Am I the Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.peepcode.com/tutorials/2010/file-navigation-in-text-editors <comment><USER2> Am I the only one that found staring at orange hard on the eyes? I guess I should give the author credit for all the work that they put into this rant, seems like a blog post could have done just the same without all the fancy graphics and what not.

<comment><USER3> If you happen to be on a mac, control-option-command-8 is your friend. Also, the readability bookmarklet does wonders for the appearance of sites like these. (And thanks to the people on HN who originally introduced me to these)

<comment><USER4> _control-option-command-8 is your friend_

Ditto for if you go to Best Buy or any other non Apple store that sells Macs. They never know about this delightful key combo. </8 year old level of humor>

<comment><USER5> Glad I'm not the only one to sometimes be a bit childish and do this :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote a snappy Ruby-based Vim plugin called LustyExplorer which does fuzzy/flex matching for opening files and switching buffers: <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1890>

<comment><USER7> Not to downplay your contributions (thank you), but just letting people know about other options:

FuzzyFinder Textmate <http://github.com/jamis/fuzzyfinder_textmate> (Unfortunately only works with fuzzyfinder up until v2.16)

and more recently

Command-T <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3025>

<comment><USER8> i've written a plugin as well. it's extremely simple: it uses find (or globpath() if you do not like external dependencies) to build a local cache. matching isn't approximate but you get results on partial matches and can browse files in directories (something i really missed in some other solutions).

i recorded a quick screencast: <http://pipsq.com/s.mov>

note that i'm matching against the linux source; searching smaller source trees should be a lot faster.

you can try it out by downloading the following files:

[http://github.com/strange/dotfiles/blob/master/.vim/plugin/p...](http://github.com/strange/dotfiles/blob/master/.vim/plugin/pyxis.vim) [http://github.com/strange/dotfiles/blob/master/.vim/autoload...](http://github.com/strange/dotfiles/blob/master/.vim/autoload/pyxis.vim)

launch with :Pyxis or create a map:

noremap <leader>e :Pyxis<CR> noremap <silent> <leader>E :PyxisUpdateCache<CR>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who almost didn't scroll down, thinking that the keyboard graphic was the thing to see?

<comment><USER10> No. It's a terrible webpage design.

Am I the only one who still values things like <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html> ?

<comment><USER11> Yes. The "user's don't scroll" meme has been confirmed as a myth.

<comment><USER12> "confirmed" by who? every blog post I see titled "the fold is a myths" follows the same path where there author lays out a bunch of opinion of why they think it is "honestly people scroll fine, honest"

every empirical study (like the one linked) seems to confirm that there is an obvious bias towards content above the fold.

Dont think its particularly important here, I was pretty impressed by his design and not everyone needs to stick to strict usability constraints, but still handy to know what they are.

<comment><USER13> Anecdotal evidence, but evidence nonetheless: We did some testing of how people interact with icanhascheezburger.com and found that most people basically _just_ scroll and then click the "next page" link at the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did anyone ever think that maybe the problem is the FILES?

Let me ask that one more time. Would people be ranting like this if there were NO FILES?

I still believe the "future of programming" is where your code objects are not arbitrarily mapped onto files in the file system, you just manipulate them directly!

A few Smalltalks and Lisps out there do this using image-based development. This is where it's at. If you can't use a image-based Smalltalk or Lisp to get your work done, then use a JetBrains/Eclipse IDE. They're generally modeled off of the Smalltalk IDE and are the next best thing if you're forced to use a broken file-based language.

If you just take "files" for granted and think that the UNIX design philosophy is the best thing ever, then accept your fate and stop bitching.

<comment><USER15> " If you can't use a image-based Smalltalk or Lisp to get your work done, then use a JetBrains/Eclipse IDE. They're generally modeled off of the Smalltalk IDE and are the next best thing if you're forced to use a broken file-based language."

I've worked in smalltalk, and yes it is an interesting way to work but images had almost as many problems as hey solved. primarily version controlling and syncing code were terrible (yes there were some tools, and yes they all broke on weird edge cases).

If forced to choose these days, I'd rather use files + git + (+ emacs + grep + ... ) than images, Images are nice as an _additional_ dev time artifact, but I believe files are more natural than images for source code.

"If you just take "files" for granted and think that the UNIX design philosophy is the best thing ever, then accept your fate and stop bitching."

This is provocative nonsense. smalltalk, while hugely influential and innovative is hardly the ultimate superior dev env that some old geezers make it out to be. I think it is mostly "the lost cause" style romanticism.

<comment><USER16> That's just the thing, git doesn't give a shit about files internally, it tracks the content instead and uses heuristics to figure out the file metadata.

Files and their artifacts do show up everywhere in git's UIs, because noone's found a better model yet of exposing the content to the user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like some people still haven't learned NetBeans or Eclipse.

Takes some time getting used to, -just like vim or emacs, but once you get used to the keyboard shortcuts you get everything the author asked for. No mouse needed: check, fuzzy search: check, paths: check, metadata: check, beautiful: check

<comment><USER18> Works over SSH: not so much.

<comment><USER19> Try with X forwarding turned on next time ;) Most GUI apps work just fine over SSH.

<comment><USER20> Not so much over high latency trans-atlantic connections with low bandwidth, which is something that works perfectly fine with a terminal based editor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No mention of ctags. I use that more than anything to navigate around files in emacs: M-. SomeIdentifier takes you straight to the definition. I hardly care which file its in.

<comment><USER22> I prefer cscope & vim, but yes, I often have no idea what file I'm in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Uh..have you never heard of IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse? Or RubyMine? Or Netbeans even...

They pretty much do everything you're talking about.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, why was the OP upvoted? Are there seriously that many people on Hacker News who have never used a real ide?

<comment><USER25> Depending on the language, IDEs are often not worth the trouble. I was big Eclipse and then Netbeans user when I did Java dev. When I started working in C++, I used Eclipse for about two days before I went back to vim. The Eclipse functions I depended upon most in Java - navigation, autocomplete, and refactoring - just didn't work all that well in C++.

IntelliJ IDEA has exactly what the author implemented, but IntelliJ IDEA can also take about 5 minutes to start up, and takes up _all_ your screen real estate. When you work in 5 languages on a regular basis and just want your editor to start up quickly, that can be quite a pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My favourite text editor still has to be Notepad++ on Windows. I've never found another (both for Windows or Linux) that was as snappy and simple.

 _shrug_

(never quite "got" emacs - it reminds me of the crappy, buggy, horrid PIC IDE we used at uni)

<comment><USER27> I was very impressed with Notepad++. I've switched to vim simply because I've been doing more and more work on remote unix machines - and it's so much easier to just open up vim through ssh. Now that I'm used to how to use it, I also appreciate how easy it is to get a dark color scheme that's easy on the eyes.

But yes - a big upvote for notepad++. Very lightweight and easy to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> VIM has a similar file finder using a plugin called Fuzzy Finder <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984>

<comment><USER29> It's almost like programmers _write programs_ to help them get work done! And I thought you were supposed to solve problems by making a big orange web page whining about them...

<comment><USER30> You mean like what the author did?

"This article started with pain, developed into an idea, and ended up as an unexpected prototype implemented in MacRuby. I'm using it daily and am fine- tuning the interaction, visuals, features, and performance."

<comment><USER29> A window that displays filenames next to a larger-font-version of their extensions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In my experience, Anything provides better file and buffer location for Emacs. <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything>

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not sure this matters for what I do mostly: Use Rails.vim where you are moving around typically with :Rmodel or :Rcontroller and splitting windows to see the implementation and test side-by-side.

</comment><comment><USER33> A pretty, re-invented, better Emacs would nice.

Till one exists use the current emacs.

</comment><comment><USER34> One solution:

Use fewer files. I try to keep the number of files and folders for a project to as few as possible.

Then you spend much less time opening and searching for files. As more people get involved with a project, you'll have more files, but you should make an active effort to keep the numbers minimized.

Here's a little script I wrote to give quick stats on a project's size:

<http://breckyunits.com/metrics_for_programmers>

<comment><USER19> > Use fewer files.

Why? What does that have to do with text editing capabilities? The number of files depends (or at least should) on what you do, not on how bad your tools are. If you limit the number of files to limit the file-opening time, you increase the fragment-searching time in the gigantic-file-of-doom. Also you lose the possibility to make local one-file changes which are self-explanatory if you look at the VCS history.

I'm not sure why would I want to make my work harder just to make up for the tool's features...

<comment><USER34> The OP complains that:

> For most programming tasks, editing involves opening several files at once > and switching between them (e.g. HTML/JavaScript/CSS).

His idea of a solution is for better file navigation.

My claim is that often the real problem is a bloated set of files and directories in a project.

I find when the set of files is small, opening and switching between them is much faster and more productive.

This applies particularly to the beginning of a project. As classes/files mature, then I recommend splitting them up into more files.

For example, when starting a new MVC project I'll create one models file. All the models go in there at first because the project will be heavily edited.

Once it's become more stable, I'll split it into a file for each model/class.

