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Spreadsheets are all you need

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Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#111

Post by DrDeadCrash »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #72
ccppurcell wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just an idea but how would you advise someone learning programming/a new programming language? Probably you'd say: build something with it. So same goes for excel. Try to hook up a spreadsheet to some database, have it update automatically, have drop down lists that populate automatically from the database (e.g. have a "country" drop down and automatically populate a "region" drop down based on the choice of country)…

Oh wow. Different poster same problem. Your comment made me realize that it's the "but I don't wanna!" attitude that I already know how to push through when it comes to language learning, just disguised differently. I'm still not sure that I wanna, tho...

You gotta need it ...

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#112

Post by michaelcampbell »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #97
decafninja wrote: post #26

Classic scenario in legacy finance tech: the hotshot trader or investment banker shakes his fist furiously demanding to be given back his Excel spreadsheets and the entire tech department be fired.

regulators would like a word.

Not any more; they're overworked and underpaid and have little to no authority in our new reality.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#114

Post by throwaway2037 »

yreg wrote: post #104
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

Our company used to run completely on Google spreadsheets (a lot of it was written by the CEO). It worked, but at some point, it became a convoluted unmaintainable mess. First, we partially switched to Airtable, but soon abandoned it in favour of our own internal node/python tools. The company is now a lot larger and the tools are more robust/capable/clean now, but at the same time, they are much less flexible than t…

Why is this downvoted? Many Wall Street fixed income trading desks were the same before 2010. What you wrote is true for many different types of businesses. A huge amount of sales (customer management) tools are written in Excel/VBA. They work well. It is a great platform.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#115

Post by throwaway2037 »

internet101010 wrote: post #92
pipes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?

For a best practices introduction I would recommend a course geared toward investment bankers. Some things that should be covered are: * Avoiding hardcoding numbers, making input cells a certain color, etc. * Knowing the all powerful F4 key that alternates between A1, $A$1, $A1, and A$1 (and knowing what each of these mean) * Inserting blank lines above and below a summed range and including those rows inside of the…

All solid advice. I learned many of these by: (1) reverse engineering other people's great sheets (formulas and VBA), and (2) watching highly skilled Excel users.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#116

Post by throwaway2037 »

seb1204 wrote: post #74
pipes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?

There was a video from Joel Spolsky - you suck at excel. That is a good starting point

Damn. Taken down! Can I get an archived copy somewhere?

Link from Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/14zj5vz/you_suck_at_...

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#117

Post by bunderbunder »

mrfakename wrote: post #113

Wow! Impressive. How did they manage to fit GPT-2 in a spreadsheet? A question for the author: will it be open sourced?

It's GPT-2 Small, which is only ~125 million parameters. That's big, but it's not out of reach for modern versions of Excel. The final spreadsheet is a 1.25GB file.

There's a GitHub link on the page: https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#118

Post by throwaway2037 »

asabla wrote: post #34
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

> I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch. That sounds wild. Do you or your friend have anything to share about this?

Related: Excel as ESports parody...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#119

Post by bunderbunder »

skipants wrote: post #110
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

I'm confused... are you just commenting on the name of the website itself or the content? The content itself is about demonstrating how an LLM/Neural net works using a spreadsheet and is a play on the title "Attention is All You Need". It has nothing to do with using a spreadsheet for most of your use cases.

And the author's comments on the difficulty of doing matrix multiplication in Excel suggest that he doesn't _actually_ believe that spreadsheets are all you need.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#120

Post by sillysaurusx »

DonHopkins wrote: post #88
kitd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A spreadsheet is really just an easily accessible, visual, functional programming environment. I think the question is not how to make spreadsheets more programmable, but how to make programming IDEs as simple as spreadsheets.

From the discussion of Brad Myers' classic 1990 paper (originally published by the ACM CHI conference in 1986, then updated in 1990 in the Journal of Visual Languages & Computing), "Taxonomies of Visual Programming and Program Visualization" (where Brad dropped by to answer questions): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26057530 https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/VLtax2-jvlc-1990.pdf https://news.ycombinator.com/it…

This is by far the most comprehensive overview of spreadsheets related to programming that I’ve ever seen. Thank you for putting this together.
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