MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: "Computer use" mcp for webapps and Electron apps
by clharman | 2025-06-30 19:40:17+00:00
Circuit MCP allows agents to use webapps and electron apps like a human would.

For a while I've been using browser automation MCPs to have my agents test webapps as they developed them - autonomously. I was using Microsoft's Playwright MCP for this and it worked pretty well. Found myself building an Electron app and needing the same thing but nothing existed, so here it is!

It supports both Electron AND web apps (you just install a different package), since it's uses Playwright under the hood and they're not very different.

Here's the config to drop in your agent (Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, etc):

{ "mcpServers": { "circuit-web": { "command": "npx", "args": ["@snowfort/circuit-web@latest"] }, "circuit-electron": { "command": "npx", "args": ["@snowfort/circuit-electron@latest"] } } }
by const_cast | 2025-06-30 19:41:49+00:00
I don't think it's that Academia is/has been taking sides, it's that the right has continued to become more and more insane in the past few decades. The right is now explicitly anti-science and anti-fact. They, quite literally, ARE ideologically opposed to clean air.

We've had decades of extremely strong pro-oil propaganda and what have you and it's caused this extremely tumultuous situation where people think there really is two sides to everything. But there just... isn't. There is no logic, no reasoning. It's all about making money and fucking over as many people as possible. That's it.

It doesn't matter what Academia does because even acknowledging the sky is blue is a threat to the right. They operate in an alternative universe of lies. No truth is safe, no matter how benign or obvious.
by LeFantome | 2025-06-30 19:42:28+00:00
While many people desire this “total compatibility” with Xorg idea, the Wayland team sees this as an anti-feature.

Many things on X are done the way they are because all processes can see all pixels and all devices. Wayland does not want that. So, tools built to these requirements will not work. And, obviously, they cannot be “fixed”.
by bitwize | 2025-06-30 19:42:37+00:00
Again, Xwayland is Xorg, just with a Wayland DDX backend.If you check out the xorg-server source tree, you can build your own Xwayland with appropriate configuration.

Beyond just doing an end run around nazi X forks, I think the idea here is to get everybody on Wayland by hook or by crook. The Xorg developers explicitly DO NOT want you to use Xorg, especially not with a direct hardware backend (even modesetting). Wayland is their solution for a much-needed replacement. and, going forward, aside from bugfixes Xwayland will be the only supported/maintained X solution. But really the idea is to keep Xwayland around only for legacy apps, so we'll probably see no new features or protocols added to Xwayland except perhaps to better integrate with Wayland desktops. Xwayland itself will be slated for deprecation and eventual removal from the latest versions of most major distros in the next ten years or so.
by joseonjok | 2025-06-30 19:42:58+00:00
There are clearly people using LLMs to generate comments but what's worse is people now just accusing people of being agents or bots in an effort to downplay and ignore their points.

What's clear is that its impacting HN very negatively in the past 3 months or so. What irks me is there are clearly long formatted responses that are clearly using LLM but authentic user comments are being written off as LLM/agent/bot in order to get others to stop engaging with them.
by tripdout | 2025-06-30 19:43:11+00:00
It will be really interesting to see what production devices this is enabled on - It mentions the OnePlus 6 at least which has it fused out but is still accessible.

Edit: How are they reading the eFuses on a production OnePlus 6? Do they have a Qualcomm-signed EL3 EDL loader?

It seems to exist as qcom,msm-eud in the device tree of a (unfortunately production) SM4350 device I have along with an eud_enable_reg. Time to recompile the kernel with `/dev/mem`.
by bob1029 | 2025-06-30 19:43:33+00:00
Exceptions can even work with remote APIs.

If you reach into the enterprise bucket of tricks, technologies like WCF/SOAP can propagate these across systems reliably. You can even forward the remote stack traces by turning on some scary flags in your app.config. When printing the final exception using .ToString(), this creates a really magical narrative of what the fuck happened.

