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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

#391

Post by aoeu345 »

ggame wrote: post #321
astrodust wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a community leader who isn't afraid to crack some heads to keep people in line is always important. People like this poison any community. Make a Code of Conduct and use it to control your community rather than let your community control you. It's like parents complaining their kids are "out of control" and "there's nothing I can do". Seriously? We've been raising kids for a hundred thousand years. This shit i…

People will complain about the code of conduct and again about their banning upon breaking a code of conduct. Managing a community takes a lot of time for something you're not getting paid for.

If you have a good enough product it shouldn't really matter, right? Just ban the trolls, answer questions where you can, but mainly work on the product. No one should be sifting through questions - They should be taking the most commonly asked ones, answering them, and swiftly banning those who seem unhelpful and rude. There's no way that type of moderation would kill your community unless your product just sucked enough that it didn't grow on it's own.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#392

Post by BeetleB »

jordigh wrote: post #301
fsloth wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why such acidity towards Mathworks? I've use Matlab decades ago with someone elses licensing so I don't really know the details. "our entire purpose for working on Octave is to make sure people don't have to use Matlab." That's a really negative way to put it. Isn't Scilab a viable Matlab alternative as well. Are you hoping to block people from using that as well? What about Intel's fortan compiler... The point is, i…

The reason for the acidity is quite simple: we believe non-free software like Matlab to be unethical. You should not be restricted by a license manager, there should not be any restrictions on who you can share your software with (Matlab's license says you can only share Matlab's own source code with other Matlab users), you should have complete access to the source code (Matlab hides a lot of juicy secrets in its hi…

>This is why Octave is part of GNU, and why it's GPLed.

And why NumPy/SciPy will overtake Octave, if it hasn't already.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#393

Post by BeetleB »

hkmurakami wrote: post #136
hughw wrote: post #132

While recruiting at UT Austin petroleum engineering school recently, I was impressed how embedded Matlab has become there. The students use Matlab for big semester projects and everyday scratchpad computation. I believe it's a required skill. I don't know the licensing arrangement Mathworks made with them. It's common for software companies to donate licenses to engineering and science departments. It's a loss leader…

Iirc student licenses are ~$100, and full licenses are ~$2500, with $1000-$1500 for additional libraries. I wonder if schools pay $0, $100, or somewhere around $300-$500.

My university had only student licenses.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#394

Post by BeetleB »

SandB0x wrote: post #214
nuntius wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matlab has always been a quirky language. It has good libraries for common math operations, good visualization tools, good documentation, and toolboxes available for many special tasks. There are a number of common pitfalls, with well-known workarounds, that cannot be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. The performance of a "for loop" is usually dog slow (some special cases were optimized recently). You o…

> The performance of a "for loop" is usually dog slow (some special cases were optimized recently). You often spend hours figuring out how to vectorize your code so it runs decently fast. A similar story for Python and NumPy on this point, mitigated by NumPy's elegant broadcasting rules. Agree with everything else!

>A similar story for Python and NumPy on this point

Not as similar. When I was in grad school and encountered NumPy, I ported over my Matlab code to NumPy. It was hard to vectorize and so I had an explicit for loop (in both code bases).

NumPy ran 7x faster.

Did not really drill down to whether it was the loop itself or the operation in it, but I suspect it was the loop itself.

Matlab really has a slow for loop.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#395

Post by beagle3 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #285
fijal wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're the one who can write a check, but this is a difficult topic... I do corporate accounting for baroque software and I can write an invoice and pushing people to pay for it is still quite a sales challenge - you need to be able to talk to high enough people and prove the value of what you're offering on top of the software you are already giving for free. It's not different to a standard issue sales exerci…

"...software you are already giving for free" Free and open software has created the expectation that software has no cost. Trying to overcome that after the fact will take time and education.

I suspect that is never going to change, and the same is true for many services.

There is a community site I frequent that keeps itself afloat with a freemium model (if you pay you get more features; but you still get 98% of features even as a free user; there are no ads on that site). Many people understand this and pay to keep the site running, but something like 10%-20% of users claim that it's just a money grab because "facebook offers essentially the same features and they can do it for free, so obviously this site is trying to make a profit on our back".

