skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Numbers, from the iWork suite, does this. You can name your rows and columns and just them in your formulas:
http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/

Of course, it's not perfect if you look at the proprietary format, at the smaller number of formulas than Excel, and so on. But it's a nice piece of software as far as I'm concerned.
Libertarians do not oppose this stuff, they merely want to consider other approaches. I think pollution can be dealt with purely from a property rights framework, not a greater good framework.

Again, this is a low priority issue, and the thing to look out for is when planners try to use the 'greater good of all' to give handouts to special interests, as has been overwhelmingly the case with eminent domain lawsuits around the country.
Microsoft: Expect Fewer Phones With Windows
I'm both a consumer and creator.

I consume large quantities of non-fiction, but would prefer to write fiction.

I'd rather create video games than play them.

I don't think consuming and creating are mutually exclusive.
I'm not too concerned with MSG, but certain types give me a bad reaction (MSG in chips, Pho soup, ramen flavorings, etc).

Broccoli, no reaction and I can eat tons.
I continue to hear really good things about SoftLayer. Sounds like they are doing something right.
You seem to be getting caught up in the most extreme version of libertarianism.

Consider this: If more big problems were solved in various ways at the state level, there would be COMPETITION and government might be BIGGER in some areas and SMALLER in others.

My guess is that in many cases it would be smaller if there were more competition between regulatory ideas/approaches, but this is probably not going to be the case in every area.

Libertarians don't believe in small government at all cost, only that government should be put under competitive pressure so that it's as minimal and efficient as possible, and so that there are not perverse incentives and special interest entrenchment created.
Tesla debuts zippier Roadster Sport
My understanding of Cells what that it is a dataflow system that handles calculation graphs for some kind of formula. I doubt that it has any insight into user workflows in an actual spreadsheet application.
SQL queries would be really good. I have been in many situations where I would like to do a simple query on a large spreadsheet and can't so I have to resort to programming. Most of the time it is not worth the effort, so I don't bother. This feature would be a big help.
Does any OS let me right click on a window and select "stay on top" or are we still in the stoneage?
BTW, you might be able to throw =large() around that formula to get your top 10 directly
Libertarians generally tend toward a property rights framework to handle things like this, as opposed to a "greater good" framework.

In other words, if you put toxic waste on your property, that's fine UNLESS it leaks onto someone else's property. So there is no need to open the discussion of how pollution impacts the greater good, because polluters just can't harm the neighbours' good!

The perverse incentive for planners to identify the "greater good" is the same as the way priests and religious leaders do so -- and they are likely to shake their finger just as judgementally.
False dichotomy. Interesting, anyway.
they actually mention that on the article, did you not read it?
Neither Windows nor OS X dies when you close the lid, and when you install any of them on a new machine WIFI just works. Always.

I install every new version of Ubuntu as soon as it's released. Once sleep/resume, WIFI, sound, the trackpad and power management all work without tweaking drivers, I might actually keep it. So far that hasn't been the case on any of the machines I tried.

(I should add that I'm no big fan of any OS so far)
I don't think you offer any evidence to support your point.

I'd argue the opposite, that a big, opaque regulatory state is the perfect environment for corruption.
Cooperation only happens when you iterate every time in a one-on-one fashion with the same players over and over again. For example: the relationship with your local grocer, who has a reputation to build. But it is the wrong metaphor for most real issues in social policy. Pollution is a tragedy of the commons problem.
Not quite the same as that - but I now live on a property that has a large amount of gardens to take care of (otherwise fire/snakes and general pestilence will ensue). its not every day, but its an epic effort when I do tackle it - but I view it as a) healthy excercise (on top of what I normally do) and b) somehow good for me - I do enjoy doing it and look forward to it.
of course print will die. It's so last century What else did you expect?
That's correct, textually `diff'ing two versions of a file in a bisecting fashion is quite disparate from viewing a document's change history. The idea of auditing and version control ought to be more intrinsic to a spreadsheet or database system than an after-thought supported (poorly) by external tools.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429028
Excel doesn't work well on very large spreadsheets (I use it on some sheets with over 150,000 rows.) Things are slow to load, and commands like lookups are extremely slow, enough that I think they're doing O(n) lookups for things like the VLOOKUP command, even when looking up data on tables or sorted columns.

