skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It is quite impractical to build a large building that will withstand a tornado"

It's also quite obvious there's a need for a shelter in areas where tornadoes are likely to form. So obvious in fact it's impossible to plead ignorance of that need, so the only other possible reason they didn't is carelessness because they could not have cared less if employees lives were at risk.
> It has certainly 'worked great' for leeches,

And for communities, and for sponsoring companies, and for some (although not all) authors.

> if you ignore bombs like this logging bug destroying Western civilization.

...yeah, no; a library had a bug. Somehow, Western civilization is still here.

> Can you explain a bit more how it worked great for the bulk of maintainers / authors who don't see any return on their work, burn out and have to do something else?

Can you explain why you think the majority of authors/maintainers burn out?
I see lots of sentiment in this thread that amounts to "I didn't know you were going to get rich off of my work."

That's anathema to Open Source. How do I know? Check "The Open Source Way" [1].

If you feel uncompensated, use a license that prevents commercial use.

[1] https://opensource.com/open-source-way
The sad part is that's only bringing in mid-5 figures which makes me think that findom is an efficient market and I await the Harvard Business Review case study of it with baited breath.
I hacked treestyle to look similar,
how does it play with vimium?
I always think about paying for the open source software that I use and I try to be more dilligent in paying for it.

The problem for me is, that while calculating how much I theoretically should spend on the OS I use for example (gnome+fedora+linux kernel,etc), it would be actually cheaper to pay for a windows version+microsoft cloud/office suite or switch to the apple ecosystem.

Same applies for programming frameworks I use.

Doesn't that mean opensource is inherently impossible to use ethically as a private person?

So how do you decide on how to deep and how much one should pay?
Yeah, it’s really wild. You get more mrems per year living down wind of a coal plant than you would living in a nuclear plant’s control room. You get more from eating bananas.
Open source users are the welfare queens of our times. As long as open source software exists, these lazy degenerates with no skin in the game will feel entitled to keep demanding more and more. Open source software needs to die.
You say that as if you even know your full dependency chain. Reality doesn't quite work that way. No one knew their codebase even relied on leftpad until it broke millions of applications the world over when it got pulled.

Some projects have the benefit of notoriety (log4j falls in that category) but plenty of projects are just "plumbing" and the only thing you know is the name of the dependencies you have in your dependency list. I can guarantee you that except for security audits, no one knows their full dependency tree, and that they have a deeper dependency with itself a dependency on a utility that depends on a thing that no one's even heard of, and no one's looked at for years, and you would never have looked for. While also being one of the critical pieces that your software runs on top of, capable of bringing down your entire product even if _what it does_ is literally trivial.

Best case, it fails. Your product/server is now broken (hopefully, for only a short while). But worst case, it has a 0-day exploit. And now your entire company is at risk to the tune of "depending on how bad, you may have just gone out of business because you can't afford what is necessary to both legally and professionally deal with the fallout".

(Did your product/service have a database that comes with rather massive fines for leaking that data? Good luck, that might bankrupt you. Does your company have contracts that are void on significant service interruption? Good luck, you may have just lost all your big clients. Etc.)
The entire thing is unlikely. I'm just pointing out that you can't claim space 'cleanly' when your adversaries are actively opposing your claim. To play devil's advocate further though:

As the 'defender' you likely don't need stable orbits. A year or two of denial might buy you what you want. You also don't need to ensure a collision against a single small target, you just need enough debris to make use of the area cost prohibitive in terms of risk.
I suppose in my case he might have been less effective at assessing my technical abilities (there were multiple technical interviewers throughout the day.)
Your Local Radio DJ's fake celeb chat scam – The open-ended interview
> It's how people rely on it without any consideration about the sourcing of it.

Exactly this. I think the problem is that OSS consumers often have a complex that they are entitled to "good software". But I doubt that the solution is to make it so that the producers are "entitled" to financial compensation. I can see situations where that backfires -- satisfying the producer's "entitlement" can exacerbate the consumer's sense of entitlement and just create an entitlement arms race, and stress out open source producers.
> authors who don't see any return on their work, burn out and have to do something else?

I don't understand this argument. Nobody starts an open source project - and posts it in the open to share freely - expecting to make any money. Are there even any significant amount of projects with a donation or a Patreon page?

Webnovels I read on RoyalRoad all have it and are much more successful that I would ever have thought given that the stories are all coimpletely free and all any one who pays a story author gets is a few chapters ahead of others, but I can't remember any of the numerous OS projects I use one way or another to even try to make any money.

I did see burnout in some projects. I once joined as co-maintainer of a medium sized project and was left as the sole maintainer because the main author just up and left and was unreachable (we only heard of him again over a year later, and he never touched that particular project again).

