MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JadBelcaid | 2025-10-15 14:25:19+00:00
Hey everyone,

Recently I was browsing Google to check for tools that would allow me to open parquet files in Excel and to my surprise, they were almost none.

So the only options were to either have to convert to CSV (and lose half your structure), or use heavy enterprise tools that cost a fortune and take forever to set up.

So seeing as though no one made a simple version of this type of tool, I decided to do it.

So I decided to build my own solution, something simple, fast, and affordable.

Essentially, if you're interested in Parquet files and Excel, it will allow you to:

Opens Parquet files directly in Excel

Lets you explore, filter, and edit data seamlessly

Saves back to Parquet (no conversion, no mess)

Keeps the original schema and data types intact

Make sure to check it out: https://parquetpowertools.com/
Ask HN: Who is working on AI-powered glasses for the visually impaired?
by jimkri | 2025-10-15 14:25:40+00:00
I've been thinking about the potential for AI, particularly with wearables, to assist the visually impaired. It's one of those applications that feels transformative, moving beyond simple accessibility features to providing genuine environmental awareness.

Instead of just one-off examples, consider the range of daily challenges that could be solved:

- At Home: The ability to simply ask, "Where did I leave my keys?" and get a response like, "They're on the kitchen counter, next to the coffee maker."

- Urban Navigation: Navigating a city and being warned in real-time: "The sidewalk ahead is closed for construction. The safest alternative is to use the crosswalk 50 feet ahead to your left to cross the street."

- Dynamic Environments: Decoding a chaotic, busy street: "You're approaching the curb. The pedestrian signal is still red. A bicyclist is approaching quickly from your right."

This is far beyond simple object detection (person, car, tree). It requires genuine, real-time spatial and situational understanding—a true co-pilot for navigating the physical world.

Who is working on this?

-- Here is a video that motivated me and had me thinking of ideas to help those who could benefit from it.

https://youtube.com/shorts/mu5RK1wpPt4?si=B1UO-VmXIy1fLsdp
by thfuran | 2025-10-15 14:25:48+00:00
>Laptops and desktops are for work,

But that's mostly email, SaaS, web meetings, and spreadsheets. Most people have never in their lives run "cargo build" or launched Cyberpunk 2077. The actual market for sustained high local CPU/GPU compute is pretty small compared to the market for minimal load with the occasional small burst, and the latter works pretty well with poor cooling solutions.
by czbond | 2025-10-15 14:26:04+00:00
The Pro sales page says their RAM is unified, which is more efficient than traditional. Anyone have a concept by how much more efficient unified RAM performs vs RAM?

Their sales copy for reference:

"M-series chips include unified memory, which is more efficient than traditional RAM. This single pool of high-performance memory allows apps to efficiently share data between the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.... This means you can do more with unified memory than you could with the same amount of traditional RAM."
by anastasija2504 | 2025-10-15 14:26:19+00:00
What if your AI assistant could juggle flights, messages, and security checks all at once? Filip Srnec showed it’s possible. At Infobip Shift in Zadar, Principal Engineer Filip Srnec pulled back the curtain on a crucial piece of this puzzle: Infobip’s MCP servers, a solution designed to give AI agents “communication superpowers.”

Imagine an AI agent tasked with booking a flight, informing the user of the details, and setting up a 2FA notification for their departure. This isn’t science fiction anymore.

For such an agent to succeed, it must interact with airline APIs, messaging platforms, and potentially a customer data platform. The challenge, as Filip highlighted, is standardizing these interactions – creating a universal language that allows AI to “speak” with the tools it needs.
by asnyder | 2025-10-15 14:26:33+00:00
#freenode was generally the main IRC node I used with all the good dev rooms.

Seems to still be chugging along. You can even join directly via their web-client: https://freenode.net.

Personally I still use pidgin.im to connect to all the relevant #freenode goodness. Seems people forget it still works and is pretty great even all these years later :).
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-15 14:26:41+00:00
I also have the Viture Pros. They are awesome for airplane/hotel use. Not great as second monitors, as you say optically they aren't perfect and text makes that show a bit more... but if you hook up a steamdeck or want to watch Netflix on the go it's great!

