MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Is there demand for a tool that turns natural language to SQL without database?
by viewer_midoria | 2025-07-28 12:08:08+00:00
The tool lets you upload your schema, auto selects the tables required for the query and instantly starts generating SQL code for any database without ever needing access to the data itself.

Unlike other tools, there’s no need to give up database access. It also lets you rework existing sql queries.

Honestly, I built this for myself. In my last interview, I totally bluffed about being an advanced SQL expert… but I didn’t know a thing. On my first day, they handed me their database and told me to sort out marketing and user data on Metabase. So, I built this tool just to survive the job.

Now, I’m curious if any of you could use something like this, too. The tool also explains its logic step-by-step, so you can present your work confidently (and actually understand what’s going on).

There are two main use cases I see:

For companies that don’t want to connect their database to an AI tool for security or privacy reasons.

For folks like me, who need to write SQL like a pro, but would rather not admit they’re learning on the job.

If this post gets 1,001 upvotes, I’ll launch it.

P.S. It’s been three months, and I’m doing great at the job!
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-07-28 12:08:30+00:00
> there exist no problems, that require a solution provided by this tool

> For instance, you need a webserver, a workqueue and a database to run standalone all together.

This is the only real use-case that I would have for a tool like this and it's already been solved for nearly 15 years by foreman [1]

[1] https://github.com/ddollar/foreman
by rayiner | 2025-07-28 12:09:15+00:00
> The social cultural analysis people really left us hanging when it came to finding out what is it with middle eastern culture that makes it unable to build working states and socities

Nobody said that. Iraq under Saddam and Syria under Assad were working states and societies. The trouble is with bottom up democracy, and that’s a shortcoming of virtually every non-european society. Singapore for example is wealthy, but is already having trouble after its benevolent quasi-authoritarian ruler died.

> Its a special kind of evil to deny billions of people hope and participation in the worlds society so one can get high on ones own ideological supply

To the contrary, it’s cruel to push democracy on societies that aren’t capable of sustaining them.
by teruoo | 2025-07-28 12:09:32+00:00
Working on https://openreaders.com – a platform with free graded readers, starting with Spanish (my native language).

When learning a new language, it’s surprisingly hard to find free, engaging reading content at your level. Even paid options often aren’t that great. I’m trying to solve this by leveraging LLMs, building useful features for learners, and focusing on user experience.

Just launched the beta yesterday on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1matsp6/fr...
by Asooka | 2025-07-28 12:10:50+00:00
> Especially in the current political climate

I am forever thankful that Trump won the last election. If it were a Democrat party at the helm it would be practically impossible to have opposition to this, as most of the left would simply fall in line and cancel anyone daring to oppose the party. Look at how Obama strengthened the Patriot Act and carried out mass deportations with but a tiny grumble from the press.
by vimto | 2025-07-28 12:11:23+00:00
This is a common sentiment because so many people use ORMs, and because people are using them so often they take the upsides for granted and emphasise the negatives.

I've worked with devs who hated on ORMs for performance issues and opted for custom queries that in time became just as much a maintenance and performance burden as the ORM code they replaced. My suspicion is the issues, like with most tools, are a case of devs not taking the time to understand the limits and inner workings of what they're using.
by sevensor | 2025-07-28 12:11:30+00:00
At the top of my list is taking unstructured workbooks and adding a sheet to tabulate inputs and outputs. A lot of spreadsheet models are not set up for bulk evaluation or retaining old results, and the peculiar arrangement of cells constitutes an ad hoc user interface for the model. I want to take that seriously as a programming environment for subject matter experts and give them an extra tool for working with their models. As programmers, we give spreadsheet authors far too little credit for intelligence and skill, and often blame them for the faults of their platform. This is unproductive, and we can do better.
by trollbridge | 2025-07-28 12:11:44+00:00
It’s amazing how nothing goes wrong with my 20+ year old Maytags, Whirlpools, or Estates by Whirlpool (their budget subbrand). No logic board failures, drain pump failures.

