The sexes don't feel pain the same way - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00895-3 <comment><USER2> I feel like this article has buried the lede to the point that the actual news story has been completely missed.

The more newsworthy headline here is that biological and physiological studies will have varying results across test subjects with differing genetics, and that testing against genetically identical test subjects will give overly specific results. This seems to be a fundamental problem in the methodology of a lot of biological studies.

We've done a very good job at creating an invulnerable lab mouse.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article writes that in 2016 the "National Institutes of Health (NIH) made it a requirement for grant applicants to justify their choice of the sex of animals used in experiments." I can only imagine that some people took this as yet another example of political correctness creeping in to the public sphere. Hopefully the results from this study helps to bolster more scientific studies using diverse populations (including more funding for larger studies that might be required for more statistical significance).

<comment><USER4> > another example of political correctness

It's also the opposite. There's a strain of far left ideology that claims men and women are mentally identical, despite much scientific evidence to the contrary. If they were identical, studies on both genders would be unnecessary.

<comment><USER5> >There's a strain of far left ideology that claims men and women are mentally identical

I've never seen anyone actually claim this. Often, people on the right _want_ people on the left to be claiming this because it would be easy to refute. But in fact what people on the left are usually doing is expressing skepticism that various aspects of the status quo (such as the distribution of genders in various professions) are explained primarily by the - typically small - average cognitive differences between men and women.

<comment><USER6> I get into debates about this topic all the time. There are definitely people on the left who claim that sex isn't binary, and that the existence of intersex people somehow disproves the idea of male/female sexes.

<comment><USER5> That seems like a separate topic. The question at issue is whether people who can be clearly classified as "men" or "women" according to general consensus show some cognitive differences on average. I have not seen anyone deny this.

In a similar way, one might argue that "races" don't really have any objective existence, and yet still acknowledge that e.g. African-Americans are less likely to go to college than Asian Americans. Such stats aren't invalidated by the lack of any objective biological definition of "race", or by the existence of some people with mixed African/Asian heritage, etc. etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My girlfriend seems to handle "direct" pain, like hitting stuff, getting cut or back pain, compared to me. Most times she just keeps going without uttering much at all.

But she's significantly worse at dealing with cold, heat and high brightness. One thing is that her body may be worse at regulating temperature, but she can't stand going out in the cold even for a few minutes unless she's dressed like she's visiting one of the poles.

Me on the other hand have little problem handling the discomfort of being cold or too hot. I also have no issue handling very bright sunny days without sunglasses, while she cannot.

Writing this it seems tempting to view it in an evolutionary perspective... giving birth is a very painful event one must endure, and when hunting it certainly helps to keep pushing even though you're too cold or too hot... or maybe it's just the way the two of us are wired up.

<comment><USER8> So uhm, I'm a male reporting in with my anecdata. I am just like your girlfriend.

Can't tolerate extreme temperatures (especially cold), but have a fairly high tolerance for physical pain compared to what's normal I think.

And I am INFAMOUS for needing sunglasses. Whenever I'm visiting my folks, they know it's the thing I'll complain about if I'll be in the sun and my mom will usually have bought sunglasses just for me.

<comment><USER9> Eye colour has a lot to do with how much light your retinas let in, iirc. Would this explain your sensitivity?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure of a relationship there, but I recall reading reports for a long time that red-heads felt less pain than other people - as a red-head this amuses me, but I have no personal data to share.

Random source is random:

[http://sciencenordic.com/redheads-feel-different-kind- pain](http://sciencenordic.com/redheads-feel-different-kind-pain)

<comment><USER11> My dentist told me that people with red hair are less susceptible to the effects of novicane. I have red in my beard and always need a second injection when getting drilled. She said this is the cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Obviously these things are highly individual, but my personal experience totally aligns with this article. I'm a transgender woman and when I started taking estrogen my pain tolerance increased noticeably over the course of about a month. Stubbing my toe just doesn't bother me like it used to

<comment><USER13> I wonder if this knowledge can be used "in reverse", like testing for both pain pathways to determine one's biological sex in a less binary way. Perhaps that would give a better indication of which type of treatments will work best on an individual level, even beyond just pain relief.

<comment><USER14> While those kind of research help show that gender and sex are on a spectrum and not binaries, I really doubt that you could use this to accurately pinpoint someone on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I understand the need to test pain response for medical purposes, but I can't shake the feeling that in a few hundred years we're going to look back on the use of animals in pain studies and think it's barbarism.

<comment><USER16> I doubt it, but only because from a utilitarian standpoint, using animals for research purposes is not even a drop in the bucket. Humanity slaughters billions of animals each year just because they're tasty. At least the research animals have some benefit beyond a single person's satiation.

I do wonder how long it will be before people start vandalizing statues of historical figures because they ate meat.

<comment><USER17> >> Humanity slaughters billions of animals each year just because they're tasty.

It's very likely that people find meat tasty because it's nutritious, just as we find sugar and plant fats tasty. Your comment makes it sound as if eating meat is some kind of indulgence, like eating sweets.

Meat is a rich source of protein and energy. We don't need any more justification than that to want to eat other animals. There are practical matters of efficiency and of the ethics of kiling animals at scale, in industrial farming, that are far more important and interesting to discuss than the nebulous idea of the morality of eating any meat at all.

At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?

>> At least the research animals have some benefit beyond a single person's satiation.

I don't understand this. Even a chicken is large enough to feed two people. Larger animals can feed a family for several days.

<comment><USER16> > Meat is a rich source of protein and energy. We don't need any more > justification than that to want to eat other animals.

Jonathan Swift argued the same in _A Modest Proposal_ [1]:

> I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, > that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, > nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; > and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

Swift also argued that eating the babies of the poor also helps prevent famine and breaks the cycle of poverty. Clearly this has more advantages than eating chickens or cows!

> At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any > different for humans to do the same?

Animals also rape each other, kill each other over mates and territory, and occasionally commit cannibalism. By your logic, why shouldn't humans do the same?

> Even a chicken is large enough to feed two people. Larger animals can feed a > family for several days.

Depends on the chicken. Almost all male chicks are killed within 3 days of hatching, usually by tossing them into a shredder.[2] I doubt one of them is very filling.

1\. [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling)

<comment><USER17> Swift's text was satire.

Also: cannibalism, rape, murder etc are illegal in pretty much every territory. What is your point?

Also also: a chicken thrown to the shredder is not eaten, yes.

Can you please explain what you mean without colorful metaphors and attempts at humour? I enjoy those as the next person but they don't help me understand what you mean. If I make an assumption about what you mean and I reply to the assumption in the same way, with metaphors and similes, and you make an assumptiona bout what _that_ meant and reply accordingly, we'll lose the plot very, very quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If the physiology of pain differs between the sexes, does the subjective experience of pain differ too? Even at the same reported severity? For all we know, if a female and a male both identify a color as blue, the two sexes may be experiencing different colors and attaching it the same label. Same goes for pain.

Imagine what a boon a technological fix for this could be. If we could record the quality and quantity of pain felt by one organism and play it back at high fidelity for another organism, it could be an effective torture device ... but also a way to promote empathy across sexes, races, and species.

But it's probably a fix that will remain a fantasy permanently, because if physiology underlies the difference, one organism would have to physiologically become something else in order to experience the same pain as an other. Probably we're stuck with the same old limited channel for communicating subjective experience: art.

<comment><USER19> This is the premise of one of the short stories in Black Mirror's "Black Museum" episode (written by Penn Jillette, actually). A doctor uses it as a diagnostic device and then, as you might expect, the plot turns dark. It's very well done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The first thing I thought to myself when I read this headline is that certain people are probably going to get offended by someone pointing out physiological differences between sexes.

<comment><USER21> I can understand why you might find that a silly reaction. It is indeed obvious that there are many physiological differences between men and women. However, one reason I think people get worried about this kind of research is that it can be cited as justification for treating men and women differently in situations where it is certainly not warranted.

I'm not saying there's no value to research like this, but I also believe that if it makes some people uneasy, their fears come from a good place.

<comment><USER22> But that is a really overblown and damaging worry. This study gives us actual facts that we probably need to treat men and women differently to help them both out better in dealing with pain. We need more studies which look at gender differences, not fewer. Justifying that worry because it makes people uneasy is denying reality and pretty unethical in my view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Reporting this kind of stuff without drawing the bell curves should be criminal. Duh, the curves mostly overlap, but maybe they have slightly different peak heights or median locations. If you're not drawing the curves, you're deliberately misleading your readers and wasting everyone's time.

</comment><comment><USER24> Related story from a couple weeks ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19438722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19438722)

</comment><comment><USER25> Women display different cardiac symptoms from men [https://outline.com/aYwSJV](https://outline.com/aYwSJV)

</comment><comment><USER26> Fibromyalgia has been reported to affect twice as much women than men.[1] Now I wonder whether this has to do with pain tolerance during diagnosis or some biological difference affecting epidemiology.

[1] [https://doi.org/10.1001%2Fjama.2014.3266](https://doi.org/10.1001%2Fjama.2014.3266)

</comment><comment><USER27> Sorry, but no [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/07/050705004113.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/07/050705004113.htm)

<comment><USER14> Science is rarely "yes" and "no". It's much more complicated than that.

This link seem to say that women experience more pain over a lifetime, not necessary when testing for a large number of different triggers and comparing them to men.

"Research is telling us that women experience a greater number of pain episodes across their lifespan than men, in more bodily areas and with greater frequency."

They also only tested one trigger that is way more related to temperature sensitivity than actual pain tolerance.

"To carry out this research, scientists asked volunteers to place their non- dominant arm in a warm water bath (37 degrees centigrade) for two minutes before transferring the hand into an ice water bath maintained at a temperature of 1 - 2 degrees centigrade."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The obvious theory for different pain sensitivity between men and women is that women need to handle childbirth.

