skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Developers often ask on HN: "How can I make a full-time living from my open source product?"

Consider this scenario: You have created an open source library or programme and now want to sell it to customers. You would love to work on the product full-time. And it's important to you that the product remains open source. What are your options?

- Offer the product for free, but sell support. (No developer finds this option appealing.)

- Offer the product for free, but charge for documentation. (This is inherently user-hostile and encourages purposely complicated products to goad users to pay for the documentation.)

- Offer the product for free, but offer a paid hosting option if it is a server-based web app. (Users who do not want to pay for hosting will self-install the product.)

- Offer the product for free, but charge for a closed-source add-on with more features ('open core').

Notice a missing option in the list above? To sell you product with source code (with a open source licence attached) is simply not possible. And yet, this missing option probably appeals the most to creators.

The examples of commercial success of open source products are few and far between. You can make a list of a few dozen successful examples e.g. GitLab ('open core'), Red Hat (enterprise support) - but these examples are the exceptions, not the norm.

Sponsorship, donations or patreon campaigns are not steady or sustainable long-term options.

The alternative? Well, one option is to offer a source-only option for your product. You charge for your product and offer the source code at the same time. The customer is free to amend the code to suit their needs. This isn't open source though - the customer cannot re-distribute the code. This is the 'source-only' model.

Recently, some companies have created a hybrid model: free open-source code for non-commercial use and a paid license for commercial use. There is debate about whether this meets the spirit of open source development or not. Everyone has a opinion. You can make you up your own mind.

Finally, and quite ironically, there is a recent development in software (related to open source code) that has been wildy successful: SaaS (Software as a Service).

Why ironic? Because open source software has been critical to the success of the SaaS model. And yet, the source code for these services (built on open source) is not visible.

It's a model that takes away the hassle of installation and maintainence of software, but gives users less control of their data than the desktop software model that preceded it. Where you essentially "rent" an app until you stop payment.

You could argue SaaS is the true success of the 'open source business model'. Just not in the way open source advocates ever expected it to be.
How to print a number with commas as thousands separators in JavaScript
The claim about carbon cost of shipping has no numbers attached to it and is most likely completely deceptive. It doesn't account for the energy return on energy invested of tar sands being 3x-10x less than conventional oil, an EROEI of 5 versus 18-50:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

We do not need this oil in particular, there's more than enough other oil, so there's no foregone conclusion that we are going to extract these tar sands.

Further, the need for stopping this particular pipeline is that we are not transitioning quickly enough, and it's a bad capital allocation that hurts our ability to make the investments we do need.

The pipeline isn't being installed to lower the carbon load of bringing the oil to market, it's only there to reduce costs, which means that there will be greater amounts of that oil brought to market, versus cheaper oil from other sources that don't require as much energy intensity. The pipeline only exists for these particular oil investors to profit, instead of other ones in other parts of the world.
I agree on points you gave.
> The lead developer
.. was your manager.
Isn't shallow vs deep copying a thing in most languages?
Phoronix made a small article about this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DAMON-Pa...
> Yet it continues to be 'mandatory' here, and he has a monopoly on serving this market.

I don't know if it was mandatory, but I had packages sewn up in Hyderabad as recently as a few years ago. There's a bunch of guys who sit outside the GPO that do this. Show your package to the clerk inside before to make sure its kosher, and then the guy will wrap and seal it for 20 rupees.
It sure seems like that has not been true historically. Religions are organizations full of people that have worldviews. When science finds evidence contradicting those worldviews it often becomes quite a bit less 'peaceful' real quick.
Oh you checked the numbers for me? Oh darn. If rent is rapidly going up and purchasing is more and more impossible, I guess the only natural conclusion is everyone making mid six figures will all be unable to live in homes any more. Maybe even homeless? I should probably just drop out.
What a great story. I dont think you are alone in this. I also think this applies to more than just math.
I feel like I understand a lot of the pandemic and post-pandemic demand spikes, but used cars elude me. Is it just people wanting new cars less, or less new cars being available?
Call me when solar shingles are actually cost effective. Having hulking solar panel nailed to my roof is a big no.
> So the developers take on the responsibility of a manager so they don't need a manager? The value of a good manager is that they can do some of the stuff on that list so the developers don't have to (ideally including all the 'fighting').

Incompetent managers fail to unblock their teams and instead push pressure on their reports to "fight". Often blocking career growth, promos, compensation changes with these reasons.

I'm sorry. If the dev ultimately does this work, the manager should be fired or made an IC where they can demonstrate their value.
This is the plot of a Star Trek episode

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...
In my experience it was just not doing huge UX reorganisations without prior notice.

