[userbinator]

used a proprietary license

Does the license actually mention it mines? I am reminded of a lot of "freemium"/"ad-supported"/etc. software that makes its author money via ads or whatever else --- and you agree to that if you read the license --- and it is a bit shady to name the miner 'systemd', but it seems rather overboard to call this "malware"... when I see that term I think of software that self-propagates and exfiltrates personal data, delete/encrypts files for ransom, etc.

Also from the page:

Size 138.8 MB

I'm not really familiar with the latest trends in (bloatware?) development, but a simple game like that taking >100MB would make me suspicious --- even 10MB is in the "questionable" range, and ~1MB would be closer to what I consider "typical". 138MB is bigger than the installed size of Firefox, and that's a far more complex application...

[faho]

>a simple game like that taking >100MB would make me suspicious

Nah. Games often feature a bunch of textures and video and sound files. Bad compression or too high resolution on those is quite common, which is why games _are_ often that large.

Also proprietary software usually ships a bunch of libraries - games often ship with a premade engine, which are also often quite large.

As a datapoint, I have a copy of "Strata", which is a simple /minimalistic puzzle game, and it _is_ 78MB.

[colejohnson66]

I remember the Facebook app being less than 20 megabytes in size half a decade ago. Now it’s almost half a gigabyte

[scarface74]

And for the life of me I can't understand why people use the Facebook app. The mobile web page loads faster, it's automatically sandboxed by being just a browser page and it can do almost anything that the app can do.

Besides on iOS at least, if you click on a link from the Facebook web page, you can take advantage of whatever content blocker you have installed.

[coatmatter]

> And for the life of me I can't understand why people use the Facebook app.

When I last used it, it just felt less clunky than opening it in a mobile browser tab (Android). I bet most people who do use the app would agree. A mobile browser's address bar is also kind of ugly, so apps often just feel more 'immersive' and therefore 'better'. The ultimate reason however is probably because Facebook is somewhat good at marketing and managed to sell their apps to users better than the mobile version of their site. There are probably more reasons at hand too but I can't remember anymore as I now use neither.

> The mobile web page loads faster

Not really in my experience. Also, apps tend to have more support for gestures than mobile pages. Instagram is probably an easier example. It's more swiping, and less precise tapping. Browsers are also kind of yucky to load if you have many tabs open (Brave seems to be better with this though). Scrolling in apps can often be somehow more pleasant.

The gap between mobile pages and official apps has probably narrowed, but I don't think it's quite correct to imply that the mobile page is always better for everyone (especially those who are still enjoying the 'rewards' of Facebook).

Do you use the Google Maps with its app, or in a browser?

[scarface74]

Google Maps while navigating requires features that require an app.

[fjsolwmv]

If you log into Facebook on web, then visit any other site, they send your browsing info to Facebook via Like button.

The Facebook app is more sandboxed, since it can't snoop on your web browsing.

[mkl]

The Facebook app can and does track your physical location, among other things.

I think the real answer is "Don't use Facebook" or "If you must use Facebook, do it through Tor Browser".

[michaelmrose]

The facebook app for quite a while was actually sending facebook data about your phone calls and sms so guess again.

[scarface74]

Only on Android....they couldn't do that on iOS.

[viraptor]

The like button can't track you if you block it ;-)

[Casseres]

I use a seperate web browser on my phone for Firefox and Gmail. Everything else, I use Firefox.

[mikelward]

For which platform? Google Play Store says the full Facebook app is 73 MB; Facebook Lite is 1.7 MB.

[kuschku]

Which is crazy – with my own apps even after they’re packed with features I can barely get above 4MB.

Going to 100x that? Insane.

[xab9]

One word: electron.

[64kbisalluneed]

Ues, electron is in opposition to less is more. It’s an abuse of memory and hdd. How can someone invent such a bloatware product?

[FRex]

The website version of the game was 150 KB.

You'd be hard pressed to find an engine or runtime (except electron as some people are saying it actually is..) to get a game like that (literally moving boxes and text) up to that size.

Even if he used static images and ttf fonts the size is way off. Pngs are a couple to couple dozen kilos a piece. Fonts are a few megs at most each. The single biggest font 'file' I know of/used for real (except for experiments people might do with the file formats) is Noto Sans CJK ttc file and it's not a single font but a collection (and it covers all of CJK[0] which is an insane range).

Entire Minecraft is under 300 megs and that includes the launcher, the language packs, and the entire JRE that is 140 megs in itself (!).

On gamejolt there is a (very nice) small low poly game called The Very Organized Thief, it was made in Unity3D and is just 13 megs in a zip (EDIT: and 35 unpacked).

