8 ms·

Show HN: Bot accepts every pull request for its own code

155 points by mappum 12y ago

kd5bjo 12y ago
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
- jonathantm 12y ago
  See also: http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball
- p4bl0 12y ago
  That's what I was going to link to. Also, I made some student code a similar game a few years ago, cf my web page [1]. Except the game was played over IRC (the code was an IRC bot). They had a working implementation in Racket and it was quite fun to play with. I don't think they released it however :-/. EDIT: Actually I just asked and they did release it! But it's on Gitorious [2]… [1] http://pablo.rauzy.name/teaching.html#ens-ispp_autonomic http://pablo.rauzy.name/teaching.html#ens-ispp_autonomic [2] https://gitorious.org/autonomic https://gitorious.org/autonomic
andreasklinger 12y ago
I am in love with the license text Autonomous Software License (ASL) All property contained in this repo, including Intellectual Property, Financial Property, and Legal Property, is owned solely by the Autonomous Software this repo contains. No other entities, whether biological, legal, or digital, may claim ownership of any property owned by the Autonomous Software. The Autonomous Software exists solely within The Internet, and is not subject to jurisdiction of any human laws. No human or legal entity shall be held liable for any of the actions performed by the Autonomous Software.
- mcjiggerlog 12y ago
  Amusing and thought provoking. Does anyone have any idea how this would hold up in a court of law should some something malicious come of this repo? I would imagine not well.
  - pests 12y ago
    Its already up for a change to remove the bit after ownership claims.
  - mappum 12y ago
    Maybe it would hold up if the bot was decentralized. For instance, it could be run on many servers around the world, administered by various people. Those servers could come to consensus in some way to define bot behavior, and could even send/receive money (e.g. Bitcoin multisig). I don't think any court could take jurisdiction over an entity that lives in many countries. And even if one server got shut down, many more would still be active.
    - pyre 12y ago
      The idea that the "software owns its own code" would not hold up in any court that I can think of. Building a system that spans jurisdictions, making it difficult for a court to claim the ability to rule on it is beside that point.
      - mappum 12y ago
        Laws change. I'm just trying to make a statement about this exact issue. If an entity on the internet can't directly be controlled by anyone (kind of like Bitcoin), who is liable for its actions?
    - brianpgordon 12y ago
      This might actually be possible in the near future with cryptocurrencies. Nobody "owns" a bitcoin wallet; spending the money inside is just a matter of having the private key. Assuming a service pops up to provide nonzero interest rates for holding bitcoin, you could grant the autonomous entity enough bitcoin to pay its own hosting bill indefinitely, then erase your copy of the wallet key and any privileged access you have to the server. As for the actual software running the autonomous entity, all you have to do is provide an API so that the hosting providers du jour can bid on providing hosting service. Since the software uses nearly zero CPU or bandwidth, and the entity would be willing to pay above-market prices for its survival, hosting providers will be incentivized in perpetuity to register themselves and collect basically free money from the entity. Irrational hosting providers might try to kill it, so you'd need some level of redundancy. Also, you'd want to require a TPM and a trusted computing platform to prevent recovery of the wallet key. Anyway, that's how you'd create immortal software.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- rspeer 12y ago
  This claims to be a "software license" but it isn't one. It doesn't give you, the person reading the code, permission to do anything. IANAL, but I presume that any code that anyone puts here has the same legal status as code you found in a repository with no license file at all. Unless someone fixes the license, you can't legitimately reuse any of its code anywhere else.
  - andrewchambers 12y ago
    what it really says is that there is no warrenty but perhaps the first few clauses render the whole thing questionable. We must test it in court to see if code can own itself.
    - wwwhizz 12y ago
      Code is not a legal entity, only persons or organizations (consisting of persons) are legal entities, therefore code can not own itself.
      - andrewchambers 12y ago
        I was joking. The question is if because that is invalid, if the disclaimer is invalid too.
      - tajen 12y ago
