MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MCP Browser Agent – Autonomous Browser Automation for Claude Desktop
by ivanimprv | 2025-05-12 13:24:41+00:00
Hey HN! Following up on MCPs for Claude, I've created another Model Context Protocol server that gives Claude Desktop autonomous browser automation capabilities.

The Browser Agent MCP lets Claude control a headful browser to navigate websites, capture screenshots, manipulate DOM elements, execute JavaScript, and perform API requests—all through natural language instructions.

Check out a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lMsKiTy7TE Repository: https://github.com/imprvhub/mcp-browser-agent

With this MCP integration, you can: - Navigate to any URL with configurable load strategies - Capture full-page or element-specific screenshots - Perform precise DOM interactions (click, fill, select, hover) - Execute arbitrary JavaScript with console logs capture - Make HTTP requests (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE) with headers and body

What makes this a true AI agent is its persistent browser session. Claude maintains state across multiple commands, captures console logs, stores screenshots as resources, and can chain operations for complex workflows.

It's particularly useful for web testing, form automation, data extraction, or creating visual documentation. The setup requires Node.js, Claude Desktop, and Playwright dependencies. The browser runs headful by default with chrome (you can change to firefox, chromium and more).

If you've been exploring MCP development or browser automation, I'd love to hear about your use cases. What other browser capabilities would enhance your AI Agents workflows?

The project is open source under Mozilla Public License 2.0, and I welcome contributions if you're interested in MCP development or want to extend the automation features.
by vv_ | 2025-05-12 13:24:42+00:00
> We really need the right to modify our vehicle software

We really don't and neither do the manufacturers. Unless you want frequent crashes and user-caused engine problems. Programming an Engine Control Unit (ECU) is not trivial.

> with no surprise NSA backdoor management engines

These backdoors are generally required by law (e.g. Lawful Interception for Cellular Technologies) and are highly standardized. It is very unlikely that Tesla/Apple make backdoors on purpose.
by malcolmgreaves | 2025-05-12 13:25:17+00:00
So, is this a lawyer who is using his normal legal tactics of intimidation against LLVM devs who are donating their time to provide open source software? And is his aim that, because he’s incompetent, he messed up multiple parts of the process and got his own feelings hurt, and thus now wants…other people to coddle his feelings?

EDIT -

> Once again these two Gentoo developers showed a lack of good manners.

…

> hold a personal grudge against me

Yes, indeed this non technical person seems to have found that while they don’t have a mind sharp enough for software, nor the respect and understanding that they can’t talk to people the same way they do as a lawyer, they’ve well on their way into the subculture of posting their emotional rants onto the internet. (haha!)
by medfield | 2025-05-12 13:25:41+00:00
Agreed. I use organic maps for hiking, because its just simple offline trail mapping. I want a mapping program in my car to easily be offline, have map overlays that are easy to read like more pronounced lane/route arrows and can re route if there is a road shut down or a backup on the expressway and I go to get off.

But my biggest gripe with using organic maps with driving is its search function. I couldnt care if it doesnt have all the online social features like google maps and come up with the police/safety warnings and restaurant ratings. I just want its seach to actually find the place I want to go.

Most of the time I try and avoid using google maps, but then I go back and try organic maps. Notice it doesnt have where i want to go listed in its search, so i google the address to plug in. I can enter in the exact address and it wont find it and then go back to google maps.
by bluGill | 2025-05-12 13:25:45+00:00
In some areas you pay different rates to charge your EV at different times of the day. If that is the case for you then you will want to pay attention to and control charging. Normally you will want to do a get your car charging at the cheap rate, but sometimes you are willing to pay triple costs because you need to leave soon and there isn't enough remaining range. (your car matters - my PHEV only gets 30 miles from a full charge, so I'm always low when I get home, while many EVs get several hundred miles and so really only run low when on a road trip)

Eventually I expect cars, chargers, calendars, and the electric company will somehow integrate so that you can plug in and the system figures out when to charge your car. that is a complex project though with privacy concerns that are hard to address.
by kmarc | 2025-05-12 13:26:51+00:00
The biggest for me is definitely the lack of public transportation. This is something even gnome-maps support. Global search (eg. things that are not downloaded yet) only works for some bigger entities, that are part of the world map (although I understand that this would need some server-side support). Not having a satellite map is also a bummer.

