MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Kichan AI, free Chrome extension that generates and injects userscripts
by k1rd | 2025-06-18 13:18:32+00:00
I’ve been working on KICHAN, a Chrome extension that turns your requests into JavaScript user scripts and runs them instantly.

• Ask it to “add a column to that table”, “highlight email addresses”, “add a ‘Download’ button”, etc.

• The extension sends the request plus the page context and whatever you right clicked to Google Gemini, then injects the generated code.

• Then you can save the script; next time you hit the same domain/url you can set it to auto run or run manually. Over time you build a library of tested scripts you (and others) can reuse.

Why I’m excited: each saved script is a callable primitive. Once you have a collection, an LLM agent could chain them together to automate bigger workflows that aren’t automated today. This part is still not implemented but is a long term goal.

I just had the idea and had to build it. I mostly have used it to automate a browser game that then banned me. Twice.

Caveats:

• Very beta, is quite rough, and some CSP/iframe/canvas heavy sites can block injections.

• I am not a javascript or web developer. It is heavily vibecoded. Expect some bugs.

Feedback, reviews, ideas on how to improve etc. are welcome. If you can leave a review in the chrome extension store it would be great.

Website: https://kichan.ai

Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kichan-ai-web-augme...

Twitter: https://x.com/kichan_ai
by throw0101d | 2025-06-18 13:19:20+00:00
> You can't actually decode HEIC without also installing libde265, which you are supposed to have a license for. I'm not even sure how you'd go about getting an individual license.

Debian doesn't seem to have a problem with it:

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libde265

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libheif
by arp242 | 2025-06-18 13:20:25+00:00
The risks and downsides of exposing an image decoder to the entire web are very real, especially a relatively new/untested one written in a language like C++. There's been vulnerabilities in pretty much every other image decoder and I fully expect jpeg-xl to be no different. You can't just brush that aside. Hell, article doesn't even acknowledge it. Google has no real stake in webp vs. jpeg-xl either. You may disagree with the decision, this this kind of stuff doesn't make much sense.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-18 13:22:05+00:00
Well, you aren't in a position where you can put them on a PIP. Someone else can (and maybe should), but you can't.

So what are you going to do? Are you going to just grit your teeth in a lousy situation? Are you going to leave? Or are you, first, going to try to do what you can to fix it?

Trying to fix it first is, IMHO, the right thing, for several reasons. It's right morally. You're trying to do good to the people around you. It's right in pragmatic terms, too, because it may work, and if it doesn't, you can still leave. And it's right just in "leave your options open" terms, because it adds one to the list of options.
by dspillett | 2025-06-18 13:22:32+00:00
Also: some people seem to get an amount of pleasure from pointing out repeats, as if remembering that something was posted before is knowledge enough to make them a better person than the poster, us all, or just the person they thought they were themselves. This is fine when something is posted far too often, or is reposted by a point-farming bot (presumably the users running such bots hope to use the reputation of the account somehow in future), but is often done overzealously.
by alganet | 2025-06-18 13:22:32+00:00
The following section of the Wave whitepaper suggests that the chat app aspect was minor to the project. It was all about solving collaborative rich text editing:

> Waves are hosted XML documents that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications.

The following section suggests that the Wave team had a specific goal related to rich text OT extensions, which were NOT trivial at the time:

> There are others that offer rich text, such as Google Docs, but do not offer a seamless live concurrent editing experience, as merge failures can occur.

It also suggests that it was specifically intended to be featured later in Google Docs (it would not make sense to dunk on their own product). It actually doesn't matter if it is the same team or not. It is common to have a dedicated R&D separate from the deliver team for such breakthroughs.
by CactusRocket | 2025-06-18 13:22:33+00:00
I don't really think so. The tracker is just a tiny part of the whole Bittorrent setup, and it's only really used by clients to get a list of peers. It's basically just an HTTP call to the tracker, returning a response. The only thing that I can quickly think of is returning some malformed bencode which could cause a memory exhaustion a client written by a novice.

