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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

The "Suddenly any financial analyst in your company, given the right permissions" comment is telling. The companies that would be most likely to use a service like Blockspring would be the types of companies that would never be willing to give and trust data access and processing to a random third party. The Privacy policy does not help alleviate these concerns (tl;dr: we keep everything). It is also unclear if the business offering (https://www.blockspring.com/business ) offers self-hosting.

Case in point, one of the example scripts in the blog post (https://open.blockspring.com/pkpp1233/get-amazon-new-price-b... ) requires you to input a Amazon Product Access Key and a Amazon Product Secret Key as parameters.

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I recently discovered the joys of ExcelDNA, which lets you do spreadsheet extensions using C#. One of the first things I did was spin up a plugin that allows users to request data elements from CSV files hosted on a server, essentially a giant remote VLOOKUP. The product uses TCP/IP so it can run anywhere - client self-hosted, or remote over the internet. Throughput was pretty high - 70k elements per second over a network. This, and I'm a novice programmer.

So I look at Blockspring, and my first thought is that I don't quite get it, although if they ran on proprietary, internal data sources, it would make sense. (Do people really download Amazon listings into Excel? I suppose). Or, if they could get a company like Factset or Bloomberg to let them do direct data pulls from their databases, then you'd get masses of high quality data to analyze.

In terms of the core "into excel" functionality - maybe I am understating my novice capabilities, but ever since I discovered ExcelDNA it seems like you can do almost anything with Excel and C#.

> if they could get a company like Factset or Bloomberg to let them do direct data pulls from their databases

this exists. bloomberg has a plug-in that lets you pull much of its data directly into excel using normal-looking formulas. the catch is you have to pay $20,000/year.

These are not normal parameters, they are "Secrets", a special kind of parameters that are saved internally in Blockspring and automatically applied to functions that use them, after the account owner has set them.

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