The reverts will continue until morale improves

133 points by hans_castorp 3 hours ago on hackernews | 13 comments

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...

sammatilda | 2 hours ago

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 | an hour ago

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

andsoitis | an hour ago

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

: LastTrain | an hour ago
It is a play on the old joke “The beatings will continue until morale approves.”
: DangitBobby | an hour ago
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 | an hour ago
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 | an hour ago

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

: pak9rabid | an hour ago
Yes. There's always room for improvement.
: asdf88990 | 54 minutes ago
Yes, not only is there always improvements to existing functionality possible due to changes in improvements in general software engineering and mathematical methods beyond it or supporting new hardware features.
Generally, software engineering like other industries is evolving and there is need for different facilities. Consider graph and vector databases featuring, as well as json columns as examples of things you that are relatively recently in common use.

sublinear | 33 minutes ago

> as far as I can tell, this situation is not due to “vibe coding”. This code was written well before that was a possibility.

Since people refuse to read things on HN, I might as well bubble up this particular bullet point.

wodenokoto | 31 minutes ago

I’m not sure I like the headline.

A bunch of features that made it to beta turned out not to be in a state that could be made satisfactory for release time and so was reverted.

That seems to me to be the right thing to do. Unfortunate, but the right thing to do.

“[something] will continue until morale improves” is usually a sacastic dig at tone deaf and incompetent leadership (e.g, “firing will continue until morale improves”)

I don’t think that is fair to say here.

PaulKeeble | 8 minutes ago

Seems like this is more about the introduction of LLM code reviews that has found edge cases that would have otherwise been missed and fixed as they appeared over years in the future. The issue is that the volume of issues has been beyond what people could do in time.