[HN Gopher] My tiny side project has had more impact than my dec...
___________________________________________________________________
My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the
software industry
Author : mwilliamson
Score : 547 points
Date : 2021-08-01 12:05 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mike.zwobble.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mike.zwobble.org)
| butz wrote:
| Converting Word documents to HTML and fixing layout and
| formatting issues afterwards is a huge pain of mine. I usually
| end up pasting content from Word (or more recently, from
| LibreOffice Writer) to CKEditor, cleaning extra formatting, like
| fonts and only then moving content to CMS.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| > I don't know what the total amount of time saved is, but I'm
| almost certain that it's at least hundreds of times more than the
| time I've spent working on the tool.
|
| To me, this is the _entire point_ of software and automation. To
| give time and money back to people, because I want to make the
| world better. I see software being priced to just _barely_ be
| worth it for the buyer because it saves time (e.g. Mailgun and
| Auth0). When I write software, I want to price it so that it
| saves them so much money adoption is a no-brainer. "Free"
| pricing would be included in that, of course. Unfortunately, I
| also don't write much useful software.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Isn't the statement a bit obvious? Most of the tech companies out
| there were not born to make an impact on society, they were born
| to make money (which is totally fine). Only a handful of
| companies can be proud of making money while actually having an
| impact (good or bad) on society (e.g., Apple). Most of us (us !=
| HN crowd) work for companies in the first group.
|
| On the other hand, the vast majority of side projects have a very
| different: to have fun and/or being useful. Things that are
| useful usually make an impact on the society.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| All enterprises have multiple impacts on society. Many people
| want their work to tied to an overall net positive
| organization. That's why so many companies put energy into
| saying they are beneficial to society. Too bad those statements
| don't have to be vetted by an independent and impartial rating
| agency of some sort.
| js8 wrote:
| > Isn't the statement a bit obvious?
|
| No, it isn't obvious, just like the Earth is not _obviously_
| round. Even 40 years ago, the statement wasn 't obvious to many
| public intellectuals in the West, when they were in favor of
| neoliberal economic policies, under the broad assumption that
| free markets will automatically bring meritocracy (whatever it
| is). I think this example is one of many that show that
| meritocracy doesn't really happen by itself, but requires
| societal consciousness to be implemented.
| noodles_nomore wrote:
| Seems like money is only useful to pay for things that are
| predictable and require hard work, but we're quickly moving
| into a world where things that are predictable don't require
| hard work and thing that require hard work aren't
| predictable.
| david_allison wrote:
| Author's donation links [mammoth.js]:
|
| https://liberapay.com/mwilliamson
|
| https://ko-fi.com/mwilliamson
| semireg wrote:
| A few months ago my tiny side project blossomed into a 6-figure
| income stream. It's an electron app that designs and prints
| labels.
|
| Users import spreadsheet data and generate barcodes. Since I have
| a customer base and a target market, I've had every one of my
| mentors tell me I need to stop writing features and work more on
| marketing and analytics. But it's not as fun!
|
| Instead, I find myself up late at night working on USB weight
| scale integration for grocer/farm labeling kiosk. I'm looking for
| beta testers that have a need for such a thing.
|
| Check it out at https://label.live
| 0x262d wrote:
| This article starts to get at an interesting controversy about
| the definition of value. Is the value of a project equal to the
| amount of labor time it saves over previously used methods? Or is
| it equal to the amount of labor time it took to create the
| project? I think most software devs would intuitively pick the
| former, and that is what the article sides with and also what the
| market awards to innovations in the short term, but I think there
| is merit to the latter and people should at least consider it.
| The article presents an apparent contradiction (the author's side
| project was coded in a few hours and has arguably had more of a
| positive impact than their entire day job career's output) but
| that contradiction is resolved by the latter definition of value,
| the labor theory of value.
|
| The labor theory of value explanation for this is
| straightforward. In general, LTV asserts that the value output of
| some work approximates the amount of work that ordinarily has to
| go into it, or more precisely, of the socially necessary labor
| time going into that work (ie, the time it would take an average
| worker to do it without slacking off). This is because if you
| wanted that work done and didn't care how it got done, the
| socially necessary labor time would be the real cost of doing it
| yourself or paying someone else to support themselves while they
| do it (before various market dynamics and other distorting
| factors - it is an idealized model). I.e., in an assembly line,
| the cost of a part is the cost of raw materials + the cost of the
| labor added to them. This seems straightforward for assembly line
| work, but is a little less intuitive when the actual work is
| about making other people's work more efficient, which a lot of
| software dev falls into. But if someone simply said to themselves
| "I need the functionality of mammoth.js", the core idea still
| applies - of being able to replace the worker, hire a generic
| software dev, and get comparable work (or at least, good enough
| work), for a similarly low amount of value. Another way to think
| of it is that mammoth.js might save a lot of people a lot of
| time, but getting some version of mammoth.js implemented is
| probably historically inevitable and has a fixed and much smaller
| cost to actually do.
|
| How does this resolve the contradiction in the article? Well,
| mwilliamson's day job career labor output might possibly have
| saved less time of other people's work than mammoth.js. But their
| day job career labor output probably couldn't have been replaced
| in any way but by a similarly large amount of time and effort
| from other developer(s). Meanwhile, mammoth.js could be
| reimplemented in a similarly small amount of time by someone
| else, maybe taking a couple of tries to get it right. If
| mammoth.js hadn't been written at the time it was, maybe that
| would have happened.
|
| This isn't to discount ingenuity or insight going into this side
| project, or the usefulness of something like mammoth.js being in
| the right place and time. But I think it is a more precise way to
| think about how much value and what kinds are being added to the
| world by larger or smaller amounts of effort. In other words,
| devs shouldn't feel bad about having worked hard on stuff that is
| less neatly labor-saving than a small widget, as long as that
| hard work turned out to be useful.
| nattaylor wrote:
| I use a Mammoth WordPress plugin on a few sites. I dislike
| prominent donation nags, but if just popped up when I converted a
| document I think I'd be compelled to donate. It's a real time
| saver.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am banging on about software literacy again, but if the users
| were more software literate they _coukd_ have written something
| themselves, and if we lived in a software literate society we
| would reject inaccessible formats thus making the whole thing
| easier- same as the ERP system mentioned elsewhere.
