>In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. The platform fee largely answers that: GitHub now monetizes Actions usage regardless of where jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds.
It does? I feel like it implies that they want third-party runners like Blacksmith out of the ecosystem, which is why they're now financially penalizing customers who use them.
1. Services like blacksmith and WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax.
2. The biggest lever for controlling costs now is reducing the number of minutes used in CI. Given how slow Github's runners are, or even the ones on AWS compared to our baremetal processor single core performance + nvme disks, it makes even more sense to use WarpBuild. This actually makes a better case for moving from slow AWS instances running with actions-runner-controller etc. to WarpBuild!
3. Messaging this to most users is harder since the first reaction is that Github options make more sense. After some rational thought, it is the opposite.
Overall - it is worse for Github users, but options like blacksmith and WarpBuild are still the better option.
The statement regarding the better option is as it stands today and does not account for all possible futures.
Reg. hiking it again, they'd have to either be extremely anti-competitive and selectively apply the pricing OR apply the hike uniformly by about double the current value to match our pricing while making it completely unviable for any large co to use self-hosted github actions in the first place.
I checked the WarpBuild website and got excited because the header in the menu says you have macOS Intel runners, but then you click through and it doesn't seem to be so?
Right now at my company our biggest complaint are macOS Intel runners from GitHub which somehow take 15+ minutes to provision and are the slowest of the bunch.
I can assure you WarpBuild has Mac runners that work very well. When I first switched GH only offered 1 Mac runner and it was horribly slow. Literally cut my build times in half by changing 1 line in my workflow file to use the WB runner.
Nowadays GH has more sizes by WB continues to beat them in price and performance.
It’s highway robbery what GH charges for the crap they provide. I can highly recommend WarpBuild for Mac (and Linux) runners.
That's clearly the case, this is a three-pronged manoeuver :
- Introducing a cheap 1-core runner
- Lowering the price of GitHub-hosted runners
- Making it slightly more expensive to use self-hosted runners
- There is actually a fourth one: the vnet integration, which also allows you to run public runners in your own infra
As a bonus, for some people it means something that was free is now not free. Those who are willing to pay rather than go, might prefer to use GitHub-hosted if they are going to pay anyway.
This is clearly an incentive to use github-hosted, and their sales reps are also going this way.
From what I've read, success depends a lot on line of sight. If you're on flat, open land, you'll likely see much better range than I did.
There's a neat tool in the MeshCore app (available in the web version[0], too) that shows line of sight between two points on a map. You can click the three dots in the upper right > Tools > Line of Sight. It will show you how good line of sight is between those two points, accounting for changes in elevation.
It's also possible a good repeater would make more of a difference. I'm hoping to hear feedback from other MeshCore users about that.
Sadly not flat and not open. But more far flung repeaters are an option as I have electricity further from the house.
However the TDeck being hard to use makes it unlikely the kid would carry it. And bad UX in general makes it hard on my wife. It was mainly the bad UX and lack of open source (no hacking for me) aspects that put a damper on things for me.
bergie shared this in the general Meshtastic thread[0] the other day, but I thought it deserved its own thread. It's the best real-world report I've seen of someone using LoRa (long range radio) for off-grid communications.
matt-bornstein's commits in that repo do often start off with ai-generated descriptions which he then edits down. there are notes on some commits that say things like "AI GENERATED NEED TO EDIT". the other contributors' changes don't have these tells.
while it should come as no surprise to have software written by llms, if these books are in fact just picked by llms then what's the point of this list?
I’d be curious what the point is even if it were written by humans with some evidence of non-zero effort, but posting something with no point and no effort is really puzzling.
That's almost more damning. The list was created by humans, who presumably read the books, but then couldn't be bothered to summarize the very books they read? Either the human is really lazy ("read" the book but can't be bothered to write a short summary) or really really lazy (didn't read the book but felt a summary was necessary). Either way, it makes this list less interesting, at the very least because it doesn't need to exist at all if someone can just ask an LLM "list and describe books that A16Z might think are valuable to read" and get the same quality output.