This way when you make small changes you'll have the VCS history benefit you mention, but often you don't really need that at the beginning of a project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Vim has this nice feature where you can edit directories as well as files. Just say:

      vi dir

Now you're looking at a directory listing, and you can move down to an entry and press Enter to go there.

When you're inside a file, you can go back up with:

      :e ..

You can also use wildcards and tab completion. I suppose for finding routines you can use ctags, though I haven't bothered with that in quite a while.

<comment><USER36> That didn't work for me with nvi or vim, it just says, "/usr is a directory". Does it require an extension? (I'm assuming your 'vi' is a symlink to 'vim', which is not always the case.)

Similarly, Emacs has dired, and in some extensions you can edit the file metadata in place and hit save to rename files, chmod, etc.

<comment><USER35> Right, I'm talking about vim. On Ubuntu, by default, my "vi" is vim.

I'm surprised it didn't work for you using vim explicitly. It works for me using versions 7.1.138 and 7.2.245, from fresh installs, by default, with no fancy configuration or add-ons.

When I run vim on /usr, it shows me a directory listing which I can browse and edit. I can create, delete, and rename directories and files right there.

<comment><USER36> I probably just don't have the relevant plugins installed. I installed vim on this computer for some reason or another, but I usually use Emacs or nvi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Kate comes close to providing what he is looking for:

It doesn't do an x/y fuzzy search, or an x y fuzzy search though it does to single word search.

It colors files by how recent they were opened and by if they were most recently edited or just viewed (changing/reference code). The file searches include folder names. All navigation tasks work through the keyboard. It has GUI beauty.

</comment><comment><USER29> Typical designer. "Oh no, my text editor displays its status to me using text."

Yeah. Some people get their eye-candy feed from lolcat videos, and then use their tools for work. (My desktop doesn't even have wobbly windows! Just a 1-px red border! How can I get any work done that way!)

Also, I'm fairly certain that eproject gets rid of the "wall of text" that disqualifies Emacs. In a perl project, for example, I can hit C-c C-f to find project files, but the files are displayed as the names of their resources -- instead of lib/Foo/Bar.pm, I see "Foo::Bar".

Personally, though, I just "eproject-open-all-project-files" when I start working, and then just iswitchb to the file I want to work in. Usually, you are two or three characters away from any file you want.

Learning and thinking > pretty.

<comment><USER38> I think your attitude is overly dismissive. At least, I'd have a hard time writing someone off as a "typical designer" (a bit of a tired stereotype) if they're experienced in both vim and emacs, let alone work for Peepcode. The author offered a sustained, reasoned argument for better navigation within projects.

I agree that as a programmer, I care about functionality and tools that get out of my way so that I can get my work done quickly and efficiently. But I don't think that means that everything has to look ugly (or better - that it couldn't be more elegantly presented).

I'm a Vim user, and rarely leave full-screen mode. It's a great app, but on large projects even with the Fuzzy File Finder plugin, I agree that navigating can be cumbersome. I'd like to try out Jamis Buck's "Fuzzy Finder Textmate" plugin that builds on this, but have had trouble getting it installed on both my desktop and laptop.

tl/dr: The author knows what s/he's talking about, and things can be pretty and functional, too.

<comment><USER39> If you've had trouble setting up fuzzy_finder textmate, check out my post: [http://codeulate.com/2010/02/installing- fuzzyfinder_textmate...](http://codeulate.com/2010/02/installing- fuzzyfinder_textmate-textmates-cmdt-in-vim/)

I walk you through it step by step.

<comment><USER40> I've gone through this process a number of times on different computers so I imagine that others will find this quite useful. Thanks for writing it up!

As an aside, I think you can just download the 2.16 version of fuzzyfinder from vim.org and it will work with Jamis' plugin. That's the version I use - love this plugin and I doubt I'd be able to use vim without it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Command-T is a relatively new Vim plugin that does fuzzy matching on the entire path, giving greater weight to characters immediately following slashes or other word separators in the pathname. I've been using it for a few days now and can attest that it is extremely fast and seems to "know" exactly which file I want after just a few keystrokes.

<http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3025> | <http://github.com/wincent/Command-T>

</comment><comment><USER42> I use Acme, it's got a smashing way to browse, open, and manage files.

<comment><USER43> Is there a port of Acme to OS X?

Or are there any similar editors?

<comment><USER36> Wily (<http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/>) is a major Unix port. Some quick googling says that it should work on OS X, though you need a three-button mouse for its chording-based interface. Its design is strongly influenced inspired by Oberon (<http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/>) (the OS, not the beer).

I find its design very novel, but the mouse-centric UI is a dealbreaker for me. (I went back to Emacs.) If you're already using a Mac, you're probably a bit more forgiving of mice, though.

<comment><USER43> That's what people think. But Mac OS X is actually short-cut land. There are loads of short-cuts.

<comment><USER36> Can you use OS X entirely without a mouse?

<comment><USER43> I don't know. Never tried it.

I'm just very happy common things like closing a window(cmd-w), quitting and app(cmd-q) have sane and comfortable short-cuts compared to Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> For file finding, I use FuzzyFinder with a shortcut to the recursive search. So far that and ctags been good enough that I haven't wrestled with fuzzy file finder textmate. The Command-T plugin looks neat though.

        " vim-fuzzyfinder plugin
        map <Leader>t :FufFile<Enter>
        " start recursive search with a comma. see help for 'fuf-abbreviation'
        let g:fuf_abbrevMap = {
                \   "^," : [
                \     "**/",
                \   ],
                \ }

</comment><comment><USER45> I wrote a simple fuzzy file finder extension for Emacs that tries to address some of the things I don't like about IDO (namely the "big paragraph" presentation that this article tells about), but does much less of course. I use it myself all the time, and if it could be of interest to the readers of this thread, here it is: <http://code.google.com/p/find-file-suggest>

</comment><comment><USER46> This is really well done, and especially interesting because I am doing research on making a text editor right now.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm so close to getting vim to be my ideal editor...7.0 for tab support, and ctags opens tags in a new tab, not a new buffer.

But I can't figure out how to search currently open tabs instead of opening a new tab no matter what; I end up with duplicate tabs very easily. So his 3rd major "what I want" point really rings true.

<comment><USER48> Your problem is trying to use the tabbar as a replacement for :ls/:files/:buffers. Stop, and learn what tabpages really are--work spaces, or view ports.

<comment><USER49> I agree. Now that I know how to use buffers, splits and the jumplist, I don't often open buffers in new tabs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm suprised Geoffrey doesn't mention that you can switch between TextMate tabs without the mouse using ⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3, etc. I navigate Rails projects through a combination of ⌘t (fuzzy search), ⌘ _n_ (move focus to tab _n_ ), and the occasional side-menu mouse click, which works well for me.

</comment><comment><USER51>
      cd ~/code
      ctags -R .
      echo "set tags=~/code/tags" >> ~/.vimrc
      vim -t SomeClass

</comment><comment><USER52> GoToFile bundle is an alternative to default Command-T in TextMate. It does filter by path for instance. <http://github.com/subtleGradient/gotofile.tmbundle>

</comment><comment><USER53> <http://www.sublimetext.com> has a feature almost exactly like this (missing the modified timestamp -- not sure how useful that would be anyway).

</comment><comment><USER54> _At the risk of ending anticlimactically, I plan to release it as a serious helper application with painless TextMate, Vim, and Emacs integration for a small fee (payable with PeepCode credits or free to Unlimited subscribers)._

Good to know. We're saved. For a small fee.

</comment><comment><USER55> A case study in how not to layout your website for easy readability.

</comment><comment><USER56> I like it.

Feature Request: Allow it to run invisibly (no Dock or menubar icon).

</comment><comment><USER57> I get it. Yes, I want.

</comment><comment><USER58> Yup, I use Coda

</comment><comment><USER59> Where's the geany integration? _sniff_

</comment><comment><USER60> I shall subscribe to your mailing list.

</comment><comment><USER61> I find it funny that about half of the comments are about the "horrible" web design of the article.

If you agreed with the message you would never have wasted that much breath on it, but you don't agree with it, and you don't have any good arguments against the article, so "Too orange!" it is. :-)</comment>


Ask HN: Review my webapp EatMyCharts.com (Social Music Charts on Facebook Connect) - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, I actually posted this last week with a different title but no one seemed to notice (or maybe no one's interested in it?).. anyway I hope I can get some feedback from you guys.. thanks! <comment><USER2> I don't rate songs, i rate artists and occasionally albums. I can't remmeber song names. You need some form of "browser" that lets me select albums then choose a song to rate from that album.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out! you have a point there.. I was also debating with myself on that before, but I decided that going with songs/singles will make the charts move faster (people will be encouraged to vote more often). Also often when I want to try out new music, I just like to hear 1 song from the artist (preferably the best song on the album)-- if I like it then I try the whole album. The browser part is good, I need to add that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What does FC add to this besides saving a login step?

Also, how will it make money?

