S.&P. Says Argentina Has Defaulted - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/s-p-says-argentina-has-defaulted/ <comment><USER2> Brazil and Argentina had very similar economic plans to get out of hyperinflation from the 80's - both created a new currency whose value was attached to the USD.

There was a subtle difference: Brazil forbade domestic contracts in dollar (with a few exceptions, mainly leasing contracts for imported vehicles). So when the market forces kicked in and Brazil was forced to devalue its artificially priced new currency, the impact was not that big.

In Argentina, most contracts were underwritten in dollars, so the government delayed devaluation as much as possible. As the result, when it finally adjusted the exchange rate to more realistic values, the guy who bought one home was bound to pay 3 or 4. The government solution was the first default (by passing a law saying you could pay these contracts with a huge discount). This is why they are in this mess, some creditors are fighting to receive the full value.

<comment><USER3> Also, Brazilian Real was born to be around 1:1 with USD, but the exchange rate was never fixed, it floated from day one. Argentinian coin (don't remember the name) was 1:1 by force, which made the delay even more catastrophic.

<comment><USER4> > Argentinian coin

Argentinian Peso. Before that it was Austral.

<comment><USER5> and before austral it was peso

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To understand background and potential implication, I found [http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/q-a-whats-behind- the-...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/q-a-whats-behind-the-battle- over-argentinas-debt/) helpful.

<comment><USER7> > Argentina issued bonds under New York law.

Until I read this, I assumed that international bonds were issued under international law, with the World Bank as the arbitrator. With the US as both lender and arbitrator, it seems to give them a lot of power.

<comment><USER8> In a transaction like this one, the parties get to choose the law that applies. Indeed, they are free to choose privately-formulated law and have the disputes resolved by private arbitration organizations (there are several examples of each). That said, it is quite popular to choose New York law to govern international transactions, and litigate issues in New York courts, even when the transactions have nothing to do with New York. That's because New York law is well understood, there is a deep body of precedent involving sophisticated financial transactions, and the courts have a lot of experience resolving financial disputes.

<comment><USER9> Likely, the bonds cost a little bit less if they're in a jurisdiction where it's going to be relatively easy, straightforward and fair to sort things out in the event things go wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Everybody involved in the 2001 default knew this was going to happen. And it can even be said that Argentina didn't plan to pay what they promised from the beginning, although I cannot attest to it.

One detail I want to add to the discussion is that in the past few years the global panorama changed for Argentina, they sit on top of the second largest shale gas reserve in the world, and plan to extract it. They need money to start working and suddenly felt the urge to settle this issue.

Known fact: There is the Argentinean way of doing things, not straightforward, which is why talking about the bondholders like victims sounds naïve. They saw they might get their money now, and with Argentina's shell gas urge probably felt the call to make more.

To me there is a larger scope, take a look at tech companies like Google and Facebook, they placed their head regional offices in Argentina. Both companies knew well in advance that the political and judicial system in Argentina is completely corrupt but still decided to direct their regional efforts from Buenos Aires. Why would anyone place offices in Argentina, when there is Chile, Perú or Colombia, countries that have greater political, social and economic stability, extremely better infrastructure, better weather and even tastier food.

I could be going paranoid but I believe it is simple; it looks like the big guys like to get in bed with the naughty ones, rather than the honest and better-behaved gals around the corner. This makes sense to me, after all, the bigger the risk the greater the possible reward.

The country is extremely wealthy, but that wealth is not getting to everyone (not that uncommon), and maybe that's why the demonization of the international monetary funds has so much appeal locally. The certainty is that by the end of this story, it will be the Argentinean people who will be paying for this.

<comment><USER11> Colombia is in what could be called a civil war without exaggerating too much, it's not like a FARC like organization controls large swath of Argentina. Why do you call Colombia more stable?

<comment><USER10> You are right, things have changed in Colombia, but might be too early to say it is more stable

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is how much money has been spent lobbying US officials in order to make this happen.

[http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000047065...](http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000047065&year=2014)

edit: I summed the years and got $5.3 million since 2007. The UI doesn't seem to help you sum at all.

edit2: [http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas- blog/nnfarm...](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas- blog/nnfarmer-education-groups-to-anti-argentina-lobby-uh-who-are-you)

excerpt from WSJ article included:

"Mr. Matlack is president of American Agriculture Movement, a farmers' advocacy group that was listed among about 40 members of American Task Force Argentina, whose stated mission is to help investors recoup money from Argentina's 2001 bond default and subsequent restructuring.

"But Mr. Matlack and some leaders of other groups representing ranchers, teachers and farmers, are baffled about why the task force listed their organizations as members 'united for a just and fair reconciliation' of Argentina's default.

"Reached while he was planting wheat on his farm, Mr. Matlack said he had never heard of American Task Force Argentina. 'We don't have anything to do with Argentina's debt,' he said.

"Also perplexed are leaders of the Colorado conference of the American Association of University Professors, which was listed under members and supporters. 'This is absolutely foreign to me,' says Ray Hogler, legislative director of the academic group.

"Both groups were dropped from the list after the Wall Street Journal alerted the task force to the discrepancies."

<comment><USER7> Is there a group representing the 93% who accepted the restructuring?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The worst thing about living in Uruguay is being right next to Them. Now this happens, and we're going to get the fallout.

<comment><USER14> And here we thought you were going to say that the worst thing about living in Uruguay was the rampant nationalism between Uruguayans and Argentinians..

<comment><USER15> I don't see how this adds to the conversation. Also, Argentina and Uruguay have similar racial composition & as far as I can tell see themselves as the same people of the Rio Plata.

<comment><USER16> Not to bring too many facts into the discussion, but Uruguay and Argentina dont have similar racial composition:

[http://www.indexmundi.com/uruguay/demographics_profile.html](http://www.indexmundi.com/uruguay/demographics_profile.html) [http://www.indexmundi.com/argentina/demographics_profile.htm...](http://www.indexmundi.com/argentina/demographics_profile.html)

Uruguay have 12% non-white, Argentina only 3%

That's not what I would call "similar".

<comment><USER15> Sorry, I should have been clearer: they are predominantly white. When I was last in each country, I didn't get any real sense of deep hatred of each other. Though there was some seemingly good natured ribbing about who was better at e.g. asado.

<comment><USER17> It's so friendly that Uruguayans and Argentines don't identify the other as foreign. Uruguayans didn't want to be their own country when their started their independence war, it was an attempt to not be part of Spain or Brazil and to be joined with what would become Argentina. It was the British who decided Uruguay would be an independent country. Since then in the last 200 years, they've developed somewhat distinct institutions and cultures. It's similar to the relationship between the US and Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand why S&Ps rating matters, except for in the cases of US state or federal investments where some of the ratings agencies have been written into statute. Everybody is as familiar with the Argentinian situation and how it has developed as S&P is, and they have the ability to make their own judgements about whether they want to buy Argentinean bonds.

The danger to Argentina is that the US government has declared that they're holding hostage the bond payments that Argentina has agreed to and wishes to make.

<comment><USER18> The background behind the rating agencies is that there are thousands or even millions of investment portfolios out there, with many of them fulfilling very important risk management functions. Pension funds, health insurance, all other forms of insurance, Banks, even many big companies who aren't technically in the finance industry.

Most of them need some form of "low yield safe investment". But it is hard to define what is safe. That's where rating agencies come in. An insurance can promise to abide by such an agency, and that removes a lot of oportunity for bad judgement on the part of individual fund managers.

You may argue whether these agencies are doing a good job at this, but most proposals to get to a better system involve some way of increasing the power of governments or individual fund managers.

<comment><USER19> >You may argue whether these agencies are doing a good job at this, but most proposals to get to a better system involve some way of increasing the power of governments or individual fund managers.

Ratings agencies are unaccountable private entities. Every time they are challenged they invoke the 1st amendment - i.e. their right to lie. Yet the law enshrines their privilege through regulation of investments (which are forced to rely upon their opinions).

There's absolutely no way the government would be any worse. They are at least accountable to their citizens via voting. Ratings agencies are accountable to nobody.

They've also used their weight to bully, too. S&P downgraded the US even though it made absolutely no sense because there were moves made to prosecute them for mis-rating CDOs before the credit crisis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what highly esteemed economics expert Paul Krugman thinks about this.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/down- argentina-w...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/down-argentina- way/)

<comment><USER21> I don't usually upvote sarcasm, and I'm not even sure if that _is_ sarcasm, but regardless, I don't understand this statement.

> But why exactly is Brazil an impressive "BRIC" while Argentina is always > disparaged? Actually, we know why — but it doesn't speak well for the state > of economics reporting.

What is it that we know? Why is, in Krugman's mind, Argentina always being disparaged?

<comment><USER22> Because they already defaulted in 2001 and got into a spat with the IMF and various investors from western nations who tried to capitalize on their misfortune.

In Krugman's mind, Argentina is disparaged because they don't really want to be part of the western "system" of investment in the national resources of South American nations by developed powers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So in the coming days we'll be hearing a lot more about 'Las Malvinas' and how Britain is an evil colonial power and stole the islands?

That usually seems to be what happens when Argentina has internal problems that need to be distracted from.

<comment><USER24> Rather off topic - I watched the World Cup Final in a large crowd at a German owned resort in Turkey, with a lot of Germans, English, Turks and a handful of Scots (us).

