MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lowjax | 2026-03-01 10:37:20+00:00
I built vscreen because AI agents couldn't actually use the internet. They can call APIs, but they can't browse a website, click a cookie banner, fill out a multi-step form, or watch a video. So I built the missing piece.

vscreen sits between a headless Chromium and your browser. It captures the viewport via Chrome DevTools Protocol, encodes H.264 or VP9 video + Opus audio, and streams everything over WebRTC. You get a live, low-latency video feed of what the AI is doing. Mouse, keyboard, scroll, and clipboard all relay back bidirectionally.

For AI automation, there's a built-in MCP server with 63 tools — navigate, screenshot, click elements, type text, wait for selectors, solve CAPTCHAs, manage cookies, and more. Multiple isolated instances can run in parallel.

Written in Rust (tokio, axum, webrtc-rs). No Electron, no Puppeteer wrapper — purpose-built media pipeline. Audio also available via RTSP for external consumers like VLC or GStreamer.

Highlights:

- Full-page screenshots with automatic coordinate translation
- Instance locking for multi-agent coordination
- Works with any MCP client (Cursor, Claude, custom agents)

Source-available, non-commercial license.

GitHub: https://github.com/lowjax-com/vscreen
Show HN: Nummi – AI companion with memory and daily guidance
by ab-abg | 2026-03-01 10:38:11+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Arsh, founder of Nummi.

We’ve been quietly building and testing nummi.ai, a personal AI companion that:

Remembers your journey and context over time,

Helps you reflect, understand yourself, and navigate life with clarity,

Offers daily guidance & personalized insights (including spiritual/astrology-based timing) based on your birth chart and tracked patterns.

Unlike generic chat assistants, Nummi is designed as an ongoing companion — not a search tool or generic productivity bot. It learns from your inputs, your patterns, and your preferences so responses get more contextual and relevant over time.

Why we built it

In early testing:

We’ve seen 10k+ signups

(~21% signup-to-paid conversion)
These are very early numbers, but users seem to value the ongoing connection and personal context.
(This isn’t “astrology predictions” — it’s reflective AI that combines memory + optional vedic insights.)

We’re experimenting with features like:

Personalized daily insight prompts

Habit support and emotional check-ins

Memory that grows the quality of responses over time
All with privacy and optionality at the core.

Open questions for HN

How can we better signal long-term value (vs one-off chat)?

What onboarding patterns help users unlock value faster?

To product people: how do you think about AI companions that mix reflection + memory + optional metaphysical context?

Happy to answer any questions — and genuinely looking for feedback.
by ab-abg | 2026-03-01 10:38:44+00:00
Thanks for taking a look! A few more context points:

• Nummi’s core differentiator is the *memory layer* — it doesn’t restart every chat.
• Optional spirituality/astrology is just one lens; you can also use it purely reflectively.
• We’re self-funded and testing early monetization levers.

Happy to dive into onboarding patterns, retention tactics, or community feedback ideas.
by littlestymaar | 2026-03-01 10:40:25+00:00
> the machine that works by generating the most statistically likely text

You've just described a “base models” (or pre-trained model), but later training stages (RLHF, GRPO, whatever secret sauce model makers use) induce a strong bias in the output.

Also, being “statistically identical to human generated text” doesn't mean it's unrecognizable, because human generated text exhibit many various clusters (you're not texting your friends with the same language you're writing a book with) and an LLM can, and in practice, do, use language that is not appropriate for the tone a human expects in a certain context (like when bots write LinkedIn-worthy posts in reddit comment section). The “average human-looking text” is as unnatural to us as a “synthetic average human” with one testicle and half a vagina would be.
by Rohan51 | 2026-03-01 10:40:55+00:00
Haha — it's surprisingly therapeutic to get roasted by your own tool.
I ran it on the repo itself and it called out my own placeholder names
in the test fixtures. The fallback roast lines weren't safe either.

