Apple plans Final Cut Pro makeover - <AUTHOR> http://dock-of-bay.blogspot.com/2011/04/apple-plans-final-cut-pro-makeover.html <comment><USER2> Dear Apple: Please come up with some competition for the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite because it's a total mess.

</comment><comment><USER3> about time!</comment>


I want to turn your idea into a demo - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to compete in the LAUNCH Hackathon at the end of the month, and want to present a demo that wows the judges.
I'm doing this because I work with a talented team, and we've decided to show rather than tell what we're capable of.
So what are some ideas you'd love to see a demo of? If you submit through https://launch.appoutloud.com and I pick your idea, then you'll have full ownership of the demo. <comment><USER2> Hey guys. I listen to many podcast and I'm even considering starting one with some friends. The problem is that there are no great apps in which you could do all the podcast on them instead of using several softwares.

It would be awesome if there was a podcast-creator-app, with already back sound tracks, templates, interviews questions, story telling ideas, ways to do conclusions , even quotes.

Give the opportunity toeveryone to be able to make their own podcast

What if you could add your own advertiser on the go? Hear a podcast and you find a great moment to ad an ad of your company, you want to ad it and pay for it. How can I get into the audio and get my ad there, pay for it and go. Just one click to ad your advertising to that podcast, you put your credit card and you just talk or upload your prerecord ad. This will create revenue for people that create great podcasts but don't know how to market them.

Issues to consider: 1-How this will affect the quality of the podcast ( specific places to upload the ad)

2-The ad must be accepted (so it won't get troll or stuff not related) but it should be smooth to add your credit card and audio and get in. (stripe?)

Flexibility: You don't need pre establish format. You don't need a contract or pay for every episode, you pay for that one because you felt it.

See you!

(if you want to talk more about it @JDcarlu :) )

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm picturing something like this [http://www.soundboardarchive.com/game/603/George- Takei.html](http://www.soundboardarchive.com/game/603/George-Takei.html) but with audio and recording functions as well?

A quick google search turned up [http://www.mobilepodcaster.com/](http://www.mobilepodcaster.com/) which is somewhat similar. What's the killer feature that sets your idea above this one ? Also, what are your ideas for an impressive demo of this idea?

<comment><USER2> The capability of giving anyone a monetization channel. Mobile Podcaster is really good, but its just a recording/publishing app. The main features they have is to add intro and publish directly to WordPress. There is no editing to add commercials or ads that can monetize your podcast. Also the feature I'm talking about should be from the listener to the producer (not the other way around). So if I listen to your podcast and I want to advertise my site in it, I just select a "free space" on your episode and record myself or upload my ad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://calacanis.com/2015/01/27/why-hackathons-are- important...](http://calacanis.com/2015/01/27/why-hackathons-are-important- how-to-win-them/) is great for inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try to work on your own ideas.

One of the things I noticed early on was that I always pushed myself that extra mile when I was working on my own ideas.

It's actually intrinsically more rewarding to be able to visualize your idea coming to life.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree with this. One skill that I pride myself in is being able to internalize others' ideas. For example, I'm working on a startup right now (it helps that I have equity), and am pretty happy when I'm still up coding at 5am because I just want it to work perfectly.

Part of the reason for requesting others' ideas for this, is that there are so many domain experts for domains other than technology that I want to meet,learn from, and ultimately help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there any other way of submitting, apart from FB? Have deactivated FB for more than year. Active on Twitter though.

<comment><AUTHOR> We stuck with facebook to keep it simple, but I agree it would be really nice to login via twitter. This is definitely on our roadmap, but I don't think we'll get to it for this time. If you have a great idea and think you can get people to vote for it (where they're on facebook), then feel free to email it to firstname.lastname@example.com and I'll try to enter it in on your behalf.

<comment><USER4> thank you, will do that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got this message when I tried to submit:

"The change you wanted was rejected. Maybe you tried to change something you didn't have access to."

You have an email address? I'll just send you the concept...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reporting this. It looks like the database connection went down just as you were submitting. I'll switch to a better database tonight to ensure the connection stays up. Would you mind trying to submit again?</comment></comment>


Give away your code, but never your time - <AUTHOR> http://wgross.net/essays/give-away-your-code-but-never-your-time <comment><USER4> Color me deeply skeptical of the suggestion to try to lock people out of community participation unless they pay.

The real secret to not burning out is to scale up the set of maintainers in proportion to the users. You do that by lowering the barriers to involvement, not raising them.

Most maintainers err on the side of controlling too much. Which makes them into bottlenecks.

One or two good PRs is enough for me to give you commit bit on my repos. This has never yet resulted in abuse, and has brought in a many helpful co- maintainers.

Bad commits can be easily reverted. Whereas giving people a bit of trust often inspires them to help more.

<comment><USER5> Bad commits are the absolute most difficult thing to reverse when they get released and the userbase codes to them. When I don't pay super close attention to what's being contributed, it creates three times as much work after I let it through.

<comment><USER6> How often is commit bad enough to require revert, yet made it through testing and got released?

<comment><USER7> Code style, inconsistent APIs, a feature that's barely tested by its own contributor, introducing dependencies on innards that were planned to be removed by an ongoing refactoring project, etc. So many ways contributions can go wrong.

<comment><USER8> All those things should and hopefully would have been caught when the PR was made, not after the commits made it into master.

<comment><USER7> The entire context of this thread is that adding committers can introduce risk in the quality of accepted contributions. Building a trusted network of gatekeepers is hard.

<comment><USER6> Just because stuff gets to master doesn't mean they get to the release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _We also need to bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or > pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer._

> _The message to users should be "do whatever you want with the code, but pay > us for our time if you want to influence the project's future."_

So, for me, this goes against the reasons I decide to give my personal time to the community. For me, creating an open source project is a contract with the community, and part of that contract is to assist members of this community that might require features or have issues. Statements such as the ones quoted above go wholeheartedly against my idea of an open source community, and I have a feeling most of the open source community shares this sentiment.

Breaking this contract would be, for me, a cease and desist of the project. For me, it is very simple, if a personal project is stagnated, that's acceptable as no one owes anyone here anything. If a company's open source projects go stagnant, but the company continues to boast how pro-OSS they are, it is a cardinal sin, as they have broken this contract with their users. This may be a naive look, but I don't think a company should be able to have it both ways—boast about its OSS projects, lure people in and then ignore them and move on to their next PR OSS project.

Donations are a different proposition than the suggestions in the article, and should definitely be encouraged.

<comment><USER10> That's a strange view of open source that borders on communism.

You don't have any duties or obligation towards any individual to assist them with their issues.

The only obligations you have is to be honest about the project. For example, if you know that the project is not written with security in mind, you must announce the fact, so that people don't go using the project assuming you took care of all potential exploits.

Beyond that, you have no obligations towards anyone. Quite the opposite. You've already done your part. You donated the product of your effort for free. The obligation is on people who use your product. If they want you to care of their issues, they are obliged to give something back in return. At the very least, appreciation.

<comment><USER11> Don't know about duty but I think everyone has a right to expect help and a right to give help. It makes for a better world where these rights are regularly exercised.

<comment><USER12> > everyone has a right to expect help and a right to give help

This might make sense when asking a stranger for directions or for someone to help with your car problem, because the relationship is _1:1_.

But this breaks down in contexts where scale is a factor.

When assisting users of your project, the relationship is _1:many_. And if the project is popular, it is unfair to expect the author to be helping so many people.

<comment><USER11> I don't really see how 1:to many makes any difference in principle. Perhaps you were thinking of the amount of effort to help the many? As in 1:1 case it is up to the helper to decide how many resources, if any, to spend on helping. A society where the default position is that people deserve help is different from one that is based on the survival of the fittest.

<comment><USER12> Even if the default position is to help, it can't be unconditional, there are limits. You don't have a right to expect help when it places an unreasonable burden on the helper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I led a small open source project more than a decade ago.

Most people involved had more time than money. I'm quite certain that trying to charge an annual fee from members would have killed the entire project before it was even born.

Introducing money to the equation changes everything. People start to look at the project as a product they are buying, instead of a cause they are contributing to.

I believe the author of this article is deeply misguided. Money is not a way to make open projects work, but it is a good way to kill them.

<comment><USER14> As soon as money is involved there is a certain expectation of quality and the work being done properly. If you start depending on that money then you are under the control of your customers and your hobby will quickly degrade into a regular job.

<comment><USER15> "Degrade"? Getting a job contributing to FOSS projects sounds pretty good to me.

