MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freehorse | 2025-10-01 15:32:50+00:00
> It's the best authoring tool we've ever devised.

It is also a very bad co-authoring tool imo unless you have a very tight team and processes of how to use spreadsheets. I would not mind if I was using it alone. But spreadsheets encourage a certain naive "visual" approach to structuring data in them that can become an issue if you want to import the data to actually process it somewhere and your coworkers don't really understand this well.

Spreadsheets can be useful, however:

1. Speaking about excel in particular, localisation issues are an absolute nightmare if you happen to live in the wrong country (commas vs dots for decimal points) especially while importing CSV files (which is already unnecessarily complicated in excel). If somehow you don't notice these issues, you end up with wrong data without understanding there the error came from.

2. If your coworkers do not really understand very well how spreadsheets work, you quickly get to become really frustrated with issues coming up when you have to import a spreadsheet for actual processing. Datetimes with different forms, coloured boxes being meaningful, mixtures of text and numbers and whatnot.

Yes a big part of it is "people problem" rather than "technology problem" but imo spreadsheet technology (excel, google sheets etc) encourages a variety of practices that make it less reliable. If the technology gives you the freedom to mess up too easily, imo it is not just a people problem.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-01 15:32:59+00:00
if I were in charge of a major OS, and I having one of the major app frameworks used on my OS tested on for my annual upgrade

Each program contains its own version of Electron. How is Apple going to know the version of Electron your particular version of your particular app that you installed on one particular date perhaps years in the past works?

n apps in the world × n versions of Electron

The problem isn't Apple. It's that the developer of your program is using an outdated version of Electron, or it's put out an update and you haven't updated.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-01 15:33:03+00:00
It’s tricky because a lot of these spreadsheet “apps” are made when the business is young. Specifically non-tech companies who don’t have IT departments let alone any developers. They hire an MSP, get office, and go to town in Excel.

By the time they do get big enough to hire internal IT, the Rube Goldberg system is entrenched. Then by the time they get big enough again to need an internal dev team because off the shelf SaaS no longer cuts it, it’s too late. It’d take too many dev resources too much time and money to fix the spreadsheets, design databases, and start popping out web apps.

Plus the software development process is too rigid for how fast business requirements can change. The accounting department will just do it in Excel in an afternoon instead of being willing to wait 2+ weeks for the next sprint.

So we end up at a place in big enterprises where only some things get successfully moved to something more robust but there just isn’t enough resources (or will to allocate those resources) to tackle every spreadsheet, and so there are always key parts of the business that will forever run on Excel.
by clickety_clack | 2025-10-01 15:33:08+00:00
For a few months they will, but the innovation, problem solving and creativity that happens in person just can’t be replicated online and it’ll eventually drop off.

I hope you’re not arguing for remote, in a non-tech hub city, but only in the US. If I thought remote individuals were as productive as in person, there would be no such thing as “remote but not too remote”. Canada is cheaper than the US and has American English speakers, if that’s important to you. LATAM is in the US time zones and is cheaper again. If I didn’t care about time zone offset there’s almost unlimited options for offshoring at a fraction of the cost of US labor.
Show HN: Privacy-First AI Document Chat for macOS (Offline RAG)
by irqlevel | 2025-10-01 15:33:08+00:00
I built a privacy-first Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) app for macOS. It lets you search, index, and chat with your local documents directly on your Mac. Everything runs fully offline — no cloud, no tracking.

The app is currently in beta and supports PDF files only. The only time an internet connection is needed is during the initial LLM model download at setup.

Any feedback is very much appreciated, and contributions are welcome!
by crazygringo | 2025-10-01 15:33:21+00:00
There's just something appealing about this period of time before all the modern technological "evils" seemed to take over: capitalism, firearms, factories, etc.

And it's particularly romantic in terms of castles, knights, and clothing.

Of course it's not exactly historically accurate. E.g. firearms were definitely a thing at the time, but the fairs focus on swords, shields, and bows.
by stego-tech | 2025-10-01 15:33:32+00:00
Solid slice of the more extreme side of the autism spectrum for those who can still function within “normal” society, albeit with some assistance and tolerance.

I’m lucky enough to be on the lower/moderate side of things, but man all of this stuff hit home in its own way. Annoying noises (for me it’s the whine of cheap electronics or the chaotic bass of some music genres/upstairs neighbors), the forceful imposition of others in my space (“cameras on!”, scented cleaners, voluntold activities), and the daily task micromanagement to get by (do I call a friend/family member since they’ve texted me three times today about a trivial matter, or do I watch comfort shows and work on a personal project?).

This shit is hard, and adding in the requirement to engage in political maneuvering to succeed and thrive makes it exponentially worse.

