motogpjimbo

I was frankly amazed that Dave Cullen of all people was sent a review copy of Picard S3. Either Paramount/Amazon don't know who he is, or there's a legitimate attempt to extend an olive branch to "the fans" going on. Hopefully the latter, but if so there is almost certainly going to be a backlash from the teens and twentysomethings these franchises have been targeting (largely unsuccessfully) over the last few years.

Are you aware that black people commit crimes at higher rates in countries that have no history of slavery or the various other social problems that have existed in the US?

It does, but it turns them off on any article that is even remotely controversial.

A perfect illustration of the grandfather comment.

Up to and including refusing to acknowledge demonstrably provable facts?

I'm sure she was, but her work on Jordan's novels wasn't effective. Under normal circumstances, a writer wouldn't be able to get away with releasing 5 or 6 books in a row in which almost nothing of consequence happens.

Robert Jordan's wife was his editor. Once you understand that, you understand why his books are so poorly edited. A competent and empowered editor would surely have insisted on literally thousands of pages of cuts across the series.

I've spent the last 10 years working for a succession of companies that used PHP yet have never worked on WordPress and I doubt I ever will.

If you're in the tech startup bubble it's easy to come to the conclusion that Python, Ruby and an assortment of minority interest languages with rabidly toxic fanbases rule the roost, but outside of that bubble PHP, C# and Java are quietly running the world.

Have you got a source for him being a convicted Nazi?

> The big win is that each function that gets split out has fewer reasons to change. The individual functions are therefore easier to maintain and understand.

Yet the namespace becomes more polluted and the interconnections between the functions becomes more complicated, particularly during debugging.

It's important to remember that "break big things into smaller things" only pushes complexity someone else rather than eliminating it altogether, while simultaneously increasing the overall complexity of the system by increasing the number of interconnections between the parts. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it but you should be honest about the consequences.

I think you're putting too much faith in frameworks there. My employer's large PHP application is written in a framework that was once popular but then was abandoned years ago. Since that framework defines every aspect of the application, down to the directory layout, migrating away from it towards a more recent framework is largely impossible at this point. While it's true that the framework is "easy to understand", it's also true that it encases the application like a concrete coffin.

Libraries are infinitely preferable to frameworks if you want your application's life cycle to be independent of $POPULAR_FRAMEWORK's.

Even with Laravel, which is the current thing in the PHP world, I've worked in multiple teams where their application is written in a very old version of Laravel and there's no desire to attempt an upgrade to the most recent version.

I wonder whether you would post a comment similar to this if it turned out that the donation money had been funnelled to right-wing think tanks and had then subsequently been distributed to right-leaning commentators?

The point is that the school won't reject a child because their parents don't work in a particular industry or belong to a certain religious organisation, as was sometimes the case with "private" schools previously. Both private and public schools pre-date state schools in the UK, hence the confusion over the terminology.

She and her chancellor announced a series of tax cuts at a time when inflation is running at 10%. Even worse, they sidestepped the usual processes on fiscal responsibility and declined to explain how the tax cuts would be funded. The bonds market then panicked as a result, with the Bank of England having to step in and bail the market out to prevent gilts from entering a death spiral, which would have bankrupted pension funds.

Since then, she's been a dead woman walking.

This sounds like you're opening yourself up to situations where you have rows in data_journal that have status='Loading' but which have started_loading_at=NULL, in violation of your data model.

Your premise is slightly flawed in that your second example isn't actually difficult to write or understand as you claim. However, it could be argued that if the logic for selecting "loading" rows is repeated in multiple places then a layer of abstraction over it would be useful. This could be achieved in SQL by e.g.

    CREATE VIEW loading_entries AS
    SELECT * FROM data_journal 
    WHERE started_loading_at IS NOT NULL AND finished_loading_at IS NULL

or, if you have several such statuses you need to define,

    CREATE VIEW data_journal_view AS
    SELECT
    data_journal.*,
    CASE
      WHEN started_loading_at IS NOT NULL AND 
    finished_loading_at IS NULL THEN 'Loading'
      WHEN ... THEN ...
      ELSE 'Some other status'
    END AS status
    FROM data_journal

This is one of the weakest smears I've ever seen attempted on this site.

I love to see effective yet brutally-simple "redneck engineering" solutions to software problems, particularly ones that straddle the line between genius and stupidity in a way that makes architecture astronauts feel uncomfortable.

I used to work at an brokerage that worked with a panel of around 12 providers, all of whom offered 5+ products that were updated multiple times per year to meet changing regulatory requirements. When a sales adviser recommended product X from provider Y to a customer, the adviser would then need to fill in an application form that was precisely tailored to that particular revision of that particular product. Bear in mind that these were complex, multi-sectioned forms. Needless to say, this created a huge workload for the devteam to keep track of all the product changes and update the UI accordingly each time.

At some point, someone on the devteam had the genius idea to simply take the PDF application forms from the provider, extract the individual pages as PNGs and overlay HTML form elements on top of them. The provider would essentially be doing our UI design for us. Add in an editor tool so the sales managers could set up the forms themselves and a tagging system so specific fields could be pre-filled from customer data we already had stored in the DB and the devteam's workload dropped by maybe 90%. Simple, stupid perhaps, but effective.

