Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Real hackers care about open source software.
Real hackers don't necessarily care about open source software. Closed source offers more low hanging fruit attack vectors.
France's homegrown open source online office suite
161–170 of 367 posts
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#162Why is Django so popular among open-source projects like these, especially government funded? I’ve never happened to see a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field. Ruby/Go or even bun or node would be much more approachable and performant options today.
Instagram uses it as their main backend. They have hundreds of million of daily users. Some of the critical backend services are in C++.
Depends on your definition of "use." They use an internal async fork, and don't use the ORM: https://djangochat.com/episodes/django-instagram-carl-meyer
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#163Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#164Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / T…
The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting:
"A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React."
An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient as a purpose-built wiki.
Based on the quote description, it looks like your project inverted the thinking: Is word processing not a/the primary function? Are the other functions truly prioritized - e.g., is the wiki somewhat as efficient as MediaWiki?
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe the solution must be one rooted in reducing taxes. Make investing extremely attractively, and stop relying on taxes to solve everything.
Having tax reduction as a primary goal is terrible for society, because taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from rich people into services for everybody, particularly poor people.
> taxes are the primary mechanism for converting money from rich people into services for everybody
Even California billionaires would rather leave the state than pay the 5% wealth tax. All to provide “services” that are generally superfluous or tied to corrupt kickbacks.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfa…
With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they…
A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better.
For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France.
[0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Glad to be working as part of this initiative too!
Hi! Congratulations to you and Yousef. And I am lucky enough to be in a position from learning from both of you. Anyone think what they might about La Suite, but blocknote is a solid product!
Very much appreciated! We put a lot of effort into it!
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like this that's proven itself: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... TLDR: C++, WASM, and some form of GRPC with C++ on the server side as well. Because you need a language that's fast, can contain high complexity and large programs without collapsing (which is a short list of languages) and can work fast for the bits that need speed.
I’m my opinion, you have to be kinda masochist to choose C++ for this. Web development is hard in C++. But thanks for answering honestly.
Wt actually isn’t terrible, with the added benefit of being able to leverage the enormous c/c++ library ecosystem. Also, it can be quite fast if you care for it to be.
Edit: also appears to be based in the eu, how fitting for this thread.
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which it can’t. There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states
The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfa…
> You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare.
I'm curios what do you mean by this. Could you provide some examples of such policies or propaganda campaigns?
Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite
#170Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / T…
The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting: "A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React." An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient…
Think of Docs more of a modern, kind of Notion-style collaboration tool. It's not meant to be a Word replacement for full-scale document authoring (I believe La Suite will work with LibreOffice for that, but might be wrong here). The product vision is that Docs should focus on "Content over Form"; i.e.: make it easy to create well-structured documents (content), as opposed to Word which makes it easy to change every little visual detail of your document (form).
In addition, there are some advanced integrations with other products in La Suite. For example, video calls made in Visio can be automatically AI-transcribed and presented in a Docs document, etc.