I got infected in a hospital while already suffering from an autoimmune flare. I was isolated for a week, hazmat suits, the works. Lost 15lbs in the hospital and had to take antibiotics for 3 months to make sure any resistant spores were killed. I’ve heard that fecal transplants have a very high success rate in curing Cdiff but didn’t have that option at the time.
These infections are a huge problem. My neighbor missed 2 _years_ of college recovering from a C. diff infection. And you are correct: fecal transplant is the way, for now.
Per the article, these bleach (sodium hypochlorite) resistant spores are a HUGE problem. At my office, we clean surfaces with quaternary ammonium compounds, and those are supposed to be superior against spores. But still, if the required contact times to disinfect surfaces keep increasing in healthcare settings, we are going to have a major issue where only the most resistant spore-forming bacterial strains survive (basically, we'll be selecting for the strongest... you know, evolution).
> basically, we'll be selecting for the strongest... you know, evolution
Fortunately TANSTAAFL[0] applies to evolution as well, right? Specific adaptations come with increased metabolic cost, so e.g. strongly bleach-resistant bacteria should eventually start losing resistance to other antimicrobials/antiseptics. Right?
Transplants are typically reserved for those with recurrent CDI (although that is likely different in the US where I think you can pay for one privately). In Canada it is a covered procedure.
Not sure about Canada anymore, Queens was doing this in select cases when I was there, but FMT is also increasingly used for initial episode fulminant CDI in the US as well (varies by institution).
I was unlucky enough to get CDI in medical school when flagyl was first line and had to pay OOP for PO vanco, I assume that’s changed now.
What’s first line in Canada these days, is fidaxomycin covered?
Couldn’t tell you about inpatient hospital use. Outside of hospital, it’s covered by the public drug plan in Ontario if you’ve failed (or have allergies to) vancomycin treatment.
Metronidazole is still first line under that program for “mild” cases, otherwise it’s vanco. But nobody is really checking, so it comes down to how your doctor wants to document it.
Glad to hear approval for vanco is relaxed, this was 2015 when I think vanco first line was still new. I was also on the university drug plan which required documented treatment failure at that time.
I remember we used to give patients vanco IV bags to drink on discharge for outpatient therapy because the PO formulation was too expensive for some (iirc I paid $300 for a 10 day course).
The standup set that put Tig Notaro on the cultural radar centered around getting pneumonia, catching c diff, and then her mother dies from a freak head injury and she gets diagnosed with breast cancer. She was never what anyone would call 'sturdy' to begin with. I can only imagine she looked like Skeletor by the end.
I see a lot comments here suggesting the he should just pack his bags and get a corporate gig. How many other great open source projects will we miss out on because developers see this advice and not even bother in the first place.
Sure, but you (maybe not you specifically) _solve problems_ by using a lot of open source. Your ability to do your job and get paid depends on the labor of others. Why not compensate them for it.
At this risk of some self promotion, we developed StackAid (https://stackaid.us) to help fund the long tail of open source because of the exact problems you mentioned. People only tend to remember the popular/direct dependencies.
Am I interpreting it right, and your service acts as an escrow? Even though you seem to solve the payment headaches, I'm not sure I'd trust a middle-man to do the right thing in these matters. Would it be possible to use your tool entirely offline and just get a list of dependencies, and suggested payment per month for each depending on available funds? And then allow me to tweak it depending on whatever criteria I want, similar to the Humble Bundle sliders?
Getting the payments out to every project would be a hassle that you already solve, but I think it would be preferable to deal with those than with a centralized service that everyone depends on.
Yes, we do hold payments for projects and pay them out monthly. However if you don't want to claim your funds on StackAid but do accept donations elsewhere, we will use those service to pay you out instead. Running the tool offline would be challenging because we a large index of dependency->repository mappings across various ecosystems so we can resolve your dependency tree. You would also still be stuck manually paying out to possibly hundreds of projects. FWIW we are completely transparent about the payments we make to each project as well as how much goes to us.
You have to ask to the appropriate forum though, and that's what he got completely wrong. Getting npm to scream for help when a developer installs your package is equivalent to asking your peer for a raise.
I'd say that over 99.999% of the people who saw that message, created memes about it, etc.. did not have a corporate credit card and the power to use it at their discretion. If you want money from corps, THOSE are the guys you need to find and ask money from.
> I'd say that over 99.999% of the people who saw that message, created memes about it, etc.. did not have a corporate credit card and the power to use it at their discretion. If you want money from corps, THOSE are the guys you need to find and ask money from.
So he should be cold emailing netflix, airbnb, linkedin purchasing managers?
If you look at “real” non-profits, there are a couple of key things that are largely missing from Open Source fundraising today.
First is capital campaigns. A capital campaign is a campaign to raise a large amount of money towards a goal. E.g. “we need 3 million dollars by the end of the year for our building renovations.” Having a concrete target is more motivating that just asking for “whatever you can give” to “keep the lights on.”
Second is cultivating relationships with (large) individual donors. It makes sense to track people who have donated to you, send them thank you cards, and take the biggest donors out to lunch. Then when you need money and you’re running your capital campaign, you can ask previous donors for larger contributions. It’s not cold-emailing, because you have a previous relationship with your donors.
Today, open source funding looks more like begging with a sign—sitting in a prominent place and asking for a small amount of money from a lot of people. Nothing wrong with that, you can get enough to eat, but I’d like to see free and open source software try more sustainable and effective strategies.
