MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aoztanir | 2026-03-05 00:22:21+00:00
Hi HN — we’re Aryah and Ajay, the founders of o11 (o11.ai).

We build AI agents that run inside Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace apps so you can create and modify files directly in PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Slides, Docs, and Sheets.

The problem we kept running into was simple: most real work still happens in “legacy” productivity software, but most AI tools live outside of it. You paste data into a chat interface, get text back, and then manually move it into your slides or spreadsheets. Even the built-in AI features in tools like Microsoft Copilot or Gemini tend to generate suggestions rather than actually carrying out multi-step work inside the file.

Last year, before leaving University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we saw finance teams spending hours building slide decks and updating Excel models by hand during internships. We tried existing AI tools, but they mostly produced text snippets. The friction wasn’t in writing a paragraph — it was in assembling and formatting the actual file.

So we started with a PowerPoint add-in. Instead of generating text in a sidebar, it can construct and modify slides directly using the native Office APIs: create layouts, insert tables, format charts, update numbers, restructure content. Users then asked for Excel support, then Word. After that we built the same capability set for Google Slides, Docs, and Sheets.

Under the hood, we treat each host app as an execution environment. The model doesn’t just return text; it generates structured actions that map to the app’s object model (e.g., slide trees, cell ranges, document blocks). We maintain a state representation of the file so the agent can reason about what already exists before making changes. That helps avoid the “AI overwrote my document” problem and makes edits incremental rather than destructive.

There’s a free tier to try o11. For Launch HN, we’ve removed demo gates — you can install and use it directly.

Where we’re heading is broader than Office and Workspace. Our hypothesis is that most enterprise software will remain in place for a long time, and automation will need to operate inside those interfaces rather than replacing them. We’re working on a generalized runtime that lets the same agent framework execute actions in other desktop and web apps.

We’re still early and would genuinely appreciate feedback — especially from people who’ve built on Office.js, Google Apps Script, or other plugin ecosystems. We’re also happy to answer technical questions about how we handle file state, permissions, or reliability inside these host environments.

Thanks for reading.
by ajross | 2026-03-05 00:22:24+00:00
> To wit: there are I issues and P positions for each issue, yet there are not I * P ballot choices, so people inevitably get something they don't want.

Sigh. I hate the internet. That was exactly my point. Thank you.

The democratic process inherently produces outcomes where not every action taken by a government has majority support. Always. Inevitably.

And, precisely because this is an inevitable result, arguments of the form that such actions represent the manipulation of the government by a conspiracy of elites suppressing the will of the masses are, in the jargon, batshit.

There is no conspiracy. You're just, to repeat for the fifth time, in a minority. Not on the issue itself, but on your prioritization. Sure, lots of people might "agree" with you, but no one gives enough of a shit to change their vote. So the government chases the votes instead, and the interests of those who can deliver the votes.
by OldSchool | 2026-03-05 00:22:25+00:00
Kind of a stretch to suggest that an internal combustion vehicle requires 3x more "energy" to move it than an equally physics-burdened (weight, friction, etc) electric vehicle...

This is only "true" if the energy stored in the vehicle's battery got there without any relevant conversion inefficiency; If those joules came from a gas-fired plant, overall efficiency is only about 35-40%: comparable to a typical internal combustion powered-automobile or actually worse than a diesel automobile.
by jonstewart | 2026-03-05 00:23:18+00:00
About 150 Iranian sailors drowned this morning, far from home, not a clear and present danger to anyone, no war declared on them by Congress, nor sanctioned by the UN. We could have demanded a surrender but instead we blew them up.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/04/iran-war-...
by PaulKeeble | 2026-03-05 00:23:42+00:00
Many different viral infections and other immune pressures can kick off ME/CFS. We don't yet know what otherwise actually means really, Epstein Bar Virus and Influenza but there is likely many others and only 70% of patients with the condition say it was initiated with an infection. Its a question well worth good research, there just isn't much in the way of funding for ME/CFS.
by sorenjan | 2026-03-05 00:24:25+00:00
The discussion was about fine-tuned Qwen models, not industrial inspection in general. I would also find it interesting to learn about what kind of edge AI industrial inspection task you could do with fine-tuned llms, not some handwavy answer about how sometimes latency is important in real time systems. Of course it is, so generally you don't use models with several billion parameters unless you need to.
by VK-pro | 2026-03-05 00:25:09+00:00
I’m skeptical of your username and the fact that you commented twice in 23 minutes, ~10 minutes apart ala the dead internet theory. But isn’t this a fairly simple statement? He hopes that the folks at OpenAI are not as gullible as the “Twitter morons.”

