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Even if you talk to users, you can do it the wrong way. Big companies are incentivized by the stock market to care more about new users than existing ones because their only focus is growth. Growth can't be rooted in your existing users is a common feeling in product management circles. If you try to do things for people other than your existing users, then you end up doing odd stuff that at best is a mild annoyance. More likely you hurt their ability to continue using the app.

It's not just about the language. The good money for these low-code tools is larger organizations which have deployment/hosting/compliance/maintenance concerns that need to be accounted for. You can knock out as many apps in whatever platform you want, but they don't want these at the IT gatekeeper level.

They want a tool that makes this file share talk to this SharePoint site which updates this ERP tool over there. The LLM approach is great for the departmental person (if they can still host shadow IT) but falls down at the organizational level. The nature of this work is fundamentally different, crappier, and less interesting than what any person on HN wants to be doing which is a contributor to misunderstanding of the market.

EDIT: fixed grammar.

>> Being a "transparent umbrella" does require knowing the personalities of your reports, some people do get distracted when they think higher-up decisions or unhappiness are going to affect their team.

There is the expectation that the manager knows who will be distracted. This is a basic part of knowing your people. I know which of my colleagues is going to get distracted without having the level of communication that my manager has. On one extreme, they just forward information knowing a report can work with it. One the other, the manager has to translate and communicate every element.

Ideally, the manager is already working on a way to ensure their report can handle transparency because that means they can work autonomously. You can't have individual contributors lead, if they are going to run into issues as soon as they discover what is going on overhead. They may not understand it yet, but they should have coping and mitigation strategies.

Engineers can be the worst group you could deal with when it comes to overhead conversations when they expect things to be orderly. Your organization is failing when everything has to go through managers and people can't operate independently.

I've wondered if people who write detailed specs, are overly detailed, are in a regulated industry, or even work with offshore teams have success more quickly simply they start with that behavior. Maybe they have a tendency to dwell before moving on which may be slightly more iterative than someone who vibecodes straight through.

>> Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.

How would the economics of this work universally? Jetbrains is a bit of an oddity in terms of SaaS. For the most part, it's desktop or on-premises software that was sold with a perpetual license. If you've bought a subscription and canceled, they've generated some revenue. Maintaining a subscription generates more revenue for them, but they can slow or stop development without stopping you from using the product.

SaaS is typically some server software hosted by someone else which most often doesn't have an on-premises version. They can stop making feature updates, but if they turn off the servers, the service ends. They still have costs even if you use the software less. You can argue about the profit margins, but that's not the point here. As most SaaS companies don't start with on-premises, they can't ever get their software working there for many reasons. There are a few like Atlassian and GitHub that do both, but if you look at the heritage, both are really on-premises first.

This is a better article than other recent ones on XML vs JSON. "The S-Expression Connection" is something that resonates having been in the .NET space where Don Box was active and whole bunch of web services things (good and bad) overlapped.

It's right to question this. I had taken https://www.photosync-app.com/support/basics/answers/does-ph... ("PhotoSync transfers the original, unaltered images including all EXIF and GPS data") on face value without thinking of all of the iCloud behavior. Even limited copies would suffice in my case, but that's insufficient for others.

Does the PhotoSync app permit that? I use it to copy files to my NAS but it has some USB-related options I never explored. I used to use Image Capture but heard of PhotoSync and have never looked back.

I was a Feed Demon user. There are some videos of the experience which is much closer to a Windows email client than Google Reader was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIz5u9T94K0. Google Reader was late-stage RSS for me, but it brought some of the benefits of having all of the content download and aggregation being done server-side so the cost of adding new feeds was shared.

A common setup was to have a folder hierarchy similar to email. Blogs were in folders organized by topic using whatever approach you felt best. You'd then dip into parts of the hierarchy. There often wasn't an aggregated feed that you could use but you could see a list of all items per blog. Each blog would then be highlighted or show a count when there was new content.

I said blog instead of feed because social networks had a focus on the single scrolling feed as a list of content aggregated from different authors. Some RSS clients embraced this to a degree, but it didn't start out that way. Twitter was the first social network I really used in 2007 to follow bloggers I subscribed to, and it took a while to adjust to this firehose of interspersed content. That wasn't an uncommon sentiment from devs.

