MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built an AI-based image-to-Excel tool to avoid re-typing tables
by owoamier | 2025-12-29 08:33:58+00:00
This project started from a very common work situation.

Near the end of the day, I was asked to convert invoices and scanned tables into Excel files. The images were slightly blurry, misaligned, and had inconsistent table borders.

The usual approach was slow and frustrating. I had to type data row by row, constantly zoom in and out, double-check numbers, and still worry about missing or incorrect values.

I tried existing image-to-Excel and OCR tools, but ran into the same problems repeatedly. Table structure reconstruction was unreliable, OCR errors were frequent, and batch processing was either limited or unusable.

I then experimented with AI-based OCR models. The recognition accuracy improved, but the workflow was still painful. Uploading images one by one, writing prompts, and copying results manually does not scale when dealing with many invoices.

So I built a web tool focused on one thing only: converting table images into usable Excel files with minimal manual effort.

The current workflow is simple. You upload one or multiple images, the system detects text and table structure, you preview the generated Excel file, and then download it.

I mainly use it for invoices, receipts, printed tables, and screenshots. The output is not perfect in every edge case, but it is significantly better than manual typing and good enough for real-world work.

[https://jpg2excel.app](https://jpg2excel.app)

This is not a must-have tool. But if you regularly deal with table data trapped in images, it may save you a few hours of manual work.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-12-29 08:34:15+00:00
> I come to Hacker News to avoid this kind of rhetoric.

I think this rhetoric fits seamlessly inline with the hacker ethos, and that's one of my motivators (if not the biggest) to read through HN comments at all. It's exhausting to comprehend at times, but so are any well expressed positions in the complexity of life. Otherwise, I worry that HN will complete its transformation to become just another marketing platform for the wider tech sector, like some seem to already think it is.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-12-29 08:34:31+00:00
> points to an issue in the language or std library design.

Rust has a too-small stdlib because they want to avoid a calcified stdlib like C++ and Python, which both have too-big stdlibs.

This is a law of nature, your stdlib can either be too small or too big. It cannot be the right size. At least it isn't C.
by hollowturtle | 2025-12-29 08:34:41+00:00
> If you include hyphens in the name, you can guarantee that your tag won’t appear in any future versions of HTML.

Which future version? Is there something I'm missing? I'd like to have html6 that has feature parity with native, but I'm afraid we got html5 and just stopped there. And if there will be an html6 why can't we just state "use version 5 in this document" so there won't be any name clashing between supported and custom tags?
by ggm | 2025-12-29 08:34:45+00:00
You're absolutely right that assumption was implicit. The answer was written totally in that framework. I'm not here to say what's right or wrong in determining something about people who lie outside of normal in these things, or what normal means.

So what I wrote should be read with a "if it is held to be a condition which deserved remediation or avoidance of it's manifestation" attached.

Most medical conditions are couched in this sense, that a deficit or departure from the normal is a problem. In matters of brain chemistry it pays to be more nuanced.
by robocat | 2025-12-29 08:35:37+00:00
And you need to be genuine.

Find whatever works for you to be genuinely interested.

People know if you're faking attention, or if you're unnaturally giving.

It's a tricky balance.

We slowly learn by practicing...

I've learnt over time to be more generous (tried to stop keeping a mental record of debts, and try to avoid giving obligations to anyone), and to be less judgemental (acceptance is mostly good).
by ma1or | 2025-12-29 08:35:44+00:00
Hi HN,

For years I’ve been rebuilding UIs — legacy internal tools, SaaS dashboards, competitor clones — and I kept running into the same problem:
screenshots lose states, transitions, and behavior design files exist only for new features prompts can guess layout but not actual interaction logic reverse-engineering takes weeks, not minutes

So I built something for myself: Replay.

The core idea is simple but (I think) new: treat a video of the UI as the source of truth. Not single frames, not mocks, but how a UI actually behaves over time — clicks, scrolling, navigation, state changes.

