was a non-profit. Very noble. The feedback in Github is interesting. Ghost is probably more likely to have issues with demanding users than, say, mongodb.

Very cool and inspiring post. That said:

\- Ghost's marketing materials tend to outright lie to users when making comparisons to WordPress or other platforms.

\- I dislike OSS projects that hide their OSS nature. Why does a user need to pay $29/mo for an entry level blog? Why isn't there any obvious mention of the OSS nature of the project on the pricing page, home page, or features page?

\- What's been done about the memory issues? Last time I tried ghost, it was a bit of a memory hog.

<comment><USER40> Their home page at ghost.org literally says "Ghost is a fully open source, adaptable platform for building and running a modern online publication" at the top.

<comment><USER41> After reading this comment I went to check for myself. However I believe the grandfather post still has a valid point. It's not "obvious" how to use the self hosting open source version.

However, I'm pretty sure a person that was really interested in self hosting would not have trouble figuring it out.

I don't necessarily think it's bad that they don't emphasize how to use the open source version. After all, it is a business.

<comment><USER42> They are claiming it is not a business

<comment><USER41> They didn't claim to not be a business in the blog post. They are a non-profit business. They still need to earn money to pay bill, pay employees, etc.

"Being a non-profit means that the company has no shares. I don't own it. Hannah doesn't own it. Nobody owns it - it's an independent entity. The company makes money and pays expenses, salaries and taxes as normal - <USER2> there's no way for it to be bought or sold either in part (investment) or as a whole (aquisition). Any profit the company makes can only ever be reinvested, not distributed. We can't cash out. Ever. Also the entire product is open source and has no copyright. Anyone can do whatever they want with our code, for free."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've nothing but a positive experience using the self-hosted Ghost instance for some clients. Glad to see this transparency and that they're doing well.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've really appreciated ghost, been using it pretty much since launch in one way or another. Been really cool to see it develop over the years.

</comment><comment><USER45> The Ghost website borrows alot from Stripe's.

</comment><comment><USER46> only drawback ghost has it doesn't support EL7. and there is documentation only for ubuntu. pretty bad :/

</comment><comment><USER47> Ghost is great. Would love to see support for LDAP/Oauth.

</comment><comment><USER48> Ghost is looking dated today with those templates and their script tags. Technically speaking, today, I'd rather use Gatsby as a Wordpress front-end.

<comment><USER49> I feel Ghost is trying to be the ideal replacement for WordPress i.e. you have a lot of engineers who love JavaScript and node but also having a marketing team that wants a blogging platform.

I also agree it feels like static site generators are starting to take over (personally think its an awesome direction the web is headed towards for some sites) but not everyone is familiar how to use them so Ghost is another nice alternative.

<comment><USER48> I remember it used to sell itself as the most modern platform though, but that was back in 2013 or so, perhaps that's why it bugs me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I am not familiar with Ghost. Isn't it basically Wordpress, but built with modern tools, and with a modern look?

<comment><USER51> In the sense that it's a blogging platform, sure. But that's about where the similarities end

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I gave up on the install. So many errors, some of which I found as open issues in their repo.

</comment><comment><USER53> is Ghost still a thing? I thought they ceased to exist after nobody used it.

I guess wordpress beat them in every possible aspect.

<comment><USER36> OpenAI are nobody? Square are nobody? Apple are nobody? Interesting...

[https://ghost.org/customers/](https://ghost.org/customers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm a little surprised to read that Ghost doesn't use gitlab. Given the companies are both open source and distributed work forces; not to mention they call out github as a big headache.

>How open source works is: If you want something, you can build it.

<comment><USER55> The problems listed were with the interaction model. There's nothing I've seen in GitLab's UX that would indicate it's any better.

<comment><USER54> _Unfortunately I think Github itself has a lot to do with this. The product has become too transactional - more support tool than collaboration. And Github themselves show remarkable disinterest in the open source community as a whole - they give us beta access to test new features every so often. That 's about it. There's no wider involvement at all._

I read it as two parts. Interactions are flawed & Github doesn't really care about open source. Just one guys opinion, and my wife works for gitlab, but there is a deep commitment to open source and contributors, as well as an abundance of places for deeper dialogues to occur, between projects / contributors / the general public / gitlab.

+1 for also living in Minneapolis. We should get coffee.

<comment><USER56> Huh, I also live in Minneapolis.

How many HNers are around here?

<comment><USER54> There are a few. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? A meetup?

<comment><USER56> Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: When to re-invest vs when to build new - <AUTHOR>

I have a few iOS and web software products that make decent money, but none (yet) that make enough for me to stop focusing on everything else and work on them exclusively.
I can't decide whether to invest more in the current products (more features, better design, etc), or build something new and hope it does just as well.
For example: 10 products at $500/month = 5k
vs
1 product at 5k/month = 5k
I'm curious - how do you decide when to re-invest in a product to make it better, or when to let it ride and build something new? <comment><USER2> Can you tell us about iOS web software products,i mean names?

One big fish is better than many small fish,but you can focus on one and call someone else to help you on the others.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, here's a link to one that's doing well, but I feel could be doing better.

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zazen-suite-meditation- timer/...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zazen-suite-meditation- timer/id378744626?mt=8)</comment></comment>


Teaching Programming in High Schools Will Be Useless - <AUTHOR> http://williamrfry.com/2016/07/04/teaching-programming-is-useless/ <comment><USER2> Teaching programming in high school is already too late.

I was excited when my high school offered a programming class. Until I realized that they were teaching Visual Basic. "Look, you can make the form pretty colors!" By that time, I was programming in C on a FreeBSD system. I exited that class pretty quickly.</comment>


Airbnb Shares the Keys to Its Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://www.theplatform.net/2015/09/10/airbnb-shares-the-keys-to-its-infrastructure/ <comment><USER2> I'm honestly surprised that the author includes Lyft & Uber in the "sharing economy" sector. After all, the sharing part of their businesses is only a minor aspect - they are rather a part of the "service economy", with the car owner not actually sharing their car in the AirBnB / "rental" sense...</comment>


Trestup – new online social networking platform (based on people's interests) - <AUTHOR>

Trestup is an online social platform that connects people who have similar interests, and who want to do stuff together. Have you ever wanted to do stuff, but had no one to take part? Or have you ever wanted to make more friends who share the same passion with you? Now you can. Join Trestup. Next, search for an activity, join it and do it, or you can create yours. Bringing social back to social networking. We truly connect people. Follow on Twitter @trestup. Join Trestup @ www.trestup.com <comment><USER2> U competing with FB or Meetup?

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice idea. Are you in SF?

<comment><AUTHOR> Up north in Canada.</comment></comment>