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Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
41–50 of 79 posts
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#42Some features I think are pretty cool: - We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs) - You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook - You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it - You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about - We have a built-in term…
Can I use CLI to convert an .xlsx to PDF? What sort of pagination do you support? Can the page expand to contain the entire sheet? Can you split into physical pages given page size?
Yes, you can print an xlsx to PDF as excel would if you printed the same file (respecting whatever print layout has been done in excel). It'll be vectorized, so you have infinite resolution on zoom for text.
We do not yet support editing print layout, so you can't adjust the pagination / change the page size in / with Nobie yet, but that will come soon :)
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#43[flagged]
I'm not sure I follow, but the math in Nobie ties with the math in Excel.
When you use codex / claude in our built-in terminal, the agents get very high signal context about the workbook and what you're doing in it.
As far as I'm aware, Nobie is the the best spreadsheet for agentic use-cases explicitly because they don't have to guess anymore.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#44Some features I think are pretty cool: - We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs) - You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook - You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it - You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about - We have a built-in term…
Gave it a spin and it feels really polished!
Since you offered... I'm curious about the rendering technology behind it. I'm working on a web app with a spreadsheet interface, and I'm using a standard canvas-rendered grid.
You obviously have different design constraints, so it would be interesting to see how they shaped your solution.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this because your free customers bring their own ai/tokens?
Yeah, we're not providing subsidized AI to people. It costs us nothing to give people a great, computer-use friendly, native spreadsheet app
How does that work, do you not pay the developers who build and maintain this software?
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#46This is really cool - I think desktop tools, like native apps, CLIs, self-hosted tools, etc., have a lot of potential for innovation since they can be consumed by agents and the user can maintain more privacy, while also using their preferred agents and not being locked into a specific one.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#47Some features I think are pretty cool: - We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs) - You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook - You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it - You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about - We have a built-in term…
Gave it a spin and it feels really polished! Since you offered... I'm curious about the rendering technology behind it. I'm working on a web app with a spreadsheet interface, and I'm using a standard canvas-rendered grid. You obviously have different design constraints, so it would be interesting to see how they shaped your solution.
We've gone through a bunch of iterations. One of those iterations was canvas, but we care a lot about the user experience, and found getting the frame times we wanted on huge workbooks wasn't practical, so we graduated to webgpu/webgl, and that was better, but we kept hitting bugs in the web rendering engines that we couldn't tolerate, so now we've ended up going down to the metal and writing an engine on top of metal/vulkan/opengl (we still have a webgpu/webgl backend, but we're not using it at the moment).
You didn't ask a specific question, but it basically comes down to getting really good at calculating layout fast, getting good at figuring out how to incrementally maintain your rendered view, then getting really good at figuring out how to optimally use the hardware you're targeting.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, we're not providing subsidized AI to people. It costs us nothing to give people a great, computer-use friendly, native spreadsheet app
How does that work, do you not pay the developers who build and maintain this software?
I'm one of those developers :)
I linked in this thread, and Matt replied above in this thread, but we charge companies making >$100M in revenue for using Nobie to provide a service to users, or for using it to help train models.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#49I noticed that the page does not provide uninstall instructions for the sh installation method. Could you please provide them?
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#50I noticed that the page does not provide uninstall instructions for the sh installation method. Could you please provide them?
You're right, we'll update the script to help facilitate uninstall. You just need to delete `~/.nobie` and:
- Delete `/usr/local/bin/nobie`
- If you're on mac, you also need to delete the .app from `/Applications`