_coveredInBees

Yeah, making sure we have capacity to treat anyone sick is certainly one of the highest priorities (and the reason there was such a scramble trying to contain the virus from wreaking havoc if we went past that). And I get that there are other "costs" to the virus and lockdown and a holistic, balanced view is useful. Heck, I have two young children who have been remote schooling for almost a year now while both parents work full-time.

I just object with the parent's following statement:

> With the vaccines now available, it seems like our goal should still be be to maintain the highest level of sustainable medical system occupancy.

If we are still trying to maintain the highest level of sustainable medical system occupancy while the percentage of population that has been vaccinated is slowly increasing, it would actually mean we are doing a horrible job in trying to limit preventable deaths when a fully vaccinated populace + herd immunity is not too far away. Maybe when a much larger percentage of the population is vaccinated, the spread and rate of deaths will be low enough that this may change, but we are still nowhere near that stage.

Call me a renegade, but I think the only goal should be to minimize the total number of deaths from Covid. Trying to maximize sustainable medical system occupancy is almost certainly not aligned with the former goal.

I'm curious, what are your thoughts on first-hand survivor accounts such as these?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071

https://www.voanews.com/south-central-asia/china-uses-rape-t...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/uighur-xinjian...

These are real people. They aren't Western "plants", and it would be a pretty big conspiracy for them to all coordinate and "lie" about the things they detail. Sure, western media is biased, but I would still trust it a lot more when reporting on such matters than Chinese media because the latter have a lot more to lose and are also single-mindedly focused on controlling the narrative when it comes to any sort of press or public release of information because ultimately they are an extension of the Chinese government in a very direct way.

If I had to guess, he is likely a front-end engineer and I can kind of sympathize with some of his gripes because I've dabbled with front-end/full-stack work myself (benefits of working at a small company and getting to wear different hats) and it seemed absurd to me how much churn there is in the field and how much extra effort you need to put in to remain relevant from an employability standpoint. If your place of employment still uses 5-10 year old tech (and that would be perfectly reasonable) the skills you develop at work aren't necessarily making you more attractive to current employers. Even though I was never going to be a full-timd front-end developer, I couldn't fathom having to put in the extra effort outside of work just to keep up with developments and the latest and greatest in the field while trying to manage a healthy work-life balance.

That being said, I don't think that is really the issue here for this person. It reads as someone who has no real passion for programming or his craft and went into the field for perhaps the wrong reasons. I love coding and software engineering. I've loved it ever since I was a child and started with GWBASIC. Even though I went down a different path and ended up with a PhD in Physics, I ultimately couldn't be happy without coding in my life and I ended up self teaching myself almost everything I know and making a career switch (ML Engineer + SWE) and I simply can't imagine doing anything else. I'd still choose this path even if I earned half my salary because I enjoy what I do. But I felt exactly like the author in my prior career which over time felt more and more like a grind and something I did just to maintain the status quo and help support my family.

The person who wrote the article just needs to make a switch to something they are passionate about, or something that they are equally dispassionate about but provides more compensation (don't recommend that trade-off personally). His issues have very little to do with the field of computer programming itself.

While you are not wrong, that doesn't feel entirely true. Every single time I watch some version of the 2 Falcons landing back on earth [1], I get chills and have a tear or two in my eyes. It feels right, it feels like progress and it is awe inspiring. Not that I don't have an immense amount of admiration and respect for everything that has come before and was achieved in the past. But it feels like time to move forward with newer designs, ideas and technology. Especially when SpaceX, BO and others are achieving success with these new ideas and showing that we can take that next step forward.

[1] - https://youtu.be/sX1Y2JMK6g8?t=189

Exactly. I was cringing so hard because he kept engaging with the rep on lines of questioning that were so obviously going to go down the path they did. I've cancelled my NYT account in the past and it was rather painless because I was consistent in my response and communicated clearly that I just wanted to unsubscribe. I've since renewed my subscription, but cancelling service with an ISP or even Amazon Prime at this point is way more annoying.

It's a good article with a lot of solid points, but that section had me rolling my eyes. Sure reads like someone pining for exploitative "startup" culture to get more than what they are paying for out of their employees. If you consistently feel the need to impinge on your employees weekends or PTO, that's a management failure, not an entitled employee problem.

That's not true. If you install it from the Mac App store, you do then get the extension and can activate it within Safari. I just switched from LastPass to Bitwarden and by all accounts it seems better than LastPass (for my basic usage) and the Safari extension is working fine for me.

