skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Correct, collaboration is much better (realtime editing/chat/cloud storage and sharing).

Admittedly, Excel has a smoother editing experience (which is the real issue here) and is probably better suited for more resource heavy tasks, but Google Spreadsheets excels [intentional] in the following areas:

API -- http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/

Scripts/Templates -- http://code.google.com/googleapps/appsscript/

Forms -- http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

External data functions -- http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Revision History --

Some of this might be achievable in Excel, but it's not integrated as well and requires much more wrangling (e.g. VB scripts).
Into Eternity
Did you read the part about taxes?

-50% alone to the federal government.
-1% of your total net worth, which is means you may have to pay taxes, even when you have no profits coming in.
-Anytime he purchases something, he is charged VAT
-They mentioned 25% payroll taxes
-This doesn't include local city/state taxes
-There are tons of other taxes that aren't even mentioned (property, luxury, etc)

After all this, there isn't much left over. At that point, it's almost state capitalism. The state pretty much owns every company.

Even better, you can figure out exactly how much anyone makes through the government website.

More gems from the article:

"When you start buying expensive stuff, people start to talk," says Dalmo. "I have to be careful, because some of the people who are judging are my potential customers."

I don't know about you, but I would rather have the added risk of health care than having the government in full control of my business.

The unemployment rate is also misleading. Does Norway consider people that are getting government assistance unemployed?

"Between workers who do the same job at a given com
pany, salaries vary little, if at all. At Wiggo Dalmo's company, everyone doing the same job makes the same salary."

Interesting, so I guess skill set doesn't really matter in Norway. A guy with 6 months of experience will be paid the same rate as a guy with 4 years.

Some people are alleging that Norway isn't socialist. They are more socialist than I ever thought.

"firing an employee for cause typically takes months, and employers generally end up paying at least three months' severance. "

More proof that starting a company may be easy, but having a long-term business will be tough. If you are bootstrapping a company, how can you possibly afford this?

"The three things we as Americans worry about—education, retirement, and medical expenses—are things that Norwegians don't worry about,"

Norwegians are putting all of their eggs in one basket, which is riskier than anything in my mind. They are under the impression that their government will be around to pay for all of their medical expenses in 30-40 years when they want to finally retire. What happens if the system collapses during that time? Since the majority of your money is going into the system, you won't nearly have enough to pay out of your pocket.

"Even if Nordlaks made no profits, paid no dividends, and paid its owner no salary, Berg would owe the Norwegian government a third of a million dollars a year. "Every year, I have to take a dividend, just to pay the tax," he says, sounding genuinely angry."

I'm amazed that people actually put up with this. I would have left that county asap.
I edited just the capitalization of the title. I did a cut and paste from the original article and did not want to do any editing on my own. I guess the white house needs an Editor-in -Chief.
Submitted lots of times. Here are a few:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156163

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157322

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2159550

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161867

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163105
"What Toronto's got that the Valley Can't Provide"

Bandwidth caps?
Why is this viewed as a problem? He's already said he has never (and won't) set a cap limit on the number of startups he accepts, so if he gets more great companies, there will be more great companies. And also, when has people fighting for your product (his product, being this mentor program) ever been an issue? If anything, this is going to skyrocket his clout and prove that what he's doing works (and very well).
Why do they discriminate based on age?
They also mentioned having not seen mockups. I'd imagine they just lifted the picture from the plugin page, and that the real thing will have much deeper Facebook integration.
New images of remote Brazil tribe
After my PhD in EE, when I started my graduate work in Linguistics I had quite a shock to see how different they thought and argued (and then I took a course in the philosophy of department, that's a different story altogether).

My advice would be: Try to get the most out of meeting with them. It's easy to look down on the "soft sciences", but you'll be surprised at the insights you may learn. You should not use jargon, even if it sounds mundane to you, they won't understand it and think you're doing it deliberately to look clever.
I question the judgment of all the bloggers I have seen commenting about this given that not enough information has been given in any article about it in order to say hardly anything.

It has been several days of discussion. There is little discussion that this is a loan, which must be paid back, or at the lender's discretion can convert into equity, without a value cap.

Nor has anyone asked or answered - how much equity are we talking about? It does make a big difference and without knowing both that and the details of each business, no one can say if this is a good deal for either side.

Much discussion acts like this is free money, or winning the lottery, or even that it's a straight trade of equity for cash.

Analysis is at the level of observation that "150 is greater than 17" therefore "it is a better deal now". But "150 is greater than 17" has little to do with anything, and such level of analysis is as financially naive as the prudence shown by those who bought million dollar houses and thought they could afford it because the initial payments were $500 a month, but which came with a variable APR that undergoes a big increase after 12 months, and then has a balloon payment greater than the original mortgage value if you make it to the end of the loan. But the monthly payment is $500 so why not eh, and ignore all other details of the contract. It seems like the financial skills here stop at is one number bigger than the other, and anything involving percentages, conditions, or interest is simply overlooked because it is beyond people's mathematical skills.

