skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll save you the trouble of reading it. He argues that politicians etc are wrong to hope that economic growth will come from startups. He then redefines "startup" to make this true:

"The typical start-up is a company capitalized with about $25,000 of the founder’s savings that operates in retail or personal services."

I feel pretty sure the guys at AI are experienced enough to understand the difference between startups and random small businesses, and that they deliberately ran this story as provocative linkbait to generate traffic on a slow news day.
Consider programmers that you respect; why do you respect them?

The expertise and dedication that I consider respect-worthy have not been deemed so by others.

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.

Again, you assume a meritocracy in which those who excel are appropriately rewarded. In my experience of the corporate world the rewards are distributed according to a different set of rules and I would like to understand them so as to be better served by them.

Your assumption here is that I did nothing to deserve respect but expect it to be delivered free of charge. This is untrue and an ungenerous reading of my statement. I worked my ass off in that job for many years, betting that it would pay off eventually. I lost that bet. Next time I would like to fare better - your suggested approach did not work for me.
Add more dimensions for the spreadsheet data. Like a 3d Cube.
Not to mention that politicians and the American people sent those soldiers in Irak ;)
this is good, I want to use this as Nikil's application of to Feynman's metaphor for science to startups in my entrepreneurial quotes list. Can you please send me an appropriate attribution I can use.
Sounded cheesy when I first came across it but if you found it useful I will give it a more open-minded second look. Thanks.
I'd echo the use of WATiR. Never used Ruby before (although it's been on my list of things to do for a long time), let alone WATiR but managed to learn enough of the language and the framework to write a DSL based on WATiR. The idea being that it would be simple enough for non-developers (read testers) to pick-up relatively easily.

We're using it to test an enterprise grade ASP.NET application and it's doing well so far. Although you can only run it against IE, I think there is a FF version called FireWATiR which is based on a fork of the code to not exactly the same but similar enough. The other minor drawback is that it doesn't work well when waiting for AJAX requests; you have to get a bit clever and use some of way of noting an AJAX call has come back - for example the hiding of a progress bar. Other than that a great lightweight and free tool to improve your code!
McDonalds the corp can't make money from francisees selling food because McDonalds the corp's revenue from franchisees is for services provided (including land) and "right to call yourself McDonalds" fees.

However, over half of McDonalds are not franchises, but corporate "stores". In that case, McDonalds the corp can only make money by selling food.
I detest sites that start videos without warning. I browse by opening sometimes dozens of tabs, letting them load, then reading them at my leisure. In essence, I visit a tree of sites using the facilities (powerful machine, tabbing browser) and I get really annoyed when I can't find the two sites that, without being asked, are playing video/audio without warning.

Don't do that.

Sorry. </rant>
im really interested in this, also.
O RLY?
Easily customizable keystrokes for absolutely everything.
"Zed's argument was essentially this"

grandalf, I think you missed one of Zed's main points. Here's a more entertaining, less rambling, version from Belle Waring:

http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_...

In the real world there are large, extemely powerful, centralized power structures. And they don't plan to go away, only to become more powerful. If your libertarian politics doesn't include an actual plan to diminish the power of these centralized social organizations that want to control people's lives then it's not politics, it's fantasy.

The 'A' is not really 'B' the way I define 'B' in my fantasy world argument is used by idealists of every stripe. Ask any Marxist about the Soviet Union.
Indeed I do. Thanks.
#1 is possible using COM automation. You can write an app that interfaces with Excel via COM, or integrate your own functionality into Excel by developing a COM add-in.

#5 can be done in Excel by implementing an RTD server (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP030662371033.aspx). An interesting example is here: http://fransking.blogspot.com/2007/03/yfquotertd-real-time-d...
I have a field that's a dictionary. Excel doesn't have a way to store it as a dictionary in a cell.
I wish it could be that simple. In societies with low corruption it is this way mostly because people don't think about it, or are ashamed of it, much more then having mechanisms that catch them. Short term, yes, it's an organizational problem. But long term it can only be an ethical one, and it's not easy to solve this way.
Hmm, having a private repo might be pretty nice.

I wonder if the Dropbox cats have thought about doing something like this? They could continue acting as a "controller" and route data elsewhere.
Alternatively, the pockets of success can be significant. I have zero hope of it being "search engine" worthy, since it's too easy to fake (see meta keyword).

But... in more controlled environments, it's a very powerful tool. Corporate networks and Medical Research are two areas where it's getting bigger, and has made significant advances.