I just want to do a good job and go home to live the best life I can. I suspect most autists are the same.
by gamblor956 | 2025-10-01 15:33:56+00:00
declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.

You would think by now that HN would understand that there is a difference between the accountants and the finance guys. The greatest con that Finance achieved is convincing everyone that the accountants were to blame for everything finance did. But the accountants just handle the transactional details. They don't make the financial decisions.

And generally a dying company should have a lawyer in charge because their mandate is to try to negotiate selling off the company or its assets, or to run it through bankruptcy.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-10-01 15:34:02+00:00
Wow. Didn't see that coming. It's snazzy sure, but first take, doesn't convey what it's about really in the logomark. The surrounding label text takes care of that I guess but what is this thing? Wavy.... sort of a heart in the 3.... right, the DNA vibes. What happened to the C?

Ah well, future.
by tpmoney | 2025-10-01 15:34:07+00:00
Even if you bought with Linux in mind, there’s no guarantee what works today works tomorrow. I have a Linux box that had working HDMI audio. A recent set of updates to the audio subsystems now means that when the box boots, the HDMI devices are muted by default. It seems like something changed in the order that things are initialized and the HDMI devices aren’t present when the audio system is initialized so none of your saved settings are re-applied. Every boot now requires manually fiddling with the audio settings to reset where audio should be going and unmute the devices. If my choice when going into an interview is the box that you need to buy specific hardware for and hope that no one re-configured the audio subsystems in the last update or the box that runs an os by a company known to put explicit code paths to recreate a prior edition bug that other software relies on… I might choose the latter too, even if it is windows. Of course I’d also probably choose the latter because there’s a non zero chance the interviewer is going to want to use some conferencing software or website that doesn’t work in Linux regardless of how well matched my hardware is.
by parthdesai | 2025-10-01 15:34:46+00:00
> My other mild criticism is in the discussion on TigerBeetle’s consensus: yes, it seems quite clever and has no other dependencies, but it’s also not trying to deal with large rows. When you can fit 8,190 transactions into a 1 MiB packet that takes a single trip to be delivered, you can probably manage what would be impossible for a traditional RDBMS.

Isn't that the point? They're saying to separate out transactions workload from other workloads. They're not saying they'll replace your OLGP db, you remove transactionally important data into another db.

It's something similar that we see with another db: https://turbopuffer.com/
by freediver | 2025-10-01 15:34:47+00:00
Thank you for your support. What I will say will sound a bit selfish - but I needed this and it happened. More details in my relationship with news in the first two articles linked at https://kite.kagi.com/about

To be fair this is exactly how Kagi Search happened too - many people didn't see a point in a paid search engine in 2018 too, but I and my family needed one and it happened.
by evanelias | 2025-10-01 15:36:22+00:00
At quick glance I already see several things in that prompt are completely incorrect. For example: MariaDB has natively supported sequences for quite some time; for decades all versions of MySQL/MariaDB support "bool" or "boolean" as an alias; the timestamp default value advice is wrong as any arbitrary expression can be used; etc.

These are all easily testable in Docker containers. There's a concerning lack of attention to detail here, or perhaps the prompt itself was also created using AI and it bakes in hallucinations from the get-go.

As for the AGPL: in ChartDB's previous Show HN (only 6 weeks ago), I asked how they were running an enhanced paid SaaS when they had so many external contributions prior to adopting a CLA, and I did not receive a response [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972986
by tptacek | 2025-10-01 15:37:12+00:00
Wholeheartedly recommend it, just remember we're not the core market for it (that's high school students, though the curricula goes all the way through the normal college math sequence).

Minutes later

In case I've spooked anyone, they have an adult course series (Foundations I, II, and III) that's accelerated by trimming out all the material their authors believe are important only for things like school placement exams; the modal adult Math Academy person is doing I, II, and III as a leadup to their Math for Machine Learning course, which is linear algebra and multivariable calc.

I think it's one of the three most mindblowing learning resources I've ever used. One of the other three: Lingua Latina Familia Romana. In both cases, I have the uncanny certainty that I am operating at the limit of my ability to acquire and retain new information, which is a fun place to be.
by amszmidt | 2025-10-01 15:37:12+00:00
MIT System 99 was made after the first LMI release, which was based on MIT System 98 (and even slightly older releases) - which removed the flag bit. See the release notes here https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/sys-msg/sys98-msg.html

programs.

] Pointer Fields Now 25 Bits; Flag Bit Gone. Each typed data word in Lisp machine memory used to have one bit called the "flag bit" which was not considered part of the contents of the word. This is no longer so. There is no longer a flag bit; instead, the pointer field

of the word is one bit larger, making it 25 bits in all.

