skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can feel the frustration when people are forced to use a specific proprietary app that is bad (hey MS Teams). They clearly have the resources and experience to build better native apps.

But I guess the one big advantage for electron is the Web stack. It is so ubiquitous and relevant that most developers have experience with it. In combination with open source, this is the reason VS Code (as an example) has so many contributions, leading to many features for a variety of languages and so many plugins. As a result, I don't have to learn other editors or IDEs which makes me more productive.

I would welcome performance improvements, but I heavily doubt that a native alternative for the same scope of VS Code can exist. Every other UI solution is niche compared to the Web. Even for mobile apps, many companies use something like React-native or Ionic instead of developing two native versions.

I hope that one day electron uses Bun[1] as it offers much more performance compared to node/v8. But until then, I will happily trade performance for productivity.

[1] https://bun.sh/
For info, it is not applied to edits of the title
There are benchmarks/cases were JS is faster then C++
Yes obliviously C++ is faster then JS, but complexity/time of programmer may cause you to write slower code then v8/JIT.
I can't sadly find a link for that benchmark
How is that review tongue in cheek?
> There are just too many levels, and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++.

JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled.

For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway, other than some exceptional cases like WebGL-type stuff.

What's also not mentioned is that because JavaScript is single-threaded and garbage collected, classes of issues that you'd see in C++ are completely avoided (of course at the cost of absolute performance potential). I'd argue that TypeScript is probably the easiest language to grok, but I'm biased.

Anyway, Electron is its own circle of hell as it redundantly ships a ton of stuff and eats memory due to its own inefficiencies (though some of this is necessary sadly as letting you Bring Your Own Browser would create complexity of its own). I'm honestly surprised the Chromium team hasn't already addressed this with the Electron team somehow by now, given the popularity of the apps.

Though, I guess with newer apis such as the File System one Electron is slowly becoming unnecessary (but I doubt it'll ever go away because it's doubtful Chrome will include all of the APIs necessary).

The other issues mentioned in the article, such as UI could easily be addressed if Google and Apple cared to. They could release a CSS framework and style guide and people would quickly adhere to it. Google kind of did this with Material, but it doesn't go far enough, which is why you see 3rd parties picking up the slack.
They are saying if they have say an iphone and an android (tablet?), the same app should behave the same. Contrary to you, some people could not care less about "consistency" of different apps that have different UIs and do different things anyway.
Microsoft doesn't have a great reputation among the Japanese public as an employer. My understanding is it's to do with a round of layoffs they conducted in the early 2000s which caused a huge stink. The story goes that this was the reason they got laughed out the room when they first tried this.
> 1st amendment says, and has always said, I have a right to make twitter and YouTube make you read my posts.

Weren't the same people who made this joke again and again when Trump was banned from Twitter the exact same people who then cried out loud when Musk took over and changed the rules?
could you list the ones you are thinking of?
> species that have survived for millions of years

I mean, this is a perfect example of pretending that differences don't exist because you can't see them. There are no such species.

https://www.darklegacycomics.com/185
It surprisingly resembles Swedish language a bit.
Web apps don't require constant access to the internet.
In other words, Google has all your records and they intend to use them --- to your benefit and to theirs.
Free speech is not the same as being entitled to a spotlight on YouTube.

He is free to use whatever other means he wants to spread his ideas. It's not like he's being shipped off to a forced labour camp.
> Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website?

In some cases, so you can load and save data from the user's disk instead of the app's back-end.
The headline says "non-food products", so no, that would be stupid. If it is indeed dangerous then it should be regulated as dangerous foods which is something EFSA handles.
No, it works cross project, with no specific need for the victim to do anything dumb. And the attacker needs no rights to the victim target repo. You end up with an active CI_JOB_TOKEN that impersonates the victim. It's pretty bad.
I have around 20 years of experience doing work with third generation languages. So I’d classify myself as both “normal” and “experienced”. The closest thing my group does with “low code” is the odd Azure Logic app for alerting, and we don’t have any plans to change that. I’ve been around long enough to see things like Lighswitch die on the vine.

The problem is that I don’t control the entire IT org and my group has to deal with issues like presentation logic bubbling up into our APIs from underpowered and overhyped low-code platforms.

I guess the difference between you and me is that I’m open-minded about the possibility that some of these tools might potentially, someday, be better than what we’ve seen until now.
Need to have a bit more of a play with it but I really like it so far. I mainly see myself using it to pipe into (like from curl or the gh cli).

One thing that isn't clear to me is how to actually use the themes you can display with fx --themes.
See also <https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/>.
This is a fairly recent development. The wait times for registering a vehicle were downright absurd.

