openthc

Any pointers on how to turn an existing company into a worker co-op or employee owned company?

Seems apt: The Hacker's Choice

I (we, my company) have offered to become maintainers. This is something we are passionate about.

Use this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36955806

For many years (since 2014) the API for Metrc (the cannabis reporting engine in Colorado and other states) would NEVER return any useful data at all, simply an empty JSON array. So after each operation, one would have to query the search endpoint for plants or inventory to discover the new items -- and hope you could positively identify which one was the new one you were looking for.

That and not supporting B2B transactions via their API. They would alternately claim it's for security or that the States were not asking for it. States would tell other software vendors that Metrc coludn't do it. Neither party could move the ball.

Only now, in 2023, have they started responding with the ID of the newly created items (why not a fully inflated record of what was just created) and working to support B2B.

These state run APIs, from a for-profit corporation, are not good for the public (they hide, or cannot handle important laboratory testing data) and they are not good for the licensees, especially the small businesses. And there is no accountability -- agency points to vendor & vendor points to agency.

Sadly, getting these State agencies to understand the beauty of distributed/federated systems -- and the difficutly for small businesses to respond to RFPs -- keep us from having nice things.

End of rant.

Do you support cannabis business? Or rather, those of us who provide services too cannabis businesses? Some folk (eg: Stripe, Twilio) frown on even using their platforms for things next-to (but not touching) cannabis.

Is this something that one (a business) can now (or soon-ish) use to send or receive payments?

GitLab appears to be back online (for me anyway). Status page still shows red tho.

Status page is hosted by status.io behind cloudfront.net(amazon.com)

IME it's one microservice doing something unexpected -- then down(|up)-stream starts to act unexpected -- and it cascades.

It's way more fun to debug than some single-monster code base with a complete stack-trace from the single-process. That basically tells you exactly where to look and how it got there! What fun is that, where's the adventure!?

IIRC, it's not about private use but about distribution. We publish libraries under MIT, since other corporate users would very likely need to distribute those.

But the higher-level Apps we publish under GPL, so that downstream is obligated to keep it open-source (but there is no obligation to submit a PR upstream).

And there are more than a few companies that use our GPL stuff, internally and don't redistrubute and therefore don't have to make their internal modifications available under GPL -- because there is no distribution happening.

I'm not a lawyer but our decision was informed by one who has prior experience in IP, licensing and specifically FOSS-style licenses.

would love to see a new radio shack; a proper maker-supply store.

Not fully (ie: 100%); since folk were at least getting the skeleton of the pages and other parts did still work -- at least a little. It feels like a core-service outage but not 100% dead.

Laugh to hide the discomfort.

EHLO ycombinator.com

GitHub is great for discoverability, not exactly "community". Because GitHub is a high-ranking and trusted site some of it's "creditability" can wash-off onto one's own project.

Stars are a vanity metric but, they can help with monitoring some early growth.

Everyone on this thread should list their projects, then we all star each others stuff all the way up!

See also this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35967797 which just came up about GitHub stability sentiment.

Yes, I'm having the same push problems as a few days ago. Status page is green as I write this.

Update: It's now YELLOW -- inside of 5 minutes of my own observation of the outage.

In 2001 I started a PHP project and it was cool, lots of people were going that way. In 2008 folk we telling me it's a terrible security risk. In 2014 they told me it's the WORST choice. In 2023 it's cool again?

Mine looks like (on git push):

  remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (4/4), completed with 4 local objects.
  remote: fatal error in commit_refs
  To $REPO
   ! [remote rejected] main -> main (failure)
  error: failed to push some refs to '$REPO'

Status Page: https://www.githubstatus.com/ -- actually shows red -- it was almost updated as fast as HN.

Did a search for cannabis -- since banking for that industry is challenging -- and got no results. I think that would be cool.

A little different in USA...question some authority and next thing you know that authority is paying extra special attention to you and your clients (cause we're all overseen by the same agency). At least with FOIA we can get some of the details. And no arrests; just fines and hassle.

Cannabis farms and retailers (1200+) in WA have to have cameras covering every square foot of the facility where controlled substances are. Surely we can do that for energy.

But then how can a manager meet OKRs/KPIs and get promoted?

Watch out for pretzels then.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/01/14/b...

This guy started that rumour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger

Total jerk.

don't hold in the smoke, puff, exhale, puff again. No benefit to holding cannabis smoke.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2554344/

https://www.algonquincollege.com/umbrellaproject/dont-hold-y...

Wow! I know folks at this bank, they are one of the few banks approved by Washington DFI for cannabis -- https://dfi.wa.gov/cannabis/financial-services -- we were looking to move some banking there.

But one of our crew found info on Crunchbase about Alameda Research + Moonstone and we nope-d out of that deal. They said "we don’t have any risk or exposure from Alameda Research" -- but, still -- too close for comfort

We love Mattermost for our organization; it feels nicer to use it over Slack/Discord because we're also FOSS. Our next iteration is to be moving to a more protocol oriented method - which means Matrix or ActivityPub even.

We don't care if our chat is search-indexed; it's mostly internal; there are client channels, specific topic channels. At least for our case being OUT OF SEARCH is better. However, we do use the conversation as seeds for our help-docs, blog post, etc, etc.

Perhaps Linen could be the winner by putting Slack+Discord+Mattermost+Matrix+ActivityPub in to a better search-index.

Anyone remember MARC? -- https://marc.info/

Why not use https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite ?

You have to write to the SQLite via the rqlite HTTP API but it will replicate the data to N nodes (at least 20) via RAFT and then others can read-only the SQLite replica files directly; and file-permissions prevent the accidental write.