MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Zero Agent – agentless PC inventory → offline HTML/CSV reports
by kuni_ops | 2025-12-15 05:14:30+00:00
I built an agentless Windows PC inventory workflow for small IT teams/MSPs.

Workflow: run a PowerShell collector on PCs → gather JSON snapshots → generate offline HTML + CSV audit-ready reports (no cloud, no agents).

Links:

Collector (free): https://github.com/ZeroAgent-Labs/ZeroAgent-Inventory

Workflow article: https://zeroagent-labs.github.io/blog/

Viewer/product page ($59, 30-day money-back): https://www.zeroagentlabs.com/

Live sample report (dummy data): https://zeroagent-labs.github.io/za-sample-report/

I’d love feedback on:

what data points you expect for annual inventory/audits

report layout / grouping (sites/departments)

whether $59 feels reasonable for this “run-once inventory + report” use case
by yusufaytas | 2025-12-15 05:14:33+00:00
I’m working on OpsOrch(https://www.opsorch.com/), an open-source orchestration layer that provides a single API across incidents, logs, metrics, tickets, messaging, and service metadata.

It sits on top of existing tools like PagerDuty, Jira, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and Slack, and normalizes them into a shared schema. It doesn’t store operational data, it just brokers requests through pluggable adapters and returns unified structures.

The motivation came from incident response workflows that still require hopping across multiple vendor UIs and APIs with different auth models and query languages. Instead of another “single pane of glass,” this is meant to be a small, transparent glue layer.

On top of the core service, I’m also exposing everything via an MCP server so LLM agents can query incidents, metrics, and logs as typed tools without needing vendor-specific knowledge.

Currently open source, written mostly in Go and TypeScript. Still early, but usable with PagerDuty, Jira, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Slack, and mock providers. Feedback from SREs and infra folks has been very helpful so far.
by nurettin | 2025-12-15 05:16:01+00:00
I've been dangerously skipping permissions for months. Claude always stays in the project dir and is generally well behaved. Haven't had a problem. Perhaps it was a fluke, doesn't mean you won't.

But this person was "cleaning up" files using an LLM, something that raises red flags in my brain. That is definitely not an "LLM job" in my head. Perhaps the reason I survived for so long has to do with avoiding batch file operations and focusing on code refractors and integrations.
by luqtas | 2025-12-15 05:16:28+00:00
my first initial thoughts when i visit very big cities with dozens of skyscrapers is how the proletariat still deals with a bunch of millionaires and billionaires seeing the clouds under their hard work /s

you gotta go to Brasilia and check Niemeyer's huuuuge empty concrete/grass spaces on a city that almost reaches 40°C on summer and it's basically warm all year. trimming and taking care of these trees must be a joy
by KPGv2 | 2025-12-15 05:16:39+00:00
> If you are using JSDoc and you get squigglies or intellisense or any other similar features, you are using TypeScript.

This is true in the same way you are "using" C++ if you are on Windows. When most people say "use XYZ language" they mean "are personally writing code in XYZ language" rather than "under the hood my code is transpiled to this other language I don't write in"
What's the biggest operational bottleneck in home service businesses today?
by Homefront | 2025-12-15 05:16:50+00:00
Hey HN - we're the team building Homefront, an intelligent (AI-powered) CRM app for home service businesses (heating ventilation & air conditioning/plumbing/electrical/etc.), built for iPhone + Android.

We ended up here because we kept seeing a pattern: small service teams really don't "use a CRM." They survive on calls, WhatsApp/SMS, a notes app, and a calendar… until the day gets busy. Then stuff slips.

And when stuff slips, it’s never the dramatic stuff. It’s the boring, expensive stuff:

you're in the middle of a job and you get a call → you remind yourself you'll have to call back because you're busy → you never do

Someone texts an address → it’s missing details → now you're scrolling for context

you schedule two jobs too close together → the day becomes damage control

invoices get pushed to "later tonight" → and later tonight becomes next week

So Homefront is us trying to remove that constant juggling, basically — using AI for the parts you shouldn’t have to babysit.