Since that is unique to our species, animal testing probably won't be helpful there.

<comment><USER29> > Since that is unique to our species,

Much of the animal kingdom has the same issue of painful childbirth. What you mean by "handle", I can only guess. Perhaps something about recovery and a desire repeat.

<comment><USER30> > Much of the animal kingdom has the same issue of painful childbirth

Do they? As far as I was aware, humans have a uniquely awkward childbirth due to our cranial size.

<comment><USER31> Not only that. No other animal menstruates quite like humans do either; there's been an arms race between the placenta and the womb, and rather than a safe place to protect the fetus, the womb is more of a safe place to isolate the fetus and manage its access to the mother's resources while keeping the mother safe.

Human pregnancy is messed up beyond the obvious issue of squeezing our large brain through out narrow running hips.

<comment><USER32> > an arms race between the placenta and the womb, and rather than a safe place > to protect the fetus, the womb is more of a safe place to isolate the fetus > and manage its access to the mother's resources while keeping the mother > safe.

I don't see anything human-specific here, this would have been true for all placental animals no?

<comment><USER31> It doesn't sound inherently human-specific, but somehow it is. Well, other primates have it to a lesser extent, but other placental mammals don't, and we have it worse than other primates. Why only primates have this arms race between placenta and womb, and why humans have it worse than any primate, I don't know. But it's definitely a thing. It's the reason why humans menstruate while non-primate mammals don't.

<comment><USER32> Interesting, I did some more digging and found this for anyone interested in a nice paper:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5121266/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5121266/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cold Brew Experiment 2 - Tea Bags in a Jar - <AUTHOR> http://www.brouhaha.io/cold-brew-tea-in-a-jar/

<comment><USER2> 18 tea bags in a pint jar seems a bit much. Or even four. We've been making "sun tea" for decades this way: Five tea bags dangling from strings in a two- gallon jar left in a window for 24 hours. Makes a pleasant cold-brewed tea.</comment>


Welcome to password creation hell - <AUTHOR> https://www.devonhomechoice.com/customer-login <comment><USER3> On the plus side: The web site not only has a text size selector – there also is a "Text Only" link that does exactly what it says, _and_ reveals a "Colour Scheme" menu: Black on white, black on cream, white on blue, yellow on black.

Some dev has been having fun with this while all the product people are away. As a creator of useless side projects, I can relate.

<comment><USER4> You'd think that this is to conform to accessibility regulations, this is a British site, and the British are very strict on that front. Nothing wrong with high-contrast schemes especially when you have cataracts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Please do not use the browser back button, only use the Back button at the > bottom of the page._

This amazes me a lot more than a ridiculous password scheme. You can always come up with a justification for a stupid password scheme. But there's no justification for "I don't know how sessions work" after 20 years of web development history. It was the #1 most frequent developer mistake _IN 1999._

[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-top-ten-web-design- mist...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-top-ten-web-design-mistakes- of-1999/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wrote a program to check how many 9 digit numbers met the criteria. The answer I got was 897,674,400.

I used the following Java code, which may be flawed, to count:

        public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
          int count=0;
          int[] digitCount=new int[10];

          mainLoop:
          for(int i=0; i<=999999999; i++){
              Arrays.fill(digitCount,0);
              digitCount[i / 1          %10]++;
              digitCount[i / 10         %10]++;
              digitCount[i / 100        %10]++;
              digitCount[i / 1000       %10]++;
              digitCount[i / 10000      %10]++;
              digitCount[i / 100000     %10]++;
              digitCount[i / 1000000    %10]++;
              digitCount[i / 10000000   %10]++;
              digitCount[i / 100000000  %10]++;

              int differentNumbers=0;
              for(int index=0; index<10; index++){
                  if(digitCount[index]>3){
                      continue mainLoop;
                  }
                  if(digitCount[index]>0){
                      differentNumbers++;
                  }
              }
              if(differentNumbers>4){
                  count++;
              }
          }
          System.out.println("count: "+count);
        }

<comment><USER7> Good call on the leading zeroes. I was trying to write a Python program to do the same and I would have implicitly ignored leading zeroes, which _should_ be considered here because a password could be, for example, 000123456.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a silver lining here. It practically eliminates the possibility of reusing a password from another site ... because nobody else is stupid enough to have rules like these. At least when somebody cracks your password here it won't do them any good anywhere else.

<comment><USER9> Not if my password is 123456789

<comment><USER10> We're sorry, that password is already in use.

<comment><USER11> We're sorry, user "wrycoder" is already using that password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I also hate ADP's password requirements:

> Your password must be 8 to 20 characters and may include upper or lowercase > letters (A-Z and a-z), numbers (0-9), spaces (except at the beginning or > end), and special characters. You must use at least one letter and one > number. You cannot use the same character in four or more consecutive > positions (for example, AAAa is valid, but AAAA is not valid) and you cannot > use four or more sequential characters, in ascending or descending order, in > a row (for example, ABCD and 4321 are not allowed).

It almost feels like a riddle...

Because I have to choose a complicated password that I can't remember, every single time I go back (maybe twice a month) I pretty much have to use the password reset functionality and make another non-memorable password. Even setting up the password takes some thinking as you can read the requirements that you have to conform with. Ugh. It's pretty annoying.

<comment><USER5> This brings up one of many interesting paradoxes of browsers. They can save passwords by default, but they won't generate strong passwords for you by default. (If your browser has a password generator you have to manually enable it)

<comment><USER13> Safari on MacOS will suggest/generate fairly strong passwords as soon as you're on a password field:

[https://i.gyazo.com/92fc8a49323dffbd22ff34c2ccbea0b0.png](https://i.gyazo.com/92fc8a49323dffbd22ff34c2ccbea0b0.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > "Your new password must contain 9 numbers, and include at least 4 different > numbers but cannot include the same number more than three times."

Talk about reduction of password entropy.

<comment><USER15> I wonder how many passwords contain strings of 123 or 111222333?

<comment><USER16> Just download a dictionary of known passwords, it's fascinating. You should see a lot of common words and names followed by 123 or 69.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My bank is almost as awful:

To change your Internet Banking password, please enter your current password and then enter your new password to confirm.

Password requirements:

        Must be between 6 and 8 characters and can contain letters, numbers or both
        Will be case sensitive so check your caps lock
        Can't contain special characters (eg. $%&#) or spaces
        Can't be your Customer ID
        Can't contain consecutive numbers (eg. 123456)
        Shouldn't contain part of your name, date of birth, drivers licence or anything that would be in your wallet

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh please add it here: [https://github.com/duffn/dumb-password- rules](https://github.com/duffn/dumb-password-rules)

</comment><comment><USER19> This seems to _significantly_ narrow down the possibilities of passwords - <USER2> would they do this?

<comment><USER6> One word: incompetence

<comment><USER20> Doh! You guessed my password.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just reminded me of the new rules set by my University. I had a really hard time coming up with one.

       Password needs a minimum of 10 digits.
       Low and upper characters, at least 2 numbers
       and could include special characters. These
       chars are not allowed: ! & ' ` $ % ; § ~ ^ @
       \ € ä ö ü ß. It will be checked against last
       two former passwords and it couldn't be
       include 3 or more identical characters.

Theres not many spacial characters left. Also this is a german University and äöüß are not allowed.

</comment><comment><USER22> PSA: Passwordless authentication is a valid and easy-to-implement authentication technique: [http://www.east5th.co/blog/2017/04/24/passwordless- authentic...](http://www.east5th.co/blog/2017/04/24/passwordless- authentication-with-phoenix-tokens/) [https://auth0.com/passwordless](https://auth0.com/passwordless)

<comment><USER23> Another PSA: SMS and email are both less secure channels than your average https login. My doctor doesn't trust these channels to communicate my test results, so I guess don't use this for anything more sensitive than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't wait until NIST finalizes their new password rules. I wonder how many companies are forced into these inane password rules because of compliance requirements

<comment><USER25> Here's current UK government level advice about passwords:

[https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/password-guidance- simplifyi...](https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/password-guidance-simplifying- your-approach)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Quoting password requirements here for discussion:

> Your new password must contain 9 numbers, and include at least 4 different > numbers but cannot include the same number more than three times.

> To create a new password you will need to confirm some basic personal > details (name, date of birth and National Insurance number).

> These must match the details recorded on your Devon Home Choice application.

<comment><USER27> I wish I were clever enough to do a back-of-the-napkin calculation quickly; maybe someone else can do it. What are the number of possibilities given the constraints above, and some reasonable assumptions of human behavior:

\- At least 2 to 4 numbers will be reference to a specific year, such as the user's birth year or the current year, e.g. 17, 1965, 2017.

\- As many as 3 to 4 numbers will be a predictable pattern, such as an incremented sequence or repetition of numbers not likely to be a birth year or of `2017`, e.g. `1234`, `987`, `1010`

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why don't websites say something like this: Your password must be 6 or more characters long. Any character goes. If you use a weak password and your account gets hacked, it's your fault.

And then maybe have a brief explanation of what makes a password weak, but let the user decide if they want to get hacked or not.

</comment><comment><USER29> Someone posted this solution on Reddit months ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/identifythisfont/comments/53zcom/ap...](https://www.reddit.com/r/identifythisfont/comments/53zcom/apple_homekit_font/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Yeah - guessing after reading that, nearly everyone's password is 123456789

If you can figure out what they use for user IDs (emails, or perhaps another 9-digit number), you'll own all these user accounts.

This is what happens when cleverness meets ignorance of security.

</comment><comment><USER31> pfff. the Satan of that hell needs to be fired. I could do WAY better:

"

Your password must conform to the following rules:

\- It must be exactly 6 characters

\- The first character must be @ or #

\- The second character must be a digit except 0.

