MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geeknonerd | 2025-09-01 13:28:53+00:00
I built *SmartCSV*, a free web tool that converts CSV files to Excel (.xlsx) with AI-powered format detection — *all processing runs locally in your browser, no uploads, no account required*.

What it does

* Drag & drop or browse CSV/TSV files and convert them to Excel (.xlsx) instantly. * Batch processing: convert up to 50 files at once; supports files up to 100MB each. * Smart detection: AI automatically detects encoding (UTF-8, GBK, etc.), delimiters (comma/semicolon/tab/pipe), and column data types with >95% accuracy. * Customizable settings: include/exclude headers, trim whitespace, preserve leading zeros, date/number formats, and preview before download. * Export-ready: handles Excel row limits, preserves formatting where possible, and offers scaled previews for large datasets. * Works on desktop & mobile, PWA-friendly, and uses WebGL / WASM / Web Workers for performance.

Why this might be interesting

* *Privacy-first:* your CSV never leaves your device — zero server upload or storage. * *Fast & practical:* useful for analysts, devs, accountants, and product teams who need reliable conversions without manual cleanup. * *No friction:* no registration, no watermarks, no hidden costs — it’s free to use.

Technical & UX highlights

* Client-side processing (local by default) with optimized chunking for large files so the UI remains responsive. * Intelligent pipeline: encoding detection → delimiter sniffing → type inference → preview → xlsx generation. * Accessibility & mobile-first UI, virtualized preview for huge files, and clear user guidance through a 5-step conversion flow.

How to try

1. Go to `https://csvtoexcel.org` 2. Drag & drop your CSV(s) or click “Upload” 3. Review the AI-detected settings (encoding, delimiter, types) and adjust if needed 4. Click “Convert” and download the generated .xlsx files
by RianAtheer | 2025-09-01 13:29:27+00:00
I’m not surprised. AI tools have become such a huge time saver. I use them a lot too, but I still double check everything to keep quality high. I read an article on finance gossips called “The Rise of AI in Banking: Friend or Foe”, and it really put this into perspective. AI’s growth in finance shows how quickly it is reshaping industries, so seeing devs rely on AI for half their code makes total sense. Like in banking, it’s not about replacing humans but creating smarter systems, as long as we manage trust, ethics, and transparency, it’s a tool to level us up, not phase us out.
by jug | 2025-09-01 13:29:55+00:00
Yeah. The oldest known gag is a Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap"

You also have another joke from 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? Sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile - and urge the pharaoh to go fishing."
by zxcvbn4038 | 2025-09-01 13:30:03+00:00
Some NCR cash registers used this trick: they shipped with all the hardware included, but jumper blocks determined what percentage of the hardware the customer had paid for. As the customer’s business grew, they could purchase additional capacity, and an NCR service technician would visit to adjust the jumpers, instantly unlocking 25% more capacity. The actual limits were software-based; the jumper block was only read at startup or when a special code was entered on one of the terminals, and the software limits would adjust accordingly.
by codingdave | 2025-09-01 13:30:03+00:00
> we glorify bootcamps that promise anyone can become a developer in weeks. We worship open source, working nights and weekends “to help the community,”

We do? I was under the impression that most devs were disappointed in the result of bootcamps. And there are bootcamps that are simply scams. We do like open source, but the number of people working nights and weekends on it is quite small.

You are just seeing the natural progression of knowledge. Standing on the shoulders of giants, etc. Back in the 90s, you could have a 7 figure ARR startup just by doing one basic CRUD app and putting it online. Now, people can do that as a learning exercise within a few days of starting learning how to code, and that was even before AI. The tools are better, libraries exist for most common needs, coding and DevOps practices have evolved, access to documentation and tutorials is incredible, and we are working at higher and higher levels of abstraction.

It is not because we are glorifying mediocrity. On the contrary, we have spent decades striving quite hard to increase everyone's skills and communicate better ways of doing things. And we succeeded. If you can find any, go look at code and practices from the early 2000s and you will see just how much the general quality of work has increased.

As a result of all the support from each other, more people can do the work now. Yes, it decreases salaries, but we've been living in an insane compensation bubble for a long time.
by okasaki | 2025-09-01 13:30:30+00:00
So on the site itself it says

Agile prices can spike up to 100 p/kWh any time - although a typical household in Winter '22-'23 paid around 35 p/kWh average.

so that's even more than I'm paying. This seems to only make sense if you have some sort of intelligent battery system.
by jibal | 2025-09-01 13:31:36+00:00
This comment and your other comments are simply wrong and full of nonsense. Endgame table generators are pure solvers ... given enough time, they can solve chess from the initial position. But the amount of time is longer than the time until the heat death of the universe, and to record the best-play game tree--without which a solution isn't useful--would take more material than there is in the universe.
by mrbombastic | 2025-09-01 13:31:41+00:00
I am going to start sounding like a dinosaur but I really hate this dev tendency to trash the old way as soon as the new way comes out. I am seeing it with all the devs advocating for mise over asdf, and a year ago they were all singing asdf’s praises. I think we can advocate for better while still thanking those we are building upon. Long winded way of saying: thanks to the cocoapods maintainers, you made iOS dev better for a lot of people.
by reaperducer | 2025-09-01 13:31:54+00:00
What’s the alternative? The bank sending out a debit card to anyone who calls up and says “I’m @kristov, trust me…”

Are you under the impression that this wasn't a solved problem for the half-century before "apps?"