The only way I can understand that as an explanation is if your entire company can see each other's chats, and so she clicked yours and read the response you got. Is that what you're saying?
How else would she have been able to parrot the exact same GPT response without reading it directly? You think she just thought of it word for word exactly the same off the top of her head?
They're saying that the shared account is enough for OpenAI to provide the same result. Very interesting, I'd like to know more like was it a generic IUD or a specific one in the query. Also, the Doc is a cardiologist, they don't specialize in Gyno stuff and their training/schooling is enough for them to evaluate sources.
Just for reference before AI it was typical for employers of doctors to pay for a service/app called UpToDate which provided vetted info for docs like google.
There were several specific brands cited in the response and she read through them one by one in the same order with the supporting details, word for word. I think it just gave us the same response and she read it off the page.
I appreciate Brian's posts and they've helped me learn to build my own NAS systems, but there's a scammy angle to his articles.
All of the merchant links are affiliate links, which he (illegally) does not disclose.[0] He's effectively acting as a sales rep for these brands, but he's presenting himself as an unbiased consumer.
The affiliate relationship incentivizes Brian to recommend more expensive equipment and push readers to the vendors that pay Brian the most rather than the vendors that are the best for consumers.
I recognize that it's an unfortunate truth that affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money writing non-AI content about computer hardware. I'm fine with affiliate links, but the author should disclose the conflict of interest at the top of the post before getting into the recommendations.
In the interest of full disclosure, I also write about NAS builds on my blog, so I somewhat compete with Brian's posts, but I stopped using affiliate links five years ago because of the conflict of interest.
If you're not familiar with how affiliate relationships create dangerous incentives, I recommend reading the article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] tl;dr - All the top mattress-in-a-box reviewers were just giving favorable reviews to the company that paid the best affiliate rates, even going so far as to retroactively update old reviews if the payout rates changed.
Just skimming over the article, I feel like the blue link coloured word "Topton" has been seared into my retinas.
That aside, as someone who has been building computers for nearly 3 decades, and NAS's for a decade plus, I dislike almost everything about this build.
Spending a lot on the PSU is a good move, but the motherboard is a bad choice for the price when a much more capable socketed board + CPU could be had for around the same price, and the use of no-name SSD and NVMe is an absolute no-no for me.
The impression I got from so many linked mentions of Topton this and Topton that, is that this was mostly done to push that particular brand for a sponsorship or affiliate program.
Youtube has already long gone the way of being untrustworthy for advice on this sort of thing due to sponsorships and affiliates etc, perhaps I should blog my advice and experience that no body pays to influence, in a more generic sense for those who actually need guidance on where to focus when building hardware like PCs and NASs.
I'm not going to suggest that hardware I chose for my "NAS" as it would be universlly bad advice for most people, but there is some generic knowledge to be shared here.
Sometimes it feels just like telling my kids to "learn from my mistakes", does anyone actually want to hear it?
"The Guides are intended to give insight into what the FTC thinks about various marketing activities involving endorsements and how Section 5 might apply to those activities. The Guides themselves don’t have the force of law."
Though I think the sentence immediately after the one you quoted is also relevant:
> However, practices inconsistent with the Guides may result in law enforcement actions alleging Section 5 violations.
My understanding is that there's no law that says, "You have to disclose if you're an affiliate earning commissions on a recommendation," but the FTC is saying that they interpret Section 5 of the FTC act to imply that, and they may prosecute people under that interpretation, which they have done.[0, 1]
Yeah, I was hoping for more detail as well. I'm guessing they did something similar to what I did to make my Pi control computers.[0]
The Raspberry Pi 4 can emulate a USB keyboard and mouse, and there are inexpensive adapters that allow it to capture display output. You can also hook it up to a relay to cycle power for an external device.
> maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected.
> people run kaneo on setups i never imagined:
> behind corporate proxies
> ...
> in kubernetes with custom networking
It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in large enterprises.
It's FOSS, so they can use it for free if they want, but if they need custom support or features, they're a great user to tell, "Sure, I'm happy to help you with that if you purchase a $500/yr support contract." You'd be surprised how many customers like that don't care because they have a corporate card and that amount is too little to require approvals or much process.
