Can someone shorten the dollar amount in the title to be less distracting/markety? $155K would be better.
"$154,999.89" is as long as "$15,499,989" so it's tricking the brain into temporarily thinking it might be millions of dollars at first.
"$154,999.89" is as long as "$15,499,989" so it's tricking the brain into temporarily thinking it might be millions of dollars at first.
The We Company only takes.
(Before parent poster edited their post they had "$~154k").
> As to the 11¢ offset, we have currency conversion to thank.
Perhaps after giving each open source project 11 cents? That made me curious about the numbers, and I found a paper which says "Daffara estimates that there were 18,000 active open source projects in September 2007 worldwide"[0] which would mean donating about $2000.
Another analysis from 2013 calculated that "87% of projects have 5 or fewer committers per year"[1] so if we unreasonably assume that each developer only works on one project, that might mean 5 times as many developers as projects, so $10,000 to donate 11 cents to every open source developer.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.4978.pdf
[1] https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/04/22/the-size-of-open-so...
HN Cynicism: No, you're donating it wrong
But after reading this comment and the title again, I see how that could be a possibility.
HN, a pretty high quality crowd at the best of times, is confused about numbers now? Fixed point decimals at that! And reacting to that temporary double-take?
I'm more disappointed that the suggestion was upvoted enough to distract from any substantial discussion.
The title change can bring the discussion back on-topic but this really does feel like a massive brainfart. HN literally decided that a factual number was not appropriate and a sensational milestone is.
If you want to argue, "well, they put the .99 cents on the end to confuse people and make it look like they donated 1.5 million instead" then that really only speaks to your own desperation to twist facts and make them sound favourable to your agenda. You're literally admitting to jumping to a conclusion before even processing the information.
Sorry, I'm just sad that HN decided that they needed to editorialise this specific title.
The original blog post draft originally had $150,000 in the title, but when the receipts came back and we realized that we "saved" 11 cents, someone jokingly updated the title and we thought it was a cutesy change. That's it.