MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Visual, local-first data tool
by rafferty97 | 2025-12-02 10:07:31+00:00
I've spent the past two years building an app for quick, ad-hoc data manipulation because I was dissatisfied with the existing landscape of tools. I thought others might find it useful too, so I'm throwing it out into the world.

Currently, if you want to grab some CSV or JSON data and do a sequence of operations on it (filter, sort, aggregate, etc.), the path of least resistance is to open an IDE or notebook and write code. This is fine for simple tasks, but can get messy quickly and doesn't offer the same immediate visual feedback loop that something like a spreadsheet does.

I thought there ought to exist a tool that offers a similar UX to a spreadsheet but with the power of a dataframe library, so I built one.

There's no signup and it runs entirely within the browser, using Rust compiled to WebAssembly for the data processing and Solid.JS for the UI. Projects are persisted to IndexedDB and files are read directly from disk using the file system API, so nothing sensitive ever leaves your computer.

I know documentation is currently scarce, but if there's enough interest, I'm happy to work on this.

Any questions or feedback are of course welcome. I'm just curious whether anyone would actually find this tool useful.
by bogdan | 2025-12-02 10:10:05+00:00
> American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition

If that's true, why doesn't America compete on this front against China?

> they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments

So when the US had the policy advantage over the EU it was just the market working, but when China has the policy advantage over the US it suddenly becomes unfair?
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-12-02 10:10:44+00:00
> Reality. The businesses that have the best long term performance over the previous decades are the ones that have done the most buybacks, hence buybacks do not cause short term-ism. It’s just as easy as a business cutting expenses now to juice dividends in the near term, we’ve seen it time and time again with businesses that sacrifice quality and innovation in the short term which eventually cede ground to new businesses.

So no source(s) then?

Your statement is just as un-evidenced as mine, so I'm uncertain why you seem to be so sure of your statement.

> Examining fantastical scenarios is a waste of time. No one has that button, there is a whole board of directors that votes on these things, and again, compensation is staggered over various performance targets staggered over a number of years. The proxy reports detailing these are easily accessible with an online search.

If I can reduce the number of shares, then I can increase EPS. Buybacks reduce the number of shares. The button clearly exists, and based on watching this happen it's clear that the button gets pressed pretty often.
by dcminter | 2025-12-02 10:10:50+00:00
The Player giving a bit of meta-commentary (meta-meta-commentary?) on plays in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead:

"Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."
by SquareWheel | 2025-12-02 10:11:18+00:00
I made no such implication. Mozilla is certainly an other party, and their positions on standards hold water. They successfully argued for Web Assembly over Native Client, and have blocked other proposals such as HTML Import in the Web Components API. They are still a key member of the WHATWG.

The fact that Mozilla aligns with Google on both of these deprecations suggests the reasons are valid.

I personally see no reason for XSLT today. Outside of the novelty of theming RSS feeds, it sees very little use. And JPEG XL carries a large security surface area which neither company was comfortable including in its current shape. That may change based on adoption and availability of memory-safe decoders.
by a5c11 | 2025-12-02 10:11:55+00:00
Can't tell what would be the best case (pun intended) for you, depends on the language you use. Yes, it will eventually end up as some sort of look-up table, though switch statement is the last option I'd use (assuming you gonna have more than 20 cases or so).

The good thing of programming without generative assistants is that it makes you think how to make the algorithm and the code better to avoid too much manual work. Laziness of engineers is crucial for automation and optimisation.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-12-02 10:12:05+00:00
> The businesses that have the best long term performance over the previous decades are the ones that have done the most buybacks, hence buybacks do not cause short term-ism

This is mixing up cause and effect. If I have lots of free cash flow, then I can do buybacks which increases EPS. Lots of free cash flow is associated with better performance, which is perhaps why people believe this.
by gostsamo | 2025-12-02 10:12:32+00:00
The question to ask is, what a sighted person learns after looking at the image? The answer is the alt text. E.g if the image is a floppy, maybe you communicate that this is the save button. If it shows a cat sleeping on the windowsill, the alt text is yep: "my cat looking cute while sleeping on the windowsill".
by zerosizedweasle | 2025-12-02 10:12:43+00:00
I'm in the same boat, well actually much darker, no golden handcuffs, lot of student debt, health problems. I'm losing hope. I'm hoping the AI bubble bursts so that interest rates come down so I can get an interest rate on loans that is affordable. If I don't refinance it is game over. Honestly, I'm not sure I will be able to get through this.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-02 10:13:49+00:00
It's the models.

"A well crafted layer of business logic" just doesn't exist. The amount of "business logic" involved in frontier LLMs is surprisingly low, and mostly comes down to prompting and how tools like search or memory are implemented.

