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

https://openciv3.org/
624•klaussilveira•12h ago•182 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
926•xnx•18h ago•548 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
32•helloplanets•4d ago•24 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
109•matheusalmeida•1d ago•27 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
9•kaonwarb•3d ago•7 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
40•videotopia•4d ago•1 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
219•isitcontent•13h ago•25 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
210•dmpetrov•13h ago•103 comments

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

https://vecti.com
322•vecti•15h ago•143 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
369•ostacke•18h ago•94 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
358•aktau•19h ago•181 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
477•todsacerdoti•20h ago•232 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
272•eljojo•15h ago•160 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
402•lstoll•19h ago•271 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
85•quibono•4d ago•20 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
14•jesperordrup•2h ago•6 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
25•romes•4d ago•3 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
3•theblazehen•2d ago•0 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
56•kmm•5d ago•3 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
12•bikenaga•3d ago•2 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
244•i5heu•15h ago•188 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
52•gfortaine•10h ago•21 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
140•vmatsiiako•17h ago•62 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
280•surprisetalk•3d ago•37 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1058•cdrnsf•22h ago•433 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
132•SerCe•8h ago•117 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
70•phreda4•12h ago•14 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
28•gmays•7h ago•11 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
176•limoce•3d ago•96 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
63•rescrv•20h ago•22 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: Data Formulator – interactive AI agents for data analysis (Microsoft)

https://data-formulator.ai/
38•chenglong-hn•2mo ago
Hi everyone, we are excited to share with you our new release of Data Formulator. Starting from a dataset, you can communicate with AI agents with UI + natural language to explore data and create visualizations to discover new insights. Here's a demo video of the experience: https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator/releases/tag/0.....

This is a build-up from our release a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907719). We spent a year exploring how to blend agent mode with interactions to allow you more easily "vibe" with your data but still keeping in control. We don't think the future of data analysis is just "agent to do all for you from a high-level prompt" --- you should still be able to drive the open-ended exploration; but we also don't want you to do everything step-by-step. Thus we worked on this "interactive agent mode" for data analysis with some UI innovations.

Our new demo features:

* We want to let you import (almost) any data easily to get started exploration — either it's a screenshot of a web table, an unnormalized excel table, table in a chunk of text, a csv file, or a table in database, you should be able to load into the tool easily with a little bit of AI assistance.

* We want you to easily choose between agent mode (more automation) vs interactive mode (more fine-grained control) yourself as you explore data. We designed an interface of "data threads": both your and agents' explorations are organized as threads so you can jump into any point to decide how you want to follow-up or revise using UI + NL instruction to provide fine-grained control.

* The results should be easily interpretable. Data Formulator now presents "concept" behind the code generated by AI agents alongside code/explanation/data. Plus, you can compose a report easily based on your visualizations to share insights.

We are sharing the online demo at https://data-formulator.ai/ for you to try! If you want more involvement and customization, checkout our source code https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator and let's build something together as a community!

Comments

XYZ12334•2mo ago
Hyped to use your product in our Mumbai SaaS startup sir!
chenglong-hn•2mo ago
Feel free to submit requests in github for any customization needs!
xnx•2mo ago
Pretty cool. I like the local install option.

I almost skipped this as more AI wrapper shovelware. Would benefit from putting "Microsoft" in the title.

chenglong-hn•2mo ago
That's a good suggestion :)
cadamsdotcom•2mo ago
Very cool - a lot of well thought out stuff in there.

One area for exploration is letting people turn natural language questions into non-LLM queries, UIs, & dashboards. In other words to let non-engineers codify their questions into queries they can review for correctness and then take the LLM out of the picture.

Imagine if your CEO could ask natural language questions, build their own dashboard, review the generated queries for correctness, and be able to see deterministic results on any metric they care about - without having to ask an intern and without a multi-hour turnaround while it’s implemented.

Codification is kind of the best of both worlds and the underlying idea (explore with an LLM & then codify into something fast and deterministic when ready) is quite universal.

chenglong-hn•2mo ago
That's something we are building! We hope to enhance the report generation as a dashboard builder. Instead of automatically compose an article out of the exploration, we could add more instructions and UI to allow user to specify how different components (vis, data, questions) should be put together to "codify" into a live document to share.
mritchie712•2mo ago
This was too perfect of a setup, had to record a video[0] showing how we do this.

Yes, you definitely need need for a codification layer.

I think a semantic layer is the best way to do that for analytics. Having an LLM write bespoke SQL to answer every question will fail fast.

e.g. if you ask for "revenue by month" against a Snowflake warehouse with hundreds of tables, you are guaranteed to get different answers over multiple attempts.

We[1] use an agent to build a semantic layer over time at Definite so you get consistent results.

0 - https://www.loom.com/share/2da829dd440e489a8f7e3906c7083048

1 - https://www.definite.app/

chenglong-hn•2mo ago
This is incredibly cool! A lot of times the user query can be ambiguous enough to make it consistent across runs. The semantic layer is essential to reduce ambiguity, either built by AI or engineers.
jaxn•2mo ago
There are references to using connectors to connect to databases, but I can't find any documentation on how to actually do that.
chenglong-hn•2mo ago
It's here! https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator/tree/main/py-sr...

When install Data Formulator locally, it's possible to connect DF to databases with connection parameters in UI. To add more data loaders, there is a common template.

freakynit•2mo ago
Lol... this is exactly what my product does: https://zenquery.app
chenglong-hn•2mo ago
Zenquery is super cool! Data Formulator is mostly designed for data visualization and not as flexible for general QA -- we might be able to find some collaboration, Data Formulator is open source: https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator
freakynit•2mo ago
Yep.. the visualizations are really cool though.. I too have added them in beta version :)

Open to open-source ZenQuery if needed..