I couldn't find a low poly game in Unreal Engine 4 nor one that is under 100-200 megs (EDIT: when packed) so maybe Unreal Engine 4 has that high static cost but I'm not sure right now.

In any case: 2048 taking over 100 megs is actually crazy, especially since it's a game so simple you can rewrite it in almost any engine overnight. He/she could have done at least that much.

[0] - https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/cjk/

[amenod]

For ordinary games, maybe - but this is 2048 we are talking about. Sound maybe, but I doubt there are any videos or textures.

[drchickensalad]

For some high performance games, storing assets with weaker compression means less CPU cycles spent.

[codedokode]

Not necessary. Larger assets take more time to read from disk.

[FRex]

That might backfire on an HDD and it's a very convoluted scenario (loading from disk and decompressing when hogging all of the CPU).

Many people even with a quad core i5/i7 might have a small SSD just for Windows and important stuff and any large game goes onto the HDD, the fact you'd do such a trade off and make the game size swell only makes the effect worse and user more likely to use HDD.

Linux (the kernel) is compressed by default (that's why the filename is vmlinuz, vm for virtual memory support, z for compression) and it doesn't impact the startup enough to have many/most distros take it out.

Simple compression might not bring lots of savings but it'll at least help a bit. And with BMP instead of PNG a game would just blow up in size to crazy proportions. There also is some (still patented?) lossy tech to decompress on the GPU, not the CPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

Ooodle from RAD game tools (kind of a veteran gaming middleware company with some prominent game devs employed at it and prices being 'contact us') also has some really fast compressors and decompressors (but I've never used them and I don't want to ask for a testing SDK if I don't consider buying their product).

You can also trade time on your end for optimization that is then literally free to the end user, e.g. use pngopti.

Tokyo Dark (a VN-ish game from Japan) was notorious (for like 30 reasons but this one is very annoying) and loaded entire several hours long 500+ meg game off of the disk at once at start up for no reason other than it being simple to do or done by their Construct 2 set up. Just some compression or pngopti would help a lot for that, I remember cutting like 5 or 10 percent of game size using just pngopti.

John Carmack said that to make Rage's MegaTexture system assets work (and they still ended up being huge) he used some 200 GB server to optimize it for hours.

Crash Bandicoot also used some smart packers that took ages to run at the time on multi thousand dollar workstations (90s).

All in all: I mean to say that compression and size optimization might still be worthwhile, is cheap and doesn't have to imply a big cost to the end user, more often than not the cost is very asymmetric and the compressor pays way more than the decompressor (e.g. 7zip ultra takes hours to pack many gigs of files and uses 17 GB of RAM but the unpacking of such an archive takes just 10-30 minutes and is actually limited by my HDD speed).

[zokier]

I would be really surprised if the miner is contributing any major portion of that size. I just did a very basic search and a random miner I found has binary sizes <1MB

https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/releases

edit: apparently the actual game is based on https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/2048 which is HTML+JS, so probably the Snap was bundling in Chromium/Electron, which explains the size.

[StavrosK]

Yeah, the Coinhive miner is ~115 KILObytes.

[rrix2]

Snaps ship with quarter a distribution worth of shared libraries in them, don't they?

[RayDonnelly]

> I'm not really familiar with the latest trends in (bloatware?) development, but a simple game like that taking >100MB would make me suspicious

This is very much the idea of these awful (IMHO) ways of distributing software. Bundle all of your dependencies, share nothing, expose users to the risks of exploits in the libraries you've bundled (and maybe statically so no one can even figure out you have done that).

Please stop this madness.

[aritmo]

There is no support for specifying the license yet, so all snap packages appear as "proprietary".

Nothing to look here.

edit: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/snap-license-metadata/856/53 Still it is unresolved, they probably use the deprecated licence feature in VLC.

[popey]

You can. The store used to default to "Proprietary" if the developer didn't set it. Now we default to "Unknown" if not specified by the developer.

[evand]

That is not true. You absolutely can specify a license: https://snapcraft.io/vlc

[amenod]

Off topic: why would someone install VLC over Snap instead of the version from Ubuntu repos?

[popey]

Because the same snap can run on releases of Ubuntu all the way back to 14.04. 14.04 has VLC 2.1 in the repo. 16.04 LTS has VLC 2.2. The snap store has 3.0.1 in the stable channel, with 4.0 (dev release) in the edge channel. Versions that will never be in the archive of those older releases.

As LTS releases age, the contents of the repo age with them. PPAs are one solution, but they're undiscoverable and not straightforward for new users to setup. Ubuntu has a ton of users who are 'sticky' on old LTS releases.