The person you're responding to is probably referring to the plans to release direct sequels to Ghostbusters 2016, which were shelved after that film flopped.

Unless you're paying money to Twitter, you're not their customer.

I would argue that the problem is less due to franchise fatigue than it is to low quality and needlessly confrontational writing. Classic drama tends to have a universal quality to it that transcends any particular time, place and culture, and it's this quality that has been lacking in woke entertainments from the last five or so years.

Take Squid Game for example. I don't speak Korean and know next to nothing about Korean society, yet its core story about a group of people in desperate circumstances being forced to constantly reevaluate what they're willing to do to survive resonates with me just as well as if the show had been set in any other country.

Compare that with The Rings of Power, where Galadriel is portrayed as a perfect warrior woman whose biggest source of antagonism is the weak and unprincipled men around her. Or She-Hulk, who has to explain to Bruce Banner that men telling her how to do her job makes her a better Hulk than him.

Young progressives lap this stuff up but it leaves everyone else cold, including many women. In years to come, these stories are not going to be loved. These films and TV shows are not going to top any polls. The characters are rotten, unlikable and will not live on in anyone's hearts.

The evidence doesn't back you up here. The Rise of Skywalker made half as much money as The Force Awakens. Rey and Rose Tico merchandise didn't sell. Viewing figures for recent Disney Marvel TV shows have been extremely low. Star Trek Discovery can't be viewed in many countries because no network broadcasts it. Netflix's attempts at woke series tend to get cancelled after the first season. And so on. The poor performance of woke entertainment products is visible for all to see.

> Usually, there's just no time to build internal admin apps when you're a solo founder or a small team.

At my current job, the "admin UI" is rolled into the same CRM we present to our customers, and often takes the form of e.g. additional panels on customer-facing pages that are only visible to admin users. In my opinion, this design was a mistake because it means we have to go to considerable lengths to make internal tools visually polished, despite them often being used by just one or two users who (a) work for us and therefore don't need any polish and (b) we can directly brief on how to perform a particular task.

At a previous job, the customer-facing CRM was as polished as you'd like but the admin tools were kept separate and, as a kind of informal company policy, were often deliberately designed to be _brutally_ simple. Black text on white background, no CSS, no Javascript except maybe for a JQuery plugin thrown onto a table to make it sortable. In some cases where we felt it was justified, we'd even just dump JSON onto a page and train the operator to CTRL+F to find the field they were interested in. Admin tools that were used by more users would receive slightly more effort, but the whole point was to keep these tools as simple and unpolished as they could possibly be while still being functional so the bulk of the devteam's time could be spent on customer-facing code. While this was an extreme contrast to my current job, I nevertheless find this approach a better use of the devteam's time. And as a bonus, it meant the friction to putting together a new admin app was much lower. If one or two of the admin users felt that they were being slowed down by an awkward workflow, it was entirely uncontroversial for the devs to throw together a quick microapp just for those users. If we'd had to do it by putting together an API with a React frontend and everything that goes along with that, we probably would have rejected most of those requests.

If a customer ever changes their billing rate, you will need to keep track of when it was changed and what their previous rates were, otherwise you'll have no audit trail and no way to bill customers correctly.

One approach would be to have a billing_period (account_id, billing_rate_id, start_date, end_date) table. Another would be to store the billing_rate_id in your account_credit table so each usage can be tied to the billing rate the customer should be charged for it.

I also wouldn't keep a running_balance column. I forget which rule of normalisation it is because it's been so long, but you shouldn't normally store a value that you can compute from other data.

If you're going to jail for 15 years, isn't running up a debt with your lawyers the least of your concerns?

I know several people have already mentioned it, but SQL.

Over the past nearly three decades I've learned and used many programming languages, frameworks, tools and development methodologies, most of which have turned out to be here-today, gone-tomorrow. But the 6 month SQL course I took when I was 18 is still paying my bills to this day, and probably will continue to do so until I retire.

The difference is that on those old 8-bit microcomputers BASIC was the standard way to write programs. The only other choice was assembly language, which was mostly used by games for performance reasons. So BASIC programs written by the user really were first class citizens.

While you technically can write a Python program in Microsoft's terrible terminal window, such a program is a very distant second class citizen in the Windows ecosystem. This adds to the friction the poster above is referring to.

PC-DOS's predecessor, 86-DOS, was allegedly reverse engineered from CP/M. The subsequent lower development costs probably account for at least some of the price difference between the two products.

Or even worse, when the ORM is written in a programming language your organisation no longer uses and is part of codebase that is no longer under development.

It has always amused me when developers try to make their application's database layer vendor-agnostic. Not only does that restrict you to the most vanilla dialect of SQL imaginable, it's also a pointless exercise generally because it is orders of magnitude more likely that your app will be replaced and the database kept than the other way round.

So, not only is your arrogance out of control, you're fragile too. So fragile that echoing your own intemperate words back to you triggers you.

In future, remember that you're on Hacker News, not Reddit. If you can't be civil to people who ask you to clarify your points then perhaps this isn't the site for you.