Everyone supported Germany apart from the English who supported Argentina - which rather surprised me :-)

<comment><USER25> Probably has more to do with how Brits feel about Germany than Argentina

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Argentina should never have handled the bonds under NY law and without control of the bondholder's list. That mistake is costing them dearly.

The only reason they can't pay everyone but the holdouts [e.g. selective default] is because of the fact they handled them under NY law after the 2001 default. :/

<comment><USER27> If they hadn't ceded the legal control to NY law, then they either wouldn't have gotten the money they wanted, or at the very least had a much higher interest for it.

That's the whole point - if you're a trustworthy borrower, then you can get money on decent terms; but if you're like Argentina then every lender needs all the protection they can get, to try to prevent cases like this one.

<comment><USER26> The point is, they are getting hit multiple times with the "untrustworthy borrower bat" for a single incident in 2001 and are now being forced to screw _all of their borrowers_ and not just the ones who refused to play ball in 2001. Because NY law.

That is like saying "Oh, you can pay none of your debts until you pay the ones you defaulted on already in 2001."

Nope.jpg.

That is f'ed up.

They defaulted in 2001. You don't get to come back and say "Oh, but you have to pay us anyway or we will not let you pay the debts since then either."

EDIT: I'm amused by the downvotes given that is how bankruptcy law works most places. You default one time. The zombie borrowers don't get to come back later and demand money later, enforced by the courts.

<comment><USER27> The reason that they can demand money is that those bonds have a requirement that Argentina will pay all bondholders equally - even if they pay x% of it, then they have to pay _every_ bondholder x%, instead of paying some bondholders more and some less or nothing.

Now Argentina is paying money to some of those old bondholders according to the restructured debt that Argentina itself agreed to. However, all other bondholders - including some that Argentina dislikes and doesn't want to pay - have a valid claim on that money, according to that initial rule. That's it.

Argentina can pay noone (as per a default). Argentina can pay all the bondholders equally. But it's not allowed to choose which bonds to pay and which not to pay.

<comment><USER26> > However, all other bondholders - including some that Argentina dislikes and > doesn't want to pay - have a valid claim on that money, according to that > initial rule. That's it.

That isn't it. Those "bondholders Argetina dislikes" are asking for more money than the rest and are demanding the full value for bonds that all the other bondholders agreed to take a haircut on in 2001.

You don't get to go back and demand full value on debt that was restructured for everyone else. That is like if I declared bankruptcy and one of my credit card companies held out for full payment on the debt when all the others had already signed off on X% of the debt.

That credit card company wouldn't be able to do it but these bondholders can because they found the right judge.

<comment><USER27> Argentina issued the bonds on explicit terms that it will be okay to hold out on a haircut - Argentina agreed that even if 93% agree on restructuring, then it's not binding to others and they can demand full value.

Argentina issued the bonds on explicit terms that it will pay everyone equally - even if they agree or refuse some future deal. Argentina dislikes them from not agreeing to it, but that's it - only a dislike that doesn't give any rights to pay them differently than others; they didn't have to agree to the haircut, so it's within their rights to demand to be paid whenever the others get paid.

For your CC example - yes, it would likely be different in personal bankruptcy, but that's not relevant because personal bankruptcy intentionally gives much more protection than sovereign bonds, the rules are quite different there. And sovereign defaults don't wipe you as clean like a personal bankruptcy does in many western countries - and there are jurisdictions where you don't get personal bankruptcy, and you keep the debts until you die. And in some places, even after that - the debt transfers to the heirs.

<comment><USER26> I think the issue is, I disagree with the morality of the bondholder's cause and the negative impact it creates on other bondholders.

You don't seem to realize that is why I'm complaining. >.>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A decent article on the mechanics of why these holdouts were able to force Argentina's hand: [https://mises.org/daily/6825/Understanding-Argentinas- Coming...](https://mises.org/daily/6825/Understanding-Argentinas-Coming- Default)

</comment><comment><USER29> Well, the recent Greek default seems to have been handled quite gracefully... (but of course, Greece is part of the EU zone, so there was a lot of help available)

[http://www.economist.com/node/21550271](http://www.economist.com/node/21550271)

<comment><USER30> This is the second default in 13 years, with (as you mention) no strong regional bank to support them, and (most likely) in a country without the political willpower to push through reforms to prevent this kind of thing happening again.

<comment><USER29> From another article linked in the HN comments, it seems that this is really a finalization of the 2001 default. Argentina is not able to pay the (current) bond holders only because the courts won't let it do so.

<comment><USER27> Argentina _is_ able to pay the current bondholders, it's simply choosing not to pay them because part of that money will go also to those bondholders Argentina dislikes.

<comment><USER31> In the story they said Argentina has transferred $500MM to pay bond holders, but the bank refuses to transfer it because the court ruled they could not selectively pay and any cooperating banks would be in contempt. Is there another layer to the story I'm missing?

<comment><USER27> That's the exact thing - they have the money to pay, but they have to give a proportion of that money to the holdout bondholders (the "not selective" part), and they refused to do that, despite all the negotiations.

Courts didn't rule that they can't pay, courts ruled that they can't ignore the other bondholders when paying.

[edit] A car analogy - if a court says you can't drive until you pay your parking fines, then it doesn't mean that you're maliciously completely prevented from driving, it simply means that you're compelled to pay the fine at last.

<comment><USER31> that makes sense

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm very sorry for Argentinians - I've been there last year, visiting relatives (I'm from Italy, and my grand aunt moved to Argentina in the 50s - she was a bit over 20 - to escape an arranged marriage in Italy, and came back only in the 80s).

Argentina is a beautiful country, with problems that are very similar to the ones that we have in Italy - but different scenarios, and different economies.

I see this as an opportunity to consider adopting Bitcoin as a national currency, and stop being hostage of 1) banks, and 2) corrupt government officials. I don't know if it would work... But I hope so.

<comment><USER33> Bitcoin would make these problems worse. The whole reason they got into this mess in the first place was by pegging their currency to the dollar, which meant they couldn't devalue the peso when they should have done for a long time; when the eventual reckoning came it was brutal. With bitcoin it would be much much worse, because you can't ever do that decoupling, and you wouldn't even get the US government doing writedowns like QE (which at least mean that in any global financial disaster, you've got a government doing approximately the appropriate things).

<comment><USER34> Then you just change the price in bitcoins: this was 0.005 bitcoins yesterday? well, today it will be 0.007.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why does Argentina struggle so with these sorts of problems?

It seems like a country with enormous potential. Lots of resources, limited security threat, amazing climate.

<comment><USER36> Disclaimer: I'm from Argentina.

One batch of politicians and lobbyists sells the country for short-term gain. Later politicians inherit the problem, and maybe compound it with their own batch of mistakes. The "problem" in this particular case is a tiny group of foreign speculative capital creditors holding the whole country hostage. It has little to do with the country's potential.

Note these so-called "vulture funds" are doing what they do: acquire debt at low prices while a country's economy is down, then attempt to recoup it at disproportionate interest rates when the country's economy recovers. That they are attempting this _now_ , if anything, is a sign Argentina's economy isn't in such a bad shape. The vulture funds aren't run by fools; they wouldn't attempt to extract money where there is none.

<comment><USER4> That they are attempting this now might also be a sign that they expect Argentina's economy to take a nose dive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> To the more knowledgeable people around: can this trigger a credit default swaps crisis? Are all the Argentina CDS bought in the last decade really known to the public?

<comment><USER38> Not really -- it's an event that has been expected for a while. CDS dominoes usually start falling when a significant AND unexpected event happens ('black swan'). Argentina in default is moderately significant but not unexpected.

In other words, sudden changes in valuations cause a problem. Their government bond valuations have slowly approached zero therefore there's no sudden jump. The value of the CDSs does not change suddenly when Argentina is formally considered default if everybody has expected that outcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Let's hope this doesn't precipitate that favoured bread and circuses smokescreen of Argentine politics, viz idiotic sabre-rattling over the Falklands.

<comment><USER36> This comment is naive. Our "sabre-rattling" over the Malvinas Islands was done during our vicious, murderous military dictatorship in the 70s/early 80s. We now have a democracy. Any dispute about the islands is done via diplomatic means (regardless of whether you believe the claim has merit, diplomacy is the only legitimate way to resolve it).

No sabre-rattling is possible. Don't confuse democratic Argentina with past dictatorship-ruled Argentina.

<comment><USER40> >Our "sabre-rattling" over the Malvinas Islands was done during our vicious, murderous military dictatorship in the 70s/early 80s.

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/12/argentina- falkl...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/12/argentina-falklands- oil-international-courts)

[http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/feb/05/falklands-under- ou...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/feb/05/falklands-under-our-control- argentina)

<comment><USER36> That's absurd. "Sabre-rattling" means attempting to intimidate by displays of military power (or implied military power). See: [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sabre- rattling?s=t&pa...](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sabre- rattling?s=t&path=/)

Both links you cited specifically rule out military intervention. Allow me to quote from your first link:

Quotes from your first link:

\----

 _" Argentina will seek legal punishment, including prison sentences, for anyone who drills for oil in the Falklands and the surrounding waters it claims as its territories, the country's newly created Malvinas secretary has told the Guardian. [...] In his first interview with the international media since taking the post on Monday, Daniel Filmus also warned that companies involved in exploration of the disputed areas will be disqualified from potentially more lucrative work in Vaca Muerta (the giant shale oil deposit in Argentina's Patagonia region) and offshore areas.

