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HN yellow pages (Google docs) (spreadsheets.google.com)
118 points by sdrinf on July 15, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 47 comments



So, people keep vandalizing the publicly editable spreadsheet. Here's a spreadsheet that can only be modified by the form, but is publicly readable.

Form To Submit: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dE...

Spreadsheet Of Results: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ArBfYaOI31DfdEo0TWRF...


Great, but the "Country" and "City" fields were very usefull in the previous sheet, and you did you add them. Also, you could have imported the lines from the previous sheet :) Let's say that if you add the "City" and "Country" fields, I could resubmit the missing lines from the original sheet. Deal ?


Very sorry, I meant to put those fields in, but forgot. Just added them though.

I can't do an import of the old, full-public spreadsheet today, but if you (or anyone else) wants to, just send me an email with your Google account email so I can add you as a direct editor.


miss the country field greatly, too!


I'm sorry, I totally forgot. Should be fixed now.


Thank you ! Is there a way for me to update my line with my country and city now ? or should I submit a new one ?


Noone else put anything in there... I feel lonely :(


It's a shame some people are too immature to handle viewing a public Google doc without destroying it. People like that are worthless non-contributors.


I'm shocked that the hackernews community would act that way.


If someone acts like that I don't consider them part of this community. There's more to being part of HN's community than registering for a username. At one point one of the trolls had written "who thought it would be a good idea to make this doc public?" which IMO shows you their level of mentality. We've had several successful public Google docs on the front page in the past. In this case I believe the people who are doing it are mostly people who ran out of things to click on Reddit.


No true scotsman fallacy ? :)


Perhaps, and thanks for pointing out a fallacy I didn't know about, but in my defense I did say 'mostly.' ;)

We all know how that community acts compared to how this community acts and it's no secret that many of their users like to stalk our hallways when they get bored of lolcats.

"Oh look, a thing on the Internet that is getting attention but isn't read-only. I'd better jump in a troll it up before it gets locked down." I won't welcome their userbase here until they can learn to act like adults when the situation calls for it. They're just a different breed and while I don't mind going onto their site to enjoy the humorous comments, you won't find me trying to have an actual debate on there.


also, I was saying it tongue-in-cheek as it matched the pattern of the fallacy superficially, but otherwise I agree with you. This must be a meta-fallacy in itself.


Perhaps negative-contributors. Regardless, while it's all gone doesn't Google have some sort of versioning/rollback in docs? This should really be protected with a contact email for additions.


Inspired by Kent's initiative ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514803 ), I've decided to scale this up a notch -similar to the earlier cofounder google docs. To quote Kent:

"...Often times I need someone to talk to when I need to bounce an idea around and I don't have another programmer / techie in my area. I also don't work in an office and find IRC a little cold. So, let's go remote, I will be your proxy desk neighbour. ."


I consolidated all such Gdocs into 1 folder:

http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B97Zl0IkSUKrMzBhOTViMzEtMjAz...



> and find IRC a little cold.

Are there any HN IRC channels? It'd be great to actually get to know some HN people.


Try #startups on irc.freenode.net


Don't. That place is mostly inane kids on pills.


Awesome! I see you're based in the UK. Are you going to the London meetup tonight?


Indeed I will :)

http://www.slengpung.com/pics/Function%202007/17443.jpg -fairly recent photo of me (guy in white on the right). Look me up, buy me a beer, ask me about "infornography".


Cool, I'll shout out "infornography" if I don't spot you.


That's hackable.


Straight up guys, this feels like the next great social network. Think technical chat roulette, but the people have stored their qualifications and interests so an algorithm can choose who to connect you to (assuming they are logged in to their office hours).


I would be more interested in a curated "who's who" list of HN user names and their real world projects. The quality of the list would be a function of its completeness and the curator's judgment about who to include. The list could be generated by going through comment history and noting when users self-identify as being involved with an interesting project or company. It would be pretty tedious to generate, but would a valuable and interesting resource.

The burden might be eased if the curator generated a seed list, posted it to HN, then asked, "Who am I missing?"


that's not the first time somone comes out with this great idea of google doc spreadsheet. Yay! Unfortunately that's not very maintainable. Would anyone be interested in a website à la Drupal which keeps track of all that precious information ?


We also have the HN Contractors list, also on Google Docs: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...

Thread is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262467


This is definitely not a contractor list.

This is more like a desk neighbor / having a beertalk / got an interesting idea, whatdoyouthink contact list.


You're right, wasn't a 100% clear to me. Yellow Pages alone doesnt sound like the right definition then.


White pages, perhaps?


https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+iPe-nq...

Is a wave with IRC chat and access to this Document.


A 'wave' you say... hrm I tried clicking the link. The UI is too complex to comprehend :(


yeah. I'm considering working on a way to make Wave more usable.


Hah, you can tell it's a bunch of engineers on here, all coming up with "better" solutions instead of using the tool. :D


Plain old HTML form and table would fit nicely here.

Also add all previous spreadsheets, white pages, contractors, projects, etc in one place so we know where to go when we need any hacker info.


Its all deleted


Unfortunately, there are as*holes even in this community.. Maybe somebody could create Google form that publishes to a read-only spreadsheet?


Any community with more than 50 people will have a destructive element in it. It's gotten to the point where you have to analyze the abuse potential of anything you build before you release it. Very annoying.


Standard operation procedure: wait 'till asshole gets tired, revert, add your data.


What's the point? There's contact information in user profiles.


I think the intention is to figure out who to talk to regarding a topic i might know nothing about.

It would have been better if we could ask the users to update the relevant info right on there profiles. But i guess this way all the willing ppl are just consolidated and you don't have to go hunting them down.


I don't know... all these things seem to end up a bit by the wayside though unless they are actively promoted/ and maintained, which I'm not sure pg is willing to do in terms of linking to it, and I'm not sure I'm willing to do: I have way too many places with information about me on the internet, and adding another one seems redundant, let alone maintaining it.

There's got to be a better way...

Also, honestly, IRC can be pretty good for this sort of thing if you don't happen upon a really lame channel.


I totally agree with you. I think most people are just trying to find another avenue to market themselves. And these posts half the time, are attempts at a little karma.

I was trying to consolidate all such lists into one directory, so that we don't keep repeating and duplicating such content. I've linked it above. I would prefer one place for this sort of stuff, HN/IRC, where i can find it if needed. I'm fine with anything that works


Nothing wrong with marketing yourself. I just don't want to have to do it in so many places.


for instance you can filter by country/city, which is something I'm really happy to have here :)


Is this a public load test for google docs?




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