MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: xllify turns prompts into Excel functions
by alexjreid | 2026-01-30 12:53:15+00:00
Maintaining large Excel workbooks is dull and thankless work. The situation can be can be somewhat improved with custom functions whose logic can be tested outside of Excel. Traditionally this has been a fairly advanced area with not a huge amount of adoption. xllify can create high performance .xll add-ins to extend Excel, all from prompting with requirements, existing formulas or VBA.
The resulting add-in uses the C SDK for maximum performance: no Python, .NET or COM.
I'd be glad of any thoughts!
by lelanthran | 2026-01-30 12:53:27+00:00
> But software keeps moving forward - my lack of time coding assembly by hand has never hindered my career.

Well, yeah. You were still (presumably) debugging the code you did write in the higher level language.

The linked article makes it very clear that the largest decline was in problem solving (debugging). The juniors starting with AI today are most definitely not going to do that problem-solving on their own.
by slfnflctd | 2026-01-30 12:53:31+00:00
Except that they can talk with you, at length, and seem empathetic, even if they're totally unconscious.

Which, you know, humans can also do, including when they're not actually empathizing with you. It's often called lying. In some fields it's called a bedside manner.

An imaginary friend is just your own brain. LLMs are something much more.
by kakacik | 2026-01-30 12:53:39+00:00
> Elon is aware that Tesla insane market valuation would crash 10x if it stays a car company.

I see nothing wrong here, correction back to reality.

I understand why people adored him blindly in the early days, but liking him now after its clear what sort of person he is and always will be is same as liking trump. Many people still do it, but its hardly a defensible position unless on is already invested in his empire.
by crashingintoyou | 2026-01-30 12:53:48+00:00
If you're worried about prep time, I've been taking the approach at https://www.hippressurecooking.com/pressure-cooker-oatmeal-h... of cooking steel cut oats pot-in-pot in my Instant Pot.

As a single guy, I just cook the oats in the bowl that I intend to serve them in and, since it's basically water just water in the base of the instant pot, there's not much cleaning required. The oats cook without manual intervention during the cooking process.

It takes a bit of time, but in theory you could set up your instant pot on a delay timer and wake up to freshly-cooked steel-cut oats.
by brookst | 2026-01-30 12:54:19+00:00
I wish they had attempted to measure product management skill.

My hypothesis is that the AI users gained less in coding skill, but improved in spec/requirement writing skills.

But there’s no data, so it’s just my speculation. Intuitively, I think AI is shifting entry level programmers to focus on expressing requirements clearly, which may not be all that bad of a thing.
by NalNezumi | 2026-01-30 12:54:30+00:00
>There is so much motivated reasoning around this brand that it's hard to take any article like the above, or half the comments in this thread, seriously.

Funny, because for the last year, any submission that have Tesla or Musk or Musk associated with something negative have been flagged very quickly. I assume by Musk fanboys. So when an article or two slips the Crack, it naturally is filled with criticism. Survivor bias at its finest.

Your criticism paragraph being longer than "it really is great!" paragraph does point towards motivated reasoning going both ways.
by no-name-here | 2026-01-30 12:54:48+00:00
I tried to find some data: In a 20 mph school zone, ~70-80% of drivers drove 26 mph or faster, regardless of whether there were flashing lights, an always-20 zone, or a 20-when-schoolchildren-present zone. [1]

Although note that ~70-80% of drivers drove 6 or more mph over the speed limit in a school zone, while it seems like the claims in some of these comments are that a human driver would drive at less than 17 mph out of an abundance of caution.

[1] https://wtsc.wa.gov/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2023/12/1...
by deaux | 2026-01-30 12:54:50+00:00
> The last thing that your doctor wants is giving you pills so you go away

Except for all the doctors who do want just that.

> Doctors of all countries have been under a lot of pressure by patients and health administrators to "fix the issue and quick"

While such patients exist, I don't believe they're a global majority, and the group of patients who want the exact opposite, more time rather than "quick", is the bigger out of the two.