<comment><USER16> Depends, turning a hobby into work can be either wonderful or horrible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As much as I agree with the sentiment behind this post, I disagree with the implementation. The nature of open source code is collaboration. Paying for collaboration seems like it would hinder progress altogether and possibly direct the project into a direction that is not suitable for the poor majority not paying. One more thing that bothers me is that money for maintenance should not come from developers. This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Code Sponsor ([https://codesponsor.io](https://codesponsor.io))

Code Sponsor is trying to help provide those who are maintaining OSS projects with untethered sponsorship funds. They can go about doing their business on the projects and be making money through sponsor-based ad revenue. This provides them with the incentive and finances to justify continued support on those projects that end up being abandoned when unfunded.

I agree that this is a HUGE problem that needs to be addressed. Code Sponsor's approach is to go where money can scale: marketing budgets.

<comment><USER18> You're likely going to be shut down by GitHub. They have a special section in their ToS that prohibits advertising.

[https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of- service/#k-...](https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of- service/#k-advertising-on-github)

> Short version: We do not generally prohibit use of GitHub for advertising. > However, we expect our users to follow certain limitations, so GitHub does > not become a spam haven. No one wants that.

<comment><USER19> >They have a special section in their ToS that prohibits advertising

Ehm, your quote does not quite support your statement:

>We do not generally prohibit use of GitHub for advertising

<comment><USER20> It's a TOS, worded for PR, besides which it's unenforceable and at the whim of GitHub.

It's like building a business on Google Reader or FB Parse.

<comment><USER17> We have advocates at GitHub and are in discussions with their compliance team. Code Sponsor is not directly tied to GitHub for it to be successful. Many of our developers are making money through different channels such as npm or their own generated documentation website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Devil's advocate: How about an issue/PR tracker that lets users pay for priority? A simple bidding system. If BigCorp International is willing to pay $200/hour for IE10 support, they can be next on your list. And afterward, an bug with significant community support totalling $50/hour, pledged by 50 different users. With allowances for your own preferences as maintainer and the needs of the community, of course, but giving people who care the most the opportunity to put their money where their pain is.

<comment><USER22> Paying for PR? really? Why would anyone do that rather than maintain their own copy if it is an OSS project?

<comment><USER23> Maintaining your own fork means you are taking de-facto responsibility for the maintenance of more projects in addition to your paying projects.

The costs of keeping them current adds up surprisingly quickly.

In fact, it adds up so quickly that my company has a standing policy in place that we will do _whatever_it_takes_ to have any pull requests we need in an upstream project integrated in order to avoid us having to maintain a fork.

What this means in practice usually is that getting the pull request accepted becomes the primary focus for one of the senior engineers for the 1-2 weeks it takes to get it into a shape that the project maintainer can work with.

As you can imagine this is also expensive, but it's a fraction of the cost of maintaining our own fork of the project.

So - here's my offer to Libré, Free and Open Source Software maintainers everywhere:

I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either:

1) do the quality control work yourself or…

2) hold the hand of one of my junior engineers while they learn how to do it.

<comment><USER24> > I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have > you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either: > 1) do the > quality control work yourself

I too would gladly pay one dollar for a hundred dollars bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I haven't seen any large scale, long-term open source projects succeed with a 'pay to play' process; what usually happens is the original maintainers realize that even with some amount of compensation, they still don't like scratching _other_ people's itch when it comes to their project.

And then they realize that the amount of people/companies even willing to pay at all is a tiny fraction of 1% of their potential target market.

The better advice is to do what you want, know your limits, consider sharing some maintainance responsibility with another committer or two, and don't ever feel obligated to do anything with other people's issues and PRs. It's nice to do, but if it's interfering with anything else, or taking away valuable time, ignore them or just blanket close them, with a note that it's not something you'd be interested in maintaining.

The great thing about open source is someone can fork your code and do what they need. You have no obligation to help them, it's just nice if you can. And if they don't get that, that's not your problem.

<comment><USER26> It's not your problem only in the sense that it _shouldn 't_ be your problem. E.g., in theory.

Some people can be quite belligerent about their FOSS entitlement. I've also seen folk publicly bash open source projects just because the license wasn't permissive enough, in their opinion (GPL vs. their darling I'll-bend-over-do- what-you-will-with-me BSD or MIT).

It can be hard to maintain poker face with "not my problem"... as hard as the "fuck you, pay me" proposed by the OP. The social pressure to give away your work for free is real, and humans are social animals. Just look at this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think what open source needs is some very deliberate price discrimination. Have the license be free to the vast majority of users, and cost money for large corporations that can damn well afford it. Not, like, large amounts of money, just something vaguely close to the all-in cost of one full time developer.

Basically, "BSD, unless you're a $1B+ valued company that is not paying our software foundation $10k/mo".

<comment><USER28> Many moons ago I developed a moderately successful shareware program. My licensing terms were simple: If you owned the computer where you installed and used it no license was needed, but if someone else owned the machine, you owed me money.

It allowed students, hobbyists and freelancers to use the software for free, for any purpose, but companies, institutions and governments had to pay to play.

This idea does not seem to translate in an obvious way to software released under an open source license.

<comment><USER29> Interesting idea, but two things struck me here:

1\. Does that mean a student would have to pay to install it on their school computer? Or maybe a school provided laptop?

2\. What about personal installs for other people? Not as a business or service, but merely on a friend or relative's computer?

Because in theory, both of those would come under 'someone else owning the machine', but they'd also be seen as personal usage by any rational person.

<comment><USER28> You'll always have a corner case or another. I wouldn't care about personal usage users.

Case 2 clearly falls into the free usage policy, but in case 1 if the school is requiring students to install this software in their school-provided hardware as a way of sidestepping licensing fees I think they are stretching it a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The key suggestion:

"bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer... If you're the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be "do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project's future." Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails."

<comment><USER31> Right, so are there any examples of successful projects which do this?

The idea is certainly _plausible_ given that the vast majority of initial contributions to an open source project are based on need: [http://climate- action.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Library/S...](http://climate- action.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Library/Shah_open_source_governance_2006.pdf)

However continued involvement seems to be usually based on hobbyist motivations, so you might be setting yourself up to not see anybody else jump on board with you long term.

<comment><USER32> [https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/](https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/)

I'm not sure how successful it is, but Crystal seems to have the right idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I dislike the key suggestion. What's the point of open-source - if not to give back? It's a developer's codex/morale to answer.

It seems the author is salty about the fact he doesn't make money from open source, but is investing a lot of time. Well my dear colleague, offer support to the bigger companies that use your software in production or use that software to sell another. Simple.

Open source was never meant to be for-profit, at least from my understanding. Something you give back to the community, because you have taken a lot from it in the first place. You dislike new issues by non-payees? Well, write better docs. Someone is also giving YOU time by submitting that issue or by finding a bug - so should you pay them money for testing? Be grateful.

Should we all pay for the open source tools/frameworks we use? I can guarantee this would cause riots. If you don't want to contribute to OSS don't, but please do not whine about it.

<comment><USER34> Your employer benefits financially from the open source community. People who purchase software cheaply due to lower barrier to entry and more competition also benefit. As a coder I generally don't benefit so don't feel the need to give back.

As a coder the tsunami of FOSS is a negative. My job is now to glue free modules together rather than design stuff. I'd be quite happy to pay for a compiler if I had to.

<comment><USER22> I mean if you are genius who has written all parts of OS/compiler/whatever software you use, then maybe it is a negative for you. But most people can't do so and FOSS is actually a blessing. If you like to pay for wall-gardens, where you can't read any code without an NDA/paying a million dollars, they exist. Feel free to use them.

<comment><USER34> I've been plenty happy working in Windows/.NET land. As a developer.

As a home tinkerer I do agree with you. And glad Haskell and Linux are available for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The notion of charging people to be part of the community seems like a terrific way to immediately kill any semblance of community.

Realistically, the only people who will pay a membership fee are those who can charge it to a company. That means you'll lose all the people hacking on the project in _their_ free time.

Personally, I contributed a lot more to open source when I was in college and had more free time than money. There's no way I would have paid to be able to contribute.

The solution is really just to have lower expectations on maintainers, both around timely responses/support (want fast support, pay for it) and improvements. They can and should also be more liberal with adding maintainers.

<comment><USER36> Are you sure? If what you're saying is true, wouldn't that mean it would be impossible for any business to have a "sense of community" around it?

<comment><USER37> To be part of a community you need to have the same stake as everyone else. Businesses don't have communities, they have customers.

