from Hacker News

Decipad – Like Notion with problem-solving capabilities

by g-camargo on 9/21/22, 2:35 PM with 45 comments

  • by g-camargo on 9/21/22, 2:35 PM

    I've been working on Decipad. It's a low-code notebook to tell stories with numbers and build interactive models. It's like Notion with spreadsheet-like capabilities. You can build and publish interactive notebooks for things like forecasting, burn rate, a mortgage calculator, or just something fun.

    We're testing with early access users. Would be grateful for any feedback if you're interested! Decipad.com

  • by r2sk5t on 9/21/22, 4:14 PM

    Congrats! Whether it's Notion, Google Docs/Sheet/Slides, Coda, Figma, Adobe Cloud, iCloud, Slack, Google Drive, One Drive, etc. the issue for me is content management and SSO. There is a high bar to get anointed to manage content inside a company/team.

    For example, we use Office 365 and OneDrive for file management. But, I prefer Keynote over PowerPoint. Saving Keynote to OneDrive folders works perfectly fine. Of course that means anyone who wants to edit my documents needs OneDrive and Keynote, but that's reasonable for our team.

    To use Decipad, Notion, Coda, Google Docs etc. We would need a way to manage the documents in OneDrive, an authentication mechanism so that the documents can be open and edited from OneDrive. Whether it's OneDrive, Box, DropBox, or GDrive my issue might be the same for others.

    Just rewrite the software to run on Mac & Windows and save documents as files, and then we would give it a try :-)

  • by Rafsark on 9/21/22, 3:18 PM

    That's probably something I would see "on-top" of Notion. I really like the formulas on steroid, but having another tool inside the company is a bit painful. Notion team could authorize add-ons built on top...

  • by leobg on 9/21/22, 3:05 PM

    Would like to see a demo video. Reading through the landing page doesn’t really tell me what this does, or how are using it would work.

  • by PaulHoule on 9/21/22, 2:42 PM

    Nice to see something follow in the footsteps of

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK_Solver

  • by light_hue_1 on 9/21/22, 3:45 PM

    I might have been a user if I could access it without signing up to try it out.

    Having to give my email, click a link, set up an account, etc. just to see what this is to decide if I want to use it, is far too high of a barrier to entry.

  • by ibdf on 9/21/22, 2:57 PM

    I wish Notion would allow people to build third-party plugins/add-ons. This looks really cool but it would be so much cooler if it build on top of everything Notion already does.

  • by phren0logy on 9/21/22, 3:48 PM

    Nice! Reminds me of the native MacOS apps Numi and Soulver. But being web-based and understanding python opens up a lot of interesting possibilities that those apps don't have.

  • by skybrian on 9/21/22, 3:06 PM

    Too bad the documentation isn’t online. What does it use for formulas? How do you share notebooks? Do you need the app to view them?

    I’m pretty happy with Observable’s notebooks. It means you need to know JavaScript, though, and furthermore learn Observable’s quirks [1] and a plotting library.

    [1] https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/observables-not-javas...

  • by unwoundmouse on 9/21/22, 4:18 PM

    What did you use for UI, is this tailwind? looks really clean

  • by dscape on 9/22/22, 3:55 PM

    Hi Everyone! I’m a co-founder at Decipad. Love the support and excitement for what we’re building! We’re currently collaborating with a small group of early access users. Come say hi on Discord. We will be sharing more soon. And, if you have a certain modeling use case in mind, we would love to learn more about it.

  • by zbhoy on 9/21/22, 2:42 PM

    This is really interesting! I have been keeping an eye on the low code number modeling scene and it's great to see a mix on the usual spreadsheet + X.

    I applied for early access but I wanted to ask how you balance the amount of spreadsheet and modeling you expose vs keeping it out of sight?

  • by personjerry on 9/21/22, 6:07 PM

    Be careful, the name sounds a bit like it's a feminine hygiene product

  • by valyagolev on 9/21/22, 10:30 PM

    i wonder if it would be cool to have generalized "task" management in the form of embedded Prolog-like (basically make queries through unification)

  • by avgcorrection on 9/21/22, 8:54 PM

    > Can I afford a

    No.