The GUI and menu systems dont phase me but the sheer complexity of the game and the number of things that can go wrong fun is just overwhelming.

Thanks. I know I could use cat to simplify generation, but I’ve already figured out how to populate HTML templates using sed. It’s more complex, but also more powerful since I can chain multiple operations into a single command.

I had originally started out by writing a shell script, but once I was ready to loop through multiple files I realized that a shell script wasn’t really the best tool for the job, and that I might have a better time if I use make.

This way I can tell my wife that the ten bucks I spent on a used copy of sed & awk from O’Reilly Press wasn’t wasted. :)

Ah right, that does make some sense. Even though the server coalescing etc is HTTP/2 which ossified hardware is hardly going to support. But even still, HTTPS seems like a complex & possibly heavyweight protocol to use as a carrier for comparatively simple payloads, no?

But it’s not a new protocol – it’s TLS. If a middlebox can tell what is going over TLS in order to treat it differently, we refer to the situation as an “attack”.

The problem is that so many pieces of networking hardware have ossified over the years that there are real challenges to introducing new protocols on the internet.

While I understand your argument, I always think of what ancient Egyptians would think of our “real challenges”.

Compared to people from 5000 years ago, we are all sissies.

I think you misunderstand what I’m saying. My claim isn’t that Qt would solve every problem that people are looking to electron to solve if only it were more popular. My claim is merely that of the cross-platform native toolkits, Qt seems to be both the furthest along in terms of capability, and also seems to be one of the less recognized tools in that space (compared to Wx, GTK, Mono, Unity, heck I’ve seen seen more about TK and FLTK than Qt lately). I suspect that Qt could grow and support more of what people want if it got more attention, but for whatever reason of the cross-platform native toolkits it seems to be less discussed.

without Electron we would simply not have many of the Electron-powered cross-platform apps that are popular and used by many today.

I don’t really remember having a problem finding desktop applications before Electron. There seems to be relatively little evidence for this statement.

I’m not sure sure that it’s necessarily true that the existence of these apps is necessarily better than the alternative. For a technical audience, sure. I can choose to, grudgingly, use some bloated application that I know is going to affect my performance, and I’m technical enough to know the tradeoffs and how to mitigate the costs (close all electron apps when I’m running on battery, or doing something that will benefit from more available memory). The problem is for a non-technical audience who doesn’t understand these costs, or how to manage their resources, the net result is a degraded computing experience- and it affects the entire computing ecosystem. Resource hog applications are essentially replaying the tragedy of the commons on every single device they are running on, and even as the year-over-year gains in performance are slowing the underlying problem seems to be getting worse.

And when I say “we” should do better, I’m acknowledging that the onus to fix this mess is going to be in large part on those of us who have started to realize there’s a problem. I’m not sure we’ll succeed as javascript continues to eat the world, but I’ll take at least partial ownership over the lack of any viable contenders from the native application world.

“and without Electron we would simply not have many of the Electron-powered cross-platform apps that are popular and used by many today. “

What that’s actually saying is that people who envision and build cross-platform apps for their own satisfaction, fame, or fortune would stop doing that if Electron didnt exist. I think the evidence we have is they’d build one or more of a non-portable app (maybe your claim), cross-platform app natively, or a web app. That’s what most were doing before Electron when they had the motivations above. Usually web, too, instead of non-portable.

We didnt need Electron for these apps. Quite a few would even be portable either immediately or later with more use/funds. The developers just wanted to use it for whatever reasons which might vary considerably among them. Clearly, it’s something many from a web background find approachable, though. That’s plus development time savings is my theory.

I think the big caveat to this is that for a great many of the applications I see that have electron-based desktop apps, they are frontends for SAAS applications. They could make money off a GPL application just as easily as a proprietary one, especially since a lot of these services publish most of the APIs anyway.

Granted, I’d love to see a world where software moved away from unnecessary rent-seeking and back to actually selling deliverable applications, but as long as we’re in a SAAS-first world the decision to release a decent GPL-ed frontend doesn’t seem like it should be that hard.

I have been responsible for third party IP at a company that did exactly that with Qt; it’s fine.

I never claimed that it doesn’t make life easier for some developers, or even that every electron app would have been written with some other cross-platform toolkit. Clearly for anyone who uses Javascript as their primary (or, in many cases, only) language, and works with web technology day in and day out, something like electron is going to be the nearest to hand and the fastest thing for them to get started with.

The problem I see is that what’s near to hand for developers, and good for the individual applications, ends up polluting the ecosystem by proliferating grossly, irresponsibly inefficient applications. The problem of inefficiency and the subsequent negative affect it has on the entire computing ecosystem is compounded by the fact that most users aren’t savvy enough to understand the implications of the developers technology choices, or even capable of looking at the impact that a given application is having on their system. Additionally, software as an industry is woefully prone to adopting local maxima solutions- even if something better did come along, we’re starting to hit an inflection point of critical mass where electron will continue to gain popularity. Competitors might stand a chance if developers seemed to value efficiency, and respect the resources of their users devices, but if they did we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

“But that is not Electron’s fault.”

