If anyone is wondering, this looks a bit like a syndromic set of phenotypes resulting from the mutation(s) in DHDDS. The mutations are hitting a really bad part in the glycosylation pathways, where I can imagine impacts on a massive number of proteins. I’m assuming this is a hypomorph, as if you lost function of this gene completely, it’s hard to see how any cell can survive.
No one was wondering that about Portugal. The Man’s website.
FYI they are rising money to save their kid https://gofund.me/d012bb5b the tech side is fun but the most important link is hidden and I see very few donations rolling it for it to be home the HN front page
Fucking incredible.
This doesn't work well on mobile devices. Hopefully it doesn't become a trend.
Since it loads everything at once, navigation is very snappy, which I really like. I'd rather let the whole thing load once than wait every time I click an internal link.
So that would be Portugal. The Man. The Website. The Google Sheet.
Thanks very much I'm here all week, try the Beef Wellington.
It’s over for frontend devs, no code has won
If you click on the Tab 'FRANCES CHANGED MY LIFE' it shows that band members John and Zoe have a daughter Frances. They're raising money to fund research into Frances' rare neurological disease:
"Frances has a rare genetic mutation that causes a degenerative disease called DHDDS. In the last few years, breakthroughs in medical science have made it possible to develop a treatment. Unfortunately, it's extremely expensive. We are telling Frances’story in hopes of raising enough donations to fund her treatment."
https://www.chrisblackchangedmylife.com/donate
Hopefully the HN traffic boost can help drive some donations and new research into treating neurological diseases. Donate!
These things always make me uneasy. On the one hand, I understand they are in a very hard situation. On the other hand, donating to research into rare neurological diseases will literally save hundreds of times fewer lives than donating to "effective" charities (https://www.effectivealtruism.org/)
Sam Bankman-Fried did a pretty great job proving how awful "effective altruism" can end up.
Believe in something? Donate your time. Donate your money.
Not all lives have the same subjective utility to the donor. When pressed into making a choice I think most would rather save their own child’s life than a million random children in Africa. If someone likes the band I imagine the donor would feel more utility in helping them than saving a greater amount of people they have no connection to.
> most would rather save their own child’s life than a million random children
The idea of effective altruism is that this is immoral, and that our instinctive behavior of being so indifferent to the sufferings of those we don't feel "close" to should be fought against.
Sure, but there is no reason to think that universal utilitarianism is the correct moral philosophy. I think lots of people get trapped into thinking from these universal principles in the abstract and it’s important to remind that that’s an absolutely arbitrary, and not-natural-to-humans, way of thinking about ethics. Our view of other humans absolutely doesn’t, and shouldn’t, start from an uninformed prior.
Effective altruism has worked out pretty well, hasn’t it?
Is this a reference to Sam Bankman-Fried ? He was a promoter of effective altruism and also a fraudster. But I'm not sure why that should prevent non-fraudsters to also promote effective altruism.
His perspective was literally that being a fraudster is OK if it nets you billions of dollars that can go toward significant causes. It's at the core of "effective altruism": the ends justify the means.
So yes, he was a shining example of why "effective altruism" is just an excuse to do terrible things / make small improvements in the world.
That’s some harsh utilitarianism.
This would be a decent idea if the mobile site wasn't terrible
seems very difficult to use on mobile. i suppose it doesnt matter since most people buy tickets through third parties.
The problem with this website is that it's filled with popups suggesting to accept cookies, privacy, and stuff. Before I ever see an unobstructed web page, I have to perform about two or three clicks accompanied with intimidating text descriptions.
The more clicks the better, right? More clicks is a sure sign of improved engagement. But seriously, it is not.
The issue you describe is a general one driven by regulation and not specific to this website
> driven by regulation
It’s driven by privacy invasive practices from the services. I have never created a website that showed popups or required people to “accept” anything, because I respect the people who visit them. The websites who say they “value your privacy” while at the same time revealing they have “1542 partners” (yes, really) they share your data with are the problem.
