Gitpod shipped GitHub a launch cake for Codespaces | Hacker News Reader

Gitpod shipped GitHub a launch cake for Codespaces

gitpod.io

237 pointsghuntley84 comments

> thus a lot of our employees are German. After an unfair vote, German Chocolate was declared the winner, but it wasn’t without some office debate as to what German Chocolate tastes like

It's not from Germany, it's named after a guy named Samuel German

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_chocolate_cake

... just like a French drain is named after Henry Flagg French

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_drain

Fun fact after that last one, while France will call a French drain a drain, Quebec (the French-speaking part of Canada) actually calls it a "drain Français" due to the influence of English neighbours. We translated the guy's name.

Off topic, but I got a good laugh when I learned that the French call French toast "Pain perdu Americain"

We only call it that when we visit the US though.

I'm sorry to announce you that somebody fooled you. Source: I'm french, lived in many different regions and everybody called it simply "pain perdu". Moreover, french people usually do not add the origin of a recipe like american do on a regular basis.

Also, pain perdu and French toast are different things. You don't use fresh bread for pain perdu, that would be a waste (pun intended).

is that like stop signs saying arret when in france they say "stop"?

Not quite, the stop/arrêt thing is because of a law that says our official language is French so everything HAS to be in French. If a product's packaging does not have a French side it simply cannot be sold in Quebec unless it has an exception of sorts.

There's a great bit about that in the movie Canadian Bacon where a police officer in Canada (not sure if it was actually in Quebec or not) catches some Americans writing anti-Canadian graffiti. The officer informs them that they need to have French translations and helps them add it, and then moves on.

You must see the Latin correction in life of Brian then

Sounds very Pythonesque, indeed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyO1ILQAGsU

Thanks. It's been quite a while since I've seen it. Guess I slightly mis-remembered it, but got the gist of it right.

In Montreal, there is a flashing neon sign on top of a former flour factory [1]. This sign originally read:

    FARINE
    FIVE ROSES
    FLOUR

The first line is French for “flour”, the second line is the brand name, and third line is, well, “flour” in English.

When Bill 101 passed, they had to remove “flour” from the sign as it was an English word. However, they were allowed to keep “Five Roses”, as opposed to “Cinq Roses”, since it’a a brand name, so now it simply reads:

   FARINE
   FIVE ROSES

The owners have apparently tried to take the sign down, since the brand has since been sold to their competitors, but capitulated to public outcry. Apparently, it’s quite expensive to maintain, but I can see why locals don’t want it to go. It adds a lot of character to the skyline.

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/farine-five-roses-sign

Is "stopper" not a valid french verb? I was taught it was.

I'm a bit interested in why all the European countries standardized on STOP for that sign. Apparently that's mandated by the convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Sign... which has wide support in Europe and sporadically other places.

It's impressive/weird to me that the convention got all the countries to use the english word on the stop sign, for consistency.

While I don't know the answer, I would guess it has something to do with it not just being the English word. It's also the Dutch word (spelled exactly the same) and, based on some random clicking in Google Translate, Croation, Norwegian and Czech. It's a secondary translation in a bunch of other languages. I don't know how much of that changed after the road signs, but it looks like a good international basis.

it is not norwegian, as we would write STOPP in norwegian. In that sense, it's annoying, it's a word you understand, but the sign is also "misspelled".

Same in German. I remember teachers lecturing us in school about this. "Stop" certainly has become an acceptable spelling in colloquial German for some people because of this, much to the despair of language purists. Even the Duden (German standard reference dictionary) seems to have adopted it even if with some caveats:

https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/stop

> Even the Duden

Good. The purpose of a dictionary is to record how language is used, not to gatekeep or social engineer what is "proper" language and what isn't.

Linguistic prescriptivism is the purview of bigots and school teachers.

I hate the extremists at the descriptivist end of the spectrum. I have no desire to return to four hundred years ago where everyone spelled words as one pleased, and comprehension suffers for it.

I'm skeptical that anyone wants to de-standardize spelling. Maybe its like the abortion debate. There isn't a pro-abortion side except in the minds of the "pro-life" people. Descriptivists by definition study/report how language is used rather than agitate for any changes so if such people do exist they would be a different kind of prescriptivist.

I think it's a common category error. The job of an academic linguist is mostly (as I understand it) to study language as-found, but I've met a few people who take that to mean "linguists -- the experts on language -- say we shouldn't try to 'correct' differences."