The entire reason exceptions are good is because of stack traces. It is amazing to me how many developers do not understand that having a stack trace at the exact instant of a bad thing is like having undetectable wall hacks in a competitive CS:GO match.
by kenmacd | 2025-06-30 19:43:58+00:00
If you haven't, you may enjoy reading Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. It explores some similar themes to the 'would humans be satisfied in a world where they have no economic role whatsoever' discussion.

I thought it was interesting to see Claude say 'It seems like we'd just be shuffling money in circles' as if that's not exactly what money is for, and 'If we're essentially having companies fund UBI through taxes, which then gets spent back at those same companies, it does seem circular. Why not just... give people the goods directly?', when the exact same could be said about labour (and it being an equally bad idea).

As to the wider discussion, it seemed to fall a bit too far in to the "won't somebody think of the economy" in places, and in to pretty easily solved issues like 'What if everyone wants a Ferrari?'.
by Kranar | 2025-06-30 19:44:32+00:00
I think your contribution to this discussion has been very thorough but I need to nitpick some details:

>For any X⊆N, if 0 ∈ X, and for every n ∈ X, S(n) ∈ X, then X=N.

You're right that this is a perfectly valid axiom in SOL, but it's not true that it rules out non-standard "shit". What this axiom does is it forces your theory to have a single model, the categorical model. But this axiom does not in anyway pick out the standard model as the categorical model, it doesn't force the categorical model to be the standard model. It's possible that N = {0, 1, 2, ..., Q - 1, Q, Q + 1, ...} in which case the categorical model ends up being nonstandard. This axiom has no way to force N to be intended standard model.
by kristopolous | 2025-06-30 19:45:05+00:00
I think the reason is that, on laptops, the cosmetic has such a high correlation with what you can expect wrong with the device - people don't take their laptops in for "body work".

Also these devices in the second-hand market are probably 80+% < $1,000 and let's be real - getting a bad $400 computer is kinda whatever in the dramas of life. Just get another.

(I've sold about 5k things on ebay btw).
by layer8 | 2025-06-30 19:45:36+00:00
Ah, that’s what I get for not reading the footnotes. However, the alternative solution presented evaluates the item argument twice, which is problematic as well (but could probably be worked around by passing `(list)->payload` on instead). Secondly, the assignment for type-checking doesn’t work for read-only operations on a const List, or does it? And doesn’t the assignment overwrite the head? Lastly, the do-while construction means you can’t use it for operations that return a value (without compiler extensions).

I also don’t agree it’s “squeamish” to be wary of aliasing analysis going wrong. It’s not a clean abstraction and can hide subtle bugs down the road.
by jonplackett | 2025-06-30 19:45:48+00:00
I find this all quite baffling.

I’m pretty sure I could knock up a decent Siri clone with got4o-mini, because I already did a bootleg Alexa to power our smart home stuff after Amazon removed the privacy controls. The only hard bit was the wake word.

Siri is currently so terrible that even something like Mistral 8b could do a decent job. Whey don’t they just run something like that on their own servers instead?
by chrsw | 2025-06-30 19:46:05+00:00
Hopefully this makes things easier and simpler for users? Not being a Linux application developer or maintainer, I always wondered why we needed snaps, flatpaks, etc when we have .deb packages. I just like doing 'apt install something'. As a user, I prefer one central way to manage software and have the complexity automatically handled behind the scenes. It's great when things are open so I can dig into that stuff if I want to. But I shouldn't really need to.
by beefnugs | 2025-06-30 19:47:01+00:00
yeahhhh why isnt there a training structure where you play 5000 games, and the reward function is based on doing well in all of them?

I guess its a totaly different level of control: instead of immediately choosing a certain button to press, you need to set longer term goals. "press whatever sequence over this time i need to do to end up closer to this result"

There is some kind of nested multidimensional thing to train on here instead of immediate limited choices
by jasperry | 2025-06-30 19:47:08+00:00
That's a good example! So the sqrt(n) space in the result must refer to space beyond that needed to write down the output--basically a working memory scratchpad. In which case, a string-copying function could use just a constant amount of scratch space.

I mean, for all I know, the result may have been proved in the model of decision problems where the output is always one bit. But I'd guess that it generalizes just fine to the case where you have to write longer outputs.

