System D | Hacker News Reader

System D

en.wikipedia.org

"System D, arguably, reached its heyday in the Victorian-era railway hotels, where the menus were huge and it was not unusual for an extra two hundred guests to show up wanting, say, the Fricasse of Lobster Thermidor — for which only fifty portions were available. Suddenly, Thermidor for fifty was transformed into Thermidor for two hundred. Don't ask how. You don't want to know."

fun fact: Thermidor - after which Sauce Thermidor and derived dishes like Lobster Themidor are named, is a month in the French Republican Calendar, specifically: the second month of summer, going approx. from mid-July to mid-August.

Even more fun fact. "Thermidor" as well as the other months on the Republican Calendar don't have any root word. They were made up whole cloth and intended to sound like Greek or Latin.

    Autumn:
        Vendémiaire (from French vendange, derived from Latin vindemia, "vintage"), starting 22, 23, or 24 September
        Brumaire (from French brume, "mist", from Latin brūma, "winter solstice; winter; winter cold"), starting 22, 23, or 24 October
        Frimaire (from French frimas, "frost"), starting 21, 22, or 23 November
    Winter:
        Nivôse (from Latin nivosus, "snowy"), starting 21, 22, or 23 December
        Pluviôse (from French pluvieux, derived from Latin pluvius, "rainy"), starting 20, 21, or 22 January
        Ventôse (from French venteux, derived from Latin ventosus, "windy"), starting 19, 20, or 21 February
    Spring:
        Germinal (from French germination), starting 20 or 21 March
        Floréal (from French fleur, derived from Latin flos, "flower"), starting 20 or 21 April
        Prairial (from French prairie, "meadow"), starting 20 or 21 May
    Summer:
        Messidor (from Latin messis, "harvest"), starting 19 or 20 June
        Thermidor (or Fervidor*) (from Greek thermon, "summer heat"), starting 19 or 20 July
        Fructidor (from Latin fructus, "fruit"), starting 18 or 19 August

???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

Even more fun fact: 9 Thermidor Year II is also when Robespierre was ousted and his reign of terror ceased. He would be executed the next day.

This Republican calendar is also a source of headaches for students studying the French Revolution because while it didn’t stick, it stuck around long enough to matter and for historians to need to deal with it in primary sources.

That may be true for other months, but "therme" is Greek for heat and Thermidor would be the hottest month of the calendar.

Neil Gaiman who introduced me to the French Republican Calendar in a story set during the French revolutionary period (The Sandman #29). I didn’t have easy access to an encylopedia (or the Internet) in the early nineties so Thermidor was the only month I knew for a long time.

A longer excerpt available online here: https://www.denverpost.com/2006/05/26/the-nasty-bits-by-anth...

Presumably they would reuse the lobster shells and stuff them with something like crab or fish. Amazing!

I might be dense, but I really have little idea of what System D _actually_ is in practice after reading this.

Can anyone ELI5 what it is in practice? What are some of the ideas that allows one to débrouiller, etc... ?

Well I was raised in French and my dad would use this expression from time to time. (I didn't read the whole wiki page, I'm just answering based on my experience)

It meant "being resourceful" & ingenious. Don't always expect someone else to help you in order to achieve something, or don't just give up at the first problem you encounter.

e.g. Something is heavy to lift and you expected someone stronger to be there to help you. Well you can borrow a lift, you can call someone else and lift it together, try to come up with some kind of lever, etc

Another example: Don't wait for someone to explain something you don't understand, when you could be looking it up by yourself on the internet (sorry that one was an easy joke ;) )

My read from the page was that this term is coupled with a temporal component - the need to think effectively on your feet. Rapidly.

Unfortunately, that's not me. I'm a sit and ruminate kind of person. Oh well, no System D for me.

I speak French and it's typically used in that context indeed.

I wonder if systemd in Linux was named after this, given that it's a collection of services to help you do things, even 3rd party or ad hoc ones made by yourself.

Unlikely, given that systemd started out as a remake of Upstart and Apple’s launchd, or launch daemon. [0]

The article says the authors of systemd initially considered building upon either but ultimately decided to start from scratch for technical reasons.

