MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d3Xt3r | 2025-12-07 20:23:57+00:00
The chasm is enormous, but Calc doesn't need to implement 100% of Excel's functionality when most people - even business/power users - don't use all of its features.

What major commonly used features do you reckon Excel has that hasn't been implemented in LO Calc yet, that would be a deal-breaker for most businesses?

To my knowledge, Calc has implemented most of Excel's formulae (well over 500 in total count), so at least for typical spreadsheet functionality you wouldn't missing anything.

The biggest limitation I can think of is the limited support for VBA, but Microsoft have already announced VBA's deprecation[1], so no one should be relying on it even in MS World.

And whilst LO's own Basic scripting is... basic, it also supports rich scripting and full automation via Python and Javascript. It even has a full-fledged SDK for developing addins/extensions using a high-level language like C++/Java etc[2], so businesses who're dependent on some random proprietary excel COM addin or something could invest in development effort to port it over.

Heck, if businesses are so inclined, they could modify the LO source itself and build a custom version to add the features they want - that's the beauty of FOSS.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/how-to-prepar...

[2] https://api.libreoffice.org/
by pjmlp | 2025-12-07 20:23:59+00:00
Because the Java Virtual Machine is designed for Java, and that is what all vendors care about.

Kotlin is Google's C#, with Android being Google's .NET, after Google being sued by coming up with Google's J++, Android Java dialect.

Since Google wasn't able to come up with a replacement themselves, Fuchsia/Dart lost the internal politics, they adopted the language of the JetBrains, thanks to internal JetBrains advocates.
by conrs | 2025-12-07 20:24:17+00:00
Good question, was on my mind too. The problem I could see is Walmart style - the predator will beat the prices of the non-predator down until the non-predator goes out of business, then raise their prices again.

They can do this because they are operating in other areas with predatory prices, giving them the ability to operate at a loss, and relying on the fact that at least some of those areas are not being challenged by non-predators.

Everybody seems to be playing the game right in this scenario. Interesting to try to come up with a good counter.
by obscurette | 2025-12-07 20:24:21+00:00
It's not just about parents, it's about our (western) society as a whole. While Germany has a bigger problems because of massive immigration, all this sound familiar for all teachers from Eastern-Europe to the US. We stopped treating people as being accountable for their own actions. This is true for parents, children etc. It's OK to have every possible excuse – "I'm immigrant, single mother, immature, don't have an education etc" not to take any responsibility and people take advantage of it. This is the idea that you just have to treat people well and it fixes all sorts issues in society failing.
by sahilagarwal | 2025-12-07 20:24:37+00:00
Somehow this became one of favorite posts ever shared on this website.

Its give a view into one of the most common thing used for entertainment in households worldwide now (specially if you consider phones and tablets a part of this). As a guy born in 1990s, I have never even made the connection - television itself is so ingrained into nearly all households.

I kind of like how good storytelling also relates to the article. A black person showing all the stereotyped black mannerisms in media is fine, but great storytelling builds a character whole. Adding a small thing like liking spicy indian food adds so much to the character.
by cnnlives736 | 2025-12-07 20:25:14+00:00
> The diagnostic models suck

Mental healthcare in-general tends to suck. I went for years to a boutique psych that had suspect people working for them and that would just increase dose until prescribing the max allowed of various meds.

What I’ve noticed is that if a doctor’s or dentist office looks stylish, consider moving to a different one. It’s not worth ruining your life, health, teeth, etc.
Show HN: We built an app to help you walk more
by wowitsmrinal | 2025-12-07 20:25:45+00:00
My partner (designer) and I (engineer) love walking. On long hikes and trips, we often found ourself walking just a little bit more than we needed to, just to beat our personal records. But its 1) hard to remember what that record was, and 2) those memories would just stay in the Apple Health screenshots.

So we made BestSteps, an app where one can see their top-10 step count days, add notes and photos, and share any of those days with their friends.