It’s as if the milk industry were peeing in your milk, a law passed saying they could only do that with consent, and you complained of all the pee warnings being driven by regulation. I mean, technically the warning are only there because of regulation, but the law isn’t the thing to criticise there, the behaviour which lead to it is.
"A country is a group of people," guitar player and vocalist John Gourley explains. "With Portugal, it just ended up being the first country that came to mind. The band's name is 'Portugal'. The period is stating that, and 'The Man' states that it's just one person" (any one of the band members).
I'm not expecting a lot from their song writing after this statement.
> I'm not expecting a lot from their song writing after this statement.
They are actually quite a well-known band, so you shouldn’t be so cynical. People on HN love to judge things before they know anything about it. This band has won a Grammy award, but you were content to assume the worst for trivial reasons.
A band name is not trivial. It doesn't seem they spent any time or effort thinking up a good one (unless of course there is a marketing angle here, and the name (and band?) was entirely manufactured).
You must be a lot of fun at parties.
Let’s be real, the Beatles is one of the worst band names ever. People often name their band when they are young and they get stuck with it.
If Portugal the man is manufactured (entirely baseless claim) they did a pretty terrible job with it. They recorded and toured for ~15 years before getting any mainstream success.
"Some tools not available due to huge traffic." Why is gdocs shitting itself while handling 28 concurrent users just viewing a doc ?
I once made a google sheets social network facebook clone, just because I thought I could. Shared with some friends (who each got a protected tab). It was dumb.
Similar to Hyukoh's[1], although it is actually multiple documents. P.TM seem to have gone all in, which is neat.
I'm surprised that Google Sheets hasn't been throttled on that url yet.
At one point I provided live tracking data to a popular event site using Google Sheets and advised their web team to create a local cache of the data and refresh it every 10 minutes. Instead they ignored that advice and included the document itself into the home-page. The document was hugged to death within about 30 minutes of going live on a four day event and it took days for Google to increase their throttle, at which point it didn't matter any more, since the event was over.
I realise that Google has infrastructure to handle this load, but an international event, with a (then) Google Apps account, was unable to make enough noise at Google to fix things in a timely manner.
> I'm surprised that Google Sheets hasn't been throttled on that url yet.
It is for me. I get a banner saying some features are disabled due to high traffic.
And a huge cookie popup and a massive signup banner
truly headless CMS
truly CMSless head
This makes me want to see an electronic act with a Github repo for their website containing markdown docs for tour, merch, etc.
You're giving me ideas haha
Love it when a band does something weird or interesting with their website. My favorite is The Strokes:
There's also https://redfoo.com/
I also have an iOS published app that has a Google Sheets “backend”: https://subsol.one
It’s an app for finding parties and festivals in Romania, and the sheets choice makes it super easy for my brother and his friends to add parties to the app.
I thought about adding a “real” database and tried some apps/frontends for them, but nothing made it easy enough to update and insert rows for non technical people.
I figured I could just download and cache the Sheets CSV, and use that for the database.
PS: the app is the one I had trouble getting published because the App Store reviewers deemed it“too simple”: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Dealing-with-App-Store-reject...
I made something very similar for our company's internal directory. HR is used to maintaining Google Sheets and fit really well into their workflow
Your choice is a reasonable one! I have built entire CMS systems that pull data for thousands of users from sharepoint spreadsheets.
Realtors and doctors, mostly.
Take a look at SeaTable.
For your next app backend, you should try SQLPage [1][2]
It makes creating a small web form to feed your database as easy as
SELECT 'form' AS component;
SELECT name, label, type FROM form_fields;
INSERT INTO parties(name, date) VALUES(:name, :date);
SELECT 'json' AS component,
(SELECT JSON_GROUP_ARRAY(JSON_OBJECT('name', name, 'date', date)) FROM parties) AS contents;
This looks really good, but I had to pass on it because I couldn't find screenshots or, even better, a demo site. I think that would really help sell this.
The official website for SQLPage (https://sql.ophir.dev/) is written in SQLPage.
The sql source code for it is here: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/tree/main/examples/offici...
