zelly

> Not sure what the point is on the first two - you wouldn't even need that with a non crap ui framework.

Server-side rendering is a business need not a programming need. A company like Spotify may want to change the UI without updating the installation. To do this on the web platform is a well-supported pattern. To do this with Qt you'd have to implement your own HTML- or JSX-like framework on top of Qt (like Hyperview does for mobile).

Companies that use Electron can just move faster and crush competition. That's why there are billion dollar companies based on Electron programs and Qt people get excited about it being the software behind the radio volume button on the latest model fishing boat.

The old Skype client using Qt was similar to a Slack using a classic GUI framework. Compared to Slack it was barebones. You had a list of conversations and a view for the conversations themselves. I'm not saying it's bad; I'd probably prefer it in fact. But it's not the same product as Slack. This comes back to my point about Electron vs. others, maybe the reason Electron apps are slow is because Electron apps typically have more functionality. The easiest way to make a program faster is to remove code.

> However, you cannot develop Chromium with Chromium

Why not? You can run Visual Studio Code in the browser and edit the Chromium source code. Perhaps, given sufficient memory, you can also run clang in the browser (WASM) so you can compile and link in Chromium too.

> Because it looks ugly (i.e. non-native) on pretty much every platform.

I'm not sure if you're talking about Electron or Qt because this statement applies equally well to both. Electron, Qt, Swing, JavaFX, Flutter all take the approach of drawing every pixel themselves, not using any "native" widgets rendered by the OS vendor.

Anecdotally all the Electron apps I've used have been beautiful whereas the Qt/GTK ones look stuck in the 90s.

Dynamic, server-side rendered views

HTML snippets rendered for free (no need for an external HTML renderer)

Lots of little things like <video> being enough to embed a video into the view versus subclassing a C++ Qt class or whatever song and dance it is in other frameworks. It's productivity that's the killer feature. You can theoretically do everything Electron does in Java Swing, but it would require reimplementing most of the web platform.

> security issues that make Electron bad

Exposing a HTTP port with application state is a million times worse for security

> Even if you're not legally required to implement it now, and even if you don't think this is a basic human right (which you should), there are legal changes coming, and you never know when you will be forced to implement it.

Never have to comply with the law if you never have any users to begin with

GTK user tapping head

You can add Flutter to this list which is becoming a viable option for desktop UIs. The downside is Dart, but that's not so different from picking Pascal/Delphi just for its UI framework.

Chromium is the best UI toolkit ever created. What exactly are the arguments against Electron?

It's slow to render? Wrong, Electron (Chromium) renders faster than Qt. The Skia engine is optimized to an extent that these other toolkits cannot compete with. It even has a Vulkan backend now.

Single threaded? The render process is--you can use any native multithreaded code you want in another process.

Memory? It's 70MB. That's nothing nowadays. Modern OSes can page it in and out when the application is idling. A lot of these other toolkits are quite heavy too, especially JavaFX in my experience. Also what happens when you need a webview in one of these other toolkits? In Qt you get an embedded instance of Chromium[1] so not only do you have the 70MB of Chromium, you also have the Qt runtime (!).

The reason the Electron app you're using is slow or hogs giants amount of memory is the Javascript code itself is slow. Yes, Slack is a slow monster, but it's a giant codebase that does things that would be simply impossible in Qt, GTK, Swing and others. There's a reason we never saw these types of apps when the only frameworks were Qt and others.

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebengine-overview.html

I seem to remember a lot of Windows programs back in the day were webviews (backed by IE of course) and it was the most horrible unprofessional looking thing, especially when an Alert would pop up which revealed it was just an IE page.

Webviews are okay on mobile though.

If they wouldn't make any money with the new law it would be irresponsible to their shareholders for them to stay in California.

Uber : Taxis :: cloud/hyperscaling : bare metal

The author of this should start with the root name server for his domain

All the money this guy donates is just going to be added to the CEO's salary

If you really love MDN or whatever then why not fork it and pay for hosting its competitor. Just import all the pages to Mediawiki and put it up online.

If they had a problem with the walled garden they wouldn't buy it. Say "walled garden" to the average iPhone owner and they'll say "So? That's a good thing".

There's no need for anonymity. I don't understand why that's relevant.

