skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Welcome to my world:) I'm a software dev and always worked in or around sap (~13years).

Sap's secret sauce was understanding that different companies have mostly the same needs. All have employees that need paying and maybe shifts to be tracked. All generate invoices. All buy stuff from suppliers, etc. So they built different solutions (HR/FI/etc.) For those needs. All running on the same technical platform with its own programming language: ABAP. All domain code is ABAP and everything is readable, you can even debug code that SAP wrote years ago but (generally) you're not allowed to change it. And it's full of comments in German so good luck :)

For medium to large companies it's a no brainer to use SAP so most do. For example Sap keeps the client's systems compliant with new laws. Say some country changes laws on how employees pay taxes, sap updates the code or tells their clients what's needed to update the systems.

Companies that have been around for a few years, most likely they already have SAP so makes no sense to shift to something else.

SAP's ERP code is also quite generic. Tons of configurations are possible in any module. E.g. you may have employees but no shifts. Or maybe you have 200 different shift patterns across many factories to configure. Configuration is so complex it's a well paid profession in itself: the functional consultant.

When that config is not enough to implement the requirements then developers can modify the system. Either changing existing ABAP code, or building new ABAP programs or (more commonly nowadays) just building webapps with the normal tools (react/node.js/java etc) in the cloud and using sap ERP as a backend to read/write data to. This last one sums up my day to day.

ABAP is interesting though. Syntactically it looks like COBOL and that you've gone back 40years plus most of the DB tables/columns/data types have seemingly random names like WERKS or DMBTR. They make sense in German after you've shortened the German meaning to 5chars :). So ABAP code looks very cryptic at first sight.

But semantically the language is ok. It is strongly typed, has some nice features for working with finance programs (e.g. fixed point arithmetic) and an OO model that feels familiar to anyone that knows Java (e.g. single inheritance).
SAP is the German's revenge on the world for losing WW2... :P
Soft agree with you about the secular ideologies, I keep wondering if the alternative was actually better. Pre globalization with hard borders, little travel, suspicious of your neighbours, long distance travel reserved for the rich. Is the old situation of social pressure to comply to local social norms better? I am not so hot about the culture of places with abject poverty. As you correctly pointed out it's amazing for a poor kid from Hyderabad or rather millions of other poor kids from similar places. I don't think there can be any kind of positive culture without peace, jobs and people getting along well.
There are some great examples here of both how far Airt has come and how far it still has to go.

Eg: https://prompthero.com/prompt/42a1e1dad9f - The description begins: "photo of a gorgeous woman Extremely detailed..".

The images are of a nice (blurry) den, but there is no-one in it.
Is that as in "Why is it worth only $163B?"
Excellent content strategy by Retool team to write about SAP. Retool is for every organisation who do not think of SAP but get the fast internal tools ready to be deployed.
> I'm a simple man; I see a post for John Cook, I upvote!

Doubly so for anything Ramanujan.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/936/
Passkeys are designed to take away further control from you and that is why BigTech are promoting it. Do you really want to tie your digital life to a device?
No, S4HANA is marketed as cloud. Reality is different.

How common is „three system landscape“ in cloud, like S4HANA?
Elastic scaling? No.
TCO footprint of an new tenant? Sigh.
That's a fairly weak article then.
Chuck some modern CSS on it, and you could call it "no-code", right?
Some more info about the awe-inspiring box art: https://ask.metafilter.com/347272/Who-did-the-box-art-for-Si...
Access is included with a $100/year ACM membership (excludes a few non-book items). Alternatively, each year they've had a black friday/cyber monday deal for $200/year.
Thanks for expanding! And do you see my other three refactorings similarly lacking?

To me it sounds as if you just didn't like JavaScript: the statement vs expression distinction constrains all non-JSX code too, e.g. you need to use the ternary operator to conditionally assign a value to a const variable.

Similarly, your example functions have long multi-line expressions as bodies so for the small gain of not needing the curly braces and a return statement, you pay a huge cost of not being able to use any statements in your code.
Money laundering is harder than not declaring taxes. You're not going to be able to run your business in perfect privacy.
interesting perspective to consider writing as graph traversal.
“Don’t put it there.”
Changing your desktop wallpaper without installing a karaoke captioning library
SAP can be quite innovative.

I remember SAP circa 2003. The only think that used XMLHttpRequest (AJAX aka dynamic html) was Outlook web frontend, and SAP web UI. GMail that widely popularized dynamic html did not even existed yet.
No, babel is completely optional for react+typescript.
I agree, the Tornado cash situation just shows the importance of making privacy a primary consideration in the currency itself
This lady represents British military violence to millions of black and brown people around the world. I don't understand why people, especially the British, aren't ashamed of this person.

India alone had $45 trillion dollars of wealth looted from the country: https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/how-britain-stole-dollar4...

