MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by frabonacci | 2025-12-16 16:00:49+00:00
We spent the last few months trying to understand why computer-use agents (Claude Computer-Use, OpenAI CUA, Gemini 2.5 Computer-Use) fail so inconsistently.

The pattern we kept seeing: same agent, same task, different OS theme = notably different results.

Claude Sonnet 4 scores 31.9% on OSWorld and Windows Agent Arena (2 of the most relevant benchmarks for computer-use agents) — but with massive variance. An agent trained on Windows 11 light mode fails on dark mode. Works on macOS Ventura, breaks on Monterey. Works on Win11, collapses on Vista.

The root cause: training data lacks visual diversity. Current benchmarks (OSWorld, Windows Agent Arena) rely on static VM snapshots with fixed configurations. They don't capture the reality of diverse OS themes, window layouts, resolution differences, or desktop clutter.

We built cua-bench — HTML-based simulated environments that render across 10+ OS themes (macOS, Win11, WinXP, Win98, Vista, iOS, Android). Define a task once, generate thousands of visual variations.

This enables: - Oracle trajectory generation via a Playwright-like API (verified ground truth for training) - Trajectory replotting: record 1 demo → re-render across 10 OS themes = 10 training trajectories

The technical report covers our approach to trajectory generation, Android/iOS environments, cross-platform HTML snapshots, and a comparison with existing benchmarks.

We’re currently working with research labs on training data generation and benchmarks, but we’d really value input from the HN community: - What tasks or OS environments should be standardized to actually stress computer-use agents? - Legacy OSes? Weird resolutions? Broken themes? Cluttered desktops? Modal hell?

Curious what people here think are the real failure modes we should be benchmarking.
by sltr | 2025-12-16 16:01:07+00:00
To help draw out some concrete software requirements, can you expand on what a "good way to manage the failures" would be and how what you've tried "does not work very well"?

- How many failures per day do you experience?

- How long do you need to retain records?

- What's the lifecycle of a failure? How does it get recorded, who investigates/triages, who responds?

- What are your custom scripts doing? Importing/exporting tickets?

- SSO, audit, compliance needs?

- You said JIRA was slow and limited. Is that just the UI or is creating/managing tickets too cumbersome? (Or yes to both X-D)

- What specifically broke with Google Sheets? Not enough rows/too slow?

You may well be looking at custom software since a lot of the apps that come to mind are either focused on aggregation (Datadog, etc) or high-touch tickets e.g. product development or customer support.
by runjake | 2025-12-16 16:01:17+00:00
Yes, in fact, during my days of red teaming, if I couldn't get info on an HVT (think celebrity), I'd go after their not-famous relatives[1] and friends, who generally had very bad opsec/persec. It was extremely effective.

1. An effective tactic is to friend relatives and friends on social media. From there, you either get to the HVT's data because it's set to viewable for "friend of friend" or you be patient, friend more of their friends and family and eventually friend the HVT directly, using your "connections" as social proof.

A very famous celebrity family was very susceptible to this tactic. After this project, they... tidied up their social media permissions.
by tolerance | 2025-12-16 16:01:22+00:00
The argument—independent of the author's illustration of it—is a valid one. But her writing does not appear to be an arena where it will be resolved in truth.

The problem is that she presents no direct stance as to what values a person should have in order to resist overconsumption. I suspect that's because this post itself is a sort of product to be consumed and it really doesn’t matter what the reader may buy less of under its influence...as long as it’s not y’know...a Substack subscription.
by nickpp | 2025-12-16 16:01:33+00:00
> Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down.

Collusion and cartels never work on the long run. It's an unstable equilibrium, the incentive to reduce prices to capture more market is too great.

