skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For YEARS I remember having to chase down the VBRUN{100|200|300}.dll runtimes for the Visual Basic runtimes.

Now that internet is everywhere, couldn't Electron:

1) Setup a common bootstrap mechanism so it's version agnostic
2) Check for the declared version of the app
3) If online (and allowed by system policy) check if there are security issues, or updates for the needed version
4) Advise user where to download the update, or (again, if allowed by policy) allow the user the proceed with the installation?

With some magic to allow a 'side-by-side' distribution of the Electron runtime, on good-ol' durable media, wouldn't this go far to minimize the size of the distributions of these Electron apps? You could have a system with one (or more if nessecary) versions of the runtime, and multiple apps using that runtime (with isolated profiles, of course ...)
That anyone trusted the people running reddit -- a free platform that sells users' attention and therefore relies on manipulating them for their business model -- is the real cause for concern in this story.

"If a website is free, you're the product, not the customer."
Clay Figurine Is Bronze Age Ancestor of Rodin's 'Thinker'
"If you want to make a quick little app, instead of using something convenient that you know, you should learn a REAL language like C"

Why is this garbage on the front page? Stop giving condescending people like this a platform.
Getting started with Qt is pretty easy I'd say, at least when you use Python and not C++:

import sys
from PyQt4 import QtGui

def window():
app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
w = QtGui.QWidget()
b = QtGui.QLabel(w)
b.setText("Hello World!")
w.setGeometry(100,100,200,50)
b.move(50,20)
w.setWindowTitle(“PyQt”)
w.show()
sys.exit(app.exec_())

if __name__ == '__main__':
window()

In general I think Qt is one of the best-documented UI toolkits out there, and while it surely is complex it offers a lot of modern features and is able to produce pretty great UIs.
My guess is he just picked the wrong topics to target liberals. Put in stuff about big agra, the failures of modern medicine, the wonders of alernative medicine, etc, and you'll make money.

Umm... Hold on while I register a few sites...
If you're doing commercial development, why is a license (and the attendant support) a big deal? Its cost in relation to that of your developers is neglegable.

Or is the cost of the license really that prohibitive for a well supported and performant piece of software?

[EDIT]: I found the pricing after a bit of creative googling: Startups is about $1,000 a year, non-startups are about $3,500 a year. Even without the discount, that's roughly equivalent to a month of one developer's time. IMO, not a terrible deal, for something you can freely license and use for cross platform development.
Handling Overload
Ditto. Or I can spin up a paid VM for an hour for a penny or less.
> For the price of 200 extra MiB of disk space and an entire Chromium process in RAM and on your CPU, you get a less capable GUI that saves you from having to type the -ss and -t flags yourself.

Cool. I remember when Handbrake first came out, and 'make video go on iPod' went from some long winder research into ffmpeg flags to clicking a button that says 'output for iPod' [1]. This sounds similarly timesaving.

[1]. yes, iPod. Showing my age.
Eval.js – A JavaScript interpreter written in JavaScript
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you can point me in the direction of the article you mentioned, maybe one of the developers who are more intimately familiar with the cluster internals can take a stab at it?
Electron apps have exactly the same performance as web apps, which is what its aimed at. Badly performing code can be written in any language; you'd be surprised at how much mediocre C++ code is running on your desktop. You're also running insane amounts of mediocre C# applications.

Comparing Electron to AIR makes no sense, they're radically different runtimes with radically different ecosystems. AIR stands alone while Electron reuses the web stack already used by millions of developers.

I find it rather elitist to dismiss Electron apps as "easier" to build or having users suffer. Thats completely false and grossly overlooks the context in which these apps were built. This is the kind of comment you'd expect from a beginner without much experience wanting everything to be in his favourite language.
Any particular software you host your VM in? How easy/hard is it to get the VM networking with the host machine?
There may be a lot of components and interests involved in this change.

