This is what #meetoo has come to. The genders being afraid of each other. Thanks, social media. Social media just removes any and all possibilities of nuance and makes people angry
What specifically do you hate about Jupyter? Is it out of order execution exacerbating the "hidden state" problem? If so, and if you already use VS Code, I encourage you to try out our Python VS Code extension. We have an "Interactive Python Window" mode https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support that we showed a lot of folks at pycon last week and even among the "I don't like Jupyter" crowd, it was quite well received. The key thing about our experience is that it is an editor focused interactive programming experience vs. trying to just replicate Jupyter functionality in an editor (though we are also doing work here because we believe that folks want an experience where they can move seamlessly back and forth between and editor and a notebook experience).
Disclaimer: I designed this experience in VS Code.
Please allow me to thank you for designing an experience that hits the sweet spot between maintaining a good history of work through git while allowing for interactivity and ease of exploration. I started using VS Code on seeing a video of the jupyter support within the latest release of the Python extension. This has eased and sped up my work tremendously!
We also need to work in the discoverability of this feature too. Lots of existing users of our extension had no idea it was there ... suggestions welcome!
I tend to do a lot of exploratory work in Jupyter stuff, but find the whole process really annoying and cumbersome to set up - just been playing around with this VS code extension and it seems really neat!
I've been using nteract a lot recently but I'm gonna switch to VS Code now, at least that reduces one Electron app eating up my memory
Yay for less electrons! We're also using nteract for a future release of Azure Notebooks, and we're already using nteract in the VS Code extension. BTW, by nteract I mean nteract as a suite of components for building Jupyter things vs. nteract the electron app. We recently hired the awesome Safia Abdalla to help us contribute back to the nteract community and things have been going great!
Nice work on this! I think apart from the very valid points raised by Joel Gru in his presentation slides, Jupyter Notebooks are woefully inadequate for exploring and understanding code that utilizes libraries. I'll take the FastAI library as an example since Jeremy Howard is the one who took Joel to task regarding criticizing Notebooks:
If I view any fastai notebooks taken from their repo, there are a million imports (having a bunch of `import *` statements in the fastai lib doesn't help things) and methods and classes keep popping up out of nowhere. Good luck making sense out of them in a notebook. At least in Pycharm or VS Code, it's one Ctrl+Click away from viewing the relevant source code and having a somewhat better idea of what is going on.
Debugging is woefully inadequate compared to the Pycharm experience (VS Code is slowly catching up with Pycharm on that front).
I've only found 2 good uses for Jupyter Notebooks:
1. As a scratch-pad to try out things without any plans to utilize directly or share the code with anyone
2. As a means to write well documented examples/code with a bunch of markdown...especially when I'm modeling things that have a lot of equations, where the LATEX support is a boon and makes the documentation in the notebook far superior to what you could achieve in a regular .py script.
In almost every other instance, you are better off using a full-blown IDE with a far superior development environment, ability to have venvs, superior debugging, superior code management/refactoring and most importantly, much better reproducibility.
All that being said, I think the direction in VSC is definitely a great step in the right direction. I honestly love VSC but can't give up PyCharm yet as it is still a long way ahead of VSC when it comes to Python features (much better linting, much better management of venvs and run configs, more powerful debugging experience... though VSC is getting pretty good, much better refactoring support and PEP-8 reformatting/linting). I really hope there is more of a push within MS to continue improving the Python experience in VS Code. Nothing would make me happier than to consolidate my work in VSCode! Keep up the awesome work!
I'm currently thinking about a model of notebooks / interactive programming where the default assumption is that you're using it as a scratchpad, i.e., you won't need to explicitly name the file in order to get the benefits of auto-save, but yet the file won't pollute your filesystem / project namespace until you choose to "keep" it. Hopefully this helps reduce the friction in the exploratory programming realm; my goal is to eliminate the "ConsoleApplicationX" directories (I'm a VS guy from way back so ...) and I think it helps with your scenario 1) above.