"We will go to the international courts. It must be known that Argentina will defend its claim," Filmus told the Guardian at his office in the ministry of foreign affairs. "Whoever doesn't obtain authorisation will not only face administrative consequences but will also face prison sentences.""_

\----

You may or may not like Argentina's policies and position on the matter of the Malvinas, but all this is:

a- Not military posturing. b- Within legal bounds. See mentions of legal action, prison sentences, international courts. I don't see any threats of military aggression, do you?

So we can rule out sabre-rattling from your first link. Let's go on with your second link.

First sentence after the heading of second link:

\----

 _" Argentinian foreign minister rules out military solution but says 'not one single country' supports UK right to govern islands"_

\----

So a military solution is ruled out then? I rest my case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wow ! Just one investor can bring a country to its knees !

<comment><USER42> Wouldn't it be more fair to say endemic corruption and decades of misguided plans that swung too hard to socialist, then capitalist and then again socialist policies created this?

The idea that the root cause of this is that a group of investors come along, buy debt on the open market and then expect that debt to be paid seems overly simplistic.

<comment><USER43> Defaulting is error on both sides, the borrower failed in risk analysis just like the debtor.

The problem is that sovereign nations don't have clear bankrupt procedure and these hedge funds are holding country as hostage for their past mistakes despite the fact that majority of borrowers accepted debt restructuring that was arranged and accepted haircuts.

If the debt and its interest grows past what country gdp can ever grow, they can never pay back and they either became debt slaves forever or keep defaulting. This is attempt at debt slavery in national level. (if person can't pay his debt ever, should he and his family lineage be responsible for that debt forever?)

I think it's reasonable to expect that in these cases banks should accept haircuts and settle like wast majority of investors did. Upholding business deal is ethically less important than country of millions being able to continue their life. The logical cost of country not being able to pay for their dept should be higher interest rates in future, not shutting country down.

<comment><USER42> Nice reply! I love HN sometimes.

What impact does this have on contracts in general?

When I give my word, I keep it. When I sign a contract, I honor it. There's a social contract that assures me that the counter party will too. There's a court system setup to ensure they do. There is force behind that if it is taken even further.

If I should instead shape every contract with a 20% hedge that assumes the counter party will not keep their word, doesn't that introduce a significant amount of inefficiency in the entire system.

Isn't it long term better and in fact just that those who give their word, spend all of their money and then run out take the consequences of it?

For systemic risk to be properly moderated, the individuals or even individual counties must suffer the consequences of their actions. You can opt to not allow this, but you ultimately suffer as a whole when you do.

I see no better way through. Do you?

<comment><USER33> So there's currently an interesting case going on with Caesar's bonds because someone accidentally put "and" in a contract where they meant "or".[1] If you have to spend lots of time having a group of expert lawyers and grammaticians going through your contracts before you sign them and checking for every possible edge case, that's a significant inefficiency and cost in the system as well.

The 2001 restructuring was reasonable; most of the bondholders agreed with it, and got a fair price for their bonds. The holdouts knew this when they bought the same bonds.

Imagine a court system that applies common sense and equitable principles and tries to interpret contracts in a way that's as fair as possible to everyone involved, rather than going by the strict letter of every contract document. This removes the ability to rip someone off when you spot a hole in their contract, which makes some things less efficient, but I can see it working better overall.

[1] So it's something like: there's a provision in the contract that says that certain guarantees are invalidated if this subsidiary is reabsorbed into its parent corporation and it's sold to a different company, and some other conditions. Which is obviously nonsense because there's no way those things would both happen. But it's also what the contract says.

<comment><USER21> > a way that's as fair as possible to everyone involved, rather than going by > the strict letter of every contract document.

Presumably, this is in place to keep colluding with judges who will interpret your claim "fairly", for a fee, to a minimum, as well as mitigate the hedge against those who defend contract discrepancies with "Well, that's what we meant", when in fact, that was neither what was meant or ever said.

The Halbig decision bears on this matter. There's a law, which is effectively a contract, and the IRS attempted to interpret it how they needed to to make the ACA work. What this means now is, right or wrong, that we have a group of Senators and Representatives who voted on a law to be enacted as it was written, and when that was no longer viable, they simply 'interpreted' the text of the law to mean something new so that it could work.

Ignoring who's right or who is wrong, some additional lawyering up front would have prevented this, but that was not done because it would not have been politically expedient. Contracts are a way of keeping people fair. If the contract is written in a way that isn't fair, then it would be unenforceable regardless of how well it was written, so that 'fairness' is built in to contract law already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> TLDR;

When restructuring defaulted bonds, Argentina agree to borrow in US dollars. They further agreed:

\- to pay all bond holders equally.

\- to be governed by New York state law.

\- to NOT include a collective action clause in the bond agreement which would have forced minority recalcitrant bondholders to enter a restructuring agreement, if a super majority of the bondholders agreed.

A small minority (2.5-3%) refused to accept the 70-75% haircut the Argentina government was forcing on the bondholders (fyi: previously the largest haircut in sovereign debt was 30%)

(from one of the dealbook article's comments)

<comment><USER45> Small corrections: \- Holdouts are 7.6% \- Haircut was around 75% nominal, but in practice was more around 40% since there were some GDP growth incentives and better interest rates

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Time to reinforce the Falkland's garrison

<comment><USER36> Sigh. Argentina is currently a democracy and has been one since the early 80s after our last military dictatorship. We are not a warlike country. Any issue with the Malvinas Islands is being handled via diplomacy. Please stop spreading mindless FUD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> We really should have evolved by now to using a monetary system that doesn't revolve around debt.

<comment><USER18> Which is impossible, because any economic activity that takes some time to come to fruition is already a sort of debt. If you can't use a currency to increase the "money" supply, other forms of credit and investment emerge, and you get the same problems.

<comment><USER47> Right, because there isn't numerous examples throughout history where debt- free fiat currency flourished. We have been conditioned by neoclassical economics and have refused to confront the pyramid scheme.

<comment><USER18> Can you name one such debt-free currency? Preferably one that works in a modern economy? Don't forget: A lot of our risk-management and wealth today depends on derivatives and a well running financial market.

To say that a completely different but unproven system works better is a very tough point to defend.

<comment><USER47> Well let me preface with this: I'm not an economist and of course harbor my own bias(just like everybody else), but I'm educated enough to recognize when systems and people are being gamed.

Why can't our government(or any government for that matter) print their own money and issue it to its people, which is then freed from the private central bank's interest? Instead, we allow the banking industry to self-regulate and it in turn does what's in its self-interest.

I've heard historians and anti-neoclassic-economists refer back to the success of Tally Sticks(1100 - 1854), Colonial Script(1764 –– 1776), and Roman currency before they switched to a gold standard. But, I'm not an authority on this and sincerely would appreciate any literature that contradicts it.

The only modern example would be cyprtocurrency, and the verdict is still out on that. Hell, even if more states and nations moved to North Dakota's banking approach we'd be better off.

I don't have all the answers, but I know humans can do better and it starts with the average-person continually investing time to educate themselves about monetary policies and the history of currencies.

The current monetary system has feed global wars, imperialism and possibly the worst financial inequality in mankind's history. Unless you're a banker or in the financial industry, I don't understand why you wouldn't want to try something new?

<comment><USER18> Obviously you are not an economist or historian (I'm neither). "Why can't our government print their own money?" pretty much gives away that you haven't put in any effort to learn how banking, money or a central bank works.

All the examples you mention don't hold up. Not even in their own time, much less in a modern time where we need private finance.

"Cryptocurrency" is a new kind of knee-jerk reaction to "everything perceived to be wrong with money". There's a reason why conspiracy nuts flock to cryptocurrencies in droves. Turns out that ordinary people get screwed over with bitcoins far more easily than with the "evil" fiat currencies. Also there is no reason why you can't have a sort of reserve-banking, or even monetary expansion in a bitcoin-based economy. They just don't do it yet, because Bitcoins at the present moment have negligible impact on the real economy (which might change).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> If only they had won the world cup, this whole mess might have been avoided.

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't mean to sound like an evangelist but i've been waiting for a currency to fail to see how/if crypto-currencies have the ability to get the country up and running again. In theory the tools are there if they can wrestle value out of their slumping traditional currency.

<comment><USER30> The peso has been all but failed for some years now, due to the falsification of inflation figures by the central bank, and the divergence between the real/market exchange rate and the "offical" exchange rate. The result has been fairly simple: people use USD.</comment></comment>


A promo video for my startup that cost $6k - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWUmnfA-ILs

<comment><USER2> I don't think any prospective customer will watch a 1:30 video about a _browser extension_. (Especially since it takes 30 seconds to show the product itself. Users have limited attention span and the product is not "cool" enough to justify it.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the honest feedback. Time will tell if our investment in this video was a good idea or not. The purpose of it is to get people interested in the service, mainly on an emotional level, so that they will install the extension.

Once installed, we direct users to a tutorial video, that goes over the features much more clearly. Here's a direct link to it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhaWEs5ckDM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhaWEs5ckDM)

The video would normally be viewed from our home page [http://agora.sh](http://agora.sh) so there would likely be more context.</comment></comment>


Microsoft Wins $480M Army HoloLens Contract - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-28/microsoft-wins-480-million-army-battlefield-contract <comment><USER2> > "Many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used > for waging war"

Someone is lacking in perspective. The modern US military cannot operate without Windows, SharePoint, Exchange, Internet Explorer, Office, and most importantly, PowerPoint. It's both frustrating and sad.