The peer protocol (and variants, like uTP) are much more interesting to attack, and you don't need to host a tracker for that, you can just get peer IPs from trackers or DHT, connect, and do your magic.
by sensanaty | 2025-06-18 13:23:35+00:00
I try all the time, but I always end up having to wrestle a trillion calls into some library code that has 0 relevance to me, and if the issue is happening at some undetermined point in the chain, you basically have to step through it all to get an idea for where things are going wrong.

On the other hand, the humble console.log() just works without requiring insanely tedious and frustrating debugger steps.
by samrus | 2025-06-18 13:23:51+00:00
> Why invest in labor when capital grows faster?

Because capital (in the sense that your referring to, which is money) isnt "real". The economy isnt based on money, its based on goods and services, which require labour and natural resources. Money is just the lubricant to make sure these two things can be optimally distributed.

In simpler terms, if everyone skipped college and just invested in the stock market, then the market will collapse because no one is producing the goods and services the market is trading kn. and thats the rub (tragedy) of economics, its a cooperative system, you are a part of it, not the temporarily embarrassed billionaire you might fancy yourself as. so if you have a strategy, you have to account for everyone using it, and see if its sustainable

This applies to cost reduction through wage supression or tax avoidance. If onky you do it, then it works great for you, but if all the companies in the economy do it, there suddenly consumers have no money to buy your products and the public infrastructure you need.

This is why im kinda on the side of the luddites, as presented in the post. They've been portrayed as neadrathals, backwards and scared of technological progress. But if they are people who understand that capitalists (not fans of capitalism but people who own and deploy capital for a living) will ruin the whole economy with their greed and must be brought back in line, then i support that. The original luddite movement might have failed but the industrial revolution did neccesitate revolts later on where people had to get violent to ensure basic rights like child labour laws, minimum wage, the weekend, paid leave. I think the information revolution will have that as well. Probably something like the 19th- early 20th century labour rights protests, with a butlerian twist
by goda90 | 2025-06-18 13:24:13+00:00
Put the bottle in a smaller container of clean water inside the larger container of water with the top sticking out of the water so it doesn't overflow into it. It'll take longer to boil without the convection but you'll get there eventually. You can fashion tongs out of sticks to pull rocks back out after their heat has mostly transferred to the water while you put newly heated ones in.
by a_bonobo | 2025-06-18 13:24:25+00:00
I like ChatIPT! It solves a real challenge with biodiversity data. It doesn't mention the term 'agentic' but there's definitely Python code being written and executed.

https://www.gbif.org/news/6aw2VFiEHYlqb48w86uKSf/chatipt-sys...

It's still in beta.

Press release:

Rukaya Johaadien's chatbot provides conversation-style support to students and researchers who hold biodiversity data but are first-time or infrequent data publishers. Its prompts guide users as it cleans and standardizes spreadsheets, creates basic metadata, and publishes well-structured datasets on GBIF.org as a Darwin Core Archive.

To date, publishing high quality data from PhD and Master's degrees and other small-scale biodiversity research studies has been difficult to do at scale. Standardizing data typically requires specialist knowledge of programming languages, data management techniques, and familiarity with specialist software.

Meanwhile, the process of gaining access to existing instances of the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT)—the GBIF network's workhorse application for data sharing run by node staff with limited time and resources—can test a novice's patience. Training can do little to surmount such logistical barriers and others, like language, when occasional users forget the precise steps and details from year to year.

"Data standardization is hard, and biologists don't become biologists because they like coding or Excel, so a lot of potentially valuable data falls by the wayside," said Johaadien. "Recognizing that large language models have gotten really good at generating code and working with data, I built an automated tool to guide non-technical users through routine questions and process their messy data as much as possible, then publish it quickly and automatically to GBIF."
by DrillShopper | 2025-06-18 13:24:51+00:00
> The quick answer is that Wayland, while it has certain design provisions for privacy and security, doesn't really enforce anything on its own, it's just a set of protocols that applications can use to talk to a display server. The display server is free to do whatever it wants.