Point-to-point navigation at places where you already downloaded maps is alright (same with osmand), but for exploration, or public trasnport, I would need to use moovit, mapy, osmand (wikipedia overlay is awesome), or google maps.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-12 13:26:54+00:00
Yeah, as long as you pay reliably (ideally automatically) so you never get hit with any fees, it's fine.

But if everyone did that, these companies would go out of business. So they're clearly counting on a significant percentage of users failing to do that, and sticking themselves with the fees in the fine print. And those tend to be the folks who can less afford it and are less equipped to reliably handle such things, making the enterprise feel predatory.
by Leftium | 2025-05-12 13:27:18+00:00
The demo simply demonstrates how I used my tool. It requires some manual set up:

- TTML files are downloaded via CLI: `yt-dlp.exe --skip-download --write-auto-sub --sub-format ttml`

- TTML files are converted to the OTR .MD format via my CLI tool

- The MD file can be dragged & dropped onto the web app.

---

I think it is possible to download SBV/TTML files, but the download must be done from the server due to CORS restrictions.

My app didn't go this far due to limitations of the (serverless) platform it is hosted on. Also it was faster to just do the steps manually vs. developing a server that does it.

I have seen many services that download the transcript. Here are a few:

- https://youtubetranscript.com

- https://kagi.com/summarizer

- https://www.tubepen.com

However, note YouTube may block your server if you download too many transcripts: https://kagifeedback.org/d/4451-universal-summarizer-cant-fi...
by leonheld | 2025-05-12 13:27:19+00:00
> Honestly my sense is that it's just time to rip the bandaid off and generate synthesizable hardware from Python or Rust or whatnot.

I worked a bit with VHDL and the parallelism aspect is - to me - so fundamentally different than what our sequential programming languages can express that I'm not sure I a layer of abstraction between this and that. How would that work?
by digikazi | 2025-05-12 13:28:39+00:00
That's genuinely awesome! I've been wanting to do something like this for a long time!

I don't have a background in coding, rather I'm just a humble engineering tech but this sounds like something I want to learn and sink my teeth into.

I have a tremendous amount of links - probably going back to the late 2000's and I've always relied on services like Pinboard, Raindrop and Delicious (!).

Once again thank you for the inspiration and the metaphorical kick up the backside!
by jasonhong | 2025-05-12 13:28:57+00:00
This post is a great example of whataboutism and distracting people from the big picture: science funding works and has led to a large number of innovations that many of us here on HN use every day.

The original article talks about several of these, including RISC, out-of-order execution, speculative prefetching, vector processing, GPGPU, and multicore.

It's easy to cherry pick and find things that you might personally disagree with. That's true with any system created by us humans. That doesn't mean that you should burn the whole thing down, which is what this administration is doing.

I feel like I've been making the same post over and over on threads like these. NSF-funded research has led to innovations like the above, as well as multibillion dollar companies like Google, Databricks, Duolingo, and more (and that's just in computer science). NSF-funded research has had an incredible Return on Investment in terms of jobs, economic growth, and national security. It took generations to build the American scientific enterprise, and the system has worked incredibly well as is. It's incredibly short-sighted and a massive self-own to destroy something that has advanced the USA and the world so much.
by vv_ | 2025-05-12 13:28:59+00:00
> Why does your car need an internet connection?

There are several reasons to have internet connectivity in a car. For example, you might want to start your car remotely (e.g. winter time and you want to pre-heat it) or you'd like your onboard navigation maps to update automatically, or you'd like the latest traffic reports (if available in your region), yadda yadda.

