skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's the point, they don't pay, and they don't get support. But they still complain

You've put your finger on the core of the issue with FiloSottile's suggestion. The problem is that to sell something to a big corporation, you need to have something tangible you can sell. What you have are enormous pieces of widely used software, being given away for free. Many companies are going to take that and run with it, and forgo a support contract entirely. You may argue that they want support when there's an issue, but the truth is they're happy enough with the status quo and just complaining a lot.

In FiloSottile's model, a corporation needs to use your software for something specific, but also expects to need changes to it or prioritized issue support and approaches you; you send them an invoice with five zeroes on it as a bill for your services and they are heavily incentivized to pay for it.

Unfortunately that's not the reality for 99.9% of open source maintainers, a figure that includes most creators of popular software like VLC. I've personally contributed to a bunch of projects and maintain some of my own, but it's a hobby. As far as I know no corporations are even using any of them. Figuring out some software niche that no one yet has a product it, building it, and waiting for a corporation to swoop in and drop me a six figure yearly check cannot be a career strategy.
It may be a shameless plug to your blog post, but that led me to your library shoelace[0], so thank you!

0: https://shoelace.style/
Countering this anecdata with my own: I have several rare diseases and I'm quite disabled. I didn't get noticeable effects from my first two Pfizer doses (at least nothing I could distinguish from my chronic illness), while the third gave me flu-like symptoms for 2-3 days. I was happy about this because it told me it was working, and I returned to my (crappy) baseline afterwards with no lingering effects.

I wonder if you just happened to get ear ringing coincidentally around the time you got your second dose, and connected the dots even though it might not be causally related.
Binary toggle switches? Luxury. In my day we didn’t have binary toggle switches. We had to quickly touch raw wire leads to each other in the right sequence, flawlessly, every time. And we were damn grateful of it.
Everything we do has risks and what-ifs.

What if you come out with a baseball bat and the thief has a gun?

What if you come out with a gun and there's a second thief that you don't see and he fires first?

What if you come out and fire at the "burglar" and it turns out to be your neighbor's drunk teenager walking into the wrong home or police doing a no-knock warrant on the wrong address?

There's always risks. The actions you take and the risks you choose to be guided by are entirely a function of the deep values you actually hold and act on.
Well, talking about people wanting their home warm in winter, in a discussion about non-fossil power source is pretty ironic.
>Sometimes I just have a feeling Linus is playing dumb.

I don't think he was playing dumb in that case. I think he was frustrated by the Linux challenge and didn't enjoy it one bit so he did all the tasks in a sloppy, "let's just get this over with" manner, which caused him to make silly mistakes that could have been prevented if he would have done 60 seconds of googling "how do I x on Linux" before plowing head first into everything.

But I can completely understand him. He's the CEO and the face of a multi million dollar media company and a family man with kids, hardly the person with the spare time and inclination to be learning the quirks of a new OS between running a company and spending time with a family, when he just wanted to use that little spare time to play the vidja games he liked on Linux instead of Windows, not study the new OS beforehand.

And I think his attitude can be found in many average joes who don't find the experience of learning a new OS enticing and just expect a seamless transition from Windows/MacOS to Linux.
I can't remember his name, this was circa 2004 in the UK (so technically a "solicitor" not a lawyer). I found him on a referral from an acquaintance.
In the Turing Test you have one human judge. I'm asking what happens when two humans disagree about the human-ness of some automatically generated text.
*tested
The vertigo effect you describe, was that right after each dose, or at a later point.

It would be interesting to know more about this side effect.
I actually do make a very small amount of money for my posts. I make about $120 per month on Patreon (I more accurately make $175-ish per month but I also donate back to the amount of about $55 per month to other projects) and this blog is frequently brought up in interviews, which means that it becomes an impetus for people to hire me. I'm not sure how to quantify that, but either way it offsets the costs of hosting the server, even though I have kind of a ridiculous level of overkill (Ryzen 5 3600, 64 GB of ram) for that server.

As for the time to write these posts, yeah I'm making nowhere near my market value for this kind of writing. I've considered adding ads to my blog, but I still feel kind of philosophically uncomfortable with "selling out" like that. My job really does make sure that all my needs are accounted for and I am blessed to be in a state where I have financial excess and can make additional private contributions to other projects.

At some level though my blog is really a sink for my anxiety. Just being able to put words out into the void and knowing that someone is gonna read them helps a lot when it comes to making things a lot less scary in the world. I really do just throw them over the wall when I'm done though lol. Sometimes I'll do a typo pass but most of the time I write well enough that my first pass turns out to be the last pass unless some critical problem is found. This doesn't happen often though.

