> We nevertheless stress that such improvements are only of theoretical interest, since the huge constants involved in the complexity of fast matrix multiplication usually make these algorithms impractical.
* A weekly newsletter of top hacker news posts [0]
* Filtering hacker news to just technical posts [1]
What makes it special is the categorization is decided by an estimation of a referendum. We estimate referedums using elected representatives, statistical samples and referendums. The efficient corrected by the accurate. The goal is to spread the work of curation so the signal to noise ratio improves. Consensus among your peers is a good signal. For more details see the longer explanation of democratic moderation[2].
Next steps:
* Curate hacker news comments
* Curate /r/science
* Content creation - submitting posts/comments
* New name
Eventually:
* reimagine reddit so the discussion reflects the desires of all users and not just the most active and passionate [3]
The code is available on github [4]. It's a mess (cashier's first website). Some silly things I've done:
* Using ReactDOMServer.renderToStaticMarkup to replace EJS so the compiler catches view type errors
* Cache using a global object on my single webserver - no memcache/redis
Biggest regret:
* Not using a more opinionated framework as I've rewritten many things 3 times and focused more the optimality of plumbing than user experience - fun as that is.
not op, but if bitcoin existed 1000 years ago, it would probably have replaced gold as a generic currency.
And while one might argue that the reason that gold is valued today is because of historic reasons, that it has been accepted as something of value almost everywhere for a very long time..
Now, if this wasn't the case, and someone would have proposed today that we should make this metal a currency just because it is limited in supply and very easy to recognize, I would probably feel the same way about gold as I do about bitcoin.
There are a lot of people who are very good at coding who don't care for high salaries. Despite mainstream pop being the most profitable, many musicians pursue niche genres.
This still doesn't make UBI relevant to this discussion. It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over to dedicate to open source, and yet this path is relatively untrodden.
Plenty of engineers (myself included) already leverage the flexibility and surplus pay of the industry to opt out of the "40 years of 40 hours" ratrace. But they do so to varying degrees, and evidently aren't spending enough of that surplus on OSS to fix the problem we're discussing.
I don't see what UBI would materially contribute to this dynamic.
If picking up software contracts here and there is consistent enough for you to count on then it's either already a full time job or the end result of years of networking and experience.
UBI would let people devoted to a subject pursue only that.
Sure, I'm not suggesting that it's as easy or as comprehensive as UBI, of which I'm a strong and longtime supporter.
I'm saying that the existence of this weaker alternative is illuminating: there's a non-trivial subset of the population for whom this is an option, including many OSS maintainers, and they don't seem especially jazzed about the idea of making an income that's 10% of what their skills could bring in.
Personally speaking I wouldn't see that as an alternative. Just doing a little above-the-table consulting work comes with periodic obligations. Why make a fraction of your income to still deal with the distractions?
I think you could just ask retired people who volunteer about the subject and get a good take on it.
> It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there.
What about less talented ones that can still contribute, but need to work 20 hours a week? Or 30 hours a week? Or gasp 40 hours a week?
> Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over
No. There isn't plenty of time left over. Moreover, why wouldn't I want to work on something full time, and not in my "left over time"?
> Plenty of engineers
Which means: not even the majority of engineers.
> I don't see what UBI would materially contribute to this dynamic.
"I don't see how giving all engineers, and not some percent of engineers, the option to pursue projects they like would materially contribute to this dynamic".
This is a textbook Gish gallop, so I'll avoid the trap of responding point-by-point and address all the irrelevance and inaccuracy of your comment simultaneously.
The premise I responded to was that UBI was the only way to free up OSS maintainers, and that they wouldn't care about the lost hundreds of thousands of income if their basic needs were met. My point was that if this was the case, you would already see the low-hours-per-week strategy in place as a non-trivial factor in OSS funding. And yet you don't, because the foundational assumption is incorrect.
Also note that 10 hours a week is hyper-conservative. The population of people maintaining OSS projects are more than capable of pulling eg $70/hr for contracts[1], especially at the low volumes we're talking about. To reach UBI levels of income at this rate would require _1.5 hrs/wk_ of work, or 6 hrs per MONTH. This allows you to drop the required talent level pretty low, despite already pulling from a population that's selected for "ability to maintain a useful OSS project".
[1] also very conservative: I wouldn't be surprised if a median estimate came closer to $150/hr for your average OSS maintainer
> This is a textbook Gish gallop, so I'll avoid the trap of responding point-by-point
And this is textbook avoiding an answer
> My point was that if this was the case, you would already see the low-hours-per-week strategy in place as a non-trivial factor in OSS funding.
Yes, and your point is based on the flawed premise that there are many engineers who can do that.
> The population of people maintaining OSS projects are more than capable of pulling eg $70/hr for contracts[1], especially at the low volumes we're talking about.
And you pulled this estimation out of which crevice?