It comes in a few flavours. Sometimes an assumption that linguists as people are never prescriptive. Sometimes as an argument for the respectability of established dialect (not to say this conclusion is wrong, only the argument.)

There is plenty of (mostly non-professional IME) "normative descriptivism" floating around.

There are multiple French-speaking parts of Canada

Of course! I didn't mean to say that French is only spoken in Quebec, you can read my comment more as a one of the French-speaking province, didn't mean to exclude anyone :)

Too late! Your comment commanded everyone else in Canada to speak English, and French is now excluded.

Yea I have had heard disdain from born in France speakers who immigrated to Canada, about Quebecois or Canadian french.

Alot is literal translation of English to French, not using a specific french term or word for an item.

Example I always hear of: sour cream is translated to Crème Sure in Canada french.

Where while not always identical in product, proper France French term is Crème fraîche

While they’re similar, crème fraîche and sour cream are different foods. Sour cream usually has additional ingredients and is noticeably more viscous, and has a much more sour flavor. You wouldn’t really want to put it on fruit or breakfast pastries like crème fraîche.

> Sour cream usually has additional ingredients

While sour cream may sometimes have additional stabilizers, the main difference (both are cultured cream products made with a similar process) is that crème fraiche has a significantly higher (~30%) than sour cream (~20%).

Official French from Quebec has some pretty atrocious words that where forcibly "adapted". My favourite example is "mél" which is "mail" as-in email.

Before you ask, no, no one uses that.

Other way around. Quebec uses "courriel" and France has settled on "mél".

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/robert-chaudenson/blog/210513/ema...

> Yea I have had heard disdain from born in France speakers who immigrated to Canada, about Quebecois or Canadian french.

Ironically, the brain drain seems to only be going one way.

> Where while not always identical in product, proper France French term is Crème fraîche

Rarely identical.

There's a similar story about you'll hear from tour guides in East Jerusalem – there's a neighborhood there called at-tel al-faransiya (in Arabic) or ha-giv'a ha-tzarfatit (in Hebrew), both translate "The French [people] Hill".

When your tour passes by that neighborhood, your guide would surely tell you that it is actually named after the British general John French who was stationed there, and a similar mistake as the one above made it change nationality.

Everyone laughs, and continue with the tour. But those that would later search for general French woill find he didn't serve with his Majesty's forces in Palestine – and that the hill is named after the French monks from the Monastery of St Anne…

And in France, a "French Kiss" is just a "kiss."

In France, a French kiss is a shovel.

Same for French dip.

This reminds me of the French Fries renamed Freedom Fries in the USA because of France opposition to the invasion of Iraq after 9/11.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries

The funny thing is that this name certainly has nothing to do with France :

"The origin of the name French fries has nothing to do with France, the name comes from the Irish. In the old Irish language, the word french means chopped. At the beginning of the 20th century, Irish people immigrated to the United States, Canada, and other regions. These immigrants popularized the term french fries to other countries. Therefore, French fries originally meant frenched fries, cut into strips. Frenched strips are larger than julienned filaments, so this is why it is called French fries."

(from https://www.potatochipprocessing.com/why-are-french-fries-ca... )

See also "The French cut" a.k.a. "Julienning" :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julienning

I always assumed this was an American thing as most Europeans seem to regard "original" fries as Belgian (or Dutch). Interesting that it's not actually about the origin but the cut.

FWIW thick cut fries are often sold as "Flamse Friets" (Flemish fries, in Dutch) or "Belgische Fritten" (Belgian fries, in German) so having "French fries" in English just felt consistently inconsistent.

We (USA) also have "steak fries" which are much thicker than normal fries.

So named because they're commonly served with steak

My favorite part of this marketing stunt is how classy the author was about giving maximum shine to the baker. It is indeed an excellent-looking cake and she deserves it.

That was nice. You can still see, though, the initial hesitancy to let the baker run with the idea. We're pretty funny as a group where we push back hard on our customers that want to peer into details. But we tend to not return the favor to other fields of expertise when we need their help. I've noticed physicians and pilots are often the same way.

A lawyer friend used to say his worst customers were engineers and doctors, who would want to understand the entire legal system before being being comfortable with a legal position.

At the risk of showing how much I live in a bubble: Yes? How else would you do it? Not understanding seems like a great way to at best get caught flat footed and and worst unintentionally do something illegal.

Agreed! Unfortunately, most of the Codespaces team aren't even in the SF area, in order to actually receive this cake (like most modern teams, we're heavily distributed). But I love that this gave awareness for Camisha, and her unbelievable cakes.