This is not as simple as it sounds. Just yesterday I had a call with the Delft university of technology in Netherland, they want me to add some features on the free version of my FOSS product [1] but they did not want to pay anything. Over the last month, I was in contact with a 800B publicly traded company for a 1.8k per year invoice, once we agreed on the general direction they kept adding expectations, first was to sign tons of paperwork with their security checklist, legal stuff which took a few days but when they start asking for things that would take potentially weeks more, I invite them to do extras on a contracting basis, since them I have never heard back and of course they never paid a dime. I have literally tons of stories like this from governments to F500. In my bubble the paid support plan mostly work with US entities.
Universities are a special case. They generally don’t spend money because of the red tape.
In much of corporate America expenses under $100 give or take don’t even require documentation, so a $50/month support subscription is easily purchased.
Just need to find the person with the purchase card.
In my experience, having MIT and UCI as customers, US universities are much easier to deal with small to no process for simple cheap things. On the other hand, I was contacted by a well known engineering school in France (ENSEEIHT), they wanted support but were laughing at the idea to spend 20$ per month for the privilege, left the impression they wanted to use my time for way under minimum wage, same yesterday with a deutch school who wanted help but not willing to spend a dime, and some other universities who have deployed my software in prod but did not upgrade in the last 5 years. Even in China, I stumbled upon a fork maintained by the university of Shangai, of course they never reached out in the first place to ask for any kind of support, just took the code and went their own way. This kind of behavior haven't happen with US universities which are more likely to reach out and pay for support
> I stumbled upon a fork maintained by the university of Shangai, of course they never reached out in the first place to ask for any kind of support, just took the code and went their own way.
It is very hard to find a person with that purchase card.
As a developer in corporate environment I won't get anywhere close to be able to influence anyone to buy a support, or a subscription for an open source or closed source product. This is my third corp, and it was true in all of them.
The most what I got is the approval to do some PRs for such projects during company time.
It's actually pretty simple. For the former case, you do nothing. Tell the university to find someone to make the improvement, or do it for fun. In the latter case, you should be charging 5-10x that, for starters... You send a Statement of Work, and only do what's in that, and only after they pay.
You're too cheap. Anyone that won't pay for a proper enterprise support contract you should tell to pound sand. You'll be surprised that when you start charging more people will actually take you more seriously and will be more inclined to sign up. It's counter intuitive from your side, but perception is reality. A 20k/yr enterprise support agreement is more believable to provide results than a 2k/yr deal.
Quite. I remember one of my first corporate customers who was very suspicious of $2K/week, because nobody could do that for that cheap they said. It was nothing extraordinary, just some integration work, tests etc for the project, they wanted it to work with their other suppliers' systems
I agree, it's not as simple as "$500 per year". In some cases it can be, but mostly it's not.
Firstly, you need to clearly define what is included, and even more so, what is not included. How many hours is $500? Who decides what us should bug? Can they get new features because they have support? How many installs does the support cover? And do on.
And if they start with things like "supplier agreements" etc, just walk away.
Yes, some companies have a threshold where managers can just "spend money". Some managers may even use that to support you. But taking any money changes the relationship you have with the user.
Right now, it's completely inside your control. Direction, Priorities, Scope, Pace, levels of effort etc. I'm a huge fan of getting paid, I write software for money, but make no mistake - taking money changes things.
But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year.
Also, look at Gitea. People got paranoid and forked the project after the original author did exactly that.
> But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year.
I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them.
Depending on the local laws, that's easier said than done. E.g. in Germany, a private entity (read: person) can't just bill a company. And you can't just write something that resembles an invoice either. Especially, you're not allowed to make it look like a business invoice by putting net sums on it.
A German business on the other side of the transaction rarely will pay anything if there's not a proper invoice (listing net sums and VAT separately) on file. And they usually also require the (business) tax ID of the other party.
To be fair, founding a business is a matter of filling in some form, paying a small fee, and a few days of time (depending on the workload of your local trade office). But still - if this is a one-off thing and you don't even know whether there will be more... I'm not sure I'd want to go through the hassle. Especially if it means having to hire an accountant with monthly costs, when I don't even know whether there will be more income.