> What is it that still makes you believe

Competition. It's the only force keeping humans honest. That's why we must treat any barriers of entry in a market with extreme care. The only "failed" or "captured" market is a strongly regulated one.
by cowpig | 2025-12-16 16:01:35+00:00
Game theory applied to the world is a useful simplification; reality is messy. In reality:

* Actors have access to limited computation

* The "rules" of the universe are unknowable and changing

* Available sets of actions are unknowable

* Information is unknowable, continuous, incomplete, and changes based on the frame of reference

* Even the concept of an "Actor" is a leaky abstraction

There's a field of study called Agent-based Computational Economics which explores how systems of actors behaving according to sets of assumptions behave. In this field you can see a lot of behaviour that more closely resembles real world phenomena, but of course if those models are highly predictive they have a tendency to be kept secret and monetized.

So for practical purposes, "game theory is inevitable" is only a narrowly useful heuristic. It's certainly not a heuristic that supports technological determinism.
by empressplay | 2025-12-16 16:01:37+00:00
> Game theory makes a lot of simplifying assumptions.

It does because it's trying to get across the point that although the world seems impossibly complex it's not. Of course it is in fact _almost_ impossibly complex.

This doesn't mean that it's redundant for more complex situations, it only means that to increase its accuracy you have to deepen its depth.
by curtisblaine | 2025-12-16 16:02:17+00:00
> If I want to get exposed to "different morals" I just open any of the other existing social networks. Until then I'm stuck here

I think the point is that "opening all other existing social networks" to get a rounded point of view has immense friction, especially in an enshittified world. Even with supposedly non-enshittified solutions like Mastodon, for example, you have to subscribe with different users to distinct instances that allow only a subset of the network and manage that for you. They can alter their banlist behind your back, for starters, so you have to manage that as well.

The proposal of Nostr is that you can follow as many relays as you want, in the same app, with the same user. Compare to having separate accounts for Facebook, X, Threads, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, <woke-friendly Mastodon instance> and <reactionary-friendly Mastodon instance>.
by guywithahat | 2025-12-16 16:02:35+00:00
There are programs in the US to give poor people healthcare for free; I was unemployed for a while and on one. Surprisingly simple and easy to set up.

The issue highlighted in this article seems to largely be due to illegal immigration, not due to a lack of support. If we curbed illegal immigration the problem would likely fix itself, although this article isn't very clear on who is or isn't a citizen in their numbers which makes it hard to use for anything useful
Show HN: My Tizen multiplayer drawing game flopped, but then hit 100M drawings
by lombarovic | 2025-12-16 16:02:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I built the first version of Drawize back in late 2016 specifically for a Samsung Tizen OS app contest. I crunched and built the whole thing (including the real-time multiplayer engine) in under 4 weeks.

It didn’t win anything in the contest.

Since it was built with web tech anyway, I published it on the open web in early 2017 just to see what would happen. It started living its own life, and today — 8 years later — the database processed the 100,000,000th drawing.

On the busiest days it’s been 30k+ active users, and storing 100M drawings currently sits at ~3.16 TB.

The milestone moment: I was watching live logs today, terrified the 100Mth drawing would be NSFW. Luckily, the RNG gods smiled and it turned out to be a Red Balloon (You can see the 100Mth drawing here: https://www.drawize.com/blog/100-million-drawings-milestone)

Tech stack (boring but fast):

Backend: .NET + WebSockets (real-time sync)

Frontend: hand-coded HTML/JS + jQuery (no React, no bundlers)

Data: PostgreSQL & MongoDB

Storage: Wasabi Cloud (moved there to save on S3 costs)

Scaling as a solo dev: real-time lobbies + reconnection edge cases + moderation/content filtering. I use content classification models trained in 2021 to filter bad content, and the real-time multiplayer side is mostly highly optimized .NET code.

Happy to answer questions about the “failed” Tizen origin, real-time multiplayer on the web, moderation, or how .NET handles the load.
by strangescript | 2025-12-16 16:03:58+00:00
"This post is to underline that Nothing is inevitable."

Inevitable and being a holdout are conceptually different and you can't expect society as a whole to care or respect your personal space with regards to it.

They listed smartphones as a requirement an example. That is great, have fun with your flip phone, but that isn't for most people.