As a user of, not developer for, Firefox with its extensions, it's this simple for me: The day my existing extensions stop working -- the day neither they nor an alternative under the new paradigm offer equivalent functionality -- is the day I no longer have any reason to stay with Firefox.

I'm not saying, "Stop, wait, a user is unhappy!"

I'm simply saying that, as a perhaps sophisticated user with some more advanced functionality, security, and privacy concerns, the set of extensions I currently use is my only compelling reason for using Firefox over Chrome.

Well, that and Google/Chrome's current trend towards its own version of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish wrapped within a panopticon.

I embrace the browser as the user client. I'm glad to have security issues addressed, but I also require that the browser do what I want, and not what -- a la Chrome, for example -- media interests want to dictate.

I'm watching 2017 with trepidation, and wonder whether and when something may fork. Not unrealistically, though; I'm skeptical any fork is going to have the resources and commitment to maintain a modern, full-featured browser in the face of current and future... err, developments.

Maybe such a fork will, both of desire and of necessity, look instead towards a bit of minimalism. Not doing "everything", but doing core functionality well and securely.

I guess then we'd have to see whether the content farms with their Javascript++, DRM delivered content, end up leaving such a fork too much out in the cold for it to maintain sufficient interest and/or usefulness to keep itself going.
Someone should!

I ran into this when teaching myself Swift last year. Learning a new language is easy. Learning the ecosystem, architecture, and some initial best practices is a sisyphean task.
What, if anything, does this mean for GreaseMonkey?
Yea but look at VSCode, definitely an exception to this. The feel of code vs atom is night and day to me.
>I've learned plenty of programming tools and I recoil in disgust at the sight of them

As do I.

>Spreadsheets are pretty much the best tool out there for exploratory work with numbers.

That's an ideal use of a spreadsheet. A non-ideal use would be, say, re-inventing the RDBMS in Excel (perhaps the most common one, but there are far worse sins).

>Personally, I'm in a process of learning Excel in depth

I would, but I don't have the time. As I've said: with the sort of data analysis I'm doing (very little), AWK works well enough.
TL;DR anyone? Like seriously.

I ran this through the read-o-meter => http://niram.org/read/ and it says "Estimated reading time: 20 minutes, 38 seconds. Contains 4128 words".

How many of you here actually read the entire article? Just curious, not trolling.
I think the author really has some valid points and he warns you about the rant part.

Valid points are:

* Electron is often too much for the purpose
* it does not look native and the devs don't care
* often there are better tools

His points about JS being not a good programming language, meh, the language wars are probably never over #SmalltalkIsStillTheBest
I have a Nationwide credit card, which has no charges for non-GBP purchases, and uses spot rates for currency conversion. Highly recommended it, if they still offer it to new customers.
Why in Richard Stallman's name would you buy a Lenovo?
Hey, is this open source? Sounds very cool. If not, can you point me towards any open source apps that are using a similar approach?
Ask HN: What are you thankful for?
It's Thanksgiving today in the U.S., but gratitude need not be restricted by geographic boundaries or traditions.

Sometime a few years ago, I started journaling 3 things I was grateful for every day. Often they were fundamental, like having access to a library.

Given the holiday today, I would like to hear what HN is thankful for.
JS is a terrible programming language

I can never see the point of comments like these. Not one person who reads that will have his mind changed.

HTML/CSS can be nice to have in such a situation, although a refusal to learn other GUI frameworks probably makes for a poor (native) developer.

No it doesn't. Either the developer benefits or doesn't benefit from "refusing". There's only so much time in the day. I'll refuse to to learn Qt or gtk+, unless there is some overwhelming benefit for me to learn it.
>He duped millions of people.

Yes and no. I suspect those people would have voted for Trump anyway.

I just got done reading The Righteous Mind (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...). After reading it, my default view on all these things: The final outcome is set in their mind, and they are merely looking for any reason to justify it.