Overview of what it does:

Helps convert calls/messages into actual leads and jobs, not loose threads.

helps with planning so tasks don't disappear into "I'll deal with it later"

helps with routing/dispatch so that the day isn't guesswork.

Helps generate invoices/estimates faster, based on what happened on the job

It's on iOS + Android:

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/homefront-home-service-crm/id6541761081

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chapterone.atlas

Also: Not saying "AI runs your business." If it's ever autopilot, we probably messed up. Goal is less admin, fewer missed leads, fewer "where was that info again?" moments.

I want to hear the kind of feedback HN is good for:

If you have worked in field service or built tools for them, what is the real bottleneck here, which we are most likely underestimating?

When you hear "AI + calls," what immediately concerns you - privacy, reliability, failure modes, cost?

What would instill trust in an intelligent CRM here… what would make you uninstall on day one?

Happily answer the blunt questions, and I won't dodge the ones that make me uncomfortable.
by btilly | 2025-12-15 05:17:56+00:00
While the immediate interactivity of these old systems was technically limited, the way that people thought about them was more flexible than you might expect. Try reading https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m.... Written in the waning days of WW 2 (Germany had surrendered, Japan had not), it is the first recorded proposal of hypertext. The vision described is extremely interactive.

Interestingly, it is also the original description of the science citation index. When this was later combined with hypertext, the result was Google's PageRank system...

Now how could someone in 1945 be that visionary about how computers could be used some day? Well you see, he'd been in computers for nearly 20 years, and had been thinking about this system off and on for around a decade, in between real jobs like being in charge of R&D for the USA during WW 2...

If you fast forward to the 1960s, everyone should watch the Mother of all Demos. That was possible in 1968. In some ways it was better integrated than what we put up with today...
by thisisit | 2025-12-15 05:18:12+00:00
I work with both enterprise software and in house teams. Each path has its pro and cons. As you put it costly CRM might not be fulfilling its purpose. And the two biggest points in favour of in house are cost and bespoke nature of solution.

Building is only one part. Maintaining and using/running is another.

Onboarding for both technical and functional teams takes longer as the ERP is different from other company. Feature creep is an issue. After all who can say no to more bespoke features. Maybe roll CRM, Reporting and Analytics into one. Maintenance costs and priorities now become more important.

We have also explored AI agents in this area. People specific tasks are great use cases. Create mock up and wireframes? AI can do well and you still have human in the loop. Enterprise level tasks like say book closing for late company ERP? AI makes lot of mistakes.
by chickensong | 2025-12-15 05:19:28+00:00
Team tung oil here. Wooden-handled knives and wooden utensils get a light coat and left outside on a nice day. Repeat for 3-5 days and you're good for at least a year or two, depending on how you treat the items. The coating needs to be light else you get a shellac/lacquer finish. I use Walrus brand, pure tung oil.
by apatheticonion | 2025-12-15 05:19:50+00:00
JSDoc is missing a lot of basic capabilities. For example a TypeDef is automatically exported which can cause collisions and forces you to repeat or inline types.

Types for classes are poor and often you'll find yourself creating a `.d.ts` file or `.ts` file to export non trivial types - however the target file doesn't know how to consume them.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-15 05:19:53+00:00
I can probably shed some light on that. I've used Forth on 8 bit platforms (6502, 6809), 16 bit platforms (80286) and 32 bit platforms (68K), as well as assembly, and on the 16 and 32 bit platforms C. Putting these side-by-side and assuming roughly equivalent programmer competence levels at the time assembler would win out, C would get you to maybe half the speed of assembly on a good day and Forth was about 10x slower than that.

Which was still incredibly fast for the day, given that Forth was compiled to an intermediary format with the Forth interpreter acting as a very primitive virtual machine. This interpretation step had considerable overhead, especially in inner loops with few instructions the overhead would be massive. For every one instruction doing actual work you'd have a whole slew of them assigned to bookkeeping and stack management. What in C would compile to a few machine instructions (which a competent assembly programmer of the time would be able to significantly improve upon) would result in endless calls to lower and lower levels.

