[shii]

Thanks for collecting these all, but I must say, what a shitty and needlessly obtuse way to go about it with all these heavy spreadsheets everywhere. Surely there must be a simpler and better way?

They weren't designed to be in tandem or work together at all, but maybe some enterprising hacker can get their name out there by finding a way to use the Docs API to scrape the data from all these and host it on a pretty ajaxified site (like say, hnsheets.com or something) with a MongoDB backend and all the code on Github?

Or maybe just put it up on a wiki somewhere. Are there any other better solutions than these slow-crawling and large spreadsheets on Google Docs that anyone else can offer?

edit: how about metahn.com with subdirs or subdomains of:

   /directory

for listing of persons and meta info about them, history of work done, availability for contract work, availability for starting a startup, etc

   /jobs

with the different internships and jobs posted every month listed and searchable/ordered by different fields/categories

   /misc

with the other links and/or editable fronts to the data like the listing of TED talks or just links to the other static documents you mentioned.

There's already a few spread out hn-related sites like hndir.com[1] for students and hnofficehours.com[2] for general help and consultation between HN'ers but maybe there's room for one more.

[1] http://www.hndir.com/

[2] http://hnofficehours.com/

[thesethings]

I agree that spreadsheets are not optimal for reading tons of info, but I think they are easier than wikis for writing most stuff: Concurrent live editing w/out fear, no manual markup formatting, no Edit button, no Submit step... I think that was one of the points of the other thread (about the overnight book): that Google Docs and Spreadsheets are enabling some collaborative works that would have otherwise been more painful to create.

That said, Google supports lots of input + output formats. I hope you're right and somebody is hacking some cool stuff together.

edit: your proposed structure sounds really cool to me.