Then we took it out for a spin, and walked 50,000 steps in 12 hours to beat our personal record (fun video on the website)

We’ve put it on the App Store (my first app!) for everyone to try. Feedback, bugs, and suggestions are all welcome.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beststeps-walking-leaderboard/...
by msm_ | 2025-12-07 20:26:34+00:00
>EDR/AV is basically unnecessary, when you only mount things either writable or executable

Sounds good, except:

* scripting languages exist. The situation is even worse on Linux than on Windows (because of the sysadmin focus). You need at least /bin/sh installed and runnable on any POSIX system. In practice bash, python, perl and many more are also always available.

* exploits exist. Just opening a pdf file may execute arbitrary code on a machine. There is no way to avoid that by just configuring your system. And it will happen sooner or later, especially if nation states are involved.

The idea that your systems are somehow unhackable because you... mount everything W^X is... not based in reality. Of course it's a great idea, but in practice you need defense in depth, and you need to have a way to Detect and Respond to inevitable Endpoint breaches. I don't love EDR/AVs, but they mitigate real attacks happening in the real world.
by biglyburrito | 2025-12-07 20:26:59+00:00
This "article" is useless. Just go read the proper news article it cited, which has the actual data:

https://www.moneygeek.com/resources/top-states-health-care/

TLDR: Hawaii ranked the best, with a life expectancy of 79.9 years; Mississippi ranked the worst, with a life expectancy of 70.9 years.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-07 20:27:02+00:00
This article is about something subtly different than overcharging: it's about consumers believing that they're paying one amount (the list/sticker price), and being charged a different amount (typically higher in the company's favor) at checkout.

In my experience, this doesn't really happen with bodegas: they might be overpriced in the "this is a bad deal for milk" sense, but they don't misrepresent their sticker prices to any degree that I've ever experienced.

(But also, I don't think bodegas do categorically overcharge in NYC. I think they're about the same as grocery stores, i.e. there's a large amount of internal variation in pricing because people generally don't want to make multiple bodega pit stops just to save $2.00 on eggs.)
by jackfranklyn | 2025-12-07 20:27:16+00:00
The Reddit commenter nailed it - community first, product second. But there's a timing thing people miss.

You can't speedrun trust. I've been building software tools for accountants and spent months just answering questions in bookkeeping forums before anyone even knew I made anything. No links, no mentions, just being useful. Eventually someone asks "what do you do?" and the conversation happens naturally.

The 5.3K views means the topic resonated. The zero sales means they didn't trust you yet. That's not fixable with better marketing copy - it's a relationship problem.

For your next project: pick one community, show up consistently for 3-6 months, share your actual process (failures included), and let people watch you figure things out. By launch time you won't need to convince strangers - you'll have 50 people who already know your work.

The Substack/email thing works but only if you're already interesting to someone. Cold signups don't convert either.
by dtech | 2025-12-07 20:28:25+00:00
Kotlin existed before Java 7 and kept support JVM 1.6 for a long time (mainly because of Android)

Even then, they benchmarked it, and inlining was still faster* than invokedynamic and friends, so they aren't changing it now JVM 1.8+ is a requirement.

* at the expense of expanded bytecode size
by mystraline | 2025-12-07 20:28:42+00:00
> yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection

So, have every agent in the state inspect them. Fine 5k. Immediately inspect again, different goods. Fine another 5k. Keep doing it opening hours.

Treat them like an inspection money piñata until they fix their ways. State gets a big pile of money to do better, and massive fines at 5k a pop for a few weeks punish the company and their bottom line.
Built an API abuse-prevention and traffic-governance system, need feedback on it
by arnch | 2025-12-07 20:29:00+00:00
Hey HN / devs,

Over the past few months I’ve been building APIGate — a lightweight, high-performance API traffic monitoring, protection & governance layer designed for companies and API-first platforms that want real-time control without adding complexity or latency.

What APIGate does

Real-time traffic governance: lets you track & control API requests by IP, email, user agent, country, and status codes.

