skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Electron is just another proof that ease of programming matters.

Node.js too was a terrible idea. Who in their right mind would write server-side javascript? It turns out: pretty much anyone who didn't want to have to screw around for hours before being able to respond to a simple http request.

Similarly, it is way harder to write a desktop app than a browser app. DOM / CSS manipulation, however bad they are, are years ahead compared to what you can easily do with WPF and friends.

And what about Python for data analysis? The one language that is known to be 10x slower than C becomes the de-facto standard for a field where what matters most is code performance. Again: ease of programming.

The success of electron only shows that there is a market for a UI library that can be written just like what you do in the browser but for native desktop apps... Please someone, write that !
Relevant info: https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/fly-rights

Short version: if bumped, you're legally entitled to a cash payout equal to 2x fare cost.
I've applaud the effort but I don't think I would use this over electron. Without HTML/css how do you make an interface? With canvas directly? I can't find any examples other than three.js stuff.
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Maybe I have the wrong impression, but I feel like the author of the original post never wrote anything cross platform that's sufficiently complex (ie, more than a "let's fill out a form and press OK" Qt app).

> The trade-off — and there is a trade-off — is that Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications.

There's nothing inherently electron-specific that makes an app "shite" any more than writing one in Qt would. You can write shit in any language, framework or platform. The day someone invents a system that protects us from our own stupidity will be the day humans become obsolete.

> They fail to integrate with the host platform,

Untrue. You can—if you need to—integrate with the host platform by writing a native node module, however it becomes less cross-platform at this point.

> they are slow, they hog memory and drink power.

Yes web apps use a bit—sometimes considerably, depending on what you do—more memory, and a bit more CPU (and hence bettery),
but they are not perceivably slower, unless you're doing something stupid (in which case the equivalent Qt app would probably suffer in the same way).

> But let's be honest here – there is nothing preventing e.g. Spotify or Slack from building native clients for each platform they support, and I find it difficult to believe that the costs would be prohibitive.

Maybe, maybe not. I think using a cross-platform solution wouldn't be ideal for them (they'd need to either rely on something like Qt, write their own rendering engine, or use something like SFML; all of these are overkill compared to Electron), and the alternative is writing it in different languages for each platform, which would probably inevitably cause the projects to get out of sync in one way or the other over time.
$17 DIY A/R kit
It's true that adult ADHD (and non-hyperactive ADHD, and ADHD in women) is under-recognised in the UK.

However, NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) has published guidelines about diagnosis and the short version iirc is that you're well within your rights to point out that your GP is not a specialist in this area and ask to be referred.

The bad news is there may not be anywhere locally to refer you to, so you may need to travel out of area, pay to see someone private (and then fight to have your prescription accepted and paid for by the NHS). There are more kids' specialists but they may not recognise the nuances of the adult condition.

No, I haven't done it - I've been meaning to for over a year and keep putting it off, ha ha.

Links: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG72 - NICE guidelines; https://aadduk.org/forum/ - AADD UK forum
While I'm sure it's possible an employee forwarded this email without official authorization, it is unlikely this email was written without the expectation that it would eventually make its way into the press. IOW, it's been written with the public as its ultimate audience, I wouldn't assume that it has anything that the CEO didn't want the world to know.
Opps Daily http://www.oppsdaily.com/ We ask people about the problems they face at work, and the software that could solve those problems. Then, we send you their answers.
A good run down, with a live link to the commercial: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/business/kendall-jenner-p...
So get a better IRC client? Really not hard to do things like syntax formatting and auto link follow (GUI versions of IRCII had plugins for this in the late 90s, so it's not like it's even a novel idea).
I wonder if you could hold the phone flat in one hand and press the buttons with the other hand to defeat this. Or wobbling while entering it one-handed.
He was a Dr. going to work
I wasnt suggesting writing an emulator from scratch. I was suggesting emulating the mainframe. Here is what we, specifically, were looking at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_%28emulator%29
I quite enjoyed "F is for Fake" by Orson Welles, which starts of as a documentary essay of sorts about an art forger. It discusses some of the same issues with authentication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake
I was in the same camp until I personally witnessed administrative-level collusion to block certain topics on Reddit. I observed the entire event, from the initial breaking story, to its meteoric amplification, and finally to the censorship and aftermath. I didn't believe it was possible, or that such things were happening, until I saw it happen for myself.

Since then, I have seen it happen many times on various platforms. Twitter is particularly guilty of suppressing hash tags that go against their politics. Google does the same by manipulating their trending topics report.
Its a terrible experience to discover my battery life is cut in half because of a cursor animation in VS Code, or to have my laptop heat up and the fans engage because of an animated GIF in slack.

