Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jongjong 240 days ago
Yes, it's impossible for a distributed system to figure out the collaborative intent when it sees conflicting changes... Even the people who made the changes may not 'know' what is the correct way to resolve the conflict... For that to happen, people involved would have to communicate and agree on either option or they would have to agree on a compromise. This problem cannot be solved automatically because computers cannot read minds (yet).

This is why I like using granular data structures where each value can be updated in an all-or-nothing manner and if one person's change overwrites another, the person whose change was overwritten will just assume that the other person made an update shortly after and the amount overwritten is minimal.
1 comments
edbaskerville 240 days ago
I think the really interesting problem in this space is designing UIs and data structures that, on the one hand, capture as much user intent as possible, but, more importantly, make it easier for users to manage conflicts.

I.e., if there's a tricky conflict, the app need not resolve it at all. Rather, it should provide, by default, a nice way for the user to manage the resolution as part of the normal workflow.

Or, phrased another way, conflicts aren't conflicts. Parallel, "conflicting" edits are simply a state of affairs that is inherent to the process, and are still reflected in the data structure after merging all edits.

How this would actually look would probably vary from domain to domain. But my general philosophy on this stuff is that if complexity is real and potentially important to the user, the software should expose the complexity and enable the user to manage it, not force a simplification that hides something important.

link
jongjong 238 days ago
For CRUD applications with real-time updates, I find that updating individual fields as opposed to overwriting the entire record works sufficiently well. It can be dome relatively cheaply using WebSockets. Would be overkill to use HTTP to update individual fields (as each request carries redundant headers) but WebSocket frames are very lightweight. I've built a serverless platform on this principle and it helps to simplify the frontend components.
link