skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FOSS is a cargo cult to many naive developers. They build useful tools, give them out, and expect millions of payout will happen somehow.
I should have been clear, I'm not looking for a deal but just trying to buy these companies' API offerings. I didn't think it be this hard to get in touch with sales.
It's straight out of the South Park underpants gnome school of business:

1) Write open source code

2) ???

3) Profit
I disagree. We're short iridium, We're not short copper. We don't have an efficient way to extract it, from either waste or from raw materials.

That's also the other side of it: we're short better wiring materials/technologies because copper is 'good enough' at it's price point.
The article was from 2019. The case with NYAG was settled. Not much wrong-doing was found by now.
I'm interested in the legality of what they're doing.

But it seems very similar in concept to automated web scraping, which has been deemed legal in the US.
memetic viruses are real. Infohazards should not be taken lightly.

What has been seen cannot be unseen. However, it's worth taking all that lightly because correcting people's grammar is a suboptimal social strategy.
>known right-wing advocacy groups

Known to who? Do you have a list of approved sources we are allowed to use and are not sharing?
Yes and no.

Yes because the web is already a kind of knowledge graph but it's mostly written in natural language, and thus it's very hard for machines to traverse and reason about it. The Semantic Web was an attempt to formalize some ways to make the web's inherent knowledge graph nature more explicit and thus easier for programs to understand.

No, because knowledge graphs predated the web by many years and KGs are a bigger topic than just the web.
Random bits of semi-related advice:

1. If you wanted Retool to stop using your service, you should have said it up front instead of beating around the bush. From what I can gather from your emails, you sent their CEO a random sales pitch and he ignored it. Hard to fault him for that.

2. I love faker.js. I have used it in the past, and I'm sure several teams in my company use it today. I would, however, never ever pay for your cloud service, simply because taking a dependency on a third party hosted website to run unit tests is madness. The old school corporate software licensing model might be losing favor, but that does not mean it isn't apt for any use case. If faker.js was still downloadable but needed a license key to run I'm sure people would pay for it. It would probably be the easiest thing in the world to bypass, but the same Fortune 500 companies you mention would gladly break our their checkbooks rather than risk getting sued.
It's MIT licensed. If they're actually reselling the API (and not hosting their own instance) then it could potentially be in violation of the terms of service, but that's it.

Using images from Faker's CDN is scummy and potentially illegal, but fairly minor overall.
You might be thinking of this[0] 1981 book which claims similar for the Navy. I've personally used this same technique taught to me by some random from IRC who claimed to be an ex-con, and despite his questionable credentials it has legitimate results. I believe I've read about it in at least one science fiction novel, too.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/Relax-and-Win_Championship-Perfo...
Which off-topic rule? Non-technological topics are more than welcome, here.
>Hi Marak, this is interesting! Give me a day to work on this; I will reach back out soon!

You promised this last time. Why is a post on Hacker News any different than a private email?
I did a pram reset and have had zero issues. First day with the machine with a 27” 4K monitor and temps were soaring, fans going crazy with just chrome, sublime and vagrant running. PRAM reset and fans only turn on when something actually intense is happening. Latest big sur, and pretty much a maxed out machine - 64gb/1TB/ and I think the same graphics as mentioned in the article.
No offense taken!

I do wish that the market would work as intended such that failures in handling abuse (e.g. frivolous accusations as we're plausibly seeing here) would lead to organizations moving away from Zoom to competitors, whether it's Teams or Meet or BlueJeans or whatever else. But unfortunately the friction of changing platforms is high, between sunk cost of contracts, needing to vet / compare multiple new systems, training on the use of new software, etc.

Meanwhile, the existing solution mostly just works 99% of the time.

(All this said -- even if CG-NAT is to blame for multiple students showing up with the same IP address, that should be tangential to the actual identification of abuse. Either there's a process failure (students aren't required to sign in), or Zoom's not logging or looking at the right things (e.g. display name changes).)
Does it violate the TOS though? I didn't see that mentioned in the article.

But if so, then definitely a problem. They would then have a valid legal case against the company, I assume.
I don't think so. coroutine awaits are just like normal function calls in Go (since all of Go functions are implicitely suspendable).

I guess you meant the "go" statement? That is more of a coroutine spawn thing, and this would be a separate function in C++ too.
Use what Google builds, which will likely (as I mentioned) be WebAuthn based
Are you one of the three kids that will want this stuff shipped across the country?
The California Air Resources Board is the group that approves "prescribed burns" in California. You can read about them at https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/prescribed-burning, and see a map of upcoming & recent burns. Note that for the map, you'll want to drill down into "Fire Locations", then "Prescribed Fire Ignitions", and select the appropriate boxes.