If youve spent even a small amount of time with llms you’ll know that these security measures are just window dressing.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-03-05 00:25:13+00:00
If the estimate is 1/5 people are mentally ill, the definition needs some readjustment. That is such an inclusive number that it must be counting otherwise fine people who....like to count their tic tacs so get labelled as slightly OCD. Had a bummer of a day, so I am prone to depression?

There was a recent study about 99% of people have an abnormal shoulder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064944 . We are all unique in our own way, but labeling everyone as ill does not seem productive.
by AngryData | 2026-03-05 00:26:11+00:00
Ideally we would but that costs energy, and if we can't afford the energy to completely remove the need for fossil fuels, spending even more on capturing it again seems still far out of reach.

Part of the reason it is still far away despite the increasing prevalence of renewable sources is that not everything is a 1:1 replacement between electric power and fossil fuels, fertilizer and many of our chemical productions can be done without fossil fuels, but at 10x the energy cost that we currently use.

We like to focus on things like cars and engines, but those were always an easy win because internal combustion is only 30% efficient to start with while electric motors are 90%+. But as a source of chemical process energy not only can fossil fuel sources be more efficient than as a motor fuel, our electric energy replacement for chemical synthesis and purification is not always very efficient itself, on top of being an energy intensive product already.

I think last time I looked, which was admittedly a few years ago now, fertilizer production with fossil fuels consumed 1% of the world's electrical production, and the best anyone could hope for in synthesizing nitrogen from the air and not using any fossil fuels was at least a 10 fold increase in energy requirements. Which means clean fertilizer requires at least 10% of total world electrical production, which is obviously an ass ton. Perhaps we have slightly more efficient fertilizer synthesis now, but at the same time farmland utilization has dropped which means a higher reliance and demand for artificial fertilizer.

Of course I think this is all avoidable if we weren't complete slaves to capital markets and just built tons of nuclear reactors and solar plants even if it that means they weren't all profit makers. Energy production and availability is ultimately one of our largest bottlenecks across almost every industry and human endeavor.
by nickthegreek | 2026-03-05 00:26:26+00:00
Current setup is freshrss running in a proxmox lxc on prem + tailscale. Big fan of the lire iOS app for interacting on mobile and use the freshrss webui on desktop. killthenewsletter helps patch in some email stuff too. RSS and NNTP are 2 technologies that have been with me for decades and you are gonna have to pry them from me.
by joe_the_user | 2026-03-05 00:27:08+00:00
It would be hard to believe that BMW doesn't have many industrial robots already deployed and in fact they do on a serious scale [1]. Now, to my mind, adding humanoid-robots to the existing mix of standard-robots and people seems not completely terrible.

The article's vacuous AI gloss language indeed makes it seem like they are indeed engaging in, crudely put, baloney. But your own language is weird here, like you don't realize robots are a standard thing in modern manufacturing. I mean, modern manufacturing "succeeds" massively using nonhumanoid robots at large scale.

[1] https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en/our-plant.html
by wpietri | 2026-03-05 00:27:27+00:00
When I ask an interviewee a technical question, what I want is an answer that is correct technically.

If I want them to give me a different kind of technical answer, then I think it's on me to ask a question that actually requires what I'm looking for. It's not hard! All the Stripe interviewer had to say is, "Ok, great. It sounds like you have a good sense for system capacity. Now let's add another zero to all the load numbers." And then keep increasing orders of magnitude until they learn what they're looking to learn.

I am, just to be clear, not defending people being willfully obtuse or contrary jackasses. But that's not the scenario being described in either the Stripe story or the Google Sheets story I'm responding to. Two apparently reasonable people were asked technical questions and they gave answers that were the right thing for the business.