Replay analyzes a recording end-to-end and reconstructs: a responsive UI based on real behavior
flow map of transitions and possible paths,componentized code (React + Tailwind), an editable design system

all states observed in the video

It doesn’t guess missing features — it faithfully rebuilds what it sees in style we want keeping the data.

I’ve used this to rebuild several real products and internal systems, and it’s saved days or weeks compared to manual reconstruction. The technology feels possible now because recent advances in AI make it feasible to infer state machines and interaction graphs, not just pixels.

We’re in early access beta (2 free reconstructions for new users), and I’m curious about a couple of things:

What are edge cases this might fail on?
Do others have workflows that suffer from the same “screenshots aren’t enough” problem?
How useful would a tool like this be for your team?

Beta: replay.build

Happy to answer questions.
Bartosz
by gattilorenz | 2025-12-29 08:36:04+00:00
The default Mac approach is IMHO superior in this. Just select the regular US keyboard, you have deadkeys available if you need them by pressing “alt”+symbol (e.g. “o” to have the dieresis symbol), then press the vowel you want to modify. But if you don’t know better, it’s just a regular US layout, and it’s always there, by default, on every computer (including that of your colleagues).
by fasbiner | 2025-12-29 08:36:17+00:00
So to be clear, your sole expectation of a liberal democracy is that it have a better judicial system than Russia or Iran.

And beyond that, you applaud any democratic country's efforts to reign in speech by arresting their own citizens in order to combat foreign influence operations?

And the fulcrum of this argument is that we believe that Russia and China have uniquely pernicious influence operations and there are no other state-level actors domestically or semi-domestically whose intelligence services also exert influence through the passage of laws restricting speech?

Having seen the last two years of politics in the UK and the US, your impression is that there is an overwhelming Chinese-Russian troll farm operation which self-evidently justifies rolling back the last two centuries worth of hard-fought and incremental precedents won for free speech and free press.

And again, the water-line we need to stay above is merely "this is still better than being arrested in Russia or Iran", keeping in mind that many countries we would not consider to be democracies at all also meet this bar.
by sQL_inject | 2025-12-29 08:36:57+00:00
This sentiment, branded differently but functionally the same, is punished in the US currently, because the hordes are upset their Shein costs more in the short term.

We've entered a new era where every nation is walling up its industries (tariffs and fines), its demographics (via immigration), and it's culture (internet and social media control).

A customs duty and a tariff are functionally the same, raising the cost of foreign goods to protect local industries.
by lawn | 2025-12-29 08:37:19+00:00
> Why is anybody supposed to be scared of them?

Don't underestimate them just because they couldn't defeat Ukraine.

They have no regard for the lives of their own soldiers and will send wave after wave of meat towards the front, which is very hard to defend against. This is backed up by an incredible knowledge of drone warfare and most countries in the world would be unable to defend against them.
by nirvdrum | 2025-12-29 08:39:00+00:00
When the news hit that the entry model was being retired I thought it might not be so bad because there’s probably a deluge of used models available, either because the owner doesn’t really use it or because they upgraded to the OLED. I was astounded by how many blatant scam postings there are on Facebook Marketplace. I can’t imagine that Meta can’t detect these since every post title ends in some random four character alphanumeric string. I’m concerned now that we’re going to see an uptick in people being scammed because they want a Steam Deck but can’t afford the OLED models.

I don’t have any data to support this, but I suspect a sizable segment of PC gamers aren’t going to view this as the impetus they needed to splurge on the OLED. I doubt very many of those people see this as a double-edged sword. It doesn’t particularly matter to them what Valve’s confidence in the product is if they can’t afford to buy one. While some may buy the step-up model, many won’t. Valve loses out on the sale of the hardware and on the sale of the software to run on it. And I’d be concerned that ceding the lower end of the market is going to poison the well like video game consoles in the early 80s.

