MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Per row context understanding for data transformations
by abhijithneil | 2025-09-04 20:57:30+00:00
Traditional databases rely on RAG and vector databases or SQL-based transformations/analytics. But will they be able to preserve per-row contextual understanding?

We’ve released Agents as part of Datatune:

https://github.com/vitalops/datatune

In a single prompt, you can define multiple tasks for data transformations, and Datatune performs the transformations on your data at a per-row level, with contextual understanding.

Example prompt:

"Extract categories from the product description and name. Keep only electronics products. Add a column called ProfitMargin = (Total Profit / Revenue) * 100"

Datatune interprets the prompt and applies the right operation (map, filter, or an LLM-powered agent pipeline) on your data using OpenAI, Azure, Ollama, or other LLMs via LiteLLM.

Key Features

- Row-level map() and filter() operations using natural language

- Agent interface for auto-generating multi-step transformations

- Built-in support for Dask DataFrames (for scalability)

- Works with multiple LLM backends (OpenAI, Azure, Ollama, etc.)

- Compatible with LiteLLM for flexibility across providers

- Auto-token batching, metadata tracking, and smart pipeline composition

Token & Cost Optimization

- Datatune gives you explicit control over which columns are sent to the LLM, reducing token usage and API cost:

- Use input_fields to send only relevant columns

- Automatically handles batching and metadata internally

- Supports setting tokens-per-minute and requests-per-minute limits

- Defaults to known model limits (e.g., GPT-3.5) if not specified

- This makes it possible to run LLM-based transformations over large datasets without incurring runaway costs.
by barishnamazov | 2025-09-04 20:57:35+00:00
I was onsite today watching the contest live, and great atmosphere all around. One surprising outcome: the team in 17th place solved the same number of problems as the team that won gold in 4th place. Hopefully that isn't too demotivating to any team and we can see better separation in the future. After all, it can only mean that the problemsetters underestimated the contestants ;)

Congratulations to all the teams!
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-04 20:58:06+00:00
I use agents to do so much stuff on my computer, MCPs are easy to roll so you can give them whatever powers you want. Being able to just direct agents to do stuff on my computer via voice is amazing. The direct driving still sucks so they're not a general UI yet, and the models need to be a bit more consistent/smarter in general, but it'll be there very soon.
by slashdave | 2025-09-04 20:58:21+00:00
> Yes, it would be easier if we could just trust our banks to offer instant settlement and very low fees, but they don't.

All transactions must be derisked (there is a fallback if the transaction fails). This usually means backed with reserves, which also means they cannot be instant.

Now if you don't care for the risk management of a bank, sure, go ahead and do what you would like.
by const_cast | 2025-09-04 20:58:25+00:00
Almost all of our laws fall into this categorizations.

The idea that laws are clear-cut is largely a programmers fantasy.

Related: there's a lot of people who think that if you don't technically break the law then you're off the hook.

Uh, no, not how law works. The letter of the law doesn't matter, the spirit does. Being an asshole but not technically breaking the law is still illegal.

Yes, that's a lot different than code, isnt it? But it has to be.
by zahlman | 2025-09-04 20:58:41+00:00
> A little tinfoil birdie told me

I appreciate your willingness to consider possibilities like this, but I think it really is tinfoil in this case.

> Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.

This gets cause and effect wrong. Wikipedia reminds:

> The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, and first referred to it as a pandemic on 11 March 2020.[3][4]

Markets were doing well in Jan 2020 until people started noticing the case numbers and speculating about the WHO's judgement. They were on a bull run before that — up almost 29% in the 2019 calendar year — which was largely a recovery from problems at the end of 2018.

So the market was only hiccuping because of existing panic over the pandemic (including people reasonably pricing in risk that pandemic would be officially declared; the "social distancing" policies and business closures were quite telegraphed).

> Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy

This is just naturally what would happen.

> Money ran out

It's more that people started devaluing money because of how much was printed, so interest rates were controlled to avoid a hyperinflationary spiral. It could have gone much worse (see: early 70s until early 80s). Powell did an impressive job to engineer the desired "soft landing", but I personally was surprised and displeased that they waited that long to reach for the brakes. (It came across that there was a reluctance to trust early vague inflation signals, despite what should have been a high prior on their correctness given recent policy.)
by yieldcrv | 2025-09-04 20:58:41+00:00
to me this is an indication that the priorities of these formative years should change, and it doesn't look like what "school" looks like

the montessori and sudbury school model always seemed closest to what was necessary, although now I wonder if even those are cracking at the seams with outsourced thinking

regardless, I think a re-evaluation of the point is absolutely necessary.

self-motivated children are rare and require a specific environment and support system to thrive in, but will always be there to escape the more obvious return to serfs working on fiefs, unless born into capital themselves
by altruios | 2025-09-04 20:58:55+00:00
Do you mean empathy, by emotional connection?

