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Top stories from https://news.ycombinator.com (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot Also check https://t.me/designer_news Contacts: @philr
Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (Score: 153+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eW5A
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eW5A
Critical Exploit in MediaTek Wi-Fi Chipsets: Zero-Click Vulnerability (Score: 150+ in 14 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eV8A
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eV8A
Tō Reo – A Māori Spellchecker (Score: 150+ in 22 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eTKd
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eTKd
Discord Reduced WebSocket Traffic by 40% (Score: 150+ in 14 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eUFm
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eUFm
I Like Makefiles (Score: 152+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eVzd
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eVzd
Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform (Score: 151+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6eQkL
Hi HN! I’m Eoin, founder of Sourcetable (https://sourcetable.com).
Sourcetable is an AI-native spreadsheet that syncs with all your data. Users pair with an AI copilot that helps them do their spreadsheet work, as well as more database-centric analysis and SQL.
Soucetable syncs with databases including Postgres, MySQL, and MongoDB, and over 100+ business applications including Stripe, Zendesk, Hubspot, Quickbooks and Google Analytics. That data is available in a spreadsheet, and any models you build automatically update in near-real-time as new data flows in. The core primitives are AI + spreadsheet + data sync + storage + compute.
If you want to play with Sourcetable today, the easiest way is to upload a CSV and start asking questions.
Who is it for?
Sourcetable is for analysts, operators and finance folk doing data-centric work in a spreadsheet. Sourcetable’s spreadsheet-based AI assistant understands workbook range selection and can adjust scope context to the datasets you are working with. You can talk directly to your database and SaaS integrations, which is great for analysis, data search and retrieval, SQL writing & editing (including writing joins across different datasets), and automatic chart creation.
Niching down, if you work in operations at a <50 person startup or SMB and your company relies on a Postgres or MySQL database, Sourcetable is an affordable reporting tool with turnkey data infrastructure that doesn’t require code or engineers to set up.
Spreadsheets are the most used analytical tool on the planet. AI is a platform shift with broad applications. We are staying open-minded about users and use cases since everything is so new.
Backstory:
I spent ten years working in de-facto operations and technical roles at startups. Sourcetable draws from that experience of needing better data tooling inside spreadsheets, and constantly hacking ad hoc solutions to fill the gap. Andrew (CTO / co-founder) previously had a deep learning company and was initially drawn to the idea that Sourcetable could be an operating system for the web. We’re both Aussie expats in the Bay Area, which is how we met. Internally, we think of Sourcetable as an application platform, with AI applications being a useful and interesting place to focus.
Features & Use Cases:
Talk to your CSV files, spreadsheets, integrations, and datasets using LLMs.
AI + data work: Text-to-SQL, search and retrieval from databases, LLM-based data analysis. (This is an entirely different experience to what Copilot/Gemini & Excel/Sheets provide, since they are thin workbooks and not data platforms.)
AI + spreadsheet work: formula assist, workbook analysis, data cleaning, chart creation, error handling, summarization, chat, etc.
Automated reporting: data is synced, reports you build stay up to date.
No-code data access: give the business team safe database access so they will leave you alone!
Centralizing data for cross-channel reporting. (e.g. Postgres + Stripe + Mailchimp)
Analyzing large CSV files: Sourcetable can handle multi-gigabit files. (Google Sheets can’t handle large data and the experience in Excel is rather cumbersome.)
Technical Details:
Sourcetable was built to be fast. It was also built to scale.
AI: LLama 3 (via Groq), Claude, GPT-4o, LiteLLM, custom LLMs
Frontend: DuckDB, React, ShadCN, AntV / Bizcharts, Plotly, CodeMirror, Hookstate
Backend: DuckDB, Python, Cassandra, Redis, NGINX, Cloudflare
Data Eng & Transformations: Fivetran, DBT, Apache Arrow, SQLglot
Distributed Computing & Scaling: Daft, Ray, Cloud Formation
Other: Linux Namespaces, Dill (U.Queensland)
A huge thank you to the open source community, and a special shout-out to DuckDB for being so damn fast. Thank you also to Groq & Anthropic for the rate limit increases in time for this ShowHN post!
