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Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
50•thelok•3h ago•6 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
114•AlexeyBrin•6h ago•20 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
49•vinhnx•4h ago•7 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
809•klaussilveira•21h ago•246 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
72•onurkanbkrc•6h ago•5 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
88•1vuio0pswjnm7•7h ago•99 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1053•xnx•1d ago•599 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
470•theblazehen•2d ago•173 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
8•languid-photic•3d ago•1 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
196•jesperordrup•11h ago•67 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
8•surprisetalk•59m ago•1 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
534•nar001•5h ago•248 comments

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-sin...
42•alephnerd•1h ago•14 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
204•alainrk•6h ago•309 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
33•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
25•marklit•5d ago•1 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
63•mellosouls•4h ago•67 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
110•videotopia•4d ago•30 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
67•speckx•4d ago•70 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
21•sandGorgon•2d ago•10 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
271•isitcontent•21h ago•36 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
199•limoce•4d ago•109 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
284•dmpetrov•21h ago•151 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
155•matheusalmeida•2d ago•48 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
553•todsacerdoti•1d ago•267 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
424•ostacke•1d ago•110 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
41•matt_d•4d ago•16 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
348•eljojo•1d ago•214 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
466•lstoll•1d ago•308 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
367•vecti•23h ago•167 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: I built an AI dataset generator

https://github.com/metabase/dataset-generator
169•matthewhefferon•7mo ago

Comments

matthewhefferon•7mo ago
I was tired of digging through Kaggle and writing prompts over and over just to get fake data for dashboards and demos. So I built a little tool to help me out.

It uses GPT-4o to generate a detailed schema and business rules based on a few dropdowns (like business type, schema structure, and row count). Then Faker fills in the rows using those rules, which keeps it fast and cheap.

You can preview the data, export as CSV or SQL, or spin up Metabase with one click to explore the data. It’s open-source, still in early stages, but wanted to share, get feedback and see how you'd improve it.

thenaturalist•7mo ago
Congrats, thanks for shipping and open sourcing this!

Cool to see Metabase is enabling contributions to the ecosystem this way! :)

matthewhefferon•7mo ago
No problem, thanks for taking a look!
margotli•7mo ago
Feels like a useful tool for anyone learning analytics or just needing sample data to test with.
hiatus•7mo ago
Are you affiliated with metabase? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44107584
mritchie712•7mo ago
I use this prompt to spin up demos for customers at https://www.definite.app/:

    @Web Do some research on https://somecompany.com and write up a detailed overview of what the company does. What might their database schema look like?

    I need you to build a mock database for them in duckdb for a demo

Then:

    Create a uv project and write a python script to add demo data. Use Faker.

    @Web research how many customers they have. Make the database to appropriate scale.

Only takes a few minutes in Cursor, should work just as well in Claude Code. It works really well for the companies core business, but I still need to create one to populate 3rd party sources (e.g. Stripe, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.).
matthewhefferon•7mo ago
Cool, I don’t do customer-specific demos, but I like this idea. I might add this use case as an option. Thanks for sharing!
b0a04gl•7mo ago
seen this pattern a before too. faker holds shape without flow. real tables come from actions : retry, decline, manual review, all that. you just set col types, you might miss why the row even happened. gen needs to simulate behavior, not format
matthewhefferon•7mo ago
That’s a solid callout, appreciate you pointing it out. I’ll definitely dig into that more.
ajd555•7mo ago
Was looking for this exact comment. I completely agree with this method, especially if you're testing an entire flow, and not just a UI tool. You want to test the service that interfaces between the API and the dabatase.

I've been writing custom simulation agents (just simple go programs) that simulate different users of my system. I can scale appropriately and see test data flow in. If metabase could generate these simulation agents based on a schema and some instructions, now that would be quite neat! Good job on this first version of the tool, though!

tomrod•7mo ago
The best synthetic data are those that capture ingestion and action, instead of just relationship.

