MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: GrowChief – open-source social media automation tool
by nevodavid10 | 2025-08-25 15:41:30+00:00
So happy to introduce GrowChief (AGPL-3).

Growchief is an open-source social media automation tool (aka social scraper). It allows you to create a workflow (step-by-step) for interacting with different social media accounts, such as sending a connection request, following up with a message, and so on. Unlike other platforms, GrowChief does not work with search criteria. You'll need to specify the account email, URL, or company information to connect with it. I do not encourage spam.

I had tons of fun working on this project Tech Stack: - PNPM (Monorepo) - React (Vite) - NestJS (Backend, Workers) - Prisma (Default to PostgreSQL) - Temporal (Orchestrator)

- It takes care of concurrency — even if you create 10 workflows with the same account and trigger all of them at the same time, it will make an action every 10 minutes, never having multiple scrapings happening at the same time.

- Enrichment waterful - when you don't provide the account URL but other parameters like email, we use multiple providers to figure out the profile URL. It takes care of your working hours — you can use the API to keep adding leads to your workflows, but they will only be processed during working hours.

- Proxies are allowed — you can add your own proxies or create one using proxy providers to keep you safe.

- Human-like automation — GrowChief uses natural mouse movements and clicks on different parts of the screen. It never triggers clicks by "document.querySelector('x').click()".

- It uses Playwright together with Patchright for maximum stealthiness.

- It uses a special technology to authenticate your accounts — you never need to put your username and password directly into the system.

- It always runs in headful mode — our Docker image is already built with xvfb for real human automation.

It's the very first version, I hope you like it :)
by darth_avocado | 2025-08-25 15:41:32+00:00
Seems like an everyone sucks here situation. People who bought houses and chose an off grid life in a water stressed area and did nothing to alleviate the situation, only add consumption. People who want to water their lawns and are unable to adjust their personal behavior in times of need. People with “I got mine” mentality who don’t want to share the space because they got there first and were able to exploit the resources to their desire. The town governance and realtors who keep allowing the sale of properties when there’s no water.
by skydhash | 2025-08-25 15:41:42+00:00
That’s a variable order. I prefer a more consistent order like a default section structure (which a lot of man pages adopt) and an alphabetical order for flags (which a lot of man pages also adopt).

When I open a manual it’s usually for: flags and argument ordering; argument format (for things like string format or globbing). Some manuals are short enough that it can serve as a guide, but most assumes domain knowledge.

What you want is a cheatsheet. And there’s a lot on the internet and even some tools that collect them. But most practitioners write shell aliases and functions
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-08-25 15:42:00+00:00
Thanks for the context - I was baffled at first how the Guardian would run with the tagline "a trignometric table more accurate than any".

But it's because the sine of 60 degrees is said by modern tables to be equal to sqrt(3) / 2, which Wildberger doesn't "believe in", he prefers to state that the square of the sine is actually 3 / 4 and that this is "more accurate".

The actual paper is at [1]:

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2017.08.001
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-25 15:42:54+00:00
I can't speak to this particular county but the vibe I get from friends of mine who live in this part of Colorado is that the municipalities/counties will do anything/everything they can to stick it to the off grid crowd who are seen as poor and trashy in the best case and evil dangerous sov-cits, anarchists or other anti-government types in the worst case when in reality many/most of them simply wanted to live in BFE and it's not a money or ideological thing and they just want to do whatever works. They buy water from someone who trucks it in no different and with no more thought than they buy propane or pay for their septic to be pumped and trucked out.

Like every small town/county, I bet if you follow the trail of financial and ideological interests of the parties involved you'll find that the personalities involved are motivated by more than just whatever their oath of office is. Seeing as there's only one water hauler I'd look into who he pissed off.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-25 15:43:04+00:00
Potentially about anyone who used Access without the forms interfaces... While I'm not the biggest fan, I know a lot of people who prefer a visual editor for table schema creation. They'll use SQL Management Studio, or whatever equivalent with other DBMS and edit that way instead of DB specific queries... For example, re-ordering fields is destructive in a lot of DBMS and the queries get painful, a visual editor eases this burden.

As to importing/exporting data (csv, etc), You can't exactly run queries against a CSV generally (I mean you can with JET/ODBC, but still)... it's a chore.