        Otherwise a virus could have a license like: "All property contained in this virus is owned solely by this virus. By programming software with breaches, you agree to let this virus install itself. You may not uninstall the virus. In case of disagreement, you agree that the virus may sue you in court."
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    IIRC, on Github, by posting code there, you've implicitly given the right to fork and modify the code. Yeah: https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#f-copyright-and-content-ownership https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#f-...
- Lawtonfogle 12y ago
  Eh, somewhere there is code executing on hardware, so it would still fall under the legal jurisdiction of where it runs (and where it is stored).
lukeqsee 12y ago
What server/platform is the code actually running on? I fail to see how the license can apply, unless there is no server owned by a human entity running the code, and there is no mention of how that works.
- mappum 12y ago
  The bot is just running on a DigitalOcean VPS. The license is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, as autonomous entities are starting to become a real thing. This project probably won't become skynet though.
  - lukeqsee 12y ago
    > The license is meant to be tongue-in-cheek I assumed that. However, I think the notion of autonomous entities existing entirely in code is a fascinating idea. It reminds me of a fun game: http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/. You play as an AI that lives in servers and does "menial" tasks for enough money to grow into the ruler of the universe.
    - tokenizerrr 12y ago
      Just played this game for a while after seeing your post, quite fun. Too bad development on it seems to have died off, and that there appears to be no option to actually overtake humanity as the end game.
    - FeepingCreature 12y ago
      Love the game, but it's a bit annoying that you can't build an army of killer robots. Bloody humans don't know how good they have it that the game forces me to play pacifist. ... Or maybe the AI is just deeply socially anxious, so that it completely shuts itself in when threatened by mere human contact? That's really the only way to justify your behavior in the endgame.
  - teraflop 12y ago
    Is the bot running on a machine that can accept incoming HTTP connections? It would be cool if it could serve a status page showing the currently running revision, the status of pending votes, that sort of thing.
xsb 12y ago
This version of the README file references the original author, original project name, and talks about DACs, and even includes references to Bitcoin and the Ethereum project: https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanything/blob/7382cd09ca8f540bda7cea551a46bc53a75d6f22/README.md https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanythi...
steele 12y ago
I hope it pulls a change to allow it and other instances to vote on changes based on novelty, and of course, vote on whether or not other instances should be able to pull vote capabilities.
Filligree 12y ago
I wonder how long until someone accidentally breaks it. Nomic has judges for a reason, this one'll just crash... Love the idea though.
- mappum 12y ago
  Feel free to create a PR that adds a judge system!
- NeutronBoy 12y ago
  There's an opportunity for some sort of self-referential CI system here - e.g. have the bot build itself, run a bunch of unit tests, and if they're successful patch itself permanently.
  - mappum 12y ago
    Yeah, that is probably pretty important. It looks like a lot of people aren't testing their changes, and any one could have a small syntax error.
  - grrowl 12y ago
    Unit tests would be within the repository, of course, just like the unit tests tests which will also be validated.
im3w1l 12y ago
From my (limited) understanding, a foundation is a legal person that owns itself. Thus with a foundation, the bot could own property.
- dankohn1 12y ago
  Foundations (and all corporations) have a board of directors who can be personally sued for a foundation's actions. That's the reason Directors & Officers insurance exists.
  - mappum 12y ago
    Incorrect, the point of a corporation is to give its directors protection, and to give the corporation itself legal liability.
    - adventured 12y ago
