Hacker News Reader

Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

Add a mechanism to donate tokens towards the maintainers' LLMs for a particular ticket and this whole class of problems will be resolved all at once.

View on HN

> Add a mechanism to donate tokens

Or donate money. Crazy idea, eh?

Some people have tokens but no money. Tokens, like Amazon gift cards and Tide detergent [1], are a form of currency in a way. If people have a currency equivalent they want to spend for your benefit, or the collective benefit, it makes sense (depending on level of effort) to enable them to do so.

[1] How Tide Detergent Became a Drug Currency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023204 - January 2013 (124 comments)

(edit: maybe put AI tokens on stablecoin rails as value tokens? could be fun, could move them around instantly between participants on the value rails and could consume them programmatically, if someone implements this idea, buy me a beer!)

> Some people have tokens but no money.

This sounds like a piece of worldbuilding from a Daniel Suarez novel. Who has tokens but no money?

People who were issued AI token credits.

Some AI folks want to bifurcate the meaning of "token" towards a spendable store of value, rather than characters processed by a tokenizer.

"Donate tokens". "Gift tokens". Semantic drift?

And creates a new class of problems. Why not just fork the project and modify it yourself at that point, and cut out the maintainer middleman.

Because it is vibecoded garbage.

Why fork at all? Why not just vendor the dependency and slop the changes you want on top of it? You can even pull from upstream down the line for the latest updates.

The problem is sloppers really, really want other people to use their code, so they feel useful for doing a bit of prompting, probably to rationalize how much they pay Anthropic et al to do the actual work for them. I just wish they'd direct that money directly to the projects they find useful instead of trying to insert themselves as middlemen.

I actually do that quite often these days. Keeping synced with upstream is trivial these days with a modern agent. Even just pi with DeepSeek V4 Flash can do it. It's a huge free-rider issue, but there's no way for me to contribute even human changes upstream because I'll be lost in the AI contributions so I don't bother.

So almost everything is forked and I then just have the agent keep my changes in sync with upstream. Works like a charm. I suspect my pattern is commonplace.

Yep, same here. I hate it a lot, but it's the new reality. It's easier/better for me to just fork, change whatever the hell I want, and push it to my fork. If I become away that upstream wants it I'm happy to put in the work to get a clean merge, but I'm not wasting anymore time pushing things upstream without some indicator that my time is valued by them. Been burned too many time now. It wasn't this way pre-AI, but AI peed in the pool and there isn't a good way to clean it yet

> If I become away that upstream wants it I'm happy to put in the work to get a clean merge, but I'm not wasting anymore time pushing things upstream without some indicator that my time is valued by them. Been burned too many time now.

Do you realize that all the major package system on BSD and Linux works that way. You take upstream, patch it to get it to compile on the system, and then build a package. That is what open source is about. It's not about building a community and what's not.

That's the same as donating money, which you can already do.

Well, yes, exactly. And yet nobody but the biggest corp-sponsored projects get anything more than negligible donations. So what does this tell us? These "contributors" are happy to throw money at open source projects as long as they think they're doing something by prompting the LLM?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com