I’d dig deeper into the why with your customers, after we understood moving buttons around causes people’s day to be hard we did it only when really justified etc.

I wouldn’t hold up releases for customers, but do dig into the why more with your customers about why they want this notice, you may find it’s just an assurance something like a workflow isn’t totally different next Monday morning.
What Causes the Northern Lights? Scientists Finally Know for Sure
That's what I call good customer service. :)
Why would you not want to eradicate Covid?
If the rooms aren't used, they won't experience any wear and tear and they won't have to be cleaned again for the next renters.
Stripe's documentation and API integration was so simple compared to Paypal and others.
> prone to inflation of its worth

This issue is not limited to developers.
For what it's worth, Georgians have been paying for new nuclear for over 10 years now, and solar has made vastly more impact over that timeframe. (Our new nuclear has yet to come online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...)
It wont be banned, it will just cost much more to insure (since it will be directly tied to risk, computers already drive better than humans). If you drive manually, you will need to pay for the privilege.
> Your run of the mile non-technical manager sure is not very good at understanding the intricate complexity of all the moving parts of creating software.

> Developers on the other hand appears blind to the fact that they play only a minor role in the bigger picture.

Y Combinator was largely founded as a rejection of this premise. Paul Graham believed it was much easier to teach great Software Hackers how to business, than it was to teach business folks how to software. I think it turned out pretty well.

> A scenario which never happens because in real life you have at least 3 levels of technical management, multiple divisions/departments involved, spread across continents and multiple vendors participating.

And your organization with 3 levels of technical management and all those divisions and departments will often get their lunch eaten by a very small group of people working in a startup, moving faster and accomplishing more in less time.
CSS in SVG in CSS: Shipping Confetti to Stack Overflow’s Design System
Wait, so iOS doesn't let you fine tune your notifications? I don't know how I could deal with my phone unless I could turn off, or turn down notifications.
People that play zero sum games only get to play with other zero sum players. There is some risk they will lose. People that play win-win games get to play with other winners (and be winners).

Be a winner.
Right? I did mention it's controversial.
I did transition 2 years ago as I got a mac from my job and I was in mobile development. Within a few days I got productive with it although it took more than a year to accept "the mac way". My arch linux was fully customized with i3 and the like. I still miss tiling window manager this day.
Absolutely this. Android's notification channels are a lifesaver for apps like Snapchat, Instagram, or any of the other social media apps that only serve to suck you in. It makes it super easy to disable all notifications except for DM alerts (which is what I typically do for most apps). It's crazy how many apps actually support it, and it's even crazier that Apple hasn't followed suit yet. Even with iOS 15, Apple's notifications are still a last-gen mess.
People like it for the same reason we like modern chess notation over older more verbose notation.

Consider a game that starts with white moving their king side knight to the square in front of the pawn on the bishop's file. Here is how that would have been written through the ages [1].

Early 1600s: The white king commands his owne knight into the third house before his owne bishop.

Mid-1700s: K. knight to His Bishop's 3d.

Early 1800s: K.Kt. to B.third sq.

Around 1850: K.Kt to B's 3rd.

Around 1860: K.Kt to B. 3d.

Around 1870: K.Kt to B3.

Around 1890: KKt-B3.

Early 1900s: Kt-KB3.

Mid 1900s: N-KB3.

Last quarter of 1900s to present: Nf3 or ♘f3 if you want to avoid language-specific piece names.

Reading that numpy code compared to reading APL is like reading a record of a chess game from around 1700.

[1] https://www.knightschessclub.org/the_history_of_notation.htm...
One of life's little wondrous coincidences - a global hunt for one Satoshi, years before the Satoshi Nakamoto mystery. I guess it's just a given name, like Richard or whatever.

I wish there had been a creative solution to the puzzle, rather than 'wait until a sufficiently creepy facial search on internet photos product is invented'.
I understand that from the 1st of July, the electronic services section will expand to all goods, potentially with some thresholds, so you should charge the VAT rate for that particular item at the customer's home country and submit that to the Finnish tax authority (under the OSS scheme).
IATA Travel Pass app to go live soon, providing electronic vaccine passport
I mean, it will be like everything else - companies which really want to spoil their employees and who buy BMWs as fleet cars, will order them with every subscription option covered and just eat the cost. So the CEO doesn't have to worry about his 7-series not having heated seats.

But I can also totally see situations where if the choice is between say....a Ford Mondeo or a BMW 3-series, the company can go "you can get the BMW, but we're not paying anything for options - if you want them, that's on you".

>>Eight months later I'm looking at moving to another company and I'll lose that value. Maybe that affects my decision.