That’s quite a cake, and a cheeky way to put themselves into the conversation. GitPod was and is a great service and I hope they find a sustainable path forward. Of course they can support other repo hosting services, but codespaces must have been a devastating blow. Best to them.

Geoff here from Gitpod. Codespaces launching is _awesome_ and we have been waiting for this moment for so long (over 2 years!) - now everyone is talking about improving developer experience.

ps. If you run technical workshops I would <3 to speak with you https://www.gitpod.io/blog/workshops-as-code

very nice gesture :-) greetings from kiel <3

Is it though? This totally sounds like "yeay... we love that you've ruined our business model, it's greeaaat!"

Though I get that you can't really say that you're gutted. And at least they aren't giving Codespaces away for free, so you can at least compete.

And I guess companies like Shazam and TomTom still exist, despite Google making way better free versions of their products.

Not affiliated with anything of this at all, but this can totally be a good thing for them.

GitHub entering this space gives them additional validation of the existence of a market for this kind of product and gives a lot of additional exposure to the product idea as a whole.

Even if they will now get a smaller percentage of developers using this kind of tool, the rise in the total number of developers using such tools will most probably make up for it.

GitPod so far has been a better experience, unless you get access to the actually 'paid' codespaces. Dealing with branches is a pain and a fork is impossible with the GitHub web editor. GitPod has a better real desktop experience in the browser. So I can see how this can help verify the experience they are after and confirms people want.

Personally been using GitPod a lot for mentoring and small workshops. (but also coder).

Gitpod looks awesome! I hope a CodeCommit integration is coming so I can use this in my environment.

Also great work leading the charge on the COVIDSafe app last year - I knew I knew your name from somewhere!

I’ll add an anecdote here that I’ve been really looking forward to playing with codespaces, and after seeing this post earlier today I spent a bit of time playing with gitpod, and reading up on comparisons. The clear pricing, prebuilds, and simple configuration has me leaning towards trialing gitpod for our team, I doubt I would have even been aware of it without the hype around codespaces.

The fact that free git platforms exists all around doesn't kill dozens of profitable alternatives.

The same could be said about codespaces. In fact, more people getting into codespaces is great for platforms like gitpod that can fight and offer solid alternative experiences.

The issue I believe for platforms like gitpod is to shift the mindset of many devs and companies that developing in a browser isn't merely a possibility but sometimes preferable.

> preferable

Pull up a chair for a moment and consider that in this moment of time you are an open-source maintainer or a team-lead who has to review the pull-requests in the video below. Each browser tab is a brand new development environment, the git branch is automatically cloned, all dependencies are restored and your software has already been compiled.

Good? Now you understand what Gitpod is all about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7BINiu_Rbo

Pretty much the same here. It provides an easy view on the PR and for basic smoke tests. Have been using c9 before this, but GitPod changed a lot for the better.

Many of these platforms aren't really interested in shifting the _full_ development to the browser (although they could), since that would destroy the business position they're trying to establish for themselves. JS was created to be able to run in the browser, and yet most JS developers insist on still writing or relying on metatooling that can't actually run in the browser, even if that tooling is already written in JS! It requires downloading and installing an SDK/runtime† like NodeJS, or relying on a service provider like GitPod to provide the analog (read: run the same tools, but on machines that they own and that you can communicate with via the browser viewport).

If folks were really committed to improving the developer experience, then instead of what we do now and instead of what services like GitPod and Codespaces propose that we do, development would work like this:

1. Download the project source tree

2. Open README.html

3. Drag and drop the project source _onto_ README.html, which doesn't contain half explanations about setting up the appropriate development environment, so much as it contains an exact description (i.e. in executable code) of the build process—for the benefit of the machine that will perform it (along with these three steps—for the benefit of the human/prospective contributor)

† See <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-java...>

On the contrary, the software engineering industry is massive and market validation with more competitors is a good thing. You can build a great business just dealing with companies that don't use Github.

Personally, this post made me aware there are existing alternatives to Codespaces. Codespaces is very cool, but it also adds to an ever-growing single point of failure, which is dependence on Github for almost all of our tools and tooling. Using robust alternatives can help to spread that risk around.

Gitpod is open-source, accepts pull-requests and can be self hosted on your own infrastructure btw.

The page title says "Page Not Found" which would make you think it's a 404, the page body says "500 Oh, no! Something went wrong on our side." But the actual HTTP response is 200 OK.

The entire /blog section has a flash of content and then is replaced with the error message. If you view the source, you can still find the content.

