

Show HN: Small, public, shareable spreadsheets - fiatjaf
http://sheets.alhur.es/hn

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

[https://github.com/audreyt/500lines/blob/master/spreadsheet/...](https://github.com/audreyt/500lines/blob/master/spreadsheet/chapter.md)

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

This reminds me of [http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-
cafe/2014-August/11...](http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-
cafe/2014-August/115586.html)

>> 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8284939)

~~~
fiatjaf
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).

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

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

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36](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.

~~~
nateparrott
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.