However, your question does make me wonder if the result still applies in the RAM model, where you can move to any spot on the tape in constant time. My theory knowledge is getting rusty...
by bigbadfeline | 2025-06-30 19:47:22+00:00
> make a change yourself. Start a business and try a 4 day work week. Everyone should love it according to your world view...

Back to reality, we would have 16x6 workweeks if not for government regulation. That much is not up for debate. Moving to 4x8 workweek is just a logical next step demanded by the circumstances.
by roscas | 2025-06-30 19:47:28+00:00
Funny that it is not just Apple doing that. Samsung also and that has happen ty Galaxy. They break the device you pay'd for. But any Android device will have Android unwanted apps, vender unwanted apps and spy crap like Facebook app for UI and 3 more to keep sending Facebook all data. So if you don't connect any Andoid to a PC and remove that crap, you're out of luck. It is not just bloatware. It's spyware.
by const_cast | 2025-06-30 19:47:30+00:00
Is it possible he said that because that wasn't the primary purpose of the slide, or the thing you should focus on?

Like, when I was in school we saw a lot of pointers and yeah, 99% of the time the actual memory address was more or less useless. What mattered is it was a pointer and it was over there, and it was part of some struct or whatever. The actual numbers of it's address didn't matter much and would actually change between runs.

I don't know, I see people miss the forest for the trees with this stuff constantly. They don't understand that absolute veracity and education are pretty much orthogonal. As in, your professor isn't trying to just say correct things, they're trying to teach you. And, actually, saying too many correct things makes it harder to teach you.
by voxleone | 2025-06-30 19:47:38+00:00
I'm working on yet another computer vision graphical annotation tool — but with a twist. I have this wild idea that labels should live inside the image itself, stored as dedicated text chunks within the PNG file, completely eliminating the need for sidecar files.

The tool will support four annotation modes: Box, Polygon, Mask, and Keypoints — each with its own dedicated panel. You can switch modes by clicking the color-coded buttons on the toolbar, complete with smooth transitions. Labeling is a tedious task, so a bit of satisfying UI action here and there can't hurt.

It will also export labels to all major formats — and can (re)generate any sidecar file structure when needed.

https://github.com/VoxleOne/XLabel/blob/v0.3/README.md
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-30 19:47:46+00:00
I was in a gifted program. But it ends up often being segregation by another name where the well connected can get there kids into them even if they aren’t “gifted” to keep their kids away from “those kids” and you end up giving funding and the best teachers to those kids.

Something similar happen to me. I was smart enough to be in gifted programs in high school. But I got into magnet school in middle school (which was supposed to be to be based on a waiting list) because my mom tutored the child of the admission officer years before.

It’s just like people being against affirmative action for college admission but never say a word about legacy admissions.

And it’s not liberals who oppose research based education, common core, etc. Trump just basically dismantled the department of education and conservative states are mostly concerned with getting rid of books that teach American history including the bad parts and forcing the 10 commandments to be posted and teach that the election was stolen in 2020.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/22/okla...

Are you really trying to argue that conservatives want fact based education and not Christianity, Creationism, “The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and it wasn’t about slavery”.
by alganet | 2025-06-30 19:47:49+00:00
Dataset? That's so 2000s.

Each crawl on the internet is actually a discrete chunk of a more abstractly defined, constant influx of information streams. Let's call them rivers (it's a big stream).

These rivers can dry up, present seasonal shifts, be poisoned, be barraged.

It will never "get there" and gather enough data to "be done".

--

Regarding "new ideas in AI", I think there could be. But this whole thing is not about AI anymore.
by resolutefunctor | 2025-06-30 19:48:10+00:00
There is a lot I hate about building apps and releasing them on the App Store, and I'd be happy for there to be alternatives. But that said, I don't understand how its a monopoly. There is no requirement to build an app for iOS devices. There are other devices and means for software delivery out there. What makes their control of their own ecosystem monopolistic? As someone who has paid the apple tax for digital sales, it sucks but I'm also choosing to try to capture that market and that's the cost of doing business.

