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Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

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Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#22
post #18

I like! One thing that I am hoping for however is some kind of notebook-like interface for doing small, ad-hoc data analysis projects. This looks fairly close to that. Mathematica pioneered "the computational notebook" concept, and now we have similar stuff with R/Rstudio, IPython/Jupyter, matlab, and jmp. Those are all really nice and powerful, but they're somewhat large in scope and very ambitious. It would be sooo…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#24
post #12
post #8

Every single spreadsheet software has been able to do this for years, but using Javascript makes it better amirite? What makes this better than Excel (VBA, Python, probably half of the languages on the planet.), Libre Office, Google Spreadsheets, etc., aside from Javascript ? The only point I could see would be integrating this into a page, which is of dubious utility.

Please don't be mean and dismissive in response to new work. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

I'm having trouble finding anything useful in a new, nonstandard spreadsheet software whose only interest is that you can use Javascript.

But it's branded as a "new kind" of software, so it must be good :^)

Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#25

I'd love to see Jupyter (IPython Notebooks) capable of this kind of thing. It'd be awesome to be able to select a column of a Pandas DataFrame and apply a function to it.

Tongue in cheek? Alternatively, you should know about: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas...

Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#27
post #24
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't be mean and dismissive in response to new work. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

I'm having trouble finding anything useful in a new, nonstandard spreadsheet software whose only interest is that you can use Javascript. But it's branded as a "new kind" of software, so it must be good :^)

As the Show HN guidelines say: "When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is." But you also needn't trample over someone's freshly planted garden.

Helpful criticism is fine. Asking a question is fine (a real question, not a gotcha one designed to make someone look bad); for example, one could ask "what do you mean when you say this is a new kind of spreadsheet?" Pointing out similarities to other work is fine. All we want to avoid is being dismissive. Since the line isn't obvious (especially to a million readers), simply err on the side of not being.

On HN, new work doesn't need to be useful, just alive. One can't always predict what will turn out to be useful anyhow.

Everybody showing new work deserves a minimal baseline of respect here. If you know more and have done more than someone else has, that's great. That's an opportunity to teach and to share, not put them down.

Edit: since "new kind of spreadsheet" is arguably a bit baity we've changed to the HTML doc title.

Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#28
post #8

Every single spreadsheet software has been able to do this for years, but using Javascript makes it better amirite? What makes this better than Excel (VBA, Python, probably half of the languages on the planet.), Libre Office, Google Spreadsheets, etc., aside from Javascript ? The only point I could see would be integrating this into a page, which is of dubious utility.

In a typical office environment, everybody knows how to work with spreadsheets. They're a common interface and a great way to present and explore tabular data.

But as soon as you put that data into an Excel document and hit Save, it's outdated. Somewhere, somebody in the office has a .xlsx file on their C: drive with the data you need, but that doesn't help you much, does it? Or somebody puts the data into a spreadsheet and emails it to everybody in the office, then a few people make some changes and email again, and now you've got 15 different versions of the same spreadsheet floating around and nobody knows which one is the latest and most truthful.

Or you put that interface on a web page connected to a shared data source and all of those problems disappear.

Re: Show HN: Dtab – Spreadsheet for Data Science

#29
post #28
post #8

Every single spreadsheet software has been able to do this for years, but using Javascript makes it better amirite? What makes this better than Excel (VBA, Python, probably half of the languages on the planet.), Libre Office, Google Spreadsheets, etc., aside from Javascript ? The only point I could see would be integrating this into a page, which is of dubious utility.

In a typical office environment, everybody knows how to work with spreadsheets. They're a common interface and a great way to present and explore tabular data. But as soon as you put that data into an Excel document and hit Save, it's outdated. Somewhere, somebody in the office has a .xlsx file on their C: drive with the data you need, but that doesn't help you much, does it? Or somebody puts the data into a spreadsh…

But those people could be using Google Spreadsheet already for example, which would have already solved the problem. And people in the office are not going to be writing Javascript in their spreadsheet.

It literally solves nothing.

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