There were later Forth implementations that improved on this by compiling to native code but I never had access to those when I was still doing this.

For a lark I wrote a Forth in C rather than bootstrapping it through assembly and it performed quite well, Forth is ridiculously easy to bring up, it is essentially a few afternoons work to go from zero to highway speeds on a brand new board that you have a compiler for. Which is one of the reasons it is still a favorite for initial board bring-up.

One area where Forth usually beat out C by a comfortable margin was code size, Forth code tends to be extremely compact (and devoid of any luxury). On even the smallest micro controllers (8051 for instance, and later, MicroChip and such) you could get real work done in Forth.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-15 05:19:54+00:00
>people claiming that back then, but it didn't really work.

Roger. You could also say that's true today.

Seems like there was always some consensus about miracles just around the corner, but a whole lot wider faith has built by now.

I thoroughly felt like AI was coming fast because I knew what I would do if I had all that computer power. But to all appearances I ran the other way since that was absurdly out-of-reach, while at the same time I could count on those enthusiasts to carry the ball forward. There was only a very short time when I had more "desktop" (benchtop) computing power to dedicate than almost any of my peers. I could see that beginning to reverse as the IBM PC began to take hold.

Then it became plain to see the "brain drain" from natural science as the majority of students who were most capable logically & mathematically, gravitated to computer science of some kind instead. That was one of the only growth opportunities during the Reagan Recession so I did't blame them. For better or worse I wasn't a student any more and it was interesting to see the growth money rain down on them, but I wasn't worried and stuck with what I had a head start in. Mathematically, there was going to be a growing number of professionals spending all their time on computers who would have otherwise been doing it with natural science, with no end in sight. Those kind of odds were in my favor if I could ante up long enough to stay in the game.

I had incredible good fortune coming into far more tonnes of scientific electronics than usual, so my hands were full simply concentrating on natural science efforts, by that time I figured if that was going to come together with AI some day, I would want to be ready.

In the '90's the neural-net people had some major breakthroughs, after I had my own company they tried to get a fit, but not near the level of perfection needed. I knew how cool it would be though. I even tried a little sophomore effort myself after I had hundreds of megabytes but there was an unfortunate crash that had nothing to do with it.

One of the most prevalent feelings the whole time is I hope I live long enough to see the kind of progress I would want :\

While far more people than me have always felt that it already arrived.

In the mean time, whether employed or as an entrepreneur, doing the math says it would have been more expensive to automate rather than do so much manual effort over the decades.

But thousands of the things I worked on, the whole world could automate to tremendous advantage, so I thought it would be worth it to figure out how, even if it took decades :)
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-15 05:20:38+00:00
How much current would the capacitor/resistor attached to it use?

Modern microcontrollers are insanely power efficient. An ESP32 in "light sleep" (which would be sufficient to serve timer routines) is said to consume <1 mA (at 3.3V), down to ~10 uA (microamps!) in "deep sleep".

In other words, 1 year in deep sleep is 315 ampere-seconds or less than 100 mAh.

Obviously it's irrelevant in this use case (where the goal is running a motor every wake-up cycle), but nowadays, as absurd as it looks, being power-constrained isn't necessarily a reason to not slap something on it that happens to also be able to do cryptography, connect to WiFi and make HTTPS requests.
by tkinom | 2025-12-15 05:23:05+00:00
Can we design something like virustotal setup? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirusTotal)

NPM setup similar dl_files_security_sigs.db .database for all downloaded files from npm in all offline install? List all versions, latest mod date, multiple latest crypto signatures (shar256, etc) and have been reviewed by multiple security org/researchers, auto flag if any contents are not pure clear/clean txt...

If it detects anything (file date, size, crypto sigs) < N days and have not been thru M="enough" security reviews, the npm system will automatically raise a security flag and stop the install and auto trigger security review on those files.

