d4nt

After evaluating all the desktop html frameworks I could find, I settled on "node-webkit".

I built QueryTree (http://querytreeapp.com) as a response to this sort of problem. It's a domain specific visual programming language designed for working with tabular data. So people who want to build a custom query on a database can do it just by dragging and dropping the right "tool" onto the "worksheet".

It's a desktop app rather than web, although it is actually built using HTML, canvas and JavaScript.

It can do almost anything SQL can. It can't do "IN" queries yet but I have a plan do that in a way that's consistent with the general drag and drop approach of the app. It doesn't explicitly handle BETWEEN queries but they are easily achieved by using two filter tools one after the other.

I think there are two types of complexity to be dealt with when enabling users to build reports/queries. One is the complexity of the concepts involved, the other is the complexity of communicating what you want to happen to the computer. I built QueryTree because of a belief that many people understood they the concept of a filter or a join, but just didn't like text based programming languages. I replaced the SQL syntax but left everything else in place. If I didn't think my target users were up to understanding the conceptual complexity I would have restricted it a bit more and would probably have ended up with something like IFTTT.com but for data. Mostly, people seem to "get" QueryTree though, especially when they're using it on data that they're familiar with.

What you say is true, but I don't believe a contract of employment entitles any company to tell someone who they can or cannot date.

If, for the reasons you describe, they wish to maintain a public position of "we not encourage dating coworkers" that's one thing, so long as they don't actually think they have any say in this matter.

The fact that the tech architect spent any time at all contemplating this issue is a massive red flag to me.

Technical Architecture should be about making the right set of trade offs given the business goals of the system being developed. That involves spending a lot of time talking to people both inside and outside of dev team about what the goals are and how the decisions that devs are making are impacting everyone else in the company. That stuff is time consuming, but if there's any time left you should really be keeping up with the latest frameworks and tools.

If you're spending your time reviewing commits and enforcing coding standards, you're doing it wrong.

I was talking to a lawyer earlier today and she said something like "97% of Facebook's value is in their IP (intellectual property)" and I silently thought, no, their entire value is in the fact that they have active users. Without the network effects of active users, they are worth almost nothing.

They are like a social networking black hole, what makes them big is that they are already big, and that's all.

So if anyone starts taking away their daily active users, even if they were only taking a few percentage points off Facebook's metrics, they are effectively threatening to break Facebook's business model and put them out of business, and it makes sense to spend almost anything they can afford to neutralise that threat.

This article kind of reminded me if this comic strip:

http://xkcd.com/810/

What we're saying here is that someone offered to let the blog owner post some well written and original content on their blog, that would be relevant to their readership and mutually benefiting to both parties. But that's bad because Google says so.

Now, if the content is bad, or not relevant to the readership, or overly spammy, then the blog's readership will presumably react. So it's up to the blog owner to protect their reputation and vet all content that they publish. But assuming the content is good, haven't we just got to a nice place? With marketers realising that the best way to promote their product is to persuade respected content publishers to endorse their products and by making content that people want to read?

I think that since adopting the 2D desktop metaphor, we've all started working with way too much data for it to be reasonably represented as a 3D world. The trend in OS design recently seems to be away from representing physical objects and more towards

  * dashboards (Windows 8 start screen and Mac OS dashboard) 
  * lists (browser tabs, Windows taskbar jump lists)
  * search

I think we're evolving towards a common visual language for representing information, and the concept of a physical piece of paper or a table on which to store it is going to become a distant memory.

This is very true. I once went to work at a .NET company which had built their own ORM and web UI binding framework. It was very nice back in the .NET 1.1 days but ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, the .NET base class library and the javascript community gradually overtook us. After a while it became more of a liability than a benefit. We'd never really documented it very well. New people ended up duplicating features and some of the quirkier bugs just never got fixed. Recruiting and retaining staff got hard and we ended up in a local minimum where each new screen was quicker to do in the in-house framework, but overall we were always falling behind.

It helped us to begin with, but my view is you have to factor in what the abandonment cost might be when the industry standard starts pulling ahead of you, and that could be big. As soon as it looks like the industry is settling on a standard way of doing something, start skating to where that puck will be.