The site also links to this little collaborative game written in SQLPage: https://conundrum.ophir.dev/
The github README has code snippets and associated screenshots: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage#examples
There is also an official repl.it that you can fork to quickly try it online without having to download anything: https://replit.com/@pimaj62145/SQLPage
And SQLPage cloud is coming: https://sql.ophir.dev/your-first-sql-website/hosted.sql
This is all good, but you're making a mistake I see many people make: If one person has this experience/questions (me), then many of your other visitors will. Answering here will answer my questions, but it won't answer everyone else's questions.
My recommendation would be to have a clear "see a demo" button, which leads to a website that showcases the most common elements I might want to have on such a page (a form, some graphs, etc), maybe with source code close by.
You are right. I'll update the website !
I agree. I was looking for the same thing.
They’re not easy to create but side by side code/result demos like the ones I saw on https://imba.io/ make it very clear on what I’ll be getting into as a developer.
Thanks for building this, and for the sample code :)
Although what sheets excels at is batch editing and collaboration, which is really hard to get in an SQL frontend. My brother usually runs a Raycast workflow I wrote for him to extract a small number of party data as TSV which gets copied in clipboard. Then in sheets he can just paste that to get full rows and columns populated.
After that he and his friends start proof reading and cross referencing social media data for each row, and Sheets makes this super easy as they can see each row highlighted with each user’s color so they don’t step on each other’s toes.
Your solution is still very good for other use cases and I think I already have one in mind. My father always wanted to maintain a list of up-to-date prices for the vegetables that sell in my hometown’s large wholesale market.
> Although what sheets excels at
well played
Django provides an admin page that makes it easy for non programmers to update SQL tables so thats worth looking into as well
I like the idea of this a lot, but does it provide any way to edit the data?
You write the SQL yourself, so you can do anything you want, including
UPDATE parties SET name=:name, date=:date WHERE id=:id;Thanks for the response, I was looking at your site from mobile earlier and it didn't jump out at me that it could also be used to edit data (tho I now see it mentioned clearly). Might be worth calling it out in a section as easy editing.
Btw how would you compare this to https://datasette.io/ which is the first thing that came to mind? Is yours a bit more developer oriented?
I can’t tell if that’s a sarcasm or “dropbox is just ftp” level of professional deformation.
I'm not sure I understand this comment. The parent asked whether SQLPage could be used to update data in the database after inserting it. I answered that yes, it could.
The update form would look something like this:
select 'form' as component;
select 'event_name' as name,
(select name from events where id=$id) as value;
select 'event_date' as name, 'date' as type,
(select date from events where id=$id) as value;
select 'event_id' as name, $id as value, 'hidden' as type;
update events set name=:event_name, date=:event_date where id=:event_id;
It's a little bit more complicated to set up than a google sheet, but it's less complicated to use afterwards.
You can easily turn a spreadsheet into a small CRUD database with HTTP API using Google Apps Script. I've shared an example a few years ago: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/setup.
How's the performance?
Good enough
Websites or apps backed by a sheet or some other minimalist setup are fairly common. What's noteworthy about the submission is that the website is a sheet, not a layer to render info from one.
Sameish here. I made hundreds of flashcards and other "matrixes" of data, this is pulled each time I build the app, which then converts the csv to json and stored in the app.
I also write articles in Sketch, because the app is heavy on illustrations. Using sketch allows me to draw the images directly while writing the articles. It is then sliced and exported into the app through a custom plugin.
It’s a pet peeve of mine how selectively the “don’t editorialise headlines” guideline is enforced
There’s a difference between headlines and page titles imo. A (good) headline already tells you what’s interesting about a link, whereas a page title may or may not.
The title accurately describes what's interesting about the submission, no hyperbole or clickbait. What's wrong with that?
Nothing. That's the point.
It looks like John Gurley has a GoFundMe to help research a treatment/cure for his daughter's genetic mutation: https://gofund.me/d012bb5b
Idea shamelessly lifted from Zack Fox.
They're playing with Good Kid!
A few years back I was in a tech interview in San Francisco, and after the fact I hung out with other candidates in the city. One of them was from Canada and told us he played in a band. This is the band! Happy to see this project still going strong and gaining traction!
