It's the nature of most types of volunteering work. If you sign up to be the conductor of your local choir, you have the same thing. People start expecting you to do stuff. If you're going to be in that role, as ploxiln says, you need to be OK with that part of it. You have to be OK with the thanklessness of the task, and you have to seek your rewards elsewhere. Still, I feel very sorry for zloirock, and I hope that he gets some kind of compensation for his work, at least enough to get his life back together.
> You have to be OK with the thanklessness of the task, and you have to seek your rewards elsewhere.
Is this really how we want the world to be? Someone who is trying to help needs to be ok with being treated badly? I can understand not being put on a pedestal, but I think a "thank you" and a bit of gratefulness is warranted by people actively being helped.
I am not saying either party is better than another but I do not wish to live in a world that people are order of magnitude less willing to donate to FOSS developers than people posting sexy photos online.
Edit: maybe I used wrong comparison. Most of the income of the photo publishers should be from sales (to unlock paywall of exclusive content), not many will donation.
The best way to do open source work is to consult or be employed and release open source stuff as part of your work. Otherwise it turns into politics, competition for money and popularity contest rather than product of passion. If you are as proficient as this guy you will find employers that do not mind open source work
Did he look though? Maybe he is not aware this is a possibility. Even if he cannot leave Russia there are likely russian companies that would pay him and be even happy if he contributes to OSS. I know Qiwi, Yandex publish and maintain packages
Yeah but if the statement is a guy like this could find something like this, then the answer is no. I think mostly because it's not entirely clear how to get such a job and how to do that job without handing over the reigns of your project to the company.
> Yeah but if the statement is a guy like this could find something like this, then the answer is no.
What? Why?
> I think mostly because it's not entirely clear how to get such a job
Same as any other job, by looking. Even I do something like that and I am not even close to corejs maintainer level
> reins
If you do this while working as independent contributor (popular in Russia) then it's not even a question, the company will not have any reins on whatever you do outside the contract. If you are employed then company may have the reins, but you will publish OSS while getting money and recognition for it, which is 80% of the formula.
The part where he spent the year 2020 in a russian slave labour prison might help explain his difficulty getting a job. Plus as a russian national living in russia, FAANG is not exactly knocking at his door.
I used FAANG as a shorthand for "big international tech companies that pay a lot". Glad to hear though that there are lots opportunites for tech folk in Russia to make good money.
> I used FAANG as a shorthand for "big international tech companies that pay a lot".
Uhh… Yes and that's my point? He could earn 50-100 USD per hour, which would get him a more than decent lifestyle in Russia. Why would someone pick between Lots Of Money and begging and not accept an alternative between that would allow him to keep doing OSS while feeding his family? This whole plea just doesn't compute with me.
> Glad to hear though that there are lots opportunites for tech folk in Russia to make good money.
It's not good money, it's just money to live okay. And it's not in Russia, it's everywhere. Internet, it did wonders.
you can't really compare volunteering at a local choir / local homeless canteen to big corporations taking advantage of open source projects (which is perfectly legit) and never ever feel like they should contribute more to make open source financially sustainable. There is a reason why major open source projects are backed by companies selling products or services based on the open source project itself.
If you don't want big corporations using your software, change the license. They are not "taking advantage" of Free/open software, they are using it, and don't owe the maintainer for it. It feels very entitled to me (a Free software enthusiast who wishes more authors chose GPL over BSD/MIT). As G.W. Bush said "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... I can't get fooled again"
It's a person who applies engineering principles to the design and implementation of software. It's about the "rigidity" of the methods that are used to construct the software. If the software is just cobbled together, it's not "engineered".
Usually it does have all the information, it just isn't able to put it all together. If you for instance ask it to name the female tennis players who have won the Wimbledon tennis tournament twice, but not more than twice, it will give you a plausible list of names, but at least half of the names on the list will be wrong.
If you then ask it to tell you more about one of the players that has been wrongly named, it will actually be able to tell you the correct number of Wimbledon wins for that player. It does know the facts. It just doesn't know how to put the facts together into new useful knowledge.
That's a prediction you'll make only if you're not a programmer yourself. The entire purpose of a programming language, as opposed to a natural language, is to be able to communicate precise intent to a computer. A programming language is designed to be able to communicate precise intent, and a natural language isn't.
Even if you could, you would not want to use natural language to instruct a computer. You don't want the AI, or the computer, to guess your intent.
Is there a name for believing that figure Google spits out when it guesses the number of pages? A trustgoogle? A googull? I've seen it in so many places from people I'd think would know better.
