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

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

#171

Post by nvln »

dosinga wrote: post #131
jedberg wrote: post #125

Hey, this is awesome! As someone who primarily codes in Python, I love that it's first class with a REPL! Nothing frustrates me more then when I have to figure out Javascript for scripting in Google Sheets. I ran through your demo and I have some feedback: - Tab completion in the REPL would be great. - When I change code in the editor, it doesn't update the cell where that code is used until I click on the cell, clic…

Thanks, this is excellent feedback: * The REPL is supposed to do autocomplete where it makes sense. If you enter A1. it should show you a list of things you can do there. That always feels better than asking for it explicitly. Let me know if that doesn't work. * Yeah, code changes don't rerun the affected cells. It is something we've debated, and maybe we should? It feels like it could also cause unexpected things to…

> 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?

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

#172

Post by slotrans »

tomxor wrote: post #36
slotrans wrote: post #30

can it handle a million rows? 10M? believe it or not this is my biggest problem with Sheets, and while Excel does better it's still capped at 1M

Since manually scrolling through 10M rows is not likely... at that point isn't it better to just use an SQL DB rather than a spreadsheet? SQlite could be enough, and it's comparable to a spreadsheet in that it is well suited to a single-file single-user local-DB scenario, yet can still handle large quantities of data.

No one loves SQL more than me but the effort jump between "paste into a spreadsheet" and "load into SQLite" is at least 100x

Computers are fast, I have gigabytes of RAM, I should be able to look at 10M rows

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

#173

Post by slotrans »

dosinga wrote: post #43
slotrans wrote: post #30

can it handle a million rows? 10M? believe it or not this is my biggest problem with Sheets, and while Excel does better it's still capped at 1M

Currently it cannot. However we find that many millions of row use cases don't actually need those millions of rows to be in the spreadsheet - you just want to be able to process that amount of data. So connect to a SQL database from the python side of things, read in 10 million rows, aggregate them into something succinct and write that to the spreadsheet is to sort of thing we're seeing.

I (mainly) don't want to aggregate them, I want to look at them.

Don't forget "Filter". It's very easy in a spreadsheet to take a huge number of rows and cut them down -- interactively! -- to a subset that's of interest.

Based on what I see I may want to scribble formulas in the margins.

I love love love SQL but it is not a spreadsheet. SQL is great at aggregating down a column but very awkward at aggregating across a row. My SQL prompt doesn't have scatter plots built-in. I can't arbitrarily color rows/columns/cells.

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

#174

Post by jackamadeo »

grvdrm wrote: post #141

This is really cool. There was another recent post about something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805132 One question/thought: what's your security like? Inevitably, people treat spreadsheets like databases for better or worse. That means they often contain lots of things that might be better stored elsewhere - sometimes PII, sometimes a proprietary formula, set of factors as inputs to a process, etc…

All excellent points. Right now, Neptyne works much like a Google doc in that it's private to you but is easily sharable to pretty much anyone. If our users are looking for it, a self-hosted option is certainly something we'll explore.

Then there's things like PII protections as you said, data provenance, that you could imagine baked into the spreadsheet directly. We haven't gone in that direction but I think it's interesting to consider.

What sort of features around data security would you hope to see in a spreadsheet?

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

#176

Post by slotrans »

This 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 data in the first place.

I frequently paste timestamps into Sheets or Excel and it just ruins everything. If split-to-text puts the date part in one column and the time part in another, I can't put them back together with a simple string concatenation, because again "formatting" turned my date text into Excel's weird internal number. This is legacy behavior that Excel has to keep for backward compatibility, but I don't want it, and I wish I could turn it off.

Sometimes I'll try to scatter-plot 5 series against a timestamp, and Excel will decide all 6 columns are series, even though a scatter plot with no X-axis makes zero sense. Even when it does work, Excel seems stubbornly uninterested in understanding how dates/times work, and I can't do simple things like tell it to have an X-axis tick every day/week/month.

If you are building a spreadsheet in 2023, the #1 goal should be leaving behind all the baggage, even if it has to be behind a toggle. Listen to what people find frustrating about Excel (tip: it's gonna be dates) and fix that.

If you can do that, then yeah, Python! Woo! Neat! But that's not going to be the main draw, because it's not a solution to the main problems that spreadsheets have.

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

#177

Post by dosinga »

slotrans wrote: post #176

This 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…

While we didn't set out to solve those problems in Neptyne, using actual data types in a spreadsheet does solve this sort of problems. Of course we have to be a little compatible, so our dates do come with the 1900 is a leap year bug that pre-dates excel. But they also have a .to_datetime() if you want to be more sophisticated. We have great plots out of the box, but if we want to go deeper, you can use whatever plotly or pydeck construct gets you exactly what you want.

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

#178

Post by dosinga »

nvln wrote: post #171
dosinga wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, this is excellent feedback: * The REPL is supposed to do autocomplete where it makes sense. If you enter A1. it should show you a list of things you can do there. That always feels better than asking for it explicitly. Let me know if that doesn't work. * Yeah, code changes don't rerun the affected cells. It is something we've debated, and maybe we should? It feels like it could also cause unexpected things to…

> 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

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

#179

Post by layer8 »

slotrans wrote: post #176

This 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.
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