A fun funky idea. Sad I can’t think of a ton of HN worthy ideas of musical acts making newsworthy tech-empowered quirky choices. The last thing that comes to mind is Radiohead making In Rainbows pay-what-you-want.
One Hacker Band is a robot band that plays real instruments.
Vulfpeck fans won’t shut up about the fact that the band made their own font.
What about when U2’s new album appeared on iPods automatically?
This is why I was never interested in U2. I'm sure they made great stuff before I was born, but my primary exposure to them as a kid was Apple iPod ads. It turned me off them and I have ignored their existence ever since.
True. It was newsworthy, albeit in a cringeworthy way.
I really enjoy Portugal. The Man, so many good days in the sun playing their music over the years.
Lol, I wonder if this has caused issues for Google
I’m sure it’s slamming a (hopefully very) fast cache since the load is all read.
The Sheets UI is showing only about ~33 viewers.
Spreadsheets: the original no-code platform. I like it. Infinitely scalable, easy to update. Most of the time when I go to an artist's site it's to find tour dates or merch. This does both okay.
About that scaling…
I’ve seen workflows with data chunked out into multiple excel files because the results exceeded the row limit (4 million?) Going through all that by hand was a pain, and it took hours to go from a flat file format to spreadsheets. Parquet took this down to seconds, and provided a rich data analysis API.
Spreadsheets scale for small to medium-ish workflows and are very much a drag for anything remotely “big.”
Can we implement a locking mechanism with purely using google sheets ? Example think of a hotel room booking system
After years of dormancy, a surprising new chapter in the using <table> for layout debate emerges.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror.
While this site has some similarities to reddit, HN is not reddit.
...and were suddenly set to `display: none;`
The most adept practitioners can create pixel-perfect bitmaps by minimizing column widths and row heights and tweaking background color cell by cell.
With slightly larger granularity, and for somewhat more mundane purposes, it's also a neat way to present QR codes. Especially good for QR codes via email, since no attachment is required and almost every client supports tables.
Please try to understand us
We’ve said goodbye to Kansas
Since time immemorial
(hyperbole, millennial!)
<table> has been my <canvas>Someone implemented Doom in Excel https://youtu.be/J2qU7t6Jmfw
RETVRN
I lol'd, thank you.
Now might be a good time to mention the band Vulfpeck's website, which is refreshingly stripped-down and no more flashy in it's design than Craigslist. Aside from it's custom typeface: https://www.vulfpeck.com/
The site is a little light on content right now because there's not much going on with the band, but going back in time you can see how crisp and functional the entire thing is, even when loaded with information: https://web.archive.org/web/20200417092603/https://vulfpeck....
> which is refreshingly stripped-down
Until you look at the HTML source.
Similar one that I love from Nicolas Jaar with major indie-hacker vibes, albeit a less sick typeface:
I love his mixes, this is great!
I really like Vulf Mono. More bands should make their own typeface.
Haha that's funny. Surprisingly functional as well.
Website's definitely suffering in performance while having a grand total of .. 37 viewers.
Actually works well to get the points across (on desktop, at least), and is interesting from an artistic perspective. I enjoy it as an interesting anecdote, but it does make for a comparatively miserable browsing experience!
This looks so bad on mobile lol
We've gone full circle from Word home pages to spreadsheet ones now, yay
I love this band.
But this is actually a terrible idea.
Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one. Agents and venues looking for promo pictures. Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc.,
Artist websites have a variety of audiences.
My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are...
PTM has won a Grammy, they don't need planners to get a sense of their style. If anything, GSheet might be their styles.
Band websites used to be very much about an art experience and very little about conveying any kinds of facts.
Back in the early 2000s homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really.
> homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really
You can shorten this by eliminating the "of artists like Radiohead" from the phrasing, and it will still be true of many businesses.