All the stories I saw had nothing to do with money at all though, just getting fed up with the expectations. In "my" project's case it also was the large amount of complexity and technical debt that made the original owner's attempts at adding and/or refactoring a huge time sink, and he probably would have been better off to start again from scratch (it's what happens after adding more and more features in a complex cross-mobile phone platform library project's code).

None of those "disillusioned open source maintainer" stories I saw ever included any attempt of making money with it. Disappointment of not being able to get money from anyone only ever comes from people starting a commercial project (a new company), if that kind of disappointment exists for freely shared open source software then I must have missed all instances of such a thing happening.

> It has certainly 'worked great' for leeches, if you ignore bombs like this logging bug destroying Western civilization.

All of life and especially commercial life in anything slightly sophisticated or at scale is "muddling through" to some degree. The same as biological life actually.

So overall I agree with the previous statement that it worked quite well. Nobody should be called a "leech" for using projects that were meant to be shared openly and freely, given the license and method of distribution (e.g. freely on Gitlab or Github).
Under the "Known limitations" section, the author mentions that anonymous functions get skipped. That might be a dealbreaker for some.

Since this program just walks the statically apparent callgraph, you'll get an under-approximation of the behavior of your program. If you'd like an over-approximation, something like control-flow analysis can handle cases with anonymous functions. [^1] [^2] [^3] There are still some limitations, but CFA is really powerful.

(Anyone curious can contact me (see my blog) if you want more information on CFA.)

[^1]: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2021-05-20_cfa/

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_flow_analysis

[^3]: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/papers/pldi88.pdf
> That afternoon, Rambo reached out to Watkins using the address jackbentleyesq@gmail.com, which he later described as an “off network” account sanctioned by the Counter Network Division.

That is actually a felony under many state laws, and could be a crime under federal law too.
Analogue of Quaternions for 2D Motions
Google Stadia Review 2021: Finally worth using
Watchy [1] has already be mentioned somewhere below and has an e-paper display.

[1] https://watchy.sqfmi.com
I'm an open source author and maintainer of a somewhat-popular python package[0] (~1M downloads/month) that I've maintained for over 10 years. I don't recall ever receiving a donation. I am still maintaining it, but I just don't have time to add the improvements that it needs to keep up with the ecosystem (asyncio, for example). If organizations who use it got together and chipped in some non-negligible amount, I would be much more serious about keeping up with it, but $0, or $5-20/month, is just not realistic incentive to compete with other priorities in my life. I don't know the answer, but that's my thought process.

0. https://github.com/amoffat/sh
‘Open Source’ has no implications about whether the writer gets paid or not, but I’ll set aside this semantic criticism.

There are many many FOSS projects where contributors get paid a great deal of money. Universities sponsor contributors. And most contributions to a project like say Kubernetes come from Google’s employees. Government agency grants. Et cetera. But if that’s not enough, tech giants throw a lot of money at places like the Linux Foundation to ensure that FOSS projects get maintained (and thus the maintainers get compensated).

The fact is that a little ‘buy me coffee’ link is simply an ineffective way to monetize a FOSS project. But FOSS is not broken. Some of the greatest things in computing today are FOSS.
Even if the contract itself might be commodified, the relationship won't be. Business will want what it wants, regardless of what the contract says. Maintainers will certainly be subject to influence campaigns by business, which will sometimes conflict with other "clients". Even saying "no, read the contract" to a persistent VP has a psychological and social cost. I can't really imagine this decreasing the pressure on maintainers: it's basically turning the project into a startup.
> IMO the worst is middle aged guys walking recording self-help/promotion sales selfie videos.

Paging "The brutal truth about marketing" guy that records selfie videos in a suburban neighborhood. Maximum cringe.
You could find where in your desktop environment it decides which app to open, and replace "firefox" with "firefox --profilemanager".
That's more an argument against old-school "no amount of architecture is ever enough" Java -- not so much an argument against the principle that engineer-time can fix bugs.
The only reason I’m able to maintain a reasonably successful open source library is because it is part of an open core business model. Without that I couldn’t justify the development effort or relentless support to myself, or my family. Getting a few hundred dollars a month wouldn’t cut it either.

Building a business on a stack of other people’s hobbies isn’t sustainable. I mean, just tell that to anybody outside of tech and watch their reaction.
Whatever I put out there is mostly to keep HR folks happy to check their bullet points, or done under straight GPL.

Valuable stuff, only with commercial contracts.

I also buy books from folks, or do occasional contributions to all ecosystems which are valuable to me.

Like myself they have bills to pay, however none of them (buying books or donations) is a sustainable business, if only a couple of people occasionally do it.

