HN user

mceoin

735 karma

Founder @ Sourcetable.com

I moved to San Francisco on February 1st 2011 with a desire to build a better Internet. I'd like to think I'm making progress.

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news.ycombinator.com 9mo ago

Show HN: Quant, the AI stock trading analyst

mceoin
8pts0
www.fastcompany.com 10mo ago

Bringing AI to an Excel-style spreadsheet

mceoin
2pts0
sourcetable.com 10mo ago

Show HN: Superagents – connect spreadsheets to any database, API or MCP server

mceoin
35pts13
sourcetable.com 11mo ago

Show HN: AI Fantasy Football Analyst

mceoin
1pts1
blog.sourcetable.com 11mo ago

Notes on last week's GPT-5 release

mceoin
1pts0
blog.sourcetable.com 1y ago

Sourcetable launches Data Science mode

mceoin
1pts0
blog.sourcetable.com 1y ago

Supabase is now available on Sourcetable

mceoin
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet

mceoin
9pts3
twitter.com 1y ago

Llama 3.3 is now available on Sourcetable

mceoin
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Show HN: Sourcetable – "Cursor for Spreadsheets"

mceoin
5pts2
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Sourcetable's AI spreadsheet now free for students

mceoin
1pts0
blog.sourcetable.com 1y ago

Sourcetable (ShowHN S24) is now free for students

mceoin
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

mceoin
188pts88
blog.sourcetable.com 3y ago

Happy Spreadsheet Day!

mceoin
4pts0
www.nytimes.com 4y ago

Elon Musk Becomes Twitter's Largest Shareholder

mceoin
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: San Francisco vs. Palo Alto – which is better for funded startup?

mceoin
2pts8
www.youtube.com 5y ago

Zoox goes live – class 3 autonomous vehicle

mceoin
2pts0
bolinastesting.org 6y ago

Bolinas CA, testing entire town for Covid-19

mceoin
2pts0
www.indie.vc 6y ago

Indie VC 2020 Applications now open

mceoin
2pts0
journalofastrobiology.com 7y ago

Evidence of Life on Mars?

mceoin
2pts0
blog.angel.co 8y ago

Female founded startups to join in 2018

mceoin
2pts0
earthquake.usgs.gov 8y ago

Magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit Mexico City

mceoin
2pts0
500hats.com 9y ago

Welcome to the Unicorn Hedge

mceoin
1pts0
doublej.net.au 10y ago

Yothu Yindi's Treaty

mceoin
3pts0
medium.com 11y ago

Why Color Failed

mceoin
2pts0
imgur.com 12y ago

Google Bookmarks: Getting an upgrade?

mceoin
1pts0
www.sbs.com.au 13y ago

Australian Asylum Seeker Policy: send refugees to Papua New Guinea.

mceoin
2pts3
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

StartupBus - 7 Cities Announced, applications still open

mceoin
14pts3
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

The Pandodaily Pantomime

mceoin
6pts0

More a practice than a project, but I'm working on using voice as much as possible to interact with computers. This started with mapping the Tap Assistance on my phone to ChatGPT voice, then vibe coding better voice transcription for my computer, then shifting increasing amounts of work to Claude Remote control, etc.

This is less of a latency/efficiency thing and more about disconnecting the eyes from a screen and fingers from a keyboard. The upside is more walking, flow and creativity.

Claude for Excel 9 months ago

We'll hit a new plateau somewhere, for sure. Still, I'm glad I'm not doing my spreadsheets on paper so net win so far!

Claude for Excel 9 months ago

I second this. Spreadsheets are the primary tool used for 15% of the U.S. economy. Productivity improvements will affect hundreds of millions of users globally. Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add.

The criticisms broadly fall between "spreadsheets are bad" and "AI will cause more trouble than it solves".

This release is a dot in a trend towards everyone having a Goldman-Sachs level analyst at their disposal 24/7. This is a huge deal for the average person or business. Our expectation (disclaimer: I work in this space) is that spreadsheet intelligence will soon be a solved problem. The "harder" problem is the instruction set and human <> machine prompting.

For the "spreadsheets are bad" crowd -- sure, they have problems, but users have spoken and they are the preferred interface for analysis, project management and lightweight database work globally. All solutions to "the spreadsheet problem" come with their own UX and usability tradeoffs, so it'a a balance.

Congrats to the Claude team and looking forward to the next release!

For now we're pretty obsessed with the spreadsheet interface, but we do think of Sourcetable as a spreadsheet-based application platform, so there multi-modal plans in the future.

For now, one fun experience is loading the app on Mobile and just talking to your database. It's the same as talking from a desktop but can feel far more natural and the form factor let's you get quick business answers on the go.

Separate to the Superagents launch here, LLMs are excellent for keyword optimizations since the compression/summary/synthesis essentially comes for free out of the box. This isn't unique to Sourcetable, but I do find it extremely pleasant that vector analysis with LLMs is easy, not hard. SEM/SEO is all just math at the end of the day.

The main things we bring to the table are that the AI can write code and handle much larger datasets than fit in ChatGPT, etc., and also that Superagents you can pipe your data in without code or SaaS interface kludge, so you can ask much more complicated questions than you usually might if you're not great at cleaning, filtering or analyzing data.

As naive as this may sound, when I first moved to America and was deciding where to base myself, I first had to learn that there was a difference between Silicon Valley (i.e. Peninsula / South Bay) and San Francisco.

From there, San Francisco looks quite small, but many neighborhoods are worlds away from the action - Outer Richmond is not the density of networks you are looking for, for example (better than rest of world, suboptimal for SF).

Co-locating close to the center of these dense founder networks is the best way maximize luck and opportunity.

