MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Tasker – An open-source desktop agent for browser and OS automation
by schnetzlerjoe | 2026-01-01 20:53:23+00:00
Hi HN

I recently got married, promptly had a bit of a meltdown, and decided to lock myself
in a room and build for a while.

At the same time, I was trying to outbound sell for my startup and kept running into
the same problem: I wanted an automation tool that could actually use my computer
like a person. Click through UIs, copy/paste between apps, handle messy workflows —
not just APIs and webhooks.

I couldn’t find anything that felt:
- consumer-friendly (non-technical)
- local-first
- flexible enough for real-world, UI-driven tasks

So I challenged myself to see how far I could get building an open-source,
desktop automation app powered by AI. That’s Tasker.

I’ve been using it daily for ~2–3 weeks for sales workflows, and my father has been
using it to help generate estimates for his HVAC business. It’s still early (still needs to expand to general OS), but it’s
already replaced a lot of manual work for us in browser.

One thing that’s become very clear: a cloud/deployable version that can run on cron
or be triggered via HTTP would unlock a lot of use cases. I’m not totally sure where
this goes next, but I wanted to share it early and get feedback.

Would love thoughts on:
- What workflows you’d actually trust something like this with
- Desktop vs cloud tradeoffs
- Where this breaks down in practice
- Whether this feels useful or just scary

Repo and docs are linked on the site.
by com2kid | 2026-01-01 20:53:37+00:00
For a couple years I did a super low weight time under tension routine.

Almost no hypertrophy, but I was able to step into a BJJ gym and roll for hours, I was still ready to go long after everyone else had gassed out.

The adage that you get good at what you train at is true.

Train to lift a ton of weight 3 times and you aren't going to be able to compete with the calisthenics peeps who can rep out 100 pullups and literally dance mid air.
by cloudfudge | 2026-01-01 20:53:50+00:00
I didn't see a summary in here so based on my reading:

* Certain headset devices from varying vendors have crappy BT security over both bluetooth classic and BLE
* They implement a custom protocol called RACE which can do certain things with no authentication at all
* One of the things RACE lets you do is read arbitrary memory and exfiltrate keys needed to impersonate the vulnerable device with your already-paired phone
* Once you're impersonating the vulnerable device you can do all sorts of things on the paired phone like place/accept calls, listen on the microphone, etc.

This is pretty bad and you can easily see this being used to bypass other layers of auth like SMS verification or "have a robot call me and read me a code." It also makes me wonder if a spoofed device could appear as a HID device (e.g. a keyboard), but it's unclear whether the link key compromise works for new device classes.

So the way to mitigate this is to be certain you don't have one of the vulnerable peripherals or to disable BT. Note that the list of device models sounds *far* from complete because it's a chipset issue. Which makes me wonder if there are cars out there using this chipset and exposing the same vulns. I'd be very interested if anyone has a source on whether any cars use these chipsets.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-01 20:53:59+00:00
iOS hasn't had a jailbreak since ios 15.5, or 17 if you own a iPhone 11.

Nintendo DS is now kind of EOL. So the era of Flashcarts and the likes are gone. I remeber the toothpick wrapped in tinfoil to flash a custom firmware trick and applying it to my DS. the recent lawsuit kind of killed the main provider to these carts.

PS3+ Switch have had e-fuses which now look out the console when attempting CFW.

PC Games are now protected by Denuvo which are almost impossible to crack apart from a couple of folk, one who is slightly mental and another who only does racing games.

The android bootloader is being locked down to stop custom firmware. EMicrosoft is attempting to lock the user out unless you upgrade to Windows 11 with TPM.

Emulation is another game, but Nintendo throws a lawsut if you attempt. Sony is locking down by having to dump your own firmware.
by godelski | 2026-01-01 20:55:12+00:00
It seems like you agree with me yet simply do not easy to. I can't do anything with that. You seek evidence that is incredibly difficult to present. History is recorded differently now than in the past yet things are the same. You're ignoring the biases of how it's recorded. Any example I give you'll say it's not enough and point out another. It's a fruitless game

> but when I said "do homework" I didn't mean podcasts

Maybe you should judge the information on its merit rather than its medium
by Steve6 | 2026-01-01 20:58:39+00:00
I want you to know I took some time research and educate myself on these claims.

From my findings, I could not find anything directly correlating the 2017 TCJA to total donations. The TCJA did change how deductions are treated, and more people opted to go with standard deductions instead of itemized deductions, but this is not the same as total donations. It is possible this incentivized people to donate less because they couldn't get as much of a tax write off.

For total donations, it has continued to trend upward despite some fluctuations, and a $20 billion swing is not a large deviation. The numbers I saw were $400+ billion during that time. Again, this has many more factors than the TCJA.

