Show HN: Small, public, shareable spreadsheets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Small, public, shareable spreadsheets

sheets.alhur.es

19 pointsfiatjaf9 comments

Also check out this project, being featured in the next AOSA book:

https://github.com/audreyt/500lines/blob/master/spreadsheet/...

I see empty cells are treated as zero by SUM and the + operator: http://sheets.alhur.es/c8045lb

This reminds me of http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2014-August/11...

>> There is no excuse for a spreadsheet quietly taking a never-assigned cell as zero, but indeed it does. WHAT THE HELL WERE THESE PEOPLE SMOKING?

HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8284939

Are you saying this is bad, or just quoting the blog post for fun and information? I don't think it is bad. Spreadsheets are not meant as programming engines, just as practical editable tables.

As for "the wrong sum" he complais about in the link, people would know it was meant to be the eternally correct sum, because they will see the empty cells waiting to be filled (either by data or by imagination).

I was thinking of doing something similar (not spreadsheets, but open editable pages). How to do generate the ids?

I use https://www.npmjs.org/package/cuid

About open editable pages, are you imagining something like http://consultutah.42pag.es/?

No, it's not really "editable pages". I've just got an idea for a weekend project that needs unique, but book markable pages. I could easily use a guid, but wanted a shorter id, saw this and thought I'd ask. Thx!

A lot of simple sites just use an incrementing ID which is encoded in base36 for output:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36

If you don't care about the lengths of identifiers you can instead use a GUID. Otherwise you're down to compressed strings that slowly expand in length, and uniqueness tests on generation.

You might also want to append some random data onto each id you assign, to prevent malicious bots from just iterating through all the id's and doing evil on them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com