There is no competitor, proprietary or open, that comes close to Excel. It's been relentlessly,
extensively polished for years and years, and keeps gaining new features every year.
And this sticking to the spreadsheet concept, which is very limiting.
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Contrast for example Tableau -- it's a great idea and generated a lot of enthusiasm for a while, but never quite took off as an office package one needs to have. The normal awkwardness of its first versions is still there; they don't have the deep <whatever> that the Excel team has.
Tableau is great, but it has a much narrower use case: given one or more tables of data, generate graphs for presentation or for exploring the dataset.
In comparison, Excel can do that too (just worse), but it can also solve equations, do your company's bookkeeping, and pretty much every other task that relies mostly on numbers.
I would argue Open/LibreOffice Calc comes fairly close to Excel if you ignore the worse user interface (which is fair in the original assertion that it's "mostly polish and small incremental improvements")
It is intended. I, too, dislike the manner of creating links as keys into a hash of memory resident continuations for exactly this reason. It's just not a good way to structure things. It can be made to work, obviously, but it's far from an ideal setup.
I believe the smalltalk-based "seaside" server works analogously.
In fairness, it doesn't tend to bother often, most of my ( and presumably most of all ) traffic being directed to the harder links, none of which use the "fnid" keys. The continuations appear to be used for links that are hiding information ( indexes into current ranking, user-ids for flagging, etc ). It just stings when you click something after coming back to a page and it throws it back in your face.
I don't want to come off as a troll or anything, but how do you expect us to deal with all the parens in the language you built this site in? It's like, all parens.
... which is a really terrible way to run something effectively. Basically, it means it'll fail whenever it suddenly needs something predictable but previously unneeded.
I think we just have different expectations. I see HN as a YC-hosted water cooler - nothing more. It's not important to me that it be bug-free or fast or even up all the time. YMMV.
... which will drive away everyone overly impressed by flashy features and/or who like to whine about every little unimportant thing, like a social news site being down briefly, or not being able to see karma scores. Working as intended probably.
DateTime code bugs happen all the time, there are so much things to consider and it's hard to test, because the problem conditions might not occur for years to come. Remember this? http://news.cnet.com/new-years-hangover-for-zune-users/ (also I too am guilty of producing a similar bug in a software a few years ago)
Iceland did not "fail as a nation." Simply the financial sector was too large a percentage of the economy. When the financial sector collapsed (as it did in the UK as I recall) so did the economy.