<comment><USER15> A community can still be formed amongst your customers, and make your product better. Game mods are a good example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I shudder to think of the sense of entitlement some of my users would have towards getting me to fix their pet issues that they had to _pay_ to tell me about. This article got a lot right but then charging for community membership is a super bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER38> The open source community defies definition. It's a diverse multitude of people with different motivations. This will ensure its survival even under challenging circumstances.

There is a risk, maybe significant, of the generational hand off. A lot of folks who built this rich legacy were academics and pioneers motivated by ideology. Software has moved on from early pioneers motivated by liberty and freedom issues to being subsumed by establishment interests.

At the moment there is also widespread cynicism about ideology in general and a lot of open source is increasingly developed by corporate interests. This could have repercussions for the 'nature' of open source as institutions and a connection to individuals beyond their identity as 'users' has not really been built.

</comment><comment><USER39> Here are a few ideas off the top of my head for a purely open source (non- commercial) project:

* custom features

* prioritization

* training

* enterprise support

* sponsorships

* invites to free conferences and swag

* t-shirts and swag sales

* commercial software integrations/partnerships

* brand sponsorship/inclusion on docs/websites/etc.

* professionally managed and scalable hosting

What did I miss?

<comment><USER40> err ICO?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I disagree.

By using a small project and reporting bugs you are helping to test it, giving feedback and allowing it to grow.

Also, reporting a bug sometimes saves the maintainers the effort of finding the bug themselves... something that actually takes time.

A better policy is to encourage people to help fix the bugs they report, with a test case or a pull request if possible... something actionable.

<comment><USER42> maybe some sortof point system would be nice. You get points by providing good bug reports, good forum answers, good PRs, good code reviews, providing tests, donating, etc., but you can lose points by wasting people's time or being a jerk, for instance. Then maintainers can prioritize PRs by people with good points, regardless of how they got the points (be it from donating time, code, or other ways of helping the community & project).

<comment><USER41> The problem I see with that is that people gain and lose interest in a project over time.

Some other people become disenchanted with how the project is going and try to fork it when it doesn't go their way. This is not inherently bad... many good projects come from forks... but it is not an ideal situation to have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The dude's key project has a total of 4 contributors (working at the same company?) 0 forks and 0 stars. I am sure we should all follow his guidance on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER44> > annual fee for community membership

Sleepycat did this [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software) and seemed to work out for them.

But if opensource truly is infrastructure, why not nationalize it? i.e. government pays maintainers a subsistence wage (provided they meet some scale crtieria, perhaps similar to automatic royalties for pop-song airplay).

Users (i.e. big corporations) would pay a levy to fund this. Of course, it could be set up privately, independent of a government.

<comment><USER10> Because who decides what projects deserve how much? Who decides that a project is even worthy to receive anything at all? If there was such a government program, what would prevent masses of inexperienced developers to start pointless projects, open source them, and file a claim to receive money from the government?

<comment><USER44> > perhaps similar to automatic royalties for pop-song airplay

From [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright- compulsory-...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright-compulsory- license.html)

In order to take advantage of this compulsory license, a notice must be sent to the copyright owner along with a fee set by the U.S. Copyright Office, known as the statutory fee or statutory rate. The fee for recordings is currently (as of 2017) 9.1 cents per song (or 1.75 cents per minute of playing time). To verify the current rate, check the Copyright Office's guide to compulsory licenses. On the site, you can click "Mechanical Royalty Rate."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> What works for me is locking down the application behind a plan. Users can submit whatever feedback, bugs, suggestions, enhancements, and wishlists they want. These contributions are important, but they won't change the roadmap.

This only works when an open source application becomes ubiquitous or nearly ubiquitous and the users want it everywhere. Popularity and consumption rates are irrelevant to whether this works. This is because ubiquitous software solves an extremely common problem and takes too much effort to replace with an alternate solution. Ubiquitous software is not necessarily good software.

When somebody wants a change in the roadmap they can pay you money to compensate you for the additional time it takes to pivot into another direction. You probably aren't going to make any money like this. Then benefits of this approach is that the maintainers won't burn out. They just work to the plan and occasionally respond to issues. The software has a transparent and published trajectory.

<comment><USER46> That's the right approach. The question is whether you can keep enforcing that - sticking to the product roadmap and release plan - if/when a large software company becomes a "customer" of your open source project. That's when it requires a tremendous amount of discipline to stick to this. But the right approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > _When I say "open source", I mean code licensed in a way that it can be used > to build proprietary things._

This redefinition of a basic term should have been at the beginning, not the end.

<comment><USER48> And so should "open-source code is utility software".

Stallman was right when he said that the Open Source movement would eventually abandon any conceptions of software freedom - it seems to me that we now have a whole generation of "open source" contributors for whom the only type of freedom that matters is the freedom of downstream developers, rather than users, and who seem to think that the role of open source in the world is just to provide a base on top of which one can write proprietary applications. Where do developers of open source end-user applications fit into this picture?

<comment><USER49> I maintain both types of open source projects. I, for one, am happy that we are trending towards more so-called "developer freedom" in open source. I never actually abandoned the concept of "software freedom" as defined by Stallman because I never bought into it in the first place.

<comment><USER42> Thanks...this is the best attitude I've heard. Instead of making people feel they need to take sides in the open-source vs free-software debate, better to just acknowledge that both are important and aren't necessarily in conflict.

<comment><USER48> They're not in _conflict_ , per se, and they are indeed both important - <USER2> progress towards one of these goals has the advantage of serving the goals of megacorps, while the other one does not.

FWIW, I work as an open source developer on a strategic "infrastructure" project that my employer funds because having an open source base platform serves their commercial interests - and I'm very much okay with this, it absolutely is a good thing for them to be contributing to, but at the end of the day we're also a proprietary software firm. I'd just like to see more work go towards figuring out how to fund developers whose projects _aren 't_ of strategic interest to proprietary software companies than articles that keep making the assumption that all important open source software is libraries or utility software that ultimately would line up nicely with corporate interests.

<comment><USER49> > I'd just like to see more work go towards figuring out how to fund > developers whose projects aren't of strategic interest to proprietary > software companies than articles that keep making the assumption that all > important open source software is libraries or utility software that > ultimately would line up nicely with corporate interests.

To be clear, I do agree with that goal. I just tend to diverge with others on the _means_. That is, I don't agree with hacking the IP system to achieve that end. I'd rather see the IP system done away with entirely. (IP and software is near and dear to my heart, but IP itself is so much bigger than just software.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The author has many good points however it's either his writing style (thinking), ideas, or conceptual mental model where he is missing the point of open source. It is actually a bit confusing. His title doesn't correlate with what he writes later which contains several somewhat vacuous statements. People love to work together and produce something for the common good, humanity wouldn't be here without that good feeling and collaborative spirit. open source comes from people's time, time has led us to a point where open source is everywhere. Not all people are greedy, every coder owes another coder their livelihood. I think this draft just needed like 100 more edits. Also, "Many" does not equal 3.

</comment><comment><USER51> In the proposed approach, what would happen to a high-quality and desirable code contribution from someone who cannot afford to pay for their code to be reviewed?

</comment><comment><USER52> I always wonder where coders find the time to significantly contribute to Opensouce projects - which many seem to do - after their day job, having played and eaten with their kids, and were an attentful husband.

<comment><USER53> You might want to stick a debugger on your assumptions about who does and does not have children and/or a spouse.

<comment><USER54> And/or a day job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Yep, that agrees with one rule I've found very helpful in my Sidekiq project:

All free/OSS work/discussion is done in public.

Never private email, never Slack. Always open an issue. Security issues are the exception here. No one should get to monopolize my time without paying.

</comment><comment><USER32> I like the idea of donating to projects that benefit me, so the developers working on those projects have a financial incentive to continue doing so. For example, I'm interested in the Crystal language, so I give the project $10 a month. Yeah, it isn't much, but if enough people did this, it would allow open-source developers to make a living out of these projects, rather than being enslaved by them to the point they burn out.

<comment><USER56> Something like Gratipay is good for facilitating that use case but I don't know that there are enough other devs out there willing to fund these projects themselves. At least I haven't seen one yet where the maintainer pulls in anything like a normal developer salary for their experience level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I don't get the jump the author makes from "your time is valuable" (understandable) to "you should have to pay to contribute to open-source projects" (umm, what).

</comment><comment><USER58> I run a relatively popular open source project. I think that there are some strange forces in the tech industry which make it nearly impossible to get big companies to use your project.

Maybe it's not right but I really feel like not being based in Silicon Valley has something to do with it... Related to branding, social networks, bloggers. Outside of SV, it's very tough.

