skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If writing software is about making users' lives easier, happier, or better, though, I think we ought to optimize for that and that alone.

That's (imo) your flawed assumption. And no, just choosing electron won't make your users happier.

> Love it or not, JS is a point of entry for a hell of a lot more ppl than C++ is

C++ is not the only alternative. And considering the staggering amount of frameworks and tools one must learn to get started with JS other alternatives are actually easier. Unfortunately, not as cool.

> That said, the article does skirt an issue I've thought about a little, and I'm interested to hear others' takes.

Is this a joke? I had to google what skirt means: "attempt to ignore; avoid dealing with." That's the exact opposite of what the article does. Let me quote it for you:

About electron: "One of the slowest, least memory efficient [...]"

About terminal: "They’ve taken one of the most lightweight and essential tools on your computer and bloated it by orders of magnitude. "

About lossless-cut: "For the price of 200 extra MiB of disk space and an entire Chromium process in RAM and on your CPU [..]"

The conclusion that "people will require more money to buy more hardware to run bloated software" is not something only you thought about, it's only one step away from what the article says. And it's actually hilarious (read: infuriating) that you don't see the problem with that way of thinking. NASA put people on the moon with computers less powerful than a mobile phone.

The article criticizes people who write bloated software, but you argue it's fine, because users are happy. Then you go on wondering if it's a problem that users won't afford the latest laptops to run bloated software. WAT?
Don was talking about alt.right (obviously a play on alt-right: but probably also the alt-right news group, if there is one). However, the standard acronym expansion for the alt hierarchy on the usenet (it actually stands for alternative) is Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists: partly a running gag and partly because alt.* was (and still is) the wild west of the usenet: a lawless wasteland, with the occasional specks of civilization.
Why doesn't the home owners association crack
down on the short term rentals?
I've been fighting with this for a while now. I think the only good reason to use something like Electron is if you need to get a cross-platform POC up and running quickly.

I am currently trying to make a GUI to compose and render Terraform assets in a similar manner to AWS CloudFormation's visual designer, and I've spent an eternity trying to devise the best way to do this (this is mainly driven out of boredom more than anything else...Terraform works just fine as is). As much as I don't want to use Javascript and the cancer that is it's dependency management, the web stack is proving to be the path of least resistance thus far. Although I still don't understand why you need to download half of the known internet to install gulp and babel locally.

I'm a GUI novice. Is there any cross-platform software that generates a true native UI on target platforms?
That would be a _responsible_ commercial enterprise. This property (and many other AirBNB) properties are commercial, but effectively skirting all regulations that would normally apply.

This specific house was rented and a massive party thrown where someone was shot. Hostels and hotels spend money (e.g. security) to ensure the environment is safe and this kind of thing doesn't happen.

AirBNBs can be responsible, but it means things like actually renting spare rooms, having someone nearby (you or a neighbour) meet guests and keep an eye on things, etc.
Cmd+tab (OSX) / Alt+tab?

or

Cmd+<back-tick> (OSX) / Ctl-tab?

I tend to work more with the keyboard than the mouse, though. (a few things like web-browsers excepted)
Wow that's so useful. Thanks for this.
Why "of course"? Did you set it specifically so that it would be on the FP? It certainly wasn't within an hour of you writing that comment.

(I'm in Europe, so I was checking the frontpage many times while you guys were asleep.)

Eventually it did make it, that was quite a lot of hours later, and it only lasted for a handful of hours.

Edit: it strikes me now that there is a need for an hourly HN frontpage archive. Does this exist?
I remember the JavaONE when they were given. Oh getting old!
Pretty sure it only makes sense when you can spin up AWS GPU instances, which you probably cannot do here.
Second this. Will be using this in the future, and some kind of categorisation would improve usability.
I'm fairly certain electron could easily be modified to be installed once and used as the launcher for its applications. I'm also fairly certain we'll see this in the future.

Therefore all claims that electron bloats 200Mb are just temporary. Its still a relatively young technology with huge potential (which also means huge potential for misuse!)

I spent 5+ years writing native GUI apps in half a dozen frameworks, I hope to never do so again unless the project's requirements ask for it, which I don't see happening for most use-cases out there.

Besides, almost nobody writes true native applications anymore - its all C# now which is ironic as its also extremely bloated with huge pools of average developers at best.
Pretty straight forward to use and relies on draf-js which is awesome.
Someone made an unoffical github repo, but it's not been kept up-to-date: https://github.com/unofficial-opensource-apple

The tool they used to create it is here: https://github.com/n-b/tatin

Not sure if it still works, but it's was pretty handy for doing diffs, etc...
Maybe. It depends on what internal controls they have (or don't) and whether it was evident to other admins that the comments had been altered.