To another point, I often feel that sqlite is a great backup format for data, it's portable, you can query directly, etc. I kind of wished that Azure Data Studio (now discontinued) had directly supported loading CSV/TXT etc into an in-memory or temp db for queries and portability similar to mentioned between various data sources (sqlite, mssql, pgsql, etc).
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-25 15:43:04+00:00
It absolutely is a problem with human assistants (though, of course, those are currently much smarter). But people can and have scammed assistants to steal money or personal details from their bosses. Phishing and social engineering are exactly forms of this same vulnerability. Of course, human assistants are smart enough to not get phished by, say, reading a book that happens to contain phrases that are similar to commands that their boss could give them, but that's just the current difference of intelligence and the hugely larger context windows humans still have compared to LLMs.
by teiferer | 2025-08-25 15:43:31+00:00
And environmentally, that tends to be pretty bad for a long time. Looks more peaceful than a fracking site, but it's still pretty bad.

There is no magic solution. I'm happy to see all those efforts, but am missing a mention of saving energy. In the age of record-setting data centers for AI training, that's not a popular aspect to mention. Though at least we get higher res more realistic artificial cat videos out of it.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-08-25 15:43:50+00:00
I took this[0] in Kyiv, it was really uncomfortable. Apparently it's "Deepest Metro station in the world, and a long escalator ride" [1]

[0]: https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-o/15/9...

[1]: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g294474-d80742...
by mindslight | 2025-08-25 15:44:27+00:00
The ultimate problem is the incentives. Web stores are already forcing us to use their proprietary (web)apps, where they define all of the software's capabilities.

For example, subscription purchases could be a great thing if they were at a predictable trustable price, or paused/canceled themselves if the price has gone up. But look at the way Amazon has implemented them: you can buy it once at the competitive price, but then there is a good chance the listing will have been jacked up after a few months goes by. This is obviously set up to benefit Amazon at the expense of the user. And then Amazon leans into the dynamic even harder by constantly playing games with their prices.

Working in the interest of the user would mean the repeating purchase was made by software that compared prices across many stores, analyzed all the quantity break / sale games, and then purchased the best option. That is obviously a pipe dream, even with the talk of "agentic" "AI". Not because of any technical reason, but because it is in the stores' interest to computationally disenfranchise us by making us use their proprietary (web)apps - instead of an effortless comparison across 12 different vendors, we're left spending lots of valuable human effort on a mere few and consider that enough diligence.

So yes, there is no doubt the quiet part is that these "agents" will mostly not be representing the user, but rather representing the retailers to drive more sales. Especially non-diligent high-margin sales.
by exmadscientist | 2025-08-25 15:44:54+00:00
What I miss from Acrobat is its Print dialog. Yes, really, the Print dialog. I've had to install the whole bloated mess just to get that dialog.

Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-25 15:45:00+00:00
It depends on how you think about your spread. If, as someone else said, you're trying to represent a tunable laser going from red to blue, going through gray is completely wrong. That is not what a laser will do, ever. It will always be a fully saturated color.

So, depending on what you're doing, you want different things. You may want to view your color space as an RGB cube, and go through gray. Or you may want to view your color space as something more like HLS or OKLCH, and not go through gray.
by louwrentius | 2025-08-25 15:46:27+00:00
After reading the article I come to the conclusion that this was never really about water. There wasn't even a water shortage, only a technical issue that would be resolved.

This was about some people on the waterboard not being able to manage angry - semi-aggressive- people properly.

And now those people can irrigate their lawns while others can't even drink, wash or cook.
by smelendez | 2025-08-25 15:47:19+00:00
I think that's right.

It's like the endless examples around finding restaurants and making reservations, seemingly as common a problem in AI demos as stain removal is in daytime TV ads. But it's a problem that even Toast, which makes restaurant software, says most people just don't regularly have (https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/data/restaurant-wait-times-and...).

Most people either never make restaurant reservations, or do so infrequently for special occasions, in which case they probably already know where they want to go and how to book it.
by duxup | 2025-08-25 15:47:21+00:00
Sounds like the water pump failed, and while it was being fixed restrictions were put in place for everyone. Some folks didn't like the restrictions and they blamed the folks who came to buy water because they live off the grid nearby, even if it does not appear those sales would change any of the restrictions.

Sad situation. Fear of outsiders and other people often pop up when people are stressed.
by NegativeK | 2025-08-25 15:47:31+00:00
I really appreciate you giving a shit. Not sarcastically -- it seems like you're actually doing everything right, and it makes a difference.

Gating robots.txt might be a mistake, but it also might be a quick way to deal with crawlers who mine robots.txt for pages that are more interesting. It's also a page that's never visited by humans. So if you make it a tarpit, you both refuse to give the bot more information and slow it down.