\- The third character must be a lowercase, uncommon letter. Uncommon letters are q, x and z.

\- The fourth character may be any uppercase vowel, with the exception of U. Y is not considered a vowel.

\- The fifth character must be a lowercase letter differing from the third character.

\- The sixth character must be an underscore (_).

Your password must be changed after every third log-in. You may not use any of your previous ten passwords nor any password you have used in the past 180 days.

</comment><comment><USER32> Find and ridicule many other examples here: [http://password- shaming.tumblr.com/](http://password-shaming.tumblr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Would love to see the creative functions y'all can come up with to validate this...

<comment><USER34>
      function isPasswordValid(pass){
          //There's no way in hell they figured it out.
          return false;
      }

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> 9 digits. I wonder what fraction of these passwords are SSNs

<comment><USER36> Since Devon is in the UK, presumably very few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> At least it's served via HTTPS?</comment>


Bored 10-year-old girl hacker finds zero-day exploit in iOS & Android games - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/bored-10-year-old-girl-hacker-finds-zero-day-exploit-in-ios-android-games-2011087/

<comment><USER2> Edit:

"The exploit is to do with the clock used on devices running the two mobile operating systems, and just as importantly how games use it to aid in gameplay progression. Many of these farm-style games rely on the clock to grow crops the player plants or by signifying general time progression. "

Oh christ, this article is just pure silliness. Ignore the below. And the article itself.

If the hacker and intelligent human being happened to have a penis wouldn't the title be one word shorter?

//this// is an actual real reason why people without Y chromosomes aren't as into tech or the engineering industry; because as soon as they get in, they are pushed into this subset of "girl hackers", "girl geeks".

I understand that it isn't "on-topic" and posts here aren't supposed to be motivated by emotion (especially not anger), but I really expect more from sites getting to the front page here.

<comment><USER3> To be honest, the whole title is silly. Apparently a kid needs to be "bored" to do that. It's obviously an important information. "Zero-day exploit" is also an amazing way to call "changing the hour to make the crops grow faster".

The whole title is a click bait, as we expect some kind of hacker kid prodigy (after all, he was "bored", not actively hacking) who would have found a severe exploit in iOS and Android.

The article can be summed up by "a young kid changes the hour on her device to make the crops grow faster in the game".

 _(heck, I was changing the date to make my sharewares work longer at the same age and nobody wrote about me)_

<comment><USER4> The inevitability in the movie Idiocracy is manifesting itself by having "set the clock forward" being considered an incredibly devious hacking technique and labeled as a 0day :P It's good to see that even when everyone born these days are morons that there are still going to be a small subset of people who are more creative and intelligent than the rest.

<comment><USER3> Let's not exaggerate. Just because the article is silly and obviously trying to make something bigger than it actually is doesn't mean that "everyone born these days are morons".

Also, <http://xkcd.com/603/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats to the girl for giving a presentation at age 10, but in all honesty this is nothing new. I'm positive that this is pretty much common knowledge to anyone who has ever played a time based game. Also, calling it an "exploit" makes it seem like it's some sort of security risk; when in reality it's about on par with turning off a device before saving to erase unwanted actions.

<comment><USER6> She's 10, and she figured it out on her own. Let her have her 5 minutes.

<comment><USER5> Not to seem rude, but I was probably at a similar age when I figured it out myself. While it does deserve some level of praise, it's not exactly news worthy.

<comment><USER6> The more people hacking, the better IMO. It's something that should be praised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ...with 1 weird trick!

Seriously, what's going on with this title?

</comment><comment><USER8> Eh, who _didn't_ do this in Animal Crossing?

<comment><USER2> Anyone who didn't want weeds and actually cared ;(

(sly little plug to my time-based animal crossing wild world bug/fish checklist because this is the best place to plug it that I may ever find on HN <http://wild-world-clock.googlecode.com> )</comment></comment>


MPs will ask Obama to drop extradition of vulnerable 'hacker' Lauri Love - <AUTHOR> http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/mps-will-ask-obama-to-drop-us-extradition-of-vulnerable-hacker-a3366011.html <comment><USER2> From the article:

> "If a person on the autistic spectrum can access these files, then there's > something wrong with their encryption. It's a public service."

Specially in these times, it is good to be reminded that there are still a few sensible politicians out there.

</comment><comment><USER2> About time! And it only take them what... two years to do this?

Australia, are you watching?</comment>


Egyptian official blames middle east violence on Tom and Jerry - <AUTHOR> http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tom-and-jerry-blame-middle-east-violence-top-egypt-intelligence-official-2022746 <comment><USER2> I see your "Tom and Jerry" and I raise you.... chinese food [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Haryana-khap- blames...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Haryana-khap-blames- consumption-of-chowmein-for-rapes/articleshow/16829882.cms)

There's never a shortage of people blaming other people for their own evil

</comment><comment><USER3> They have violent cartoons in Japan too, and look at the level of violence they have!</comment>


Frank Ocean Exclusive: Apple should be investigated for antitrust - <AUTHOR> http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2016/08/21/frank-ocean-exclusive/ <comment><AUTHOR> Cranky as this is, it's interesting to see the subsequent post about Universal Music Group ending exclusive streaming deals.</comment>


The Coronavirus Recovery Could Pit the Old and Young Against Each Other - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/graying-populations-economic-recovery.html <comment><USER2> There does not seem to be a long term negative impact on hard hit countries. Hong Kong lost 15% of its population in 1968 due to a virus but had about 10% growth in the each of the following 5 years.</comment>


A few reasons Tim Ferriss decided to leave SV (his own words) - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and/dq6zrh1/?st=jb8vscx5&sh=9d056f9a <comment><USER2> Texas is very welcoming to people, we just ask that you don't turn Texas into another version of the place you left.

Austin and Houston are some very diverse cities, and that's awesome, but the way people vote in those cities could turn Texas into a place that's like the places that people wanted to leave.

<comment><USER3> True. It's funny because looking back over 40 or 50 years, SV is a great example of how that happens. Best wishes for my Texas friends. I really liked Austin when I first visited in the late 90s. Visiting again last month, it was still rocking, but distinctly got the feeling that it's well on its way to the same kind of climate that's already pervasive in the valley.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> agree or disagree with #5?

"Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism"

<comment><USER4> idk if mccarthyism is the right analogy. but there is certainly a huge social and career cost to expressing an honest opinion. i'm making alot of money doing nothing, you're making alot of money doing nothing, look at how happy and important we all are, dont make this complicated, its very rude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Dupe? Can someone please link the original then?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - op - I sure don't think it's been posted?

Sometimes HN blocks articles it disagrees with. Kind of sucks. This is exactly why this conversation is relevant.

I get blocking hateful comments, but this a a real conversation presenting real ideas from a recognized and informed observer.</comment></comment>


Facebook's Messenger App Is Tracking a Lot More of Your Data Than You Think - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/facebooks-messenger-app-is-tracking-a-lot-more-of-your-data-than-you-think

<comment><USER2> _She offered one such example where analytics told the team that users were using Like stickers often, "so we moved that feature so people can send in fewer taps."_

Oh, Facebook, that's your best coverup for the media? How cute. Or did she just tell me to go fuck myself? [1]

[http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault- tolerance.png](http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault-tolerance.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> The SSID thing may be suspicious, but everything else?

Websites track those same metrics. Heck HN has, at a fair rate, links to articles encouraging developers and founders to gather analytics.

None of those functions even should suspicious, unless one fears the word "global" (I mean globals are evil but this is taking fear a bit too far! ;)

The article title is horrible link bait, and even the article admits "well nothing was really found."</comment>


Show HN: Cross-platform desktop applications with PyQT - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mherrmann/fbs <comment><USER16> I have been developing in HTML/Python for a while now. This works wonderfully. You just need to put all your business logic in Python, use PyQt to run all the platform specific code like file dialogs, printing, etc. but keep the main interface with React. You do that by having a webview with a service object being the bridge between Python and the JS view[0]. If you are a bit careful with the amount of information going through the bridge, you get very good performance (the page[0] is linking to some small screencasts/videos).

With this approach, I have the best of both worlds for my small shop where development time is constrained. The really good part is that I can reuse for the desktop application work done for the website both the front-end and the backend which is written in Python for all the scientific code.

[0]: [https://www.ceondo.com/ecte/2016/04/chemeo-studio- explore/](https://www.ceondo.com/ecte/2016/04/chemeo-studio-explore/)

<comment><USER17> I'm curious, does that work with sandboxing on the Mac?

One of the things that Mac file dialogs do is implicitly expand the sandbox _for the process that opens the file dialog_. Is the other side of the bridge still able to access the selected path?

<comment><USER16> I am sorry, I am developing mostly for _boring_ big companies and my experience is only with Linux (because I develop with) and Windows (because my customers pay me to have the stuff available on it). Practically, this is just a PyQt application with a webview, so, it _should_ work with PyInstaller.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not directly related to the initiative itself, but comparing and contrasting the Electron website vs. PyQT is striking:

[https://riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro](https://riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro)

[https://electronjs.org/](https://electronjs.org/)

I've been a (proud) Pythonist for years now, and I've always been a bit chagrined by the quality of the "marketing" of Python projects. It doesn't at all reflect the quality of the community and the projects.

<comment><USER19> It does reflect the priorities of the community, though.

PyQT's page is clearly written by a developer, with an emphasis on explaining the internals of the library. The author clearly saw no need to make it attractive. There is no long-term vision beyond the library itself.