There's a lot we don't know without knowing the internal workings of Reddit, though I agree that you can't have to think that if one rogue person (even someone like that) can just do such things, they don't have robust internal controls at all.
Electron is a cross-platform desktop framework based on a web stack.

http://electron.atom.io/
Vikings vs. Lions Live Stream Free
Quantum computing news (Scott Aaronson)
Firefox always broke stuff, since the very beginning. Mayor stuff, sometimes for no good reason, sometimes for very good reasons. Add-on developers learned to deal with it. A lot of add-on developers now have an alternative in WebExtensions, which will ease that pain indeed.

But those developers that cannot or will not use WebExtensions (e.g. I will not/can not port most/any of my add-ons incl. DownThemAll!), but probably would manage breaking changes (I did that for more than a decade now), are left in the cold, rainy dark now.
I recently had to decide on a GUI technology for a file manager I'm developing [1]. Electron is sexy, but unfortunately takes way too long to start for my purposes. I ended up with PyQt:

Pros:

+ Fast startup speed

+ I can use Python (and its vast ecosystem)

+ Qt has good ready-made components for eg. displaying a list of files (which is exactly what I need)

Cons:

- Compiling Qt (which I have to do for various reasons) takes time and is a pain

- Bundling and deploying a Qt-based app (times 3 - OS X, Windows, Linux) is a pain

- I have to deal with auto-updating myself (which I believe Electron supports out of the box) - times 3.

- I would prefer to lay out the UI in well-understood HTML/CSS. Qt's components and its CSS-equivalent behave in very weird ways sometimes.

I still sometimes wish I could use Electron but as OP says, we're supposed to pick the right tools.

I explain my reasoning for picking PyQt over Electron (and other alternatives) in a blog post [2].

1: https://fman.io

2: https://fman.io/blog/picking-technologies-for-a-desktop-app-...
Pinebook ARM Linux Laptop Powered by Allwinner A64 CPU
Nope, got about 1/3 to 1/2 in, and it started to seem repetitive.

Good points, but needed editing.
How moving too fast actually harms your startup
Well, yes. "Deep technical experience" is a superset of "A modicum of tech experience". :)
I tried to do something like this last summer. I found little to zero intersection between the cards that GlobalPlatformPro can personalize, and the cards that you can just buy in low volume at reasonable cost.

I think I did buy one "$5" JavaCard but the shipping was like $50.

As much as I admire GlobalPlatformPro, staking your small company's security infrastructure on 1) a hobby project maintained by one guy (Martin Paljaik), and 2) materials with "call us" pricing that the suppliers really don't want to sell in sub-thousands volume seems worse than just using Yubikey.

Oh, also, I couldn't find an actual working open source PKCS#11 applet that wasn't abandonware. I did get something working with GPG (though it felt like duct tape and prayer), but I couldn't get the PKI stuff to work at all.
Now I'm curious. What would you say is wrong with python closures? Asking because they feel natural to me, and I haven't run into anything irritating about them. (As opposed to lambdas, which are really annoying and restricted in Python.)
It's a framework for building cross-platform applications in which the UI is implemented in HTML/CSS/JS using an embedded Chromium and Node.js.

http://electron.atom.io/
A riddle? Did someone ever really think that this was a british dish and that no one in Italy could come up with a tomato+meat sauce?
Uh, I'm not sure who you hang out with but this is not my experience at all. Taking care of multiple properties will be a career and a lot of work. I grew up in Toronto and know many families that could easily afford income properties and probably be profitable but they don't. Nowhere near everyone's goal is to rent out properties.
I've always found the way people cheer on rising property values a little odd.

The basic things everybody needs are food clothing and shelter. How is it a good thing that something everybody needs should get more and more expensive? I think the relative amount I spend on food and clothing has dropped over the past 25 years, but my housing expenses have skyrocketed.
Huh. Oh well. I guess I need to brush up on my *chan history.

But I do maintain that that's a little different. That's essentially another instance of "disregard that, I suck cock," whereas spez actually altered people's stated opinions.
You can't hand a nuclear weapon to Assange and have him fire it for you and then deny knowing anything about it :)
> partly because alt.* was (and still is) the wild west of the usenet: a lawless wasteland, with the occasional specks of civilization.

...and even that was too restricted for some people, which is one of the reasons free.* was set up.

http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/free/
I find firefox to be faster and less hungry than before as well. And let us not forget about the privacy killer-feature.

Also if you find firefox to be slow, try it with addons disabled (firefox --safe-mode).
> While he hasn't mentioned it directly

He pretty much has[1], stating that DoL will be directed to investigate visa abuse that undercut american workers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX_KaStFT8
I'm a proponent of centralization in money. Not so much of useless intermediaries. But I up-voted the grandparent because his question makes total sense.

What is the point of this except, as another commentator say, to keep a registry of all the transactions?

When the Internet started we all though that it was the start of the age of freedom through anonymity, but instead is the age of "I'm only a click away of knowing everything about you".