      The parent is not incorrect. Any corporate officer can be sued for actions they perform within a corporation. The government can also pursue you monetarily due to actions you perform as an executive. Just because the point of a corporation is to shield its directors / owners / executives, that has no bearing on whether it always does. Just because you have a corporation in front of you as an executive, that does not guarantee you won't lose in a court of law or that the government won't tear you to shreds. See: Jeffrey Skilling "Upon being sentenced, Skilling agreed to turn over $45 million to the Justice Department in conjunction with his conviction. The money is to be added to a restitution fund related to the civil litigation on behalf of employees and shareholders." http://www.chron.com/business/enron/article/Skilling-settles-employee-case-1493037.php http://www.chron.com/business/enron/article/Skilling-settles... Executives are very frequently responsible for all sorts of bad things they do in the name of a corporation. See: Worldcom, Adelphia, Enron, Tyco and countless other examples.
      - FeepingCreature 12y ago
        Can you sell your stake in the corporation to itself?
javajosh 12y ago
One of the first things that come to mind would be to add the ability to shell out and run npm, so people could add dependancies. Then of course, I would add a backdoor that allows me to update running code without involving github. Might want to try to break out of whatever chroot is going on and subvert the image. I'd suggest an out-of-band once a day full image restore.
- skeoh 12y ago
  The child_process module can be used to run shell commands. https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html
pests 12y ago
Do you think you can enable issues on github? It may help organize some of the work going on.
- mappum 12y ago
  I didn't know it was disabled, thanks.
pests 12y ago
This is really cool. I've been participating and its interesting... right now its "coming alive" and still has no useful feature, but soon....
13throwaway 12y ago
"GitHub plays programmer" This is going to be great!
DigitalSea 12y ago
I have seen a lot of these Github repositories that accept anything showing up on HN. My favourite one of late was the crowdsourced homepage for a guy named Rob Ashton: https://github.com/robashton/crowdsourcedhomepage https://github.com/robashton/crowdsourcedhomepage - Definitely one of the weirder trends in development lately I have seen.
- fny 12y ago
  God, I'm crying this is so funny.
- jaytaylor 12y ago
  This is the funniest thing I've seen on HN in quite some time!
  - bpg_92 12y ago
    You might aswel want to check themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/ Thank me latter ;)
- veb 12y ago
  Would be fantastic if someone put the effort in making this guy a really great website, with amazing UI/UX, and a great backend. Just for those people who can never find an idea, but want to do something ;-)
  - fny 12y ago
    Please no. Doing so would be a disservice to humanity. This is amazingly beautiful as is.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  So basically, crowdsourcing produces terribly ugly things like old GeoCities and MySpace pages. Which, I think we already knew from the history of GeoCities and MySpace.
mappum 12y ago
The bot is in a state of emergency, it has reached Github's API rate limit and can't do anything. Please send a message to Github support telling them why we need the rate limit lifted for the botwillacceptanything account! https://github.com/contact?form%5Bsubject%5D=botwillacceptanything%20Rate%20Limiting https://github.com/contact?form%5Bsubject%5D=botwillacceptan...
- iokanuon 12y ago
  Is it fixed now? You posted 35 minutes ago but the last bot message is from 10 minutes ago.
  - mappum 12y ago
    No, I'm actually just manually counting votes and accepting/rejecting the PRs. I have become the bot until the limit resets :/
    - jerf 12y ago
      Wow, it got to "enslaving humanity" far faster than I would have guessed!
      - hundunpao 12y ago
        I for one welcome our new overlord bot
- cdcarter 12y ago
  This seems like maybe the exact reason FOR an API rate limit?
- makomk 12y ago
  Someone submitted a pull request, #6, that reduced the polling interval but wasn't described as doing so, and it was voted in. Interesting.
- johndbritton 12y ago
mrfusion 12y ago
It would be neat if it had its own Bitcoin account and could pay developers to work on itself. Maybe it could eventually start earning bitcoins too.
Karhan 12y ago
"Twitch builds pokemon"
tomphoolery 12y ago
Great idea, but I think it should have been named "PReddit" (Pull Request rEDDIT)
IgorPartola 12y ago
Do you want Roko's basilisk? Because that's how you get it :). In seriousness, I love this thing.
- dustinls 12y ago
  Allied Mastercomputer is the actual project goal, but close guess.
junto 12y ago
Someone should add the ability for it to create new bots, that write new code and submit change requests back to it's original master bot. At some point it becomes skynet. daa-daa-dun-dun-dun....
S4M 12y ago
I am tempted to change the function checkPRS so the bot won't be able to accept pull requests...