By the way, the Kfz-Zulassungsstelle is allegedly one of the best-organised offices on Berlin. It's all downhill from there.
Yes indeed. The alternative timeline - Windows on nearly all servers and desktops. All software purchased from ISV and closed source. Bugs galore that never get fixed because they have you locked in. Crappy software due to lack of competition.
LLMs can write as naturally as you want. You can even paste some of your writing to emulate. The default style is just the default.
iOS apps tend to have back buttons, vs Android's swipe from left side to go back
Makes you wonder what modern hardware is truly capable of, if only we had the sacred knowledge.
This reminds me George Carlin's skit on soft language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h67k9eEw9AY
This is not true. I tested it before: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/berlin-buergeramt-experimen...
More than port, I would call it conversion.
Me too! I definitely remember seeing that thank you note. Mandela Effect comes to mind of course but the memory is so vivid it’s creepy.
HP, yes, but Brother?
There're few benefits that comes with packaging it into an electron wrapper, including:

- making sure it works on all platforms independently of the browser you use (because it comes packages with chromium)

- having access to more API from the platform. Although the UI is rendered through a WebView, there's still native code running, that you can hook back into your app. That can be useful to either offload some logic to native, or access native API that you pilot from the WebApps

- having a shortcut icon to open you app in the system (although this is getting obsolete now that Chrome and Safari offer "Add to Desktop" functionally)
The truth is somewhere in between. The adrenal cortex responds to signals from the brain which responds to the hormones from the adrenal cortex. It's the interplay of mind and body that influences our perception of reality.
Optimizing out an empty loop in C is illegal.
While we're here with fun facts. I've been living here for ten years, and haven't needed a registered seal until recently. To register my seal (using katakana) at the city hall, I needed to register my katakana name at the city hall too, which I never needed and had never done. How do you that? By presenting a somewhat official document with your katakana name, which none of the official IDs (resident card or driver's license) have. The document they would accept are a cash card or a passbook from a bank. How did the bank get my katakana name in the first place? I made it up. So what's the point? Who knows.
If it's a legend, Raymond repeats it: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98...
More like one week, while travelling, and most of it was obsessing over design details.
Would someone share some details on why SAST mentioned in this thread, for those who are not familar with the Gitlab architecture design and product decisions. Thanks.
So glad that I moved my game from Unity to Monogame
I first started developing my game in Unity but didn't like that I wasn't getting an instant feedback loop like in other code first game engines so I moved my development to Monogame and couldn't be happier, especially now that Unity have brought in those stupid per install fees. Is anybody else going to make the move or are you just going to wait it out?
Nobody said they were??
I haven't had the opportunity to try this yet, but it's a brilliant use of LLM!
Thanks for sharing.
macOS doesn’t have support for cgroups / containers however, so you are stuck running a vm to achieve this. wsl runs a vm as well but requires much less care and attention.

It is odd because it seems that macOS should be able to provide a better Linux development experience but right now, Microsoft seems to care about this immensely more than Apple.
Today Is International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"Just like" if we ignore the huge difference: once is a game millions of individual people willingly buy and willingly play for fun, popular among countless other readily available board game options.

The other is a system in which people are born into, it's protected by law and enforced by the police and the state, and has no readily available alternative that an individual can just opt for and use without huge co-ordinated societal and law and government restructuring.

So, kind of "Elmer Fudd is just like Darth Vader", if we ignore that one is a cartoon rabbit hunter and farmer, and the other is the feared throughout a whole galaxy enforcer of a dictatorship through his dark mystical powers, in a live action sci-fi film.
The hobby vintage computing scene very rarely plays a part in important recovery or support situations.

I would hazard a guess that the number of real and important situations where a critical and irreplaceable legacy system requires access to *Gmail* is close to zero. These systems are unlikely to have access to the internet, and if you’re connecting an *unsupported browser* to a legacy webmail solution, you’re doing things very, very wrong.
> unless a game was designed specifically around this rendering strategy

This used to happen all the time.

An N64 game with this level of graphics would have sold like crazy back in the day, even if the game wasn't that great.
Also worth noting - a broadcaster like Channel 4 is not a monolith that produces all of the programmes that it airs. A lot of the programmes, like those in the Big Brother franchise, are produced by independent production companies and then shopped to multiple distributors like Channel 4, or Channel 5, or ITV2 (where the most recent series have aired) for broadcast.

Also, I would argue that media companies that do journalism should not shy away from having those journalists investigate other departments of those companies. And while those journalists ought to give those depts the right to respond to any accusations, they shouldn't necessarily wait until those depts have completed in-depth investigations of their own and concocted a full CYA strategy, before breaking the story.

