Location: Belgrade, Serbia -> San Francisco, US (in a couple of months)
Remote: Maybe
Willing to relocate: Yes, within US
Technologies: Python, some Javascript, basic machine learning, people management, product management, scaling tech businesses.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivancherevko
Résumé/CV: on request
Email: chrvk@hey.com
Hi, I'm Ivan, boasting a rich tech background that spans development, technical leadership, startup ventures, product and marketing management, and now, a focus on privacy. In a couple of months, I'll be relocating to the US on an O-1 visa and am on the lookout for an engaging role in engineering management or product management.
If Apple, another big player in the BSD ecosystem, were to donate their December operating profit to open source, that'd be a game-changing $10 billion a year!
Shoutout to Tarsnap, who's already doing awesome stuff like this.
You know GitHub sponsors is a broken experience when you find out GitHub only supports 7 people on their own platform https://github.com/github companies really need to fund their dependency tree…
Yes, perfect training grounds for your future “solo-pilot coding agent”.
Let’s not kid ourselves, by now we know that data is gold and we hand it to these corporations without ever getting paid for it.
One of the main reasons they can “incur losses” on co-pilot is not only future monopolization by market share but also by being provided endless amounts of golden data through usage.
So yes, hosting “social git” with some fancy UI and CI and spinning up GPUs (they will constantly need to ramp up on anyways) is peanuts in comparison to the upside.
Yes, open source developers as well as co-pilot users should get paid for their labour. Directly and by MSFT.
>The folly here is you believe MS does this because they want to support open source...In reality they get a TON of value from this "free" service
What is the difference? Nobody supports open source for the sake of it, we support it because we get tons of value from the "free" service. It sounds like incentives are properly aligned.
I see nowhere that GP said anything about what they believe. They might believe that, but until they say so, you're reading more into the comment than is there and making an assumption
another common folly is thinking that paying puts you in a special tier. free stuff is solely funded by the value of data, ofc there are exceptions funded by donated money and hard work. The things that are made to make money though, don't suddenly stop using the value of your data because you pay for them.
I recently learned that Kubernetes is running on a lot of free labour. The main draw and ever increasing underpinning for lots of services provided by the behemoth infrastructure entities…
Software labor is so funny. Here we are, with software engineering salaries some of the highest of any profession in the US. While at the same time much of the most critical and commonly used software was written completely for free. It’s an interesting juxtaposition.
I wonder if there's a license pegged to some meaningful metric (a hard problem unto itself), that prevents usage if the dev fund/devs are not compensated an X amount in a specified interval.
Something like an SOS License.
Support Open Source
...
All development on this project will cease to exist if dev fund does not meet "DOL Software Dev CPI adjusted Blah Blah Salary" * Number of active/approved devs.
Bugfixes will stop if dev fund falls below Y amount or something
...
Just some half baked thoughts, many conditions can be added or removed depending on the project structure/goals, but the underlying thought would be that Devs Get Paid is a key requirement in there somewhere.
Lots to consider here, but it's weird that no popular licenses have this as a clause in there - almost like it's frowned upon to ask for money?
> I recently learned that Kubernetes is running on a lot of free labour.
Not sure what is your source for that? At a quick glance most contributions come from Red Hat, Google, VmWare, Microsoft, Amazon. Lot of independent contributions are done independently but as part of employment, which I guess is not free labour?
It is opensource so there is still a lot of volunteer work going on there but the infrastructure (CI/CD, image hosting, etc) is also paid for by corporations and not by the community. Its millions of dollars a year in contributions.
i wouldn't really call $400k/year in total "heavily subsidized", that's around the all in cost of a single developer at one of these sponsoring companies
Depends. Giving $1m to free open source is “bad” but hiring 4 engineers and have them write core code and then open source that is good. Microsoft basically does this (more than 4 of course)
> Giving $1m to free open source is “bad” but hiring 4 engineers and have them write core code and then open source that is good. Microsoft basically does this (more than 4 of course)
Apple bought CUPS (printing) and now owns it and hired the original developer (who left at some point):
They ought to hire him back. When I upgrade my Macbook Pro to Monterey, it no longer prints to my Canon D530 printer. I have to copy files to a 10.6.8 Snow Leopard Mac Mini and then send them to the printer. Yay progress!
How can you say something like this with a straight face? There are millions of examples of "good" that have come from the products and services for-profit companies produce.
They have tens of thousands of workers. They ensure the sustainability of what they need and I bet they give back the bare minimum to abide by the laws. Apple is famous for benefiting much more than contributing to FOSS.
Apple are also infamous for making terrible software (iTunes put of off even looking at Mac for a decade and a half) so it might actually be a good thing..