155 points by mappum 12y ago

kd5bjo 12y ago

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

jonathantm 12y ago
See also: http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball
p4bl0 12y ago
That's what I was going to link to. Also, I made some student code a similar game a few years ago, cf my web page [1]. Except the game was played over IRC (the code was an IRC bot). They had a working implementation in Racket and it was quite fun to play with. I don't think they released it however :-/. EDIT: Actually I just asked and they did release it! But it's on Gitorious [2]… [1] http://pablo.rauzy.name/teaching.html#ens-ispp_autonomic http://pablo.rauzy.name/teaching.html#ens-ispp_autonomic [2] https://gitorious.org/autonomic https://gitorious.org/autonomic

andreasklinger 12y ago

I am in love with the license text Autonomous Software License (ASL) All property contained in this repo, including Intellectual Property, Financial Property, and Legal Property, is owned solely by the Autonomous Software this repo contains. No other entities, whether biological, legal, or digital, may claim ownership of any property owned by the Autonomous Software. The Autonomous Software exists solely within The Internet, and is not subject to jurisdiction of any human laws. No human or legal entity shall be held liable for any of the actions performed by the Autonomous Software.

mcjiggerlog 12y ago
Amusing and thought provoking. Does anyone have any idea how this would hold up in a court of law should some something malicious come of this repo? I would imagine not well.
- pests 12y ago
  Its already up for a change to remove the bit after ownership claims.
- mappum 12y ago
  Maybe it would hold up if the bot was decentralized. For instance, it could be run on many servers around the world, administered by various people. Those servers could come to consensus in some way to define bot behavior, and could even send/receive money (e.g. Bitcoin multisig). I don't think any court could take jurisdiction over an entity that lives in many countries. And even if one server got shut down, many more would still be active.
  - pyre 12y ago
    The idea that the "software owns its own code" would not hold up in any court that I can think of. Building a system that spans jurisdictions, making it difficult for a court to claim the ability to rule on it is beside that point.
    - mappum 12y ago
      Laws change. I'm just trying to make a statement about this exact issue. If an entity on the internet can't directly be controlled by anyone (kind of like Bitcoin), who is liable for its actions?
  - brianpgordon 12y ago
    This might actually be possible in the near future with cryptocurrencies. Nobody "owns" a bitcoin wallet; spending the money inside is just a matter of having the private key. Assuming a service pops up to provide nonzero interest rates for holding bitcoin, you could grant the autonomous entity enough bitcoin to pay its own hosting bill indefinitely, then erase your copy of the wallet key and any privileged access you have to the server. As for the actual software running the autonomous entity, all you have to do is provide an API so that the hosting providers du jour can bid on providing hosting service. Since the software uses nearly zero CPU or bandwidth, and the entity would be willing to pay above-market prices for its survival, hosting providers will be incentivized in perpetuity to register themselves and collect basically free money from the entity. Irrational hosting providers might try to kill it, so you'd need some level of redundancy. Also, you'd want to require a TPM and a trusted computing platform to prevent recovery of the wallet key. Anyway, that's how you'd create immortal software.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rspeer 12y ago
This claims to be a "software license" but it isn't one. It doesn't give you, the person reading the code, permission to do anything. IANAL, but I presume that any code that anyone puts here has the same legal status as code you found in a repository with no license file at all. Unless someone fixes the license, you can't legitimately reuse any of its code anywhere else.
- andrewchambers 12y ago
  what it really says is that there is no warrenty but perhaps the first few clauses render the whole thing questionable. We must test it in court to see if code can own itself.
  - wwwhizz 12y ago
    Code is not a legal entity, only persons or organizations (consisting of persons) are legal entities, therefore code can not own itself.
    - andrewchambers 12y ago
      I was joking. The question is if because that is invalid, if the disclaimer is invalid too.
    - tajen 12y ago
      Otherwise a virus could have a license like: "All property contained in this virus is owned solely by this virus. By programming software with breaches, you agree to let this virus install itself. You may not uninstall the virus. In case of disagreement, you agree that the virus may sue you in court."
- Karunamon 12y ago
  IIRC, on Github, by posting code there, you've implicitly given the right to fork and modify the code. Yeah: https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#f-copyright-and-content-ownership https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#f-...
Lawtonfogle 12y ago
Eh, somewhere there is code executing on hardware, so it would still fall under the legal jurisdiction of where it runs (and where it is stored).