The Python VS Code extension team is well aware of the gaps that you list as well, and are working hard to narrow them with each release. We are definitely serious about improving the Python experience in VS Code. How times have changed :)
Thanks for the support and encouragement. And as always, if you find issues that aren't already in our github, feel free to add some more and keep the feedback coming!
Awesome! Wish you guys the best. As someone who has made a few electron apps in the past couple of years (I am not a front-end/back-end guy), I have immense respect for the VSCode team and the quality of the product. They pretty much showed the whole world what a quality electron app can look like and that most of the blackeye electron gets for "performance" can be chalked down to poor programming practices and software design in the case of a lot of other electron apps.
I fundamentally disagree with Mozillas notion of "openness". The internet always was open to LGBTQI+ people. The internet does not discriminate. Get an account named X. Done.
Problems only arise when professional activists try to change existing communities. E.g. the new linux kernel code of conduct and it's, let's say "questionable", author.
A lot of the problems came about when sites began mandating "Real Names". People began to assume that online is somehow analogous to real life (it isn't). Combined with the nonsense claim that "hateful/rude/unpleasant speech and violence are the same", we're hurtling down a dangerous path.
Anyone threatening other users here would soon get banned. You surely know that as well as anyone.
Would you please stop upping the inflammation like this in HN comments? You've been doing it a lot, and we've been cutting you a lot of slack because you've been a good contributor over the years, but this is not cool, and I can feel my roll of slack running out. If your taste for ideological warfare is growing, please gratify it elsewhere, not here.
This comment violates numerous site guidelines, including:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
There are women who post to HN but who hide the fact that they're women, because of the attitudes displayed in this thread.
There are a bunch of women who don't post to HN at all.
I'll dial it back a bit, but you need to regain control from the misogynists who are making this place hostile to others. Parent post is literally telling women not to identify as women, yet you didn't say anything to them. Respectfully, you need better aim.
If you're concerned about that, you need to stop pumping aggression into this place, by which you're contributing to making it more hostile and less safe. A war zone can never be safe and welcoming. First stop making HN more of a war zone (which you've done a lot over the years, routinely calling people cunts and all the rest of it—which as I said, we've cut you a ton of slack for when we would have banned others), and we'll be interested in your ideas about how to make HN less hostile to others.
Do you really believe explicit, credible death and/or rape threats for being a woman with opinions on Marvel movies or games or being LGBQ are examples of a non-discriminatory environment?
Internet is a tool to communicate freely and regardless of the message.
Internet isn't "people". If someone harass you with your phone, you don't blame the phone, you blame the harasser. The phone is fine.
The same way journalist and activist are protected.
Should you blame the mailman if he deliver some harassing anonymous letter ? The physical mail offer the same sort of protection if it's done properly.
If someone harassed me with anonymous letters, I would open a police report. The point is that no equivalent recourse exists online.
Edit: The point being that the mailman is a red herring. If the internet is really an extension of public space as (presumably) claimed, let's treat it like one.
I m no expert in that field. Probably better than you think since the police has access to a lot of tools to find you and been an harasser doesn't mean you have the technical skill to be anonymous enougth.
We are now in an endless debate. Internet isn't the problem. Bad behaviours, uneducation, missinformation, fake news, etc are the problem.
Blaming internet won't solve those. And they will be ready for the next tool.
How would it change anything if the harasser did it in the real world? Online there are logs of it, in the real world it'll be you word against theirs.
I am not suggesting that harassment ceases to exist in the real world, I'm saying that it's simply not so cut-and-dry as the parent's comment suggests. An individual's behavior can drastically alter between the physical and virtual world, where social norms and filters can easily be tossed aside.
A true non-discriminatory environment is also an environment of no mercy. All opinions are permitted, even ones you will find incredibly vile and threatening.
So think carefully when you ask for this kind of environment. I think what some people are actually asking for when they say "non-discriminatory" is an environment where people who do not accept minority members or opinions are not welcomed.
Ejecting people for making rape and death threats to other members of the community is not the same as ejecting members of the community for being PoC, LGBTQ, Nazis or Republicans.
Yeah but it is a "anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human" thing. It says nothing of worthiness and everything about possibilities because worthiness is ultimately a matter of opinion.
