There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable.
Never received even one donation/rating/comment/etc.? Be prepared to wait approximately forever.
Got a few, especially publicly-visible? Suddenly things trickle in faster.
Well-known project with 5000 stars? Here, have more stars. Here, have more donations. Success breeds success.
Meanwhile, wasn’t it shown that crucial infrastructure like SSL had between 1-2 unknown developers? How many other projects are there? How many developers can you name? How many different projects have you donated to? How many “not well known” apps have you balked at paying even $0.99 for?
It’s a problem. There needs to be better ways to vault critical “boring” projects into the well-known category. And, there has to be a way to keep positive feedback loops from ballooning ratings and income for projects simply because they sorted to the top and stayed there.
> There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable.
> Never received even one donation/rating/comment/etc.? Be prepared to wait approximately forever.
> Got a few, especially publicly-visible? Suddenly things trickle in faster.
That's not tech specific; there's a reason that places with tip jars preseed them with an initial stash of visible tips, and advertising (for consumer products, charity, and even B2B productos) features endorsers known to the target audience. Human social behavior is strongly based in imitation.
Ah, the cruelty of power law distributions. Problem is they come up everywhere, all the time -- as often, if not more often, than Gaussian distributions.
This is soul crushing when starting B2B companies. The valley of death between "first customer who breaks everything" and "ten customers happily using your product without customization" takes a (physically) painful amount of time. Much better to do pre-investment and get it out of the way.
[Disclaimer: that happened in France, not sure it applies in all countries] A friend of mine is a freelance worker, getting paid in public grants for doing 100% OSS dev for medical software. He has a skill that I have not: he spends 50% of his time filling forms, making proposals and hunting grants that often fail. The ones that succeed, however, pay him several months of time.
There are public funds out there, in France and in EU, at least. Getting them require a bit of networking (you usually need to be back up by a partner either a lab, a company or an institution) a lot of paperwork but it allows to get financed in a way that charity or donations will have a hard time achieving.
It's a business opportunity that someone should tackle anytime soon (like patreon). A company to be the umbrella for these important projects that no one care but use. Companies and people using some of these projects donate to this main company and it distributes to its "incubated" projects.
>There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable.
As others have said in this thread, it is not specific to technology.
Other words to describe it: Hipsters, teenager-(like)-wannabe-with-the-"in"-crowd-mentality (I see that a lot in adults), winner-take-all, network effects, (going back) "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (or insert other popular bigco name here), ... , all the way back to the fundamental point - human nature.
Not very many people are discerning and try to make independent judgments/decisions. Much easier to follow the crowd or herd.
> Both King and Rowling’s foray into undercover writing reveals a harsh truth about success and social status — winners keep winning. This idea is formally known as cumulative advantage, or the Matthew effect, and explains how those who start with an advantage relative to others can retain that advantage over long periods of time. This effect has also been shown to describe how music gets popular, but applies to any domain that can result in fame or social status. I discovered this concept by reading Michael Mauboussin’s The Success Equation where he writes:
>> The Matthew effect explains how two people can start in nearly the same place and end up worlds apart. In these kinds of systems, initial conditions matter. And as time goes on, they matter more and more.
I feel like HN is an imperfect but not terrible partial solution. Yes, it is still based on likes and involves no small element of luck, but you can have a project that is not very well known, post it on HN, get 50-100 views minimum and if your project resonates and gets a bit lucky, it can be a good kickstart
It's still based on the same social feedback loops and marketing that causes the problem you describe, but it makes it easier for unknown projects to get seen and evaluated by a knowledgable, generally objective audience
You live in a competitive society, and that is the logical result of that. We should (especially the creative ones) fight for a society with wealth redistribution, so we wouldn't have to spent the whole day working just to survive and more people would be able to work in projects that are meaningful.
It shows the importance of self-promotion. If you don't self-promote then no one will know that you exist no matter how good or even how significant your project is.
It's easy to forget to self-promote when you're busy doing actual work though.
That was my problem as well because I created a popular open source project and I was focused on driving all the attention towards the project and none to myself. I created a Twitter account for the project, the GitHub repo was under an organization instead of my own personal profile, the blog I made was also named after the project.
The lesson I learned is that people don't care that much about projects and concepts, they need to see faces and names. Even among highly technical developer communities... So imagine how bad it must be in mainstream communities.
You could always hold the industry ransom. Proprietary everything, strict paid licensing, unions/guilds, etc. See how much people are willing to pay once the things they take for granted are gone
Two years ago, I was writing a modest Lisp interpreter in C. The evaluator was more or less working, but I was totally stuck on parsing user input (in other words, I had the E in REPL, but not the R). After spending an entire night banging my head against the parsing logic without making any progress, I began to despair that it would never work and I would have to throw the whole thing in the trash.