It's crap that it's affecting your work, but a website owner isn't likely to care about the distinction when they're pissed off at having to deal with bad actors that they should never have to care about.
by jasonlotito | 2025-08-25 15:47:38+00:00
Yes, they were buying water that the municipality could sell. And they got that water. The article suggests that the municipality is rationing its residents' water, so they don't have excess water to sell to outsiders.

Basically, the idea that I'm required to sell something is silly. No one said any contracts were broken. People got what they paid for.
by nordsieck | 2025-08-25 15:49:18+00:00
> But chemical batteries cost a lot more and don't have lifespans of hundreds or thousands of years in seasonal storage scenarios.

Practically speaking, you're probably not going to get 1000s of years out of any storage method. There's just too much stuff that breaks down.

Heck - a lot of historic dams are in the low hundreds of years old and are experiencing serious problems.

IMO, the shorter lifespan of batteries isn't that big of a downside as long as the "bad" batteries can be mined for raw materials eventually.
by MisterTea | 2025-08-25 15:49:25+00:00
Plan 9 does exactly this but all networking protocols live in /net - ethernet, tcp, udp, tls, icmp, etc. The dial string in the form of "net!address!service" abstracts the protocol from the application. A program can dial tcp!1.2.3.4!7788 or maybe udp!1.2.3.4!7788. How about raw Ethernet? /net/ether1!aabbccddeeff!12345. The dial(2) routine takes a dial string and returns an fd you read() and write(). Very simple networking API.
by achierius | 2025-08-25 15:49:48+00:00
You're proposing something that doesn't exist in reality: an LLM widely deployed in a way that totally isolates it from the outside world. That's not actually how we do things, so I don't understand why you seem to expect the Anthropic researchers to use that as their starting point.

If you were to try and argue that we should change over existing systems to look more like your idealized version, you would in fact probably want to start by doing what Anthropic has done here -- show how NOT putting them in a box is inherently dangerous
by speleding | 2025-08-25 15:51:01+00:00
I'm surprised that they use the PV power for heating coils instead of using heat pumps. I'm sure they've run the numbers and considered it too expensive or too much maintenance hassle.

However, if that's the case you would think that you can cut out the PV step as well and use direct heat from the sun to heat the dirt, by running water hoses though the dirt and through solar water heaters. Should be cheaper and more efficient than the sun -> PV -> heat coils cycle.
by Retric | 2025-08-25 15:51:18+00:00
That’s just for heat to thermal and quite optimistic not end to end. “Conversion back into electricity is 40%-45%”

More realistic end to end numbers are likely in the 30% range which means summer electricity needs to be vastly less valuable than winter energy before you nominally break even and start repaying the investment. Further you instantly lose all the electricity required to heat the mound up to working temperatures. IE: If you can only operate between 550C and 650C then going from 20C to 550C needs to happen before you can extract any energy and you don’t get that investment back. On the other hand if you’re a chemical plant that needs 200C things start looking a lot better.
by 542354234235 | 2025-08-25 15:51:40+00:00
I would disagree and say this is important if you are trying to maximize screen time, not if you are trying to maximize enjoyment. When I want to half pay attention or I am mentally tired, I put on something easy, usually something I have seen before. I watch it because it is easy and familiar, but I have no desire to watch something “similar”. If you keep pushing it, and auto playing, you could probably get me to watch similar things, but I doubt I will like them.

When I’m actually watching something, I want it to be complex, thoughtful, interesting and challenging. I don’t spend as much time watching but those are the things I watch with all of my attention.

I am actively trying to reduce my intake of low effort tv because it wastes my time, doesn’t actually give me much enjoyment, and takes attention away from things I do enjoy. It’s like comparing the books you read to doomscrolling Facebook. Reading time vs ratings are going to be very different.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-25 15:52:58+00:00
> are undistinguishable if the recording light is covered by black masking tape

Is that a viable thing? I thought they'd put in a check so that they wouldn't record if the light was covered.

I hope there's a way to distinguish these from regular RayBans so I don't have to avoid everyone wearing RayBans at all.
by Sharlin | 2025-08-25 15:53:12+00:00
I think GP is referring to the difference between "normal" (gamma-encoded) sRGB and linear sRGB. Though it's not logarithmic but a power law. In any case linear interpolation done in non-linear sRGB gives you intermediate colors that are darker than they should (though historically it's been so common in computer graphics that people are accustomed to it).
by jrowen | 2025-08-25 15:53:23+00:00
Infinity is aspirational. Infinity is a concept, simple and self-evident, yet paradoxical and oxymoronic.