> To reach UBI levels of income at this rate would require _1.5 hrs/wk_ of work, or 6 hrs per MONTH.
Ah yes. Because there are plenty of jobs which will gladly pay you for 6 hours of work a month.
I'm not sure if we have misaligned expectations of how much income a reasonable UBI is likely to provide, or of how much income you can make contracting.
The range of incomes I've seen from UBI proposals range from 10-20k/yr, with the high end generally applying to people with 2+ children. This is partially constrained by political reality, but politics aren't the only thing putting an implicit ceiling on the amount of UBI (as a reductio ad absurdum, consider why we wouldn't just give everyone $500k a year and all just retire onto our yachts).
Taking the midpoint, $15k pa means $1250/month, which means you'd need to make _$30/hr_ on software contracts to match UBI. You don't think it's plausible to fill the pipe with a 10-hr week of contracts over $30? Bear in mind that this means you'd need 3 hours a week or _12 hours a month_ with a more realistic (yet still quite conservative) income estimate of $100/hr, and that the type of person who's currently maintaining an OSS project is already increasing the quality of the talent/income potential distribution.
Sure it's _plausible_. I even used to think that kind of thing was _possible_, long ago.
But I've come to the conclusion since that it's virtually impossible to "scale down" your income like that. And that you can't actually choose to accept lower pay to obtain more options (in software anyway), contrary to highly plausible economic theories.
Do you have any real world evidence other than that it sounds plausible?
I don't think I currently do, but that's sort of my point: people don't want to do this, for reasons ranging from the income left on the table to the type of work not being fulfilling.
Note that both of these are handled by the premise, which was that OSS maintainers would be materially unblocked to focus on OSS by a UBI-level income. This assumes that there are a non-trivial amount of OSS maintainers that don't care about the couple hundred thousand dollars they're forgoing, and that they have at least 30 hours of their week filled with fulfilling work.
Tangentially, I match the motivations you're asking about, but not the exact implementation. I spent the early half of my 20s with a far higher income than I wanted, and definitely didn't (and don't) enjoy working 40 hours a week. Given how motivated I am by intellectual challenge, I came to the realization that it was damnably hard to find a job that would give me a suitable intellectual challenge but not require me to be full-time. I "solved" this by interleaving 2-3 years of working with 1-2 years of travel/personal development a couple of times during my 20s.
That’s probably how most people do that. I have to admit that programming less than full-time was hard for me, because I tended to go flat out. And then burn out, LOL.
Only if you're incapable of making basic inferences and uncomfortable with thinking about distributions and error bars instead of forcing everything into artificial certainty.
If, like many people, you need things shoved into an imaginary concrete, low-dimensional, binary box: "the type of person maintaining an OSS project can trivially make >$30/hr[1] on 10 hrs of contract work a week". If you still think this is too subjective to infer anything from, enjoy your onanistic "nobody can ever really know anything maaaan" perspective, but it's not really relevant to this conversation.
[1] See another comment of mine in this thread for back-of-the-envelope math
I mean I'm not saying that I do not feel exhausted after playing
Matches where e.g we lose early game and have to come back somehow by avoiding commiting mistakes hard and somehow catching off somebody from enemy team could be exhausting cuz you're basically balacing on the edge for 30min :P
I'm not sure that is legal either. You can charge for some product or service but, unless you are a licensed bank, you can't lend out money and charge for overdraft, which is basically something they're doing here.
And even a bank can only do it against accounts open in that bank.
There's no lending of money involved? If your card gets declined, they add a fee to your bill. You can either choose to not pay it (and stop receiving any services from that company, and possibly have your account sent to collections or even be sued since you agreed to pay something and then didn't pay it), or you can pay it.
IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the service.
If I make up charges for you and you refuse to pay, I can cease offering the service (to everybody) but I cannot just cut you out because you will not pay the out of contract charge.
These laws are to protect people who belong to groups that commonly get discriminated against.
> IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the service.
First off, you need to stop using the (incredibly loaded) word "civilized".
Second, I am not aware of ANY jurisdiction in which businesses are required to provide their services or products to anyone.
Third, THIS IS NOT AN "OUT OF CONTRACT CHARGE". This is a charge which IS IN THE CONTRACT.
Fourth, anti-discrimination laws have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with charging someone a fee when they don't pay you in a timely manner and/or cause you to incur higher costs (such as decline fees or NSF fees).
When selling to consumers, you can't force an arbitrary contract on them and demand that they pay you in various tangential circumstances. Neither you are a bank neither them are your insurer.
LOL @ the guy replying to you acting like collection costs ("§ 17. The debtor's responsibility for costs of extrajudicial collection") is somehow relevant... :)
You may be right. It looks like some states have specific rules for credit cards. For example, in some states businesses can't charge credit card processing fees.
However, many businesses charge late payment fees.
It's only for mathematical interest