Things like RAG never quite took off in frontier labs, and the agentic scaffolding they use is quite barebones. They bet on improving the model's own capabilities instead, and they're winning on that bet.
Show HN: I built a bulk image generator after seeing a YouTuber's struggle
by qinggeng | 2025-12-02 10:14:02+00:00
Hello HN,

I built this tool after seeing a Reddit thread where a historical documentary creator described their painful workflow. They produce 30-minute videos requiring over 240 unique images. Currently, they have to manually write prompts, generate, and download images one by one for every scene.

To solve this bottleneck, I built AI Bulk Image Generator.

The Tool: https://aibulkimagegenerator.com

How it works:

I designed the workflow around two core features to maximize efficiency:

1、Prompt × N (Batch Variations): If you need to explore styles or get the perfect shot, you can input a single prompt, set a specific quantity (e.g., 10 images), and the tool will generate all variations in one batch. No more clicking "generate" repeatedly.

2、Prompts via CSV : This addresses the Reddit user's problem. You can upload a CSV file containing a list of pre-written prompts (one per line). The system automatically parses the file and creates images for every single prompt in the list. This allows you to generate assets for a full video script in one go.

Models Supported: Currently, I support a mix of models including Nano Banana / Pro, GPT-4o, and SeaDream v4. I plan to add more models based on user demand. This is an MVP aimed at content creators who need volume. I’d appreciate any feedback on the UI or the batch processing flow!

Thanks!
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-02 10:14:56+00:00
> Isn’t obamacare what caused all these problems in the first place?

I don’t think so, but it’s a fairly poor attempt to address the industry problems. It’s a lash-up “solution” to a problem caused by our entire healthcare structure.

> Obamacare was just a blank check to private companies

And healthcare providers. No one wants to fix the real issue, so this was the only thing all those lobbyists would allow.

That doesn’t change the fact that it has actually become quite popular.
by gethly | 2025-12-02 10:15:22+00:00
I just finished adding Paywall as a Service functionality into https://gethly.com, which is a hosting and sales platform for digital content creators. This allows creators to host their content on their own without having to vendor lock themselves or anything like that. Best part is that the minimum price if any content is 1 cent due to how the platform works.

I am not sure what the next feature will be but this one was something I was looking forward to add.
by dvdkon | 2025-12-02 10:16:04+00:00
At least where I live, there's no extra information being gathered. The only difference is that I no longer have to physically go somewhere to deal with that information, because I can sign in to government services online.

Information that was previously in paper form and scattered across various bureaus is now being digitised and centralised, but that's orthogonal to "digital ID"!
by elmoreeng | 2025-12-02 10:16:15+00:00
Location: Davis, CA, USA

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Python, Go, Typescript, Javascript, SQL, Java, React.js, Next.js, Redux, Tailwind CSS, HTML5, CSS3, WebSockets, Vercel, Django, FastAPI, Flask, Node.js, Starlette, GraphQL, Rest APIs, Langchain, Langchgraph, OpenAI, Calude, Gemini, RAG, Vector DB, TensorFlow, Pandas,, AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Kubernets, CI/CD, Terraform, PostgreSQL, Redis

Email: elmore.eng@gmail.com

Resume/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CCzosISCkUOFt-vzSpFHKUjwCr4...
by nephihaha | 2025-12-02 10:16:32+00:00
I was generalising of course, but that was my experience. My god daughter came out of school barely able to read or write. Others I know just remember being bullied by teachers.

Out of that list you mention there (from my personal experience), we were never taught calculus, linear algebra or probability theory. The maths was very basic and uninspiring. The foreign language teaching was next to useless. (I learnt more in six months learning German after high school than six years of French in high school.) The science teaching was okay. The history teaching was appalling (I do like history but we were taught it in such a dull fashion, and from only one or two angles.)

It would have been useful for me to learn basic cookery, how to open a bank account and so on. Sewing and clothing repair would also have been handy. We did do some carpentry and I.T. (which is obsolete, but was a useful foundation). I do use some of what I learnt in Geography class.

Against this, they tried to instill some horrible habits in us. Like they would punish all of us when one person did something wrong (and they didn't know who). I saw that across multiple schools, and I still resent it. There was also the notion that we should obey teachers without question and accept everything they say (and they were frequently wrong). In my last school, you either went straight into university or the military but at that point in life neither was an option.
by w10-1 | 2025-12-02 10:16:40+00:00
> It might be the case that real revenue is worse than hypothetical revenue.

Because Altman is eying IPO, and controlling the valuation narrative.

It's a bit like keeping rents high and apartments empty to build average rents while hiding the vacancy rate to project a good multiple (and avoid rent control from user-facing businesses).

They'll never earn or borrow enough for their current spend; it has to come from equity sales.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-02 10:17:26+00:00
> But 7b is rather small no?

Sure, its smallish.

> Are other open weight video models also this small?