Poor math skills and an inability to read contracts are common in our society and this weakness is definitely exploited in many situations.
If we're on analogies, this is like the USPS deciding in the early 2000s that you have to pay to receive mail as well as to send it. eBay and Amazon have just made it big and resulted in a massive increase in package deliveries, so USPS decides to double-dip and get a slice of the Internet pie.

Also, the cost of postage does not go down -- their revenues just go up.
Your contributions will be missed.
hi, I am considering moving to Canada from the Washington DC area. Where would you consider the most startup-friendly areas in Canada be?
ISPs will lose this argument, and not because governments will necessarily ban them from charging content providers, but because if they try, the content providers will just cut them off. Users care more about Netflix and Youtube than they do about who provides the pipe to their home, and they'll switch in droves once they can't access Youtube anymore. Content providers are in the position of power here.
Thanks for the feedback.

1) I'm rather fond of our yellow buttons myself.

2) You can track a person's events by following them on Twitter - at the moment the Lanyrd social graph and the Twitter graph are the same thing. We're going to add "follow" buttons on Lanyrd to make it easier to follow someone without having to go to Twitter to do it.

3) That's definitely coming. For the moment, you can use our RSS feeds for that (on the place pages, topic pages and even the topic-in-place pages) but it won't be an RSS-only feature forever.
If/when you need to disagree/contradict them frame it in a way that is not like you are the authority.

Generally, it's probably better (more polite) to say "I am pretty sure it's actually..." or, "I always thought it was .." even when you know 100%.

Wikileaks is probably a good topic of conversation (politics and technology).
Much appreciated - I understand why you felt that way, but it is just so much easier to read in the new format.
I work at Yammer. It's awesome.
Waterloo, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto. Probably in that order.
Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard
This is impossible, I'm sorry.

Maybe a couple of cities in the US have more than one broadband provider, but most of us only have one choice. If netflix decided to cut off cox communications as well as qwest, I would be SOL.
This product was doomed to fail because both sides of the tech spectrum are over looking it. Those with some tech knowledge know the Android OS it uses isn't meant for tablets. Those with Little to no tech knowledge know that the next iPad is coming out and they are looking past the Galaxy Tab. I know Samsung wanted to get in the market ASAP but a couple months wait would have helped them immensely.
Great point. Keep in mind that for the next 4-6 months, a lot of new startups are going to be focused on YC because of the guaranteed 150k funding. This means, there will be a lot of opportunity with other angel investors who will be eager to invest on startups out of YC. And if you are lucky and hardworking (in terms of seeking funding), you may even get more money than the 150k. It is actually a win-win situation for new startups.
> "It almost seems like Excel's designers worked really hard to come up with a user interface that would make introducing errors trivial and noticing errors very hard."

Or, rather, Excel's designers spent very little time and effort into support for non-trivial formula creation and use.

But, if we all seem to agree that Excel is not the place for serious calculations, can we fairly continue to take shots at Excel for being bad at supporting them?

i.e. When I see people maintain non-trivial web apps by opening notepad against production code, it never occurs to me to complain that notepad should have syntax highlighting, collaboration and version management, etc.
In JS web apps, the most common speed constraint you'll encounter is how fast you can render views and update the DOM. Imagine trying to render 500 list items ... say, contacts in an address book -- you don't really want that to take 3 seconds on an iPad. If it works for your needs, that's fantastic, but it's nice to be aware of the performance relative to alternatives that accomplish the same goal.
thanks everyone. ill try some of these out.
Hi, Alain here, one of the co-founders. If you have high karma on Hacker News, you should know that you don't need an invitation code from TechCrunch, you are automatically welcome :-)
> Yes, I did not mean that Megastore is eventually consistent. It is not, it's ACID compliant and uses Paxos. Real question: was this not stated clearly in my comment (I'd like to edit to clarify if it is)?

I was interpreting the nod to Megastore in the context of the first sentence, which seemed pretty strongly about eventual consistency. Nothing to worry about, though - your followup comments are very clear!

> Megastore, however, is an example of a "NoSQL" system

Looking at Google's recent papers, they actually seem to be moving more in a SQL-ish direction. Dremel, in particular, appears to be a variant of SQL that allows easier access to nested and/or repeated columns. I thought Megastore was in a similar vein, but at that moment I can't seem to find the link that made me believe that (other than seeing that it uses strongly typed schemas).

Regardless of the benefits of a SQL-like language as an interface, however, I think you have a good point: the underlying architectural decisions about things like consistency or stability are very interesting, but often obscured.
Thank you for the advice!