Literally millions of Indians died as a result of deliberate policies of colonization and economic enslavement by the British.

Their history in Africa is too chilling to even recount here.

In 7 decades as a figurehead and leader of her people, she never apologized for these crimes, and continued to quietly benefit from the spoils of war.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-koh-i-noor...
Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages (2015)
I think this way of thinking is trapped in the past.

The reality of atmospheric carbon is that we have to get rid of it or face mass extinction. Trying to build some nostalgic idea of a untouched ecosystem in tune with 'nature' is just a feelgood ideology.

We're actually faced with an engineering project - the first planet that our species will terraform.
Not having a wheel is not really an issue for Python-only packages.
And ironically, the end result would be worse and more complicated, but the people that worked on it would get to write a blog and put it on their CV about it, and move on elsewhere without having to live with their own decisions.
> I love hating on moderation and I'm always ready to be critical of it, and of dang

That's an oddly positive attitude to hatred.
Speaking as an Irish person who hates inherited titles, those people are effing assholes. What part of don't speak I'll of the dead did they miss out on?
ADSL Router as Effects Pedal
But to the GP’s point, this VM config is a program, so why are you expressing it as a static config file? The ending virtual machine will be valid as long as the steps involved in its creation are.
> Linux gives you a built-in shaper (TBF) but there is a better idea out there (timing wheels) and rather than wait for a new kernel version, eBPF lets you get the new function into the kernel as eBPF code.

This is the really cool part about eBPF for me. On the other hand though, blurring the line between userspace and kernel space does raise some interesting questions, especially in production. For example, I wonder how much this would complicate enterprise support such as Red Hat's.
Hmm, this seems to be because of Google's new policy for verifying extensions. The domain (modernhn.com) hasn't been used for an extension before, so it needs to be around for a few months with a good track record to be verified. Their page [1] says:

> For new developers, it will take at least a few months of respecting these conditions to qualify.

Modern for Wikipedia [2] already meets those standards, and has the relevant badges, so I guess it'll just take some time for those to be approved and for the "Enhanced Safe Browsing" warning to be removed.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/discovery/#publis...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/modern-for-wikiped...
Don't know anything about your company or product, but I've been in 4 different companies where React was used. Every single one had different setup, best practices, state management lib, "the way" of doing things, bundler (create-react-app, next.js), etc.

Each project was so big, that I'm little in doubt about your statement "within 24h they contribute to the code". It could be your react apps are very very small or junior devs are very very good and probably shouldn't be called juniors.
The UX is horrible because:

a) Engineering: Nobody will rewrite 20 year old views just to improve the UX. In many cases, nobody even dares to touch the 20 years old spaghetti code.

b) Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying.

c) Management: There is a solid economical rationale in not giving a fcuk about UX. Over the years, SAP outcompeted and absorbed many competitors that were more interested in UX than golf. Golf won every single time. Nobody at the top understands or cares about UX because it does not bring more revenue, it is a cost.

Source: I am an ex SAP.
> Please don't participate in the discussion if you're going to be this bad faith.

That works both ways. You've asked a question, to which the information is easily accessible online[https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT213305]. It very clear from both the article and other online sources that this is based on WebAuthN[https://webauthn.guide]. You have been equally as disingenuous and based on your responses, acted in bad faith from the beginning in a bid to start a flamewar. How what you are doing is anything but basic bullying is beyond me.
> Both car safety and emergency medicine have got a lot better over time.

Don't let the walkable city and cycling activists hear you say that. From the way they tell it, modern cars have become rampaging murder machines.
:D You can run SAP in the cloud on Kubernetes: https://cap.cloud.sap/docs/guides/deployment/deploy-to-kyma

Also you can re-write everything in Rust https://blogs.sap.com/2020/07/23/learning-rust-with-cap-part...
All the alternatives have serious efficiency penalties. All the alternatives that have carbon atoms in them require either atmospheric CO2 capture (expensive) or capture and storage of CO2 from combustion (and now we're back to storage of a gas, and also we've just increased the per-output-power cost of the system, which is very bad.) Hydrogen is unique in requiring none of that and allowing cheap underground storage.
I think we will have supersonic planes, but they will be electric.

But to get there we first need normal conservative electric planes to make electric planes more normal. Battery have to be getting better for this to happen but I think we will get there, some people overestimate how large battery improvements we need by basically thinking they need to match chat fuel.

If you look at how far the currently in development electric plans can go you can see lots of improvements that can be made to increase that range considerably.

You can also build your air-frame out of batteries. The batteries themselves need to become structural members in the air-frame. Some manufactures are doing that already for cars but for plans it will be even more important.

