MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skandersab | 2026-03-08 16:47:40+00:00
Hi HN — maker here.

A bit more context on why I built this.

I noticed that many small businesses still rely heavily on Excel to track things like sales, products, and inventory. But once the spreadsheet grows, answering simple questions becomes surprisingly difficult.

For example:

Which products are actually profitable?

Where are we losing money?

Which categories are growing or declining?

Most BI tools solve this, but they often require integrations, data models, and manual dashboard building.

My goal with this project was to make the process much simpler: upload a spreadsheet and instantly get a visual overview of the business.

I'm still improving the product, so I'd really love feedback from people here, especially from those who deal with spreadsheets regularly.

Curious to know:

How do you currently analyze spreadsheet data?

Do you build dashboards manually or use another tool?

Happy to answer any questions.
by worksonmine | 2026-03-08 16:48:12+00:00
> creating a file is of little use in a file viewer

I'm not sure the first programs could handle more than one, and (neo)vi(m) just uses :e, for edit. New or existing is irrelevant, it's not Microsoft Word.

> is [p]age up old enough

Is this a real thing? I only know of [f]orward/[b]ack and [d]own/[u]p.

> are they more important than basic navigation

Don't put words in my mouth, but sure in insert mode you're not supposed to navigate, but this discussion is getting off-topic.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-08 16:48:12+00:00
Witness all of the people who, when you suggest that there is demand for open hardware products, show up to tell you that ordinary people don't care about that so STFU nerd. As if they're afraid someone would actually offer it.

The problem, of course, is that ordinary people don't care at first, because at first the collar is only installed around your neck and not yet used to shock you, and people with no eye for the future say, what's the big deal? It's just a collar.

It's only after they're around enough necks that people start getting zapped for modifying the OS, but even then some people will say, it's for your own good, why are you defending "hackers"?

Then people start getting shocked for trying to compete with the incumbents or expressing unpopular opinions, but by that point every device without a collar is some kind of obscure Linux Phone with a high price and low specs.

Now you're at the point where all someone has to do is make a competitive device which is otherwise identical to the one they were going to make anyway but it doesn't come with a shock collar and ordinary people will want it because they're tired of getting screwed. But the same critics will then show up to say that ordinary people don't care about that and point to the fact that they didn't when it was first being rolled out and nobody was getting electrocuted yet.
by kubanczyk | 2026-03-08 16:48:15+00:00
> do you enjoy the "micro" of getting bits of code to work and fit together neatly, or the "macro" of building systems that work?

These are not toys. I want to make money. The customers want feature after feature, in a steady stream. It's bad business if the third or fourth feature takes ages. The longer stream, the better financially.

That the code "works" on any level is elementary, Watson, what must "work" is that stream of new features/pivots/redesigns/fixes flowing.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-08 16:48:19+00:00
> Why is oracle invested in ai at all

Oracle is using AI as a way to justify their pivot into becoming a Tier 1 Hyperscaler - Oracle Cloud now represents 50% of Oracle's overall revenue.

Becoming a hyperscaler is expensive, and by building an AI Infra story, Oracle can make a valid case as to why I should give Oracle money to expand their DC capacity.
by wiz21c | 2026-03-08 16:49:30+00:00
> My point is that we settle with what we see for convenience/utility and base our models on that.

I disagree with that. My abstractions are pure in my mind (well, I hope even if it sounds a bit pretentious). I try to get the best out of the tools I have at hand to represent them. I'm perfectly fine with leaky abstractions, mismatches, inconvenent languages, etc. I live with that. But I certainly don't actively seek these leaks. Quite the opposite :-) (well instead I'm pursuing another goal like performance, in which case, I blow abstractions away). Oh, and in case you wonder, I did write tons of assembly on 8086/80386 and 6502 and now I'm full on on rust, julia and python. I know what an abstraction is :-)

But I thnk we globally agree nonetheless
by jorgen123 | 2026-03-08 16:49:41+00:00
Interesting to see this statement at the top of the article. Long live the web fighting back. Not sure I have seen many (any?) sites with this. Calls for some sort of acronym or logo that others can adopt without having a long sentence at the beginning of many pages:

"This newsletter does not contain ads, sponsored posts, or affiliate links. Open and click tracking are disabled. And there is no paid upgrade or AI generated content. Enjoy!"
Show HN: Mapstr – AI-powered codebase mapper CLI
by tahaio | 2026-03-08 16:50:39+00:00
Mapstr is a blazing-fast CLI that uses Tree-sitter + LLMs to generate instant codebase maps: CONTEXT.md, Mermaid graphs, JSON exports.