Don't get me wrong, they work as a monitor in a pinch on a plane when you need privacy it's just not going to ever replace a real monitor for you.
by exabrial | 2025-10-15 14:26:51+00:00
Apple's software division has lost their way. They've done nothing but add flashy features and move buttons around, deprecating things and breaking backwards compatibility (yeah, 32bit has been awhile now, but alas), meanwhile retreating on stability.

Snow Leopard still remains the company's crown achievement. 0 bloatware, 0 "mobile features on desktop" (wtf is this even a thing?), tuned for absolute speed and stability.
by dismalaf | 2025-10-15 14:27:31+00:00
> It is in Israel, where there is an apartheid rule

Are you thick? Israel literally has Arab politicians and political parties, and 2 million Arabs living in Israel proper.

> Ethnonationalism means you believe in one ethnicity being the only rightful cirizens of your state, superior to other ethnicities that live there.

No, you're making up your own definition. Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_nationalism

While occasionally it means other ethnicities are second class citizens (if you want to use Jews as an example they were kicked out of a ton of Arab countries where they had lived for centuries) that's far from the rule.

> Every country on earth has more than one ethnicity loving there

I mean, if a single person from another ethnicity lives there than this is true I guess.

An absolute ton of countries are named after and defined by the majority ethnic group. Literally most in Asia, a bunch in Africa (and in the rest you have ethnic strife), most in Europe. Again, the places this isn't true is mainly places that were defined by colonialism. Name a country, either they're an ethnostate or a colonial remnant.
by dathinab | 2025-10-15 14:27:40+00:00
I mean positive sentiment between people they worked with might literally have gotten them the job (as they most likely worked with people which have influence on this hiring decision during their time as lobbyist. And a huge part of lobby work is to create positive personal connections with people from the other side through whatever mean is possible which doesn't count as bribe. You could say positive personal sentiment is the WD40(lubricant) of smooth manipulation of political outcomes)
by yalogin | 2025-10-15 14:27:46+00:00
It feels like apple is “ a square peg in a round hole” when it comes to AI - atleast for now.

They are not the hardware provider like nvidia, they don’t do the software and services like OpenAI or even Microsoft/oracle. So they are struggling to find a foothold here. I am sure they are working on a lot of things but the only way to showcase them is through their phone which ironically enough feels like not the best path for apple.

Apple’s best option is to put llms locally on the phone and claim privacy (which is true) but they may end up in the same Siri vs others situation, where Siri always is the dumber one.

This is interesting to see how it plays out
by butlike | 2025-10-15 14:27:55+00:00
I think it's probably a play to get you to upgrade for the new GPU computational power. I _do_ think that what we're seeing (and marketed as AI) will be the future, but I don't think it will look like what we're seeing now. Whatever that future holds will require the upgraded capabilities of these new GPU architectures, and this being a reason for the subtle nudge to upgrade from Apple makes sense to me.

It feels very much like how I imagine someone living in the late 1800's might have felt. The advent of electricity, the advent of cars, but can't predict airplanes, even though they're right around the corner and they'll have likely seen them in their lifetime.
by kkukshtel | 2025-10-15 14:28:03+00:00
(DISCO ELYSIUM SPOILERS BELOW)

One of the most poignant moments in Disco Elysium is near the very end when you encounter a very elusive crypid/mythic beast.

The moment is treated with a lot of care and consideration, and the conversation itself is, I think, transcendent and some of the best writing in games (or any media) ever.

The line that sticks with me most is when the cryptid says:

"The moral of our encounter is: I am a relatively median lifeform -- while it is you who are total, extreme madness. A volatile simian nervous system, ominously new to the planet. The pale, too, came with you. No one remembers it before you. The cnidarians do not, the radially symmetricals do not. There is an almost unanimous agreement between the birds and the plants that you are going to destroy us all."