Yes, there was some tiny fraction of fraud, but it's not like adding all these layers upon layers of technology has fixed anything. The difference is that instead of getting ripped off by one of the people in your own town, anyone anywhere on the planet can rip you off now.
by xyzelement | 2025-09-01 13:32:44+00:00
I don't know if you are right about things "not experienced by anyone"

If anything, men we owe much to like Darwin, Newton and Lematire were religiously trained and lived religious lives - their belief and experience is vastly different from yours (projecting an atheist belief system on you based on your comment) and you have no way to relate to it. But the fact that our greatest advanced came from minds running that operating system is not something you can waive away.
Show HN: I hated making Anki cards on mobile, so I built a Telegram bot for it
by saint_angels | 2025-09-01 13:33:59+00:00
I've used Anki for years, first for studying Chinese and now for German. Previously, I would never create flashcards on the go, because it's so cumbersome on the mobile Anki app. Instead I would send words to myself on telegram, and then process them at home.

So I got tired of it, and built a telegram bot for creating German flashcards on the go. No languages except German are supported for now.

How it works: - You send a German word or a sentence to the bot. - It uses an LLM to automatically generate a flashcard, complete with a mnemonic, translation, etc. - You customize and save the card in the chat. - And then export your collected cards directly as an Anki Package (.apkg) file for easy import.

Pricing: To cover the LLM API costs and to make the project sustainable, it's $4.99/month after the first 30 cards.

If this sounds useful, check it out and tell me what you think!
by n4r9 | 2025-09-01 13:36:03+00:00
In which case he's misusing the term "miasma", oversimplifying modern medicine by labelling the entire practice as "germ theory", and presenting a false balance on the issue. And it's kinda dangerous to dog-whistle like that; vaccines have saved far more lives than simple nutrition and healthy living would be able to replace. We've seen the outcome of RFK spewing misinformation about the measles vaccine in Samoa. People suffer and die.
by Luker88 | 2025-09-01 13:36:31+00:00
So many people paraphrasing Stallman and GPL, and so few realizing that without legal enforcement these problems will keep happening over and over again.

Yet there is more BSD and MIT code than ever.

Android is full of open source stuff. GPL3 would have prevented this. We've all been bamboozled and we are starting to realize it.

I wonder if any project will start switching license. Unlikely, but one can dream.
by sunshine-o | 2025-09-01 13:37:21+00:00
> I think there's a bunch of factors to why yubi have upped their prices - not least, waiting for competition in their form factor & not seeing any emerge (token2 & nitrokey are much bulkier)

It is true about the size.

Sill I do not understand the price difference between 5C Nano [0] and the PIN+ Mini-C [1]. 3 to 4 times more expensive depending on the currency.

- [0] https://www.yubico.com/pt/product/yubikey-5-series/yubikey-5...

- [1] https://www.token2.com/shop/product/pin-mini-c-release3-1-fi...
by imtringued | 2025-09-01 13:37:33+00:00
What do you mean by "no context can leak into it"? Do you mean it shouldn't export transitive imports?

As in `#include <vector>` also performs `#include <iterator>` but `import vector` would only import vector, requiring you to `import iterator`, if you wanted to assign `vec.begin()` to a variable?

Or is it more like it shouldn't matter in which order you do an import and that preprocessor directives in an importing file shouldn't affect the imported file?
by alluro2 | 2025-09-01 13:38:47+00:00
I finally got to do something more extensive and serious with Claude Code / Gemini. It's basically a more complex CRUD app for multiple data entities, with some additional functionality.

I'm hoping that sharing my experience, amongst all others, can: A) help someone understand more / set their expectations B) get someone to point out how to do it better

On one hand, I managed, in 10 days, to get the amount of functionality would take ~2 months of coding "by hand". If I started the same project now - after learning, realising what works and not, and adapting - it would probably be possible in 5. The amount done was incredible - and it's working.

