On your parenthetical point, I also agree: some really weird camera selections, and frustrating dropouts, during the crucial moments of the launch.
Nevertheless, a real triumph, and I particularly enjoyed the "full send" remark from (I think) the commander. I also really enjoy the fact that the livestream is relatively light on commentary and that most of what you hear is from mission control and the crew.
> in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel.
Yeah, but there’s “able to use Excel”, and then there’s “able to use Excel.”
There is a vast skill gap between those with basic Excel, those who are proficient, and those who have mastered it.
As in intermittent user of Excel I fall somewhere in the middle, although I’m probably a master of knowing how to find out how to do what I need with Excel.
The same will be true for agentic development (which is more than just coding).
I agree. Also good for small changes that need to be applied consistently across an entire codebase.
I recently refactored our whole app from hard deletes to soft deletes. There are obviously various ways to skin this particular cat, but the way I chose needed all our deletions updated and also needed queries updating to exclude soft deleted rows, except in specific circumstances (e.g., admins restoring accidentally deleted data).
Of course, this is not hard to do manually but is is a bloody chore and tends toward error prone. But the agent made short work of it, for which I was very grateful.
Do you not end up breaking half the value of referential integrity doing it that way (e.g. you had to update all the queries but now you have a sharp edge in that all future queries need to remember to be soft delete aware. Not a blocker for sure, just a sharp edge).
You know your system better than me for sure, a random commenter on a website :-D your comment just shocked me out of my daze enough for my brain to say "but I always move the record to another table rather than soft delete" and i felt compelled to give unsolicited and likely wrong opinion.
Yeah, I did consider moving records to shadow tables, but - because of the nature of our data - it requires moving a lot of child records as well, so it's quite a lot of additional churn in WAL, and the same for restore. And this approach has its own challenges with referential integrity.
More than that, though: lots of queries for reporting, and the like, suddenly need to use JOINs. Same for admin use cases where we want them to be able to see archived and live data in a unified view. The conclusion I came to is it doesn't really eliminate complexity for us: just moves it elsehwere.
Totally valid approach though. I'd also considered different views for live versus archived (or live+archived) data. Again, it solves some issues, but moves complexity elsewhere.
The other key point: it's a Ruby on Rails system so the moment you start doing funky stuff with separate tables or views, whilst it is doable, you lose a lot of the benefits of Active Record and end up having to do a lot more manual lifting. So, again, this sort of played against the alternatives.
As I say, not to diss other approaches: in a different situation I might have chosen one of them.
My conclusion - not for the first time - is that soft delete obviously adds some level of irreducible complexity to an application or system versus hard delete no matter how you do it. Whether or not that extra complexity is worth it very much depends on the application and your user/customer base.
For some people, just the ability to restore deleted rows from backup would be enough - and in other cases it's been enough for me - but that is always a bit of a faff so not a great fit if you're optimising for minimal support overhead and rapid turnaround of any issues that do arise.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a high quality reply; this is something I've wondered about for a long time and I appreciate the thought and detail you've shared here. :)
No worries - I'm glad it's helpful. Like anything, it's incredibly context specific, and you're always weighing up trade offs that may or may not turn out to be valid over the long term based on the best information you have right now.
This, make sure the 'active' flag (or deleted_at timestamp) is part of most indexes and you're probably going to see very small impacts on reads.
It then turns into a slowly-growing problem if you never ever clean up the soft-deleted records, but just being able to gain auditability nearly immediately is usually well worth kicking the can down the road.
This is what gives me the warm fuzzies about the HN community: people jumping to wild conclusions about your domain and systems based on a 4 sentence comment. /s
The thing you'll start to notice is this happens A LOT on every subject.
HN tends to think of itself as smarter than the average for every topic. But it turns out there is a lot of bad and factually wrong information in every thread.
Yeah, I know, and I know I've been guilty of it myself at times. It's a trap that's too easy to fall into.
Something about aughts dev culture as well: I remember it being really common back then. Everybody had to appear to be smart by second guessing everything everyone else was doing. Exhausting.
Entitlement and, really, some of this crosses the line into bullying of the foundation and the maintainers, should be dealt with robustly. It will help to reset expectations around what's reasonable for the relationship of those developing LibreOffice with the community of users.
People need to recognise that they get a huge amount of value out of LibreOffice, for which they aren't required to pay a penny, so it's not unreasonable to be asked if they would like to contribute something back in return.
But amongst large populations of people, when it comees to free things, some portion of that population will always undervalue that free thing and fail to recognise how much benefit they get from it and start acting entitled. There's nothing wrong with calling that out.
> It doesn't look professional when you loose your temper, this article is comparable to that.