Also, I should mention that I am indeed fascinated by the multitude of topics that other have studied, but that I don't know anything of. That's the problem, I believe: I want to get past the mundane "So what is that?" sort of questions.
In many places, there are only 1, sometimes 2 choices for internet. If AT&T or Charter (my 2 choices) wanted to make it hard or more expensive for me to receive Netflix, there would be little as a consumer I could.
Ironically, last year moot gave a talk at TED last year that made very much the same argument: we're moving toward a system of persistent identity online, and everyone seems to be okay with that when they probably should be regarding it with more caution.

Here's a link to the video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...
There have been several studies showing that Netflix bandwidth use has exceeded that of torrent traffic.

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/15151-netflix-popularity-excee...

A factor that adds to the impact of the streaming services is their use being more concentrated around the already high traffic peak viewing periods.

It is more than a little absurd that ISPs complain about users actually using what they're paying for. The days of people paying for broadband and using little more than email, chat, and simple web pages are over. And many of those that have consumed video online for some time are now understandably needing more bandwidth for higher quality now.

The situation with mobile is where many will be getting upset. Networks are being billed as fast and offering all sorts of video, but many consumers face plans limiting them to no more data in a month than most could get with low-end home broadband plans in a day. Of course there are good reasons why massive numbers of people can't be heavily consuming video at once on mobile networks, but the providers are not very up front about it.
I love OpenID and use it as much as possible. The only problem I have with it is the URL-as-username approach it takes. When a site asks me for the URL, I don't use OpenID as I always forget it. If the site asks me to "log in with Google using OpenID" or something similar I will use it. I don't see how people say that OpenID is a solution in search of a problem: I DO have the problem that I don't want to create a new account for every site I use. The problem is there, and some uses of OpenID really do solve it.
Android Tablets Gain on Apple IPad in Fourth Quarter
The problems pointed out in this post have turned into a major issue. A clinical trial was designed to test cancer treatments recommended by the erroneous analysis. The trial was stopped (and restarted and stopped again) and now the National Cancer Institute is conducting an investigation.
It's already on the front page
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2162620
TL;DR: don't be complacent.

Slightly less TLDR: companies which foster working there all the time (Facebook, Google) are the kind of people who need to go out and meet people besides their coworkers. Companies which foster working on their own stack the whole time (Microsoft) are the kind of people who need to go out and use other programming languages.
It's still different, as a 4chan user myself I know for a fact I wouldn't get up to the same antics if the site had my email on record.
Sorry if I gave the impression that you were passing judgement. I just find it interesting that smart people come up with the same ideas again and again.

"Taxation" is not the best way to put it. It is a market exchange. In exchange for a fixed portion of your value output (which will be variable), the company guarantees a certain payment upon a fixed input (usually hours-per-week).

Thus the company is essentially taking on the risk that you will produce enough value to cover the cost and leave some space for profit.

If you or the company disagree about the values involved, the employment relationship ends.

The concept that a capitalist's profits come from the risk he or she takes to earn them is the other half of what is missing from the Marxist theory of economics -- following almost inevitably from the adoption of the labour theory of value.
Yep, except you have to add FedEx, UPS, etc. won't carry your packages because they don't serve your area.
This is pretty creative - does anyone have suggestions on how I can convert this into a screensaver?
Might be the marketing budget. "Don't worry founders, we get it we arn't idiots, look, we are so cool 90% of YC companies are funded by us."
http://rapportive.com/
If it matters, there's currently A LOT of money in Montreal. VC funds are full and they're desperately looking for deals. If you have a decent team with a decent idea, they'll just throw money your way.
Google Teams Up With Twitter And SayNow To Bring Tweeting-By-Phone To Egypt
Yeah, but... that's kinda the point, right?

If moot wanted to make another /b/, he'd just add on another board, like he did recently with /soc/.
What is deck.ly?
Finally, I can rise to prominence as The Other Jacques!

edit: I can't read this thread, I feel like everyone is addressing me personally :/
Bah, sorry about that. I'm lame. I forgot hit submit and stepped away and I didn't notice it was already posted.

Deleting.
it seemed that the pivot they were taking at the end was in a similar direction to what lanyrd is doing. just a thought, is all.
US Leaders VS Chinese Leaders aka (Lawyers vs Engineers)
Some love for those of us with low karma would be good karma.
If you're on a Mac, you can do it with Quartz Composer: http://www.cybero.co.uk/QuartzComposerJavaScriptGuide-Eng/in...

If you do make a Quartz composition out of this, please do share it!
There are touchscreen technologies that claim to work in these kinds of environments. Namely, infrared and surface acoustic wave. But I don't know how well they actually hold up in the real world.
Yes, especially on the first: he picked JavaScript specifically because it had so few libraries (implicitly: for a well-known and likeable enough language). Conversely, had he picked a language with lots of existing (blocking) libraries, node might well have been dismissed as broken or half-assed.
Downvoted? That's awfully harsh for just pointing out that most companies can't get consumers to drop hundreds of dollars out of sheer brand trust, on a product they don't understand and don't know how to evaluate.
What those European ISP suggest is simply outrageous, those service already pay an insane amount of money to serve their traffic, i don't see a valid reason to double bill them.