If that is the case: I disagree that rage is the natural response to a loss of empathy AND switching to an analytical mode of thinking. I don't think rage (an emotion) stems from analytical thinking. Loss of empathy may be a required precursor to rage comments, but I don't see how analytical thinking fits anywhere in there. And if analytical thinking is a function of time: I would expect to find calmer comments after deliberate thought.

It would be testable - if you had the data - if it was the case that rage comments are thought out, or spur of the moment. I'm betting on the latter. Rage never seems well thought out to me.

If I misread your comment, I am sorry in advance.
by dctoedt | 2025-09-04 20:58:57+00:00
> Bork believed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which his party got through Congress) was unconstitutional.

Um: You're massively overstating the case for GOP involvement in the Civil Rights Act. The Act was muscled through by President Lyndon Johnson — a Democrat and protégé of LBJ; liberal congressional Democrats; and a few (and now-extinct) liberal Republicans. The racist, segregation-forever southern Democrats, who as powerful committee chairs had blocked civil-rights legislation for decades — mostly died off or became Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to the GOP's "Southern Strategy."
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-04 20:59:59+00:00
The library will exist to maintain high quality/consistency and reduce load times. Also, it's faster to generate a page with parameterized components than to recreate all the components. It's a win all around from an engineering perspective, and nobody has to maintain them, there could be an artifact registry where people publish their components and you or AI can just select nice ones for the given use case.
by stefanos82 | 2025-09-04 21:01:33+00:00
The last thing I expected was to get downvoted for just saying "English language can be a landmine if you are not careful, especially as a foreigner! lol".

English language uses words such as pussy that supposedly mean a cat, but at the same time they interpret it as vagina; another word is the name Dick which also is being used to mean phallus!

...and the best one is spotted dick which is literally a British steamed pudding! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_dick

Meanwhile, I get downvoted for commenting the obvious thing which is, English language is absurdly confusing for me as a foreigner and have no idea what to say without offending every English speaker!
by WillAdams | 2025-09-04 21:01:37+00:00
One can make arbitrary threads (vertically) on a CNC using a single point cutter (limited by the height of the Z-axis/thickness of the stock which one can fit a tool over/into):

https://community.carbide3d.com/t/thread-milling-in-metal-on...

A manual lathe will often have a gearbox which allows cutting threads on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_KF3n3oo08
by krrishd | 2025-09-04 21:01:47+00:00
> existing centralized systems

Other comments speak to this - but I wouldn't describe SWIFT (the predominant cross-border payments rail for high-value transactions that you couldn't just throw at a fintech eg. Wise) as centralized.

It's a bunch of hops, across correspondent (but separate) banks, that slow payments down, make them expensive + inconsistently traceable + introduce a bunch of manual ops burden along the way across each of the banks in the chain.
by madamelic | 2025-09-04 21:01:47+00:00
Personally, I think US banking needs something an Uber or AirBnB style shake-up to get their act in order.

It's awful how behind the times the US is when it comes to banking. 2 - 3 days to get money from one account to another is beyond embarrassing in the modern day. It took the US something like 15 years to get chip-and-pin.

Banks are still these monolithic entities that don't care to innovate or listen to customers because "what are you going to do, go to one of the other 4 monoliths that are all in cahoots with each other"
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-04 21:01:58+00:00
That’s the polite way they state it. The under the line philosophy comes from some reading of pre-determinism.

People who are guided by this see the negative fate of a child as a measure of the parent’s rejection of god’s grace. That’s why you have the weird commitment to pro-life principles, but nearly complete disdain once a child leaves the womb.

People find ways to twist things to fit their self interest.
by WhiteStar01 | 2025-09-04 21:02:05+00:00
We nearly lost our family pup at 7 due to undiagnosed copper storage disease. I was lucky that my wife spent years learning pet allergies, symptoms and nutrition. She saved his life. I build petcoach.ai so no one else would need to go through a similar experience. AI can easily do correlations and monitoring of the entire health and life of a pet. The program also gives you all the tools to ensure your pet has the healthiest life possible based on data and science.
by joe_the_user | 2025-09-04 21:02:23+00:00
It's sort of an interesting but the use of the term attention seems "over determined" (used to mean several not identical things) and "looping" is fuzzily defined (the main clue of seems analogy with "good sex", sex where you're engaging your entire body and being - a subject that apparently gets people's interest, yeah).

I think there's a standard and clearer explanation of what the author describes. A rich, satisfying experience comes from a melding of "goal focus" and expanded awareness. IE, Pleasure in some complex process involves reaching for a set "foreground" goal while keeping an awareness of entire "background" situation that prevents from fixating on the immediate goal. You can qualities of rhythm, self-similarity and etc into this "recipe" to describe rich satisfying experiences of multiple sorts (Art, sex, dance, conversation, [insert your favorite thing]).