Just because you don't find something desirable doesn't mean you deserve extra attention or a special space. It also doesn't you can call people catering to the wants of the masses as "grifters".
by mindslight | 2025-12-16 16:04:31+00:00
> they only mitigate [1] them [animalistic urges] for whites

The article says they only do it for non-whites. By flipping the sense of only [hide descriptions] for non-whites into only [avoid animalistic urges] for whites, you're seemingly dragging in an assumption that every white just naturally harbors racism against other races - basically showing a hand of promoting racism.

And regardless of word choice - as I said given how many people were eager to see our country burn simply so "those people" would get hurt more, it's certainly looking like that "deception" was actually the lesser evil!

The crux of the issue is that while racism might be endemic, or even an unavoidable emergent effect (cf black cops policing black neighborhoods while living in white suburbs), we're able to have society of many people working together to achieve larger goals precisely because we aim to suppress the "natural" animalistic urges. For example, everyone poops as well. And yet we make it a point of keeping it to ourselves, often doing it alone in a different room. And if someone were to come out of the bathroom holding a giant log in their hands proclaiming "I make poop and I'm not ashamed of it!" while everyone else recoils in disgust, it's not because that person is being edgy or otherwise doing something novel or productive.
by rayiner | 2025-12-16 16:04:56+00:00
The Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) has covered health insurance for children in middle-income families since 1997: https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2017/08/03/what-every-policy-make.... CHIP eligibility ranges from 175% of the federal poverty line in Wyoming to 405%. So how are their children who don't have coverage?
by rng-concern | 2025-12-16 16:04:59+00:00
Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment:

Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level.

Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!".

I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
by epec254 | 2025-12-16 16:05:16+00:00
A key challenge with HTML is client side trust. How do I enable an agent platform (say Gemini, Claude, OpenAI) to render UI from an untrusted 3p agent that’s integrated with the platform? This is a common scenario in the enterprise version of these apps - eg I want to use the agent from (insert saas vendor) alongside my company’s home grown agents and data.

Most HTML is actually HTML+CSS+JS - IMO, accepting this is a code injection attack waiting to happen. By abstracting to JSON, a client can safely render UI without this concern.
by ActivePattern | 2025-12-16 16:05:19+00:00
> I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it.

So we're just waving away the carbon cost, centralization of power, privacy fallout, fraud amplification, and the erosion of trust in information? These are enormous society-level effects (and there are many more to list).

Dismissing AI criticism as simply ignorance says more about your own.
by jajuuka | 2025-12-16 16:05:20+00:00
I think it also depends on urgency. When Apple unveiled Intel and Apple Silicon they were very clearly the future of the platforms with large buy in from day 1. Blizzard seems to have a good relationship with Apple since they released the Apple Silicon version of WoW almost the day the first laptops started shipping to customers.

Windows on ARM isn't really the same ballpark. They were still there early, but the platform is still changing quite a bit.
by Noaidi | 2025-12-16 16:05:46+00:00
Sorry, you are all missing the point.

By "sell" I do not mena to make a profit, I mean, make it visible to the market.

If firefox did its job and got out of the way, who would notice Firefox? It is hard to sell something with no "bells and whistles". Do you think it is a mistake that Liquid Glass exists? No. LG is there so you notice you are on an iPhone which uses to just get out of the way but now is just in my way all the time.

Adding AI to Firefox is to make it visible in the market.
by jinen83 | 2025-12-16 16:05:48+00:00
I am Jinen, founder of DronaHQ. we are converging low code and vibe code but very very differently then most other platforms like retool/tooljet.

we bring the power of vibe code -- build anything frontend and marry them to advantages of low code -- SSO, RBAC, etc.

I would love your feedback.
by anonnon | 2025-12-16 16:05:53+00:00
> ICU has bindings for Rust that provide case-folding functionality, but not case-insensitive substring search.