> extremely volatile asset with ~2x price swing within recent couple of years

Can be hedged with futures. Also S&P 500 had ~1.5x price swings recently and no one cared. The derivatives market has solved the problem of volatility in all markets not just Bitcoin.

There are already several billionaires who publicly say they have lots of BTC, prob many more who don't speak up. Jack (8B), Chamath (1B), Paul Tudor Jones (6B), Winklevii (1 B), Peter Thiel (2B). Eventually it will be known as the tax haven coin (already kind of is) and that will be its killer app.

Reads like GPT-3. Lots of words to say nothing.

I got a Raspberry Pi 4 and naively thought that because it was ARM it used little power and didn't need fans. In a few weeks the board melted and now won't turn on. Was only running a few programs.

Most of the world agrees with you which is why they keep buying iPhones as soon as they can afford them

The national institutions you speak of are the ones doing the exploitation. I wouldn't lose any sleep if they'll have to cut back on droning villages or putting poor people in prison because Bitcoin disrupted their funding.

My hope is that some centimillionaires and maybe billionaires will convert all their cash to BTC when a wealth tax comes. That's one possible scenario for 100k or higher.

It's not, the dominant currency on darknet is still Bitcoin. Even Litecoin is more used than Monero. Criminals are stupid.

For a regular user to use Lightning, they would have to run an always-online instance of lnd--a very memory-intensive Go program that also requires a Bitcoin fullnode (300GB) or the experimental Neutrino light node either of which also has to be always-online. The average internet user has never typed a bash command so this is a pipe dream. Or you could have the alternative which is to push people onto centralized Lightning-like (but better, more polished) services run by the likes of JP Morgan. (It's my suspicion that focusing hype on Lightning instead of scaling Bitcoin Core was a way to sabotage it in favor of paid services of a certain company that most Bitcoin developers are employed by but I digress.) Micropayments in general is a bad idea which the market has rejected time and time again. If you really want to do something like that, just do it the same way all billing works, add it up and notify the user with an invoice at the end of the month or year. That could be integrated into browsers without being tied to a specific payment method or forcing payment. I don't even want to imagine how rich hackers would get if every web browser had a code path that transferred real money.

This is really ghetto. Why does Debian allow it on their domain?

It's using features of the language. Is that not what this is meant to measure/compare? .NET has unsafe, SIMD, and value types which opens it to a whole world of programming that Java is currently unsuited for.

I remember that too, then suddenly it reappeared. My guess it caused too many flamewars and anger at the maintainer.

A wise man once said, "Don't play games, write them"

Most mobile websites are intentionally gimped because native apps can target ads better.

But Reddit is one of the worst. I wouldn't ever visit the site if it didn't rank so high on search results. I've noticed the frontend has gotten worse and worse every time I look at it. Ever since they changed to a React type frontend, at least 5% of the time the comments won't even load. It just doesn't work. Reddit really is a cautionary tale of attacking your users. I expect it to follow in Mozilla's footsteps as another company that makes no money but pretends it's a unicorn.

Great read, but who knows how much of this story is true

Does anyone know why the favicon for this site is the emblem of the PLA and the Red Army?

Bitcoin is more regulated and more spied on than most forms of payment. To turn a large amount of Bitcoin into dollars in a bank account, you have to go through extreme AML/KYC checks. I can go to a gas station in California and send $1000 in cash to someone in Turkey who could receive cash and walk out a few minutes later. A briefcase full of cash is not regulated at all and can be used to settle debt or pay taxes, unlike Bitcoin. The only advantage of Bitcoin is not requiring the risk of physical presence, which has to be <1% of all crime. Also, unlike cash, Bitcoin by design retains a full immutable public ledger. The criminals can mix their coins, but it'd still be possible (although computationally expensive) to recreate a chain of transactions going back to the original ransom. In the future if Bitcoin is to become used in commerce more, it should be expected that these dirty transaction outputs would be worth less than clean ones or not accepted, like dollar bills cut in half taped together.

To be fair you could track down the git repositories or tarballs and compile and install the right versions. If the author used autotools as is standard, the version number should be listed.

It's not ideal of course. I wish it were standard to build all dependencies from source and statically link a big binary like Go does.