skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What about accounting software?
Hello,

It seems I am a finance/controller guy with passion for programming. In my job, we deal with a huge amount of data coming from many different places, usually in excel spreadsheets. It is painful and it leads to error (in a field where errors kill your reputation).

The mainstream software used is called "Hyperion". While this is good for submitting to corporate, still most of the calculation and consolidation (imagine consolidating numbers in excel from 30 entities around the globe) happen in excel. Which, I think, is an outdated tool for this kind of things.

This problem (handling and consolidating data in finance) is HUGE. It leads to big productivity problems and it is one of the main reasons people have to work late. Solving this, would improve quality of life and make some money..

And so my question, do you know of any people/group or project in the area of accounting/finance in order to improve data handling and consolidating? I have a lot of 'field' knowledge and ideas I'd like to discuss. This could be a lot of fun.
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Sounds almost like a revenue raising exercise. If the protestors are getting small fines, and no other penalties, this would be very disturbing. Serious sentences for trouble makers is necessary, but using small revenue-raising fines to control large mobs will chill protest movements.
> "We stopped stocking one particular brand of free soda"

In most cases, that is the most unethical action a company can take against its employees.
Intel Software Division is Broken. Tizen, beware.
Perhaps it is also influenced by Python? Come on, not everyone on Earth loves Ruby's syntax. I was turned off by the endless 'end's.
The original article is http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/apple-facebook-hp/?utm_source...
I've taken psilocybin mushrooms twice. I've also read plenty of literature about psychedelics and the nature of reality. My experience is difficult to describe, because it was mostly "feeling." Language is a very crude way to express feeling, but the pithiest description I can give: it was extremely balanced.

In fact, on my first trip I listened to "Handlebars" by Flobots and the music (without the lyrics) accurately conveys what I experienced.
So you never commit on master, only pull (fast-forward merge) from origin/master and merge from your feature branch? Does merging your squashed commit from MyFeatureBranch to master commit a merge record or is it always fast-forward?
These gigs don't sound ridiculous, what they wanna pay does. Plus what happens when something breaks in the future?
Interesting discussion on why the quality of discourse on Reddit has dropped.
Markdown Editor for web developers, on Mac OS X
big times small is faster than big times big
Right you are, my mistake.
How will you guys make money?
The answers which the question received, in addition to an insult, were that CoffeeScript removes bugs and mis-features, "is a breath of fresh air", and delights programmers by letting "the underlying awesomeness of Javascript shine through." Hardly real answers.

It is perhaps to-the-point, but I don't think it is aggressive to point out that CoffeeScript frequently shows up on the front page of HN. I am guessing that the comments about fanboyism and unfair down votes came as a response to a down vote, so the initial down vote couldn't be justified on those grounds.

As to the original question of the why CoffeeScript is so popular on HN, I too would like to know.
A new Markdown editor for Mac I made, it's still in early beta stage. Requires OS X 10.7+ to run.

:)
I don't see that the design of other popular SmartPhones has radically changed much in the last year or so either. We're at the point where the SmartPhone is pretty much a finished product. There will be spec bumps, software improvements, and some small arbitrary design changes but it can't get much bigger or smaller, it can't get much thinner before holding the device in your hands becomes difficult, and it's unlikely it will get radically lighter due to the weight of the battery. What else is left? We're really talking about very small changes that probably don't have much, if any, impact on the market. The 14 month old iPhone 4 is still the single best selling model of SmartPhone with the 26 month old 3GS coming in at number two.

What Apple does need is a competitor to the 4-4.5" Android devices. According to the rumors that's what the iPhone 5 was supposed to be. If they have to go another 12 months without a competitor they will probably continue to lose more marketshare. If you look at the sales of Android phones they are almost all 4-4.5" devices so you could say it's the fastest growing segment of the SmartPhone market. Hard to say if people are buying them because they are increasingly the only option for an Android phone or if they prefer the bigger size. Either way it's probably safe to say a significant chunk of the SmartPhone market wants the bigger size.
My account was created 537 days ago and I assure you jpetrosky is not PR or paid or otherwise compensated for that post.
IMHO, good testing is hard. I think that something that's probably as hard as writing programs in the first place shouldn't be commoditized into a methodology. I don't particularly dislike TDD, but I certainly don't like it either.

The best phase to write tests is when you've locked down a part of your program. A part such as one distinct submodule or function or the sort.c or nodegraph.c of your latest project--a part that is relatively orthogonal to the rest of your code. That sort of ensures that the basic blocks, once finished, won't fail surprisingly. However, this can only be applied to basic building blocks.

