We're discussing one right now. VSCode is an electron-based application, isn't overly-bloated, and starts up quickly. I switch between IJ and VSC every day and VSC is significantly faster, including startup. But, even if it _was_ slower on startup, that would be a tradeoff I'd be happy with if it was faster or more functional normally. I restart my computer maybe once a week, I'd be fine to wait another couple seconds.
VSCode is better than many, but I do think it counts as bloated, has reasonably high recommended machine requirements, and performs more poorly than I would expect of such an application.
It does perform better than IJ and the like, but that's a bit of damning with faint praise.
I don't comment beyond that on it as I don't use it more than I have to (for reasons unrelated to it being Electron-based) and want to avoid Speaking Of That I Know Not. I was speaking about Electron more generally.
I don't think there was some grand concerted effort to self-promote by the WDT guy, it's just a legitimately helpful and (at the time) novel technique for getting decently even flow when using cheap(er) home coffee grinders. It requires like 5 seconds of time and something like a toothpick or cake tester. This is not the same as the audiophile magic cables or whatever, the results are measurable and replicable by anyone with a toothpick and a home espresso setup.
I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and in good condition. I don't absolutely love Spotify but I'm not going back to a CD collection.
We've lost: cover art, liner notes, the ability to share or sell your music without 3rd party permission, music stores, and in many cases local music scenes that formed around music stores. Bret Victor has been harping on this for years, but we've also lost a great deal of tactility - putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play it uses your hands in pleasant ways that screens just aren't.
As for discovery, the promise is greater than reality. I used Spotify for a while specifically for this purpose, but I didn't discover a single new artist through it. YouTube, by contrast, has introduced me to new artists, as have a few radio stations like KCRW and KQED (who both have excellent YT channels too). And you know what? Music discovery is a different mode of listening than enjoying my library and ne'er the twain shall meet, IMHO.
Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me it does.
> Music discovery is a different mode of listening
For me it really is the same mode. I regularly discover new artists when my handcrafted playlists finish playing and it starts to play music based on the playlist I just listened to
> I didn't discover a single new artist through it.
That's surprising. I've never used Spotify for this, but 10+ years ago used Pandora for that purpose. I was overjoyed with the new artists I learned about.
someone who very clearly hates Spotify for ideological reasons
Why would you say that? It's a pretty harsh dig, and it's not justified. I tried Spotify and didn't like it. I never said I hated it. I don't like it because I weight its trade-offs differently than you. I mean, have YOU tried the alternative I've suggested? If not, is it because of your ideology?
1. Cover art / liner notes - any given digital album can include links to these notes or even a website with the cover art, and if you're referring to the physical component I would argue that's just less trash that comes with the predominant reason for me purchasing music... which is the music.
2. Ability to share music - I frequently share music from Spotify all the time, either using the Spotify link and sending it to my friends over Chat, or even just telling them the name of it and they can frequently find the exact song on YouTube.
3. Ability to sell music - since I'm not really purchasing the music on Spotify I don't feel like this is a fair argument
4. Music stores - i'll give you this one though for a lot of us we simply don't have the free time to physically browse for music in a brick and mortar store.
5. Discovery - anecdotal of course but I've had the exact opposite experience, the Discover weekly list that Spotify provides invariably introduces me to new artists that I would've otherwise never even heard of, and if I like a song I can look for playlists curated by users that contain that song, which is an additional avenue of discovery.
Man I used to put CDs in players all day long, I don't miss it a single bit. I was one of the first MP3 player adopters and never looked back. I also used tapes. Was happy to ditch those for CDs too. Never used vinyl though. Maybe I would have liked that more than tapes and CDs. Seems plausible enough, but then again maybe not.
As someone with mobility impairment, putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play was never pleasant. In fact I was often stuck with whatever five CDs were left in the player. CDs actually haven't gone away, and you can still use them today. I am glad the world has moved on though.
Many people bring up the "discover new music" argument. It is probably subjective, but for me this has never been an issue. There are so many way to discover new music today, there are tons on youtube and people recommend in the comments, you see a mention of something and head over to Wikipedia, follow some links, and so on. I don't need an algorithm for it, an algorithm that most likely is more optimized for revenue than anything else.
Streaming has sacrificed so much at the altar of "discovery". Sometimes you want discovery and sometimes you don't. More and more, I'm finding I don't care about discovery and just want to listen to my music. If it's a choice between my old late-2000s era iPod loaded with my carefully curated list of albums and streaming services which are optimized for "discovery" and "engagement" and require the network to be online, I pick the iPod any day of the week.