Literally a few comments down from this one:

> N=1, but last yearly physical my primary care doctor asked me if I ever had anxiety. I said yes, but that I wasn't really interested in treating it outside of lifestyle change. They asked if I wanted a prescription for prozac, without explaining anything about how to does it or titrate up or down or a time frame. I said I wasn't interested again, and that I particularly didn't want to take any medications that you can't just stop taking one day on a whim (a statement she didn't respond to).
She then proceeded to say "well I'll just write you the prescription anyway and you can do your research later and decide to fill it or not".

> I was actually shocked by this interaction, and think about it often. She's a regular family doctor with the local hospital system, and this was just a regular checkup. I answered one question with a "yes, but it's manageable and I think I can handle it with lifestyle change" and then said no twice to medication and ended up with a prescription, which I ignored but don't appreciate having on my record, since it's a false indicator for future prescribing physicians.
by skrebbel | 2026-01-30 12:55:00+00:00
Yeah I probably will, when this one breaks. I had Android always before and I'm pretty unimpressed with Apple. HN'ers love to imagine that only Apple has their interests in mind unlike other BigCos, but no Android phone I had ever nudged me out of the blue, in the middle of other work, to "turn on Google Drive" with just "Ok" and "Ask me later" as the options.
by xetokky | 2026-01-30 12:56:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I built UnIQum because most "real-time" scanners are actually snapshot-based with a ~5s latency. In arbitrage, 5-second-old data is dead data.

Worse, existing tools often show "paper profit" while ignoring execution reality. We focus on what actually matters for a successful trade.

Why UnIQum is different:

True Real-Time: ~40ms internal processing via WebSockets (vs standard polling).

Execution Safety: Automatically checks deposit/withdraw status and network alignment to prevent stuck funds.

Smart Sizing: Calculates the optimal trade volume based on real order book depth to minimize slippage.

Deep Data: Funding Rates & Delta-Neutral strategies included out of the box.

I’m looking for feedback on performance and suggestions: what specific risk metrics or features are you missing in current tools?
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-30 12:56:55+00:00
All good. I would say Watchmen is one of those ones in particular that is truly above the noise however. I even hesitate to call it “pop culture.” It’s “high art” if I can be pretentious about it, and a powerful mirror for us.

At a time when state violence in the US is brandished so loudly and proudly, it feels like a very important piece of media for folks to watch.
by gassi | 2026-01-30 12:57:10+00:00
In the last 6 months we've seen no fewer then a dozen vibe coded/AI assisted open source, self hosted projects launch that complete against ours. So far all but one has fizzled out, with the same pattern each time: announcement, repo with 1 giant commit, 2-4 months of feature releases, loss of interest from the author, and finally abandonment.

I expect once users get burnt enough time, they'll stop adopting the new cool thing until it's been out long enough with consistent releases.
by KineticLensman | 2026-01-30 12:57:19+00:00
> Once again, it was the English who provided the spur.

I'm continuing with this initiative by proposing a new variant on Haggis: "Shepheard's Haggis". It's basically a Shepheard's pie - which is essentially lamb mince+stuff topped with mashed potato - made using haggis instead of mince. If I have any leftover gravy in the freezer that gets mixed into the haggis to moisten it a bit. I've making this for years.

For added heresy I replace the neeps with baked beans, themselves livened up with some sumac or similar.
by no-name-here | 2026-01-30 12:58:51+00:00
> The fact that lots of drivers suck doesn't mean that waymo gets a pass.

But that fact does mean that we should encourage alternatives that reduce fatalities, and that not doing so results in fatalities that did not need to occur.

> The real solution? Get rid of cars.

I also support initiatives to improve public transit, etc. However, I don't think "get rid of cars" is a realistic idea to the general public right now, so let's encourage all of the things that improve things - robot drivers if they kill people less often than humans, public transit, etc. - let's not put off changes that will save lives on the hope that humanity will "get rid of cars" any time soon. Or when do you think humanity will "get rid of cars"?
by Apira_G | 2026-01-30 12:59:03+00:00
With all the tech advancements and the rise of AI, it’s easy to wonder if we’re heading toward a jobless future. But if we look at history, technology has always shifted the way jobs work, rather than completely eliminating them. Sure, some roles may disappear, but new ones will emerge, and a lot of them will change in ways we can’t even predict right now.