–
Feedback:
Product feedback is welcome! eoin@sourcetable.com
Docker Desktop Alternative (Score: 155+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eUFg
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eUFg
Openpilot – Operating system for robotics (Score: 150+ in 11 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eTnj
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eTnj
Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning (Score: 150+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eTnm
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eTnm
Linux/4004: booting Linux on Intel 4004 for fun, art, and no profit (🔥 Score: 151+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eTyE
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eTyE
Digital signatures and how to avoid them (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6ePVb
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6ePVb
Why Apple Uses JPEG XL in the iPhone 16 and What It Means for Your Photos (Score: 150+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eSJu
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eSJu
Diatom Arrangements (Score: 152+ in 18 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eQnZ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eQnZ
Gaining access to anyones browser without them even visiting a website (Score: 150+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eSs4
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eSs4
3K free SVG icons for popular brands (Score: 154+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eSqu
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eSqu
MemoRAG – Enhance RAG with memory-based knowledge discovery for long contexts (Score: 150+ in 21 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eU7k
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eU7k
Show HN: Inngest 1.0 – Open-source durable workflows on every platform (Score: 151+ in 17 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eUBk
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eUBk
Hi HN! I’m Tony, one of the co-founders of Inngest (https://inngest.com/)
Inngest is an open-source durable workflow platform that works on any cloud. Durable workflows are stateful, long running step functions written in code, which automatically retry on failure. It abstracts everything about queues, event streams and state for you, letting you focus on code. Some examples of uses: managing stateful AI chained step functions; managing search/rag indexes and data pipelines; integrations and webhooks; billing and payment flows.
Technical details: unlike other solutions, we put lots of effort into designing our SDK’s step.run APIs to make them extremely easy to use — developer experience is the most important thing for us.
We had to design and build our own queueing system to work with multi-tenancy, batching, and debouncing, and we’re iterating on this as we move to FoundationDB. It’s largely all Go in the backend, with a bunch of caching, clickhouse, event streams, and coordination on our behalf. Workers are shared nothing, and run based off of the queue and execution state.
We did a post last year as we iterated on our TS SDK. The product has changed a lot since then and wanted to show the community what’s changed as we reach 1.0:
* Golang, Java, and Python SDKs with cross-language function invocation (across clouds, too)
* Multi-tenant aware flow control (concurrency, throttling, debounce)
* Batching, grouping many events into a single function call
* Much improved dashboard, with tracing and metrics built in
* Advanced recovery tools like function replay, temporary pausing, bulk cancellation (with optional expressions). No more dead letter queues!
* Branch deploys built in, with staging env support out of the box
* Full local testing with production parity
Apple Shares Full iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro Repair Manuals (Score: 150+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eVpL
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eVpL
Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal (Score: 150+ in 18 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eTLV
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eTLV
Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eLNH
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eLNH
Qualcomm Wants to Buy Intel (Score: 151+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eV4t
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eV4t
Show HN: Put this touch sensor on a robot and learn super precise tasks (Score: 150+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eUyb
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eUyb
We just released a very excited touch sensor that finally simplifies touch sensing for robotics.
Our most exciting result: Learned visuotactile policies for precise tasks like inserting USBs and credit card swiping, that work out-of-the-box when you replace skins! To the best of our knowledge, this has never been shown before with any existing tactile sensor.
Why is this important? For the first time, you could now collect data and train models on one sensor and expect them to generalize to new copies of the sensor -- opening the door to the kind of large foundation models that have revolutionized vision and language reasoning.
Would love to hear the community's questions, thoughts and comments!
Visualizing Weather Forecasts Through Landscape Imagery (🔥 Score: 150+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eUsu
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eUsu
CuPy: NumPy and SciPy for GPU (Score: 150+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eTS4
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eTS4
Contextual Retrieval (Score: 150+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eSHz
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eSHz
Lichess: Post-Mortem of Our Longest Downtime (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eP3v
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eP3v
Show HN: Numscript, a declarative language to model financial transactions (Score: 150+ in 14 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eRa2
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eRa2
Numscript is a simple, declarative language that helps you model financial transactions. You can do quite a few things with it, such as modeling:
* Payments involving vouchers and a user's prepaid balance
* Complex funds destination scenario where the customer gets cash back
* Configurable user credit balance spending transactions
The main idea is to take the pain out of describing of a system dealing with money movements should behave in traditional languages such as JS/TS/Go/Ruby etc, landing an expressive way to model these movements of value.
It is voluntarily broad in applicability—our customers use it today for use-cases ranging from marketplaces funds orchestration to home-grown loan management systems.
Once those transactions are modeled, they are to be picked up and committed to a system-of-record, ledgering system or executed on a set of payments and banking APIs.
It was initially a DSL we bundled into our Core Ledger product at Formance (YCS21) but we're giving it more autonomy now and started to make it standalone, with the idea that anyone could eventually bolt Numscript on top of their ledgering system. We're also exploring to make it natively compatible with other backends.
As part of this un-bundling, we've just shipping a playground which lets you fiddle with it without installing anything at https://playground.numscript.org/ (it works best on desktop).
Happy to chime in on any questions!
DirectX Adopting SPIR-V as the Interchange Format of the Future (Score: 150+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eRSx
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eRSx
Visual guide to SSH tunneling and port forwarding (Score: 153+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eSik
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eSik
Real-time Linux is officially part of the kernel (Score: 151+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6eRFq
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6eRFq