It existed for Laptops 20 years ago (or a little less). You got sent stickers to put on your Laptop and had to send weekly pictures with you Laptop and people in it, then you got paid.
"The 501(c)(6) differs from the more familiar 501(c)(3) designation in that we are not a charity. The 501(c)(3) is explicitly designed for charitable organizations, and confers the additional benefit of donations being tax-deductible. Over time, though, the definition of a 501(c)(3) has become extremely distorted, especially in the software space, since companies were able to convince the IRS that making open-source software is a charitable/scientific activity. The result is that large companies were able to fund their own development by creating a “charity”, open-sourcing some of their core technology, and then building their extremely lucrative closed-source software on top. That way they get to deduct the core tech expenses from their taxes! What a deal!"
I get that, but I don't understand why it supports a 501(6) in this case[1].
Just because others have abused it doesn’t mean you should give up on it. Even if it's only about sending the right signal, that still matters.
Or is this about brutal honesty and they are saying bluntly: We're not a charity, so don't expect us to act like one in the first place.
If it is that, then why would anyone support them apart from their sponsoring organizations?
EDIT: Reading the whole thing carefully, I think they are going for an exclusive club.
I genuinely wish them well, but to me it looks like a quite quixotic endeavour.
[1] There are many cases where a 501(6) makes sense. I'm strictly arguing the "Handmade Software Foundation" case here. Otherwise it gets complicated quickly.
The point is that as a 501(c)(6) we are directly allowed to act in the interests of the software industry, without having to invent a tortured explanation for why benefiting a very lucrative industry is Charity, Actually.
The hope is that people will sponsor us because we directly boost the creation and publishing of high-quality software, and give some measure of benefits to our paying members, which is typical 501(c)(6) stuff.
My impression is that recently ChatGPT tries to avoid
going out to research on the Internet as long as it can. I have to tell it to pull info from the web or verify its answers on the web explicitly.
My non-existent marketing instinct would tell me that they are trying to keep you inside the app to convince you that ChatGPT is the internet, the same way some people wouldn't know there's life outside Facebook.
My grumpy instinct tells me they know that they're poisoning the internet and they have given out on trying to weed out the fake websites from the real ones.
I agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example.
Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out.
I guess not unlike many of us here on HN.
Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks.
Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.
Sure, self awareness is important. When you tell your kids not to walk your way, you take accountability. You say that what you did was bad, and you are accountable for it. You also acknowledge that what you did brought you to where you are, but given the chance you would take a different way. It’s not bad to have moral principles after you’ve done what you fight against, as long as you do it with accountability and self awareness.
“Opt out of capitalism” doesn’t work when you’re trying to feed your family. He offers no alternative, speaks from a place of safety with no acknowledgment that the people he’s addressing don’t have the same safety net as he does.[0]
He’s not wrong. We are all fucked. But if it were as simple as “not participating” (whatever that means), then we wouldn’t be.
[0]: to be fair he does address others at tech companies, maybe he assumes that everyone working in big tech has a safety net, which is perhaps not as unreasonable as I first thought.
That is a way to get your changed approved quickly, so it is good for you. It is terrible for a project that values quality.
A tremendous value of a QA team is that they interpret the requirements independently and if in the end they approve you can be pretty confident you implemented something that conforms to the commonly understood meaning of requirements and not your developer biased view.
Challenge. I use it as a way to double check, "Did the way I understood the ticket/requirement match the way that QA did?". They're testing what the ticket says is required. But part of that is testing that I understood the ticket correctly.
The article argues that Dev-Owned testing isn't wrong but all the arguments it presents support that it is.
I always understood shift-left as doing more tests earlier. That is pretty uncontroversial and where the article is still on the right track. It derails at the moment it equates shift-left with dev-owned testing - a common mistake.
You can have quality owned by QA specialists in every development cycle and it is something that consistently works.
You do everything the same as today. Then you turn it over to QA who keep finding weird things that you never thought of. QA finds more than half your written bugs (of course I don't write a bug everytime a unit test fails when doing TDD, but sometimes I find a bug in code I wrote a few weeks ago and I write that up so I can focus on the story I'm doing today and not forget about the bug)
QA should not be replacing anything a developer does, it should be a supplement because you can't think of everything.
We also use QA because we are making multi-million dollar embedded machines. One QA can put the code of 10 different developers on the machine and verify it works as well in the real world as it does in software simulation.
They find all the things the devs and their automated tests missed, then they mentor the devs in how to test for these and they work out how the bug could have been found earlier. Rinse and repeat until the tester is struggling to find issues and has coached the devs out of his job
Why is it that we have agents that can prospect for sales leads and answer support tickets accurately, but we don’t seem to be able to consistently generate high quality slides?
I don't know about prospecting, but "answer support tickets accurately"? Seriously, this must be ironic, right?
It's great to hear you've already tried X twice. But have you tried reading our FAQ section on X? Also, try using this setting that doesn't exist or this dialog that was removed in 2022
The consistency guarantees are what makes this interesting in my opinion.
> *
Close-to-open consistency. Once a file is written and closed, it is guaranteed to view the written data in the following opens and reads from any client. Within the same mount point, all the written data can be read immediately.*
> Rename and all other metadata operations are atomic, which are guaranteed by supported metadata engine transaction.
This is a lot more than other "POSIX compatible" overlays claim, and I think similar to what NFSv4 promises. There are lots of subtitles there, though, and I doubt you could safely run a database on it.
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