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Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

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Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#161

Post by dboreham »

santaclaus wrote: post #118
kafkaesq wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will his work on Octave--which by all rights should be able to serve as a strong-enough resume by itself to justify his hiring--even be looked at by potential employers? It'll probably register on the backs of their eyeballs somewhere. Some of them might even might even experience some momentary flash of recognition: "Octave? Right, yeah. Some GNU thingy..." before catching themselves and saying "Well that's, nice. B…

Ha, I'd love to see a youtube series in which famous old-school open source devs apply for web front-end gigs. Episode I, Linus Pair Programs.

Funniest post on HN in years!

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#162

Post by aangjie »

anigbrowl wrote: post #28

There's something fundamentally broken about the open-source model when you can invest so much time and npt get any sort of economic return. This seems like a huge limiting factor on open-source development. As I've pointed out in discussions on copyright issues, artists value copyright because the patronage model sucked - you're essentially dependent on people's charity and having to beg just to maintain basic econo…

This is one reason, I look at contributing to open source as a way of building reusable tools I want to use.(in service of some other goal). rather than trying to contributing to them as a goal in and of itself. The most progress i seem to make are in projects of the first kind. As long as I can't justify it(time on OSS) in service to making money on some other goal, I can't work on OSS at all.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#163

Post by saurik »

sandGorgon wrote: post #116

This post today is what is wrong with open source software. If someone knows jwe, then they should tell him that lots of corporates and startups WANT to support stuff like this. But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. I need an invoice. Hell, if you can get a business account, I daresay you will get subscriptions. I like to call this "gratitude-ware". Check out Sidekiq Pr…

(I am honestly extremely interested.) It seems like Sidekiq is offering a slightly differen piece of software as the Pro version?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#164

Post by dboreham »

Swizec wrote: post #37
anigbrowl wrote: post #28

There's something fundamentally broken about the open-source model when you can invest so much time and npt get any sort of economic return. This seems like a huge limiting factor on open-source development. As I've pointed out in discussions on copyright issues, artists value copyright because the patronage model sucked - you're essentially dependent on people's charity and having to beg just to maintain basic econo…

> There's something fundamentally broken about the open-source model when you can invest so much time and npt get any sort of economic return. This seems like a huge limiting factor on open-source development. The problem we have is that OSS creators don't realize, and often willfully ignore, the fact that nothing about opensource says you can't charge for delivering value to people. Sure, their ability to copy it th…

Have you actually tried this?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#165

Post by [deleted] »

sandGorgon wrote: post #116

This post today is what is wrong with open source software. If someone knows jwe, then they should tell him that lots of corporates and startups WANT to support stuff like this. But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. I need an invoice. Hell, if you can get a business account, I daresay you will get subscriptions. I like to call this "gratitude-ware". Check out Sidekiq Pr…

[deleted]

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#166

Post by tavert »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #158
supahfly_remix wrote: post #10

It seems that octave has been overtaken (in mindshare) by python/numpy. Why is that the case?

The scientific libraries for Python have gotten so good that Octave doesn't really have a chance, unless you are just interested in running some (old) MATLAB code and can't get MATLAB itself. This is really all about the libraries and frameworks, rather than the language. And with Jupyter notebooks you get a great UI which is something Octave never had.

Octave has a GUI nowadays which is pretty good, but a bit late to make much difference.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#167

Post by kbenson »

username223 wrote: post #101
tomphoolery wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon is awesome, but it's not enough to pay the bills full-time for most people. That said...anyone who owns an open-source project, is the primary contributor of said project and sacrifices a significant amount of possible revenue at their job to contribute to the project should have a Patreon page where anyone who feels like they want to contribute can do so. It may not be your primary source of income, but gett…

> Patreon is awesome,... Is it? AFAICT, they take a 5% cut in exchange for setting up recurring billing. (I'll ignore any ethical questions about automatic recurring billing; I likely get free satellite radio because someone else forgot to cancel it.) Are there any stats about how readership/viewership translates into payment that are more informative than the PR department's "Average Pledge" of $5?

> AFAICT, they take a 5% cut in exchange for setting up recurring billing.

Sort of. That recurrence can be time based (monthly), but canalso be based on work produced. It allows people to set the amount they way to pay, and for payment of work produces, it allows you to set a monthly cap. Most importantly (in my opinion), once you've got a patreon patron account it allows you to easily track and change what you decide to fund, and easily fund new things without setting up card/paypal/bitcoin payment individually.

When I signed up for Patreon (for a webcomic, IIRC), I actually went looking for and found a few other things I consumed to add. I've suggested they set up and added a few people from the HFY subreddit for some of the more prolific authors. I actually find it rather annoying when some people/groups specifically decide to not use Patreon in lieu of Paypal or something less automated. That friction has actually kept me from donating a few times, because the friction is real. Reducing that friction can lead to a lot more donations IMO.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#168

Post by kbenson »

mikekchar wrote: post #159
username223 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Patreon is awesome,... Is it? AFAICT, they take a 5% cut in exchange for setting up recurring billing. (I'll ignore any ethical questions about automatic recurring billing; I likely get free satellite radio because someone else forgot to cancel it.) Are there any stats about how readership/viewership translates into payment that are more informative than the PR department's "Average Pledge" of $5?

Wow. I had assumed (without looking) that Patreon took more than 5%. 5% is indeed awesome in my books. How much would it cost me to set that up myself (and deal with charge backs, etc, etc)? Specifically the cost of lost opportunity to do the work (and maintenance) necessary. 5% is "shut up and take my money" level for me. Having said that, you have a point about the automatic recurring billing thing...

Well, it's 5% + processor fees. The 5% is purely Patreon's cut, but personally I think it's well worth it for a lot of people. I know there's at least few hundred dollars of my money in various people's accounts over the last couple years that wouldn't be there without Patreon.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#169

Post by detaro »

username223 wrote: post #101
tomphoolery wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon is awesome, but it's not enough to pay the bills full-time for most people. That said...anyone who owns an open-source project, is the primary contributor of said project and sacrifices a significant amount of possible revenue at their job to contribute to the project should have a Patreon page where anyone who feels like they want to contribute can do so. It may not be your primary source of income, but gett…

> Patreon is awesome,... Is it? AFAICT, they take a 5% cut in exchange for setting up recurring billing. (I'll ignore any ethical questions about automatic recurring billing; I likely get free satellite radio because someone else forgot to cancel it.) Are there any stats about how readership/viewership translates into payment that are more informative than the PR department's "Average Pledge" of $5?

I prefer to give small sums to a wider range of people, and if each of them collected the money directly via Stripe, the per-transaction fee would also already make up 5 % or higher. With patreon, it only is deducted once.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#170

Post by insulinrocks »

fsloth wrote: post #156
dheera wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of thoughts: - Octave won't die. It won't die even if you ditch it altogether. A lot of companies depend on it because licenses are free and that makes it easy to do massive parallel computations by launching thousands of instances. Matlab doesn't let you do that. As long as it stays GPL, the employees within those companies and academic institutions will continue to contribute to it. (Python is competition,…

"Build something cool" is not sound financial advice for a person in a dire situation. The only reason it seems to work is because in the internet thousands are rolling the dice on this and you only hear of the few fraction of them who make it.

"Get to the top of HN" might be good advice for an ask, though.
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