This extra bit extends the range of integers that can be represented without allocation of storage, and also extends the precision of small-floats by one bit. On the Lambda processor, the maximum size of virtual memory is doubled. This is the primary reason for the change. Unfortunately, the CADR mapping hardware is not able to use the extra bit as an address bit, so the maximum virtual memory size on a CADR is unchanged. The functions %24-BIT-PLUS, %24-BIT-DIFFERENCE and %24-BIT-TIMES still produce only 24 bits of result. If you wish to have a result the full size of the pointer field, however wide that is, you should use the functions %POINTER-DIFFERENCE and %POINTER-TIMES (the last is new), and %MAKE-POINTER-OFFSET with a first argument of DTP-FIX to do addition. The functions %FLOAT-DOUBLE, %DIVIDE-DOUBLE, %REMAINDER-DOUBLE and %MULTIPLY-FRACTIONS use the full width of the pointer field. The values returned by SXHASH have not changed! They are always positive

fixnums less than 2*23.
by unclad5968 | 2025-10-01 15:37:22+00:00
I can't speak for everyone, but for myself the scenarios in this simulator basically don't affect my life at all. Annoying radio ad, "That's annoying". People team requests my participation at some event, "No thanks". Don't want to go to work, "oh well". If someone suggested we get coffee I'd be excited. I've never even considered not taking meds I've been prescribed. Other things seem normal to me. I put on ANC headphones at my office job all the time.

While going through the simulator, I was shocked with the response to some choices and situations. I was not aware that these things were so disruptive to some people.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-01 15:38:08+00:00
It's a term i used to explain that in 'thinking' mode LLMs will read their own output and call out things like incorrect math statements before posting to the user.

Now you probably want a debate about the term 'thinking' mode but i cbf with that. It's pretty clear what was meant and semantic arguments suck. Don't do that.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-01 15:38:11+00:00
Where do you that sentiment from?

The sentiment is that when the Government picks winners then they also remove other companies from the market. The lack of competition causes that winner to stagnate to the point where they can only compete in a market with no competition.

It's not obvious that the US needs _those_ mines. What the USG should be doing is saying that Lithium is an essential mineral and accepting proposals from _any_ company about how much money they need to produce x KG of refined lithium and then going through those proposals for feasibility and then awarding contracts to the cheapest feasible ones. Instead, the USG has just straight up picked a winner and thrown money to them.

Keep in mind that Lithium Americas is "North American" (Canadian) so if anything its evidence of American unexceptionalism ...
by duothrowaway99 | 2025-10-01 15:38:13+00:00
Already mentioned elsewhere, but take a look at https://www.goethe.de/en/spr/kur.html , search for "Goethe Institut" on Google Maps, consider working with someone from https://www.italki.com/en/teachers/german , search for "learn german" on YouTube, etc.

Babbel was mentioned a few times, Pimsleur as well (they're different companies/methods), https://www.languagetransfer.org/ ...

Mix and match to find what works for you - what seems fun and motivating.

Oh, and consider informal irl meetings as well - https://www.meetup.com/topics/german/ (depending where you live ofc)
by lionkor | 2025-10-01 15:38:19+00:00
Slightly off-topic, but:

The fact that go "lifts" the deferred statement out of the block is just another reason in the long list of reasons that go shouldn't exist.

Not only is there no protection against data-races (in a language all about multithreading), basically no static checking for safety, allocation and initialization is easy to mess up, but also defer just doesn't work as it does in C++, Rust, Zig, and any other language that implements similar semantics.

What a joke.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-01 15:38:25+00:00
Last weekend I went to my local ren faire. What a fantastic time. If you havent been to one before, definitely go. At mine, I'd say 70% of people are in a costume of some kind. 95% of the costumes were period correct or related.

I went in star trek blue. My favourite response a lady tells me that I'm violating the temporal prime directive for being in uniform. That was hilarious!

Note, I was literally the only person dressed in star trek lol.
by 1-more | 2025-10-01 15:38:37+00:00
At my old gig, all of our content generation was in Google sheets or Airtable.

Anything we made would have _never_ been as good a UI and would have stopped us from being able to publish new content. The other nice thing about them is you can scale the integration effort. You can download a sheet from GS as a CSV then upload that in an admin page and you can probably ship that feature today. A tiny bit more effort and you can add a 3rd dimension to the data by finding an XSLX library and exporting the page as an Excel workbook. Eventually you can do something with their API where you just click "reload data from the master sheet" and you can generate all the data you need to preview the changes on the frontend. That's what our Airtable integration looked like. Airtable was very "pull this in via API" native and had a better way of expressing higher dimensional data in cells which matched nicely with Postgres storing arrays in cells.
by vimota | 2025-10-01 15:38:45+00:00
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The world doesn't need another ERP. CoPlane is building the Agentic Orchestration platform that enables enterprises to orchestrate intelligent processes across their existing systems. Founded by ex-Stripe/Segment product and tech leads, we're changing how businesses operate their backoffice - helping them scale intelligence not headcount.

