Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#31

Post by fatline » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

uberman wrote: post #9

flyingswift wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: Work at Facebook Not really sure what you are implying with the 'Big Brother' comment. The remote development servers are only used for writing/debugging code and not for other daily tasks. Even if they are tracking what tools/functions I am using on the server, what does that matter? Personally, I have found remote development awesome because it enables engineers to start contributing to a huge product i…

People don't like being tracked and Facebook has a long history of being deceptive around how and when it tracks people. Facebook also has a long history of selling the data it collects as a result of tracking even when the people being tracked try as they might to opt out. Hence the "big brother" reference. Frankly, I was/am a little leary of how Facebook might be "improving" the MSVSC Remote Development pack since…

> People don't like being tracked and Facebook has a long history of being deceptive around how and when it tracks people.

you are mixing unrelated things. As an employee of a company it's unlikely you can raise any concern about your privacy when working on the company's main asset.

> Facebook also has a long history of selling the data it collects as a result of tracking even when the people being tracked try as they might to opt out.

provide a reference please

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#32

Post by jonathankoren » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

I hadn’t realized Nuclide was dead. It had a great experience browsing remote files systems (albeit quite a heavyweight setup, but the big problem with it is that it tried to do too much. It override almost every preference and plugin. It was crazy.

You just had to drink the kool aid and give up any thought of of using any of your own preferences, but it worked.

Guess I’m uninstalling it now.

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#33

Post by taurath » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 11:46 PM UTC

flyingswift wrote: post #5

taurath wrote: post #2

I’m disappointed this wasn’t really about remote workers but about remote development as in code doesn’t live on the machine. That said, remote development tends to be awful, and more tools could be helpful if it’s not specific to a FBs particular implementation of remote dev shards. Learning that at Facebook you don’t develop things locally and likely are on a box with all sorts of things tracking your usage and acc…

Disclaimer: Work at Facebook Not really sure what you are implying with the 'Big Brother' comment. The remote development servers are only used for writing/debugging code and not for other daily tasks. Even if they are tracking what tools/functions I am using on the server, what does that matter? Personally, I have found remote development awesome because it enables engineers to start contributing to a huge product i…

I don't honestly expect there to not be access control especially at a big tech company, but for me when its Facebook doing it I can't help but think there's some MBA that might put you in a "bottom 5%" productive employee cohort because your usage patterns just so happen to correlate with less productive employees. They could of course do that almost anywhere as a lot of business IT tracking software is ubiquitous especially in tech, but it feels more likely at FB.

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#34

Post by simlevesque » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 11:47 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #26

I was an Atom holdout for a while - it felt disingenuous the way Microsoft kind of swept in and usurped their idea. But man, eventually I caved. VSCode is a marvel. It performs better than most native IDEs I've used, despite being Electron-based. It's the good parts of Visual Studio without any of the legacy baggage. Its package ecosystem is just as vibrant as Atom's, with solid support for nearly every language unde…

> usurped their idea.

Monaco was a thing way before Atom was. It was publicly released after Atom but it was already in some of Microsoft's websites.

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#35

Post by IggleSniggle » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 11:51 PM UTC

fatline wrote: post #31

uberman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't like being tracked and Facebook has a long history of being deceptive around how and when it tracks people. Facebook also has a long history of selling the data it collects as a result of tracking even when the people being tracked try as they might to opt out. Hence the "big brother" reference. Frankly, I was/am a little leary of how Facebook might be "improving" the MSVSC Remote Development pack since…

> People don't like being tracked and Facebook has a long history of being deceptive around how and when it tracks people. you are mixing unrelated things. As an employee of a company it's unlikely you can raise any concern about your privacy when working on the company's main asset. > Facebook also has a long history of selling the data it collects as a result of tracking even when the people being tracked try as th…

Not OP, but I'm also not sure how OP will provide a decent reference of constantly moving goalposts of privacy wrt to privacy implications of the Facebook platform. The default has always been towards public and noisy, even as Facebook has been forced to mature and realize there were privacy implications about things they were doing by default on the platform.