With that said, Valve almost certainly has the data and would know better than me. It seems like a gamble to me. Maybe the post is correct and this is all about price anchoring for the new Steam Machine and Frame.
by wltr | 2025-12-29 08:39:13+00:00
Throughout using Linux here and there for like two decades or so, my only issues were Ubuntu forcing some very Microsoft-ish decisions on me, which I did not like. Plus, this very very stable very stable Debian breaking upon version upgrades (I have no idea why, I keep running mostly default Debian since forever). These days I mostly use Arch and Fedora (on those shared computers I don’t bother to config to my liking), and they were mostly flawless for like years. I have some things I don’t like, but they aren’t too many and minuscule. I used a MacBook Pro for like over a decade, but left macOS earlier than this LiquidAss fiasco, so I cannot relate really. But still reading all these complaints about Windows and macOS, it looks like your guys only issue with Linux is ‘I did not make any effort to understand the system, I’d use my weird pervert Windows baggage and expect it would just work the same way.’ Hey, it wouldn’t. Take a weekend to research, take a month to play with Linux on some non-critical hardware (buy a used ThinkPad or ThinkCentre). I’d say Linux is quite ready for most things these days. Yes, not all hardware may work well, but once you understand the reasons for that, you won’t blame the community, but rather those who intentionally do nothing to make their own hardware work. I’m looking at you Nvidia. And even them, it looks like, started doing something. Switching my desktops from almost a decade on macOS, I mostly feel like an upgrade. Even on a MacBook! I wish some software to be better, but it’s getting there slowly, even without my help.
by tpoacher | 2025-12-29 08:39:26+00:00
Friends and people you know are fine.

People you don't know but who take the time to leave a considerate message explaining why they would like to connect, is also probably fine.

But some "Jeffrey Epstein" rando wanting to connect without even explaining why should be an instant ignore. You are the company you keep, so might as well know who your company are.
by necovek | 2025-12-29 08:39:28+00:00
They know about it, but decided to ignore it "because most people don't set it correctly".

Instead of trying to figure out who has set it correctly first, and then use it if they have, they always default to language and search results for your location.

I can get the location bit: they want/need to show you local ads, so they push local shops to you too (and just maybe, you do want stuff nearby), but language?
by SXX | 2025-12-29 08:40:38+00:00
Low end gaming ia 2d indie titles and they now run on toasters.

All the popular mass matket games work on iGPU: fortnite, roblox, mmos, arena shooters, battlen royales. Good chunk of cross platform console titles also work just fine.

You can play Cyberpunk or BG3 on damn Steam Deck. I wont call this low end.

Number of games that dont run to some extent without dGPU is limited to heavy AAA titles and niche PC only genres.
by ggm | 2025-12-29 08:40:43+00:00
It would be understood that any action under the sherman act is unlikely and as you say, the financial penalties are tokenistic.

The non financial parts, which include mandated restructuring and penalties to directors including incarceration however, are not tokenistic. They'd be appealed and delayed, but at some point the shareholders would seek redress from the board. Ignoring judicial mandated instructions isn't really a good idea, current WH behaviour aside. If the defence here is "courts don't matter any more" that's very unhelpful, if true. At some point, a country which cannot enforce judicial outcomes has stopped being civil society.

My personal hope the EU tears holes in the FAANG aside, the collusive pricing of chips has been a problem for some time. The cost/price disjunction here is strong.
by chrischen | 2025-12-29 08:42:18+00:00
To be fair with the languages I use there are only a finite number of ways a particular line or even function can be implemented due to high level algebraic data structures and strict type checking. Business logic is encoded as data requirements, which is encoded into types, which is enforced by the type checker. Even a non-AI based system can technically be made to fill in the code, but AI system allows this to sort of be generalized across many languages that did not implement auto-complete.
by Tepix | 2025-12-29 08:43:00+00:00
The topic of ranking mechanisms sits at the core of many of our issues with social networks and centrally operated instances. I think it deserves far more attention.

And these algorithms should be open source and we should be able to pick our own and mash them.

Related:

Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm: A Blueprint

https://blog.mozilla.ai/build-your-own-timeline-algorithm-a-...
by goku12 | 2025-12-29 08:43:13+00:00
> You could argue that Plex, MinIO or Mattermost is being enshittified, but definitely not self hosting as a whole.

