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Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#41

Post by mmckelvy »

threeseed wrote: post #31
mmckelvy wrote: post #26

Interesting. I think you're on to something here. I fully agree that a combination of spreadsheets and SQL are the ideal tools for data analysis -- not a SaaS GUI. > Niching down, if you work in operations at a With the rise of AI, companies like Tembo that help you set up all in one databases, and tools like this, I'm increasingly of the mind that many companies should start bringing things like analytics and observ…

Minus the AI part tools like this have existed for decades. And companies are not dumping their SaaS tools and switching to them en masse. Because (a) data silos have dramatically increased pushing dreams of a unified data schema out of reach, (b) technology stacks have become far more complex necessitating tools like Datadog and (c) competition is stronger than ever meaning that skimping on paying for tools like Mix…

Not yet. But in the analytics case, suppose you could build a tool that collected data on your own infrastructure, allowed you to write plain SQL against a PostgreSQL database to get whatever analytics data you need, had an AI-driven text-to-SQL option so non-technical users could get whatever analytics data _they_ need, and output everything to a universal interface, i.e. a spreadsheet? No vendor flavored DSL, GUI, or workflows to learn. That product would be tough to beat. It wasn't built in the past because it was hard. But with AI and something like Tembo or Timescale, is it actually hard anymore?

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#42

Post by halfcat »

I always wonder where these spreadsheet/database apps will land. Usually it falls flat for one of a few reasons I’ve observed:

- Fundamental gap in skillset, in that if you want to have ultimate flexibility to slice and dice the data and report on whatever you’re seeking, you’ve ultimately needed SQL skills in the past (which isn’t rocket science, but also isn’t something most accounting users can run with on their own).

- Fundamental desire of users to work with unstructured data. This goes back at least as far as Excel vs Lotus Improv in the early 90’s. Joel Spolsky talked about this, how they were terrified that Lotus Improv was going to kill Excel, because Improv was built to work with structured data, which users could then query and ask questions of to get any answer they want. But it turned out, as they observed people using both apps, there were zero users that used 100% normalized, structure data.

- Imperfect translation between spreadsheet and database. I’ve seen these work well 99.9% of the time, but at some point a column gets added or something that throws off formulas. And 0.1% error is basically catastrophic in accounting.

Maybe LLMs help overcome these challenges. Wish you luck.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#43

Post by primitivesuave »

This is incredible. I uploaded a CSV with ~6000 rows containing campaign finance data for a particularly corrupt local politician and asked "what was the total contributed amount in [year]". Not only did it produce the correct answer (in around the same amount of time it took me to calculate it on my end) but it also seemed to understand that the spreadsheet was related to campaign finance in the "summary" portion of the response.

The most useful aspect was that I could ask "what was the total contributed amount between January and June of 2020" and get an accurate answer for that as well. Since the date column is provided as an "MM/DD/YYYY" string, I would normally have to do some boilerplate work to sanitize this.

For my particular use case, the charting aspect left a few things to be desired - once I grouped campaign donations by contributor, I could only see the first 10 rows in the AI response, with no option to expand the output. But overall I was truly blown away that something like this is even possible for a small team to build.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#44

Post by mceoin »

primitivesuave wrote: post #43

This is incredible. I uploaded a CSV with ~6000 rows containing campaign finance data for a particularly corrupt local politician and asked "what was the total contributed amount in [year]". Not only did it produce the correct answer (in around the same amount of time it took me to calculate it on my end) but it also seemed to understand that the spreadsheet was related to campaign finance in the "summary" portion of…

> For my particular use case, the charting aspect left a few things to be desired - once I grouped campaign donations by contributor, I could only see the first 10 rows in the AI response, with no option to expand the output.

Insert it as a table on the page (you should see a button), it will then print the whole table result from that query into the spreadsheet. Also, you can check the SQL first and validate it, then print to table after that.

Try a few million rows and see what happens!

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#45

Post by dioptre »

mceoin wrote: post #44
primitivesuave wrote: post #43

This is incredible. I uploaded a CSV with ~6000 rows containing campaign finance data for a particularly corrupt local politician and asked "what was the total contributed amount in [year]". Not only did it produce the correct answer (in around the same amount of time it took me to calculate it on my end) but it also seemed to understand that the spreadsheet was related to campaign finance in the "summary" portion of…

> For my particular use case, the charting aspect left a few things to be desired - once I grouped campaign donations by contributor, I could only see the first 10 rows in the AI response, with no option to expand the output. Insert it as a table on the page (you should see a button), it will then print the whole table result from that query into the spreadsheet. Also, you can check the SQL first and validate it, the…

Also keep an eye out on the limit - we default to 10,000 to keep it snappy but if you want to make it larger its a click away. The "summarize table" button should auto limit to 1B+ rows.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#49

Post by dioptre »

SoulAuctioneer wrote: post #46
Brajeshwar wrote: post #40

You might want to check who is blacklisting you and request to unblock. AdGuard blocked sourcetable.com as "Scam". https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/np92pyo0eb0zphysc9wwz/screens...

Thanks for reporting! Taking a look now.

Hey do you mind removing this comment? Seems it might have caused us to be blacklisted?
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