Let me know what score you get if you try it! The worst I've seen so far
was a 12/100 on a legacy codebase with 200+ TODOs.
by peteforde | 2026-03-01 10:41:22+00:00
I got very excited when I saw this title, because I've wanted to consolidate on Claude for a long time. I have been using ChatGPT very extensively for Q&A for 2+ years and I have hundreds of long, very technical conversations which I constantly search and refer to.

The problem (for me, anyway) is that even several megabytes worth of quality "memory" data on my profile would not allow me to migrate if it can't also confidently clone all of my chat history with it.

To be clear, this is a big enough problem that I would immediately pay low three digits dollars to have this solved on my behalf. I don't really want any of the providers to have a walled garden of all my design planning conversations, all of my PCB design conversations. Many are hundreds of prompts long. A clean break is not even remotely palatable short of OAI going full evil.

Look, I'd find it convenient for Claude to have a powerful sense of what I've been working on from conversation #1 onwards. But I absolutely refuse to bifurcate my chat history across multiple services. There is a tier list of hells, and being stuck on ChatGPT is a substantially less painful tier than needing to constantly search two different sites for what's been discussed.
by toraway | 2026-03-01 10:43:10+00:00
The constitution assigns legislative power to the Congress, and does not allow the President to rewrite law by fiat.

The Department of Defense was established by the National Security Act of 1947 and is still the law of the land until they pass legislation amending it.

The Trump Administration could request the Republican controlled Congress rename the DoD in the NDA, but for whatever reason they have not done so.

So it's correct to say that accepting the idea that a President can rewrite a law based on their own personal whims without Congress is in opposition to fundamental constitutional separation of powers.
by M95D | 2026-03-01 10:43:25+00:00
It's because of drivers and PnP and especially USB. When you load Win3.1, WinNT4 and lower, drivers load without scanning for hardware presence. It's just a disk to memory copy. In Win95, the first PnP OS, it scans for PnP hardware at every boot. That's slow.

To prove my point, you could try loading some of the USB drivers for DOS or one of the ISA PnP configuration utilities (such as ICU - Intel Configuration Utility), see how fast it boots then!

Also, if you left the network config untouched, it defaults to TCPIP+DHCP, and when DHCP doesn't respond (cable unplugged), it's another 30s delay. Win311 didn't have TCPIP unless you install it manually. It also asks you to configure it during installation - less likely to select DHCP if you don't have it. And then, in Win311, network is started by DOS (NET START in autoexec.bat), not by Windows.
by codingdave | 2026-03-01 10:47:10+00:00
HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

One post is fine. 4 posts over 2 days, when you have never otherwise engaged with the community here is really sketchy.
by ithora | 2026-03-01 10:48:02+00:00
Most people don’t avoid programming because it’s too hard. They avoid it because they don’t identify as technical. Just like math many people who could be decent at it still recoil from it. It’s not capability, it’s identity and preference. Humans aren’t fundamentally logical thinkers, we’re storytelling creatures who occasionally use logic to justify what we already feel.
by ozlikethewizard | 2026-03-01 10:48:50+00:00
Another option is obsidian lets you set which folders should sync. So I have everything in one vault, and in my trusted environment I let have everything synced, work machine only gets the work folder, and windows gaming machine only gets required non-confidential stuff (i.e notes about stuff that isnt me).

Its nice to be able to review it all from one machine though
by littlestymaar | 2026-03-01 10:50:01+00:00
I don't think anyone should shed a tear for Khamenei's death, but I'm not convinced the current trend of regime decapitation is setting the world in a desirable direction.

I'm convinced that with current technology (namely, drones) any half competent state actor can easily assassinate any world leader, and I wonder if the recent US actions aren't going to make the practice commonplace, with dramatic destabilization risks. (For instance think about Air Force One being shot down during landing by an FPV drone controlled over LTE from somewhere in South America by a Cuban intelligence officer).
by lxgr | 2026-03-01 10:50:03+00:00
This should in theory be solveable by using a custom frontend and only using the various backend APIs as stateless inference providers, but everything I've tested falls flat on a few aspects: Chat history RAG and web search, and to a lesser extent tool use.

