Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 246 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#121

Post by mardifoufs »

zo1 wrote: post #48
navanchauhan wrote: post #3

Most of the CS classes at my university have moved on to an online Jupyter environment with VS Code preinstalled. It lets students spawn an environment with all the required software for their class preinstalled. E.g. For Computer System it spawns an environment with GDB pre-installed, while for Intro to AI it has PyTorch/Python3 pre-installed

Having more grads coming out of university unprepared and expecting even more handholding (this time in the form of devcontainers in the cloud preconfigured and "ready", etc) really does not bode well for the health of our industry long term.

How is that different from using shared Unix boxes from back in the day? Using Containers doesn't mean not having access to the file system or console. You basically have the exact same experience as using vscode locally.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#122

Post by vbezhenar »

mh- wrote: post #114
paxys wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSH used to work perfectly fine over 28.8 kbps modems. You don't really need a stellar connection for remote coding. If your internet is capable enough for a video call it can run a hundred remote IDEs side by side.

>SSH used to work perfectly fine over 28.8 kbps modems. I can't agree with "perfectly fine" here. Not unless you enabled local echo in your terminal emulator. The keyboard latency, especially for typo correction, was maddening . I still remember what a staggering QoL improvement it was the first time I used a low-latency connection to a server.

That's why vi is so handy over bad links: with rich command set you minimize number of key presses to achieve the target goal.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#125

Post by thinkmassive »

My computing environment mostly consists of a browser and tmux, with vim for editing. A few months ago I wanted to try Github Copilot, so I signed up for the trial thinking I could use it in Codespaces. Eventually I gave up and installed VSCode locally. Now I use it a little, mostly for exploratory work, but less than I would if it were in my browser.

Is there any CDE with good Copilot (or equivalent) integration available today?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#126

Post by Ocha »

conductr wrote: post #96
fswd wrote: post #18

I rent server rack space at a datacenter where I have a beefy workstation to do all my work. I use VS Code Remote and SSH port forwarding. The workstation has fast 2TB NVMe and 64gb of ram, 16 cores and a RTX GPU. It's actually cheaper and faster than our production cloud server. I tried Github Codespaces and thought it was cool but wasn't nearly as fast as my remote workstation.

Almost the same for me. The data center is a couple miles from my home and my home has fiber. It’s low latency, I almost never notice a difference from my device. Maybe if I used it for really large files but that’s not my thing. It’s nice keeping my local device crud free and low demand. Edit to add; cost me about $70/month depending on a few variables on collocation for a 4U. My same apps on AWS would cost 10x more…

Where are you colocating? Looking for one myself

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#127

Post by nrdxp »

I thought CDEs were a pretty cool idea years ago until I discovered Nix and specifically "nix shells".

Call me old school but if I can run my tooling locally I typically prefer that in most cases, and Nix does a stellar job of tracking everything deterministically, so sharing amongst the team works great too.

So much so I think replit actually uses it under the hood for some of their environments iirc.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#128

Post by klysm »

naikrovek wrote: post #119
jkaplowitz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t help when you truly don’t have WAN connectivity. Imagine working on an airplane where the wifi is unusable or unavailable, or working during a long NYC subway ride (where even mobile data connectivity between stations is only occasionally and transiently available in the underground segments of the system).

why would you be working while sitting on some type of conveyance? doing things like that will not get you any rewards which compare to the effort you've spent. look out a window, I say.

Let’s say I take a train 1 hour each way every day - why not do some work?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#129

Post by marktolson »

ivan_burazin wrote: post #40
nbrad wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool! I've used a similar workflow with teams that SSH into boxes with GPUs, VSCode makes it completely seamless - surprised i don't hear about it more

Would not using one of the selfhosted CDE solution make it even easier?

Kind of, I used to run code server but you miss out on plug-ins and other custom settings. Connecting via SSH is seamless. You can copy from local -> remote, keep your plug-ins and access from any machine with VS Code.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#130

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

naikrovek wrote: post #119
jkaplowitz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t help when you truly don’t have WAN connectivity. Imagine working on an airplane where the wifi is unusable or unavailable, or working during a long NYC subway ride (where even mobile data connectivity between stations is only occasionally and transiently available in the underground segments of the system).

why would you be working while sitting on some type of conveyance? doing things like that will not get you any rewards which compare to the effort you've spent. look out a window, I say.

Over the past decade I'd reckon 1/4 of my productive output has been whilst sitting on some type of conveyance. Some of the intervals in that period have stretched from 6mo to 1.5 year where >50% is while commuting or otherwise traveling.

Honestly, I'm either on the clock or off, and I have better things to do with my time than look out a window when I'm not being paid.

Post reply on HN