But its worse than that - most users don't even know why their battery life is awful. So they blame apple, or microsoft, or dell or whoever. And they just don't use their computers as much, because its all a bit gross and slow. And thats bad news for our entire industry.
tl;dr: Everybody wants native apps, but nobody wants to write them.
[E]very man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?”

― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2376452-l-existentiali...
Uhm, I'm sorry, why does this apply only to encrypted messaging apps? What about people in cars? Isn't it about time police had a swift and reliable method to find out what car passengers say to each other? Do we really want to let terrorists and pedophiles use their cars as a safe haven, where they can say whatever they want, and the good guys are powerless to find out? Just recently a terrorist used a truck in an attack - wouldn't it aid police to know what he said while driving?

I also heard almost all terrorists and child molesters talk to others in their homes. There's many reports of terrorists getting together in someone's house to plot and exchange information. I think it's about time we gave the good guys the tools they need to find out what was said in a room. We wouldn't want to leave pedophiles and terrorists any safe havens, would we?

And don't worry about abuse - any time a police officer requires access to the recordings of microphones that will be mandatory in all cars and houses, a judge will have to approve the request, so the risk of abuse is minimal! Only privacy extremists would be against such common-sense precautions.
forbid creating an off platform archive

I'm not sure that's a substantively enforceable idea.

Just try and stop me?
I'm still waiting for the white people from the north to throw a fit because I said this. It's not always well received...
So it was stupid business not to offer more money for other people to leave the plane (or to find some other way to move the crew), there's nothing to argue about there.

What did they do that should be illegal?

Overselling each flight makes the tickets cheaper. People want cheaper tickets. So it isn't obvious to me that over selling is wrong. Is the problem that they failed to stop the people boarding before deciding they didn't want to carry them on that flight?
The user experience of Slack as a desktop app is not great. The UI is consistently one of the highest energy users on my machine, despite being one of the worst performing (have you ever tried scrolling up into a conversation's history?)
Not sure about the products/companies you're listing, but cult of personality must have a lot to do with the extra press. People will click on links to stories about Tesla/Elon/SolarCity without the journalists having to do as much.
Wasn't this basically true of Java in 1995? Everyone was excited about finally being able to easily write cross platform apps. And then there was flash that anyone willing to pay for the designer could build apps that could run on any platform. So now we're on to the third thing.
Well, "the planet" = "our species" is a big part of the problem, no?
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Clickbait title. Sales suck so they are offering undervalued trade-in discounts to ease the pain of the used market, and recycle some sales. Not a bad idea, but GoPro is clearly 1. Able to sell new cameras 2. Not 'buying' cameras except as tradeins. This is akin to saying ford can't sell cars so is buying them back.

If you can't write a factual article, don't.
I was expecting Stallman-style advocacy against closed-source as a principle; pleasantly surprised by the arguments.

Synchronous communication, indeed, is bad for the main communication channel. However, as a secondary communication channel, it can serve important needs.

When people are looking not to just get a single issue resolved, but to form a community, this community is often based on informal communication and emotions. Seeing the same people in the member list every day, exchanging little inside jokes, getting to know individual members of the community on a personal basis — this is something completely irrelevant for the user of the open-source product, but can be an important emotional component that motivates people to stay in the community and continue to put in effort into the project.

And, of course, a synchronous channel, where you can get more lax on moderation, is a much more suitable tool for this purpose.
I'm surprised to see so little mention of Java as a cross-platform native app platform. Maybe I'm just old enough to remember coming up though when Swing and AWT were the next big thing. Nowadays, IntelliJ and it's derivatives are all Java-based, and pretty popular and performant.

I love getting a chance to get out of web-dev world and go build some ugly tools with WinForms from time to time. You have to do more work yourself, but there's so much less magic involved.
Mazda's a weird one. The alphanumeric names they use in the US aren't used in Japan.

In the US, they used to use three-digit numbers for their family sedans: 323, 626, and 929. Well, they never did that in Japan: they were called Familia, Capella, and Luce/Sentia (Luce was used before 1991, Sentia after), respectively. There was also the Mazda 121 in Europe, which depending on the generation was either a rebadged Ford or came from Mazda's Japan-only Autozam marque (the Autozam Revue, specifically).