I did some work like this back in the day, on the side while doing my normal software dev day job.
It's another acquired skill that you don't get just because you're an excellent programmer. On that basis, adding a donation prompt when installing the package is I think a valid attempt at solving the problem, but it's a solution coming from a developer mindset not a fundraiser mindset; if you code it they will come, all that.
If you had the capital you'd hire someone to help with this or find a suitable volunteer with a goal to making it paid.
Obviously I’m biased because I have skin in the game but articles like this really do a disservice for getting maintainers paid, something the author purports to support, because it gives people yet another excuse not to fund maintainers and maintain the status quo. I have yet to see illustrative examples in posts like these that show well funded projects doing worse because they got money.
That is effectively what happens. Unclaimed funds are reallocated after a few months to projects that have been claimed. Like you said, that's a good incentive to sign up sooner rather than later.
There is no Stackaid dependency to install. We are treated as an implicit direct dependency for the purpose of calculating the fee we collect. If you have 19 direct dependencies, StackAid will be the 20th, and get 5% of your total subscription.
Anyone with admin access to a repository can register to be paid by StackAid and the total allocation for a project will be split amongst them equally. We plan to allow adjusting the percentages each maintainer receives in the near future.
StackAid founder here. There are a couple of questions that keep coming up that I thought I would address in one place.
- People don't want to give money to Stripe, Meta, etc since their projects are already well funded by corporations. We agree! Right now, those projects can just not claim their funds which would then be reallocated, or they can pass their funds on to their dependencies instead. We are exploring other ways to allow you to exempt certain organizations/repositories from being funded.
- People will try and game the system. They can try but they largely will not succeed because ultimately many developers will still need to be convinced to use and depend on their projects. How funds are allocated and what dependencies an open source project has is public knowledge and the community will rightly punish bad actors.
Hey, I think this is amazing! I think this has the power to transform open source development/funding in a good way.
I have one question from the main page - it says you sign up for a subscription and list _your_ dependencies. Does that mean for an individual (non open source maintainer) you pose as a project and donate to your own project? It's not clear how this works as a contributor. Do I subscribe to projects, at a mininum of $15 per project? (Also does the project you're donating to itself get any money? Or is it 100% split among dependencies?)
I echo the sentiment about manual allocation though. There are critical project dependencies, and there are things employed in an edge feature that devs might and could be replaced at any time, and all the way between.
Right now people already have the ability to control funding - just don't use StackAid and only donate projects you feel are critical. Or they may decide to explicitly remove dependencies below some threshold. Both of these hurt the long tail. And it feels manipulative - people should have the end say in how their money is donated.
Not all projects need money too. For instance, maybe project X requires a lot of manual work (curation of country/timezone datasets) and its developers no longer have time to do it on top of their day job, vs a library that's just an interface for a standard. Or maybe the devs of project Y are in an area hit by disaster and you want to increase funding to them for a while.
Also, aren't bad actors _because_ of the automatic allocation? The current entirely manual allocation system doesn't really have issues of this sort.
That said, I'll probably sign up for this, but if you added some options for finer control I'd be singing praises high and low.
Okay, thinking about this more I think the automatic allocation might be a reasonable.
I think there's the risk of allocation getting out of drift with a project as the project evolves. Both from a sign up perspective and "if this requires hand tweaking, people will forget to do it" perspective having this low touch is probably important.
If there's manual allocations any automatic adjustments will affect existing allocations
To answer your first question, you give StackAid access to repositories that you own (private or public) and we discover the dependencies you use automatically. Those dependencies are what is funded by your monthly subscription. Let's say you give us access to 4 different repositories with a total of 50 dependencies, then your subscription is divided equally among them. Hope that's helpful.
I just want to offer a word of support: I really like your solution! Don't get too hung up on HN curmudgeons "unable to use this product" because it does not work exactly the way they want to every last detail. There's more to this than making darn sure `aws-sdk` doesn't see a cent of your money...
You've found a need and you are addressing it. You've been thinking about this problem far longer than the drive by dissenters. You've run simulations and built the solution. Of course listen to the feedback, but don't let impact your trajectory unduly.
Personally, I find the emergent ecosystem of an egalitarian solution like this pretty fascinating. I'm totally on board. You've sold me and all you have is a waitlist. Take my card. I want to stop being the problem and actually participate in the solution (:
Also, I can't find any information about StackAid itself on the site. What country is it in (physical address or physical contact information?) What's the legal status? Right now it's totally anonymous which seems sketchy since its dealing with money.
How are taxes handled? How is money stored and transferred? What risks are there here?
Hey, we are located in the US based in Seattle and San Francisco and incorporated as an LLC. Our other founder has more of a social media[1] presence if that's helpful.
We use Stripe to process credit card payments as well as to pay out funds to projects that claim their funds. US based recipients who receive above a certain amount of money will be required to give the required information for 1099 income.
Whether they succeed or not, it this takes off it creates a big incentive towards adding your own crap dependency to successful projects, that is to say, more garbage PRs (some better disguised than others). It’s like the Hacktoberfest disaster. The only difference is this has a tangible upside, the question is whether is outweighs the downside (quite likely in the taking off scenario), whereas Hacktoberfest is strictly negative value-add in my experience.