Acquired from yard sales and then subject to duty cycles of 5-10 loads a day.

Somewhat relevant, I have 3 relatives/colleagues still sporting iPhone 8’s/8 Pluses. The only issue is that some newer apps are slow. Told them to grab iPhone SE 3rd gens before they’re discontinued; one of them has it sitting unopened in the box, waiting for their 8 to die.
by sergiolema | 2025-07-28 12:11:48+00:00
n my React application, I have to fetch the backend to:

list the products

display the price

list the availabilities

and more.

But all the time, if an error occurs, a 4xx or a 5xx, I repeat the same logic, everywhere: display a pop-in with an error message like "Your product is no more available", "There is no availabilities in the selected dates" or simply "An internal error occurred, try again later."

But it's always the same logic. I don't want to repeat the popin and the catch of the request everywhere. That's why I use the useContext hook
by dontoni | 2025-07-28 12:11:54+00:00
Hm. What if it’s a startup that has just a couple of people and really needs more operational capability even though can’t hire that many people?

From what you said, you won’t accept such a product if it isn’t open source? Or at least, where you can choose the models and pay per use or something similar to that.

My guess is that big, powerful companies won’t use a pay-per-use Devin-like service because they just have so much people they can delegate tasks on that also use Cursor or the like; and startup companies that really need the product’d prefer a fixed rate like Cursor does.

Maybe they’ll actually use specialized agents for multiple tasks, but will also try to build their own solutions or sue frameworks rather than hire another company (like big companies that use Crew AI because it’s open source).

And are you ok with the quality that those full-fledged AI agents (like Devin) deliver? Do you have more pains that the single vendor dilemma?
by mbb70 | 2025-07-28 12:12:08+00:00
His comments on VS Code reminds me of the quote "Good accessibility design is mostly just good design":

> Consistent keyboard shortcuts across all features, and the ability to jump to any part of the interface by keyboard

This is something I notice and appreciate about VS Code as a fully sighted person. Just like I appreciate slopped sidewalk cutouts when I'm walking with luggage.

A11y is a big commitment and cost, and of course not all a11y features benefit everyone equally, but it has a larger impact than most people realize.
by sofixa | 2025-07-28 12:12:51+00:00
> That is in large part French propaganda in service of French interests—manufacturing consent for continuing French imperialism over their maltreated colonies; and delegitimizing narratives that speak counter to that—delegitimizing the political voice of the people actually living there

That could be true, if there weren't 3 referendums organised to give those people a voice in deciding their fate. They all failed, progressively more in favour of New Caledonia remaining part of France.

After the last one, and the announcement the end of the franchise restrictions to ensure that those referendums gave a fair chance to the pro-independence indigenous people, a targeted propaganda campaign stoked rioting. People were waving Azeri flags while rioting ffs!

> But hammering on that point is a form of dehumanization: it's to say people who disagree you, having been misled, no longer have the right to a voice, and are fair game to be silenced

It's the misleading group that was attempted to be silenced, not the people. The people in question had been given three referendums to give their voice, via official channels. Rioting because Azeris told them so isn't a legitimate way to voice concerns.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-07-28 12:13:35+00:00
None of what you mention or claim make them "far right".

"Euroscepticism" used to be quite significant in the "traditionally right" and Gaullist parties in France, like Thatcher was in the UK. And that was before the massive EU power grab of the recent years.

MODEM is centre (I mean it's Bayrou's party, so as centre as can be!). LR has effectively split with the 'right' now allied with RN and the 'left' allied with Macron. The LR now allied with the RN is not so different from Chirac's RPR when they won the general election in 1986. It it right, not far right but not centre right, either.

The original National Front (FN) was far right but it has shifted left and now RN is the de facto main party of the right. It is the largest party in Parliament and it is difficult to argue that 30-45% (depending on elections) of the French are "far right": They are not and the party isn't.