I love having to detect at runtime the compositor I'm using (and its version) and have bespoke code paths to work around their various bugs and omissions.

Definitely a recipe for reliable, usable, maintainable software.

> Unfortunately this is poorly understood due to it being generally poorly explained.

This reads like a "missing missing reason"[1]. People do understand it, and they explain why it's a dealbreaker. Wayland has had a decade and a half to grow some consensus and make these very basic things that work under X11 work. Instead of doing that, they're now relying on the main distributions just giving up on (the hardware) X11 servers instead of fixing this. I don't care if only one or two compositors that I don't run support the one thing that I need. That doesn't help me because those compositors don't implement other functionality I need. Having a stable, agreed upon, universally consistently implemented base of functionality that application developers and toolkits can rely on is a good thing.

This is a complete clusterfuck, and that's why there's user feedback. Trying to frame it as "people just don't understand" isn't productive. They do, and their criticisms have some validity. It's up to the Wayland devs to see if they care, and historically, they haven't.

[1] https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-mis...
by ecshafer | 2025-06-18 13:25:40+00:00
This isn't an actual solution. Video Games have to do things fast. You can't just sit there and wait for a minute as you try brownian motion on hundreds of units. There are plenty of different solutions to get more realistic and natural pathfinding, typically navmeshes and then local node based movement. But you still need to go from a to b, somehow.

Your example also fails in several really obvious ways. What if there is a pool of mud or water in the middle of the path, it IS traversable but doing so is not ideal? A* you give this a high traversal cost and you'll naturally path around it. Your solution will have the object going through high cost but traversable areas in strange ways. This is going to be worse, as players will just kite and exploit this fact.
by ozim | 2025-06-18 13:27:15+00:00
Debugging in Visual Studio by Microsoft has changed a lot in last 5 years, JetBrains IDE debugging a lot as well.

I can debug .NET application and change code live, change variable states if needed. Watch variables and all kinds of helpers like stack navigation was immensely improved since I started 15 years ago.

I can say debugging Java/.NET applications is totally different experience than using debugger from 1999.

Multi threaded apps debugging and all kinds of helpers i visual debuggers.

I just fail to see why someone would waste time putting in debug statements when they can configure debug session with conditional break points.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-06-18 13:27:24+00:00
Always always always -- and it's often multiple problems, where the filesystem preview generators don't support it or don't support it over a network or the social media used by the other person doesn't support it (often egregiously so, where an unrecognized drop bubbles up to browser scope and blasts the page you were on) or there's a weird problem with a site/app that is supposed to support it, such as it turns into a black box.

Support for webp is still so rough that I have to wonder what one's ecosystem must look like for it to be seamless. Maybe if you are a googler and your phone/computer/browser use entirely google software and ditto for your friends and your friends friends and your spouses? Maybe?
by kawsper | 2025-06-18 13:28:02+00:00
Every major release of InfluxDB have been a rewrite.

While 3. looks impressive, it seems like most of the interesting features are closed source, so not a 1:1 replacement for version 1.

InfluxDB Edge is open-source, but you need to depend on InfluxDB Community which is free, but closed source, to get things like include functionality like a compactor, which will add capabilities for deletes and re-organizing files to optimize for queries on longer time ranges.

They also need to resurrect all their old 1.* Client libraries for 3.*.

I love InfluxDB, but I’m not hopeful for its future.
by jesse_portal | 2025-06-18 13:28:03+00:00
Hey Hacker News,

I built a simple registry to make it easier to find and share remote MCP servers: https://remote-mcp-servers.com

I know there are a lot of MCP server registries, but most of them don't focus on remote access so I've created this one.

If you run a remote enabled MCP server, please add yours!

Feedback welcome on features and usability. Thanks!
by falcor84 | 2025-06-18 13:28:14+00:00
Could that Netflix subtitle thing have been a one-off error? I don't think I've ever encountered such a mismatch before.