[0]: https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

Système D has both a positive and negative connotation. There is indeed a resourceful part, but also an 'it's an ugly hack' part (but justified by the circumstances).

As an example, my parents used to leave in Africa, and at the time, the water supply system was unreliable, so my father hooked-up a 100 litters drum so that we at least had some water for essential needs during outages. Smart given the circumstances but a proper water supply would have been preferable.

> Can anyone ELI5 what it is in practice? What are some of the ideas that allows one to débrouiller, etc... ?

Broadly speaking, it refers to one's capability of being smart in a "handy man" field.

Your tire is flat and you have nothing to fix it? Take a toothpick and hot glue. That's system D.

You have a bottle of wine but nothing to open it? Put the bottom in your shoe and rub it against the wall. That's system D.

Nowadays you can use *system D" for any subject where you demonstrate the capability to overcome problems not using "book" solutions.

The term got it's roots during and after the war in France, where you had to be able to find these kind of solutions in a country where everything was broken.

In other words, a ‘hack’

A hack has connotations of laziness though. This is the opposite.

The constraints of the situation may call for a ‘hack’ but it’s not an expression of laziness. It is a necessary action provided the circumstances.

Maybe Macgyver'ing it would be a more modern reference. Still pretty dated. Is there a word for what Phineas and Ferb do? That's not a good fit, but still has the same flavor.

Yeah it’s a language issue. There have been hacks that did express the idea but “hack” does get used broadly. Macguyvering conveys the concept well but as you say it’s reference is outdated so it’s lost some of its meaning.

in India, we would call it a "Jugaad"

I applied some system D earlier tonight. I needed about 1.8V to feed into a level shifter IC. I ended up connecting three diodes in series with a resistor, then connected it to 3.3V.

Be a Marine WRT "adapt and overcome at all costs to accomplish the mission" without mentioning the Marines.

The Army did it too, we just didn't have a cool name for it.

Exactly. "Improvise, adapt, and overcome" could be a definition of "Système D".

An example from the software world:

Back in the misty days of Not Too Long Ago, there was a Jira add-on called nFeed. It allowed you to hook external databases to Jira using SQL queries and display the query results for users. Note I said display but not search for, which became a sticking point: The nontechnical users could see all the data from the Microsoft CRM internal database (and getting data out of that was another saga, but not quite of this kind) but not search for it using normal Jira search functions.

(Before I go on, I'll state that nFeed is now Elements Connect, which supports this use case natively. Basic search is a "use case" which must be explicitly "supported" because Jira.)

This was intolerable. This was not something you could fix from within nFeed. This was something I had to fix.

Fortunately, I had an Idea.

The Idea: I could create shadow fields to mirror the contents of the nFeed fields, such that those fields would be normal Jira text fields which Jira could search. I just needed a way to automatically synchronize the nFeed fields and the text fields, and a way to hide those shadow fields from the nontechnical users.

The System D stuff: nFeed used the Velocity template engine to allow you to generate the HTML to display in the Jira tickets. Velocity didn't know HTML, CSS, or JavaScript from Sweet Fanny Adams. Therefore, I could inject all three of those things directly into the ticket using the templates. I used JavaScript to read the text field from the displayed page, compare it to the text from the fresh SQL query, and, if they didn't match, use XMLHttpRequest to update the backend using the published REST API, which succeeded because it ran in the security context of the user viewing the page. A bit of inline CSS to hide the shadow text fields as long as they were beneath their corresponding nFeed field on the page and I was done.

Mostly done. I still had to ensure I wrote the JavaScript without curly brackets, as those were sacred to Velocity, and I fought with correct text quoting and unquoting for a little bit. Something I couldn't fix was Jira's own logging functionality: Every time a user with permissions to edit a ticket viewed it, the JavaScript might trigger and Jira would record that as them editing the ticket. That got me some confused support calls, but it was still better than what I would have gotten had I thrown up my hands. After all, I was the one who suggested nFeed to begin with.