But then they rebranded in the '00s. The three-number names were replaced by single-number names joined to Mazda's own name. We now have the Mazda2, Mazda3, Mazda5, and Mazda6. Well, they also rebranded their cars in Japan at the same time... but they just rebranded them to other names: they're known as the Mazda Demio, Mazda Axela, Mazda Premacy, and Mazda Atenza, respectively.
Maybe time to ressurect my abandoned wxwidgets inspired assembly project?
Shipping the prototype is hardly a new problem, this is just the latest iteration.
it may be "a big selling point," but you're being sold a bill of goods.

using sass as you describe is an anti-pattern.

the important thing that sass allows you to do (which CSS should have built in, but doesn't) is to apply chunks of style to a named class. that is, precisely to decouple naming, styling, and html structure. you do this in sass with @extend or @include.

practically, this means i can take canned styles of my own making or from libraries like bootstrap, and then define my semantically named classes in terms of them. this allows composition at any level of granularity, total control over the units of re-use, and clear, readable markup.
Bologna: nothing truly performant uses Javascript because Javascript can't get at hardware accelerators in their full glory. Apple's macOS and iOS are themselves desktop apps, in the latter case for a pocketable desktop, and they resolutely don't rely on the very constrained subset of 50 years of engineering called Javascript.
No, but you got an 80% improvement for a similar price.
> That's nonsense.

Proper this and proper that, and don't get me wrong, I agree, but parent is correct -- and that is these apps wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Electron. It just wouldn't have been a consideration for it to be a desktop app. Instead it would have just been thrown up on the web. For example VSCode would have just been some type of online IDE clone like Cloud9 or something similar.

If you think this is nonsense, you are out of touch, and I don't mean this as an insult, although I realize there isn't a good way to say that.
I have a couple of hobby desktop (macOS) applications in various stages of done-ness, which, if there were a low-effort solution, I'd like to port to Windows. Yet even with the business logic nicely separated out into portable C++, it's a huge pain. In the 10 or so years since I've done Windows, the development environment on that platform became totally foreign. C++/MFC seems to be dead and buried, now we have WPF (which is also going away if I'm reading things right) and C# and XAML and Windows Universal and all these layers of exotic technology I now need to learn and master just to get a simple native looking port of this thing. Screw that, I'll find something else to work on thankyouverymuch.

I totally see the pain and the burning need out there for a way to write something that works across the "big three" platforms that have grown more and more distant from each other over the years. But Javascript and a browser? Really, that's the answer? I'd even be willing to toss out my investment in Objective-C native code on macOS if I could keep my C++ business logic. Is Qt really viable? My understanding (again, maybe dated) is that a Qt application looks like a Qt application, not a native application. Is this still true?
People grew up and stopped using Flash, slowly phasing it out. If Electron is as influencial as some comments here seem to think it is, the big players in the desktop market will (hopefully) step up and put together new APIs and tools which fill the gap Electron is currently filling. And they'll do it all natively and without the terrible bloat, poor productivity and bad accessibility that Electron currently brings to the party.
Should I redesign my current job's crappy CMS?
I've been thinking about redesigning this software since I got here. I work at a college, and they could desperately use a site redesign among other things. However, no one seems to be interested in trying to do it even though it would solve lots of problems.

Just wondering how many people have experienced something like this and if they have followed the urge to do it and had it turn out well.
It's been a few years since games can't run on core 2 duo. I had to processor because of that. (running at 10fps isn't running fine).
Eh? Indie developers thrived on Mac ecosystem for years.
As a paying customer, both Spotify and Slack are relativity shitty experiences.

I pay for both despite their poor quality software and bad UI/UX, not because of it.
Tutorial on how to build your own smartphone powered A/R device using cardboard.
Vagrant on the existing Mac or develop in the cloud. Why have ANOTHER computer?
Developing for Mac may = Developing for iOS.

Developing for Mac + Windows + Linux + Web > Developing for Electron.
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That IS my advice.. immediately stop using their services. It will come at a cost of convenience to yourself of course.
Sorry, I forgot to append /s.
There was some effort in the past to allow browsers to provide desktop app-like experiences for webapps. Progressive Web Apps are doing similar, though the target is very strongly toward mobile. It would be more efficient for disk space, though likely not CPU/RAM, to just make webapps be able to work more like desktop apps.
The weird thing is I'm almost certain you can build the exact same thing with e.g. python+Qt, do literally all the drawing using python code in custom widgets, and the result would still be nicer to use than the status quo. I'm not advocating switching to the PyQt stack, I just want the electron stack to be saner, in particular

1) Electron is obviously a system library now. Treat it as such. Install ONE copy of electron per version, not ten private copies of electron in npm. It should be simple to integrate with at least Windows and OSX install systems - instead of downloading the full electron module, download an installer that installs the required version system-wide. This can be done as a step during installation like desktop programs have been installing required dependencies since the dawn of time.