Only small startups were using my project initially; literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of small startups but not one large corporation (that I knew about).

It's been 4 years though and the good thing is that now several of the startups that were using my project got really big and are growing fast. Still no big corporations but it doesn't matter anymore. Me and one other contributor are now able to make money offering consulting to those startups which grew. Also we have a sponsorship deal now.

</comment><comment><USER59> Maybe write your article after you've done this and tell us how it worked.

</comment><comment><USER60> I just stumbled on a note from the abandoned project [History.js]([https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/](https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/)):

> Despite History.js being one of the most popular JavaScript libraries there > is, and has been used by even multi-million-user companies in its time - <USER3> > reality of economy and company practices seems to be that companies prefer > to fork their own internal versions and fix locally with their own devs > rather than fund open-source maintainers what they would pay their own devs > to make things better for everyone, including themselves, which would be > cheaper - but no, that would require too many tiers of company approval that > don't understand the need.

> As such, if you are an open-source developer, I'd recommend just working on > open-source projects that are paid for by your own consulting work or your > own company (e.g. every successful open-source project). As otherwise, when > they become popular, you better hope they are easily maintainable and > testable, otherwise the cost of maintenance is higher than the free time of > the maintainers.

</comment><comment><USER61> >> Don't give away your time.

>> But do give away your time _and money_ to work on my projects.

Come on.

</comment><comment><USER62> I've considered opensourcing some business products and researched the various models for doing so. I found three main ones:

* pay for support, like ardour

* pay for additional features, like gitlab on-premise

* pay for hosting, like piwik, or gitlab.com

I'm not a big fan of paying for support, like mentioned in the article, because support is not just something you give to your users, it's also useful for you: if someone spotted a big bug (possibly a security issue) but is not paying for support, don't you want to know it? Asking to pay for support is also creating a lot of tension, because people will ask for help anyway, and you have to tell them they won't receive it if they don't pay.

Paying for features is an obvious and efficient way. But I also like the idea that someone in a country where what I consider a decent price is actually a big part of the income can still manage to use my product to its full extent, provided they make an effort to use it.

That's why pay for hosting seems the best way to me for opensource products : everybody can use the product to the full extent, no issue is ignored, people pay for comfort.

Obviously, this works for the products I mentioned because they are ... products, and not libs. But I think it can apply to libs as well:

* pay for support : the idea mentioned in the article

* pay for features : this is something Sidekiq is doing, would love to know how it goes for them

* pay for hosting : this one is tricky, maybe offer to help implementing the lib in customer product? Hardly scalable, though

I would say that for libraries, paying for additional features is what makes the most of sense for me.

</comment><comment><USER63> I think a crowdfunding site specifically designed for software projects would go a long way toward solving this problem. Something like this: [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2017-05-11-plan-for-foss- mai...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2017-05-11-plan-for-foss- maintainers.html)

</comment><comment><USER64> About any software stack for about any computer task involves at least some open source code running for you, written by someone on their free time, mostly out of pure altruism. I wonder how many dollars has this person contributed to, say OpenSSL, or to GnuPG, or to the GNU project, or to Linux, or to the Apache Foundation, &c.

If you dont want to respond to pull requests or to emails, just ignore them or dont put your code up on a platform that allows these. Publish release tarballs. Nobody's obliged to accept patches. But what this article tells is a merely a shortcut to making someone hard-fork your project. If I have to pay to get my patch upstream, well, I'll just maintain my patchset against upstream instead, if there are no alternative projects.

</comment><comment><USER65> Why does the text on this website have 52% transparency?

<comment><USER66> You gotta pay to get 100% opaque.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Glad to see other ideas and operating models being proposed and tried.

Most of us live in countries where you need money to pay rent and buy food. Unless you're already wealthy, that means you need to work (trade time for money) or find a way to trade time for an ownership stake that will, you hope, generate income (and in the process that stake becomes itself more valuable).

A buddy of mine in a maintainer for a popular Drupal module. A very large, well known, social media platform uses it. One day he got an email from someone - likely someone making $150-$200k- more or less demanding that he review and accept some PRs, as well as do some work himself, for a feature they needed.

I told this friend "Ok, did you ask them about their budget to pay you for that?" My friend, more idealistic than me, looked at me like I had 3 heads at first. But he got my question. Nonetheless he decided to "honor" their request and proceeded to work several weeks unexpectedly - for free - so the large for-profit company could stick with its plan and the person requesting this, who is paid, could meet her/his commitment to their boss. His rationale was afraid he'd criticized by the community for not dropping his paid work (!) to do this, since he was the maintainer. He did not want to be a "sell out". I think his decision was insane but such is the pressure to stay true to the ideals.

These stories are all to common and similar to what Willian describes.

I do work around expanding computer science in schools. I do work around mobilizing tech communities to lend their tech skills to disaster relief. A lot of folks in the "startup tech" and open sources communities (different communities with overlap) do the same -- I'm seeing them show up in big numbers for Irma volunteering right now for example. I view these efforts as akin to open course - they are contributions people make of their (unpaid) time to the greater good.

The big tech companies by contrast, many who got their start using open source software and many of whom still power much of their systems with it, could do much much much more on any number of fronts - CS in schools, supporting civic hacking, etc - than they do now. I am sure folks within those companies think they do a lot, but it's not, in my opinion, 5% of what they could do.

And when they do get involved in causes they make huge, often unreasonable expectations of unpaid volunteers in order to minimize their donation, whether that's a donation in time or money. (Case in point: last year a large tech company that provides search and email services asked me to organize Hour of Code events at 30-40 schools around NYC at which their staff to volunteer for an hour or two -- planning and logistics work that would have taken me 1-2 days a week for 4-6 weeks at least. They balked at the idea of paying me for my time since this was a "cause" and I should do it for free, though of course the people who would have been working on this project with me from said company would have been paid.) Sound similar? Expect a ton from volunteers to minimize your own investment.

I bring this up because the LEAST that people who work on open source projects - at least those who aren't pulling in $300K at one of the big tech companies - and ESPECIALLY maintainers, should expect is to get paid somehow. Seriously, how are people supposed to pay rent? William is right on with his piece.

Ideals are great but people need to eat. This emerging duopoly in tech where on one side there is a group of people who are entitled to make massive wealth and demand huge salaries and, on the other, are the open source maintainers, civic hackers, and computer science teachers who are being disloyal to the noble ideals of tech for not wanting to eat cat food is serves the industry poorly.

I engage in this hyperbole to make a point -- an industry that was built by many idealists who saw tech as being an engine to democratization and equality is now becoming exaggerated mirror of society large.

And if you're one of those making $250k, $300k, $500k at some tech company and demanding people work for free or else you'll accuse them of being sellouts for wanting to pay their rent -- well, look in the mirror before you cast that stone.

<comment><USER67> "One day he got an email from someone - likely someone making $150-$200k- more or less demanding that he review and accept some PRs, as well as do some work himself, for a feature they needed."

This is called a 'business opportunity'.

Seriously, people are going to ask you for free stuff all the time.

Sometimes they'll be up front about it (as in, "we don't have budget for that, but can you still help us out?"), and sometimes they just won't specify initially if they are willing to pay or not (ie, they'll just make a demand).

Every interaction is a negotiation, even if you are led to believe otherwise.

<comment><USER46> Yes, and hence my suggestion to him.

But this is also why I introduced my only vaguely related example of the large search engine company who wanted me to work for free to help them organize 30-40 school events for Hour of Code -- a big undertaking. They just said no to my request and did not do the events, and implied I was the reason why those kids wouldn't benefit from their hour or two at each school. No "'business opportunity'".

As context I do A TON of free work already in schools around computer science education. Was I being unreasonable to ask to be paid for this work? They sure thought I was, even though the people in their CSR group who'd have been the PMs of my work sure as heck get paid. The company chose just not to do the events at all (w/ a market cap of both of $500b) - the kids lost out too.

It's actually not so that the request for free work is a negotiation technique - it's an actual expectation of more and more people in the tech community who will get angry when you won't work for free (and they'll convey that anger from the desk of their $250k/year job).

I at least am seeing this dynamic play out all over the tech world. Work in a big tech company, nominally as a software engineer but really as someone who makes a lot of PowerPoints and watches (and "likes") a lot of Ted Talks, and the ecosystem seems to be ok with you pulling down $250K (and from that comfortable seat demanding quicker response times from volunteers in the tech community of various sorts).

