HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Here's the latest (2021) Financial Modeling World Championships (FMWC) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSU11kxxJvc

⬐ INTPenis

Seeing these Excel pros compete reminds me of when I found an old server inventory system at work. Someone had in Excel+Visio+VBS made a system where you could see a top-down map of our DCs, and server cabinets. Each cabinet had an alert light indicating if there were any alerts on any server in that cabinet (fetched from Xymon), you could click each cabinet to get a front view of all servers, with graphics of server fronts reflecting the vendor and model of the server.

The person who made this had quit a long time ago, no one was quite sure of who it was. And of course things had slowly started to break down, like API connections, alerts, it wasn't up to date, but wow. It blew my mind.

⬐ watersb

IIRC, Visio Pro had some network crawling routines for just this sort of system map.

I had an app for this on my Macintosh(AppleTalk!)network, by a great bunch of folks at a company named Neon. (I believe that was the name of the company, or maybe the app.)

Basic reporting was a GUI front end for SNMP queries. It had a great packet sniffer, too.

We had a senior network manager who ran all of the Ethernet cable, and maintained all of that infrastructure. A really sharp fellow, really knew cabling and networking, routing topologies etc. At one point, he was trying to sort out a problem in network authorization that had been escalated to him from application support team, because it seemed to occur on a particular network segment. He had a lunchbox PC with some dedicated network hardware and an application, a turnkey system from somewhere, cost ten thousand bucks. He was working the problem, capturing the packets... I was able to use my damn Macintosh setup to identify the authorization packets in like five minutes.

We all went with Windows NT soon after that. It has fantastic monitoring capabilities, and I bought Visio before they were re-absorbed back into Microsoft. Network maps were fun to set up with a bit of Visual Basic.

I was a horrible, horrible programmer, but I loved network administration.

⬐ booleanbetrayal

Wait ... this is a real thing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

⬐ sokoloff

“Top Sheethead” is going to have me giggling on and off all day.

⬐ obnauticus

God I love krazam. I think what makes it better is the hint of amazon hell he adds into all his videos (I believe he works there).

⬐ thefunnyman

Pretty sure he does. The offices in “The Hustle” looks exactly like an Amazon building.

⬐ kingcharles

Finally! Emoji macros are a reality!

Do we all remember the dark days of the Before?

⬐ vanderZwan

Upload date: 28 March, which is suspiciously close to...

Really well-made though :D

⬐ wsinks

I just want to validate that I thought Krazam was based on total fiction. I'm stunned to see a 2k person livestream about this today in the best way!

⬐ webdoodle

Excel still is used heavily in government. I wrote a VBA macro for an Excel spreadsheet that would take a payroll flat text file, import it into SQL Server using OLE DB, do some data clean up, sort and then export to separate sheets in a different spreadsheet by employee name. Before I wrote this macro (which took a couple days), the payroll department of this government organization had dedicated an entire 40 hour per week person to doing this manually. They had been doing that job for years!

⬐ Rebelgecko

When I sometimes interfaced with people in the government, it was astounding how often a higher-up told me they had a "database" that turned out to be an Excel spreadsheet maintained by some GS-8

⬐ funstuff007

Yes, I've long said don't fear the robot revolution, fear the VBA revolution.

⬐ wolverine876

> Excel still is used heavily in government.

Are you implying that there is somewhere it's not used heavily?

⬐ ourlordcaffeine

The place I work at pretty much did away with it for all analysis and statistics

⬐ wolverine876

What industry? When? Is it common in your industry?

What replaced it?

⬐ jackhalford

made me think of this [1] parody.

1: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY

⬐ wiseleo

If you like using Excel as an app development platform, take a look at https://youtube.com/c/ExcelForFreelancers

He makes apps that look nothing like Excel using custom shapes.

⬐ bmsleight_

Disappointed having watch the earlier rounds there were not much in terms of tips.

Just heavy use of index, left$ and if statements.

⬐ martini333

It's a competition. Not a tutorial.

⬐ aaron695

I don't think watching Magnus Carlsen helps with tips in chess either?

Or watching tennis pros.

It might help define the journey you have to go on to get to the upper echelon.

You now seem to think 'index, left$ and if' seems to be what matters, that's something.

It will be interesting to see where Deepmind takes something like this.

⬐ OzCrimson

One thing that's good to see is how Excel can be applied. I was a host when the challenges were: 1. Roulette 2. Biathlon

And, no. It's not heavy on tips. The rounds are timed and each of the contestants have their own methods. It was interesting to see some people use formulas and some people use conditional formatting for the same solution.

⬐ ineedasername

TIL you actually can enable circular references in Excel. Though I struggle to see the practical usefulness except for a few edge cases.