On the other hand:

- you need to be already very experienced in knowing how things should be built well, how they need to work together, and what is a good way to organize the user interface for the functionality

- you then need to have some practical experience with LLMs to know the limitations, and guide it through the above gradually, with proper level of detail provided and iteration. Which takes attention and process and time - it won't be a couple of sentences and hitting enter a couple of times, no matter how smart your prompts are

- otherwise, if you didn't think it through and planned it first, and did it with consideration of LLM itself, and you just give it high level requirements for an app with multiple functionalities - you'll just get a mess. You can try and improve your prompts over and over, and you'll get a different kind of mess every time, but mess nevertheless

- even with doing all of the above, you'll get a very very mediocre result in terms of "feeling of quality" - thoughtfulness of design, how information is laid out and things are organised - UX and polish. It might be more than fine for a lot of use-cases, but if you're building something that people need to use productively every day, it's not passable...

- the problem is that, at least in my experience, you can't get it to high level with LLM in an automated way - you still need to craft it meticulously. And doing that will require manually tearing down a lot of what LLM generated. And that way you'll still end up with something at least a bit compromised, and messy when it comes to code

In summary, it's amazing how far it's come and how much you can do quickly - but if you need quality, there's no going around it, you still need most of the effort and time do invest in it. Considering both together, I think it's still a great position to be in currently for people who can provide that needed level of quality - sometimes you can do things very easily and quickly and sometimes you do your proud work with a bit of assistance along the way.

I'm not sure until when that will work, or what happens later, or how does current state already bodes for less experienced people...
Show HN: Swimming in Tech Debt
by loumf | 2025-09-01 13:38:49+00:00
This is the first half of my book, “Swimming in Tech Debt”. It is available at a pre-launch sale price of $0.99 (https://loufranco.com/tech-debt-book).

I have been working on it since January 2024. It is based on some posts in my blog, but expands on my ideas quite a bit.

In September 2024, excerpts appeared in Gergely Orosz’s Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, which helped me get a lot of feedback that expanded the book from my initial idea. This half is about what I expected to do before that —- the rest of the book goes into team and CTO practices.
by alanbernstein | 2025-09-01 13:39:51+00:00
The behavior I'm imagining is: someone sends me a link to a song, provided by their music service of choice, which I can't use. I click the link, then my OS tries to open that resource in my preferred music player. I haven't thought about what happens if that doesn't work (not available on the service for example).

You're probably right that it would end up being more clunky and broken.

But I think a song is much closer to a resource (like a hyperlink to a website), than to a contact address (like a mailto link).

This is actually a regular problem for me, and I solved it by backing up my messages, then using a script to scan them for music URLs, and create a playlist on my music service of choice. It felt like a pretty silly thing to create.
by pkphilip | 2025-09-01 13:40:03+00:00
What is a "general purpose" computer? who decides what is "general" or not? what can you not do in a mobile phone which you cannot do on a regular desktop / laptop computer? If anything, a mobile phone has MORE capabilities - such as GPS, the gyro etc. So it is a superset of features of a "general" computer like a desktop or a laptop and not a subset of features making it a "non-general" limited computer.
JDeploy 5.0: Deploy Java Desktop Apps to ARM64 Windows and Linux with One Click
by shannah78 | 2025-09-01 13:40:09+00:00
We just released jDeploy 5.0, which adds native ARM64 support for Windows and Linux Java desktop applications.

Previously, if you wanted to deploy a Java desktop app to ARM64 devices (Surface Pro X, Raspberry Pi, etc.), you needed separate build environments and complex toolchains. Now it's literally checking a box in the GUI.

Key improvements:

- Native ARM64 builds for Windows and Linux (joining existing macOS ARM64 support)

- AI setup through Claude Code integration - just say "Setup jDeploy for me"

- Customizable download pages to control which platforms you offer

- Cross-platform permissions system (macOS implemented, Windows/Linux coming)

Try the JavaFX Ensemble demo app with new Windows and Linux ARM64 download links: https://www.jdeploy.com/~jdeploy-demo-javafx-ensemble?preview=1

If you have a minute and are running Linux or Windows on ARM64, please try out some of the demos. Any feedback is appreciated.

Full details: https://www.jdeploy.com/docs/releases/5.0/release-notes.html

Website: https://www.jdeploy.com
by pheelicks | 2025-09-01 13:41:16+00:00
This agrees with my experience on a project I’ve been working on this year, in particular related to porting the code. I’ve developed a strategy that I’m calling “Polyglot Mirroring” where the code is written in multiple languages at once, with LLMs handling the mirroring.

I actually made a Ask HN about it just today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45091607 but for some reason the HN algorithm never even showed it on the Ask page :/
I built a tool to simplify visa application documents – would love your feedback
by errric-vd | 2025-09-01 13:41:48+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently launched visadocs.ai, a small project that helps travelers generate professional visa application documents like itineraries and accommodation plans.

It came out of my own frustrations preparing visa applications — piecing together flights, hotels, and day-to-day plans was time-consuming and often felt like busywork. The tool automates a lot of that: you enter your trip details, and it generates a ready-to-use PDF in minutes.