I love the idea, but it's aimed wrong every time it's explained. Trust is a big issue, and there's no way to prevent lies. But in the absence of trust problems, it's incredibly powerful.
There is cheesy stuff but also very solid advice.
A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery
You're completely right, my mistake.
upgraded vista sp1 on my macbook pro to beta build 7000. Went smoothly took about 2 hrs. No driver issues etc.
Taskbar is much cleaner, and the horrible aurora green/blue theme throughout Vista is replaced with OSX aqua style coloring.
Very stable, more responsive.
Fewer icons on the taskbar, and the gadgets dont sit awkwardly on the left.
All minor improvements that add up to be what Vista should have been.

Only gripe so far is slower when coming out of hibernate ...
Wont be going back to Vista ! Hooray!
A really simple way to do VLOOKUPS, for people who never have before.

findincolumn('john',a)
scrollaccross(3)
retrievedata
Powered re-entries to Earth are not feasible and not desirable

If you've just mined a million tons of iron from an asteroid, I think you would want to bring it back in a controlled fashion!
Detroit Goes for Electric Cars, but Will Drivers?
Windows XP with the Royale theme looks quite professional.
That was a fun read.

Doing the same thing over and over again for years at the hours the writer says he was working is sure to induce burnout. But if you change even the industry you're writing for and/or the type of projects you're working on, as well as mixing some fun personal programming stuff in there, that helps to alleviate burnout.
The kind of consuming he's talking about here, the continuous soaking up of information, news, current events, on subjects that interest you, is something I'm pretty familiar with personally, and I can tell you that it can be a cognitive drain that actually reduces your desire to produce. And news is addictive; it's easier than producing something new, and, at least to me, seems to hit the reward receptors in the brain pretty hard.

This is one of the reasons I try to route all the streams of news I keep up with through a single RSS reader; this helps enforce limits on how often I can go back for another hit.
Fun fact: the whole "global cooling" thing in the 60s and 70s was primarily the result of sulfur dioxide.

Sulfur dioxide has a much more immediate effect than most greenhouse gases, and reflects a great deal of sunlight--enough to significantly decrease global temperature. But it has a more important consequence than that--acid rain. This led to a huge push to eliminate it and other toxins from emissions.

Because it's in acid rain, of course, this means it has a relatively short half-life in the atmosphere. Give it a few years, and it begins to all drop out.

Thus, with the campaign against acid rain, sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere drastically decreased...

... and suddenly everyone started having to worry about global warming because they had just eliminated one of the main chemicals offsetting the warming.

Ironic, isn't it?
Well, the satellite data shows a cooling trend since '98.
No, it is a little diversionary tactic used by anti-global warming crusaders.

What happened was a few scientists mused about it in a few papers and a few publications wrote articles about it, but it was never investigated deeply nor was it ever endorsed by scientific organizations like the NAS.

So what did the NAS say in the mid-70s about "global cooling"?

>>"we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate."

Fast forward to today, and what is the NAS stance on global warming?

>> "In the judgment of most climate scientists, Earth’s warming in recent decades has been caused primarily by human activities that have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. ... On climate change, [the National Academies’ reports] have assessed consensus findings on the science..."

How people believe the two to be one and the same is quite beyond me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...
Best ideas I have here:

* Support Seadragon-like zooming into cells which expand into full spreadsheets of their own. You can go to infinite distance deep into the spreadsheets and each spreadsheet chooses a "cell" value to represent it to above container sheets.

* Ideally the above spreadsheet allows you to pull in other people's spreadsheets across the world to use as one of your cells (somewhat like Yahoo Pipes, I suppose)

* Alternatively, I'd like to see Excel go three dimensional for a single sheet. At a minimum perhaps use "layers" like Photoshop would to apply transformations and adaptations that collapse into the final view.

* I'd prefer this imaginary Excel also use Python or JavaScript for cell programming/calculations.

* I second the versioning information idea, too-- keep a history of every manual change to every cell and allow them to be reverted. In a git-esque way, support branching of cells, etc.
Do you consider the Apollo or Soyuz re-entries to be too uncontrolled?
hmmm... i've been looking for something like this for a while now also.
I've also considered making one of my own.
I'd rather have 10 of the cheap boxes, at 70/mo, than one 16GB at 800/mo.
Aye, runs fine in Workstation 6.5 omn Ubuntu 8.10.
I have serious trouble believing that "the market" would have led to Citi keeping larger amounts of reserve capital around. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was the banks pressuring the government to let them hold less in reserve.

I am registered Libertarian, as I believe in marketizing problems whenever possible; however, the markets must be set up correctly to be truly free, and only the government can do that.
I used to work for a decent-sized international bank that used Excel for pretty much everything (any development projects were doomed if users couldn't pull the data they produced/exposed into Excel). So I can tell you some of the things I saw people need when working with Excel in a large organization:

1. Ability to push/pull a range from a company-wide database, based on a (name,date) key. When you pull based on a (name,date) key, you get the first range with that name that was published on or before the date you specified. A dev team at the bank implemented this and people really loved it.