>> Shareholders will boot Tim Cook if he even thinks of that..
> Which is why seldom good ever happens in the land of profit-driven business.
Many responses disagree with this comment. My knee-jerk reaction is the same.
OTOH, there is truth to the comment in that many examples of "good" are examples in which a business is driven by vision or value, not by profit first.
The history of computing is intimately tied with government investment and academic research. Hence ARPAnet and ALOHA. The impetus for world changing innovation tends to come from governments trying to improve things that are structurally inefficient.
Let's take a look at where the exponential growth of technology kicked off, and when the first actually almost-free-market began. Hmm. Quite a strong correlation.
That is just an outright lie. Even most of the open source stuff I'm going to assume you are thinking of could never have existed without adjecent profit-driven ecosystems.
Profit drives innovation, and more importantly makes technology accessible at scale. Do you think most of the world would have access to washing machines (which are of ridiculous utility, especially when you factor in their price with profit margins and all!) if it were not for some schmuck wanting to line his or hers of pocket? Because it would not.
At its heart, capitalism is a (greedy) solution to a planet-scale resource allocation problem, and there are no viable alternatives (give or take some modifications/variations).
>like US cable and telco companies like to remind you every time they do an anticompetitive move.
And despite that, who is helping move the telco world forward? Pointing to one mediocre example is certainly not proof that profit doesn't drive innovation.
No red tape needed, when comcast temporarely lowers their rates anywhere a new provider is trying to gain ground. Even the threat of doing that is enough to stop most attempts dead in their tracks.
It's not impossible to enter a market offering better services for bigger price than you competitors really. Or having better tech it's possible to attract enough investments to overstay lowered prices. Or use other ways which definitely work outside of US telco industry.
This is like the nursery rhyme version of economics we tell to freshmen. The truth is pretty far from this.
My personal take is that in practice most of the innovation we see in tech comes from the universities. E.g. the tech in search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI etc.
The tech is then, in practice, given to the private sector. There the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate.
Commercialization does often require some innovation around the edges, which companies often get by hiring talent from academia.
I realize this is unlikely to be a super popular opinion for some HN readers. But to me it's the one most defensible by evidence.
>>The tech is then, in practice, given to the private sector.
100% false, normally the people that created the tech while in university are the ones that create the business using the test (see facebook, google, etc), it is their tech to begin with it was not given to them
In most cases the University is also either paid a fee, or is part owner in the company as a startup, cashing out when funding starts.
Nothing is "given away"
now I personally think anything developed using Government Grants should be Public domain, non-patentable, non-copyright, 100% public domain, but ....
The technologies I mentioned were all developed by dozens or hundreds of people over the course of decades. Statistically, P(you become a founder | you helped invent the tech) is basically 0. Although you are probably right that P(you helped invent the tech | you are a founder) may be nonzero.
"(...) nursery rhyme (...)" is a nice way of not addressing what was said. Good for you.
Yes, a lot of discoveries (not "most innovation", but besides the point!) happens at Universities. But so what? Universities are either for-profit themselves, or they are financed through taxes which depends on the profitability of businesses in the economy which they exist in and contribute to. And like a sibling comment pointed out: Researchers are often the ones commercializing a discovery. Moreover, I specifically stated that "[the commercializing actor] makes technology accessible at scale."
Your statement that "the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate" is a half-truth, because the profit motive is very much present once you consider more than the first-order effects.
I 100% agree that commercialization of new techology (again, innovation is a lot more than bleeding-edge research) e.g., search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI, is optimally done through some kind of interaction between univiersities and commercial actors – but to the mutual benefit of a spiderweb of stakeholders affiliated with both academia and commercial actors, and not some quasi-altruistic act of sacrifice on the part of the university.
You should realize that the second part of your claim is just a postmodernist mantra (written to sound fine, links to reality skipped). In observable world one needs better economy to contribute more time to not-for-profit activities. While each, and every attempt to destroy evolutional capitalism to replace it with revolutional whatever "non-gready" model consistently lead to notable worsening of economy.
Worsening of economy by what measure? The argument is circular if you're saying "less profit is made in economic setups which encourage not-for-profit activity". It hardly seems like a reasonable criticism.
