Primary keys in DBs should be natural keys in the first place. You use surrogate keys only to optimize things.
So the whole analogy now points in the exact opposite direction as stated.
2,093 karma · joined May 24, 2016
So the whole analogy now points in the exact opposite direction as stated.
Think of how you would explain things to some external or new person. Compare:
"You need to tune Steve so Lily doesn't get stuck".
to
"You need to tune the data collection service so the object storage service doesn't get stuck".
The first proposed variant is just ridiculous! Whereas the second variant gives you a glimpse of what's going on.
For the exact same reason you should not call your identifiers in code "liz" or "bobo".
Name your things what they are!
Culture may differ, but human brains work the same in the end.
Please don't confuse things. FB users aren't FB's customers. FB doesn't get any money directly from the (on average just a little bit) richer US users.
But there are good uses for mountable "git like" repos. For example for backup systems.
What did they "patent"? Object databases? Versioning files? Mounting file-systems?
Anyway, that are at most some super weird software patents; so you don't have to care outside of the US, I guess.
def `. . .` = println("That's valid syntax!")
@main def entryPoint = `. . .`
I said almost because HN suppresses the back-ticks…
I can understand what it does but I don't get the intend behind that. (I'm not a Ruby programmer, so maybe I miss something "obvious")
LTS is exactly this pain!
I really don't understand why anybody would use that for development. Your SW won't land anyway in the current "stable" distri release, but at the earliest in the "next" version. So you need to develop against that "next" version anyway. The "next" version is something like Debian Testing…
And if you don't plan to release your SW properly into a distri you need to bring your own environment anyway.
Secondly it's very well possible to remove features from a language. It just needs to be well enough designed that there is a good migration story (ideally though automatic rewrite by the compiler). Just see what Scala 3 did!
https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/dropped-feature...
Source: https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/blob/master/READM...
Someone here mentioned:
Looks exactly like what is asked for.
Never heard about it though. Would need some more visibility (and word of mouth, I guess).
Why should they care? They're too big to fail…
Google controls almost the whole end-user realm through Chrome & clones, and Android, the dominating end-user OS by a wide margin.
At the same time end-users are completely helpless and can't do anything against Googles liking because they don't understand anything about IT tech.
Computers are black magic to most people so they're trapped. This never changed! Especially millennials and gen-z are completely clueless as they didn't had the chance to use personal computers ever, where you had at lest some control over the device and needed to know at least some basics about its inner working. All the younger people know are the tightly sealed black-box devices you don't have any control over, called mobiles, which are fully operated by big-tech. Google search + Android apps are "the internet" for most people. They mostly don't even know there is something else beyond that, so Google can do whatever they want, and this will have exactly zero consequences for them by now.
Google's move regarding rolling out "browser DRM", the next "trusted computing" initiative, regardless of what anybody thinks about is is very telling.
Now they will violently reap the fruits of their monopoly, and likely nobody will be able to stop them in the next decade. People where warned about the consequences of this monopoly for many many years. Nobody cared. Now it's payout day for Google.
Exactly! There can't be anything beyond duct tape "engineering" in IT, because worse is "better"… You know?
Doing things properly would cost money. Nobody is willing to pay. So nothing will ever change.
But saving it work at least. Than you need a large screen. :-) It's 7,763 × 4,684 pixels.
Have you actually gone down already the rabbit hole that is the history of computing and alternative approaches to what we have today?
I don't say that you need to be an expert on low level programming to write good code (sometimes this is even a hindrance as quite some of these people are prone to the premature optimization anti-pattern) but one should imho know at least the basics and have a high level overview of the low level stuff.
But frankly the reality is that even people who struggle with mere syntax, people who have no clue whatsoever what's going actually on, "contribute" code way to often to the corpus that you need to deal with in professional settings.
</rant>
Edith thinks I should at least praise the great article we're commenting on here!
Very nice write up.