It is like asking for bullets which only hurt guilty people whom it would be necessary to shoot.
The distinction being action taken towards other members on the one hand (the making of threats) and convictions (being PoC, LGBTQ, Nazi) on the other hand?
What about convictions that compel action (Jihadis, Jehovas, militant atheists, Nazis) it might serve to eject people of those convictions because it should be expected they take those actions.
As somebody who wants to hide every aspect of who I am regardless, I don't find this a particularly compelling argument. I'll admit it's easy for me to say, but I'm less concerned about receiving stateless baseless threats than to have my entire life cataloged and foreseen by surveillance machines.
I suspect this is a big part of the divide between the old guard "nobody knows you're a dog" and the new "broadcast your identity". I turn to the Internet to not be participating in the monkeysphere. Any trace I leave behind is due to laziness rather than intent.
I do have to wonder how much this is just inevitable "normie" human behavior, and how much it has been stoked by companies pushing realname policies and profile selfies.
It's really ironic to see HN posters staking out bold claims about the value of totally "uncensored" platforms...in a thread with dozens of dead, hidden comments, on a message board subject to heavy-handed, arbitrary and unaccountable moderation.
Moderation isn't really censorship IMO, if a comment was deleted that would be censorship. Or, if you were prevented from reading downvoted comments then I would qualify that as censorship as well.
It's subjective in some ways which makes the discussion complicated.
That's a slippery statement to respond to because "remove" can mean a lot of different things. chasd00 used the clearer word "deleted", which is actually precisely what we don't do.
I can think of four removeyish things that happen to comments and threads: (1) downweighting of rank; (2) collapsing by default; (3) killing (marking [dead]); (4) deleting altogether. Moderators and software do the first three. We never do #4, except when the author asks us to, or—exceedingly rarely—when our attorneys tell us we have to (less than half a dozen times in ten years, and we push to avoid it, except one time when an HN user was exposed).
In cases 1, 2, and 3, nothing is deleted. Anybody can still read everything if they want to. They can read #1 by scrolling; #2 by expanding a subthread; #3 by setting "showdead" to "yes" in their profile.
Are those removal? censorship? Sure, if you like—people use those words to express a feeling. But deletion, in the sense of "you used to be able to read something but now you can't", is a question not of feeling but of fact, and the fact is we don't do that.
In case it wasn't clear: I don't have a problem with the moderation on HN. But elsewhere in this same thread we have HN users denouncing Mozilla's good-faith efforts to reduce harassment and fake news on the internet as "censorship", so you'll forgive me for not parsing the narrow distinctions between different varieties of "no longer visible to 99% of users".
I don't think these are narrow distinctions. To see why, try this simple thought experiment: imagine what would happen if we removed the "showdead" option and simply made all dead comments permanently unreadable. There would be a huge uproar in the community—a scandal to end all scandals.
Why is this surprising? Most anti-poverty measures are ineffective. The "war on poverty" has not worked in a single metric. Affirmative action hasn't changed a thing. The only thing that can get you out of poverty is a good family structure, a culture built on performance (Chinese, Indian culture takes this waaaay to far, but it's a start).
Social Security is an anti-poverty measure, and it's the most successful thing the US government has ever done. Turns out that giving people money is a great way to solve the problem of not having enough money.
It helps old people who otherwise had nothing. But we're also giving money to a lot of people who don't strictly need it, or who had the means to save for their own retirements.
You'll need a lot of citation for that. Also, Affirmative Action is decidedly not an anti-poverty program. It's an anti-bias program. And the comparison to China and India is apples and oranges. Aside from the fact that both countries have hundreds of millions of people in poverty, their success has been in industrializing agrarian societies. America is pretty far past that point. Our levels of absolute poverty (penury) are already near zero.
That's not really how it works, but I also didn't comment on it's effectiveness, just that it's not anti-poverty. If you're rich and a minority you get the same advantage. The test for eligibility isn't means-based. Hence, not anti-poverty. The intent is to get more minorities into colleges and into jobs. You can argue whether or not that's fair, but it probably works pretty well as intended.