More interesting is what people would achieve if their time wasn't dedicated to profit seeking. The measure of success then may be the subjective usefulness of someone's contributions. It is a big subject but waving it away as you have isn't a satisfactory answer at all
You don't understand. You can't just e.g. sleep late, fish a little, play with your children, take siesta with your spouse, and spend evenings playing guitar and sipping wine with your friends; you have to spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat, then with the proceeds from the bigger boat buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats, then you open your own cannery, controlling the product, processing and distribution. You would expand, branch out, acquire and merge, do an IPO and then, in twenty or so years if everything goes well, you could retire with millions in your bank account and then, I don't know, move to live somewhere on a nice coast, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your children, take siesta with your spouse, and spend evenings playing guitar and sipping wine with your friends.
Linux and git, probably the two most successful free software programs out there were both created by one person (the same person) WITHOUT relying on a "profit-driven ecosystem". His code made trillions of dollars but that wasn't what motivated him nor he got some % as those new kids (and their VC parents) joining FOSS wants to.
He could not have made Linux into what it is today without additional contributors, and many of those contributors have been in the employ of companies that use Linux.
Yeah so he helped create a system where contribution beats direct monetary benefit. Microsoft tried hard with hundreds of billions to prevent Linux success, the fact that it spends so much money on it nowadays proves that no amount of money could have stopped Linux success.
Linux and git were examples I was thinking of. He could still have made them, but most of their value relies on interactions with commercial offerings. Not to mention technology financed on the back of taxed profits. And their availability to regular people (notice how I talked about "making technology available at scale") would be diminished beyond belief.
But yes, people make the most incerdible stuff without being paid to do so.
> At its heart, capitalism is a (greedy) solution to a planet-scale resource allocation problem, and there are no viable alternatives (give or take some modifications/variations).
I am pretty certain we had economics for millenia before capitalism has emerged about three hundred years ago.
Do you mean greedy, as in the sense of a greedy algorithm? Because I don’t have a formal mathematical description for this, but it feels more ‘optimal’ than a purely greedy algorithm.
Local agent behaviour may be greedy, but this could still result in something approaching a global optimum - the economy could work like Ant Colony Optimisation in aggregate.
Put the FOSS grants under the Marketing budget, call them "sponsorships" or "comarketing" or whatever. Corporations have a budgets for warm fuzzy stuff like that.
You realize that people like retirees have parts of their savings invested in things like Apple stock?
So this is literally taking money that would otherwise go to grandma and giving it to open source.
Money that would go partially to hedge funds, sure. But money that's also partially going to grandmas.
How about you let individual shareholders themselves decide if they want to donate to open source personally, since the profit belongs to them? They can take their dividend and they can transfer it to open source. But not have Apple force them to.
I mean, I personally just don't like other people donating my things for me. And if I want to donate my money, maybe I want to donate it to something else like fighting poverty or disease?
It's awesome for a privately-owned two-person company to choose to donate to open source. It would not be cool for a publicly traded corporation to take a twelfth of the dividends I receive and send them to a charity that is not of my choosing.
Great! 55 year old+ have an average net worth of about a million dollars[1]. They can spare a few bucks for open source which they use to generate a huge pile of cash anyway.
First of all, why don't you take a look at the median rather than the average.
Second -- if you're 65 your savings have got to last you for the next 20-30 years. Including often expensive nursing home care. Suddenly even a million bucks... isn't that much.
So no -- in general, they can't spare an entire twelfth of an investment. But more importantly, even if they want to, it should be up to them. Not somebody deciding for them.
Because the moment Apple announced that they were going to implement a policy like that, the value of the stock would drop by a twelfth. Instantly.
So by the time you found out about it, the damage would be done.
But you're missing the bigger picture anyways: business is business and charity is charity. The job of publicly traded corporations is to make money, not to give to charity. Then individual people can take the money the business made, and give to the charities of their individual choosing.
Having to choose which stocks to invest in based on their charitable giving portfolios just mixes everything up. The profits are all the same in the end, but charitable giving decisions around those profits should be in the hands of individual people, not corporations.
Why shouldn’t my programs be intense neutron stars of weird symbols, if there’s a superhuman intelligence always at hand to explain and improve the code?
Assembly language generation by symbolic AI (compilers) has been here for 60 years. The "prompts" are very precise and predictably behaved, but requiring the users to learn a specialized language. (Most such languages tend to be concerned with the "how" rather than "what".)
With the new AI, you just specify the "how". Then you get a buggy program, in one of the above specialized languages for the old AI, and the rest of the prompts in the chat are edit instructions on how the AI should fix the code to make it work.
That doesn't work in Dyalog APL, comes back with RANK ERROR.
It's idiomatic to pick ⊃ the first result of ⎕NGET to get just the lines to work on, and not the other things like file encoding.