The only thing that I miss a little bit is a kind of "disclaimer" that what gets presented is "just" the result of a market race, and not how computers need necessary to work like. Not going into the details of possible hardware architectures and implementation, but even on the "user facing" level (the operating system and application layer) things can look very, very differently. Just as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-webtrans-ov...
https://www.w3.org/TR/webtransport/
https://github.com/w3c/webtransport
https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/blob/main/explainer.md
https://github.com/aiortc/aioquic/blob/main/examples/http3_s...
WebTransport just landed in Firefox release versions and is available since some time in Chromium so it's indeed ready for hacking! :-D
> No it is an API to expose lower level parts of HTTP/3 to developers. HTTP/3 uses QUIC as a transport protocol, but it is very wrong to say it "is" QUIC.
Well, that's the only thing the parent got almost right. (The rest was obvious nonsense, though. I agree.)
WebTransport is of course not QUIC. But it allows to use QUIC streams almost directly.
There are no "lower parts" of HTTP/3 other than QUIC. HTTP/3 is a quite thin layer directly atop of QUIC.
With WebTransport you send a CONNECT request with some special flags / headers to the web server and given a correct response you can start using raw QUIC streams over your HTTP/3 QUIC connection.
The overhead to get at your raw QUIC streams is quite low and a one time thing. From there you can directly use all the capabilities QUIC gives you (client or server initiated reliable unidirectional and bidirectional data streams or unreliable datagrams transporting arbitrary binary messages over a kind of "virtual" connection).
Exactly this is going on for at least the last 30 years.
Nowadays they just seem to have better PR / marketing so the usual daily scandal has exactly zero impact on them.
But form the perspective what they're doing, and how they're doing it, nothing ever changed. Microsoft is Microsoft.
---
I've read at some point some revealed internal memos or emails from Microsoft, I guess from a court case as the PDF was full of scans of printed out stuff. It was about their internal strategy regarding competition (and actually their "partners" who they count to their competition more or less, only that they see them as a kind of "useful idiots"). Frankly I can't find the PDF right now but it would be really helpful here! It was likely something famous as I wouldn't have downloaded it back than. Who has the right link?
What's exactly novel about all this?
I see an untyped(!) DSL to model actor supervisor hierarchies, including a protocol which allows the actors to access some shared mutable state.
But else? (Maybe besides some NIH and "rewrite the world" allures?)
From a systems architecture point of view this looks actually very good, but all the details are more or less standard stuff found in industry products since quite some time.
Don't get me wrong, the engineering behind this systems architecture is quite impressive!
But it's engineering, not research to me.
The other thing is, all hard problems, there where the "fun" starts, seem actually unsolved. Form the end of the dissertation defense slides:
Future Work
Enhancements to the formal models
- types; names; grouping & relaying; formal properties
System model
- performance; tool support; generic protocols; process management;
stdio; contracts; security; persistence; polyglot
Distributed systems
- unpredictable latency & scheduling; message loss; subnets
Given that, and the fact that this whole thingy is untyped makes me skeptical. Not even the std. ingredients like type-state, session types, behavioral types, or the like seem to get used. I also don't see linear types here, which go very well with session types / behavioral types, and can help making typing message passing easier.
Also that this approach would be completely network transparent, as I see it, seems like a design flaw. One needs control over the various effects that can occur! Otherwise the points form "distributed systems future work" can't be solved, imho.
And form the practical point of view: There is no Akka / Pekko based Scala implementation? I'm quite surprised, to be honest.
Akka / Pekko is the actor runtime, and Scala is famous for it's eDSL features; besides of course its type-system, which makes things like Libretto possible, which seems related here:
https://github.com/TomasMikula/libretto
Syndicate-lang looks OTOH more like the usual callback-hell.
But like I've said, I don't get this whole thingy really. I've just clicked through some parts of the web-sites. Most likely I'm just overlooking the elephant in the room. So would be glad to learn more!