Pre-flight API checks (Groq/OpenAI/etc), cost tracking, cache. go install github.com/BATAHA22/mapstr@latest

Tired of reading docs? Map it. v1.4.0 out now!
by everforward | 2026-03-08 16:50:39+00:00
I haven’t looked into it deeply either.

To my knowledge, we understand how an individual neuron works quite well. We just don’t really understand macro effects in large networks of neurons.

The video seems buzz wordy. Without looking into this too deeply, it seems like they’re using neurons individually or in small groups rather than creating a true “brain”. I would guess they’re using neurons or small groups of them sort of like transistors that do a single basic thing rather than a full “brain” that they just feed images to.
by jstummbillig | 2026-03-08 16:50:58+00:00
> all these people are so excited to explain, but not once, ever

What do you mean? What is this class of people in your mind? There are tons of people who consider and talk about the ethics behind what they are doing, long before most people would think it remotely relevant (leading AI labs being an example, and I know the same to be true of various geneticists startups).

I do agree that the entire presentation in this case is bewildering.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-03-08 16:51:15+00:00
Interestingly, with an oscilloscope you can see the harmonics in all their gory detail :)

Actually depending on microphone or instrument interface, you can see stuff that's beyond the range of hearing too.

Also, on a low-frequency long-string like an upright bass, if it is bowed at the halfway node, you still hear mainly the fundamental but the second harmonic is naturally emphasized more than usual, and you can also see half the string making its contribution as pictured, with the naked eye.
by mandarlimaye | 2026-03-08 16:52:48+00:00
I went all-in on AI coding assistants and my GitHub heatmap went vertical. I built a side project in a few weeks that would have taken me months before. But then the project stalled for non-technical reasons (app store review ). It made me question whether we're just measuring activity instead of actual impact. I wrote down my thoughts on this "productivity paradox." Curious to hear if others are experiencing the same thing.
by mfifth93 | 2026-03-08 16:52:53+00:00
Hi HN,

I built RailsForge, a CLI toolkit for Ruby on Rails development, entirely with AI.

This started as a portfolio project while I’ve been looking for my next developer role. When I originally learned programming, Ruby and Rails were the first technologies that really clicked for me, so I decided to build something for the Rails ecosystem as a way to demonstrate what I can do.

The project became an experiment in AI-assisted development: how far could I push an idea by iterating with AI and treating it like a real software project?

RailsForge ended up turning into a fairly large developer toolkit.

Some of the features:

CLI generators for services, queries, jobs, forms, presenters, policies, serializers, mailers, APIs, ViewComponents, and Stimulus controllers

Interactive TTY wizard for configuring new Rails projects

Versioned generator templates (v1 / v2 / v3 patterns)

Project analyzers for controllers, models, specs, database schema, security, and performance

Auto-refactoring tools that detect large controller methods and suggest or extract service objects

DevOps scaffolding (Docker, CI/CD templates)

Monitoring/logging templates (Sentry, Lograge)

Bulk generator operations and dry-run previews

Demo project generator to showcase the features

The idea is to help scaffold Rails architecture, enforce patterns, and analyze projects from the CLI.

Building it was a great learning experience — both technically and in terms of figuring out how to structure a larger codebase while collaborating with AI.

Repo:
https://github.com/mfifth/railsforge

I’d really appreciate feedback, especially from people working with Rails or experimenting with AI-assisted development.