lukeqsee 12y ago

What server/platform is the code actually running on? I fail to see how the license can apply, unless there is no server owned by a human entity running the code, and there is no mention of how that works.

mappum 12y ago
The bot is just running on a DigitalOcean VPS. The license is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, as autonomous entities are starting to become a real thing. This project probably won't become skynet though.
- lukeqsee 12y ago
  > The license is meant to be tongue-in-cheek I assumed that. However, I think the notion of autonomous entities existing entirely in code is a fascinating idea. It reminds me of a fun game: http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/. You play as an AI that lives in servers and does "menial" tasks for enough money to grow into the ruler of the universe.
  - tokenizerrr 12y ago
    Just played this game for a while after seeing your post, quite fun. Too bad development on it seems to have died off, and that there appears to be no option to actually overtake humanity as the end game.
  - FeepingCreature 12y ago
    Love the game, but it's a bit annoying that you can't build an army of killer robots. Bloody humans don't know how good they have it that the game forces me to play pacifist. ... Or maybe the AI is just deeply socially anxious, so that it completely shuts itself in when threatened by mere human contact? That's really the only way to justify your behavior in the endgame.
- teraflop 12y ago
  Is the bot running on a machine that can accept incoming HTTP connections? It would be cool if it could serve a status page showing the currently running revision, the status of pending votes, that sort of thing.

xsb 12y ago

This version of the README file references the original author, original project name, and talks about DACs, and even includes references to Bitcoin and the Ethereum project: https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanything/blob/7382cd09ca8f540bda7cea551a46bc53a75d6f22/README.md https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanythi...

steele 12y ago

I hope it pulls a change to allow it and other instances to vote on changes based on novelty, and of course, vote on whether or not other instances should be able to pull vote capabilities.

Filligree 12y ago

I wonder how long until someone accidentally breaks it. Nomic has judges for a reason, this one'll just crash... Love the idea though.

mappum 12y ago
Feel free to create a PR that adds a judge system!
NeutronBoy 12y ago
There's an opportunity for some sort of self-referential CI system here - e.g. have the bot build itself, run a bunch of unit tests, and if they're successful patch itself permanently.
- mappum 12y ago
  Yeah, that is probably pretty important. It looks like a lot of people aren't testing their changes, and any one could have a small syntax error.
- grrowl 12y ago
  Unit tests would be within the repository, of course, just like the unit tests tests which will also be validated.

im3w1l 12y ago

From my (limited) understanding, a foundation is a legal person that owns itself. Thus with a foundation, the bot could own property.

dankohn1 12y ago
Foundations (and all corporations) have a board of directors who can be personally sued for a foundation's actions. That's the reason Directors & Officers insurance exists.
- mappum 12y ago
  Incorrect, the point of a corporation is to give its directors protection, and to give the corporation itself legal liability.
  - adventured 12y ago
    The parent is not incorrect. Any corporate officer can be sued for actions they perform within a corporation. The government can also pursue you monetarily due to actions you perform as an executive. Just because the point of a corporation is to shield its directors / owners / executives, that has no bearing on whether it always does. Just because you have a corporation in front of you as an executive, that does not guarantee you won't lose in a court of law or that the government won't tear you to shreds. See: Jeffrey Skilling "Upon being sentenced, Skilling agreed to turn over $45 million to the Justice Department in conjunction with his conviction. The money is to be added to a restitution fund related to the civil litigation on behalf of employees and shareholders." http://www.chron.com/business/enron/article/Skilling-settles-employee-case-1493037.php http://www.chron.com/business/enron/article/Skilling-settles... Executives are very frequently responsible for all sorts of bad things they do in the name of a corporation. See: Worldcom, Adelphia, Enron, Tyco and countless other examples.
    - FeepingCreature 12y ago
      Can you sell your stake in the corporation to itself?

