Comment by antt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antt | Hacker News Reader

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>If it's "shitty" and cost almost $3k, you were either taken for a ride or have unrealistic expectations.

16 gb ram, i7, 1tb ssd, 2tb hd. It's also 5 years old, but I'm just too used to the bloody thing to get rid of it. That developer laptops are basically mass market machines is the reason why so much software sucks and why nothing new is being pushed out.

>What kind of work and developer are we talking about? The only ones with computers near this cost I've met usually called themselves "Engineers" and were doing fluid modelling/finite element analysis. Or realtime video processing.

My title does have engineer and principal in it, the other words change every six months or so.

I run a lot of ML models locally before I let them run on the real machines. Most of the cost of the laptop came from all the ram I need to run a couple of dozen VMs to see how our wonderful heterogeneous data environment reacts to something being changed - most of the time the answer is "badly".

Your penny-pinching complaint comes from the following quote from the original text: "The original Requests is a small pure-Python library; if you want to work on it, then any cheap laptop is more than sufficient. $5k is the price of a beefy server or top-end gaming rig."

That task really comes nowhere close to the requiring the hardware you describe as being essential to your work.

You don't think that a library that is supposed to add async support to web requests needs to run a swarm of vms to test the responses of said library?

It’s 2019. You want a swarm of dumb http servers, you call AWS or whatever you use. He worked at Heroku, he knows.

Come on, let’s be frank: he wanted a new top-of-line MBP, regardless of what he’d do with it. He knew he can leverage the fame he carefully cultivated (has said as such in the past) to get it paid for, so he did it. And will keep doing it.

And this is why I no longer work in open source. Know nothings who have no idea about what they are talking about doing character assassinations on those who do.

Sure, call me when he accounts for that money. Note how he’s replied twice already without even trying to do it. Besides, it’s the author of urllib who is surprised, not toyg from HN.

If one fosters a personality cult, one should be ready to stand scrutiny.

Why? For developing that library I'd be perfectly happy if he'd made a fund raiser then spend the money on hookers and blow.

God knows that happens enough in finance for much worse outcomes.

We clearly have very different concepts of what "prompting for donations for project X" actually means.

And frankly, the person you are complaining about thinks essentially the same thing, writing "But I figured that even if he spent $5k of the money on some unrelated computer, we could call that compensation for his past work, and it would still leave ~$25k to fulfill the promises he'd made in the fundraiser."

The point wasn't specifically a complaint about spending $5K on a computer but more establishing a pattern of a lack of transparency which the author thinks has an overall negative effect on community-funded, multi-author/community-run open source projects in Python.

Also, as described, it sounds like Smith - an author of the networking package which Reitz was planning to use - presumably knows what hardware needed to develop and test the network layer.

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