I think that's good and I like to hire people like that. I get lots of others don't, and I get the POSIWID reasons behind it. But I'm not going to pretend I think it's a healthy way to run an organization. And I also get that the people who like pretense and deference in interviews are not going to like me saying so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by bentcorner | 2026-03-05 00:27:45+00:00
Installing humanoid robots in a factory is like using regexes to parse data.

It makes sense if it's a one-off but there are better solutions.

Maybe it does make sense for small scale businesses that need just a little automation? Like a humanoid robot could restock shelves and do inventory in a grocery store at night, and you wouldn't need to retrofit anything to be able to do that.

Large scale factories seems like the wrong use case for humanoid robots.
by temp8830 | 2026-03-05 00:28:24+00:00
Ukraine is far from a monolith. It's an agglomeration of bits and pieces attached in the aftermath of WW2 to a Ukrainian core. But there are plenty of ethnic Poles, Hungarians and Russians whose lands got attached that don't identify with it.

Before you downvote (OK, you can downvote first, I don't particularly care) - go look up what folks in Hungarian parts of Ukraine do to army recruiters.
by ogou | 2026-03-05 00:28:27+00:00
Location: San Francisco, CA
Remote: Yes, prefer on-site/hybrid in SF
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Svelte 5 & Sveltekit, React & React Native, LangChain, Typescript, Node.js, PHP, Python, Linux admin, WCAG, UX/UI, Writing & content creation
Résumé/CV: https://joshuacurry.dev
Email: see dev portfolio above

15+ years frontend and full-stack. Lots of experience at content companies. Teaching, writing, video, and DevRel experience. Leadership experience. Recently leveled-up with a bunch of AI middleware courses.
by heyitsgarrett | 2026-03-05 00:28:50+00:00
I'm slowly easing into wider sharing, but you're really keying in on a dynamic I was hoping to grow within the community, of brush artists and pixel artists collaborating or sharing toys. For right now I'm storing my own brushes as little .txt files.

One feature that is quietly implemented, though - any png you save from MOSS also encodes its brushes. So if you share that png with someone else (or online somewhere!) it can be imported into MOSS with those same brushes and palette. I stole this concept from PICO8, which cleverly encodes all of the game data into a png file.
by maximinus_thrax | 2026-03-05 00:29:18+00:00
> After Khamenei death Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement that Russia is "against killing of the leaders of sovereign countries". Somehow they didn't mention nor regular citizens nor rank-and-file soldiers of sovereign countries.

Rich, coming from the state that sponsored more than a dozen assassination attempts on Zelenskyy. But russians get over this hypocrisy by not recognizing a country as sovereign, so it's fair game.
by prawn | 2026-03-05 00:30:10+00:00
From Daring Fireball:

It was, I am reliably informed by Apple product marketing folks, a significant engineering achievement to get a second USB port at all on the MacBook Neo while basing it on the A18 Pro SoC.

But yes, even just two dots above the USB3 and two dots above the USB2 wouldn't be rude.
by nickjj | 2026-03-05 00:30:41+00:00
> Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.

In September I picked up a laptop for $575.

Its specs are 15.6" 1080p IPS display, AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores, 16 threads) CPU, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, Radeon 680M iGPU that can allocate 8 GB of GPU memory, 1 TB SSD with a backlight keyboard. Weighs about 3.5 pounds and has (5) USB ports plus HDMI port. It comes with a 2 year warranty as well.

Running Arch Linux on it with niri and it's really nice for what it is.

There are decent laptops out there at affordable prices.
by QuiEgo | 2026-03-05 00:30:58+00:00
Fantastic value proposition.

For most of the non-tech people in my life, I'd now recommend a base MacBook Neo + base iPhone 17 + AirPods Pro 3. Students may want to throw in a base iPad and an Apple Pencil. Splurge on the higher end versions if you like nice things, but that combo will pretty much cover the tech needs of most non-tech people.

