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.
But it's branded as a "new kind" of software, so it must be good :^)
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.
But as soon as you put that data into an Excel document and hit Save, it's outdated.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.
It literally solves nothing.
I can already imagine several good uses for this software in my workplace, so saying it "literally solves nothing" is "literally false".
What does this product have that fixes the problem you're talking about here? How does working in a spreadsheet with javascript net you any better benefit than working with Excel with respect to obsolete sheets?
There's another nuanced advantage to this kind of tool, however: the ability to perform "reproducible" analysis.
With an excel spreadsheet, the person doing the analysis typically pulls in some data (usually by copy/paste), and then performs a series of manipulations on it. These manipulations are NOT recorded. A the end of the analysis the author sends the spreadsheet in an email or maybe copies the spreadsheet into the body of an email. Recipients, if they're going to evaluate the analysis have a lot of work to do over and aren't necessarily able to determine what, exactly, was done to the data.
Something like this puts everything into a console, javascript libraries, and tables-- as long as the author manipulates data from the console and the functions, it should be possible for someone to follow what was done to the data, reproduce results, and go further with the analysis.
Excel works just fine with dynamic data via SQL and Jason via URL.
You can also embed it as a runtime object in HTML.
But what I can do is provide them with an easy interface for interacting with that data directly, and give them the option to "save" their results within the context of those interactions so that they can share a simple link instead of a static file.
As for embedding runtimes in HTML, ActiveX is dead and I do not mourn it. Our office has finally decided to standardize on a modern web browser, and I couldn't be happier about that.
Creating a better solution is a lot easier than teaching everyone what a database is and why it's useful.
I have created summary of comparing spreadsheet with web application using online database at the following link. Major items are security, multi-user experience, encryption/decryption of sensitive data, auditing/change-history, workflow-requirements etc. For simple work in a smaller team environment spreadsheets work fine.
https://mydataorganizer.com/MyDataOrganizerBlog/Employees_HR...
Either way calling it a "new kind" seems a stretch unless it's not as well described as it appears to be.