(BTW: Very nice web-site design on all the projects. Especially nice typography. Really enjoyed this part while clicking through this stuff.)
IT security isn't only about "not crashing servers".
> When an airliner crashes, hundreds of people die.
I've just showed examples where likely hundreds of people died because of missing impact evaluation on IT systems.
I think this is related.
As long as people don't see this nothing will change.
So yes, maybe my context switch is a little bit drastic. But this was the intend: To show similarities in outcomes and at the same time the hubris that things aren't taken seriously in the one case where they are taken very very serous in the other case, regardless of identical outcomes.
Sure! But it's a really substantial part. If this branch of "Germany-AG" gets into trouble this will have noticeable consequences.
> Carl Zeiss, for example, is a big company doing state-of-the-art work.
There is always some company which makes good money and is important. The point was about the big picture. And by now even the usual big players, which are "too big to fail" and are strongly supported by the state, start to get nervous. The article cited quite some of the most important players and some of the most influential economy think tanks.
> Do you know by the way why Germany and software don’t go well together? What do you think?
Complicated question. I don't know, to be honest.
It's not like we don't have any SW industry. But it seems not to catch up.
From the global viewpoint Germany has SAP, but else?
I don't think it's because we "can't do software". But it seems we can't do any relevant software.
Two points come to mind:
We don't have a culture of "pure software products". Most SW is in industrial applications. But this SW isn't very visible, and most of the time it is considered just a secondary or even tertiary part of a product. In the eyes of the management it's often still "just a byproduct" or even "pure cost". The car people for example really didn't get it until just lately that SW is now a primary sales argument. They're still trying to catch up. But actually it's quite laughable what they're doing because they still think you can "produce SW as any other car part"… Same goes for a lot of other companies. SW is just a matter of expense. They don't try to innovate here, they preferably would order somewhere some box with the "needed parts" in it and "concentrate on their business".
Likely related: People who "built mostly machines until now" don't really know how to build SW. So even if they realized that they need SW to make their products competitive they don't know how to get there.
The other thing is: Nobody here really tries to compete with the leaders on the world market. There is no motivation to do so. Even the state buys everything from US companies.
There is at the same time almost no support for local SW companies.
The only exception I know of is actually gaming. Germany invests some (imho symbolic amounts of) money in local game developers. But there are no (proper) big state financed projects that try to create something in the business and/or mass market related sectors.
There are some projects but all the money gets wasted on feeding the big industry players like Siemens or Telekom—which won't produce anything in the end, like always here when it comes to this kind of projects.
In my opinion Germany could actually do something about the software industry issue. We were able to build high-end machines (at least in the past). Software is "just" a different kind of machine… But as long it's politically not wanted to compete with the US software industry nothing will happen, imho.
Germany could inhabit a quite interesting niche, if they would take it serous: High-quality, actually secure, and privacy oriented software, in the high-price segment. This is an area currently under explored. Everything else from the competition is optimized to be cheap, just about bearable from the quality standpoint, and of course it's very insecure. We can't compete with that. But we could compete with the others doing the opposite. (Biggest problem would be to create a market with demand, as most buyers currently also only look at the price tag. One would need to change that, with really outstanding quality. We have here still some good foundational research, also when it comes to IT and software. So we could try to tackle this from that angle.)
You get that only when you look at a bunch of "unrelated", "small" facts. If there are a lot of facts pointing in one direction, maybe there is something to it.
The other point is: That was not cheery picking. There are no other facts that would point in the opposite direction… More or less everything in Germany is in decline. That's just true. Source: I'm living here since about 40 years.
Though the article interpreted something quite wrong in the very beginning: The decline started quite exactly around 20 years ago. It was caused by the move to ultra-capitalism (the mentioned big social reforms 20 years ago), which made Germany a low wage country, which made the people poor and started an exodus of the well educated parts of society. The reforms made some of the numbers capitalists are interested in look good for some time, but at the expense of maximally "squeezing out" society. Now this short sighted tactic backfires.