If it's a subscription, then that value is lost anyway. You can probably get a partial refund for the unused months before you return the car.
Yep. Most of the top talent retired, died, or changed jobs around the late 90's and early 00's. EPRI and the NRC aren't what they were either.

UIUC has a great nuclear program (NPRE PSE), and so does the US Navy with hands-on experience.

Building that back to a fraction of what it was would take decades and wouldn't be the same.
That's the nature of the internet and decentralized information sources.

The vast majority of people are consuming propaganda or crazy shit (MSM and conspiracy theories) but don't know how to filter the info to find a narrative that most accurately represents reality.

Because of this, the mainstream media will ALWAYS be able to dismiss strawman arguments and label dissidents as conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists will also ALWAYS be able to poke holes in the propaganda and spin convincing alternate narratives.

In any valid disagreement with the popular narrative, you WILL find conspiracy theorists.

One caveat to this situation is that IF the mainstream institutions were able to rebuild trust (by telling the truth), then you would have far less people poking holes in their narratives and therefore fewer conspiracy theories. So, I don't get angry at conspiracy theorists because I understand that they're created by a lying state and media - they're canaries not a cancer.
I haven't, I'm not super familiar with those systems TBH.
Changes a few things, you don't "know" the result of something that never happened, you suspect.

Also changes the perception that Microsoft were doing it to attack Google.

Once it's a standard you'd get it enacted in law that companies have to respect the setting.
> The main argument the inflation lovers propose is, “well if the prices keep going down then people won’t buy anything as they’ll just wait longer for the product to get cheaper.”

I'm not sure if I have seen that argument very often. It's not a great one, for sure, because at some point prices kind of just stabilize long enough for people to decide it's time to make a purchase. So sure maybe that happens in the short term, but not the long term. The inverse is true too - people are rushing out to buy cars and things anticipating the prices will continue to go up.

The strongest argument I've seen against strict deflation just comes down to competitiveness of exports.
I hate the rollerbag phenomenon and fighting for the overhead compartments enough that I check bags even when I don't have to.

Often the people handling the luggage think I'm strange to pay $50 to check a bag when I haven't maximized my carry-on bags or even take advantage of the free bag I get because I have the credit card. It might even get me investigated by the TSA for being un-American.
Definitely a conflict of interest. That said I think all the solar sales organizations/financial models I have seen have been bullish on the performance of solar assets and then refer to the warranties as a backup.

If you are financing a project and the degradation occurs faster but not at a rate of which it gets swapped out on warranty - you want something to cover that financial difference. Also swapping out the asset has costs that aren't covered - so it isn't as simple as it would seem.

It's the same as all insurance products - might need it, might not. At least in this case they put forward some real statistical data. And their comment that residential performs worse than commercial completely resonates given the LOE difference.
The MTTR That Matters
Yup. Use mdadm to do RAID5, 6 or 10 and let it sit in your friend's place as a target for encrypted snapshots; do the same in exchange and you both have reliable offsite backups. If you need a big restore, go get the machine physically and bring it back to your network for full gigabit speeds.
I would be happy to pay money to be able to use a car without needing a drivers license but own my own car
A class is a blueprint you go to for constructing new objects. A prototype is an object you create once that is copied to a variable when the constructor is called. That is how I understand it, but maybe someone else can explain further.
> I think you are attributing a lot of things to Graham that he didn't say. He did not say that it was not about slavery.

What you are saying is just simply quite literally not true. He said exactly that:

> "Better stick to the standard cartoon version that the Civil War was about slavery"

-- http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html
I'm not sure how folks use it, but I think the sweet spot is for simple-to-run relational storage for a smallish set of data.

Some people don't use it for the distribution, but just like a HTTP API in front of SQLite.

https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite/blob/master/DOC/FAQ.md#why-...
It's still denial. It's just moving past Stage 1 denial ("it's not happening") and maybe past Stage 2 denial ("it's not our fault").

It could be seen as a form of Stage 3 denial ("it's not that bad"), if that's taken to include "the solutions are easy". Of course in this case it proceeds instantly to stage 4 denialism ("it's too expensive", i.e. impossible).

I know you'd rather be optimistic about it, but when people move through the stages like that, they seem unlikely jump off of them. They can hang out at stage 4 indefinitely before moving on to stage 5 ("it's too late").
The main reason I want to learn APL is for the white-boarding exercises during interviews. Most places will let you write in your strongest language.
Very interesting, I wonder how it’d hold against Aphyr’s db claim invalidating machine.
Two factors that I'm aware of:

-- Early in the pandemic, travel was way down. Rental car companies unloaded a lot of their fleet that were sitting idle. Now that demand is back up, they are back on the market for vehicles.

