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Comment by formercoder | Hacker News Reader

I think there could be a middle ground with an excel like tool with some kind of typing. For example I often get confused about what currencies particular cells are, and mixing this up causes a lot of pain. Not sure why the hard coded number can’t just have a “$” and every time it gets multiplied by EUR/USD changes to a euro, and is displayed as such. This little thing would save me so much time.

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How would the conversion rate between EUR and USD be determined?

My first job was cleaning up the mess that was caused by hard coded yahoo finance urls in spreadsheets. One of them died, no one noticed and it cost the company millions of dollars in bad trades over three months.

You could automatically import a table from the web into the sheet, or alternatively create some custom data types for currency conversion.

Or you could act like you're responsible for tens of millions of dollars and hand it over to someone who can make sure it doesn't blow up.

"We don't need to hire an electrician to wire up the office, I did my garage using uninsulated wires and it works perfectly!"

The guys handling millions of dollars should be trained in finance / accounting, so they aren’t untrained.

Handing over to IT usually means their flexible spreadsheet that they can change as they require, turns into an expensive and inflexible black box that only IT can change and that doesn’t integrate with the rest of their decisions. Also the new solution also probably has errors and pulls currency info from the same endpoint. Excel isn’t perfect, but it’s used for a reason.

To use your analogy, You can wait for an electrician to change your lightbulb, but that means your going to be working in the dark for longer.

Lightbulbs do not generally cost millions when they go out.

are you suggesting programmers don't hardcode URLs in quick-and-dirty (and sometimes, even production) Python scripts/code?

I'm suggesting they have logs.

logs of what? if a programmer hard-codes URLs, you really think they are following best practices elsewhere? further, how do logs help get back the millions of dollars that were lost?

Yes, logging with email alerts means that when a catastrophic error is encountered you'd know about it, instead of it being hidden for months.

LOL! as I already stated, a weak coder isn't going to implement best practices for logging. At best, he hard-coded his own email address to receive an alert, however, this also goes unnoticed, since, as you stated initially, he's dead.

Look, whatever company this was, was relying on YAHOO as its data source for making million+ dollar trades -- not Reuters, or Bloomberg, or JP Morgan, but YAHOO -- and then, for MONTHS -- not hours, or days, but MONTHS -- nobody in its finance department or trading desk or whatever happened to notice that the incoming data feeds were not matching up with quotes from counterparties, market makers, CNBC, colleagues, Wall St Journal? Does this company not have auditors? A CFO? Any IT oversight whatsoever? I'm sorry to say that this particular company's problems are rooted much, much deeper than the loss of a particular Excel guy.

Usually it’s pulled in via plug-in from a third party data source like Bloomberg or a cheaper alternative.

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