This enables the VLC developer to have one package that targets millions of users across lots of releases of Ubuntu - and other distros too.

[amenod]

Thanks!

[FRex]

It would still look quite shady. It's also burning electricity, hogging your CPU and putting heat and stress onto your CPU which is way worse than just displaying an ad which costs literally nothing (or 1 or 2 cents for fetching a single png and link).

I use one donationware app and it's cleanly marked it display an add and it's explained they fetch it from their own site via a dumb static image request on startup (it sits under the main GUI, it's not a splash or wait or anything) and for a donation you can get rid of it. That's leagues above the experience an average website gives you without adblocking software these days.

As for the size - I've no idea what happened, the original page[0] tested by [1] reports as 153 KB. Maybe he just wrapped it in electron?

[0] - http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/ [1] - https://tools.pingdom.com/

[scarface74]

It would still look quite shady. It's also burning electricity, hogging your CPU and putting heat and stress onto your CPU

Like any other Electron based app...

[FRex]

This is false equivalence. The electron app is ostensibly working for your benefit, just in a very inefficient way, not mining a currency using your resources to ship off to someone.

You could argue that making users pay for savings in development by their RAM, Disk, CPU, GPU and electricity costs is also bad (and even bad for the planet) but that's a less shady business strategy for saving cost than covertly mining. I have argued that and similar points with varying success at [0]. Then again someone took it upon themselves to downvote this[2] 30 minute comment of mine already and offered no counterpoint so maybe bloatware is what people want and they will go out of their way to justify it.

Back to this topic: to stop mining requires stopping being shady and turn it off, to stop burning resources with electron requires huge staff changes, technology changes, mentality changes, etc. and goes against what Joel Spolsky said about rewrite from scratch[1] (but I do feel the irony every time I see Atom or something claim they have now way more performant code by rewriting a part of the program in C++).

It's also very unfair IMO to compare pure hearted electron users (whatever you think of people who use it and the tech itself) to someone who stealthily installs malware (which borders on a crime and is way more shady and immoral).

Coincidentally I found a very neat app for music conversion/extraction from videos today, it's light, starts instantly, the GUI never lags even for thousands of files, it's total size is 40 megs and I looked into it and it's just ffmpeg dll, some other dll for other media stuff and the main GUI is in Delphi (and to add insult to injury the author is a Pole, which is ironic because I am also a Pole and I was taught Delphi in high school too - as my first language - and use Lazarus from time to time to play around with Pascal and native GUIs again).

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15948290

[1] - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17055872

[scarface74]

and goes against what Joel Spolsky said about rewrite from scratch[1]

Joel at one time was the product manager(?) for Excel. Microsoft also got lambasted for trying to use an internally built cross platform solution to use the same codebase for Mac Office and Windows Office back in the mid 1990s. Microsoft even decided that it was better to use native tooling for both platforms.

There is a difference between "rewriting" and using native tools for each platform. Would you still want something using Java+Swing?

[FRex]

Why not? Is Java + Swing very heavy or something? Is NetBeans in Swing or something else? I've used NetBeans for C, C++, PHP and HTML5 on my old Core 2 Duo with 2 Gigs of RAM on Fedora during my uni years and it was fine by me. It lagged some but on that machine everything lagged and it was a full on IDE (not just a code editor) with some really nice features.

[scarface74]

A Core 2 Duo should not lag running an IDE. I ran Visual 2008 on a Core 2 Duo with Sql Server running and it had 4GB of RAM.

Netbeans and almost every other Java IDE at the time was one of my major turn offs about using Java compared to using .Net + Visual Studio.

In fact, I still use the same Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4GB of RAM running Windows 10 as my Plex Server and it can transcode up to two streams simultaneously. I'll still use it interactively when I'm working from home and I'm mindlessly browsing the web while I am waiting on something.

[fjsolwmv]

You say "shady" but you don't explain why. I don't understand the distinction. I care about the quality of an app and how much it costs in $/CPU/RAM. Why should I care why it uses the CPU it uses?

If someone (legally) cloned an app, cut CPU in half, and replaced have the savings with mining, why would you prefer the original app?

[michaelmrose]

Mining in the background is worse than ads because it will be silently ruining the battery life of your laptop or silently running up your electric bill on your desktop.

Note that at 12c per kilowatt hour 200W of extra draw on a machine that's always running is 2.4c per hour.

Over the expected 5 year lifespan of a machine this could cost you $880 in the EU this would be more like $1980 because electricity is on average more expensive there.

Stealing up to 2K from users isn't much more friendly that cryptolockers.

[dest]

Think about how much ads steal from you, by tricking your brain into buying stuff you don't need.