Pretty good for something I cooked up the day I found the original problem, in the period of time between finding the problem and reporting it all to my manager.

Another example:

I was working as a service tech for a hardware company. We had an order come in for 1200 off something that needed to ship in 4 days. The rub was that the firmware needed to be updated over RS232, and it only supported COM1. We realized if we did one at a time we wouldn’t have enough people to finish even 300 of them. We didn’t have any way to get ahold of the original developer in Japan. So I opened the program in a hex editor and started looking for the string COM1. When I found it I changed it to COM2, then 3, then 4 to produce 4 separate programs that we could run side by side.

In practice it is to come up with a solution to a problem and follow through with it regardless of what it takes to do so or how unconventional the solution may have to be.

Think of it as a philosophy or a resolve as much as a verb.

Pratically, it's The A-Team.

Yes, and perhaps even more the MacGyver show. But those references are getting quite old.

Only vaguely related, but mentioned in the article:

“In Down and Out in Paris and London,[6] George Orwell described the term débrouillard as something the lowest-level kitchen workers, the plongeurs, wanted to be called, indicating that they were people who would get the job done, no matter what.”

Orwell’s best work IMO, if you haven’t read it you should.

Now I finally know what my Swiss mother-in-law says when the normal tablecloth is dirty and we need to improvise.

I thought “oh it’s like Plan B”, but never got why it’s D…. Now I get that D is a euphemism for “out of the shit” (démerde).

Could be but my understanding is the D stands for débrouiller (se débrouiller = take oneself out of the fog). Kind of like the American "National Awareness Day" where people are encouraged to extract their heads and take note of the people in their surroundings.

I learned the term while learning french, working for Médecins sans Frontières Suisse. It was most definitely translated as démerde, not débrouiller.

I'm french, and both "se débrouiller" and "se démerder" mean exactly the same thing. "se démerder" is just more familiar/foul.

I would mostly use the familiar version if someone or an organization explicitly created the situation, like I must go to the post office but it's only open during my work hour, and closed the only day I can take an hour off. And System D is really débrouille to me

(Se) débrouiller really means “to get by”/“to make do”/“to cope”/“to manage (be able to handle)”. Système D refers to managing a situation with a make-shift or unconventional solution.

As a french person: it is in fact much like "plan B" but in a more "this wasn't part of the plan, in fact the plan calls for specific things that we are going to improvise" way.

I mean to say that when we say "systeme D", it has its meaning on its own, separate from what the words signify. It is also used when talking about alternate means of acquiring objects, such as bargaining (in the commerce sense) or repurposing trash.

One funny thing about it in German speaking countries is this reference in the page:

> Examples for those are Trick 17 [de] in German, Trick 77 in Swiss German

It seems that something got lost in translation or Chinese-Whispered between Germany and Switzerland

Anthony Bourdain... recently started watching his show from time to time. Really a bummer that he's gone.

There was a documentary Roadrunner (2021). I haven't seen it.

I'm curious if anyone besides him knew why he did it. Existential loneliness, lack of love, distance from family and others, and purposelessness?

Mostly middle-age and older American men, skewing towards white and lower in income, are dying early by their own initiative. It might explain a fraction of drug overdose and mass murder events.

There has been a lot of discussion about Bourdain’s suicide. Speculation.

The stress of fame and constant travel. Drinking constantly and avoiding problems in your own life. These are possible contributing factors. I don’t think you can really know why someone did it, most of the time. I don’t think we can even assume that he knows why he did it. We do things without understanding why.

There is a "Système D" DIY magazine here in France, since 1924. I don't know if it is predated by the term or originated it. I remember that there is a big pile of old issues in my grandfather attic.

Same, as a kid I liked to discover all the random things one could build step by step.

That's crazy talk. Nothing actualy exist until the anglosphere takes note of its existence.

Can you please not post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? We're trying for something different here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Incidentally, HN has had countless wonderful and interesting threads about things from outside "the anglosphere". As HN is an English-language site one would expect those to be less common, but they are well-represented, well-loved, and welcome.