Yes, I do that now, but there are still issues around that workflow and nothing beats being able to prototype locally. Some issues (not major deal breakers, but still a source of annoyance):

- Much more limited IDE experience if you use any graphical IDE. I prefer Pycharm because it is far superior to pretty much anything else out there when working in Python + Pytorch. You need to use a remote desktop solution like VNC in that situation, which is not remotely close to being on-par with local code prototyping.

Jupyter notebooks I abhor because of how poor they are in relation to any decent IDE. VsCode is the only tool that has a great remote dev workflow but it just isn't near the functionality of Pycharm when you use the latter daily. You also don't directly get the ability to plot and visualize data in something like matplotlib when working remotely which is again an issue. I'll still use it if I have to when VNC isn't snappy enough

- If data security is a concern, everything needs to occur through a VPN which is another intermediate step in your workflow to get started every time you open up your laptop.

- If you have spotty internet access or are traveling, the remote dev workflow suffers immensely.

The other thing I should mention is that outside of the standard data exploration + model training/inference workflow, there are other use-cases where being able to prototype locally is very advantageous. I write a lot of our tooling and internal libraries (for example: a keras-like model training framework in Pytorch) and that involves a lot of pytorch code that references GPUs but testing and prototyping that could easily be done with small models on a laptop. Not being able to do that at all is really annoying and having a native IDE experience when writing a library (especially when you rely on several internally developed libraries) is very critical in my experience.

Again, all of these are not individual deal-breakers, but I feel the pain almost every day.

Not everything in deep learning involves running gigantic models on large GPUs or TPUs in the cloud though I'm sure that is the norm for a lot of companies. There is a lot of value in being able to run smaller models when you are working on real-time, edge applications, especially on the inference side of things. We do a lot of that where I work and I find my macbook pro very frustrating on that front after previously having had a Dell XPS 15 with a decent enough nvidia GPU.

I just don't think you've tried or been exposed to responsible REPL prototyping and development. Like sure, you could have all sorts of issues if you use REPL irresponsibly and pollute your state with undocumented code and side effects. But if you use it responsibly, it can be really fast and efficient when prototyping things... Even complex subsystems in a larger codebase. I've prototyped entire reimplementations of SOTA object-detection DNN algorithms in Pytorch with no issues and have been far more productive because I can develop functionality in small chunks while intimately understanding the problem at hand and associated data and then immediately graduate it to a working script/module/package as I go along.

For more complex things, I can even have a stub for a function I am developing and breakpoint into it and then I prototype the functionality in the REPL and that is wayyy faster and less bug prone than trying to go at it blindly in your IDE without being able to experiment and verify your code as you develop it.

Lol, that got a chuckle out of me. Yeah, it boggles my mind that someone would be disdainful of something as useful as a good variable viewer in an IDE. While it is certainly pretty essential when you are working with data or prototyping algorithms, I also do a lot of software engineering and library development in Python and I still find it *extremely* useful in Pycharm when prototyping code, and especially when debugging.

Like sure, I could drop into pdb and tediously work through printing things out (and good luck if you are printing out ndarrays or large dictionaries or wanting to look through instance variables for an instance in your local execution context) and take 4X longer to figure out why something isn't working, or just in a quick glance figure out exactly what the issue is. I guess I'll continue being a n00b developer happily relying on a variable explorer whenever available :o).

I couldn't agree more. While I have moved on from Spyder onto Pycharm for many years now, Spyder will always have a soft spot in my heart for being a great first IDE that brought so many great quality-of-life features and replicated and surpassed the MATLAB experience of prototyping and developing code/algorithms in an interactive manner.

Also, I know ccordoba is here on HN. If you read this, know that you have immense respect from me for tirelessly maintaining Spyder for all these years (I started using it in 2009)

Personally, I can't stand Jupyter for research because the introspection capabilities are so poor and limited compared to working in something like Spyder, Pycharm or VsCode. Moreover, I much prefer having interactive matplotlib plots for data exploration in a Qt/Gtk window rather than the inline matplotlib plots in Jupyter (though you can sometimes get it work to pop up windows for plots, but you still have a more interactive plotting experience in Pycharm/Spyder/VsCode)

As someone who loves Spyder and used it a lot many years back, I've had no trouble doing all my scientific/algorithm prototyping in Pycharm while benefiting immensely from the astoundingly superior code intelligence/auto-complete/type-hinting in Pycharm. There is also a "Code Cell" plugin you can download for Pycharm that basically gets you to parity with Code-cells in Spyder/Matlab.