2. Versioning, but more for reasons of space than for having a "blame" feature. People use the same spreadsheet daily/weekly to create a report, so they have to save copies of the reports daily/weekly in case they need to reproduce the calculations from a particular report even though the differences from report to report were just minor tweaks. It wasn't uncommon for me to see spreadsheets that were > 100 MB, copied and saved daily.

3. Better explaining of formulas - you can ask Excel what cells reference another cell and it'll draw a bunch of arrows for you, but it still takes a lot of concentration to figure out why you're getting the number 4 in a cell when its references are many cells deep, spread across several worksheets. It would be nice if there was a clear way of explaining a cell's formula without having to navigate from worksheet to worksheet and actually hand-trace the references. Even collecting all of the references in one place and drawing out a tree of formulas would be an improvement.
Webdav + some simple scripting could do it on any server. That's basically what the "iDisk" for .Mac is.
I would feel rather empty without coding.

That said, I think it's important to have a life outside of one's job. That way, one can escape to fuel up the batteries. Getting a girlfriend, doing some sports and having vacations is a really good way of preventing a burnout.
Despite this post being 3-4 years old, this remains good advice. You can't please everyone, and you can't implement every feature that every user thinks they'd want for their one specific situation. Instead you take all those requests and let them sit in the subconscious. As the article said, the ones people REALLY need will bubble to the surface again and again.

It's also commonly said that the customer doesn't REALLY know what they want or need. It's up to you to take their requirements and apply your expertise to the situation giving them the solution they need, rather than the solution they may be asking for.
For me it is worth it not to have to deal with it.

For $529/mo I got:

2x Intel Xeon-Clovertown 5320L-QuadCore [1.86GHz]
4x Seagate Cheetah ST373455SS (10K SCSI drives)
Hardware RAID controller
16GB RAM
2TB transfer per month.
100Mbps uplink
Peace of mind

Sure I could get everything but that last item for less. There is an inflection point where it is more economical to run my own hardware again but I'm not there. For a few hundred more than cost when issues occur a competent support person is helping me within minutes.

When (not if) there are issues with my servers, driving to a colo would eat my savings. When you have a hardware issue at softlayer they fix it. They don't have to wait for new hardware as they have a stock.

I'd rather be spending my time coding and working on features. Having your own non-mission colo-ed box is awesome, but the cases where dedicated leasing or AWS doesn't make sense are fewer and fewer for bootstrapers.

Note: userscripts.org is 3 years old. It ran on a colo-ed box for a year. Then a $200 serverbeach box. But it just outgrew that ( http://userscripts.org/articles/22-2008-overview for 2008 review with stats )
I didn't say that and I really don't know how much of the NHS is being paid for by NI contributions.

The point is that in the UK you pay according to your actual profit wheras in other european countries you pay a lot starting on the day you register your business.
You beat me to it. I especially liked the link at the bottom of the page "Speak the truth and shame the Devil."
1. Already doable to a significant extent http://www.google.com/search?q=excel+python

2. Well, Google does this :)

3. Follows from 1.

4. Good idea, but why not just use this: http://www.google.com/search?q=spreadsheet+widget

Or http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=55244...

5. Already easily doable in Excel http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6115870.h...

In Google Spreadsheet, just use: =GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "price")

------

And I hope Google is working on a REPL for Google Docs where you can interactively run any language on your spreadsheet. :-)
Killing the planet one search at a time
He's expressed an interest, but he still doesn't know what it is. If you hover over him and continually tell him "you're doing it wrong" he won't have fun.

In order for someone to decide it's worth their time to learn the best practices for anything, they first have to reach the point where they decide "I want to get good at this." The kid may never reach that point, and that's okay, too.

Kids express interest in lots of things. That doesn't mean they'll do any of them for the rest of their life.
What about all those shared hosting accounts that no one uses?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Truth
typically a server with 16Gb of RAM is powered by quad-processors intel xeon quad cores (7300 or 7400 series), or the equivalent AMDs. One 7400 processor is sold from $1200, so just the cost of processors is $4800 for the web hosting provider. Add to the accessories (which are not commodity), a 2U case (or 4U), and you've got at minimum $8000 server apiece.

so yes, RAM is cheap, but RAM is just a fractional cost. at $8000, a web hoster needs to compute in costs of stocks, loan costs, so $800/mo is a reasonable price.

if you're really low on budget and need 16Gb (I guess it's for virtualization ?), look for "7310 hosting" in google, and then boost the RAM to 16Gb. You should be able to find one at around $650
When it comes to Pravda it's more like degrees of wrong.
One of the really great aspects of Dropbox is that it versions all content and just transmits/saved the delta's after the original file is saved. It there an easy way of achieving that around a webdav share?
Programming in Python 3 Book Review
You could hack something together using rsync, or unison. But, frankly, if neither of these things does what you want out of the box you will quickly find yourself spending more time than it's worth to save the $99 annual cost of a 50GB Dropbox account.