That's probably not how you should interpret it. Self hosting as a whole is still a vastly better option. But if there is a significant enough public movement towards it, you can expect it to be targeted for enshittification too. The incidents related to Plex, MinIO and Mattermost should be taken as warning signals about what this may escalate into in the future. Here are the possible problems I foresee.

1. The situation with Plex, MinIO and Mattermost can be expected to happen more frequently. After a limit, the pain of frequent migration will become untenable. MinIO is a great example. Even the crowd on HN hadn't considered an alternative until then. Some of us learned about Garage, RustFS and Ceph S3 for the first time and we were debating about each of their pros and cons. It's very telling that that discussion was very lengthy.

2. There is a gradual nudge to move everything to the cloud and then monetize it. Mandatory online account for Win11, monetization of GH self-hosted runner (now suspended after backlash, I think) and cloudification of MS Office are good examples. You can expect a similar attempt on self hosted applications. Of course, most of our self-hosted software is currently open source. But if these big companies decide to embrace, extend and extinguish it, I'm not sure that the market will be prudent enough to stick with the FOSS options. Half of HN was fighting me a few days back when I suggested that we should strive to push the market towards serviceable modular hardware.

3. FOSS projects developed under companies are always at a higher risk of being hijacked or going rogue. To be clear, I'm not against that model. For example, I'm happy with Zulip's development and monetization model - ethical, generous and not too pushy. But mattermost shows where that can go wrong. Sure, they're are open source. But there are practical difficulties in easily overriding such issues.

4. At one time, we were expecting small form-factor headless computers (Plug computers [1]) like SheevaPlug and FreedomBox to become ubiquitous. That should still be an option, though I'm not sure where it's headed, given the current RAM situation. But even if they make a come back, it's very likely that OEMs will lock it down like smartphones today and make it difficult for you to exercise your choices of servers, if not outright restrict them. (If anybody wants to argue that normal people will never consider it, remember how smartphones were, before iPhone. We had a blackberry that was used only by a niche crowd.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_computer
by ivanjermakov | 2025-12-29 08:43:18+00:00
Man, "homelab" is such a wide term. For some it's an old Android, for some it's a literal datacenter in a basement. And everything in between.

Goals are vastly different too. For some it's about hosting a few services to be free from company slop, for others it's a way to practice devops: clustering, containers, complex networking.

Seeing someone recommending Proxmox or Freenas to a beginner that just want to share family photos from an old laptop is wrong in so many ways...
by cs02rm0 | 2025-12-29 08:43:56+00:00
> He’s a proper democrat.

The same Starmer who's cancelled local elections? Who's not looked at the polls and thought maybe it's time to go, because the demos clearly don't want me? The same Starmer who said no rise in NI in the manifesto, only to increase NI? The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership?

He's no proper democrat. People are already talking about the rhetoric being used around war with Russia as laying the foundations for removing a 2029 general election.
by thinkingemote | 2025-12-29 08:44:47+00:00
In the UK the arrests are mostly about "grossly offensive" speech. That's more of a grey area than the clearly defined hate speech. Often there are arrests and investigations but convictions on these are less. Convictions of hate speech also occur but are not news worthy and no one objects. The two different offenses are being confused and so it becomes news. In the US they don't have the grossly offensive category.

It's an issue because people are being investigated because people are offended by some things while others are not, and others (like comments here) see the difference between offensive speech and outright calls for violence. The police in some areas are encouraged to actively investigate reports of offensiveness whether or not they seem to them serious. It's a good idea on paper but the ambiguities and unequal application of their policy is newsworthy. It leads to conspiratorial and political theories.

There is also a related newsworthy issue of the widening of what hate speech means to encompass forms of offensiveness. So some may say it's a direct call to violence to say some things but others may say it's not. This ambiguity leads to an effect and discussions.

"Silence is violence" and "From the river to the sea" are topical example quotes used in this debate.
by crapple8430 | 2025-12-29 08:44:49+00:00
I don't really agree with this blog post; there is nothing enshittified about self-hosting.

