Live data from Hacker News

GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

github.blog

201–210 of 704 posts

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#201

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

This may not be what you are referring too BUT I can say as a .Net developer it's amazing how little .Net devs know about how the low level dev related stuff works because visual studio holds there hand.

I have blown people's minds by showing them how to just call msbuild or git from the command line etc... I think it's changing since dotnet core took over in that space but had a good 10 year run where generally no one at various work places had any understanding of what visual studio was really doing and it did bite us in the ass at times.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this right now with the Remote SSH extension for VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

I use this for developing on linux/pi/jetsons, (need to test linking against real libs, and cross compiling for some reason still isnt a thing), but the compile times are terrible... I wish this was even more modular so we could have a dumb compile farm, +local ide +run&debug on-device (I've recently got 90% closer by remote sshing with vs code to a pi vm)

I suspect you could hack it together with something like distcc, with VSCode none the wiser.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#206

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

Free software won, the commons ossified as no one cared to invest in fundamental ways, new layers are slapped on to hide the cruft, and the pendulum swings back to proprietary competition.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#207

> My friends, I’m here to tell you I was a Codespaces skeptic before this started and now I am not. This is the way. ~@iolsen I don't actually doubt that this (and the 4 other glowing employee quotes) are real, but even assuming they are, I can understand people remaining skeptical about the sample size of 5 being broadly representative of the 100s (1000s?) of engineers at the company. Also slightly hilarious that "T…

I've been playing around with a homegrown version of this. It's really not that hard: just set up a docker context to your home lab server and use VSCode remote containers.

I've been able to remove WSL from my PC: Docker desktop was gouging itself on resources. I can now also shut down my desktop and continue exactly where I was on my laptop, and visa-versa. I don't have to pull WIP commits back and forth between the two machines.

It's a major leap forward, and there is no need to use GitHub infra.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing was said about every programming abstraction to ever be introduced. How do we expect people to build memory-efficient applications when they become reliant on a garbage collector?

I've never seen a company collapse because their garbage collector posted an Our Incredible Journey™ blog post and then shut down a week later. I have seen multiple companies collapse because the proprietary Backend-as-a-Service they built their sand castle on top of pulled a vanishing act, however.

There's plenty of companies that wasted a ton of resources trying to roll their own version of things that should be services. Remember when Uber built their own chat solution? [0]

> With operations in over 620 cities, it was paramount for us to identify a chat solution that would enable Uber employees to reliably communicate on desktop and mobile regardless of where they were in the world.

Did Uber really need their own chat solution? Are they not better served by a SaaS product, one of 5 that 90%+ of companies are using? Are they still using uChat today? (honest question, I don't know)

This is especially dangerous when talking about security sensitive features. It is highly inadvisable to roll your own crypto

Lot of companies shut down or fail for lots of reasons. I think a business should focus on what they do best and what's critical to their mission.

[0] https://eng.uber.com/uchat/

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#209

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

The same thing was said about every programming abstraction to ever be introduced. How do we expect people to build memory-efficient applications when they become reliant on a garbage collector?

The opening to the second paragraph honestly reads like satire of something that could have been said at any point in the last 50 years.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#210
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article specifically says that they support their vim and emacs users by allowing them to SSH in edit code.

No mosh? I've always had some latency issues trying to pull this off on my mobile hotspot or even just in general in SEA.

Mosh provides a noticeable improvement in SSH reliability even on a home fiber connection in the US.
Post reply on HN