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Spreadsheets are all you need

spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai

121–130 of 178 posts

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#121

Jokes on you, my Excel regularily thinks that two cells are not equal, despite both of them having exactly the same value and type (also no trailing spaces or these things). Copy and pasting it around sometimes solves the problem, but it never is apparent to me why that happens.

another shot in the dark but it could be different data types. some numbers can get stored as text when you import them. you can try wrapping your operands in VALUE() or TEXT() formulas accordingly

other than that, I agree with the other poster and the only issue I can think of is due to having a different number of digits after the decimal point causing some rounding error when comparing floats

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#122
post #56

> What about Google Sheets? > This project actually started on Google Sheets but the full 124M model was too big and switched to Excel. I’m still exploring ways to make this work in Google Sheets but it is unlikely to fit into a single file as it can with Excel. I wonder if it would work in https://rowzero.io/home ?

Founder of Row Zero here. We can handle it. We can scale your workbook to more memory/cores if the defaults aren't enough.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#123
post #18

Creator here. Thanks for posting this! Happy to answer questions or take suggestions and hope it helps folks better understand LLMs. Next video will be on embeddings and hopefully done soon-ish.

RSS would be really nice.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#124
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…

It an very different definition of visual programming to claim a system where you don't actually see the code is "visual programming”

In a text based language you see the code as text

In visual programming you generally see the code as a connected graph of nodes like Unreal Blueprints

In most spreadsheets you don't see the code. it's all hidden as formulas in cells and all you see is the result of each formula.

I'm not saying a spreadsheet isn't a programming environment but it's hard to see it as "visual programming" to see at most one line at a time

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are spreadsheet backends using Apache Arrow for storage. You could use something like pola.rs or Arrow DataFusion + Arrow Ballista for distributed processing of the dataset.

Wait really? Which spreadsheets? I want to play with this!

rowzero.io

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#126
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Well, the real thing exists as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDGdPE_C9u8

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#127
post #123
post #18

Creator here. Thanks for posting this! Happy to answer questions or take suggestions and hope it helps folks better understand LLMs. Next video will be on embeddings and hopefully done soon-ish.

RSS would be really nice.

Not 100% sure this will work, but there is a Mailchimp signup, and Mailchimp newsletters have RSS feeds. Based on the newsletter URL the RSS feed should be https://us21.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=96d33fd949860389358.... There's nothing in there yet but I would expect posts to show up if they start sending out emails.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#128
post #35
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.

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?

Buy one (or several) of these books and read through them (pick what you find interesting): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=excel

I find I learn best from (good) books because they actually explain things coherently, and you can leaf through them to discover features and things that look interesting.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#129
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It an very different definition of visual programming to claim a system where you don't actually see the code is "visual programming” In a text based language you see the code as text In visual programming you generally see the code as a connected graph of nodes like Unreal Blueprints In most spreadsheets you don't see the code. it's all hidden as formulas in cells and all you see is the result of each formula. I'm n…

Seeing all formulas in Excel is a menu-button click away:

Formulas tab > Formula Auditing group > Show Formulas button

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