With proper (default secure) setup, any new version of npm downloads (code, config, scripts) will auto trigger stop download and flagged for global security review by multiple folks/orgs.

When/if this setup available as NPM default, would it stop similar compromise from happen to NPM again? Can anyone think of anyway to hack around this?
by baxtr | 2025-12-15 05:23:42+00:00
> Its most striking, and at the same time most dramatic, feature is that it is a monocarpic species: It only blooms once, at the end of its life, and then it dies.This moment can occur between 40 and 80 years of age, depending on climatic conditions, soil type, and the amount of sunlight the plant has received over the decades. All of the plant's energy is then concentrated into a single reproductive burst.
by password-app | 2025-12-15 05:23:44+00:00
Working on The Password App (https://thepassword.app) - an AI-powered macOS desktop app that automatically rotates your passwords across websites.

The problem: most people have 100+ accounts with weak/reused passwords. Changing them manually is tedious, so nobody does it.

The solution: import a CSV from your existing password manager (1Password, LastPass, Bitwarden), select which accounts to update, and the app uses browser automation with Gemini 2.5 Flash to navigate to each site's password change page and update them in parallel. Exports a CSV with the new passwords to import back.

Key technical choices: - browser-use library for AI-driven browser automation (handles dynamic sites better than Selenium) - Local-only architecture: passwords never leave your machine, no cloud sync, everything stays in memory and is cleared after use - Electron + Python: React frontend with a Python agent for browser automation via stdio IPC - OpenRouter for LLM access (Gemini for navigation, Grok for validation)

Security was the most important and the hardest constraint. Passwords can't be logged, can't be sent to the LLM context, and can't persist on disk. Custom fork of browser-use to inject credentials via secure parameters invisible to the AI agent.

Currently at v0.38 with code signing and notarization for macOS. Working on improving success rates - the main challenges are 2FA requirements and anti-bot detection (Cloudflare, reCAPTCHA).

Would love feedback from anyone in the security/password management space.
by rendaw | 2025-12-15 05:24:08+00:00
I thought it'd be cool if the scale were shown by some channel, like coloring roads (pink at neighborhood scale, blue, green as you zoom out) so you could intuit the scale at a glance.

With map simplification and symbolic markers (roads are the same thickness at multiple scales) it can be really hard to figure out distances. I was once going to a less populated area, based on my local intuition I thought the distance between two locations was a maybe 30m walk max if I missed the bus, but it turned out it was a 3h walk.
by apatheticonion | 2025-12-15 05:24:13+00:00
Personally, given the limitations of JSDoc, I'd like to see a header-file like definition system for build-less applications (like libraries).

/ index.js index.d.ts

Where values in `index.js` can be typed in the header file with complete TypeScript syntax and those types are present in the target file via intellisense and type checking

// index.js function useStr(x){} // has intellisense for "string" useStr("Hello") useStr(42) // IDE and type checker error

And

// index.d.ts declare function useStr(x: string): void
by rohanray | 2025-12-15 05:24:17+00:00
Thank you for the kind words! I completely agree with your thoughts.

I have been part of projects with millions of LOC; team members including leads keep changing. This means after a short and certain amount of time, any project will be handled by members who are completely new to the codebase and not a single member exists who have gone through the entire code. Does that mean the devs and the projects are now bad? NO! You just continue working at a higher level i.e. at the project's invariants, concepts, guidelines, guardrails, scope etc. You dig into the code when there are issues or working on enhancements.
by koverstreet | 2025-12-15 05:24:35+00:00
Still changing the on disk format as required, but we're at the point now where the end user impact should be negligible - and we aren't doing big changes.

Just after reconcile, I landed a patch series to automatically run recovery passes in the background if they (and all dependents) can be run online; this allows the 1.33 upgrade to run in the background.