Testing the bigger parts of your non-trivial medium-size program is likely to be so hard and complex that you have no chance at planning testing beforehand. I think that a good programmer or tester can come up with a relatively comprehensive testing suite that triggers execution paths up to 80-90% code coverage if given a sufficiently finished program, i.e. the program structure has mostly stabilized. Good programmer can also make changes to the same program without decreasing the quality of code. Bad programmers are as able to write good testing as modifying the code itself without letting entropy to the driver's seat.
Blogging is Crazy
I'm not convinced there are 20 interesting stories a day. I certainly don't think I'd have time to read 20 interesting stories a day. Therefore I'm not sure you are really helping me to "trim down".

I personally like weekly newsletters.
what strikes me as odd is that one of most cost-effective safety devices, the set built, is unavailable to most passengers on buses or trains.
The Reason We Still Don't Have A FaceBook iPad App
I have to agree with him. I bought into it, but it feels like I'm getting fucked in the ass.
There is very little cultural innovation either - popular entertainment nowadays consists of reboots, prequels, sequels, and karaoke hits (American Idol and the like). It's part of the same symptom I think of stagnant, litigious, bottom-line driven, risk-averse management Stephenson talks about - and it's strangling not only our technological innovation but all forms of creativity.
Deal Sites Have Fading Allure for Merchants
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And not all probabilities are equal. I haven't implied there exists something which is a guarantee, I have stated that I don't think taking drugs is a guarantee to becoming better. Being more technical, taking drugs as an action for becoming better is heavily outweighed by other options in my expected utility function, both probabilistically and in amount of utility. (Of course this could change.)
How to write Production quality code
I'll buy that if Chamath is willing to forego his management fee on this and future deals.

A VC arguing the ethics of this deal with respect to early employees is more than a bit disingenuous, at first glance it looks as if they are doing this to protect the little guy but that is only because for once they are treated the same as the little guy.
by working day jobs. =)
Hardly real answers

You seem to have missed this part of my response:

Having a real choice in that space is a big deal.
Ps3 prices
You would be right, but he wasn't killed on the battlefield.
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Very nice, love the color scheme and content preview. Will it be free once off beta?
To quote: OK, so the bug never trigged in 16,000+ Linux kernel merges—kernel developers are probably sane people quite proficient in git so that's quite unlikely to happen. That's probably the reason the bug was out there for a year, nobody ever bumped into it. I would bet some money on none of them kernel developers ever having git-pulled into a dirty working tree. (Most of the newbies around the world who probably bumped into it didn't understand git was in error there—excluding the author.)

I can't explain why the opposite happens. Most of the people I know intuitively commit or stash their local changes before merging. They have this intuition even if git is relatively young piece of software. But then there are always a handful of people that I imagine who could do something like that. And I'm not quite sure why.

One possibility is that it could come down to the level of trust in computers. I don't think I could issue git-merge without git-stash/git-commit first—probably because I don't instictively trust programs to handle complex operations too well in the first place. Operations such as handling unsaved data or letting random commits from different place three-way merge themselves into a single branch. Or both.

This mechanism of distrust might be similar to how drivers who think they're bad drivers are, in fact, the best drivers. They underestimate their capabilities enough to assume everything won't always go right, and then they're a few steps ahead when something goes wrong.
Apple Confirms IPhone 5 Event on October 4
Who's the Alibaba Group? And why do they want Yahoo so bad?
I feel bad for Tim Cook if he has to go out and re-announce a 14 month old product with a spec bump. Not a terribly exciting way to publicly start his new job. They also tried this before with mixed results. The 3GS sold fantastically for the first 6 months or so but it was the Q1/Q2 2010 time-frame where Android phones really took off in part because they simply had better hardware. It's possible that will happen again. There are already some higher resolution displays out there, probably quad-core processors by the end of the year or early next year, and LTE support. I can't help but feel like the 4S is going to look very last-generation in a few months and it won't help if it physically re-enforces this by looking last-generation also. It's a risky move when there's so much competition out there.
Not decided yet. But if 1.0 turned into shareware, all the people who donated during beta will receive a license for free.
You are begging the question. You can't just say that CoffeeScript provides a real choice without explaining what differentiates CoffeeScript from Javascript and makes the choice viable.
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Probably the founders of AirBnB would agree that theirs is a risky business, which is one excellent reason to take some money off the table.

Think of it as hedging your bets, on the one hand you keep a large chunk of stock because the company may weather all the storms ahead successfully, on the other hand it may not. The insecurity can be translated in to a strategy where you remove some money now in case the 'worst case scenario' becomes a fact.