|
| We have a long way to go before the code and the data is truly
| free.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| As a dev at a large company, I'm wondering how the author went
| about open sourcing the side project. My employment contract
| stipulates that anything I write for work is owned by the
| company. This company wouldn't have any motivation to let me open
| source the work I do, which in my case does not go into any
| product.
|
| The reason I ask is that I have written, as part of my day job, a
| scientific library in C# that doesn't appear to have any public
| equivalent and I know addresses common tasks in the industry. I
| would love to open source it, if not for beer money, but for
| visibility to help my career --- I'm at that point where
| promotions only happen with externally-visible accomplishments.
| mwilliamson wrote:
| Author here! The open sourced code was rewritten from scratch,
| not least because the original version was in C# while the open
| source version is in JavaScript. So, the same idea, but an
| entirely new implementation.
|
| I forget exactly what conversations I had, but it was also very
| clear that they had no problem with me doing so since it
| doesn't really have any connection with their core business. If
| I wanted to, I suspect I could have open sourced the original
| version so long as I stripped out the stuff that was specific
| to the company.
| tyree731 wrote:
| At my firm you can request that side projects not be subject to
| the company's copyright agreement. The firm's market is fairly
| specific, so most requests get approved.
| Lorean wrote:
| I'm afraid it's difficult to call something written "as part
| of their day job" a side project.
| drran wrote:
| > My employment contract stipulates that anything I write for
| work is owned by the company.
|
| Did you agree on the price of that extra work? If not, I
| recommend to set price prohibitively high, e.g. $100 per line
| of code or $1000 per hour of work. If your company really want
| to own your side project, then they will need to pay the
| requested price.
| woranl wrote:
| Client side document rendering has a lot of potential. There is
| currently no open source library that can render docx file as
| nice as mammoth. There are some commercial libraries that rely on
| WASM, but they are generally bloated and you can't read their
| source.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > Sometimes I wonder whether it'd be possible to earn a living
| off mammoth. Although there's an option to donate - I currently
| get a grand total of PS1.15 a week from regular donations - it's
| not something I push very hard.
|
| There's no shame in making the source available but using a
| license that requires payment for commercial use, like the
| Prosperity [1] license.
|
| [1]: https://prosperitylicense.com/
| abiro wrote:
| The problem with this approach is that it turns open source
| adoption into a procurement process: the developer who wants to
| use your projects needs to go through the legal department etc.
| So if there is any alternative option, employee devs will avoid
| a dual-licensed package.
| musingsole wrote:
| Also nearly impossible to enforce. This approach just adds a
| layer of guilt/paranoia in the implied legal consequences.
| pembrook wrote:
| Few companies of any consequence are going to use a piece of
| software illegally.
|
| Every boilerplate due diligence process when trying to sell
| your company includes looking at what open source work you're
| using to see if there's any legal issues.
|
| You'd be stupid to risk scaring off a multi-million dollar
| pay day over something so trivial.
| telesilla wrote:
| In a business context however, how knows how many apps are
| using it, and a properly done licence forces business to pay,
| maybe only once but it's something. A commercial license
| could bring in some small revenue that justifies maintenance
| and new features.
| scosman wrote:
| Don't spend your time worrying about those who won't pay.
| Almost always a better use of time to think about expanding
| those that do/will. It's frustrating, but not a good use of
| time.
| goodpoint wrote:
| This license is not written by a legal expert, I suspect.
|
| For example this clause, phrased like an order, does not make
| sense:
|
| "Don't make any legal claim against anyone accusing this
| software, with or without changes, alone or with other
| technology, of infringing any patent."
|
| You can't give orders to people in a license or other
| contracts. You can only describe conditions.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > This license is not written by a legal expert, I suspect.
|
| FWIW, it's written by Kyle Mitchell [1], an attorney. It's
| just that he places particular emphasis on writing his
| licenses in plain language, not legalese.
|
| [1]: https://kemitchell.com/
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Sure you can. Contracts are simply bargaining for promises to
| do or not do something. Here, the "order" is the licensee
| promising not to do something.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Some people don't want to run a business and that's OK.
| [deleted]
| vinceguidry wrote:
| I guess I can see why this would be surprising to most
| programmers. It doesn't surprise me at all. Why would the wishes
| of any profit-seeking enterprise, who serves a very select
| clientele, those willing to pay for what the business provides,
| have anywhere close to the impact of a software project chosen
| out of a random itch, taken to the point where others actually
| get interested in it, and use to build their side projects, each
| of which can provide their own impact?
|
| Unless you're a big techco with worldwide reach, what could
| compete with that?
| DrOctagon wrote:
| Quite a few years ago as a (very) junior FE dev I used mammoth.js
| to automate the generation of a biennial report. Three months had
| been earmarked for the task as this is what it had taken in
| previous years (due to bad tools and lack of expertise). I had it
| done in less than a week by using mammoth. Mike was also very
| accommodating with questions I'm pleased I cant remember as I'm
| sure they were embarrassingly simple.
|
| The project still took three months as it was one of those
| special type of organisations, but it wasn't due to the HTML
| generation :)
|
| Thank you for mammoth.js!
| [deleted]
| musingsole wrote:
| Your story and mammoth's origin story really highlight how the
| Sisyphean corporate world is seemingly at odds -- or at least
| tangential -- to progress.
| DrOctagon wrote:
| In the interest of full disclosure it was a government org.
| Your point still stands though.
| yunohn wrote:
| > government org
|
| Governments and corporates function incredibly similarly.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Corporate does not care about the job, or the client.
| Corporate only cares about billable hours.
| xcambar wrote:
| Predictability, revenue per employee, and predictability of
| revenue per employee ;)
| leros wrote:
| I'm just thinking about how mammoth.js is being developed for
| free but is being used by corporations to make money. In a
| way, he's working for free by making this open source.
| Something is off about that.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| This is true for most popular open source projects, fwiw
| praveen9920 wrote:
| I once helped a friend by writing a simple script to automate
| sending series of mails which were usually composed manually with
| attachments and same-ish subject and content.
|
| This boosted their productivity at least by 60%. I was more proud
| and satisfied with that simple piece of code than my entire
| professional work that year.
| lukevp wrote:
| I think my career overall has been pretty high impact - I ran a
| team that built new systems from the ground up that were used by
| a team of 2k store employees to run daily operational tasks,
| optimizing their performance and ux tremendously, as well as
| building e-commerce into a website used by half a million people
| a month.
|
| I still feel the most proud of a little library I made one
| weekend a few years ago [0], that's now used all over the place.
| I get issues and contributions from Latin America, China, Japan,
| across the US and Europe, and Australia. I've done consulting
| work based on this library. It's a great feeling to know I built
| something that others find useful directly and isn't a tangential
| thing that was built as part of different business.
|
| [0] https://github.com/lukevp/ESC-POS-.NET -- check it out if you
| have a need to print to receipt printers from C#, and give it a
| star!
