Comment by MikhailVink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MikhailVink | Hacker News Reader

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JetBrains employee here, and I can clarify the point about “Requires login and periodic connection to JetBrains servers to verify the project”. If you are using Fleet in a Free (hobby) mode, we are verifying that the project comply with one of three criteria: 1. your project is local (no Git or Git Remote). 2. your project is public on GitHub. 3. your project is private but has less than 3 committers. In this case, we will need a periodic connection to JetBrains servers to exchange information verifying that you can use Fleet for free, but in no way we would send any sensitive information, such as source code, file names, etc.

If you have Fleet license (paid, for example) there are no criteria checks at all, just the license verification with your JetBrains Account. And we plan to support offline usage similar to how it’s done for IntelliJ IDEA-based IDEs now (offline license keys, floating license server.)

Right now Fleet is in the EAP, and there are no licensing checks at all, they are not yet implemented, and we are not yet done with the verification workflow design.

I don't care why but this is creepy. Use a token in a public repo, not some sort of callback scheme. My IDE should not be doing authorization checks that involve telling a third party what I'm working on, under any circumstances.

Then don't use the product for free?

Or maybe... find a way to not be creepy? They're the ones trying to convince people to move from VSCode.

Luckily, Microsoft has a track record of being totally non-creepy about your data.

Is that sarcasm?

The amount of data that VSCode collects dwarfs this though.

It's a single toggle to turn off all telemetry (anonymized, limited to feature usage - no reporting of source files/projects that I've seen), which takes a few seconds to configure at install time as it's literally a menu item (Code > Preferences > Telemetry):

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry

You can also dump all possible telemetry events at the command-line.

You can’t really shut down all VSCode telemetry.

Source: https://www.roboleary.net/tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry....

FTA:

> Next, I wanted to see what would happen when I disabled telemetry. After some activity, I checked the log, and found no events were logged. That is good.

One paragraph after:

> The absence of logged events doesn’t mean that data is not being sent though! A more accurate way to see what is being sent out is to monitor your outgoing network traffic and analyze the packets.

But unfortunately the author doesn't do that

A bit further down they say

> It looks like you cannot shut telemetry off 100%. These settings will opt you of most data sharing scenarios; but not all data sharing scenarios

And even VSCodium doesn't take it all out

> Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default.

You can, just install vscodium

Than we are talking about different product.

Source?

I’ll just stick with not using JetBrains software like I haven’t for the past two decades. Bloated and slower than Eclipse.

Your IDEs' project management are broken for people who use git CLI (everyone?): https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-183490

The issue is marked "shelved" while consistently active. Do you have any ability to run this up the flagpole, please? I and many others would be very grateful.

Nope nope nope. This is creepy and I can guarantee that it'll be headache after headache. I'll stick to the alternatives so long as this is the policy. Not even going to look at it.

Doesn’t everyone run a git init even if you never push it anywhere? My local projects usually get git with in an hour of me working on them.

> your project is public on GitHub.

What about Gitlab, or some other repo such as gitlab.gnome.org? This seems like it's ripe for edge cases.

Yeah, right, I was not specific enough on this one. It'll definitely go beyond GitHub, extending to some other git solutions, but we don't have a decision whether it's "any" public repo or public repo hosted on the service from some list (like, GitHub, GitLab, Gitee, etc.) We'll look into it later on.

gitlab.gnome.org - I'd expect it to be all open source, right? Open source program should cover such cases.

I really hope that in further investigation you (JetBrains) realize how futile it is to attempt to automate defining something like this.

The best-case scenario I can imagine is that I have to enter a public URL into the editor that JetBrains can then `git clone` from their server.

I can’t imagine “JetBrains curates a list of all public git servers” ends well. (As a Tildegit user.)

Manual rule that never gets defined for good sounds like a trouble waiting to happen. It will cause many support tickets asking for every edge cases and some will be angry for not being approved.

If you're really trying to win VS Code users, such a flexible rule may scare them away.

I'm sorry, I know this is off topic, but I've been looking around at the Fleet docs and can't quite find an answer to this so far, so just hoping you might have an answer.

Does the front end stack of Fleet allow one to run it in a browser when using a remote back end? The same way you can run the back end of VS Code or JupyterLab on a server and render the front end in a browser tab?

I understand you can run the front end locally on your desktop and the back end configured as a remote on a server, but the rendering of the front end in a browser is what I need for the dev environment I need to use at work[1].

[1]: https://www.dominodatalab.com/

Running fronted in browser is not possible at the moment.

Got it, thank you!

[off topic] Are you guys affected by the situation in Russia, or have all JetBrains employees left the country already?

They have stated their position really clearly (and much more clearly than most companies): https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...

I wasn't asking about the company position...

It's not clear what you are asking then. You should clarify.

The info in the link provided addresses the only concrete portion of your comment, which is that, yes, most Russian employees have moved elsewhere.

"Suspending R&D" sounds like no work is done in Russia anymore.

They opened a company in Serbia so I guess that some of the Russian employees already moved to Belgrade.

New office opened in Cyprus, lots of positions open on their site. I assume they are expanding out of Russia.

Will the pricing be same for all users or do users with existing licences (e.g. Ultimate) get a discount on Fleet licence?

We are not ready to share more details on pricing yet, but we are working on it. Will share as soon as we have it!

Emacs keys would be awesome...

I never understood what's the point of Emacs keys without elisp and Emacs plugins. Emulating only the editor part of Emacs without the rest of what makes Emacs great is not something I would spend time on.

Muscle memory. I gave up on Emacs as an editor almost 15 years ago but having spent the prior 15 using it for coding I still set most of my cli editing to use emacs key-bindings and use it in my IDEs.

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