<comment><USER3> The modern world is also powered by technologies invented because of various wars. Duct tape / super glue / rockets / radars which led to the microwave over / ..

Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would still operate under nuclear attacks?

<comment><USER4> > Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would > still operate under nuclear attacks?

Not really. The original ARPANET [0] didn't connect military command and control systems but four different universities. However, the packet-switching concept that underlies TCP/IP was informed by purely RAND theoretical studies, conducted by Paul Baran [1], that looked at building resilient communications systems.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran)

<comment><USER5> While you are technically correct, ARPA and RAND both being military focused research organizations, the parent comment is correct in spirit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For every employee that is upset about this there is probably another one that is proud about it and 5 that really don't care.

<comment><USER7> Count me in the "don't care" department -- the company needs to do business to survive and thrive. I like that things are going well for the company at the moment.

Some of these people complaining about it are likely the same sort that, when given a chance to ask Satya a question during a Q&A session, ask about getting free food in Redmond.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It reminds me of Black Mirror episode where using Augmented Reality, the face of enemies is morphed into the face of monsters so the soldiers would not hesitate to kill the enemies. May we live in interesting times!

<comment><USER9> It's a pretty good idea. Post-battle investigations show that only like 15-30% of soldiers actually shoot their weapons (the percentage increases along with the distance). So, a commander could effectively double or triple their force with a small change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used a hololens recently and I was super excited but was disappointed in the end. The technology is definitely cool but the limited field of vision really kills it. The built in hand gestures detection is nice though.

<comment><USER11> next version of Hololens will solve the view field issue. I think MS will delivery next-gen hololens to Army

<comment><USER12> I didn't downvote but what makes you think?

<comment><USER11> microsoft mentioned earlier this year that it would release the new version in 19

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems to be a typical case of someone in charge of a budget having to spend it otherwise it will be allocated elsewhere.

Either they have access to a completely improved device or expect a lot of devices being chucked out by aggravated servicemen. The current gen HoloLens is not much more than a toy.

<comment><USER14> >the Army said it wanted to incorporate night vision and thermal sensing, measure vital signs like breathing and "readiness," monitor for concussions and offer hearing protection.

Maybe a little ambitious, but if it does half of those things it might be quite useful, no?

<comment><USER15> They should be very careful with the naming. Something tells me that 'Windows For Helmets' may not inspire morale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is almost humorous in a sad kind of way. If Google is not able to fulfill contracts for the Defense Department, then the government will simply go to the next source. I think Amazon, with its new HQ2 a mile from the Pentagon, and less problems of employees walking out, is going to dominate in this area.

</comment><comment><USER17> Props to Microsoft biz dev for finding someone to buy those things, but wow - that is a _lot_ of money to spend on HMDs that will never get anywhere near actual combat. At least I hope they don't, for the safety of our troops. Can you even imagine wearing one of those monstrosities in a hostile environment requiring agility and situational awareness?

</comment><comment><USER18> Not that I agree with, or support war in any way, and it always makes me a little sick to my stomach to see brilliant people coming up with technology to make killing people simpler - but...

HoloLens has sure better improve by orders of magnitude before I'd ever want to see it used in any sort of field.

It's like looking into a postage stamp of reality.

</comment><comment><USER19> if this leads us to mitigating future wars to just a virtual battlefield .. im all for it.

let them get their testosterone kicks while the rest of us evolve peacefully.

</comment><comment><USER20> Where is the outrage from Microsoft employees? Take a stand like your Google counterparts have! You can make money and not have to sell away your soul at the same time. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Take self-driving vehicles. Every single piece of technology used in its development could be used with some minor tweaking in a military application to massively increase the lethality of existing weapons and allow for an unprecedented level of increased killing and destruction. But instead of selling themselves out to a future that will be remarkably more dystopian if given in to military application, Google has chosen to make commercial self- driving vehicles which not only will likely save an innumerable amount of lives by preventing fatal driving accidents, but also will be making boatloads of money at the same time!

Technology is a force multiplier for better or worse, and it's up to us as the future engineers and scientists who will be creating this technology to choose the right path. For those sociopathic leaning people who could care less about avoiding a future of death on an unprecedented massive and automated scale, luckily that path will be no less lucrative.

<comment><USER21> There should be outrage from Russia, Syria, Iran, ISIS, etc., but not US employees. This enhances _our_ army, rather than others' armies. We have some indirect control over what our army does, but none over those other armies.

Sometimes idealists become like pacifists who would rather die than confront someone who is going to annihilate you. That your PoV, but it certainly isn't the majority PoV even amongst Democrats.

The world isn't a dreamy place; you have to make dirty choices, given what's available.

Of course, if you want to see western influence wane, then sure, and allow other less progressive influence wax. That's the realpolitik.

These decisions should be left to the democratic process rather then the province of unelected idealists.

<comment><USER22> Your viewpoint makes sense if you see the US Armed Forces as a incorruptible benevolent force.

Take a look at police forces who claim to "serve and protect" while summarily executing random citizens (sorry, wrong house SWATTING) or racially motivated (black kid with toy = imminent threat).

<comment><USER23> Not at all. His viewpoint makes sense simply by understanding that US military superiority over countries like Russia and China is significantly better, to the entire western world, than any realistic alternative.

<comment><USER24> That only makes sense if you stop putting morons in charge, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


DPDK – Data Plane Development Kit - <AUTHOR> http://dpdk.org/ <comment><USER2> See also [http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/](http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/) which is vendor neutral and works on Linux and FreeBSD</comment>


Weak statistical standards implicated in scientific irreproducibility - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/weak-statistical-standards-implicated-in-scientific-irreproducibility-1.14131

<comment><AUTHOR> This new Bayes/frequentist test comparison test referenced looks interesting. That "which is better" storm about a year ago was less than coherent, but brought the differences to my attention, given that I was taught only frequentist methods for my researches. Academic practices and blinkers, again! I was always sceptical of the arbitrariness of the 2 SD "reasonable proof" standard in our researches, so it's great to see a specialist shed some more light.</comment>


Real-time visualisation of orbiting satellites - <AUTHOR> http://apps.agi.com/SatelliteViewer/ <comment><USER2> Holy shit, we have a lot of junk out there. It seems like we're building a multi-layered defense shield against alien invasion - the outer band will damage the enemy staging their attack from the Moon, and the inner band shall make it impossible to keep their motherships in low-orbit for continued planetary assault.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Real-time" is a bit relative ( _wink_ ) when it takes minutes to get the data into the browser.

<comment><USER4> The locations are most likely calculated using orbit information published by NORAD and/or the spacecraft operators. This is called ephemeris data, and is usually published in a format called "two-line element," or TLE. A TLE contains a complete description of the spacecraft's orbit at a specific time, so you can then calculate where the spacecraft will be at any moment given that it stays in that orbit.

See [http://www.celestrak.com](http://www.celestrak.com) for a bunch more information on the subject. Of particular interest is the TLE format itself ([http://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/documentation/tle- fmt.asp](http://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/documentation/tle-fmt.asp)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anybody knows what "nonoperational" means. Are those simply shutdown collecting space dust?

Leaving aside if it's allowed/legal .. I wonder if it's possible to establish communication with a nonoperational satellite, and what tools are required to do so

<comment><USER6> If I learned anything but watching The Martian, it's that the law of the sea applies in space. So a nonoperational satellite would be subject to salvage rights?

<comment><USER7> You should probably qualify that with a Andy-Weir-is-not-a-lawyer disclaimer. There are a few space treaties that probably supersede some elements of "maritime" law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am amazed by the Nonoperational/Operational ratio.

<comment><USER9> It takes a lot of fuel to deorbit something in a controlled manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious, at what appears to be GEO (Geostationary Earth Orbit) there is a ring of green "operational" satellites that align with the equator, then there is a "belt" of non-operational satellites that seem to have spread out from them.

1\. Is this because the non-operational ones can no longer station keep and slowly spread out?

2\. Why are they in a belt shape?

3\. Why is the belt not centered on the green ring? They seem to be all "moving" in the same direction? (When I looked at it, their orbits tend to "dip" south while above the western hemisphere and north while above eastern hemisphere)

<comment> lloyd-christmas I believe it's due to the point of ascension changing. With the earth tilting at 23.5 degrees, a GEO orbit also has to be at that angle relative to the sun. Once they are no longer operational, they will stay at that 23.5 degree angle, but the point of ascension will drift as the altitude (and therefore the orbital period) changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone explain why there are so many satellites in a cylindrical section far from the earth and not much in-between it and the earth?

<comment><USER12> That is geostationary orbit. The active satellites are in circle along the equator while the inactive ones are in wider band outside of geostationary orbit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's only a few weather satellites. That surprises me. You'd think there was a lot of demand for something like that?

<comment><USER14> A single weather satellite can cover a huge chunk of the Earth. You don't need that many for complete coverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does it include military/spy satellites? If not, then there's likely even more satellites both operational and non up there.

[Edit] Scanning the skies above Russia and China for satellites with a non- specified mission doesn't bring up a single US satellite. So it appears that this data does not include spy satellites.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you click the 'X' next to ComSpOC - removing the filter - there are a TON more satellites. What is that filter and what are all the additional satellites?