2) Find some way to make it slimmer. Maybe not every app needs the entirety of the browser loaded. Maybe we can do lazy loading of certain components? Maybe optimise the most used critical paths, and provide tools to developers (if those don't already exist) to show exactly what is causing all those wakeups?

Moving off Electron is not an option any more, it's just such an easy and familiar platform to develop for, it's not going anywhere. Maybe we should accept it as the victor of the cross-platform desktop application toolkit and work to make it better. It's shitty, but it's the right kind of easy, like PHP.
Airlines overbook because people don't show up for flights.

Overbooking means airlines can offer passengers refundable tickets.

Occasionally they get it wrong and have too many people show up. So they offer compensation to get people to voluntarily give up seats. If they can't get people to voluntarily give up seats they have the right to pick who to deny service to (but by law have to pay specific compensation to).

It's a system that works well. It keeps planes as full as possible. It keeps fares as low as possible.

I'm not sure it should change based on one guy who decided he was too important to accept being bumped.
Jimmy Kimmel pointed out the main reason why they get away with this.

“The next time we book a flight, it doesn’t matter if it’s United or Delta or American, if one of those flights is a dollar less than the other one, that’s the one we’ll pick. They know this. That’s why we’re stuck with them.”

I don't understand the dynamics of how it ended up this way. Air travel used to be a luxury, and had fairly high margins. The race to the bottom has inspired a lot of terrible practice...unbundling things like "baggage fees", pushing load factors beyond what's reasonable, increasingly smaller seats, etc.
> Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay.

Precisely. I don't use Slack in part because its desktop application is irrationally bloated for its use-case. Although I have other reasons as well, they are enduring a cost--a small one to be sure, but presumably non-trivial in aggregate--in people refusing to use their service in part because their desktop application is poor.

But I do agree with the general emotion underlying the frustration of "externalities" here. As someone who advocates for high-performance and efficient web applications, I have toyed with the question of whether developers should confront the morality of wasting energy by having selected poor/low-performance platforms. Put in a somewhat comedic tone: low-performance software contributes to climate change.
A Tale of Cataclysm, Written in Penguin Guano
I re-read the post and it does make sense when looking at the term in Wikipedia. It's odd because someone said that it's more of a UK phrase, but being from the UK, I have never heard it before.
People are making all kinds of great new apps, and more often than not, they come out on all three platforms. People are excited about the Desktop again...

You could have expressed pretty much the same sentiment about Java ~20 years ago. The trade-offs (high resource consumption, additional complexity, but less demanding of developer time) and even the fundamentals of the approach (an additional abstraction layer that works as a VM, APIs oriented around all the latest thinking) were also very similar.

Java is used for a lot of things, but mostly not as the basis of mass-market cross-platform applications the way it was originally intended.
That entire way of policing has been normalized and legalized over the decades now. For example, originally "Less Lethal" options were intended to be used in a situation an officer would otherwise have to use their firearm. Now, they're just used as compliance "come-alongs"; these kinds of things start in our prisons and then come to our streets. Now you have police tasering streakers just to stop them, or swabbing students' eyes with pepper spray to get them to submit.

Is it any wonder that "failure to comply" has become legalese for, "You've given us the right to do anything to you, up to killing you on camera."

This isn't the airlines, although obviously their customer service is appalling; this is an issue with our police.
It really is. Slack's interface is good enough and easy enough to understand that even the least technical people can pick it up in a few minutes after you show it to them and explain the difference between public and private channels. A week or two of use is enough to master everyday Slack use. Slack may not bring much to the table in terms of new functionality, but it does make it insanely easy for the average person to easily use the system and be involved, which really cannot be overstated when working at a company with a varying level of technical abilities.
A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history.
Glad to learn that the reindexing is multi threaded :)
When I hear most people say AAA, they tend to mean "big budget" (which usually implies fancy graphics, big musical scores, voice acting, mocap etc -- things that lower budget games can't afford).
irssi is a significantly better interface than any slack application.
What I mean is, that if that is the proposition on the table, don't take it.
aren't all tools a way to cut development costs?
Or you could use Chrome Apps, i.e. a desktop shortcut which opens a web page in a separate window.
It's in the comments of the post.
All numbers are ultimately "probabilistic" in calculations.

Sure you can state them as a "fact", but that undermines quantum theory itself and the Universe.

If you want to do the math right you really need to consider terms as peak probabilities and work from there. (See Chaos theory)

IMHO

Of course doing math with hard constraints is perfectly adequate for most macroscopic calculations.

That said, errors do add up given sufficient entropy and time.

It's quite simple to add fuzziness into the equations but quite a pain in the ass to compute with, plus you will in most cases get the same answer anyway.

As far as real numbers, they are no different from integers, just shift the decimal.