Most importantly, I'd like to reiterate that libertarians do not claim that cutting government will "solve" problems like open source projects getting enough funding. Just that it will give the free market an opportunity to find a balance. No big bill is going to solve these problems either, it will only make it worse. The end does not justify the mean. Stop taking people's money, and let them spend it on the things they find valuable even if you disagree with it.
by kelthuzad | 2026-01-01 20:59:20+00:00
You're right that Firefox also opposes some of these specific implementations in its current form, and that Google often rushes features. However, that doesn't diminish Apple's conflict of interest at all, so sometimes their arguments happen to align with reality just as a broken clock is correct twice a day. Apple applies many double standards e.g. they allow native apps to access these hardware features (where they happen to collect a 30% tax) but block the Web from doing the same (where they collect 0%). If privacy was the only concern, they would work on a safe standard, but instead they block the capability entirely to ensure that any of the App Store's rivals remain constrained and thus inferior such that the App Store's revenue isn't threatened.
by PaulKeeble | 2026-01-01 20:59:59+00:00
I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywhere else in my router and home servers. I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-01 21:01:12+00:00
If you're at war then declare war. You get sweeping powers to deal with existential threats. Go ahead and declare your country is at war. Is it?

If you declare war without there being a bona fide casus belli, you'll be whisked out of power so fast your head will spin. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_South_Korean_martial_law_...

If you don't declare war, you don't get those emergency powers. You only get peacetime powers.

Russia loves to go right up to the line, and then cross it a little bit, just to antagonise you. But unless you're willing to be the instigator of WW3, you'll stick to peacetime powers and peacetime courts with peacetime standards of evidence
by AngryData | 2026-01-01 21:01:30+00:00
How can you know that? Dogs were domesticated on being fed scraps to start with and came from wolves which are also natural scavengers and eat all sorts of nasty (to us) things. Ive seen many dogs happily gobble up insects, even stink bugs. Dogs don't even know what their food is made out of 95% of the time these days so im not sure anybody can claim they simply don't like eating insect food without some kind of study to back it up.
by hedgehog | 2026-01-01 21:02:38+00:00
My guess is the main "AI" contribution here is to automate some of the work around the actual fuzzing. Setting up the test environment and harness, reading the code + commit history + published vulns for similar projects, identifying likely trouble spots, gathering seed data, writing scripts to generate more seed data reaching the identified trouble spots, adding instrumentation to the target to detect conditions ASan etc don't, writing PoC code, writing draft patches... That's a lot of labor and the coding agents can do a mediocre job of all of it for the cost of compute.
by Centigonal | 2026-01-01 21:02:58+00:00
I think that companies like Oracle and Broadcom begin to resemble specialized private equity firms: they acquire innovative companies that have scaled to a level that they're familiar with. The acquirer then enforces "business discipline" and unlocks efficiencies (mainly this means leveraging the acquirer's existing connections with their customer base to cross-sell licenses, raising prices to the highest possible level their customers can sustain, and laying off/transferring redundant positions or positions not directly tied to revenue generation). This lasts 3-10 years until the market develops a lower-cost enterprise-ready alternative that starts to erode the captive customer base, but in that time these companies have collected enough rents to acquire another set of smaller companies and repeat the process.
by metadope | 2026-01-01 21:03:40+00:00
> dense, historical style

I confess, a similar thought flittered across my mind as I was reading. I was reminded of a style of writing that I had long since put behind me. That style is a slog. I enjoyed a year of intense study in literature back in 1977. I don't have the literary chops anymore, or the patience to get through Infinite Jest, let alone re-read Moby Dick or Pickwick Papers.

But, you do know better: dense is a much better word than verbose, or my rather harsh purple prose. You are kind.

Still, do you think it's okay to end a sentence with bygone? I'm going to check the HN guidelines and get back to you on that one.
by throwawaybutwhy | 2026-01-01 21:03:42+00:00
Why are you rolling out your own crypto? Timing attacks, unvalidated inputs and no bounds checking.

> I am not a cryptographer. ... However I am fairly confident that this is at least safer than pass. Feel free to prove me wrong.

Translation: I have no experience in safe cooking. Please use my garlic oil, and my chicken salad. Feel free to prove me wrong - from the ER ward.
by alecco | 2026-01-01 21:03:53+00:00
IMHO DGX Spark at $4,000 is a bad deal with only 273 GB/s bandwidth and the compute capacity between a 5070 and a 5070 TI. And with PCIe 5.0 at 64 GB/s it's not such a big difference.

And the 2x 200 GBit/s QSFP... why would you stack a bunch of these? Does anybody actually use them in day-to-day work/research?

I liked the idea until the final specs came out.
by savolai | 2026-01-01 21:04:06+00:00
Linux desktops have felt flaky for me for a few years now. I’m trying to figure out how much of that is bad choices vs real problems.