Work for yourself selling your time as a contractor in the "gig economy" and you've become the maintainer and/or a significant contributor to a couple OSS projects that are related to the services you sell: you're a "sell out" to the ideals of open sources for wanting to be paid for that time. Again, I exaggerate this duality, but it's starting to become a real problem, I think, for the industry.

<comment><USER54> > you're a "sell out" to the ideals of open sources for wanting to be paid for > that time

Who the hell unironically uses the word "sellout" anymore? Especially in this context?

I really don't think this is, like, a common opinion or anything. I haven't ever encountered anyone criticizing people for getting paid to work on open source software. Many projects I like (RPCS3, mGBA, libretro/RetroArch, GhostBSD, Redox OS, Godot Engine, Matrix.org) are funded on Patreon. In large projects such as FreeBSD, many commits are sponsored by either various companies or the project's Foundation. And specifically contractors contributing to projects related to their services, as you mentioned? That's how a ton of javascript libraries are developed :D And everyone is mostly just thankful that these projects exist.

What the hell are those "ideals of open source" anyway?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> The social contract of open source is to give away code and time to open source to enhance the community and software. The problem that open source projects really have is that raising and or selling a product is a goal that not every person with a successful project has.

If you want to actually have people pay for open source you should look into making a grant style system for people in open source that is targeted to maintainers. Google Summer of Code and Aigrant are good examples of this.

</comment><comment><USER39> The author seems to believe _contributions_ of code or _contributions_ of bug reports are a net negative for the project, while the only thing that the project needs to survive is money to pay for the _author 's_ time.

That is exactly backwards. Nearly all open source projects actually do _not_ need any money at all to grow and prosper. They simply need contributions.. of time. In the form of bug reports and code.

Take care of your users, first, and the money will follow.

<comment><USER69> They do not _need_ it, but it'd help quite a lot. If I got a bunch of money for doing open souce I could:

\- Not find random jobs to be able to live, so more time for open source.

\- Have more energy for open source (so important it has to be a separated point from the previous).

<comment><USER39> Cause vs effect. Money is the latter ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I hope the OP doesn't seriously believe that charging for open source work will somehow "fix the diversity problem", rather than magnify it.

I'm hoping that was just an off-handed line that didn't get much thought before being added to the post.

</comment><comment><USER71> "Do you want to get forks? Because this is how you get forks."

</comment><comment><USER72> Maybe not lock non-paying users, but give paying users a bigger priority and the ability to promote non-paying user's requests if they're good.

</comment><comment><USER73> IMHO, the fundamental problem of these burnout open source projects is that they are "marketed" (deliberately or otherwise) to non-decision makers and people who don't control the budgets in companies that need their software. I.e. The lowly developers of some complex hive of a deeply hierarchical group of code monkeys in a for-profit org that's typically not in technology.

Red Hat, Google, Microsoft and Oracle all know the value of open source because their big wigs are keenly aware of its value.

</comment><comment><USER74> Alt currency is an option for open source project. I think GitCoin is on these lines

</comment><comment><USER75> Would be nice if projects were organized with the Aragon project

</comment><comment><USER76> >If you're the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be "do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project's future." Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails. People who don't pay should feel like they are missing out on the party.

This could be the dumbest thing I have ever heard of it. I mean seriously, you want people to pay even for PRs they have already written?

>Also charge contributors for the time it takes to merge nontrivial pull requests. If a particular submission will not immediately benefit you, charge full price for your time. Be disciplined and remember YAGNI.

This sounds like a great way to lose all your real contributors. The article mentions "get paid for your time" over and over again, yet who is paying me for the time to write the code for the PR? You expect me to both dedicate my time to writing the code for a PR, and then pay you for the privilege.

Perhaps what projects worrying about work for commits should require rigorous testing (integration tests at the very least) on unknown PRs if they ever feel the need to do something like this. And limiting feature requests is understandable, but most projects already ignore overly specific feature requests. Charging for PRs though seems like the fastest way to have your project forked, and have you lose control of it, or for it to split the development talent and die completely.

<comment><USER77> > This sounds like a great way to lose all your real contributors. The article > mentions "get paid for your time" over and over again, yet who is paying me > for the time to write the code for the PR? You expect me to both dedicate my > time to writing the code for a PR, and then pay you for the privilege.

It certainly sounds absurd on the face of it.

On the other hand, I can think of at least three cases where I'd do the work of submitting a PR if the project in question required me to pay.

In each case I can't currently gauge accurately enough whether these projects have a well-functioning development process. I could easily end up with a bitrotting PR with the project lead making a not unreasonable argument about why it's rotting (their time is limited, something else is taking priority, etc.). I imagine I'm not the only person who's ever been in such a "holding pattern."

On the other hand, if a reputable project says they'll take money in order to merge a branch I want, things become less amorphous very quickly. A project lead is not going to get away with blowing off a bitrotting merge request, at least not without their project's reputation (and future income from PR's) taking a hit.

edit: clarification

<comment><USER78> Reading this makes me wonder, though... These maintainers are often well-paid professionals. If their lifes outside of their day jobs put the pressure to limit the open source work, what is a little money going to do? If money was their main motivator to compromise their personal life, would they not already have gotten a second job (like a part-time consulting gig), maybe instead of the whole open source thing? Makes me feel as if this article misunderstands the motivations of maintainers.

<comment><USER79> Not every developer is a highly paid superstar in Silicon Valley. When needing to juggle family / life, I'm sure this proposed model would make it a _lot_ easier to explain to the wife/husband/partner why they need to stay up a bit longer at night to work on their (previously) non-paying projects.

<comment><USER22> You need to show income to justify your hobby?

<comment><USER77> As a potential contributor I need to know whether there's a professional process or a guy "playing with trains" on the other end of the wire.

The problem is that the FLOSS ecosystem doesn't give you an easy way to tell. So if I misjudge and hit a wall of dysfunction, the general response would be, "Well, the maintainer just wants to play with trains. Leave them alone and fork the project if you want it to be some other way."

At least with paying to contribute, it would force the FLOSS ecosystem general response to be, "Those maintainers are just playing with trains, but they're taking money _as if_ they are professional engineers. _That 's bad_." Of course that's worst case scenario-- best case is that they really are engineers and I'm funding their development. Either way, it's potentially better than the status quo which is that you have no idea until you submit the patch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world.

The rest of us have work to do.

<comment><USER9> This smells like a small-minded startup-bubble nonsense to me. If you have time to use open source software, you should make time to also submit fixes and open some of your work.

That's not to say startups don't contribute, but my experience is that a lot of startups—usually led by inexperienced managers—see contribution as giving something for free instead of charging. Small-minded nonsense indeed.

<comment><USER76> Lots of companies use open source code but don't actually require any changes to be made. A lot of industry standard open source software requires no code modification of the source for the vast majority of applications. Examples being Nginx, Python, Apache Web Server, Tomcat, pretty much any enterprise level application. So many people use it that for the 99%, the code already exists, with 99% of the use cases being heavily tested.

Now they could be donating some amount of money, but that's in no way required.

<comment><USER9> All good. But then, the same people could contribute code non-pertinent to their product as open source. As someone else said in a comment here, you can always find what to open source. There is really no excuse.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


W3C forks HTML yet again - <AUTHOR> https://annevankesteren.nl/2016/01/film-at-11 <comment><USER2> I remember there had been divergence between the WHATWG spec and the HTML spec, notably with respect to the main element. Were the W3C's modifications reset in the process of re-forking the spec?

I cannot find a link to the new draft, and the 5.1 draft is dated Oct. 8th 2015: [https://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD- html51-20151008/](https://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-html51-20151008/).

<comment><USER3> I believe this is what he's talking about: [https://github.com/w3c/html](https://github.com/w3c/html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So standard</comment>


Tracking radiation levels in Japan - <AUTHOR> http://rdtn.org

<comment><USER2> Just a lurker here, but whoever is running this site is clueless.

It lists figures like "800Gy/h" which is far higher than the radiation level at Chernobyl, right after the accident, standing right beside the blown reactor.

If you check the sources, the units are in nano Gy/h. Their conversion to milliSievert is closer but still off by a factor of a 1000.

So the highest reading I can find is 700nGy/h at Hitatinaka: <http://www.houshasen-pref-ibaraki.jp/present/result01.html>

If you turn that into a yearly dose, using a weighting factor of 1 as the monitoring station website suggests, that's 6milliSievert/yr: the average yearly dose from background radiation. Exciting!

There's really no justification to make such a website.

<comment><USER3> "There's really no justification to make such a website."

