Still doing https://hackernewsletter.com/ after 15 years thanks to many of you.
I subscribed last december after knowing about it in last year's version of this thread.
It is great and gives a very good summary of the HN week, I love it!
Readit Newszoomastigophore commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox
zoomastigophore commented on Why our website looks like an operating system posthog.com/blog/why-os... · Posted by u/bnc319
Where is Doom?
zoomastigophore commented on The Tyranny of Spreadsheets timharford.com/2021/07/th... · Posted by u/shortleash
Sadly databases are hard because data is hard. I've seen people trying to stuff one-to-many relationships in a single Excel tab duplicating the one side as many times as needed, e.g.
Author_A Book_1
Author_A Book_2
Author_A Book_3
Author_B Book_4
Author_B Book_5
Horrors surfaced when we analyzed the data: unintended duplications because ids and uniqueness checking was not a thing, shifted columns, undocumented column "formats"... In the end we parsed the whole mess into a DB.
I don't see how you could implement a frontend for a database simpler than Access. It was as easy as Excel, with relationships. But reasoning a schema is harder than stuffing all things in a 2D table, and querying a multitable is harder than filtering a few columns.
I agree data is hard.
If we could provide a properly designed database which has already defined datatypes but that would be as easy to fill for a standard user as a preformated Excel table that would be great. You're right, Access has this simplicity, I just wish such tools would be available out-of-the-box for other DB engine.
zoomastigophore commented on The Tyranny of Spreadsheets timharford.com/2021/07/th... · Posted by u/shortleash
'000s of rows of data in a spreadsheet - sigh. But say 'database' to some people and they hear 'The Devil'.
Excel is a glorious tool which welcomes all, the savvy and the unskilled but imaginative newbies alike. There is something about all those little cells that presents an itch everyone wants to scratch, and you just know that for some that scratching is going to produce something akin to a spreadsheet version of gangrenous melanoma.
On the other hand, some people are happy to say that the complexity of sophisticated Excel models means they would have been better off built in a code interface. Ha ha ha!
Even with the right mix of functional and object-oriented code and suitable documentation and version control applied to code, I respectfully disagree.
Data handling capabilities could benefit from skill in all of these tools: error checking (including analytical review); pen & paper; calculators; databases; spreadsheets; math & stat techniques; Word processors (& clear logical explanations).
Together, they form a rich menagerie of tools which will probably all be around until we have an AI that follows us around and we just tell it what we want. Actually, even then, it would be good to know them so that we can grasp the underlying logic and frame the concepts leading to the actions that we ask the AI to assist with...
I think one of the main problem with databases is how do you populate them.
I wish there were simple-as-Excel frontends for databases where a normal user could input his data like in preformated Excel table without having to deal with the database mechanics.