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Great example of how fixing a problem that other people have is
| often much more impactful than fixing a problem that your manager
| has.
| nikkinana wrote:
| I wonder who owns that code?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Same here, I spent many years on complex and large pieces of
| software with relatively little impact, and an 'all nighter'
| pretty much changed the world for real time video on the web.
| Pretty weird when you consider that it was mostly gluing together
| pieces that already existed and adding a small HTTP server.
|
| I haven't been able to replicate anything close to that success
| in all the years since then.
| elcomet wrote:
| what was the software ?
| nubb wrote:
| This happens in the crypto currency space all the time. I have
| friends that have launched very thought out projects that they
| spend a significant amount of time on. Then they'll launch some
| meme project and it will do 1000x better. It's certainly a weird
| feeling.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Companies isolate devs from customers by using Product Managers.
| PMs interview customers and then decide what to build. By the
| time the tasks get to the dev it's hard to understand the
| motivation and impact. The best companies I've worked at put the
| engineers and customers in close contact so they understood the
| impact and shortcomings in their work. Alternately you need to
| foster a culture of shared purpose where you have "faith" that
| your work has impact.
| wreath wrote:
| I've seen more engineers completely disinterested in anything
| customer related (and even calling users stupid!) more than
| I've seen PMs isolating devs. Every time I ask a PM if I could
| interact with a customer (not asking for permission, but to
| hook me up) they were delighted. Every single time.
|
| Another way to solve this problem is to have engineers on
| customer support rotation of some sort. This way, engineers get
| to see how their software is used in the wild and interact with
| customers, and PMs get to see how unrealistic expectations and
| deadlines comes back to bite you in the ass in a form of your
| engineers being busy fixing half assed crap.
| reader_mode wrote:
| I agree about PM/dev/customer part but disagree on
| dev/support rotation.
|
| This sounds great in theory, in practice working on any non-
| trivial software means there are parts you know little-
| nothing about. Having spent time on support duty I'd end up
| pinging team members for help (disturbing people without
| having a sense of priority since I don't do support), budding
| into other people's stuff without the capacity or desire to
| follow it up long term.
|
| The best way I saw to get devs into customers shoes is to let
| developers be involved in client rollout - like ship then on-
| site and see how people use the feature they wrote.
|
| But frankly even then, devs shouldn't be making a lot of
| these ae user facing decisions, send the UX guy.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The project I'm currently the "lead developer" on never had a
| PM, so we directly communicate with users/customers. Often we
| are able to implement changes and make them available in a test
| environment within the hour - people are amazed, because
| they're used to everything taking days at the very least,
| usually weeks or months, with a lot of stuff never being fixed
| and so on.
| mattwad wrote:
| just be careful, without a PM you can end up building lots of
| little features for each client, making individuals happy,
| but then you end up losing sight of what problem you were
| trying to solve, and suddenly your product feels very "heavy"
| for everyone...
| andreilys wrote:
| Why do you need a PM for that?
|
| That's what a good tech lead with a robust roadmap is for.
|
| PMs sprung out of the notion that engineers are anti-social
| and need someone to keep customers/internal teams at bay so
| eng can focus on coding.
|
| Of course in reality there are plenty of highly competent
| tech leads who can both negotiate with customers on a
| roadmap and build it.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think we'd call them PMs once the job gets big enough
| to need that work done (almost) full time.
| didibus wrote:
| The work involved in keeping up with a roadmap,
| convincing execs that the roadmap is worth investing in,
| communicating it with the marketing teams, content teams
| and support teams, tying it back with customer demands
| and needs, and all that really ends up taking most of
| your time as a tech lead, and you no longer have time to
| work on tech design, architecture, training, reviews,
| coding, testing, etc.
|
| That's where you'd want a PM brought in, the tech lead
| ideally would work together with the PM on the roadmap,
| in that technology must be considered when designing a
| roadmap, feasibility, effort needed, technical
| complexities, needed tech dept pay backs, needed
| redesigns, infrastructure upgrades, security
| considerations, etc. As well as being consulted for what
| can tech realistically provide as means to solve
| problems, etc.
|
| That's why I think a PM is needed, so the tech lead can
| focus on leading the technology, while the PM focuses on
| capturing requirements, getting funding, coordinating the
| launch, and all that.
|
| Ideally, there's also a separate dev manager, so the tech
| lead doesn't have to worry about employee resourcing,
| project allocation, hiring, compensation, promotion,
| needs/wants, vacation time, performance, etc.
|
| For all these things, the tech lead should be consulted
| and have a voice, but freeing them from all this work is
| definitely a plus, why have your most experienced
| developer do all this management work?
| dahart wrote:
| It's true, there are plenty of engineers who are capable
| of dealing with customers. PMs, however, did not come
| from an idea that engineers are antisocial, you're making
| assumptions. PMs have long existed in other industries
| where the very same is true as software; the people
| building the product are often capable of talking to
| customers, but don't.
|
| The reason PMs exist is because it's a full time job,
| just like most roles. Being an engineer and/or tech lead
| is also a full time job. In larger companies, we tend to
| split out full time jobs. Often in small startups, people
| have multiple roles. So in a small company you might see
| someone talking to customers and engineering. In a large
| company, it's far more likely that the engineer and the
| PM are two different people.
| shoto_io wrote:
| I am not sure if it's correct, but I have heard that Apple does
| not PMs in their main product because of that?