<comment> lloyd-christmas It's their company's tracking repository, which is an alternative to the Joint Space Operations Center's (JSPOC) repository.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Who remembers NASA's J-Track?</comment>


MOOCulus - Massive Online Open Calculus - <AUTHOR> https://mooculus.osu.edu/

<comment><USER2> Very cool!

The lecturer seems like a nice guy +into the subject, the videos looked entertaining (not just someone speaking), they have a very free textbook with lots of examples AND, perhaps best of all, they are using the khan-exercises framework for the exercises.

It is interesting that they use coursera credentials for the login but they don't seem to be part of coursera per se.

</comment><comment><USER3> I started this course today (through Coursera) and so far it's great. Looks like they're using the Khan Academy software for the practice exercises and the videos are excellent. The instructor is high-energy and sort of eccentric and it's a real hoot watching at 1.25x speed. My only gripe is the textbook: it looks slick, but the weird Greek letters start on the first page and the prose is...laconic. The rest of the course materials seem geared specifically towards totally green beginners; the style of the textbook is a little divergent.

<comment><USER4> I agree this calculus textbook reads more like an introduction to analysis textbook for sophomore/junior level mathematics majors. Complete with problems one step away from asking your to write proofs for the problem solutions.

While I can't wait until some higher level math is available online. I don't think that's what they're going for here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish this was available when I took calculus in the previous semester. Looks pretty good, the instructor looks motivated as well.</comment>


Pyston 0.5.1 Released (Python JIT-Compiler from Dropbox) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pyston.org/2016/07/14/pyston-0-5-1-released/ <comment><USER2> I see improvements vs 0.5.0, but no benchmarks to compare it to CPython. I assume this means it compares unfavorably.

They're aiming to speed up Dropbox's workloads, which is a different focus than PyPy, but they could be more open with how they compare.

Here's PyPy's benchmark performance page: [http://speed.pypy.org/](http://speed.pypy.org/)

Edit: Pyston has a speed page, but it's missing too much data to make a comparison. :( [http://speed.pyston.org/comparison/](http://speed.pyston.org/comparison/)</comment>


Ever got laughed at because of your idea?  - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I've never got laughed at but I've had a lot of people tell me what I should do with my idea. I think the most frustrating part is when someone obviously doesn't understand what you're trying to do and proposes another route that is just bad. I think with any new concept people are very rarely capable of seeing another alternative outside of the way it's always been done. Any laughs I'd just shrug off as just them not understanding.

<comment><AUTHOR> True that, it's good to know there's a community of like minded people here that share the joys and frustrations of seeing the other end of the pond.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I did apparently....dunno if it's the environment (Philippines) and my professor (who claims to be a actual "practioner") states that only fools would use my product :D

<comment><USER3> hey..it always happens and with everyone at early stage..this does not means your idea is bad..

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose so, I guess the key to handling people is to lowered expectations? any thoughts on this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> LOL! Trust me, if you can get 1% of this world's fools to use your product, you have a hit.</comment>


Show HN: GradeMyLoan.com – Custom Analysis of Your Home Loan - <AUTHOR>

Hi - I built a website where you answer a simple nine questions about your home loan and we return to you a custom report of how your loan compares to the market in your area today. The report may make suggestions such as: equity is available in your home, your monthly payment could be lowered, or there's a possibility that you shorten your term.<p>I don't have a heavy background in design or development, so everything on the "backend" is manually done right now. I'm just testing out my hypothesis that people might be interested in a service like this. Let me know what you think? Thanks! <comment><USER2> You're dealing with sensitive information, so you need to do a lot more to make users feel comfortable giving you their data.

The first step of the form (that's as far as I got) didn't make clear why I would select Address or Home Value. I figured out that you can use either. I'd lean toward home value because that's the smallest invasion of privacy.

Good luck!</comment>


What was Alan Turing's imitation game? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecritique.com/articles/what-was-alan-turings-imitation-game/ <comment><USER2> I hate it when people criticize the Turing test as imprecise or unproductive. While it may be not be an important benchmark in serious AI research, it's been incredibly thought provoking and inspiring for over half a century. Many great scientists give us value beyond their publications in journals, essays, and dreams that help to put the bigger picture into perspective.

Also I'm glad the movie came out so it's easier to explain to my family about one of my personal heros.

<comment><USER3> Turing is also one of my heroes too, but that doesn't mean I have to worship every idea of his. As you pointed out the problem with the Turing Test is that IS as imprecise or unproductive.

This would be fine if decades of serious AI research and millions of dollars hadn't be wasted trying to fool humans with these stupid psychological tricks. I know first hand as I took an "AI" course at my University centered around their home grown chatbot. And it's not just my school, here's a list of 400 research papers dedicated to the topic.[1]

As the article points out Turing's idea that was never fully flushed out. It's nothing more than a distraction for researchers and a silly parlor trick for everyone else. Stong AI is never going to come by tricking the interviewer that you're a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy.[2] It's going to come by a fundamental understanding of the nature of intelligence.

[1] [https://www.chatbots.org/papers/](https://www.chatbots.org/papers/)

[2] [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-a-computer-beat-the- tur...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-a-computer-beat-the-turing-test- by-pretending-to-be-a-13-year-old-boy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think it is surprising at all that Turing took the possibility of telepathy seriously. Many scientists and educated people took the possibility seriously in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. This is reflected in the many research projects conducted at the time in academia and government (most infamously, the MKULTRA CIA program).

You can see this belief represented in the "hard" science fiction published at the time, much of which treated telepathy and other ESP subjects seriously-- including Bester's _The Demolished Man_ , Asimov's _Foundation_ series, Heinlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_ , Clarke's _Childhood 's End_, and Niven's _Known Space_ series.

There was a real and broadly shared sense, for several decades, that psychology and ESP might be the area of the next fundamental scientific breakthrough.

It was not until the 1980s that it became clear ESP was a dead-end, and today it's mostly mocked by the scientific community as a source of scams. But to apply today's mindset to Turing's 1950 paper is a pretty substantial hindsight error.

<comment><USER5> Telepathy exists, in the form of brain waves that can be measured and stimulated via electrodes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting read. If anyone is interested in chatbots or conversational AI, I'm working on the space (in the open) superscriptjs.com</comment>


Ask HN: What SaaS app should I build? - <AUTHOR> I am getting pretty good at designing and building React apps, but I'm struggling to come up with interesting and useful project ideas. So I want to ask you guys, do you have some cool app ideas you would like to use, but aren't going to build yourself?<p>Ideally, I would love to create something useful for indie startup founders, something that would help you to build/launch/market your projects. Although any ideas are welcome =) <comment><USER2> No one here will answer this one for you, because they are all trying to answer it for themselves.</comment>


Human body temperature has decreased in United States, study finds - <AUTHOR> http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/01/human-body-temperature-has-decreased-in-united-states.html <comment><USER2> Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002734](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002734)

</comment><comment><USER3> >The decrease in average body temperature in the United States could be explained by a reduction in metabolic rate, or the amount of energy being used. The authors hypothesize that this reduction may be due to a population- wide decline in inflammation

Let's not ignore the elephant in the room. A sedentary lifestyle with minimal exercise has become the norm.

<comment><USER4> That seems pretty straight forward to measure, you just take the temperature of people who exercise regularly (say three times a week) and compare that to people who work physically demanding jobs, and to people who work in office jobs, and don't exercise.

(I would almost expect, that the study authors know of something like that, and would have mentioned it, if it were the case.)

<comment><USER5> I imagine apple has this data already with their apple watch data collections.

<comment><USER6> There is no body temperature measurements in Apple Health from the Apple Watch, but that would definitely be an interesting data point were it available.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but also a potential privacy concern since if you have temperature data for a female, you could use it to pinpoint when ovulation may be occurring. I can only imagine that due to some of the recent privacy issues with cycle tracker apps that information might already be exploited for some nefarious advertising campaign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the summary is they aren't certain why, but it seems like it's due to people being a lot more sedentary, having lower metabolisms and being in climate controlled buildings a lot more.

Unfortunately, it seems pretty predictable given the changes in our lifestyles...

<comment><USER9> Why is it unfortunate? The article didn't seem to say whether this change was good or bad, although I would assume a decrease in inflammation would be good?

<comment><USER10> > I would assume a decrease in inflammation would be good

I'd be careful with that assumption. Context means everything. It depends on what caused the inflammation, and what is causing its decrease.

<comment><USER11> Here's the relevant context from the study:

> _Economic development, improved standards of living and sanitation, > decreased chronic infections from war injuries, improved dental hygiene, the > waning of tuberculosis and malaria infections, and the dawn of the > antibiotic age together are likely to have decreased chronic inflammation > since the 19th century. For example, in the mid-19th century, 2–3% of the > population would have been living with active tuberculosis (Tiemersma et > al., 2011). This figure is consistent with the UAVCW Surgeons ' Certificates > that reported 737 cases of active tuberculosis among 23,757 subjects (3.1%). > That UAVCW veterans who reported either current tuberculosis or pneumonia > had a higher temperature (0.19°C and 0.03°C respectively) than those without > infectious conditions supports this theory._

I would assume that less tuberculosis is a good thing (though, this being Hacker News, someone will probably show up to question that assumption too).

<comment><USER10> Inflammation is one of the body's natural defense mechanisms to issues like infection, or injury. Treating inflammation like it is the "bad thing", while ignoring (or not understanding) the underlying cause of it is not good, and potentially hazardous. People do this all the time by taking ibuprofen to treat headaches or minor pains that are natural indicators that something is wrong (dehydration, infection, etc).

