If you think of them as mostly just syntactic sugar for closure state variables wrapped up in the module pattern, it's not so bad. (This is how some of us have been writing D3.js code for years!)
I see lots of responses to this article asking "why client-side navigation?". I can share my own experience with building an app a few months ago, and how/why I switched to a client-side single-page app..
It is a worldwide list of brands that have been seeded with OpenStreetMap data, and which volunteers have linked to Wikidata identifiers. We use this data in OpenStreetMap editors to help people add branded businesses. Pretty cool!
1. We had data in `.json` files (but not too much data) and we wanted to show it to people working on the project so that they could review the brands.
2. I spent a day or two and built a static document generator. It took our data and spit out an `index.html` and few hundred `whatever.html` files. This worked really well. As the article says, "browsers are pretty good at loading pages". A side benefit - Google is really good at indexing content like this.
3. Then users made the obvious request: "I want to filter the data. Let me type a search string and only show matching brands. Or brands that appear in a certain country".
4. OK, SO.. If your data is spread out over a few hundred files, short answer - you can't do this.
5. But the data is _really_ only a few megabytes of `.json`. I spent a few days to learn React and switch to a single-page client side app so that we can filter across all of it. The new version uses hooks to fetch the few `.json` files that it needs, `react-router` to handle navigation between the index and the category pages. It works pretty ok! Most people would stop here.
6. The first version with client-side filtering performed good enough, but not great. The reason was because, as users type these things happen: The filters get applied, the React components get a new list of brands passed in as props, and React re-renders these new lists to the virtual DOM, and eventually, slowly, the real DOM.
7. It's really easy to build React code like this, and many people do. But it is better to avoid DOM changes in the first place. I changed the components so that the lists stay the same, but filtered things just get classed as hidden `display:none` instead of being added and removed from the DOM, and performance is much better now.
I believe that a multi page app/website would have the data in a database rather than distributed across html files. The server would then populate the html files before serving them up to clients.
It sounds like you started by trying to build a static website and then decided you wanted something more dynamic...so shifted to react where you are doing the dynamic data manipulation on the client as opposed to a server..not a like for like comparison
> Realistically, we can't pay people full engineering salaries to do random OSS.
Why can't you?
Professors get paid full professor salaries to do "random research".
Doctors get paid full doctor salaries to treat "random illnesses".
I expect if you looked a bit closer, you'll find that "Random OSS" is maintenance that makes the entire ecosystem possible. Would love to hear from some of your engineers what they are doing to earn that $20/hr.
But professors are usually also required to teach classes or carry out other duties in return for getting research funding. They don't just get to randomly do whatever they want.
And doctors treating 'random illnesses' doesn't really work as an analogy–that would be more like if they could randomly decide to turn away patients they didn't 'want' to treat.
As a professional full-time open source maintainer and developer, initiatives like this bother me a lot.
The work we do is worth much more than $20/hr.
Ideally I'd like to see open source developers in stable, tenured positions that pay fair salaries with benefits. Anything that normalizes the idea that open source should be funded on tips, patreons, or spare time goodwill is embarrassing to all of us. We can do better.
If you value open source, hire people to do it and pay them fairly.
Formidable employee here: To be quite honest we are compensated very fairly for our industry already and this program is not meant to ‘provide a living wage’ by any means.
Instead, this is a ‘fair nod’ at the work some of us feel compelled and motivated to do after work hours.
Not saying your perspective is wrong, just hopefully providing a bit more context about what this program means for someone who uses it.
I get that. I work ten hours a week or so for free on my open source passion projects. If that turned in to an extra $200 a week that would be cool - I’m doing the work anyway.
I haven’t read the article yet but my only fear with crowd funding is what happens when I want to take a month off of technical work.
As someone who supports several developers, I hope you take as much holiday as you need. I mostly support it to increase the chance of the project surviving in the long term, and as a token of appreciation of your past contributions.
You can pause patreon campaigns. If you're open about your work life balance and how you need to take a month off from the project I think most people will understand that.