I do occasionally make volumes out of my writing and sell them on Itch (https://withinstudios.itch.io/), but I have only ever made $250 on there in total; nowhere near enough to fund the creation of the media in question. I also don't advertise my Itch shop very well so that may be partially on me.

Mostly though the goal of this post was to make people think about the issue. I have succeeded.
> pay for health insurance

Have cancer, or a premature baby with 90 days in Neonatal Intensive Care, in the USA, and get back to me on your health insurance.
Are data breaches actually treated as all that seriously? For all the talk about cyber security, there seems to generally be little investment. It appears to be viewed as more of a reputational concern than an operational one.

A past organization of mine had a data breach (the kind that ended up making the news everywhere). A few people left (probably making it worse with all the turnover there), but I would be surprised if anything really changed in that organization.
This is just the broken window fallacy. Hobbyists giving away schematics for unbreakable windows are not stealing from your window repair business.

Yes, having open source competition means you'll have to either build a superior product that customers are willing to pay for, or find another niche. That's a good thing.
It was added by these maintainers in 2.x and did not exist in 1.x. The maintainers are also different from 1.x developers and took the brand. They may regret their past decisions, but it was is irresponsible to claim that it was not their fault and added for backward compatibility.
The story of heirloom fruit and vegetables is sad. People spent their entire lives sometimes creating delicious varieties only to be blown out by produce that was cheap to grow and looked good on the supermarket shelf (taste didn’t matter).

Apples are a great example. Almost everything in the supermarket (save for a few varieties) is bland and mealy. It LOOKS great though, and that’s all that matters.
If you read the first post of the series, he talks about palisades and pre-roman/assyrian fortifications. Basically, there were simple fortifications when you expect raiders like the indian tribes in America. Once you have big states with specialized armies, you start to build bigger and more complex defenses. When the western roman empire fell, western Europe went back to simpler fortifications. With the enrichment of that part of the continent, the fortifications became stronger and built of stone, but then gunpowder was introduced and it changed all the equations.
> The culture of companies -- nearly all of them, including the one I work for -- that freeload off this work is what's broken.

Capitalism will always try to extract work at the lowest possible cost. If it’s possible to use your work without paying for it, companies will do it. They’ll fund work when funding the work can gain them influence or political dividends.

My two open-source projects, a font and pip-chill, are, respectively, a work of love and something that solves a problem for me. I enjoy working on them. In the past I have worked on other projects, but always to solve issues I had.
I believe some things about cellular and neural activity are about bi-stable states of being. You expend energy holding state A and can be in state B by changing expenditure of energy.

If you disrupt neural and oxygenated blood flow, there would be an initial pressure and energy drop. But, clearly most cells get a simultaneous uh-oh kick. If it took about 60 seconds for them to hold back the change from intra cellular holdings and then flip state, I would not be surprised.

Muscle meat takes longer to shed its lactic acid burden. That's what meat hanging is about. I'm told you can see muscle twitches in hung carcases for some time.

Van Jacobson's work on TCP included the network effect of buffer and delay causing window synchronisation. You would think a brain might also be forced into a co-aligned state by a single massive all encompassing trauma like loss of oxygenated blood in one stroke (sorry)
> weeded out a huge number of bad candidates.

A lot of hiring managers have no concept of experiment design.

You can’t invent a measure (or copy it from a blogs about how other companies hire), look at who it rejects, and conclude they are bad. You don’t know if they were good or bad. You never worked with any of them. You only know that you applied your measure.

The only candidates you have any information about are the ones you hired, yet you are insulting the others on the internet today
What are the licenses that force the licensee to:

- share money earned (support or sales)

- share theyr time to support the project (writing docs)

i do know it's illusionary that everybody does theyr part, but not asking for something back might be just wrong.

what are other ideas that do not require the developer to create a support ecosystem around his library to earn money or the possibility to work on the project full time?

Is it an idea for a startup to support developers earn money with theyr products?
Shouldn’t Open Source be considered the 8th wonder of the world?

- OSS allowed an entire industry to flourish,

- It has had so many contributions that it is easily the category which is the biggest benevolence of the world, and possibly the biggest achievement of humanity,

- It allowed the entire world to go securely on the internet (launch a Debian and it’s secure and up to very high professional standards without effort, try doing that in the legal field),

- Its results are permanent. In 2100, documents written in Office 365 or Adobe will be lost, but they’ll be able to recompile LibreOffice, Chrome (at least Webkit) or Wordpress. Benefits of OSS accrue over time, as opposed to closed-source software which is sold under closed license and DRM.
30 years on Kuwait is still scarred by catastrophic pollution
Can someone explain exactly what bad thing someone can do with this exploit?