What makes the above even worse is that Excel has a pretty poor understanding of when a change necessitates a re-calculation of all values in the workbook, so I grind to a halt when making random unrelated changes (and even if I switch it to manual calculations, it re-calculates upon saving, meaning saving my work can become a 30-40 minute endeavor).

Pivot tables are pretty clunky an unintuitive for most users, even though I think lots of people would use them if they understood what they were.

VBA is a very verbose and inelegant language, and there are lots of operations which are called in totally different ways than the analagous forumulas in the spreadsheet. There are even some things you can do in spreadsheets which don't have an analagous VBA command, which leads to the fantastic work-around of using cells on your worksheet instead of variables and changing their text values to the command you really want to just run in VBA.

The standard fill down operation sometimes doesn't Just Work(TM). Example: say you want to make a cell "=C2E5". You try filling down and you get "=C3E6", when you wanted "=C3E5", because E5 is a constant. OK, fair enough, you say, you can't reasonably expect the machine to infer what you meant. But now you adjust the cell below to what you want, and now you select two cells, one that's "=C2E5", one right below it that is now "=C3E5", and now with both selected, you fill down again. Presto, the next cells are "=C4E7","=C5E7","=C6E9","=C7E9","=C8E11".... etc. That's pretty bad.

Some of these are pretty mundane, but they would all be big deals for me.
On top of their specials, you can also negotiate better deals with them.
"... In the long term, it is unlikely that any particular ASP will survive without you needing to migrate your data to something else. ... The issue you bring up, of how do you deal with the fact that it is unlikely most ASPs will be around to maintain your data, is a good one. It should be discussed and careful attention should be paid to it. Your suggestion to go with ones that have the most partners and customers (VisiCalc's situation in its day) doesn't fit with your comparison to staying away from VisiCalc. ..."

From the man (Dan Bricklin) himself ~ http://www.bricklin.com/nextvisicalc.htm
like veecee said this is usually a data provider problem and seems like it in this case too... Fixing this is a manual process. I have notified the marketwatch.com data team and someone at marketwatch.com should be taking care of this shortly. Apparently over 4k ticker data were corrupted by the provider.
Do Us All Favor And Forget That Startup Idea
"... how do you deal with the fact that it is unlikely most ASPs will be around to maintain your data ..."

Added as a side read for post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429477 which asks the question, "Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?"
How much does it cost to rent a small appartment with broadband in a secure neighbourhood in India?
"many retailers have been using the try-then-buy tactic for years"

Many sites also try to do this - allow the user to perform an action (rating, create a playlist, post a comment, ...) without having to commit to creating an account.

It would have been interesting if there was a study with how time between handling and bidding, as it might help with the problem of maintaining engagement of new users.

Keeping in front of the user's eyes using email or inserting themselves into their current interactions can help remind the users to use the new service, but there is a fine line (different for every user) between informing and annoying.
It sounds like you're looking for a primer on career management in a large company. I recommend Jack Welch's book Winning. Available in the business section of most public libraries, and cheap on Amazon.
Why not just buy a machine and just colo it Softlayer? That way when you do need an additional 8GB, you can pay whatever the current price of 8GB is. These days you can build a 4 to 8 core machine with 16GB ecc memory for around $1500. Hardware is cheap these days... you should be putting most of the money into electricity & bandwidth.
Who Should Redesign?
Some thoughts:

-With an online spreadsheet program, it would be nice if it could understand existing VBA code/Excel Macros. There is a lot of this out there.