In case it wasn't clear from my other comments up and down this comment chain, I don't really care about the specifics of Germany. If it's hard for you[1] to do it in Germany, then suck it up and figure it out.
More than enough has been written about how the ecosystem in various EU countries stifles entrepreneurship. It's not new information, but it's not a problem for the vast majority of people reading this site. This site is also focused on supporting entrepreneurship, we should be supporting the default approach of getting paid for your work.
Germany needs to change, not the stance of this site or the argument of charging for your work/time/etc.
Germany doesn't need to change, just Germans need to change talking lot of bullshit.
I registered a private SW development entity in Germany easily, without any costs. You just need to declare it as System SW, not Applications, or you'll have to pay Gewerbesteuer and Kammermitgliedschaft. Which is a lot and not needed at all. Your yearly taxes are trivial, no need for an accountant.
Especially a site that frequently champions, shall we say... more creative forms of running a company in its early stages (like how Spotify started out charging money for pirated music). If it's okay for OpenAI to launder copyright, it's okay for you to send a net-30 PDF to a Fortune 500 company.
Alternatively, people could just stop complaining about it.
Well the laws are like spider webs that only catch small bugs. It's "okay" for a Spotify or OpenAI because they can hire lawyers and expect to blitzscale. Harder to take those risks for a random solo developer who just wants to make things.
At least where I live you can hire an accountant from an accounting company for $n/hr so you can ask them
>"hey, can I do this?"
<"no, you'll need fields from forms X,Y and the price needs to be at least Z with them"
Same goes with a law-person. Then if you're lazy you'll just look at how much they cost you in some timeframe and add that to the price, and find that you've lowballed so hard you'll get laughed out of the bidding
You aren't wrong on either; Germany's tax law is insanely complex but also many people don't want to change the tax law as they can deduct a million and one things.
Since Hacker News also centers on entrepreneurship: I know quite some entrepreneurs in Germany who think this way about the bureacratic chicanery that companies have to handle, and already thought about whether hiring a hitman for these politicians would be a good idea. The hate for the political caste in Germany among many people is insane.
These laws may very well be terrible, but no need to mention on an internet forum you want to help (hire?) someone to mass murder people involved in making them. Jokes and sarcasm don't always land as intended.
As to a more constructive path: bureaucracy all over EU is definitely considered a big problem (for startups, and for many others) and there are a bunch of movements aimed at addressing them at all kinds of levels. For example look at the eu acc movement.
One should hire an accountant to handle the bureaucracy, and of course charge enough to make that viable. And you should stop airing your murderous dreams in public, that's disturbed no matter your feelings towards politicians.
Startup founders dislike any regulation that doesn't let do heinous stuff to earn some money, so I'm not really sympathetic with their plight honestly.
You should definitely charge enough to hire an accountant to handle the bureaucracy. This might be multiples of the payment for the technical bits but probably still cheaper than a hitman/woman.
Come on, stop with this slave mentality please. You can make invoices without funding any company and without the tax office getting in your hair. It's not illegal to charge for your services and never has been. You can declare that income just fine, or skip it. The tax office won't bother you.
This is entirely jurisdiction specific, so I can't say for certain, but in almost every country I've looked into it for, there is a set of paperwork that an individual can use to independently invoice for work, without the effort of setting up an incorporated company. You will definitely need to record the income you received, and declare it on the relevant tax forms.
There is often a scale variance too - in Australia, "hobby" income is treated differently from "business" income. [0]
In Germany, there is the concept of the "Freien Berufen" ("liberal professions"), in which you can freelance without a company. [1]
> ... the client also will demand...
The client may also demand these things of you.
They are certainly capable of dealing with sole traders, and will have some services provided by people who do not have those things. (Your boss does not check if the receipt you submit for the new bookshelf for the office comes from a registered company or a sole trader carpenter.)
Depending on the scale of the services you are providing, they may prefer to deal with a registered entity, but for small one-off things, that may not be necessary.