For me, the excellent Python shell in Pycharm that supports multiline copy-paste, tab completion, and function-signature overlays makes prototyping algorithms and ideas much faster. That paired with the excellent history browser in Pycharm lets me easily grab relevant bits of code and promote them into a script or function and go from there. And then if you are trying to debug any algorithm, Pycharm is far superior on that front and I am far more efficient at debugging and fixing problems in Pycharm than in something like Vscode (though I do recall Spyder's debugger being pretty decent since it supports integration with IPython)

There is a steep learning curve with Pycharm initially, but imo it works just fine (and for me at least, much better) in comparison to other things like Spyder/Jupyter.

I would definitely recommend Spyder to most non-software engineer Python users, especially if they are in Data science. Nothing by <3 for Spyder's awesome data viewer widgets.

I may be misunderstanding, but Pycharm has supported multiple Python consoles (and running multiple files) for a while now.

I'm not arguing against VR for shared social experiences over the internet with remote participants. I actually do think that it can be great for that, especially once technology catches up some more. My point though is that if you already have family or friends in your home, then it is pretty much impossible to have any sort of quality social interactions in VR and you are much better off enjoying things IRL, even if it isn't as immersive as what a VR experience could produce.

I was never arguing that VRChat/social apps are worse than other remote social experiences (phone call / video conference, etc.). My point is that it is very isolating and impossible to share the experience in any meaningful way with folks around you, or just be present at all while doing something in VR.

Like I can play Mario on my TV while sharing that experience with my kids or chatting with my wife about things, while still being around my family in a shared living space. VR just isn't cut out for that. I do use it for sim-racing (which is pretty much a perfect fit for VR headsets) which is anyway a situation where you need to be distraction free and kinda isolated from everyone else so it works well in those types of scenarios.

Ehh. I've owned a VR headset for a long time now, and I think many people underestimate how fundamentally isolating being in VR is. Humans are social creatures and unless you live by yourself and want to escape into VR, you're a lot more likely to enjoy watching the big game with friends and family so you can shoot the shit, and share the experience.

Don't get me wrong... VR is and can be a lot of fun, but I just don't see it being this next big thing that people seem to hope it will be. On the other hand, I think when someone solves AR, I suspect that may very well produce a seismic change across society with widespread adoption.

So many comments here are missing the point of the rant. If it doesn't work for you, fine, move on. But it takes a special type of asshole to go around harassing maintainers and continuously putting down their hard work and in many cases just making overly broad and incorrect generalizations or propagating outright lies. There is a big difference between constructive criticism and what drove the author to write that rant in the first place.

It boggles my mind how people can be complete assholes to people writing FOSS because the sense of entitlement that users have when it comes to FOSS is staggering, and the more technical someone believes themselves to be, oftentimes, the more caustic they tend to be in how they interact with FOSS developers. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but having been a silent observer on Github issues for many FOSS projects as well as reading the rants on reddit and HN against FOSS technology <X>, it really pisses me off even though I have no skin in the game.

These are real humans and people devoting their own free time to build something they are passionate about and believe in. It may not work for you, you may even think what they are doing is a terrible idea. Then provide constructive criticism if you wish and move along. That's all too rare though. In reality, what people really want is they want Wayland (or insert Technology <X> here), but they want it the way they would wish it to be, and so they will essentially engage in negging developers and their decisions trying to beat them into submission. It's despicable behavior and no one should be defending this.

Measured criticism is fine, but then move the fuck on. Let people passionate about FOSS they care about, continue working on it. But don't be an asshole and keep trying to tear them down just because you selfishly want what they are building, but you want them to really build it the way you want it and to meet your specific use cases.

I have an LG C9, and I much prefer the integration and smart apps over slower Chromecast/Fire sticks. I can also cast to my TV and still use the remote in the Youtube app when casting (for example). It's a pretty good UX and the C9 has enough compute resources for everything to be very snappy. I could drop more on something like the nVidia Shield, but I already have an HTPC hooked up to my TV, running a Plex server as well as letting me use MPC-HC if I need to.

I've made my peace with the telemetry ramifications though I have not accepted a number of privacy policy notices so things aren't all that bad.