It did remind me of watching "The Beast" (La Bête)[0] in the original French with subtitles and I was then surprised when I saw the subtitles say "[In English]" and I was, "Oh, damn, the characters did actually switch to English".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_(2023_film)
by dspillett | 2025-06-18 13:28:25+00:00
> Interesting that this used to be called "AI".

What has been called AI in gaming in the past is rich and varied, and goes all the way down to a computer control opponent “seeing” a player and opening fire, moving towards, or moving away. Any code controlling NPC was referred to as “the AI of the game” even if all the code was doing was applying a few simple rote rules rather than following an exactly pre-specified sequence.

“AI” in gaming means (or has previously meant) a lot less than “AI” has meant in other fields, but with the increasing use of “AI” in all contexts this will soon no longer be the case.
by bko | 2025-06-18 13:28:29+00:00
> In simpler terms, if everyone skipped college and just invested in the stock market, then the market will collapse because no one is producing the goods and services the market is trading kn... you have to account for everyone using it, and see if its sustainable

This is just silly. I can give advice to my son "you should go to college" and on the margin, I could think more people should go to college, and then somebody like you comes in "If everyone went to college who would pick up garbage??" as though its some profound statement.

If you think capital grows faster than labor (conditional not 100% of the population), on the margin you should invest more in capital.

You're tilting at windmills here.
by reitzensteinm | 2025-06-18 13:28:32+00:00
But humans do quite intelligently pathfind around objects they're aware of, and update their mental models with new information. The front door is locked? I'll go around the back.

You can achieve exactly what you're describing by hiding information entities do not have from their pathfinding.

Graphs aren't the problem, and thinking along those lines won't get you where you're trying to go.
by tosh | 2025-06-18 13:28:37+00:00
kudos @ shipping this jaime

Can you explain how/when the "guardrails" are run in Cursor? I mean: how does the extension hook in so that the code in the diff view gets changed?

Does this also work with agents like Claude Code and Amp? I guess since there is an MCP it can already work even though it's not explicitly mentioned in the docs?

What are your thoughts on running something like guardrails during dev-time vs CI time?
by jrcplus | 2025-06-18 13:29:10+00:00
Scrappy co-creator here. It was a surprise to us that this blew up on HN. We've hurriedly added an FAQ to the write-up.

In regards to this question about the "Scrappy backend": Scrappy is local-first, so data is stored locally in your browser, and optionally replicated to a lightweight sync server, to help coordinate syncing between peers. In other words, Scrappy is almost entirely front-end. The only third-party dependencies are Yjs <https://yjs.dev/> and CodeMirror <https://codemirror.net/>. We don’t use any other libraries or frameworks like React. There’s no analytics.

And there's no traditional backend. The only cloud dependency is the sync server, which is a plain vanilla y-websocket-server <https://github.com/yjs/y-websocket-server/>.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-06-18 13:29:38+00:00
LLMs are really good for things that don’t have to be 100% correct, presuming that the artifact generated is checked by someone with expertise. We used it to suggest some places to visit in Italy the past year. Great use case for AI: it brainstorms spots for an itinerary that we then check for ourselves to see if it fits our requirements. The machine helps us think beyond the usual destinations, and we vet the results. Hallucinations are not an issue.

Hallucinations seem fundamental to how LLMs work now, so AI is probably still a ways off from being able to absorb responsibility for decisions like a human can.

I’m sure this comment will offend both pro and anti AI camps. :)
by coro_1 | 2025-06-18 13:29:47+00:00
We found AI is surprisingly good at programming (when no one thought this would be the frontier) which says a lot about the specific nature of the tools.

You can for example, do minimal input (some peppered phrases) and see a rich answer. More specificity and research on your own, brings it out to play. The designs appear to level their self to your own capabilities.
by Xeoncross | 2025-06-18 13:29:47+00:00
That is the difference between complex state and simple state.