-- Semiconductor shortages: automobile manufacturers cut their orders in early 2020 anticipating a decline in demand. That decline never happened, so they're now now able to obtain sufficient chips for new vehicle manufacturing. Thus a decline in new car availability that might push some car-buyers onto the secondary market.
I don't think QC uses naive Copenhagen by convention? I remember reading something by a quantum computation scientist (maybe it was Scott Aaronson?) who said he prefers many works.
> Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers.

I feel like a relatively intelligent person but I absolutely struggle with writing concise emails / docs that are well organized. It's an agonizing process and I feel my results are hit or miss with little inbetween.
Exist power in being fully immerse in a paradigm. You can do OO on C, but still you are on C, that is not OO.

You can do arrays on python, but python is not an array language.

In other words, the moment you mix 2 paradigms, them will mismatch in direction of the most dominant one.
I'm going to assume you are asking in good faith. From wikipedia: "A conflict of interest (COI) is a situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another"

In this specific case where the firm is publishing research they have funded, there are essentially two interests or activities at play:

A. research to determine the extent of solar panel installation performance or lack thereof
B. selling financial products based on performance

Since interest B would be negatively impacted by a certain outcome from interest A (a finding that solar installation performance is optimal, in this case), that implies the firm's performance of activity A may have been affected in order to reduce negative impact to the firm overall.

We see this a lot in industry-funded research. Its not unusual. For example, recently a lot of airlines have funded studies about Covid19 spread in airplane cabins. To be published in a reputable journal, researchers are compelled to declare these interests in the cover page of their papers. Also, a good journalist will state this somewhere in their piece (normally at the top or the bottom, conventionally in italics).

To your point about competition and rates, that is really not any part of conventions on declaring interest conflicts in academic research but I'll entertain an argument about it here because I don't think the market forces are as strong as you imply.

The idea that a product will be priced perfectly simply does not apply in a niche market such as this. When you are selling a niche product, the market will not be deep enough to force firms into the behaviour you are describing. This already applies to things as widely held as flood insurance where the market is so shallow, that the federal government has to intervene to make it viable. Solar PV Installation performance insurance (not to mention options) is extremely niche.
Why are these just-so stories believed so much?

Just because plants compete on some limited level doesn’t mean that a particular plant organism “winning” means becoming the most efficient converter of sunlight.

Is everyone’s memory like those people who can remember every detail? Why not? If you’re immediately planning to make up a just-so explanation on the spot that has the requisite but unproven claim about increasing the genetic fitness function, that is the problem with evolutionary explanations. It’s not science if you just make stuff up and give it the same amount of credibility as something that has been tested and proven. You can take any trait and spin stories about why it is the way it is, and then expect somehow that some metric has to be maximized because of your unproven theory.
I don't do financial modeling, but in all other areas of modeling it's definitely the case that there are many different "solutions" by which I'm guessing you mean local optima.

Having multiple solutions is somewhat equivalent to having different states of matter in physics. And economies definitely have very different modes, or states, that we call recessions or booms. Being able to have these sorts of local optima would seem to be necessary foe any model of an economy.

But I may not be understanding you, because we are using the same words in different ways...
I see that as a separate and larger point, but it is true. The reasons for it are also more complex than "they just don't" though they aren't technological reasons.
This seems like a massively overcomplicated solution to a simple problem. If you're running out of memory, it's because:

1. You don't have enough memory for what you're trying to do

2. Your software has a memory leak

Add more memory to the system or fix your software. Why is this fancy feature needed at all? It's simpler and safer just to reboot and have a fresh start if you're out of memory. Set panic_on_oom, job done.
> From what I can tell, they have meetings, try to get people to work more, and approve time off.

Do not under appreciate the importance of managers attending meetings, because a good manager attends those meetings so the devs don't have to. A good manager of developers seeks to shield her developers from the busywork and politics imposed by the larger organization so they can be as productive as possible.
Small reactors aren't cost-effective at scale because of physics.

They also need to be near large water sources to use evaporative cooling.
We shipped customer portal support a few weeks ago, apologies for not following up and letting you know! If there were any other issues though, do let me know -- kmoriarty@stripe.com
Part of what's driving the prices in used cars upwards is the inability to manufacture enough new cars to meet demand, which in turn is caused by a global chip shortage / volatile chip supply.
Removed from US Blacklist, Xiaomi Rekindles Its Mobile Chip Ambition
"amount you can look at at once" is severely underestimated.
Good summary. It's easy enough for EU VAT/MOSS, but this is the killer right here:

> you may be liable to collect and pay VAT to the customer's country's tax authorities