About 10 years ago I applied for a software engineering job at a startup that had the title “System D Engineer.” I thought it was the perfect distillation of what it’s like being an engineer at an early stage startup. I got the offer and I probably should have taken it. It would have been interesting and the startup had a successful exit!

I worked with an engineer that did an internship in "low-tech innovations", he basically designed system D solution in Brazil, I think to irrigate fields or smth alike Very very cool stuff

Brilliant. Apart from Freeling's "The Kitchen Book / The Cook Book" système D appears throughout French culture including the record "Système D" by Les Rita Mitsouko. It stands there encouraging those who get it to understand and overcome despite one's being knee-deep in sewage.

Ironically, the French Wikipedia page is even shorter: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syst%C3%A8me_D

nothing remains to be said. Thanks.

See also ... systemd, a suite of system components for Linux, whose name is inspired by System D.

It links to that Wikipedia entry at the top of this page.

The wikipedia entry is wrong. See my other comment.

Not, it's not. systemd just stands for system daemon.

That’s what I think too, but FWIW, geocrasher is quoting the “see also” section of the article. It doesn’t have a citation and I can’t find any other references to it, though.

Poettering more or less establishes that systemd was directly inspired by both Upstart and launchd: [0]

> I hope that I managed to explain in the text above why we came up with something new, instead of building on Upstart or launchd.

That, and another dozen mentions of launchd whenever it talks about socket and bus activation, strongly suggests to me that the “d” would be for daemon, just like in launchd.

[0]: https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

Also:

> Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. Why? Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d. And since systemd manages the system, it's called systemd. It's that simple. But then again, if all that appears too simple to you, call it (but never spell it!) System Five Hundred since D is the roman numeral for 500 (this also clarifies the relation to System V, right?). The only situation where we find it OK to use an uppercase letter in the name (but don't like it either) is if you start a sentence with systemd. On high holidays you may also spell it sÿstëmd. But then again, Système D is not an acceptable spelling and something completely different

Definitely a reference to being a daemon.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/

They're not wrong though, systemd has a whole boatload of related and ancillary tools beyond just its pid 1 process daemon. Stuff like journalctl, systemctl, machinectl, etc.

From https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ :

> Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d. And since systemd manages the system, it's called systemd.

> Système D is not an acceptable spelling and something completely different (though kinda fitting).

Wikipedia says that it somehow relates to Systeme D, but they don't have any good references for it.

but they do have a good reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#cite_note-control-cent...

which eventually leads to https://web.archive.org/web/20130114034246/http://0pointer.d...

System D [in French, Système D] is a shorthand term that refers back to the French word débrouillard[1]. The verb se débrouiller means "to untangle." [...]

That sounds just about perfect to be honest "untangling the boot process" - yes please.

so the name wasn't directly inspired by System D, but the relationship was noted and approved of.

Wikipedia claims the name was inspired by, though, which is inaccurate.

But that line is from a comment by "sam" to that article.

So, really nothing do with Poettering et al.

Reminds me of Pratchett and the adaptability of the Quirmians when muddy old boots were substituted for the original ingredients ...

"... let's see ... Mousse de la Boue dans un Panier de la Pâte de Chaussures ..."

(... I don't now if this was simply Pratchett's standard cynicism / semi-jaundiced take on humanity, as applied in a standard enough way to French restaurants, or more directly related. Pratchett did have an awfully wide range of knowledge and constantly expanded that knowledge with research while writing.)

> I don't now if this was simply Pratchett's standard cynicism / semi-jaundiced take on humanity

It’s Pratchett, so most probably a bit of each. Plus a healthy dose of piss taking.

As a side note, I would not use “cynicism” for Pratchett. Whilst there is some of it, cynicism has become associated with mindless reactionary contrarianism, which is very, very far from Pratchett’s general optimism.

> In recent literature on the informal economy, System D is the growing share of the world's economy which makes up the underground economy...

This just seems like word salad to me. What am I missing?

All of the 'underground' things desperate people do to stay alive, i.e. prostitution

You mean “e.g.”, not “i.e.”. Prostitution is not the only thing people do outside of the purview of the government for income.