There’s no blueprint for a jobless society, but businesses, markets, and governments are adapting as they go. Most companies are using AI to make people more productive, not replace them.

The real concern is inequality, the fear that some people might be left behind while others benefit from AI. We’ll have to be mindful of that as things evolve.

My opinion or advice would be that to thrive in this future, we should focus on developing skills in areas that are harder to automate, like creativity, judgement, and complex problem-solving. These are the kinds of skills that will keep you adaptable, no matter how the job market changes.
by drysine | 2026-01-30 12:59:06+00:00
>the EU doesn't work like that

It does work like that. The EU just plays a zero-sum game.

"As part of its strategy to secure supplies of critical raw materials, the European Union signed an EU-Ukrainian strategic Partnership on Critical Minerals with Ukraine in July 2021. This agreement, which covers around a hundred projects, aims to secure the supply of ten essential raw materials. It forms part of the European Action Plan on Critical Raw Materials, which seeks to diversify sources of supply and reduce dependence on suppliers from outside the EU.

This partnership brings together several major players, including the European Raw Materials Alliance, a platform that aims to ensure a sustainable and secure supply of raw materials for the European industry, and the European Battery Alliance, a strategic initiative to build a competitive and sustainable battery value chain in Europe." [0]

[0] https://regard-est.com/ukraine-critical-materials-a-strategi...
by 1dom | 2026-01-30 12:59:46+00:00
I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them.

"x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x.

When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use to build useful things in the world, and NextBigTech thing actually does that building, not just what LastBigTech thing (AI) did, that obviously didn't deliver the utopia it promised".

I wonder what it'll be. AGI? Quantum computing? Brain computer interfaces?

I'd love to pickup this conversation again with you in 15 years.
by LightBug1 | 2026-01-30 13:00:46+00:00
I 100% agree with that. Shotwell appears to be one of those few great leaders that don't appear to have the need for adulation at every turn (unlike the founder). Musk is lucky to have her.

However, the combined talents of her and her team, the profits they generate, and their accumulated incredible achievements all still accrue to the benefit of said N'azi.
by Apira_G | 2026-01-30 13:01:12+00:00
The impact of AI on the software engineering job market isn’t something that we can ignore anymore. A lot of routine coding tasks are now automated, and I’ve seen how they’ve affected entry and mid-level roles that focused on boilerplate code.

But the demand has shifted. Employers are now looking for engineers who can integrate AI into their work, and these roles often come with better pay.

It’s true that junior software engineering jobs are becoming more competitive. But by focusing on skills that AI can’t replace (like system design and debugging, and learning to use AI tools as assistants), you can stay ahead and land higher-paying roles.
by dissent | 2026-01-30 13:01:20+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful response. You know what, I do feel a bit conned by this vision only implementation. It wasn't obvious when we test drove it, and they didn't mention it. When we picked the car up, on the shop floor, before it had even moved we saw the "Park Assist Degraded" warning and questioned it. They assured us it just needed time to calibrate. It has never gone away. It will never go away.

As a consumer, I'm pissed off. I do feel conned.

But I'm fine explaining Musk's promises away as hubris. He made promises he should not have, and couldn't keep. He shouldn't have done it, but I do think he believed it. I don't think it was an intent to mislead. Incompetence before malice and so on.

He deserves credit where credit is due. He did push us into the EV era.
by pegasus | 2026-01-30 13:01:39+00:00
Didn't read the whole wall of text/slop, but noticed how the first note (referred from "the intuition I developed of the years of thinking deeply about these problems[0]") is nonsensical in the context. If this is reply is indeed AI-generated, it hilariously self-disproves itself this way. I would congratulate you for the irony, but I have a feeling this is not intentional.
by esskay | 2026-01-30 13:02:01+00:00
The best part of all of this is given their history, and the state of robotaxies as a whole, they will fail, and Tesla will crash. And it'll be a great day. The hype and obscene over valuation of them is utterly moronic.