While PyQT is navel-gazing, Electron's page is all about grabbing mindshare and establishing clout. It seeks to conquer the world and your desktop, _and you 're going to like it._

<comment><USER20> As a developer, Electron's page shows their prowess in writing good front end code, which is really important. As someone who understands the basic concept of Electron, I want a product that demonstrates those competencies.

<comment><USER21> I get what you're saying, but "writes good web front end code" isn't on my list when I'm looking for a good Desktop development framework.

I think stuff like this is pretty tribal, which is OK, but we should confuse it with decisions made on technical or experience merits.

<comment><USER20> When the "good Desktop development framework" is primarily in javascript, it's a good signal.

<comment><USER21> There are a lot of counter-examples:

      - <USER2>

      - <USER3>

      - <USER4>

      - <USER5>

      - <USER6>

      - <USER7>

      - <USER8>

      - any imaging library (libpng, libjpeg)

      - any compression library (zlib, xz, bzip2)

      - <USER9>

      - <USER10>

      - <USER11>

      - <USER12>

Basically none of these have good websites. When I'm looking for a CSS framework or like, UI tricks like scriptaculous then I think it's a good signal, but past that I really think there's no link here. Really "has a good website" means "someone who knows how to build good websites built one for this project".

<comment><USER20> I would expect that apache and lighttpd are hosted in their respective projects; linux is used to run linux.com servers, etc.

<comment><USER21> Sure because those are examples of what you can do with the tech. You can't really make a website with Qt, so using... PyQt's website as an example for evaluation doesn't make a ton of sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The main problem with "other toolkits" vs Electron apps is that they are not as simple to use in order to create a very good looking UIs. Compare how easy it is to use HTML and CSS in order to create a very complex UIs with all sort of effects vs how utterly complicated is to override, let's say, Qt's ::paint() method in order to achieve rich text inside a label. Let me repeat it. Rich text inside a label. Such a simple thing...

<comment><USER23> How is this an issue? Before Electron and other HTML/CSS-based "native" apps became all the rage (which is fairly recently), native apps were built using Qt, GTK, Cocoa, WPF, WinForms, MFC, etc., and they did just fine. Perhaps we just really don't need these "effects" and just need consistent, simple UIs of the sort that toolkits that paint native widgets can give you. Whenever I install an app that's built using something like Electron (which is immediately obvious once the app launches), I know I'm in for a sub-par experience.

<comment><USER24> "Bah humbug, the old stuff is good enough for me!" is a shitty answer.

Why would you not want a toolkit that makes rich application experiences across multiple platforms easy and standard?

I get that performance is a problem with the tooling in its current form (arguably...) but that's not a reason to ignore the problem electron is solving: creating complex UIs using things like WinForms, QT, GTK, Cocoa, etc SUCKS.

It requires learning vendor specific toolchains, different builds for different platforms, and an incredible amount of wasted time that could be spent developing your business logic instead.

<comment><USER23> I'd argue the old stuff is _better_ , not simply "good enough" vs. Electron etc. What have we gotten in exchange for the crap performance and extra RAM usage? Pretty animations? I don't need those; in fact they're distracting and annoying. You absolutely can make "pretty", complex UIs in native/cross- platform toolkits, and personally I find them _much_ nicer to work with than the horror show that is HTML/JS/CSS.

I get that Electron brings benefits: it's dirt-easy to build something that'll run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, without having to know a bunch of platform- specific details, and if you already have a webapp, you can leverage a lot of that work, but in the end it just feels to me like people cutting corners. You get a sub-standard app, but you don't have to pay developers to build for each platform plus the web. Which I think is a perfectly reasonable business trade off to make; I'm just not happy with the result as a user.

<comment><USER25> _> Pretty animations? I don't need those; in fact they're distracting and annoying._

Animations are an important tool for showing transitions between states.

Pasquale D'Silva has a bunch of good blog posts explaining how they can help an interface:

\- [https://medium.com/@pasql/transitional- interfaces-926eb80d64...](https://medium.com/@pasql/transitional- interfaces-926eb80d64e3)

\- [https://medium.com/elepath-exports/spatial- interfaces-886bcc...](https://medium.com/elepath-exports/spatial- interfaces-886bccc5d1e9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> QT is amazing, it has been around so long and there even is a photoshop to qml exporter [1] that helped us make this dashboard for my Universitys formula hybrid team in [2] [3]. It really did not take too long and the performance is amazing on the Pi. I highly recommend QT, and there are amazing bindings for languages. I am looking forward to trying this out!

[1] [https://github.com/qt-labs/photoshop-qmlexporter](https://github.com/qt- labs/photoshop-qmlexporter) [2] [https://drive.google.com/open?id=1D733SdbUvGsGvct8jdGqJ3R9iJ...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1D733SdbUvGsGvct8jdGqJ3R9iJxeMyvW) [3] [https://github.com/UVicFH/infotainment](https://github.com/UVicFH/infotainment)

<comment><USER27> Qt, the application framework from Qt Software is written as Qt (capital Q). It is not written as QT (capital Q, capital T). QT can refer to a lot of other things, e.g. Apple QuickTime.

The official pronunciation of Qt is "cute". It is not pronounced as "cue tea".

[0]: [https://ariya.io/2009/01/qt-not-qt](https://ariya.io/2009/01/qt-not-qt)

<comment><USER28> That's funny, I've never heard anyone pronounce it 'cute'. (anecdotal, maybe ~20 developers so far)

<comment><USER27> True, and I was pedantic to reply.

Last week someone else on hn did the same; and I kept quite.

Unfortunately this time I could not stop the graybeard in me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > "PyQt is dual licensed on all supported platforms under the GNU GPL v3 and > the Riverbank Commercial License. Unlike Qt, PyQt is not available under the > LGPL. You can purchase the commercial version of PyQt here. More information > about licensing can be found in the License FAQ."

Except this sucks if, you know, you want to make some money on your app... Kicking the tires for a potentially commercial app is a FULL stop for me right there.

JS and so many newer language(s)/bindings that compile to JS make the option to good to ignore.

I love Python, but it has stagnated hard in the last few years. The 2 to 3 transition really hurt the Python ecosystem in ways I am just starting to recognize. There are only "ok" to "terrible" options for GUI creation in the python ecosystem. Furthermore, packaging for different platforms is still a problem in 2018.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Except this sucks if, you know, you want to make some money on your app...

Why is that a problem? You get a commercial license for PyQt and are good to go(?)

> I love Python, but it has stagnated hard in the last few years. The 2 to 3 > transition really hurt the Python ecosystem [...]

I disagree. I think the ecosystem is more vibrant than ever.

> Furthermore, packaging for different platforms is still a problem in 2018.

That is exactly what this project is trying to help with.

<comment><USER29> $500 dollars... is "not expensive"?

Beside the ML/AI sub-community, I am having a hard time finding GUI innovation in the Python ecosystem. Perhaps, you could show me an option that doesn't suck? I've tried Kivy, PyQt, PySide, Eel, gooey, etc... I am not a JS dev and had an electron/react app up and running that I easily ported to my Android phone in under an hour.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it depends on how much time you spend on an app. I've been working on my PyQt app [1] for 2331 hours (I track my time). $500 is nothing in comparison.

[1]: [https://fman.io](https://fman.io)

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I wish you all the luck... but look at it from a new programmer perspective, or someone that wants to create an app for money, but doesn't know if it will work.

On one hand you have the complex licensing thing (PyQt) where you are limited to desktop of Mac, Win, Linux. On the other you have a skill (JS dev) that is good for literally any screen, on any platform with almost zero complications for commercial apps. It is a no brainer.

If it isn't obvious, I have begun the transition to embrace JS for what it is... I am learning it and it hasn't been too bad. Python will be relegated to ML/AI and glue...

<comment><AUTHOR> You raise valid points. Of course, a web developer who has never used Python will be more comfortable with Electron. That may be a very good reason for her to prefer it.

Regarding licensing, you can simply buy the commercial license only when you go public / begin making money. It's not that difficult I think.

But as I said, you are correct in that Electron is easier to use for many people. I'm also the last person to say you should always use PyQt. Just today I recommended someone to use Electron over PyQt. It really depends on the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Unfortunatelly PyQt does not solve the problem of Javascript engineers who are not willing to learn a new programming language.

That's the whole reason for the whole Javascript fadigue. Computer Science has had "had tools for the right jobs" for years, but now we have a large developer base that only knows Javascript and think it's some kind of holy grail of computing. Happened before with Java. Happened before with PHP. It will happen again.

It even happened in Python, too. I personally attribute a whole generation of failure for the Linux Desktop to the "Python for Desktop" frenzy of the Gnome 2/KDE 4 times. I remember I had a dual-boot Pentium 4 box, and while Windows apps were always slick and responsive, Linux always felt sluggish and unresponsive, until I found C/C++ alternatives to all the apps I used.

<comment><USER31> Speaking as a developer who primarily writes Python and secondarily C, Rust, C++, bash, and others as necessary, who has in fact worked on a large-scale C++ UI project in Qt on the Linux desktop running alongside PyGTK UIs, and who _doesn 't_ actively write JavaScript, I have to say that JavaScript is a really good choice of language, especially for UI, because it has a strong bias towards event-based programming and callbacks instead of blocking code and threads. If you're going to pick the right tool for the job of UI, I'd put JS a bit ahead of Rust (because of immaturity; that is likely to change real soon), which I'd put a lot ahead of C++ (because you're going to screw up threading) a little bit ahead of C and Python (because you're definitely going to screw up threading). If you're interested in rapid prototyping, I'd move Python up several notches - but not past JS, which is what I reach for these days for throwaway prototypes if I think I know enough JS to pull it off.

(If someone has a high-quality way to use asyncio or Twisted with the Qt event loop, I'd probably bump Python a bit higher.)

