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I have been running an open source MathJax-based mathematics pastebin[1] since 2012 and I had received 2 donations for it until recently. Then a mathematician t

• fierarul 6y ago
  Honestly, I think I heard about the website you are using about donations but I wouldn't necessarily put my credit card in there. It would be trivial for you to also put a PayPal address, which seems safer for one-off donations. You might also be tempted to put BTC/ETH addresses but I doubt there's many donors that way.
  • input_sh 6y ago
    You can pay via PayPal and the author likely receives money via PayPal. One could cut out the middle man, but at the same time, it's a prettier interface to look at specifically made for the purpose of donations.
    • fierarul 6y ago
      I don't see a PayPal logo underneath the 'Pay' button.
      • input_sh 6y ago
        I guess it's country-dependent then? I can see debit/credit card and PayPal as options as soon as I click on "support".
• metahost 6y ago
  Was looking forward to using it but, it says my IP is blacklisted. :(
  • susam 6y ago
    It was the spam filter at work. I have tuned it just now. Would you please try once more and see if you can use it now? By the way, this spam filter is one of the things I want to fix when I resume work on this project again. Currently, it blacklists IP addresses whereas ideally it should be blocking certain type of content only.
• offtop5 6y ago
  I'm stupid , but what exactly do mathematicians do ? I'd assume economists are a significant portion of them ???
  • _hl_ 6y ago
    I've seen questions of this kind a lot on HN, and I think they really deserve a better answer than what I can come with. Here's my best shot at an answer: Mathematics is a bit like art. There is no functional purpose to art, people just do it for the sake of itself, and for the intellectual stimulation. Likewise, mathematics deals with building theory on top of previous theory, with no real purpose other than for the sake of building theory and getting intellectual stimulation. Think of this: Where did that previous theory come from? It was built on top of previous theory, etc. Mathematics is pretty much a never-ending stack of things built on top of each other for the sake of building things on top of each other. Every now and then (quite often actually), there is some really useful stuff that can be done with this enormous stack of theory, with applications in practical fields like computer science or engineering. In fact the computer was invented as a result of a lot of merely theoretical contemplations about the nature of logic. But for a "pure" mathematicians, the applications are not the main focus of mathematics. For a forum like HN where a lot of folks are driven by doing stuff, this idea might seem rather strange, but it is the same motivation that drives artists and probably many other things. Then there's of course the applied mathematicians who try to use everything they know about math to work on some real-world problem. Theoretical computer science is often a good example, where we build algorithms that try to improve performance for some practical problem by using mathematical insights into the properties of the problem. But there's also less applied computer science, where algorithms are built merely because they are interesting or beautiful or whatever, and then maybe someone finds a need to apply them, or not. For those without any formal education in mathematics, here's a little problem that will help you understand what a mathematical proof actually is: Consider some set S containing some elements (anything really, just some stuff). For any elements a, b in S, we define an operation: a + b yields some other element of S (+ here is just a symbol, not necessarily addition). The operation + has only the following properties: - (0) a + b is another element of S - (1) For any c in S, we have (a + b) + c = a + (b + c) - (2) There exists a special element in S, written as 0, such that a + 0 = a, for any a in S Note that we did not assume that b + a = a + b. In particular, 0 + a might not be a. Assume that there exists an element 0' such that 0' + a = a = a + 0. Use only the properties stated above to argue that 0 = 0'. If it helps, replace "+" with any other symbol. ---- Solution: This structure (a set with an associative operation and a neutral element) is called a monoid. We are proving that the neutral element of a monoid is both "left-neutral" and "right-neutral". The proof proceeds as follows: By (1), we have 0' + 0 = 0', but also 0' + 0 = by our assumption of 0. Hence 0' + 0 = 0' = 0, which was to be shown. This solution is fairly straightforward. The next step is to try your hand at something a little more complicated: Define a second operation (-a) which takes an element of S and returns an element of S called the inverse of a, with the property that a + (-a) = (-a) + a = 0, for any a in S. Prove that (-(-a)) = a.
• akersten 6y ago
  What kind of legal notices are you routinely dealing with? That's a frightening aspect of maintaining an open source side project I hadn't really considered.
  • susam 6y ago
    The notices are usually takedown notices to remove content violating various regulations that spammers often post to the website. This issue occurs if my spam filter or I do not detect and remove such content before someone else finds it and submits a complaint about it. In my experience, this additional overhead comes with hosting a live service that allows user-generated content. Other types of projects where the tool is run offline or where the users take the tool and host it themselves are fine.
• bigiain 6y ago
  So that's 2 donations in 8 years - or about 0.25 donations per year. And _three_ donations in the last year! Or 1200% YoY growth! (VCs please form an orderly queue...)