Look how much longer, and more experience Waymo has and they still have multiple issues a week popping up online, and thats with running them in a very small well mapped and planned out area. Musk wants robo taxies globally, that's just not happening, not any time soon and certainly not by the 10 year limit for him to get his trillion dollar bonus from Tesla, which is the only reason he's pushing so hard to make it happen.
by Revolution1120 | 2026-01-30 13:02:06+00:00
Although he is very unintelligent,but he possessed a strong sense of justice and was brave and fearless in the face of danger.This is reflected not only in this rescue operation, but also in the lawsuits he previously filed. Although foolish, he showed no lack of awareness of human rights. Such a person could not exist in China; even the smartest Chinese people，the most influential, most distinguished, and most prestigious people,would not hesitate to persecute innocent people and disregard human rights. Chinese and Americans are completely opposite in this respect.
Mangione should not have been sentenced to death.
by shayonj | 2026-01-30 13:02:58+00:00
Being able to debug and diagnose difficult problems and distributed systems still remains a key skill, at least until Opus or some other model gets better at it.

I think being intentional about learning while using AI to be productive is where the stitch is, at least for folks earlier in their career. I touch that in my post here as well: https://www.shayon.dev/post/2026/19/software-engineering-whe...
by samusiam | 2026-01-30 13:03:23+00:00
I'd argue that it depends how that degradation manifests whether you want to include it or not.

Consider two scenarios: (1) degradation leads to the model being routed behind the scenes to a different server, with subtly different performance characteristics, all unbeknownst to the user; (2) degradation leads to the model refusing a request and returning an "overloaded" message.

In the first case, absolutely you want to include that because that's the kind of lack of transparency about performance that you'd want signal on. In the second case, an automated test harness might fail, but in the real world the user will just wait and retry when the server is under less load. Maybe you don't include that because it's actually misleading to say that performance (in terms of the model's intelligence, which is how the benchmark will be interpreted) is worse.
by siliconc0w | 2026-01-30 13:04:14+00:00
The new shit-coin-as-a-service app(Bags) is a fascinating evolution of the system. Shitcoins started as a mechanism to monetize your own fame but have apparently evolved so you can monetize other people's fame.

On one hand this is pretty obviously dumb but on the other maybe I'm just not 'getting it' and if shit-coin-speculators want to help finance OSS projects (vibe coded or no) why complain about it?
by bell-cot | 2026-01-30 13:04:26+00:00
A point I don't notice being made -

Try assuming that the target audience for this research is clinicians and nutritionists working with general population patients - particularly patients who really need cholesterol-reducing interventions. The medical system has limited resources; patients have limited attention spans and compliance curves. The patient may be in your ER or hospital after a medical incident, or in your clinic after a bad test result. If the hospital kitchen, a family member, or the patient himself can get through two days of this relatively easy oatmeal diet, the research say that his short-term and intermediate-term numbers should (X fingers) improve by [details]. If, two real-world days later, both a follow-up cholesterol test and (hopefully) the patient's daily symptoms and perception of his health are greatly improved - that's a clear win, both for him and for the medical system. And (hopefully) the patient's perception of the medical system - because high cholesterol is a chronic health problem, and you need him to readily seek care, show up for appointments, and comply with prescribed treatments.
by gcanyon | 2026-01-30 13:04:33+00:00
And like I, Robot, it has numerous loopholes built in, ignores the larger population (Asimov added a law 0 later about humanity), says nothing about the endless variations of the Trolley Problem, assumes that LLMs/bots have a god-like ability to foresee and weigh consequences, and of course ignores alignment completely.
by acdha | 2026-01-30 13:05:08+00:00
It’d be best for everyone outside of the company but he and the board would be buried in lawsuits for the rest of their lives. They have a strong personal interest in avoiding that even if it’s well-deserved based on sober data analysis, so they’re pushing the Hail Mary play trying to jump into a bigger new market which they haven’t already ceded to the competition.
by pinusc | 2026-01-30 13:05:14+00:00
Units is a cool piece of software, but I have since switched to qalculate.
Mostly units has some silly defaults like needing to type tempC(30) instead of 30C; and it's nice to have a full calculator.