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by kulkarnikedar | 2025-10-01 15:38:52+00:00
Strum AI | Founding/Lead Engineer | https://www.linkedin.com/company/strum-ai/

At Strum, we're reimagining technology that powers global supply chain using a fresh AI-first approach. Most supply chains are still stuck with Excel or enterprise tools that take months (and $MM) to adopt. Our mission is to lower that barrier — making it possible for any business, big or small, to access modern forecasting, inventory, and planning solutions in days, not months. We’re on our journey to democratizing supply chain technology. As our first engineer, you’ll be working with the founders (former Supply chain/tech directors at Amazon who have built key components of Amazon's supply chain) to develop the core product from the grounds up (involves application of LLMs, deep learning, and optimization). If you have mid to senior level experience in software development, have built SaaS applications, understand ML-Engineering, and love building 0->1 products, we would love to talk to you. Please reach out to us at: careers@strum-ai.com.

Location negotiable.
by _7acn | 2025-10-01 15:38:57+00:00
Here you're talking about shallow depth of field which is desirable for portraits. But show me a camera that will have in JPG the dynamic range that you have in a smartphone by default? Show me a camera that will have as LARGE depth of field as smartphones have thanks to their small sensor.

These are all pros and cons depending on the scenario, but a phone has one advantage - it's small and you have it always with you.
by unshavedyak | 2025-10-01 15:39:25+00:00
> Countless people in comments say this, but other people fail to see evidence of that in the wild. As has been said in response to this point many times in the past: Where's the open source renaissance that should be happening right now? Where are the actual, in-use dependencies and libraries that are being developed by AI?

The thing that this comment misses, imo, is that LLMs are not always enabling people who previously couldn't create value to create value. In fact i think they are likely to cause some people who created value previously to create even less value!

However that's not mutually exclusive with enabling others to create more value than they did previously. Is it a net gain for society? Currently I'd bet not, by a large margin. However is it a net gain for some individual users of LLMs? I suspect yes.

LLMs are a powerful tool for the right job, and as time goes on the "right job" keeps expanding to more territory. The problem is it's a tool that takes a keen eye to analyze and train on. It's not easy to use for reliable output. It's currently a multiplier for those willing to use it on the right jobs and with the right training (reviews, suspicion, etc).
by observationist | 2025-10-01 15:39:32+00:00
Depends on the confidence and appetite for risk of the leadership, what they're instructed to do by boards, what they think they can or should get away with. If it's a hesitant political creature who wants to hide weakness it's going to be much different outcome than a strong leader with a principled stance, like Costa Rica.

Lots of shitty behavior is grounded in what weak people imagine other people will think of them, and them bending over backwards to hide and cover up and obfuscate. Those are the ones that pay ransomware gangs, and they're also the ones that don't plan ahead and prepare responsibly.
by tptacek | 2025-10-01 15:39:33+00:00
In my experience, it's 100%. Not 95%, not 99%. Unless GPT5 (and O4-mini) were colluding with Math Academy behind the scenes specifically to be wrong about something, it just doesn't get any of this content wrong.

And keep in mind, what it's getting right is trickier than just answering Calc I questions: it's taking an answer I give it, calculating the correct answer itself, selecting its answer over mine, and then spotting where I e.g. forgot to check the domain of a variable inside a log.
by PlantingSpace | 2025-10-01 15:39:53+00:00
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We’re building an AI system for analysts and scientists, based on a fundamentally new approach to reasoning and knowledge representation. Our approach differs from LLMs in that we compose algorithms symbolically to represent complex knowledge, and perform probabilistic computations. This enables the AI-driven application of statistical models to different problems, while providing the user with a verifiable reasoning path, and an assessment of the uncertainty in each answer. We are developing applications for analysis and research in domains such as Finance, Strategy Consulting, Engineering, Material Sciences, and more.

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by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-01 15:39:55+00:00
The caveat is that the hardware constraints have fundamentally changed, so database architectures from 30 years ago are effectively incapable of properly using modern hardware environments.

Databases have not been bottlenecked on storage bandwidth in a long time but most databases are designed as if this was still the case. Optimizing for memory bandwidth, the current bottleneck, leads to substantially different architectures than are commonly deployed.