Happy to answer questions about how the project was built.
by mindslight | 2026-03-08 16:53:05+00:00
While I agree with the thrust of where you're coming from, that number is much much higher than 30%. While pigeonholing the problem this way might make you feel good, it's really not productive.

The definition of amoral we're using here isn't someone being openly amoral, but rather people who think they're acting morally but actually rationalizing immoral things to themselves as moral. So it's not terribly surprising for this to be nearly everyone - that 30% is also acting directly against their own self-interest, yet rationalizing that as well.

I suspect part of the dynamic with the rich and powerful is that rationalization and general success are both reliant on intelligence - the same ability that helped them amass wealth/power has also assuaged their ego that they did so for some higher purpose. In addition to the obvious dynamic whereby sticking to your morals is generally less lucrative, of course.
by bitbybit_ch | 2026-03-08 16:53:53+00:00
I think the anxiety often comes down to how we choose to use such tools. I’ve started following a similar philosophy to keep my skills sharp:

- I use AI primarily for a rough prototype, design elements, UI scaffolding, and quick proof-of-concepts. It’s great for seeing if an idea might work. But for the final product, especially the critical logic I write it by hand with some assistance AI autocomplete etc.

- Even when AI generates a snippet, I force myself to audit every line. It often feels unnecessary or slow, but it’s the only way to ensure I actually understand the codebase. If you can’t explain why a line of code is there, you’ve lost control of your software. Might work for now and might actually be ok for the product you are building but generally not a fan of it.

- This shift allows me to stop sweating the "dumb" recurring tasks and focus on the big-picture architecture. AI handles some boilerplate. I handle the systems design.

At the end of the day, I still want to be the one who built the software, not just the one who prompted it into existence. But the same way i don't want to set every bit in the software code for a web-app and use abstract languages i think it has it's spot to get more done.

Also of course instead of reading through hours of documentations i can read through a documentation summary that's most of the time good enough.
by kllrnohj | 2026-03-08 16:54:02+00:00
Many of these, like RGB or YUV, are intermediate "simplifications", not what you're necessarily supposed to be working in to generate them. It's like a physics calculation where everyone just decides to randomly stop half way through and use that as a transport medium. RGB exists because that's how the display physically operates, it's how bright those literal subpixels should be. Thus the RGB intermediate transport. YUV (particularly 4:2:2 and 4:2:0) is then essentially a lossy-compression format that's very easy to compress/decompress, and that's why it exists.

If you're doing rendering work, like in a game, those do operate in a more physical domain. That's the so-called "Physically Based Rendering" or PBR that you might see if you hang out in game dev circles.
by drecked | 2026-03-08 16:54:03+00:00
Your comment conveniently disproves itself.

> It is objectively bad to feed your children ultra processed foods

It’s not “objectively bad”
To feed your children ultra processed foods.

Once you do the work of defining what ultra processed food is in the first place (which you cannot because there is no definition and your argument is already lost), you will find that many ultra processed foods are objectively good for children and adults.

But then your comment only tells you what parents shouldn’t feed kids. It doesn’t tell you anything about what they should.

And when you look into that things get a lot harder. Meat? Not ultraprocsssed but almost certainly bad for health, especially in anything more than minor amounts. You know what else isn’t ultra processed? Alcohol.

And I can’t help but comment on the ridiculousness of pointing to the percentage of children being the outcome of rape being less than 1% as a somehow low njmber, while ignoring that it was 64,000 children. And rape isn’t the only way parents may struggle or regret having kids. And you’re pretending post partum depression doesn’t exist. Then you ignore all the children born with illnesses that may make it difficult or impossible for parents to manage them. Then you’re ignoring all the states that allow abortions but parents may still not opt for them because of cultural, religious, or even personal ethical considerations. Then you’re ignoring the fact that so many American marriages end in divorce and even the ones that don’t may not remain as tight knit as they were when the parents made the decision to have a child.

Your entire comment is a whole bunch of wrong based on your personal experience, which thankfully appears to have been positive.
by YZF | 2026-03-08 16:54:27+00:00
I don't think this is generally true for the guitar. There are even songs that have notes intentionally out of tune (e.g. Scar Tissue by the Red Hot Chili Peppers).

Agree with the OP that the characteristics of the guitar, including its "out of perfect tune", is what gives its music its unique characteristic. It's not a bug it's a feature. There might be some people with perfect pitch who get annoyed but for most people that's "colour" and the sound they expect and associate with their favorite music. If you played those songs on an "ideal" guitar they would not sound right.
by cb321 | 2026-03-08 16:54:44+00:00
In fact, to support your point, it is perhaps questionable from first principles if 3 dimensions not 4 is right. Leaving out tetra chromats and the (partially) color blind, normal human light perception is 1 kind of rod and 3 kinds of cones (i.e. 4 photo receptors, plus some light sensitive ganglia that don't seem to participate in vision, but diurnal regulation).

So, sure, this "4th dimension" (for normals) might be as simple as "candelas" - truly orthogonal, but one does hear an awful lot about "ambient" or "candela contrastive" (a term I just made up) kinds of effects. (EDIT: e.g. in color calibration of projectors in dark rooms vs. living rooms, for example, but I'm sure there are many.) I am just one person, but it feels like candela brightness matters for color perception. So, maybe luminous intensity is not actually exactly orthogonal. Maybe this is all covered in the 1931 CIE documents, though.
by bri3d | 2026-03-08 16:56:04+00:00
100% agree. I think AST-driven tooling is very valuable (most big companies have internal tools akin to each operation Beagle provides, and Linux have Coccinelle / Spatch for example), but it's still just easier implemented as a layer on top of source code than the fundamental source of truth.

There are some clever things that can be done with merge/split using CRDTs as the stored transformation, but they're hard to reason about compared to just semantic merge tools, and don't outweigh the cognitive overhead IMO.

Having worked for many years with programming systems which were natively expressed as trees - often just operation trees and object graphs, discarding the notion of syntax completely, this layer is incredibly difficult for humans to reason about, especially when it comes to diffs, and usually at the end you end up having to build a system which can produce and act upon text-based diffs anyway.

I think there's some notion of these kinds of revision management tools being useful for an LLM, but again, at that point you might as well run them aside (just perform the source -> AST transformation at each commit) rather than use them as the core storage.
by efitz | 2026-03-08 16:56:42+00:00
I don’t agree but I take your point. After seeing the recent scandals regarding US AID etc. I have very low confidence that the majority of nonprofits have altruistic motives.

I also don’t buy the “most of our money goes to staff and directors salary and expenses because what we do is organize volunteers”. Why? Why can’t the staff and directors be volunteers too? Why do they need to even have any funding if it’s just volunteer coordination? We do lots of complex things with just volunteers- Linux, for example.

And I’m unable to differentiate the behavior of most nonprofit hospitals from for-profit hospitals, with only a few exceptions.
by kleebeesh | 2026-03-08 16:57:13+00:00
Neat!

> Right now, accessing my apps requires typing in the IP address of my machine (or Tailscale address) together with the app’s port number.

You might try running Nginx as an application, and configure it as a reverse proxy to the other apps. In your router config you can setup foo.home and bar.home to point to the Nginx IP address. And then the Nginx config tells it to redirect foo.home to IP:8080 and bar.home to IP:9090. That's not a thorough explanation but I'm sure you can plug this into an LLM and it'll spell it out for you.
by bearjaws | 2026-03-08 16:57:36+00:00
The economy is going to go into a deep recession for years with the current economic environment.

There will be nobody left to spend money, just increasing corporate and ultra high wealth spend. The rest will be left with food and water.

We are destroying currently valuable jobs to allocate resources to electricity and silicon, concentrating wealth into 10 companies pockets.

I don't know what comes after, but when you combine this with the Iran war it's going to be closer to economic depression.
by dmoy | 2026-03-08 16:57:46+00:00
Yea I don't doubt that capitalist greed goes into it too.

And in the case of true fear of liability lawsuits, even that also has capitalist greed undertones:

Imagine you're building random-iot-device-with-a-lithium-battery. You could:

1. Build the whole thing so it's easily hackable

Your lawyers point out prior art in liability cases around exploding/burning lithium-powered-devices and won't really approve release without some precautionary measures

2. Properly isolate and test the battery and related systems, ensure they can't possibly overheat even in the face of arbitrary input from the rest of the system, if modified. Lock down the battery parts, leave everything else open.

3. Do some testing on the whole-ass system to assuage your lawyers, and then lock the whole thing down

3 is typically cheaper, a lot of companies then open door 3 instead of 2.

Capitalism and liability lawsuits tag teaming here imo

Side note, the reason we have a litigious society imo is because most companies reach for door #4

4. Yolo, release unsafe product even with company's own firmware, fires and explosions ensue, people are maimed and die, lawsuits follow. Because lawsuits are the only recourse, we don't hold the companies criminally liable or anything.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-08 16:58:25+00:00
Long context degradation is a problem with the Qwen3.5 models for me. They have some clever tricks to accelerate attention that favor more recent context.

The models can be frustrating to use if you expect long contexts to behave like they do on SOTA models. In my trials I could give them strict instructions to NOT do something and they would follow it for a short time before ignoring my prompt and doing the things I told it not to do.
by Chris2048 | 2026-03-08 16:58:32+00:00
> not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics

On the contrary, I dislike premature ethics discussion, where you end up wildly speculating what the tech might become and riffing off that, greatly padding whatever relative technical content you had. I don't want every technical paper to turn into that, ethics should be treated as a higher-level overview of concerns in a field, with a study dedicated to the ethical concerns of that field (by domain-specific ethics specialists).

Is your concern weapon automaton, or animal rights?
by dahart | 2026-03-08 16:59:14+00:00
Hold on. Your first video is indeed a rolling shutter artifact. But your second video never shows enough of the string to see the harmonics. When you (for example) pluck with a finger on the 12th fret, you absolutely do have a real physical squiggle vibrating in the string, with one node and two antinodes. With a 7th fret harmonic, there are 3 antinodes, with a 5th fret harmonic there are four. There are squiggles, and you can see them with real slowmo.
by birdsongs | 2026-03-08 16:59:21+00:00
No. We don't understand our own sentience. I don't know how we can be so confident as to not think it can evolve here using literal human neurons that can learn to take input signals and send output signals.

I don't think this 200,000 neuron array is sentient. But I also don't think we can define the line where that may happen. I assume this company will scale. How far, and to what extent?
by 4er_transform | 2026-03-08 16:59:40+00:00
Actually I think a lot of climate change denialism has more to do with the “…and so we have to do X to solve it” part of climate change. It’s “climate change activism” that turns people off.

Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth. Unfortunately this is another area that gets so wrapped up in political power and incentives where: Democrats have factions and groups that want to implement world changing measures and redirect billions of dollars in a way that benefits their interests, and climate scientists seem to weigh the climate costs far higher than the economic devastation a hard switch would bring, so naturally there’s a level of skepticism at the whole affair.

There should be level headedness about it: climate change is real, it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it, we need to make investments in changing our societal behavior to get on a track that balances mitigating the harms while keeping the real economic boon that comes with our current approach.
by mendyberger | 2026-03-08 16:59:49+00:00
It's not just about string performance, it's about making wasm a first class experience on the web. That includes performance improvements - because you don't need to wake up the js engine - but it's a lot more than that. Including much better dev-ex, which is not great as you can see in the OP.

It would also enable combining different languages with high-level interfaces rather than having to drop down to c-style interfaces for everything.
by grey-area | 2026-03-08 17:00:21+00:00
Interesting. I think over the long term many people come to realise it's better to know at compile time (when they mistype something and end up with a program that runs but is incorrect it's worse than not running and just telling you your mistake). But perhaps for beginners it can be too intimidating having the compiler shout at you all the time!

Perhaps nicer messages explaining what to do to fix things would help?