Well, that morning I met Andy. Groggy and frustrated, I told him about my problem. He said "Why don't you try tokenizing the input before parsing it?" This was a revelation to me. Yes, it turns out that reading a string character by character and trying to recursively convert it into a Lisp object all at once isn't the best way to do it. Who knew (aside from anyone who had ever learned anything about parsing)?
Andrew, if you're listening, add some higher thresholds on Patreon, you'd be surprised. Someone who's willing to give you money (any amount, even $1) is probably also willing to give you $5 or $10 (impulse spending, basically).
Yeah, I did this for my Patreon as well (some people donate less but it's not the majority) https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu (I also quit a few months ago to do open source on Babel ). Maybe also depends on audience and type of Patreon (open source vs video/content creation)? I also tried to get a little creative with my tiers based on I what I liked: it's hard to justify making rewards for people when you already provide a service through working on open source already without it turning into more of a 2nd job though. Lots to talk about with that.
Some amount of people always go above the number. I have someone on my own $5 level paying $10. And it's perfectly common for people to put $3 in a $1 level. I wouldn't be surprised if the first person to take me up on my $200 level doubles it.
That said, because it's normal for people to pay more than you ask, it's not a bad idea to have a higher level or two if you have lofty goals for it.
I don't think it's really impulse spending though. Most of the people on my Patreon are people I talked to for a year or more on social media before they signed up.
What's amazing to me is that he's sustaining living in NYC on currently $423 a month. He must be pulling from a pretty large savings fund. Even his "fully sustain working on zig" goal is only $3000.
OKWS author here. I have to take some issue, we made a lot of improvements to the infrastructure over the years. The Tame system for instance was a big one. [1]
Having the courage to take the plunge is admirable, and that's enough to get $1/month from me. Congratulations on making such a big decision!
One thing I'm curious about: the current ~$400/month from Patreon (minus fees) isn't close to enough to cover a similarly comfortable standard of living in New York, and I imagine that this would affect your "runway", if you will. Are you able to live and work off of savings, or will you be relocating for a lower cost of living?
Apologies if this comes across as prying into your financial details. I'm more just curious about the process. Again, congrats!
As much as I love NYC, it may be practical to relocate somewhere with a lower cost of living. Alee & I will reevaluate when the lease is up. She's in grad school, so who knows where that will take her? I'll probably just live where she needs to for her career.
He writes in Patreon that reaching $1000 will allow him to "work on Zig full-time for 3 times longer", so I'm guessing he's burning some savings and every extra dollar will just extend that for some time.
Follow up question: What do you do about health insurance? The cheapest (read: catastrophic coverage) on Oscar is several hundred per month last time I checked.
For anyone like me who's hearing of Zig for the first time, I totally encourage y'all to watch the video that's attached on his Patreon page.
It's rare to see a technical presentation done in a way where the concepts are so clearly understandable. Makes me want to take a peek into Zig and see what it's like in there and consider supporting the author just because. Hope it works out well enough for him to live his dream :).
I think this may be exactly what I've been looking for. I've been wanting a "Better C" type of language, but all the existing candidates fall down on some point like - too complicated (Rust/D/C++), no manual memory management (Go), etc. I've even made some half baked attempts at writing my own language.
It seems that the design goals of this language are exactly what I'm after. Going to have to give it a try later.
People here are commenting that NYC is quite an expensive place to live off donations.
I'm not sure what advantages that the location brings when working on a programming language (networking?), but I can suggest moving to South Africa where cost of living is low and quality of life is high. Yeah there's "crime" -- but it's not too bad as long as you're a little smart about the way you conduct yourself.
Cape Town is an obvious first choice and is really cosmopolitan with a good dev community, but I can suggest Durban as a good runner up; it was recently voted "Most Livable City in South Africa" [0]
For New York level "hole-in-a-wall" rentals, you can live like a king in South Africa :) If you're willing to share a spot you can really get a palace for yourself, and enjoy some of the best beaches in the world (in Durban).
Cool, good for you :). I like the world where the internet enables niche creators to live and engage with invested supporters/patrons.
Aside, have you seen the language Jonathan Blow's working on (jai)? Curious how you'd compare the two, goals or implementation-wise. (Given he hasn't released anything yet, no worries if this is unanswerable :))
Best of luck. Is there any place you wrote about why you belive Zig is better than all the other alternatives to C? Why should I look at Zig, insted of looking at Rust?
Not trying to be dismissive, genuinely curious what your thinking is.
Looking for more on Zig I found a talk [0] (~1 hour) on the language by Andrew Kelley from just a few months ago.
Edit: I see there already questions about Rust in this thread. There's an audience question on Rust in the talk [1] and the creator states that Rust is Zig's biggest competitor.