It seems that blockchain technologies are going to follow the same pattern.
How  to Build Customer Trust and Reputation with Social Media
The page almost crashed my browser and made me not want to use it.

Very lazy on the part of the developer to code it that way.
Didn't Pentadactyl stop working a while ago? For a while I was trying to keep it working, making the necessary changes on every firefox update, but eventually it got too much for me and I switched over to VimFX. At first I didn't think it would be satisfactory, but it actually is a quite good 80% solution. What seemed to be a weakness - the fact that it doesn't aggressively change how the browser works - now seems like a good design decision, making it considerably more robust than Pentadactyl/Vimperator in the face of the changes Mozilla is making, even at the cost of some of Pentadactyl/Vimperator's more advanced functionality.
This is insanely good. I remember studying the code of other NES emulators and all of them easily passed the 10k lines mark. Makes you wonder how much repeated code is there.
"a variable is not required to have its type declared nor are types associated with properties" (ECMAScript 2016 spec, 4.2)
This is quite true.

Using clasic *nix tools (vim+plugins, zsh, etc) plus their CLI tools, I can download and build many C# projects.

Creating a new solution/project? I need an IDE for that. Or copy-paste the base project files from an existing one.
No it wouldn't, because this means additional delays for anyone that is actually using the site.
I found the article to be an interesting look into an approach to project management at a small, successful software product shop.

You may not find Basecamp relevant, but they still offer a service that people pay for 10+ years after they started. How many of the Kanban board-based project management tools that exist today will still be around in 10 years?
They are trying I guess, and may succeed for a bunch of use cases to bring what's required. But certainly not all. Even the add-ons that can be somewhat reasonably be ported will have to deal with limitations, and I think the quality of some of those ported add-ons will take a (major) hit.

To elaborate:
If you're doing "web stuff", toolbar buttons, and request stuff (adblocking etc), you'll probably be fine. If you're lucky enough that you only need a few additional new things and your name is e.g. Giorgio of NoScript, you also will be probably fine.

If your add-on does not have a sizable user base, and you do fancy things like modding the browser UI itself, or doing something else not entirely "webby", your outlook is a lot less rosy.
I would look at the trajectory of data points so far. Can't expect the altitude to jump by several kilometers in a few seconds. Unless the two altimeters were always disagreeing but that doesn't seem to have been the case here.
> For the average application going native will easily triple your development time and costs for absolutely no noticeable performance difference.

Sublime text still smokes Atom and VSCode in the performance arena.
Has a Start-Up Found the Secret to Farming the Elusive Truffle
The original article by Zed should stand as an example of logical fallacies.
I'm sorry, but I hear this all the time--it's the primary argument used for deprecating or removing any functionality in any software. And my response is: so what? Maintaining software is a burden, period.

Software exists to be useful. The APIs in question make it useful. The developers have been maintaining it for nearly 20 years. Their employer receives millions of dollars a year to do so.

They don't want to maintain this "burden" anymore because it's not fun to maintain old code. It's not glamorous. No one becomes a rock star by unloading the bus. But if you remove the baggage compartments, the bus ceases to be useful, and the show doesn't go on.

Chromium is such a cooler project. It was started from scratch (except for the WebKit part), and it's made by Google (which at least used to be cool), and it's got all these modern APIs. They're so great that it only took them 7 years to support resumable HTTP requests[1].

Firefox used to be about the users. Now it's about the developers. (This is not to say that individual developers are selfish, but that the organization as a whole is behaving in a way that disregards the needs of users and prioritizes the desires of the developers.)

1: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=7648. Just look at this cleverness: "In the absence of a crypto::SecureHash object, DownloadFile reads the partial file and calculates the partial hash state in a new crypto::SecureHash object. If a prefix hash value is available, then the hash of the partial file is matched against this prefix hash. A mismatch causes a FILE_HASH_MISMATCH error which in turn causes the download to abandon its partial state and restart." Any other software in the world would just restart the download. I mean, they already give it a special ".crdownload" extension, so it's not like any other program is going to mess with it. But no, they can't just resume the download, they have to make 15 hash checks and pass around 7 different objects and find every possible reason to start the download all over again. What could have been a 5-line patch turned into 7 years of waiting, a dozen revisions across 50 files...
Startup Helix Wants to Create a World of Personalized Products from Your DNA
Technically that would be up to congress, since the executive branch does not set budgetary policy. Of course, they approve it, so YMMV.
Jetbrains' stuff only works properly on Oracle's proprietary JDK, and not on the reference JDK (OpenJDK), which kinda sucks, doubly so since the former is not re-distributable, making it even more alien in the linux world.
German workers are more productive than UK workers, work less, and earn more
OrientDB has a similar feature called "live query".