Somehow I think open source has legitimated piracy, in the sense that those that would pirate, now feel safe because license, and just go on their merry way and don't need to fear that the economic activities surprise audit would close down their shop.
Normal basements are almost underground bunkers, a reinforced concrete lid tied into reinforced concrete walls and the basement is survivable from F5.
Except you can't because hundreds of thousands of project have "log4j" in their dependency list not "wyldfire-fixed-log4j". If log4j broke and there was no maintainer, a fork would not fix things.
The James Webb Space Telescope
I want to know what percentage of those who died also suffered form
comorbidities. Also this is for people aged 50 and above, what about
healthy young people?

Do the math, death rate is 0.008% (boosted) vs 0.16% (unboosted) for aged
50 and above. Still super low. And we're getting better and better at
treating this thing.

Get it if you *want* it. Don't if you don't. I do not want it or need
it thank you very much.
Brave is not a good or secure browser, you can search here on HN for all the things they do wrong
That doesn’t change the fact that open source users are the welfare queens of our times. As long as open source software exists, lazy degenerates with no skin in the game will feel entitled to keep demanding more and more. That’s why open source software needs to die.
Realistic Mesmer Robot Head
Version and Stage Configuration Changes with HTTP Applications in Beta
Those audits are your duty. We've did this in programming a long time until recently the JavaScript craze took over.
At the same time, I think it's a lot to expect of people to wade through the feverish speculative bubble to make sense of what technology is interesting. I think it would be nice if some of this stuff started making its way out of currency associated blockchain projects and into the wider world of decentralized algorithms and protocols.
At a summer job in 1973, we used carved wood sticks to quickly set the toggle switches for the bootloader.
whispers cryptooo~

Gitcoin could really help here.
> How do you exhaust a renewable? By driving up its price, which creates higher rewards on innovation that brings it down.

This is a naive position: geothermal, like hydropower, have only a few locations where they can be feasibly tapped. If that power is used by cryptocurrency miners, that will drive up the price until it's no longer cheaper than the alternatives and that region will not be attractive to relocating industrial operations.

That could be excusable if cryptocurrency was useful but since over a decade and billions of dollars have yet to find a productive application, there's no way it's worth taking capacity away from useful activities. There's no shortage of demand, so anyone who makes a cheap non-carbon electricity source will have customers even without being subsidized by proof-of-waste speculators.
I get the feeling that you misunderstand the gist of the article.

The gist of the article is not "I didn't know you were going to get rich off of my work (and I'm pissed off by that)". The premise is - in my reading -

"Don't point the finger at me for writing bad software in my own free time, when you didn't even consider contributing to it and don't try to shift the blame when you have to face the consequences of your own cheap behavior".

At least that's my interpretation.
Sounds like an opportunity for a seedlegals.com style sass.

There’s tipping and sponsorship infra, but is there a service to plug an OS project into corporate-friendly licensing and support invoicing?
Do you pay for every piece of Open source software you use? How much? What is the criteria you use to determine how much you want to give them?

Yes, it would be very good if more people started to contribute to software they depend on, but to call them "leeches" is not only against the spirit of free software, it is counterproductive as it will probably lead people to the idea that proprietary/closed source is better.
This post didn't go the way I thought it would. When these discussions get going, I always feel a little guilty because my tiny company doesn't pay for all the open-source software we use. I suppose we should, but it would be hard to make a business case for that, since the software is already free. It would be easy to conclude that this is a problem for the big, rich companies to solve, but I'm suspicious of advocating any action that I'm not willing to do myself.
>>> When they started making the Model 3 or PowerWalls or rolled out the SuperCharger network, it’s because leadership decided to

yes, and ...

Look anything I say sounds like sour grapes but, honestly there were a thousand bloggers saying "someone should make electric cars", there were hundreds of engineers who had built prototypes in and out of major car companies. It was time. The technology was there.

Leadership is not posting a vision up on a site or sending round a memo (ie deciding to).

Leadership is having the capital in place (financial and reputation and network and that x factor), and risking it.

I am not trying to belittle the leadership - but I am trying to right size it. Without the climate, without the skilled engineers and the cash and the government support and so on, leadership is just prattling on HN comments.

You could pluck any fucker from HN and put them as CEO of any random tech company and their decisions would be within 10% of the original CEO.

The hard part is not leading. We already know where we are going. The hard part is not staff work. The hard part is inspiring people so they don't fuck off and join the other guy with the same ideas but more charisma.