That seems like a very strange conclusion. How did you arrive at that? Wouldn't it be good to know from yet another source that radiation levels currently really are nothing to worry about?

<comment><USER2> Their text: "This ongoing crisis has highlighted the need for trusted sources. With conflicting reports of radiation levels in affected areas, we wanted to build a way to report and see data in an unbiased format.

This site is not meant as a replacement for government nor official nuclear agencies. Our hope is that data sets from various sources can provide additional context to the official word in these rapidly changing events. ..."

They're using loaded language. They don't say that the official reading are not credible, but let's take a few measurements to make sure.

Background radiation levels vary quite a bit due to surrounding geographical features. A reading from a government station is made under a controlled environment, so a prolonged and large increase in their readings is a good indicator of possible contributions from artificial sources. Getting people to run around with consumer radiation meters isn't going to produce credible data, especially when people are more likely to submit a sample if they "find" an unusual reading.

Also, they're calling for contributions from people in Japan. Yet they do so not in their native language. It seems to me that their intent is that they want radiation readings primarily from English readers i.e. not Japanese.

<comment><USER3> So you have no problem with the concept, just this specific implementation? There are more understandable ways of saying that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Radiation dose chart...

<http://xkcd.com/radiation/>

<comment><USER5> According to that chart 100 millisieverts/year (or 0.01 per hour) is linked to increased cancer risk. The readings in cities near the reactor look like between 0.1 and 0.8. Not good if it doesn't go down.

<comment><USER6> Right - Note, that those are rates per hour. Which means for the .8/Hour, you are seeing 19.2 mSv/Day. You hit that 100 mSv total in about a week. That's bad for two reasons, #1, it's exceeding the 100 mSv baseline, but also, I have to believe that getting that much radiation in a week, instead of a year, can't be good for you either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great idea but it would be much more useful if the pins were color- coded to indicate danger levels.

<comment><USER8> They are. Gray indicates a complete lack of danger. I'll ask them to add a legend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else find it ironic that all the people flying out of Tokyo are exposing themselves to more radiation than those who remain there?

<comment><USER10> There's quite a bit of misleading info in some news reporting making numeric comparisons between numbers representing different types of data (activity totals versus exposure rates) and in some cases mismatching units too. At least there seems to be plenty of monitoring going on in Japan, and wide access to frequently updated data. NHK today was reporting the government website now has hour by hour values tabulated. I think that's to help people understand that the daily averages are mostly well below the peak values that get attention. Using a peak hourly rate value for a daily or longer calculation may cause people to over react. (Of course people may have other exposure through food, water etc.)

Studying two other incidents, one at a Japanese fuel facility in 1999 (closed in 2003) and the other with a U.S. army Idaho Falls (Dugway testing grounds) reactor that went critical in an accident in 1961 provides insight into the neutron-moderating behavior of water, and interesting case studies of exposure to people after the initial events. Less known than three mile island, both are significant.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SL-1> [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tokaimura_nuc...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It strikes me as a site for scamming people, <http://bit.ly/fgGX3a> sure doesn't sound like a normal way to access the Red Cross. The retailing links are fishy too.

<comment><USER11> The Amazon link is an affiliate link, all others are clean. Bit.ly provides a simple service to shorten links, and some additional features like click counting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Marian Steinbach blog entry "Japan Radiation Open Data" referenced in the article has solid raw data links.</comment>


Got Ice? The Physics of Chilling Your Beer - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/how-much-ice-do-you-need-for-your-drinks/

<comment><USER2> My uncle built a really cool beer chilling device. I posted it about a year ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634090>

<comment><USER3> That is one seriously cool hack. Do you have a video of it in action? Did you sell any?

<comment><USER2> No video. I guess I could put one on YouTube.

Haven't sold any. Sent out a catalogue sheet to all the big box stores and any that were seriously interested wanted to see a sample. Factories quoted me 30-45K just to start. It's definitely on the back-burner, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another question: if the beers in the fridge are running out and you have to "restock" with room-temperature ones (<http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail39.html>), how long does it take a 4*C fridge to get them down to that temperature? And how long for the freezer to do the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER5> This probably ought to include the heat lost through the walls of the cooler, which is the big ice melter for outdoor picnics. (After all, you can put the beer in the fridge before you go out.) I did some of these calculations at [http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen- tol/2007-Decembe...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen- tol/2007-December/000876.html) with a somewhat larger cooler in mind.

</comment><comment><USER6> The first comment on wired has a very good tip:

For best cooling you want to use a mix of Ice and cold water, with a ton of salt. This lets the water temp drop below freezing, and makes better contact with the cans/bottles, transferring heat away from them faster.

It makes a pretty big difference, especially when you've got a bunch of warm beer / wine and want to get it to a drinkable temperature as fast as possible.

</comment><comment><USER7> I looking for suggestions on how to get a can of dr pepper down to the temperature where it just starts to get slushy but not freeze and then stay there. My current approach is to stick it in a bucket filled with ice and salt wAter, stick that in the freezer for 20 mins, then enjoy. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I enjoyed reading the comments pointing out numerous flaws and errors in the article. :) Happy 4th of July!

</comment><comment><USER9> The title should be "Got Beer?" because that photo doesn't have any real beer in it ...

</comment><comment><USER10> Talk about partying on July 4th. List all temperatures in celsius. ಠ_ಠ</comment>


Ask HN: Examples of Excellent Python Code? - <AUTHOR>

Are there open source projects or other applications that are held to be excellent examples of Python coding (both in style and in function)?  I'm going to have some time after finals in a week and I want to give some good code a close reading. <comment><USER2> All the code on <http://norvig.com/> is a pleasure to read.

This is one of my favorites: <http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Source code of Mercurial:

<http://selenic.com/repo/index.cgi/hg-stable/file/>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.djangoproject.com/>

edit: <http://twistedmatrix.com></comment>


After 11 years, a new "Programming in Standard ML" [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/smlbook/ <comment><USER2> Download this, download this (<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf>), and block some play time.

<comment><USER3> How different is this PDF from the book version? (see: [http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris- Oka...](http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris- Okasaki/dp/0521663504)) Regardless, thanks for the link.

<comment><USER4> The book expands upon his thesis, and has Haskell source code in an appendix. I'm more familiar with the book than that PDF (and definitely recommend it), but comparing their tables of contents would probably help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The members of the research group I work in are pretty heavy users of OCaml and I'm a big proponent of languages of the ML style. I generally have the impression that OCaml has become the de facto ML implementation. Can anyone make a case why I might want to consider using SML rather than OCaml?

<comment><USER6> A few years ago, I had some time off from work and decided to spend the week learning *ML. I spent a bunch of time with Standard ML, including the entirety of the older version of the Harper book, and implemented a bunch of nontrivial toys in it.

In the end, after having covered the whole book, I became frustrated with the language and jumped ship (to Haskell with a quick stopover at OCaml). My main reason was fragmentation: SML/NJ, MLton, etc. all have somewhat different "standard" libraries, which means that in many cases you can't use libraries written for one compiler with another. I ended up having to choose which compiler and set of libraries I wanted per project in order to optimize the availability of libraries for that particular project, which is a frustrating experience. I'd rather learn the idiosyncrasies of one compiler than two.

Before jumping to Haskell, I dabbled in OCaml. I did not implement anything serious with it; rather, I went back and reimplemented a couple of the small toys I'd done in SML using OCaml. I decided that if I had to choose between one of these and the other, I'd probably end up going with OCaml: since there's only one major implementation, you won't run into the frustrating experience of trying to merge two disjoint but frustratingly similar ecosystems. To my sensibilities, however, OCaml is a bit uglier syntactically than SML. In the end, I just never clicked with OCaml, and decided that Haskell would scratch my itch better (and it has).

Having said all that, I don't mean this to imply that you shouldn't read this book! Reading Harper's book on SML made it much easier to pick up OCaml and Haskell, and I definitely consider it an excellent use of my time. SML is a really nice language and a good introduction to Hindley-Milner, but the SML ecosystem is something of a jungle and you'll probably get frustrated if you stay too long. The biggest thing going for SML vs OCaml, in my opinion, is that the syntax is just plain nicer.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. The parallels between ML and Scheme, two languages invented in the '70s and in an academic setting, are striking: the core language is great, but the community is divided into ever-so-slightly incompatible implementations, so, in practice, there's very little sharing. Therefore, it's impractical to do most "large" projects in the language, due to lack of critical mass of useful libraries. ML/Scheme end up being learning languages, for the most part, and then everyone moves on to {OCaml, Haskell}/Common Lisp to get real work done.