Tuberculosis is a disease, and widely accepted as detrimental to human health. I agree, less tuberculosis = a good thing.

This being a medically related post, more information, and less assumptions is better for everyone. Thank you for adding context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This has obviously been planned by the cold-blooded Reptilians

</comment><comment><USER13> I found this passage interesting (about the impact of climate controlled environments on resting metabolic rate)

> Changes in ambient temperature may also explain some of the observed change > in body temperature over time. Maintaining constant body temperature despite > fluctuations in ambient temperature consumes up to 50–70% of daily energy > intake (Levine, 2007).

> Resting metabolic rate (RMR), for which body temperature is a crude proxy, > increases when the ambient temperature decreases below or rises above the > thermoneutral zone, that is the temperature of the environment at which > humans can maintain normal temperature with minimum energy expenditure > (Erikson et al., 1956).

> ... Thus, the amount of time the population has spent at thermoneutral zones > has markedly increased, potentially causing a decrease in RMR, and, by > analogy, body temperature.

Source: [https://elifesciences.org/articles/49555](https://elifesciences.org/articles/49555)

</comment><comment><USER14> The latest temperature data was measured from patients visiting hospital. Older people are naturally more prone to health problems and would therefore be visiting hospital more than younger people, on average.

Our average lifespan is longer than it used to be. I'd assume older people have a lower base temperature. This would skew the results statistically.

<comment><USER15> I would assume that a well constructed study would account for this.

<comment><USER16> In my experience, studies are typically not well constructed.

See the numerous studies that cannot be replicated, the below-the-surface iceberg of unpublished (unfavorable) studies paid for by for-profit institutions, or the shockingly small sample set or biased sample set in most studies. Most studies expose this information implicitly but it's up to the reader to determine the bias or replicate the study.

<comment><USER17> The study compared people born after 1990, so if there were any old people in that cohort this study would be much bigger news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was always confused how 37 C was a normal temperature in the US. In the USSR where I grew it was a fever and the normal was 36.6. Could it be the way it's measured?

<comment><USER19> Not sure about any US/USSR differences, but there can be pretty big differences between people individually, between measurements in the same person throughout the day (or month for women), and between how it's measured. 37°C is an average.

Axillary (armpit) measurements, for example, are a lot colder than oral or rectal measurements. Perhaps the Russians favoured the former, while the Americans preferred the latter?

I suspect there's a nice little bell curve with 37°C in the middle.

<comment><USER18> Yes, Russia measures temperature in the armpit. Is it really that much colder than in the mouth?

Edit: A 37 temperature would automatically give you an excuse from school when I was a kid and, obviously, children always were finding ways to cheat. If just putting the thermometer in your mouth worked then either I was in the dark or nobody has discovered this.

<comment><USER19> Yes, the armpit is roughly 0.5°C colder than the mouth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The original average was set in 1868.

Isn't it likely that this is just a measurement/calibration/methodology error?

<comment><USER21> They do mention this in the article:

> As part of the study, the authors investigated the possibility that the > decrease could simply reflect improvements in thermometer technology; > thermometers used today are far more accurate than those used two centuries > ago. "In the 19thcentury, thermometry was just beginning," Parsonnet said.

> To assess whether temperatures truly decreased, the researchers checked for > body temperature trends within each dataset; for each historical group, they > expected that measurements would be taken with similar thermometers. Within > the veterans dataset, they observed a similar decrease for each decade, > consistent with observations made using the combined data.

<comment><USER22> I'm unconvinced by their method to assess whether temperatures truly decreased. Why wouldn't a methodological error not also apply to the veterans dataset? E.g. all thermometers of an era reading slightly hot (rather than them all being less accurate in any direction)

<comment><USER21> Yeah, fair point! I'm not well versed in this kind of stuff. So I'm not sure.

Maybe the original paper discusses the point though? Perhaps they have a way to normalize temperatures to a baseline across all data sets and evaluate that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Link to the actual study: [https://elifesciences.org/articles/49555](https://elifesciences.org/articles/49555)

Protsiv, M., Ley, C., Lankester, J., Hastie, T., & Parsonnet, J. (2020). Decreasing human body temperature in the United States since the industrial revolution. _eLife_ , 9, e49555.

</comment><comment><USER24> Completely unscientific observation:

When working in offices, I have noticed that people who drink pop/soda daily prefer lower room temperature than people not consuming them at all. I might have "noticed" it because of a bunch of biases, but I'd love to see a proper study on that.

</comment><comment><USER25> This could simply be a result of nationwide iodine deficiency.

Our main source is fortified salt and everyone is cutting back on their sodium or using fancier salts that don't add iodine.

I make sure to put a pinch of iodized salt in everything I cook.

<comment><USER17> This study is from before iodine was added supplementally (1924 in the US). You are correct that iodine deficiency leads to low body temperature due to hyperthyroidism.

Dairy and grain are the biggest sources of iodine. To get your iodine from salt alone would require over 3 grams per day, which is quite a lot. The average American consumes 3.4 g, DV recommendation is 2.3 g.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> i'd guess that given the antibiotics, better nutrition, wide availability of warm clothes/shoes, etc. natural selection pressure for higher temperature has naturally decreased (in such historically short period that decrease mostly manifested itself in much lower child mortality).

People also became bigger during the last century which results in better thermodynamics, ie. surface/volume ratio, thus less need for burning of the internal fuel, i.e metabolic rate can be lower. Compare - elephant's 96.6 vs. cat's 101.5 body temp.

</comment><comment><USER27> A lot of comments here blame obesity/sedentary lifestyles/junk food for low body temperature. Let's look at this:

      Obesity: raises temperature
      exercise: lowers resting temperature
      junk food: raises temperature

What if it's the reverse? What if your desire to eat and not exercise had a lot to do with being cold?

Frankly I'm not buying the arguments in the article. Occam's razor says it's a common nutritional deficiency or environmental toxin affecting the thyroid.

<comment><USER27> Anecdote: I've been getting noticeably colder every year for no natural reason, so I've tried many things: fish oil, iodine etc. The only thing that worked was iron. I took 600mg ferrous gluconate with 5g vitamin C, and I was sweating hot and felt amazing for the next 24 hours. Iron overdose can be deadly and irreversible, so I have not repeated this and do not recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm not sure how much this matters but I've been on TRT therapy for a while now and I remember before I started my limbs would get so cold, and hands would be so cold to touch.

After therapy my significant other tells me I'm like a body heater constantly radiating heat possibly due to high synthesis and metabolism.

I'm curious but there was a chart I saw as well regarding men's testosterone levels declining over the last century I wonder how related that is to lowered body temperatures

</comment><comment><USER29> Could some of it be explained by demographic changes (immigration)? iI remember always being taught growing up than 37.5°C was the average human body temperature. However after moving to East Asia I met plenty of people who consider 37.5 a light fever and 36 the normal temp. On my phone so no data to back it up for now though...

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if they simply looked at the antibiotic use. For example when that was introduced specifically, and more so when we started "over-prescribing" it. That's got to have had an effect of persistent low grade fevers that exist in just about everyone.

<comment><USER17> Body temperatures are currently lower, so the opposite of what you're suggesting with low grade fevers from overprescription of antibiotics.

However, fevers are caused by a subset of the interleukin family, which as a whole causes inflammation. Inflammation was the author's suggestion.

Also, low grade fevers aren't a thing. Fever is caused by the immune system. You can only have a continuous infection with diseases that avoid or supress the immune system. There are a small number of brain-affecting infectious diseases like meningitis that can raise body temperature on their own. Chronically recurring stuff will also give you intermittent fevers, but there's no low-grade. You have it or you don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> WSJ article referencing this research: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/98-6-degrees-fahrenheit-isnt- th...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/98-6-degrees-fahrenheit-isnt-the-average- any-more-11579257001)

</comment><comment><USER32> No mention of high prevalence of cold beverage and ice consumption. Couldn't possibly be related?

<comment><USER33> I don't think that's how the human body works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting. 100F is supposed to be normal human body temperature, by definition. (Fahrenheit set 100F as normal human body temperature and 0 as the coldest temperature he could achieve, using a mixture of ice, water, and ammonium chloride.) For years I'd heard that the reason normal body temperature is 98.6 is because Fahrenheit was running a slight fever at the time he made his scale, but this article suggests that it might've been accurate, but body temperature has been decreasing. If you extrapolate the numbers in the article out (a drop of just over a degree since the 1800s) to when Fahrenheit made his scale in 1724, it's possible that normal body temperature actually _was_ very close to 100F then.

<comment><USER35> > Fahrenheit set 100F as normal human body temperature

Nope: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History)

<comment><USER36> Much more here, with references. An early version of the scale set 96F to human body temperature, apparently because 96 divides evenly in half five times, so it's easy to make graduated markings between the reference points on your mercury thermometer.

[https://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/solutions/faq/...](https://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/solutions/faq/zero- fahrenheit.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've noticed that my temp is always 1 degree lower than it should be. It's never been a problem and has been that way since birth.

<comment><USER17> The normal range of resting body temperatures is anywhere from 95 to 100 F. People vary a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm leaning strongly on the side of thermometers were less accurate and gave a higher reading in the early 1800s.