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| The best PMs I've worked with have very clear understandings of
| customer workflows and needs (or work towards developing them)
| and communicate those to the dev team. They also make sure to
| share customer feedback, whether constructive criticism or
| excitement/thanks.
|
| It's really motivating to hear customers are happy and I don't
| know why a PM wouldn't share that good news.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Outsourced operations like contractors are often neglected in
| the feedback loop. So are SRE's and parts of the business
| that are less customer facing. This can lead to lack of
| purpose. Good companies make sure everyone knows their
| contribution to the whole.
| tialaramex wrote:
| It is valuable to have someone for the customer to talk to
| that is on their wavelength (often less technical and
| sometimes more domain knowledge), and who has more soft
| skills than you might seek in developers. Calming down an
| angry customer is a useful ability and that's not what you
| hired me to do.
|
| However, sometimes the problem is just technical, and every
| game of telephone makes it worse. I have had two week back-
| and-forths which were eventually resolved by the agreement
| that OK, this nerd who does our implementation (me) can be on
| a teleconference with your nerd who does _your_
| implementation so long as us grown-ups are also in the call -
| and then it takes maybe five minutes to get to "No the
| _digit_ five. Not the word five, the _digit_ five. " "Oh! Oh
| Wow. I never considered that. Sorry. Yes, it works now." and
| we're done.
|
| I really valued time spent shadowing people using my
| software, one of our tools was for call takers, and _I_ could
| see that the thing they 're all kinda used to but have to
| keep working around is a thing I can fix with a CSS tweak,
| whereas the change their _manager_ tells us should be
| prioritised is going to take months. I can land the tiny
| improvement next week, and make their lives better while
| their manager argues with my manager about whether the big
| piece of work is P2 or P3 and so on. The role I 'm in theory
| taking next (if they get their act together and issue me a
| contract to sign) is more user contact again, and I look
| forward to being able to make people's lives better directly.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Documenting and communicating motivation and impact are often
| pretty high up the priority list for PMs, otherwise you're just
| a context-free ticket factory, which typically results in
| subpar products.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Not in my experience or maybe large companies have so much
| hierarchy that the PM gives kudos to the dev manager that
| never trickles down to the individual devs
| cdubzzz wrote:
| My first side project[0] is almost four years old at this point
| and continues to get lots of interest and use. It's been really
| fun to engage with its users.
|
| My second side project[1] has not got nearly as much traction but
| also has a much smaller target audience and I haven't really got
| fully finished.
|
| I do find my professional work rewarding and valuable but there
| is definitely something different about the side projects. They
| feel like much bigger accomplishments.
|
| [0] https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy
|
| [1] https://github.com/kcal-app/kcal
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| Good work!
|
| On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
| https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
| swayvil wrote:
| One level down. My serious side project
| (https://vimeo.com/241051006) is arguably less cool than my
| casual side project (https://vimeo.com/308956882)
| sheetjs wrote:
| Our story is very similar. I wrote a small library for converting
| XLSX and XLS files to CSV. Over the years, that grew into one of
| the most popular open source libraries on npm/github:
| https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs
|
| Back in 2015, 'patio11 reached out to us. In addition to a
| structured license purchase, he gave great insights and actually
| wrote a blog post about the experience
| https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementati...
|
| Today, we offer paid software builds to solve related problems
| and it allows us to work on SheetJS full-time!
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| These kind of translators are fun. Long ago I wrote a PL/M (Intel
| proprietary compiler)- to - C convertor. It used context to
| translate the simple looping constructs of PL/M to the most
| congenial C loop (for, do, while). It translated the single macro
| mechanism into either 'const foo=x', simple #define or #define
| with arguments. It moved declarations into context. What it
| produced looked like C, not 'C/LM'.
|
| It can be a blast to tinker with these, iterating until the
| output looks pretty sweet. One of my favorite projects. I can
| imagine the docx - to - css translation allowed for lots of neat
| tricks.
| justinclift wrote:
| Sounds fairly normal over the course of a lifetime.
|
| One is "the day job", used to pay bills.
|
| The other is "what I feel good about as a human being". It's
| great when both align, but that's not the standard thing that
| seems to happen.
|
| Take it as a useful data point, not something to get bent out of
| shape over. :)
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I've worked at a VC funded startup that burned $3 million for
| 2,000 users.
|
| I built a side project that I put on Reddit that got 5,000 hits
| last month.
|
| The second seems like better ROI
| CharlieMunger wrote:
| I am one of dozens of moderators of the Hardcore Berkshire
| Hathaway subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/
|
| I put in a little effort each day, but thousands of people
| benefit. Small work, big impact. Contributing on Reddit is an
| easy way to have a meaningful effect on the world.
| zrail wrote:
| In 2015 or so I wrote a tiny tool for people to record the
| outgoing voicemail message from their phone. In the intervening
| years it's helped more than 23,000 people move on from loss, save
| a grown child's cute voice, and lots of other things. It hasn't
| been significantly financially rewarding but it's incredibly
| fulfilling to help someone on such a personal level.
|
| https://vmsave.petekeen.net if you're curious.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I'm a CS associate professor. I teach a course which consists in
| contributing to a free software, in third year at my uni. A few
| years ago a couple of students decided to make a contribution to
| GNU ls. The change was to have the output color independent of
| capitalisation (it is based on filename extension). Their code
| was accepted. It was a tiny tiny contribution, but it's probable
| that these few lines of code are and will be executed a few
| thousands times more than all other contributions my other
| students made.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| Glad to see France promoting meaningful experiences for CS
| students.
| inson wrote:
| That the best way of teaching CS! Bravo! I wish the US
| professors have the same attitude like yours.
| inamiyar wrote:
| That's so cool! Are you able/willing to share the course name/a
| course page?
| boulos wrote:
| Looks like
| https://pablo.rauzy.name/teaching/2016-2020.html#ddll (via
| profile)
| iamcreasy wrote:
| That's great! Did you guide them through the process? Did you
| motivate them in any way?
| ozarkerD wrote:
| Man I wish my college offered courses like these. I don't
| regret getting my degree but I sure didn't get much out of it
| besides the piece of paper that made me hire-able in some
| people's eyes.
| antoviaque wrote:
| That's great to see this course -- there aren't enough good
| courses materials on how to contribute to free software, and it
| can be quite intimidating the first time. Yet, it can
| definitely be one of the most rewarding development work...
|
| With others from a few large free software projects &
| communities (Open edX, OpenStack, Framasoft, Mines-Telecom...),
| we are in the initial stages of producing an online course /
| MOOC about contributing to free software. If you (or anyone
| else reading this :) ) are interested in contributing or
| joining the project at this early stage, please let me know. :
| ) My email is on my profile.
|
| Presentation site (draft): https://larrybotha.gitlab.io/mooc-
| floss/ Repository: https://gitlab.com/mooc-floss/mooc-floss
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I can relate. My side project ( _not_ tiny) has had a much larger
| impact on the world than anything I ever got paid to do.