I would say these similar outcomes are a repudiation of the idea that multiple implementations of the same language is a good thing, but that hasn't hurt C's popularity. More likely, it has something to do with their roots in programming language research. Maybe ML and Scheme are _too_ good for their own good, and other academics can't resist using them as a basis for their own pet ideas. Perhaps a truly successful (read, "widely-adopted") programming language has to be flawed just enough to discourage anyone from trying to improve on it. Worse is better strikes again?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I concluded the same thing. Languages with standards seem to be largely worse off than languages with canonical implementations with regard to interoperability and ecosystem coherence. I think maybe the problem is that if your standard isn't restrictive enough to ensure general interoperability, you end up without it.

It seems strange that Haskell seems to be a special case to this, but even there you see language extensions that ghc supports but Hugs et al do not. It's just that, for most people, ghc just wins outright. SML/NJ vs MLton is a harder question to decide given the freakish performance that MLton can achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the point of ML now that we have Haskell? This is not meant to be a troll; I'm seriously asking. Haskell proponents mention ML and Miranda only in passing and as lesser (in terms of purity and ease of use) antecedents of Haskell. What reasons are there to still use it?

<comment><USER9> Just because Haskell is purer that doesn't mean ML is pointless. Under the right circumstances even a functional program can benefit from mutable state. One example (perhaps the only real example; I don't know) can be found in the SML New Jersey implemetation of splay trees, which modifies the tree during certain operations.

Even without the purity question there are other things to consider. ML is evaluated strictly, for example. I don't know much Haskell but I don't believe it has any direct counterpart to ML's functors, either. There are probably many other differences. Haskell is definitely more popular and is still a niche language, so the reason you don't hear much about ML's benefits is probably just because it has so few users.

<comment><USER8> Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Store your luggage in local shops - <AUTHOR> http://usebounce.com/ <comment><USER3> I forget which app it was, but when in the US for the Boston Marathon this year, my friend and I used one of these systems. It was amazing - we left one set of cards and a phone in a bag the day before, plus clothes. We could then finish the race, go to the shop to get our bag (a chinese health store - <USER2> stored it in a back room), and get changed, then go have beers. No need to go back to our hotel (which was near Hopkinton).

It's actually a more legitimate service I think than the likes of uber, as it is anciliary service for more income for small shops (we also bought 'candy' when in the store - a bit more revenue for them), as opposed to people relying on it to make a living.

<comment><USER4> This sounds great. I would compare it more to airbnb - using someone's stuff that would otherwise go unused. So actually extracting lost value. Uber might one day become that (I hear the typical personal car goes unused something like 90% of the day), but when everything is self-driving.

<comment><USER5> I think the days of Airbnb being "rent out a spare room" are gone, whenever I look, most Airbnb properties tend to be used as dedicated short-term lets and has supplanted the old holiday letting market.

<comment><USER6> I've seen a mix. Some are definitely dedicated AirBnB rentals where it's obvious the owners are professional landlords; but we've stayed in ADUs where owners occupied the primary residences, cottages being rent out part-time, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a pretty vibrant space with many startups trying to solve the problem.

It's been sparked by the raise of Airbnbs which rarely offer luggage storage.

A similar trend is in self checkin solutions.

It's interesting to note the herd effect on this kind of startups: it becomes easier and easier to raise capital to solve problems many others are trying to solve already.

<comment><USER8> I wanted to start something like this many years ago (and I still cannot find anything like it in the cities I go to); I travel a lot for work and I want to leave a suitcase in every city I travel to every few months so I can just take my laptop on the plane. The places that exist only do 24-48 hours max or are very expensive (can rent an apartment for just a little more). So yeah, airbnb for luggage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where have you needed this? Will add it to our expansion roadmap! Keep a look out for us next time. We're in 72 cities now and that number will at least double this year.

<comment><USER8> I was thinking of adding some other services as well as all people (expats) were looking for those; buying stuff for you and putting it into suitcases for instance.

I have a room full with crap; even at $1/day per case (which I would pay long term), I can put enough cases in there and easily get them out to pay triple the mortgage on the entire house every month... All my chinese and thai friends (where I store stuff now) would gladly long term store cases in their houses: 20-30 of them for sure.

Short term they would not but 2 weeks or more; many people working abroad would jump at that.

<comment><USER9> I have always dreamed of someone providing me all the essentials I need on a vacation - toothpaste brush comb etc and having it ready at airport or hotel. At a reasonable price.

Seems I always forget something or forget to bring it home. Would be nice just to not stress about them during packing and just focus on clothes laptop etc

<comment><USER10> As a general tip, if you travel enough, keep a travel kit that you can just toss in a bag. For toiletries, I just have a 1 quart Ziplock I only use for travel. And I have another little kit bag that contains a bunch of odds and ends I may need while traveling.

I don't keep dupes of everything. My cables and plugs bag is the same one I use day-to-day. But I do keep a general travel pile that has most of the stuff I may need on a trip other than clothing--which varies by location/season/type of trip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In some countries, like Japan and Taiwan, they have big lockers for storing luggage at the airport or MRT (metro) stations.

Is this meant for the same purpose?

<comment><USER12> train stations offer the same service in europe, in my experience.

(it's not the same and not very reliable, but random places like museums and restaurants will keep your luggage if you just ask them nicely too :)

<comment><USER13> We used a locker at Antwerp main station. It was defective. Spent most of our visit there trying to get our bags back.

Something with a human attendant right there could be an advantage.

<comment><AUTHOR> :( that sounds miserable. I hope Bounce is in Belgium for your next visit. Manned by staff, and also 24/7 support if you need help with anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In my experience, you can go to any random hotel bell desk and check your bag for the day for 1-2 units of the local currency. (You don't need to prove that you are checking in or out.)

I don't see paying bounce $6 and farfing around on a website for something that's so simple and quick to do in person and if there's a problem of any sort, I can readily sort it out on the spot instead of over some support-via- email system. (When bounce offers a non-hotel answer in a spot with no hotels nearby, I can see the value, but that seems like a corner case.)

Of course, I also didn't see people being willing to pay $10 to have unpredictably slow delivery of cold food from the likes of Doordash, either, so...

<comment><USER10> I'm usually staying in hotels and, to be honest, I've never tried to go into a random hotel and asked them to take my bag. So my alternative take is I'd probably rather pay $6 for a legit service than farfing around social engineering random hotels to store my bag for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is how we describe it! Low enough price, and max reliability. The cost of getting turned away at a hotel because you're not a guest is probably worth $6, especially if you have places to go, people to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not all hotels are convenient to where you want to be - if you are staying in Fisherman's Wharf for example and will be in Union Square before your flight, it doesn't make sense to go all the way back to FW to get your bags. Bounce has locations everywhere. It's also really popular with AirBnB folks, people going to games, concerts etc.

Have 10's of thousands of users already.

</comment><comment><USER15> Bounce is an awesome idea! I've struggled to find good places to store luggage in the US, while I've generally managed to find something when I travel in Europe. If you use Airbnb exclusively, most hosts let you checkin in the afternoon. So you absolutely need to store luggage somewhere while you wait for your host.

<comment><USER16> Have you ever reached out to the Airbnb host and asked them to store your luggage before check in? This is something that I think most hotels will allow.

<comment><USER17> I've had multiple Airbnb hosts have no problem with that. However, you can't really rely on it, and unlike a hotel, figuring out timing logistics for when they will be around to let you drop it off early can be tricky/more trouble than it's worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think [https://stasher.com](https://stasher.com) is the leader here. They have nearly every Premier Inn in the Uk on their platform.

<comment><USER19> Stasher are the leader worldwide from what the press says. They also work with Klook and hotels.com

Bounce website looks nice too

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This would be incredibly useful in ski towns, when you're trying to get that last day of riding in but checked out of the hotel. I always skip it cause I'm afraid my car will get robbed.

<comment><USER21> Many hotels will hang onto your luggage even after you check out.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I think this service is meant to fill that gap for Airbnb users. There's no added value here if you stay at a hotel.

<comment><USER23> I think there is because you don't always have a hotel in convenient spot. Not having to go back to your hotel might be added value.

Like you have to check out at noon but you have evening flight and you could drop your things somewhere in city center and take Uber to airport from there instead of going back to pick your stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This gave me a wildly dumb idea that some startup should try.

This idea, but in the trunks of Ubers (as a side gig for the driver), rather than static locations. You can summon your shit wherever you end up.

<comment><USER25> People need to go home sometimes. This would be pretty complicated dealing with issues like someone being late to get their stuff. At least a shop can say come back tomorrow.