I know it's a way to specify that the conversion is absolute rather than relative, but qalculate just asks you about it the first time you convert, and since converting oven and outside temperatures is most of what I do, I don't havr to bother with remembering a different syntax.

Also qalculate is an awesome piece of software in general, so if you're excited by units you should check it out!
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-30 13:05:28+00:00
Trump says look at me --- I'm a bully and not a very smart one.

Trade deficit hits new record high --- despite tariffs. Factory construction and manufacturing jobs are *down*. Trump fans are still swimming in a river in Africa.

https://www.reuters.com/business/us-trade-deficit-widens-by-...

https://cepr.net/publications/how-many-manufacturing-jobs-ha...
by dissent | 2026-01-30 13:05:31+00:00
If I said I wasn't a Musk or Tesla fanboy, I would expect you to take me at my word. I gave a two sided account of my Tesla experience. I do like this car, and I bought it because I liked it.

Maybe it gets flagged because there's no chance of having an intellectually honest discussion if it involves Elon or Tesla? I certainly don't flag them.
by squarefoot | 2026-01-30 13:05:42+00:00
Dual gate mosfets were a godsend when building RF/IF mixers or preamps. Luckily I have a small stash as they're almost unobtanium and costly these days, but for most uses such as mixers and preamps they can be swapped with a pair or normal jfets in a cascode configuration like this one: https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Nyhg.gif
by rvnx | 2026-01-30 13:06:27+00:00
Sounds like investors in Cursor.

Cursor was popular because it was reselling OpenAI at a loss, so for 20 USD / month you could consume 200 USD of tokens per day, but now it's over.

Founders (coins minters) are leaving the ship.

The last ones to leave the ship are going to be left holding the bag.
by cactusplant7374 | 2026-01-30 13:06:41+00:00
> AI models became much better and even doing a "ralph loop" on a simple prompt in a few hours could produce copious amount of working code. As a result you have burned through thousands of dollars of tokens to get some barely working "product" but you had no idea who or why would use it.

Not with a plan from Anthropic or OpenAI. It seems like using pure API is a status symbol among some developers. Look how much I spend on tokens.
by lm28469 | 2026-01-30 13:07:33+00:00
None of these are "communism"... people who don't know better use it as a "china bad" gotcha because it's about as far as their political education allows them to think but it really is way more complex than that.

> Authoritarian. Totalitarian.

Yes these apply, but they're not synonyms of communism. The Iranian government is authoritarian, totalitarian and absolutely not communist

> Red fascism is an OLD term.

But surely you see how dumb this sounds? Fascism is by definition a far right moment, communism is by definition far left moment. By definition fascism is opposed to communism... Of course if we start using literal American propagandists buzzwords ("red fascism") as a basis for modern political discussions we're not going to get anywhere...
by dreamhomestore | 2026-01-30 13:07:48+00:00
In a master bedroom, the bedside chest of drawers often serves multiple roles. A 70 cm wide top surface provides enough "real estate" for both a decorative lamp and practical items like CPAP machines or large-format books. This eliminates the frustration of cramped surfaces. By choosing a 3 drawer unit with this specific width, you are investing in a piece that adapts to the evolving needs of a long-term home, delivered directly with free delivery for added logistical ease.
by nirui | 2026-01-30 13:07:50+00:00
I doubt that.

Some dirt-cheap VPS maybe too unreliable to run anything serious, that's why they sell that for dirt cheap. And their consumers generally won't complain about sudden server reboots, because that's what expected for the price.

If they increase their prices, then many of their customers maybe better off just use Linode or DigitalOcean etc instead, as these vendors provides better guaranty on stability.
by no-name-here | 2026-01-30 13:08:47+00:00
The 'next' comment after yours is "Alternate headline: Waymo saves child's life" and the 'prev' comment is "A human driver would most likely have killed this child. That's what should be on the ledger." - would either of those be less 'callous and clinical'?

Other accident reports I've seen (NTSB, etc) often seem to take a similar approach - is it a bad thing?

Or what kind of language wouldn't make you 'want not to use their service'?