Actually, I would say that your comment illustrates was I mentioned in my previous comment. There has been, and still is, a rather insidious narrative in France and Europe that labels anyone against the current level of immigration and against the current EU trends as "far right" to shut them down. The only result is to make those parties get more and more votes as people's concerns are ignored.
by kylebenzle | 2025-07-28 12:13:37+00:00
I'm trying to get the word out that: The judges are the top lawyers and the lawyers are pieces of shit.

The US domestic (family) court system, in Ohio in particular, has become functionally corrupt.

The Ohio bar association has co-opted the domestic court system for their own revenue generating stream. The judges profit from kickbacks in the form of campaign contributions every four years from the very attorneys are supposed to be judging against, this is not just the appearance of corruption it is a system built on it.

On top of that, all the judgments are sealed and secret, meaning that there's zero records and zero accountability for any judges or lawyers in the system. This means the judges only incentive is to judge in a way that is most in line with his best interest. In practice this means that what little data we have shows that almost every time the judge finds in favor of whichever attorney donated the most money to his campaign.

This has been going on for the better part of 20 years and is the reason that 85% of divorces end with single parent custody in Ohio, it's because the judges are getting paid off.

I'm blowing the whistle, working on websites, printing signs, sending out mailers, Court watching and taking notes on these corrupt evil fucks, doing anything and everything I can to get the word out that the Franklin County Ohio domestic court system in particularly has been corrupted by a small group of judges, mainly Judge James Brown. I'm doing everything I can to get the word out about these evil and corrupt judges, the biggest hurdle seems to be how much money they are making and that people believe that once a lawyer gets rich and powerful enough they're uncorruptible, which is the exact opposite of the truth. The judges are the ones running a corrupt, pay to play, system of kickbacks with themselves at the top. The judges are the top lawyers and the lawyers are pieces of shit.

They are literally horse trading children like they're chips at the casino and what they've done to a generation of young people and millennial fathers is pure evil.
by soco | 2025-07-28 12:13:49+00:00
Let me underline again that with the "fortune teller". I don't take the absolute view on the internet freedom of speech, that hate speech should be allowed. As hate speech is not allowed on the playground (you get your parents called in) and not allowed on the street (you get slapped) it's not acceptable on the internet either. We can talk details, that the current implementation is faulty, and please come up with proposal how to make it better without running into the full censorship which nobody wants, but also not allowing campaigns based on straight out lying - campaigns all too pervasive nowadays (and yes in real life lying is penalized as well, so there). Or ok if you think lying and aggression on the internet should be permitted because dunno internet, at least be sincere with that and don't beat around the bush showing an imaginary boogieman.
by jart | 2025-07-28 12:14:14+00:00
8.8 percent of Firefox users have 32-bit systems. It's probably mostly people with a 32-bit install of Windows 7 rather than people who actually have an old 32-bit Intel chip like Prescott. Intel also sold 32-bit chips like Intel Quark inside Intel Galileo boards up until about 2020. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

People still buy 16-bit i8086 and i80186 microprocessors too. Particularly for applications like defense, aerospace, and other critical systems where they need predictable timing, radiation hardening, and don't have the resources to get new designs verified. https://www.digikey.at/en/products/detail/rochester-electron...
by rklaehn | 2025-07-28 12:15:11+00:00
In this particular example there is no multiplexing. It's just one QUIC stream.

In other iroh based protocols the ability to have many cheap QUIC streams without head-of-line blocking is very useful. E.g. we got various request/response style protocols where a large number of requests can be in flight concurrently, and each request just maps to a single QUIC stream.
by Mudbugs | 2025-07-28 12:15:46+00:00
>The restrictions on "free speech" that European countries implement, and which are increasing, would be unthinkable in the US

This is why you don't get a "serious" reply. You think too highly of US free speech, and it does not have a foot in reality, and you use "US good, Trump bad" crap when Trump is not even mentioned, it is more than you have a bias of "US good, EU bad".