Rate limiting & abuse protection: track request rates across multiple time windows and auto-block or restrict when thresholds are crossed.

Anomaly detection: detect spikes in error patterns (4xx/5xx) per requester with custom triggers.

Geo & network access controls: whitelist/blacklist by country and block VPN/proxy abuse.

Intelligent user linkage: see all IPs, user agents, and countries tied to each user.

Dashboard & insights: rich analytics with traffic heatmaps and real-time activity maps.

Full flexibility: every rule, threshold, and action is configurable to your policies.

Ultra-low latency: built with Go + Fiber — responses remain <50ms with minimal overhead.

Integration is simple — just two endpoints:

a decision API (before requests) for allow/deny decisions

a logging API (after requests) that powers dashboards and adaptive logic

We also include a built-in IP reputation shield with millions of known proxy/VPN/spam IPs to pre-block obvious bad traffic. apigate.in

What I’m looking for

Product feedback: What’s missing?

Use cases: Would you use this instead of rolling your own or using a cloud provider’s tooling?

Integration concerns: What would stop you from adopting something like this?

Pricing feedback: Does the tiering make sense for indie devs vs startups vs enterprise?

Happy to answer any questions about design decisions or implementation approach!

Cheers
by alted | 2025-12-07 20:29:28+00:00
The Hacker Fab [1] project at Carnegie Mellon is creating and publishing guides to building simple fab equipment including photolithography and a sputtering system. For somewhat more complex equipment, I appreciate [2] from the founders of InchFab [3].

But maybe the easiest way to do (very low resolution) photolithography at home is to use dry film photoresist, which is like tape you can stick onto a copper PCB you then expose and etch; a cheap roll is ~$20 from eBay/Amazon.

[1] https://docs.hackerfab.org/home [2] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/93835 [3] https://www.inchfab.com/
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-07 20:29:39+00:00
Sorry, but how does Kanban come into this?

From your description, SCRUM, could work just as equally.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Kanban, it's awesome for visually presenting where bottlenecks are for tasks, but estimations aren't a feature of that.

But SCRUM maybe, where people are having a sprint planning meeting maybe more what you're thinking?
by 627467 | 2025-12-07 20:30:01+00:00
You dont need specialized teams of people to testify that the photo on the right[0] is fabricated. Any police officer on duty could do that. You dont need people to say "the bridge is sound" just that the rumours are false.

Its like certain societies enjoy the rigidity they are in.

But i guess in a country where a "retweet" of the wrong opinion can get you in legal trouble it just easier to say that fabricating and propagating ai slop is also ilegal

[0] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/cpsprodpb/5e92/live/bc1e9...
by t43562 | 2025-12-07 20:30:32+00:00
Perl was super for little scripts hence it became popular. I think the killer feature was its fantastic regular expression language which beat everything at the time. All other languages had to do to was neutralise that one advantage and they did.

Perl was horrible to build, IMO, and seemed to require 100s of options to be selected which would mean that some script would or would not run with that particular build of Perl depending on what you chose.

Python had a more clunky but still excellent regexp package, it was a doddle to build and most of the things that affected compatibility were things you could install after the python executable was built and installed - i.e. users could get their code to work more reliably.
by njovin | 2025-12-07 20:30:48+00:00
The next natural progression of this line of discussion between "the business" and engineering is for them to agree on a time range as an estimate. Engineering doesn't want to say it'll be done in 6 weeks, but they feel okay saying it will take between 4 and 20 weeks so this estimate is accepted.

You can guess what happens next, which is that around week 8 the business is getting pretty angry that their 4-week project is taking twice as much time as they thought, while the engineering team has encountered some really nasty surprises and is worried they'll have to push to 24 weeks.
by satisfice | 2025-12-07 20:30:55+00:00
I like your comment.

