Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | ezst's commentslogin

Maybe it should have clicked earlier in life and I'm perhaps that much dumb dumb, but it only recently occurred to me (from experiencing it at two very different companies and discussing with peers having reached a certain seniority level more or less at the same time) how dysfunctional many companies are, and how often they produce incentives that are misaligned with the overall company goals and sustainability principles. I blame in large part a layer of middle management that selfishly puts itself above all else, misguides, misrepresents, because it essentially pays larger dividends (literally and not) to "play the networking game than to be an efficient and effective productive structure". Maybe that's to be expected in a services-driven economy where the value of the work is immaterial and subjective (and the whole phenomenon of bullshit jobs).

Not OP but many people eligible for social benefits don't seek it, for all kinds of reasons (not knowing about it, pride, ideology, peer pressure, ...)

They make it that way on purpose, to save money.

Who is "they" and what specific actions are they taking?

The government that runs the benefits programs. They make you jump through hoops to get any benefits. The first hoop is even knowing that a program exists that you qualify for.

But then they also pay social workers to guide you through the steps of applying and receiving this support. Sometimes the biggest hurdle is to get to know what you don't know.

Who exactly in the Linux world is supposed to get paid wonderfully to keep mountains of old cruft and technical debt in working order? Not to say I'm insensitive to your point, but when whole UI frameworks are amateurs' passion-projects, the practical burden of maintenance has very real implications. That's essentially the whole story behind the Linux desktop losing Xorg.

In the end, it's always the old problem, how to properly fund open source projects.

Maybe with the current political events and subsequent changes in priorities we'll see EU governments ponying up some money under "digital sovereignty" programs - but given the rabid opposition to systemd (funded by RedHat), I fear that any attempt by the EU to get some order into the chaos will be met with just the same toxicity.


> Maybe with the current political events and subsequent changes in priorities we'll see EU governments ponying up some money

Those wheels are already spinning at a fast pace, the French government has its own NixOS-based distro for public servants¹, teams-up with the German and Dutch governments to develop a productivity suite as to not rely on MSOffice², NLNet sponsors many "infrastructure-level" initiatives though NGI Zero³ (many in the area of networking, computer design, federated/P2P communication protocols, …)

¹: https://github.com/rlahfa-dinum/securix ²: https://www.opendesk.eu/en ; https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ ³: https://nlnet.nl/project/


Money is one thing, it's desperately needed.

The key question is, who will call the shots? That's the most pressing problem with many open-source projects without commercial backers - they completely lack focus, unless there is either some sort of BDFL providing the guardrails (be it Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Daniel Stenberg, Fabrice Bellard or the other usual suspects), or someone backed by serious financial firepower uses said influence (i.e. Lennart Poettering of systemd).

Particularly something like an office / productivity suite is ripe for conflicts. One group of users (i.e. stingy governments) want something that can run on computers that would be more fitting in a museum. Other groups want pixel-perfect compatibility with Microsoft products, even if it results in a ton of extra work. Others don't want LDAP support for the email client's address book, but instead other stuff like an integration into Okta or whatever other SaaS. And either someone will get empowered to make such decisions by everyone involved... or it will be a lot of money wasted or a lot of chaos.


Not saying that more governance and focus wouldn't bring more bang for buck, but from the lists I sent, you would notice a pattern of investing on open standards and vendor-agnostic infrastructure. It makes servicing specific needs overall easier, because the whole field is elevated through easier interop and efficiency. If LDAP, email, GUI apps and videoconferencing become easier, making an "LDAP-enabled GUI email client that does group calls" that's perfect your (industry/trade/…) needs goes from "near impossible, requires millions in CAPEX" to "we'll have it in a matter of days/weeks".

The other nice thing is, the whole world benefits from it, for free. The only losers are the monopolists and other societal parasites.


> entities are fundamentally different from tables

Isn't the fact that they are _mostly_ interchangeable the foundational principle of hundreds of ORMs? Of course the DDL doesn't say much about the entity's lifecycle, but if the bar is set at representing its relationships, fields and cardinality as a graph, it seems sufficient?


I think most successful ORMs have an additional layer of semantics beyond what can be directly expressed in SQL. For example, Active Record has multiple types of associations (belongs_to, has_one, has_many, etc.) that I would argue align more closely to the ER model than the relational model. Of course you can come up with a set of conventions to go from ER to relational when everything is fed through the ORM, but you are losing some semantic information in the process. (That is, if you just look at the SQL table definitions, you don't have the same information about relationships).

ORMs are on a poor foundation. But I don't see the problem with this tool, it's just showing the tables.

I don't see a problem with the tool either really, it's just a pet peeve of mine to call what it produces an ER diagram when it's really a diagram of the relational model defined by the SQL.

I was rolling with "don't expect me to read something you haven't spent the effort to write", but that works, too.

I'd slightly rephrase that as "Apple has recently started building pointless animations into their product, instead of sticking to meaningful animations like they were doing since unmemorable times".

Old Apple knew not to overdo things.


Re: YouTube example, the issue (as I understand it, and I'm what you could describe as the opposite of an expert in that) is that the video and the playlist blend with transparency over one another. Had the playlist appeared sliding from the right side of the screen, it would have worked (I guess).

yes what you described is how it is right now on youtube, the main reason is to make it look more fluid and natural, apple examples shown mostly work because the overall structure is very static and have a lot of negative spacing. More animations tend to negate the principle described if not done with extreme care.

And the fact that "better" is highly subjective and domain/task/vibe-specific

Went from E61 to N900 to pre³, least I can say is that neither modern Android nor iOS amazes me.

Look into "next cloud HPB" (High performance backend) https://github.com/nextcloud/notify_push

You sure that's the right link ?

Yup, you can read more about it from here (and follow the same link I posted earlier at the bottom of the page) https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-faster-than-ever-introd...

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: