MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by carefree-bob | 2026-02-08 04:00:41+00:00
For a traditional office suite, you'd want a word processor with somewhat of a decent layout engine in it, a spreadsheet, something for slide presentations, something for rudimentary databases/datasources, and some sort of diagram drawing capability, and all of these integrated together.

By a "decent layout" engine, you'd like the ability to change fonts, add spacing between paragraphs, segment the page into regions, e.g. by changing the number of columns on a page, insert images and diagrams and choose how text wraps around them, create captions for embedded media, set page numbering policies (or navigational policies for web generation), generate table of contents, set table headers, make more complex tables with merged cells and different types of boundaries, generate table of references, generate tabs, then export to a web page, to a pdf, or to whatever other format you want, hopefully all from the same source. Then when you send it out for review, people can attach their comments to portions of the document, you can accept or reject their changes, there is a document revision history, etc.

So for example, you could write up a quarterly report by importing summary financial data into your spreadsheet, doing some basic analysis, export tables to your word processor, generate some bar charts or graphs, draw some boxes and arrows with your drawing program, stick that into your word processor, add some footnotes and hyperlinks, put the same info into a slide presentation. Then if you want, you could save that as a pdf or turn into a webpage, etc.

One time I had to write up documentation for various security certifications, and that was my introduction to the world of Microsoft office. Learning office made the project more fun, I had never used it before and was impressed with the functionality.

That said, I don't think most people who have office suites actually need a full powered office suite. Probably markdown + slack is enough for a lot of people, but I always like a good drawing or diagram.

Most people I know have shifted to google suite, it really has everything you need and is OS independent. But apart from the convenience of being browser-based, it is just another MS Office clone. The google drawing functionality is very basic, I often wish you could integrate something like excalidraw into it.

I am not suggesting this project needs to keep adding clones of MS Office functionality until it turns into Libre Office, but funded by the French government. That would be a waste. Instead, why not make it better? Reimagine it? Look, for example, at excalidraw. It's fantastic. It was really a fresh take on the stuff people were doing with visio.

I think there is lots of room to make a truly modern office suite instead of another MS Office rehash, so I would encourage this project to go its own way and do something interesting if they intend to be a replacement for proprietary office suites like google suite or MS Office.
by kranner | 2026-02-08 04:00:58+00:00
I'm seeing the same thing with my own little app that implements several new heuristics for functionality and optimisation over a classic algorithm in this domain. I came up with the improvements by implementing the older algorithm and just... being a human and spending time with the problem.

The improvements become evident from the nature of the problem in the physical world. I can see why a purely text-based intelligence could not have derived them from the specs, and I haven't been able to coax them out of LLMs with any amount of prodding and persuasion. They reason about the problem in some abstract space detached from reality; they're brilliant savants in that sense, but you can't teach a blind person what the colour red feels like to see.
by rendaw | 2026-02-08 04:01:34+00:00
What an awful professor! When I first tried to learn pointers, I didn't get it. I tried again 6 months later and suddenly it clicked. The same thing happened for another guy I was learning with.

So the professor just gaslit years of students into thinking they were too dumb to get programming, and also left them with the developmental scar of "if you can't figure something out in a few days, you'll never get it".
by mandevil | 2026-02-08 04:01:49+00:00
Because then the companies that have been given legal license to monopolize this technology could charge whatever price they wanted and insurance companies would have to pay for it? The ability for an insurance company to say no is literally their only negotiation leverage.

Every country arranges their payment mechanism slightly differently- the US is worse than pretty much all of them but they are all slightly different- but every form of insurance has to be able to walk away in the negotiations (at least with patented medicines), or else the monopoly producer will hike the price up.
by perilunar | 2026-02-08 04:02:52+00:00
I looks really pretty, but it's bloated. The home page is 10 times the size of the original (630 kB vs 56 kB).

And the code... everything is just divs and spans, instead of more semantic markup. Where are the lists, headings, and paragraphs? And tailwind classes everywhere — yuck. The beauty of HN is the structure is very regular, so that it would be extremely easy and efficient to style everything using element and descendent selectors, without having to put classes on every single element.

The existing HN table markup is pretty crap also btw, but this isn't an improvement.
by landl0rd | 2026-02-08 04:03:55+00:00
What they are probably doing is speculative decoding, given they've mentioned identical distribution at 2.5x speed. That's roughly in the range you'd expect for that to achieve; 10x is not.

It's also absolute highway robbery (or at least overly-aggressive price discrimination) to charge 6x for speculative decoding, by the way. It is not that expensive and (under certain conditions, usually very cheap drafter and high acceptance rate) actually decrease total cost. In any case, it's unlikely to be even a 2x cost increase, let alone 6x.
by runarberg | 2026-02-08 04:05:02+00:00
> Language-based undefined behavior is just one kind of nondeterminism that programmers deal with every day.

Every day you say. I program every day, and I have never, in my 20 years of programming, on purpose written in undefined behavior. I think you may be exaggerating a bit here.

I mean, sure, some leet programmers do dabble in the undefined behavior, they may even rely on some compiler bug for some extreme edge case during code golf. Whatever. However it is not uncommon when enough programmers start relying on undefined behavior behaving in a certain way, that it later becomes a part of the standard and is therefor no longer “undefined behavior”.

Like I said in a different thread, I suspect you may be willfully ignorant about this. I suspect you actually know the difference between:

a) written instructions compiled into machine code for the machine to perform, and,

b) output of a statistical model, that may or may not include written instructions of (a).

There are a million reasons to claim (a) is not like (b), the fact that (a) is (mostly; or rather desirably) deterministic, while (b) is stochastic is only one (albeit a very good) reason.
by Balgair | 2026-02-08 04:05:11+00:00
My company makes HPLCs.

Yes, they can 'prove' what is in something to the limits of the physics.

However, the human in the loop is quite frail for most operators. In that, these very fancy and very expensive instruments are mostly run by high school grads and serviced by field engineers with a huge backlog.

For a first time one off test of something's composition, I'd go for at least 3 companies and preferably you have a history with them. This stuff is terribly complicated and misinterpretation is shockingly common. If the tech hasn't used the standards before then your at the mercy of fate.

Like, we have 5 (!) places on the home screen that do the exact same function of ending a run because when we try to consolidate it to just 1, our customers freak out and can't find where the button went to. Granted they pay $100k+ per instrument plus service plan, so we add it back in no question ( and this is life critical equipment in many cases), but I hope that shows how embedded to routine these operators get.
by trimethylpurine | 2026-02-08 04:05:35+00:00
What lesser job? People are unemployed after six months. Meanwhile MS hired other people for less to replace those that left. Nobody won here.

It's not about "lesser" jobs being actually lesser. The point is that you don't actually have a choice. Big companies that nobody likes are in control of the economy and you can't do anything except join the unemployed until you get rehired from the pool of desperate people willing to do their bidding.

(All of this with a grain of salt. Not literally everyone is in this situation, but there are certainly many who are.)

I'm just saying, maybe don't be so quick to judge.
by zippyman55 | 2026-02-08 04:05:49+00:00
It’s kinda difficult in an antidotal observation to prove if someone is truly disabled but three of my observations that rubbed me the wrong way was the co-worker who ran regular marathons but was planning to seek disability pay for a physical injury; the co-worker that never seemed to have a hearing issue over the ten yrs I worked w her but instantly claimed to have had damage from earlier; and the co-worker who got back injury disability but surfed at lunchtime.
I’m sure there are edge cases that can explain all of these. But I’m feeling better if the person really needs the assistance get it.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-08 04:06:44+00:00
The difference is that what most languages compile to is much much more stable than what is produced by
running a spec through an LLM.

A language or a library might change the implementation of a sorting algorithm once in a few years. An LLM is likely to do it every time you regenerate the code.

It’s not just a matter of non-determinism either, but about how chaotic LLMs are. Compilers can produce different machine code with slightly different inputs, but it’s nothing compared to how wildly different LLM output is with very small differences in input. Adding a single word to your spec file can cause the final code to be far more unrecognizably different than adding a new line to a C file.

If you are only checking in the spec which is the logical conclusion of “this is the new high level language”, everyone you regenerate your code all of the thousands upon thousands of unspecified implementation details will change.

Oops I didn’t think I needed to specify what going to happen when a user tries to do C before A but after B. Yesterday it didn’t seem
to do anything but today it resets their account balance to $0. But after the deployment 5 minutes ago
it seems to be fixed.

Sometimes users dragging a box across the screen will see the box disappear behind other boxes. I can’t reproduce it though.

I changed one word in my spec and now there’s an extra 500k LOC to implement a hidden asteroids game on the home page that uses 100% of every visitor’s CPU.

This kind of stuff happens now, but the scale with which it will happen if you actually use LLMs as a high level language is unimaginable. The chaos of all the little unspecified implementation details constantly shifting is just insane to contemplate as user or a maintainer.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-08 04:08:06+00:00
Your rental car example reminds me of my own "pizza dinner for the team" example. A company I used to work for would order pizza on Thursdays for folks who were working late. No paperwork, no expenses, no manager approval--at 7PM on Thursday, 5-6 boxes of pizza would show up in the break room, and people would spend a little more time at work hacking away. Win win. As the company grew, of course, people being idiots, the free pizza got abused. People would walk into the break room at 7:01, take an entire box, and leave the office. So, sure enough, free pizza night ended.

Because it's easier to just forbid than eat the cost or (heaven forbid!) talk to people.

How much was this pizza costing the company? Pennies in the grand scheme of things. How much were the rental cars costing? Pennies. Probably a rounding error in even the smallest department's budget. You can afford to hire an army of engineers making $100K each, but $10 pizza is where you draw the line? $100 rental cars? Really???
by DonaldPShimoda | 2026-02-08 04:08:21+00:00
> if they are correct I see no issue at all.

Indeed. Are you verifying that they are correct, or are you glancing at the output and seeing something that seems plausible enough and then not really scrutinizing? Because the latter is how LLMs often propagate errors: through humans choosing to trust the fancy predictive text engine, abdicating their own responsibility in the process.

As a consumer of an API, I would much rather have static types and nothing else than incorrect LLM-generated prosaic documentation.
by jjav | 2026-02-08 04:09:33+00:00
> You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.

(Silicon Valley is NorCal but still)

I've also lived in Pittsburgh, did not own a car or a bike just walked everywhere. And northern New Jersey, was also walking distance to shops and restaurants.

The one and only place I've lived in the US where walking to shops was not practical was out in the countryside in northwestern NJ. That's a pretty rural area so needed the car, closest supermarket was a 5 minute drive.

Also have family in Phoenix, have lived there for decades and never had a drivers license. Supermarket is 1.5 blocks away. The heat can be rough, but in distance it is very near.

Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
by kulahan | 2026-02-08 04:09:49+00:00
If there's not a constant stream of consciousness throughout the entire process, I'm just assuming that's gonna be nothing more than a copy. What else could it be? When "you" wake up, it'll be 100% convincing either way, so I assume you can only prove it going in. I'm not great at philosophy though.

Edit: biology is pretty efficient though. We might as well just start growing new bodies/parts for people, enhancing it over time. There are already functionally immortal species on Earth.
by carefree-bob | 2026-02-08 04:10:35+00:00
I guess I am a markdown hater, but I don't like it. Markdown feels too much like hand writing your own html, when you have to put in tags, but like html it suffers from lack of layout control, which is why they invented CSS, but you don't get CSS control in markdown. If you start adding that, you end up with LaTex, and I don't know anyone who actually enjoyed writing serious documents in Latex. It was fun in the beginning, but it quickly became tiresome and I found myself not being very productive.

Doing layout is not easy. Programming layouts well requires real expertise, which is why most layout engines expose a gui and let you deal with larger text components graphically. Maybe someone else will come up with a usability innovation here, but I'm not aware of it, and markdown certainly doesn't have that capability.
by WoodenChair | 2026-02-08 04:10:35+00:00
The article starts with a philosophically bad analogy in my opinion. C-> Java != Java -> LLM because the intermediate product (the code) changed its form with previous transitions. LLMs still produce the same intermediate product. I expanded on this in a post a couple months back:

https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/c-java-java-llm....

"The intermediate product is the source code itself. The intermediate goal of a software development project is to produce robust maintainable source code. The end product is to produce a binary. New programming languages changed the intermediate product. When a team changed from using assembly, to C, to Java, it drastically changed its intermediate product. That came with new tools built around different language ecosystems and different programming paradigms and philosophies. Which in turn came with new ways of refactoring, thinking about software architecture, and working together.

LLMs don’t do that in the same way. The intermediate product of LLMs is still the Java or C or Rust or Python that came before them. English is not the intermediate product, as much as some may say it is. You don’t go prompt->binary. You still go prompt->source code->changes to source code from hand editing or further prompts->binary. It’s a distinction that matters.

Until LLMs are fully autonomous with virtually no human guidance or oversight, source code in existing languages will continue to be the intermediate product. And that means many of the ways that we work together will continue to be the same (how we architect source code, store and review it, collaborate on it, refactor it, etc.) in a way that it wasn’t with prior transitions. These processes are just supercharged and easier because the LLM is supporting us or doing much of the work for us."
by vagab0nd | 2026-02-08 04:11:09+00:00
I have a theory: I think the recent advance in coding agent has shocked everyone. It's something of such unheard-of novelty that everyone thinks they've discovered something profound. Naturally, they all think they are the only ones in on it and feel the need to share. But in reality, it's already public knowledge, so they add no value. I've been in this trap many times in the last couple years.
by matthewisabel | 2026-02-08 04:12:30+00:00
We'll ship some initial changes here next week to provide maintainers the ability to configure PR access as discussed above.

After that ships we'll continue doing a lot of rapid exploration given there's still a lot of ways to improve here. We also just shipped some issues related features here like comment pinning and +1 comment steering [1] to help cut through some noise.

Interested though to see what else emerges like this in the community, I expect we'll see continued experimentation and that's good for OSS.

[1] https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-05-pinned-comments-on-...
by wookmaster | 2026-02-08 04:12:33+00:00
You’re absolutely correct what used to take me hours reading docs and googling now takes minutes to find an answer to. Just this week my new beelink I couldnt get hardware acceleration working for transcoding. A couple prompts lead me to the fact the gpu was new and I needed a newer Linux kernel. I probably would have spent hours and hours fiddling with device drivers and configs in the past.
by nonethewiser | 2026-02-08 04:14:21+00:00
Smart if you can get away with it. For non trivial things you can't quite get away with it.

I've started asking Claude to make me a high-level implementation plan and basically prompt ME to write it. For the most part I walk through it and ask Claude to just do it. But then 10% of the time there is a pretty major issue that I investigate, weigh pros/cons, and then decide to change course on.

Those things accumulate. Maybe 5-10 things over the course of an MVP that I wouldn't really have a clue about if I let Claude just dutiful implement it's own plan.
by elamje | 2026-02-08 04:16:14+00:00
Not arguing on broken internal pricing dynamics that are skewed by all sorts of gov programs and payors.

It’s about external, global pricing dynamics. The site clearly isn’t going to be able to give clean payor/pbm/gov subsidized pricing tables - that is almost an impossible exercise in our system.

What the agreement does accomplish is saying Americans will not pay $1150/mo while EU pays $400/mo while Argentina pays $120/mo.

It guarantees drugs will be greater than or equal to US pricing abroad which effectively forces pharma to find deeper profits outside of the US, or lower prices for all countries to acquire demand.

That is extremely effective. Now it’s up to a really complex group of people to figure out what that means inside our weird system of pharma/pbm/rebates/insurance/medicare.

But that’s not what trumprx is aiming to solve for right?
by jack_pp | 2026-02-08 04:16:28+00:00
Can you provide examples in the wild of LLMs creating bad descriptions of code? Has it ever happened to you?

Somehow I doubt at this point in time they can even fail at something so simple.

Like at some point, for some stuff we have to trust LLMs to be correct 99% of the time. I believe summaries, translate, code docs are in that category
by valenterry | 2026-02-08 04:18:22+00:00
What would you say if someone has a project written in, let's say, PureScript and then they use a Java backend to generate/overwrite and also version control Java code. If they claim that this would be a Java project, you would probably disagree right? Seems to me that LLMs are the same thing, that is, if you also store the prompt and everything else to reproduce the same code generation process. Since LLMs can be made deterministic, I don't see why that wouldn't be possible.
by refurb | 2026-02-08 04:18:45+00:00
ANDA is for drugs that have gotten off patent. Semaglutide has not gone off patent in the US. It won’t until 2032 at the earliest.

And ANDA absolutely does require supply chain inspections, first at approval then random inspections there after.

Whats Hims and Hers was doing was compounding (turning the chemical into a formulation patients can take) under an exception due to limited supply. Supply issues are over, so they can not longer compound.

I do t think anything is wrong with the US system here. These patients got access under a temporary exception, they have the option to obtain a supply through other channels going forward. If affordability is an issue, the manufacturers have several programs that make these drugs affordablez
by zachYCB | 2026-02-08 04:18:48+00:00
It sounds like she arrived without being on any sort of Visa. I haven’t found any mentions of one, other than she’s a pending asylum case. That could just mean she walked up through the border and claimed asylum.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise, I think. If you walk into another country without a valid reason to be there, you’re going to be asked to leave. Honduras isn’t currently at war, and a ton of people are abusing the asylum process for purely economic reasons. I feel like articles like this are trying to paint this behavior as cruel and unusual, but it is just the usual.
by lazyxyz | 2026-02-08 04:19:12+00:00
The calendar aggregation example keeps coming up, and I think it illustrates the real divide in how people think about these tools. The skeptics are right that you shouldn't trust a non-deterministic system to never miss a school event. But the proponents aren't really asking for that — they want a morning briefing that saves them from opening four apps, not a replacement for the calendar itself. The sweet spot for agent-based tools right now is read-heavy, write-light workflows. Aggregating and summarizing information across sources? Great. Autonomously rescheduling your meetings? Probably not yet. The security concerns about granting calendar access are valid though — the permission model needs to be way more granular than "full access to everything."
by lazyxyz | 2026-02-08 04:19:50+00:00
Fair point about the marketing noise. The Twitter spam around it is genuinely bad — lots of engagement-farming bots. But separating the signal from the noise, the underlying architecture is interesting: a self-hosted orchestration layer that connects chat apps to LLM providers. The real question isn't whether the hype machine is annoying (it is), but whether the tool has legs once the hype fades. From what I've seen, the people getting actual value are the tinkerer types who would've built something similar themselves — this just saves them the plumbing work.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-08 04:22:04+00:00
The refugee process isn’t based on visas, you show up and ask for asylum. It’s been like that for a long time. They aren’t undocumented, they have documents, it isn’t a visa, but there is, or was, at least, an agreement to stay until their case is heard. Trump was basically like “I don’t care what judges say, I’m king and they go”. And here we are.