<comment><USER32> The point is that we unnecessarily focus on developer comfort in writing software, but software needs to be optimised first and foremost for runtime. In fact I'd put the priority as such:

Priority #1: Runtime, your code will (hopefully) be run a lot more than it does anything else.

Priority #2: Debug, your code will be debugged more than it is read

Priority #3: Reading, you will probably read your code a significant amount more than you write code.

Priority #4: Writing. A software should spend the least amount of time on a CPU being written.

I'm not saying that you should only focus on making fast/slick runtimes that are easily debuggable above literally everything else; but you should absolutely have slanted priorities towards this goal.

And in that respect, why wouldn't you learn the right tool for the job?

<comment><USER33> Most code, #1 is irrelevant. Most code isn't in the inner loop of performance- limiting execution.

Given that, what makes sense to optimize for? The slowest, most error-prone processor in the mix is, the wetware in your head.

So, almost all of the time, put #1 at the bottom of the list. Put #3 next, because once it works, the slowest process is relearning why it works, necessary to debug or extend it.

#2 and #4 are simultaneous.

So, for most coding most of the time on most projects, write dead-obvious code using normal design patterns and simplest abstractions. Because time is money, and your wetware time is millions of times more expensive than cpu time.

<comment><USER34> > Most code, #1 is irrelevant. Most code isn't in the inner loop of > performance-limiting execution.

Just because your code isn't in a tight loop doesn't mean you shouldn't think about performance. If you waste CPU resources then the rest of the system that is in a tight loop will have more switches to do. If you waste memory then the code in the tight loop will have memory evicted from it's precious memory cache. Just because your process is not CPU bound does not mean you aren't having an impact on overall system performance.

If you're running your own servers do whatever you want, but if you're making consumer software then don't pretend you're software is the only thing running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am curious about final package size on various platforms when using this project. The download bundles for the related "fman" project vary considerably -- Win: 1MB; macOS: 23MB; Ubuntu: 39MB. The last number matches my experience with scripted Qt applications, at which point the size is comparable to a typical ~50-70 MB Electron app, at least for compressed downloads. Visual Studio Code is 44 MB on Windows and 65MB on Mac. Scriptable wrappers usually imply that the core Qt shared objects can't be pruned, and the wrappers themselves also add up, so that Windows number is impressive and intriguing!

I would also wonder about performance scaling. Are there good examples of "large" applications where CPython drives the main loop, as opposed to a scripting layer over a C++ core? CPython has a shallower optimization floor than Javascript+V8, and most larger Python GUI applications I've tried had noticeable lags (thinking of several visualization apps, and several Python- centric IDEs). I was similarly skeptical of Javascript-based desktop applications until recently, but Visual Studio Code has been very impressive.

<comment><USER36> I'd wager the Windows download is not the full app, rather just an installer. There's no way Qt and PyQt would fit in just 1MB on an OS that doesn't include those as shared libraries.

As a side note: I see the Arch Linux package is 16M, unlike Ubuntu's 39M. Perhaps the app needs a relatively recent Qt or PyQt release that is available from Arch's repos but not on the oldest supported Ubuntu and thus needs to be shipped.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is correct, the Windows binary is an online installer. The reason for this is that fman uses Google Omaha for its auto-update mechanism [1].

The Arch package is smaller because it declares PyQt as a dependency, rather than shipping it itself. The reason for this is that it was difficult otherwise to make the shipped version of PyQt libraries and dependencies compatible with the ones already on the system.

[1]: [https://fman.io/blog/google-omaha- tutorial/](https://fman.io/blog/google-omaha-tutorial/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It seems Sciter[0] is another alternative to Electron for those who aren't too keen on Electron's resource usage but still want to use HTML, Js and CSS for their UI.

I haven't used it personally but they appear to have a few notable clients. Seems they also have popular language bindings[1] (Go, Python, Rust etc...).

It's not opensource though so that could be a deal-breaker for some but licensing/pricing[2] isn't prohibitive.

Has anybody here on HN used this before? Care to share your experience with it?

      [0] https://sciter.com/
      [1] https://sciter.com/developers/sciter-sdk-bindings/
      [2] https://sciter.com/prices/

</comment><comment><USER38> > In simple terms, this means you can use it for free in open source projects > that are also licensed under the GPL

That's not really what being licensed under the GPL means.

PC-BSD thought that they had to license their own stuff under the GPL because they were using Qt, but all you need is GPL _compatibility_. After that realisation, PC-BSD relicensed their code to 3-clause BSD.

<comment><USER39> Do you have a source for the PC-BSD assertion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Immediate mode graphical user interfaces have changed the way I look at GUI programming for the better.

Here are my bindings to python for the nuklear framework. [https://github.com/billsix/pyNuklear](https://github.com/billsix/pyNuklear)

<comment><USER41> Could you elaborate, or have a link handy?

<comment><USER40> No callbacks. No lifecycle diagrams. You don't give up control of the event loop. No memory management. You can add new widgets by copying/ pasting/modifying from demos easily.

Lisp is interesting in that unevaluated code is a data structure of the language. In immediate mode GUIs, the sequence of function calls is your data structure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> An actually good alternative to Electron is badly needed, imo. PyQt seems like a reasonable start for a platform like this.

Electron needs to be competed with in two areas, though: Developer experience and end user experience. Solving just one of them means you don't really compete with Electron.

For a good user experience I'd have recommended a Qt Quick [QML] based interface. Developer experience requires some good tooling, which unfortunately Qt creator doesn't really provide for me.

</comment><comment><USER43> Browsers should just provide controlled access to the operating system file system which will remove some large percentage of the use cases for Electron. It would be easier and much safer.

<comment><USER44> I would still prefer to have native apps, instead of spending 400MB per application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> While this looks promising on paper for Python user , it will probably just die in the coming years due to a lack of vision and of community.

Electron is backed up by Github , we are talking about a billion dollar unicorn , and a lot of commits made are coming from outside github ( microsoft engineers for instance)

For this ? I doubt it would go beyond 1 year of surviving .

Also I've been using VS Code for years ,it's incredibly well optimized and doesn't have a problem in terms of memory or CPU .I personally found electron very reliable , it has surprised me on this point.

Ultimately this tech feels a lot like all the 'I hate javascript so here is my alternative' frameworks we had for the past year.

</comment><comment><USER29> It costs $500 for a commercial license for PyQT!!!!!!!

That is super welcoming for people that want to run more than CLI in 2018! /s

<comment><USER46> You can develop commercial apps with PyQT, your code just needs to be compatible with the GPL3 license ([https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/commercial/pyqt](https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/commercial/pyqt)). PyQT is not different from any other dual-licensed open-source project in that sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on how much time you will spend developing your app. I've been working on mine [1] for 2331 hours (I track my time). $500 is nothing in comparison.

[1]: [https://fman.io](https://fman.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> There is another option, far easier to use: Lazarus.

<comment><USER48> and another option use Tcl/Tk, or just Tk with your language of choice: [http://www.tkdocs.com](http://www.tkdocs.com)

<comment><USER49> How is the themeability of Tk? Can I make it look good? What's the best looking Tk app you're aware of?

<comment><USER50> I was curious as well and found this: [https://wiki.tcl.tk/9485](https://wiki.tcl.tk/9485)

I don't have an answer to your questions, but it's at least somewhere to start looking.

E: Most of the links are broken. This one is a bit better, but it's Windows- specific: [https://wiki.tcl.tk/8646](https://wiki.tcl.tk/8646)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> If this comes to fruition it would be great. I, wanting to start a new commercial desktop app, recently researched using Python/PyQT. The packaging situation was not good so I decided on another technology but I'd love to be able to use Python and reliably create a desktop app installation. The PyQT license cost doesn't bother me if I could use it. Certainly cheaper than Delphi.

</comment><comment><USER52> HTML/CSS is nice to display information. Now if you have to input data, then HTML/FORMS/etc. are not that good...

<comment><USER53> This is... very far from the truth.

HTML Forms suck until you have to write form classes/UI in native languages, and then realize how annoying it is when you need to customize something or want a unique input that might make said form easier to deal with.

e.g, NSTextField in Cocoa _still uses cells_ behind the scenes.

<comment><USER52> Ah... My experience differs :-) For example, many keyboard shortcuts don't work over tables (because they conflict with those from the browser; maybe Electron helps here, don't know); copy/pasting images is not easy; editing complex data structures is not easy, especially when you want to transmit delta-edits to the server; it's also tough to freely draw over controls (for example to give visual hints here and there).

But well, Qt presentation is not nearly as sexy as HTML/CSS, that's for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Coding is only a part of my job. I am currently building an application for our warehouse, connecting our ERP to some external services. Lots of moving parts across several machines. In the middle is a tiny GUI, which has been more trouble than the rest put together. I used Tkinter to minimise dependencies. I am staggered by how much code it takes to get a GUI working (compared to the rest of the project), and this is just a plain industrial app. I'm sure this is part of the reason why JavaScript is taking over the desktop. Visual Studio had me making apps like this in minutes last time I used it (some time ago). Where did we go wrong?

I recently wanted to dabble with a tiny Android app, after hours wasted trying to get Kivy to work I bought a book on Kotlin and downloaded Android Studio, lots to learn but with the advantage that it works.

If I had just learnt JavaScript instead I could have done both in one hit.

<comment><USER55> How would javascript reduce the code necessary for a gui or help you cross platform? UIs are very different between phone / desktop so even if you stayed with javascript you'd be learning different libraries or rewriting everything to conform to the other platform.

Personally, I tend to use QtDesigner to layout apps and Qt for implementation (this applies for PyQt/PySide or C++). It tends to reduce the code necessary to get something up and going and helps keep things more MVC.