<comment><AUTHOR> It eases the registration. You can also publish your votes to Facebook, which some people may like (like being a fan to an artist). On the part of making money, there's the usual ads, and I'm planning to sell mp3's from Amazon.</comment></comment>


Google announces 2$/100GB of storage - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/settings/storage

<comment><USER2> Already on the front page [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393416)</comment>


Welcome to the age of "Big Software" - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/07/entering-age-big-software/ <comment><USER2> Software does not physically exist in the real world - it's just a recipe.

Pharmaceuticals, having chemistry as its underlying dependent science, required fundamental research to uncover the physiological properties of certain materials, the majority of the low-hanging fruits of which were discovered in the late 1800s because that was the time in history at which cheap instrumentation became available.

For software, new forms of electronics and systems create a technological feedback loop, which may continue to become available for many hundreds of years, if Michio Kaku is to be believed. If we grant that this will happen, we can keep writing new recipes on top of those new systems for hundreds of years. Now, you might say at some point that these new systems are no longer, "software," but then the argument from the article would kind of be reaching and making things up as it goes along, therefore not really saying anything.

You can't just take one technological movement and extrapolate its history on top of another. The Stone Age lasted about 6000 years, and then the Bronze age lasted around 1000 years. Nothing about the Stone Age predicted anything about what the Bronze Age would be like - it's more about the underlying physics of the technology itself, and the speed at which humans can build on top of that underlying physics given the current state of technology, and how the new technology generated feeds back onto itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair points, but I'd counter by pointing out how the VR/AR landscape seems to be shaking out. Google, Microsoft, Apple, HTC, Sony, Facebook, Samsung, and Snapchat are all investing heavily in VR. Magic Leap is really the only independent company pursuing the tech. Now maybe there will be a startup to come out of left field, but I doubt it. The incumbents just have too much leverage. Like the pharma companies that discovered the "low-hanging fruit" software companies have done the same. Facebook is the default address book. Amazon's multi-level logistics advantage will be hard to beat. It's not to say that they won't face competition, but they'll be able to buy them out—or clone the products.

Lets assume VR/AR isn't the next meaningful battlefield and it's self-driving cars. Who is going to win? Google and Apple are both clearly investing here. Tesla and Uber could make a case, though Apple could buy either rather comfortably. GM acquiring Cruise is a great example of the theory in operation.

I'm not saying the theory is airtight, and I don't think it means we won't see new companies emerge, but rather, that the pillars of ecosystem are set.</comment></comment>


Is vast inequality necessary? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/opinion/is-vast-inequality-necessary.html <comment><USER2> Personally I think the '3 stylised models' that the author paints as being the possible sources of high inequality are somewhat wide of the mark.

The majority of 1%ers are there because their parents were 1%ers, and western society is broadly set up to allow those with large amounts of capital to protect it and use it to gain advantage & accumulate more capital. It's not necessarily a bad thing, except where those with capital can use it to bias the system in their favour.

An example is access to education. In the US, the lowest ability quartile of high earners now has a better chance of graduating collage than the highest ability quartile of low earners. From memory it was something like 31% to 29% respectively. The real shame there is the 71% of high-ability low-wealth kids who can't graduate college but really should. That value is being squandered.

However... inequality itself is a trailing indicator of other indicators relating to social cohesion, so it's possible that addressing inequality alone won't have a lasting effect. Robert Putnam is an interesting source on this stuff if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I couldn't agree more.

Generational passing-down of wealth (largely a result of rents that can extracted from resources kept within one's family) is completely elided in the article.

<comment><USER4> Intergenerational wealth transfer accounts for almost none of today's inequality. The vast majority of it is gone within a generation or two.[0]

[0] [http://time.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose- wealth/](http://time.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/)

<comment><USER5> I see this figure around a lot, does anyone have a pointer to the actual study? I got as far as a book called "Preparing Heirs: Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values", no detail on the actual study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > And power is surely a big factor, too. Reading someone like Mr. Graham, you > might imagine that America's wealthy are mainly entrepreneurs. In fact, the > top 0.1 percent consists mainly of business executives, and while some of > these executives may have made their fortunes by being associated with risky > start-ups, most probably got where they are by climbing well-established > corporate ladders. And the rise in incomes at the top largely reflects the > soaring pay of top executives, not the rewards to innovation.

Most probably got there by climbing well established corporate ladders? Is there a source for this? It seems "Executives, managers and supervisors (non- finance)" is rather broad and does not address whether these are corporate structures that can "set their own compensation".

<comment><USER7> " most probably got where they are by climbing well-established corporate ladders. And the rise in incomes at the top largely reflects the soaring pay of top executives, not the rewards to innovation."

Then why the heck are you here?

If you want piles of money, shouldn't you be climbing the uncreative, guaranteed ladder to wealth?

If being the 0.1% were really that easy, it wouldn't be the 0.1% anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like Krugman, and agree with him on this; though it's quite an example of Betteridge's Law. Obviously vast inequality isn't necessary, there are plenty of historical examples of merely ordinary inequality (and even a few of almost-equality). To me the question his piece begs is "how do you legislate redistribution when your lawmakers are beholden to the vast amounts of money the super-rich happen to have?"

</comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting that one of the articles in the header says "Why Spin Is Good For Democracy". Seems Krugman takes that hook, line, and stinker.

I personally would reframe the luck argument into one based on scarcity of resources. It's not about whether inequality is "necessary". It's about whether it can even be avoided.

<comment><USER10> Did you get to the end? He says explicitly that inequality is inevitable. He's asking whether the American kind of _vast_ inequality is necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Krugman channelling his inner Piketty.

They're not wrong though. The greatest growth did come when there was the least inequality, and the gilded age wasn't exactly a time of phenomenal economic growth...

<comment><USER12> _the gilded age wasn 't exactly a time of phenomenal economic growth..._

Wasn't it?

 _n the quarter century following the war, America's economy grew at the fastest rate ever in the history of the country. In the half century between 1870 and 1920, the number of Americans employed in manufacturing jumped almost 450%, climbing from 2.5 million to 11.2 million. This created a vacuum that encouraged immigration and, during the same period, 27.5 million immigrants came to the United States. In order to support the country's burgeoning population, farmers increased the number of acres under cultivation by an astonishing 234%_

[http://www.saylor.org/site/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/HIST31...](http://www.saylor.org/site/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/HIST312-Industrialization-and-Economic-Growth- FINAL.pdf)

<comment><USER11> > n the quarter century following the war, America's economy grew at the > fastest rate ever in the history of the country.

This is exactly my point. Fastest ever growth. 1945-1970.

> In the half century between 1870 and 1920, the number of Americans employed > in manufacturing jumped almost 450%, climbing from 2.5 million to 11.2 > million. This created a vacuum that encouraged immigration and, during the > same period, 27.5 million immigrants came to the United States. In order to > support the country's burgeoning population, farmers increased the number of > acres under cultivation by an astonishing 234%

This is simply population growth. Economic growth, as a metric that actually matters to quality of life, is defined as Real GDP per person.

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.5671.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.5671.pdf)

If you look at the main chart in this paper, you will see the growth was, relatively speaking, rather flat throughout the gilded age, which was also characterized by wild swings in the economy. Growth becomes higher and more constant after WWII (largely due to the rather left-wing policies at play that started with the New Deal, and later the restrictions imposed during the war, and high tax rates immediately after the war).

<comment><USER12> >This is exactly my point. Fastest ever growth. 1945-1970.

They are talking about the Civil War.

>This is simply population growth. Economic growth, as a metric that actually matters to quality of life, is defined as Real GDP per person.

First, it's not just "simply" population growth. Try ferrying 27 million immigrants to current Southern Europe and see how the GDP fares.

But more importantly, I just don't get the idea that GDP per capita _inside the country_ is the only metric that matters to quality of life. Dozens of millions of people were able to increase their income by coming to the US, that doesn't count?

What you're essentially saying is that if a country has ten people earning $100 each, and then ten more people who were earning $2 in other countries now join the first ten (whose income is unaltered) but earn only $5, the quality of life has been reduced.

To me this is simply nonsense unless one doesn't care about the quality of life of immigrants.

<comment><USER11> Here's a fun chart for you. US real GDP per capital from 1790 to the present:

[https://www.quandl.com/data/MWORTH/0_5-United-States-Real- GD...](https://www.quandl.com/data/MWORTH/0_5-United-States-Real-GDP-per- capita)

Here's nominal GDP: [https://www.quandl.com/data/MWORTH/0_0-United-States- Nominal...](https://www.quandl.com/data/MWORTH/0_0-United-States-Nominal-GDP)

> They are talking about the Civil War.

My bad. I forget about these things since I'm not American.

> First, it's not just "simply" population growth. Try ferrying 27 million > immigrants to current Southern Europe and see how the GDP fares.

A certain economic development model says growth is a function of technology, labour, and capital utilization. Assuming there's excess capital available, more population growth will always lead to economic growth. Whether or not you actually believe the model doesn't matter, economic growth has generally followed population growth, according to data.

> What you're essentially saying is that if a country has ten people earning > $100 each, and then ten more people who were earning $2 in other countries > now join the first ten (whose income is unaltered) but earn only $5, the > quality of life has been reduced.

That's essentially what slavery was...

> To me this is simply nonsense unless one doesn't care about the quality of > life of immigrants.