Apple is crushing it with their entry products.
by stoneman24 | 2026-03-05 00:31:41+00:00
We did the poem in secondary school as well. While we didn’t have the acting skills of your teacher, we deconstructed and reviewed each line and it really had a powerful impact on the class. The tortured helplessness of the dying soldier was a lasting memory.

Later, I thought that the job of a soldier wasn’t to die for their country but to make someone else die for theirs. Perhaps that more cynical view was influenced by the poem and the other war poets that we covered.
by ricardobeat | 2026-03-05 00:31:42+00:00
This take might have been true years ago, especially for cheaper makes, but modern EVs from china use high-quality components and designs that often surpass european automakers. Most of the premium brands - Nio, Zeekr, Polestar, Lotus - actually have design and R&D offices in Europe.

The driving feel is definitely a thing, the chinese cars are very soft and 'boaty' which is not as desirable elsewhere. They are also on average much larger and heavier than their western counterparts, most cities in China have road infrastructure built in the past 20-30 years with spacious lanes.
by quesera | 2026-03-05 00:31:48+00:00
The Sidebery extension is the key, for me. Tabs are vertical, hierarchical, and searchable.

I also set the color of specific tabs (another Sidebery feature) that have some special returnability reason. I don't love the color options, nor the default ordering (would prefer the more traditional color spectrum order (red-blue or inverse) so that I could infer the tag/priority/etc from the color, but I only use a few colors and it's fine.

I don't have a problem with duplicates. If it's a page/app that I return to often, I know that and just jump to it. I'm sure I have some dupes hiding in there though. NBD.
by cperciva | 2026-03-05 00:32:43+00:00
The Champernowne numbers were already known to be irrational, but this makes the proof much easier!

(But to clarify: When I said "proving that a value is transcendental", I was thinking of numbers specifically constructed for that purpose, not of other numbers more generally. 100% of transcendental numbers have irrationally measure 2.)
by protocolture | 2026-03-05 00:32:59+00:00
>But how do you define a non-sociopathic corporate scenario

Corporate structures are sort of sociopathic by default. Theres no empathy globule on the corporate hierarchy and everyone is motivated to put the corporations interests first.

This isnt even a criticism really, its just the reality. Corporations are like, paperclip maximising AI's, but for shareholder profit.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-03-05 00:33:26+00:00
Vietnam was Lyndon B Johnson making money from weapons procurement and supporting his donors. (Such as Brown and Root, who started the war as a tiny firm and ended it as one of the biggest contractors in the US.)

Iraq was Dick Cheney's sponsors making money from oil and arms deals.

Afghanistan was Bush's sponsors making money from weapons procurement.

Iran is Trump's sponsors making money from oil and arms deals, plus some crusading crank millenarianism for the faithful.

Gaza is a straightforward land grab and real estate development opportunity with some cynical other-abuse thrown in.

None of these have anything at all to do with realistic threats to non-rich people.

It's always money. Always. Someone always makes money from these things.

The disposable shlub in the Oval Office gets the reputational damage, but their funders are so happy they can barely count.
by hamdingers | 2026-03-05 00:34:43+00:00
What would it be transferring the load to?

"Transfer switch" refers to a specific kind of switch that transfers load between two sources. There is only one source (the panels) and one load (the grid) on a grid-tied inverter, so what you're saying does not make sense.

There are more complicated solar setups that do involve transfer switches, but they are not applicable to the balcony solar use case and remain uncommon even for hardwired rooftop solar.
by latexr | 2026-03-05 00:35:24+00:00
> The lists in the post look like they're LLM-formatted, em-dashes etc.

No, not “etc”. What else looks LLM-formatted about them? Because em-dashes are not enough to claim LLM.

Look, I get that you don’t care about proper typographic characters. You don’t have to, that’s fine. But many of us humans do.