You'd think that when an organization shells out money to someone so they'll grab a domain name and set up a site for them, it would be for the org to have a depository for their content just like TBL intended—and they can piggyback off the ubiquity of the Web so those resources are retrievable/accessible with pretty low friction. Weirdly, a whole industry of people specializing in e.g. Wordpress or CSS-framework-du-jour have managed to pull some sleight of hand so that the world at large doesn't have expectations that are anything like that in mind and instead thinks that the purpose should rather be little more than something like a visually stunning brochure (or billboard) that's already out of date the day it's published—and everything the business relies on to actually operate and communicate will happen either through Facebook or is created in a facsimile of a 90s-style office suite and gets shuttled around via email or Google Drive (or simply never leaves the machine where it was created).
Pretty weird fuckin' milieu (and expensive), if we're being frank.
That was a time before almost everyone got almost all their information about everything from the internet.
> But this is actually a terrible idea.
A lot of people say that about a lot of art. 'Terrible ideas' can be very, very dope though. IMO mapping their primary domain to a fuckin' Google Sheet is banger hah.
> Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one.
Those are there, though? Also Google returns the 29 tour tracking/ticketing platforms in their trailing results behind the primary domain. I think the fans will be ok...
> Agents and venues looking for promo pictures.
> Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc.
Bruh it's Portugal. The Man. There is one agent (theirs) and venues/festival "planners" (???) aren't "looking" for promo photos – they're delivered by their agent and/or management with restrictions, guidelines, and approval for promotional use only. They can't just pull random media off the internet for promo.
Nobody is trying to determine their "style". That's been clearly defined for a minute (decade+) now. If anything these people are selling PTM, not the other way around.
> My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are...
I can guarantee you that's incorrect. You don't think they plot & plan & intelligently deploy their entire, well... everything? For months on months before we see it? Nobody fumbled about, tweaked the layout & styling, and toggled the Share function on the Google Sheet organically haha.
But all that information is on the website
I saw them live last year and they had the stage lights off the whole show, you couldn't see them at all. They closed with their big hit and played the Beavis and Butthead clip making fun of it first. I think they're a little (playfully) antagonistic
I think it's awesome, just the kind of fun thing they'd do.
Nah, this is 100% an artistic choice.
> tour dates... pictures
All that stuff is here
I don’t understand. It seems to be doing exactly the job you specified.
All of your stated purposes are effectively communicated via this spreadsheet.
Sadly these days social media fulfills that requirement.
Not really. Social media is feed based. Finding "on demand" info such as "when are they playing in my town?" is a nightmare even with pinned posts.
First result for "when is portugal the man playing in my town?" via Google. https://www.google.com/search?q=when+is+portugal+the+man+pla...
https://www.songkick.com/artists/400418-portugal-the-man
The "Track Artist" button at the top of the page will let you subscribe to all future dates inside a radius of your town.
Nightmare avoided. :)
Most ways of putting up a conventional website don't make updates easy, unless you buy into some whole system, or pay someone. If Sheets is familiar and works, why not?
Arguably the fact that the website is more likely to be accurate and up to date this way makes it more user friendly.
Sure, but there are a lot of options these days which are much nicer to look at. For example you can easily share Notion documents as websites.
Why should they care whether it’s nice to look at?
Hacker News isn’t exactly pretty, and I hope it never will be.
My 75 year old mother who struggles with the remote still can update her church wordpress.
Funny related story: I have nearly 2 decades professional webdev experience, including a cumulative decade at a FAANG and a "decacorn". My HOA was looking for someone to take over maintenance of their website for events and photos and other super basic stuff. I volunteered along with some other lady who only had experience maintaining her church website in WordPress.
The board chose the other lady without even talking to me "because she had deeper WordPress experience."
The site still looks and functions like it's 1998 /shrug
brutalism through free corporate spreadsheets
could you _get_ more indie than that?
>indie
You misspelled “pretentious”.
They are not the only band to do this. My fav small Dutch band Woezels do the same, just for lolz https://woezels.nl/
That's even better because it seems to allow anyone to edit.
My guess is that this is a funky artistic choice, and that they used to have a "normal" webpage.
I checked with the wayback machine, and it looks like my guess is correct. I clicked randomly into an archive a few years old, and here's 2016 website looking a lot more like what you describe http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portuga... .
