Great guy. Going to miss him
Thank you, GitHub
331–340 of 460 posts
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll take the "con" side. A lot of the core Rubyists left for Shopify after the sale, and I'm sure Nat had a contract to stay on for X amount of time, where Microsoft would make no major changes. Now that this is expiring, I fully expect Microsoft to start making changes with the site that will appeal to large corporations, at the expense of what I would prefer, as an individual user. I guess time will tell.
Nat comes from the Microsoft side, not the GitHub side.
To me, Nat and Miguel come from Xamarin Desktop, which made Linux on the desktop an actual pleasure in the late 90's/early 2000's. They're a couple of my heroes.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
"They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran." Wait, that's a thing ? We get a signup from Iran about once every month and I always, apologetically, send a personal note saying that I wish we could provide service to them but ... You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ?
> You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ? A lot of it probably. Also, not sure how you can collect payment from these users. And keep in mind your software might end up being used by their regime for oppressive purpose. Keep in mind the people of Iran can end these sanctions at any time. It's a personal and societal choice.
> the people of Iran can end these sanctions at any time
Sorry to bite on this off-topic thing... but, _how_? Overthrowing their government? I guess that would be technically true, but "at any time" seems like a weird phrase to use for that.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#334Most people probably say this just to be like “I know Nat, look at me.” I don’t know how to phrase this to avoid that: Nat is an incredible person. I’ve been lucky to get to know him over the past couple months. Not only is he super chill, but he’s also not afraid to ask basic questions. Many of you might roll your eyes at that, but it’s a real problem: when you’re organizing something, you feel pressured to know eve…
He (unless someone impersonated him) made some quite undiplomatic remarks regarding CoPilot here on HN. As an OSS author, I was offended by those remarks.
I think it's fine that someone shares their bold opinions on future technology and puts it out in the public without hiding all this discussion in private where the public can not interact with them.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#335Re: Thank you, GitHub
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
That youtube-dl moment was a really defining moment for me, particularly as a heavy user of youtube-dl and having contributed a PR here or there. GitHub handled the situation really well, both in terms of the course of action it took, as well as setting up new procedures and a legal fund to prevent future incidents like this. Along with the EFF, they have actively promoted the right of developers (and FOSS) to tinker…
That was just for show because it was a brand risk. Similar repos without journalists covering them are still banned without dispute. https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-0...
If you read the response letter the EFF prepared you'll see their argument was that the "rolling cipher" yt-dl worked around was not an actual protection measure. They contrast it with widevine, which is. There's a good legal argument yt-dl was legal in the us, and there isn't for the repo you linked to. I think standing up for things that have a plausible argument that they're legal in the US but not things that aren't is a reasonable line for a corporation to draw.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ? A lot of it probably. Also, not sure how you can collect payment from these users. And keep in mind your software might end up being used by their regime for oppressive purpose. Keep in mind the people of Iran can end these sanctions at any time. It's a personal and societal choice.
> the people of Iran can end these sanctions at any time Sorry to bite on this off-topic thing... but, _how_? Overthrowing their government? I guess that would be technically true, but "at any time" seems like a weird phrase to use for that.
Yes. Just look at Libya during the Arab Spring. Democracy is never given, it is earned.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#338Microsoft buying Github was the best thing that could've happened to Github/open source in general.
Screw the people who still spread MS FUD. I cannot think of any other company, certainly not FB/Goog (Amzn has nothing in this space and no interest outside paid AWS services) that would've done anything close to what MS have done.
Everything is better, tons of things are now free, integration has improved, there's full transparency. It helps that MS's own tools like VSCode, VS online etc are best in class by some margin and used by everyone.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> removed from the programming language so that more Microsoft Visual Studio licenses could be sold. Honestly, I’m fine with this level of dickishness so long as it means the rest of the VS ecosystem is free-to-use. Someone or something has to subsidise VSCode.
Right, I have to admit I don't entirely understand the .NET kerfuffle. .NET is clearly Microsoft's language ecosystem, just as much as Swift is Apple's, and much more so than, say, Go is Google's. A lot of the value in .NET is how it works with the Microsoft ecosystem - or put another way, as someone who mostly doesn't develop on Windows (but uses Windows a lot as a desktop OS), I have never once felt that .NET was t…
> It is pretty cool that this isn't true. But the idea that Microsoft organizationally having control over the .NET open source project is somehow bad for open source is just incomprehensible to me, who grew up on .NET not being open source at all.
It's not about open-source: it's more that major organizations and industries won't use a programming platform that is entirely at the whims of a company they have no real control over and without independent means to ensure it keeps on working, so a compromise position that Microsoft took is to make .NET open-source, so that in the event Microsoft disappears overnight (say, Mt. Rainier erupting and wiping out the Seattle metro area) people have something they can keep on using and build and maintain themselves. We saw the opposite with VB6: the VB6 platform was never open and shared and now all the companies that invested in VBA and VB6 in the 1990s is rightfully annoyed because VB6 is a complete dead-end with no feasible upgrade-path to .NET (VB.NET is not compatible with VB6).
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While my SaaS (and my current job) is a .NET shop because it originated with some "Classic" ASP 3.0 VBScripts that my boss put together himself in the late 1990s that was slowly transitioned through .NET WebForms (ew) and ASP.NET MVC, we still use it for new greenfield projects because .NET is a nice platform overall that scales really well from one-off prototype projects that can be easily transitioned to high-performance distributed applications without any major rewrites (the only thing I've had to "rewrite" was the conversion from .aspx (as an MVC View, not WebForms) to Razor .cshtml, everything else has been refactored through the years. The tooling and integration between MS products and services does save a lot of trouble otherwise (that's where the value is).
My experience from other shops, and the problems I've seen there is not that other "stacks" (I hate that word) like MySQL+PHP, Postgres+Python, Anything+NodeJS are somehow less capable (excepting PHP, it's often the opposite, actually) but that you end up with dozens of projects all with their own separate stacks and build environments, all with their own tedious onboarding processes (e.g. having one Angular project that absolutely requires Node 12, not Node 14, to run) while another project's server-side NodeJS code absolutely requires Node 16 and Python and Tomcat somewhere.
So I'm more than happy to pay the thousands of USD per year for my MSDN Subscription because it gives me a platform that saves me the trouble and headaches of a highly heterogenous environment especially given the fact we're a small shop.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#340Microsoft buying Github was the best thing that could've happened to Github/open source in general. Screw the people who still spread MS FUD. I cannot think of any other company, certainly not FB/Goog (Amzn has nothing in this space and no interest outside paid AWS services) that would've done anything close to what MS have done. Everything is better, tons of things are now free, integration has improved, there's ful…
It’s not FUD if Microsoft has a history of EEE.
I’m rolling my eyes hard at your claim of VS Code as best in class. If the category is JS-powered code editors then I’ll surely give them that title. However BS Code has many flaws compared to other IDEs. One being that it’s restricted in performance by the language it’s written in. I don’t use those products so I must not be apart of everyone?