It happens by default with a lot of Electron apps. It doesnt so much with native ones. That might mean it’s a side effect of Electron’s design. Of course, Id like to see more data on different use-cases in case it happens dor some things but not others. In your case, did you have to really work hard at keeping the memory down?

Edit: The Github link has some good info. Thanks.

Of course, this was over a decade ago, so I strongly suspect the lisp situation has changed.

It’s currently powering Grammarly (circa 2015) so it sounds like it.

One of the common complaints about Lisp that there are no libraries in the ecosystem. As you see, 5 libraries are used just in this example for such things as encoding, compression, getting Unix time, and socket connections.

I thought HN was arc, Paul Graham’s take on scheme?

People wouldn’t flock to a non-invasive alternative with roughly equal quality search results?

Correct. Unless that alternative can also provide maps, multimedia, try to satisfy sci-fi fantasies, perform nearly every service under the sun, and become just as big of a household name, no one is going anywhere.

People already see critics and those who use the smaller alternatives as “power-hungry loonies who demand privacy in the postprivacy age” and “reject the inevitable” as I keep getting told.

You’re oversimplifying. Big corporations by necessity cooperate with the states in which they operate. That’s the reality of doing business, anyone who thinks anything different is deluding themselves.

Also, anyone who thinks they can own a modern smartphone and thinks they can’t be tracked, that their location isn’t being recorded somewhere, and that everything they send and receive isn’t being scanned is also deluding themselves.

We live in David Brin’s Transparent Society - best either get used to it, or learn to forego the conveniences such modern technological advances bestow.

The problem is that people, for the most part, assess risk by how often they know of bad outcomes. When was the last time you heard that somebody was bitten by Google’s invasion of their privacy? Europe is a bit different with regard to a cultural memory of spying, and accordingly European policies usually favor privacy.

I don’t think things are looking up, either. As robots slowly eclipse humans in various kinds of labor, people’s opinions and attention will become increasingly valuable. If Facebook and Google’s revenue are any indication, there’s a lot of value in people’s privacy.

I thoght that it might be harder for them to accurately track a device without an account, but after thinking about it in more detail, a kind of artifical device IP really shouldn’t be that hard for them to implement f they’ve gotten this far. The second reason was that until recently my phone was rooted with Cyanogen Mod w/o Gapps, so unless they pulled a MINIX on my phone, they shouldn’t have been able to access my device directly.

It’s so incredibly evil that it’s amazing nobody seems to care.

It’s not that nobody seems to care; it’s that people embrace it if it makes their lives more convenient.

Thanks for the testimonial! Btw, what made you choose QFMLWY over QGMLWY (the latter is the one with ZXCV unchanged)? Part of the reason I was attracted to Colemak/Workman was because I didn’t want to have to change my hot key muscle memory/bindings (one of the reason why I never gave Dvorak a try). I’m guessing you didn’t find that to be a problem?

I’ve demo’d the Kinesis Advantage in person, and wasn’t quite a fan of the bowl size (I have small hands. I’ve also used the Ergo Dox previously and had to sell it because my hands also too small to reach the keys and the thumb clusters comfortably)–I’m thinking of getting a TypeMatrix 2030 keyboard since I did enjoy the columnar non-staggered layout of the Ergo Dox.

While getting started with vim, I read “hjkl forcursor movement”. Then I tried, and I expected k to be cursor down and j cursor up.

But that may all depend on who tries.

Assuming hjkl starts from the leftmost key with Left then we can assume by going clockwise the next key will be Up, but that doesn’t happen.

Another assumption is that the edges of hjkl are Left and Right, and therefore the middle keys must be Up and Down since that’s the most common ordering of [up, down] in Western culture, just like left commonly comes before right.

Does this make sense?

I try to use common patterns to figure out what each key should do, but the keys don’t adhere to common patterns so it makes no sense when thinking about them in that context.

Each day of the week, we’re having to take time out of the lesson to remind them how to save because if we don’t, we’ll be bombarded with “Wait, how do I save this?”. This happened each day we had the Python lesson, the Flash lesson, the Photoshop lesson, and the web dev lesson. The same goes to navigating Windows’s Explorer and the fact they hold the mouse button down when instructed to quickly click the mouse twice. I’m probably just overreacting, acting condescending, and/or subconsciously yelling at them to get off my lawn.

Maybe this week’s experience with the girls will be different than with the boys last week. Today, the girls followed directions a lot better and we didn’t have to jump on their case about going on the Web or chugging packets of salt and pepper.

Yes.