If you are regularly working with large businesses who are funding your work, it's worth looking into the most effective tax and legal structures for you. But if you just need to send the occasional invoice off to someone who wants something quick done, it's useful to know what your options are.
One final thought - even when dealing with organisations who prefer to deal with registered businesses, you have options. You can choose to be employed by a company which does that on your behalf. Either a business which you have a good relationship with, and is willing to enter into a casual employment contract with you and bill for your services, or a dedicated contractor management company. Either way, you give up a percentage of what you bill, but in exchange, they take the paperwork and liability overhead.
> There is often a scale variance too - in Australia, "hobby" income is treated differently from "business" income. [0]
I have an ABN and I am registered for GST for side hustles beyond the hobbyist income threshold. This costs me about 10 minutes of extra admin per year when I do my tax return.
All I need to do is give the tax office three figures: How much money I earned, how much GST I charged, and how much I paid (ie how much they need to give back to me.)
You don't seem to understand the power balance here. The client is in no position to demand anything, since the article author can just tell them to scram, and they can solve their own problems.
Working with corps is not a problem. Unless you have a slave mentality that is, and let them bully you and stomp all over you. If they have their wits with them, they will fully understand what negotiating position they are in, and not make unnecessary demands on the software creator.
I have a company in Estonia for cases like this. The amount of paperwork is nearly zero, the corps are happy they’re working with an actual company, and you can do things like holding money there (for business purchases) and paying no taxes in your home country (unless they have a CFC rule, notably US and Japan, in which case eh good luck).
It depends. Sibling thread has some horror stories about Germany, for example.
Estonia has been trying to get foreigners to open their businesses there for a while now: https://e-estonia.com/ But I don’t think that helps US residents too much (ask your tax advisor about CFC rules; I have only a vague understanding that it’s a PITA).
It also mostly doesn't help EU residents. If you live in another EU country, your tax office will treat your Estonian company as a local one since that's where the business takes place in truth.
Not sure about elsewhere but ot took me 15 minutes to setup my LTD in the UK and I paid a monthly fee for accountancy which was about £100 and another yearly fee of about £100 for them to do my tax return (as I am lazy and didn't want to do it).
Unless you are getting paid in cash or monero, HMRC will absolutely know if you are getting paid under the table.
The IRS will definitely bother you if they figure out you have unreported income. Will they find out? Maybe not if it’s a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars. More than $10K? Then it gets more likely. If a client sends you a 1099 then they’ll certainly know.
They’ll know because in the US and abroad the banks send the balances and transactions to the IRS. I get letters every year/6 months that I’m subject to additional withholding because they haven’t gotten any $$ but they show I have.
Reporting income from freelancing is no more difficult than reporting income from your day job. So we're left still mystified what mbirth was talking about.
If a company is unwilling to jump through its self-imposed barriers to paying for things it wants, then it obviously doesn't value those features/items. This is definitely a case of 'voting with [one's] dollars'.
Do you think GP is like, lying to you? Or maybe managers are just silly and are indeed willing to draw $500 for a pizza party but are unwilling to drop the same for a year of support for software they depend on. This is absolutely believable to me.
I mean you might have to negotiate a bit but yeah, a simple professional statement like “My rate for custom enhancements is $X/hr” is not going to ruffle any feathers. They might not bat an eye.
The thing is if you agree, now you have to deliver. Be sure it’s something you want to do. If the project is open source because you don’t want to be a business, then be careful about letting a little quick cash change your mind.
I wouldnt worry about the license, unless you licenses yourself into a corner. MIT is great for this.
Secondly, yes. The biggest challenge I have seen is getting on "VENDOR LISTS". Vendor approval is a huge PITA. master agreements, proof of insurance, etc.
You don't have to deliver a result or continued service. You are paid per hour not per feature. If you can only offer an hour support you can only charge one hour. If you have too many clients you can decline new work until you have time. Per hour work is limited for total pay but clients expectations are limited by time.
It does? I feel like it implies that they want third-party runners like Blacksmith out of the ecosystem, which is why they're now financially penalizing customers who use them.
reply