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vgrichinaon What you need to know before you join a startup

It's not like Google is some magical unicorn place though. It's boring soul-crushing big corp job with overwhelming politics.

Seeing smartest people waste their time on this was very depressing for me during 3 years spent there.

vgrichinaon MuJS: an embeddable JavaScript interpreter

So I guess this is slower than JavaScriptCore and you have to get commercial license to actually embed it. Why would one choose it at all?

vgrichinaon Using Virtual Reality to Create Software: A Likely Future

State of the art development workflows fail to utilize possibilities of high-resolution 2d displays (using concepts are rooted in times of plaintext terminals). So I don't see VR coming to programming any time soon.

vgrichinaon Ask HN: Sell, open-source, or abandon a $10k/year Mac app?

Hi Evan,

I own small consultancy and am an iOS / OS X developer myself. We are in Ukraine, so 10k / year goes much further here.

We can help you with support, e.g. for percentage of sales. Or we can negotiate other deal. Drop me a line to vgrichina@gmail.com, let's discuss the details.

vgrichinaon The failed economics of our software commons and what to do about it

IMO the problem isn't that there are less resources dedicated to open source stuff than to commercial projects. The problem is that there is much less effort and especially polish dedicated to any not user facing aspescts of software. Internal libraries are almost certainly even more half-baked and full of shitty code than most open source projects.

vgrichinaon Stream Processing with a Spreadsheet [pdf]

Thanks for great paper, it would definitely help me organise my thoughts as I'm building similar project.

Here is my blog for it – http://spreadsheets-on-steroids.tumblr.com

My idea is however to create programming environment from scratch based on the same principles, so that it doesn't have limitations imposed by Excel.

vgrichinaon Ask HN: what features do you want in a geocoder?

Publicly visible and flexible pricing. Not $10k+ per year as Google Maps API.

vgrichinaon Project VimR – Refined Vim experience for Mac

For anyone interested in Vim-like editors with Mac UI, I suggest trying Vico – https://github.com/vicoapp/vico

It is completely native, supports TextMate bundles and is scriptable using Lisp dialect.

vgrichinaon Ask HN: Got rejected this time, here is my application

I think even more important question is "what essential dev tools you've purchased that had some sort of open source equivalent".

As for me, last thing I remember – I've purchased http://theolabrothers.com/sip/ when is wasn't free. And it is just a simple tool I don't require at all (any image editor can be used instead), it is just much more convenient than any other alternative.

vgrichinaon Ask HN: Got rejected this time, here is my application

To some extent maybe yes, but my main idea isn't to make better spreadsheets.

I want to take direct manipulation of data present in spreadsheets and make it more universal. Something more similar to ideas expressed by Chris Granger – http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/03/27/toward-a-better-prog...

vgrichinaon Ask HN: Got rejected this time, here is my application

My current plan is to make runtime platform open-source, but sell hosted development tools as SaaS.

While software developers don't usually buy platform stuff like compilers, libraries etc – they are usually more than willing to buy products that make things simple. Otherwise companies like GitHub or (my own product – Hosted CI) won't get any revenue.

vgrichinaon Ask HN: Got rejected this time, here is my application

Got your point about being less technical. Also I agree that project is currently more about research than building actual product.

(1) There are 2 main pain points: 1) for programmers it is building and debugging systems in non-interactive way; 2) for non-programmers is building contraptions using Excel and bubble gum – see some discussion on that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7363824

(2) Potential market size is around 20 million exiting software developers, based on e.g. this post http://www.quora.com/Ruby-on-Rails-Professionals/Where-can-I... Around 0.05% of that market needs to be captured to have reasonable ROI I guess.

(3) Agree with you. BTW, may you detail what is your background?

vgrichinaon Ask HN: Got rejected this time, here is my application

Unfortunately I don't have a co-founder yet. Started working on the idea not so long enough.

vgrichinaon YC emails are sent

Got rejected.

My startup is visual programming system ala Spreadsheets + Zapier, here is my YC application – http://spreadsheets-on-steroids.tumblr.com/post/82903500034/...

Would like to hear some feedback on my application.

vgrichinaon Ask HN: Rejected from YC? What's your startup?

My startup is visual programming system ala Spreadsheets + Zapier, here is my YC application – http://spreadsheets-on-steroids.tumblr.com/post/82903500034/...

Would like some feedback on my application.

vgrichinaon Ask HN: What are the crazy/clever ways you use and abuse spreadsheets?

Thats interesting, thanks!

I plan to build something less limited to the traditional spreadsheet UI though. Same concept but more flexible UI, so that for example you may process image data by manipulating pixels as cells.

vgrichinaon Saving your YC application

Doesn't just pressing Cmd+S / Ctrls+S in browser do the job? ;)

vgrichinaon Could keybase.io do for crypto what GitHub did for Git?

But Github is already doing same thing for crypto as it is doing for Git ;) https://github.com/substack/cipherhub

vgrichinaon Ask HN: What are the crazy/clever ways you use and abuse spreadsheets?

BTW, what were the main difficulties/problems in implementing your project using spreadsheets?

I assume that one of these was having to write Ruby scripts to connect things together instead of working directly with your data sources, was there anything else?

vgrichinaon Ask HN: What are the crazy/clever ways you use and abuse spreadsheets?

So as I understood you wanted the ability to generate nice-looking report from your data?

So you had to resort to making extremely small cells to allow for precise positioning of elements, correct?

vgrichinaon Ask HN: What are the crazy/clever ways you use and abuse spreadsheets?

I understand relation to FP. I even think of having lazy-evaluated infinite sequences in my system :)

BTW, great thanks for the paper, it seems to be closely related to what I'm working on.

vgrichinaon Ask HN: What are the crazy/clever ways you use and abuse spreadsheets?

"bubble gum and duct tape programming job" – I guess you just found a name for the programming paradigm I plan to implement :)

As I understood in your case a system was a mix of what spreadsheets are good fit in (accounting) and where it is currently a kludge (gathering and massaging data).

So I think I'll explore data massaging in more depth. I am a bit concerned however with the representation of hierarchical data (like JSON) in spreadsheet model.

vgrichinaon Ask HN: What are the crazy/clever ways you use and abuse spreadsheets?

This is nice – I visualised something like this in my head, but never knew somebody already implemented it :)

vgrichinaon Wayback machine gets a facelift, new features

Here's page with my bookmarklet saved by itself :) http://web.archive.org/web/20131104224622/http://www.compone...

vgrichinaon Clochure — A Better Clojure

No, there is nothing one indentation level deeper than 1, so it should have no parens according to the rule.

vgrichinaon Clochure — A Better Clojure

Rule is straightforward – if there is stuff one indentation level deeper, prepend parens.

vgrichinaon Show HN: RTE – Bret Victor’s interfaces, the Unix way

I don't get the point of using FUSE/ramdisk. Why not just use FSEvents/inotify to listen for updates? See for example https://github.com/ggreer/fsevents-tools