This map isn't perfect, but it makes it pretty obvious where you should move if you're interested in startups.

Career wise, moving to "the center of the network" is still the best decision I ever made.

Sourcetable.com | Product Marketing (contract) | San Francisco We're building a spreadsheet-based operating system for the web, although on first touch Sourcetable feels more like Excel Copilot or "Cursor for spreadsheets".

We're looking for one Product Marketer to join our team in a part-time contract capacity in the Bay Area (San Francisco preferred). The requirement are that you need to be great at video storytelling and also be strong at spreadsheets & analysis.

Everyone on our team codes, and you should too. There's no technical requirement for the role, per-se, but we have found it is better this way.

Email me if this sounds interesting.

This is completely excessive, but we threw our AI at solving fantasy sports analysis and added a bunch of native integrations and python libraries. It's pretty decent, and fun to just chat with the data.

Big props to Joseph Wilson (@pseudo-r) who maintains the unofficial ESPN API. https://github.com/pseudo-r/Public-ESPN-API. Reliably the best service for interacting with fantasy sports data and AI.

This was an interesting project to work on, mainly because the quality and popularity of API docs for various services really does impact the experience of untrained LLMs using them out of the box. It was fun to experience this outside of our regular B2B context, and my big takeaway from this project was just how much people are underestimating the importance of this as we experience the rise of the agentic web over the next 3 years. (Agents are users too!)

We included some easter egg cricket features, but we haven't found a free service the AI likes enough to bundle that in officially yet, so that'll come at a later date. (We're Aussies, so of course the fantasy Cricket analysis will improve over time : )

Perhaps you shouldn't care, although I find this to be a short-sighted perspective.

Agents are users now, and agent-friendly docs and libraries will be standard practice for the tools that want to thrive through broader industry adoption.

Similarly, perhaps you wouldn't care if your website wasn't easily parsable by crawlers, but if you'd like your work to appear in search results you might like to include a sitemap or structure the HTML a little.

Check out Sourcetable, you might like it for your AI spreadsheet work. It's much better than Excel copilot in every aspect (financial modeling, data science, data cleaning, agent tools, etc.)

I'm working on an AI spreadsheet platform called Sourcetable (https://sourcetable.com).

Most people use it for analysis and ops work, + data science.

I find myself using Sourcetable to run our company: query the DB, analyze the user data, make projections, write copy, help with technical SEO (search the web, scrape data, check status codes, clean my sitemap, run vector space analysis etc.), talk to apps, financial modeling for our operating model + forecasting, etc.

The main idea I'm thinking about is LLM related: we're all having a social experience with machines (!) while building the machines (!!). I'm not sure my brain fully grasps that it's talking to silicon while I work.

Sourcetable.com | Product Marketing (contract) | San Francisco

We're building a spreadsheet-based operating system for the web, although on first touch Sourcetable feels more like Excel Copilot or "Cursor for spreadsheets".

We're looking for one Product Marketer to join our team in a part-time contract capacity in San Francisco. The requirement are that you need to be great at video storytelling and also be strong at spreadsheets & analysis.

Everyone on our team codes, and you should too. There's no technical requirement for the role, per-se, but we have found it is better this way.

Email me if this sounds interesting.

"Pay it forwards" is the general advice here, and I think it is generally correct in the macro/social sense.

Although not completely analogous, helping people is similar to gifting. In gifting societies, we don't give to someone with the expectation of a direct benefit in return (A -> B, B -> A). Instead, it's more of a long arc that goes around a corner and returns in an indirect sense (A --> B --> C --> ... --> A).

When you layer time succession in, helping others progresses more like the circle of life. It often doesn't make sense to give back directly — your professors are already at the peak of their careers — but we can give back to society. In doing so, we increase the resonance of the gift that was given.

Often, the role of the receiver is simply to receive. On the other hand, Tuesdays with Morrie is a book that speaks to a gentler form of directly giving back to elders as they age.

Sourcetable is hiring a product educator (contract), in San Francisco. https://sourcetable.com

Sourcetable is the world's most capable AI spreadsheet (think: "Cursor for spreadsheets"). We're a small team of experienced engineers, the company is growing quickly, and and we're looking for an experienced product educator to make videos and blogs on everything spreadsheet, data, analysis, and AI related. Personality wise, you could be a fit if you're something of a combination YouTuber, hacker, and ex-Goldman Sachs spreadsheet junkie.

Although it isn't definitionally required for the role, everyone on the team codes and ideally you do too. We have found it works better that way.

If you are considering applying, please email me a body of work.

-- Eoin (founder)

Sourcetable | Product Education (Contract) | San Francisco, U.S., or Australia.

Sourcetable is building a spreadsheet-based analyst. Talk to the computer, tell it what you want done, and it does the work for you.

This is a new UX, and we're looking for a great product educator to join our team to tell that story and show people how it's done.

You need to be exceptional at making product education videos. These particular videos will be related to using AI for spreadsheet analysis and ops work, flexing up into leveraging any python library you can think of for analysis and other shenanigans. That's the gig.

If you need a lot of guidance it will not be a good fit.

I'm curious why people think business is so underrepresented as a user group, especially since "analyzing" 30% of the Bloom Taxonomy results. My dual theories are:

- LLMs are good enough to zero or few-shot most business questions and assignments, so n.questions is low VS other tasks like writing a codebase.

- Form factor (biased here); maybe threads-only aren't best for business analysis?

Apache ECharts 1 year ago

We [1] just added to ECharts as a charting library for our AI and are switching the default GUI charts over to it as well. We did a pretty extensive review before selecting it. ECharts won because it's excellent, and very pretty.

1. https://sourcetable.com