Yes, all of these are theoretically possible (the APIs now all support web search, as far as I know, there are RAG APIs too, and tool use has been supported for a while), but the various "chat" models just seem to be much better at using their first-party tools than any third-party harness, which makes sense that this is what they've been trained on.
by bartread | 2026-03-01 10:51:34+00:00
I think the interesting larger observation here is the perhaps both Microsoft and Apple peaked in their usability design between the mid-90s and late-aughts (I think Apple stayed at their peak for longer, particularly when you start thinking about the iPhone which, at the time, was streets ahead of what any other company was offering), and have both been on a down trend ever since.

Why is that though? Why does that appear to have to be the case given that neither seems anble to do annything but get worse nowadays? And why hasn’t any other player managed to step in and fill that void?

Clearly there are some broader forces and trends at play here.

Is it pressure to monetize in ever more intrusive, user-hostile, and “micro-tiresome” ways? Is it that they don’t really have to compete any more, or at least not with eachother?

What is going on here? I don’t understand. But I wish I did because then a way out might be easier to discern. Because - I still don’t think - Linux on the desktop (taking one aspect of the problem) is still necessarily ready to be the answer - certainly not outside of the technology, engineering, and scientific niches.
by primoco | 2026-03-01 10:52:08+00:00
Hi everyone,

I really needed a RAG setup for work docs that can't leave our servers – no OpenAI, no cloud leaks, nothing. So I ended up building this: RAG-Enterprise.

It's all local, zero external calls.

What it does (the parts that seem solid so far):

Setup is dead simple: ./setup.sh standard – grabs Docker, Ollama, Qdrant, FastAPI + React frontend. Takes maybe 15-60 mins depending on your machine and connection
Users log in with JWT, there are roles (basic user, power user, admin)
Handles PDF with real OCR (Tesseract does the heavy lifting), plus Word, PPT, Excel, markdown... Apache Tika parses most stuff
Backups/restores via rclone to tons of places – S3, Google Drive, OneDrive, SFTP, whatever (like 70 options)
Inference runs on Ollama – whatever models you pull (Llama 3.1, 3.2, Mistral, Phi...)
LangChain for chunking/embedding/retrieval, Qdrant as vector store
Clean chat UI to query your uploaded documents

License is AGPL-3.0. I get it, some orgs see that and nope out – if it gets traction maybe dual-license down the line.

Repo, docs and a quick GIF in the README: https://github.com/I3K-IT/RAG-Enterprise

Would love real feedback, the honest/rude kind especially:

Setup blow up on your rig?
What's missing to make it usable at work?
Any security/privacy facepalm I missed?
How to speed it up for 1000+ docs?

Thanks a ton for checking it out – hit me with questions or fixes!
by wesselbindt | 2026-03-01 10:53:23+00:00
One core principle behind determining whether the use of a weapon is a war crime is seeing if it can be used discriminately, i.e., if it can be targeted. So for example, the use of guns (though awful) is not a war crime, because using it requires you to point it at something and pull the trigger. You are in control of whether you shoot an enemy who is actively engaging, an enemy who is retreating, a field medic, a journalist reporting on the scene, a civilian who was not able to flee the area. With for example mustard gas, you cannot make this choice, and that's one of the two major reasons why the use of mustard gas is a war crime.

Even if you build in a self destruction mechanism to landmines(1), this indiscriminate nature remains.

On top of that, you mention something about peppering cities with land mines not being ok (and it wouldn't be), but I'm not convinced that anyone's doing that. And still civilians make up 90% of the victims.

Of course, there's another thing playing into that 90% figure, which is that, by and large, mines are not very effective against military tartgets because they have ample means to dispose of them. Given the fact that our target here is Russia, and not some poorly funded guerilla outfit, I think this should be taken into consideration.

Pairing their war crimey nature and their low efficacy, I personally cannot get behind withdrawing from the Ottawa treaty.