I get kind of intrigued by these large number things at first but ultimately it feels like kind of a less elegant version of the same thing? It's all this mucking about with multiples and powers of multiples and powers when it's like...we've already taken this to the limit, we can just stand back and marvel at that, what are we looking for? We already know you can always add another digit, why invent more and more complicated ways to do that?

This isn't meant to be contradictory to what you're saying or anything, just interesting to explore these different perspectives on what mathematical concepts capture the imagination.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-25 15:53:40+00:00
First of all, medieval style punishments is not an acceptable answer. Scamming someone doesn't rise anywhere near the level of offense that should forfeit your human rights. The people who made this law and those who actually carry out the punishments are far more deserving of the death penalty than the vast majority of scammers.

Now, even disregarding this obvious violation of human rights, from even a purely amoral perspective this is a bad take. "other countries should stop their own criminality" is simply not an actionable insight. And there are far worse, more universally despised, and easy to prosecute crimes (such as pedophilia) that even functioning rich countries have completely failed to stop.
by jibal | 2025-08-25 15:53:58+00:00
P.S. I don't know which argument is allegedly "a bait and switch argument" .... certainly not mine. Even if Penrose and Lucas were right (again, they aren't--Godel's Theorems are in PA and can be proved by existing machines), that would not be a barrier to achieving AGI because being able to "see" the validity Godel's theorems is not a necessary condition for being an AGI.

P.P.S. Oh, I just noticed that the response came from the same person who wrote "won’t somebody please think about Mr. Godel, and the Incompleteness Theorem ?"

I will simply observe that isn't any sort of argument.
by bArray | 2025-08-25 15:55:09+00:00
China has long faked all numbers they publish. They literally paint mountainsides green to fool satellites and get green subsidies [1] [2]. I can't find the article on it now, but they had fields of fake solar panels too. The only figure coming out of China that can be believed is externally measured emissions, and the number continues to go up at an incredible rate [3].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/14/china

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/chinese-mine-spray-painted-r...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
by __bb | 2025-08-25 15:56:02+00:00
A lot of people use it as a step up from Excel.

I’ve got quite a few scientists using it for data analysis, a whole bunch of people importing sales data for querying.

A good number of folks never write any SQL and just use the GUI to sort/filter data.

I’ve also heard from people who use Base to design a schema and then export the SQL into their codebase.

EDIT: I should add that Base does nothing that that the command line tool can't. But it does offer more convenience, particularly for those who might be less comfortable writing SQL.
by ElectronCharge | 2025-08-25 15:56:06+00:00
The F-35 isn't inferior to many other aircraft as far as raw capability goes. Really only the F-22. Nor is it expensive, at least the F-35A (I'm speaking of the initial cost, not sustainment which may or may not be a bargain).

The F-35 is the only genuinely stealthy aircraft any country outside the USA has access to (other than China, and the efficacy of its stealth technology isn't known). F-35 stealth is a game changer, as seen in every exercise in which they're involved.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-25 15:56:12+00:00
Actually, the story of the Radioactive Boy-scout is often steeped in urban legends. The TLDR is he cobbled together a breeder reactor, and found a large sample of Radium from an antique clock that mistakenly contained an old dial-paint vile. His little hobby cost a lot to clean up, and ruined his life.

Nuclear energy should be conserved for space, as in the past 80 years people still haven't figured out how to safely dispose of hotter waste products. You can disagree on what this means, but every project attempt is provably wrong when projecting containment past 75 years.

These days renewables are profitable, and are not a 1950's hubris driven loss-leader fission tech for our grand kids to pay the actual cost. =3
by ashton314 | 2025-08-25 15:56:20+00:00
For macOS users, I highly recommend ShortCat: https://shortcat.app/

ShortCat uses the accessibility API to put Vimium-style keyboard links on buttons and text fields in any app.

I find that Vimium works faster in Firefox than using ShortCat to click around websites, so I use both, but ShortCat technically should do everything (clicking-wise) that Vimium does.
by f33d5173 | 2025-08-25 15:56:23+00:00
User level separation, while it has improved over the years, was not originally designed assuming unprivileged users were malicious, and even today privilege escalation bugs regularly pop up. If you are going to use it as a sandboxing mechanism, you should at least ensure the sandboxed user doesn't have access to any suid binaries as these regularly have exploits found in them.