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Comment by mmonihan | Hacker News Reader

One thing a lot of us underestimate is the flexibility of things like spreadsheets, and believe it or not, paper.

The resolution of an A4 piece of paper is a crisp 3508px x 2480px. For comparison, my MacBook Air is about a third of that at 1440px x 900px.

And, the processes companies have developed over years are tailored to that medium. While tech has gotten drastically cheaper in recent years, it still needs to get cheaper still for most businesses.

I spoke about this recently at NYC.rb. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13446715

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> The resolution of an A4 piece of paper is a crisp 3508px x 2480px. For comparison, my MacBook Air is about a third of that at 1440px x 900px.

Not to mention how infinitely more convenient paper is to handle than laptops, and while I can easily spread 10 A4 pages in front of me to look at them simultaneously, I doubt my company will buy me 9 more computers to do the equivalent "digital" thing...

That's why I occasionally even print out code - usually when I know I'll spend a lot of time changing a particular file, and I'm having a hard time understanding it or maintaining focus. Paper + color pens facilitate thinking better than an open IDE.

> Not to mention how infinitely more convenient paper is to handle than laptops, and while I can easily spread 10 A4 pages in front of me to look at them simultaneously, I doubt my company will buy me 9 more computers to do the equivalent "digital" thing...

People nowadays laugh at how people in Star Trek always had multiple PADDs and sorted through them like a stack of papers or books, but at the end of the day trying to cross reference several sources to do work on a single iPad can be very frustrating.

There's probably a huge market for super thin portable (wireless) displays. If I could grab a handful of displays and wirelessly link them with my laptop while using gestures to move content between them, I'd probably pay a few hundred dollars per display. (I imagine the drawback of them being wireless would be a really slow refresh rate, so you likely wouldn't be able to watch video on them.)

If you placed a magnet on the back of them you can throw one on the wall when you get home and it could detect it's location in the room and start serving as some other systems interface.. like a thermostat or something. Then pick it up on your way out the door and it connects to your phone or laptop.

No reason more than 2 thin displays couldn't spread out of this laptop in the future: https://www.wired.com/2017/01/razers-project-valerie-insane-... :P

I was thinking something more versatile that could have many different uses, but that's cool none-the-less.

I love printing out an interesting bit of code (usually 3 or 4 pages max), grabbing a cup of coffee and a pencil and working through the logic while sitting out on the back porch in the fresh air.

Edit: I also keep a paper programming journal for writing down thoughts about code/bugs I've worked on.

>That's why I occasionally even print out code

I recently had a project where I converted a ~2k loc project from "FORCE" (a homebrewed extension of FORTRAN) into C, and the first thing I did was print out the whole project into a 15 page packet to annotate the code. There was not a single comment past headers.

I wonder if VR will live out to the hype would it be good development environment. Would it be so good that the obvious disadvantage of having something on one's face would be passable.

I know that right now the resolution is not there. Also maybe AR would be better.

I wonder now also how to do better code exploration software. Current development tools are usually tied more to the editing than to the exploration of the code base. Exploration is IMO much more important.

> a lot of us underestimate is the flexibility of things like spreadsheet

Even though I love using cool and new tech I often ask first, "can a spreadsheet do this?" Or as is often the case now, a Google Doc spreadsheet.

For example, our office TV dashboard is just Chrome with an off-the-shelf plugin that cycles through open tabs that are mostly display Google Sheets.

It has two benefits:

- It took almost no time at all to set up and 0 code

- Non-technical people can update the numbers easily

Plus Google has an API so if we wanted to add data to the sheets programmatically we could.

That's pretty much what my company does, and we're a SaaS company.

Simple is better oftentimes.

A company I used to work at got burned because their scheduling system based on a google doc spreadsheet broke due to google pushing a new change.

I've seen a few companies using google docs because no one knew excel also has a collaborative spreadsheet mode. All had MSoffice.

Last place had about 60 users. Average load time for the gdocs page is ~90 seconds. Users access the page dozens of times a day, most leave it open as a tab but memory usage became an issue.

Ever-increasing spreadsheet size eventually meant multiple computers were crashing/becoming unusable with the sheet open.

I offered to migrate it to Excel/VBA, was an old tiny codebase for simple calculations. Management bought more RAM instead, made me laugh.

> Excel/VBA

I don't believe this works on the mac; has this changed?

There's MSoffice for mac, haven't used it but it certainly exists. Unless you mean VBA? Don't see why they'd sell office without macros.

In the US there are also tons of processes that require paper, since SMB's won't benefit and can't afford doing everything 2-3 times (digital > paper > digital) they might as well keep everything one paper.

They pay suppliers with cash or cheques, they pay employees with cash or cheques, they take orders over the phone or via walk ins.

There are a few companies like Sage Software that do have all in one solutions for self employed to SMB's but again they still require quite a bit of time investment to manage.