Things like using a PRANDTL Wing and prop blade would make a large difference for example.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwtcDNB15E

It of course makes sense for startups like Heart Aerospace not to try these things but I think eventually people will. Electric planes will be so operational efficient that there will be huge demand to increase the range.
Playing Pokemon Together with Node.js – Samuel Agnew – JSConf US 2019
3-Minute Introduction to Bun JavaScript Runtime
SAP is successful because they've spent over 50 years learning how businesses work and somewhat successfully implemented reasonably configurable processes within their software. You need to handle MRP? Check. Multi-country payroll with complete integration to finance? Check. Even things as esoteric as downstream oil production (think ARAMCO). Check.

I'm not sure why in the early days they were more succesful than the competitors (JD Edwards, BAAN, etc) - all of the others were doing something similar but SAP overtook them all. Perhaps it was because the system was very flexible - if you needed to enhance the SAP-delivered functionality or build your own to integrated with SAP, they delivered tooling to do so (very crude in the early days, a lot better now).

Related to this is that almost all application souce is available to customers (not open source, but available to view and modify if required). For those who've never worked with SAP, the majority of the application code in their on-premise systems is written in a proprietary COBOL-like 4GL called ABAP. One of SAP's key differentiators in the early years was that customers had access to all of this code and, with the required access, could extend/modify as needed. A masterstroke IMHO.

Source: I've worked as an SAP consultant for 20+ years (including a fair number of those working for SAP) and I'm no fan of any of their products. For the number of extremely intelligent people who work there (and I mean that sincerely - a lot of their employees are /extremely/ smart and forward thinking), the code quality and quality control of their products is abysmal. It's like the majority of the code is written by people who did a training course last week and they /love/ overengineering things, reinventing the wheel or backing the wrong horse. SAP went all in on Silverlight at one point and these days they love OData, which NO-ONE really uses. It also took them years and years to officially support a browser other than IE.

At times they have done some pretty forward-thinking things though. In the late 80s they adopted three-tier before most (R/3, the first three-tier release came out in 1992) and they cleverly have a very portable application. Back in the days of the Unix wars SAP ran on pretty much every OS and all the major databases (heck, Microsoft had to convince them to port to NT and SQL Server, primarily so that Microsoft could run SAP on NT in their own back office).

Rambling a bit here but SAP still pays my bills (and fairly well at that), but I'm no fan and I'm always looking for a way out. Unfortunately, for me the situation is like many SAP customers - once you've checked in, it's hard to leave (apologies to The Eagles).
Only in US iPhone 14 doesn’t support physical SIMs
How to Not Block the Browser
I once encountered this problem when writing a video game as an never-published side project.

Most in-game items and resources were very simple - largely expressible by a simple <item_type>:<quantity> dictionary. Others however, could support a never-ending variety of custom attributes and logic.

After much thought, I wound up pursuing a solution that turned out to be quite powerful and extendible:

Items would be represented via a <item_type>:<<attr_key>:<attr_value>> datastructure. Any system that needed to interact with an item would call an 'item handler' assigned to that item type, which exposed a standard interface like 'getQuantity', 'useItem', etc.

Most basic items shared a common handler that stored quantity as an attribute field. However, more complex items could implement custom logic. I guess this is somewhat similar to Mixins or Component Based Architecture.

I think this is partially covered under the 'more abstraction' option in the blog, but I've personally found this to be an interesting and valuable tradeoff that can be deployed in a lot of situations.
Sensory Bridge Creates Beautiful Low-Latency LED Visualizations
I don't know about poetry, but prose? After the first draft, where there is some of this romantic instinct of writing by inspiration, the rest is hard work for months or years, more similar to finding bugs in a program than a divine muse driving you to write a masterpiece. Related in my blog: http://antirez.com/news/136
They wrote you can be agile if you move to the cloud. Did you try that?

I jest. But that's kind of the point. SAP is terrible by the nature of the beast. It's a closed off system with specialised developers who require all sorts of expensive certifications. That doesn't make for good developers, that makes for pigeon-holed developers who don't have a lot of competition.

A terrible SAP developer with all the certifications to their name would probably still find plenty of work, because the expectations are low to begin with, as proven by SAP being held in low regard across the industry.

To me, needing expensive certifications to prove your worth (as if...) is a big red flag. I'm a developer who has 20+ years of experience, I recently worked for Apple and other Fortune top 50 companies, I went from startups to enormous companies.

Nowhere did I need certifications. And my past experience was never enough to land a job. I'd have to prove myself in every job application. That's tiresome and feels extremely unnecessary, but it requires me (and my peers) to stay sharp.

Of course, none of the above is very black and white. There are certified developers who are amazing, and there are open-source developers who keep themselves relevant who actually suck at what they do.

