[HN Gopher] Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for Exploring Scenarios
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Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for Exploring Scenarios
Author : azhenley
Score : 159 points
Date : 2025-02-04 23:56 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.inkandswitch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.inkandswitch.com)
| ziddoap wrote:
| It's interesting, for sure, but I'm not buying that this is much
| better than just setting up some extra columns. The two arguments
| presented against extra columns are 1) editing time and 2) space.
|
| 1) Editing can be sped up, albeit with a learning curve, so
| _maybe_ I can see that one. At least at my proficiency, I doubt I
| 'd be saving any material amount of time. I can think of
| scenarios where this would actually be slower for me. People with
| less experience in spreadsheets might find some time savings,
| it's hard for me to gauge that.
|
| 2) Space, on the other hand, I'm not really buying. You replace
| extra columns with a wider column and a bespoke UI piece on the
| right-hand side. I can see columns A:H in the column example, and
| columns A:B in the final Ambsheet example (which, funny enough,
| is displayed as a 2x3 spreadsheet -- why not just have those 6
| cells right in the sheet?).
|
| This also seems much more difficult to do visualizations from.
| Graphs, conditional formatting, etc. But that part isn't
| discussed, so there may be a solution for that which isn't shown.
|
| It's interesting enough that I would enjoy playing around with
| it. I very well could just be entrenched in my habits.
| barathr wrote:
| This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for.
| (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the
| description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two
| prompts it built a working React app prototype.)
| aa_memon wrote:
| Would you be open to sharing the code?
| barathr wrote:
| Sure, here's what Claude generated (all the usual caveats
| apply): https://pastebin.com/Xbs2qasH
| aa_memon wrote:
| Thank you
| phonon wrote:
| Excel has "Scenario Manager", "Goal Seek", and "Data Table" for
| What If Analysis. In particular, "Data Table with Multiple
| Arguments" seems like a similar/more powerful version of what you
| are doing, which you don't address.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.xelplus.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-table/
| Closi wrote:
| This was my thinking too - data tables can often do this.
|
| The negative of data tables is that it massively slows down
| your spreadsheet, and cause some weird errors/glitches, but
| it's essentially the same thing.
| world2vec wrote:
| And "Solver", in case you need something really sturdy.
| ai-christianson wrote:
| At this point I think I'd just resort to throwing together a
| quick script in Python or Julia to run the scenarios.
| batmenace wrote:
| I think it's a neat idea (maybe because I was talking over ow to
| do something similar in Python, specifically for financial
| analysis). Definitely feels like an early stage, but I would love
| to see where it goes.
| dfex wrote:
| The ideas and prototypes coming out of inkandswitch are really
| interesting.
|
| It feels like user interface innovations all stopped/stagnated in
| the early 2000s and we've just spent the last 20 years adjusting
| the previous 20 years of desktop UI paradigms to the mobile and
| tablet space.
|
| It's great to see people still working on interesting problems
| like this
| batmenace wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. Spent the evening reading though some of
| their work, and it's all so... fun. Just exploring fun and
| potentially useful ideas not restricted to what tools already
| exist (which seems to be the case much of the time)
| WillAdams wrote:
| This would be a lot more interesting if these folks would release
| their product/code.
|
| https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/
|
| https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/
|
| are very interesting and promising, but not available for
| use/experimentation.
| spiralganglion wrote:
| We recently open sourced Inkling [1] (which is a spiritual
| successor to Crosscut) and the iPad Wrapper [2] app we used to
| prototype Crosscut, Inkling, and other projects. We're also
| going to share some more similarly-interesting non-essay output
| from our research in the near future.
|
| [1] https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling
|
| [2] https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper
| WillAdams wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| I'm peripherally involved in a similar project:
|
| https://github.com/IndiePython/myappmaker-sdd
|
| and appreciate anything which could be shared which might be
| helpful or inform development.
|
| I will note that if you would try either Android or a Windows
| tablet w/ a Wacom EMR stylus you should be able to get the
| sort of input you want --- or maybe on a Mac w/ a Wacom One
| Gen 2 13 inch or Movink 13 or Cintiq w/ Touch display?
| somat wrote:
| "what if a single cell could hold multiple values at once?"
|
| Somebody is rediscovering why slide rules are nice. you get your
| answer but you simultaneously get nearby answers as well.
|
| I am not sure what the modern ui equivalent would be. a plot?
| _blk wrote:
| If I may ask, what spreasheet program is running underneath?
| xrd wrote:
| Not a surprise that this comes from at least one person involved
| in dabbledb twenty years ago (later acquired by Twitter). Avi
| Bryant, now sponsoring very interesting work.