I use unison to sync a bunch of folders between my laptop and desktop, but only on an ad hoc basis. For stuff that I want synced in the background I use Dropbox. And, frankly, I'm not sure why I'm not using Dropbox for everything. For example, I'm running Jungledisk to make backups of my current project folders to S3 in the event of a big fire in my building... but if I just put my Jungledisk stuff in a Dropbox I believe I'd be syncing it and backing it up with versioning, all automatically. I need to look into that.

As for the clients that require verified encryption... is it possible to make an encrypted volume, created with something like Truecrype, and stick that in Dropbox? I've done that. Not sure how the task of automating the mounting and dismounting would go, nor of how secure this really is.
> SUM(IF($C1:$C$10000 = "England",$E$1:$E10000,0))

Slightly offtopic, but I just wanted to point out that excel syntax looks a lot like lisp, with biggest different being the first item is outside the parens.
Regulation sets a minimum reserve, not a maximum one.
SVN with webdav and apache would work.
Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
I find the comments on HN to often be much better quality than the actual link. As a result, I've been clicking on the comments first, and then decide whether to read the full article. A somewhat strange reading habit - just wondering if others do this too?
You can but it helps to know their online offers.

About a year ago I spent many hours talking with a rep who came back with the same boxes and prices we could have configured with their online system.

Last week I spent a couple hours chatting with a rep for userscripts.org's new box and he did better than the online prices.

I think the difference last year I approached with general requirements, so they spent all their time speccing out multiple systems and figuring out what was the best fit. My second experience I knew what I wanted, so I was able to ask for deals based on specific hardware choices.
'The simple fact that you can compare Ubuntu (cost: $0) with OSX ($120 + custom hardware) and Windows ($117) is utterly amazing.'

Why? They're all competing desktop Operating Systems.

Also for hardware to be supported by your distributor, per other Operating Systems, your vendor pays money to that distributor - eg, Dell and HP pay Canonical to support Ubuntu.
If you're in the area, you should drive down to Geneva and meet us (NewsCred). We're always looking for smart/interesting folks...
Just use any vcs. afaik there is svn behind Dropbox.
I run a mile when I need to unwind, it does absolute wonders (both physical and mental health!), and is a great way to refocus.
The article says "the Data Liberation team would like to announce". I am curious, is the Data Liberation team real? It seems quite possible that Googlers would form such a intergrouplet (a Googley word for a cross-group team of volunteer collaborators). There are already intergrouplets for testing, code reuse, code readability, accessibility, and much more. If these data liberators are organized, maybe we'll see a lot more announcements like this one.
I think it is not only mechanisms that catch them, it is putting people in positions where they can abuse their power to begin with. I would expect that most of the time in "western" societies people in power don't have the absolute power, they are more bureaucrats. For example, suppose you want to start a business and you need approval from a state official. In a corrupt country, maybe if that official says no, you are screwed. In other countries there are regulations for what you have to do to start a business. If one official tries to reject you even though you did everything the right way, you could go to court and force the official to approve your business. So the official does not have the absolute power he has in other countries.
Which will work for some things, but not say, a database server that needs 16gigs of in memory tables.
You should demand your money back.
I'd like to be able to open a database as as spreadsheet, with fields turned into column names, and tables on worksheets.

I'd like v and hlookups to be turned into SQL (and vice versa) with animations explaining what's happening in each.
India's Enron: A Software Giant
I want to point out that most producers also consume a lot. But it's not necessary true the other way around.

There's also a difference between mindless consumption and focused consumption. People who produce a lot do the latter.
Facebook Prepares To Launch FriendFeed “Like” Feature
what about being able to specify linear algebraic manipulations of part of the spread sheets, that would go a long way to make many things easier (sort of a mini matlab, but done right)
It's an article about the Milanankovitch Theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch which theorizes that ice ages are caused by cycles in the eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the earth's orbit. The Wikipedia article cites some problems with the theory.

There are other theories. One I like is that ice ages are caused by global warming. The arctic ocean becomes ice free leading to increased evaporation and water from the melting Greenland ice cap shuts off the gulf stream, resulting in lots more snow and big glaciers. [citation needed] And maybe it's variations in the the sunspot cycle, the Maunder Minimum, but bigger.
I actually remember when I was telling my friends about Windows 95 when it first came out, and what it has to offer over Win 3.11. It sounded like "well, it has a button in the lower-left corner with a menu, and all the programs are started from that menu". My firends were quite unimpressed, untill they got to try it later themselves.

The moral of the story is that even if people can not explain why, new windows can be a serious improvement over the previous version, and quite more popular, too. Give it a try.