Unfortunately not. It does support a bunch of adblockers, as well as a few limited extensions but nothing super useful on the privacy front.

I've had a Galaxy S9 for 2+ years now and I've always found Samsung's Android browser to be far superior to everything else available. People love to crap on Samsung for their software, but their browser is a real solid piece of software.

I just tried Firefox for the 5th time (over the past 2 years) last week and it was so much slower to load pages, and the scrolling experience was quite poor.

Samsung's dark mode is outstanding and while less flexible, a lot less clunkier than Firefox extensions. Any browser without a viable Dark mode setting (for sites i.e.) is a non-starter, especially when you can enjoy dark mode reading in bed with a great OLED screen.

Tab browsing and private mode both work really well.

Text zoom and general page layouts are much more readable. Accessing old.reddit.com via Firefox was a mess with the font being tiny, whereas it is totally usable on Samsung's browser.

Ad blocking works quite well as well. At the end of the day, Samsung's browser gets out of the way and executes really well on all the main things you'd want in a browser.

I really want to use Firefox or a similar browser that I trust more with my privacy, but at the moment, Samsung's browser is miles better than all the other browsers I've tried using.

> React, since hooks, includes a full state management solution - Context, Provider, and hooks.

Sure, but that hasn't been around even 2 years. Prior to that, there was a different approach and philosophy to doing things. I remember when higher order components were all the rage till suddenly they weren't.

I'm not advocating for stagnation, but at the same time, everything in JS land feels experimental, even in established frameworks, and the entire community keeps marching along as things keep changing. Which if you are a full-time developer doing that, is fine I guess, but it is not the norm compared to pretty much any other software engineering field.

> Second, even if you want an actual state management library, both mobx and Redux are quite stable

I cannot say enough nice things about MobX (although I was using it back when it didn't use Proxies so you had to deal with a lot of cloning back to native JS objects which got a bit ugly at times), and I don't disagree with you on this point for state management, although I personally could not stand redux despite 90% of the community vehemently singing its praise.

> This is a comical take. Facebook is powered by React. Large, complex, enterprise, and fully powered by the cutting edge of JS frameworks.

I should have perhaps qualified that better. Yes, I know there are people writing complex apps, but I was viewing it from the POV of a non FAANG type place with tons of engineers to throw at a problem. If I was a single person or a very small team trying to develop something complex, I would place a much higher emphasis on a more stable development environment/language/framework.

> Is it not true the entire ML ecosystem has been reinvented in the last 5 years? My React code still builds & runs from 2016. I really feel like this is a case of "external person overestimates complexity in external domain, underestimates complexity in internal domain" because everything you're saying sounds like you dipped your toes, and didn't actually build applications.

Let's take Pytorch as a comparison framework. It's had tons of releases, but at a fundamental level, the core API has stayed the same. I've ported 3 year old code to the latest version with pretty much negligible effort. And at its heart, it is because APIs are kept very stable and people aren't deciding each year that they need an entirely new way of doing ML or performing automatic gradient estimations, etc.

Similarly with Python... there have been a bunch of Python 3 releases in the past few years but they each add new things that are useful without making big changes that suddenly change how everyone would tackle building a new piece of software.

On the other hand, porting a 2+ year old React app to the latest version of React (along with bringing dependencies along) would be a very painful process. I know this, because we've done this at the company I work at.

There is also this implicit assumption in JS/React land that you are going to come marching along with all the latest changes. Heck, less than 2 years back, their documentation site wouldn't even let you view older versions of React documentation, so the moment they released a new version of React, the docs would only ever show you the new docs. What's funny, is that today they supposedly have links to their older docs...but every fucking link is broken :-/

example: https://reactjs.org/version/16.8

And nobody probably even knows that, because there is a general expectation in the field that everyone just keeps staying up to date with the latest and greatest and deals with whatever pain points come along with that and no one has probably even tried to access older documentations or raise issues about it. Which is fine, like I've said many times before if you've made your peace with it and that is your full-time job, but it is not the expectation or norm in most other fields.

Finally, I should state for the record (because you stated otherwise in another reply to me), that I actually love javascript...well at least ES6+ JS. I greatly enjoy(ed) JS, JSX, developing in VsCode, and even building things with React, Mobx, etc. I'm not a software engineering snob who looks down on JS and the ecosystem. But I also have a more diverse viewpoint because I work at a small company and get to wear many hats and have been able to do lots of different things (ML Engineer, Front-end work, write and deploy pretty complex software, etc.). And while I have a lot of fun doing front-end stuff, It still feels like there is a lot of constant overhead to it, and that is pretty unique to this one field compared to most everything else.

