Is it just me or the fact that Dagster has one of their competitors Mage.ai listed here as a repo with around 15% of fake stars seems like an odd coincidence?
It’s possible that was the impetus of the blog post. Maybe they suspect Mage.ai of astroturfing GitHub stars and investigate it as above. They then publish a blog post that:
1. Indicates the astroturfing without actually specifically calling them out
2. Does so in a way where others can verify their work and use it on other repos
3. Uses their product to do so
If you’re going to accuse a competitor of fraud, writing a blog post showing your work seems like the most safe way to do it. People lie with statistics all the time of course.
> we track our own GitHub star count along with that of other projects. So when we spotted some new open-source projects suddenly racking up hundreds of stars a week, we were impressed. In some cases, it looked a bit too good to be true, and the patterns seemed off
If their competitor has fake-looking star counts, I'd expect them to be the ones best equipped and most likely to suspect it.
[Blogpost author here]
We ran the numbers for Prefect and several other repos in our space and they came out clean. As we note in the article, while some repos game the system, from what we can tell the number of abusers is actually fairly small.
oh man, i'm in my 30s and this is exactly how my daily life is. I grew up in a culture that didn't have much of an inclination of understanding what ADHD is and stuff, so I never bothered. I really need to get myself checked.
Same here. Both in age (mid-30s) to being exactly how my daily life is to the point of a culture that had a misguided opinion on ADHD.
I shared before on HN that I'm still ongoing investigation with my therapist, after some 2-3 years of therapy and working around some anxiety issues I had we're narrowing it down to a very likely ADHD diagnosis.
The more I read and educate myself about it the more I believe I might have it. It's still hard for me to properly accept that this might be it, and not that I have an inherent failure of character by never being able to keep my focus, motivation, planning, etc. as well as what others can.
To be very honest, something inside me still don't want to believe that I very likely have ADHD, that part still shames me by telling that I'm just using this as a crutch for my failures, that it's just a convenient excuse for not being good enough at some mundane tasks.
It's exhausting, I'm glad I'm finally getting help because for the past 3-4 years I have been on a steadily downwards spiral. It's been very gradual until I got to this point where I can definitely tell I'm suffering mentally because of it...
definitely agree to this. And one segment that they could (should) definitely get customers are those who use ArcGIS. As someone who previously worked in oil & gas, the tax that these companies pay to Arc for all their mapping data is just crazy. I've always wondered why there isn't a solid tech company that could build a product that could take over Arc's business. Looking forward to Felt!
> I've always wondered why there isn't a solid tech company that could build a product that could take over Arc's business
A few reasons:
1.) many geotech companies require on premise installations because they want control of their data and/or the internet quality at remote sites is poor. This means that a SaaS solution is a non-starter.
2.) Most geotechs are already familiar with Arc tools due to Arc’s aggressive marketing to universities
3.) Arc is a swiss army knife which can do most things “good enough”. For most businesses Arc can do what they want out of the box. Products like felt only have 1/10th or less of the functionality as Arc.
We are in the process of replacing Arc with our own custom platform at my company. If you are a heavy user of Arc you quickly outgrow the capabilities of the system. We want to serve petabytes of geotechnical data, and Arc quickly starts to choke on data sizes that large. The operational work of keeping Arc up and running smoothly is also a major headache since you don’t have access to the source code and the error messages in Arc are very poor which means you rely on ESRI support a lot.
Esri has been around for a long time, it’s basically MS Excel for anybody who has to make maps for work.
Their pro software and online services have kept up with the times, you can do almost anything in the program as well. And there’s multiple ways to do each thing.
It also has its own internal logic that people get used to like photoshop.