There is much more to say about this, and much more has been said about this. I would recommend giving

https://www.humanity-inclusion.org.uk/en/landmines-can-no-lo...

a skim. They give alternative, more effective, less inhumane, solutions to the problems that mines try (and largely fail) to solve.

(1) Which is ultimately a bit of a hypothetical exercise, because the nations that left the treaty, well, left the treaty. They didn't propose an amendment allowing for temporary mines, they left the treaty. And on top of that the failure rate for such smart mines is like 20%. You get 1/5th of a war crime I guess.
by pixelesque | 2026-03-01 10:53:38+00:00
> So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse.

On single monitor setups maybe: but on early OS X multi-monitor setups, you then had the farcical situation where the menu would only be shown on the "primary" display, and the secondary display didn't have any menu at all, so to use menus for windows that were on the secondary display, you had to move the cursor onto the other primary display where the menu was for all windows (or use keyboard shortcuts).

I think 10.6/7 (not sure exactly) was when they started putting the menu bar on both displays rather than just the primary.
by guerrilla | 2026-03-01 10:53:44+00:00
> One, they tried. They don’t have the capability.

No, they didn't, not at the peak of their power. They waited until many of their tools were hit and THEN responded. Everything they've done is unfortunately in self-defense after their capabilities have been extremely degraded. They sat around and waited for Israel to strike first every time.

> Two, that means more Iranians die. Cultures that choose pointless vengeance over pragmatic survival tend to get weeded out.

Again, you're missing the point. They are going to be weeded out no matter what.
by peteforde | 2026-03-01 10:53:56+00:00
ChatGPT knows what's in my bar and what types of base liquors I love and/or can't drink. It knows what fruit, syrups and mixes are in my fridge. It knows that my friend is allergic to mint. It knows that when I ask for recommendations, I tend to want a choice between spirit forward, tiki, martini and herbaceous.

ChatGPT knows the broad strokes of the 3-4 main hardware projects I have on the go, and depending on the questions I'm asking, it will often structure its responses in a way that differentiates based on which one I'm thinking about.

It knows what resistor and capacitor values I have on my pick and place machine, and when I ask for divider ratios it will do its best to calculate based on those values to the degree that it will chain 1-2 resistors together to achieve those ratios.

I knows what kind of solder I use, and has warned me about components with sensitive reflow temperature concerns.

It's an extraordinarily useful feature for engineering and drinking, two things that are commonly found in the same Venn diagram.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-03-01 10:54:04+00:00
I skipped the touchbar/buttery era, but before that the GPU/ballgate disaster plagued the MacBookPro lineup — pushed me away from Apple hardware for over decade!

My vision has since gotten bad enough that I can't really use laptops/phones well, anymore — but recently got a 15" MacBookAir, M3 pre-Tahoe (for bedtime youtubies).

The hardware is exceptional, battery life even more so... and I'll never update the operating system.
by AngryData | 2026-03-01 10:56:09+00:00
How does it change anything? Being an asshole should not be a crime, that is way too fine a line to ever be a productive or worthwhile endeavor. Should we arrest someone for being like "Jesus is a level 16 Lich" or saying god is vengeful and bloodthirsty or joke about wearing mixed fabrics? Even just straight up saying "I hate you and hate your religious beliefs" shouldn't be a crime, there is nobody who would claim being liked or agreed with was a right.
by ivan_gammel | 2026-03-01 10:56:18+00:00
The more code is out there, the worse is the average in the training dataset. There will be legacy approaches and APIs, poor design choices, popular use cases irrelevant for your context etc that increase the chances of output not matching your expectations. In Java world this is exactly how it works. I need 3-5 iterations with Claude to get things done the way I expect, sometimes jumping straight to manual refactoring and then returning the result to Claude for review and learning. My CLAUDE.md (multiple of them) are growing big with all patterns and anti-patterns identified this way. To overcome this problem model needs specialized training, that I don‘t think the industry knows how to approach (it has to beat the effort put in the education system for humans).
by petre | 2026-03-01 10:56:22+00:00
As perfectly echoed by Bob Dylan's Highway 61 song.

"Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored /
He was tryin' to create a next world war /
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor /
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before /
But yes I think it can be very easily done /
We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun /
And have it on Highway 61"
by bossyTeacher | 2026-03-01 10:56:50+00:00
I tried Claude recently (after they dropped the nonsensical requirement to give them your phone number) and I was surprised to see how significantly less sycophant it was. Chatgpt, unless you are talking hard science, tends to be overly agreeable. Claude questions you a lot (you ask for x and it asks you stuff like: why are you interested in x, or based on our previous convo, x might not be suitable to you, or I see your point but based on our previous convo, y is better than x, etc). Chatgpt rarely does that.

Of course, also OpenAI being ran by openly questionable people while Dario so far doesn't seem nowhere near as bad even if none of them are angels.
by maximedupre | 2026-03-01 10:58:32+00:00
Hey! I run a small competitor monitoring service for SaaS founders. One of the paid features lets you see what keywords a competitor ranks for on Google. I figured that's useful enough on its own, so I pulled it out as a free tool.

You just paste any website URL and it shows the top 10 keywords that site ranks for, with the Google position, monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and search intent. Takes about 3 seconds.
by nwellnhof | 2026-03-01 10:58:49+00:00
About a day after I resigned as maintainer, SUSE stepped in and is now maintaining the project. As announced here [1], I'm currently trying a different funding model and started a GPL-licensed fork with many security and performance improvements [2].

It should also be noted that the remaining security issues in the core parser have to do with algorithmic complexity, not memory safety. Many other parts of libxml2 aren't security-critical at all.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/976

[2] https://codeberg.org/nwellnhof/libxml2-ee
by gck1 | 2026-03-01 11:00:21+00:00
You could also use the same framework always - that's what I'm doing anyway. But you gotta remember that no matter how well you spec it, first iteration of the specs is going to suck anyway.

But you vibe-code it anyway and see what happens. You'll start noticing obvious issues that you can track back to something in spec.

Then you throw away the entire thing (the entire project!) and start from scratch. Repeat until you have something you like.

Incremental specing doesn't work though. You need a clean room approach with only important learnings from previous iterations. Otherwise agent will never pick a hard but correct path.
by psychoslave | 2026-03-01 11:00:39+00:00
I don't know, I started using a Mac only 3 years ago when joining my current job. The UX always felt so wrong on every matter to me. I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.

I would pick a default bare gnome 3 agaisnt any Mac os version UX without any hesitation.

With a lot of tools from third parties, it puts back the level to supportable, but that's the highest satisfaction level it ever procured to me. Rectangle and some alternative window switcher plus brew are the minimum to survive without going crazy after 2 minutes of exposition. Having finder always present in window switcher and no way to close/hide it? What a monstrosity!

I'm still looking for a working solution to select and paste with middle click.

Glad I don't have to use it out of work.
by modulared | 2026-03-01 11:00:43+00:00
Not having a required input, say when you try to reproduce a previous build of a package, is a separate issue to an input silently changing when you go to rebuild it. No build system can ensure a link stays up, only that what's fetched hasn't changed. The latter is what the hash in nix is for. If it tries to fetch a file from a link and the hash doesn't match, the build fails.

Flakes, then, run in a pure evaluation mode, meaning you don't have access to stuff like the system triple, the current time, or env vars and all fetching functions require a hash.
by naxtsass | 2026-03-01 11:00:52+00:00
Seedance 2.0's temporal consistency is definitely top-tier right now; it effectively mitigates the flickering and topological deformation issues that plague most diffusion-based video models. ByteDance’s low-level optimizations in spatio-temporal attention make physics simulations under high-dynamic motion feel remarkably grounded. Having a dedicated web-based entry point like SeeVideo is a huge productivity multiplier compared to the friction of mobile-only apps.