Tkinter is the standard UI library for Python _, but I haven 't used Tk in close to 15 years. Tk worked well enough for smaller Perl or Tcl apps, but when I first moved to Python professionally (around 2005) I bounced between WxWidgets, PyGTK, and PyQt. Qt was always ahead of the rest, but had licensing concerns at the time. I feel like there's a bit of roughness conceptually between Qt and Python that are just fundamental, but I think that's more on Python and asynchronous needs of UIs.

_ I was trying to figure out when this decision was made. I see references of tkinter dating back to 1999 (tk is from 1991), but it looks like it was officially included along with Python starting in 2008. If true, I would think it would be obvious it wouldn't be the best general choice going forward by that time. But I can see the reasoning behind choosing it due to licensing, size, volatility of api.

<comment><USER54> PyQt is really difficult for me to use because of the license, I'm afraid.

In all of the comparisons I found on different frameworks the criticisms of Tk all seem to be about the looks (in that it didn't take on native styles), but that seems to have been resolved. It doesn't affect my in house use case either. The other thing mentioned is that Qt has more widgets. I don;t need those right now. Therefore it would seem that for simple in house software Tkinter was a pretty fair choice.

> I feel like there's a bit of roughness conceptually between Qt and Python > that are just fundamental, but I think that's more on Python and > asynchronous needs of UIs.

I can't get over this. I am not a good enough scientist to explain what the problem is but there is something that just doesn't feel right with Python GUI programming.

<comment><USER55> Yeah, Tk just looks and behaves (as a gui) very crudely, but my preference for other gui libraries was always ease of use, organization, and troubleshooting. Verbosity would go under ease of use and organization. I think Gtk and/or Wx had a gui to layout widgets, but it was so far behind Qt. I still don't have a preferred way to organize Qt code, but it offers almost too many options. The main book on PyQt, Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt, doesn't use Designer and all the guis are done programatically. It's a great way to learn the library, but horrible for maintenance.

Most of the guis Ive needed just use basic widgets. I've poked at the browser and opengl widget, but never really used them. I have had to add custom behaviors to widgets to match other apps and it seemed pretty well suited. Funny enough, the Qt organization has stopped development on Widgets over 5 years ago (which is all I've ever really used). They consider Widgets feature complete and are focusing on QML.

> there is something that just doesn't feel right with Python GUI programming.

I think it's because GUIs, by their nature, are event driven and require parallel execution. Python doesn't do this very well so there's awkward syntax, a few competing paradigms, and unexpected behaviors (with memory, code flow, etc). I can see an argument for Javascript in this regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I write desktop apps using PyQt and build an installer with pynsist. This is cross-platform, but I only need Windows support. Other than that, is this project just a simplified way to build desktop applications, or would it produce something fundamentally different from what I'm building now?

<comment><AUTHOR> It would build something similar but encapsulate knowledge gained from distributing to many thousands of machines. For instance, about .dlls that are available 99% of the time but sometimes missing on some users' machines [1].

[1]: [https://github.com/mherrmann/fbs/blob/cb0d57e59c9fecf24fb281...](https://github.com/mherrmann/fbs/blob/cb0d57e59c9fecf24fb28104ea52f4837f49c892/fbs/freeze/windows.py#L32)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> So this is a wrapper for PyInstaller? I see that it creates an installer .exe on Windows or a dmg on Mac, which is nice (I'm having trouble with PyQt and the latter at the moment).

It's unclear what the other advantages over PyInstaller are. Does @cached_property provide a performance benefit?

<comment><AUTHOR> It uses PyInstaller, but also does much more. For example, PyInstaller doesn't let you create installers. Also, PyInstaller only gets you 95% there for packaging. There are still some edge cases such as missing DLLs [1]. Finally, fbs provides a very high-level interface. You don't have to learn PyInstaller's configuration options, or how to create an installer on Windows or a .dmg file on Mac. Those are all things that take a significant amount of time to learn, get right and integrate. fbs does it all for you.

[1]: [https://github.com/mherrmann/fbs/blob/cb0d57e59c9fecf24fb281...](https://github.com/mherrmann/fbs/blob/cb0d57e59c9fecf24fb28104ea52f4837f49c892/fbs/freeze/windows.py#L32)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Would it be possible to resolve Electron's performance issues by "precompiling"/prerendering the HTML and CSS (+ maybe scripts) ? As long as the app UI stays the same, it should be cached in an optimized form. (sorry if that already exists in Electron)

<comment><USER59> Performance-sensitive apps already do that (like VS Code, Atom). Most of the cost is in the javascript, caching bytecode lowers startup time a lot. Pre- rendering is not really practical, and painting is rarely the main bottleneck either way.

AFAIK the main performance issues come from chromium's vast size - <USER13> are complex machines and it's easy to hurt performance by doing something that looks reasonable at first, but blocks the UI. Being single-threaded doesn't help. But reality is, most of the time Electron apps perform really well, it's just that they have slower startup times, consume massive amounts of memory, more CPU than average, and are 100MB each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> And then we just have to put React-ExtJS on our 8 gigs and still swapping displaced full stacks to have something that looks like a proper desktop application again.

</comment><comment><USER61> I think that to compete with electron it would need to have something like React. It's very hard to go back to gui controls and the way they were done since before the web after you tasted something like React.

Killer innovation is not the markup language but components (extremely flexible and trivially composable at any level).

</comment><comment><USER62> I made a few apps with PyQT. I certainly wouldn't do it again.

</comment><comment><USER53> Every time this argument comes up, I see the same tired comments, and they're typically from people that don't have to build a modern UI. There is an insane amount that you get for free in HTML/CSS/JS, and it's very clear why things like Qt & co don't stack up.

Here's a small list (which could easily be a much bigger list) of things that are much easier in web dev land than their native counterparts.

\- Want to chart some data with nice animations? The chart library in Qt is good... until you need to make it look sexy. If you're in HTML/CSS/JS, you can just reach for an unlimited number of alternative libraries to pull from. (No, saying "go without the animations" isn't an answer.)

\- Universal stylesheets are a godsend for quickly iterating on UI. Qt's stylesheets do not come close to the abilities that modern CSS provides you (and frameworks beyond Qt often lack something even close to this). Saying "CSS shouldn't be doing this stuff" isn't an answer, because the alternatives are simply less productive. It's absolutely amazing to be able to target an arbitrary node in a nested structure and tell it to behave differently, and have the entire thing render appropriately.

\- You want smooth scrolling (that matches the OS behavior...) at 60fps? There is an untold amount of work that each browser vendor has put in to this effort, and the benefit is greatly undersold. Ever looked into wxWidgets? You have to go out of your way to make a scroll view bounce on macOS. That is utterly insane in 2018 - and no, saying "why does Mac need to be different?" isn't a solution. The entire point of cross platform development is that it should handle this.

\- Have you ever tried to optimize scrolling on a TableView in Qt/wxWidgets/Cocoa/etc? Give me HTML/CSS/JS any day of the week.

\- This point is slightly separate, but... I've written Python for over 10 years now, and I would not want to write a UI in Python. The language is one of my favorite and works well for most things, but UIs are often just kind of hacky - Python isn't a language that's ideal to write hacky code in. I'd sooner do it in Ruby or something.

Want the tl;dr? There is no other frontend community that even comes close* to the wide range of documentation, available libraries, built-in/free benefits, approachability, and general "it'll just work" feeling across platforms.

I write native UI code daily, and the writing is on the walls for it. Tangentially, this is very much why I suspect Apple is looking to merge Cocoa and UIKit more - it's the only way native Mac apps survive (oh, and even Apple renders significant chunks of some of their apps with Webkit... three finger swipe right on your trackpad if you wanna see some ancient Webkit app history).

* - _maybe_ UIKit for iOS comes close, due to Apple's vendor lock in factor and focus on UI, but that's something that a) rarely extends back to macOS apps and b) usually winds up splintered between Objective-C/Swift implementations.

<comment><USER63> Here is an example of modern UI build with Qt:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7en65HkjeQ&t=39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7en65HkjeQ&t=39)

<comment><USER53> That's a killer UI, and I'm happy to admit it's incredibly good for what I've seen/used of Qt apps over the years... but it's not the norm. I would honestly pay money to see how much effort it took to get it to this.

There's also the point I forgot to mention in my original post, which is that... if your entire app starts as a webapp, there's no sense in maintaining an entire separate Qt codebase when you could just wrap it. Standalone products like this (embedded, etc) might have an easier time justifying it, but I really don't think it hits the ease of use metric (not even touching on the fact that you then need to handle product changes across multiple codebases/teams - money doesn't absolve your, your team or your company of the inherent difficulty here).

Also, hell, the simple act of refactoring native level UI code is often more of a PITA than the HTML/CSS/JS counterpart. Native APIs need to make themselves more accessible and sexy if they want to have a chance here.

Alsoooo to just end this rant of mine, I'll point out that the OP's project shouldn't charge money for this. It's not that they're not allowed to or anything like that, but you're in no way making PyQT a viable Electron alternative if you require licensing. There's little money in building UI frameworks for this reason; the web kind of requires you to compete on free to use. There are people (regardless of your take on the matter) that don't use Qt for licensing reasons and that is a hard blocker.

<comment><USER64> > That's a killer UI, and I'm happy to admit it's incredibly good for what > I've seen/used of Qt apps over the years... but it's not the norm.

It's the norm for Qt apps since 2011 - 2012 when qml was introduced (of course, older apps use the older tech - and honestly, sometimes it makes more sense : at least all the colors, fonts, etc... will respect your desktop theme unlike "modern" toolkits). Here's how some QML code looks: [https://github.com/jcelerier/TodoMVC- QML/blob/master/Main.qm...](https://github.com/jcelerier/TodoMVC- QML/blob/master/Main.qml) ; as you can see, it's far from bloated (mostly due to the language being based on reactive semantics).