While there are a lot of people that love Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, there still remains a sizeable group of people that want to have a navigation solution without using their phone, or to be able to enjoy their car without having a smartphone at all.
by boyd | 2025-05-12 13:29:07+00:00
Throwing cores at the problem with `pytest-xdist` is typically the lowest hanging fruit, but you still hit all the paper cuts the authors mention -- collection, DB fixtures, import time, etc.

And, further optimization is really hard when the CI plumbing starts to dominate. For example, the last Warehouse `test` job I checked has 43s of Github Actions overhead for 51s of pytest execution time (half the test action time and approaching 100% overhead).

Disclosure: Have been tinkering on a side project trying to provide 90% of these pytest optimizations automatically, but also get "time-to-first-test-failure" down to ~10 seconds (via warm runners, container snapshotting, etc.). Email in profile if anyone would like to swap notes.
by jorvi | 2025-05-12 13:29:40+00:00
I hate the penny-wise pound-foolish attitude both in embedded and Android phone development.

For years now, Samsung has used a 'virtual proximity sensor' in everything but their premium stuff. Sensors like that are a few cents. Degrading the entire experience on the phone for a few cents cost savings. Say you do that for 25 components, saving 4 cents each. You've now saved $1 on a BoM of $100-$200, whilst making the whole experience of your product feel a lot worse.
by rad_gruchalski | 2025-05-12 13:30:17+00:00
I’m certain you aren’t that important for anyone to care.

Yes: it reports your location to a third party. When you have an accident. So you can get help.

And of course it can be verified. At the end of the day it’s a sim card in a passive mode. Maybe you don’t know how to verify it. There are millions of them driving around. I’m sure someone more qualified than you would have already reported if they were tracking in real-time. The system is nearly a decade old.
by fjfaase | 2025-05-12 13:30:24+00:00
I thought that this was about the hardware description language Clash developed by some ex-colleagues, but it appeared to be something else. Clash [1] is based on the functional programming language Haskell and it can output to VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog.

Although the last official release mentioned on the website is from 2021, it is still actively developed on GitHub [2]. See also contranomy [3] for a non-pipelined RV32I RISC-V core written in Clash.

[1] https://clash-lang.org/

[2] https://github.com/clash-lang/clash-compiler

[3] https://github.com/christiaanb/contranomy
by mmastrac | 2025-05-12 13:30:39+00:00
While your first statement is reasonable, your second is uncharitable and hostile.

If Windows won't allow use of the filesystem as a database or cannot heuristically detect when a folder is being used as a store of data, Windows is wrong, not the developer.

Amusingly Microsoft ships exclusions for their own software, and states "Opting out of automatic exclusions might adversely impact performance, or result in data corruption. Automatic server role exclusions are optimized for Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022, and Windows Server 2025."

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-endpoint/configur...
by stevepotter | 2025-05-12 13:31:13+00:00
I love ClickOnce and am amazed that it never got that popular. Installs and updates are seamless.

I wrote an inventory management program for my father's hazardous waste company. Used .net mvc as the backend, WPF as the frontend. WPF sucks in many ways, but I got it working and have had zero complaints.

I built that program almost 20 years ago. Until last year I spend maybe 5-6 hours total in maintenance, mostly ssl cert updates. Let that sink in.
by slifin | 2025-05-12 13:31:59+00:00
To me something unreadable is code that I cannot statically make any assertions about the runtime behaviour of the code

This function you're complaining about looks like 2 virtual threads doing program input reading and output writing for the LSP client given some ArrayBlockingQueues in about 25-30 lines

If I wanted the complete story I could use Clojure's inbuilt test runner to slip some ArrayBlockingQueues in there and run it under record with Flowstorm

Then leisurely seek through the entire state of the program, to get the play-by-play of how this works