Other people like streaming, and want The Algorithm to feed them discovery, and that's fine--it's just not for me.
> an algorithm that most likely is more optimized for revenue than anything else.
Yup, that is the core issue. We have all this great tech, but then deploy it against ourselves. The peak is when FB optimized for polarized (ahem fake) content, because that is what drives "engagement".
I'm not sure what is the solution here. Regulations around more algorithmic transparency? "Low tech" alternatives? User education?
it's easier than ever before to discover new artists
Not really.
It's easier than ever to be exposed to a select group of pre-selected songs by a small subset of artists churned out by a computer program for the purpose of getting you to continue your subscription. That's not discovery.
Go into any real music store, like Louisiana Music Factory in New Orleans, Amoeba Music in Los Angeles, or Electric Fetus in Minneapolis, and you'll find thousands of albums and artists that are not on streaming, never have been on streaming, and never will be on streaming.
The tech companies have made people believe that they're seeing everything, but they're not. They're just looking through a keyhole into the world of music.
For example, Apple boasts something like 90 million songs on Apple Music. The reality check is that's probably less than 1% of the world's recorded music.
People on HN rail against "walled gardens" in app stores, and then wall themselves into one streaming service or the other because they bought the infinite music hype, and don't even know it.
I'm not sure I understand what your point is, that since digital discovery doesn't provide every single artist in perpetuity throughout the universe that it is somehow not useful as an avenue of discovery?
I can spin this argument directly around and guarantee that if you go to the Louisiana music factory in New Orleans, that for every artist and album they know about, there are 1000 international or country specific artists that are available only online to listeners in America via online channels.
My results from discovering new artists have been far superior on community oriented places vs spotify or any streaming service. Algos just suck at this.
I'm not really arguing that Spotify has the greatest music discover system but if you read about an album, it costs you nothing to try it out. Prior to subscription services and digital music it would be a 10$ investment that you may or may not make.
It is not actually easier. It is theoretically more available. Practically, current tech is designed to keep you in one bubble and makes it harder to step put of it.
FWIW, this law is not banning marriage, rather it's preventing Palestinians from becoming automatically naturalized citizens through marrying an Israeli citizen.
That's the point. There is no path to becoming "naturalized", a legal resident or much more-so a citizen in your own country - whether you see that as Palestine or Israel. This is just one more mechanism to humiliate a population of millions.
Of course nobody cares that an Israeli Jew marrying a Lebanese, or a Jordanian, or an Egyptian, let alone a Saudi citizen, can't get Lebanese or Jordanian or Egyptian or Saudi citizenship.
But Israel must give citizenship to everyone... right?
This is happening between Palestinians. You can call them Arab Israelis if you want but they still identify as Palestinians. Splitting them up for the sake of division with these policies is political and systematic.
And yes a double standard applies compared to other countries because Israel identifies as a western liberal democracy whereas the others don’t or no one implies that they seriously are.
Main problem here that if Israeli citizen will decide to marry a Lebanese, or a Jordanian, or an Egyptian or even Saudi citizen, they won't be able to live in Israel.
Outrage of non-Israelis about is law is merely academical. Outrage of (some of) Israelis is practical: the state is putting a choice in front of a citizen -- be able to marry a person you want or be able to live in Israel.
Because I'm not a citizen of Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt. As an Israeli citizen I share the responsibility and am obliged to react to any colonial era exercise the government is trying to pull off.
Gather | Atlanta, GA | Software Engineer - Senior & Mid | ONSITE - Full Time https://www.gatherhere.com/careers/
Hey all, I’m an engineer at Gather in Atlanta and we’re looking to add a senior-level engineer to our team. Gather is a restaurant-tech SaaS startup focused on helping restaurants and event venues manage their events business, drive demand, and interact with their guests. We’re looking for developers with interest in team leadership and experience in some or all of:
- Typescript
- Node
- React/Redux
- Docker
- PostgreSQL
- Unit / integration testing patterns
- AWS, especially Lambda
Hey all, I’m an engineer at Gather in Atlanta and we’re looking to add a senior-level engineer to our team. Gather is a restaurant-tech SaaS startup focused on helping restaurants and event venues manage their events business, drive demand, and interact with their guests. We’re looking for developers with interest in team leadership and experience in some or all of:
- Typescript
- Node
- React/Redux
- Docker
- PostgreSQL
- Unit / integration testing patterns
- AWS, especially Lambda
At Gather, we believe that planning life's special events should be a seamless, fun experience for everyone involved. That's why we set out to empower events teams and their customers with user-friendly tools to simplify the event booking process — from initial inquiry to day-of execution.