This is a different discussion altogether. We can see today, in places like Saudi Arabia, migrant workers come and are unable to attain anywhere close to a living standard the Saudis enjoy, is that the model we want?

Also, the US can't take in 6+ billion immigrants. Nice thought, but not possible.

And finally, I'm well aware of the plight of immigrants and those in 3rd world countries - my wife is an immigrant from a 3rd world country. However, when you factor in the cost of living, it's not always an upgrade (in my wife's case, she's done well so it is, but many of her family are in worse condition in Canada than back home)...

<comment><USER12> _Here 's a fun chart for you. US real GDP per capital from 1790 to the present:_

I understand that GDP per capita didn't grew much during that time. I just don't think it disproves the idea that the economy grew; that's the GDP, and it did grew a lot.

I also don't agree that GDP per capita is the metric that matters to quality of life. Like I showed, GDP per capita can drop despite an overall growth in the quality of life of every person. And it can also grow a lot despite quality of life generally dropping, if a few become fabulously wealthy while most people become a bit poorer.

Dividing the GDP by the number of people is simply not that useful in determining how wealthy the median person actually is.

On the other hand, here's a report on wage growth during that time: [http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2500.pdf](http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2500.pdf)

 _This is a different discussion altogether. We can see today, in places like Saudi Arabia, migrant workers come and are unable to attain anywhere close to a living standard the Saudis enjoy, is that the model we want?_

The discussion regarding the model we want is the different one. It can still be a model with economic growth and even improvements in quality of life. That doesn't mean better models don't exist, nor did I claim so.

 _That 's essentially what slavery was..._

Right. Except this was after the Civil War, and these were actual immigrants, not slaves.

 _A certain economic development model says growth is a function of technology, labour, and capital utilization. Assuming there 's excess capital available, more population growth will always lead to economic growth. Whether or not you actually believe the model doesn't matter, economic growth has generally followed population growth, according to data. (...) Also, the US can't take in 6+ billion immigrants. Nice thought, but not possible._

Why not, if the economy will just automatically grow, as you write?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Samsung's Galaxy S20 Ultra Might Have More RAM Than Your PC - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/13/samsung-galaxy-s20-specs-leak/ <comment><USER2> Shut up and take my money!</comment>


Enough - <AUTHOR> http://www.43folders.com/2009/12/14/enough <comment><USER2> If you click on a link titled "Enough," you are definitely suffering from compulsive overload, unless you really have time to open every link that makes the first page of HN. How about an informative title to help us filter our reading?

<comment><USER3> Hmmm. I look at the title, the number of upvotes, the URL and the commentary. I think coming from a well-known URL you can get away with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "There is no such thing as information overload. There is only filter failure." - Clay Shirky

</comment><comment><USER5> I have to be honest; while I enjoyed this article, I mainly upvoted it for the author's use of the phrase "shrimp-induced torpor," which elicited giggling from me in turn.

</comment><comment><USER6> I find it interesting that of late there had been such a surge in articles about information overload. It is definitely a lash back that will probably continue to get stronger as the amount of information we are exposed to increases.

<comment><USER7> I made an extra OPML file to follow my 5,000 favorite information overload blogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How did this guy compute 24,000?

<comment><USER9> 12 times an hour, 40 hour work week, 50 work weeks a year.

<comment><USER8> I see. I didn't realize people only checked email at work on weekdays. I was thinking more like 365 x 24 (or 16) x 60 / 5.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon wins patent for a flying warehouse that will deploy delivery drones - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/29/amazon-flying-warehouse-deploy-delivery-drones-patent.html <comment><USER2> Prior Art: Storks, the movie.</comment>


Telegram: Simply Beautiful CMS - <AUTHOR> https://telegr.am/index <comment><USER2> So many problems. If this is for geeks, why would I pay telegram to do what basically any static page cms does? If this is for normals why call it a cms? In either case, why the complex description of what it does? Why does it not tell me why I should want it? And the pricing scheme is clear as mud.</comment>


History of Gawker - <AUTHOR> http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=gawker-2002-2007

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting read if you have the time :)

The best part is of the article is how Denton turned his biggest competitors into his heaviest source of traffic by writing trash about reporters and scandals at the big publishing houses in NYC.</comment>


Physicists Aim to Classify All Possible Phases of Matter - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-aim-to-classify-all-possible-phases-of-matter-20180103/ <comment><USER2> > Instead, the classification of phases is "more like a periodic table. There > are many elements, but they fall into categories and we can understand the > categories."

> Before these zero-temperature phases cropped up, physicists thought they had > phases all figured out.

Ahh, the irony. This is an endless loop: hey, we figured it all out! Some years/decades later: hah! Past scientists didn't have the full picture. Now we have figured it all out...

<comment><USER3> Physics usually works in cycles. Someone finds some new weird observation that our current models don't yet explain. People swarm it, poking at the edge trying to find cases that the current model fails to explain. Eventually someone comes up with a new model that fits all the newly found observations in addition to all the old observations. Sometimes the new model is an addendum/special case/clarification of the existing model, sometimes it's a 'deeper' more fundamental model from which the entire old model is a special case. The new model's predictions are exercised and stretched until some prediction that the new model makes doesn't line up with experiment and the whole thing starts over.

This process is happening for basically every aspect of every model all the time, all at different stages and timescales.

We've known that all kinds of weird states of matter exist for quite a while now, but all these observations have so far resisted being made into nice, neat predictive models. So in this case the 'poking it' stage has been decades long, and we're stuck on the modeling stage. Hopefully the team in the article has found a model that can be useful and kicks us over the hump.

It _is_ an endless loop, but it's not irony. It's just the way science works.

<comment><USER4> > _it 's not irony_

Well, it is irony when _some_ scientists don't seem to remember the nature of the scientific inquiry as you describe it. Maybe because some seeming paradox or aberration is easier discarded as irrelevant or untrue rather than upsetting the whole theoretic framework that he/she has built their whole career on ...

It is human of course. But also ironic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Discussion from January 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16080907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16080907)</comment>


Microsoft break acquired Acompli app overnight with vague message to "upgrade" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/search?q=acompli%20lang%3Aen%20since%3A2015-03-18&src=typd <comment><AUTHOR> You get a message in the top bar to "upgrade", but you can't click it, and if you're not a nerd who follows tech news, you wouldn't know that Microsoft want you to use the new Outlook app instead.

So the effectively broke all Exchange/Google-related updates for people at work and home, since the app stops to fetch updates—I stopped receiving e-mails from what I can tell.</comment>


General Magic is a film about the '90s startup that imagined the smartphone - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/22/17233362/general-magic-movie-review-documentary-silicon-valley-tribeca-2018 <comment><USER2> I did a look back at using a Palm V as a young techie back in 1998/1999\. It's interesting since I still had some records of screenshots from real-world apps I used on a daily basis back then.

[http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/12/30/mobile- in-1998](http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/12/30/mobile-in-1998)

The Palm V wasn't that far off from modern smartphones, when set up correctly. Of course, lacked color and cellular connectivity. But, form factor was very similar to modern smartphones. And use cases have evolved in roughly the same direction. Plus, due to the grayscale screen and slow clock speed, the battery life was pretty darn good!

The two major problems that hindered widespread adoption of the Palm V: (a) The requirement to use Palm Graffiti with a stylus for text and input[1], which had a steep-ish learning curve. (b) The slow serial port (!!!) sync to desktop for pretty much all "connected" functionality.

AvantGo[2], in particular, was very ahead of its time, and using it did feel like "living in the future". And, in fact, I was -- it allowed me to read news articles and digital web content 'on the go', even in the period 1998-2001.

The iPod would be released in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007. So, it turns out it was about ~5 years too early for the hardware/infrastructure tech to catch up to the (conceived) mobile software use cases.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_\(Palm_OS\))

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AvantGo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AvantGo)

<comment><USER3> It's easy to overlook how critical infrastructure is in the ecosystem. In 1998 pervasive Wifi wasn't a thing, and virtually all noteworthy apps were desktop oriented. Generic cloud storage wasn't a thing yet, and household internet was connected directly to a PC anyways, so a serial connection to a PC for sync makes sense -- USB was still very brand new, while serial was pretty universal.

To me the interesting question is, given they had a functional device, how did they fuck up the next decade? Palm could have easily introduced many of the same features iPod had, and rescued 3Com/USRobotics from the dialup modem graveyard. Instead they spun off Palm for a forkload of cash, after driving away the founders to Handspring. It wasn't until 2004 that they supported any sort of sound beyond piezo buzzers with the Zire 31.

<comment><USER4> I haven't thought of WiFi as a available infrastructure until this year, the development was so slow to arrive I missed it actually coming.

And this is the City Of London, I live close enough to consider the city home.

Ironically, I only noticed the ubiquity of WiFi in the city as a result of testing the lowest end phone and prepaid options possible. This is in reaction to the most ridiculous dispute with my contract network provider, over the fate of the premium number I've used for a long long time being held hostage. I only wanted it to move to another account..