I use a debugger when I've constructed a complex process that has a large cardinally of states it could end up in. There is no possibility that I can write logic checks (tests) for all source inputs to that state.

I don't use one when I could simply increase test situations to find my logical error.

Consider the difference between a game engine and a simple state machine. The former can be complex enough to replicate many features of the real world while a simple state machine/lexer probably just needs more tests of each individual state to spot the issue.
by redeeman | 2025-06-18 13:30:06+00:00
why do you need a union? everyone should just set their personal standards for what they accept/demand, and then let the market sort it out? someone wants to work for $20/hour programming, in a fashion that can satisfy some demand? great, then I will simply NOT be doing that job. Everyone wins even though I do not get that particular job. Someone is willing to work 7 days a week as they prefer to grind to earn more money? good on them. Its not gonna be me, They win the job, I dont.

Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this
by mikeocool | 2025-06-18 13:30:21+00:00
This very much aligns with my experience — I had a case yesterday where opus was trying to do something with a library, and it encountered a build error. Rather than fix the error, it decided to switch to another library. It then encountered another error and decided to switch back to the first library.

I don’t think I’ve encountered a case where I’ve just let the LLM churn for more than a few minutes and gotten a good result. If it doesn’t solve an issue on the first or second pass, it seems to rapidly start making things up, make totally unrelated changes claiming they’ll fix the issue, or trying the same thing over and over.
by nlnn | 2025-06-18 13:31:36+00:00
Yeah, I wasn't disputing the car analogy, more the benefits. If I'm using GPT to benefit myself (e.g. working on a side project), that's great and saves me time to do other things. If I'm using it to benefit my employer, I won't save any time, they'll fill it with other things to do, or expect me to be X times as productive in the same time.
by teleforce | 2025-06-18 13:32:09+00:00
>Runtime performance is also — to put it lightly — lacking. I benchmarked the unencrypted and encrypted versions of the last write wins register on an M4 MacBook Pro. The unencrypted one averaged a merge time of 0.52 nanoseconds.The encrypted one? 1.06 seconds. That’s not a typo: the homomorphically encrypted merge is two billion times slower.

Ouch!
by ednite | 2025-06-18 13:32:11+00:00
I get what you’re saying, and agree there’s definitely a big risk right now of mass-producing poor-quality results.

I see it happening every day. It’s especially concerning when the person using the tool doesn’t really understand the output. That kind of disconnect can be dangerous. But at the same time, I’ve also read about cases where AI helped scientists accelerate research and save years of work. So there’s clearly potential for good.

In my case, I’m genuinely worried about where this technology could lead us. But I’m still hopeful. With enough awareness through voices like the author’s and continued public pressure, maybe policymakers will step up and take it seriously before things get out of hand. Thanks for your comment.
by bko | 2025-06-18 13:32:21+00:00
> This makes me wonder if one day we will see artisan software developer (I mean, the idea of software craftmanship is already here).

Would you rather the software that drives your car be "artisan software", where labels were carefully chosen by a human?

Software isn't the end product. It's a tool that's supposed to do something we want. We may want an artisan to design our house or iPhone, but we don't want them using "artisan hand crafted" rulers and compilers.
by drweevil | 2025-06-18 13:32:34+00:00
Today's capitalists are playing with fire. Sure, companies can do "more with less". Sure, "Fewer employees means faster growth." But to what end? One gets the distinct impression that the "more" and the "growth" are only "more" and "growth" from the point of view of investors. But for everyone else? An economy that does not meet the needs of the majority will eventually be replaced by one that does.
by deadbabe | 2025-06-18 13:33:33+00:00
This is another reason why there’s no point in carefully constructing prompts and contexts trying to coax the right solution out of an LLM. The end result becomes more brittle with time.

If you can’t zero shot your way to success the LLM simply doesn’t have enough training for your problem and you need a human touch or slightly different trigger words. There have been times where I’ve gotten a solution with such a minimal prompt it practically feels like the LLM read my mind, that’s the vibe.