I'm not smart enough to get into the politics of other parts of the world, but just because the EU found something illegal doesn't mean its the basis of a good lawsuit under the US rules. Will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
by bluSCALE4 | 2025-06-30 19:48:15+00:00
Another reason HP is irrelevant. They pour money into stupid ideas no one is interested in. I'm curious what HP would think about the Acer C740 I recently reformatted and reflashed so I could directly into Linux. Would they "restore" it to its EOL state, undoing that work I did? My money is on yes because corporations don't know shit about PC building or optimal settings.
by godelski | 2025-06-30 19:48:46+00:00
> LLMs already that generalizability

This is not a proven statement. In fact, it's pretty clear that they don't. They have some generalization but that's not enough for what you're inferring. The best way to show this is to carefully talk to an LLM about anything you have a lot of domain expertise in. Be careful to not give it answers (information leakage can sneak in subtly) and specifically look for those small subtle details (that's why it needs to be a topic you have expertise in). "The smell" will be right but the information won't.

Also, LLMs these days aren't trained on just language
by verall | 2025-06-30 19:48:52+00:00
HPE is very happy with off-lease server HW only being sold on ebay and appearing as sketchy as possible. The margins are really high on server HW - offering HW support on systems sold at 20% above the used market under their brand name would cannibalize their core business so it will never happen.

But in consumer space, margins are very low, and so there is money to be made reselling used HW at a premium, so they will try.
by bunderbunder | 2025-06-30 19:49:36+00:00
And LLMs belong to this subset. They're largely built using supervised machine learning.

But also, "AI" is polysemous. There's "AI" the academic field, and machine learning is a subset of that field. But there's also "AI" the marketing term, which is much more well-known nowadays. And for that meaning of the term, it's the other way around -- it's a subset of machine learning.

Under either definition, though, I agree it doesn't make much sense to talk about them as if they are two different things, because either way one is just a particular kind of the other.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-30 19:50:00+00:00
Excellent critique of the state of observability, especially for us IT folks. We’re often the first - and last, until the bills come - line of defense for observability in orgs lacking a dedicated team. SNMP Traps get us 99% of the way there with anything operating in a standard way, but OTel/Prometheus/New Relic/etc all want to get “in the action” in a sense, and hoover up as much data points as possible.

Which, sure, if you’re willing to pay for it, I’m happy to let you make your life miserable. But I’m still going to be the Marie Kondo of IT and ask if that specific data point brings you joy. Does having per-second interval data points actually improve response times and diagnostics for your internal tooling, or does it just make you feel big and important while checking off a box somewhere?

Observability is a lot like imaging or patching: a necessary process to be sure, but do you really need a Cadillac Escalade (New Relic/Datadog/etc) to go to the grocery store when a Honda Accord (self-hosted Grafana + OTel) will do the same job more efficiently for less money?

Honestly regret not picking the Observability’s head at BigCo when I had the chance. What little he showed me (self-hosted Grafana for $90/mo in AWS ECS for the corporate infrastructure of a Fortune 50? With OTel agents consuming 1/3 to 1/2 the resources of New Relic agents? Man, I wish I had jumped down that specific rabbit hole) was amazingly efficient and informative. Observation done right.
by atonse | 2025-06-30 19:50:06+00:00
At this point, just about anything Apple can do will be way way way better than the absolute turd that is Siri. (It was only impressive 15 years ago).

Apple's AI strategy has seriously hurt their reputation. I'd love to be a fly on the wall where they discussed a strategy that amounted to "forget using the most basic LLM to understand combinations of commands like, stop all the timers and just keep the one that has about four minutes left... or turn on the lights in x, y, z room and turn off the fans around the house. let's just try to invent a completely new wheel that will get us bogged down in tech hell for years never making any progress"

They could've just improved the thing probably 99% of people use Siri for (Music, Home, Timers, Weather, Sports Scores) without developing any new tech or trying to reinvent any wheel. And in the background, continue to iterate in secret like they do best. Instead they have zero to show for two years since good LLMs have been out.