Despite a culture of "move fast and break things," things have never been broken from new more restrictive default privacy settings. Users who signed up in 2005 would still be an open book by default today.

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#36

Post by filleokus » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 11:51 PM UTC

I have such high hopes for remote development, I want this in all my editors/environment.

Semi-OT but: How are spinup times for different VM/host options? Would it be feasible to have a beefy dedicated machine with something on it that spins up a VM/container when I SSH to it, with all my stuff on it?

Would it be feasible to build something like that with any of the major cloud hosting providers? One always-on server accepting the SSH connection and forwarding it to a fresh VM or something?

It seems wasteful to resources allocated 24/7 when they will probably only be used 8/5.

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#37

Post by Aqueous » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 11:57 PM UTC

flyingswift wrote: post #5

taurath wrote: post #2

I’m disappointed this wasn’t really about remote workers but about remote development as in code doesn’t live on the machine. That said, remote development tends to be awful, and more tools could be helpful if it’s not specific to a FBs particular implementation of remote dev shards. Learning that at Facebook you don’t develop things locally and likely are on a box with all sorts of things tracking your usage and acc…

Disclaimer: Work at Facebook Not really sure what you are implying with the 'Big Brother' comment. The remote development servers are only used for writing/debugging code and not for other daily tasks. Even if they are tracking what tools/functions I am using on the server, what does that matter? Personally, I have found remote development awesome because it enables engineers to start contributing to a huge product i…

If you’re using a React pipeline on the remote server, how quickly does the page refresh occur? I do remote VM development where I work and a major pain point for me is how long it takes to refresh a page that I’m working on.

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#38

Post by ahartmetz » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 11:59 PM UTC

tudelo wrote: post #16

uberman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't like being tracked and Facebook has a long history of being deceptive around how and when it tracks people. Facebook also has a long history of selling the data it collects as a result of tracking even when the people being tracked try as they might to opt out. Hence the "big brother" reference. Frankly, I was/am a little leary of how Facebook might be "improving" the MSVSC Remote Development pack since…

As an employee working on a corporate device everything will be tracked anyways, this is the most tin-foil take ever. Your latter concern is at least a reasonable one, but it should all be open source anyways? Not that any of us have the time to audit everything. I doubt Microsoft is going to allow anything nefarious...

> As an employee working on a corporate device everything will be tracked anyways

Note that that isn't true in most (all?) European countries. It is illegal to eavesdrop on employees without a strong and particular reason.

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#39

Post by coldtea » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #24

taurath wrote: post #2

I’m disappointed this wasn’t really about remote workers but about remote development as in code doesn’t live on the machine. That said, remote development tends to be awful, and more tools could be helpful if it’s not specific to a FBs particular implementation of remote dev shards. Learning that at Facebook you don’t develop things locally and likely are on a box with all sorts of things tracking your usage and acc…

> all sorts of things tracking your usage and access to everything lends even further credence to the big brother thing. As a user, shouldn't you be happy if the usage / access to everything by Facebook developers is carefully monitored? That should significantly reduce the risk that some insider improperly accesses any of your data.

>As a user, shouldn't you be happy if the usage / access to everything by Facebook developers is carefully monitored?

Only in the sense that I would be happy that the serial killer that captured me uses sterilised blades. That would considerably reduce the risk of infection.

Re: Facebook and Microsoft Partner on Remote Development

#40

Post by Scarbutt » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 12:08 AM UTC

dan-robertson wrote: post #28

xxpor wrote: post #15

Remote development via TRAMP is the number 1 reason I'm stuck with Emacs. More support via other editors is always appreciated.

The sad thing about tramp is that it requires code to be written agains it. When it was added to emacs, developers had not previously had to think that some buffers might be on remote machines and so their code would not magically work agains it. New code ought to be written with tramp in mind using functions that work remotely but this isn’t always done. With a complex development environment (say compiler, separate…

Emacs works great in a terminal, all the issues you mentioned disappear ;) (you didn't mention why you really need GUI Emacs) - I use emacs 95% of the time inside remote tmux sessions, you also have true color support is that your thing, what issues do you have?

Also, ITerm lets you open http links.