4 minutes ago by supernova87a
Yeah, this is geeky and technically pleasing, but destined to live only as long as the guy has enthusiasm or the will to keep doing this as a small business. As soon as it comes time to have someone take ownership or manage the system, the model breaks. What retail bakery employee is he going to find to maintain the SELECT * FROM statements and look at the Github repo for release notes?
There was a post a few years ago with the message "don't get too clever or special when designing a system if you want it to be maintainable for any reasonable cost by an average programmer". I think this is related...
Edit: the bakery website is gone or down, 2 years after the story.
11 hours ago by submeta
Iāve been using MS Access some twenty years ago to do all sorts of magic for small businesses. That was from the 90s to the early 2000s. - Later Iād use Python to do magic for companies who didnāt know anything better than MS Excel to handle large sets of data, and when they were lost in chaos, Iād start to streamline, process, tidy their data and help them make sense.
Just two examples that showed me: Use whatever helps you to get the job done, automate and streamline processes, select tools that might give you a competitive advantage.
Edit: I love Emacs, for everything text and code and some more, but there are way better tools for the task the author describes.
3 hours ago by jimmyed
On almost all Emacs posts, I see folks go like,
"<harsh criticism> PS: I love Emacs"
10 hours ago by bitwize
Emacs (esp. with org-mode) sits close to the barycenter of the space of problems like this, where the vector sum of "effort to use the solution to solve the problem" and "engineering effort needed to build the solution" is quite low. Building a React web app, or a Visual Basic bespoke app, might yield a nicer to use program, but would require more effort than throwing something together with Emacs Lisp, SQLite, and org-mode.
It's one reason why I won't give Emacs up, again despite half of Hackernews being convinced the VSCode will solve world hunger.
10 hours ago by submeta
I love Emacs and Orgmode, especially in combination with Sqlite. And I am convinced that VS Code - despite doing so many things right - does not have the versatility and the capability of Emacs, no matter how many packages are written for it because it is not intended to be configured by itās end users in a way where they read the code of the packages, learn from them, change them according to their needs and automate all kinds of processes / workflows with it. Emacs is an application framework for the user with a hacker mindset. And Emacs Lisp is the underlying scripting languages that invites you to play around with your tool.
Having said that: Yes, you can run your business with Emacs alone. But I am not convinced it is the right tool for the job.
3 hours ago by machawinka
Viscose is impressive, but emacs is a lisp machine.
10 hours ago by jsilence
Only vaguely related: what would be the Access equivalent of today? Somethings with low learning curve and forms.
Any suggestions?
7 hours ago by tyingq
Commercial Web-Based Databases: http://quickbase.com https://www.zoho.com/creator/ https://www.knack.com/ https://bubble.io/ https://airtable.com/ https://www.claris.com/filemaker/ https://www.appsheet.com/ https://ninox.com/en https://www.honeycode.aws/ https://www.ragic.com/ https://www.fusioo.com/
Surprisingly, there's not much in the way of open source with the same level of functionality as above. Here's a few:
https://cortezaproject.org/ https://www.openxava.org/ https://www.joget.org/ https://www.nubuilder.com/ https://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html https://baserow.io/
9 hours ago by jedimastert
Access still exists, although I haven't used it in a long time
Alternatively, you can access Google Sheets with SQL queries, although I guess it probably wouldn't be great, but Google Forms + Sheets?
3 hours ago by snuxoll
Force.com/Salesforce - literally the reason I pushed our business unit to purchase a couple dozen Force.com-only licenses was we had teams that needed really simple apps to store and track data and my team (internal development) did not have the bandwidth to make them with our traditional stacks.
Had something up within 48 hours, still working and worth it to this day.
6 hours ago by brandonmenc
> what would be the Access equivalent of today
Access.
9 hours ago by d_burfoot
I think PostgreSQL is great, but I also think SQLite would be much better for this use case.
8 hours ago by oblio
What would be even cooler would be a minimally updated FoxPro, just to make it run on modern OSes and such.
5 hours ago by lmz
xharbour?
7 hours ago by nimchimpsky
why ?
11 hours ago by wolfgang42
(2019); discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19252952 (191 comments)
10 hours ago by Topgamer7
In his follow up post he talks about union combining identical results. If the author ever reads this, you can prevent that by using `union all` instead of just `union`. That won't remove duplicates.
10 hours ago by radiowave
Indeed, though his work-around of adding a path column is something is worth having anyway, because it makes it much easier to see where the generated output has come from.
2 hours ago by Tostino
It is forcing the engine to do more work though, because it demands a distinct result set, so it adds extra nodes to the plan to remove duplicates. If you know your query doesn't have duplicates, it's much smarter to not add an extra whole sort/distinct when totally unnecessary for correct results.
40 minutes ago by adrianN
I'm fairly sure that a bakery doesn't produce the amounts of data where you need to worry about such things.
10 hours ago by ed25519FUUU
This is super cool, but Iād worry a lot about passing on the domain knowledge to somebody else without a dead-simple TUI/GUI. Eventually somebody else will need to run things.
8 hours ago by codemonkey-zeta
Will this be software the author will ever have to pass on? I'd guess probably not, considering it's software for his small bakery. It's software directly tied to his identity - he's the sole consumers. That's exactly the kind of software emacs is great for, and precisely the kind of software "hacker" types use.
He's not going to sell this as a "bakery management system" and become a software company, he's just going to bake bread. If he needs to share the _information_, then he can just print reports, that's ostensibly what the system is _for_.
2 hours ago by AlexCoventry
If he wants to grow beyond a single shop, he'll either need a standard entry format, or be prepared to compete for employees against enterprises which actually need a high degree of technical literacy.
an hour ago by redisman
A software engineer starting a bake shop doesn't exactly sound like someone looking for a "scalable" business.
6 hours ago by undefined
8 hours ago by asguy
This reminds me of supermarket clerks running IBM 3270 apps one handed. As long as the UI is straight forward, it doesnāt need to be pretty or slick. It just needs to be second nature.
10 hours ago by spicybright
I'd also worry about bugs accidentally inserting bogus data into it.
The author says he doesn't like spreadsheets because of all the copy and pasting, but I think that's a feature.
You go over every calculation to make sure it's right, and once you have a template sheets to copy and paste for a monthly report or something, you're able to do a lot less of that.
It can be hard to view a raw database to track issues down depending on how it's structured. Usually you need more than viewing tables as spread sheets at least.
8 hours ago by dm319
Training I guess?
8 hours ago by slk500
Soon Emacs will replace bread oven.
9 hours ago by eb0la
Well, looks like Emacs is really an operating system disguised as a text editor.
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