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Comment by TheAdamist | Hacker News Reader

Ironic that a post about Threads backend is hosted on twitter.

If you want real irony here, it's this: powering an app called Threads with Python that's got a global interpreter lock which makes threading hard.

Get it? Threads, threading...? OK, I'll see myself out.

Now that is Meta!

Gotten burned by that. Have a python utility that calls something that's very CPU intensive (GDAL) and I literally have to wrap this python process in java for real concurrency. Not a python expert by any means but I'd love to know what other people do when this happens. I'm assuming it's something revolving around containers and messaging (blech)...

I thought Python calling a native lib was the one time you could multithread your way around the GIL if you were cpu limited? Are the GDAL bindings not releasing the lock or something?

Is your problem that the c part of GDAL isn't concurrent and you are calling it multiple times, or are you blocking on something you shouldn't?

Python calling a concurrent c thing is super common. For more complex things there is multiprocessing, but that essentially is simplification of IPC.

Had a massive amount of images that I was trying to process for a specific purpose. I wound up spinning up multiple python processes within a java wrapper using concurrent linked queues. Got the job done but it's not the proudest moment of my life.

Why did you need the Java wrapper? You can orchestrate stuff like that within Python. The multiprocessing module.

You could have done this with the multiprocessing module. It interfaces like the threading library but it's launching new processes for each "thread". I've done a shitload of image processing in Python with it. You'll end up with a 100% Python version of what you did.

Multiprocessing does basically the same thing, but in python.

Python works around this by having multithreading through multiprocessing and IPC. its made pretty easy to use with the futures builtin module but is finicky/slow/hard to support.

I guess PEP 703 has to be auto-accepted now. I don't make the rules.

Meta does have their own higher-performance JIT-compiled implementation of Python, but I don't know if it still uses a global interpreter lock.

... wait, what? Did this morph out of HHVM? Any links on this?

Click on the link, it's linked inside.

Seems to be behind login.

https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder

Python does threading fine than most languges. Not every language supports native threading.

Threads is a mobile-only app, like Instagram. You can't actually use Threads on a desktop browser, so that's probably why this is shared as a Twitter post. Even if it were a Threads post, it would not be submittable to HN.

Not exactly true. They have a read-only browser view.

In fact a Thread thread has already been on the front of HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609632

> Not exactly true.

Still, mostly true.. read-only is just dumb. Nice to be back in 2008, when mobile-first turned into mobile-only.

The entire point of this thread was that this is a Python/Django web app, but it's not actually a web app at all, so what's the point of pointing out any of this?

I see these https://www.threads.net/t/xxx links to specific threads, but is there any top level page where you can search for stuff or browse ? https://www.threads.net just has a QR code (to install the app presumably).

You can get to users profiles too and view their posts: https://www.threads.net/@zuck.

But there's no broader browser yet it seems.

It also launched "in more than 100 countries" but none of the the E.U. ones.

So until it either solves its privacy issues of becomes part of the fediverse, audience is crippled.

Right. But this demonstrates why that's dumb. People can't even share press about their app without using a different product.

Edit: Someone kindly pointed out that you can see the content in the browser without an account from following a direct link. (You just can't have the app installed or it will open that and drop you on the login page.) This makes me a lot happier with the product!

Instagram launched in 2010 (but really gained traction only in 2011). It has been available via the web since 2012 but it took until 2015 for the web version to reach feature parity with the app version (namely posting and discovery).

Based on that, I think it's safe to assume that a full featured web version of Threads should be up within a year. Threads already has some web presence (you can view threads and profiles).

> Threads is a mobile-only app, like Instagram

Instagram can be used in a desktop browser just fine.

Let's imagine that I don't have an Instagram account because I don't. (I never really understood it because it just felt like a slightly differently flavored Facebook and I already had a Facebook account.) Up until this weekend, I could simply view a Twitter post regardless of whether I had an account. And while I've never been much of a Twitter user, I did find that useful as a lot of local news and weather type stuff would get posted and I could easily view them. Is there any analogy to that with Threads?

You could view a tweet if linked to it, but it would limit your ability to view a feed or navigate elsewhere. Which is similar to instagram, but insta is more aggressive with stopping you, whereas twitter gave a slightly larger grace period.

Twitter removed that behavior under Elon, then developed something even more restrictive. Great.

