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bjoernson Ask HN: anyone from Berlin startup scene?

hi, I'm based in Berlin (I run spreadgit, a version control system for Excel). we could meet up for a beer or something on Saturday. Otherwise, the cool startup kids hang out in the betahaus over in Kreuzberg (http://www.betahaus.com/berlin/). I'll drop you an email.

bjoernson Today at 16:53:20 GMT, it'll be 1400000000 in Unix time.

no party for the Excel people: 41772.7037037037

bjoernson CShell: A simple, yet powerful, C# scripting IDE

wow, didn't know that. thanks for putting together that list - maybe we should start a list somewhere where people can add, this is definitely super interesting.

bjoernson CShell: A simple, yet powerful, C# scripting IDE

this is pretty cool, thanks for sharing! will see if I can integrate this with Excel-DNA.

bjoernson Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

go for it!

bjoernson Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

I'd be interested, don't have a CS degree and at times I feel I lack some basics. Have you written anything yet or is this still at the idea stage?

bjoernson Ledger, a powerful CLI accounting tool

that's pretty awesome. I'm paying one of these accounting cloud services about EUR 600/year. They are ok but they only have a SOAP API to get the data in and I don't want to mess around with that. So I end up preparing all my accounting data in Excel which is mostly automated but it does make me wonder why I'm paying them EUR 600/year in the first place...

bjoernson We lost a customer. This is how we found out

this is the most useful post I've read in a long time. thx

bjoernson Ask HN: Was everyone's first web development experience extremely difficult?

sounds very familiar! I used to work as a quantitative analyst at an IB and was quite familiar with programming. Turned out that coding algorithms is one thing, coding up a webapp with loads of different moving parts is quite another story. But by the sounds of it, you're on the right track, keep it up!

bjoernson Ask HN: What testing tools do you use?

mainly using http://casperjs.org/ to do all my high level testing.

as to services, recently started moving to https://www.codeship.io/ for continuous integration testing. though I love it it doesn't 100% cut it for me though as I have some dependencies on Windows, unfortunately.

bjoernson Ask HN: What is the newest hobby you have picked up?

flying single engine piston aircraft (mostly Cessna 172 and Piper 28). it's awesome, unfortunately very time consuming and expensive.

bjoernson Ask HN: Does your office have quiet working conditions?

I used to work in a coworking office. They didn't play music but I still found other people having conversations quite distracting. Working from a spare room at home again which is quite quiet. Having said that, it's not today as my little one is poorly and at home and cranky... which has quite a negative impact on my ability to focus.

bjoernson How to track an updates to a 3party libraries?

apparently yolk -U does the same

bjoernson How to track an updates to a 3party libraries?

I'm a Python guy - a 'pip-review' every now is what keeps me in the loop. Admittedly not very elegant but it does the job.

bjoernson Show HN: Version Control for Excel

github doesn't know how to read spreadsheets, i.e. depending on the file format it's either a binary file or an xml. at the moment it's private only. do you think it would be useful to have public workbooks?

bjoernson Show HN: Version Control for Excel

any feedback would be much appreciated!

bjoernson Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

I run https://www.spreadgit.com, a hosted version control system for Excel. Doing this solo and full time. It's been a hell of a ride so far but I love it.

bjoernson How the Mig-31 repelled the SR-71 Blackbird from Soviet skies

wish I could contribute. i got my wings (just a PPL) 4 years ago and the craziest two manoeuvres I've ever flown were: 1. a recovery from a spin. 2. turning back to my local airfield because my 2-year old son was puking like crazy in the back... now all these blackbird stories make me really, really jealous.

bjoernson Using Python and Pandas to Create Continuous Futures Contracts

that's pretty cool, thanks very much for sharing this!

just had a quick scan through the code and it looks there's one thing missing (apologies if not as I haven't had the time yet to really run the code). if you actually want to create a tradable backtest you have to bear in mind that you are selling/buying during the roll period meaning that if you invest amount x before rolling over what you end up with after the roll is not equal to the value of your perpetual series.

to give you a simple example: if you roll over 1 day only and CLG14 settles at t1=100, t2=110 and CLH14 settles at t1=90, t2=95 your position after the roll is worth 105.56 (not 95).

makes sense?

bjoernson Ask HN: May you list some HN-like sites?

http://www.boredbanker.com/

bjoernson Ask HN: How did you finance your start-up?

I second edwardliu's comment. did the same thing, putting my own money where my mouth is. Whether you take on investor money obviously depends on many, many things but in my view, but bootstrapping it for as long as you can helps you focus on what matters most when you run a business: revenues. build a product that solves a real problem, get traction and make money.

bjoernson Ask HN: Who is Co-founding? (December 2013)

I've built SpreadGit (www.spreadgit.com), a version control system for Excel that doesn't suck. started as a side project a couple of months ago which turned into my full time job.

I've cobbled SpreadGit together myself (mostly in Python) and it's live with a number of paying subscribers. Looking for a UI/UX/designer/JS guy to join the ship as a co-founder. am fully bootstrapped and want to ride this wave for as long as possible.

if you are interested, email me at bjoern@spreadgit.com. thanks!

bjoernson Ask HN: Python or R?

...although even at the risk of getting laughed at, Excel is an awesome tool for a lot of quick and dirty data analysis stuff (depending on what you do). Throw in a little Python/R (e.g. via datanitro) and it's even more powerful.

bjoernson Ask HN: Python or R?

I use both for my data analysis (though I'm not doing anything too fancy these days). R is great at statistics (that's what it was designed for) but a bit of a terrible programming language. So I combine the two, do all the IO stuff etc in Python and run the actual statistical analysis in R (RPy is a great Python interface to R).

bjoernson Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

hmm, guess I got a bit ahead of myself - you are right, you wouldn't want to switch views/apps as you would indeed expect people to use it in quite a dynamic way. really looking forward to it!

bjoernson Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

yup. feel free to drop me an email if you want to touch base (i've just done the sign-up)

bjoernson Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

hmm, what's wrong with uploading it? I would actually prefer the no-Addin solution: the Excel Addin 'deployment' is a bit messy (with references stuck in the Addin-manager) + no Addins in the Mac world (though I guess that >95% of Excel users are on windows)

bjoernson Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet

it's a great idea - much better than the old built-in formula dependency tracker. definitely loving your idea! I've been in the Excel business myself for years (having worked in finance) and always love when someone comes up with a fresh tool for the mighty Excel (yeah, I know most developer's views on Excel...). I've recently started www.spreadgit.com which is a GitHub-like service for spreadsheets. looking forward to playing around with your service!