pete_nic

Can it calculate words per minute too? That would be helpful.

> Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users.

>I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.

VisiCalc was conceived in 1978, before the internet and all the data that comes with it. Excel has had to catch up with these developments and is finally doing a good job with it.

This is a great idea but the list seems incomplete. For example, where are the email marketing tools? Mailchimp / Intuit, Convetkit, SendFox, and so many more. There are many other markets / verticals not covered here.

In this context I’m interpreting DSL to mean “domain-specific language”

> Excel may be the most influential software ever built.

I believe this to be true in business. Other tech may be more widely used eg “email” but the software is created by a variety of different companies (Google, Microsoft).

I signed up for a Codeblog! The Captcha making me pick photos of traffic lights and cross walks to verify my humanity feels like the antithesis of what this article and product is trying to do.

One use case where this does not work: when attempting to learn if someone understood you properly. I find myself asking short, direct questions, often in a managerial capacity, to confirm that other people have the correct understanding. Making a statement and then asking an individual “do you understand?” does not suffice to confirm if someone has the correct understanding.

I feel like a more appropriate name would be “write first, then build”. “Documentation” reminds the product managers and engineers of corporate-y documents like release notes. The “documentation” described is more of a fluid collection of ideas than what we would consider “documentation”. I have found this to be true - “Writing is a way of finding out”.

>Opening in 2022, our state-of-the-art Texas manufacturing site will manufacture products to address drug shortages and price gouging

[1] Their website says they will start manufacturing drugs this year

[1] https://www.markcubancostplusdrugcompany.com/

>If you won’t or can’t talk to customers then at least make the thing simple. The simpler something is, the more people will use it.

Great advice

Good point, I’m sure more exist today and will be created in the future.

Google is a large, horizontal platform. My intuition is the next Google killers will be specific to verticals, health comes up on HN a lot. All that to say, if I were yep I would focus on search that avoids big, corporate, SEO stuff and connects users with thoughtful, small creators. I would not focus on commerce eg film, as it’s a crowded vertical full of Google, Shopify, Etsy, and other large e-commerce players.

> We believe the best way to protect user data is to not have it in the first place

I like the exchange of value that comes from paying money for a service. With free products from companies like Google you do not pay for the service and there is no exchange of value. This results in the myriad of HN threads discussing how Google Docs did them wrong (locked out, privacy violation, etc.)

> Excel is cheap and and you can find it everywhere.

Thank you, very helpful answer. I was not trying to be antagonistic, I had never heard a critique of calendly and wanted to understand how an open source project would improve the situation. I agree, very important to understand how your data is used.

Why does this problem warrant an open source alternative? What are the downfalls with Calendly being “closed” that this aims to solve?

What is your methodology to collect the tech stack data? Some things seem easy to identify, eg Google Analytics, and others much harder, eg back office like Microsoft Excel.

Spreadsheets are one of the most ubiquitous business tools in the world. Similar to email, another ubiquitous business tool, there are good uses and bad uses of the tool. Users need to know when to use them, when to not use them, and when to move onto something more robust.

> So they’re at their best when you have a foundation to build on — a decent number of fixed assumptions atop which you want to see the effect over time or scale of a limited number of variables. See the myriad permutations proliferate from a small number of questions.

In reading this article on finance my mind drifts to the refrain on HN that search (Google) is broken and ready to be disrupted. Can consensus mechanisms on distributed systems help create a less spammy, more equitable search engine?

> a consensus mechanism can be considered as a shared system of standards and steps that allows a distributed system (a group of individuals or computers) to accurately, precisely, and reliably coordinate on shared problems.

> Consensus mechanisms (also known as consensus protocols or consensus algorithms) allow distributed systems (networks of computers) to work together and stay secure.

Contextual advertising

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contextual-advertising....

Do you believe privacy is 100% respected in the offline world? A billboard for a personal injury lawyer on the highway or an ad for headphones at a subway stop are all examples of segmentation and targeting we experience in the offline world.

Perhaps a bit idealistic but I aspire for a world where companies can segment and target their market while consumers maintain a level of privacy.

> The truth is we’re in a post-truth world, where more than one opinion is valid. You should never trust just one single source of information, without validating what it's telling you, and thinking about the potential motivations and incentives behind that conclusion.

Wisdom applicable beyond the topic of this article

Excel, and spreadsheets, need a re-branding campaign. They are cloud-based, low-code, ELT tools; these terms are typically associated with buzzy enterprise tech companies, not technology developed in the 1980’s.

Agree with this. When battling Microsoft product can matter less than things like contracts and licensing. I have to believe that businesses are spending so much on Azure that they get Office for free (as an analogy - at a previous employer GSuite was nearly free because our AdSense bill was so high). Businesses are unlikely to pay extra for a few more features when they already have Excel and have no plans to move off Azure.

Agree, I just downloaded Firefox onto my windows PC this week, experienced none of these things, and the process was really easy. I am in the US, so that could be an explanation.

I agree. There may be no better UX alternative than columnar spreadsheets. Excel shines in scenario analysis when, for example, the data comes from your head. I believe Excel has an opportunity to improve when data comes from external sources like CSV dump from a CRM. I would like to see Excel improve the way it allows you to extract data from other systems which would reduce redundant effort and decrease the likelihood of errors.

Non-developer here that likes to try to understand CS. I have latched onto this definition from Stanford:

“But fundamentally, computer science is a science of abstraction — creating the right model for thinking about a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.”

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs/ch01.pdf

This is great. As a frequent Google user, I breathed a sigh of relief seeing ad free search results from individuals.

Curious - how do you know whether a site is a blog versus something else?