By now almost 1/6 of the people here are poor (and 1/4 is at risk of becoming poor):
https://www.malteser.de/armut-in-deutschland.html
Almost nobody can afford children. ("Bio-Germans" are foreseeable dying out therefore, and it doesn't look like this is avoidable any more when you try to play the numbers game. The article showed the relevant statistic. At least we get some migrants; with children. But the "Bio-Germans" hate migrants. Also this may pay off not before one generation; we need to educate the children; but the education system is broken…)
Actually it's getting hard to even afford a living place. Liberal housing markets made space in areas of high population density so expensive "normal" people can't afford it any more. At the same time building new housing is too expensive and nobody invest in that. Which made companies in the building business die out, and even if the state would massively invest in housing right now we don't have the capacity to build that stuff. And even if we would have the firms, they would not find employees…
https://www.mieterbund.de/fileadmin/public/Studien/Studie_-_...
(Fun fact: AFAIK if Germany would build enough housing it would completely miss it's green goals, as building housing creates a lot of CO₂.)
The complete dependence on the car industry becomes a real problem at the same time. It's not only the big car manufacturers. But the largest part of "the Mittelstand" are external suppliers for the car industry… Should this implode (and it looks like that, as China is flooding the car markets, that's a fact) this will have catastrophic results for Germany. We simply don't have anything besides the car stuff. All we've got is already gone. And what's left is leaving because of he astronomical energy prices.
Big players are moving elsewhere, the smaller ones just die. Result: More people becoming poor, which just accelerates the downward spiral.
In regard to modern tech, like IT, Germany is a developing country. We're completely depended on the US and Asia in this area! People are making jokes about "Russian computers"[1] but the sad truth is we couldn't even build such a thing on our own.
In the last decades the education became completely messed up also. They tried to make everybody go to university; which destroyed the previously high class educational system. By now even the firms offering apprenticeship in handicraft trades complain that you can't find people skilled for that as the people coming from school can't properly read, write, or do basic calculus. (Source: I've talked to people offering apprenticeships, not only once, and I've had some contact to the youth.)
At the same time politics try to just close their eyes to most problems: If you listen to the local propaganda "everything is good" or, currently, "It's Putin's fault!". (That's not completely true, of course, there is some critical thinking even in mainstream here and there, but they hide it usually under a really large pile of straight propaganda; and it became quite seldom. This wasn't always like that. Even the state media was much more critical 20 years ago. By now it's obviously just coordinated propaganda. We actually pay over 10 billion Euro for our state propaganda…)
The article was actually refreshing unpolitical. You usually don't see such "pure" recitation of facts in the local (and especially state) media. (I was waiting the whole time while reading when we "get to the meat" and I get informed what we should buy to safe our souls, or who to blame for all the problems, but to my surprise this part never surfaced. The article looked almost like proper journalism from decades ago).
Just naming those facts is actually considered "right wing activism" here in Germany. You will get canceled quite instantly for saying the things the article said if you state such stuff for example as comment in some of the mainstream media outlets. Yes, they cancel for reciting facts. Especially if the recited facts have potential to "irritate people", and you present some proper numbers to make your point.
(Disclaimer: I'm not supporting any political party any more. I was once "leaning to the left". But the lefties are by now the same scammers as every other political movement. All these people in politics just care about redirecting state money into their own pockets. No difference the "color" or "side" of the political movement. Kleptocracy in it's final stage. Peak capitalism. This won't end good… And if there wouldn't be the language barrier I would actually start to consider to move to China. It's getting noticeably worse here and while looking at the current state of affairs it foreseeably won't get better during my lifetime anymore.)
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/MIG-Akinak-Russlands-selbstentworf... (See also the comments!)
Compare to usual practice around IT…
Broken IT can in today's world directly or indirectly cause death of people. Some current examples:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-66130105
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-04-20/tiktok-ef...
Still nobody cares!