I'm confused by how differently some otherwise smart people view the world than I do. My wife and family, by some definitions, are worthless. They have no economic value. But I look at them and feel that we lead lives of meaning and purpose every day. We know why we are alive and we are living up to it. If that's unproductive, then productivity itself is, I declare, vanity.
by dmurray | 2025-12-07 20:31:47+00:00
I don't think the laws of the specific jurisdiction matter. In every US jurisdiction, the prices aren't completely legally binding (what if the previous customer changed the price tag?). In ~every US jurisdiction, if you systematically show one price but charge customers another, that's an offence.

So intent matters. What would decide an individual case is not the exact characterisation of the laws on the books, but how sympathetic a regulator or a judge is to the supermarket's claim that these things just happen sometimes.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-12-07 20:32:38+00:00
Does this actually happen? If a community opened up a co-op shop that started eating into the revenue of a dollar store, would the dollar store company try to fight back, or would they just exit that market?

Yes, I guess well capitalize companies could offer unrealistically low prices, but on the other hand, any kind of co-op or community driven organization has the benefit of not needing the margins. Dollar store investors are there to make a buck, if their capital isn't getting reasonable returns will ultimately exit the business and move somewhere else.
by Palmik | 2025-12-07 20:33:09+00:00
DeepSeek and other Chinese companies. Not only do they publish research, they also put their resources where their mouth (research) is. They actually use it and prove it through their open models.

Most research coming out of big US labs is counter indicative of practical performance. If it worked (too) well in practice, it wouldn't have been published.

Some examples from DeepSeek:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04434

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11089
by edoceo | 2025-12-07 20:33:14+00:00
One thing frustrating for me is when folk leave $BigCo, with it's methods (ie: estimate time to complete, sprint planning) and try to apply those same methods at a very early company.

Estimates don't work there at all - everything is new.

So, flip it. Use known values to prioritize work. That is: client demand and (potential) revenue. Then allocate known time/budget to the necessary project, see how far you get, iterate. Team can move faster. Looks chaotic.

At some (uncomfortable) point however, need to rotate into the "standard" process.
by jmclnx | 2025-12-07 20:33:21+00:00
I wish I could be surprised and I can see this happening in many places. This type of 'fraud' was predicted when we allowed the stores to stop marking items with the price.

Many places were I shop, hardly any products are lined up with the price attached to the shelves, plus the descriptions of some items are confusing due to the multiple names for the same thing.

Time to force stores to mark each item with the price once again.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-07 20:33:59+00:00
Material gains (produced by more productive workers) don't offset the increases in

the number of expenses required to minimally live (ex:utilities, transpo, insurance, comms) and the ever escalating costs of those added requirements

Nor does it offset the accelerating increases in complexity for basic living factors - complexity that consumes internal resources and time.

More to the point, a pocket supercomputer is an irrelevancy for a typical wage worker, who's earnings are far insufficient for even the barest self-sufficiency.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-07 20:34:01+00:00
> 36-40 hours is a typical workweek. Around here, it's 36 hours.

Didn't expect that, tbh. Not bad.

> Why is there such resistance to just paying people more?

Because I said elsewhere, nurses are mostly happy with their wages, it's the hospital management and de facto working conditions which suck. Higher wages won't fix these working conditions.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-07 20:34:16+00:00
It really wasn't this bad in the past on a whole. There were plenty of bad actors, but EVERY actor wasn't bad.

Just look at food recipes American corporations feed to Americans, and their different recipes for Europe that look more like the American recipes circa the 1990s. Everything in America is optimised to the max permissible bad action.
by cfbradford | 2025-12-07 20:34:19+00:00
Do you give Claude the screenshot as a file? If so I’d just ask it to write a tool to diff each asset to every possible location in the source image to find the most likely position of each asset. You don’t really need recognition if you can brute force the search. As a human this is roughly what I would do if you told me I needed to recreate something like that with pixel perfect precision.
by adolph | 2025-12-07 20:34:21+00:00
> When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?

It always has been this way since barcoded stock keeping units because of the problems identified by CAP Theorem [0]. Since the price data of an object must exist in two locations, shelf and checkout, the data is partitioned. It is also relatively expensive to update the shelf price since it depends on physical changes made by an unreliable human. Even if all stores used electronic price tags there will a very small lag, or a period in which prices are unavailable (or a period of unavailability like an overnight closure).