(Pointing this out does not mean one is condoning the actions of media corporations)
Mind sharing links on what's happened?
For some U.S. tales, e.g., the challenges of digitizing California's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) sign-up process, see the excellent Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, former deputy CTO of the United States and now the founder of the non-profit organization Code For America. [0]

(Memorable passage: A civil servant described a complex government policy as having been "vomited" onto an impenetrable sign-up form — for my contract-drafting course, I stole that as the label "barf clause" to describe long, wall-of-words provisions such as the 357-word "Fragment 1" in an example I had students rewrite in class last week. [1])

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Recoding-America-Government-Failing-D...

[1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#guar-wow-1
And so you double down?
Discussed yesterday: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37555004>
Why DEI Training Doesn’t Work–and How to Fix It
> Nitter.net doesn't play videos.

Huh? Unless you meant that you can't play without JavaScript (which is unfair considering that the other website can't even load with JavaScript off), this is blatantly false that I even doubt if you have really used it.
While I seriously sympathize with some of the above (and below) descriptions of byzantine German bureaucracy and its broad lack of digitization, there's another side to it all that's hard not to appreciate slightly in the context of our creeping, already vast, global surveillance state of constant digital monitoring by thousands of actors both private and public, or both and feeding off each other's surveillance carrion...
Massive reductions in the number of police support staff was a part of the coalition government's austerity plan and the reduction in service quality in the police recruiting agency was a (positive!) case study in a degree I did in organisational management.
It is worth noting, for the benefit of US-based readers, that the legal age of consent in the UK is 16.

Brand was 31 at the time, according to media reports.
I saw a review of a cheap Damascus knife today, and the guy was so busy cutting in jokes... it was infuriating. I just wanted to see how the blade failed.

he finally bent the unhardened knife at the sixteen minute mark. I wish I was kidding.
Or may be not. People commit to use a tool, so why not doing it fully so you get the most benefit from it?

It makes everything harder if you want to use a tool without really using it so you can move to a different one if needed.
Their product includes a static code analysis tool you can run in ci/cd pipelines, triggered by the existence of some files in your repo.

It's the entry point for this exploit. Something the attacker abuses to get rights they shouldn't have. The victim doesn't have to use it at all.
I think that lesson is a great takeaway. I don't think it should have been possible to generate access levels equal to the user without their direct input (for example, on a specific "generate access token" page). Then a satellite team requesting that ability hopefully would have raised red flags with the main team, if that's how they're operating.
If you make it centralised, it becomes a huge project that costs hundreds of millions.

I agree that this would be ideal, but on a local scale, these projects are easier to manage.
MSN Messenger really was never that bad, was it?

I keep hitting the RAM ceiling on my 16GB dev machine with the amount of electron crap I have to have open just to send messages to colleagues. Maybe it isn't noticeable when your app is the only one developed on your machine, but on a typical user machine these days the RAM guzzling is real.

We could have it better, we had it better and I hate this.
For sure but that should change how much regard we hold them in right? The example given by your sibling comment is a great one because we know that there is something we're missing in the explanations given by General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and that's okay. It doesn't mean that neither are useful just that we understand their explanatory limits. In comparison flat-earth theory is basically completely contradictory to vast swathes of evidence and explanations.
You’re probably faster than the typical “good developer” I had in mind.
I think part of the civility was because people knew they could get banned from the various BBS's that were their access to fidonet in the first place. When you were limited to local access points, due to the costs of long distance calls, there was more incentive to not piss off your hosts.
ChatGPT wrote me a personal JavaScript browser “plugin.”
Japanese first/last names are largely separate, so it would be pretty safe to just find someone on wikipedia who shares either name and use them as a guide.
This is actually my preferred approach. If the app doesn't have a compelling reason to be native I prefer it to be a website.

- I know that I can access it from any device and any OS.

- Better security and privacy unless it grant it permissions.

- I can open multiple tabs and switch between them.
Unity had 7000+ employees before layoff.

Valve maintains one of the biggest platforms, and their own game engine. Valve also developed CSGO, TF2, and Dota, all popular online games that need constant maintenance (and even big content updates sometimes). Valve also invested in VR and sells hardware.

Valve has 1200 employees.

To me it's easy to see why Unity lose money.
Electron has always had capabilities that websites don't have. VS Code, e.g., has shell integration, uses file watchers, lets you connect to remote servers or your container runtime, interacts with other installed programs, etc. I don't want to miss these features, which is why I don't want to use the web version.
Yeah this really bugs me because it leads people down the path of WASM craziness when the language is rarely the problem.

