News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by realPubkey on Thursday February 09, 2017 @03:10AM (#13605416)
I have watched how people use crypto-currencies to donate for a long time. I also tried it for a own privacy-project which has over 10.000 users / day.

Since you can see the donation-amount in the blockchain, I'm free to say that "blockchains" are not the solution to this problem. People do not donate, no matter if via paypal or bitcoin.

Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by tommorris on Thursday February 09, 2017 @03:22AM (#13605451)
There's so much magical tech bullshit thinking embedded in "if people aren't donating via PayPal, switching to Bitcoin is going to make them donate even though Bitcoin is a lot fucking harder to use than PayPal".
Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by fsloth on Thursday February 09, 2017 @03:27AM (#13605471)
It's not a donation but a licence fee. For enterprises this is effectively compulsory, not opt in. I meant it would be convenient if there was some platform to maintain the licence contract chain so that a dual licenced project could use a third party dual licensed library, and the license fees would be forwarded to all license owning parties in a transparent manner.

Just an idea, not sure if it would work non-parhologically in the end (i.e. some mega troll buying the licensing rights for a set of critical open source libraries, for example ).

Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by Y_Y on Thursday February 09, 2017 @03:31AM (#13605483)

  "10.000"
What number is this? Is it ten? Ten thousand? I don't think decimal (thousand) separators are necessary when you can write the number without, use scientific notation or the number in words. But there is an English-speaking standard (comma) and an international standard (thin space). Considering that there are at least five better options I think this usage is perverse.
Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by travisjungroth on Thursday February 09, 2017 @04:18AM (#13605654)
Some countries use dots instead of commas for thousand separators.
Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by Y_Y on Thursday February 09, 2017 @05:12AM (#13605867)
And I was arguing that it is a bad idea to do that in an international forum.
Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by robjan on Thursday February 09, 2017 @09:36AM (#13607159)
Could you not understand, given the context?
Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by CamperBob2 on Thursday February 09, 2017 @10:15PM (#13612980)
Actually, I agree with him/her. Using decimal points where commas belong, and vice versa, is an insanely stupid idea. People (and countries) who promulgate such ideas should not be encouraged. It's just begging for a Mars Climate Orbiter-type disaster.

I reeeeallly don't like it when I have to think about whether my bench multimeter is reading 115 volts or 115 millivolts.

Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by grzm on Thursday February 09, 2017 @10:21PM (#13612990)
This is a localization (localisation?) issue: different locales have different conventions. It is important to decide on a standard on, say, a project. In the case of an international forum like HN, it makes sense to ask for clarification when necessary. Even if a convention were added to the FAQ, there will always be those who aren't aware of the convention. Cut each other some slack, at least until the HN community decides to launch a satellite.
Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by CamperBob2 on Thursday February 09, 2017 @11:57PM (#13613329)
The thing is, though, the period was in use as a decimal point for hundreds of years, since the time of Napier and Kepler. And then someone in Europe decided to start using commas because, hey, why not, it's cool and fun to be different for no reason.

That kind of behavior needs to be called out.

Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by yunolisten on Thursday February 09, 2017 @05:15AM (#13605881)
> Considering that there are at least five better options I think this usage is perverse.

Wow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Examples_of_use

Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by inimino on Thursday February 09, 2017 @08:32AM (#13606749)
It's ten, followed by three decimal places of zeros, because that's obviously what makes sense in the context, right? /s
Re:Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave by midgetjones on Thursday February 09, 2017 @06:18AM (#13606130)
That's a really odd thing to get wound up about.