It would be interesting to understand at what point of shelf/checkout accuracy would lead to what increases in overall prices [1]. That is to say that pricing information has a cost: a buyer must bring the item to checkout to find out the true cost in the case of authoritative checkout, or the clerk must walk to each shelf in the case of authoritative shelf.

Once upon a time, each item in the store was labeled with a price tag and the clerk typed that tag into a tabulation device in order to calculate tax and total. The advent of the bar code lead to shelf label pricing since the clerk needn't read a price from each item, leading to the CAP Theory problem of today.

I suppose that the future will bring back something similar to individual price tags in the form of individual RFID pricing. This way each individual item on a shelf can be priced in a way that is readable by the buyer and the seller in the same manner.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency
by nevi-me | 2025-12-07 20:34:22+00:00
It's great to see my name mentioned here, cheered me up as I'm not having a good weekend. It feels like a lifetime ago since I got to work on this and parquet-rs.

Yeah, I agree with the conclusion on Kafka here. Kafka is a very resource-heavy application that's worth replacing with leaner options.

Oxbow seems very interesting, I presume it's designed to forward data that trickles into some S3 bucket as parquet data?
by literalAardvark | 2025-12-07 20:34:34+00:00
Pigs are extremely dangerous for kids, but herding cows and goats is 100% something kids did. Source: I did it.

The village kids would get up, take the cows out to the road where the other cows also came, then together, a big group of kids and cows would head to a pasture and spend most of their day watching cows, playing games and messing about.

It was great.

Realistically the cows and goats took more care of the kids than the other way around.
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-12-07 20:34:43+00:00
That doesn’t follow. Scala is a high level language and compiler above the JVM. The bug here is a high level one:

> Turns out there was indeed a subtle bug making chained evaluations inefficient in Scala 3

I’m comparing with Haskell, Scheme, or even SQl which all promise to compile efficient code from high level descriptions.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-07 20:35:34+00:00
Cash strapped, but also presumably more likely than the general population to be innumerate or have dyscalculia or dyslexia.

It's the same bullshit that allows discount prices on Black Friday or during January sales to be completely misleading.

In the UK we are much tougher on this kind of manipulative pricing, but you still find manipulative things, like being unable to find the price-per-100g on discounted items and "clubcard" items, or bulk buys that end up having higher unit costs and yet seem not to be errors.
by hilsdev | 2025-12-07 20:35:34+00:00
Anecdotal but I was talking to a recruiter about a role in Apple last week, and then was told they are doing a total hiring freeze until at least the new year.

There was also a bit of a shakeup in one of their teams for video content production a few months back which surprised me. Not anyone that would get a tech journal article written about them, but someone who was very experienced, knowledgeable, and loved his role.

Nothing newsworthy just sounds more rocky than usual for Apple
by tehjoker | 2025-12-07 20:36:38+00:00
I don't think Stallman is a communist. I'm a communist and initially I looked into it to learn more, but it's just a kind of techno-anarchism. The thing he misses is the thing that many (not all) anarchists miss: that there is a larger centralizing logic to capitalism that can't be resisted by small scale decentralized efforts and legal maneuvers. Rather, he does recognize the centralizing logic (the reason d'etre behind the GPL!) but I think it's become clear at this point that the general course of the evolution of the landscape has favored capitalist interests even though free and open source software has had a significant (and in many cases quite favorable) impact.

Free software gives people part of the means of production. In the 1980s/early-1990s model where personal computers were common but most software was run locally, it was an effective challenge to corporate interests, but since the evolution of robust networks and remotely processed software, it has ceased to be nearly as effective.

However, it's important to note that if free software ever truly challenged industrial interests, they would just get the laws changed to prevent it from restricting them in any real way using some bizarre legal maneuver. As it is, it is tolerable and produces useful products corporations can use for free. That's what it means to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.