At some point, I think traditional database platforms like Oracle and SQL Server will build things that make it easier to treat them like a NoSQL store (simpler replication, ability to distribute read only queries across multiple replicas, a few enhancements to sparse columns) and the NoSQL stores will add ACID, a query language, ODBC support etc. At which point talking about the "relational market" or the "NoSQL market" will not make a lot of sense. They'll all just be competing storage engines.

Fortunately, the mega corps haven't started hiring their own police forces and locking people up who break whatever rules they decide are appropriate. If they did that, then I might reconsider what data I shared with them.

The state is in a very different (privileged) position to commercial companies and we need an additional layer of protection from the state that is not necessary with companies.

I'm generally in favour of the 'learn to code' meme, but I think we've gotten too hung up on text based procedural coding languages and are not seeing the big picture here.

I would prefer to define programming as "composing a set instructions which can repeated automatically". By that definition there are many people who create valuable 'programs' such as spreadsheets, MS Word themes, CRM workflows, Photoshop scripts, AutoCAD scripts, manufacturing plans, automated UI tests or clever ways of using Mechanical Turk and oDesk. These people don't call themselves programmers but they've grasped the fundamental thing that makes programming a more powerful way of working. It's a way of thinking, not a particular syntax, and I think the economy will increasingly depend on those people who can amplify their effectiveness by thinking in that way.

I hope to teach my kids some basic python and HTML but mostly I hope to teach them that just pushing buttons and doing what you're told for 40 hours a week will not be very fulfilling career. Even if you're technically a doctor or a lawyer, you could get stuck being basically a robot. Whereas being someone who designs repeatable systems is much more rewarding.

I get the feeling Colin may have already automated this and it's a bot posting these things.

You missed my (admittedly subtle) point. Yes, on the face of it, it gives a basic income to everyone. But you haven't magically made more wealth so your average tax payer has to pay somehow. Either through higher taxes, a devalued currency, or fewer schools/hospitals. The people who do stand to benefit are those who would have been earning just enough to stop receiving welfare before. They now get to keep the benefits and the transition up the income scale is smoother. Meanwhile, those people who had a job administering welfare are out of work.

We're already giving money to people with no job, this would effectively take money off people who administer welfare systems and give it to low paid workers who would then get benefits and wages.

"Just 27% of companies were able to secure outside funding within one year. Ultimately, just 36% of accelerated companies since 2005 added to their seed and angel rounds."

"According to the New York Times, 72% of Y Combinator companies through 2012 raised money after their Demo Day, and the majority of these companies have raised increasingly larger rounds"

I'd be really interested to know what proportion of non-YC startups raised follow on funding. It seems like YC might be dragging the average up.

Google, and tech companies in general, should not be trying to innovate despite the need to make money, they should be trying to innovate because of the need to make money. If Google have lost that culture of innovation because of a short term need for operational efficiency then it will hurt them in the long run. People have observed how Microsoft failed to capitalise early on the internet, the smartphone explosion and the tablet explosion because of a poor culture. While that effect takes many years to hurt the bottom line, it is real and it hurts. If Google go down the same road then that is them failing at plain old capitalism, not the death of some alternative utopian dream.

It's not really a zero sum game because marketing costs money. If you can figure out how to do marketing for less money per new customer than the other guy then you have freed up money that would otherwise have been spent on marketing... Or, if that money wasn't currently being spent on marketing then the value of that product was not being passed on to the market and you are unlocking that unrealised value. Either way, innovating around marketing is quite valid.

Yes, Iraq and Syria were very different situations. If anything Syria is the one we should have got involved in. I just raised it to highlight how a non-intervention policy is now firmly establish following years of pressure.

I agree, but...

Things like this matter in the long run. Remember how, before the war in Iraq, over 1 million people marched in London against the war? We still went to war, but Tony Blair never recovered from it, and when the issue of Syria came up recently, MPs opposed intervention - that is the legacy of the opposition to the war in Iraq.

In Britian at least, policy trends seem to be set over periods of 10-15 years. (The battle with the miners is another example). Things rarely get sort out in one big showdown. When it comes to government surveillance and privacy, the important thing is that we keep the story going, that we keep the pressure on, that we keep explaining to people why this is an issue and keep building the argument. And making intelligence chiefs squirm is all part of that.