Relationship is important, but your data structure might capture a virtually infinite number of unexpected behaviors that you would preferably call errors or bugs.

zikani_03•7mo ago
This is well put. I once built a tool called [zefaker] (github.com/creditdatamw/zefaker) to test some data pipelines but never managed to get a good pattern or method for generating data that simulates actions or scenarios that didn't involve too much extra work.

Was hoping this AI dataset generator solves that issue, but i guess it is still early days. Looks good though and using Faker to generate the data locally sounds good as a cost-cutting measure, but also potentially opens room for human-in-the-loop adjustments of the generated data.

jasonthorsness•7mo ago
AI is really good at this sort of thing; I've been using an LLM with Faker for some time to load data for demos into SingleStore: https://github.com/jasonthorsness/loadit
matthewhefferon•7mo ago
Nice, I like the challenge video!
jasonthorsness•7mo ago
Ha thanks, appreciate that, I regret the video a little as I was going through a short "a more exciting blog with videos is what the people want" phase.
paxys•7mo ago
Feature request - make the URL for the OpenAI API configurable. That way one can swap it out with Anthropic or any other LLM provider of their choice that provides an OpenAI-compatible API.
matthewhefferon•7mo ago
I was actually thinking about this very feature in the shower this morning :)
wiradikusuma•7mo ago
"Stack: OpenAI API (GPT-4o for data generation)" -- I wonder if someday we'll have a generic API like how it's done in Java (e.g., Servlet API implemented by Tomcat, JBoss etc), so everyone can use their favorite LLM instead of having to register each provider like streaming services e.g. Disney+, Netflix, etc.
matthewhefferon•7mo ago
I hope so. I'm already subscribed to every streaming service, and my wallet can't handle all these LLMs too.
zild3d•7mo ago
isn't this essentially https://openrouter.ai/
MattSayar•7mo ago
I used Anthropic's new Claude API integration with artifacts to make a probably-worse version that you can play with (after logging in of course).

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/eb7d8256-6d21-4c85-af9b-c...

I used this GitHub repo as context and Claude Opus 4 to create this artifact

NitpickLawyer•7mo ago
Haha, I find this kind of exercise telling for what's coming to the one-size-fits-all SaaS companies out there. I see a future where small teams can in-house the set of features they actually need, and a big drop in SaaS usage. Avoids the big vendor lock-in problems, unwanted features and bypasses all the accenture-style consulting fees.
MattSayar•7mo ago
Optimistically, this will allow smaller teams to do more, hopefully incentivizing the consulting places to help out with harder problems.
jmsdnns•7mo ago
depending on what you're using the synthetic data for, it is sometimes called distillation. here is a robust example from some upenn students: https://datadreamer.dev/
reedlaw•7mo ago
"Dataset" connotes training data, but this seems to generate sample data, maybe for testing an application. Is there any use for synthetic datasets in ML?
dankwizard•7mo ago
words can have multiple meanings <:- )
DiscourseFan•7mo ago
They could.
Mamawho•7mo ago
Yes, check out Synthbyte.ai, we make training data and have with all sorts of datasets, including NIH data
smcleod•7mo ago
This is a bit confusing, I sort of expected it to be a bit like Kiln https://github.com/Kiln-AI/Kiln to generate datasets for AI, but it looks like the outputs are more just data / files than datasets?
ajar8087•7mo ago
I was thinking more synthetic data to fit models like https://whitelightning.ai/
ChrisMarshallNY•7mo ago
I wrote a Swift CLI app to generate dummy user profiles for an app we wrote (I needed many more than we’ll actually get, and I needed screenshots for the App Store that didn’t have real user data).

It was pretty “dumb,” and used thispersondoesnotexist.com for profile pics.

klntsky•7mo ago
You absolutely do not need docker as a requirement here
alienbaby•7mo ago
Good for the shape of data, but what about the actual data? If it's entirely random then it's more of a UI demo tool than a tool to generate useful data.