⬐ jkaptur

How else would you implement Newton’s method? ;)

⬐ dsizzle

I'm reminded of solving Laplace's equation in Excel. It makes some cool animations too https://www.av8n.com/physics/laplace.htm

⬐ sl8r

Interestingly, they’re actually used all the time in LBO models. Because the default is to sweep all FCF to pay down debt, but then the interest expense is dependent on FCF, which depends on the interest expense… Sort of a trivial example b/c you could solve it by being more granular with time periods, but in practice people just use the circular ref.

⬐ DwnVoteHoneyPot

I've also seen it basterdize into running a loop for a monte carlo sim instead of using a VBA macro. Genius and stupid all at the same time.

⬐ CactusOnFire

Am I an asshole for just thinking that at this scale of complexity, it's just easier to build things using a web-app framework?

⬐ DwnVoteHoneyPot

Yes, you are an asshole for suggesting a web-app framework instead just vanilla programming language. Why all the bloat of a web-app?

⬐ fuzzfactor

Like when your main focus is array math, and you work with a uniquely different database on each of 5 worksheets and the deliverable output has to be in the form of another Excel spreadsheet anyway?

And it has nothing to do with the web or networking at all?

JK, I know you mean much lesser scale of complexity.

⬐ agumonkey

brainfuck existence should hint at what humans enjoy :)

⬐ ineedasername

To explain the competition? Sure.

To explain why people build highly complex excel applications to get work done? That's more about industry standards, learning curve, portability, need for rapid modification of requirements by users...

I've certainly done a lot of work over the years eliminating the need to use Excel docs that require manual maintenance, but mainly for things where a) the underlying data structures don't change much and b) if they do change, the end user doesn't need to be the one to do it on the fly. (mostly this entails tapping into the underlying data sources-- or first building the tools to do so-- and then automating the transformations, analysis, and presentation using some combination of r/python along with a SQL database & BI platform.) I work with finance folks too though, and what they do with excel is generally not a candidate for this process.

⬐ agumonkey

Ah well it's a million dollar question.

These people were trained in excel I assume, it's cultural and then you also have this weird pivot point like C where excel has reactive semantics, data table, ad-hoc input / modeling .. it's a massive reactive data notebook on steroid that requires next to no fiddling to get working.

Now as you point, things are changing.. R/julia/numpy/notebooks, reactive web frameworks.. can all suck some use case from excel. I believe that future clearly lies in the middle. Microsoft should be wise to implement some presentation/component feature to match the web.

⬐ ineedasername

Microsoft should be wise to implement some presentation/component feature to match the web

Yep, they would be. Although I think they're trying push the whole Power Apps model. Which, I'll admit, is an interesting ecosystem, but something on the desktop to enhance excel power users that will never have their needs satisfied by Power Apps would be beneficial. But possibly also eat into the user base that might be enticed into Power Apps instead, and the steady stream of monthly revenue from Power Apps clouds resources usage is preferable ( to MS ) than the "buy once" model for Office.

⬐ ineedasername

For something that needs to be editable and analyzed and shared among users that are highly proficient in financial tech (excel) but are not programmers, an app framework isn't going to work.

My work is often an input into the work of the finance folks where I'm at, and they have countless very complex excel docs. None of them are programmers, but all them (and anyone else moderately proficient in Excel) can look under the hood, see what's going on, and make their own additions/changes as needed.

And there may need to be new versions of all of these that have slight or major changes made on a monthly/quarterly/annual basis. No single build w/ a web-app framework is going to do this very well without a very large investment in developer costs, and that simply isn't necessary when there is already a perfectly good tool for their needs. Developer costs aside, it would also mean that these folks had a significant delay in their work: They could no longer clone last quarter's sheet and spend a morning making the necessary changes. They'd need to spend a few days going back & forth with a developer over the scope & specs of the changes, a little longer for the developer to write the code, do a bit of UAT, and assuming everything works as expected then get to the actual work and hope nothing new came up before next quarter that would stop their work for more dev time.

The types of systems that eliminate a little bit of this are part of industry-specific monolithic ERP systems, and even those may only cover the 60% of requirements that don't change often or are supported by contractually guaranteed TOS upgrades each quarter from the vendor.

⬐ kingcharles

Obligatory Ian Malcolm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0

⬐ SMAAART

I found my people!

⬐ michaelyuan2012

Excel is good for business office using.

hope this Cement Trailer For Sale is helpful for logistic company.

https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/cement-trailer-for-sale/

⬐ Flankk

Cell Shock are heading into the finals with an 8-point lead in macro chaining but they face fierce opposition from the Miami Sheet with their blazing 460 shortcut APM. Five competitors have been caught doping but let's hope the others will recover from their repetitive strain injuries from last season.