Apples models are weights-available not open weights, and yes, WAN 2.1, as well as the 14B models, also has 1.3B models; WAN 2.2, as well as the 14B models, also has a 5B model (the WAN 2.2 VAE used by Starflow-V is specifically the one used with the 5B model.) and because the WAN models are largely actually open weights models (Apache 2.0 licensed) there are lots of downstream open-licensed derivatives.

> Can this run on a single consumer card?

Modern model runtimes like ComfyUI can run models that do not fit in VRAM on a single consumer card by swapping model layers between RAM and VRAM as needed; models bigger than this can run on single consumer cards.
by windward | 2025-12-02 10:17:28+00:00
Good question. I've gone with:

>Live under your means and save as much as possible?

which, while obvious, isn't being done by all of us.

A part of me gets angry that collective action was so unpopular thanks to the view that it dragged down those who could excel individually. Every time I see software people act powerless in front of these steamrolling, enormous tech giants that control every facet of our lives, I think about how much power we had - and are on the verge of giving up.

I also try to confront the future, rather than turn a blind eye to it. Can I be happy and find self-actualisation without this identity and financial status? That's a question everyone should think about regardless of what happens.
by survirtual | 2025-12-02 10:17:50+00:00
No problem.

I was once a big proponent for people having DMT experiences but then I learned it works very differently for different people.

Now, I believe it is an acute intervention drug for the suicidal.

It behaved very differently for me in that context. Soon after repeated treatment with it, my entire state changed. I was lifted out of poverty into well compensated employment. I bought my first house. My software skills leveled up and I shifted from being fixated on game dev to more impactful fields. I can't describe the number of changes, but I attribute it all to DMT.

It flipped a switch in my mind and I know that I am alive today only because of that.

I hope that someday, we recognize it as what it was for me: a powerful spiritual medicine.

Something I always say to people who claim these things are all just hallucinations: if a hallucination teaches you how to be a better person, gives you a reason to live, and allows you to be more open and loving, was it really a hallucination? Something to think about.
by liampulles | 2025-12-02 10:18:56+00:00
I appreciate and respect that this org is avoiding AI hype work, but I don't know if there are long term reputational benefits. Clients are going to be more turned off by your reasons not to do work than your having a "principled business".

From the clients perspective, it's their job to set the principles (or lack thereof) and your job to follow their instructions.

That doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to do though. Ethics are important, but recognise that it may just be for the sake of your "soul".
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-02 10:19:06+00:00
Takeup of Google was rapid but nobody managed to obviate their advantage. It wasn't even a first mover advantage.

The problem for alternatives is they have to answer the question of why they are better than ChatGPT. ChatGPT only had to answer the question of why it was better than <anything before AI> and for most people that was obvious.
by kovac | 2025-12-02 10:19:28+00:00
> My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea.

This is what I'm encouraged by Grammarly as well. To some extent, perhaps the book "Elements of style" encourages this too.

However, I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She writes long (wordy?) sentences that are clear, and even feels beautiful to read. I really enjoyed her writing.

But I'm not a native speaker. A question for the native speakers: what's your take on this? Has Shelly's writing style gone out of fashion, or are these two (Shelley's style and succinctness) different things?
by spider-mario | 2025-12-02 10:21:45+00:00
A better Gemini also works. Google Search seems to use the most minimal of Geminis, giving it a bad rep.

Prompt: “How many A4 pages would a 1073741823×1073741824 image printed at 600dpi be?”

Gemini Pro: “It would require approximately 33.1 billion (33,127,520,230) A4 pages to print that image.

To put that into perspective, the image would cover an area of 2,066 square kilometers […].

The Math

1. Image Dimensions: 1,073,741,823 × 1,073,741,824 pixels.

2. Physical Size: At 600 DPI, the image measures roughly 45.45 km wide by 45.45 km tall.

3. A4 Area: A single sheet of A4 paper (210 mm * 297 mm) covers approximately 0.06237 m².

4. Result: 2,066,163,436 m² / 0.06237 m² ≈ 33,127,520,230 pages.”

Alternatively, rink (https://rinkcalc.app/) :

> (1073741823 / (600/inch))**2 / A4paper

approx. 3.312752e10 (dimensionless)
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-02 10:21:52+00:00
I recently ported a personal coding agent from GPT-5 by adding Grok 4 Fast Reasoning. This was quite tricky. It wasn't just a matter of switching a model URL. Grok 4 Fast is vastly faster, but some things GPT-5 can do well Grok struggled with, aspects of the prompting style confused it too. I had to rework some tools and stuff.

It wasn't a huge lift, but there is some moat. And the results were worse than for GPT-5 which I suppose is not a surprise, it was always unlikely GPT-5 was wasting all those flops.
by komali2 | 2025-12-02 10:22:03+00:00
> Would you believe that the people who support this just do believe there is an immigration problem?