Ubuntu’s default desktop felt unstable in a macOS VM. Dual-booting on a couple of HP laptops slowed to a crawl after installing a few desktop apps, apparently because they pulled in background services. What surprised me was how quickly the system became unpleasant to use without any obvious “you just broke X” moment.

My current guess: not Linux in general, but heavy defaults (GNOME, Snap, systemd timers), desktop apps dragging in daemons, and OEM firmware / power-management quirks that don’t play well with Linux. Server Linux holds up because everything stays explicit. Desktop distros hide complexity and don’t give much visibility when things start to rot.

Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?
by belter | 2026-01-01 21:05:11+00:00
Russia has already carried out chemical attacks on UK soil, used radioactive poisoning in London, sabotaged rail infrastructure in Poland, and launched cyberattacks against German air traffic control.[1]

The Associated Press has documented 59 Russian hybrid operations across Europe. A systematic campaign of intimidation, sabotage, and violence:
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-europe-hybrid-...

Russia supplied the Buk missile system that shot down MH17, killing 298 civilians, most of them Europeans. Putin eliminates political opponents, like Alexei Navalny, who died in custody days before a possible release.

European leaders may be passive and slow, but what is making the situation truly dangerous, is the dictator-jealousy fueled encouragement and indulgence of the current U.S. administration, and all its sycophants, which got to the point of publicly applauding a dictator on U.S. soil.

That behavior legitimizes aggression, emboldens Moscow, and directly undermines European security, and is making thinks really, really, sketchy right now.

Germany accuses Russia of air traffic control cyber-attack:
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgrrnylzzyo
by habinero | 2026-01-01 21:05:13+00:00
No, frankly it's the difference between actual engineers and hobbyists/amateurs/non-SWEs.

SWEs are trained to discard surface-level observations and be adversarial. You can't just look at the happy path, how does the system behave for edge cases? Where does it break down and how? What are the failure modes?

The actual analogy to a machine shop would be to look at whether the machines were adequate for their use case, the building had enough reliable power to run and if there were any safety issues.

It's easy to Clever Hans yourself and get snowed by what looks like sophisticated effort or flat out bullshit. I had to gently tell a junior engineer that just because the marketing claims something will work a certain way, that doesn't mean it will.
by adamkittelson | 2026-01-01 21:05:26+00:00
I made the move about a month ago to bazzite on my desktop with an nvidia graphics card. I still have my windows drive for when I need it but that's pretty rare. Bazzite isn't perfect but we've reached the point where the rough edges are less painful than the self sabotage microsoft has been inflicting on their users in recent versions of windows.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-01 21:05:41+00:00
Exactly this. I'm not sure why people keep drumming the "a Mac or Strix Halo is faster/cheaper" drum. Different market.

If I want to do hobby / amateur AI research or do stuff with fine tuning models etc, learn the tooling. I'm better off with the DG10 than AMD or Apple's systems.

The Strix Halo machines look nice. I'd like one of those too. Especially if/when they ever get around to getting it into a compelling laptop.

But I ordered the ASUS Ascent DG10 machine (since it was more easily available for me than the other versions of these) because I want to play around with fine tuning open weight models, learning tooling, etc.

That and I like the idea of having a (non-Apple) Aarch64 linux workstation at home.

Now if the courier would just get their shit together and actually deliver the thing...
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-01 21:05:53+00:00
I see what you mean, I was assuming you were referring to a smaller code base.

I'm sure Paul Heckbert's business card is in-distribution, but it'd be a good example of what I'm talking about ( see variation at https://fabiensanglard.net/rayTracing_back_of_business_card/ ).
by otterley | 2026-01-01 21:06:16+00:00
Apple made it very clear that their security concerns related to third party browsing engines are about difficult-to-contain threats posed by JIT compilation. (JITs require non-text memory pages to be executable.) Apple doesn’t allow other apps to use such technology, so they’re consistent in that respect.

Apple even disables JIT for Safari itself when you put an iPhone in lockdown mode, at no small cost to performance, in an effort to harden the device even more.

Do you have a rebuttal to that?
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-01 21:06:44+00:00
> Does this line up with others’ experience?

Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down?

> If yes, what actually works long-term?

Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it).

Can you give an example of which desktop apps are "dragging in daemons"?
by MostlyStable | 2026-01-01 21:06:49+00:00
It is good, and for 99+% of use cases for 90+% of users (who mostly use nothing but the browser), they will hardly even notice a difference, besides the lack of obnoxious, instrusive MS behavior.

However, despite really, really wanting to switch (and having it installed on my laptop), I keep finding things that don't quite work right that are preventing me from switching some of my machines. My living room PC, which is what my TV is connected to, the DVR software that runs my TV tuner card doesn't quite work right (despite having a native linux installer), and I couldn't get channels to come through as clearly and as easily. I spent a couple of hours of troubleshooting and gave up.