I guess an audience that you left out in your description is people appreciating the experience of looking at the website or the artist themselves wanting to make a statement. I think the band has thoroughly "made it" so to speak, and doesn't have to worry too much about most of what you mentioned. They do list tour dates in their google sheet and also can sell out pretty large venues easily, and I don't think there are any festival planners who don't know who Portugal, the Man who have any chance of nabbing them for their festival.
Maybe they got tired of paying some web dev money every time they needed to update their page. With Google Sheets they can do that themselves.
Ahhh that totally makes sense. Thanks for researching and sharing.
Portugal The Man is "made" but my concern was that the new bands that are still struggling to make it should not take inspiration from this and create a google sheets website. That would be terrible for their career.
Maybe I am not thinking through this enough but... why? Social media accounts and artist pages on streaming platforms showing up at the top of Google search is probably more important than their website.
Yep. When was the last time you went to a bands actual website to find info? Spotify has tour dates. You’d follow them on Instagram, they share music and dates, links to merch stores there. The website itself means pretty much nothing these days so you can take some creative angles. So many smaller bands I’ve worked with who are growing don’t have one.
Surprisingly, I am listening the latest Rolling Stone album right now and I wanted to check if they will tour our town. I went to their web site to check it and to my surprise I was not able to find any tour info there.
Not a counterpoint, just coincide I guess.
I would hope that a website wouldn’t make or break an artist. It’s about the music after all. Outside of looking at this post, I don’t think I could tell you what a single musician’s webpage looks like. It’s not something I ever look at.
For concerts, I tend to look for who is coming to venues near me, rather than looking at 200 band websites and hoping they are both on tour and near me.
Do most people go to the band’s actual site to learn this stuff?
If you already know a band's music or an artist work it may not matter as much.
But for artists who are not well known, a website can help make a great first impression.
I found this Apple Music for artists page a good intro on why promo/marketing materials are important.
https://artists.apple.com/support/1121-why-an-electronic-pre...
For a great many people, the artists own website is the last place they’d look for the artist.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Spotify would all rank much higher.
Even as someone who doesn’t do social media, I would still turn to YouTube and Spotify before I’d even bother looking for their band website. In fact the only time over ever visited an artists website in the last 10 years was to buy merch from their official stores.
Furthermore, people’s first impression of an artist is seeing them live at a festival, as a support act for another band they went to see, or even just that artist playing in the bar. Maybe they heard that artist on an independent radio station. But it would always be about the artist. Literally no one would have heard a band name and think “I will check out their website before I bother listening to any of their songs”. (Or at least if anyone does, they’re not the kind of people who give a crap about music so wouldnt be buying their albums nor going to their gigs anyway).
I’m not saying your advice is bad per se, just that you’re vastly over exaggerating the importance of a good website for people’s perceptions of an artist.
Agents and venues can look at Instagram or other socials for promo pictures and styles etc.
Hmmmm ideally you want them to look for your best images not some random after show picture from a fan on social media.
Websites make it easy for you to control your promo material ( EPK).
They have their own instagram account.
This is a pretty good idea to be fair.
If you live in Japan, maybe.
this.
many websites _should_ be this tbh. lmao
They should be an embedded google sheet that is impossible to view properly on mobile and that gets locked if too many view it?
There used to be a nice file format for this called HTML...
A big javascript mess that doesn't work on phones?
I can't tell if you are talking about most websites or Google Sheets.
Yes
I love these guys. I'm not sure what learning this means for my fan ship. They never struck me as a particular no-frills aesthetic type of group. I wonder if they made this themselves or there's some story behind it.
They're being rebels just for kicks
How long have you been feeling it?
Since 19:56
If it works it works?
Doesn't work so well on mobile though :(
Does it not work, or are you just saying it could be better?
There’s a huge fixed unclosable signup overlay at the bottom so the viewport is limited. Also the content is not scaled down so you have to pan on two axis. Some text is so long it doesn’t fit in the viewport. Nearly literally unusable.
Yeah I mean… it’s clunky but it does get the job done…
Works fine for me, with the caveat that my phone screen is so big that it doesn't actually fit in my hand
If it doesn't work it doesn't work.
You speak the True True.
I got, "Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file.".