> ICU has many bindings. The Rust one doesn’t expose any substring search functionality, but the Python one does:

Python's ICU support is based on ICU4C. Rust's ICU "bindings" are actually a new implementation called ICU4X, by developers who worked on i18n at Mozilla and Google and on ICU4C, with the goal of a cleaner, more performant implementation that is also memory safe. Maybe not relevant (as in substantially altering the benchmarks), but it's at least worth noting that the ICU backends aren't consistent throughout.
by empressplay | 2025-12-16 16:06:04+00:00
It was all inevitable, by definition, as we live in a deterministic universe (shock, I know!)

But further, the human condition has been developing for tens of thousands of years, and efforts to exploit the human condition for a couple of thousand (at least) and so we expect that a technology around for a fraction of that would escape all of the inevitable 'abuses' of it?

What we need to focus on is mitigation, not lament that people do what people do.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-12-16 16:06:11+00:00
As someone else put it succinctly, there's art and then there's content. AI generated stuff is content.

And not to be too dismissive of copywriters, but old Buzzfeed style listicles are content as well. Stuff that people get paid pennies per word for, stuff that a huge amount of people will bid on on a gig job site like Fiverr or what have you is content, stuff that people churn out by rote is content.

Creative writing on the other hand is not content. I won't call my shitposting on HN art, but it's not content either because I put (some) thought into it and am typing it out with my real hands. And I don't have someone telling me what I should write. Or paying me for it, for that matter.

Meanwhile, AI doesn't do anything on its own. It can be made to simulate doing stuff on its own (by running continuously / unlimited, or by feeding it a regular stream of prompts), but it won't suddenly go "I'm going to shitpost on HN today" unless told to.
by jedberg | 2025-12-16 16:06:16+00:00
> Given there are something like 20 million people in the US illegally

You should probably check your sources on that one. That number is highly suspect and came from someone who was trying to sell you on upping budgets for ICE.

> seems counter productive to count people who aren't citizens in a article primarily about US health statistics.

Non-citizens are still people.
by petcat | 2025-12-16 16:06:19+00:00
I saw a statistic that roughly 10% of the US workforce is in some form of "customer-facing service" role and I just have to wonder how many of those jobs are nearly gone, or already gone. Even if it's a 5% reduction, or 3% over the next decade, that seems catastrophic without a completely new category of jobs to replace them.

I haven't talked to a cashier at a grocery store in years. It's all self-checkout. I stayed in a hotel recently and I didn't even talk to someone at the front desk. I just checked in at a kiosk and got my room card. There was no one else around.

I guess the people that used to do those jobs are all just driving Ubers and Doordash now?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-16 16:06:29+00:00
> maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent

Retribution is a real component of justice. When it's ignored, people take the law into their own hands.

Harsher sentences for despicable crimes makes sense. Automatic sentence enhancers are cruel. But automatically giving the judge the power to sentence for longer based on the victim's profile is not.
by aidgn | 2025-12-16 16:06:33+00:00
Hello HN,

Traditional data formats often create structural bottlenecks across data and AI pipelines. Instead of relying on them, I wondered what would happen if I kept the readability that both humans and AI can share, while still reaching binary-level speed.

That's why I created a self-contained format that expresses meaning without parsing (Semantic), preserves information in its original state (Raw), and maintains a fully organized structure (Format). This is the Semantic Raw Format (SRF), and I call it BEAT (Behavioral Event Analytics Transcript).

Here is an xPU platform example (1-byte scan).

s = srf == ord('!') # Contextual Space (who) t = srf == ord('~') # Time (when) p = srf == ord('^') # Position (where) a = srf == ord('*') # Action (what) f = srf == ord('/') # Flow (how) v = srf == ord(':') # Causal Value (why)

xPU can scan BEAT sequences directly without any additional setup. The rest is just address arithmetic to load and store tokens. In short, it achieves binary-level performance while preserving the human readability of a text sequence. This layout supports byte-wise scanning and simple dispatch, without tokenization or parse trees.