What if you have deleted social media accounts? It's possible to state that you had them with whatever identifiers, but do you have to prove their existence in some way so they can check an archive (assuming it was Twitter)?

The original article is about a UK university. Cashflow and revenue generation is a very important topic for UK universities. They have copied the approaches of US universities, and in many cases have created overseas campuses when they have some name recognition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_branch_campus for examples.

Did a JS polyfill ever go anywhere? There is a comment on https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/zIg2K... which suggests that it might be possible, but a lot has changed. I suspect any effort died with continued availability after the first attempt to kill XSLT.

The sites sometimes want to provide some special formatting on top of the RSS without modifying it. For example, you might point people to available RSS readers which may not be installed or provide other directions to end users. RSS feeds are used in places other than reading apps. I've seen people suggest that this transformation could be done server-side, but that would modify the RSS feed which needs to be consumed.

This is probably one of the few things I think works better in an office environment. There was older equipment hanging around with space to set it up in a corner so people could sit down and just go. When mobile came along there would be sustainable lending program for devices.

With more people being remote, this either doesn't happen, or is much more limited. Support teams have to repro issues or walk through scenarios across web, iOS, and Android. Sometimes they only have their own device. Better places will have some kind of program to get them refurb devices. Most times though people have to move the customer to someone who has an iPhone or whatever.

You can nerf network performance in the browser devtools or underprovision a VM relatively easily on these machines. People sometimes choose not to and others are ignorant. Most of the time, it's just the case that they are dealing with too many things that are vague making it difficult to prioritize seemingly less important things.

A number of times I've had to have a framing discussion with a dev that eventually gets to me asking "what kind of computer do your (grand)parents use? How might X perform there" around some customer complaint. Other times, I've heard devs comment negatively after the holidays when they've tried their product on a family computer.

I could have been clearer. I wouldn't say it's the paragon of photo editing, but it's further along in terms of usability. I've seen some normal people who don't want to pay the Adobe tax move to it.

An investigation of FOSS development would highlight a bunch of problems that exist to a lesser extent with other software development. When money is on the table and there is no motivation to keep supporting behaviors that particular contributors favor then feedback shift things. When you're building stuff for "yourself" then that feedback doesn't land the same even if the project owner has aspirations for better UX.

I'm not a FOSS advocate, but I think that's a bit strong. I think it's more a case that they recognized the need for a good user experience, but that never hit a threshold which would move the needle for change to happen with the most popular FOSS. Darktable is probably one of the exceptions here.

What's the use case for this? It seems to be for situations where you might have a SaaS product, but there is some data required from a customer system. You'd expose the customer data using this relay and integrate into the SaaS. Is that the gist of it? Integration would still likely involve you giving the customer some software to expose a limited API and handle auth, logging, etc.

The problem is that the data has to go somewhere. If you don't have the compute power locally, you have to send it to a server you control. At a point, this starts to break down because your attention to detail isn't sufficient to protect other operators. I think there are some happier mediums, but I wouldn't be as strident as saying there is no risk even if this is stored locally.

>> feeling of optimism and hope for the future.

I thought I was strange for feeling this when I brought my US-raised kids back to Northern Ireland this spring. Some would have been visible from my childhood home had they been built earlier. It made me think that maybe these people can get something right for the future.

If they have to touch and go, how long would it take until they get the plane around for another approach? In fact, you might not get as far as that touch and go and have to go around. You need some margin for all of these eventualities. The likelihood is low that these happen, but they have to be accounted for.

It's far from all they can do, but it seems like they are focused on some important and achievable goals. These then feed into adoption which will bring other investment because Servo will be viable for more use cases. I see this investment more at the level of basic science research.

Which VC is going to be interested in implementing accessibility in this situation? The Sovereign Tech Fund is an organization that values this. It's too long term and uncertain of a project for most entrepreneurs to be involved in too.

I don't think anyone desires fragmentation. It's just the reality of the space. People were exploring options but didn't have support from the key stakeholders who were the browser makers (IE was at its peak) and Google. Firefox and WHATWG advanced some of the ideas in time.