Neither are good, and unfortunate that tumblr has recently ish copied this (for default css at least). Real shithead behavior.

Unfortunately, Facebook looks the best out of all of them. If a restaurant posts their specials on Facebook, I can see them. Basically not true for other social sites.

You can view single IG posts without an account.

Chill it's been in development for like 6 months and they wanted it to scale to 10M users. I'm sure a web interface is on the roadmap.

Six months and it still doesn't have a basic and open web interface. Not impressive. Many apps, including HN, operate for years with only a web interface.

Their web app is not there. I think you can directly link to a Thread but it only shows what you linked to, not even the discussion tree or anything like that.

Its not open to the web yet. Supposedly, it will be

Why downvote this? It's a fair point.

A fair point about what? Threads is out for less than a day, I have 8 followers there so far. I originally posted this information on Mastodon, actually: https://mastodon.social/@ambv/110665808046065754

However, I have a much larger following on Twitter, so it was the tweet that got picked up by someone here on HN.

We'll see how this looks like in twelve months.

A fair point that it's stupid to implement a mostly plain text publishing site that doesn't support linking to any of the text published there.

You can link to it, what are you talking about? An example fetched from a verge article -> https://www.threads.net/t/CuVaOg1PgU4/

This is the first time I'm seeing this. I'm surprised they have a .net domain and that the design is so terrible.

They just extracted Instagram comments and threw them in a sea of whitespace. No thought is given to anchoring content by importance or context, nor is there any esthetic apeal to it.

Oh nice! Thanks!

I hadn't seen one of these deep links before I installed the app. After I installed the app they just opened the app but did nothing because I don't have an account. But I just uninstalled the app and now I see. This makes me a lot more positive on this product!

That link doesn't work for me - just get a splash page

Same. Worked when I tried Chrome, but apparently they did not test Firefox.

They don't even have the dotcom?

Linking to it works better than linking to Twitter, in fact, as of this week (Twitter no longer shows replies unless you're logged in...)

Twitter no longer shows anything unless you're logged in. Everything just redirects to a login page.

You can’t link to threads? By design?

I was seriously considering trying it out, but if there’s no search engine visibility, there’s no point. Most of the searches for my real name pull up tweets.

Hopefully it’s just a missing feature that will be added later. Even TikToks are linkable, and those have very little google visibility.

It seems like you can generate links, but they don't do anything for people who don't have the app (except direct you to install the app). I haven't fiddled with it to see if they've implemented something to make the content visible to search engines. (Which presumably would mean I could see it too with some effort.) But I haven't seen such a thing yet.

I am able to view links to Threads from a web browser without being logged in: https://www.threads.net/t/CuVaOg1PgU4/

At least there are links. That’s a good sign. TikTok survived on mostly that model, though it’s still important to make the content visible without installing an app.

Check my edit: It turns out this does work for deep links to threads and user profiles (the homepage is still entirely useless) as long as you don't have the app installed. Definitely much better than I thought.

I think Facebook/Instagram pioneered login walls for public post content.

Pay walls have been around longer than facebook

Pinterest felt especially egregious.

Because it's not ironic. It's obvious. Twitter is just a medium to post stuff. Threads is as well. I can post this on mastodon even. Also: Europe still can't join in on the fun.

I'm in Europe and just downloaded the apk. All my Chinese friends have joined too.

EU != Europe. Biggest country in Europe is Russia. Biggest population is Russians.

Yeah, that's up for debate. It's not as clear as you make it out to be. As a (EU) European, Russia is not. The western most part of it maybe, yeah. Same for Turkey.

No, it really isn't at all.

European Russia is 40% of the total European landmass. 15% of its total population. That's 110 million Russians in only the part that is inside Europe! Germany is at a low 80 million. Total population of EU is 445 million. Besides, numbers doesn't change because you are from the EU and disagree. I'm also in the EU.

Just like America is not just the US. But nobody cares…

Is there a web-based version of threads at the moment, or just the app ?

Or, "Threads" and the GIL maybe? Love Python though.

Is the person from Meta? Doesn’t appear so.

It’s still perfectly acceptable for Twitter users to discus other platforms on Twitter.

He was and worked on, among other things, Python while there. He's a trustworthy source.

So, no he doesn’t work at Meta. We could have stopped this thread an hour ago.

We need a social network that removes the noise from the conversation

Ironic people on MySpace talked about Facebook

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