It's easy to see this reflected in nature in the real world. All animals and life seem to be aware and accommodating of each other, but humans are cut out from that communication. Everything runs from us, we are not part of the conversation. We are the exclusion, the anomaly.

I think to realize this deeply inside of yourself is a big moment of growth, to see that we exist in a world that was around long before us and will be around long after us.
by us-merul | 2025-10-15 14:28:11+00:00
"Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of." -- A pretty bleak, and also accurate, observation of humanity. I have to hope that the alternative sentence encompassing all of the good can lead to some balance.
by MichealCodes | 2025-10-15 14:28:12+00:00
Adds hours of battery life to the expense of making your microphone input completely inaudible due to throttling if you background the tab it's running on.

On iOS you cannot even keep a web app running in the background. The second they mutlitask, even with an audio/microphone active, Apple kills it. Are they truly adding battery life or are they cheating by creating restrictions that prevent apps from working?

Being able to conduct a voice call through the browser seems like a pretty basic use case to me.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-10-15 14:28:15+00:00
I kinda like the look of liquid glass. Though I'm also reminded of the whole Windows Vista debacle and the comparison seems apt.

And iOS already had really bad contrast, like how you can't tell if the Wifi/Bluetooth are enabled/disabled depending on the background.

My issue is that the iOS 26 update degraded the performance and probably battery life of my iPhone 13 mini. Just switching between home screen pages went from 60fps to 10fps even with liquid disabled.

There are also weird changes like how the Safari url bar displays even less of the URL. On HN I only see "news.ycomb[[inator.com]]/item?id=1234", jeez. Only slightly better on a normal iPhone.

I had no business trying out iOS 26 on a four year old phone. Should have just stayed with iOS 18(?) security updates until EOL.
by drweevil | 2025-10-15 14:28:25+00:00
In asking this question it seems it would be important to consider the true cost of replacing juniors with AI. What I mean is this: So far none of the big AI providers are turning a profit. There is also talk of greatly increasing the number of AI data centers, and of course the electricity required to power them. Leaving aside the environmental costs, and the fact that today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors, what is the cost of all this? If all the AI adopters were to pay for the actual cost of AI, would juniors be cheaper?
by netsharc | 2025-10-15 14:28:26+00:00
I remember reading (here's the trigger for some people to stop reading) Paul Krugman's writing about Greek politicians and the Brussels set: if the Greek leaders just follow what Brussels want, they can guarantee their spot in some cushy position afterwards, and what Brussels set (lobbied by German banks) wanted was austerity for Greeks in order to repay the loans the German banks gave out freely, knowing that because the country was in the Eurozone, the ECB will bail them out.

Meanwhile the socialist Syriza party were obviously former activists who were going to fight for the Greek people, and Brussels knew they won't be persuaded to follow the script...
by fennecfoxy | 2025-10-15 14:28:29+00:00
Big screen beyond came out in '23. Meta has made strides with their recent showings. And I don't believe anybody is really dumping vast sums of money into it quite yet, they're coasting somewhat (though I realise that that's conjecture).

I'd say the biggest unsolved issue is the focus/depth of field issue...how to provide variable per pixel depth so that virtual objects can appear in a scene and be focussed on naturally (apparently called vergence–accommodation conflict) since most if not all displays have a fixed focus distance atm.
by eqvinox | 2025-10-15 14:28:38+00:00
> Today, the “: list[str]” is 11 wasted characters and it’s not as aesthetically pleasing. Tomorrow, you do some refactor and your inferred list[str] becomes a list[int] without you realizing it… I’m sure that sounds silly in this toy example, but just imagine it’s a much more complex piece of code.

Hmm. I'm looking at a codebase that is still in a lot of "early flux", where one day I might be looking at a "list[VirtualRouter]" but the next day it's a "list[VirtualRouterSpec]". It's already gone through several refactors and it kinda felt like the type hints were pretty much spot on in terms of effort-benefit. It's not a legacy codebase; it has reasonably good type hint coverage, but it's focused on type hinting interfaces (a few Protocol in there), classes and functions. The type hinting inline in actual code is limited.