That embedded world needs a simple, performant, low-level language that isn't C. If Zig focuses on providing that for the robotics domain, I could see it becoming popular.
I want this to work so much (because this is exactly the "business model" by which I'd like to live.)
I know of another example: the guy who draws and writes the web- (and now print too) comic "Kill Six Billion Demons". I believe he's currently living off of direct fan support (through Patreon too, as it happens) although he has published a physical book collecting the first arc of the story. (I guess that is also fan support..?)
Props to you buddy! Glad people like you are always willing to take risks to move the software community forward. Whether it works out or not, I give you my thumbs up!
I've looked at the guide[1] to writing Brainfuck interpreter, and the Zig language indeed looks very practical. In particular the test "..." {} block is neat, and the love for stack backtraces makes me feel at home.
I am curious whether it's inspired by Elixir's ExUnit test macro or the idea for that sprung up independently. Greatness is 99% transpiration nonetheless.
[+] [-] makecheck|7 years ago|reply
Never received even one donation/rating/comment/etc.? Be prepared to wait approximately forever.
Got a few, especially publicly-visible? Suddenly things trickle in faster.
Well-known project with 5000 stars? Here, have more stars. Here, have more donations. Success breeds success.
Meanwhile, wasn’t it shown that crucial infrastructure like SSL had between 1-2 unknown developers? How many other projects are there? How many developers can you name? How many different projects have you donated to? How many “not well known” apps have you balked at paying even $0.99 for?
It’s a problem. There needs to be better ways to vault critical “boring” projects into the well-known category. And, there has to be a way to keep positive feedback loops from ballooning ratings and income for projects simply because they sorted to the top and stayed there.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|7 years ago|reply
> Never received even one donation/rating/comment/etc.? Be prepared to wait approximately forever.
> Got a few, especially publicly-visible? Suddenly things trickle in faster.
That's not tech specific; there's a reason that places with tip jars preseed them with an initial stash of visible tips, and advertising (for consumer products, charity, and even B2B productos) features endorsers known to the target audience. Human social behavior is strongly based in imitation.
[+] [-] Hasz|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
[+] [-] sbinthree|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iv|7 years ago|reply
There are public funds out there, in France and in EU, at least. Getting them require a bit of networking (you usually need to be back up by a partner either a lab, a company or an institution) a lot of paperwork but it allows to get financed in a way that charity or donations will have a hard time achieving.
[+] [-] meiraleal|7 years ago|reply
Does something like this already exist?
[+] [-] vram22|7 years ago|reply
As others have said in this thread, it is not specific to technology.
Other words to describe it: Hipsters, teenager-(like)-wannabe-with-the-"in"-crowd-mentality (I see that a lot in adults), winner-take-all, network effects, (going back) "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (or insert other popular bigco name here), ... , all the way back to the fundamental point - human nature.
Not very many people are discerning and try to make independent judgments/decisions. Much easier to follow the crowd or herd.
[+] [-] ForHackernews|7 years ago|reply
> Both King and Rowling’s foray into undercover writing reveals a harsh truth about success and social status — winners keep winning. This idea is formally known as cumulative advantage, or the Matthew effect, and explains how those who start with an advantage relative to others can retain that advantage over long periods of time. This effect has also been shown to describe how music gets popular, but applies to any domain that can result in fame or social status. I discovered this concept by reading Michael Mauboussin’s The Success Equation where he writes:
>> The Matthew effect explains how two people can start in nearly the same place and end up worlds apart. In these kinds of systems, initial conditions matter. And as time goes on, they matter more and more.
[+] [-] aaavl2821|7 years ago|reply
It's still based on the same social feedback loops and marketing that causes the problem you describe, but it makes it easier for unknown projects to get seen and evaluated by a knowledgable, generally objective audience
[+] [-] asicsp|7 years ago|reply
agree with getting more stars, but donation? not yet :-/ :( https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...
[+] [-] coliveira|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grosjona|7 years ago|reply
It's easy to forget to self-promote when you're busy doing actual work though.
That was my problem as well because I created a popular open source project and I was focused on driving all the attention towards the project and none to myself. I created a Twitter account for the project, the GitHub repo was under an organization instead of my own personal profile, the blog I made was also named after the project.
The lesson I learned is that people don't care that much about projects and concepts, they need to see faces and names. Even among highly technical developer communities... So imagine how bad it must be in mainstream communities.
[+] [-] bazooka_penguin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] patcon|7 years ago|reply
You have just written a simple and alternative specification for "government" :)
[+] [-] nickdrozd|7 years ago|reply
Two years ago, I was writing a modest Lisp interpreter in C. The evaluator was more or less working, but I was totally stuck on parsing user input (in other words, I had the E in REPL, but not the R). After spending an entire night banging my head against the parsing logic without making any progress, I began to despair that it would never work and I would have to throw the whole thing in the trash.