I understand passing a data to a second server and being able to exfiltrate environment vars. (Environment vars are evil.) But I feel like I’m missing a step. How does this let someone take over a machine? How can attacker upload and run their own binary that can actually do real damage?
> Douche® furnitures

Somehow that does have the cadence and sound of a ‘premium’ brand, or at least faux-premium. The ‘registered’ symbol really sells it, though.

In these post-ironic times, I can easily see this name being used.
It's the fucking Juicero of coffee. If you put it that way, no wonder that company got so much funding.

Seems juice drinkers are smarter than coffee guzzlers lol
Obviously this isn’t how Anders Hejlsberg, who invented and then ‘maintained’ C# for a decade thinks about things.
What else does it do and what cost? What is the cost benefit analysis of the rice research center?
$50 is a very high number and location specific. You get off-shore wind power in the UK for that, with off-shore being more expensive than on-shore.

$13.5 for solar in Abu Dhabi could be set as the current lower limit in optimal conditions.

https://rethinkresearch.biz/articles/uae-solar-deal-brings-l...
Perhaps OSS has become too sophisticated and professional-standard for its own good, while still being created and maintained by amateurs.

I have an analytics package which is apparently being evaluated by the military of a large country. Even if secure code, now the maintainers themselves are under attack.

For I am definitely a weaker link than a soldier or agent or gov department. Did not expect such usage when creating this project. If said government had seen how this was developed and tested, they would probably physically destroy the machines it is installed on.
2nded. Link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL150326949691B199
It aint going to happen, have you read some of the contracts linked to opensource, it will be a minority who make money from it. For example, I could use opensource internally, add features to it but I dont have to submit those changes back to the main source for others to use. Not only that who is going to police it? Its not like there is some magic open source police who will police my computer is there?!?
So sure whilst the statement is true that Open Source runs most of the internet, the companies using it like Facebook or Google are not under any legal obligation to submit any changes back to the public domain for the greater good under some of those contracts. Even MS has some API's which come very close to mirroring Open Source functionality which makes me question MS is this legal!

Open Source is just naïve charity, much like the UK Govt exploited the charity of the public by helping along a Weekly 8pm clap for NHS workers on a Thursday night during Covid Lockdowns. A weekly clap aint going to pay the bills and the rich will say anything to get out of handing over money. Hard lesson but its the truth, they would spend on PR Image control than pay bills IMO.

So sorry, Open Source is something people can practice on and not get paid for except in a consulting role at best.
That's why I don't contribute to open source that is used by big corps. I don't like the idea of working for free for the benefit of billionaires.
If breaking changes on an API are made in minor versions then they're not actually following semantic versioning.. and that's by choice.
>> You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support.

That's true. The problems brought up in the article all stem from companies relying on open source and then getting into trouble when there are problems with it. They would pay if they had to.

The core problem is that everyone wants something for nothing. Sure companies appreciate that they can get billions of dollars worth of infrastructure software for free. Individuals appreciate that they can get useful software for free (though many don't care if it's FLOSS or illegally obtains commercial). People will take what they can, and pay for what they must. Open source is sometimes better than commercial, and even if the developers were paid industry rates it would be much cheaper because companies charge rent for software - not for development.
You cannot say “this” straight after a full stop (period). Get over it.

The commenter is a native speaker and I had to read what they said more than once to understand.
Thank you for indulging this because the opposition refines the idea. The objection I'm interpreting is that this will make the price of electricity in the region too high for anything else because of that demand. I'd say that in exchange for locating there, it provides a certain percentage of power at a loss rate, and this electricity supplied to the region is in effect a tax. Regional energy needs above a certain level would have to pay competitive prices for it.

If I have a hydroelectric dam or geothermal plant in a little remote mining town, and I put the output of whole thing towards miners for proof of work/waste/sacrificial block processing, that means the processors are taking something that is local there (hydro power) and refining it into value (blocks that facilitate economic transactions), and exports the value instantly via satellite uplink to the global economy (completed blocks, proofs, etc).

This means we don't have to transmit electricity hundreds of miles/km and lose it. We just refine electricity into compute processing, and export its service value as processed transactions right there. Since most of the renewable electricity is being used and isn't being transmitted, it doesn't effect broader energy market prices, and creates further incentives to innovate to optimize power use in the region.

I get the sense that most of the objections to cryptocurrencies are because the low bar to entry and decentralized nature makes them the wrong kind of Keynesianism, where instead of government printing money to pay hole diggers and hole fillers, we're using the same proof-of-waste algorithm, but on machines instead of people.