I do understand your perspective, but tbh to me it feels like if I went that far I might rather not choose Python to begin with…
by thesz | 2025-10-15 14:29:32+00:00
The list of papers miss this one from 1970: https://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/conor.mcbride/FVMcB-PhD.pd...

This is thesis of Frederick McBride, father of Connor McBride, who does significant work in dependent types' circles [1]. The thesis describes symbolic computation algorithms, applies them to expression derivative calculation with simplification, and provides not only definition and construction of algebraic types, but also pattern matching over their values.

[1] https://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/conor.mcbride/
by coredog64 | 2025-10-15 14:30:18+00:00
I would say it's less about losing and more about focus. Identify the lines of business you don't want to be in and sell those features to a third party who can then bundle them for $1/$10/$20. A $2T company just doesn't care, but I would bet that those excised features would be good enough for a smaller software house.

(I have the same complaint about AWS, where a bunch of services are in KTLO and would be better served by not being inside AWS)
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-15 14:30:23+00:00
If you wear glasses, or need them and don't normally wear them, it's important to get the prescription lens inserts. They make them for the Quest as well, and they aren't expensive.

Meta doesn't try to force it on you the way Apple does, but you really have to or it will always be blurry. The screen has a sort of fixed focal point and if your vision isn't great at that distance EVERYTHING will be blurry instead of just the one range that's normally blurry for you.

You may not even realize you need glasses until you try it and everything is blurry.
by nradov | 2025-10-15 14:30:33+00:00
You guys are really missing the point (responding to all the critics below, not just you). If you all had actually listened to the entire interview linked above instead of posting a hot take you would understand that it's not about "feelings". Rather it's evidence that the data is likely measuring something wrong or irrelevant, or not being gathered correctly. Thus a deeper factual and qualitative analysis is required.
by scbzzzzz | 2025-10-15 14:30:59+00:00
True. I would like to hijack this thread and wante d to discuss what we want for software that is not present. For me. All i can think of is ondevice , al/ml ( photo editing, video editing etc ) and not the ones the current companies are trying hard shove down our throats.

May be steve is true. We don't know what we want until some one shows it .
by xpe | 2025-10-15 14:31:00+00:00
Below I'll list each quote and rewrite them with elaboration to unpack some unstated assumptions. (These are my interpretations; they may be different than what the authors intended.)

> 1: This is oddly a case to signify there is value in an AI moderation tools - to avoid bias inherent to human actors.

"To the extent (1) AI moderation tools don't have conflicting interests (such as an ownership stake in a business); (2) their decisions are guided by some publicly stated moderation guidelines; (3) they make decisions openly with chain-of-thought, then such decisions may be more reliable and trustworthy than decisions made by a small group of moderators (who often have hidden agendas)."

> 2: Do you understand how AI tools are trained?

"In the pretraining phase, LLMs learn to mimic the patterns in the training text. These patterns run very deep. To a large extent, fine-tuning (e.g. with RLHF) shapes the behavior of the LLM. Still, some research shows the baseline capabilities learned during pretraining still exist after fine-tuning, which means various human biases remain."

Does this sound right to the authors? From what I understand, when unpacked in this way, both argument structures are valid. (This doesn't mean the assumptions hold, though.)
by kentonv | 2025-10-15 14:31:27+00:00
> Configs that worked in Wrangler 3 didn’t carry over cleanly to Wrangler 4, and it feels like Wrangler 5 will introduce yet another interaction model.

There were no changes to the config format in Wrangler 4. The reasons for the major version bump didn't affect 99.99% of users. They are listed here:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/wrangler/migration...

Personally I pushed back on bumping the major version at all, because I know even a no-op major version update creates pain. But the team wasn't comfortable given the obscure edge cases. We have resolved, though, that in the future we'll build ways to manage all these issues without requiring a major version bump (e.g. support multiple versions of esbuild, so that you can upgrade wrangler without updating esbuild).

