skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I own multiple copies of office and use them every day, but the author has an interesting point. And that point isn't revealed through me, or even (probably) the person reading this comment, it's revealed through my mother.

My mom is an attorney and works with office every day. She's also in her 50s and not technologically fluent. But she got an iPhone. And then she got an iPad. She even got a keyboard for the iPad; which I rolled my eyes at, but that's where some of us are blind here. One of the first things she asked me was where office was--there is no doubt she would have purchased office had it been available--instead she downloaded a bunch of things (pages, docstogo, QuickOffice) and worked out which of those she likes. And she uses them a ton now; even to create documents.

Where I think the author is a bit off is in his assessment that the wizard has been revealed. I think Office is a good product for a lot of people and I think my mom would still buy it if they rolled one out for iOS (and I think they're working on it). Moreover, most corporate offices are deeply entrenched in office, and it will take years for that to change (my machine at work still comes with ie 7--how sick is that?). So, Microsoft still has time, but I think there's merit to the argument that they're behind and need to recover. Some damage has already been done, but it's not too late.
I can never resist these discussions. Relevant: http://voltsteve.blogspot.com/2011/07/all-that-is-wrong-with...
The curtain has finally fallen? You mean the rest of the world has finally caught up.

Of note, Microsoft Jan 2010 Profit:
Windows OS + Windows Server = ~$13B,
Office = ~$8B

Source: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/tech/29961217...
I think the point is that people have been trained (either by MS or by themselves) that they need Office to get something done.

The copy of Word on my mother's computer was recently corrupted somehow. Printing didn't work, and if you tried Word became non-functional until you wiped out all stored preferences.

She didn't know what to do. She just wanted to type up recipes, little notes to friends, etc. My brother showed her TextEdit and she had what she needed. She is used to Word. When you need to type on the computer, you use Word.

But it's not like back when she was using her dissertation. I wouldn't expect people to type a dissertation in TextEdit. But when all you need is to type up little rich text documents, TextEdit works great.

I think there are a lot of people like that. They've been trained on Word and think they need word. Far a large number, there is tons of other software that can accomplish what they want.

What I got out of the article was the author's realization that because MS didn't have Office ready, people were forced to make due. They had to use Pages or Keynote. Or maybe they just used email directly. But some of those users learned that they don't really need Word... and that could be a dangerous trend for MS.

There are always people who need the features of Word, or some of the really advanced stuff in Excel.

But most users just type up text in Word and add a little formatting. Most users use Excel as a grid, sometimes putting a formula or two in. Powerpoint is used to write text, put up images, and animate a bit.

All those use cases can be easily replaced with other, simpler, software. Now that some users know that, they might stop buying Office.
> it's like saying that the microwave will kill off the oven

Great analogy. Unless tablets grow in terms of connectable peripherals, I can't imagine secretaries, programmers, accountants, or anybody else spend 8 hours staring down their desk on a 7" screen poking fingers at a virtual keyboard.
As I said, I think the most important thing to decide is what you want to work on. Research Python roles and research Ruby roles, which of the two look like things you'd want to be working with/on? That should be your decision! I know the majority of Python roles I work on tend to pick Python for it's speed so they are generally more for hosting platforms or system development. Ruby roles tend to be the focus for more web development. As I said, those are just what I've seen here in Seattle.
Perhaps you may feel I am defending the indefensible here... But MS Access is actually a great tool for analysing data. It will import in CSV files, spreadsheets or even data from OBBC connections. I have handwritten text parsers for huge complicated data files in many programming languages and nothing comes close to MS Access for actually chopping up data from multiple sources and cleaning it up. I tried looking for a similar tool for Linux (this was several years ago) and none existed.
I think the right title is "HipChat comments on non-existent controversy in clever move to get attention".
Maybe the release of OneNote has been lost, but does anyone really care about it? I think I had it installed as part of Office the whole time I was at my previous job but never ever used it for anything. Word and Excel may or may not be important, but I doubt there can be many people who would ditch Office completely except for OneNote.
> It has to do with not having "hidden" input to a function.

Why would it be hidden? It's a default, customizable behavior. If you don't need to customize it you don't and there's no reason to task you with putting the method in the state which is going to be needed 9 times out of 10.

> and indeed if the default value is flipped in the header file the caller could change behavior with no code change at the call site!

And if the whole implementation is replaced by formatting your hard drive, the caller could change behavior with no code change at the call site!!

> Taking a line from the Python philosophy: "explicit is better than implicit."

You're probably misapplying/misunderstanding things, since Python is one of the languages making the most use out of default values and with extremely strong first-class support for them.
How We Built a Product In Just 8 Hours
Half the files I have to work with come in pre-OOXML formats, and I don't think it ever failed to properly open it.