There is expectation that because some software is free, most software is free. Similarly, there's an expectation that if some websites are free, most similar websites should be free as well.

p.s.: the main cost to using Facebook in my opinion is privacy, and I value my privacy much more than what I get from Facebook. Obviously. other people value privacy and facebookness differently.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#396

Post by brianwawok »

dragandj wrote: post #194
bzbarsky wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/ins... estimates about $3000 per life saved (which I will grant is not the same thing as "malaria case prevented"). So a year's salary for a good developer would be on the order of 30-150 lives saved, depending on market and definition of "good"... Agreed with your overall point, though.

The cost of one Matlab license could save a human life, by such accounting.

Or every time you buy a new car instead of a used car, you kill 1-2 starving people somewhere.

Such math is hard...

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#397

Post by toephu2 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #357
taway_1212 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory on why Google insists on whiteboarding senior-level candidates. I don't think it's for checking for talent as much as for checking for motivation. Think about it - in order to pass, you basically need to drill those algorithmic exercises for weeks before the interview. If you do, it's a very good signal that you really want to work for Google (similarly, investment banks, management consultancies, pre…

This. Because of the massive amount of hiring the big 4 do their entire interview process is available online. Sure there are variations depending on the interviewer you may end up in a room with but for the most part they all follow the same format. Anyone who really wanted to work at one of these has to study and practice how to interview for THAT company. Sure there is still some element of luck / right time right…

You're saying getting in Google has nothing to do with intelligence?

Have you gotten an offer from the Big4?

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#398

Post by jrpt »

cabalamat wrote: post #234
fsloth wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value. I suppose the simplest way would be to offer dual licensing. GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. The problem is, if the source code you are working on depends on third party GPL software it's very hard to do t…

> My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value. Maybe there could be a startup that helps people monetise their free software output?

There already is one, it's called Supported Source: https://supportedsource.org/

More projects just need to use it.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#399

Post by edblarney »

st3v3r wrote: post #386
edblarney wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need for a sales and marketing team for a very well established and entrenched product. He could make something very easily himself, 1-click to $X a month for some bit of software or service. In fact, if he did it properly, he could be wealthy, or chose to hire a bunch of people to make his software even better. Mozilla is a great org, but I'm not sure if they are the best example as I believe they depend…

"There's no need for a sales and marketing team for a very well established and entrenched product." So should I go tell Pepsi and Coke that they're wasting their money? Plus, while Octave is an established project, there are many projects being started each day. No project comes into being fully established. "He could make something very easily himself, 1-click to $X a month for some bit of software or service." Do…

"Pepsi and Coke" are multibillion dollar commodity consumer brands - and have absolutely nothing to do with this.

"No project comes into being fully established"

Octave is well established, so he doesn't have that problem.

For those that are 'new' - it's extremely difficult for governments to decide how to allocate funding. There are 1000's of 'open source' ideas. It's very hard to tell which one's would work, and have merit. It seems this guy was able to make something on his own. Great.

Now he can generate some revenue and expand the project - OR - work full time somewhere else, and plug away at this in his spare time.

"Do that, instead of working on his project."

He's not going to be 'working on his project'. He's going to be 'working full time somewhere else' because his project has no income.

The time and energy he spends on some kind of 'revenue' is an 'investment' not a cost. Once it's up and running, there should hopefully be net surpluses. If it goes well, he can even hire a small team to do 'sales and marketing', and possibly hire some developers to make his project considerably better, so that it's even more useful to others, and possibly even more people want to use it.

There's no reason that he couldn't try to find a way to generate income from his project, it's creating a lot of value for others.

Paying money to each other as a fair exchange of value is how most of the world works, and it works well.

Re: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

#400

Post by 010a »

fsloth wrote: post #189
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…

My heart breaks each time I discover a free tool of recognition is developed by some altruistic talent who lives at a near poverty level while their work generates millions in added value. I suppose the simplest way would be to offer dual licensing. GPL for non-profit projects, proprietary for enterprises. The problem is, if the source code you are working on depends on third party GPL software it's very hard to do t…

It is his responsibility to capture the value of his work. The world does not owe him this. The world doesn't owe him anything unless he demands it.

You're asking to have your cake and eat it to: Give software away (altruism) but also feel guilty when he complains that he doesn't have any money. You can't have both.

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