>"in the US sense" being the key word

There is no difference; free speech is free speech. That is your core issue in the argument.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-07-28 12:15:47+00:00
tombstones use the same bit as empty (empty and deleted don't have hash codes, so there's room).

the key realization behind swissdict is that all the complications people add are only necessary if you have a bad hash function, so you can just use a good one and be happier.

linear probing also has the significant advantage that it allows removing tombstones when whenever the next entry is empty
by aleksituk | 2025-07-28 12:16:29+00:00
We're working on brief.audio, looking at taking the concept of personal podcasts (sort of introduced by NotebookLM) into its natural conclusion by thinking more about what content should be included and how to tailor the outputs into something that is really nice to listen to. Make it a truly slick mobile experience.

https://www.brief.audio -> Have a go, we're primarily testing internally atm, will look to make it more available and a bit more polished next week.

Primary focus is getting the content right this week with the audio script and hosts being user & content dependent. :)

Especially interested in hearing what content to pipe in (we're looking to put in our hackernews.coffee as a feed for example, but also other key news sources).
by cluckindan | 2025-07-28 12:16:32+00:00
There is a solution engineered specifically for avoiding N+1 queries and overfetching: GraphQL.

More specifically a GraphQL-native columnar database such as Dgraph, which can leverage the query to optimize fetching and joining.

Or, you could simply use a CRUD model 1:1 with your database schema and optimize top-level resolvers yourself where actually needed.

Prisma can also work, but is more susceptible to N+1 if the db adapter layer does separate queries instead of joining.
by candu | 2025-07-28 12:16:38+00:00
Government investment in science is...the only way basic science happens, really. I'd recommend reading The Entrepreneurial State [1] here: in essence, basic science pays off too slowly to interest even the most deeply-pocketed capital interests, but it pays off, so wise societies invest in it; Silicon Valley owes its existence to massive formative public investments in underlying technologies.

Not to mention that smart people generally prefer to live in places that value and protect science, so it's _also_ an indirect form of geopolitical talent recruitment. (See brain drain + brain gain impacts of science policy, for instance. There's a strong argument to be made that US mid-20th-century dominance in science and engineering was largely driven by a lot of very smart people fleeing Nazi Germany.)

Basic science isn't so much a lottery ticket as a bond with unknown maturity measured in decades, a _very_ high rate of return, a high minimum investment, and dividend-like payouts created by adding skilled scientists, engineers, etc. to your tax base.

[1] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state...
by derelicta | 2025-07-28 12:16:44+00:00
How can you tell it is a repressive regime? They have elections, a press and they are pretty satisfied about their form of governance, actually much more than their western counterparts.

So let me sum this up. We cannot ask the people. We cannot base ourselves on how their institutions function and how well they perform.

This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs), and everything outside of their little group of friends is a masquerade. The issue with that is that westerners disconnect themselves from reality. They are losing ground and it shows.
by pimlottc | 2025-07-28 12:17:09+00:00
Small suggestion: in the "Try These Examples" section, the call-to-action is click a button that is not initially visible. Users have to hover over the image to see the "recreate" button, which is not obvious. You should add a dedicate "Recreate" button below each example so it's immediately clear what to do.

Also it would a good idea to have a detail view of a sample image at 100% to show that the images are made up of other photos. Maybe even an interactive zoom window. At monitor resolutions, the full images mostly just look like smudgy photos, and not all users may be familiar with photomosiacs. Even the "view" option on the sample mosiacs does not let you see the detail of the individual tiles very well.
by incomingpain | 2025-07-28 12:17:49+00:00
AI and labourer robots are essentially here.

At first they'll be assembling themselves.

But essentially all the "temporary foreign workers" stop and are replaced by bots. One of the key jobs here are 'farm workers' what we find out is that those jobs can now be filled by robots and farms can expand to areas where workers arent even available.