Speculators as a bugbear aren't a thing when you are building something either, so I'm not sure that's a material argument.
What you say is nonsense.
Companies will try to pay as little as possible to make more profit. They won't pay you more than you can make them.
Employees will try to get paid as much as possible. They won't work for something they can't live on.

All is good and dandy.

If employees are not getting paid, they'll go and do something else (like another job or growing food themselves) or steal and starve if there are no jobs or resources. They would never work for free because they can't live without eating.
Only, I don't remember what computer that was

Didn't the iPhone developer guidelines call for this to be done by individual apps at one point, in lieu of splash screens?
Also the IRRI which is I believe the Philippines, Vietnam, Lao and Cambodia who have the rice research cooperative agreement. They do a lot of work on Golden rice.
I'm not sure if there's a language issue here, or if I'm misinterpreting something, or something else

> For instance, the divisibility rule of 6 is very similar to the divisibility rule of 45732360346.

What does this mean? Are you talking about which numbers factor into these numbers, or which numbers have these numbers as a factor?

The latter meaning is what I've always understood the "divisibility rule" of a number to mean. But it seems like you might be using the term in the first sense.
It is often expected to be defined in the expectations towards engineers at Staff+ level that people on that level are good at communications and can balance technical and business points of view.

Also, developers are often not skilled enough to hide their “lunacy” and they are sincerely open about it. Managers are more skilful at hiding malice, incompetence, pure wish for power, that makes them more harmful for a company.
Wouldn't the obvious conclusion be: "carrying a gun is dangerous for you"?
> use lots of features.

That's the problem, you use log4j to log. Any 'feature' outside of that being used is wrong. Any 'feature' outside of that being implemented, is wrong.

If JNDI string interpolation is desired, write another module that does that.

I hate 'is-odd' but this is another extreme and demonstratably worse.
Let's see, one of the benefits is probably that we're not all starving to death right now. Not sure if there are others.

I guess you could get rid of it to save every American 5¢ annually and trade that for a chance of a future rice disease wiping out our crops. That might make sense, in the same way that the Texas electric grid is very efficient.
I'm really glad game studios will now need 300 million dollar budgets to replicate the gameplay of a Game & Watch
Semantic versioning itself is substantially younger than 20 years.
> It does because now I pull in a dependency

How would proprietary software make this better? You wouldn't even have anything to pull in!

Is your argument "having the source code and the legal rights to fix this bug even when nobody else wants to or even can fix it is not good enough because not everyone will use my fix"? Because good luck with proprietary software then!
We may as well get it over with. Our launch strategy as a species is so bad that we will inevitably lose access to our orbital region due to the high velocity garbage eventually. If we get to that stage early on, we can stop pretending that governments and companies are capable of acting like adults

/s
I don't think watching Magnus Carlsen helps with tips in chess either?

Or watching tennis pros.

It might help define the journey you have to go on to get to the upper echelon.

You now seem to think 'index, left$ and if' seems to be what matters, that's something.

It will be interesting to see where Deepmind takes something like this.
> But that's all part of the deal going in, and everyone is fully aware of all the trade-offs straight from the onset.

I think part of the problem here, in all honesty, is that some people just _are not_ aware of the trade-offs upfront. They learn these after getting started, and it bites them in the butt one way or another.
Just fixing a bug isn't making the project what it is, though.
At one point Oracle changed the licensing, which caused enterprises to stop upgrading.
Gotcha. Yeah, phrased like that, I can see your perspective better (and I even agree!). Maybe a little external site icon and moving that link to the end of the nav could clear that up.
Does this not mean it's time for a new open source license? Perhaps one that stipulates all the freedom current ones have up to a point?

I am not a lawyer and know little about open source but is it possible to create a new license that allows free use up to a certain revenue level?
Yeah, and that is about 0.1% of total amount of software assembled and deployed in the world. It is like saying all my friends drink Evian water so that's the way we handle clean drinking water shortage in the world.
The reality of ongoing maintenance is that they just don't maintain the APC and leave it parked out front. If it doesn't work in 30 years they don't care, it's a playpiece for kids to climb over worst case like the Sherman WWII tanks given to U.S. cities under a similar program in the 1950s. For the other ongoing maintenance, for something like an M16 it's not going to require very much costly specialized things from the armory. It's going to use the same gun lube, the ammunition used is economical, it's literally the toyota corolla of spare parts in terms of a gun given how many manufacturers exist producing AR15 parts at scale and therefore at affordable prices. Stuff like a military flashlight or a rifle sight or ballistic vest doesn't really need ongoing maintenance either.