acolytic

I've been working with coding agents for a few years and became increasingly frustrated by the way it pushes you towards a solution. So I built rubberduck (https://userubberduck.com/) - a way to control exactly what solution the agent ends up creating by mimicking a design conversation with a competent colleague where the agent explores the solution space together and forces you to make decisions. The final output is a consolidated design document of all the decisions you made. At least that was how it began. I've since built an implementation plan step where it figures out how to translate the design to code and execution where it actually builds it. All of this happens in a properly isolated environment (using gVisor under the hood). There are more features I want to build so on it goes I suppose.

I'm not very familiar with the concept of tarpitting. How do they get the bot to run CPU intensive code? By passing in extra Javascript? Can this affect a bot that doesn't run any JS?

I thought Google's SRE book (https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html) was incredible. Probably a good place to start.

In my case, I lost one of them.

Don't believe so, no. The lottery is supposed to be blind though, so no company has any edge for any given applicant. That said, one strategy some companies take is to pack in as many applications as possible to get as many people through.

Just to add some context to this since I was a bit confused. The H-1B goes through the lottery to see which applications get seen by immigration. This seems to be the approval rates of the H-1B after the lottery which makes sense. The FAANG applications are probably mostly legit. 90% acceptance rate for an H-1B before lottery though seemed a little high :)

Are you talking about the earpods? I just bought the iPhone XR and I got the earpods but I didn't see any lightning adaptor. Now I have two earphones, one that only works on my phone and another that only works on my laptop - it's a real pain.

Other crowd founding venue charge around 5 % which is the level i would personally feel comfortable with.

5% is $0.5 which right off the bat assumes payment processing is separate. That's fine if people prefer that but even then $0.5 is barely enough to cover infrastructure. How do we pay for someone to maintain that infrastructure? This is the same issue OSS is facing but on the other side. No one wins when the tools we rely on don't have a sustainable business model. I don't think 5% is sustainable as we've seen with Patreon's recent increase.

Personally i am looking for a way to give to project i use the most, (firefox, vim , zsh etc...) and also project that i use and particularly need funding.

Yea this mostly geared towards libraries and frameworks not apps.

Any plans for the entreprise market ?

Enterprise is an important market but I was hoping to get some early adopters to prove the idea first and then use that proof to get businesses to join. Not opposed to doing both in parallel though.

Donations are not tax-deductible for now. We might do that later if people ask for it.

30% includes all payment processing costs and other costs for both users and projects, so there is a flat 70% remaining for projects that doesn't get deducted further. We do this to keep things simple and make it clear how much projects can get.

Payment processing alone costs $0.3 + 3% with Stripe, so at $10/month that's a fixed $0.6 out of the $3 we take. The other $2.4 needs to accommodate the fees to send money to each of the projects + infrastructure costs. Not sure how to account for that but assuming at scale around $0.4/user/month, we're looking at $2/user/month in profit. Assuming sustainability is reached at $200,000, that is approximately 8300 people giving to open source through this. That is high but seems approachable.

Does that seem reasonable? My objective with this is to build something that increases the pool of people who contribute but also ensure the underlying project can stay afloat indefinitely with the right incentives.

One thing I'm not seeing here is people giving freely simply because you created something they value. You will never become a billionaire through this mechanism but I suspect you can probably earn a decent living.

The problem with this mechanism is that now each project is out on their own to advertise their needs and get donations. I'm actually experimenting in this space with SeedAndDew (https://www.seedanddew.com). My hypothesis is that if you can give people the ability to set a specific amount to open source that automatically goes to the right places, more people will contribute. Just went full-time to see this through so early days but I'm optimistic.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a platform that allows you to contribute to open source as a whole and which distributes your money proportionally to how much you care about various projects. I'm thinking of taking 30% as well.

I think people are just getting hung up on the number without thinking deeper on what it costs to make things sustainable.

5% of the 500 million Patreon claims to be able to process is 25 million. According to their team picture on their website (https://www.patreon.com/about), they have 74 employees. That amounts to $330000/employee. Halving that to account for benefits (chair, table, wifi, insurance, etc) leads to $165000/employee for salary which seems reasonable average for a senior employee in the Bay Area. Notice this doesn't account for infrastructure, taxes, outside counsel/contractors, etc. It's crazy that after working for 6 years and creating half a billion of value, a company can barely afford to keep the lights on, let alone make a profit. I agree 30% just makes sense for a platform - you need enough to hire properly, pay all expenses and make enough of a profit for this to make sense. The alternative is half a billion of value disappears to save on a few million which I think is incredibly myopic.

Hey everyone, this is Alex from SeedAndDew. The idea here to give people a way to contribute to open source as a whole with the revenue being distributed in proportion to how much you care about a project. The proxy we're using for now is the amount of time you spend reading documentation. We currently have 12 projects on board including projects like SQLAlchemy, Bundler, RSpec and Gorm and have a few more in the pipeline.