(I mean, sure, things are elastic. His articles do play a role - just not that much).
What are your problems with Qt?

I was using PyQt, and I found it nice (Qt's integration is good).
I'm strongly opposed to short term rentals because it's just giving rise to alt-hotel property management landlords that reduce housing supply. I'm sort of OK with it on an ad-hoc this is my primary residence and I have a spare bedroom.
How to enjoy giving presentations
Aha, he missed the joke...
>"<Imperative>, kids" is just an ideom. The proverbial kid would be somebody here that hasn't heard of the Usenet or didn't make the connection—not you.

Yeah, I know. I felt that it was an entertaining enough juxtaposition that I said it anyways.
A reputable lawyer I hired offers the same deal. If you paid up front, specifically in cash, 10% off precisely for the reasons you state.
Airbnb is a joke. Who the hell would actually rent their home out to a complete stranger for a $100 payday one weekend?

Not to mention you can just rent out a single room in your home. Like you want some stranger to temporarily live with you for a day or two and invade your privacy, all for just a few dollars.

The site was clearly meant to look one way yet allow people to run illegal hotels. The only people I've ever heard renting out on Airbnb are ones who buy homes specifically for Airbnb.

Airbnb is everything that is wrong with SV, so disconnected from the real world. I just don't understand who would let totally random strangers from the internet live amongst them or even just their possessions.
Nor do batteries (although batteries are far flatter than capacitors).

That problem of "sagging voltage" is solved with either a buck-boost converter, or a buck-boost inverting converter... or a SEPIC converter. Good ones get ~95% efficiency or so.
I even have a ring that runs JavaCard software on its JVM, they are sold for cheap, and I bought one just for fun and history, there is an eBay listing here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/JAVA-RING-RARE-Sun-Microsystems-JA...
Zotero will work the way it does with Chrome now: there will be a plugin that integrates with Zotero Standalone, which will continue to be developed using XULRunner.

I think this will be good in the long run--Zotero is complex enough to merit being its own application, and separating Zotero and browser plugins will make it easier to migrate Zotero off XULRunner at some point, if the developers choose to do so.
Seattle average rent hits $1,900 and keeps growing
> Not quite. If you read the details about the case you can find that it didn't have the handler for the overflow in the calculations(!) It's similar to this case now that both were developed with under the assumptions "can't happen," in the sense, developed to be too brittle, for the inputs that were certainly possible to happen as soon as the trajectory (in the case of Ariane 5)

I'm not sure that's entirely fair. The software was intended for the Ariane 4 which wasn't intended to have as much horizontal acceleration as the 5. If the 4 had experienced such an acceleration it wasn't intended to be capable of recovering from it. That area of the code also explicitly had some protections provided by the language removed for the sake of efficiency. So it wasn't a total oversight that just happened to work out - there was a decision made based on the fact the rocket had already irrecoverably failed if the situation ever occurred.

While I agree it's somewhat distasteful not to cover all the bases in the most technically correct way all the time, I'm not sure how important it is to have an overflow handler fire in the inertial reference system just as the rocket self-destructs.
Yes it does for me, too / win 10, too /; I _think_ it is connected to @mention of my nick
Stupid essay is stupid, but I'm glad it pointed me to lossless-cut because that tool is great! The author completely misses the point of Chromium in berating lossless-cut for being "a graphical UI for two ffmpeg flags". Yes, exactly, it's a GUI that lets you cut video to the precise frame you want to. That exactly solves a problem I've had for a long time; I've been using a horrible ffmpeg command line alias (along with preview in VLC) for a year now. He's a little right about "It doesn’t even use ffmpeg to decode the video preview in the app"; that would be useful for supporting weird formats that Chromium doesn't. But for common formats lossless-cut is great. It's at https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
This is one example of how powerful and expressive C++ can be in the hands of the right person. I love (plain) C for its openness and the apparent ease of use but keep being amazed at how much more powerful as a language C++ is - to the point that C starts looking like a children's toy tool that should be abandoned as soon as the hand is strong enough to hold the real one.
Just to kick it off...