When it happens I think it'll look like an explosion in semi-telecomute jobs. All those people who spend weekdays away from their families at the moment will find they really only need to be in town for 1 or 2 days per week, and companies will realise that this is a great way of opening up the talent pool while keeping wages low.

So, building lots of co-working spaces in England's market towns and regional cities seems like a sensible move right now.

I agree. Having lived through an SAP implementation while at an in house IT department, I think SAP is more of a lifestyle than a technology. The whole point is that consultations are done, RFPs are written, sales executives shmooze, directors feel that buying SAP makes them important, consultants are hired and armies of business analysts are deployed. The servers you're running on, cloud or internal, are not an issue. Going after smaller businesses will take more than saying we'll run it on our servers for you. It'll be a massive cultural change for SAP.

This is a big deal, one of the key benefits of Coal/Gas/Oil power stations is their ability to provide frequency response (where the power output is adjusted to keep the AC as close to 50 Hz as possible) or to participate in a balancing mechanism (where generators place bids on providing minute by minute changes to their power output). Until now the only thing a solar/wind/nuclear generator could do was turn their generators on or off. That severally limits the proportion of renewables you can reasonably have on your grid[1]. But this technology looks like it'll give a renewable generator a way of dynamically adjusting their output to match demand.

[1] You do get controlled generation with biomass, but the efficiency is terrible and you need that land to grow food, so it'll (hopefully) only ever be a niche technology.

You shutdown all the targeted benefit programs that try and give money to people based on certain criteria. Things like unemployment benefit, state pensions, food vouchers, tax breaks for people on low incomes, tax breaks on goods and services that are deemed "essential" like childrens clothes.

What you end up with is a much simpler system. Everyone gets enough to survive, if you decide to earn extra you pay standard rate tax on it all.

This is the title of the actual Guardian article, and the convention on HN is to use the linked article's title.

What I find fascinating about the video is how "human" it looks when trying to stay upright. I doubt they've tried to emulate human behavior as such, it just emerges when trying to redistribute weight.

I think you're sort of right. Banks don't think of themselves as tech companies. Their culture, priorities and upper managemet aren't those of a tech company.

But they are now tech businesses. Here's an example: Last year RBS made a mess of deploying some code[1]. It shut down their online and telephone banking services as well as stopping money transfers for a few days. Their ATM and branches were still giving out money but this pretty much shut the bank down because people rely on transfers to get paid and pay their bills. The backlog of transactions took days to work through and the whole thing cost the bank 100s of millions in compensation and damaged reputation.

Their branches remained open, but it didn't matter. What people need banks for now is the storage and processing of electronic money transfers. They are a SaaS business with a branch network bolted on. They just haven't realised it yet.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15606707, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_RBS_computer_system_prob...

It would have to be an ongoing service, a sort of "Clean Web Subscription" that got updates. Believing that there's a human curating it is what makes it valuable I think. I'd pay an annual fee of $30 for that. I may be an outlier though.

Have you considered maintaining a [paid] chrome add-in with all this stuff in?

What's more, there would be a lot fewer people around if computers weren't helping us grow food, generate energy, cure diseases and move everything around just in time. The more I think about it, the more I think computers are a sort of virus and we're in a symbiotic relationship with them.

The fundamental issue here is: who's responsibility is it to keep people safe? The author, without really acknowledging it, makes the assumption that it is up to someone in authority to keep us safe. If you accept that premise, then yes, American gun control policy doesn't make sense.

Governments across the world have been steadily extending their remit into our personal lives and behaviour with the introduction of the welfare state, socialised healthcare and nationalised industries, always in the name of keeping us safe/well/employed. The assumption that "someone should do something about this" is so pervasive these days that it's hard to mentally snap out of it and say, why?

I'm no fan of guns[1] but in recent months I've come to understand the thinking behind the 2nd amendment, that government has to be kept in its place and that society must not give complete power to a small group at the centre. When you look at it that way, the hot coffee and the driving regulations are the things that don't make sense.

Whichever side of the gun control debate you're on, denouncing the other for not getting gets you nowhere. This is a debate about the proper role of government, not about guns or hot coffee per say.

[1] I'm British and so have no involvement in the whole US gun control debate, but am virtually genetically predisposed to thinking guns are strange and scary!