Yet another Hacker News

The reverts will continue until morale improves

101 points hans_castorp 2 hours ago 15 comments

swiftcoder 1 hour ago | parent

Reverts kind of suck when it's your feature getting reverted, no doubt. But for something as foundational as Postgres, the more reverts the better...

glouwbug 1 hour ago | parent

But why were they reverted?

Did someone not understand what went in? Might someone have offloaded their thinking to some external tool? Did people stop caring? Did someone not plan or design a feature in full? Were the timelines unrealistic? Maybe with so many reverts timelines should be revised?

I wonder

jvanderbot 1 hour ago | parent

Well I have a document for you to read on this very question!

glouwbug 1 hour ago | parent

_Load bearing intensifies_

cwillu 55 minutes ago | parent

Huh?

kbenson 44 minutes ago | parent

GP is referring to the submission, in case that wasn't obvious. It's opining as to possible reasons, given the author is one of the people who had a feature reverted.

> Did someone not understand what went in?

Unlikely, from the context.

> Might someone have offloaded their thinking to some external tool?

No, according to the author, since the features predate most current LLM assisted coding.

> Did people stop caring?

I'm not sure what this means. Presumably things were reverted because people cared enough to make sure it was good quality before being released.

> Did someone not plan or design a feature in full?

An admitted possibility

> Were the timelines unrealistic?

Depending on what you mean, that may be correct according to the article, but I suspect not in the way you mean.

> Maybe with so many reverts timelines should be revised?

It sounds like there was a very large increase in load in some of the people that would commonly review during this time period, and that may or may not continue to happen to a greater or lesser degree in the future, it depends on how LLMs advance in finding bugs and if there are other large waved of bugs reported.

Paracompact 47 minutes ago | parent

The blog post mentions rising standards of quality enabled by AI-assisted code review, and that reverted code predates the era of AI. Even very competently managed codebases are not above mistakes, especially when held to as high of a standard as this.

sammatilda 1 hour ago | parent

Better to revert than lose a community that is invested in your ecosystem that starts looking elsewhere. I congratulate the team in acknowledging and doing the right thing. As a developer myself, I know it is a painful thing to do but important to listen to the community.

esafak 33 minutes ago | parent

This is a strong endorsement of postgres; it shows they take quality control seriously.

andsoitis 20 minutes ago | parent

I don’t get the meaning of the article subject.

LastTrain 13 minutes ago | parent

It is a play on the old joke “The beatings will continue until morale approves.”

DangitBobby 8 minutes ago | parent

It's a play on "the beatings will continue until morale improves". You obviously can't just beat morale into people, and, knowing that, the audience should understand improvements to a bad situation will not be forthcoming. It's often used for dramatic effect as dark/silly humor when something bad happens.

card_zero 6 minutes ago | parent

What, the title? "Until morale improves" is ineptly chosen, because it seems self-deprecating: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/07/15/morale/

Or if not the title, the general context is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50119991

TZubiri 19 minutes ago | parent

is it really necessary to keep using new version of postgres and to keep developing them? is it not done at this point?

pak9rabid 14 minutes ago | parent

Yes. There's always room for improvement.