A more mundane example is working for a restaurant under the table.

I liked their version better. It was more facetious.

Obscure topics like this often have bizarre wikipedia pages with only a few contributors. The articles are usually a few paragraphs, each touching on wildly different barely-related topics that connect to the main topic. Here's one from a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17591942 This article is also one of them.

This is what all of Wikipedia used to be like, until the formalism made the trains run on time.

Not sure which version I like better, tbh.

Perhaps related to "kombinować" in Polish, which somewhat bad connotations.

Oh, this is what goes in Italian as "l'arte di arrangiarsi" (the art of hacking it, or something like that). Tho it might lack the urgency factor.

It's a very old concept, everything old is new again, I guess.

> Oh, this is what goes in Italian as "l'arte di arrangiarsi"

Yeah, very similar concept.

> It's a very old concept, everything old is new again

Nobody said it was new, though… Or exclusively French, although the French name is marginally better known.

Jugaad. In Greek we sometimes say πατέντα.

Калтонай-малтонай, ширин-вырин-мордехай.

From the wikipedia page:

> Not to be confused with systemd.

Lol.

Vaguely related:

3K: kitanai, kiken, kitsui. (dirty, dangerous, demanding).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty,_dangerous_and_demeaning

and Mike Rowe, presenter of the shows Dirty Jobs and the series Somebody's Gotta Do It

I'm reminded of that Canadian Mike Row who started a Mike Rowe Software, which was subject to legal action from Microsoft. :)

So: responding to difficulties by taking shortcuts, disregarding regulations, sometimes cheating, all to achieve your goal or a semblance of it.

Hustle?

Hustle would be a possible translation but in my understanding only if your System D involve something illegal or is meant to generate money (eg take the bus without paying to get to your job before getting your first pay). System D is broader than that.

Can you give an example of System D that is not related to generating money or something illegal?

The examples I’ve seen were mostly about selling one kind of food as another, more expensive. E.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35671220

> System D, arguably, reached its heyday in the Victorian-era railway hotels, where the menus were huge and it was not unusual for an extra two hundred guests to show up wanting, say, the Fricasse of Lobster Thermidor — for which only fifty portions were available. Suddenly, Thermidor for fifty was transformed into Thermidor for two hundred. Don't ask how. You don't want to know.

Could be organizational, like there's a transport strike so you create a Google sheet based carpooling system that you share with colleagues coupled with a facebook page where each person that goes to the station shares up to date info and you involve your grandma that happens to own a van in the process.

Look for BlaBlaCar history it's basically that, carpooling is specifically popular in France.

> ...a synonym of "to hack it" in English

So HN might as well be called "System D News" in an alternate universe...

Anyone who has ever worked on the production end of Food & Beverage, like Bourdain, knows EXACTLY what Système D entails...

The "Shameless" series or "The pursuit of Happyness" have strong system D vibes for instance

I read this as "Get er done", ok in food service, maybe comes with long term consequences elsewhere.

When the system D solution is physical and ridiculously complicated we may also call the person a McGyver

Waiting for Dr. Fegg to comment..

Ha!

(Background: my domain name for 24 years has been systemed.net, my github handle is systemed, etc. All stems from choosing Système D as a demogroup name on the Amstrad CPC back in the 90s, partly because it’s the very essence of demo coding on a constrained machine like the CPC, but also as a riff on the French groups which were called things like Logon System, AST System etc.)

From dé- +‎ merde +‎ -er, literally “to remove oneself from the shit”.

Also not a variant of the D programming language meant for systems programming.

Obligatory.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenacious_D

Not to be confused with systemd[0], a system and service manager for Linux. Which I was kinda surprised to see that the link wasn't about this and almost didn't click on it because I saw the source was wikipedia.

Dang, Maybe we can edit the title?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd

That's obviously why it was posted.

Paul Graham once described the quality of being formidable in a startup founder. If they say they'll get something done in 2 weeks, they'll get it done in 2 weeks, even if poorly done. Formidable founders stand the greatest chance at succeeding. System D certainly reminds me of that.

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