<comment><USER17> The study was on measurements taken in the early 1900s, not 1800s. Also, it's not like technology suddenly started in the 30s or something. Liquid nitrogen was first produced in 1883. The periodic table was published in 1869. Cells were discovered in 1665. Science was a lot more than banging rocks together.

You would expect the opposite of what you're suggesting, if anything. If water was used for calibrating temperature then there would be fewer good ways to control the impurity level, which would lower its freezing point. Not to mention Fahrenheit originally defined body temperature as 96 F, and it was later corrected higher.

All of the above is totally moot because we _have_ plenty of medical thermometers from the 1900s and earlier, and they are remarkably accurate and the error is not particularly biased in either way. This is a highly researched area because the accuracy of whether thermometers is important to historical and climate research. Medical thermometers from the 1800s are good to at least 1/5th of a degree and instrumentation thermometers were good to hundredths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> When I shovel the driveway, I'm sweating wearing no jacket, but I freeze sitting on the porch in a parka.

</comment><comment><USER40> Seems conceivable that higher proportion of body fat aka more insulation could also contribute

<comment><USER17> Fat would do the opposite. The core body temperature would be the same, because otherwise it would be too hot. The distal body temperature would be insulated from the sources of heat, so the inside of your mouth, forehead, rectum etc would be cooler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Just look inside any US pharmacy

<comment><USER42> For what, exactly?

<comment> hoka-one-one Love

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I would love to see some research that attempts to correlate this to other species that have local declines in birth rate. Maybe it's a mammalian response to over population.

<comment><USER17> No, that's silly. Unless mammals are magic, the only way a species could possibly know about population is by the number of individuals it sees locally, and the number they see. That would cause there to be a huge and noticeable difference between eg rural and urban populations.

<comment><USER43> Well, I didn't write an entire introduction paragraph for a research paper, sure, but outright dismissing as "silly" seems rather closed minded.</comment></comment></comment>


Golang Desktop App with Webview/Lorca, WASM and Bazel - <AUTHOR> https://maori.geek.nz/golang-desktop-app-with-webview-lorca-wasm-and-bazel-3283813bf89 <comment><USER3> The workarounds one goes through to avoid native frameworks.

"Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go: Build responsive, cross-platform, graphical applications with the Go programming language"

[https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Andrew-Williams- ebook/dp/B07GYLYS...](https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Andrew-Williams- ebook/dp/B07GYLYSCT)

<comment><USER4> If you want to have a multi platform (desktop) app, the only decent (imo) framework is QT.

So now your app is either GPL or you fork something like 5 grands ...

<comment><USER3> Yeah, lets not pay the others for the fruits of their labour.

<comment><USER5> People don't automatically deserve payment for the "fruits of their labour". Only if you use it and can't find a better/cheaper alternative.

What the parent suggested was not using QT and not paying the company that makes it, but that its price makes it unusable for their purposes.

(Now, that might have been based on a misunderstanding of the licensing involved, but ignoring that, the point still stands. If one had to pay $5000 for a GUI library, and one didn't have $5000, then one could look elsewhere...).

<comment><USER3> Except that look elsewhere seems to be understood as free beer around here.

$5000 is not the price for small developers by the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just recently tried webview/webview in Go and was a little fed up with the fact that it could not be a single-binary plug & play experience on Windows. To that end, I am working on an experimental alternative that uses Webview2 directly without CGo: [https://github.com/jchv/go- webview2](https://github.com/jchv/go-webview2)

It still requires WebView2Loader.dll, but I am working on another library so I can just embed it directly into the application, and that work is happening over here: [https://github.com/jchv/go-winloader](https://github.com/jchv/go- winloader)

Sorry for the blatant self promotion, but I thought fellow stubborn people might have a desire to drop to as few dependencies as possible. I prefer building without CGo. The only downside is there's not really a great way to fall back to EdgeHTML so users will need a Webview2 install, and right now Windows isn't shipping it, but I think going forward it will be reasonable to just link users to the webview2 runtime page to go install it.

(Also, it should go without saying, but this approach only improves things on Windows. You will still need other bindings for other platforms.)

<comment><USER7> I like the approach of go-winloader, I'd be happy to include an example of using it with webview into the readme. I agree, including 2 DLLs on Windows is ugly, however I believe that using CGo for webview would be a long-term win, because new features of webview may emerge in webview.h and they will be available in all language bindings immediately, including Go. I might be wrong, but I think if there is a solution to include both DLLs (webview.dll and WebView2Loader.dll) into a single executable in Go - that could simplify life for everyone.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, if you embed both DLLs, the only thing preventing you from being able to build with CGo off is the bindings implementation since it relies on CGo features.

However, it might be possible to have one's cake and eat it too here, if there is one implementation using Windows-specific Go features that embeds the DLLs and one implementation that uses the existing CGo approach on other platforms. Essentially, the binding to webview.h would be abstracted away from the Webview Go interface implementation.

I will continue to work on go-winloader in my spare time, and hopefully will have an interesting webview pull request in the near-ish future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People complains about this setup but WASM is optional. I've been using Golang with Lorca _without_ WASM. I actually don't see the value of WASM here.. Anyway, I used Svelte on the frontend, pretty straightforward but any other lib would have been as easy to bind. And it just... works.

The main advantage over Electron is the size of the bin (~20MB for a medium app vs. >100MB if it was Electron). If you know the people who are going to use your app have Chrome installed, it's definitely better than Electron and you get the best of both worlds - quick crafted & beautiful UI and performant backend

<comment><USER9> Sure you have the smaller distribution size. However you also have drawbacks. As you mentioned Chrome must be installed. Then you can not guarantee the Chrome version like this.. maybe the version the user has breaks your app. Also you cannot use the "native" menu and other windowing features as you can with electron. I am not really convinced by the "Lorca concept".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My problem with these approaches, is what's the next step? Do you implement GUI buttons on top of canvas and push pixels in WASM? Do you try and do something like ImGui and use WebGL? None of these approaches are efficient. If you are making a native app because it would be more efficient, I'm not sure what the point of this approach is.

<comment><USER11> It seems like the WASM folks have a plan to address it in the future. [https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16](https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16)

</comment></comment><comment> Philip-J-Fry Personally I'm a big fan of [https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/](https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/)

It uses native webview so no electron. Let's you effortlessly bind JS functions to those in Go.

V2 is in the works and will effectively bring the best features of electron window management (menus, frameless windows, drag regions etc) over to native webview.

Currently uses IE11 on Win 10 but V2 will only support Edge so you get WebKit across the board.

<comment><USER12> I am only familiar with Electron (due to its hype), what is native webview, is it like a browser? If yes why is it better? Asking as someone who has never developed any desktop apps.

<comment><USER13> It's a minimal native application which creates a window with an HTML widget in it, essentially a mini-browser wrapped in a native application. The difference to Electron is that this browser isn't a bundled Chromium, but the browser engine that's integrated with the operating system (Edge on Windows, WebKit on macOS and Linux), so the application installer is much, much smaller.

When I tinkered with [https://github.com/webview/webview](https://github.com/webview/webview) on macOS a minimal Hello World application was around 26 kBytes (kilo, not mega), which is about 7000x smaller than a default macOS Electron instance (173 MBytes).

<comment><USER14> > this browser isn't a bundled Chromium, but the browser engine that's > integrated with the operating system

so I wouldn't have to worry about various electron app packages shipping with versions of Chromium from three years ago?

<comment><USER13> The downside is that as the application developer you no longer can control the browser version your code is running on, so you may need different code paths for WebKit vs Edge, or old vs new browser versions, but this is the same problem normal webpages have to deal with.

But at least you can call out into native code and native operating system APIs, unlike "real" web applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In general, why would one take this approach of embedding a browser, compiling to WASM, etc. over a native UI?

I'm genuinely curious why/when this is a better solution.

<comment><USER16> Building native UIs cross-platform is a huge PITA and frequently the frameworks are also very annoying to use. I don't condone the use of browsers for desktop software because it is a travesty, but it is very understandable when you look at how we got here.

<comment><USER17> You watch .Net core is going to curb stomp all that kind of crap.

<comment><USER18> Can you explain how for those of us who don't follow .Net very closely?

<comment><USER16> It doesn't, because .net core doesn't ship with cross-platform GUI toolkits. You have the usual options, which are all bad.

<comment><USER19> [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net- multi-...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-multi- platform-app-ui/)

<comment><USER20> Linux is not supported.

<comment><USER17> yet

<comment><USER16> From what I can tell of the repository, it's up to the "Community" to make a Linux version of this.

<comment><USER17> There are three problems. One that even with the resources MS has at it's disposal it's taken them half a decade to make their framework cross platform. Second it makes sense for them to target the big three that represents 95% of the market. And Linux desktop isn't one of those. And third the Linux community is hostile. Back in 2010 they could have embraced Mono which was sorely needed but didn't out of just spite.

Brings up a third point when talking about development. Microsoft is providing a posix compatible dev environment under Win10. The threat that poses is completely unappreciated.

<comment><USER16> The open-source community doesn't like Microsoft because Microsoft is hostile to open-source. It's their MO to embrace things first and people with short memories laud them for it every time. It's very disingenuous to quote their hostility as one of the problems when really it's a logical historical development. They're going to have to put in a lot more effort to make amends for all the terrible things they've done over the years.