Nobody is forcing any of these guys to do business under these terms. If the VC doesn't want to be part of the round then they should just pass on it, it's not like there is a guy with a gun behind them making them ink the contract. If they don't like the terms, don't do the deal.
On Muhammad Ali and Sylvester Stallone
>Node.js is an unpleasant software library and I will not use it.

a rant about a software he doesn't even use....
If you don't like the terms of the deal, don't do the deal (he doesn't want to do the deal, see third and next to last paragraphs of the email).

A VC complaining about the terms under the pretense that 'the little guy is treated unfairly' is a bit like royalty complaining about the price of cake.

Nobody forces him to do this deal on these terms. He's just scared to miss out on a big hit, he'd like the ring side seats to be cheaper by keeping all the money in the company or by buying out some of the founder stock.

Too bad, you can't have it both ways.

He may have a point about early employees (a 'special dividend' that excludes certain shareholders is not very elegant) but it is not his to make, and the dividend in this case was to 'common stock' which seems to imply that anybody with vested shares participates in that dividend.

His 'concern' is about the unvested employees, but that's a nonsense argument, as long as your stock is unvested, you don't have any stock.

Options do not participate in dividends until you exercise them, they never do because they are not stock and that's a pretty clear-cut thing.

Pretty low-class to dump this email in the public domain, I think that people will remember this when dealing with this particular investor in the future.
Dealing With Your Anxiety Today
That's what I was wondering, donating or buying it eventually, will be good to write a note on donation, so people like me know what will be happening :)
"if (typeof my_var !== "undefined" && my_var !== null) { // you idiots put Rasmus Lerdorf to shame }"

Someone doesn't know about the "foo == null" idiom (it's true if and only if x is null or undefined).

Not to mention the fact that the "typeof foo == 'undefined'" thing is overly defensive "best practice" that people keep needlessly repeating, IMO. If someone is stomping all over important fields of the global object, there's nothing you can do.

JavaScript has its issues, but this one isn't fair.
Forex BulletProof- Join the Revolution
I have separate Gmail accounts for you tubes realted to various verticals (which are unrelated to each other).

Separate Gmail accounts for websites (perhaps I need Google Apps).

Most of these various Gmails are fwd'd to my main Gmail account for easy monitoring (which is also my +).

I post this, because it seems unclear on the future (or potential policies) of non-real-name accounts.

If some horrendous requirement for alt-gmail accounts must register for G+...
Anyone else who doesn't understand his example? If my company is valued at $1M and someone invests $1M in it, why do I still own 50% of the company after the investment, as the author said? Doesn't this mean the company is actually valued at $2M?
Gosh I was closing the tab and noticed with the corner of my eye this title. Almost couldn't believe it - it has been so long since I remember reading Phrack and this ground breaking article in particular.

Thanks for bringing up good old memories!

Here is the Phrack archive: http://www.phrack.org/ and the article in particular (I like the design better): http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=49&id=14#article
Bad schools have unmotivated teachers. They operate more on discipline than inspiration. They have poor infrastructure and outdated books. They're understaffed, poorly managed, and some even have lead paint in the walls. There are a good amount of schools that have these problems, and since school funding is tied to property values, then we have an idea why housing costs around the good schools are high.

Bad schools are not a high school zombie apocalypse of having to fight for your life against "black and hispanic gang members". That's the stereotype that needs to end already.
Ok, I also cringed when reading the original post by Ryan Dahl bashing UNIX for its "complexity". I simply assumed that he had had a bad day. But this reply is simply mean and almost reeks of character assassination (very ad-hominem). "cancer", he "wrote code unchecked for years", "braindead"...

Yes, an async framework is not the panacea for everything. That has been known for a long time with similar frameworks for Python/Java/... It makes some things easier/faster and other things harder. But why act like this?
FaceBeer would have an RFID chip embedded in the bottle, and the beer would spill onto everything in the bar.
Standford Machine Learning enrolment open
I have no idea what benefit this extra level of government actually provides, though.

I have public infrastructure (transportation, libraries, etc) in the city of Chicago that the suburbs could only dream of.
Thanks! I just added a note below the download button.
- "Note: All the people who donated during beta will receive a license for free when Mou 1.0 released."
Clearly you still don't understand. They didn't sell 4% of their stake. If they did that, it would be somewhat reasonable. What they got was a dividend. In other words a bonus.

