gpjt

25 ms·

1. 301.▲
   by gpjt 15y ago

   Thanks! If anyone could tell us how to make clickable links in ask-HN-style posts, we'd be eternally grateful :-)
2. 302.▲
   by gpjt 16y ago

   You may be right. People were talking about a bubble for several years back in the late 90s before it finally burst in 2000, so there's no reason to assume this one will be any faster. That's actually why I was looking at investing in Amaz
3. 303.▲
   by gpjt 16y ago

   Interesting, I don't get that even on rereading -- but yup, you're certainly right that that would be a crazy thing to allege :-) I actually do think that there is a bubble, but that's more to do with crazy valuations like the recent Color
4. 304.▲
   by gpjt 16y ago

   Hi there -- article author here. Not sure why what you say (which is correct as far as it goes) makes the article wrong. All I said was that AWS is popular among startups (with proof points), but buying Amazon stock is a poor way to capit
5. 305.▲
   How to bet on the bubble? (with list of 2010/11 YC startup hosting providers)(gilesthomas.com)

   1 points by gpjt 16y ago|7 comments
6. 306.▲
   by gpjt 16y ago

   Yup. I follow the Public WebGL specification discussion list, and email from the guys at Google who participate on the list frequently wind up in my spam folder, regardless of how often I mark them as "not spam". My guess is that a lot of s
7. 307.▲
   by gpjt 16y ago

   Thanks, that's a great idea -- sorry for the slow response (PyCon got in the way) We already support a bunch of Python modules -- for open source ones it's just a case of using pip to install them on our server -- and we've always intended
8. 308.▲
   by gpjt 16y ago

   Only just saw this! I'll drop you a line now.
9. 309.▲
   by gpjt 16y ago

   We've done a lot of work on locking stuff down, and the back-end runs across a number of servers, so it would be pretty hard to take down the site as a whole. But yeah, there are bound to be loopholes. OTOH, if we're charging for compute t
10. 310.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Thanks! Couldn't get it to work in the post. HN markup remains a mystery to me...
11. 311.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Heh, we had a crisis of conscience before we decided to use it :-) http://blog.projectdirigible.com/?p=507 Thanks!
12. 312.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Right, that makes sense -- the classic benefits versus features balance -- which is, of course, made more complex by the fact that one user's benefit is another user's feature, but that's not to say that there's no balance to strike. One t
13. 313.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Interesting, thanks for that. Our model for the compute-time-plus-markup was the plethora of companies that make money doing a similar model with storage -- Dropbox being the shining example. But you raise a good point that those are inhe
14. 314.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    To be honest, we haven't given that any thought. We are open to suggestions, though.
15. 315.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Sounds sensible. And definitely agreed re: VBA... > This is a great site btw, lovely logo/design, and a fantastic piece of tech behind it. I could see this being bought by Google and folded in to Spreadsheets. Thanks! Our fingers are c
16. 316.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Not yet, but soon.
17. 317.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Thanks for the feedback. It's really useful: 1. Cool. We noticed yesterday that it could use an update, but we'll stick with the calm simplicity. 2. Excellent idea. 3. Interesting. We'll experiment with a less intense version to see how tha
18. 318.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    I hope you're wrong too, but it's a very good point. The advantage we think we have over writing their own Python (or Hadoop, or...) on EC2 is that it's just easier to put these things together in a spreadsheet environment. But we clear
19. 319.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Oh wow, that's an ace tagline! Still, it does run on web servers, would "effortless cloud supercomputing" have as good a ring, do you think? We're definitely going to avoid trying to cater for the Mom and Pop segment -- Google docs have a
20. 320.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    We've been watching Hypernumbers, they look pretty good. I'd somehow missed Skysheet (great product name), thanks for the pointer!
21. 321.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Thanks for that. Re: "programmable" -- what we're trying to emphasise with that is that it's more programmable than (say) Excel -- the whole Python in cells thing, plus its ability to rework the recalculation loop with Python code. Our fir
22. 322.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    That's excellent feedback, many thanks. I think that you're right that the average user won't get any benefits from Dirigible -- it only really helps power users, so it sounds like we need to be crystal-clear on that, and then make it clea
23. 323.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Thanks! We can import xls files, but only the values right now -- not the formulae or the macros. Formulae are definitely on the cards, we're not so sure about macros -- compiling VBA to Python is doable but might lead to completely unmai
24. 324.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Thanks, that's great feedback. We kind of expect that our users will know how to do the spreadsheet basics, but I think you're right that the for loop should move out of the first tutorial, and maybe the function too. Best not to scare pe
25. 325.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    We definitely could support other languages, Python is the first one we went for because of modules like NumPy and SciPy, which are a great fit for spreadsheets that do serious number-crunching. If we were to support Ruby or JS, the one que
26. 326.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    We started out to produce a similar desktop tool (see comments about Resolver One). That was working out OK but hasn't been the breakout success we'd always hoped for. In addition, people kept asking us (quite reasonably) about a cross-pl
27. 327.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Yup, that's right. Resolver One is a desktop app, we're now focussing much more on the web (though we'll obviously not abandon Resolver One)
28. 328.▲
    Rate our pivot: A Python cloud spreadsheet

    28 points by gpjt 16y ago|50 comments
29. 329.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    Interesting -- that's an improvement from iPad v1 -- my wife bought one of those and was annoyed that she had to plug it in to her Mac and sync it to make it work. (And she's the Apple fangrrrl in the household.)
30. 330.▲
    by gpjt 16y ago

    But what if you don't want to sync all of that? The article made it clear that the problem is that you need to connect to iTunes just to turn the iPad on the first time .