-Better access control. AFAIK, Currently with Excel you can only password the document with one password. It would be nice to have an access control list, and maybe even restricting access within worksheets within the document.
Don't worry, when I get rich off of it, I'll tell everyone you inspired the idea.
I think in the early days Tim was more interested in writing literary criticism of sci-fi than in making a buck, although I didn't know him. However, his book on Frank Herbert remains the only work of literary criticism I've ever read in full.
My guess is lallysingh believes that tocomment is paying $20/month just for a RAM upgrade, and not for a full VPS that happens to have 360MB of RAM (he was unclear, but I assume he's on Linode like you). I can't think of a better deal at that cost.
But she's still a terrible person to give advice on acting itself.
Am I missing something, or wouldn't =sum(C:C) work?
Cappuccino meets Ruby: http://github.com/tlrobinson/cappruby

It's very incomplete... a proof of concept.

The bare bones sample app works, here's the Ruby version:

http://github.com/tlrobinson/cappruby/tree/master/TestApp/Ap...

and the original version:

http://github.com/tlrobinson/cappruby/tree/master/TestApp/Ap...
Well said. How offensive is that, that your thinking has been conscripted to someone elses vision?

Another issue may be the social aspect of manual labor. I worked on a plastic assembly factory, with a more natural mix of male and female coworkers than any tech job I've had.

The pay and shifts sucked, but at least it felt...natural. Work your shift, grab a brew, and go out with a few of the mates after the gig. Good times.
to do anything useful in space we've got to get stuff there, i.e. heavy industrial machinery for mining

That is what the Sea Dragon is for. The payload capacity is 1.2 million pounds, and can be expanded with minor modifications.

-

It's only expensive and difficult now because we don't have anything with enough energy density to do it.

We have kerosene and liquid oxygen. Chilled propane works, too. Are you thinking that these fuels and oxidizers are somehow not adequate? If so, in what way?

-

If you can make a powered re-entry you don't even need to bother with the Shuttle's elaborate heat shielding

The Shuttle requires elaborate heat shielding for reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that it does not make powered re-entries. The Russian Soyuz capsule re-enters with a basic heatshield and lands on the Kazakh steppes. It's cheap. It's reliable.

Powered re-entries to Earth are not feasible and not desirable. They would be outrageously expensive and probably unreliable (read: dangerous).
"semantic web" is a buzzword, too ill-defined to allow anyone to define themselves with it label of "semantic web programmer."

The intellectual academics point at the rise of standards, structured information and shout "the semantic web is here!"

The pragmatic implementers point at the reams and reams and reams of still unstructured data and wonder where the academics point.

Save yourself the trouble; don't worry about what the semantic web is or isn't. Don't worry about how to leverage it. Find a problem and just solve it.
> Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways.

Then why not build database-like functionality into the system?
I had a coworker who used to use "in reality" in place of "actually", which is even worse. Usually he used it immediately prior to statements that needed quite a bit of justification. It used to drive me nuts. Eventually I realized that when he said, "in reality," he meant, "in my opinion," and from then on we got along much better.
Would that sum the entire column in the spreadsheet? But what if I wanted to have a couple tables on a page (which I often do), or my sum below the numbers?
> It's almost as if we've lost ground since the Apollo program ended.

We have lost ground since the Apollo program ended. At that time, we had some functional boosters left - they've been rusting in Florida since then. We also had the tooling to make more of the whole stack, but that tooling was intentionally destroyed as part of the Shuttle program. We have lost other material things.

The biggest loss is probably that we've lost the belief that we should go to space.
The boom in photography as an industry was in education.
Hmm, I've seen some pretty hair-raising stuff done with Excel already... I don't think we need to increase its capabilities any further. It's an extremely powerful piece of software already.
You can do most of that (pretty simply) in excel.

For your data C2:C10 - Do a field: sum(C2:C11) Then when you want to add more data - right-click on the row (11) and "insert" That will update your sum calculation.