| icemelt8 wrote:
| I think the only other team who has made such a feature is
| Wordpress contributors, Wordpress offers a way to copy paste word
| documents in their Text box, and it formats correctly.
|
| Perhaps you can launch commercial license for your library, and
| license it to famous CMSs, such as Umbraco or Craft. That way you
| can make a living on it too.
| lmz wrote:
| They mention docx so I guess it takes the file as input (as
| opposed to clipboard contents for web JS editors).
| codingdave wrote:
| A few years ago that would have been true, at least client-
| side. There have been a variety of server-side options for
| years, especially if you run Windows as the server OS. More
| recently editors like CKEditor have vastly improved their Word
| pasting.
|
| Even so, mammoth.js seems to remain unique in the ability to
| upload a file in the browser and programmatically retrieve
| matching HTML. That is why I use it - I can get the HTML,
| process it, and POST it back to my server already cleaned up
| and ready for my CMS. The browser does all the heavy lifting,
| my server remains a basic CRUD app, and I don't have to allow
| file uploads as it all happens client-side.
| felgueres wrote:
| I'd love to see folks plan to monetize their product from the get
| go and not as an afterthought.
|
| They should get measurable, direct compensation for the value
| created for others -- be that saved time, joy or something else.
|
| I feel there's this quasi-apologetic approach to selling software
| when there should only be respect for those who can create value
| for others by their own creative and productive ability.
| Wronnay wrote:
| I think many devs have that feeling...
|
| But often simple things have a very big effect - in my first job
| I made some simple scripts which imported data from machines into
| an ERP System.
|
| I also made some bigger projects with feature rich GUIs at my
| first job.
|
| The simple scripts probably sill import data every workday and
| automate a task previously made by humans since multiple years,
| some of the GUIs weren't even used daily before I left that
| job...
|
| So I feel like the simple scripts will be there for a long time
| and save many work hours while some of the feature rich GUIs
| probably weren't necessary...
| D13Fd wrote:
| It's crazy how much time little scripts can save.
|
| 10 years ago at my current job I created a script to automate
| the job of checking a certain website for new data each day. It
| used to be done by a person who would spend maybe 20-30 minutes
| checking the site and circulating the info each day. Others
| would also check the site on their own periodically for faster
| updates.
|
| The script just checks the site multiple times a day and
| circulates the results.
|
| Over the course of 10 years, I'd guess that my little script I
| wrote in maybe 5-10 hours (including some tweaks over time as
| the site format changed) probably saved in the ballpark of half
| a million dollars in time spent, based on billing rates.
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, but then you should also ask: how much of that is _my_ work
| and would someone else have written the same simple scripts?
| Perhaps the main value is in the existence of these ERP
| systems.
|
| From that p.o.v. your feature rich GUIs may be your biggest
| contribution to society, because that's really work based on
| _your_ decisions.
| flakiness wrote:
| Yeah, this happens even within a side project. Smaller trivial
| ones tend to be found useful, while bigger ambitious one tend
| to ending up disappointing, even if completed.
|
| At work, giving a spot-time quick help often feels more helpful
| than pushing through a "proper" project task.
|
| I suspect this is because large part of the "work" project is
| more like a speculative investment than something obviously
| useful. That is probably OK because finding large-enough-
| obviously-useful-things is hard. What we tend to overlook is
| that finding a tiny-but-obviously-useful-thing isn't as hard as
| it looks. It's just hard to earn enough from it.
| snarfy wrote:
| My most used program was a 7 byte .COM I wrote with debug.exe.
| It made the machine reboot. It took about 15 seconds to write.
| A friend who worked at the college ended up using it in their
| scripts. They had a way to do it before but it wasn't as
| reliable as my little program. That college's infrastructure
| was used as a model for the rest of the district and so my
| little program spread to the other colleges.
| oogali wrote:
| jmp f000:e05b
|
| Between fiddling with debug.exe and discovering that fixed
| address, that put me on the path to demystifying technology
| (or at least understanding everything is approachable).
| MAGZine wrote:
| I feel like everyone has an ah-ha moment when software's
| facade of magic gives way to a genuine feeling that nothing
| in software is inunderstandable.
|
| I was helping my brother through some CS classes, and he
| had to use some sort of graphics library, and things just
| weren't clicking. I opened the source of the graphics
| library so he could see what was going on under the hood
| and he was like "whoa... It's all just... Regular code..."
|
| Demystifying indeed.
| ElFitz wrote:
| I remember when a friend and I, both with barely any
| experience at all, tried building our first SaaS.
|
| We went crazy over access control, roles, etc, wondering
| how operating systems and databases did it, driving
| ourselves mad over how to implement it at the lowest
| possible levels so the rest of the stack couldn't
| possibly go around it...
|
| We were pretty certain there was some highly complex dark
| magic behind it all.
|
| A few years later, I worked on a project where we built a
| SaaS MVP for a client, with access control.
|
| Turns out most people apparently consider ABAC overkill
| and will go with a few simple if statements if they can
| afford to.
| nuclearnice3 wrote:
| I showed a friend telnet yahoo port 80 GET.
|
| "wait. it's .. just ... text!"
| busymom0 wrote:
| I think there's tons of developers who feel this way. Some of the
| brightest minds and smartest people go to work for tech companies
| simply working on figuring out how to keep an ad in front of your
| eyes for a few extra milliseconds.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Similar experience. I created a little project and it has become
| very popular. It's also completed so there is no need to develop
| anything apart from updating any security issues. When I feel
| down I always think of that little project. Hoping to make
| another one by accident one day.
| alien_ wrote:
| Same here, for most of my 15+ years career in IT I've been doing
| DevOps stuff, mostly writing small scripts and infrastructure
| code, occasionally hacking on existing projects enough to do
| drive-by contributions.
|
| About 6 years ago I started AutoSpotting, an open source tool
| designed to reduce AWS costs by automatically replacing on-demand
| instances with up to 90% cheaper Spot instances, it was meant to
| be my playground project for learning golang.
|
| I estimate it saved in aggregate in the tens or maybe even
| hundreds of millions of dollars and multiple companies have been
| built around my code or reimplementing the same idea.
|
| It's still a side project that I work on occasionally but at some
| point I tried to monetize it through support and custom
| development. I failed to get enough traction to become a full
| time job, currently make some $400/month from about a dozen users
| whom I sell precompiled binaries through Patreon.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > I estimate it saved in aggregate in the tens or maybe even
| hundreds of millions of dollars and multiple companies have
| been built around my code or reimplementing the same idea.
