dalke

43 ms·

391.
by dalke 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort > In the worst case, Timsort takes O(n logn) comparisons to sort an array of n elements. In the best case, which occurs when the input is already sorted, it runs in linear time,
392.
by dalke 6y ago
Python has a sorting HOWTO at https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sorting.html . I was the original author, back in around 1998 or so. This new article covers a subset of that HOWTO.
393.
by dalke 6y ago
Kirsch co-authored - with an undergraduate intern! - one of the foundational papers of my field of cheminformatics. Then never touched the topic again, as he was more interested in computers and art. He worked on the SEAC computer at the Na
394.
by dalke 6y ago
To date me, I learned about the Ghostscript model from Michael Tiemann in late 1996, when it used a delayed release model - GNU Ghostscript versions were released approximately a year after the corresponding Aladdin Ghostscript version. Tha
395.
by dalke 6y ago
Indeed, it is several papers. There are two journals in my field - one I can't read because it's behind a paywall and one that's expensive to publish in. I choose the latter, but couldn't afford multiple months of rent i
396.
by dalke 6y ago
I commented in the parallel thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23905523 . Basically, commercial scientific software has long had a software product model based on yearly support/upgrades, scientific softwar
397.
by dalke 6y ago
Thanks. There are a few comparisons to my field which stand out as being different than an end-user software sales model. First, like I said, most companies in my field (including me) already do a software subscription model. You write &quo
398.
by dalke 6y ago
Towards the end of the writing the paper, another paper came out on "RISC: rapid inverted-index based search of chemical fingerprints", https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.9b00069 which does something along thos
399.
by dalke 6y ago
My running hypothesis is that many people see open source as a way to avoid dealing with upstream developers. If I "pip install" a package which brings in a lot of other packages, I don't need to have any relationship with an
400.
by dalke 6y ago
I thought about it some more, and realized a different issue. I charge a fee to get the software, and renewal fee for support and upgrades. That's essentially a subscription, right? The main difference is that once my customer has the
401.
by dalke 6y ago
Yes, though technically I didn't ask them to not buy the MIT license option, but rather offered them another option which was cheaper. Personally, I would have preferred they stayed with MIT because it appeals to my desire to have peop
402.
by dalke 6y ago
Sure. It can't. Even GPUs will beat a CPU. In my paper I commented: > GPU memory bandwidth is an order of magnitude higher than CPU bandwidth, so a GPU implementation of the Tanimoto search kernel should be about ten times faster. C
403.
by dalke 6y ago
I prefer to think of it as replying to earlier papers. Quoting myself under "Funding open source", I wrote: > Starting around 15 years ago a number of papers discussed the role of free and open source software (“FOSS”) in chemi
404.
by dalke 6y ago
Why isn't it proof that a subscription model produces more revenue than a sale model, rather than proof the sale model is essentially unsustainable?
405.
by dalke 6y ago
There's a deep connection between what I do and text retrieval in general. Take a look at the early work in IR in the 1940s and 1950s, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval#Timeline 1947, "Ha
406.
by dalke 6y ago
Yeah, I fell bad about asking my customers to renew their support contract when they don't send me any support or feature requests during the year. But they do, so I must be doing something right.
407.
by dalke 6y ago
Sure, and I apologize for the confusion. I have academic licensing at EUR 0 for the pre-built Python wheels packaged for "manylinux" and EUR 1000 for source code availability. For companies have EUR $X for single geographical site
408.
by dalke 6y ago
Thanks! Yes, I've considered cloud platform. There are several big difficulties with that. First, data. It's easy to grab public data from PubChem, ChEMBL, and a few other projects, and make a service. But why would anyone pay for
409.
by dalke 6y ago
As a revenue-generating project I was able to share the burden by paying people to work on parts of it. I think that was a more effective way than waiting for others to join in. Note that my paying commercial customers are pharmaceutical co
410.
by dalke 6y ago
You can sell a proprietary product, right? With a restrictive software license? That means customers are willing to pay $base + $yearly renewal for the product. Why aren't they willing to pay the same price for the same product but
411.
by dalke 6y ago
I tried talking with funding agencies. As a self-employed/sole-proprietership, it proved to be difficult. I conducted the "mmpdb crowdfunding project" at http://mmpdb.dalkescientific.com/ . Unfortunately, it&
412.
by dalke 6y ago
Yes, those future ideas are also possible salable products, thought the market is smaller. I had hoped that the surplus from the core bitstring search would provide the seed money for their development. Chemfp is (or rather was) at least an
413.
by dalke 6y ago
I started the chemfp project in part to see if I could develop a self-funded free/open source product in my field, cheminformatics. (In short, storing and searching chemical information on a computer. Chemfp does very fast Jaccard-Tani
414.
The chemfp project: problems selling free software(jcheminf.biomedcentral.com)
66 points by dalke 6y ago|46 comments
415.
by dalke 6y ago
Radio hobbyists used to use spark-gap transmitters. These were cheap to make and popular. They also produced a lot of radio noise. This caused them to be effectively banned by the 1930s, outside of marine use, in favor of continuous wave tr
416.
by dalke 6y ago
Until this article, I thought that Gen X killed ham radio. > Amateur radio is to The Baby Boomer and Generation X’s youth as IOT is to Millennials and Gen Y. To clarify my bona fides, I'm solidly GenX. I didn't know any hams my
417.
by dalke 6y ago
I first came across Bourne because of his book "Methods of Information Handling". Its masterful summary of the available methods well deserved the American Documentation Institute Book-of-the-Year award. It's available from a
418.
The Bourne collection: the history of online search(computerhistory.org)
44 points by dalke 6y ago|6 comments
419.
by dalke 6y ago
I think my paper shows my understanding of free software, but I'll elaborate. I co-founded the Biopython project, an open source project for bioinformatics. I was secretary of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and helped organize the
420.
by dalke 6y ago
I started the chemfp project to see if I could develop a self-funded free/open source product in my field, cheminformatics. (In short, storing and searching chemical information on a computer. Chemfp does very fast Jaccard-Tanimoto sim

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