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vba

436 karma · joined September 8, 2016

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vba··on Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
You just reminded me I tried to make an office addin a few years back and distribute it on the office store. Terrible experience trying to get Microsoft’s admin/business center (whatever it is/was called) to verify I was actually a real human/owner of the domain as a sole proprietor. Terrible.
vba··on Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
I’m not Michael - presuming you are referring to Michael the PM. I was a dev. I’ll add you on LinkedIn.

Great to here you praise auth. I almost forgot getting auth ‘right’ inside Excel was a real time burglar.

vba··on Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
An aside - I wanted the username xl but someone registered it the day before (the day before!) me on hn.
vba··on Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
I don’t unfortunately. Given the more technical nature of the feature I’m inclined to agree Microsoft should make a bountiful supply of working examples.
vba··on Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
Thanks for your kind words. Did you ever use streaming function to update your analytics periodically or when new data become available?
vba··on Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
Oh this must be Felix! I saw and played with xlwings many years ago and was impressed :)

Agreed with the friction around getting started. I would like to see it reduced. It’s cool to see you using them to wrap Python functions - I have done something similar before myself, and still need to get around to shimming Haskell into excel at some point.

Another thing I don’t like is how JavaScript Custom Function cell formulas have a horrible string after the _xldudf marker, which becomes noticeable if your workbook doesn’t/can’t load the custom functions addin (or you unload the addin)

Thanks for your comment

vba··on Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
This was a nice surprise to see today as an Ex-Excel developer who worked on trying to bring Python to Excel (and, I guess, failing ;)).

7+ years ago I had the option of leaving the Excel team. My then boss’s boss knew I had an interest in bringing Python to Excel and offered me a chance to tackle it if I chose to stay. What was meant to be a 6 month project turned into a ~3 year project, the Python part faded away and we ended up enabling JavaScript Custom Functions in Excel instead.

For Python we were also running ‘in the cloud’ (AzureML v1), although there was some back-and-forth on if we should run locally. I think what made the Python part disappear was our partner AzureML team re-orged, re-released, re-hired, we lost a PM and our work caught the attention of another partner team who realised they could use our code to execute their JavaScript out-of-process. And so I spent a lot of time ensuring that feature was successfully shipped at, I guess, the detriment of Python.

I had a lot of help from some strong engineers and learnt a lot. The core of the work was modifying the calculation engine of Excel to allow functions to compute asynchronously, allowing the user to continue working on other parts of their spreadsheet while the remote endpoint (be it JavaScript, Python or something else) was computing. Previously the spreadsheet would lock up while calculations were running, and that wouldn’t be cool for long-running unbounded calculations. Have to wonder if any of the stuff we built made it into this new feature.

Super great to see this and look forward to trying it out.

Recalc or die

vba··on The hidden cost of air quality monitoring
Air quality is something I've been thinking about more and more. I'm currently mostly in Bangkok and now I check the air quality (aqair) before I exercise outdoors, and often end up skipping. Though I haven't looked into it deeply, I'd love to see some trustworthy conclusions about how I'm affecting my future health by living in Bangkok. I've really come to miss the Pacific Northwest partly because of the clean air (except, of course, during the wildfire seasons)

I'm building a house in Bangkok and up in Chiang Mai of all places (see the company is from there) and was thinking of adding some air quality sensors there so will definitely check airgradient's out.

If I may ask Achim, do you manufacture in Thailand? What kind of scale you at? No promises, but I have access to some decent sized factories and given your mission, there might be something we can help with.

vba··on The Way Things Work CD-ROM (1994)
Recall Christmas Day eating some sweets (which I didn’t like) and playing this (which I did like). I got this for my 6th (?) Christmas. Most memorable things for me were demonstration of gears (using mammoths) and the guy who would pop up if you went AFK.

Also dorling kindersly’s eyewitness soundtrack deserves a special mention.

vba··on Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
Yup combined Christmas and birthday presents and additionally forfeit any money I received from relatives back in the year 2000. Had to fight for it and made to feel guilty on how much it cost.

Didn’t become a robotics engineer.

vba··on Scaling our spreadsheet engine from thousands to billions of cells
I have heard it call that before by teammates but thought it was just a guess. Seems it’s official

Thanks for sharing :)

vba··on Scaling our spreadsheet engine from thousands to billions of cells
I also worked on Excel and in the calc code. XOpers, LBLs… it’s all coming back. We never figured out what the Hungarian prefixes kml and ptg stood for. There was a rumor kml might be the initials of duanec’s girlfriend

Recalc or die

vba··on Spinal implants allow paralysed people to walk, swim and cycle again
Why is this post downvoted? Is it inaccurate.
vba··on Bosch gives go-ahead for volume production of silicon carbide chips
Outside of the car, will this allow residential EVSEs (the ‘charger’ on the side of your house/garage) to become a lot smaller?
vba··on An oral history of Bank Python
What year was this out of interest?
vba··on Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
Appreciate the effort
vba··on 1982: The Hobbit
I was wondering where she is now - her LinkedIn says Amazon. Looks like she went back into academia before that. Wonder if she worked on any more projects like this during her 2nd stint at university.
vba··on Salmon spawning in the upper Columbia River, first in 80 years
Leavenworth? Also cool work history/projects from your website
vba··on Lambda School is the biggest mistake I made this year
interestingly, from joel "With all of Microsoft’s muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong." I remember AIM well (used AOL until they became TalkTalk), but I also remember using MSN messenger even more and being much more ubiquitous, granted that could have been generational (I wasn't a teenager until the mid-naughties). Ultimately it seems MSN did win out.
vba··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
I’m looking to naturalize next year. I’ve heard that with the current administration after filing to naturalize it takes 6-12 months due to additional interviews in the green card (not naturalization) backing up the naturalization queue. Covid is probably having a big affect too.

Anyway, if the administration changes to the democrats, in your opinion, do you feel wait times will decrease and will this be get fairly rapidly.

Further, can one be tactical and move to another state to naturalize and hopefully we processed by a state office with a lesser backlog?

vba··on Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself
Also relevant I watched Jason Crawford’s (check out his roots of progress blog) talk on the history of iron and steel a while back

https://youtu.be/--64nPQOtkI

vba··on My wife recently passed away. I used my time off to build her a giant bookshelf
Blhack do you have a portfolio/website show casing your creations I can see? :)
vba··on Ask HN: Recommend me a course on Coursera
I haven’t taken it, but what made it so great. Do you/can you apply what you’ve learnt?
vba··on How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act
£130k for a react job (or any software engineer job) in the UK? Where?
vba··on YC W20 Online-Only Demo Day
Really interested in seeing your notes too.
vba··on “Unprecedented” locust invasion threatens crops in East Africa
What do you mean by develop wings? Don’t they already have them?
vba··on A 60 GHz phased array for $10
How so? Can you elaborate? Genuinely interested
vba··on Mutexes are faster than Spinlocks
TFA? Tried to google but unsuccessful
vba··on Some scientists are serious about resurrecting zeppelins for cargo
Can you expand, or give some numbers?
vba··on “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups
Care to share the book names?
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