|
| > It's still a side project that I work on occasionally but at
| some point I tried to monetize it through support and custom
| development. I failed to get enough traction to become a full
| time job, currently make some $400/month from about a dozen
| users whom I sell precompiled binaries through Patreon.
|
| We've had a lot of issues doing donations for cool projects
| like this. I'd really like a simple subscription service ala
| Gumroad so we can sign up for the "Enterprise" tier. Saving
| $100k we can totally kick back $5k to the person every month
| without feeling it.
| alien_ wrote:
| That's exactly what I have been using Patreon for, it's not a
| donation but a subscription for an enterprise tier. Still
| very few people signed up for it, the OSS code is working
| well enough and there's very little friction in just using
| it.
|
| Going forward I'm going to offer the enterprise stuff through
| the AWS marketplace, further reducing the friction, hopefully
| that will get more traction. It's just a lot of boring
| billing engineering work that I could have spent on improving
| the software.
| tmp65535 wrote:
| Similarly, I've been writing respectable software for decades but
| I'm fairly certain that my most widely used piece of software, by
| a wide margin, is a mildly pornographic app
| (http://driftwheeler.com)
|
| This app, published in 2017, has a continuously growing
| population of users from all over the world. I get email every
| day asking whether soft1 is the only server, thanking me,
| suggesting improvements, etc.
|
| It's ironic, and there is a lesson to be learned here.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| That porn for males is massively popular ? What a lesson :D
| Isn't it the whole purpose of the internet ?
| alien_ wrote:
| It's just a numbers game. The total number of people who
| consume porn is probably many orders of magnitude larger than
| the audience of your respectable software, so even if you're
| tapping into a very small niche of porn consumers, it can be
| enough to overtake your other software.
| ushakov wrote:
| have you tried working in public sector? i'm proud my software
| runs in our hospitals and saves hours for doctors, they now spend
| treating more patients!
| codingdave wrote:
| I work in the public sector, and mammoth.js has been a huge
| help in allowing me to create tools for school districts to
| bring content from Word docs into our tools. So yes.... even if
| not directly, the OPs work has definitely had an impact in the
| public sector.
| pxue wrote:
| I've worked on multiple specialty projects billed in the
| 10M+/year range with a handful of client stakeholders.
|
| I'm sure it made impact but at most it saved <10 people a couple
| of hours a day.
|
| I'd compare this phenomenon as if drug companies spend millions
| of dollars to cure an obscure disease a handful of rich people
| have.
| bartread wrote:
| This is an interesting and thoughtful piece but I think Mike (the
| author) does rather underestimate his impact.
|
| I never worked with him directly but we both overlapped at
| Redgate for several years. During the time I was there he wrote
| code that was integrated into Simple Talk (https://www.red-
| gate.com/simple-talk/), which is/was Redgate's website for
| publishing content, articles, tutorials etc., useful to SQL
| Server and .NET professionals. I believe he also worked on
| https://www.sqlservercentral.com/, which remains the leading
| community site for SQL Server professionals. The old Simple Talk
| site is several years gone now, sadly, but Mike worked on it
| during its growth phase and (guessing somewhat here) most
| successful period.
|
| These are sites that are used and useful to hundreds of thousands
| of SQL Server and .NET professionals every month. Yes, they are
| also promotional vehicles for Redgate and its products, and a
| core part of Redgate's marketing strategy, but it is possible for
| them to be both marketing and useful.
|
| Mike is an excellent engineer, and very much cut from the get
| (valuable) things done mould - which mammoth.js firmly
| underscores. I have no idea what he's doing at the moment but, if
| you get the opportunity to work with him, you should jump at it.
| logotype wrote:
| I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX
| library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has
| been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies
| reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and
| features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the
| technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to
| automate trades, but I keep working on the library for the
| benefit of others and just the joy of creating something. But
| what's the actual impact? Enabling companies getting richer?
| Greed?
|
| https://gitlab.com/logotype/fixparser
| qmmmur wrote:
| Are you seriously asking that question about people who want to
| automate trading in the stock market?
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm trying to find niches where positive feedback loops have a
| nicer effect on society (right now trying to help courthouse
| daily duties for instance)
| akudha wrote:
| It would be nice to make a list of such niches. Things that
| wouldn't take more than a couple of hundred hours to make (at
| max) and are tremendously useful, especially to vulnerable
| populations like old people, people with limited internet
| connection, physically challenged people etc.
|
| These need not be super polished, optimized etc. They just
| need to work correctly and solve a problem quickly and easily
| agumonkey wrote:
| old people are a special demographics (I encounter a few of
| them regularly, for IT reasons or not)
|
| the obvious fields in the list:
|
| - education
|
| - healthcare
|
| - justice
|
| someone on HN showed an app for people to find good workers
| for home rework, this kind of stuff could be tremendously
| useful, and more generally the organization layer of
| society is very lacking. This also match the issues at the
| courthouse, basically making people well informed, and
| communicating issues/info smoothly (instead of waiting days
| to get a fake answer by someone shady)
| alien_ wrote:
| There's a lot to be done to address digital divide
| especially for the elderly.
|
| The other week I witnessed first hand how multiple
| 50-something folks who own smartphones struggled with
| something as easy as filling a form on a website for
| making an appointment (in this case for getting a
| passport) and confirming the appointment by clicking an
| email.
|
| Or think about the thousands of vulnerable/old people who
| will die of COVID-19 because they failed to schedule
| their vaccinations even though they could otherwise
| access it. A friend who works in Berlin on radiotherapy
| for cancer patients said lots of them aren't vaccinated
| because they just can't sign up for it and their doctor
| doesn't do it for them.
|
| Anything that requires using technology, even as simple
| as using a browser and getting a confirmation email
| should be probably be also made available by more
| familiar/accessible tools such as SMS/whatsapp/facebook
| or a call center.
| agumonkey wrote:
| biggest problem in digital anything is the amount of bs
| and randomness
|
| non tech saavy people rely on rote learning at surface
| layers, and every year comes a new way, new look, new
| lingo .. they feel it's yet another big knowledge gap to
| learn when in fact there's almost nothing new under the
| sun (algorithms are as old as civilisation, logic doesn't
| change much)
| akudha wrote:
| Physically challenged people are another group that could
| use a lot of help. One of my friends has cerebral palsy,
| until I met her, I had zero idea about the problems they
| face.