But all of that is really beside the point. Saying the "community" needs to fix it means they won't put time or effort into doing it themselves, which by extension means the integration will most likely never be as good as what they have prioritised. This will relegate their "cross-platform" solution to the realm of all the other frameworks: Bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Carlo [1] was an exciting project to hear, sad that it's no longer maintained. Glad to see Lorca [2] as a spiritual successor.

[1] [https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo/](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo/)

[2] [https://github.com/zserge/lorca](https://github.com/zserge/lorca)

</comment><comment><USER22> Cool article!

Small note: you can use rules_go's builtin go_embed_data [1] rule instead of rolling out your own using genrule.

1\. [https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/blob/master/go/extras...](https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/blob/master/go/extras.rst#go_embed_data)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, awesome. Didn't know that was a thing will, look at that later. Cheers

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I generally recommend Sciter for desktop apps; The programming model is extremely intuitive and straightforward, and in my experience, the performance is excellent. Besides that, I'd look at something like webview

<comment><USER24> I've considered using it, how has your experience been with regards to webkit compatibility and performance? Did it render correctly out of the box?

<comment><USER23> Yup, it renders correctly out of the box. Occasionally some small odd quirks with more complex CSS styling though. I've done lots of development with Qt and webview but saw significantly better performance in Sciter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hello,

I'm super happy to see that some folks are trying to make apps with Golang.

I'm myself the author of a Go package to build GUI with WASM and Go => [https://github.com/maxence-charriere/go-app](https://github.com/maxence- charriere/go-app)

WASM give us an incredible amount of new possibilities and hopefully, we will get to a point where Go will be used in production also for GUI/apps purposes :)

Congrats for this and good luck for the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I love your go-app library! I wrote a blog post using it here [https://maori.geek.nz/a-web-app-using-bazel-golang-wasm- and-...](https://maori.geek.nz/a-web-app-using-bazel-golang-wasm-and- proto-c020914f4341) and have used it on multiple small experimental projects. I have plans to use your code, either as inspiration or direct dependence, for many of my future projects! Cheers :)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well done, I too am building a desktop app in Go, I couldn't find a decent GUI library and just resorted to packing a webserver & static files into my program instead. For the time being anyway, still looking for Gui options. Figured I could make a creative html/css UI instead of figuring out how to create a GUI. I'd like to mess with Qt but the GUI builder is with their paid licensing iirc i think, but it seems to be the only cross-platform solution afaik

<comment><USER27> > I'd like to mess with Qt but the GUI builder is with their paid licensing > iirc i think, but it seems to be the only cross-platform solution afaik

        {apt, brew cask, choco} install qtcreator

it's entirely free & open-source. there is Qt Designer Studio which adds a couple of convenience functionalities if you are making e.g. embedded appliance dashboards but for 100% of desktop UIs you have everything needed in the LGPL qtcreator

<comment><USER26> Thanks for mentioning, absolute game changer for me. I'm now using qtcreator with Go bindings: [https://github.com/therecipe/qt](https://github.com/therecipe/qt)

The multi-arch & especially Android deployment feature is exactly what I needed, I can skip using Android-Studio/HTML as UI now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Knowing next to nothing about Golang: Is it unlikely that someone would ever develop an actual desktop toolkit for Golang? If so, how come?

From a naïve point of view, it would seem like overkill to run a whole web browser when a few kilobytes of memory is all it really takes to draw a widget on screen.

<comment> grey-area Cross platform UI toolkits are a sisyphean task that everyone wants someone else to work on.

Platform vendors like Apple, Google, MS don't want to let developers target multiple ecosystems - they want a monopoly on devs and users, hence the endless churn of languages, frameworks and SDKs, making it difficult to keep up.

It's much easier and more reliable to use HTML, even if the experience isn't as slick for users.

<comment><USER29> > Platform vendors like Apple, Google, MS don't want to let developers target > multiple ecosystems

Is this actually true? As in, I see how we may arrive at the same outcome anyway, but at this point, do those companies actually care about aggressive lock-in?

\- Apple seems to be more ignoring the possibility of SwiftUI on other platforms rather than actively preventing it since [https://github.com/Cosmo/OpenSwiftUI](https://github.com/Cosmo/OpenSwiftUI) (dead) exists. Sure, they will never help to make it happen, but "don't want"?

\- Google is pretty much cross-platform/-ecosystem with Flutter which explicitly supports iOS.

\- MS seems to have given up with Win Forms opensourced and working on .NET Core / Mono.

<comment><USER30> You won' probably catch any exec from MS and Apple admitting the obvious, but it's really against their best interest to encourage multi-platform apps as this would give users a choice between operating systems. It's not something that is discussed a lot these days because modern web apps are quite powerful, yet it's clear a good quality multi-platform toolkit would be a boon to users and developers alike.

As for MS open sourcing .NET Core it's all good and nice, but WinForms and WPF are still Windows-only, and according to MS they will remain this way. And Apple has no intentions of doing the same with SwiftUI.

<comment><USER29> I haven't tried to use it in anger, but [https://www.mono- project.com/docs/gui/winforms/](https://www.mono- project.com/docs/gui/winforms/)

"Support for Winforms 1.1 and 2.0 has been completed, and is now in a maintenance/bug fixing state."

"System.Windows.Forms implements its own driver interface to communicate with the host OS windowing system. Currently, we have drivers for X11, Win32, and macOS. These drivers translate the native window messages into WndProc compatible messages, to provide as much compatibility with native .Net as possible."

WPF is windows-only though.

<comment><USER30> To clarify: you can't use Windows Forms directly with .NET Core on non-MS platforms - you nee to port them to Mono.

I tried to use Mono several times, starting from Ximian and Xamarin times, and I always encountered strange problems that were not present in the original applications. I hope they improved somewhat recently because the code produced back then was often unusable (e.g. huge leaks after a couple of hours of use.)

<comment><USER17> Be interesting to see what happens, MS is releasing.Net 5.0 That's supposed to be cross platform and supersedes all the other stuff.

<comment><USER31> While the backends are unified, MS still do refuses to fix the UI framework. They instead have yet another version of the post WPF scrambled egg UI framework. AKA WinUI3.

the native grumpy old people like me will continue to use Windows forms or WPF or MFC,ATL,Win32.

The masochists will try to use the open-source silverlight replacement. Moonlight?

The futurists will use Avalonia. Maybe SAFE stack MVU via Fable?

The Microsoft contractors will use WinUI3.

Vast majority of web developers today will use electron, as unfortunate as that is...

<comment><USER3> WinUI keeps being UWP, and by the way WPF is now officially in maintenance mode.

Your Silverlight replacement would be OpenSilver.

The cross platform toolkits would be MAUI (nee Xamarin) and Blazor.

Electron is the new Active Desktop/XUL, its fashion phase will eventually fade away.

<comment><USER32> > WPF is now officially in maintenance mode.

Can you share the official source of this statement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If one is using Go/C++/whatever WASM, why not go the extra step and use a binding framework for the OS's native UI toolkit, and just produce a native app? I don't understand with the fascination of bringing an entire OS (the browser) on top of an OS.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is great but there many drawbacks. I tried Qt but needed something native-er.

After much digging got to know about gioui[1] but it also has some issues. Also Flutter[2] seems to be better fit but binding to golang is a little tough.

[1]: [https://gioui.org/](https://gioui.org/)

[2]: [https://flutter.dev/](https://flutter.dev/)

<comment><USER35> Nativer than Qt? You could try WxWidgets, but really unless you use the native toolkits directly, Qt is as native as it gets.

<comment><USER34> Oh yes.. I meant, completely in Golang.

And as far I know gioui tries to avoid Cgo where it can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does this lead to a significantly smaller memory footprint than otherwise running .js in electron or a full browser?

I see you've become a big fan of bazel :)

<comment><USER24> It's the difference between a new tab vs a new browser instance - <USER2> electron app is a new browser instance with fixed overhead of 100mb or so. A new browser tab is closer to 10mb overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> see [https://www.vugu.org/](https://www.vugu.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is cool, didn't find this in my googling. Like with go-app ([https://github.com/maxence-charriere/go-app](https://github.com/maxence- charriere/go-app)) though, it is a front and backend framework that seems closely tied together. I would like to see a front-end GoLang framework that can be reused easily. Still awesome, will take a look later

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Err, what you have there is a web app.

</comment><comment><USER39> _But I don't want to write JavaScript(!) and deal with all the complexities that comes with it like npm, webpack, typescript… Fortunately, I can just compile GoLang to WebAssembly (WASM)_

Okay...

 _Large WASM binaries (especially from GoLang): these take a long time to send over the network increasing loading times. In a desktop app the binary isn't transferred over the network, so less overhead._

I forgot that you don't have to download desktop apps, they just appear!

 _Browser incompatibility: Some WebAssembly methods are unavailable in browsers and older browsers are not supported at all. In a desktop app the "browser" is controlled (Chrome for Lorca and Safari for webview), so no compatibility issues._

Electron???

This just seems like you built a less easy to use bundling/development platform than js/webpack/etc and claimed it was better when I'd argue it's way less mainstream and thus less accessible. Not to mention you could've just used native ui like others are talking about. Seems like the worst of both worlds to me.

<comment><USER40> I wrote a simple webapp using Rust (Wasm, Yew) and the payload is 130KB gzipped - [https://rustmart-yew.netlify.app/](https://rustmart- yew.netlify.app/)

Repo: [https://github.com/sheshbabu/rustmart-yew- example](https://github.com/sheshbabu/rustmart-yew-example)</comment></comment>