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Probably all mailchimp sponsored. See this for help: https://ma.tt/2018/06/mass-uns...

That was two years ago. I commented on that on his blog here: https://ma.tt/2017/09/on-react...

But Vue.js has so much buzz right now and caters to people who like writing HTML-ish templates, I'd expect Automattic will go with that -- instead of Mithril.js which I feel is a better technical choice for people who prefer their UIs are defined entirety by JavaScript/TypeScript.

The below is from my comment a month ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

Personally, I feel templating approaches to making JavaScript-powered UIs like React's JSX or Angular's own templating approach or the templating systems in many other UI systems are obsolete. Modern webapps can use Mithril+Tachyons+JavaScript/TypeScript to write components in single files where all the code is just JavaScript/TypeScript. Such apps don't need to be partially written in either CSS and some non-standard variant of HTML that reimplements part of a programming language (badly). (Well, there may be a tiny bit of custom CSS needed on top of Tachyons, but very little.)

Here is an example of a coding playground I wrote that way with several examples in it which use that approach: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/T...

So, by writing UIs using HyperScript (plus a vdom library), you can potentially (with some work) replace a backend like Mithril with almost any other vdom or even a non-vdom solution. So, that is another way I mitigate this risk when I have a choice.

Granted, I know many web developers grew up on tweaking HTML and love HTML-looking templates and so they love JSX or whatever and are happy to ignore how hard it is to refactor such non-code stuff in the middle of their applications or validate it (granted, some IDEs are getting better at that). But I came to web development from desktop and embedded development working with systems where you (usually) generated UIs directly from code (e.g. using Swing, Tk, wxWidgets, and so on). I like the idea that standard tools can help me refactor all the code I work on and detect many inconsistencies.

... then I could not post any replies. It took me a couple of months to figure out what had happened. I had just figured Slashdot was failing with some weird error message, guessing incorrectly perhaps related to the IP range of my ISP. I was also going through mixed feelings about Slashdot, so fixing it was not high on my priority list.

I eventually had to contact someone at Slashdot via email to fix my account. Then I could post again.

But they never unmarked the submissions as SPAM.

Here are the three submissions I posted that got marked SPAM:

"SPAM: Investigation of Nano-Nuclear Reactions in Condensed Matter"
https://slashdot.org/submissio...

"SPAM: Employment Law and Robotics, AI, and Automation"
https://slashdot.org/submissio...

"SPAM: Trump GOP convention infringed copyright for at least seven songs "
https://slashdot.org/submissio...

My stats on submissions over the past fifteen years or so:
https://slashdot.org/~Paul+Fer...
"47 declined, 12 accepted (59 total, 20.34% accepted)"

I did get one front page submission again today (on Moore's Law ending). The problem is that many interesting tech stories are about specific companies that might sell something -- like that one by HP Labs. I could maybe understand the reasoning that an article about a law firm's report about employment law (and technology) might seem spammish. But a fact-based article about the GOP convention (and tech hypocrisy)? Or an article from a US government agency about cold fusion replication (vindicating the original researchers)?

The person who responded to my email (maybe six to nine months ago?) said Slashdot had been working on its spam filters.

Still kind of annoyed those all three still have bright red SPAM tags since they were not intended as such and I have no financial interest whatsoever in those groups mentioned. But I was glad to get posting privileges back.

Much more frightening was the time my GitHub account went away after posting an issue on Calypso (for WordPress). That felt like having my whole career deleted. I had spend hours writing up the comment previously intending to post it on Matt Mullenweg's blog, but it did not go through (guessing for length and links), and then decided to make a GitHub issue instead. Their spam filters must have detected that a lot of text with links was pasted right after opening an issue. Fortunately GitHub put my account back right away after I contacted them. That issue:
https://github.com/Automattic/...
And a post about that to Mullenweg's blog:
https://ma.tt/2015/11/dance-to...

Both cases serve as reminders to me of the problems of investing time into specific commercial online services with creating a body of published works and an associated online reputation. Fortunately, both companies fixed things up -- since they have reputations to maintain too.

Anyway, hope Slashdot resolves the account issue for you too, Mosquito Bites! I see Slashdot marked twelve of your submissions as spam -- which all look like good articles to me:
https://slashdot.org/~Mosquito...