For example, over the past week Lawrence Livermore National Lab has had controlled burns taking place in the East Bay between Interstate 580 and Alameda County Highway J2.
Same thing with ports, for those stuck on IPv4

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-port-fluxing-with-totp
Its a political refugees when the economy starts a business down poor mens the ones who will exceed maximum altitude in life until death in heaven mid people don’t make it anywhere and the rich starts to envy when it comes to wealth and stock measure the ability of taking risks is absolute zero in the mind of low poor people high power is always nice but their is no ending to legends that live its dreams that is why living in good financial state and poor income is good when the government judge itself so the rich suffers and the rich also in humility. It does not go 3 ways living the freedom and equity will consider a much better wave. Help/set no threads
Because now it’s public he failed to respond
> Most of the wealth in civilization, in fact all of it, has been created.

After re-reading your comment, I realize I think I misterpreted this sentence. He's not saying the total future value has already been created, he's saying the past value was worked for
Fuck yes this is the end of IE11
You can use higher doses, but you'll be losing nuance. Part of the point (for those who care) is to reveal the fruitier elements in the coffee. That means treating it a bit more like tea.
This feels gross. The kind of people who read HN see a headline or read this post and will immediately assume it's all true without caring to hear the other side of the story. Somehow the author thought the best course of action would be to publicly call them out instead of just taking sensible technical measures to stop it. Talk about burning bridges. Tarnishing their image in the eyes of people who will never see the follow up, other side of the story, or retraction to this is very irresponsible.
> Screw taxing...make it illegal for any person or entity to own more than say, 2 houses. Maybe 3

Taxes are a simpler and more effective though. Ideal solution is a land tax on comparable sales price of the estate less some portion of replacement cost of non-obsolete fixed capital improvements.

If there is a lot large enough for 10 houses worth millions in the middle of the city next to publicly maintained infrastructure, investors might be able to avoid the cap by rendering the units uninhabitable, removing toilets, etc.

Land and property taxes do not have to be flat taxes. They are easy to make distributive by adding an X% deduction on the first $Y in tax payments per resident per billing period that they resided in the same jurisdiction that the parcel is located.

State governments can reform property tax system by appointing state commissioners to chair a state board of equalization attended by local assessors to reappraise property values at the state level. When this was done in the Progressive Era, states found large areas of land held by railroad corporations and barons which were not being taxed at all and put them on the tax rolls.

The federal government can also introduce a national property tax by amending and reintroducing the direct tax collected under James Madison. Any increase in direct land or property tax burden can be offset by distributive offsets for permanent residents or cuts to regressive taxes such as sales taxes and payroll taxes.
C'mon, give the guy a break - people get busy.
However, it's us who define this world. Fatalism is not an option. (Otherwise, we may enjoy the questionable comforts of tyranny.)
If it’s rectified upon the CEO finding out about it and he makes a true apology, and implements policy to prevent it from happening again, that’s better than just not saying anything and not doing anything to rectify the situation; however, most people here would agree that doing so doesn’t excuse the fact that he let it happen in the first place.
This is a rounding error amount of money in the US tech world. The real question is, does Retool’s usage fall within the terms of service?
Our Weekend Project saved lives and then it didn’t
Like it or not Western civilization is permeated with Christian mores. As practiced in the West, large chunks of law, philosophy, and science all have historical roots in Christian culture. You can choose whether or not to understand how the cultural, socio-economic and political environment affects you and your beliefs and the beliefs of those around you. You can "let" people be whatever they want, but you cannot occur in a vacuum and would presumably stand to gain from learning how much of what you may consider crazy and irrational was in-fact based in psychological and physiological reality that is just as relevant today as it ever was.
In my view, if your web server responds to an arbitrary HTTP GET with the asset and 200 error code, then your intention is that the asset is public and any browser can request it. If you don’t like a particular request, return 403 and get on with your life.
Anytime I see the phrase "work hard" I laugh. Hard work by itself does not get people anywhere. If it did, school teachers would be wealthy.

I really do feel it's all about 'living below your means', but there's a threshold where one cannot meet the basic means.
The email he ignored was a random sales pitch. Nowhere did the author mention his actual problem.
I think they should make that clearer in the blog post because it really wasn’t clear to me. So they’re paying for fakercloud and providing that data to their customers? It seems like this would then be a TOS issue as you mentioned.
I worked at Uber for a few years.

This was a terrible layer. Everyone hated it when I was there. People ended up building logic directly into the API gateway because it was so difficult to use.

I am so glad to never have to look at RTAPI again.
> You chose not to do the homework ...

Bull. Schools only have authority over you while you're on their grounds.

Once school time is over, they can want whatever they like. Just like anybody.

