Hacker News Reader

I'm not hot for systemd but this https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.tim... looks robust, far from ad-hoc hack.

View on HN

How does it look robust? Because someone wrote a man page and there's lots of boilerplate in it?

Proper design reduces complexity. The above adds a lot of complexity, and thus it's a hack. Not the appearance.

That's not a hack though, a hack is gluing things together to fix a certain specific bug that is not easily solved because the bug is related to the design instead of a mere mistake.

Otherwise with your standard of hack anything beyond hello world and baby's first input are hacks because everything else requires boilerplate.

It's not a hack because of the boilerplate - it's a hack because it's functionality implemented in a wrong place. I think the boilerplate made you believe it's not a hack by making it look professional(ish), ie someone spend time putting a lot of lipstick on that pig, man page and all.

How is it functionality implemented in the wrong place?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com