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daltonlpon Show HN: Spreadsheet Timeline (my weekend project)

You're absolutely right!

daltonlpon Show HN: Spreadsheet Timeline (my weekend project)

Thanks for the kind words!

I am working on a writeup with some development details.

Here is the stack:

  • Alpinejs as a framework

  • Chrono for date parsing (try typing "next Tuesday" into the date input)

  • Dayjs for date formatting and operations.

  • flatpickr for the date picker

  • xslx-populate for export.  There are a LOT of JS->excel utilities out there.

  • Tailwind for styling.

  • No back-end, no database.  All static files.

The code is in a private git repo.

Don't let that stop you from looking at it with view-source. It's literally two files :)

daltonlpon The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

A remarkably fun and educational medieval city-builder game: https://scriptwelder.itch.io/waterworks

It's an absolute gem.

daltonlpon Ask HN: Any good book on companies/individuals failure stories?

You may enjoy Breaking the Mishap Chain, an excellent free book from NASA:

https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/break_mishap_chain_detai...

daltonlpon What Goodreads could have been

Along with storygraph and readng.co and librarything, there are several other goodreads alternatives.

This was my recent attempt to find the best one for my purposes:

https://bookapps.info

daltonlpon The Mortifications of Beverly Cleary

Her two memoirs, Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet are absolutely wonderful.

daltonlpon Show HN: Planimatic – Checklists x Timelines

HN mods, please delete this spam :)

daltonlpon Show HN: Planimatic – Checklists x Timelines

Just launched. What a feeling.

daltonlpon Repl.it Teams for Education

Your tl/dr is spot-on. The critical resource is teachers' and students' time.

Keep in mind, we're talking about teaching students in a class, with a curriculum.

This is not high-value open ended learning with real tools. This is basic skill training exercises.

I speak from the experience of watching a teacher struggle with multiple students' python dependencies for the first two weeks of class. This was with a set of (supposedly) homogenous school-issued laptops. After switching to repl.it, all that hassle just disappeared.

daltonlpon Show HN: Pageturner – a community for building a reading habit

> As someone that avidly uses goodreads (but wishes there was a non-Amazon option instead) this is really interesting.

I recently ditched goodreads and have no regrets :)

Here are all the alternatives I evaluated: https://bookapps.info

daltonlpon Show HN: Check if my startup ideas have legs

Supporting HTML in the description makes XSS more likely:

https://provetheywantit.com/project?public_token=pub_KSUPBwl...

daltonlpon Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

More props for William Manchester. The Glory and the Dream is an amazing book.

daltonlpon Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

"It remains day 1 for you suckers. $15 minimum wage, isn't that great? I hope you are as proud of our inventiveness as I am. I think you should be.

"For me, it's day 2. I’m excited about this transition."

daltonlpon Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

A comparison of all goodreads alternatives:

https://bookapps.info/

I made it for myself because my notes were getting too disorganized.

daltonlpon All Goodreads alternatives, updated for 2021

You are right! Thanks very much for the correction.

The notify-your-friends section has been updated accordingly.

daltonlpon Kansas welcomed my immigrant parents. Then I built Dropbox

An article about precisely this: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/tennessee-valley-authorit...

daltonlpon Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

However, the defense establishment has access to classified information and models that we civilians do not have, in addition to all the public material. I’m confident that nuclear war planners have thought deeply about the risks of climate change from nuclear war, even though I don’t know their conclusions or bureaucratic constraints.

This blinkered statement is near the conclusion of the piece.

It would be better placed near the start, so readers have a sense of the author's level of critical thinking.

daltonlpon Notion Timeline View

You're right, there are no good and free JS libraries for gantt charts (or even timelines). It is a non-trivial problem domain.

I know, because I helped build a product (https://peachyplan.com) much like Notion's timeline view :)

The notion team did a phenomenal job. This is one of the best timeline views I've seen, and I've looked at hundreds.

daltonlpon My game won't sell and that's ok

Hi!

  I bought your game a couple days ago :)

  - The music is excellent.
  - There are some really nice visual touches (screen shake, the expand/fade enemy death)
  - Switching apps on android restarts the game!  Critical blocking issue right there.
  - I did get one random crash (on Android), which meant a restart
  - The intro story could be trimmed by about half :)
  - Move the green "Play" button to the top of the menu.
  - Maybe rename "How to Play" to "Instructions", so only one menu item has the word "Play in it"
  - The inventory system sucks!   Nothing worse than having 6 slots, 2 of which are filled with "+1[2] mitts".  Please implement auto-management for inventory.
  - Most enemy and item names are awesome.
  - A few item names are confusing.  I don't know what "steelcaps are".  They look like boots.  Are they boots?
  - Apparently I can equip mitts or boots, but not both?   Does that make sense?
  - The icon has a laser sword.   Should I start with a laser sword?   Maybe a laser shiv?
  - How many dungeon floors are there?   Please add that to the instructions.
  - This might be crazy for a roguelike, but please consider difficulty levels.  It would be nice for a kid to be able to play through the game without frustration.

daltonlpon The story of the PDF (2018)

That's a very nice tool!

I attempted something similar (https://nicediff.com), and found the textual approach to be basically useless:

Tax form example: https://www.nicediff.com/view/7a5f41ba3c76ae9bb45f42a4faa8b6...

daltonlpon A warning about Glassdoor

> I believe it's highly unlikely that they'd lie so directly.

That's why lying so directly works so well!

In their T&C page, the "Removal of Content" section (6A) says they remove content, or portions thereof, at their sole discretion.

Trust IS central to their product. A direct lie usually begins with a true (or unfalsifiable) statement.

daltonlpon What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

Those sound like perfectly legal words.

A stripe customer is free to tell Stripe "Your fees are too high, and I'd prefer switching processors than raising prices".

I could be wrong. Is there an example of an illegal cartel, trying to persuade customers from whom it makes transaction fees, to raise prices? Surely this isn't a new thing under the sun.

daltonlpon Show HN: Placekey – An ID for Every Place

Hey, that's great!

Can you help me decipher the difference between the PlaceKeys "zzw-222" and "222-222"?

I'd love to know what those stand for on the user end.

daltonlpon Show HN: Placekey – An ID for Every Place

You can use this code to make your own placekeys, without the API:

https://github.com/Placekey/placekey-py/blob/4b63d090b1082c4...

daltonlpon Tables: Tracking work for teams

Are you sure?

It looks you started using to this slogan in 2019. Prior to that, it was "Work Happy": https://web.archive.org/web/20181116030147/https://www.paymo...

But there was at least one other business using "Work better together" in 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170515171057/https://projectin...

daltonlpon Titan II Missile Explosion in Arkansas – 40 Year Anniversary

> The nuke was not "armed" and had lots of fail-safe devices to ensure it would never go off.

Whew!

Though in fairness, the rocket wasn't supposed to explode in the silo either.

A good book about the incident is Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452798-command-and-cont...

daltonlpon Brutality of Life Reading List

This book pairs with "Into That Darkness" by Gitta Sereny. A semi-biography of the commandant of Treblinka, based on interviews with him.

daltonlpon The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics (2017) [pdf]

Just gonna leave this here :)

http://www.daltonlp.com/de/

daltonlpon Ask HN: What is a business anti-pattern you've experienced at work?

That invisible inflection point in a company's growth, where the prevailing attitude switches from "we succeed or fail together" to "I could still succeed, even if you fail."

This is the earlier post, BTW: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964905

daltonlpon Deconstructing Pinterest’s reverse-image-search SEO growth hack

There's an extension for that :) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...