Incidentally, on the runtime side especially, we're pretty maniacal about backwards compatibility: https://blog.cloudflare.com/backwards-compatibility-in-cloud...

> Pages seems to be on the way out, leaving me with Workers Assets that are painful to migrate.

Pages are not "on the way out". Workers Assets are just a new, more flexible implementation of Pages, which makes it easier to use other Workers features together with Pages. If you don't need those other features, you do not need to migrate. Eventually, we will get to the point where we can auto-migrate everybody, we just aren't there yet.
by mittermayr | 2025-10-15 14:31:42+00:00
This morning I was looking to maybe replace my Macbook Pro 2018, which had the horrible keyboard and finally seems to be crippled enough to not be fun to use anymore — now this!

However, I have been disappointed by Apple too many times (they wouldn't replace my keyboard despite their highly-flamed design-faux-pas, had to replace the battery twice by now, etc.)

Two years ago I finally stopped replacing their expensive external keyboards, which I used to buy once a year or every other (due to broken key-hinges) and have been so incredibly positively surprised by getting used to the MX Keys now. Much better built, incredible mileage for the price. Plus, I can easily switch and use them on my Windows PC, too.

So, about the Macbook — if I were to switch mobile computing over to Windows, what can I replace it with? My main machine is still a Mac Mini M2 Pro, which is perfect value/price. I like the Surface as a concept (replacable keyboards are a fantastic idea, battery however, super iffy nonsense), and I've got a Surface Pro 6 around, but it's essentially the same gloss-premium I don't need for my use.

Are there any much-cheaper but somewhat comparable laptops (12h+ battery, 1 TB disk, 16-32GB RAM, 2k+ Display) with reasonable build quality? Does bypassing the inherent premium of all the Apple gloss open up any useful options? Or is Apple actually providing the best value here?

Would love to hear from non-Surface, non-Thinkpad (I love it, but) folks who've got some recommendations for sub $1k laptops.

Not my main machine, but something I take along train rides, or when going to clients, or sometimes working offsite for a day.
by mothballed | 2025-10-15 14:31:47+00:00
Ackshually there is part of the first amendment that applies to certain people, specifically the right for "the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The courts have prior held that non-immigrant visas and illegal immigrants usually aren't "the people" referenced by the constitution, which is why they have no right to bear arms which also uses "the people" in reference to the people with that right. If they don't have the right to bear arms, it follows they are not "the people" and thus have no implicit protection to parts of the first amendment that explicitly assign protection to "the people."

It may be up for interpretation whether the immigrants in question were petitioning the government for grievances, if so that may have not been protected if they are not people.
by amluto | 2025-10-15 14:32:19+00:00
I’m surprised there’s no attempt to use an A/B or multi version approach. It’s only a partial solution, but the main binary could be a very minimal launcher that enumerates installed versions and decides which version to run. This results in no window at all in which the launcher doesn’t work, and it makes recovery from a bad update much, much easier.

Updating the launcher would still be tricky, but the launcher is tiny, so deleting old versions in a timely manner is not so important.
by cutlilacs | 2025-10-15 14:32:27+00:00
This is my main problem with archeology. They take a small amount of evidence for something and use it confidently for their conclusion. There are so many other possibilities why something could be true, but those are ignored for whatever theory appeals to them.

The above comment also illustrates their biases. They map their knowledge to history that came much later to the Tepe sites. Stating that it was "was likely only the craftsmen or shamans" is a prime example of that.
by jklinger410 | 2025-10-15 14:32:39+00:00
> they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers

Facebook Ads and SA360 both allow 3rd party impression and click tracking. Not to mention the myriad of 3rd party analytics tools you can use to track the website.

> if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range

I've never heard this before and seems hilariously simplistic. These megacorps don't have VPNs?

> they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic

Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this makes no sense.

As someone who has also been in the industry for 10+ years, none of what you said passes the smell test. Maybe after 15 years you still never understood the industry or technology?