|
| These groups of people aren't served because there is not
| much money in it :(
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd gladly help people with those issues. I'm gonna seek
| them (no idea why I never thought about that).
|
| The reason I put elders aside is that their motivations
| and emotions are very different from younger people.
| There are lot of fear, loneliness driving their need for
| help, and often they don't really want to own the
| knowledge, it's more a little bit of emotional support;
| which is cool, but not as motivating as, say, a younger
| handicapped person, who has more skin in the game.
| akudha wrote:
| There was a language website that connected old people
| with youngsters who want to learn languages. They
| practice their language skills and help the old people
| with loneliness. This is a very good idea.
| agumonkey wrote:
| indeed, those bridges are great
| Asymmetryk wrote:
| I'm prematurely dreaming of a browser plug in that can
| more intelligentl arrange page elements when I am heavily
| zooming in on text. The ability to select page trft6
| enlarge would be great. I miss Opera browsers whole page
| zoom possible because they wrote their own display layer.
| Windows has lost so many years spawning graphics
| subsystems, I can't believe that a distro hasn't emerged
| for us olds. We'll give you green dollars for it on
| silver round things even ..
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Are your users compensating you well for this? Sounds like the
| impact you're having is making fintech serious money, so I hope
| you're getting some of that.
| alien_ wrote:
| I'd probably offer some sort of support/consultancy services
| and prioritize the work of the paying users, making it clear
| when filing github issues and pull requests. This could easily
| sustain you in a passive income way so you can spend most of
| your time working on things that matter more to humanity.
| eloff wrote:
| Yeah, I think especially in finance companies would be
| willing to pay for support and feature development. There has
| to be a way to monetize the project and make it so at least
| it pays for your time.
|
| There's nothing wrong with a labor of love, but the companies
| using your software can afford to pay for your time.
| Asymmetryk wrote:
| I am probably not actually being realistic in terms of
| economic results and ROI, but the FIX library GP seems well
| established - making it documentation that's the case I
| would like to put forward : any code in a critical path,
| and what better than a financial exchange subsystem, can be
| purchased from any number of vendors with support, but how
| many have genuinely caring, intelligent, thoughtful and
| usable beyond the immediate remit, thorough and readable
| documentation? Cloth letter binder and loose leaf format
| with theoretical introduction, theory of operation,
| enumerated common implementation errors for examples
| together with laying out conventions for the payload / XML
| DTD - the docs you can write tests and tools against
| without the code.... I have signed off on a pretty penny or
| two to obtain docs like this, and hundreds of dollars per
| copy is totally reasonable. I'd thin film laminate select
| chapters and affix a dry wipe pen inside (how much would it
| be to custom some from All express?) and by the sounds of
| this situation I think you could see a standard adoption
| and satisfying return. Boxes, ring bind, shrink wrap and a
| 2nd color printed sparingly add up to something that
| management likes a lot, usually. Professional product
| support bridges the economicd to enterprise fees, imo..
| kilroy123 wrote:
| But then it's a job and he/she probably won't like it
| anymore.
| alien_ wrote:
| That's okay, it doesn't need to be a full-time job, but
| more like a "4 hour work week" mini-job that pays the bills
| with minimal ongoing effort.
|
| The rest of the time could be spent doing other more
| interesting things that just bring joy and/or benefit
| humankind.
|
| They'll probably also have further potential for
| monetization, and so on, sustaining a life of leisure and
| doing meaningful work.
| satellite2 wrote:
| I've been a user of your project and it's fantastic. I think
| you're being too hard on yourself.
|
| The proliferation of marketplaces and assets to trade (and all
| type of projects, automated trading, market making, etc... that
| your project enabled) can been seen as a net positive, as a win
| win for all parties involved and more.
|
| From a microeconomic perspective, your library enabled access
| to startup using js and with relatively simple tech stacks
| access to a tool that would otherwise be relatively complicated
| and time consuming and for which they would not necessary have
| the resouces. By doing so you lowered the cost of entry and
| allowed new entrants to challenge the status quo.
|
| And from a macroeconomic perspective I think it's one of the
| reason access to capital has been simplified and has lowered in
| cost, it's one of the reason for the low cost of mortgages and
| the relative resilience of economies during covid (central
| banks interventions are useless without bank and other
| financial intermediaries participation, it would be like
| pushing on a string).
|
| Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against finance.
| It's still the most important reason that explain the constant
| improvmements in prosperity and peace of recent years, and the
| best thing one can do is to make it less arcane and open it to
| more people. One of the achievements of your tool.
|
| You can be proud of your work.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against
| finance. It's still the most important reason that explain
| the constant improvmements in prosperity and peace of recent
| years
|
| I think the contempt comes from the fact that financial
| instruments have a tendency to concentrate those benefits in
| small proportion of the population. Low-cost mortgages are an
| excellent example: these have enabled wealth gain for those
| who were able to get them at a certain time. But that gain
| has come almost entirely at the expense of those who weren't
| able to (or simply didn't) get them, who now face greatly
| increased rent and house prices.
| lazide wrote:
| It isn't financial instruments doing that - it's people.
|
| Be thankful that it allows this to happen somewhat
| transparently and peacefully, rather than at the hands of
| pinkertons, criminals, or the military - which is how
| historically it has happened.
| nicoburns wrote:
| The financial instruments (and the underlying rules of
| the economic system) are the enablers here. You're
| probably right that it's probably better than what came
| before, but that doesn't mean we can improve on the
| system we have.
| lazide wrote:
| Of course we can improve it - by identifying where
| people's behaviors and systemic effects are causing
| undesirable behaviors. That probably doesn't happen if we
| blame 'finance' for it though?
|
| Every system has exploitable loopholes and will become
| unbalanced once enough people start gaming it. Some of
| them (especially new ones) are easier than others.
|
| It's easy to say 'this is terrible', but that can easily
| turn into rejecting a known system with adjustments and
| corrections for bad behaviors that isn't perfect into a
| system that gets gamed even easier by bad actors and
| turns into an even worse (but different) mess. See 90% of
| all revolutions ever.
| andrepd wrote:
| > It isn't X doing that - it's people.
|
| That's quite a silly argument since you can very
| literally replace X by anything and get a true statement.
