Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the madness ever going to end?

unixsheikh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 629 posts

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#281

Post by qayxc »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #249
qayxc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a question I've struggled with ever since I started working in the field. In terms of definition, software development ticks all the boxes - depending on who you ask. Yet every way you look at it, something just doesn't feel right. Sure, there's best practices, models, a strong mathematical foundation, but on the other hand there's way too much freedom. By "freedom" I strictly mean lack of limitations. While…

Honestly I like well-designed modern C++ as a library/app developer; it's fast, type-safe, and (more or less) expressive. The worst thing about it is unnecessarily complex syntax/concepts (TMP scares me, `template using Foo` simplifies code, concepts are complicated but help avoid TMP) and slow compile times (unavoidable to my knowledge) I looked at nlohmann/json's homepage and I find the API surface perfectly readab…

What bothers me about libraries like nlohmann/json isn't so much the style or the public interface (which is fine and I actually like, too).

It's the fact that a conforming and performant JSON parsing and serialisation library doesn't require 22kloc in C++. That's madness. I also struggle to call a library "modern" that uses goto-statements. Especially if the library is even slower than smaller alternatives like [1].

But that's just my personal opinion, I understand that other people have different priorities and are fine with including 785kb of C++ template headers as long as the public interface suits their needs and taste.

This is just an example for the kind of freedom software allows for, because it doesn't cost you anything and there is no objectively "better" in this case.

[1] https://github.com/kazuho/picojson

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#282

Post by Stratoscope »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #88
n8cpdx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t think of any reason not to use Slack exclusively as a website. I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s a better experience IMO. For Teams, the only disadvantage is you can’t share your screen and video simultaneously when running as a tab; but I find the screen sharing experience to be better otherwise when running as a browser tab. Also: all of these “shitty” Electron apps work just as well on Linux as th…

Ii run Slack outside of a tab and in its app format because it's easier to navigate to using keyboard shortcuts and OS level features. That may not be enough for you, but it's plenty reason for me, and I imagine many others.

With Chrome or Edge, you can take any web page and turn it into a standalone "app" that lives in the start menu and can be pinned to the taskbar and Alt-Tabbed to, etc.

In the Chrome menu, select More Tools / Create Shortcut... and edit the title and check the Open as Window box.

In Edge, select Apps / Install this site as an app. Edge has a lot more options here than Chrome. You can pin it to the Taskbar or Start, create a desktop shortcut, and set it to auto-start. (You can do those manually with a Chrome shortcut if you know your way around the Start menu and Startup folder, but it's easier in Edge.)

I don't see a similar option in Firefox. No idea about Safari. If anyone knows about those browsers, please comment.

And having posted this comment, I am now wondering why I am still running the Slack app. I think I will try making it an Edge app!

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#283

Post by kuahyeow »

> It's so bad that I haven't managed to find a single industry with the same massive amount of stupidity, with the exception of perhaps the fashion industry

Perhaps a bit too much hyperbole, but lots of industries have these cycles of increasing complexity. The necessity of such complexity is in the eye of the beholder.

  - Agriculture. Herbicide -> GM plants to resist herbicides
  - Automobiles. Manual -> Auto
  - Finance. HFT anyone ?
  - Construction.
  - Medicine.
  - Accounting. GAAP
  - and finally... Quantum Physics !

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#285

Post by com2kid »

slg wrote: post #193
com2kid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Expecations have changed. It is 2004, your company needs a simple CRUD app so your employees can work with some structured data in a DB somewhere, let's say so sales can check inventory levels in an existing database. A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks.…

>A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks. It can only be used by people on desktops running Windows while they are at the office, but that is fine because that is the world of 2004. ... >People underestimate how simple Windows everywhere made life for developers. Amazing documentation, stupid good tooling, and an obscenely stable platform to develop…

Static linking worked fine, there is a reason small apps shipped with the vb6 runtime dlls in their zip file.

And for locked down corporate machines life was even easier. Same base image, same libraries installed.

Also DLL hell had been solved by the Windows XP timeframe with side by side installs of multiple dll versions.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#286

Post by somewhatBored »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #173
Waterluvian wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m very critical when a company like Slack cannot find the time and resources to make native clients. I’m so #%^*ing tired of it taking three Mississippis to show a channel I click on. But on the whole, I don’t think the armchair critics truly appreciate how Electron reduces the cost by at least an order of magnitude. It’s a brilliant tool for shipping early and fast. My only criticism with these start-up use cases…

Hey, look, it's simple: just spend $5k on a new top-of-the-line M1 Max MacBook, then it'll be as fast as IRC was on a 133Mhz MMX Pentium 1. Slack is great; it's like "hey, we took IRC and added inline images, now it's three orders of magnitude slower". Google Sheets is great in the same way: "hey, we took Excel and removed half the features plus now it's a few orders of magnitude slower BUT EASIER TO SHARE THINGS". S…

One thing about Sheets vs. Excel: Appscript for automation is a lot easier to get set up with than VBA ever was to the point where my org has a ton of things that we just throw a small amount of Appscript at (E.G. generating performance reports) because it just works and it doesn't require a lot of processing power (yay, cloud!)

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#287

Post by com2kid »

datenarsch wrote: post #226
com2kid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Expecations have changed. It is 2004, your company needs a simple CRUD app so your employees can work with some structured data in a DB somewhere, let's say so sales can check inventory levels in an existing database. A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks.…

> And unless you were writing drivers, that major OS version wasn't going to break anything. Just a minor nitpick, but the NT device driver API has in fact stayed largely the same since Windows 2000 and in comparison to the various technologies that came and went in userland.

Sound and display drivers.

And then MS got pissed at Creative for having drivers so bad that crashes from Creative sound card drivers accounted for a non-trivial % of all Windows crashes. The result was MS changing the entire Windows audio stack and eliminating Creatives most lucrative product line.

But apart from that, not many changes.:)

WDDM was a huge one though.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#288

Post by ldiracdelta »

andrewstuart wrote: post #274

Removed - too negative.

If they're passionate and argue well, but are willing to disagree and commit, then they are useful. I've been places where nobody pushes back and asks, "why are we creating nano-services for everything?" "Why is it a good thing to put two NICs and the Internet between every little thing in our system?" When no one is willing to point out that the emperor has no clothes and we're here to deliver features, not endless rewrites, that is a path to doom.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#289

Post by Shared404 »

Jensson wrote: post #121
petepete wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a huge pity that we're so reliant on platforms instead of protocols - there would be native Slack clients for every platform. Few companies even allow proper API access. Spotify buck the trend, Spot is a fantastic app https://github.com/xou816/spot

Small companies loves protocols, but as they become big and dominant they start pivoting to platforms to exert control and extract more profits from the ecosystem. We need regulations around platforms, protocols are inherently more powerful and from the perspective of humanity almost always preferable over platforms, so the incentives of companies should reflect that, but it isn't right now. Stuff like email, http et…

> Stuff like email, http etc is what makes computers great.

I concur with this. I've gotten into IRC recently, and have started reading RFC's/specs for various protocols instead of ducking "How to do X", and it's both greatly increased my enjoyment of computing, and my knowledge.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#290

Post by chaos_a »

jcoletti wrote: post #30

"They constantly crash..." Putting aside the downsides and reasons not to use Electron, this statement is just false. They are not "constantly crashing." I currently use at least Figma, Insomnia, Slack, Spotify, and VS Code and these apps rarely crash, if ever.

I've experienced multiple copies of Spotify on different machines getting forever stuck just showing a blank screen when opened. Although that's probably more Spotifys fault rather than the tools used to build it.
Post reply on HN