They have no authority to actually do anything about it though, nor should they. Homework is just them trying to waste people's time.
Hey, thanks for the response & thoughts - quite literally the most feedback I’ve ever had

It seems I need to make things more clear, but also, I just finally (yesterday) created the tags (build-a-block) categories, and haven’t yet started creating / organizing the blocks.

The idea is copyleft creation of literature / movies / plays, anything really.

I’ve been writing a short story series. While the short story is copyright, the characters themselves (which will be featured on blog) will be copyleft (CC BY-SA 4.0) which means you can create with/ reinvent them & sell them commercial

Say you want to be a writer & you want to do your own short story or make a film or reinvent a certain character from one of these short stories for a novel - you can legally do this & resell.

The overarching idea is Linux for storytelling / build your own distro

And demonstrated in a “microblog” format, where the “build-a-blocks” (reworkable writes) make for succinct posts that convey the basic elements.

Probably a best / good use case is in terms of “character-bank” - lotss (so far ~ 60+) of fiction story characters that can be reinvented / reimagined / evolved

Any thoughts on how I can maybe convey that in a more “accessible / succinct” manner?

In any case thanks again :)
Kudos to the author for the article tone. I just can't grok the mindset of retool - legal, perhaps but shady AF with nothing but reputation implosion.

What were they thinking?
When Marak sent me the email, I read it as a "Hi, I built Faker, might you be interested in acquiring it?". I responded with a "yes, that could be interesting, give me a day to work on this". In the end, we decided that acquiring Faker didn't make sense, and I'm sorry to Marak for not sending a follow-up email telling him we weren't interested. In this case, the content is different (i.e. we are potentially abusing OSS), which is why I’m responding to this.

(FWIW, I typically receive 50 - 100 sales emails every day. I do try and reply to the ones that look interesting, but I do forget to follow-up sometimes if we're not interested! This does not excuse my behavior in this particular case, and I’m sorry to Marak for not following up.)
Barbarian is simply someone who does not (some might say, they don't because they simply cannot) verbally articulate deep thoughts and views on a topic.

It does not mean such people do not posses intelligence for this, it's just a cultural difference they might choose to keep their thoughts to themselves or see no point in convincing others through discourse if the power is established through sword.
Just to clear this up here: I am not marak but I do find this behavior very frustrating and even if it’s technically legally it’s really scummy behavior and I want to air it out so we can get the truth

I happen to be in the market for this service and it cropped up when I was doing research and felt it prudent to share with the rest of the industry
This is an incredible piece of literature.
There are many types of socialism, but probably the most important aspect would be the central planning of the economy by bureaucrats or the state apparatus, and consequently the use of coercive force to make it happen.
The economy is also vague, you can take utter control of it, or heavily regulate it, or just some sectors of the economy, and so on.
If by democratic worker ownership of means of production you mean that workers can collectively own a company, that is totally possible in any capitalist society, so it is vague to define socialism.
This really doesn't sound convincing at all.
The government defines efficiency standards. I’d bet money some are coming for crypto soon.
https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...
Did they ever accept the fakercloud TOS?

If faker.js, an open source library, creates links to fakercloud.com - a for-profit offering, then someone who is merely using faker.js isn't falling afoul of the fakercloud.com TOS since they were never even presented with it in the first place.

https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/blob/c9764abd20a198e318367...
That goes without saying.

But I think some people do not really envision a person in the tech industry with a family living in, like, a tiny studio apartment.

Where I live, that would suggest a household income of <$40K. Even if salaries are low here, entry level is more like $75K.

Are we talking about the SF bay area?
Lol - the tether printer goes brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Anyone that thinks nothing is going on is shilling for crypto and a total fool
You are government. Interesting to consider that governments could even collude.
How are you going to satisfy data compliance, which may require the deletion of PII upon request or expiration, if your PII data is immutable?
For a counterpoint of equivalent value - I'm fairly convinced.
I am surprised at the outrage and the choice of adjectives in this thread.

Retool is using faker.js in their app, which is MIT. It also looks like the URLs to fakercloud.com CDN are hardcoded in the library [1] so I doubt this was intentional from the Retool dev.

They even have a shout out for faker.js in the “How we built this” box [2]

[1]: https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/blob/c9764abd20a198e318367...

[2]: https://retool.com/api-generator/
Unfortunately you can't control the behavior of others. Otherwise there wouldn't be many problems in the world!

Recognizing this fact and operating with that as an assumption is important.
I don’t get it, what’s wrong with it?
To me, that is the idealistic stance. If there’s a world in which an indie developer can muster up the legal guns to win an IP battle against a VC-funded behemoth, it ain’t this one.

Writing restrictions into the license makes sense in theory. Actually enforcing that license against an uncooperative company will take far more time, money and effort than most people are willing to spend.
Nov 8, 2020:

No more free work from Marak - Pay Me or Fork This
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032105
It's not fatalism. I don't want to live in a world where a guy says I can do something with his software, and then gets upset and tries to rally people against me when I do. I've had girlfriends like that.

