karamazov

The entirety of the US is more comparable to Europe as a whole than to any individual European country.

Thank you! =)

The YCVC investments are a fire-and-forget portfolio investment; VC's usually don't follow the companies directly unless they put in additional money.

YC's investment + the startfund money is enough to pay for a place to live, even if it's an expensive short-term lease. (Companies find places to live on their own. When you're going to be in a particular apartment/home for 3-12 months you don't need to overoptimize for the last few hundred dollars in rent; it's better to find a place you like and get to work.)

I disagree with your points:

| It's not trying to target power users. They would learn VBA.

Most of our users know VBA and prefer not to use it. (Programmers who've ever tried VBA are familiar with its downsides; I won't go into them here.) Python is a significantly more productive language than VBA; our clients can typically write programs 10x faster in Python than in VBA. More importantly, a large class of programs that are trivial to write in Python using open-source libraries would take months or years of development time in VBA.

| It's not trying to target data processing. People who care enough would use a library like xlrd/xlwt.

xlrd/xlwt are very good for a subset of what DataNitro does: specifically, static processing (input and output) of Excel files. They don't support more complicated use cases (for example, building an interface to an external data source for non-technical end users, or a spreadsheet that runs analyses based on user input).

| It's not trying to go after big industries like finance.

We have a number of users in finance.

| It's easy to interop outside of excel and from within VBA

I wouldn't say it's easy, especially for people who haven't done it before. It'll certainly take more than two hours to figure out, at which point the license has already paid for itself.

| most hedge funds and banks have their own solutions already.

This is true, but internal solutions are frequently less flexible and harder to use than DataNitro; at the least, this makes them unsuitable for work done by non-developers (e.g. quants). It commonly saves developers time as well.

| This is specifically targeted to the casual people who want to do some in-Excel scripting but don't want to learn VBA.

Given the option, most people prefer to use Python over VBA; this is true even if (in fact, especially if) they know both languages.

| In that light, the product seems way over-priced (and probably should be in the $5-10 range) and unlikely to ever be used in a production setting.

DataNitro is used both in production and as a prototyping system by a number of firms.

Congrats guys!

I'm really sorry about that. When did you use the software? We've fixed a number of memory leak issues in the past few months, so this was likely resolved.

Additionally, we don't wrap pyxll; we have a completely seperate architecture.

You never stop feeling nervous when something important is on the line.

We let people with Hadoop Clusters pull a small sample of data into Excel, analyze it with Excel formulas, and then run the analysis on the full data set. The last part happens outside of Excel.

This is aimed at people doing simple analyses on massive sets of data, which can work extremely well. [1] We're not advocating that people without a data science background start doing ML or something.

[1] See "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data", by Peter Norvig, Alon Halevy, and Fernando Pereira at Google.

Thanks! We're working directly in Java right now, but might explore alternatives later. We're also planning to add support for Impala/Presto/etc.

Yes, it does. This doesn't involve pulling all of your data into a spreadsheet.

No, it can't - the limit is just over one million rows. This doesn't involve pulling anywhere near that many rows into your spreadsheet.

The major difference is the ability to run queries on Hadoop in addition to the being able to pull data.

We are using MapReduce. Latency will depend on your cluster and the query; it's just a regular MapReduce operation from Hadoop's point of view.

Formulas should be used as columnar operations: you can apply one formula to every element of a column (map) or aggregate an entire column (reduce). (This isn't that much of a restriction - you can use If-Statements to make complex expressions here.)

Spreadsheet browsing is limited to a sample of the data (head + tail); you can set the size of the sample before pulling.

Hi, I'm one of the developers. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have on this.

If you're in New York, I'd love to meet you in person at our Big Data in Excel meetup this Monday: http://www.meetup.com/DataNitro/events/149402612/

And, as the page says, we're looking for beta users! If you're interested in this, know someone who might be, or just have an opinion, I'd love to talk to you. You can comment here or reach me at ben at datanitro.com.

How does Presto compare to Impala?

In addition to our regular license, we have a read-only license that lets people run (but not edit) scripts. An Enterprise license lets you give up to 4 people in your organization read-only licenses.

$500 for an entire corporation is very low - that's one day's worth of developer time. How much developer time would you need to replicated Sidekiq?

Try Stripe. They're easy to integrate and handle that with no problem.

I'll only have myself and Coinbase to blame when the zombie apocalypse comes and I can't trade my digital currency for canned beans and shotgun pellets.

Not really. The show had 1000 episodes [1], and the Martha Stewart brand covers a number of businesses. It'd be unusual if no one who'd ever been on the show had a business conflict with any of those businesses.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_(TV_series)

one of the founders here. mainly, it's a lot easier to use. we've made our syntax as basic as possible, and we handle all the COM magic on the backend. this means you can get your code working faster, and it'll automatically include a lot of behind-the-scenes optimizations to make it run better.

here's one example of an optimization: if you're using a basic Win32com script, it'll freeze Excel while it's executing. DataNitro doesn't do this, so you can turn a spreadsheet into an interactive dashboard just by using a while loop. it'd take a lot of time to get that working properly using Win32com.

Mathematical proofs are completely precise, that is to say, not vague in the least. They are, however, in an extremely high-level language; it's left to the reader to expand the notation enough to convince themselves of the validity.

(And, of course, there can be bugs - that is, mistakes - but there is no ambiguity.)

Did you read the article? The author is talking about NDA's from people who want to discuss startup ideas with him, not NDA's from clients or potential clients.

Hustling your early users is a great idea - I'd put this at the top of the list.

Planning to grow into something else is dangerous, though. To paraphrase Peter Thiel, you should be wary of building a startup that's a two-stage rocket. If the first stage works, you can and should stick with it; if it doesn't, you'll never make it to stage two.

You say no.

He didn't say these policies were bad, just that they were consistent. They're only bad if you disagree with them.

these are fixed. thanks for pointing them out!

what's wrong with the spreadsheet?