I don't say it's not possible at all, but extremely unlikely.
Wow, my experience as been the reverse with regard to Excel and Word.

I've tried StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Abiword, WordPerfect, and every other option available. Nothing comes close to Word in functionality. Sure you can write a few paragraphs and do rich text in any of those options, but if you're doing anything at all complicated you need more.

And yet LibreOffice Calc works as well as Excel in almost every way that I've used it.

And Outlook...I don't know a sysadmin who doesn't hate Outlook or (especially) Exchange. It's true, though, that no one else really has that functionality together in a reasonable package. Talk about a vulnerable product to target, though; I guess GMail is trying to take it down, though I would have a hard time trusting Google to manage all of my email. Nothing against Google, but their tech-support is practically nonexistent, so if there WERE a problem, there's no recourse.
Hrm.

I think that the author's point is that they would be in a much better position if they were in every game. I agree.

Microsoft's biggest win is making people think they need them, and every platform they are not on is another chance for a customer to see that they don't need them to do their work. This is not the case with all of their customers, but I can't argue that it seems like a valid point.

Do they "need" to be on every platform? Not in the sense that they would fail as a company if they don't. Would it benefit them, their image, and their message? Without question.
I think that would be a good approach, it also might be wise to see if you can find development managers or something below the founders. Depending on the types and sizes of the companies the founders may not be the best person to reach out to. See if the company has any HR on their payroll, once again a simple LinkedIn search can dig that up for you.

The important thing to remember is to be persistent, but don't be annoying. It's a fine line, and you'll have to realize when you're crossing that threshold. ;)
Tabulus is a realistic alternative for heavy spreadsheet users. http://www.tabulus.com/
Hence why you're trying at all costs to make it work with things it wasn't designed for?
Microsoft Reveals New Metro-Infused Windows Logo for Windows 8
> Louis CK released his $5 show with no DRM or protection. He treated his customers with respect, but if you look at the torrent networks, it was immediately shared and now is all over the place.

> How is this respectful?

It's not, but you're using the same flawed argument that the RIAA, MPAA, etc.'s use, that a pirated file automatically equals a lost sale. This very simply isn't true.

You have to account for the people who wouldn't have purchased the product at any price, either because they're incredibly cheap (or just poor, I suppose), or because they've never heard of Louis CK, don't much care about him either way, and just want to grab the file to check it out. The latter case seems like just a special case of the first, but it's more of a special case, namely that it's not that they wouldn't buy it at any price, but that they wouldn't buy it sight unseen at any price. It's possible that there are people out there who pirated the special and then decided that it was worth it to buy the thing.

My point is that it's an incredible challenge, probably an impossible challenge, to quantify the effects of piracy. Some pirates would have never paid regardless, and some pirates will pay only because they've pirated.

I think the rest of your comment makes a valid point regarding smaller vendors and the anchoring of prices. My response is simply that it hasn't played out enough yet that I'm willing to outright agree right now.

The era of having a few large companies with massive budgets bringing in massive revenues could be ending, but that doesn't mean that independent studios will die. It could be quite the opposite, with many smaller niche studios rising up.

For app store revenues, I can't disagree with you. My only response is that if you're not making money at a $50 price point, then you probably need to try a smaller one. $50 seems like a high price to me for many consumer apps anyway, even on a PC, and especially for a mobile app (n.b. I have a dumb phone, I don't have an iPad, etc. I'm not the target market for these apps, so I'm not speaking from experience). Basically, if you're failing at $50, try dropping your price. I'd bet a lot of people who would pirate at $50 would buy at $5. If you can gain 10 buyers at $5 for every pirate at $50, you break even. It's all about finding the right price point for your product. If you can't find one, then you can make a "lite" version with reduced functionality and try segmenting the market.
>Somewhat wrong, there exists right a segment of folks whose only computer is either a smartphone or tablet

Who are these people? And no, tweens and non working folks don't count, they wouldn't buy Office apps for their iPad or iPhone anyway.
You could try building a simple CNC machine. Then you could test your fabrication skills and use it afterwards to make cool stuff. It wouldn't have to be anything complicated either. Use a simple drill for the blade and make some sort of arm to move it around. Then write a basic program to run it. Follow YC's style. Make something simple as fast as you can that just works and then as time goes by improve it. Man, I think I know what I'm doing this weekend.
What the article overlooks is that the money Microsoft makes off selling individual copies of Office is a rounding error in their overall revenue. The money they make off selling thousand-seat licenses of Office, however, is not. The latter is not possible on iOS or Android.
Well, I've had a different experience. More than once. So I'd say it's not that extremely unlikely.

Maybe my lawyer has a really old version of Word or something and he keeps sending me files in an old format that isn't supported as well.