I’m a solo founder and built this end-to-end (design, front-end, back-end, deployment). The technical stack is React + Vite for the front end, Cloudflare Pages/Workers for hosting, D1 for the database, and Stripe for payments. I've got more of a Product Designer background (been working in the industry for the past 10 years) so there was a bit of a learning curve and I might have not build this in the best way possible (especially on the back-end).

I’d love your thoughts on a couple of things:

For those who travel often, do you see value in this type of tool?

Are there obvious use cases or pain points I might be overlooking?

Any red flags you see with how this might scale (or not)?

Thanks in advance — I’d really appreciate any feedback from this community
by ticklyjunk | 2025-09-01 13:42:03+00:00
We are using deepspace storage for this. We can get/put objects into the cloud as one of our target volumes. It works as an auto archive writing anything in the fs that is over 90 to a compressed object and leaving behind a stub. You can point Harbor (or other tools like Mimir/Loki ) to a DeepSpace endpoint which looks like a standard S3 target. Then add policies and the files get moved, replicated, versioned to tape, cloud, disk array in the background. The users just interact with the file system as usual and admins have a UI with a catalog which shows where everything actually is.
by fxtentacle | 2025-09-01 13:42:10+00:00
"Test 5: DR_SWAP always rejected"

That means the monitor tries to change its own role from USB host (which it defaulted to because it's the power source) to USB gadget. And the Switch rejects the request because it sees itself as the USB gadget (for example to exchange data when you connect it to a PC).

The article itself also says "Our monitoring of the interactions with the USB-C monitor shows that the negotiation does not even get to the point of the Vendor Defined Messages(VDM)" so I see no hint of foul play by Nintendo. (And why would they? They are not in the business of selling USB monitors.)

My guess would be that the connection failure is due to a firmware bug in the monitor. But I am also heavily biased here because my last Asus screen had A LOT of firmware issues.
by giantg2 | 2025-09-01 13:42:12+00:00
I don't think bootcamps are glorified, but rather looked down on.

I don't think I know anyone who has such a big ego as to say coding is easy. Sure, hello world is easy but that's not representative of coding overall.

I'm not seeing a flood of under qualified people joining the profession... domestically at least. The group with the highest rates of underperforming people I have encountered have been from contracting companies based in India. Even then, it's not super high in general but more how the company tended to switch from their A team players from initial on-boarding to their B team players for ongoing project work.

The value/pay decline hasn't really happened yet. I think it might really happen in the nenxt few years. We are seeing higher unemployment but we are still seeing high pay for the remaining positions. The companies are being picky about who they hire and still want the "best", or they just outsource.
by fsflover | 2025-09-01 13:43:28+00:00
> It isn't hard to understand what was meant.

At least two independent people understood you in the same way. So just dismissing it isn't productive.

> PITA. If you sandbox apps you have to restrict what they can access. There is no way around this.

This has nothing to do with freedom though.

> You will need to give it access at least to your file-system.

On Qubes, you copy-paste with ctrl+shift+v/c and nothing is shared unless you actively do it yourself. It becomes a habit very quickly (my daily driver). Sharing files is a bit harder (you send them from VM to VM), but it's not as hard as you want it to look.
by xandrius | 2025-09-01 13:43:29+00:00
But that's no the point here, a more similar point is to have the scuba diving manufacturer imposing which body of water you can use the device in.

And if you decide to give the device a try in your own swimming pool or a random spot you'd like to explore, the device won't work and you might be banned from using it elsewhere. Would that make any sense?
by _heimdall | 2025-09-01 13:43:34+00:00
That can be one aspect of it, though I would argue that doesn't mean open standards are always better for competition.

I think you're also assuming the only competition that matters is long term. In the short term the potential for locking users into your own ecosystem can incentivize short term competition.

Long term competition seems like a good goal, but that assumption wasn't part of it at the beginning of this chain.
Lessons learned building a service worker-first web app: Batching, OCC, and test
by localnerve | 2025-09-01 13:43:56+00:00
After working on offline-first web applications, I put together a reference implementation that demonstrates some architectural patterns I wish I'd had examples of earlier:

The interesting challenges: - How do you handle data mutations when users go offline mid-session? - What's a good strategy for batching API calls without losing user changes? - How do you test service worker behavior reliably? - How do you resolve conflicts when multiple users edit the same data offline?

This isn't a framework - it's more like a documented case study with working code. The README explains the architecture decisions and tradeoffs.

https://github.com/localnerve/jam-build

Looking forward to comments on the approaches I took or alternative patterns others have used.
by physicsguy | 2025-09-01 13:44:46+00:00
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose is a great book about the expedition. I picked it up on a trip to the US and really enjoyed it.

One of my favourite things I didn't know was that they kept getting to new 'untouched' villages of Native Americans who would come out to trade and knew perfectly well that white people existed as they'd been visited for years by various fur traders.