Oh, but if I turn off uBlock Origin and the analytics.js and newsletter-signup.js/css are allowed to load then the page loads fine. Interesting!

Thanks for the many details! We continue to investigate that...

I noticed the same with the Brave browser a few months ago, but when we dropped Google Analytics it worked with Brave.

Diving deeper into what uBlock Origin does...

Thanks!

GitPod is awesome and of course ahead of time. I for one, however find it heartwarming - groups of humans competing against each other and cheering for each other with sweets and cakes.

We, probably at the same time can be the worst and the best creature on this planet.

Ah, reminds me of the good ol' browser wars: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358300 (From Redmond with Love - IE team sends cake for FF4, 2011)

That tradition hasn't been lost. Cakes are still regularly sent. I think the last ones were https://mobile.twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1220135193991962...

I recently started using hosted codespaces (because I bought a apple M1 and ran into a lot of issues with compilation)

I started with gitpod and then moved to GitHub codespaces after 1 weeks.

GitHub codespaces is just miles better in terms of features AND first class integration AND reliability (I gave up on gitpod after 2 consecutive nights of not being able to connect into my pod).

While I hope gitpod all the best and want them to do super well. It is hard for me to imagine going back

<3 thanks. We are sorry to hear that you had a rough experience, know that it was terrible couple days on our side as well. If you want to catch up and share insights in person https://ghuntley.com/meet

I’m also M1 (iPad and Mac) and cross-targeting needs is a boon for either Gitpod or GitHub Codespaces especially when using Nix.

What are the key differences between Gitpod's vscode and Coder's code-server[1] ? It seems that competition would be a lot easier if Microsoft just adds codespace's features directly to vscode.

[1] https://github.com/cdr/code-server

Do people really type like that normally? With emojis interspersed in the middle of sentences?

Given the user ghuntley is claiming to be the author, and types with "<3" in their messages, it seems so?

I feel like emoji's in conversation are a good middle ground for the lack of body-language?

I'm not knocking emojis across the board, I use them plenty in text conversations. But with something like,

> I’ve been scrolling through your facebook page and would love to work with you.

HN doesn't show emojis but in his email he puts a heart after the word "love." Which seems redundant and breaks up the sentence awkwardly

I dunno - I'm definitely a language purist, and even so, I will admit that the emoji is not redundant. It causes the emphasis of the sentence to fall on the word "love", rather than "work". It has a similar effect to "I would *love* to work with you", but without the awkward plain-text formatting.

Sigh, newspeak (yeah I'm abusing the term)... You even have uptalk in text with 2 sentences ending in "?". People are going to downvote this because I'm going to sound (and be) patronising, but drop it, uptalk makes you sound not confident.

Some guy whose girlfriend I follow on Facebook posts updates with emojis next to words, something like "We went up [Mountain emoji] Mount Cook today", etc. It's excruciating, the last time I saw something like this was when I was doing fill-in-the-blanks in kindergarten, where we had to add the words next to the picture hints, so when people write like that, yeah I think they're kindergartners.

> You even have uptalk in text with 2 sentences ending in "?". People are going to downvote this because I'm going to sound (and be) patronising, but drop it, uptalk makes you sound not confident.

I'm pretty sure that's the point. Ending in a question mark is a way of marking that there are error bars and you're not 100% confident, just saying what you think is most likely the case.

The 2 sentences are already hedged with "it seems so" and "I feel...". There is no need to uptalk it. "Not 100% confident", well, yeah, it shows.

Is he sure he feels that way, or is he not confident how he feels about emojis?

I personally love using gitpod for open source work.

I got it setup and working for open library (https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary) and I think some people have been quite happy to not have to download them many GB of docker images to their machine to be able to do small tweaks.

Pretty curious why Facebook is listed as a customer - they built this internally ~5 years ago and wouldn’t buy it in afaik.

In a large organization, it's quite common that some division buys a tool on their own, without the other divisions knowing about it. Especially in a company as large as Facebook. So realistically this means someone from Facebook gave them money at least once, not that all of FB is a customer.

Brilliant work Geoffrey.

The post renders completely and correctly and is promptly replaced by a 500 error that is probably fake. Modern web development is hilarious.

Our fault, fix deployed. Thanks for letting me know.

I'm still encountering the same issue though :)

That's on me, although I haven't quite figured out what causes it :). It's all static pages.

I'm going to completely remove all Javascript on pages that don't need it, which is most of them.

Investigation continues...

That's a good-looking cake!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com