I'm happy to see they're investing in Actions — charging for it should help make sure it continues to work. It's a huge reason Github is so valuable: having the status checks run on every PR, automatically, is great. Even though I'm more of a fan of Buildkite when it comes to configuring the workflows, I still need something to kick them off when PRs change, etc.
Charging a per-workflow-minute platform fee makes a lot of sense and the price is negligible. They're ingesting logs from all the runners, making them available to us, etc. Helps incentivize faster workflows, too, so pretty customer-aligned. We use self-hosted runners (actually WarpBuild) so we don't benefit from the reduced default price of the Github-hosted runners, but that's a nice improvement as well for most customers. And Actions are still free for public repos.
Now if only they'd let us say "this action is required to pass _if it runs_, otherwise it's not required" as part of branch protection rules. Then we'd really be in heaven!
This pricing model will continue to incentivize them internally to not fix the hundreds of clearly documented issues that causes CI to be incredibly slow. Everything from their self-inflicted bottlenecking of file transfers to the safe_sleep bug that randomly makes a runner run forever until it times out. All of it now makes them more money
> charging for it should help make sure it continues to work
It's there a particular reason you're extending the benefit of the doubt here? This seems like the classic playbook of making something free, waiting for people to depend on it, then charging for it, all in order to maximize revenue. Where does the idea that they're really doing this in order to deliver a more valuable service come from?
Yeah. This is a reaction to providers like blacksmith or self-hosted solutions like the k8s operator being better at operating their very bad runner then them, at cheaper prices, with better performance, more storage and warm caches. The price cut is good, the anticompetitive bit where they charge you to use computers they don't provide isn't. My guess is that either we're all gonna move to act or that one of the SaaS startups sue.
I appreciate being able to pay for a service I rely on. Using self-hosted runners, I previously paid nothing for Github Actions — now I do pay something for it. The price is extremely cheap and seems reasonable considering the benefits I receive. They've shown continued interest in investing in the product, and have a variety of things on their public roadmap that I'm looking forward to (including parallel steps) — https://github.com/orgs/github/projects/4247?pane=issue&item....
Charging "more than nothing" is certainly not what I would call maximizing revenue, and even it they were maximizing revenue I would still make the same decision to purchase or abandon based on its value to me. Have you interacted with the economy before?
I don't think it makes sense to charge per minute just for logs. If they want to charge for log retention, sure, go ahead. But that is pennies, let's be real.
At CloudX (https://cloudx.io) we’re building a new supply-side advertising platform for mobile publishers. Yes, it's ads, and yes, there's AI involved, so stop reading here if that's not interesting to you.
It's a gnarly infra problem with huge scale, combined with an interesting product space that we think legitimately benefits from tasteful AI automation. We're doing cool things with Nitro Enclaves to prove that our auctions are fair. And our founding team have done this before with great success, first at MoPub (sold to Twitter) and MAX (sold to AppLovin).
Our philosophy is to keep the team small, well-paid, and productive. We deploy every day and our monorepo CI suite takes about a minute to pass.
The best way to apply is directly through those jobs pages but if you have other questions you're welcome to email me at peter@cloudx.io. I always post here on HN because it's where I got my career started back in highschool; I will personally make sure you get a response if you apply.
Agreed. Recently started a new gig and set up Mise (previously had used nix for this) in our primary repos so that we can all share dependencies, scripts, etc. The new monorepo mode is great. Basically no one has complained and it's made everyone's lives a lot easier. Can't imagine working any other way — having the same tools everywhere is really great.
I'll also say I have absolutely 0 regrets about moving from Nix to Mise. All the common tools we want are available, it's especially easy to install tools from pip or npm and have the environments automanaged. The docs are infinity times better. And the speed of install and shell sourcing is, you guessed it, much better. Initial setup and install is also fantastically easier. I understand the ideology behind Nix, and if I were working on projects where some of our tools weren't pre-packageable or had weird conflicting runtime lib problems I'd get it, but basically everything these days has prebuilt static binaries available.
Mise is pretty nice, I'd recommend it over all the other gazillion version-manager things out there, but it's not without its own weak spots: I tried mise for a php project, neither of the backends available for php had a binary for macos, and both of them failed to build it. I now use a flake.nix, along with direnv and `use flake`. The nix language definitely makes for some baffling boilerplate around the dependencies list, but devs unfamiliar with nix can ignore it and just paste in the package name from nixpkgs search.