Just like High frequency traders the CEO competition is other CEOs. And just like HFT the secret is not the special algorithm, it's just the doing of it that gives society benefit. And just like HFT there is a lot of sound and fury and we could probably get the same social benefit with a new market structure
You don’t owe anyone that uses your free software anything. If they rely on it and something is broken, they can fix it. That’s kinda the point of open source and it’s a good thing.
Because, in a real metaverse, everybody can make changes to their own stuff. That's the difference between a metaverse and an MMO.
If some homicidal maniac comes after me with a load of loganberries, I'll concede defeat.
I like opening the code I write. I don't plan on having two customers paying me $5/mo each for my super obscure piece of code.

Are we really going to blame log4j2 authors who, for all we know, don't care if someone else is using their project?
You need lots of transmission lines for that to work, and high voltage transmission is expensive to build, eats up land, and is opposed by every community it passes through.

I’m 100% in favor of lots of renewable use, but it’s not always a great use of land, prevents rewilding (with solar), and in the case of solar uses a ton of water. The latter being a major concern in arid regions.

A lot of nuclear’s cost comes from shifting/overly tight regulation, legal prohibition of reprocessing, legal prohibition for long term storage, and graft. The latter will be a problem with large scale renewables once they’re large enough.
pinetime
First those developers don't get any money for their work, now you also telling them that the work they are doing isn't really valuable anyway?

Did you consider the fact that half of your examples of worthy things are using the unworthy log4j?
Many people believe these things are nearly inexorably linked.
I’m with you.

Imagine everyone at Amazon directly involved in the operational disaster recovering effort having to preface everything they say and write with “thoughts and prays” before getting on with fixing issues.

We’re well aware people have died, and many more will have their lives impacted.

I’m an infrastructure and steel construction guy, I’m here to get shit done. If you need consoling you’ll find me quite abrasive as you’re probably in my way.

Friends, family, mental healthcare professionals, and religious practitioners are probably better at that than I.
Yes. Any day, and twice on Sunday. If 90% of COVID deaths in the US could have been prevented (in fact, many could have been)[0][1], that cuts this whole thing down to a very bad flu season, comparable to the 1957 flu pandemic [3].

Would you rather not cut your risk by 90%?

Edit: Incidentally, I have been hit by cars while walking 3 times. No injuries, luckily, since they were very low speed impacts.

Why are you seemingly advocating against something (getting a booster shot) that's also extremely unlikely to harm you?

---

[0]: https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/coronavirus/n...

[1]: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/covid-1...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa...
I feel as if engineers at firms that build systems that use open source libraries should campaign internally to create budget line items for paying non-trivial amounts to the maintainers of those libraries.

I find it difficult to blame developers individually. Individuals working at these companies aren't going to see it as their role to send some of their own after-tax income to maintainers via GitHub Sponsors unless they are unusually charitable. But I could definitely see my company sending thousands out the door (pre-tax) every year to the maintainers of the libraries we depend on.

For example, imagine your team is 15 people. Have the company budget for and send an additional one developer's worth of salary out annually to the open source maintainers, divided among the libraries in a proportion agreed to by the development team. Yes, it's an additional cost line item, but it's the right thing to do and it won't break the bank.

Open source has reduced costs dramatically for all of us who use it in our dependencies list. A nominal cost line item on our annual budgets is more than fair.
I think Delphi 7 was the last version of Delphi I actively used.

But it was back in Ukraine, at a time when everything was pirated, so the question of licensing didn't really come up.

Ah. Enterprise Envy is such a pity. I really had my hopes up when Kylix came out.
State of the Open Home
Sure, but since someone brought the military as an argument for an example of safe nuclear power generation and since AFAIK military forces never did civil nuclear power generation then I believe it's fair game to bring a counter-example to that ^^.
This is a point I've been pondering about recently, especially since the attacks against Free Software and RMS.

I've been convinced of the inherent good that openly available software is, both for users and developers, and for society at large. I want to continue contributing to the common goods. But I am also fully aware that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, and all other platforms exploiting users' privacy and controlling so much of our digital lives could rise to power that easily because they had a trove of open source software to build on, software for which there is no counterparts needed. That is what the MIT, Apache, BSD licenses and friends allow you to do.

That is why my opinion now is that if you want your work to be open, you should not make it open source "only" but fully Libre. Use a copyleft license. If other developers don't want to pay you in money, at least their production should become a common so that the entirety of society can benefit. Don't give FB more power to turn elections in the direction they want; make it so that someone else can _only_ build a platform where users, and as such people, remain those in power.

Open Source Software benefits those in power, and unfortunately it is not us who hold this position.
Agreed. It is exactly the funding model my project (started with two colleagues) endorses. We incorporated federally and keep an open core.

I can't imagine it would be as clear cut for a "library", but it can be done...
Tech companies also pay for health insurance, sick leave, and ma/pa leave. Sure pensions aren't a big thing, but increased savings from increased salary can make up for that (not to mention 401k).