You're an employee so you can answer the question: does Formidable take copyright ownership of the open source contributions provided by you? Do you have to ask your employer if you want to change licenses for your open source projects?
And I'd assume you guys have some employees who are paid competitive salaries by Formidable and end up working almost exclusively on your open source code anyway, right?
This is awesome. If my employer did this I'd probably take a lot of that money and donate to other OSS and charity since I'd neebed working on OSS regardless.
It’s well known that nominal compensation isn’t the most effective incentive to get people to do things, and compared to engineer salaries in our US and UK tech hubs, $20/hr isn’t exactly a windfall.
This is intentional. We don’t want people to log on after hours to earn money. Instead, we think of the Sauce bonus as a recognition of the work people want to do anyway, and the compensation is aimed to be meaningful enough to do something fun with, but not so high that it would skew their priorities to stare at their computer screens instead of spending time with their hobbies, families, and friends.
In my personal experience this effect has much more to do with expectations than compensation.
As soon as it's my job to work on something, and there are deadlines and expectations looming, all of a sudden I'm more interested in every other side project I've ignored for the past several years.
But in this case, there's no expectations set, pre-approval process (after which you'd be expected to meet your goals), or anything like that. If you find yourself affected by the extrinsic motivation, you can simply not log the work afterward, and then it's like you weren't offered any money for it in the first place.
Of course. It seems that that’s exactly what’s happening here. These people are being paid a salary to do a bunch of open source and other work.
The company just recognizes that people that continue contributing at home still bring them some form of value, and it is very nice to see that this is recognized and rewarded, regardless of the amount.
Maybe we’ll get to a point where this will be the norm, and companies will have to go further to stand out, but right now this is pretty amazing.
I partially agree. I work for a public university and 100% of our code is MIT licensed. But I spend a ton of time outside of work on other open source projects. I'd love an extra 20USD/hr for that work. Heck I'd probably even open source a few more of my private repos.
As a long time open source contributor and maintainer, I'm not convinced it's worth more than $20/hour. Where does this worth come from? Comparing it to what corporations loaded with cash are willing to pay for an especially advantageous employee? That's not a fair comparison to make.
I have a few open source projects that I contribute $5 monthly for each project on https://opencollective.com/. I view my contribution as a subsidy and not as a salary. Might be wrong but Formidable probably views it the same way.
It sounds like these employees do indeed have stable positions with fair salaries and benefits. What's the problem?
If the work is worth more than $20/hr, who's going to pay it? One person's work is "worth" what someone else is willing to pay. Markets are conversations, and all that. OSS is an arena where the supply of potential practitioners is huge.
I have had employers hire me and then not give me work to do leaving me with large swaths of time to work on my unpaid open source that they are using internally. It’s probably an ethical violation to use their office, time, and equipment to work on code they are not paying for (since it’s free and liberally licensed), but they absolutely know I’m doing it.
Your situation may not be serious enough to care, but you could be fired and the company could claim ownership of all your work, screwing over you and any project with a dependency to your OSS.
I have gone through something like that before. My first big corporate employer did not claim ownership but they slapped a patent on my first big personal project. Potential for sub licensing was more important than the work itself.
My solution to the concerns of ownership and distribution is to ensure a personal project is publicly disclosed, copyright is released, and the project is known to the employer before agreement of employment. It is typically not in a company’s interest to claim ownership of such projects where there is a maintenance liability and the potential for revenue and protection are unclear.
But why though? Of course giving a well-payed salary to people is something great and I have nothing against it. But the whole "cool" thing about open-source is that it showed that it can do pretty amazing things without capitalism. Instead here we are trying to push the same mentality we use for everything else into open-source.
Why not continue the experiment as it has for the last 30 years (without any major economical incentives); it has only produced amazing pieces of work so far, so why risk to taint it?
I suspect that a significant portion of open-source development is paid work that meets a business need, but not the business' product. I know that what little open-source contribution I've made has mostly been stuff I had to do at/for work that was easy enough to break off and have as a separate library/module.