Meteor also has something called "reactive data sources" although Meteor is not really a DB.
"Electron is a really good fit: for example, shipping a
single-page webapp as a desktop app, a need that
surfaces often in today's world, despite his derision
of this concept."

From a systems perspective that is emminently rant worthy, it indicates the system has completely failed the developer who cannot easily express what they can in a single page web app as a real application in the system.
It's not as bad as I thought, but Python doesn't actually have lexical scope, not really. But the LEGB rules mean that it should still work as you expect.
The majority of desktop applications that we create, and we do create quite a few of them, are mostly WPF, with some new ones now being prototyped in UWP.

So no, .NET on GNU/Linux won't make those customers magically migrate to it, specially since GUI tooling isn't part of .NET Standard.

Even if WPF, UWP and Blend get ported, I don't see those customers changing their IT infrastructure for desktop, device readers and robot controllers OSes.
that's right, they are american. Sicilian immigrants could barely afford beef in their native Sicily, so when they started having a little more money in their pockets in America, they started adding beef to everything. Which is where spaghetti with meatballs comes from as well. No italian has ever had spaghetti with meatballs.
The price reinforces the idea of free temporary Linux servers with short TTL. I think it's smart and the price point could possibly make up for the money lost providing a free service. I am curious as to how it'll turn out financially.
I did something very similar a few years ago with http://stackmonkey.com. Note the site's cert is currently invalid and there are no pool controllers running, so you can't start a server until someone starts a pool controller. The idea was to tie starts of instances to something decentralized (Bitcoin) and then securely fetch the configuration data from somewhere you control. Thinking IPFS for that in the next iteration.
Heating isn't the only thing using energy.

"Many office buildings had window accomodating H-, T-, and L-shaped footprints to encourage natural lighting, ventilation, and cooling"

All that is mechanical in big square blobs.

Also, at the scale of large office buildings, and given that those more slender buildings would have an optimal orientation, I am not sure building shape matters that much in heating costs.

The article also states "While heating was the main energy use in pre-1950s office buildings, today cooling, lighting and electronic equipment (all operated by electricity), use 70% of all energy on-site.", but that's not a strong argument, as slender buildings would have the electronic equipment, too.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
Hard to say, now that the "sell out to Yahoo!" business plan is off the table.
It's a tech company that needs to structure its work and teams. So it might be able to speak to a technical audience about - surprise! - structuring its work and teams!
The question is: "Who owns and operates the central database?"

There is little trust between organizations. Both from ethical and technical perspectives, I wouldn't trust anyone to run a central clearing database for anything. I spent 10 years in the finance industry, overconfidence caused by incompetence is the hallmark of engineers in finance.

Blockchain solves this problem by letting everyone participate in the infrastructure, and to violate the legal and ethical agreements, a majority of parties would need to collude.
Point taken, but it is not another form. The idea of might in this example in the modern age has become more diffuse. With barely any effort, a squatter can obtain private property rights
The compiler tool chain is not installed by default on the Ubuntu 16.04 image I used. GCC installs in a few seconds. You'd need to automate the setup. So startup is a bit costly (in time) for compiling, CI, etc. Maybe dlpy could add a dev-ready image one day.

edit: the init scripts make setup easy:

https://dply.co/help/cloud-init
Doesn't mean nobody is going to try...
Countries with no zoning are living just fine
I think it's much better UX to show everything on one page in this case. You're speaking like this is an application, completely disregarding the purpose.
Ask HN: How to blog and make money?
What does it have to do with the structure of work and teams?
What are the numbers? Toronto has ~6000 fulltime units. http://insideairbnb.com/toronto/

How many new 20 story condo buildings is that? 20?

In sf the numbers are about ~5000 units. But other data sources show there are about 30k vacant units and 10k are not for rent because potential landlords think the rental laws are too crazy and rather leave them empty. Not to mention all the potential missing units that SF doesnt build due to strong NIMBYism.

How strong is the NIMBY in toronto?
major downside for me is the DC jack for charging, they always break for me...
The arrogance in it, though, is that because people who like JS are "obviously" wrong, the reason must be that they don't know (enough) other programming languages or don't know them well enough.

I have used a number of different programming languages before JS, a couple of them more extensively and for a longer time than JS. I like JS. I understand its flaws. I also understand that all programming languages are terrible in their own unique ways -- I have accepted JavaScript's terribleness and a lot of it is addressed by ES2015 and beyond. I prefer JS's terribleness over that of other languages.

I like to make fun of PHP programmers the same way, but I understand that there are PHP programmers who are able to see beauty in PHP or have found their own perspective of PHP which makes it less terrible than the alternatives. I'm not one of them but I can relate to them. It's called empathy. OP lacks it.
I disagree, I think it's much easier to search for a property by name. It's really hard to objectively categories every property, one person would put one property in one type another one would not. Sorting it alphabetically helps all users to find the property
How would you do it and still view all the properties on one page?