I'm thankful for having been introduced to computers and getting access to my first laptop around age 10.

It was a used PowerBook G3 WallStreet purchased for a few hundred bucks off eBay that I received from my mom and grandma for Christmas that year. Though it seemed like a small thing at the time, it really was the best investment I've ever had as it led to spending hours (and hours and hours) of time exploring and understanding computers, building websites and browsing the interwebs, and eventually to being a professional dev.
Thanks, this is useful. The last time I tried editing my preferences was within the Android News & Headlines app. Turns out I should have just done it in a web browser. You are right though, it is clunky.
If you didn't like the old LOL Adobe Air client you're really not going to like the new Chromium HTML 5 client.
Props where it's due! VSCode definitely feels native.
Hah :)

What do you think about leaving the penalties open for user customisation? I find its more miss than hit as a flamewar heuristic and would prefer to scroll past real flamewars rather than know that popular topics are suppressed.
Extending the functionality of Zabbix agents with your own checks
We ask that you please don't introduce political controversy into unrelated threads, it ruins them for everyone.
Another approach to security - give everyone a nuke, and only prevent untraceable strikes. If everyone can denial of service the guy who started it- he wont start it?

Dear god, now im pro-gun.
Also then identity fraud will be the weapon of tomorrow..
I miss the old internet.. maybe if the speed is so slow, that strikes become uninteresting..

Could the servers transferring TCP-IP be adapted, in such a way, that a mass-traffic causing incident (controllserver) leads to a slowing down of the connection of the causality chain origin?

No, crypto prevents that.
What a nice little maze.
I would expect a site about CSS properties to also know about the performance impacts of paints... Takes a good 5s for everything to load.
Haha that's fair. I was being a little lazy because I'm writing this from a kayak on Rainbow River. This is the thread where I got my rather limited info. :) https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/arangodb/ModsM74K1...

If it makes sense to take off thread, my email is daniel.porter@pwc.com. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge!
Qt is LGPL, you don't need to share your application code; you only need to share Qt's code (which only matters if you modify Qt).

(not legal advice; I'm not completely sure about this)

> The LGPL allows you to keep the source code of your application private as long as it is “work that uses” the library. Dynamic linking is usually recommended here.
The Economics of Silicon Valley Under Trump's Presidency
> The day pentadactyl stops working is the day I stop using firefox.

I'm with you. We should start moving to Pale Moon before the end comes.
>I really don't want APIs to freely access the filesystem, other processes etc in my browser. And my applications to work offline.

Ctrl+S -> Save whole webpage

alternatively get the Webpages source code.
While I'm sure he probably stuck to it for the money, I, for one, am thankful for his work.

I used to be a news junkie. The amount of junk I would see from proper news organizations was eye-opening. Sure - not at his level - much more subtle.

When there is not enough skepticism, people like him are a guaranteed outcome. By taking things to the extreme, he did expose how flawed our approach to the news is, and how little standards we have for journalism.

To be honest, if people become skeptical of most news media because of him, that's actually a good thing.
Problem is, when every fake news story comes from a new fake news website, clicking hide doesn't help for the future.
It's quite a burden to maintain two different sets of APIs.
I was using C++ Qt. Just found it really unintuitive and difficult to use compared to web technologies and native macOS development.
Downvoted; this question can easily be answered via a search engine.
It was not flagged off the front page. It spent many hours there, and this repost is unambiguously a dupe.
> it does not look native and the devs don't care

this is not valid. no need to limit our use case to devs, either. at worst, users don't care. at best, users prefer it. see Spotify, Discord, Skype, Sublime, Chrome, Steam... should i keep going?

whenever i open an app that uses entirely native controls i just expect the author didn't want to invest any time into making their app look good.
>There is no good cross-platform GUI solution.