Nobody's lost their temper. In no world does the article read like anyone has. That's you applying your own interpretive lens to the text, not what the text actually says.
(But actually, alienating the troublesome portions of their userbase might actually help them and the LibreOffice community over the longer term. C.f., firing customers.)
> Media coverage has largely omitted the fact that LibreOffice has been displaying donation requests for years.
Bringing thunderbird under the bus
> Nobody is making the comparison with Mozilla Thunderbird, which has asked its users for donations practically every time it starts up, with clearly visible banners
And then Wikipedia
> The same logic applies to Wikipedia.
Answering to 'comments'
> Some comments have even suggested
C'mon don't tell me it's professional, it looks amateurish.
First rule: you don't give out names.
Second rule: You don't push the fault on other even when it's their.
Third rule: you don't answer to 'comments', 'tweets', and so on. You say 'we heard feedback that this and this'.
I say it again, it feels like it's been written by a guy alone, no supervision whatsoever, and who didn't have the The necessary step back.
Making a statement of fact about media coverage isn't "bashing". And when you start off your argument by characterising it that way you've already lost.
I've been using "slopocalypse". People already know AI is responsible, but slop existed before — e.g. conventionally generated SEO spam. It's just... so much worse now.
Sorry, I realise this comment isn't up to HN's usual standards for thoughtfulness and it is perhaps a bit inflammatory but... look, I'd bet the majority of us on this site rely on GitHub and I can't be the only one becoming incredibly frustrated with its recent unreliability[0]?
(And, yes, I did enough basic data analysis to confirm that it IS indeed getting worse versus a year, two years, and three years ago, and is particularly bad since the start of this year.)
[0] EDIT: clearly not from looking at the rest of the comments in this discussion.
@KaiserPro has pasted the link to someone else's heatmap, which is really good. Mine was just an Excel spreadsheet with a graph that I'd intended to write a blog about but then got demotivated on because I was too busy with other things and I saw that heatmap as well. Maybe I will do a proper write up next time GitHub has an outage and I'm blocked by it.
Is IRIX experiencing a hobbyist revival or something? This is the second IRIX reference I’ve seen on here in the past two days, and there was a submission a day or two ago (c.f. a Voodoo video card?) as well. I haven’t personally encountered IRIX in the wild since a company I worked at in 2003. I suppose SGI has always had a cool factor but it’s unusual seeing it come up in a cluster of mentions like this.
SGUG tried hard to port newer packages for IRIX for several years but hit a wall with ABI mismatches leading to GOT corruption. This prevented a lot of larger packages from working or even building.
I picked up the effort again after wondering if LLMs would help. I ran into the ABI problems pretty quickly. This time though, I had Claude use Ghidra to RE the IRIX runtime linker daemon, which gave the LLM enough to understand that the memory structures I’d been using in LLVM were all wrong. See https://github.com/unxmaal/mogrix/blob/main/rules/methods/ir... .
After cracking that mystery I was able to quickly get “impossible” packages building, like WebKit, QT5, and even small bits of Go and Rust.
I’m optimistic that we’ll see more useful applications built for this cool old OS.
That is pretty neat. I guess this sort of unlocking and unblocking effort is exactly what’s needed for a revival.
I’m sort of thinking of AmigaOS/Workbench as well although, perhaps because of what I would assume was always a much larger user base than SGI had, it maybe never went away like SGI and IRIX did.
It is great seeing these old platforms get a new lease of life.
Ooh that's super interesting. I assume you shared the recipe with the irix community? I remember keeping Netscape up to date on my Indy was already a struggle in 2002.
This is a really interesting point that too often goes unexamined.
I don’t know how to design and integrate systems and products, and write code, because I was born that way. I had to learn.
Likewise, later on, I had to learn project management, and product management, and the language of business so I could communicate effectively with those lacking a background in technology. Again, wasn’t born that way: had to learn.
But in a quarter of a century, the number of people on the commercial side who’ve bothered to learn enough about the technology side to have an informed conversation? Very few. Probably count them on one hand (the naive way: not using binary).
And bear in mind we’re talking about businesses that were heavily if not totally reliant on technology and the delivery of technology solutions for their continued existence.
You’d think a few more of these people would want to take a bit more responsibility for those outcomes, and maybe be a bit less disruptive to productivity, given their livelihoods have often depended on the success of said outcomes.
On your parenthetical point, I also agree: some really weird camera selections, and frustrating dropouts, during the crucial moments of the launch.
Nevertheless, a real triumph, and I particularly enjoyed the "full send" remark from (I think) the commander. I also really enjoy the fact that the livestream is relatively light on commentary and that most of what you hear is from mission control and the crew.
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