I remember the Palms very well. At the time I carried a treasured HP 209LX, secretly wishing for a Psion 5 keyboard but not their systems environment. (I had the HP a while if you note the overlap)

I wish I could find the story again, but I think the sadness was just the classical combination of blunt management and silicon valley egos.

This is the canonical answer for every technological near miss, isn't it?

I mean cost driven aggressive B School management plus idealistic impatient but always sufficiently talented to change the world software and hardware Engineers, Always Always Always the same, WHY DO YOU GUYS KEEP DOING IT??!!!

I honestly care about the answer, because I thought this was the past and not the normal, when I learned to program, oh, thirty five years ago...

As for the infrastructure WiFi...

The Result has been I learned that I am almost entirely independent of any cellular carrier network for my voice connectivity.

I haven't quite yet, but I actually could drop the Networks out of my life!

The UK is blessed with a ISP called Andrews and Arnold, www.aaisp.net who will port my (once freed) precious memorable number to a SIM card that resides on their MVNO. This cuts my recurring payment to merely £2.40pcm! And, as desired, I can have more lines on that number. I must avoid starting in how good AAISP really is. If you want to be recognised by voice when you call, and get enterprise grade services, please mention John owes Phil Boddy one, and hadn't forgotten...

Oh, and my Networks- free telephonic life?

I am seriously contemplating whether it's worth the hassle of applying to install a VHF/UHF D-STAR Repeater, which our building management seems happy to let us do, to cover the Bank / St. Paul's areas.

AAISP let you port your number (any number, cellular numbers are new) to their VOIP services. I can route them as I please, so apart from the slight lack of duplex, why not over HAM RADIO? I have figured out how to use a freephone number to call in and take over the call, from a payphone, and the idea amuses me greatly. But the fact is, I'd rather carry a dedicated WiFi access device that provides me with use of a headset and the radio /audio processing power possible in a shoulder strapped battery and module, than I would carry another$1000 phone obsolete the moment the manufacturer cares to not update it.

I guess I'd just love to be serious about putting my call sign on my business card!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great technology is not a product.

Let me repeat that: Great technology is not a product!

Founders would do well to remember. If you fail to find product-market fit, if you're thinking too far ahead, or if your product has too many compromises: you can invent ground-breaking technology that completely revolutionizes the industry then promptly file for bankruptcy and walk away with nothing.

Again let me repeat that: You can invent ground-breaking technology, be 100% correct about the future, and be 5-10 years ahead of everyone else... then watch your dreams go up in smoke as you walk away with zero dollars and without even a wikipedia blurb mentioning your accomplishments.

Great ideas without execution are worthless.

Great ideas plus poor execution are a deadweight loss on humanity.

<comment><USER6> > _Great ideas plus poor execution are a deadweight loss on humanity._

That's overstating it. In general, the failed attempt helps propagate the good idea, and helps that idea find a better execution in the future, as well as being a cautionary tale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the stories of General Magic and NeXT. Even though the businesses basically failed, the technology and experience from them would go on to completely change the world :)

For a look at another company in this space around that time, Jerry Kaplan wrote a memoir about his experiences at GO: [https://www.amazon.ca/Startup- Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan...](https://www.amazon.ca/Startup-Silicon- Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan/dp/0140257314)

<comment><USER8> Is there a case where ground breaking innovation resulted in a successful business? Usually innovation is too costly and the first incarnations lack mass appeal.

<comment><USER5> Most ideas are neither new nor novel. Even if you're the first the odds are high that you are far too early and the technology won't be ready for a decade or more.

Even the first toilets were far from successful. Indoor plumbing required a whole industry and multiple compounding innovations to become successful.

Many people were working on flying machines. The Wright brothers simply got lucky in timing: internal combustion engines finally got reliable and useful enough for the idea to work. If they hadn't done it someone else would have within the following 5-10 years (and many others were in fact trying at the time).

Many people had MP3 players but none of them managed to design a product ordinary people would want to use, nor the muscle to make the record industry play ball with an online store. You can scream until you're blue in the face that Apple didn't invent MP3 players but that just makes you irrelevant and a bad potential founder/employee.

I would argue that most truly ground-breaking innovations do not result in a wildly successful business. Finding a way to pair ideas with execution and product-market fit are more important.

<comment><USER9> The bicycle is yet another example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A very nice 10-minute video covering the story of General Magic, the company:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64)

<comment><USER11> LGR Tech Tales has a lot of these types of videos. Also Company Man. But Company Man is more general and not all Tech Companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One fad in the 1990's was agent-oriented computing. You'd have scripts that carried code and data from place to place. For instance, you might send a bidding agent with your strategies to eBay's marketplace where it would constantly look for stuff you'd be interested in doing only deals you'd want. In day and age of 28Kbps links, there were advantages to not having to constantly move data back and forth. One of most interesting options came from General Magic:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent- oriented_programming](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent- oriented_programming)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_lang...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_\(programming_language\))

</comment><comment><USER13> Telescript was fun, but those machines were awful buggy and the PC client was a bit odd. I still think agent oriented programming has a place with large program organization. We regularly run other people's code on remote machines every time we visit a web page so one of the objections to mobile agents isn't exactly different than today.

<comment><AUTHOR> The opportunities for emergent behavior (or misbehavior) are abundant. That's a great approach to make systems that act in completely unpredictable ways.

<comment><USER13> Maybe, but after all the talk of training and not knowing why decisions are being made, I really want to keep anything resembling emergent at arms length. I very much more interested on multi-agent systems effects on resource allocation and maintainability.

I see your line of thinking as great and interesting, but I'm now in the camp that sees a lot of people blaming "algorithms" for computer decisions that have negative effects (banning or denying resources) on people and thinking that's ok they cannot explain their program's decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> At the end of the 90s my brother had a Spectronics phone that was amazing. It was controlled with hidden buttons on its sides, took some practice. But it had everything a smartphone would have many years later.

Looking at their wikipedia page I believe it was in the TS2000 series.

When did this General Magic stuff take place? The article keeps using the phrase 1990s over and over.

<comment><USER15> There's a Wired article (April 1994, their fifth issue) with more background and some timelines: [https://www.wired.com/1994/04/general- magic/](https://www.wired.com/1994/04/general-magic/)

<comment><USER14> Ok. SO it's interesting to note that 5 years later a Swedish company had a finished product. Even though the Spectronics design was very unique and not at all adopted by anyone else in the later smartphone era.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of my Palm Pilot Pro from ~97. It came with a modem add-on for dialup internet. It was a smartphone, otherwise.

Handspring, an offshoot by Palm's creators created the first cellular addon (Springboard) for PalmOS shortly after. Worked OK.

PalmOS, on a Treo 90 (color touch screen in 2002), with Datebk6 remains the most productive device I've ever used by a wide margin. Touchscreen, and keyboard in one form factor cut down on grafitti use.

The best part? One shortcut key (fn+calendar) took the device from power off right into a cursor in to add a task. When horsepower didn't exist, productivity made up for in oodles. It had a usable keyboard, well before blackberry showed up. Nothing today touches this.

The Palm Treo 600 came along in 2003 to me were the first real, usable smartphones. No app store, but apps could be synced from the computer. It combined a physical keyboard with a touchscreen on a smartphone to boot.

</comment><comment><USER17> I bought a Datarover from eBay on a whim a few years ago.

The device itself is a brick but Magic Cap is a delight: well designed, intuitive and fun in a way modern systems are not.

If the backlight hadn't fizzled out I'd be using it regularly as an over- engineered landline.

<comment><USER18> I also did that some years ago. I used to be a heavy newton user and then, later in early 2000, I decided to check out some other old PDAs, so I purchased a data rover and some others. Magic Cap is a very good surprise. I wish we had more stuff like that these days instead of the boring stuff we do have now.

<comment><USER19> I agree. Using the Newton was fun in a way the modern devices simply aren't. The same happened with desktop operating systems. The original Mac was more fun than what we have now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I look forward to seeing this. There was a lot of exciting and creative stuff going on in the 90s around handhelds.

<comment><USER20> The palm pilot is still probably the best series of PDAs ever.

Although maybe nostalgia is fogging my memory.

<comment><USER21> Early palms had a lot of issues - I remember swapping AA batteries _very_ frequently for example - but the products and company showed an incredible balance between technological vision and practical reality. The glyphs are a great example; most of the letters mirrored the English alphabet but a few were quite different. With a little practice you could write accurate notes quite quickly. Compare this to the oft-mocked Newton. Sync also worked quite well. I wrote a number of apps that hooked into the sync process and uploaded data to web-based systems. I still find it kind of incredible that in ~2000 I could take notes on my palm and then dock, sync and view it in a web portal. Pretty underwhelming now but not when most websites were still geocities homepages!

<comment><USER19> For me my Pilot was a better organizer than any current phone. It was lean and very fast. The Newton 2000 was also very good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Back when I was a kid in the late 90's I followed the emerging .COM boom and stock market avidly. I kept a virtual stock portfolio of companies I'd invest in if I could. General Magic was in there. Like many promising companies at the time though, it didn't survive the crash, so my stock pick turned out not so good (good thing I was only playing pretend). Nice to see they weren't completely forgotten though.

