Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> I'm at Google and I wish each engineer got some kind of budget (like the peer bonus budget) that could be used to distribute funds to third-party libraries.

One of Andrew Yang's policies when he was running for president was to give every American $100 to allocate to whatever non-profits they wanted. This is really the kind of policy we need to drive open source. I'd love to open source more software myself, but right now the thought have having 25 million people using my code commercially and making maybe 5k a year if I'm lucky isn't super appealing.

View on HN

It sounds good, but will run into problems when implemented at scale because of greedy people, jerks, and scammers.

You will see a cottage industry of OSS projects that serve only serve the purpose of parting people from their money. This is already something we see in the non profit space. But there the extent of the fraud and the damage it causes is limited because there isn’t enough money to attract scammers en masse.

In Seattle we have Democracy Vouchers funded by the city that every voter is sent in the mail and can be used to make campaign contributions.

This led one candidate to hire people to solicit/collect these democracy vouchers. He raised over 350k from democracy vouchers.

When the election came around, far fewer people voted for him than contributed democracy vouchers.

And the program administrative and overhead costs are quite high, approaching the level of total funds distributed to candidates.

Just pointing out that handing out money isn't free (although it is one of the true core competencies of the US federal government), and can have unintended unproductive side effects.

Just want to point out that this is pretty much WAI: a candidate who sounded promising but wasn't getting funding got airtime, turned out not so great, and failed.

Saying a person should be in the race shouldn't mean that you definitely think they should win it, especially in a FPTP system.

> This led one candidate to hire people to solicit/collect these democracy vouchers.

This sounds like what you'd expect an actually successful/winning candidate to do as well (explore all net positive fundraising avenues). The issue is, this guy wasn't actually a good candidate, and didn't excel at anything else.

lmao thank god he did not win.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com