It's still capitalism. It works because business folks sell valuable software acquired at a zero dollar cost of goods for billions of dollars.
And there are a ton of crappy open source projects out there, so it hasn't "only produced amazing pieces of work" it's also produced amazingly terrible software that has proliferated because it's free, but the sales people don't know or care.
It's almost as if the audience of this site participates in an incredibly toxic work culture and we're hearing regular cries for help from the victims of it.
Burnout is real. I was promoted from an entry level to senior level engineer in three years at one of the top tech companies. My compensation is great, and I’m saving heavily. Also, I’m exhausted. As in... I’m wondering what to do next with my life and work. Burn out is an understatement. I don’t talk to my spouse about this because this person has a lot of stuff to deal with, and my family relationships have wined down after they found out what I get paid and basically just wanted me to hand over everything because they believe they are entitled to it. So who do you turn to? It doesn’t solve my problems but it at least helps reading threads like this to see others perspectives.
Aren't the optical paths highly selective for direction, time, and wavelength? Let's assume coincident-wavelength for our worst case. At any given point in time, it's as if each car has a laser pointer aiming a single dot somewhere, and that single dot is also the only point it's receiving light from (in stark contrast to a camera, which is gathering light from its entire field of view). Even if the LIDARs can see each other, there's no 0-attenuation path from the output of one to the input of another unless a pair of LIDARs have chosen, out of their entire FOV, to aim directly at each other.
So, if we define "traversal time" as the time required for the dot of car A to sweep the aperture of car B, in each traversal time there's 1 chance in N^4 of perfect alignment, where N is the ratio of dot size to the full FOV. Maybe it happens once in a blue moon, but if the sensor can withstand full illumination for more than one traversal time, you would start having to compound 1/N^4 events in order to fry a sensor. I wouldn't count on it.
Well, I wouldn't count on that particular mechanism, at least. I'm sure there will be cases where a coating degrades and lets broad-band sunlight in, or a sensor parks on the sun, etc. Sensors will get fried, but not because the engineers making them were too stupid to consider interference.
>Crucially, self-driving cars also rely on conventional cameras. So if those lidars are not camera-safe, it won't just create a headache for people snapping pictures with handheld cameras. Lidar sensors could also damage the cameras on other self-driving cars.
Shouldn't this also be a problem with other non-passive sensors like radar. If we have a traffic jam of cars each sending radio waves from multiple sensors there has to be quite some interference, no?
Radars pointed at each other may have some interference resulting in temporary erroneous readings but they won't be permanently damaged like the camera in the article.
In a heterogenous environment this is not necessarily true; a radar with a powerful transmitter could damage a radar with a very sensitive receiver, particularly at close ranges.
There are military jamming devices that can quite handily permanently damage radars not designed to distinguish it.
Almost certainly not. The FCC approval process would likely catch that. Lasers are also far more focused then microwaves (typical spot size of a cheapo laser pointer is 12cm at 100m away; police LIDAR is good to target a single car out to at least 1/4 mile).
Selecting a pulse repetition interval and spreading sequence from a prng should mostly eliminate interference like that for both lidar and radar I think.
Lots of people don't realize that 1 cup milk has 13g sugar from the lactose.
For comparison, a typical sugar packet is 2-4g.
(This is why cereal + milk is probably just about the unhealthiest thing possible to start your day).
It's a good idea to switch from the sugary/milky Starbucks drinks to anything else - like cold brew, or black coffee where you add trace amounts of sugar/cream yourself, if any.
I don't think lactose is nearly as bad because it doesn't go through the same liver digestion process that causes insulin resistance and fatty liver disease. Lactose is broken into glucose and galactose before it ever enters the bloodstream, and then galactose is digested in the liver but doesn't produce triglyceride byproducts as far as I can tell.
Not sure I would recommend adult humans drink milk, but 13g is not really that much (depending on your choice of cereal) the USDA suggests males 19-30 could eat up to 82g/day (the WHO is a little more reasonable at 50g for all adults)[1]
https://www.alltheplaces.xyz/