</comment><comment><USER23> _> Some inventions seem genuinely prescient, like a collection of animated proto-emoji stickers. Some are impractical but fascinating, like a "town" computing interface with buildings for apps._

I wonder how many other have never heard of Apple's eWorld.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld)

<comment><USER24> These sorts of interfaces were very much of the atmosphere of the mid 1990s. Another somewhat better known one (although known as a flop) was Microsoft Bob. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob)

<comment><USER25> A friend of mine recently developed robert.js, a library for manipulating Bob's datafiles.

[https://github.com/Treeki/robert.js](https://github.com/Treeki/robert.js)

For example, here are the Bob rooms, rendered in your browser: [https://wuffs.org/bob/room.html](https://wuffs.org/bob/room.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The COMPAQ iPaq was in many ways ahead of its time. If they would have invested in a better OS, or convinced Microsoft to build something more "mobile", they could have beaten Apple possibly by 3-4 years.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ)

<comment><USER27> FWIW, everybody in the PDA space was influenced by General Magic. Two others that come to mind were Rex [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REX_5000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REX_5000) and Geos [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_\(16-bit_operating_system\))

<comment><USER26> Oh, cool. I haven't heard about the REX. Thanks for sharing.</comment></comment></comment>


20 years as a Debian maintainer - <AUTHOR> http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-being-debian-maintainer.html <comment><USER2> In case the author reads this, and as I can't comment there: Thank you.

Debian is an awesome and somewhat under-rated distribution. Being a maintainer always seems like a thankless and slightly forgotten role. Thanks for having the persistence to keep going so long.

<comment><USER3> Is it under-rated? Perhaps its marketing isn't as strong, but it's the "father" of a lot of distros today. Personally when I want a server distro, I still go with Debian. Simple and solid. No nonsense.

<comment><USER4> Personally, I feel like Ubuntu gets a lot more attention, perhaps more on the client-side. Sometimes, the foundational work Debian provides isn't fully acknowledged.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, Ubuntu probably is the best-marketed distro today. And I agree that Debian probably doesn't get the praise it deserves – IMO the nicest things about Ubuntu come from Debian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thank you for all your work.

I installed Debian for the first time almost 13 years ago and have enjoyed the "Debian way" every second.

But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Due to various decisions by the Debian community, Debian Wheezy will be the last version I'm going to install and for the last few years I have been in the proccess of migrating thousands of servers away from Debian.

<comment><USER6> What are you migrating to, if you don't mind my asking?

<comment><USER5> FreeBSD, so the migration is not just away from Debian but also Linux. Of course problems always arise in such operations, but in general we have been very happy with the change, and I'm just as excited about FreeBSD as I was with Debian before.

<comment><USER7> Do you migrate you workstation to FreeBSD too, or your servers and the like only?

In any case I want to take this opportunity to note that FreeBSD is quite nice as a daily driver on your workstation. The only missing thing is bug-free suspend/hibernate, which works for some and for some doesn't.

edit: added missing adverbs.

<comment><USER8> In my experience, you're also rolling the dice when you suspend Linux. My x99 workstation, z77 workstation, and XPS 13 have all failed to resume before. But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.

<comment><USER9> > But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.

Of course, you don't mention macOS. I never had issues with suspend on any of my MBPs. _If_ I did, it turned out that was my battery got empty, and the few times this happened I did think about suspend failing. Turned out I was wrong.

<comment><USER8> Good for you. I've never owned a MBP, and this thread is about switching from Debian to FreeBSD.

<comment><USER9> You completely missed the point. If ACPI is a mess, how come macOS doesn't suffer from the issue?

<comment><USER8> Look, I'm sure the macOS implementation of ACPI is great.

I said "I GUESS ACPI is a mess", because most implementations I've used (and I've only used it; I know nothing low-level about it at all) have had some problem or another.

How wrong of me not to have any experience with your preferred platform, and leave it out of the discussion.

<comment><USER9> That is why I told the reader (anecdotal) evidence which suggests the contrary.

> How wrong of me not to have any experience with your preferred platform, and > leave it out of the discussion.

No need to feel so overly offended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Riku is 10 years ahead of me!

[https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/10-years-of-debian](https://chris- lamb.co.uk/posts/10-years-of-debian)

</comment><comment><USER11> Even though I use ubuntu on my desktop, it is from Debian, and I ran Debian on my servers for years. Debian is the most important software for me for decades. For that I thank you, Riku, and everybody else contributes to Debian!

<comment><USER12> What prevents you from using Debian on the desktop? I'm using Debian testing for quite a while already, and it works rather well. The only annoyance is the the freeze period, but it got shorter lately.

<comment><USER11> Too many software development environments are using ubuntu out-of-the-box these days, I thus follow that to save some setup time. If I use desktop for simply surfing or office needs then yes Debian will be my preference.

<comment><USER13> Are there specific things you had issues with? Debian Testing still feels more stable and as feature-filled as Ubuntu Xenial to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks Riku, debian has become an excellent distro thanks to the hard work of people like you.

At the same time, it is sad to see how much work you guys need to do for things that should have been automated or done by the original developers... Let's hope AppImage changes that

Edit: Changed flatpak to appimage

<comment><USER15> Packaging is a complicated task and isn't as automatable as you'd think, It is important to consider how changes impact other tools. AppImage depends on maintainers too. Consider for example how appimage recipes depend on wget and bash and thusly openssl and libidn and glibc and libdl and git too, which brings with it libz and, and, and ...

PS: Thank you, Riku. I never understood the sheer amount of effort involved in being a packager / maintainer until I started doing the same task for NixOS. I regularly depend on Debian's excellent patches and CVE details to do my work. May you not be bogged down by nirvana fallacies :)

<comment><USER16> > Packaging is a complicated task and isn't as automatable as you'd think

I think the Solus guys would have a word with you. Even with no packaging experience it is pretty simple to create a package for Solus Project.

Here a short intro:

[https://wiki.solus-project.com/Packaging](https://wiki.solus- project.com/Packaging)

<comment><USER17> Come back when they have done this for 24000 third-party packages.

<comment><USER16> I don't see the connection. I didn't say that they have more packages, just that they have very good packaging tooling that makes it simple to make consistent packages.

<comment><AUTHOR> When you package 24000 things, you find significant diversity in build systems, languages, source code, testing etc. It isn't easy to package all of that in simple ways.

<comment><USER16> I don't know exactly to what the 24000 number refers to. Solus Project does already have 5000 packages in the repos. I think that is quite an accomplishment for a pretty small team of 3-4 people with some help from the community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thank you for your service to the Debian community. I have only run Debian based distributions on all of my installs of Linux.

</comment><comment><USER19> Thank you Riku!

I used fte as my primary editor on OS/2, and when I started using Debian I was happy to find it available there as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> A couple of weeks before they got accepted? Wow!

I considered become a DD about 10 years ago, but a friend was going through the process and it took them _over a year_ with at least one restart-from- scratch because the bureaucracy had been lost or something.

> _Regis NM did start somewhere in 2003. There was a period of him being on > hold, in 2006 we did continue the process, which used some time, but most of > the delay up to now is, again, my fault. Seems like all the few NMs left in > my AM queue do have some huge level of patience available somewhere..._

[https://lists.debian.org/debian- newmaint/2007/08/msg00046.ht...](https://lists.debian.org/debian- newmaint/2007/08/msg00046.html)

I wonder if Debian has improved their process or replaced the ineffective people since. Do they still have the second-class-citizen system (whose name I can't remember offhand)?

<comment><USER21> I went through a similar experience with the NM process some ten years ago except I ended up giving up on the whole thing. After being told I absolutely had to answer a load of questions within a week for a week that happened to be very inconvenient, my answers then got completely ignored. I carried on maintaining the one package until a few years ago when I gave up because nobody would sponsor an upload until the freeze at which point I was being told I had to backport bug fixes to the old release. I actually ended up jumping to FreeBSD before the whole systemd mess hit and I've found it to have a friendlier community.

<comment><AUTHOR> These days the questions thing has been replaced by a more streamlined process, basically if you have been contributing for a while you'll be accepted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> thank you much for your work on debian, i love the stability of debian linux, 20 years is a lifetime!

</comment><comment><USER23> Thanks. Debian is all I've ever really known in regards to Linux distros.

</comment><comment><USER24> Thank you very much, Riku! Kudos and glory! :-)

Debian muscle is behind many other Linux distributions, and Debian maintainer work is fundamental.

</comment><comment><USER25> The site doesn't even load without javascript.

</comment><comment><USER26> Version that can be read without JS enabled:

[https://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of- being-d...](https://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-being-debian- maintainer.html?m=1)

<comment><USER5> I cannot comprehend why on earth Javascript is required just to show some text. This must be the height of web design silliness.

<comment><USER27> I just switched to a simpler theme, I didn't realize the one I had chosen was so dependant on javascript.</comment></comment></comment>


WikiLeaks Begins Releasing Leaked Saudi Arabia Cables - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/3928584/wikileaks-saudi-arabia-cables/ <comment><USER2> Saudi Arabia is at the center of a lot of stuff going on in the middle east right now (their support for ISIS, their involvement in Yemen, the chess game with Iran, etc. etc.). It would be interesting to see what these cables turn up, once translated.