Also - you can do named fields - so that if you select the fields C2:C11 - then you can name them as "invoices" (in excel 2003 it's in the top left corner - there's a selection box you can type in. Just select and type a name in there). The lets you do the command sum(invoices)

Also - don't forget you can do something like sum(C:C) which will just give you everything in C column..
I checked Deep Zoom Composer, software that was used to create tiles [1].

It allows also PNG tiles export for "SeaDragon Ajax" output type, so it was probably just the decision of the author of this site to use JPGs.

I tried to convert one randomly picked tile. It was 58KB JPG (16M colors), 38KB PNG (16M colors), 9KB PNG (256 colors), 13KB GIF (256 colors).

So yes, PNGs would make a faster site and save some bandwidth.

Though you cannot export 256 color PNGs, so for the best performance, you would need to run something like ImageMagick conversion script on all the tiles (with the danger of getting noticeable seams if neighboring palettes would clash).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=457...
The fundamental problem is that Excel forces a novice (and actually everyone) to work at a level of detail such that key elements of the plan or analysis are lost in a forest of low level code. I would focus on the novice because it will be hard to get power users to switch. Letting a user pick a range or distribution for an input instead of a specific value will help to avoid anchoring around the "one right answer."

Compare two spreadsheet highlighting changes more intelligently than Excel's. For example, allow for a more intentional representation of

decisions/numbers/inputs: control variable
relationships/rules: system representation
outputs/results: state variable

Track changes to indicate if inputs or rules/relationships changed, optionally ignore output changes

Allow for a set of input variables (and optionally some rules) to be defined as a scenario to compare differences between scenarios. Also, let an input variable be a distribution or an interval and the scenario specify any covariances.

Scenario planning and decision trees: a graphical view that can switch to a traditional spreadsheet view and vice versa.

EDIT http://www.google.com/search?q="next+generation+spreadsheet" turns up some interesting ideas as well.
Ask HN: Entering the market place
In a few months I will have finished my studies of math and gotten my Diplom. (The German equivalent to a M.Sc, basically). I am writing my thesis at a railroad company in Frankfurt, Germany, about optimization of schedules.

In a few years I will have to pay back government student loans. Not a heavy burden - less than 10k Euros.

Now I am evaluating my options. I have identified three: (a) Work on my own (startup, freelancer, consulting), (b) work for someone else, (c) pursue a PhD in math, economics or CS.

My fiancee will do a PhD in Basel, Switzerland, in Systems Biology. So I place a premium on being in the general area. There are also a few other universities with relevant programs that she could apply to, if those other areas were more convenient for me.

I lean toward aquiring some savings by joining a management consulting company for some time. Afterwards I may do a PhD first or launch right into starting my own company. I consider management consulting because the 'up-or-out' model common to the industry makes it psychologically easier not to get trapped in a day job for your entire live there.

Of course I would like to read your comments. Perhaps you can also suggest an alternative I have overlooked or give some advise. Or ask for more details. You can email me, too. You'll find the address in my profile.

Thanks!
There was an episode of Happy Days in which Richie got into a little trouble, and Fonzie gave him advice on how to act tough and command respect. It didn't work for Richie. Fonzie then remembered the key component: it wasn't just acting tough; at some point in time, you had to have actually won a fight to prove it.

Consider programmers that you respect; why do you respect them? Is it their in-depth knowledge? Interesting projects they've worked on? Publications they've written? Their ability to teach? I would venture to guess that most people don't just set out to be a respectable person in the abstract; they work to excel at particular things in their life.
Not quite as bad as that in IT, but not far behind either.
I think this page has nice technique, although it's a bit different than what your old CSS was going for:

http://users.tkk.fi/tkarvine/pre-wrap-css3-mozilla-opera-ie....

P.S. -- disclosure: I work for Mozilla
P.P.S. -- I kinda hate CSS
So is your local police force, in that it's an organisation with the capacity and authority to commit violent acts on behalf of the state. But neither the military nor the police have violence as their sole objective; it's merely a tool to be used in the attainment of certain goals and policies such as national defence or community safety.