I've also had a lot of files opened flawlessly by LibreOffice; it depends on how many features you're using. Maybe you're trading documents that aren't that complicated?
Google Taking Advantage of Safari’s Security Flaws
Microsoft's Internet Explorer Performance Lab
> Also seems motivated by the desire to keep Rails relevant, but without actually trying to evolve Rails towards being more useful for client side driven apps.

IME, there isn't a smoother way to implement a bunch of RESTish json endpoints hooked up to a database (resources) and have dependency management and compilation for your frontend js/css (via the asset pipeline).

There may be other frameworks out there that make serving up and delivering client-side driven apps easy, but I haven't heard of them.
This is a good, if long-winded document. At over 100 pages, it will take a dedicated reader to sift the gold.

As other patterns covered display aspects of DRY-ness with JavaScript, let's take a look at how to write DRY code using jQuery. Note that where jQuery is used, you can easily substitute selections using vanilla JavaScript because jQuery is just JavaScript at an abstracted level.

That is jibberish, and it shows in the code examples: Using an ES5 shim is best-practice these days, so that you can use Array.prototype.forEach and not jQuery.each (with its weird argument order), amongst other things that are commonplace in modern JavaScript code. Yet the auther defers to jQuery throughout.

As jQuery is accepted as one of the best options for DOM-manipulation and selection, we'll be using it for our DOM-related examples.

More likely that the document is filled with jQuery because the author is heavily involved with the jQuery project, no?
There's a period of time which is beneficial. It's not about being secretive, it's about putting your head down and getting things done without interruption.

Five years is (in virtually any case) way longer than that should be. But three months? Great! Even a year, if you're really on to something. But after that you need viable interaction with your customers/users/prospects
There is a solution here, but not everyone will like it.

Shitty recruiters do this shit because at the end of the day, it still works. Or works well enough for them to make a decent salary. Really shitty recruiters quit after a year or two because their base salary is very low (or even zero) and they don't get their commissions if they don't get placements. Ignore them and they will literally die off.

All the Engineers, Designers, Developers who complain about this practice should just put these recruiters on blast. I freaking LOVE what DHH is doing with those stupid recruiter emails. Why don't all of you do that? Those shitty recruiters will be on notice, their Agencies will be embarrassed by the bad PR or Google Search results and no startup will use their services.

At the end of the day, a good recruiter (full disclosure: that's my day job) will still be in demand because they do more than push resumes.

Cheers,
Hong
It’s not just client-side apps where you can consume your own API. It’s completely possibly to do the consumption on the server side.
Redesigning the Windows Logo
Bingo. It's not the only problem though. There is a surprisingly large number of recruiters posing as developers in order to find out who the competition is recruiting for, your reason, coupled with this is the sole reason why recruiters never disclose their client.
Pivot tables (though I believe Google Docs has added this to some degree), the ability to cleanly import messy text data, the ability to select non-contiguous cells, keyboard short cuts, better charts, spell check. I'm sure there are a million more - Excel is actually a very impressive product.
I think the aurthors point isn't that there is no point for Office, it is that for a lot of people, they do not need a full suite. My father was a die hard 'I need Office' person, and then he got an HP Touchpad during the firesale. Turns out he just needs basic word processing/spreadsheeting capability, and hasn't opened office on his laptop since.

If Microsoft would have had an app for the Touchpad, he would have bought it, and wouldn't have seen how overpriced and over featured it was for his needs.

This is a crack in Microsoft's armor, and could lead to long term issues.
A quick google search reveals:

http://www.telegraphindia.com/external/display.jsp?mode=deta...
http://www.mactrast.com/2012/01/more-than-1-in-10-ipad-owner...

Both referencing the same IDG report.

http://tabtimes.com/news/ittech-stats-research/2012/02/17/on...

Apparently Doctors are replacing laptops with iPads.

http://brainerddispatch.com/news/2012-02-09/cass-county-boar...

County board replaced aging laptops.

Apple itself keeps saying that Fortune 500 companies are buying large quantities of iPads. They can't all be for consumption.
I think you're absolutely right, but this falls in the category of a lot of the comments in this thread: the "for now" category. I think anyone who assumes that the iPad or something-like-the-iPad (Windows 8, if you like) isn't where the vast majority of the market is heading, is going to miss the boat. The history of business is filed with the tombstones of once profitable companies that missed the boat.
Announcing SmartAlerts from Socialize
My BMW Remote App For iOS Now Available
I keep seeing comments here about whether-or-not consumers are using their iPhones and iPads to do word processing and spreadsheets. And I think that argument misses the point that the article was trying to make. I think the conclusion was that we don't need spreadsheets and word processors at all. There are a lot of tools out there that help you "get business done" that are not focused around typing a document or generating a chart. I get business done by using Freshbooks and Balsamiq Mock-ups.
I never understood why anybody would carry one of those things around. I just ask for a new one every time I buy groceries at a place that uses them, then leave it on the counter when I go.