Go to page 15 of the results (the last page) and it says
> Page 15 of about 142 results
If I "include omitted results" it claims 331 results, but these include pages with the "horizontal" spelling only...
Dave Cutler is, seemingly, a good example of this. If you have not read it, I recommend the book Show Stopper! by G. Pascal Zachary, about the development of Microsoft Windows NT under his leadership.
I don't agree with this article. I write hundreds of lines of notes each day, as a part of my coding and work routine. I do it all digitally, in Visual Studio Code, as pure text. I think, as long as you can write fluently on a keyboard, and as long as the writing and typing itself does not steal CPU cycles from your brain while you're doing it, it works just as well as handwritten notes, and, I would wager, probably even better, as you're able to write quite a bit faster on a keyboard than you are when you're writing with a pen.
As for the "slowness" of the writing being a point in itself, I don't think that's true. I achieve the same by editing my text as I write it, pondering over my wording, to make sure that I communicate (to myself, mind you) the precise intent that I'm going for.
I think the fondness for handwriting is mostly based on romantic notions, for lack of better words, predicated by our closeness in time to a period where handwriting was much more common. We think of it as the "original" way of writing, and the most "pure" way of writing. Personally I think jotting down text notes on a keyboard is just as "pure", and I don't really think that there are any extra qualities associated with handwriting, as far as learning and retaining information goes.
Your point about many lines of notes is actually highlighting another benefit of writing: handwritten notes simply force you to choose which things are truly important because you cannot possibly record as much. This process also helps retention. I don’t actually look at most notes I take very often.
But I disagree that fondness for handwriting is a romantic notion. For me writing things down by hand engages a different part of my brain. It's similar to "rubber ducking" for me, meaning I have to think about the information in a different way. I don't get the same from typing, for whatever reason.
I think you just have to make yourself do it for a prolonged period of time, all the while making sure that you do not overexert yourself. Make it pleasant on every occasion, and lower the intensity once it starts feeling like a struggle. There are theories on how long it takes to establish a new habit. The numbers may vary, but I'd say if you can keep at it for around three months, it should be possible, for anyone really, to establish regular exercise as a habit that you both enjoy and look forward to, rather than something that you dread or put off.
> rather than on the finding and promotion of undiscovered geniuses.
There's a catch in it as well, which is that you cannot really identify a genius up-front. A genius is, by definition, someone who thinks differently. A lot of people think differently. But the thing with the genius is that he thinks differently and correctly. The latter part won't be obvious until after the fact.
When Alex Ferguson started out as a Manchester United manager he probably already was a genius, but it wasn't obvious until many years later.
Same with Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They probably had a genius vision for the company right from the start. But it's only in retrospect that we recognize that it was, in fact, a genius vision.
Finding a genius is, I think, almost by definition, impossible.
Alex Ferguson might have been a good football manager, but he wasn't a genius - and I say that as a Man United supporter. He didn't advance football in any significant way, and even towards the end of his career he was somewhat naive from a tactical perspective.
He was just a good man-manager in what is a sea of managerial mediocrity - football management is largely restricted to ex-pro-footballers who can't do anything else. Rinus Michels was a genius, Arrigo Sacchi was a genius - they actually advanced the sport.
On a similar note, Page and Brin were obviously smart and driven and all, but applying linear algebra to the search problem was arguably one of the things that was "in the air". It is hard to judge, because what seems obvious ex post was (obviously) not obvious ex ante. But, again, eigenvalue decomposition/SVD (and linear algebra more generally) - you throw it at the Netflix problem, you throw it at image compression, you throw it at anything really, something's gonna stick.
It's an interesting counterfactual: without Page, when would Page Rank have come around? The idea that the stationary distribution of a Markov Chain (under certain conditions) is given by the eigenvector to the (largest) eigenvalue 1 is certainly decades old, if not a century.
Yes, and also don't forget that Rajeev Motwani's (Ph.D. supervisor and FFF investor) research field was randomized algorithms. So thinking about random walks in his group was a bread and butter thing, probably, not something that required genius. Rajeev is co-author to several seminal paper on the search engine and worked intensively with Google and joined their board. According to Prabhakar Raghavan, Sergey Brin acknowledged in a BBC Radio interview in 2009 that Google might not have been possible without Rajeev. (Tragically, he passed away in 2009 by falling into his own pool with alcohol in his blood, and he could not swim.)
You start to loose correlation with IQ really, really quickly as you move away from feats of solving established math problems to football management and entrepreneurship. Solving established math problems is more like taking an IQ test than any other activity that I can think of.
