Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

We're (team of 2) rewriting an old enterprise ERP system made of ~1M of C89 non-portable loc, tens of thousands of handwritten PLSQL loc, thousands of business rules carefully abstracted in sql data, tens of complex screen designed and scripted on a no-name RAD software that was the current fad back in the days, and some companion pieces in VB6 because, you known, 'C89, not anybody can do it'.

That's fun.

The new system is a quiet simple SOA arch with a dull, only-real data db layer, backend in Go with code-generation, frontend in es6 migrating to elm.

That looks the IT guys have when we say 'no really, we don't need IIS or Java', its priceless :)

The interesting part actually lies in handling both product management and sales for the new version while handling the day-to-day coding part.

Sometimes I think I should write a book on those subjects :)

Thanks, rs23296008n1. I toyed with the idea of a send in one hit approach, but feel it will be counterproductive to having a calm inbox. Getting 5, 10, 50 emails in quick succession would certainly raise my stress levels. Perhaps I can offer two or three digest variations... 1) all in one as it is now (plus eml) 2) burst.

Food for thought.

i like this the bottle cap collection looks cool

I'm not sure to reply to the parent comment or this one, but as you mentioned advertising model, I'd like to reply here.

All the points mentioned in the parent comment has been done before: magazines and newspapers. (Some) people used to subscribe to multiple publications to get their intake of information. The wide ranging, impact based news is the daily publication specialty. The newest in your specific interest is the magazines' playing field. News special reports used to be in longform and discusses all the finer points, including analysis and graphs to see the big picture. Magazines with themes serves the intellectual curiosity.

Somehow in the age of niche creators, these companies die out. I think the saying 'the sector is ripe for disruption' is true, but not in the way of software or automation. Better business model is really needed. The business model has been done before; the evolution to bite-sized factoids is the consequences changing to more heavily advertising-based business model.

The limiting factor of paper space and physical distribution seems to strike a balance: news to be printed and distributed need to be worth it for the public to pay. Maybe bundling also made it work[0]. The specific 'small' niches in newspaper/magazines can be fulfilled by sharing the cost with the mass of subscribers.

There is a tradeoff in the wide influence of gatekeepers, but even in that time independent publications managed to survive.

I think finding this balance again is really the key. Should we go back to tax-funded publications? Or will people welcome a microtransaction for articles? Or should the publications deliver curated, less frequent summaries to make customers happy? I think the disconnect between the customers and paying for content is driving down the quality and demand (in revenue) of these publications.

The recent years have shown that subscribing to the publications themselves are not optimal. Putting up a paywall angers people, but The Guardian have never wiped their donation banner off their pages. The need to find the correct business model for publication is urgent for the masses too; democracy that actually follows the people's will depends on this.

I don't follow the current landscape, but what The Athletic is currently doing is pretty interesting for sports.

Me, personally, really like the 'The Espresso' concept from The Economist. They curate 5 stories each day and deliver it in the morning directly in the app. No space to switch tabs and disengage but space to dig deeper in the story through the links.

[0]: https://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-...

I'm also in the planning stages of re-writing ~1M lines of C doing hardware control for a telecoms system. It's going to be replaced with Elixir (basically Erlang) because it's the perfect fit (which is unsurprising given its a telecom system).

My prediction is that it will be 10-20k lines of code when I'm done because there's so much obsolete cruft to remove. Plus ~1k of C as a shim layer to allow an incremental transition.