And yes the figure is still "large" because it is 1/6th of their funding that goes to their pockets, rather than the company.
Tesla's Car Factory is run by high-tech robots
While it does increase the chances of a hash collision, note that no-one has ever been able to find a SHA-1 collision, out of all the projects that use it everywhere.

If you find a SHA-1 collision, by any method, you will become very, very famous. It will probably be worth having a broken git repository.
The cul-de-sac suburbia is probably pretty good for kids until they're 8-10 years old and want to do something else than ride a bike along their neighbours' yards.

Because of the cul-de-sac layout, it's nearly impossible to walk or take your bike and go somewhere, namely because: a) it's a long way because you practically have to detour towards your destination all the time; b) there's nowhere to go because it's just houses and other culs-de-sac; c) if you manage the gymnastics to find yourself out of the neighbourhood you're likely to bump into a large junction leading to an arterial road where there's no place to ride a bike; d) and if there was, you'd have to pedal for miles until you ever reached some place to go, like a mall, another suburban feature.
cool article about tracking down a bug in git.

But this is really a small corner case and I can see how it went unnoticed for a year.

I almost never use 'git pull' (I do git fetch and then "git merge" or "git rebase" depending on the results), but more importantly I never ever use pull when I have changes in my current working repository. I commit, and then I pull or pull --rebase etc. This way I'm really sure that my data is safe as git has a lot of safety features for committed stuff. all files are stored as objects and there is a reflog to help if you loose track of rebased branch etc.

Another thing that I sometimes do is 'git stash' before pull/merge/rebase etc. git apply later is also a very safe op.
Unless someone is hovering over your shoulder, how is your employer going to tell the difference if you just commit tests and code together?
Very fine. I would suggest that you let the right pane follow the scroll position of the left pane (Or really - just have one scrollbar for them both). I know this isn't easy to accomplish, but it would really make a difference.
You already have a national ID number. Several, actually. They are your cell phone number, your Facebook account number, and your Gmail address, among others

They are 'numbers' that identify someone, that's for sure. But there is still a big difference with national ID numbers, as you can request multiple, share them between people, delete them, etc... Even though loads of data are collected it still offers some freedom.
The $1M in the example is the pre-money valuation, $2M is the post-money valuation. If your company is worth $X and I inject $Y into it, it automatically is worth $(X+Y) - there's no question about how you value cash in the bank.
>The only thing that seems unintuitive about it is how functions get defined

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)#Notation

I think that's probably the source (perhaps indirect) of CS's function notation. Personally I think it's far more intuitive than JavaScript's, if you start out knowing neither language.
MacOS only :(

Why don't people add that to the title? It would prevent non-mac users from getting their expectations up.
the real "mistake" here was not doing 'pull' it was doing 'pull' while having uncommitted changes in the working directory. I'd commit or stash before the pull/
That comment is inflammatory, inaccurate, and adds nothing interesting to the discussion.
I agree that they should mention it and maybe even use some sort of version control for assignments, I see no reason to teach it.

I graduated years ago before git even existed as did many others. We all managed to learn git. This is the nature of computing. Things change quickly and sometimes radically. The sooner you learn to learn on your own the better.
On a slow day, you could TYPE C:/COMMAND.COM and watch all the gibberish fly by, with the occasional beep due to the BELL character.
Please someone do this with HTML.
I had exactly the same reaction. G+ woke me up to just how much information one company had about me and how dishonest they were willing to be about the reasons for their policies surrounding that information.

Rather than G+ driving me into Google's arms it drove me out.
Then they should make a checkbox for that instead of requiring the exact birthdate.
London, UK - Product/Marketing Manager, Well Informed Ltd.

Come and work directly with the founders running the business side our successful, profitable, SaaS business.

http://blog.theorytestpro.co.uk/2011/08/01/were-hiring-onlin...
A rant about software that he won't use. Clearly he has done some testing to see how things are, but why would he use something he's convinced is crap?
Are those examples at the end his?

He totally dismisses Groupon's rejection of Google's offer, when there were almost certainly some sort of earn-out. I'm sure if Google were offering $8B in cash with no performance requirements, they would have taken the money. But that's not how deals work, and Groupon could very well have decided an IPO would lead to a much surer return.

I would expect a less shallow analysis from a finance guy.
Is getting fucked in the ass a good or bad touch here?
> Someone doesn't know about the "foo == null" idiom (it's true if and only if x is null or undefined).

(preface: I am by no means a javascript guru)

Really? Double equals in javascript? I thought that was a no-no due to the type coercion that "==" does.

I get a reference error when I crack open a console and try your example idiom.