<comment><USER3> ISIL is used as a proxy force by all powers that can effectively manipulate them, but they are also a force of their own.

The US heavily invests in using video games for propaganda and ISIL and Sunni- insurgent forces have been exposed to a number of anti-Assad video games. Hamas is unlikely to be the progenitor of anti-Assad video themed video games. It's speculative, but it makes a lot of sense that the US would do what it can to direct ire at Assad.

What's not speculative is that Turkey and the US were running guns to groups that became ISIL factions in Syria.

There's lots of influence to be had all over. The larger powers are trying to manage the situation to achieve their ends. That means funding insurgent groups where it benefits them and bombing the same groups from the air where they are challenged.

<comment><USER4> Can you provide a source for US "gun running" to ISIL factions in Syria? It is well known that Turkey's intelligence agency is doing this, but I've never heard the same accusation leveled at the US.

Also I would love to see these anti-Assad video games, even though it seems like American involvement is your own analysis.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's not exactly like the US is the only place in which video games can be created, especially since they almost certainly aren't exactly AAA stuff. (More like a _Counter-Strike_ mod at best, I would imagine).

<comment><USER3> This is true, I would expect a number of countries to be able to pull it off if they were inclined to. Iran, Russia, China, Syria, US, Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. Those are the choices. Palestine is very unlikely - though they have used video games in the past. Since the target is Syria it rules out China and Russia and Syria. Iraq is in essence a provincial government and isn't do that on its own accord. Iran could, but they aren't in the video game making business. Neither is Saudi Arabia. Given the DoD's investment in expanding propaganda operations to new media including video games, the US makes a lot of sense - though it would make some sense too if it was joint with Turkey.

No smoking gun and not strong enough evidence to assume it, but it's not a crazy speculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/press](https://wikileaks.org/saudi- cables/press) is a better link? Actual cables in Arabic at [https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/search](https://wikileaks.org/saudi- cables/search)

</comment><comment><USER7> this is laughable. WikiLeaks claims that "A document listing the subscriptions that needed renewal by 1 January 2010 details a series of contributory sums meant for two dozen publications in Damascus, Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Kuwait, Amman and Nouakchott. The sums range from $500 to 9,750 Kuwaiti Dinars ($33,000)". The actual document shows that a Saudi ministry is buying subscriptions to newspapers. The "9,750" is actually 9 dinars and 750 fils - an amount equivalent to $35!

<comment><USER8> Not really laughable commas and periods have a different meaning in math, and well accounting in many countries.

For example if you have a 2340 dollars and 87 cents then in the US it will be written like 2,345.87 in mainland Europe it will be 2.345,87.

If you remove the cents than to an American person 2,340 is 2000 and 345 dollars, to a say French person it will be 2 dollars and 34 cents.

On top of that the Kuwaiti Dinar is the only currency in the world (that i know off) that its main unit is divided into thousands and not hundreds which complicates this even further since for most people this makes it even look less like a "decimal" sign used in currency but a simple comma which is used to separate thousands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is one of a very few times, where I feel privileged that I know Arabic.

</comment><comment><USER10> I found it notable that this leak didn't directly flow from Bradley or Snowden:

      "The group did not attribute the documents to a source directly. The press
      release did note that the Saudi Foreign Ministry acknowledged a computer
      network breach in May, and a group called the Yemeni Cyber Army afterward
      began releasing "sample" classified material to various websites."

<comment><USER11> Yeah, somehow I suspect Manning and Snowden didn't have access to the Saudi Foreign Ministry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sadly I can't read Arabic, hopefully there will be some translations. This can only be interesting reads.

<comment><USER13> Well, I read all the documents in the first page here [https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/search](https://wikileaks.org/saudi- cables/search) and sadly didn't find anything interesting but there are thousands of documents so, hopefully someone will parse them and report on the interesting ones.

Aside - might be interesting to some: The OCR on these documents is completely botched, I found a couple of words that were right but that's it.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for noticing that. I cut and pasted the Arabic text in google translate and the results were just complete nonsense. I suppose much less effort has been spent on optimizing OCR for non-Latin chracter sets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Aside of the content, interesting things to do with both these and the state department cables would be to study patterns in the metadata like transmission date/time vs geographic location. Wikileaks has them sorted by various criteria, is anyone aware of a good platform for wrangling this to visualize it different ways? Most of the offerings at [http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/11/wikileaks_us_embass...](http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/11/wikileaks_us_embassy_cables_the_visualizations.html) are deprecated or dead.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there some machine learning program that can make sense from a lot of text?

What could read several thousand research articles about food intake and make common sense out of it? What could read Wikileaks and make sense of all that text?

</comment><comment><USER16> This is laundering FSB intelligence.

<comment><USER17> It certainly is never Russia or its allies that is leaked by WikiLeaks

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Have Wikileaks ever dox'd an ally to Russia?

<comment><USER18> Do they have anything? Russia was relatively ok in the last 20 years (except the wars against Georgia, Chechen wars). They never really hide their actions, like annexing Crimea was communicated way in advance to the NATO, like in years. The western media barely mentions it. There was an earlier agreement between the NATO and Russia that we are not expanding to the east direction in the EU and we do not interfere with Russian interests in ex-soviet countries. Anyways it would be good to see more information from WL on these, I am really curious what went down exactly.

<comment><USER19> > annexing Crimea was communicated way in advance to the NATO

Wait it was? I am genuinely interested. Can you please link to something more about this in either English or Russian?

<comment><USER18> This was the discussion:

[http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/10/22/rasmussen- no-n...](http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/10/22/rasmussen-no-nato- membership-for-ukraine-georgia.html)

At this stage the NATO and allies knew that Russia is not happy with their plans on eastern expansion. I am trying to find a proof that they were aware of the annexation plans.

<comment><USER20> Russia's general feelings were always reasonably clear, but there's an enormous gulf between "want to annex and complain a lot about the current situation" (lots of states have such positions on disputed territories) and "actually sending in tanks tomorrow"...

<comment><USER18> That is very clear. Putin gain massive support in Russia with these moves, of course this is melting away after the embargo kicked in. The problem with that is two fold. The embargo directly hurts EU's economy (look at the Mistral class ship deal with France) and the lower oil price triggered a massive buying up operation in China making them even stronger than before. Basically USA's (and more broadly the Western world's) influence hurting their allies and enabling the other parties (China) to gain even more power. This sort of play is not good for us in the long run.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Urbit Is for Communities - <AUTHOR> https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/ <comment><USER2> More than anything Urbit is impossible to comprehend. All I understood from it is that it's some bizarre distributed something with an alt right attachment.

<comment><USER3> Where did you get anything remotely "alt-right" from that article?

<comment><USER4> Probably referring to Curtis Yarvin (founder, "no longer involved") wrote a bunch of alt-right stuff

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As an active user (completely unaffiliated with Tlon), I can say that communities are truly booming on Urbit right now. Their newly released OS1 is pleasant to use and quite functional. The discourse in the many notebooks and chats I'm a part of is lively and engaging. If you're curious, boot[1] a comet[2] and message me at ~wolref-podlex—I'd be happy to set you up with a planet.

[1] [https://urbit.org/using/install/](https://urbit.org/using/install/)

[2] [https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a- comet/](https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a-comet/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Urbit has been popping up here and there for quite a few years now -- can someone explain what it is in terms simple to understand?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Urbit is a clean-slate OS and network for the 21st century."

The best way to get an idea is to read this series [https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/](https://urbit.org/understanding- urbit/). This is also a great high-level introduction that skips the more technical aspects: [https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-for- normies/](https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-for-normies/).

I'd try to explain more here, but I cannot do a better job at than they've already done.

Edit: Also, it's despised by many on ideological grounds due to its creator's (who is no longer affiliated with the project in any way) political views from a decade ago. I'm not going to comment on this any further, because it's a tired case (discussed in literally every other thread on HN about Urbit) and I find it quite petty.

<comment><USER6> I realize it's the tagline, but it's kind of misleading to call Urbit an OS when it's a program that needs to run on Mac or Linux. WeChat is more fully featured, but we don't call WeChat an OS...

<comment><AUTHOR> The term "operating system" is far more precise than "fully featured"; in other words, the accretion of a certain number of features does not constitute "operating system" at some point.

From Wikipedia: "An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs."

It does that, which you can read about here: [https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/arvo/arvo/](https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/arvo/arvo/)

Whether it's hosted on top of Unix at the moment is beside the point.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


You Suck at Excel (2015) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c <comment><USER2> This is the best Excel tutorial I have ever found. Even if you don't remember much about Excel, the following from this video allows me to basically get started with any data very quickly:

1\. Ctrl A : Select all the data

2\. Insert table : This will allow you to be able to filter or sort on any column, provide a row for stats if you want, and will auto format and color the table. You can also choose to go to a pivot table easily from here.

<comment><USER3> Those two suggestions, plus "always work in R1C1 mode", are enough to supercharge most inexperienced users of Excel. If you take nothing else away from Joel's video, get those three.

