Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python • Hacker News Board

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#101

Post by dosinga » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:11 PM UTC

btown wrote: post #81

Very cool! Does it allow real-time multi-person editing? (It's not very clear from the landing page.) If so - how do you handle multiple people editing the code area at the same time? Would be a killer feature if this was robust!

Thanks! Multi user should work out of the box, but right now it is last writer wins, which seems fine for the sheet side of things. We have a prototype of concurrent editing for the code area, but it's not launched yet. We'll prioritize depending on how many people ask for it.

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#102

Post by dosinga » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

MaxPengwing wrote: post #74

This looks very useful, I can see this being used in schools and universities for a plethora of studies. However I am European in EU, and while your Privacy policy is eminently readable, I don't think it can be used in EU school settings as you do not specify who your 3rd party service providers ar, what their privacy policys are or where data is hosted (thank you for making it human non lawyer readable). Schools/Uni…

Oh, thanks. That's very helpful. Schools do seem like a good area to roll this out and in fact we did a pilot with a Swiss university (I know, not in the EU). We should look into this.

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#103

Post by jackamadeo » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

Rovoska wrote: post #37

Forced signup to even test it? Hard pass

Thanks for calling that out! We made it possible to skip the sign-up to try our tutorial. https://neptyne.com/neptyne/tutorial should now let you do that

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#104

Post by dosinga » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

yubiox wrote: post #86

Is there an api or cli interface so I don't have to use the web ide?

Sorry, not yet! I suppose we could allow editing the code pane using an external editor, but the spreadsheet would be tricky I think. Or do you have an idea of how that would work?

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#105

Post by matt3210 » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

This seems like an amazing idea probably because I know python pretty well... People who can't use python probably won't be into it.

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#106

Post by ricklamers » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

Wow this is cool! I created a similar thing over the summer but never took it anywhere because I felt GSheets would just add Python.

https://github.com/ricklamers/gridstudio

Rooting for you guys

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#107

Post by dosinga » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:32 PM UTC

dexwiz wrote: post #99

dosinga wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can access stuff in a different way of course. Each sheet is also a python object, so you can just go Sheet1[20, 20] or Sheet1[10:20] if you like that way better

Sheet1[10:20] looks like the list slicing syntax. Are there any issues there?

You are correct, that is the slicing syntax. We to carefully interpret the ":" in the right way. For example:

sort(l, lambda A:F1(A)) doesn't invoke

Sheet1[10:20] just returns the 10 to 20s row of that sheet, which I think is the most reasonable thing to do here

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#108

Post by jackamadeo » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:33 PM UTC

pbreit wrote: post #80

Good opportunity to highlight Google "Apps Script" which is one of the most powerful but unknown tools in the web: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets Includes easy fetching: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetc... I suppose python could be better for this use case but javascript seems to work fine. And it's all built righ in to Google Sheets.

(cofounder of Neptyne here)

We see Apps Script is a strong signal that this kind of thing is useful. Apps Script adds so much power to Sheets but it could be so much easier to use. With Neptyne, since your spreadsheet engine runs in a Jupyter kernel, you get an interactive REPL and a very straightforward bidirectional API for reading/writing data.

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#109

Post by dosinga » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:34 PM UTC

ricklamers wrote: post #106

Wow this is cool! I created a similar thing over the summer but never took it anywhere because I felt GSheets would just add Python. https://github.com/ricklamers/gridstudio Rooting for you guys

Nice. Any learnings that we got profit from?

Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

#110

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 16, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

pbreit wrote: post #80

Good opportunity to highlight Google "Apps Script" which is one of the most powerful but unknown tools in the web: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets Includes easy fetching: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetc... I suppose python could be better for this use case but javascript seems to work fine. And it's all built righ in to Google Sheets.

[deleted]