People always mention RDF when the semantic web comes up. It's really important to understand where W3C was in the early-2000s and that RDF was driven by those with an academic bent. No one working with microformats was interested in anything beyond the RDF basics because they were too impractical for use by web devs. Part of this was complexity (OWL, anyone?), but the main part was browser and tool support.

If you go back to the time when they were invented, many semantic elements, like article or footer, didn't exist in HTML. People tried to find conventions and efforts like microformats were an attempt to standardize those when the best solution (updating the HTML standard) was difficult. In terms of timing, it's worth looking at the arc of Firefox, WHATWG, the advent of Safari and Chrome, and table use for layout.

Google was a driver in practice. Accessibility and better web experiences were important to those involved. The reality was that people interested in this area were at the bleeding edge. Many people still held onto tables for site layout and Flash was still a default option for some in the period when microformats emerged.

You would think that this is an odd question. It's such an odd question if grant a degree of anonymity. I've seen a similar type of question, as it relates to affordances for parents in the workplace, like no on-call for a time when a newborn is on the scene. I don't know if this is just happening because people are feeling unfairly impacted when folks on teams become parents, but I'm always bracing for these comments now.

Slack has been acquired. It's the same with all of these big tech companies. There is a period after acquisition where things appear to stay the same. The reality is that the real work is now happening. Operations are being studied to understand how to fold the acquisition into the parent company.

The shadow IT model isn't the dominant one in the space where Salesforce play. They used that to a degree too when they were small, but they now lean towards enterprise sales. Shadow IT is sold as a risk by them. Want something secure, safe, and compliant? Work with us because we'll sign up to these things contractually (even if delivery is questionable.)

This means that a slack salesperson has to choose between targeting a department and pissing off IT versus working on a company-level deal. This changes behavior significantly. It also changes lots of the economic expectations. Previously, these little deals here and there could add up. On top, you might get credit from driving engagement. Now you carry a much larger quota where engagement is important in practice, but not in how sales is executed.

This drives the behavior you see here. Someone is reevaluating each of the current deals with this new lens. In practice, they can maximize revenue with these bullying tactics. Many times, in the enterprise space, it's better for a customer to be cut off, or give up, even if this is temporary. The intention is for the customer to return and agree to different terms even if the financials are adjusted to something more favorable.

>> On the other hand, while typescript supports a lot of the enterprisey nonsense similar to C#, the majority of the ecosystem is written with simple functions, callbacks and options objects. Not in an enterprisey way.

Going back to culture, who makes up the Typescript community? While C# devs are attracted to it there are many multiples more devs coming from a JavaScript background. This has a big impact on how the culture developed.

Taking a step back. C# devs often need to do frontend work. They could go with what the industry has settled on, React, or go another way. The bulk go with react and some perhaps lament still have to switch their brain to another mode for that work. Frontend is obviously more fragmented, but the scale prevents C# devs from influencing patterns to the extent that they do on the backend.

I'd argue similar for Java devs when it comes to frontend. In the case of Blazor, I think C# patterns are a much smaller factor in decision-making. In fact, lots of C# adherents would default to React given it's the industry standard.

>> That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand.

This is based on the idea that there is some exception from previous rules and regulations. Before Bitcoin existed, lots of these rules were formulated. Now Bitcoin is on the scene and has evolved best practices for self-custody that ignore everything that went before. Bitcoin becoming more popular and integrated means that the rules from US financial system will start to be applied.

There is no surprise in this. If more effort was put into mitigating the concerns of the US financial system (or others) then things like this wouldn't happen. However, the truth is that the philosophies are incompatible so it's just a war of attrition that will unsurprisingly result in conformance to US financial regulation.

Possibly, but this not unreasonable for regular employees. They are not paid enough to deal with the consequences of making a mistake in a low volume situation.

If they go off-piste, even when that is a valid action, then they are likely going to be penalized by their employer's compliance department. That's because that piece of bureaucracy is still required at the next stage of bureaucracy. Now level 2's life is harder. It's best just to ignore and move on. There will always be some non-zero failure rate like this as long as bureaucracies exist.