We're a small team looking to expand and tackle some interesting challenges in the restaurant tech space. PM me for more info!
I wouldn't worry too much about not being taken seriously in a hoodie and jeans as a software developer unless you're working at an extremely traditional company that doesn't have much of a focus on the dev org. Hoodie and jeans is pretty much standard.
If you'd still like to dress "better" in general, the /r/malefashionadvice subreddit has some solid resources on the sidebar that you should check out.
I've been using both for a few years (TS at my old job, es6 at my new job but we're moving to TS so now I'm using both depending on what I'm working on).
The use case I like most about typescript is it makes refactoring and making changes really painless. For example, in an angular app, you may have a service that several components rely on. When changing a method signature in the service, you'll get compile-time info about any other usages of that service, and you feel a lot more confident about making changes without something dumb slipping through the cracks and causing bugs in production.
This confidence generally lends itself to less fear of change and more willingness to refactor, which leads to a better/cleaner codebase.
Aside from that, I love the JSDoc comments showing up as you type, especially if you're working on a team in which you may not know 100% what everyone has worked on.
Other features I use every day and love:
-automatic/generated import statements
-type definitions for libraries (most have solid documentation)
-control-flow logic checking (you'll find more bugs than you think with this and it encourages more defensive programming)
-transpiling down to support older browsers (babel does this too but it's nice to have it built in)
Edit: I forgot to go into the "cons" list here.
-there's some finagling you'll have to do with some of the more poorly-written npm packages that strap themselves onto globals
-there's a slight learning curve
-you'll require a build step (with es6 if you're targeting es6-only browsers you can deploy just static files, but most people use webpack/babel anyway for older browser support and other things webpack gives you like bundling/minification/etc)
While IDE transforms can be handy when getting started with small projects, you cannot use them for automated builds (projects with multiple contributors, continuous integration). Any serious project using TS does indeed require a build step.
As much as I will fairly praise Visual Studio, thanks for pointing out this automatic generation feature
I'm not by nature keen on automatic behaviour, or files appearing wherever, and though I visited this story simply to check in on the state of a language I know less than I want about, I'm certain that I would want a proper build step even for tinkering, once I start in earnest. I've long been enthusiastic about TypeScript especially, but from a distance, unable to allocate time to take it seriously enough.
I think the state of js and environment is now at a point that, in my view at least, I should not begin the smallest project without a deep dive into the state of the language. I see things moving so fast, that - at least in my workplace where we've had teams stick together for years commonly (partnership!) - it would suck to find oneself misdirected by a aggressive assumption, or find oneself in a unloved cul - de - sac of dependencies.
Tl;dr js is IMO at a place where the pay off for deeply studying the state of the language, is substantial while risk of not deeply groking js are rising fast.
Personally, I think I shall better resort to getting a new shelf of good books, for my needs, but I do believe the risk reward is looking hairy for any casual users. (or hurried business management, in particular)
I'm a little surprised, given my understanding the impression I had of ts is the very broad aim is to reduce your error in code, (type safety only part of that) that VS will encourage casual / random deployments like this. I can't decide if it's a occasional convenience quite suited to weekend js ciders like me, or a omitted formality that I feel encourages poor or slack habits.
Funny thing is, I never once thought of firing up VS to write JavaScript before now. I have no need, but I'm just displaying my age when I note that visually my mind thinks of early Netscape view source spelunking and text editors, not a actual IDE and build system.
What keeps me, well into a fourth decade of programming, from using JavaScript I think is only the fact that I totally phase out at the state of the tool chain for js. My mind blanks. But there's so much to like, using js, that i hope it's not abandoned by time I get to really learning it. (forgive my humour, but my first real computing experience was on a Symbolics 3650, then spanking new. Last week wanting to show a friend what one looked like, I found kids veritably boarding them! (sorry for the kids part, but it's nuts I found such phrases creeping up on me, I'm lucky in looking less than my years, but when did I start saying things like "the kids are doing x"? I want to know what causes this, and if there's a cure!)
