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Comment by sixhobbits | Hacker News Reader

any activity that places a burden on our servers, where that burden is disproportionate to the benefits provided to users (for example, don't use Actions as a content delivery network or *as part of a serverless application*, but a low benefit Action could be ok if it’s also low burden); or

Not a lawyer but pretty sure that is a violation of their ToS

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I'm very confident that what I've built here fits the set of things that you are allowed to do with Actions.

The workflow I've written here is a shortcut for writing content directly to the repository. You could go and run the commands on your laptop and copy-and-paste the extracted captions into a file and push them to the repo... but Actions are specifically designed to automate that kind of process.

(Also: I've shown this to GitHub people who have worked on Actions and they thought it was really cool.)

Being confident/cool is irrelevant if GH legal decides that this isn't a valid use of their ToS.

I would have reached out to GH to ask for permission instead of asking for forgiveness.

I doubt GitHub have the support capacity to handle everyone pinging them to ask permission any time they want to do something interesting with Actions.

I'll take my chances. If they tell me it's not a supported use-case, I'll update the project to tell people they shouldn't use it.

Keep building and ignore the haters. I'm sure Github deals with actual abuse issues with Github Actions (like trying to mine crypto) on a regular basis. This is neat and interesting and at most they'll rate limit it if it gets too popular. Plus you're connecting to a hosted paid service for the GPU backend side so it's not all CPU time.

I'm not a hater, I'm a realist. Services like this have a free tier to encourage paid accounts. When people abuse that free tier, everyone else suffers. It is not much effort to ask the support team for permission. I've also been on the devops team of having to run services like this and it really isn't fun when people abuse it. It is a lot of extra work.

Exactly, they would probably say no since that is the easiest answer.

Now that you're top of HN and they might see more abuse of their systems, it'll just come more quickly.

Great work on the actions though, it is a pleasure to read the source code. Learning a few tricks in there.

I think

> if using GitHub-hosted runners, any other activity unrelated to the production, testing, deployment, or publication of the software project associated with the repository where GitHub Actions are used.

is far more pertinent, and can be solved by self-hosting a runner.

Can you self-host a runner outside of GH enterprise?

EDIT: TIL you can! That's wild.

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