If you don't want people to make money off your software, or use it a certain way, don't put it under a license that says it's fine to do so.
I am sure that they can change that if marek requests it. But he doesn’t instead he wants a two year consulting contract where he continues to work on his own project.
Thanks for the explanation (esp. since the blog post doesn't appear to even link back to the main web site).
I don't know much about Linux, but it seems to have good financial support from various corporations. If this thing is really being used by big companies, maybe they need to find out how Linux did it and borrow some lessons from that.
Retool operates within their own budget, not with the budget of the US tech world.

How many other OSS libraries are they using? If Retool should get 10x that amount, how much should they be paying out to every other library author that published an open source/free-as-in-freedom library?
Someone in Marak's recent thread said it:

> We need some sort of open source software developer's union

https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/issues/1046#issuecomment-7...

Maybe "union" isn't the right word, but I feel it could be a powerful force if a group created a github app for solidarity amongst maintainers, that hundreds of FOSS maintainers could authorize to submit license-related PRs against their projects. It could collectivize and streamline the effort of swapping or amending licenses, and seeking permission from contributors for such changes.

How impactful might it be if the "union" could exercise the threat of a banhammer of sorts, so that (at least in theory) in one fell swoop, it could initiate a license clause that targeted very specific conditions (e.g., "Fortune 500 companies no longer get free license"), or maybe even singling out very specific companies in particularly egregious situations.

I wonder if the threat of solidarity amongst FOSS maintainers and consequences would lead to companies starting to play it safe and simply start being better stewards

Even just the threat of the infrastructure for such a thing existing might have an effect, even if it's very rarely engaged.
I think the point is rather in the opposite direction. He's not trying to argue that APL and the GOL problem are somehow uniquely matched. The idea is that yeah, APL makes a pretty solution, but it wouldn't be nearly as impressive if the parameters were changed. The point is that the APL solution people like to toss out is not flexible. Probably true of the 32b ASM demo too.
It’s debatable whether generating links that point to your cdn is you using a service. It’s definitely not desirable, but also they’re just links.

This is probably retool using faker assets for testing and forgetting this in production.
The U.S. legislature hasn’t touched computer laws in forever, so an armchair guess is hard, but chances are that causing an extreme financial burden by hotlinking someone else’s images is illegal - although maybe the fact that fakercloud could just block hotlinking based on the referrer header means it’s not as open-and-shut of a case.
They have very nice features that provider's load balancing might not offer you.

First to me is the ability to retain the IP address. When using AWS Load Balancer, the LB scale automatically and replace the IP.

Second is sophisiciated routing. Example route by cookie. What it buy is that by setting a cookie you can make sure the request hit a specific pool. You can also have concept of backup

Third is lots of useful metrics with their stats page.

Fourth is the ability to alter the responses such as removing header. You have to pair with lambda edge for these on AWS. What it helps is imagine you can write back the user_id to HAProxy, HAProxy log it together with the request, and delete it(so client won't see it). It helps to easily tail the log for a specific user.

And a lot of rate limiting built-in features that just take a few lines of config.
Uh, but he followed up with you a week later and you again decided not to reply.
So he made a useful service, put it behind an extremely permissive license, another company tried it, copied what they wanted to copy, and then utilized the permissive license to use his service for the rest. Then, "Retool is offering this new service for free".

So let's review the title:

> Retool is reselling our API...

According to TFA, they are not selling it.

> ...without permission

Except that your MIT license is permission.

I noticed the CEO has shown up here to say he's looking into it. I genuinely feel bad for him. Imagine that conversation.

"Guys I hear we are using this open source project and people say we shouldn't"

"....yeah? It's open source. It has an MIT license. What's the issue?"

"Apparently that person didn't REALLY mean for it to be open source, and now a bunch of people on an internet forum are upset."

"Do any of them pay us?"

"A couple I think? Two said they might stop paying us."

"....I'm confused boss, what did we do wrong?"

---

Now imagine that conversation having to happen and this worry happening every time someone decided they want to use a FOSS library or API for their work.

Can't imagine why OSS is having trouble.
After leading a team for about a year and a half, I see why managers get paid more. Simply, it's less fun, especially for someone who likes to solve hard technical problems.

I think I'm okay at leading a team but moving me to a staff engineer position would be better for me and the company and I think my leader knows this. The experience has been enlightening and I have a lot more respect for non-technical managers now.
For me the perfect license would be something that allows using the code freely in any project or company that makes no money or is smaller than X people.
If you are using my code and you have a lot of cash from investments or revenue - it would only be fair if you pay for the license.