And with DKMS, users aren't having to run old versions (forcing a downgrade) if they have to boot into an old kernel. That was a big support issue in the past, users would have to run old unsupported versions because of other kernel bugs (amdgpu being the most common offender).
by tguvot | 2025-12-15 05:24:49+00:00
my house is actually mostly tiles/hardwood (at least areas that are accessible for roomba). but i want it just to be vacuumed.

polished tiles will always have some water marks after washing and require pass with floor buffer to buff it out. i also don't want to deal with with clean/dirty water (yeah, i know that are now few models that you can hookup to drain/water supply. but it's not exactly trivial to arrange in convenient way).

what i really want, is dock integrated with central vacuum.
by mylesp | 2025-12-15 05:27:14+00:00
https://micro-arcade.netlify.app/

I have been making a micro-arcade of one button games using a fun little library I found.

It is so fun to just have an idea and implement it in under an hour or two. It is a great creative outlet.

Give them a play if you have a second, they are very rough around the edges but are playable on mobile or browser.

https://micro-arcade.netlify.app/
by culi | 2025-12-15 05:27:38+00:00
> throw away all the benefits of compile-time errors because we'd rather have runtime errors

This is inaccurate on multiple counts. First of all, you can still run tsc with JSDoc if you want a hard error and you can still use strict mode with JSDoc. Your tsconfig file governs JSDoc-typed code just the same as it governs .ts-typed code. In both cases you can also ignore the red squigglies (the exact same red squigglies) and end up with runtime errors.

Nobody is advocating for reduced type safety or increased runtime errors.

I also think there are many valid reasons to loathe a build step (like not dealing with the headache that is the discrepency between the way the TS compiler deals with import paths vs js runtimes).

All that being said, I'm not really trying to convince anyone to stop using TypeScript. I'm simply pointing out that using JSDoc is using TypeScript. It's the same language service.
by yeutterg | 2025-12-15 05:28:15+00:00
It’s a combination of factors: you must reduce both blue light and intensity of light to avoid suppressing melatonin. Just reducing blue light might help a little, but it still suppresses melatonin. Melatonin levels and circadian phase shifts scale with total irradiance even if blue-depleted; basically, dimming the lights is really effective.

That’s why our products focus on both intensity and color change (but we lead with blue light reduction since it’s easier to grasp).

Also, if you look at our specs, you’ll see that we don’t use pure amber or red light; we use very low-blue white light with high color rendering. We have yet to do the study on this, but you can read surprisingly well with our lighting at a very low intensity (enough to make your mom angry that you are hurting your eyes), whereas with lower CRI sources, you would have to make them brighter to achieve the same visual acuity.

There is some emerging research that IR may play a role in melatonin production locally in cells, which is why we added it to the bulb. Early days for this scientifically, but Scott Zimmerman and associated researchers suggest wideband IR may be effective, even if it’s only 20-30% of the visible intensity.
by leptons | 2025-12-15 05:31:39+00:00
It already happened.

"Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal"

https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-co...

They even admitted to using copyrighted material.

"‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-...
by arjie | 2025-12-15 05:32:18+00:00
Seems fine. There's a Qualcomm SaaS platform you don't need that they have the boilerplate no-hacking clause on. And Arduinos are the same as always. Considering the EFF and Arduino positions in favour, both of whom have done a lot for open-source stuff, I really can't be bothered that Adafruit is trying to drum up some marketing content.
by pyoner | 2025-12-15 05:32:34+00:00
I’m working on a small browser extension called Instant Preview.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/majhgbekihmliceijip...

It lets you open links in a side panel, so you can quickly look at a page without leaving what you’re reading. I built it because I tend to open too many tabs when reading docs or search results.

It supports a few simple triggers. My favorite one is long-click: you click and hold a link, and the preview opens in the side panel.

Chrome recently added Split View that you open from the context menu. It works, but for quick checks it feels a bit heavy. You have to right-click, move the mouse, and pick an option.

With long-click there’s no menu. For me it feels faster, more intentional, and better when scanning lots of links.

Most of the work lately is about polishing these interactions and dealing with browser edge cases.