I figure I'm doing the world a favor this way, since eventually enough cashiers will notice how much time this wastes and how much more effort it takes to hand out a new card to every customer. Hopefully they'll mention this to their boss, and eventually (possibly 30 years down the line) it will sink in that it's a bad idea and they'll stop doing it.

But at the end of the day, it's the store's choice to inconvenience its customers with these cards. They can't possibly be surprised when I don't happily stuff their loyalty card in my wallet.
PMulator - Your virtual project manager
As far as I can tell, his predictions on Oracle vs Google have been pretty accurate, despite being at odds with other commentators. Shouldn't we be looking at how predictions match reality, rather than how they match other predictions?
Potentiality useful advice for those seeking to apply to Khan for an internship (from a functional language college kid who applied to Khan and bombed the interview):

When they say you can use whatever language you want for the coding interview, that means use Python or JavaScript. It doesn't matter if you wrote Learn You a Haskell, hack Erlang into the wee hours of the morning, or taught a class on Clojure. You won't win any points to use things like infinite lists for Fibonacci numbers or just say that a memoize function exists already as part of the core language. Although I can't say for certain, I had the distinct feeling that my interviewer thought I was just making stuff up when I started talking about the aforementioned topics and how they worked in Clojure. Functional languages are so far removed from what most developers do everyday that it probably just looks like nonsense if they haven't seen it previously.

Stick to Javascript or Python. When you get your interviewer's name, go to the khan github page and look at the code that person has written.[0] Do they write really good code in a certain language? Are they contributing to open source projects only in that language? Pick that one. Learn it inside and out. They will be on their home turf and feel more comfortable. If you can teach them something new and exciting about the language, then you will probably stand a much better shot of "winning" the interview.

Good luck!

[0]https://github.com/Khan
Sure. I mean hey-- the most dangerous place in Washington is between me and a chicken wing.

The good news is, the term ticks of as many vegans as it does non-vegans.
I don't think its an unfair commentary, since even the poster you're responding to suggested veganism has much to do with ethics.

Presumably those who feel they are behaving ethically by committing an action, also feel that those who do not follow their standards are less ethical. That's the feeling of superiority that wafts off vegans.
So, wikis are cool and all (and we use them extensively at our startup), but let's not pretend businesses are going to roll them out. They require a server, and getting your IT department to set that up is nontrivial unless you are super tiny. I've worked in places that, being that tiny, still refused to setup something that helpful.

As for email--yes, there are hundreds of alternatives, but somehow we keep coming back to email, and when we need to guarantee that somebody else can communicate with us, that's what we use. I've had Skype updates break. I've had Google Chat randomly disappear or be inaccessible. I've had AIM clients (of many varieties) die on me. Email, barring the normal issues you see with it, is always there.
> very short list of agencies that we wanted to work with on the redesign of the logo and were thrilled when Pentagram agreed to join us in the project

Pentagram. Sounds like an appropriate company name to work on the logo redesign.
How to Save Books
"#define somefunc _someplatformfunc" isn't exactly preprocessor magic. That's just basic preprocessor functionality. "Magic" is the stuff that no one else looking at the code understands, and it's complicated and generally fragile and frankly unnecessary.
I agree that time for heads-down coding is very important. My point was more about one's overall career -- that not contributing publicly to the industry can be detrimental.

Even if it takes a long time for your stealthy startup to launch, it can be beneficial to write about your experiences and/or open-source a cool project.
It's partly name recognition and partly novelty. The 37signals approach is unusual, while most competent front-end developers are already aware of the principles in Souders' post.
this is okay, except for one thing: the iOS stuff is for playing, and nobody ever gets anything done. How many angel and VC deals of the past 2-3 involved an Excel spreadsheet at one point?

Now, how many do you think involved a spreadsheet-type app on android or iOS.

I bet you even the guys who raised a round to build a spreadsheet app (not thinking of anyone in particular) did so flinging excel sheets back and forth.

Hell, you don't even see apple dogfooding any excel replacements. There just isn't any dogfood there. Tim Cook uses excel for Mac. And in the evenings, uses the iPad for entertaintment or light email.
You can still do unit testing of your client-side code if you wrap everything in components that separate state from rendering. The rendering itself you can only test with a human looking at the page anyway (or by comparing to reerence renderings). Extjs uses this approach. I can easily unit-test my forms written on top of extjs.

Fundamentally this is a bikeshedding debate. Whether you're programming on the client or server, the tools are equally capable. The big difference is the server puts you closer to the data, and the client pus you closer to the user. Either way you're struggling with latency, and you do different trade-offs, and either way you reach your goals.