The book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly goes into this stuff in long but still fuzzy detail.
by scrlk | 2025-09-04 21:02:37+00:00
> Marc Andreessen said famously (or at least is paragraphed as saying) in 1994 that the "Browser is the Operating System" and people have been doing riffs on that since then.

Isn't that downstream of Sun Microsystems’ old slogan: The Network is the Computer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-09-04 21:03:09+00:00
plenty of straight-A students are in those same classes with miserable explanations or have jobs. plenty of kids who flunk out of expensive private schools and don't work. always have been since long before AI. nobody "needs" these tools. they're conveniences. it sounds more like your issue is with the timing and structure of impersonalized childhood education.
by idlus | 2025-09-04 21:03:32+00:00
For video, the quite obscure CinéMutins[0] offers DRM-free downloads. The catalogue is in large part in French though and the movies that aren’t are hard-subbed in French. There’s also basically no mainstream films, the focus is on social messages, but there are moderately-known films here and there.

[0] https://www.cinemutins.com/
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-09-04 21:04:10+00:00
You are obviously completely unaware of the popularity of Paypal, CashApp, Venmo within the general US population and of Square for POS by vendors.

The value proposition for everyone, consumer and vendors is both lower fees and ability to easily diversify their income/assets into non depreciating digital assets.

Somewhere there is a Steak n Shake presentation that explains their investment into accepting Bitcoin (via LN) has already paid for itself in fees.
by txrx0000 | 2025-09-04 21:04:10+00:00
To be fair, GPT-5 didn't start off as a blank slate. The architecture probably encodes a lot, much like how DNA encodes a lot. The former requires human writing to decompress into a human-like thing, the latter requires the Earth environment and a woman to decompress into a human organism.

But it's indeed apples and oranges. There's no good way to estimate the information encoded by the GPT architecture compared to human DNA. We just have to be empirical and look at what the thing can do.
by zestyping | 2025-09-04 21:04:12+00:00
Wow, that's a massive blind spot you've got there.

The value comes from doing the thing. Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value.

Trading the potatoes for something you value more, yes, also creates additional value. But notice that potatoes have value to you even if you don't trade them for anything.

If you choke on a grape and a helpful volunteer saves your life, they create value. Nothing was exchanged, but they sure as hell generated wealth right there.

Labour and voluntary trade both create value. I wonder what sort of mindset one must have to forget that labour exists.
by mbesto | 2025-09-04 21:04:18+00:00
> Instant on-chain transfers avoiding trapped liquidity. If you're transferring money from financial institution A to institution B, and the transfer takes a day, you're either slowed a day in taking the next step or you have to somehow cover that float.

These are slow by design - abuse/fraud. How does blockchain solve that issue?

> * Fees that are lower than cards. Card payments are instant, which is often valuable (and superior to many bank transfers), but card transactions are also expensive relative to stablecoins. (And while card authorization is instant, settlement is not.)

Once again - CCs are instant because the % fee pays for fraud and customer service. What is to stop centralized blockchains from incremently increasing fees to the level of CCs over time? ...nothing.

> Crypto is punishing if you make a mistake, but, if you do things correctly, reliability is all-but guaranteed.

Once again - this is a feature not a bug. Things are slow because of bureaucracy AND abuse, not JUST bureaucracy. Crypto is only beneficial today because the actors using it are savvy. When the laggards join, we'll just fall back to the norm.

FWIW - the banking system in the US is awful and the experience to transfer money into other fiat is just as abysmal. However I think crypto's current idealism is a factor of the parties involved, not the technology itself. We're just reinventing finance...it's just this time with Silicon Valley in control instead of Manhattan.
by DrBrock | 2025-09-04 21:04:24+00:00
The Terra-Luna stablecoin crash wiped out $50 billion of notional value https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15446...

It's also a very open secret that the largest Tether stablecoin is not actually 1:1 backed with USD, as they very often claim https://paymentexpert.com/2025/07/24/tether-stablecoin-regul...
by franky47 | 2025-09-04 21:04:48+00:00
“But if they have thermonuclear power, where then do they conduct their tests and detonations?” “On their own planet, sir.” Naron rose to his full twenty feet of height and thundered, “On their own planet?” “Yes, sir.” Slowly Naron drew out his stylus and passed a line through the latest addition in the smaller book. It was an unprecedented act, but, then, Naron was very wise and could see the inevitable as well as anyone in the galaxy. “Silly asses,” he muttered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_Asses
by greyb | 2025-09-04 21:04:53+00:00
> I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision. Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience.

While I respect your good intent, I am disappointed to hear this perspective. The increasing burden of homework on children honestly strikes me as the denial of childhood.