At 0.037euros/GB the money involved would be just insane, if i take the numbers from one of the website i manage, at this rate, to serve Italia, France, Germany and Spain, it would cost, at 3.7c/Gb as suggested, 1.3Meuros roughly... Might as well shutdown the site as we would make no money out of it.

Between that, and the Canada CRTC madness, it is really not a good time to be a content provider.
I'm rather new to HN, so I was wondering, can I buy some of that Karma on E-bay?
This is amazing. Would you consider offering a tutorial to implement alternate systems(other cities)?
Bandwidth costs money. Nobody says it doesn't. However, the amount of money 5Mbps of bandwidth costs is trivial compared to the cost of maintaining a separate copper pair to your house.

At /my scale/ I can buy bandwidth at around $1 per megabit/sec. 1Mbps is, uh, around 320 gigabytes of data. Even at half utilization that's less than a penny per gigabyte, and any but the smallest of local ISPs are going to dwarf my bandwidth usage. This is the sort of market where cost scales down quite a lot as you scale up, so I would bet quite a lot of money that comcast pays less than I do.

sure, if I wanted to double my usage, I'd have to buy some new network equipment, and spend some network admin time, but generally speaking the cost of your network equipment (at least at my scale) is fairly small compared to the cost of buying the transit in the first place. It certainly doesn't double the cost of bandwidth; and even if it did, bandwidth would still be cheaper than the local loop to your customer's home.

So yeah, uh, your average dsl is what five megabits/sec on a really good day? are you seriously trying to tell me that you can buy a copper loop for less than five bucks a month?

(Actually, I've been in the industry all my life and I've never been involved in buying copper loops; I guess it's possible they are that cheap; If they are, and I find out (oy, the costs of almost everything in this industry are guarded like state secrets. It's such a pain in the ass.) I'll start a DSL ISP. but I'd be very surprised if that were the case. )
A Free Day of Javascript on Mobile at Google HQ
Do you have good karma on Stack Overflow maybe? We love those guys too :-)
Chrome loads this beautifully on Ubuntu.
> He especially liked Lua

Well, not as much as Haskell : "Haskell is pretty ideal but I’m not smart enough to hack the GHC. Lua is less ideal but a lovely language [...]" (at the beginning of the 2nd answer.)

> He regrets using the CommonJS module system

Yes, and this is pretty interesting. Also, he regrets using WAF as the build system ("it introduces more WTFs than necessary".)

I have a great respect for Ryan Dahl. He is not orthodox. He is not a blind parrot.
I'm based in central Auckland so I get a decent exposure to other technologists. Living in the Bay of Islands would be awesome.
In case you haven't discovered it - you can click-and-drag your mouse across the lines to make sounds in addition to waiting for the lines to 'pluck' themselves
Disqus already has the added bonus of not showing my profile picture to the world.
Lunch is a great idea. It's long enough to start building a relationship, but not so long that a bad match will ruin your day. I should sign up and see how well the matching algorithm works.
This should significantly raise the economic cost to stifling speech in Egypt for the current regime (shutting down the phone system is probably significantly more disruptive to daily life that the internet there). Of course assuming locals manage to find out about it.
Canvas distortion in Chrome
I would most definitely say that. I've hired from corporate cultures far more rigorous than Microsofts (Samsung springs to mind) with great results. A smart engineer who can get things done is a strong engineer regardless of where they've cut their teeth.

One only needs to look at all of the startups that IBM, famous for their bureaucratic structure, too see what rubbish this is.
AboutUs.org in Portland, Oregon

We're building website analytics tools for small business owners and website operators:

http://www.aboutus.org/careers
#1 Rule of a business if your not making a profit now, you won't make any later. About 99% of the time effort is equal to profit, (as an example not directed at op) don't like cold calling? To bad go do it.
Interesting...in the old days, those phone numbers would go to the news desk of some major media corporation. The fact that (at least purportedly) Egyptians would consider getting their tidbits on Twitter--and the fact that Twitter scales better for this sort of thing than even the largest old-media institution--seems profound.
We'd move to Toronto too if she was our CM!
Seeing Americans companies take sides in the politics of foreign countries in such enthusiastic, carefree ways leaves me feeling very uneasy.
I find it pretty cool that Google is willing to get actively involved in this. Some of the calls are even in English (ie. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...)
I dunno. I think this was all about the money. Anyone that's spent ANY time with SFDC knows it's not a great company to deal with as an outside developer.
1M/1M: How We Differ From Y Combinator