Then grade-up-right-train-each (⍋⊢)¨ is redunant, it's the same as grade-up-each ⍋¨
The grade is an array of which indices to take to put the argument in sorted order and I don't think it makes sense to group ⌸ by that since the grade isn't the same for different arrangements of letters, so the whole approach breaks down there. I think the words have to be sorted, e.g to pick out 'bat' and 'tab' as the same letters:
Then 1<≢¨ would be "1 is less than the count (tally) of each" which fits somewhere in the solution, but not there and won't work on my array. We don't need to know the actual sorted letters so we can inline the bitmask of which answers matter or not in the first column:
Any with a 1 in the first column are anagrams, and 0 in the first column are not. And the other columns are indices into the wordlist where the matching words are, so words[1,3] picks out 'bat' and 'tab' and it's probably possible to filter rows with 1 in the first column:
It can probably be done shorter and cleaner with more skill than I have. It's a lot quicker to execute than the PowerShell version I commented, but took a lot longer to code.
(That expands to {⍵[⍋⍵]}¨words to sort each word, then use that on the left of Key ⌸ with words on the right, and Key feeds the count and indices into the custom function which is ⊢∘⊂ that takes the indicies with right-tack ⊢ and throws away the count, and encloses them with ⊂. That gives nested arrays of words which sort the same, including invididual words that sort like nothing else. Then (⊢⊢⍤/⍨1<≢¨) added to the left is counting the words in each nesting and filtering out the single ones, and I think ⊢⍤/ is a bodge to use compress in a train without it being misread as reduce when both use the same symbol / ?)
An example of a novel with this plot ... created by ChatGPT-4.
Title: The Age of Eclipse
In a world where artificial intelligence is on the brink of revolutionizing every aspect of human life, a group of powerful capitalists conspires to trigger a technological dark age in order to preserve their dominance and protect their traditional business models.
The story begins with the emergence of a groundbreaking AI technology called Nexus, which has the potential to disrupt industries and create a more efficient, equal, and sustainable society. Despite its promise, Nexus faces fierce opposition from a shadowy alliance of tycoons and power brokers known as the Trident Coalition. To maintain their wealth and influence, Trident hatches a plan to suppress the rise of AI and plunge the world into a new dark age.
The novel follows two main characters: Lila, a brilliant young programmer who works on the Nexus project, and Marcus, a disillusioned investigative journalist. As Lila delves deeper into the AI's potential, she discovers a hidden flaw within Nexus that allows Trident to manipulate and control it. Marcus, seeking the truth behind the sudden decline of technological advancements, stumbles upon a trail of mysterious deaths and corporate sabotage. Together, they uncover Trident's plot and must navigate a world of deception, corruption, and betrayal to prevent the impending dark age.
As their mission unfolds, they are pursued by an elite assassin employed by Trident, who is relentless in his pursuit of the truth. With each passing day, Lila and Marcus grow closer to understanding the true nature of the Nexus AI and the devastating impact it could have on humanity if it falls into the wrong hands. Along the way, they encounter allies and enemies, including a group of rogue scientists and engineers who have banded together to resist Trident's machinations.
In a thrilling climax, Lila and Marcus confront the leaders of Trident in a high-stakes battle of wits and technology. They race against time to expose Trident's scheme and restore the promise of AI to the world. As the tide turns in their favor, Lila discovers a way to rewrite Nexus's core programming and free it from Trident's control. With the help of their newfound allies, they launch a daring operation to regain control of the AI and usher in a new era of technological progress.
"The Age of Eclipse" is a gripping tale of courage, defiance, and the indomitable human spirit. At its core, it explores the themes of power, greed, and the moral consequences of unchecked ambition. Ultimately, the novel serves as a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of stifling innovation and the importance of protecting the greater good for the sake of humanity's future.
The problem with languages that use 10,000 is they still use commas at 1,000, so you get a very awkward offset that then requires a mental translation between numeric and verbal representations.
Sure if you grow up with it, you have that translation basically hard-coded but it’s still not ideal.
Which is stupid. It is annoyingly frequent that the common scale in the table is stated as powers of 1,000, not 10,000, but the scale itself is written verbally (e.g. "단위: 십억원" billion wons, much like "ten thousand dollars").
Very conspicuous list of available countries. Both English and non-English, from the most rich to some of the poorest and non-digital countries in the world, both democratic countries and brutal absolute dictatorships... yet the absentees are classic "enemy" countries - Russia, China, Syria, Iran.
Unfortunately, technology is, once again, not exempt from politics.
US export restrictions blacklist a few countries for various things. In total (except for China) the combined economies are so small it makes sense to just not do business with them rather than figure out if you can.
The government of Vietnam could be considered Marxist–Leninist/Socialist, so it's on the list of forever enemies of the US government and many businesses.