| lazide wrote:
| Definitely not true.
|
| Wildfire burns down your house (assuming no intentional
| negligence?) - fire burned down your house.
|
| Tsunami happens and wipes out your village? That was a
| tsunami, not people.
|
| Neighboring countries army invades? Yeah, that's people.
| andrepd wrote:
| Anything man-made, as should be obvious.
|
| Example: It isn't democracy doing that, just people. It
| isn't autocracy doing that, just people. It isn't
| socialism doing that, it's people. It isn't capitalism
| doing that, it's people.
|
| Therefore democracy = dictatorship, and socialism =
| capitalism. It's all the same, it's all people in the
| end, so it's no matter.
|
| Patently absurd.
| lazide wrote:
| If you replace 'finance' with another system, I guarantee
| you'll end up with another disaster soon enough. The only
| way you get halfway decent stability in any human run
| system is to build in expectations of human corruption
| and add in methods for self interested (aka greedy)
| people to get payoffs by tackling said corruption.
|
| The problem is that people are involved, and you're not
| realizing what that means - people inherently are
| corrupt, self interested, short sighted, power hungry,
| etc.
| andrepd wrote:
| The financial services industry is focused on helping those
| with the most wealth accumulate even more wealth. You can try
| to spin this any way you'd like, but this is their raison
| d'etre, it's the business they're in. Don't try to pretend
| they're actually helping us all, especially after 2008 has
| revealed their true nature to the wider public.
|
| All you're saying would be correct if we had a sane system of
| property rights, (which we don't); then finance would be
| truly benefiting everyone. But that's not the world we live
| in.
| nicoffeine wrote:
| > (central banks interventions are useless without bank and
| other financial intermediaries participation, it would be
| like pushing on a string).
|
| Yes, the only thing financial intermediaries would be missing
| is the actual funds (largely paid by the middle class) to
| bail out corporations for the second time in less than twenty
| years.
|
| > Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against
| finance.
|
| There has been contempt for greed and corruption for a long
| time, and for the same reasons that finance continues to earn
| it today. If the middle class didn't constantly bail out the
| banks and their related parasites, you would all be bankrupt.
|
| Frankly I don't want to hear any advice from anyone in the
| financial industry until you demonstrate the ability to pay
| taxes and save enough to make it through the next crisis
| without crawling to the capitol building with your hand out.
| lazide wrote:
| Pretty sure you're blaming the wrong people. I'm not now
| and have never been in finance - but blaming banks or
| traders for the Fed's actions is prima facia ridiculous.
|
| And throwing in the whole 'greed is good' stereotype
| doesn't help.
| boulos wrote:
| Huh! You left out the most funky part: you wrote a FIX parser
| in _Typescript_.
|
| What are people using it for? To make web apps and just not
| have to roll their own wrappers around FIX/FIX-derived data?
| (That is, if all back ends are used to speaking FIX, it's nicer
| to have the front end and web serving tools also just speak
| it?).
| true_religion wrote:
| People use nodejs in finance backends too. Its async
| operators make it easy to munge different data streams
| together and fan in/out results.
| vmception wrote:
| oh this is something to say louder for the people in the
| back: there is no reason that finance and computational
| finance gravitated around python
|
| there is nothing inherent about that language aside from
| people not having made some libraries in other languages
|
| javascript especially nodejs is fine for most people's
| finance cases
| nuclearnice3 wrote:
| It's true there is nothing inherent. Because all these
| non-statically typed garbage collected languages with
| Algol-like syntax are basically the same language. Given
| that it makes sense that the decision is made based on
| libraries, community, inertia and whim.
| bigyikes wrote:
| I don't think you have any obligation to continue supporting
| the software, but give yourself more credit! You're making
| dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of developers lives significantly
| better. You're helping bring the finance industry out of the
| stone age. You've created something useful and valuable, which
| is no small feat.
| hdudhdhd wrote:
| Isn't FIX messaging part of the stone age problem?
| bigyikes wrote:
| Well, baby steps and all that :^)
|
| At least it's not a hand-rolled, "enterprise-grade" (read:
| extremely verbose with unnecessary abstractions) pile of
| spaghetti. I'm slightly scarred from my brief stint at a
| large finance firm.
| jjeaff wrote:
| There is a common refrain in charitable organizations that are
| focused on helping the poor:
|
| "Sometimes you have to feed the greedy to get to the truly
| needy."
|
| In other words, the greedy will always take advantage, but that
| doesn't diminish the help you give to the needy. There is
| simply no way to totally filter for the greedy.
|
| This doesn't really apply directly to your situation, but at
| least for every greedy company that benefits from free products
| like yours, there are a lot of jobs created and benefit to
| society as a whole when these companies create useful products.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I do find this aspect of human morality interesting... people
| get REALLY upset at freeloaders, to a degree that is not
| proportionate to the cost they add. We choose to spend a ton
| of resources to prevent freeloading, even when the amount we
| spend to stop them is more than we actually lose to the
| freeloaders.
|
| I guess it kinda makes sense as social creatures, but it can
| be frustrating at times when you are trying to help people.
| petschge wrote:
| > We choose to spend a ton of resources to prevent
| freeloading, even when the amount we spend to stop them is
| more than we actually lose to the freeloaders.
|
| Is it also more than what we would lose to freeloaders if
| we did nothing against them? If yes, then it's indeed not
| rational. But if no, then it's just indicative that what we
| are doing is working.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah, that is part of why I said it was interesting... it
| is hard to figure out how important that behavior is for
| social stability.
| mech4bg wrote:
| This is amazing. I now work in consumer SAAS web development,
| but I worked for a long time in finance and for 7 years of that
| exclusively focused on FIX, writing a real-time, highly
| performant market interface. I would have _loved_ to have had
| something like this while I was working on it. Have you thought
| of commercializing it? Do you get to use it in your day-to-day
| work?
| high_byte wrote:
| if you want to erase billions and stop the richness just remove
| the library, or better yet add a typo :D
| kragen wrote:
| This is the magic of free software licensing: by removing
| barriers to sharing, it multiplies the usefulness of whatever is
| licensed by a much larger number of users, who are all free to
| repurpose it as they see fit. Most of my own free software is
| pretty radically useless, but I've written Wikipedia pages that
| thousands of people read every day, and made improvements to
| countless others. It would be difficult for anything I do in a
| normal job to have as big an effect on the world, either positive
| or negative.
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