rushabh

All the best for your launch. The website has too little information to be interesting. In 2019, your content has to be influential or free.

Makes me think that autonomous vehicles may run on specially designated roadways, like a highly flexible, adaptive version of railway.

Reading the comments here, it seems we don’t realise that ElementaryOS is run by a small team of mostly volunteers, who are doing this as a “free” service to the rest of us.

Lets take a moment to appreciate the immense perseverance, sacrifice, hard work put in by the team behind the project. The work done is pretty slick and complete. I hope there is a philanthropic minded HN member here who can help them with a generous funding, so they can keep building this awesome tool.

This is exactly the problem we have tried solving with the Frappe Framework [1] (Open Source, MIT).

The core concept in Frappe is a DocType, which is configurable metadata. Using this you can quickly build small, special purpose apps for very niche targeted use cases for their own business. You can also configure rule based permissions and add simple scripts. We have used it to build hundreds of use cases for ERPNext (Open Source, GPL) by allowing complexity to grow linearly (instead of exponentially).

This also helps keep the base layer and the "one size fits all" business layer (like say an Accounting Ledger) clean. And you don't have to worry about UI, permissions, REST API, deployment, maintenance and users get a consistent experience.

[1] https://frappe.io/frappe | https://github.com/frappe/frappe

Great UI comes from a strong leader who has specific tastes that everyone may not agree to. Execution of such a vision has to be highly controlled and it means at times taking tough decisions and throwing away someone’s work.

Open source is usually built with consensus and that is why it’s hard to follow “one vision”. Also hard to chuck out contributed code / features, specially when its voluntary since it’s not welcoming for new contributors.

My experience as an open source maintainer:

The "monetization" world has a lot of incentive in keeping open source small and make money from services, this is a cause for a lot of heartburn. This is the reason why there is no linux desktop. There are too many locked-in interests with too much power.

Another reason is that the actual deployers are not the owners of the project. For example, a company asks its developers to deploy a particular open source system. These developers don't respect the fact that the system they are using is free. For them, it would have been the same if were a closed system. When these developers-on-a-deadline hit a roadblock, they start hyperventilating and ranting on the forums.

The other class is small service providers who make money off the last mile deployments. They will resist any attempt for the product to become more complete. While they cannot win in the long run, it is a huge waste of time and resources.

It is hard balance to maintain.

There have been a few very large implementations of ERPNext. If I were to consult Lidl, we would have done a few low risk pilots, starting with their warehouses or back-office.

I would have gone for a federated architecture where each store / warehouse would have its own system that would then be consolidated at higher levels, rather than going for a mega instance with zillions of transaction rows.

There are many interesting things you can do when you have an open source system you can work to your advantage.

If you have questions, there is a very active community at https://discuss.erpnext.com

Typo: Thanks for the report. We will get it fixed.

CI: The marker is for the develop branch. So if you are on master, its much more stable.

ERP is probably the slowest moving market in software. Trying to sell ERPs for almost a decade now here is what I learned

1. The first reason for this is compliance. Most large companies are worried about compliance and trust only comes with many years of successful deployments. For a new entrant to be recognized can take upto 10 years and for clients to accept the solution as a solid one.

2. The second reason is complexity. When you consider the scale and complexity of an implementation, most new ERP companies do not understand the effort goes into pre-sales and going through hundreds of pages of RFPs. There are system integrators, consultancies and entire ecosystems locked in to this duo-poly.

But things are changing. We run an open source product (https://erpnext.org) and we have seen people are looking to move away from the SAP-Oracle duopoly. Innovative companies where the CTO has as much as a say as a CIO in such decisions are willing to look outside at Open Source. It is still very early days, but this space looks exciting right now.

ERPNext has been around for a decade now and doing quite well! https://github.com/frappe/erpnext.

Founder here, happy to answer questions.

The problems of trust that blockchain aims to solve are currently solved by the banks, the state and legal systems. Our society is built on this enormous system of trust that is backed by hard power (threat to hardship, violence and coercion) and if these systems collapse, then blockchains will suddenly be extremely valuable.

Blockchains in theory are much more efficient and than governments, so this is what people are betting on, without putting it in so many words.

If you think of it, governance is one the biggest monopolies out there and some competition might not be a bad idea for people with large amount of assets.

It’s not as simple as that. Google did not go out to commoditize content. Technology created a new distribution system that allowed them to dominate the distribution of content.

If you read the case, many of the videos Viacom was asking Google to take down, were uploaded by Viacom themselves. So everyone was scrambling to get more eyeballs, that ultimately led to commoditization.

Also referring to the parent post, “desert” is not the right analogy when you create surplus around you to keep out competition. I think the knowledge industry is more like a religion, where the information is free but there are still strong structures that support it.

In case of religion, these structures are supported by supportive communal relationships. In technology, by massive network effects.

A great opportunity to move to open source. It will help you not only have more control on your assets in case of privacy and GDPR, but also avoid vendor lock-in.