TTK. That is all.
I think the left tends not to fall so much for political stories, but put in stuff about evils of big agra, big pharma, fake studies showing alternative medications working well, etc and they'll lap it up.
3 Mindset shifts that will 10X your monthly revenue
I'm embarrassed to say that it took me 8 years to realize that staying at any one particular employer for "a long time", e.g. 4+ years, is increasingly an unrealistic life goal.
> I'd be willing to bet my net worth your users don't care at all how you built it, just that it does what they want it to do.

That's exactly right, except "what I want it to do" is not use up all my RAM.
Errors while installin windows 7/10
well...I have Acer Aspire 7750g notebook...and i wanted to install windows 10, but when it was supposed to begin the installation proces i got some BSOD and i was trying to fix it somehow with help of IT forums and youtube, but unfortunately the thing got worse...now when i turn on notebook it constanly restarting before windows going up and i now i cant begin installing neither windows cuz again i got some BSOD..7 or 10, evex XP, tried even the linux mint but there's no changes...the only change (let's say) is that in BSOD changes the errors that are missing or corrupted..so if can one dear person tell me what to do, i would be thankful, and sorry if i got some mistakes in laguage. THANKS.
Thanks for the info.

On a tangentially related note, do you have any idea what happens to the concept of sea level on earth as the sea level changes?
Jesus Christ, this is gets at exactly the Pizzagate fake news phenomena. Right here. This very thread and the other thread. The reason why people dismiss this as crazy talk, is because there's literally no evidence for this ever happening, and every time these types of allegations has been brought up before, they've been completely discredited.

Your proposition hinges on replacing the the axiom that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, with extraordinary claims are more plausible to mundane ones.

Satanic child abuse is an old moral panic from the 1980s, of which nothing ever existed. Seriously, they're all discredited. Some even involved people claiming preschool teachers were fucking literal demons while riding on brooms.[0]

I toss out a joke about the completely discredited claim that Podesta is a warlock because of a mention of world famous artist Marina Abramović.[1] But of course, the fault is on me, because this is HN, and of course it's going to be treated as gospel.

But hell, what do I know. I'm contemplating ascending to the Aetheral plane because I've been listening to backmaksed Judas Priest[2] and playing Dungeons and Dragons[3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satanic_ritual_abuse_a...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking#Subliminal_persuas...

[3] https://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.asp
Let me quote the parent post:

> Yes.
Lol, everybody in Italy has had "spaghetti bolognese". We call them "spaghetti al ragù" and learn the name "spaghetti bolognese" the first time we are exposed to international gastronomy, possibly the first vacation abroad.

The issue here is about spaghetti not being the proper kind of pasta for the "ragù" sauce, tagliatelle is the traditional one. Ok, noted, but ragù is still a common sauce for spaghetti and maccaroni. Maybe not in high priced restaurants but definitely at most people's home. Basically you use what you have.

Now back to Python vs Ruby vs Node... :-)
Very true classic. Its mind-blowing to imagine this advise still holds water 11 years after.
OpenVPN security audit fundraiser
While I agree with his general idea that Electron is usually not the best tool for the job, I think he's overestimating JS as the reason that people choose Electron. It's not because of JS, it's because of HTML and CSS, which aren't that bad comparing to other tools we have (especially since Flexbox). I think most people would love to write desktop apps using HTML and CSS, while using anything other than JS to do the logic. We're just... not there yet.
Reddit CEO admits to editing user comments amid Pizzagate malarkey
And what about extensions that have thousands upon thousands of users, still working fine, but haven't been updated in years because the author ran into real life? Is Mozilla going to dump those users on the street and then say, "Well, your author should have contacted us, we don't have time to implement your API now"?
BTW, a nice PyQt feature is that you can set properties in the class initializer:

b = QtGui.QLabel(w)
b.setText("Hello World!")

can be replaced with

b = QtGui.QLabel(w, text = "Hello World!")