| thedays wrote:
| dabbledb was awesome. Simple but powerful. I still miss it and
| haven't found anything like it to replace it at a reasonable
| price.
| jdougan wrote:
| I wonder if there is any way of getting X/Twitter to shake it
| loose?
| luizfelberti wrote:
| Computation model behind this vaguely reminds me of the Epic
| Games programming model thing for Verse Calculus:
| https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/
| interestica wrote:
| This + sports analytics. So much of sports is about slightly
| different outcomes of related scenarios. There's not much
| difference between a home run and a flyball caught at the wall.
| But the data shows something very distinct and ignores the other
| almost-as-likely outcome. Amb values has the potential to give
| new ways of analyzing performance and outcomes.
|
| (What I'm saying is get a big sports team to fund you)
| nxobject wrote:
| Re: computing with continuous distributions: I recall there was a
| "show HN" a while ago with a graph-style interface to do
| computations on continuous distributions, so you could very much
| budget by modelling a plausible distribution of gas prices within
| the month, of rental prices in your town, etc, and then see
| plausible distributions of monthly spending.
|
| I'm still trying to find it: anyone remember this, or did I just
| Mandela Effect myself? I'm not sure whether it computed outputs
| analytically or through simulation.
|
| (Hell, I might just recreate it on my own...)
| kqr wrote:
| There is nothing free and good in this space, last I checked.
| The alternatives I know of:
|
| - GetGuesstimate[1] is probably the most polished, but
| development on it is slow and it doesn't lean into the same
| interaction patterns that I think make actual spreadsheets
| popular.
|
| - There are various plugins for the proprietary Microsoft Excel
| that can do this. I don't remember their names off the top of
| my head, but sometimes "Monte Carlo" is the phrase that unlocks
| many searches around this. (Crystal Ball is a name of a plugin
| that pops into my head.)
|
| - One can hypothetically do this in vanilla spreadsheets, by
| generating arrays of random values and
| serialising/deserialising to space-separated strings in a cell.
| This is very, very slow, though.
|
| - I have started working on something I call Precel[2] which is
| not very polished but I think the basic idea (if not the
| current implementation) can be a solid foundation for a proper
| spreadsheet-for-full-distributions.
|
| [1]: https://www.getguesstimate.com/
|
| [2]: https://git.sr.ht/~kqr/precel/tree/master/item/README.md
| 8yt98z2b905o wrote:
| @Risk is another excel add-in. Found it quite powerful and
| useful:
|
| https://lumivero.com/products/at-risk/
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| @Risk, or specifically their competition, is my
| prototypical go-to example of "your SaaS product would be
| much more useful and ergonomic for the user if it were
| implemented as an Excel spreadsheet".
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I miss GetGuesstimate. It was well-polished and surprisingly
| powerful for what looked I remember being a prototype. For
| the scenarios like that example in the article, it would
| arguably fit better than spreadsheet interface.
|
| Last time I used it was about 3 years ago - I used it to
| estimate of how much we'll end up spending on renovating the
| apartment we were planning to move it, and then updated it as
| the work progressed to make decisions like whether we can
| afford some optional elements of the plan, if we'll need to
| get a loan to finish everything, and how much.
|
| Structurally, I basically broken it down by rooms, categories
| of work and stuff to buy - building materials, furniture.
| Initially, I just guesstimated (!) the costs based on gut
| feel, or web search. I'd start with things like: "my mom's
| apartment had the same proportions and painting it costed $X
| last year, ours is about Y% larger" -> one node "Painting
| walls & ceilings except kids room", value = PERT distribution
| between $X and $X * (1 + Y%) * Fudge factor. After we picked
| the paint, I'd just split that node into a) labor and b)
| material, the latter split into surface area (known), bucket
| cost (known), buckets per sqm (distribution based on values
| from the back of the bucket) - getting a much narrower
| probability distribution on the material (and total) cost.
| Stuff like this for every aspect - I'd just model the things
| I know.
|
| It was a bit of extra work, but it was instrumental for
| keeping the costs in check and gave me great peace of mind.
| It also made it obvious which aspects were driving the costs,
| which were most risky - wide distributions going into large
| amounts, which I prioritized pinning down the costs of - and
| where it's worth to look for savings or alternatives.
|
| Also, it demonstrated the usual case of webapps being
| optimized for demo examples instead of real use cases. My
| renovation planner quickly accumulated about a hundred nodes,
| most of which were computing probability distributions (via
| ~1k samples Monte Carlo). That slowed the UI down to a crawl,
| and many times updating a node would create a cascade of
| errors down the dependency graph, as the diminished
| performance started surfacing race conditions in the
| evaluator.