Well, that morning I met Andy. Groggy and frustrated, I told him about my problem. He said "Why don't you try tokenizing the input before parsing it?" This was a revelation to me. Yes, it turns out that reading a string character by character and trying to recursively convert it into a Lisp object all at once isn't the best way to do it. Who knew (aside from anyone who had ever learned anything about parsing)?
The resulting parser code: https://github.com/nickdrozd/lispinc/blob/master/parse.c
Anyway, I don't know anything about Zig, but Andy sure helped me out of that jam.
[+] [-] oblio|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yosito|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hzoo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rainbowmverse|7 years ago|reply
That said, because it's normal for people to pay more than you ask, it's not a bad idea to have a higher level or two if you have lofty goals for it.
I don't think it's really impulse spending though. Most of the people on my Patreon are people I talked to for a year or more on social media before they signed up.
[+] [-] gschier|7 years ago|reply
Note, the total number of donations I've received is ~20.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|7 years ago|reply
Methinks you don't understand how Patreon works.
[+] [-] overcast|7 years ago|reply
https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk/memberships
[+] [-] koala_man|7 years ago|reply
If current trends continue... :P
[+] [-] IshKebab|7 years ago|reply
I don't think he is?
[+] [-] jpmoyn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giarc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxtaco|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix07/tech/full_pape...
[+] [-] otras|7 years ago|reply
One thing I'm curious about: the current ~$400/month from Patreon (minus fees) isn't close to enough to cover a similarly comfortable standard of living in New York, and I imagine that this would affect your "runway", if you will. Are you able to live and work off of savings, or will you be relocating for a lower cost of living?
Apologies if this comes across as prying into your financial details. I'm more just curious about the process. Again, congrats!
[+] [-] AndyKelley|7 years ago|reply
As much as I love NYC, it may be practical to relocate somewhere with a lower cost of living. Alee & I will reevaluate when the lease is up. She's in grad school, so who knows where that will take her? I'll probably just live where she needs to for her career.
[+] [-] icebraining|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jclay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iicc|7 years ago|reply
> $3,000 per month Fully sustain full-time work on Zig.
[+] [-] nstart|7 years ago|reply
It's rare to see a technical presentation done in a way where the concepts are so clearly understandable. Makes me want to take a peek into Zig and see what it's like in there and consider supporting the author just because. Hope it works out well enough for him to live his dream :).
[+] [-] pseudonymcoward|7 years ago|reply
It seems that the design goals of this language are exactly what I'm after. Going to have to give it a try later.
[+] [-] nsomaru|7 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what advantages that the location brings when working on a programming language (networking?), but I can suggest moving to South Africa where cost of living is low and quality of life is high. Yeah there's "crime" -- but it's not too bad as long as you're a little smart about the way you conduct yourself.
Cape Town is an obvious first choice and is really cosmopolitan with a good dev community, but I can suggest Durban as a good runner up; it was recently voted "Most Livable City in South Africa" [0]
For New York level "hole-in-a-wall" rentals, you can live like a king in South Africa :) If you're willing to share a spot you can really get a palace for yourself, and enjoy some of the best beaches in the world (in Durban).
[0] https://www.iol.co.za/mercury/news/durban-is-most-liveable-c...
[+] [-] emodendroket|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tc7|7 years ago|reply
Aside, have you seen the language Jonathan Blow's working on (jai)? Curious how you'd compare the two, goals or implementation-wise. (Given he hasn't released anything yet, no worries if this is unanswerable :))
[+] [-] olejorgenb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnx|7 years ago|reply
Not trying to be dismissive, genuinely curious what your thinking is.
[+] [-] lixtra|7 years ago|reply
For ruby it was rails. Python profited from data science. Etc.
[+] [-] wlkr|7 years ago|reply
Edit: I see there already questions about Rust in this thread. There's an audience question on Rust in the talk [1] and the creator states that Rust is Zig's biggest competitor.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak&feature=youtu.be...
[+] [-] throwawayjava|7 years ago|reply
That embedded world needs a simple, performant, low-level language that isn't C. If Zig focuses on providing that for the robotics domain, I could see it becoming popular.
[+] [-] carapace|7 years ago|reply
I know of another example: the guy who draws and writes the web- (and now print too) comic "Kill Six Billion Demons". I believe he's currently living off of direct fan support (through Patreon too, as it happens) although he has published a physical book collecting the first arc of the story. (I guess that is also fan support..?)
[+] [-] fataliss|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedrocr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g4nt1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dexen|7 years ago|reply
Definitely a language to keep an eye out on.
[1] https://blog.jfo.click/how-zig-do/
[+] [-] jxub|7 years ago|reply