<comment><USER26> A mixture could work though:

Store in shops long term. Summon it on demand.

<comment><USER24> Love it. Let's make this.

SMS: Summon My Shit. On-demand storage and delivery in your city's "cloud".

<comment><USER27> Hi,

I'm Cody's co-founder. That is literally the origin of Bounce. "Bounce" your things away from you and back to you when you need them again. As mentioned it obviously comes with a host of challenges that you don't have in the current decentralised and static model - but I do believe it's achievable. And it's definitely something we want to tackle long term!

I love your name idea ;) SMS. Are you in SF?

<comment><USER24> Cool. I just assumed that it was about the expediency of "drop our stuff off quick and let's bounce!" Do kids still say that these days?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Haha love it. Adding delivery to Bounce will be a game-changer. Then you can 'bounce your stuff'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I recently thought "Uber for Backpacks" would be a boon to the homeless. They could leave it in storage until requested back, as opposed to A-to-B transport. Natural partnership here. Economics of having a storage locker or large van were problematic, this could help. Realistically a homeless person would pay a few dollars for this regularly, as they can afford to buy a few coffees from cafes they spend time in. Not being ID'd as homeless would be dignifying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting idea. I am sad to say that the stores on our platform aren't excited when someone who appears homeless (smelly or dirty clothes) wants to use Bounce.

<comment><USER29> That's perfectly understandable.

Homeless people belongings is not exactly what one expects when signing up for a _luggage_ storage. Doubly so if they are a hotel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It seems like a good idea... until the first terrorist leaves their suitcase bomb in Manhattan, mobster uses this to arrange drug mules or child trafficking, or shady business or their employees goes through bags looking for valuables.

Most people can simply mail their luggage to their hotel. Only a limited subset of travelers who use Airbnb or are homeless would need this service.

It seems like a better business model would be somewhere at the airport where you can pay someone to watch your luggage if you want to explore / go to dinner / etc. and know you're going to get everything back (like some sort of branded plastic-wrap "seal" with writing on it). Fewer locations needed and infinitely more customers. Of course, the downside is there's nothing to patent or can be protected in either business, it can be knocked-off ad infinitum.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reasonable concerns but I don't think we offer anything inherently new for terrorists. They don't need our service to carry out attacks today. There are easier ways to leave a bomb, drugs, etc without your ID / payment info attached.

We've found quite a broad range of folks using us. We even have commuters who use us 5x / week - it's become a part of their lifestyle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I sincerely hope they don't discriminate against the unhoused. This could be a game changer for folks who are used to putting together $20 per night for a shelter stay already (being homeless is very expensive, as I learned firsthand many years ago.)

<comment><USER31> (context: often shelters don't want you bringing your stuff, which means it disappears)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't get it. If you have luggage, wouldn't you also have a hotel or motel room to store it in?

This sounds more like something you'd do so your buddy, Dave, could pick up a suitcase of drugs or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops - meant to type this as a reply not as a new comment:

Not all hotels are convenient to where you want to be - if you are staying in Fisherman's Wharf for example and will be in Union Square before your flight, it doesn't make sense to go all the way back to FW to get your bags. Bounce has locations everywhere. It's also really popular with AirBnB folks, people going to games, concerts etc. Have 10's of thousands of users already.

<comment><USER33> Another scenario where it's handy: you have to leave your hotel in the morning, but fly in the evening.

Either pay a few bucks somewhere nearish where you'll head to the airport, and pick it up on the way, or drag it around all day.

<comment><USER34> That's what hotels do. It's kind of a secret but basically every hotel lets you keep your luggage past checkout and pick it up later that day before you leave for the airport.

<comment><USER7> How is that a secret? Honest question as I assumed it's common knowledge

<comment><USER34> It depends on where you're from and what sort of upbringing you've had and life you were exposed to. Just like most common knowledge.

<comment><USER19> Another little known fact - your luggage isn't insured when you do that. These guys all seem to offer insurance to protect what happens to your luggage

<comment><USER33> That's one of the reason I've been reluctant to do so, yeah. _All_ of the hotels I've been to that do this have been _painfully_ explicit about how they're not responsible for literally anything, and that there aren't even any cameras to investigate potential issues afterward.

That's a big fat "nope" from me. Which is likely their desire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How do you protect the customer in the case that somehting inside the luggage get lost? Or what if they claim that they lost something, but it just bs and want to rip off the store owner/your platform?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have an insurance policy covering $5k of loss/damage. We have a process rigorous enough to fend off scammers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Looks neat but would be great if you expanded internationally. We're in the Philippines and going to South Korea in a couple of months and there's no options in either country.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will be expanding internationally this year! Please check back in a few months!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Being a marketplace, how did you manage to get the suppliers (shops) to signup before having buyers in place? Then how did you got buyers (people wanting to leave luggage) to roll in starting with a specific launch date?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have some really great stories here. When we were first testing the model, we had a phone number on our site that said you could store your stuff in locations all around the city. Someone called and asked for a location in the Upper East Side. I said we have some spots scheduled to open there next month but let me see if they can open earlier. Can I call you back in 30 minutes? Then I called stores in that area until I found one that said yes. Then I'd connect the dots, onboard them to our platform, and off we'd go. That's how we got many of our first locations.

<comment><USER37> That's an excellent approach! Well done! Thanks for sharing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm a professional Airbnb host in Columbus and know some big hosts - 20+ properties. Any way I can help bring this to Columbus? I run into the storage issue every few days

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! What's your email?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can email me at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I thought Bagbnb - [https://bagbnb.com/](https://bagbnb.com/) \- did the same thing. Are you aware of them and what differentiates you from them?

Good luck with everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've built a far better product (judge for yourself - usebounce.com), and have a much higher quality bar for locations. This work comes through in numbers: Bounce has maintained a 4.9/5 star rating across all our customers. The company you mention has a 1.9.

This other company has far more reach however...they definitely beat us there. We hope to close that gap in the next year.

Lots of work to do!

<comment><USER40> :-) Happy to read this, but Don't use trustpilot as a bible, it is always a marketing strategy if you don't have an official account with them :-) By the way we love workings with numbers @bounce. BAGBNB 1.5 mln bags stored +2,500 luggage storage places all over the world 300 cities Is a blue ocean Good luck to all of us Ciao BAGBNB

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Sounds like a great service for drug deals though.

Drop off "luggage", give whatever code you receive to recipient, then they pick up.

If I were a shop owner the liability of storing the luggage just doesn't seem like it's worth the risk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shop owners can reject any customer that they're not comfortable with. These guys have an eye for everything. They'll sniff you out in a heart beat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Are there no security risk involved for the particitpating shops?

<comment><USER27> We do a few things to keep it risk free for store owners. For one, we are the ones providing insurance, so they're never the target of a claim. Besides that, we allow store partners the right to refuse service - or ask to inquire about what's being stored. None of our locations have ever had to do that, but it takes care of the scenario where a store partner fears people are storing something illicit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have used a similar service in Spain when my hotel was a little too distant from the train station to make and end of day return trip feasible. Worked well, good idea.

<comment><USER44> In Spain it was probably Luggagehero, you used.

[https://luggagehero.com/](https://luggagehero.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't remember how I discovered it but I used Bounce last June in NYC. Very easy to use and cheap. It was very convenient on my last day in the city.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome to hear that Nicolas - hope we can serve you again in the near future!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Nice idea! I noticed EU is not currently supported. Are you planning to launch in top European cities soon?

<comment><USER27> We certainly are! We're rapidly expanding this year and Europe is definitely one of our most requested markets

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I find that if you go to a high-end hotel and tell them you're not checking in until tomorrow but would like them to hang onto your luggage for the day until you meet a friend that you're staying with tonight, they'll do it for you. Given the low cost to them, doesn't make sense to try to check your story at the risk of upsetting an actual guest.

<comment><USER48> Depends on the hotel... many bigger hotels have dedicated bag check rooms. Last time I was a conference in New York, I was going to hang out for a while before heading to New York.

The bag check room at the hotel had a line, and there was a set fee per bag to store it there. There were hundreds of bags in the room, so not exactly low cost to accept and track all of them. Makes sense they charged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Only problem is if someone tries to store or hide illegal goods. Thats where I get concerned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Store owners have the right to reject customers and to ask what's being stored upon deposit. This has alleviated this problem and this concern with stores. These guys on the ground know what they're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This solves a problem I've had frequently while traveling. Very cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome to hear this. I just made this discount code you can use next time: THANKSHN</comment></comment>