|
| (You may ask, wouldn't it be better to do that stuff in code?
| Not really - half of the value was in having every part of
| the math as a node in visual, interactive DAG, that
| _displayed histograms of the probability distributions_ at
| every node, so you could just _see_ everything all the time.)
|
| Still, I loved it, and I really wish someone made an actively
| supported product like this.
| vosper wrote:
| Was it Projection Lab, which has been on HN before?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450913
|
| https://projectionlab.com/
| curtisblaine wrote:
| I remember that as well, so no Mandela effect, and I've been
| trying to find it too. It had a graphical interface in which
| you could specify the probability distribution of an event, and
| the graph would resolve and show the calculated distributions
| of all the steps.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| Pretty sure it was getguesstimate.com
| tmoertel wrote:
| This is like probabilistic programming but with implicit uniform
| distributions over the supplied values.
| ggm wrote:
| How could you do linear optimisation over unrelated terms in
| this? How could you implement the well known decision support
| methods from Operations Research in this? How does it compare to
| rows, or tables and extra columns?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Only from the title I thought of mr Litt. I love work like this.
| rvba wrote:
| Being able to have multiple scenarios in cells is an interesting
| idea.
|
| Although the thing is, that it would be nice to have weights too.
|
| Usual answer is to keep various options in separate columns (e.g.
| worst case, normal case, best case), problem is that often you
| want more scenarios and some have 3 options while other have 10
| portalcell wrote:
| If you liked this you might also enjoy this little toy project:
| https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2021-11-24-probabilistic-spr...
| globalise83 wrote:
| "Excel requires the user to manually enter every scenario--even
| in the simple example above, exploring 2 cars, 3 apartments, and
| 2 Netflix plans would require entering 12 scenarios, with names
| like "Cheap Car / Medium apartment / Premium Netflix". In
| contrast, an ambsheet automatically computes all combinations of
| the three amb values."
|
| Presumably this tool only works for relatively small possibility
| spaces due to the problem of combinatorial explosion?
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| As long as the operations you're doing aren't too numerically
| unstable, you could have it use monte carlo methods for
| moderate numbers of inputs. Sample, say, 10,000 values across
| the inputs and output averages, output min, 5th percentile,
| median, 95th percentile, max. Right now I do this either with
| Python or some auxiliary column full of random values.
|
| If you were doing it that way, you could also set
| distributional values for the variables. Rather than x = {500,
| 1000}, you could set (say) X ~ N(750, 100) and have it pull
| samples from that distribution. If you _really_ wanted to get
| fancy you could take advantage of known results on operations
| on distributions to keep things exact for a lot of common
| calculations, then turn to numerical methods for uglier
| operations (at which point you 're basically building a wrapper
| around one of the usual statistical libraries, I suppose).
|
| (EDIT: apparently this already exists, see other comments in
| this thread.)
| arunaugustine wrote:
| This is exactly what I loved about the Causal app (no
| affiliation). They started as a general purpose spreadsheet with
| 'Amb' cells built-in, though later on they seem to have converged
| on the financial modeling space.
|
| [0]: https://causal.app/
| gcanyon wrote:
| This does a clever job of dealing with the multiple varied inputs
| to a scenario.
|
| A real budgeting scenario might have 2 * 3 * 7 * 4 * 5 * 3 * 9 *
| 2 * 5 = 226,800 possible outcomes, so the obvious question is
| what UI do you use to consider/narrow down that beast? You need
| tools that let you slice and dice that output based on different
| sets of criteria.
|
| The simplest might be something like, "rule out all solutions
| that total more than $5000" but you also need things like "I will
| only pay for a total of 3 streaming services, rule out all
| scenarios with more than that" and "if I choose not to have a
| car, then I have to get a transit pass and an e-scooter"
|
| I almost feel like, as clever as this is, the harder problem is
| the one I describe above.
| gklitt wrote:
| We totally agree! Stay tuned for our next posts on that topic
| :)
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| I think the best solution to this was Quantrix. The multi
| dimension, multi scenario modelling just felt right and natural.
| It still exists but seems to be locked into a different price
| point and target audience and outdated app UI. Someone should
| make an airtable like experience for what quantrix was.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yes, but it was Lotus Improv (and the earlier text-based
| spreadsheet Javelin) which did it first.
|
| There is also the opensource Flexisheet:
|
| https://github.com/NattyNarwhal/FlexiSheet
|
| which I wish someone would fork and get running again.
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