But I'd argue that the SAP group of developers have far more developers who aren't very good and grow complacent, oftentimes because of their certifications. That, combined with a closed-off system, bad documentation, a lack of online support, and a much smaller community, will MORE often lead to software that is of lower quality.
Well, no, not completely solving it. There are limits to neutron fluence materials will withstand. Even neutron heating can't be too nonuniform in the blanket.
I think the mistake with SAP, as with that other article about a modelling pyramid at Ikea, is assuming that it is possible to create one system to rule them all without it being extremely inefficient and expensive.

It mirrors a dysfunctional business run on command-and-control rather than, like AWS, you have a large set of loosely affiliated teams and although you risk some duplication, it makes for much more agile work.

Imagine you have a supplier who supplies "products" but your system calls them "items", SAP would say that you have to standardise the nomenclature. Agile says, let them call them whatever works for them and lets build small systems with just the interfaces we need.

Sure, the senior management don't get their dashboards but it is still possible to get metrics from disparate systems and form pretty basic cashflow and inventory reports.
"replaced by swimming oil-fired power plants."
I find not having to contend with the break-up of iTunes into a gazillion of separate apps (so far, fingers crossed) to actually be an advantage of using it on Windows these days.

That's because I prefer to manage my collection of radio comedy episodes as podcasts [1], and with unified iTunes that's simply a matter of changing the media type of those files to "Podcast" and voila, it just works. On a modern Mac on the other hand, from what I've gathered this is no longer possible, and the separate Podcasts app that has replaced iTunes in that regards only supports subscribing to "real" podcasts, and doesn't allow manually adding additional episodes. (I suppose I'd have to resort to either hacking the local podcast database, or set up a local HTTP server with a fake podcast feed in order to add those files, or just give up on that prospect entirely…)

[1] So they don't clutter up my actual music library, to get the listened/unlistened visual indicator, and due to way I'm syncing iTunes with my Android phone, to also get my phone to remember the playback position, too (in iTunes you can enable remembering the playback position for any file, including music tracks, but my Android media player nevertheless only supports this for files synced over as "podcasts").
I mean I'm pretty confident that if SAP was rebuilt from scratch today, one could reimplement its core functionality within a tenth or less of that amount of code you mentioned.

But there's literally decades of use cases and experience contained in that code. That's one major issue with people thinking about rewriting software, they vastly underestimate the amount of things in there.

I mean on the surface SAP is just a database with a UI and some business rules - 99% of software is - but that in itself is so often underestimated.

(Source: anecdotal, I underestimated 'just' a configuration interface, except that it had hundreds of models and thousands of fields. In hindsight I should've looked for an off-the-shelf data management thing where all I would have had to do was configure the fields and validation rules and some rough layout. Instead I tried to build it in naive Go, sqlite, a REST API and a React/bootstrap front-end. It's a great solution IMO, but not if you're a solo developer working on a domain that big).
You can customise it, but you do need to stay within limits.

If you go too far, a SAP version upgrade is no longer a drop-in operation, but rather a year long project of porting all your changes to the new version.

If you stay as vanilla as possible, upgrades are a lot easier.
> Cromwell found it really quite straight forward to abolish the monarchy.

Nonsense. Cromwell had to fight and win a very bloody civil war to abolish the monarchy. Despite that it was still restored after his death.

The Right of Parliament controls the constitution of the UK and has done since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, not the current reigning monarch.
Are you sure that you compare final price in all the countries?

For example in the USA the price probably does not have sales tax, but in the European countries the price will most likely include VAT.
If anyone thinks about going for odoo - which I did for a customer - do yourself a favor and try anything else. Here's why:

The developer experience is terrible, simple template changes need a your modules to be "upgraded" which means every change takes several seconds at least.

The quality of the app ecosystem is so bad you almost can't install any non-core apps if you want to be able to maintain your project. And apps are incredibly expensive (250€ for a GDPR compliant cookie banner).
Most apps have quite few downloads so you don't know if you get what you're paying for.

The documentation is partially non-existing and you're supposed to read odoo's code to know how things works - which is true, but quite time consuming.

If you google technical questions you find odoo forum entries (which could be ok) that often contain just links to youtube videos or simply bad and out-of-date answers.

Here's a link to a forum post (full disclaimer - of me) about some of the things that kept me from getting things done with odoo: https://www.odoo.com/de_DE/forum/hilfe-1/rant-developing-wit...

These issues are just the tip of the iceberg. I honestly wonder how people working on/with odoo deal with this.
Things literally take multiples of the time they should and the whole process is a PITA.

Funny sidenote:
If you google odoo developer experience and try to find what others have to say about this, you get their conferences since they're called "odoo developer experience".
The EU parliament has elections and the politicians you can vote for are your own elected national politicians...

The only questionable thing here is that you cannot vote for politicians of other EU nations and that there is literally only one EU wide party called Volt.