Seeing this happen both to me and someone else makes me really wonder about the risk of submitting any more articles to Slashdot? I'd rather be able to discuss stuff than get front page articles posted.

Anyway, could be worse -- see the movie Brazil (hopefully not the darker Director's cut version though).

Posted here first this morning (couple of types fixed): https://ma.tt/2016/01/minsky/#...

Wow, sad to hear the news. Marvin Minsky and I were academic peers of a sort -- he was one of George A. Miller's first students, and I was one of George's last students. :-) George told my parents something like I was the student who most reminded him of Marvin Minsky, except whereas he spent George's Air Force money, I spent my father's money. :-) Which was not quite true (I paid for a chunk of Princeton with the proceeds of a video game I wrote and with some loans) but it sounded funny. :-) My dad was actually mostly a blue collar worker, and my mother only later in life worked for county social services, so George may also not have realized my family was not that well off financially.

I met Marvin Minsky once in his MIT office in 1985 as I was graduating from Princeton. I likely gave him a copy of my thesis -- "Why Intelligence: Object, Evolution, Stability, and Model". I also wrote to him once in the 1990s about getting computer time for space habitat simulations (he was responsive in a positive way, but then I met my wife and so just let stuff like that drop). And I saw him in passing about fifteen years ago when he gave a talk at IBM Research while I was a contractor there (he spoke about multiple simultaneous mental representations, and picking from the best one). A nephew of his even lived down the hall from me my senior year at Princeton in 1903 hall, too, but I never talked with him about his uncle. But we never really connected any of those times, sadly.

One of the biggest mistake I've made in my life careerwise (or so it seemed at the time) was when visiting Marvin Minsky in his office to talk to him about the triplestore and semantic network ideas in my thesis (stuff that indirectly helped inspire WordNet which George started as I graduated). I casually mentioned in passing to Marvin Minsky very early on in our meeting something about neural networks (MIT had a spinoff then of the Connection Machine), and I guess that may have put him in one of those mental states where some of the 400 different little computers activate. :-) I had not known then that he had essentially written a book (Perceptrons) to discredit neural networks (by only considering a limited version of them) to preserve funding for more formal semantic networks he worked on. He warned me sternly about how many careers had been destroyed by exploring neural networks. Another of George's students had found a copy of Marvin's original SNARC paper (what Marvin spent George's Air Force grant money on), and I can wish I had thought to take a copy to Marvin, as that might have set a different tone for our meeting, as it turned out Marvin had lost his original and wanted to reference it in his book "the Society of Mind" he was working on then.

So, instead of MIT, I spent a year hanging out in Hans Moravec's and also Red Whittaker's robot labs, and that was interesting in its own way. That experience also set me to thinking about the implications of most of the CMU robotics work being funded by the US military, which ultimately lead to my key insight about the irony of using robots to fight about material scarcity they could otherwise alleviate.

I sent Marvin Minsky an email in 2010, with a subject of "Vitamin D, computing, and abundance", warning about the health risks of vitamin D deficiency for heavy computer users. I also thanked him for his interactions with James P. Hogan, an author whose writings have been very inspiring to me (like Two Faces of Tomorrow and Voyage From Yesteryear), as James acknowledges Marvin in the first as a major source of ideas and inspirations, so some big ideas went from Marvin to James to me at least in that sense. :-) I also thanked him for being such an inspiration in years gone by. I had been reading through all the comments at a Wired article on "D

The software is the open source project WordPress.org, which is quality software. Much to the benefit of the quality WordPress.com service that we run.

Good on you Ice Station Zebra for having a link handy to an incident from the over 6 years ago, from before Automattic was even founded, and which Matt took personal responsibility for http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/

I apologize for posting incorrect information. Thesis does contain portions of GPL'd code directly copied from WordPress. So what you say is 100% true, regardless of the take on GPL vs dynamic linking and APIs. I somehow managed to read TFA without noticing that bit :( Also see this.

However, I still stand by my assertion that any other WordPress theme which did not directly copy WordPress code cannot be reasonably considered a derived work for copyright purposes (and therefore not subject to the GPL), contrary to what WordPress authors claim.

It's a pity that this case is a GPL violation so blatant that it will never get to the point of debating those (far more interesting) issues in court - in fact, I doubt there will even be a court.

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