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GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

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Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#501

Post by laumars »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #470
bogwog wrote: post #358

Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc) and monetize that data by using it to build some AI product like Copilot, or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did), use it to serve me ads, or do some stupid/irresponsible/unet…

As slownew45 points out, Github does not make money from individuals who use it for free. Of course such use will become increasingly difficult over time for Microsoft pinheads to justify from a business perspective. Telemetry, full-on surveillance and ultimately subtle manipulation of individual software authors seems an obvious choice to try to justify why Github should continue to allow non-paying individuals to u…

> The Facebook web browser. Never say never. If we knew what we know today about privacy, we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google.

Google were already making money off targeted ads at that point. There was even an outcry about GMail scanning people’s emails several years before Chrome was released. But you could probably argue that we didn’t fully appreciate just how bad things would get at that stage. Many of us were just happy to see Microsoft get some competition.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#502

Post by [deleted] »

blt wrote: post #493

If I understand correctly, this is similar to Google's CitC (clients in the cloud) [1]. According to the article, Codespaces supports non-IDE users by allowing ssh. CitC supports non-IDE users with a network file system. This seems preferable - the editor runs on your local machine with low latency, but you still run tests on the cloud machine. I wonder if Github supports this workflow, e.g. by configuring sshd to al…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#503

Post by rurp »

bern4444 wrote: post #329
anyonecancode wrote: post #321

I feel I'm swimming against the current of contemporary dev practices, but I actually believe trying to run as much of your apps and development locally is important. Not exclusively, but at least from time to time I think shutting off your network connection and seeing what happens is important. It flushes out all sorts of assumptions, especially around dependencies, you may not have realized you had. If you at leas…

My job now has no ability to run our code locally and its terrible. I work on APIs which at the end of the day is an HTTP server making and responding to requests. When I make a change its impossible to test locally which is terrible. The same issue applies to serverless technologies (at least last when I used them). It was extremely difficult to run serverless services locally, debug issues etc. Having the cloud is…

I can strongly second this. I currently work on a serverless project and running/debugging code locally is one of the biggest pain points. Over time I've gotten better at mocking out a bunch of stuff to try and get the code I care about running, but it's a really rough process.

There are of course risks that the local setup process will differ from the prod environment in a serious way. Even with good automated test coverage I feel less confident about the code I commit here than most other places I've worked.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#504

Post by scraptor »

Barrin92 wrote: post #481
leppr wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MS that's killing their own single most popular product, Windows, with anti-user features, is the MS of now . Releasing VS code and WSL doesn't redeem their sins.

is this not another example of the 'HN echo chamber'? Is Windows market share budging? Windows currently is by far not the worst iteration of the OS and nobody gives a crap about anti-user features which everyone has had to deal with for literally decades

The fact that microsoft's user hostile moves haven't affected windows' market share does very little to reassure people that they won't pull similar shit with any other product.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#505

Post by gray_-_wolf »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #425
swiley wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people like not having their physical machine tied to their dev environment. IMO "the way" to do this is with ssh and tmux, not a web app. As long as people have choices I guess it doesn't matter.

> I think people like not having their physical machine tied to their dev environment. I'm curious to know if this statement is true. Most experienced developers these days have a regular desk and a chair where they like to code and focus. How prevalent is the move-and-code scenario?

It's not just that. There is also the matter of laptop getting broken (we all have proper backups, right? right?), stolen, ...

So I do see the appeal in thin client. My only issue is that the experience his closely tied to latency, so sometimes working over ssh is... irritating. Especially on mobile connection.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#506

Post by gray_-_wolf »

randyrand wrote: post #380
bratbag wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current environment is my laptop, which I would also need to access codespaces. So by extension, codespaces is more risky than my current environment.

If you've never had these issues, this product is probably not for you. The question is, how much time do you spend on dev environment issues per year? When I was at one of the FAANGs, our dev enviroment took about 1hr to install, and you had to redo it everytime you switched platform / version (about every week). We spent ~50 hours per year managing our local dev enviroment. probably more in reality.

> The question is, how much time do you spend on dev environment issues per year?

Definitely not little. But at the same time, I usually learn a lot about how stuff works during that. Which I like to think makes me better at helping other people debug weird shit.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#507

Post by Nullabillity »

swyx wrote: post #361
skipants wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a sample of people who, if they run into issues with Codespaces, are just a Slack message away from someone who can fix it.

yes but thats the great thing about dogfooding. give it a year or two of this tight feedback loop and Codespaces will be really really solid

Given that they apparently couldn't get their setup scripts in order[0] in 13 years I wouldn't get my hopes up.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28145556

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#508

Post by Biganon »

austincheney wrote: post #456
blacktriangle wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github does not need to be open source. Open source needs to pull its head out of its collective ass and not hand over its entire workflow to private companies. Github may be the single greatest execution of embrace/extend/extinguish in computing history.

Technically speaking, Microsoft is a public company. A private company implies not open to investment on a public market.

This is not the first time I see this exact pedantry on HN and I can't help but feel the same way as with people who immediately yell "it's not free! Nothing in life is free!" when you talk about free healthcare or free public transportation.

We know. We understand that it is technically correct. But it's completely useless in the discussion. You know perfectly well what the other person meant.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#509

Post by genewitch »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #490
zamalek wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

oh right, my home lab server, that must be around here somewhere...

I have an HP 4u from 2010 with 80 threads and I think a quarter TB of memory, 6 SAS, and 2 1TB ssd, currently running Ubuntu 16 and Wok, for VMs. It took a lot of effort to get this working and it's still a huge pain - I have no UPS for it since it uses 220VAC, and UPS cost more than the server cost me, for example.

I can't use docker in general because my internet is too crappy. That was annoying in 2012 when I first used it, but it's even worse now. I've always worked with VMs, since 2001 or earlier - virtualbox, wok, AWS, wok, and now proxmox.

It helps to know what your use case is, I don't run a ton of VMs, just one or two at a time that can use almost all of the resources of the server, and I generally do infrastructure and computing work in general.

I presume none of this counts as a homelab, though, since I don't program in rust.

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