But we're arguing semantics here. I wrote my response because the way in which joubert dismissed the possibility of the author's comment being sarcasm strongly implied that he regarded the military as an inherently violent organisation to which only violence-loving terrorist-killing wannabes would aspire. I resent that.
I don't have a Mac so I don't have a way to tell if iWork does what I want or not, but note that simply being able to name a range doesn't do it.
Phase2: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"
My GNOME desktop lets me do that to any window. I don't think I'd pick an OS on that alone, mind.
Do a field: sum(C2:C11)

I.e. leave a blank row at the bottom of my table, and have the sum include that blank row? I actually know about that trick (thanks :)... what I want is a spreadsheet that does what I want without my tricking it.
Immediately made me feel like I was playing Sim City 3000. Good memories.
see my post above.

if you use insert row - then formulas respond and will go from C2:C10 to C2:C11 (tested in excel2003 at least)
In no particular order, here are some desirable features:

1) Version control.
2) Access restrictions and permissions. BONUS: Responsibilities, a la Siebel and other CRMs.
3) Simple drag and drop manipulation of data, such as concatenation.
4) Wufoo-like ease with building data entry forms.
5) Dummy data mode, so you can get help with customizing a complicated spreadsheet without revealing sensitive data.
6) Example use cases for sophisticated features, with well-written instructions, INOW a good, non-linear tutorial.
Quantrix is already a better excel and look how well they're doing for themselves (or not).

But seriously: take a gander at quantrix, rip off its features, slap yourself on the back for innovating, and go home.

Edit: the above is perhaps a bit too snarky to be helpful.

As a "power spreadsheet user" I moved on from excel to quantrix; this is something I can get away with b/c I'm not stifled with a closet full of legacy, mission-critical excel spreadsheets.

Quantrix is pretty much at the sweet spot of spreadsheet functionality: it's possible to imagine a more-powerful and more-general-purpose tool, but taking it even a little further would turn it into something not really a spreadsheet any more...you'd wind up back at R.

You'll find in Quantrix a mature, well-thought, and all-around "better excel".
I'd like a better HTML export. One that spits out all the worksheets in an XL file as one simple HTML document with a bunch of tables. No javascript or multiple files, just a simple file that can be parsed easily. Also, the ability to import that same format.
Turing-Machines are Turing-complete, too.
Using MapReduce to compute PageRank
It actually has less features than Vista, and for me that's a good sign. Microsoft focused on just making sure everything works better and faster. Memory usage is significantly lower, for example, and boot times are shorter.

The Control Panel and some menus have a more logical organization. Each app can adjust its representation in the new taskbar, so for Internet Explorer you can see a list of all open tabs, not just windows. You get Prev, Pause and Next buttons for Media Player. They took out some of the bundled applications, like Photo Gallery. They didn't even change the default wallpaper! Kudos!

If only they had released this instead of Vista things would be golden.
I don't think that's correct, but I'll give you chance to post some citations backing that up.
It is Helium-3 that is on the moon. Tritium is Hydrogen-3 (and has a half-life of only 12.3 years, so it is unlikely that there is any on the moon).
Well it's Pravda, so it's gotta be true, right?
I have seen Pasteur's quote frequently translated as "chance favors the prepared mind" but Norvig cites it as "chance favors only the prepared mind" which is closer to the original French and has a profoundly different meaning. It's certainly a stronger argument that a simple plan or clear hypothesis set will allow you to improvise more successfully as events unfold.
> If the structure of society is such that people have the power to become corrupt, they will become so (for example if the law is defect).

The necessary and sufficient condition for corruption is the ability to make decision on someone else's behalf. Given that, the decision maker can be corrupt, law or no law.

When {whatever} is regulated, the regulators will be bought and sold by folks who have interests in {whatever}.

Note that money isn't the biggest/most power source of corruption. In fact, it's among the weakest. Folks who can be bought don't stay bought. The true believers cause the real damage.
Use $ to keep copy/fill from autoincrementing. $E$5