This makes BEAT a natural fit for AI-driven analysis of large-scale event streams in domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. In these environments, its ability to be scanned at binary speed while still remaining directly readable to both engineers and AI models stands out as a clear advantage.

Humans learn the meaning of their actions as they acquire language. AI, by contrast, excels at generating language but struggles to autonomously structure and interpret the full context (5W1H) of its own actions. With BEAT, AI can record its behavior as sequences that read like natural language and analyze that flow in real time (1-byte scan), providing the foundation for feedback loops through which it can monitor its own errors and improve its outcomes.

Writing and reading coexist on the same timeline.

Action → Record → Sense (Latency) Action ~ Record ~ Sense (Real-time)

---

The Full Score project was created to demonstrate the potential of Semantic Raw Format. You can see how real-time security and AI insights are efficiently implemented through it. Due to the nature of BEAT, most analytics pipelines can be removed, and origin servers are no longer essential for analytics. This design differs fundamentally from traditional analytics.

Traditional Analytics (7 Steps) = Browser → API → Raw Database → Queue (Kafka) → Transformation (Spark) → Refined Database → Archive Full Score (2 Steps) = Browser ~ Edge → Archive

At its core, BEAT is designed as a true End-to-End format that flows directly from the browser to the xPU without any semantic transformation. Its unique grammar captures the flow of space, time, and depth, enabling AI to reproduce the decision flow underlying human behavior.

Feedback and thoughts are welcome. For more details, please check the FAQ section on the demo site.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/aidgncom/beat Full Score Demo: https://fullscore.org Full Score Video: https://www.youtube.com/@aidgn
Show HN: Superego – An AI that watches Claude Code and blocks over-engineering
by durch | 2025-12-16 16:06:43+00:00
Claude Code will solve your problem. It might also refactor three files, add "future flexibility," and solve two problems you didn't mention. Superego blocks that.

It is a Rust CLI that hooks into Claude Code's lifecycle. Before large edits or before Claude finishes, another LLM evaluates the work against one question: is this the simplest thing that actually solves the stated problem?

When something's off, Claude is blocked and shown feedback like:

"This may be a local maximum. What alternatives were considered?"

"Is this necessary right now? This seems to solve [hypothetical problem] rather than [actual need]."

Claude then tries to self-corrects, often proposing something simpler or asking clarifying questions it should have asked upfront.

The philosophy: Every line of code is a liability. Every abstraction is a loan. If you can't explain it simply, it's too complex. If it feels clever, be suspicious.

Tradeoffs: Yes, this adds LLM calls. In my experience the tighter results are worth it, but YMMV.

Install: cargo install superego # or brew install cloud-atlas-ai/superego/superego

sg init && claude

The prompt is customizable. The default is opinionated toward simplicity—because the alternative is an AI that confidently builds cathedrals when you asked for a shed.

Source-available (free for personal/research use). GitHub: https://github.com/cloud-atlas-ai/superego
by azalemeth | 2025-12-16 16:06:56+00:00
Everyone is born and at some point will die. The costs associated with this vary hugely but the certainty of those two end points are inescapable. Almost every other developed country in the world recognises that and shares both the risks and the costs recognising that health is a golden crown worn by (and invisible to) those who have it. As someone with a spinal injury who would be most likely bankrupt and unemployed in the US I just don't understand why you don't get a proper, profit-free healthcare system. You spend the most on it in the world and don't get the greatest outcomes!
by terminalshort | 2025-12-16 16:07:01+00:00
The off ramp to the loop was always a crisis like a recession or war. Covid could have been such an example. If the government hadn't bailed everyone out, the pandemic would have been a mass casualty event for companies and their owners. The financial crisis of 2008 also would have been such an event if not for the bailouts. The natural state of the economy is boom and bust, with wealth concentration increasing during the booms and dropping during the busts. But it turns out the busts are really painful for everyone, and so our government has learned how to mostly keep them from happening. Turns out people prefer the ever increasing concentration of wealth an power that this results in over the temporary pain of economic depression.