There's also jbadeau/mise-nix that lets you use flakes in mise, but I figured at that point I may as well just use flake.nix.
The beauty of mise is that as long as someone is hosting a precompiled binary for you, it's easy to get it. I just repro'd and yeah, `mise use php` fails for me on my machine because I don't have any dev headers. But looks like there's an easy workaround using the `ubi` downloader:
Having these kind of "eject" options is one of the reasons I really appreciate Mise. Not sure this would work for you but I'd rather be able to do this than have to manage/support everyone on my dev team installing and maintaining Nix.
Nix is just one installer (I steer devs toward Determinate's installer) so technically not super-different from needing Docker. Lots of files in /nix but actually less disk use since the store has much more fine-grained de-duping than container images. Nix is still a big bite though, and for most projects I wouldn't make nix a requirement, but the project in question is itself a build system with reproducibility requirements in its design, so I'm not losing too much sleep over this one. The final artifacts don't depend on Nix anyway.
I just ordered two cans of the cougar gold, one of the viking, and one of the mild cheddar. If it's not good I will blame you.
The archaic checkout system and the fact that this is a Washington State school agricultural product make me think that this will be the best cheese I've ever eaten in my life. Quite fond of their apples!
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I believe you. But one of the reasons we have this guideline is that, most of the time, the author/publisher is not in the thread, and was not the submitter to HN, which seems to be the case here. So it amounts to "shouting into the void", as your comment will not reach the person who can respond or take action.
I get that you don't see it as "complaining" or "shouting", but it's still an off-topic tangential remark, and we want discussion to focus on the substance of the article.
It's different if the author is active in the thread; then it's fair enough to ask them about this kind of stuff, because they are able to respond and take action.
Otherwise you'd be better to contact them directly via email, Tweet, etc.
Yeah, I disabled brave shields and reloaded, and... Wow. Even sketchy pirate sites don't have these many ads. On a personal blog too! Not gonna read the article on principle.
Google changes the amount and placement of the ads depending what "ad market" you are from so US and other similar countries might experience more ad placements than lower ad market countries.
I tried spinning it down to basically minimal ads in adsense settings and it's still quite a lot.
I strongly encourage the use of adblockers or pi-hole even on my site and see no problem with using them on my site.
The income from adsense just about covers the hosting bills in a year so far, I'm currently exploring alternative methods of monetization that would provide more value to the readers.
Do you really wish to go into stuff that has very little to do with the article itself?
I'll gladly provide an answer but I don't think it's constructive.
I host the site on vercel with astro, I'm on the pro plan which usually costs me somewhere around 20€ per month +/- 5-10€ depending on my monthly traffic.
add to that the minuscule cost of my domain and other stuff I'm paying about 250-300€ per year
My adsense avg per day is just about 1.20€ roughly.
So at best I break even, at worst I lose a bit of money.
I still maintain my position that everyone is welcome and should use adblock or brave or pi-hole on my site if they so wish I won't mind.
But I do like the fact that I don't have to foot the bill :)
Basically if I had to lose money to write I'd probs stop writing if I'm honest.
I've made a PDF of one of my bike club cue sheets from 2014 and put it at https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cks/tbn/tbn-gatineau-gallop-2014... ; the GPS route that is more or less equivalent to it is https://ridewithgps.com/routes/28370340 (there may be minor differences because the route is more modern than the cue sheet, but it will give you orientation). The cue sheet is written for a group ride (where the group will stay together) and for people familiar with Toronto, so it might be challenging to follow solo unless you were already somewhat familiar with the ride (as the ride leader is expected to be).
The cue sheet is structured the way it is because it's expected it will be folded in half horizontally to fit in a map/cue sheet holder, and perhaps vertically as well (if people have a small holder; you fold vertically first, initially hiding the entire right column since you only need it after lunch, then horizontally). Cue sheet holders typically let you flip them up to see the back, so the exact division of a horizontal fold doesn't have to be perfect. Each numbered section covers a (relatively) distinct section of the ride to make it easier to keep track of where you are in the cue sheet overall.
Cue sheets for different circumstances need different sorts of structure. For example, for some cue sheets it would be quite important to include the distance (cumulative and/or from the previous cue). In others, such as this one, individually numbered cues and distances to them are mostly distractions.
(I'm the author of the linked-to blog entry, and as you can tell I have Opinions on cue sheet design.)
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