For instance a consequent part of KDE has been rewritten in QML and more is underway with Kirigami : [https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/12/kde-releases- kirigami-ui-20](https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/12/kde-releases-kirigami-ui-20)

<comment><USER53> I've used QML before, but I appreciate you linking a sample for anyone who's curious.

Re: the matter at hand, it's cool if you don't consider that bloated. If I was using a C++ Qt codebase as the comparison point, I might think that too. However, if we're comparing it to a typical web codebase, that's an order of magnitude more dense. This also just doesn't matter in 2018, because QML could have the best documentation in the world and you'll still have trouble figuring out any issues as it doesn't have anywhere near the level of literature and/or (discoverable, not buried in some dead Linux project) open source code that the web platform does. Qt has a sexy problem, and every time it's brought up people try to claim it doesn't matter, but it does.

(There's also a slew of apps (e.g, I could go pick a cryptocurrency wallet app at random...) that have been built long after 2012 and still have issues with rendering.)

I'm not interested in debating KDE, since... that project stopped being relevant to me around KDE4. Nothing but wasted potential.

Re: respecting a Desktop theme... I used to love ricing out my desktop too. ;P

The thing is that it's an archaic viewpoint - one that you're welcome to have, but it'll increasingly be pushed down. Product design is always going to trump desktop UI customization capabilities, because one of those has money behind it and the other doesn't.

I also don't know anybody who customizes their desktop chrome anymore because (in addition to companies like Apple making it next to impossible) most people use their machines through a web browser at this point.

Also, let me be clear: I would love for native UI frameworks to be better. I don't particularly enjoy digging around in web codebases, but pretending that anything is else is as close to approachable as them makes it very difficult for any native UI toolkit to improve. People seem to think it's on the Web to catch up to the performance of native, but it's really the reverse - <USER14> needs to play the game how the web does or it's going to go extinct.

<comment><USER64> > However, if we're comparing it to a typical web codebase, that's an order of > magnitude more dense

Well, I disagree. All the examples I could find, for instance in Vue.js, React, etc... had quite a bit more LOC necessary to achieve the same behaviour, when counting JS + CSS + HTML. Even with lambdas, associating a behaviour to an object is still not as nice as just doing `height: width/2` and knowning that the constraint will keep being enforced.

> I'm not interested in debating KDE, since... that project stopped being > relevant to me around KDE4. Nothing but wasted potential.

These certainly were troubled times, but KDE5 is honestly really nice. See the latest release [https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.12.0.php](https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.12.0.php)

> The thing is that it's an archaic viewpoint - one that you're welcome to > have, but it'll increasingly be pushed down.

Will it ? in the contrary I find that the ricing community is more active than ever :p Ricing was a thing with e16 and blackbox when there were less than 100k linux users two decades ago. Now there are more than a hundred million... it's not going to disappear. Besides, it's sometimes a necessity. Think for instance of all the vision-problem-related enhancements that a coherent desktop theme can provide.

> I also don't know anybody who customizes their desktop chrome anymore

www.reddit.com/r/unixporn

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Serious question: Why do so many people think building desktop application GUIs with web-technologies is a good idea?

I'm currently trying to formulate some thoughts on this; While I understand that HTML/CSS generally seems more flexible and may be more easily accessible to more/newer devs, it carries huge, negative implications in the forms of HCI (not having consistent interface elements on the user platform), performance and energy usage (particularly Electron), OS-integration, and accessibility features.

Can someone please give me some arguments as to why this not only seems like a good idea, but also why it's the best tool for the job?

<comment><USER66> Because system resources are cheaper than expert knowledge.

We've got enough RAM & CPU cycles spare that we can run GUIs in a headless browser and CSS & JS have come along far enough to make this easy(ish) to pull off, especially when combined with a framework such as React or Angular.

I can see why it's done, from the cost PoV, but I'm always a little dismayed when I find yet another desktop app which has the 'uncanny valley' of an almost-native look and feel. Same goes for ReactNative vs true native mobile apps.

<comment><USER65> What's really "enough RAM & CPU cycles"? I think one can argue that this is really offloading development cost as a a resource cost onto the users - <USER15> must run "native", inefficient applications.

This means not only implicitly making a choice about the users' hardware, but it may in some cases exclude certain user segments as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I wish them the best of luck, but I don't think it's going to happen, because one of the big reasons Electron is popular is because web-dev people don't want to learn other languages.

<comment><USER68> This trope makes me quite sad...

I'd love to learn other languages and stacks! It's just that, often, it isn't a worthy use of my time. All that time used into learning C++ and Qt would be better used in making and improving my software.

This is even more impactful when hiring people. I'm building a small team that has to handle Web development, mobile apps, and someday a desktop app. The less different skills I need for all of this, the more cost-effective it will be.

Personally, I'd rather have ultra-fast, spartan-looking, as-efficient-as- possible apps. If I could choose just by heart, I'd code in Lisp, and probably I wouldn't even make GUIs and just make CLI apps. Sadly, programming is not only a hobby and I have to consider my business needs before my technical preferences.

Engineering isn't about picking the best, most perfect technologies, but about handling trade-offs. Many are using web tecnologies because of the fads, and some out of lazyness, but many (i'd guess most) are doing it because it's worth it.

<comment><USER67> "I'd love to learn other languages and stacks! It's just that, often, it isn't a worthy use of my time. All that time used into learning C++ and Qt would be better used in making and improving my software."

This line of thinking, that it's not worth your time to learn tools that would improve your software, and make it less resource intensive, is a large reason for that trope.

"Many are using web tecnologies because of the fads, and some out of lazyness, but many (i'd guess most) are doing it because it's worth it."

I can't agree with this, mainly because, it's not worth it. It doesn't improve the software in any way; if anything, it makes it worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> With PWAs coming to desktop, "Electron problem" will be solved this year.

</comment><comment><USER70> The longer i deal with computers the more brittle the Python ecosystem appears to be.

Yes it may be a wonderful language, but it seems so damned easy to get the interpreter to not find libraries that should by all accounts be right damn there in its search path.

</comment><comment><USER71> I'm really curious why anyone would want to do this. You'll almost surely arrive at something equally slow and awkward as Electron, but without the cutting edge interpreter, accessibility, or text support...

Chromes rendering engine is objectively better than Qt's for an awful lot of things.

What you may win back is a gig of ram that wasn't really being used anyways...

<comment><AUTHOR> In my case, it was Electron's startup performance that made me go for PyQt [1].

[1]: [https://fman.io/blog/picking-technologies-for-a-desktop- app-...](https://fman.io/blog/picking-technologies-for-a-desktop-app-in-2016/)

<comment><USER71> I am happy you found something that worked for you. But to me, I'm just very frustrated. People consistently suggest Qt is a net good because Electron uses more RAM and just _totally abandon_ accessibility. The proliferation of Electron is one of the single most progressive things to happen on the front of general desktop application accessibility for folks with special visual or motor control needs since OS's started addressing these needs directly

Let's just contrast and compare: The ENTIRE story for Qt accessibility is tree navigation, with trust that readers exist: [http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/accessible- qwidget.html](http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/accessible-qwidget.html)

Meanwhile Electron has _an auditing tool for a wide range of accessibility requirements which also explains how you can fix the problems_ : [https://github.com/electron/spectron#accessibility- testing](https://github.com/electron/spectron#accessibility-testing)

But congrats now we can run 2 tabbed text editor instances at once. Because for some crazy reason we're going to pretend Electron apps aren't competitive on $30 computers but IntelliJ is immune to criticism.

On a more emotional and personal level, in my entire time using linux since 1995, I've never once used a Qt app I liked. I wrote them professionally, and I hated each one and felt ashamed of the outputs.

To me, to then layer Python on top is like taking stale bread and slathering on that curiously pale, overly sweet peanut butter that they use on airlines. It's quite possibly the most Nope thing you could say other than, "Oh and also we embedded an APL interpreter and you'll need to write C++ circa 1995 for memory management."

<comment><USER72> Thank you for caring about accessibility. However, I don't think the pros and cons between Qt and Electron are as straightforward as you may think.

First, Qt accessibility on Windows is improving:

[https://blind.guru/qtwin.html](https://blind.guru/qtwin.html)

This blogger specifically mentions the JAWS screen reader, but this should also help users of the Narrator screen reader built into Windows.

Speaking of which, Electron is not very accessible with Narrator. The reason is that Chromium implements IAccessible2, a non-Microsoft extension of the old Microsoft Accessibility API. Since IA2 is not a Microsoft API, Narrator doesn't support it.

Also, one of my blind friends told me a few months ago that Electron apps are inaccessible on Linux. I haven't yet verified this myself. Qt is accessible on Linux, though I don't know how it compares with GTK.

I don't know what the situation is on Mac.

<comment><USER71> I've seen folks with readers on Chrome on Linux. I don't mean to imply that Electron magically providers full accessibility; just that the underlying engine has much more robust support not only for readers and navigators (to which there is a ceiling folks aspire to), but also for _auditing_.

It's not really possible for developers to understand the full extend of accessibility needs unless they experience it themselves. As such, Electron and Chrome's accessibility auditing tools that capture these needs are an incredible step forwards.

As for Narrator, I think historically folks have been somewhat inclined to use third party or direct integration tools because it was widely considered to be inferior to the capabilities provided by direct integrations like ChromeVox or Apple's (superior) Voice Over (which from all reports I get and can find casually searching, works as well as Safari if not better).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lockheed Martin unveils plans for quiet supersonic passenger airplane - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/supersonic-airplane-qsta-lockheed-martin/index.html <comment><USER2> "the noise should be audible from the ground only as a car door slamming shut"

That still sounds awful, and I imagine it isn't good for wildlife.