I am happy to hear that this is one by-product of the widespread adoption of LLMs. I don't even mind getting rid of phones from the classroom to ensure that school time is productive learning time under these conditions.

Children should absolutely be permitted to live out their childhood. I don't think that time without homework equates to time with electronic brain rot. There is absolutely a middle ground that parents should enforce (like doing chores and engaging in discovery).

Similarly, I think that adolescents can find far more rewarding ways to spend their time outside of homework, whether that's working part-time, participating in volunteer activities, building personal projects or developing soft skills. While there absolutely will be adolescents that spend their time consuming social media and doing nothing productive, it feels problematic to enforce the double standard that teenagers should be required to juggle school, homework, extracurricular activities, basic familial responsibilities, and personal development, all while many adults do nothing productive outside of their work lives and barely meet their own familial responsibilities. Instead of having them do more homework, we should trust them to navigate their time. Parents, mentors, teachers can guide them with a gentle hand.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-09-04 21:04:56+00:00
Neutron bombs are small fusion bombs designed for putting as much energy into the neutrons as possible. Set the bomb off high enough and the blast would not be worse than a big storm but deliver an instant-kill neutron dose.

Turns out to be a horrible idea, though--yes, that's what it does to it's target, but consider farther out. The quick kill dose is several times the kill dose--you likely have a bunch of enemy forces that are dead men walking. And when you put soldiers in hopeless positions they have a tendency to try to take the enemy with them. You just made a bunch of kamikazes.
by gpt5 | 2025-09-04 21:06:08+00:00
I think that both of you are close but missing the real moral debate.

Assume for a moment that doing homework is a positive thing for kids. The debate is whether you should give homework if there are potentially kids whose home environment is not conducive for doing homework at home. I.e. do you choose a path that lifts the average (providing homework), but could put some kids at a disadvantage, or do you aim for the weakest, at the cost of the average?
by mandevil | 2025-09-04 21:06:20+00:00
Most of those tests (almost all since the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963) were underground, where no one could witness them except in photographs. Since the LTBT over 60 years ago, China has done 22 above-ground tests, and France did 50. France stopped atmospheric testing in 1974 (over 50 years ago), China in 1980 (45 years ago).

So the last test at which it is feasible that someone watched with their own eyes would be the Chinese nuclear test at Lop Nor on 16 October 1980, at 04:30:29.67 UTC.

That was a test of the JL-1 missile, which was fired off and then flew all the way through reentry to nuclear detonation. At the time, a lot of people in the West doubted that Chinese missiles were capable of delivering a working warhead (1) so they proved their capability by firing an actually armed SLBM and it detonated in the atmosphere, exactly like it would do against a city.

1: Much like a lot of people discount North Korea's missile delivery today. No one doubts that Israel, France, Russia or the UK have missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads successfully (the US, like China, has actually done a full SLBM launch-to-warhead detonation test, the only two countries to do so- though the US Operation Frigate Bird was before the LTBT). I wonder what it is that connects China and North Korea, and makes Westerners doubt their abilities in ways that they don't doubt the French or the UK?
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-04 21:06:45+00:00
We already have communism to a certain degree in every democratic government. You already accept it willingly. It is just a matter of expanding more government programs on top of sectors being squatted by rent seekers looking to make money without actual contribution to the economy beyond rent seeking from those that do contribute to the economy. The only hard part is that rent seekers tend to have an outsized influence on politics than workers.

Really, what is the utility of a rent seeker? By definition they are a leach on the actual productive elements of an economy. A waste. An inefficiency. I mean, you pay someone to do something, but you have to pay them even more than what might be required because they have this nonworking person sustaining themselves on rent seeking you also need to pay stuck on that back of that worker. That is the situation in so many economic sectors. It leads to a huge loss of money and productivity objectively. It leads to businesses outsourcing labor due to the artificial costs brought on by speculative rent seekers in a given local economy.

My landlord has no job. They collect probably 16k in rent a month from all the units in the small complex in which they raise rents yearly. In terms of investment in the property they once hired a handyman to cauk my sink so probably not even $200 a unit a year in overhead on average. They don’t do renovations or any work between tenants beyond sweeping up the floors and they try and keep as much security deposit for themselves as possible for stupid things. I pay a substantial portion of my income not to upkeep the roof over my head, but to ensure my landlord can have an upper class existence in a high cost of living area while not having to work a job and contribute any labor or ideas.

Does that seem like a good system to you? Enabling freeloaders to leech off the people doing the actual work that makes the world spin, to a point where they are paid far more than most workers? Passing that lifestyle to their nonworking children through inheritance? Essentially creating a hidden nonworking feudal kingdom sustained by the functional economy? One that has outsized political and media influence to ensure the boat is not rocked? Really think about what is actually happening in our economy.