I believe it’s a private company too which means they aren’t always pleasing shareholders
Having grown up in the United Arab Emirates in the 90s, I've personally seen the growth of NMC / UAE Exchange along with other firms (GEMS Education Group, the Lulu Group, Danube etc.) that are giant corporate entities. This story arc isn't going to be the last of what we see from firms that saw such growth. One of the biggest hurdles with such firms listing in public stock markets internationally is the lack of corporate accountability / governance in their home markets. As much as I'd hate to say it, building and growing companies in tax havens such as Dubai helps them only to develop corporate cultures to brush off problems under the rug that come to bite them later. Because they don't have to pay taxes, there isn't a government entity they need to be held accountable to. One of the few reasons where having an income / corporate tax system might just help public shareholders. As always, this is all anecdotal.
very cool product! I've worked on much smaller datasets with pandas and their inbuilt profiling report method can slow things down to a crawl!. Hoping to see more from you guys :)
A very reductionist version of our company that Allison hates when I use is "csvstat but on the internet" :-). I think the problem of auto-summarizing datasets has hit kind of a local maximum in what pandas dataframe summaries (csvstat is a similar python tool) can do on one machine. We will be able to add much fancier things like sophisticated type classification (e.g., is this field a stock ticker) without burning your CPU.
hah! but this is a very interesting area. You're right on the auto-summarizing issue becoming a problem these days with the usage of larger datasets. Data versioning also is starting to become a larger problem and I saw that you guys already have addressed it in your enterprise product. Hoping to see some sort of API-like version for comparison of data troves from different timelines in the future.
Still, it was generous of HP not to sue him afterwards. It sounds like he was using company resources to build it, they would have had a strong case. Even if they were not interested in commercializing at the time.
I think in today's world, he would definitely be sued.
Today, it would be illegal for HP to sue him for it after having declined to take up the product when the employee first offered it to the company, because CA labor law explicitly addresses this situation.
This is in fact one of the ways that an employee can retain rights to an IP or product that is otherwise within the scope of the company's active businesses.
Companies can can do claim that ideas from employees are a company resource, even when worker is paid hourly and off the clock and the idea was on the employees own time.
Not really a fair comparison. While Woz was at HP, he wasn't the executive/leader of their personal computing division.
I don't see how anyone can fault Apple here when the person doing this was leading their entire chip division.
Scenario: I own car washes and hire someone to run and manage one of my locations. I pay them well and put them at the helm of the entire location. This person is able to completely learn the ins and outs of my business and in the meantime is slowly working on poaching other members of my staff and getting things lined up to open a competitive car wash.
I'm on the side of allowing all employees, including executives and rank and file employees, to quit and work for a competitor without being sued. This is how a competitive labor market is supposed to work.
> quit and work for a competitor without being sued
"Quit" is the operative work here. The employee in question was building the competitor using Apple resources. He didn't quit and work for a competitor. He worked for a competitor and then quit.
> While Woz was at HP, he wasn't the executive/leader of their personal computing division
Why does position even matter? Ultimately in this industry it's talent and skill that prevail. Woz was at least as capable, if not more, than anyone else working in a technical capacity at HP at the time. He arguably had better business sense than anyone at the company too because they had the opportunity to start the personal computer revolution but passed on it.
Not sure why the position is relevant, nor do I think Jobs's precedent was relevant.
"a duty of loyalty to the company" - wholly made up. The company has no loyalty to you.
"breached an intellectual property agreement" - this is the meat of the case. The rest is theater, including the subject.
You have skill and talent and you are paid to do a series of tasks. You can capitalize those talents in many ways to make money, working for a company is an option.
If you don't treat your employees well enough, they might leave and might even compete with you. We have laws to enforce this relationship at almost every possible turn. It's REALLY hard to get away with sabotage or inside information without quitting. Having your own LLC is great for a number of personal finance reasons.
This has nothing to do with loyalty. I agree that there is nothing wrong with this person going off to do their own thing. But getting that started on company time, including poaching other Apple employees, is totally out of line.
I don't think you know the whole story. He gave HP the option to own all his work on the Apple I, and he was aware the entire time of the conflict of interest with his employer, and vocal about it.
The rule of law has a lot of ambiguities and intent and context certainly matter.
If someone repeatedly says “you can have this” and you say “no” and then say “no wait I want it now that it is valuable” you probably don’t have an open and shut case regardless of what a contract says.
I’m not super familiar with Woz’s story so if that’s not what happened, my point was more about the ambiguities of the law and flexibility of its application.
He was both aware and vocal about it and tried to do something about it, but HP was not interested, which gave him freedom to pursue it independently with Jobs.