Even my son suggested things like "I wish your phone had ChatGPT and you could ask it to organize all your apps into folders" – we can all come up with really basic things they could've done so easily, with privacy built in.
by abeppu | 2025-06-30 19:51:07+00:00
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

> Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "but what about X?")[1] is a pejorative for the strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of a defense against the original accusation.

I'm not accused of anything or deflecting with a counter-accusation. I don't have a dog nor have I ever claimed an animal is a therapy animal.

I actually think the post could be a bad-faith bait article which is itself an attempt to be a distraction.
by andrewinardeer | 2025-06-30 19:51:54+00:00
I'm not an Apple enthusiast—my rarely used iPad mini is my only Apple device—but let me play devil’s advocate.

If a company invests billions in R&D to create hardware and its integrated software, shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it? Why should I be forced to open up the carefully designed ecosystem I’ve built?

If my pitch is premium, high-speed hardware and intuitive software so user-friendly that a monkey can use it, the trade-off is that you agree to my Terms of Service. There are other options out there.
by bitpush | 2025-06-30 19:51:54+00:00
If tomorrow, Tesla insisted that their cars will only accepted Tesla branded tires, would you be ok with it?

Sure it's their car and they can do whatever they want with it, but consumers are losing choices - which is what anti-monopoly rules are for. Say, Michelin or Pirelli tires are strictly better but Tesla doing this harms consumer choice and that's why it is bad.

Imagine if this were extended to Tesla branded chargers. Or Tesla branded paint. It's your damn car so you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it.
by _feus | 2025-06-30 19:53:10+00:00
Maybe for simple cases sure yes, but for complicated sentences ability to map approximate/fuzzy meaning <-> words is super helpful, especially for ornamentation and ESL scenarios.

And LLM doesn't completely remove the "burden" of reading the dictionary to make sure the meaning is indeed fitting, but shortcuts the discovery by a lot. Also helps to learn new words, lol. I see it as a supercharged thesaurus.

IMHO this applies to all general research, one needs to be an utter monkey to copy LLM generated references without checking them first, so if anything, it trains critical thinking for free.
by rbanffy | 2025-06-30 19:53:27+00:00
And, for a lot of things, it's quite sufficient.

I used Munin a lot as well in the 2005-2010 timeframe. Still do as a backup (for when Prometheus, Grafana, and Influxdb conspire against me) on my home lab.

Usually the 15 minute collection interval is just fine. One time though I had an issue with servers that were just fine and, then, crashed and rebooted with no useful metrics collected between the last "I'm fine" and the first "I'm fine again".

At that point we started collecting metrics (for only those servers) every 5 seconds, and we figured out someone introduced a nasty bug that took a couple weeks of uptime to run out of its own memory and crash everything. It was a fun couple days.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-30 19:53:27+00:00
There's a theory that "the meaning of a communication is it's effect". If I make a message that I think is a left-wing message but it causes sufficient right-wing backlash to motivate opponents to oppose me, my message wasn't really a left-wing message but a right-wing message from that viewpoint -- one that benefits my enemies.

Isn't that what you're saying here? The author pretty obviously thinks that Altman and company are horrible bullshitters and that's a bad thing, but you seem to think that somebody could come to the conclusion that they are actually really good bullshitters.
by pojzon | 2025-06-30 19:54:07+00:00
Difference between OTel and other previous standards is that OTel was created by “modern” engineers that dont care about resource consumption or dont even understand it. Which is funny because thats what the tool is about.

So yea, cost of storage and network traffic is only going to balloon.

There is room for improvements and I can already see new projects that will most likely gain traction in upcoming years.
by aw1621107 | 2025-06-30 19:54:09+00:00
> Corn syrup has way more calories por unit sweetness.

I'm not so sure about that? IIRC fructose is sweeter than sucrose and fructose concentrations aren't that much lower than in sucrose (fructose/glucose ratios of 42/58, 55/45, and 65/35 seem to be common from a quick search, comapred to 50/50 for sucrose). In addition the USDA also says fructose has fewer calories per gram than sucrose, which would also point towards HFCS having fewer calories per unit sweetness.

Both those would seem to point towards HFCS having fewer calories per unit sweetness, not "way more".