But it does almost seems like there is a squeeze on general purpose computing from all sides, including homelab. The DRAM and SSD prices is just the latest addition to that. There's also Win 11 requiring TPM, which is not an bad thing by itself, but which will almost certainly take away the ability to run arbitrary OSes 5-10 years down the line on PCs. Or you'd still be able to boot them, but nothing will run on it without a fully trusted chain from TPM -> secure boot -> browser.
Ask HN: Could someone kindly spare me an invite to Lobste.rs?
by debayande | 2025-12-29 08:46:08+00:00
Hello, all.

I've been reading quite a bit on Lobste.rs for a while now, and would like to participate more with the community. Could someone kindly spare me an invite?

Here's my email address: https://spamty.eu/show/v7/357/e9c4862a5e/

Cheers, and thanks in advance.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-12-29 08:46:10+00:00
>You seem to have a more solid idea than I of what a Vison-like device is for.

I don't. I'm just guessing what Apple may have in mind.

>But if I find myself walking down the street with a screen on my face, I’d personally prefer to just close the apps that I don’t need

Of course, but what about the apps you do need? Say you're in a shop, taking notes, browsing the shop's website, scanning barcodes with something like the Yuka app, maybe even keeping an eye on messages at the same time.

I kept wondering what's the point of covering things in this semi-transparent sludge that doesn't actually allow you to see through but still makes the things in the foreground harder to see.

Well, here's your answer. Avoiding collisions and maybe getting a vague idea of where we want to turn next.

Note that I'm not saying this is a good idea. It's just what I think Apple has in mind. I don't think we can know at this point how or if we really want to use smart glasses.
by dannye | 2025-12-29 08:46:18+00:00
I blogged about this: https://dashed-html.github.io

◄ <tagname> = always an HTMLUnknownElement until the WHATWG adds it as new Element.

◄ <tag-name> = UNDEFINED Custom Element, valid HTMLElement, great for layout and styling

◄ Upgraded with the JavaScript Custom Elements API it becomes a DEFINED Custom Element

---

► This is standard behaviour in all browsers that support the Custom Elements API. Since 2020 in all browsers when Microsoft Edge switched to the Chromium Engine. And already in Chrome, Safari, Firefox many moons before 2020

► The W3C HTML Validator accepts all <tag-name> Custom Elements with a dash as HTMLElement.
It does not accept <tagname> (no dash), those are HTMLUnknownElement

► The UA - UserAgent StyleSheet (Browsers default stylesheet)
defines CSS [hidden] { display:none }.
But Custom Elements do not inherit the default stylesheet;
so you have to add that behaviour yourself in your stylesheet.

► <DIV> is display:block only in the UA StyleSheet
You have to set the display property on these Custom Elements yourself
(You will forget this 20 times, then you never make the mistake again)

► The CSS :defined pseudo selector targets standard HTML tags and JavaScript defined Custom Elements

► Thus the CSS :not(:defined) pseudo selector targets the UNDEFINED Custom Elements; they are still valid HTMLElement, CSS applies like any element

► DSD - Declarative ShadowDOM:
<template shadowrootmode="open"> creates the same undefined Custom Elements with a shadowDOM
by darubedarob | 2025-12-29 08:47:12+00:00
Imagine you have to communicate that rewrite and drop of support for bought "addons" to the people who went on that shopping spree. Who then would have to explain the "wecan"-value drop + cost of recovery of the same abilities to the shareholders and customers. The magpiesnest of bought companies tech is a tarbaby for any tech lead, the rewrite a career ender for the CEOs office.
by necovek | 2025-12-29 08:47:29+00:00
Whatever you do, you are paying for the search in some manner.

With DuckDuckGo, you are being served non-targeted ads. If you go through the trouble of setting anything up to avoid some of the public search engine pitfalls, you are paying with time and effort, and maybe even subscriptions on top like VPN and similar.

Obviously, ad networks want people to have this mindset, and while I have no issue with "stick it to them", it's always going to be an uphill battle.

I actually believe we need distributed and federated p2p search engine built, but trusting the results is hard with that: perhaps this is where blockchain approach (to store hashes of indexed pages?) could bring real value?