My mission is to build amazing free software that is accessible and usable by the whole world.

This is a fascinating list. If you start from the bottom, you can see how few really survive a anything close to a decade. The "Dead" tag is not updated as a lot of the companies not marked are actually dead or never really took off.

Shows that if you are on the YC rocketship, you either go big and get acquired or die out trying.

That is very cynical comment. Libraries are made to fill a gap. The reason they come up so fast is that the underlying technology keeps changing. It is so easy to forget that these are open sourced libs with permissible licenses that you can hop in and fix if you you want them better.

This may sound crazy but we manage our entire SAAS and open source project with GitHub Issues. We have monthly milestones and assignments and seems to work well for our team of 15 devs. Where we are hurting is managing multiple projects.

It would be awesome is if GitHub would allow us to set milestones across repos. Then we don’t really need anything else.

Unlike the European states, Indian states are do not have a long running political history or national "myth". They have been formed based on linguistic similarity and for ease of administration. And they are not homogeneous either, hence there are multiple movements in place for further fragmentation (most of which are justified).

Also these states (or ancient / medieval kingdoms in them) have rarely been "at war" with each other. Until recently, India was sparsely populated and it was easy the "migrate" to another land to establish your kingdom rather than fight with your brother or cousin.

If you are interested, Francis Fukuyama [1] has a very interesting theory that says that India has been held together by its society and not its state. Multiple waves of invasion have not fundamentally altered the texture of the society, parts of the new culture have been slowly assimilated in it, often forcing the invaders to adapt to their new home.

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

Unlike China, India has a very weak nationalism. The "Chinese Dream" is very much the American Dream redux. Countries that have made great progress have always had a strong nationalistic spirit, may it be Britain, Japan or the United States and now China.

Though nationalism is on the rise in India, it is still a very fractured society, with a strong emphasis on autonomy of groups to make their own "rules", treating the state as a weak actor. The quality of education at all levels is shockingly poor (specially in science and technology) and no way ready to produce any kind of revolution.

While India will make painfully slow progress in the physical sense (infrastructure), it is very unlikely to follow the Chinese model. Sadly India will remain fractured (or de-centralized, if you want to put a positive spin).

If you have been to India, you will know the pervasiveness of "status quo". Things are so broken, hard and complex that it does not make sense to even start doing something.

This model works because China run a huge trade surplus, and its excess production is consumed by other countries. It would be interesting to see if this model can continue when the global trade balances out.

In a way China is subsidizing goods for the most of the world. The outcome is the kind of political problems this is causing in most countries.

On non-tech setups, such systems are called ERP systems. The its a mature multi-billion dollar market with hundreds of entrenched players. The moment an application like Asana tries to cross that threshold, they get compared to the ERP products that are designed to handle specific workflow.

ERP products lack flexibility and generally have very poor user experience (since the buyers are not the users). I think there is a separate place for both these products and it depends on the organization when the switch from one domain to another.

Thank you! We tried many approaches, but the simplicity of object oriented UI components is classic. Its much more refreshing to read old fashioned object oriented code vs hybrid libraries that seem to be trending these days.

Also checkout the Gantt lib we published earlier https://frappe.github.io/gantt

Founder of Frappé / ERPNext here. Happy to answer questions!

While the context of the question changes and it can be disconcerting the first couple of times, but as you go ahead, you quickly adjust to the fact that the answer can be anything. I found it pretty intuitive.

Also my point was that the goal of the first few tasks was not to test your intelligence or resourcefulness, but just to get you accustomed to the environment, the screen etc. I would compare it to "small talk" you would do with someone you meet the first time, so that you get familiar with the mannerisms of that person. It is merely polite.

Interesting how this is a great example for on boarding users to a new software, or suck them into completing tougher and tougher tasks.

Start with simple questions and tasks and let the user build confidence. Once they answer / complete a few tasks, their ego will push them to take on the next few tasks!

So the author was able to beat S&P500 by 10% over a period from June-2016 to June-2017 using this solver. The most important question is whether the same underlying relationships will hold true for 2017-18.

This seems like a classic example of hindsight. There are many things one can tell on hindsight when the results are out. The key is if they will hold for the future too. Am I missing something?

Checkout ERPNext (https://GitHub.com/frappe/erpnext). It is based on a metadata framework (Frappe) that lets you build by configuration, so complexity can be handled much better.

Frappe also lets you build extensions (apps), add hooks to standard events, has a built in RESTAPI and more. Here is a quick overview https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/rushabh_mehta/frapp-framew...

Disclaimer: see my bio

While the focus of this discussion here is on the taxes, I think the bigger story is the unethical behaviour of companies like Intuit. And its not only Intuit, but also companies like SAP [1] that engage in such behaviour at the cost of tax payers.

The finanical might takes away so much from the commons and also pushes back adoption of good Open Source software. We constantly under-estimate the damage done by these mega-corps.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2015/08/12/former-sap... [2] http://www.iafrikan.com/2017/02/21/sap-south-africas-managin...