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

And going from “LLM-formatted lists” (without any certainty) to vibe-coded project is a huge leap.
by joshuamcginnis | 2026-03-05 00:36:26+00:00
I culture fungus, perform DNA extraction, run PCR (polymerase chain reaction - the process used to clone the gene(s) I want to sequence), and gel electrophoresis in my home lab. I then ship tubes of the DNA to mclab.com where for about $3 per sample, they'll run sanger sequencing and email me the data the next day. Works great for DNA barcoding and plasmid sequencing.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-03-05 00:38:00+00:00
"'streamlined' mandatory hearing process" means "pushed through because TerraPower spent on $645k legitimatized bribery in 2025." [0]

"The approval also makes good on a promise by the Trump administration to fast-track the TerraPower project, which comes months ahead of the administration’s target of 18 months.
The company says the accelerated approval by the NRC shows the importance of and focus on America advancing nuclear power." [1]

The real, unanswered questions are how they got or will get insurance and what the locals think of pedo Bill Gates building an experimental nuclear reactor in their town.

0. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...

1. https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/03/04/terrapower-gets-ok-t...
by ifyoubuildit | 2026-03-05 00:39:00+00:00
Yeah, I guess I zeroed in on the YouTube part and missed the one parameter part, which I'm not really qualified to speak to. I happen to think audio/video (basically lectures and dialogues) is a fine part of the toolkit for learning.

I was reading it as "look at these dumb tiktok'ers" or something like that, which seems like it would be selling at least those 2 quite a bit short.
by iso-logi | 2026-03-05 00:39:50+00:00
You're delusional if you think the US isn't spying on you though.

They spy on everyone, they just happen to pay US-companies to do the spying to avoid any accountability.

I don't think we should also just tolerate spying on other countries. Why does the average Joe Blogs in Sweden need to be spied on by the US Government?
by threecheese | 2026-03-05 00:41:21+00:00
As a Raycast paying user, I was a little bent that they have apparently not been focusing on the core product. Frankly it shows, in retrospect.

However, having just vibe coded an actually useful Raycast extension, I can see wanting to bring this capability to a wider audience - and how this could scale their core product adoption beyond “nerds who think Spotlight stinks”. Which is getting

A lot of good (if negative) comments ITT though; it’s going to be tough for them to bring this to market safely.
by konform | 2026-03-05 00:41:40+00:00
> I need swipe typing though, and I haven't found anything even close to gboard glide.

https://f-droid.org/packages/helium314.keyboard/

HeliBoard is currently asking people to volunteer swipe data so they can further improve on free and open alternative for swipe keyboard. Please consider helping out!

https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard/wiki/Tutorial:-How-to...

https://makertube.net/w/cQECfDkuLGR9eUQquUEo4K
by tbrockman | 2026-03-05 00:42:17+00:00
Whether you disagree with whether it truly aligns with their stated values, in their partnership with Palantir (making Claude available within their AI platform) they requested consistent restrictions:

> “[We will] tailor use restrictions to the mission and legal authorities of a government entity” based on factors such as “the extent of the agency’s willingness to engage in ongoing dialogue,” Anthropic says in its terms. The terms, it notes, do not apply to AI systems it considers to “substantially increase the risk of catastrophic misuse,” show “low-level autonomous capabilities,” or that can be used for disinformation campaigns, the design or deployment of weapons, censorship, domestic surveillance, and malicious cyber operations.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/07/anthropic-teams-up-with-pa...
by thunderfork | 2026-03-05 00:42:27+00:00
>Rooting is only a bad idea if there is an alternative.

An alternative to accomplish what?

>to provide me, the physical owner of the device with control over the device

Control over what properties or behaviours of the device, exactly?

No offense, but these complaints feel more like aesthetic ("I want to log into a user named root") than practical ("I want to be able to do things that could only be done under root")
by josephg | 2026-03-05 00:43:31+00:00
| device | cpu | single core | multi core |
|:----------------------------|:----------------------------------|------------:|-----------:|
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | Apple A18 Pro | 3428 | 8531 |
| iPhone 16 Pro | Apple A18 Pro | 3445 | 8624 |
| MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) | Apple M1 Pro @ 3.2 GHz (10 cores) | 2385 | 12345 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores) | 4228 | 17464 |

The single core performance difference is wild. Far more than I expected.

My ageing M1 Pro still has better multicore performance than these new laptops. But far worse single core performance. For most users this would be a large upgrade. Well, if you can get by with 8gb of RAM.