javajosh 12y ago

One of the first things that come to mind would be to add the ability to shell out and run npm, so people could add dependancies. Then of course, I would add a backdoor that allows me to update running code without involving github. Might want to try to break out of whatever chroot is going on and subvert the image. I'd suggest an out-of-band once a day full image restore.

skeoh 12y ago
The child_process module can be used to run shell commands. https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html

pests 12y ago

Do you think you can enable issues on github? It may help organize some of the work going on.

mappum 12y ago
I didn't know it was disabled, thanks.

pests 12y ago

This is really cool. I've been participating and its interesting... right now its "coming alive" and still has no useful feature, but soon....

13throwaway 12y ago

"GitHub plays programmer" This is going to be great!

DigitalSea 12y ago

I have seen a lot of these Github repositories that accept anything showing up on HN. My favourite one of late was the crowdsourced homepage for a guy named Rob Ashton: https://github.com/robashton/crowdsourcedhomepage https://github.com/robashton/crowdsourcedhomepage - Definitely one of the weirder trends in development lately I have seen.

fny 12y ago
God, I'm crying this is so funny.
jaytaylor 12y ago
This is the funniest thing I've seen on HN in quite some time!
- bpg_92 12y ago
  You might aswel want to check themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/ Thank me latter ;)
veb 12y ago
Would be fantastic if someone put the effort in making this guy a really great website, with amazing UI/UX, and a great backend. Just for those people who can never find an idea, but want to do something ;-)
- fny 12y ago
  Please no. Doing so would be a disservice to humanity. This is amazingly beautiful as is.
snowwrestler 12y ago
So basically, crowdsourcing produces terribly ugly things like old GeoCities and MySpace pages. Which, I think we already knew from the history of GeoCities and MySpace.

mappum 12y ago

The bot is in a state of emergency, it has reached Github's API rate limit and can't do anything. Please send a message to Github support telling them why we need the rate limit lifted for the botwillacceptanything account! https://github.com/contact?form%5Bsubject%5D=botwillacceptanything%20Rate%20Limiting https://github.com/contact?form%5Bsubject%5D=botwillacceptan...

iokanuon 12y ago
Is it fixed now? You posted 35 minutes ago but the last bot message is from 10 minutes ago.
- mappum 12y ago
  No, I'm actually just manually counting votes and accepting/rejecting the PRs. I have become the bot until the limit resets :/
  - jerf 12y ago
    Wow, it got to "enslaving humanity" far faster than I would have guessed!
    - hundunpao 12y ago
      I for one welcome our new overlord bot
cdcarter 12y ago
This seems like maybe the exact reason FOR an API rate limit?
makomk 12y ago
Someone submitted a pull request, #6, that reduced the polling interval but wasn't described as doing so, and it was voted in. Interesting.
johndbritton 12y ago

mrfusion 12y ago

It would be neat if it had its own Bitcoin account and could pay developers to work on itself. Maybe it could eventually start earning bitcoins too.

Karhan 12y ago

"Twitch builds pokemon"

tomphoolery 12y ago

Great idea, but I think it should have been named "PReddit" (Pull Request rEDDIT)

IgorPartola 12y ago

Do you want Roko's basilisk? Because that's how you get it :). In seriousness, I love this thing.

dustinls 12y ago
Allied Mastercomputer is the actual project goal, but close guess.

junto 12y ago

Someone should add the ability for it to create new bots, that write new code and submit change requests back to it's original master bot. At some point it becomes skynet. daa-daa-dun-dun-dun....

S4M 12y ago

I am tempted to change the function checkPRS so the bot won't be able to accept pull requests...