There are so many good design choices in this language and a good 30% of colleagues I run into are not even doing the basics of like running a REPL, I think some people just need to clock in with a decade of C# or PHP or TS or JS or Python or whatever to get a taste of a language with next to no inbuilt immutability, statements instead of expressions, no reload-ability in the language semantics and just crapshot debuggers that run in lockstep with the program execution
by jcranmer | 2025-05-12 13:32:09+00:00
> He derided my attempt to use an AI summary to bridge a communication gap (I explicitly stated I'm not a programmer)

LLVM has already found that AI summaries tend to provide negative utility when it comes to bug reports, and it has a policy of not using them. The moment you admit "an AI told me that...", you've told every developer in the room that you don't know what you're doing, and very likely, trying to get any useful information of you to be able to resolve the bug report is going to be at best painful. (cf. https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-define-policy-on-ai-tool-us...)

Looking over the bug report in question... I disagree with the author here. The original bug report is "hi, you have lots of misnamed compiler option warnings when I build it with my toolchain" which is a very unactionable bug report. The scripts provided don't really provide a lot of insight into what the problem might be, and having loads and loads of options in a configure command increases the probability that it breaks for no good reason. Also, for extra good measure, the link provided is to the latest version of a script, which means it can change and no longer reproduce the issue in question.

Quite frankly, the LLVM developer basically responded with "hey, can you provide a better, simpler steps to reproduce?" To which the author responds [1] "no, you should be able to figure it out from what I've given already." Which, if I were in the developer's shoes, would cause me to silently peace out at that moment.

At the end of the day, what seems to have happened to me is that the author didn't provide sufficient detail in their initial bug report and bristled quite thoroughly at being asked to provide more detail. Eli Schwartz might have crossed the line in response, but the author here was (to me) quite clearly the first person to have thoroughly crossed the line.

[1] Direct link, so you can judge for yourself if my interpretation is correct: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/72413#issuecomme...
by actinium226 | 2025-05-12 13:32:10+00:00
What exactly is the danger though? I'm imagining that another Chernobyl-level reactor breach is unlikely (not least since the other 3 reactors at Chernobyl of the same type kept running until 2000, and several more reactors of the same type are still operating today in various post Soviet countries). And while reactivity release is unfortunate, the effects tend to be localized (excepting Chernobyl), and let's not pretend that other modalities have 0 environment impact or risk factors.

If fact more people die from falling off wind turbines during maintenance than have died from nuclear accidents on a per-TWh basis [1].

And there were greater health effects in Fukushima due to panic and unnecessary evacuation than from radiation [2].

Again I agree radioactivity = bad, but I think it needs to be put in context.

And as for the disposal of nuclear waste, yes it's a problem for thousands of years, but we don't need a thousand year solution, it's not like we're leaving the planet. One possible outcome there is that eventually we develop cheap enough neutron sources that we can bombard the waste with neutrons until the various atoms capture enough neutrons to become stable isotopes. Considering the technological progress over the last 300 years, maybe in another 300 such a feat will be economically feasible.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8208296/
by thesurlydev | 2025-05-12 13:32:22+00:00
I use the Windsurf Cascade plugin in JetBrains IDEs. My current flow is I rough-in the outline of what I want and have generally use the plugin to improve what I have by creating tests, performance improvements, or just making things more idiomatic. I need to invest time to add rules at both a global and project level which should make the overall experience event better.
by eddieroger | 2025-05-12 13:32:28+00:00
I get the impression this is said by people who observe large enterprises or don't have good device management. I work for a big company that deploys proper MDM to our Macs and PCs, and as long as the application is packaged correctly, they sure can push stuff out fast and without user intervention, including killing a running process if they so choose. Making an app that packages well is also hard, but that's not on those who push them to environments.
by zzrrt | 2025-05-12 13:33:01+00:00
I have a nitpick about about how AI is supposedly "designed to produce lies." That's pretty clearly false, unless you really believe the creators of AI are intentionally spreading lies through their products and that was their intention from the start. Call them careless or their technology inherently flawed if you want, but neither means "design[ing]" liar technology.