My work PC needs to have the Dropbox app (which has a linux installer), but it also needs the "online-only" functionality so that I can see and browse the entire (very large) dropbox directory without needing to have it all stored locally. This has been a feature that has been being requested on the linux version of the app for years, and dropbox appears unlikely to add it anytime soon.

Both of these are pretty niche issues that I don't expect to affect the vast majority of users (and the dropbox one in particular shouldn't be an issue at all if my org didn't insist on using dropbox in a way that it is very much not intended to be used, and for which better solutions exist, but I have given up on that fight a long time ago), and like I said, I've had linux on my laptop for a couple of years so far without any issue, and I love it.

I am curious how many "edge cases" like mine exist out there though. Maybe there exists some such edge case for a lot of people even while almost no one has the same edge case issue.
by yesfitz | 2026-01-01 21:07:37+00:00
From my experience, here's the general lowest-effort way to find community:

Make a list of public places that you like (bars, coffee shops, game shops, etc.) and go to them at the same time on the same day every week. You'll shortly start seeing the same people regularly, even if it's just the staff.

Then you can greet those people, introduce yourself, and talk with them. By asking questions about their day, their plans, and sharing the same about yourself, you'll open the door to expanding your social life outside of those locations, hours, and people.

Community doesn't need to be a series of planned events and invitations. It can be implicit and organic just by virtue of regularly sharing space.

Personal anecdote:

I do this with pinball. Sure, it's often in bars, but it's a great way to be at a bar without having to drink. Pinball players are happy to talk about pinball (or anything really), it provides an instant topic of conversation, and it's easy to invite another player to a game because it's such a short commitment. And if no one's around that you want to talk to, or you don't feel like focusing on socializing, you can just play the game while still maintaining your regular schedule.

If you want to try following in my exact footsteps, you can use Pinball Map[1] to find locations near you. Good luck!

1: https://pinballmap.com/map
by solatic | 2026-01-01 21:07:49+00:00
I think most people would disagree with you that armed members of an outlaw paramilitary count as civilians.

And I also think that most people would disagree with you that the correct first sanction is on a country's banks, the consequences of which fall disproportionately on the innocent civilians of your disfavored country; the disproportionality of which is contrary to international law.
by ceroxylon | 2026-01-01 21:08:09+00:00
I put all of my apps into category folders at the top row, so I can see my background photo that I really enjoy. Once you do this for long enough, it is jarring to see the chaotic placement of app icons all over the screen on most people's devices.

Also I never use the camera app icon, I swipe left from the lock screen 99% of the time, and the remaining 1% is from things like auth apps opening it to scan QR codes for new accounts, etc.
by stevekemp | 2026-01-01 21:08:39+00:00
Same. I spent several long evenings, back in the day, ripping all my CDs into MP3s and they've been copied from computer to computer ever since, and the collection has grown too of course since then.

I have weeks worth of music and I either "select all: random play", or choose an artist and listen to all their works.

For the past week I've been listening to Depeche Mode on repeat. Maybe next week I'll switch to Prince, Madonna, Hendrix, Prodigy, or Rammstein. It all depends on my mood, I guess.

Now that buying used DVDs costs no more than €1/film I've been buying a lot of physical media from charity shops. I've not bought more audio-CDs, but now and again it crosses my mind. If I stuck to used purchases again I think I'd be looking at €1/disk which is pretty reasonable.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-01 21:09:00+00:00
I don't, your forced under the mercy of that they keep supporting. At any time they can render your console usless and force you to upgrade.

Consoles are e-waste in my eyes, perfectly good for other uses but liocked to what the vendor wants to give. Limited by the hardware that's given and then nagged to buy latest model.

Why am I not allowed to turn an old PS4 in to a Linux router? It has a beast of a CPU, USB ports and suports SSD's, what's the issue?
by kace91 | 2026-01-01 21:09:29+00:00
I don’t see that as a threat honestly. safari being the default app pretty much guarantees its place unless google comes up with a killer feature for iOS chrome. And they are unlikely to make that push considering apple demands the app to be distributed only in Japan.

Besides, the mobile web is becoming more and more of a niche platform, since the web is becoming centralised as time passes and most main sites redirect to their own apps.

And that’s without considering direct web search being replaced by AI search,which google seems convinced is the way forward.
by crusty | 2026-01-01 21:09:38+00:00
Do you work for Peter Thiel and are you tasked with validating his wet dream?

This seems like the inevitable outcome of our current trajectory for a significant portion of society. All the blather about AI utopia and a workless UBI system supported by the boundless productivity advances ushered in by AI-everything simply has no historically basis. History's realistic interpretation points more to this outcome.

Coincidentally, I've been conceptualizing a TV sitcom that tangentially touches on this idea of humans as real-time inputs an AI agent calls on, but those humans are collective characters not actually portrayed in scenes.