Food prices ought to essentially crash; but from a farm owner point of view, it's going to still cost little to nothing to produce lots of food.

These bots are also going to make hard labour like house construction not only improve in quality but to construct a house drops significantly in cost.

Wood costs become must cheaper as robot lumberjacks and robot tree planting will greatly increase.

As a human, the cost of living becomes cheaper and cheaper; we will essentially reach utopia by energy production.
by rickdeckard | 2025-07-28 12:18:12+00:00
Of course it's been Google's Android, I don't think anyone ever questioned that. The whole reason why the OS still lives as a single entity and the app-ecosystem is not completely fragmented is due to Google's governance to keep it in check.

All the stuff Apple now slowly starts to allow on iOS due to EU's Digital Markets Act is still just scratching the surface of what Android already supports.

> hell, Apple are the only platform now with third party APIs for RCS in the EU

They provide third party API's to use APPLE's RCS-Service. The alternative would have been to support registering alternative RCS-services as default on the OS (and then, allow the user to choose a service).

> while Google’s spun an about face and will get away with it

Android already allows to install and configure alternative applications for RCS, in fact Samsung uses their own RCS Messaging service on its devices.
Show HN: SilentGPT – Terminal ChatGPT Client in C (AES-256, No Telemetry)
by silentpuck | 2025-07-28 12:19:25+00:00
I built SilentGPT as a fully terminal-based ChatGPT client written in C.

Why? I needed something minimal that respects my privacy and runs anywhere — even airgapped or offline shells.

Features: - Written in C, single portable binary - AES-256-GCM encryption for chat history and API keys - Supports multiple tokens via `--token` - Optional password protection via `--secure` - No OpenAI logging – pure curl + OpenSSL - Export, list, delete, rename chats — all from CLI

This is my first real C tool at this scale — happy to hear your feedback or critiques.

Silent and precise.
Show HN: A tiny Linux tool for clearing Steam achievements
by t9t | 2025-07-28 12:19:27+00:00
When I (re)play some games, I like to clear the Steam achievements so I can earn them again and have a fuller, more complete experience when playing. Examples include The Witcher 3 and Subnautica.

In the past I used to do that using Steam Achievement Manager (SAM), but since then I have switched to using Linux. I couldn't get SAM to work on Linux, so I looked inside to see how it works and decided to make my own small tool to do what I needed.

I first tried some things with C, C++, and Go but while I achieved a little progress I couldn't get the whole thing right. In the end with some help from Claude I was able to make this tiny C application which does exactly what I need.

It loads the libsteam_api.so library and executes some calls, pretending to be the actual game from the Steam perspective. Funny thing is that your friends will even see that you are in-game while the application is running. While there does not seem to be any security or checks around this "hack", and I've used Steam Achievement Manager for many years now, there are claims and warnings online that you might get VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) banned when you use tools like this with on-line games.

While possible, I currently don't have any intention to build a complete Steam Achievement Manager clone for Linux.

Any feedback is welcome.
by KingMob | 2025-07-28 12:20:23+00:00
Quick! What's the CLI command to use ffmpeg to cut out the first 20s of a video, drop non-English subtitles, and convert to the AV1 codec while keeping the VBR under 1 MBs?!

While you laboriously hunt for all the correct options, I've gone to lunch.

I doubt anyone's using AI for "ls" unless they're just starting to learn the terminal.
by karolinepauls | 2025-07-28 12:20:26+00:00
The world is more complicated than a 17th century lab experiment in combustion.

Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal. Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment.

Wetlands capture carbon by incorporating wood from dead trees in anoxic conditions.

> When plant productivity exceeds decomposition, net soil carbon accumulation occurs. This process eventually leads to the formation of deep peat deposits, which can accumulate for thousands of years.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44246-024-00135-y (first search result for wetland carbon sink)