Most web apps are slow because the DOM is slow.
People mistakenly consider that food and some corporations support this misconception to exploit it for profit. Some people mistakenly consider silicagel food as well (there would be no need to write "do not eat" on it if nobody did) but this doesn't mean it actually is food. Some even say cocaine is a vitamin. There are many substances which occur in our bodies naturally and play important roles in its functioning but are not foods. For example thyroxine is not a food as well, although our bodies produce and use it in some amounts for vital purposes. Same way sugar.
The proposal discusses the above concern (as it should, since the author has gotten almost every version of possible concerns). Perhaps one of them will win out and alter the proposal appropriately.
Doomscrolling is a thing even in gamedev, I suppose.
Yes, Javascript is used in browsers and has a few different competing runtimes, and as such, there are a lot of resources invested in making it faster than the other runtimes.

As a result, except in only very trivial cases, Javascript is only slower than C++ by about a factor of 2-4. This is a much smaller difference than the "orders of magnitude" mentioned above.

The following list of benchmarks illustrates this point: https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/javascrip...

The only exception is "hello world", which is about one order of magnitude slower in JS, but that's probably explained by the runtime startup / teardown.
"Assuming we are acting logically"... which a lot/most/all of people don't at any given time which is largely the issue at hand.
> typical N64 "blurry mess"

At least N64 had correctly-projected textures.

PlayStation had sharp pixelated textures that were incorrectly mapped onto 2D triangles (they didn't account for depth).

So N64 was blurry but correct. PlayStation more aptly deserves the "mess" descriptor.
You can analyze this data without Snowflake: https://clickhouse.com/blog/real-world-data-noaa-climate-dat...
This is great! Impressed by your work to make arriving in Berlin easier, especially for foreigners.
This article explores how to harness the power of AI as a personal shopping assistant, a tool that promises a more personalized, efficient, and interactive shopping experience.
IIRC the HN algorithm downranks stories where number of comments exceeds the number of upvotes. As of me writing this, there are 50 comments and 35 upvotes.
This, with a little more automation, is exactly how I was able to book a covid quarantine hotel to return to NZ.

It felt pretty unfair that the average user was at an impossible disadvantage because the system had no protection against automation.

It was quite obvious others were already running automation, but I only booked for myself and then turned it off.

I was impressed NZ got a highly functional system up and running extremely quickly, but it became a game of high frequency trading.
Peep Show is a national humiliation; its nihilism speaks for us all
This is "great news" for researchers and UK universities in particular but this is also "terrible news" because it's yet another instance of special treatment that weakens the overall system. What I mean by that it's the notion of "we can be out while still be kinda in". No system can survive for long if this is widespread.

I get most of the UK scientific community was against Brexit, but the truth is the majority voted what they voted, yes it's a terrible mistake even seen from Pluto but it is what it is. If you want in again, then make the political transformations first like anyone else. Yes, nothing was ever by the book and perfect but this type of loopholes, Northern Ireland deals, etc. will come out as net-negative in the end.
Ask HN: What's the state of the job market in the UK?
I'm a mid-senior web developer and I'm finding it brutal, I'm getting close to no responses to my direct applications, and the interviews I'm getting via LinkedIn recruiters are uninspiring at best.

Is it slow right now or am I the problem?

A bad trend I'm also noticing is most of the jobs now seem to be hybrid with 2-3 mandatory days in the office per week, which seems like a bad deal to me in that it's almost as inflexible as being on site, and likely means hotdesking.
It's true right now though there are a lot of people working on different ways to get python to have near native performance. I'd say it could be a fixable problem.

I was listening Lex Friedman's podcast featuring Chris Lattner a few months ago. He's is working on Mojo, which is basically a fast superset of python that can be fast (if you opt in to a few things) and worst case just falls back to being as fast as regular python. The intention is to give people enough means that they can optimize such code to be actually fast or just run it as is.

I'm not much of a python developer myself, even though I do have to deal with it occasionally. I liked the point that he made that, for whatever reason, there are just a lot of people using python and getting access to that community of people is a good way to get traction for your tool or technology. He was talking about machine learning specifically. A lot of the experts in that field are using python. Of course all the difficult bits and bobs are outsourced to native libraries. His vision is that a lot of that stuff should be written in mojo/python and that there are no good reasons why that should be any slower.

Probably removing the gil will help (everything blocking is not cool). And the language could use some better primitives for dealing with things like co-routines. They are kind of nice to have in asynchronous code bases like games or UIs. But those are things that could be fixable and might benefit the rest of the ecosystem.
Electron isn’t just a website-as-an-executable, it has a whole separate API that goes what a browser does/could/should offer. https://zeke.github.io/electron.atom.io/docs/api/