<comment><USER4> Hm, so that's using integers for rows and columns, rather than integer/letter (a1 vs r1c1). Is there a way to do indirect/computed references? Because if not, I'm not sure I see how it's much better (saner/easier maybe..)? What's the elevator pitch for r1c1?

[https://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...](https://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_excel-mso_mac/how-to-usecreate-formulas- in-r1c1-mode/f74759f0-725e-44ec-ba3a-abf1a747f603)

Ed: ok, apparently the video starts with r1c1 - so I guess I've found my elevator pitch...

<comment><USER5> In one sentence: Excel seems magic because when you copy and paste cells the references change to still work, but you can understand in less than a minute exactly how and why that happens if you learn R1C1.

In two more sentences: Specifically if you're in cell A1 and you enter =B1 what is actually stored is =RC[1] (same row, one column more relative to this cell). So if you copy that into cell H50 it will still be RC[1] and now evaluate to I50.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone archive the Martin Shkreli video where he shows his Excel workflow? Think what you will of the guy, but that was one of the most info-dense videos I've seen, and it's a shame that YT saw fit to remove it.

<comment><USER7> His tutorials were amongst the best I have seen on financial analysis. Problematic character but genius level skills and talents that he was willing to share.

<comment><USER8> Why do you say this? I'm close to people in finance and they derided the videos and said they were the equivalent of showing off how fast he could parse filings into Excel when real pro have scads of solutions that automate it at scale. The view is that he's a criminal with a folk hero reputation for people who were dazzled by his attitude and his facility with Excel.

<comment><USER9> > I'm close to people in finance and they derided the videos

Living among the gentry with good private performers is fine, but the peasants have to amuse themselves with the traveling minstrels in the fair ... their technique may not be the best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The video is amazing if you're a coder and might need to use excel at some point (access columns by _name_?! sign me up!).

However, what I love about excel is to see what it enables people without formal programming training to do with data, and using functional programming on top of that!

Is there any tool that comes even close in terms of power, accessibility and ubiquity? What would such a tool even look like?

<comment><USER11> I'd love to see excel running python under the hood with easy integrations to numpy and matplotlib and all that. There actually are a couple such projects I've been meaning to check out.

In essence, I've spent a lot of my career modeling things in excel. For quick, easily shareable prototypes(to pseudo-technical people), excel is great. But add any real complexity and I rapidly find myself using some UGLY hacks to get the functionality that would be trivial if I could just iterate over the data more explicitly. If I could just click a cell and set the output equal to a python function return value, man would that be a tool. THE tool even. I don't really want to learn VBA or something clunky and not very useful outside of that niche context. I already keep too many programming languages in my head between python, c++, FORTRAN, and some bash scripts.

<comment><USER12> Check out XLwings. It can do some pretty handy stuff.

<comment><USER11> That is one of the projects I've been meaning to check out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Submitted many times, the most active discussion was in 2016 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545)

<comment><USER14> In the 2016 discussion, the link to the Martin Shkreli video is down. These are some of the videos in that series where you can see him use Excel:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASInVKShnM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASInVKShnM)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poyf3Cnb- MQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poyf3Cnb-MQ)

<comment><USER15> The fact that there is a world champion Excel user tells me I suck at excel.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SysRS3lZm98&feature=emb_logo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SysRS3lZm98&feature=emb_logo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish the Excel developers would bring some of the UI in line with other apps.

The #1 thing here is the lack of smooth scrolling, scrolling by row actually gives me motion sickness whenever I use Excel (and that's not a problem I have with anything else I use).

You can find a legion of people begging for at least a setting to end snapping to rows here: [https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for- windows-...](https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows- desktop-application/suggestions/19408420-smooth-scrolling-without-snap-to- cell)

If anyone from MS is reading this, this seems like such a tiny change but it would really make a lot of people happy. In the meantime, could anyone recommend a smooth scrolling spreadsheet program? I haven't used the alternatives too much.

<comment><USER17> It would be nice if the mouse wheel clutch (i.e. Logitech Master 3) controlled that, so you could feel each row snap by individually when you wanted to, or toggle the clutch button or spin the wheel fast to scroll smoothly.

<comment><USER18> Nice idea. I wonder what would be involved in making that happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A must read: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg- rev...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/)

</comment><comment><USER20> That video really helped me to understand the horror that is Excel, but why fight it instead create a linter for Excel: [https://github.com/plasma- umass/ExceLint-addin](https://github.com/plasma-umass/ExceLint-addin) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEwUA0h2dsw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEwUA0h2dsw) It is telling how complicated that linter is.

</comment><comment><USER21> Joel's blog about software is also amazing for those unfamiliar with it. Still worth reading posts that are more than a decade old.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading- lists/top-10...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading- lists/top-10/)

</comment><comment><USER22> The worst Excel user I've ever seen was my brother. At film school he was producing a student film. He did the budget in Excel. One day I came home from work and he had some questions waiting for me. Looking through his sheet, I noticed that his summation row at the bottom had hard-coded values rather than the =SUM(...) formulas I was expecting. Thinking he had inadvertently done a 'copy -> paste values', I said, "Look, you killed your formulas here." He asked, "What are formulas?". Turns out, he had been using a calculator to tally up all the columns and was typing the total into the cell at the bottom.

<comment><USER23> It may not be relates to your brother, but I often find that the smarter people consider themselves to be, the more often they never open the manual for the tools they are using.

</comment></comment><comment> Alt-F4 The title reminds me of a part of The Website is Down #2: Excel Hell (slightly NSFW)

[https://youtu.be/1SNxaJlicEU?t=216](https://youtu.be/1SNxaJlicEU?t=216)

</comment><comment><USER24> The fact that the GUI button to make a table is called "Format as Table" and placed next to purely visual formatting options (and makes you pick a color scheme!) has been the roadblock for countless Excel users graduating to power users, I imagine.

</comment><comment><USER25> Such a classic, and great to give to first-year analysts

</comment><comment><USER26> What always amazes me are the Excel wizards I find who show me a thing they want on their website in just a few minutes and I'm thinking:

"It's going take me a hell of a lot longer to code that than it took him/her to show me it working in Excel...."

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish there was one for Access too. I find MS Access less intuitive than Excel.

</comment><comment><USER28> This video is freaking amazing, and I already know a ton about excel.

</comment><comment><USER29> His rude responses to questions aren't as adorable as he thinks.

<comment><USER30> He isn't trying to be adorable.

<comment><USER29> He succeeded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Would be nice with a list of "best of" youtube videos for various topics. This is probably best in class in the Excel category.

</comment><comment><USER32> Did you ever see Martin Shkreli on excel on YouTube?

</comment><comment><USER33> This… is supposed to be _difficult_ stuff??

</comment><comment><USER34> Please, just learn SQL instead of creating more Excel messes...

<comment><USER35> What's the quickest way to query a simple CSV file with SQL ? Interested in any gui or cli tools.

<comment><USER36> If you're accustomed to windows/office you can just set up a CSV as an ODBC data source and use access.

Otherwise [csvkit]([https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)) gives a pretty good command line interface to make sql queries against a CSV or dump the CSV into a database so you can use any standard database tool to query.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't get it, he seems to use his mouse to navigate. Day 1 in finance you remove the mouse. Video was boring/slow for such a drastic title. Should read "snarky guy slowly uses different functions in excel and is proud of himself". I got my hopes up for nothing :/.

<comment><USER38> You do realize Joel Spolsky was the MS project leader for writing Excel...</comment></comment>


18-year old launches startup with $500 - <AUTHOR> http://www.sproutly.com/2008/11/04/jessica-mahs-500-to-startup/ <comment><USER2> This is nice and all but it's nothing special. Hey look, I made a site too, but I did it for $0, and it took me two weeks as well. It's on the same scale as this. Is my site a startup? No, it's just a fun project.

<comment><USER3> But does your site also display an empty page (like <http://www.internshipin.com/>) when you visit your site? Probably not!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah I'm sick of this nonsense. I launched two sites by now, each for zip, and I'm 21. Enough whining.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hardly news. SchoolRack.com is built by two 18 year-olds.

</comment><comment><USER6> _"... InternshipIN allows employers to make job posts, while also crawling other job boards, such as SimplyHired, for internship-specific listings ..."_

While the site is small you might get away with trawling other sites. Scraping will show up on the logs of other sites & could be blocked. What is another way to get _"intern"_ job ads?

<comment><USER7> I imagine SimplyHired will just tell them to use their xml-api interface...

<comment><USER6> _"... SimplyHired will just tell them to use their xml-api interface ..."_

Didn't know they had an interface. Wonder why they didn't try this or do you think the Journo misunderstood their technology?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> True. It's nothing special.

However, I do like the simple design, especially the filter options that reflect the interests of the students.

Targeting niche audience might actually get them somewhere.

Digging on the site a little bit deeper, I realize all of the jobs are from big companies. This is hardly helping start-ups or students who want to start one.

Why don't they just build a student entrepreneur networking site? I see a lot more potential in that.

</comment><comment><USER9> I started a wordpress blog. Hi 5!</comment>