Yes, of course I believe that there's people who believe there's an immigration problem.

> People are allowed to care about things other than the economy and crime stats, by the way.

What sort of problems would one believe can arise from immigration that aren't related to the economy or public safety?
by DocTomoe | 2025-12-02 10:22:03+00:00
I'm not shocked at all. It's the nature of things for people - on average - to not want to learn. How many of your peers have shouted 'no more school' or something similar during their graduation?

How many people do you know who seem to be completely immune to learning? Go to any non-tech office an you will find shared passwords on post-it-notes, after 40 years of mantra-style 'Do not share your passwords' messaging.

If something goes wrong, it's not their fault, it's the machine's fault. "Why was this possible in the first place?" they ask. "Build it so this becomes impossible." That mindset let to OSHA regulations, to ever-safer aircraft, and to encryption on the web. It's not necessary a bad thing, it just throws out our - tech folks' - baby with the bathwater. How often has the increasingly regulated tech environment made you stop an easy implementation of a completely legitimate use case?

And yes, authoritarians thrive in this climate. Fear and promises of safety are the easiest paths to political power - and once in power, the demand for safety never ends. Politicians who genuinely prioritize individual freedom rarely get rewarded for it at the ballot box; the ones who win are simply better at wearing the right colours while expanding control.
by rast1234 | 2025-12-02 10:22:29+00:00
Location: Tbilisi

Remote: no or hybrid

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: dotnet .net c#, prometheus, gitlab-ci, kubernetes, rabbitmq, postgres, sre

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rast1234

Email: rastkirillov@gmail.com

Staff Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience building infrastructure libraries, tooling and internal services. Focused on improving performance of devs and teams. Proficient in DevOps domain: CI/CD, monitoring, observability and SRE. I am passionate about taking on entirely new problems, tech and concepts to make them useful and convenient for others.

As Tech/Community Lead i manage a loose community of about 50 .NET developers from different departments, implementing internal tools, creating space for knowledge sharing and enabling horizontal cooperation.

Love writing docs, articles and talks. One of these articles is in Google top for query “перцентили для чайников” (percentiles for dummies).
by nephihaha | 2025-12-02 10:22:49+00:00
Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the conflict.

In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
by santoshsah | 2025-12-02 10:23:06+00:00
Location: Kathmandu, Nepal(UTC+5:45) (but open to working remotely/worldwide for any timezone)

Remote: YES

Willing to relocate: NO

Technologies: Go/Golang, Postgres, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Git, CI/CD etc

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FSMO7Nu15VuIuQ-7kqLo1O-qjeS...

Email: santoshsah4@gmail.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santoshsah/

I am available to start immediately.
by philipallstar | 2025-12-02 10:23:23+00:00
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity

Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series, and not the book.

> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
by timschmidt | 2025-12-02 10:24:52+00:00
Agreed. And specifically Moore's law is about transistors per constant dollar. Because even in his time, spending enough could get you scaling beyond what was readily commercially available. Even if transistor count had stagnated, there is still a massive improvement from the $4,000 386sx Dad somehow convinced Mom to greenlight in the late 80s compared to a $45 Raspberry Pi today. And that factors into the equation as well.

Of course, feature size (and thus chip size) and cost are intimately related (wafers are a relatively fixed cost). And related as well to production quantity and yield (equipment and labor costs divide across all chips produced). That the whole thing continues scaling is non-obvious, a real insight, and tantamount to a modern miracle. Thanks to the hard work and effort of many talented people.
by ch_fr | 2025-12-02 10:26:19+00:00
I'm not trying to post this as a "gotcha", but did this shift in opinion also affect your stance on LLM-assisted-writing[1]?

I personally get the same enjoyment in the process of blogging than in that of coding, so I tend to avoid running anything I write through any kind of destructive transformation. So while I totally understand why the language barrier would make LLMs appealing for writing, I'm wondering if you still treat it as desirable after what you said in this post (not that there's anything wrong if you do).

[1] https://meysam.io/blog/hn-viral-flagged-submission/
by metalman | 2025-12-02 10:26:36+00:00
I met the inventor of the "luny cycle" which is two unicycles connected with a shaft that has attaches with universal joints and swivle joint on each seat post. He had a web site that is gone (15 yr), with video etc, with various manouvers, like one rider going strait, with the second, orbiting there progress. said his home base was the North mountain, Nova Scotia
by AndrewDucker | 2025-12-02 10:26:55+00:00
Same with Edinburgh. Except that we also cap daily and weekly fees. So it's £2.20 for a single ticket to anywhere, maxing out at £5.00 per day, and £24.50 per week.

(And if you're regularly travelling more than that, then you can pay for a card that will give you unlimited bus/tram travel for £70/month.)