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Comment by compactmani | Hacker News Reader

This is a project developed by a high school senior. Yes he made rookie choices as have been pointed out here. If you like the direction of the project, contribute! It will help him learn.

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I'm really sorry for being overly snarky, but where should one start contributing to this giant mess? It's basically a few packages packaged up in a questionable manner (with license violations[1] in the past), none of which are actually written by the developer himself.

He is styling himself and the OS as a professional project (at least that's the vibe I get from the website[2]) and he is actually asking for money[3] while he is putting his users in serious danger (as the current top post[4] illustrates) caused by his "rookie choices". This is deceptive and prompts unsuspecting users to install a High School project on their personal computers in the mistaken belief that they deal with someone skilled. I have very little sympathy for that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm young and I put up my projects as well, but I don't style myself a professional or ask for financial support for my half-assed code while keeping silent about the real nature of my project. Thinking about it, I might take down some code on GitHub or at least put up a big disclaimer.

[1] https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/issues/11

[2] check the "about the team" section, for example

[3] http://www.patreon.com/apricity

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11420627

I suggest the disclaimer route. Everything on GitHub really ought to have an indication in the README.md about why it is there. A single line saying "I'm just hosting it here and you've got no reason to ever use this" can be very helpful.

(Plus when someone posts your GitHub repo to HN for some random reason, that disclaimer can save you a lot of hassle.)

To be fair, he not only put up his code on GitHub, he also created a semi-professional looking and analogously worded website. That's not something that is posted to HN by "mistake". It sounds more like a startup than a hobby project:

> We are a Chicago based team of developers, dedicated to creating useful, intuitive software that helps people better integrate digital computing into their daily lives

The GitHub repository also proves it's not "we": https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/graphs/contributors

I was replying directly to embik (edit: which is, err, you, which I did not notice at first). I acknowledge and apologize that my parenthetical could look like I was talking about apricity, but I was not. I'm not taking the defense for apricity. Indeed I have a track record of recommending against young people doing things that will make people who trust them very, very angry when they can't follow through properly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974770 I just didn't see a point in joining the pile-on, which seems to have covered the bases fairly well.

And in turn, I have to apologize to you as well because I can see how my comment could be viewed as arguing against you. I didn't think you were defending Apricity at all, I was kinda trying to re-inforce your point by pointing out how he missed to point out important information about his project. Thank you very much for giving advice to novice developers, I very much appreciate it!

My favorite part of that:

http://storage.j0.hn/Screen%20Shot%202016-04-04%20at%209.35....

3.2 million additions, 916k deletions 20 commits.

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