Also, I'm betting this would still be very expensive, but it is cool to see passenger supersonic possibly making a comeback.

On the otherhand...I wonder if this is mainly to kick Boeing while they're down.</comment>


Microsoft Strikes Back? - <AUTHOR>

Over the weekend I watched BBC Click and they had a section on the KT Spiderphone
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m9ry (10:35)
Not sure if people outside of the UK can watch that so here's another article about it.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/239631/unique_kt_spider_phone_transforms_into_a_tablet_laptop_or_handheld_gaming_device.html
Basically the tl:dr is that it's a smartphone that slots into a tablet which can then become the screen of a notebook.
Imagine being able to buy a bundle of hardware (phone+tablet+notebook) which costs under $1000, has permanent net access courtesy of the phones 3g and which you can really use for work (notebook), play (tablet) and communication (phone) and does all of these things well.
It seems to me this could very quickly make Microsoft a major player in the smartphone & tablet space while retaining its existing desktop dominance. <comment><USER2> Microsoft's WP7 is not Windows 8. They are 2 different OS's, so they'd have to use both, on the phone's hardware. So far I haven't seen anything more powerful than a single core WP7 phone. Plus, are you asking for an Atom-based phone?

However, I do think docking a phone into different screens has potential. I was thinking before how Google could do like 3 "UI add-ons" for the core Android code. So you get your phone UI add-on by default on the phone itself, then when you dock it to a PC screen, you see the Honeycomb UI, and when you dock it to a TV, you see the Google TV UI.

I think different types of devices and form factors mandate a different UI. You can't really shoe-horn a UI from a 3" screen to a 50" screen. But of course, they could still be made so you transition painlessly from one to the other, and have the same design style. But they should all be optimized for the form factor, device type and screen size.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your right, I confused the ability to run metro with the ability to run win8 on a smartphone. But according to the BBC clip the KT Spiderphone apparently runs a dual core 1.5ghz processor although I assume that is arm and not atom.

So perhaps not seamless all in one package yet.

Although the phone and tablet could work together fine, the notebook would need its own hardware but could still utilise the tablet for screen & graphics card. I still think there's a compelling case for such a combination.</comment></comment>


Inside the Secret Building That's Bringing Cell Service To NYC's Subway - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/inside-the-secret-building-thats-bringing-cell-service-1592846616 <comment><USER2> I find it interesting that for an article that states multiple times about the "undisclosed" location of this facility it shows rooftop pictures that, for someone who knows the area, would make identifying the location easy.</comment>


How I Built an AI to Sort 2 Tons of Lego Pieces - the-mitr http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/how-i-built-an-ai-to-sort-2-tons-of-lego-pieces <comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889)

</comment><comment><USER2> Cool - this was from our very own "jacquesm" and popped up a while ago when posted from his blog. It's quite cool to see it on IEEE Spectrum though :-)</comment>


Tool for watching flagged YouTube videos - <AUTHOR> http://www.puritube.com/

<comment><USER2> Does this simply access the video through an account with a >18yrs birthdate? Because if so, I fear YouTube will simply block that account once this gains any traction.

Not that I'm bashing the idea - I appreciate services like this. I'm just wandering if you've thought of some way around that possibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no account at all: it's just a normal embed.

The sign-in requirement only exists when viewing on the YouTube site.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very simple, I know, but it was an annoyance I ran into from time to time, so I made this site as a weekend project.

Here is a flagged video if you want to test: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ95z6ywcBY></comment>


A bit of free advice for Skype -- understand your product - <AUTHOR> http://blog.borud.no/2011/04/free-advice-for-skype.html

<comment><USER2> Good advice, but I'm still with the guy who thought giving Skype free advice was casting pearls before swine. If the Skype UI sucks and they're not willing to employ talented product designers, let some other company take advantage of that oversight. By employing talented people.</comment>


Ryzen 9 3950X vs. Core i9-9900KS performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.techspot.com/review/1955-ryzen-3950x-vs-core-i9-9900ks-gaming/ <comment><AUTHOR> Minor correction: This compares performance with and without memory tuning.

</comment><comment><USER2> these numbers looks oddly familiar to me, almost like they were copied from a Hardware Unboxed youtube video

Edit: I'm an idiot the author is a guy from Hardware Unboxed so obviously the numbers are familiar</comment>


Global warming shown in Google Maps - <AUTHOR> https://maps.google.com/?ll=-67.999341,71.232605&spn=0.888021,3.694153&t=h&z=9

<comment><USER2> One flaw in that picture supporting a case for AGW - it's the Antarctic, which we've seen record _increases_ in sea ice over the last 20 years.

[http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather- blogs/climatechange/wh...](http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather- blogs/climatechange/why-is-sea-ice-increasing-in-t/17970748)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather- gang/wp/...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather- gang/wp/2013/09/23/antarctic-sea-ice-hit-35-year-record-high-saturday/)

</comment><comment><USER3> According to Google Earth, picture was taken in 1999.

Here is the same area with bing: [http://binged.it/1a3v5EZ](http://binged.it/1a3v5EZ) Is it possible to get it's date from bing?

</comment><comment><USER4> How is it shown? Is there a picture for comparison?</comment>


PocketNode - <AUTHOR> http://www.pocketnode.io/ <comment><USER2> What exactly am I looking at? A javascript REPL? Doesn't seem to be node.js (no require())? Some introduction text or a help-object with useful context would be nice.</comment>


How to Serve Django Applications with UWSGI and Nginx on Debian 8 - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-serve-django-applications-with-uwsgi-and-nginx-on-debian-8 <comment><USER2> I love DO how tos! They've helped me so many times and I'm not even hosting there. This is another good one.</comment>


Need suggestions on how to proceed with my AI career - <AUTHOR> Please excuse me, if I am raving. I came to HN as my last resort.
A little background, I have a CS Undegraduate degree. I decided to pursue AI, when I was in third year of UG. which was two years ago. In the meantime, I have secured 2 internships and 2 full time jobs, all of them are from very prominent companies with very good pay.
Still, I very much want to work on R&D side of AI. Therefore my intermediate goal was to pursue Masters in A.I, which would give me good Academic understanding of A.I and also give me opportunity for research.
With that decided, I am currently in a tuff spot, Even though I have good Industry experience and good GRE score (168Q, 164V), my UG GPA is under the bridge with 2.7 GPA, which might very well rob me of pursuing MS in top universities.
Therefore I thought i can improve my chances of getting into good MS programs by pursing stanford AI graduate certificate. This is very expensive to me, therefore I have to take a decision on whether this is necessary or not. My motive was to pursue this and write good AI papers to increase my chance of getting into top universities.
You might ask, 'why not start writing papers now?' I have completed Deeplearning.ai 5 part specilisation, Udacity NLP Nanodegree and have taken MIT OCW on Mathematics. I am very much skilled in building and tweaking models with frameworks and also on understanding how architectures work in detail but I am still a novice on full blown mathematical side of it, which I dearly want to learn, I am hoping that stanford graduate course would be rigorous in that way, to help me be proficient in A.I
I have also looked at omscs from GT, but as my goal was to indirectly pursue research, I ruled this out.
Any suggestions or inputs on this would be quite helpful to me. <comment><USER2> Give up on your dreams, your undergraduate GPA needs work. Your best bet is to work somewhere prominent as an AI/ML engineer and move over later to research, after you have practical experience in the field.

<comment><AUTHOR> That seems to be the probable outcome. thanks for the input! any thoughts on stanford online Graduate certificate?</comment></comment>


Is "Brogrammer" Culture Really So Bad? - <AUTHOR> http://www.datamation.com/feature/boy-developers-is-the-brogrammer-culture-really-so-bad-1.html

<comment><USER2> It comes down to the grey area between complete creativity and rigidity. The creativity and comfort associated with a complete free will is desired because it can produce some of the best material while at the possible expense of unprofessionalism. While he other end completely squishes creativity and is a crappy work environment.

In this example it was obviously a worker being over-rebellious just because he can, so obviously brogrammer culture is negative.

The trick is having the creative freedom, but also understanding that you don't have to be a dick/rude to have creative freedom.

I am a guy, and I wish I had the opportunity to have complete freedom over my work area, but it is dicks like that who keep companies worried about HR issues

</comment><comment><USER3> The article's answer seems to be yes, Because investors don't like lawsuits.</comment>


HTTP Requests and Other Awesome Cloud Code Enhancements - <AUTHOR> http://blog.parse.com/2012/10/23/http-requests-and-other-awesome-cloud-code-enhancements/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is one of many features requested that Parse has promptly delivered. I (among others), expressed interest in this feature just a matter of weeks ago[0].

Cloud Code opened a floodgate of functionality on the Parse platform, and HTTP requests open another such floodgate.

[0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4506888></comment>


Whatever happened to Gallium-Arsenide? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Whatever-happened-to-Gallium-Arsenide-Why-did-the-need-for-GaAs-go-away-What-technology-solved-the-problem-it-was-supposed-to-address?share=1 <comment><USER2> Thank you for this, i remember reading about it back when single core chips were hitting absurd temps (if memory serves the headlines were something like "top end p4 produces more heat per mm2 than a thermo nuclear power plant") before they managed to find another way there was much talk of GaAs

just for fun id love to see what a GaAs Bitcoin mining ASIC could do but i seriously doubt anyone will be producing one of them</comment>


A Balanced Daily Practice Leads to Happiness and Success (with PDF) - <AUTHOR> http://kevinelliott.net/blogs/entrepreneurial/2011/12/07/a-balanced-daily-practice-leads-to-happiness-and-success/

<comment><USER2> Sorry, some of that may be good advice, but it just gave me a Jehova's Witness kind of vibe.</comment>