This might have been too petty to comment on, if it weren't for the irony that an arrogant human asserting that AIs are fallible made his own logical error or exaggeration in the same sentence. Was he designed to produce lies too?

Edit: I'm not really defending a layman using AI to produce patches, but the OSS developer's characterization is an overreach in the other direction. It's not a very useful heuristic either; at some point AI content is not going to be labeled or obvious, so it will have to be carefully evaluated for correctness and good-faith intention the same as human-generated content is.
by troad | 2025-05-12 13:33:16+00:00
I genuinely don't at all understand what the issue is with calling it a pagan library. It's a clear and substantive descriptor.

The history of the Roman Empire can be divided into two overarching periods - the pagan era and the Christian era. A pagan library is significantly more valuable than a Christian library, as we have far fewer pagan texts than Christian ones, and the few we do have were often corrupted by later Christian copyists. The word pagan is doing meaningful work in the sentence.
by Draiken | 2025-05-12 13:34:33+00:00
Same here. It's extremely distracting to see the random garbage that the autocomplete keeps trying to do.

I said this in another comment but I'll repeat the question: where are these 2x, 10x or even 1.5x increases in output? I don't see more products, more features, less bugs or anything related to that since this "AI revolution".

I keep seeing this being repeated ad nauseam without any real backing of hard evidence.

If this was true and every developer had even a measly 30% increase in productivity, it would be like a team of 10 is now 13. The amount of code being produced would be substantially more and as a result we should see an absolute boom in new... everything.

New startups, new products, new features, bugs fixed and so much more. But I see absolutely nothing but more bullshit startups that use APIs to talk to these models with a few instructions.

Please someone show me how I'm wrong because I'd absolutely love to magically become way more productive.
by lolinder | 2025-05-12 13:35:18+00:00
I'm increasingly disaffected by the idea of BDFL-run projects.

The concept is appealing—it's essentially Plato's philosopher king. The BDFL can unstick decision making and ensure the project moves forward without having to litigate every decision in committee, they maintain context and vision throughout the life of the project, and because they're not accountable to anyone they can make the right call for the project rather than having to make complicated political trade-offs. It's all the perks of a monarchy.

Unfortunately, we've seen over and over again that the BDFL model also has all the problems of monarchy. If you get a good one it's the most effective form of government, but people are fickle things. Frequently we see things like this, where the BDFL turns out to have been malevolent after all or decided that they are the project and are entitled to the sole profit from it. WordPress comes to mind.

A good BDFL is worth keeping, but I think we'll find that drawing inspiration for our community structures from real-world democracies/republics will be more stable and reliable in the long term and more generalizable across new projects. Democracies aren't perfect, but by design they smooth out the variance of the individual humans in the community, giving you much more predictable results over time than monarchies do.
by rafmartom | 2025-05-12 13:35:20+00:00
Hi there,

I have always found tedious in my workflow to jump from vim to Browser in order to get some information online.

Wondering if there would be a way to browse into any programming language, ... , online-documentation, the vim-help way. Snappy experience pressing `Ctrl + ]` to jump from Method to Method, coming back to a TOC, not breaking the *Vim Zen* .

I have came out with this small plugin [vim-dan](https://github.com/rafmartom/vim-dan) All the documentations are generated by this other repository [vim-dan-generator](https://github.com/rafmartom/vim-dan-generator)

Pros: - Lightweight Offline documentation system - Keyboard centric workflow - Work from the terminal - Syntax highlighted , using different highlighting groups for keywords of the documentation - Linked across the document. Navigate the document with `Ctrl + ]` or by refering to the `TOC`, or line by line as you prefer. - Ready to port to any documentation available online with the `.dan` filetype and the `vim-dan-generator` system.

Let me know if you find it useful

Cheers