Please no
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
181–190 of 221 posts
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#182Founder of AlphaSheets here -- we built this back in 2015 and developed it for 3 years. We built Python, R, SQL and full excel formula/hotkey/format/conditional formatting/ribbon compatibility. It was a long slog!
I wish you good luck and all the best. It's a tough field but a big market. And I still think the potential is there.
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#183This reminds me a lot of DabbleDB. It was an interesting application written in Seaside, a very cool web framework running inside the Smalltalk VM. They got acquired by Twitter.
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#184[deleted]
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#185This would be actually useful if it were offline and didn't require a login.
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#186On the surface this seems like an impossible market to penetrate. But you must know this. What is the deeper insight that one who thinks this is missing?
I think when we see the title we assume the market is “everyone who currently uses a spreadsheet”. And if they try to go after that market, they have almost zero chance of success.
But if they focus on a specific set of users and use cases they can be a much more compelling product than excel, and even a “tiny” market, relative to excel’s user base, can be big enough to support a set of competing tools.
The question remains though — what is the specific set of people they are trying to help, and why are they best at helping?
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#187On the surface this seems like an impossible market to penetrate. But you must know this. What is the deeper insight that one who thinks this is missing?
I think when we see the title we assume the market is “everyone who currently uses a spreadsheet”. And if they try to go after that market, they have almost zero chance of success. But if they focus on a specific set of users and use cases they can be a much more compelling product than excel, and even a “tiny” market, relative to excel’s user base, can be big enough to support a set of competing tools. The question…
>>The question remains though — what is the specific set of people they are trying to help, and why are they best at helping?
Yeah, this is what I'm trying to understand. I can't really imagine how to do this for any subset of people in spreadsheet land. Excel and Google sheets are great products, there are network effects, the complexity of the product means scale matters.
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#188This is cool, but I think it might be missing what the big problems with spreadsheets are. I was complaining just today because I pasted some records into Excel and it decided to treat 933349234275230104 as a number (it's a hash), convert it to scientific notation (which I NEVER want), and lose precision. Yet there is no way to globally disable scientific notation. Plus it's kind of insane that "formatting" changes d…
I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but if you want unaltered text content in an Excel cell, prefix it with a single quote ('). This “escapes” the value so that it isn’t interpreted as any other data type.
I'm generally pasting the results of a SQL query so this is, while possible, massively annoying to do
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#189Founder of AlphaSheets here -- we built this back in 2015 and developed it for 3 years. We built Python, R, SQL and full excel formula/hotkey/format/conditional formatting/ribbon compatibility. It was a long slog! I wish you good luck and all the best. It's a tough field but a big market. And I still think the potential is there.
I noticed that AlphaSheets is no longer in operation - couldn't find the website. What happened?
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We call the OpenAI API - they don't always answer these days :-( Yikes. That's worrying. Is this rate limiting or API timeouts that need some retry logic wrapped around?
I think it might have been a quote issue actually ... But we should handle failures better, I agree
My worry was more about random failures on Open AI side (I'm building something with it). Thanks for sharing. I'd love to see a blog post on how you are handling the quoting issues.
Are you planning on sticking with Open AI or is it a stop gap until you train your own models?