It's also important to note that many SMB's at least usually "computerize" (jesus what is this the 80's) at least one thing and that's accounting primarily for tax reasons but most of them don't maintain their own books for this purpose and use an accounting firm so whilst tech is use the 500 SMB's that use a single accounting firm don't need to buy their own accounting software since most firms aimed at SMB's would offer a SAAS accounting platform or some way to upload your spreadsheets.

Heck, there are lots of small businesses that don't have a web page--maybe they have a Facebook page instead, if that--and, to the degree they do have a web page it's probably something just static and informational. Nothing wrong with the latter by the way but it does point to the general level of tech at a lot of local small businesses.

They don't need a web page if 90% of their customer base knows who they are and the 10% that doesn't still uses yellow pages.

I would really want to know how much business would some car mechanic in pleasantville missouri would see from having a web page.

Having a site with work hours, phone number, and current address helps in Google Maps. You can also add a "sign up for updates and coupons" thingy and at least some people will sign up. If it's cheap to setup, might as well do it.

In particular with car mechanic I would like to know the cost of basic services like tire rotation. I know it's $20-$30 at a major brandname, but I could use a local shop so I don't have to drive out of my way. Some car dealers service departments now have online services to schedule appointments and such, I think half of that can be repurposed for a small car mechanic shop as well.

There are two ways to run a business after it reaches some profitability: always optimizing or just kicking back and relaxing. Some people are happy with just their Facebook page and others would optimize and increase sales further by funneling people in through Google Maps.

(This is why I've taken photos of some restaurants in Google Maps and posted them; they aren't doing any advertising on their own so it's nice to help them along and get more visitors).

I don't really disagree and a Facebook page is probably a lot better than nothing. I would note that SquareSpace seems to do a good business (assuming that's a reasonable conclusion to draw from the amount of advertising they do) so there does seem to be a market for simple template-driven websites.

(on the other hand, given they advertise a lot on podcasts and the like, they may not be targeting traditional local businesses.)

I think they're mostly targeting the people those local businesses ask for assistance with those ads, to be frank :)

You'd be surprised. There's more customer using the internet than businesses investing in it across many niches. I launched a trades business with my brothers and thanks to seo and social we've grown a real, substantial business. We launched the site and marketing before we bought the equipment. We acquired over 150 accounts in the first two years (businesses paying thousands per year). Phone just keeps ringing now.

I think in part this to me, shows that sometimes, small businesses don't think about long term planning. Being on the web, having a real web presence as others have mentioned, from both having a website, a facebook/instagram/twitter/yelp page (not saying all of those, just examples) to doing advertising on the web (which when done properly, is better ROI at a cost that most small businesses can afford, than say a single billboard perhaps). Thats just not meeting your customers where they are, and sometimes that means future and not existing customers.

Its a lot to take in, to be sure, but you can't beat the scale of the internet for getting your message out.

Sage has repeatedly engaged in disruptive practices that hurt an employer of mine, and I recommend that everyone stay far away from them. Sage only cares about their fiscal year end results, and will discontinue and/or renew support for software as many times as they feel is profitable; you are at the mercy of their whims.

Can you share any more details or links? It would be really helpful for me. Thanks!

The employer is a user of Sage Businessvision software, which Sage claims to be supporting in exchange for a ~$1500 annual fee. Sage actually doesn't update the software or fix any bugs, they just send out the file needed for tax calculation (which is about 30 mins of work per year on their end). They have said they are discontinuing the software two or three times now, then retracted the statement. They are also pressuring all their on-prem customers to switch to cloud, but offering no porting options.

Very interesting, thank you.

> In the US there are also tons of processes that require paper, since SMB's won't benefit and can't afford doing everything 2-3 times (digital > paper > digital) they might as well keep everything one paper.

One huge advantage of paper over computer systems is that it's typically very easy to accidentally delete digital data (and cheap or poorly-architected systems often have no way to restore data), while it's more difficult to accidentally destroy a piece of paper. Moreover, in many digital systems it's possible to delete a record and not even know it, which is less likely with a paper system (and if one knows, then one can often just create a new paper record, no problem).

And of course a piece of paper will still be legible in a decade. Will a digital record?

Paper's not perfect, but it's not bad.

I feel like the resolution thing is vastly under appreciated. I'm also probably not the only person sick of the tyranny of the backlit display.

I too am getting sick of backlight displays. I work all day in a dim office and if it wasn't for redshift on linux I'd go crazy. I change the color temperature to 4500 K and reduce the backlight to 65% of maximum brightness. You will think that 65% is too little, and maybe it is on your display, but try it for 30 minutes then try 100% again.

    redshift -l geoclue2 -t 4500 3000 -b 0.65

It took me 6 months of .NET development to replace a single paper form. Do not underestimate the complexities that hide in paper forms.

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