I think the large things in my admittedly limited experience were hooks and context API. Which in a sense isn't a massive change, but the problem is that just like the author of this article mentions, now there are more ways for things to be done, and moreover, because React is a small framework itself, all your 20+ dependency libs have probably moved on and implemented everything with hooks. So now you pretty much need to learn hooks, the context API and throw out your prior domain knowledge from 2018 because whether you like it or not, you gotta still adapt to hooks, because that is the new thing now and the libraries you rely on are now using the new API and approach.

If I was a full-time web-developer, I'd maybe be willing to live with the churn of the JS ecosystem, but as someone who enjoys software engineering and building fun projects, the churn is simply exhausting and a big turn-off. I spent a year doing a lot of intensive React + Electron + D3 + MobX and all the associated stuff (webpack, npm, node, etc) in 2018, and then at some point I realized its like being on a hamster wheel and you gotta keep going frantically just to stay up to date with the newest libs and toys and APIs and current group think. Meanwhile, a year spent just writing and learning good software in Python (for example), gains me so much more transferable skills to anything I touch as a software engineer in the future.

I still like the power of being able to make user-interfaces easily and there are plenty of things I enjoyed about developing web/electron-apps, but ultimately I was just turned off by how much continuing investment of your time it requires just to stay relevant in the field without imho adding any real value to actual software engineering skills.

This is again so dismissive of the author. He seems to have a substantial amount of experience with React. He isn't just some noob who jumped on some bandwagon and picked the latest sexiest thing for reasons. If anything, the entire team seemed to do far more due diligence in decision making than pretty much 90% of the move-fast and break things (TM) SV startups.

> It's a feature, not a bug.

Yes, a small, light-weight framework can be a good thing. No one called it a bug. But like everything in life, there are trade-offs involved. And I'm not entirely convinced that it is a good tradeoff in the crazy JS ecosystem where everything is changing and breaking all the time, especially if you are building more complex things and don't have an army of web-devs to keep the house of cards from falling down.

I read the comments here first before reading the blog post, and I was expecting a very different type of (and lacking) blog post based on the combination of dismissive and defensive attitude permeating a lot of the comments here.

To be honest, there isn't a lot the author is wrong about. Sure, having a .NET team adapting to React is harder but nothing seemed egregious in the way they tackled things. The point about React including so little that you become reliant on a ton of external dependencies that see even more churn than the usual JS framework landscape is a very valid pain point, especially when you are building a very large application for the long-term. Granted, a lot of that criticism holds true for the entire JS scene where the churn is simply ridiculous and you have to cross all your appendages and hope for the best before you try to build a year old project. But React is especially problematic in that regard only because there are so few batteries included (which is great for small/mid sized projects, but the opposite if you are looking for stability).

Ultimately though, I just shudder to think about writing large, complex, enterprise Apps in the latest and greatest JS/front-end frameworks due to the crazy levels of churn in frameworks, libraries and APIs. React now looks completely different from React from 1-2 years ago. Libraries fall in and out of favor. Some keep up with the ever changing API of the parent frameworks, others die off. It's like an entire ecosystem that has ADHD and as someone who has built several small to mid-size React and React + Electron apps in the past, that ultimately turned me off the entire endeavor (I'm an ML Engineer, but I love software engineering and building stuff for fun). I would much rather take "boring", stable languages and frameworks and spend my time honing skills that actually matter and help me as a software engineer throughout my career, rather than spend a week trying to get webpack figured out, till the next big webpack update when I'd start over from scratch again.

I think it's just that unfortunately a lot of these laptops are geared towards gamers, and pretty much all gaming laptops have 16:9 aspect-ratio, and they also usually use high refresh-rate screens, which are also almost entirely in 16:9 aspect-ratio.

They seem to only have a FHD (1080p) screen with 16:9 aspect-ratio though?

https://us.msi.com/Laptop/Bravo-15-A4DX/Specification

Thanks! This worked like a charm for me.

Wait, why doesn't the Shield do Dolby Vision / HDR for Netflix/Amazon? I thought that was like one of the best options for a streaming media player so that is a big surprise to me. I'm curious because I also own a 2019 LG C9 and currently use only internal apps + my HTPC but am considering the Shield as an option.