Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

Post by rspeer » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 6:27 PM UTC

Zikes wrote: post #32

pikzen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those people could be using Google Spreadsheet already for example, which would have already solved the problem. And people in the office are not going to be writing Javascript in their spreadsheet. It literally solves nothing.

Storing proprietary data in Google may not be viable. I know it isn't in my office, for instance. Plus, you lose the flexibility to integrate it into a more comprehensive application interface which runs on your own hardware/software stack, which the Javascript in this case provides. I can already imagine several good uses for this software in my workplace, so saying it "literally solves nothing" is "literally false"…

Post by tptacek » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 6:33 PM UTC

Myrmornis wrote: post #41

dang wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the Show HN guidelines say: "When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is." But you also needn't trample over someone's freshly planted garden. Helpful criticism is fine. Asking a question is fine (a real question, not a gotcha one designed to make someone look bad); for example, one could ask "what do you mean when you say this is a new kind of spreadsheet?" Pointing out similarities to other work is…

I am uncomfortable with the line you're taking here. The sentence "javascript makes it better amirite" was a bit juvenile, but otherwise the comment was perfectly valid. We do not want to be forced to be positive about things which have serious flaws; this sort of kumbaya HN thought police makes this seem more like some sort of Christian summer camp than an environment for rational discussion.

Post by calebm » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #15

I'd love to see Jupyter (IPython Notebooks) capable of this kind of thing. It'd be awesome to be able to select a column of a Pandas DataFrame and apply a function to it.

Post by nealmydataorg » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 6:57 PM UTC

Zikes wrote: post #28

pikzen wrote: post #8

Every single spreadsheet software has been able to do this for years, but using Javascript makes it better amirite? What makes this better than Excel (VBA, Python, probably half of the languages on the planet.), Libre Office, Google Spreadsheets, etc., aside from Javascript ? The only point I could see would be integrating this into a page, which is of dubious utility.

In a typical office environment, everybody knows how to work with spreadsheets. They're a common interface and a great way to present and explore tabular data. But as soon as you put that data into an Excel document and hit Save, it's outdated. Somewhere, somebody in the office has a .xlsx file on their C: drive with the data you need, but that doesn't help you much, does it? Or somebody puts the data into a spreadsh…

Post by dang » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

Myrmornis wrote: post #41

dang wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the Show HN guidelines say: "When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is." But you also needn't trample over someone's freshly planted garden. Helpful criticism is fine. Asking a question is fine (a real question, not a gotcha one designed to make someone look bad); for example, one could ask "what do you mean when you say this is a new kind of spreadsheet?" Pointing out similarities to other work is…

I am uncomfortable with the line you're taking here. The sentence "javascript makes it better amirite" was a bit juvenile, but otherwise the comment was perfectly valid. We do not want to be forced to be positive about things which have serious flaws; this sort of kumbaya HN thought police makes this seem more like some sort of Christian summer camp than an environment for rational discussion.