skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Pywebagent – an AI that turns website functionality into Python APIs
Hello everyone!

My friend Ori Kabeli and I have been playing around with GPT-4 Vision as a way to control websites and complete complicated tasks online.
We created a small proof of concept python package called pywebagent. pywebagent allows performing high level tasks in websites,
accessible to developers as simple python functions.
It is highly experimental, and only sometimes works, but we think it still might be useful to all you tinkerers out there.
Feel free to contribute!

Example Use Case:
You can order things from amazon with one line of code.

pywebagent.act(
"https://amazon.com/",
"Order a plush bunny",
email="<email>",
password="<password"
)

We'd love to get your feedback!
Feel free to comment with feedback, suggestions, and reach out for collaborations. Whether you're a seasoned developer or a curious hobbyist, we'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

To get started, visit our GitHub page:
https://github.com/pywebagent/pywebagent

We're excited to hear your thoughts!

Best,
Maxim & Ori
My hunch,

The history of open source has been that companies who have customers with massive customization requirements land on the open source side of the equation. Companies who don't view a component as core to their product often land in a similar state.

There is almost certainly at least one major firm that wants a GPT-5 like offering, but doesn't view the model as core to their business (Meta). It's also wholly unclear if large models are necessary - or simply convenient. In a similar veign, it's unclear that data must be labeled by humans - the open source data situation is getting better by the day.

I'd expect that we'll see OpenAI hold an edge for many years, maybe we'll see a number two player as well for the foundation model, but after that everybody else will base off an open source FM and maybe keep the fine tuning/model augmentation proprietary.
Ah fuck starlink’s actually orbital drones waiting to drop
As I understand it, the Turing test doesn't require the computer to convince people it's a particularly smart human.

After all, most humans when asked to explain shor's algorithm in iambic pentameter would just say no.
I bet this comments section will be normal.
I especially enjoy using Clojure for these puzzles since the REPL makes interactively checking your ideas fast.
I read it as, a joke.
This looks good, need to try.

Just a suggestion -
If you also include, what do you do, your interests, hobbies etc. It will try to give you a more personalized answer.
Same for iOS Firefox
It's more about budget and eye, though. A skilled CG industry veteran with no time or $$$ budget and a deep immersion in in say r/combatfootage and physics could probably make something that would pass for real. It's just that all of those talents and circumstances don't really come together. Hmmm.
Not sure about alternative paywall-free sources, but here's one I found:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/30/anduril-unveils-roadrunner...
Sometimes I have an epiphany loading the dishwasher. That should count as billable time, no?
Not for actual or potential super geniuses similar in situation to Einstein at the Swiss patent office.

By definition they spend very little time and effort on 'context-switching'.
Before Firefox added the feature there were a couple of browser extensions called 'readability'. This for example can enable it per domain, there might be some who can do it for every website https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/permanent-readabili...
Eating an animal-product based lunch will use more energy than years of iPhone usage. This is certainly not a "every little bit helps" situation - it is about managing our attention on things which actually matter, when there is a war going on to distract us from it.
In this case, hindsight merely justifies the foresight: at no point did satellite return-to-Earth provide any economic justification for the shuttle program, even in conjunction with other imagined benefits.
> Now... who cares?

I care. So should you, and so should everyone here on Hacker News.

> What does that being a fact mean? It means nothing.

It means everything. It means what they really want is to more or less control what arguments you can pass to memcpy. The only way they can possibly do that is to destroy computing as you and I know it.

Think about it, about what they're really doing. All information is bits and copying bits is a fundamental computer operation. In order to restrict that, computers need to be made so that they will run all the programs, except the ones that invalidate intellectual property. Most likely they'll be made so they can run only the programs they approve. Government signed binaries, programming licenses.

Surely everyone here agrees that such a future is dystopian.
No problem. If you find the right one, link it please. This whole idea is super interesting, and I'd love to learn more about it.
OS X is derived from NeXTSTEP, first released in 1989 and based on 4.3BSD-Tahoe. Meanwhile, this was updated to 4.3BSD-Reno and ported to the x86 as 386BSD, from which NetBSD was forked in early 1993; it was subsequently reorganized to become FreeBSD in late 1993. NeXTSTEP and OS X later imported a few system components from FreeBSD, while replacing others, particularly replacing parts of the kernel with Mach.
This is such a huge gap. Why there is no widespread more impromptu collaboration product I have no idea. I try to get people to use the excalidraw shared whiteboard any chance I get, at least that doesn't require the uncomfortable on-camera appearance.

There's got to be some other process we could try to recreate (to the extent possible) that "together" feeling of the office. Maybe set aside an hour when team calls into a meeting but just keep on working as normal? And can banter/ask random questions etc. Otherwise things are just too formal.
Looking at other comments, evidently a lot of HN readers didn't!
Am I the only one whose soul hurts looking at this syntax? Not a ruby user, but as soon as I saw the use of = to define the function body I immediately thought of all the ambiguous statements one could write with that. And voila, the whole irks and quirks section validated those fears.

Please explain to this ruby noob if you have time, why use =? Why not some other less used symbol or symbol pair instead? What are they trying to achieve with this?
I would argue the savings in corporate real estate occupancy cost and associated expenses are enough savings for the company, and I’m bearing the cost of maintained an office. As a sibling points out I also work more overall by not commuting or hanging out at a water cooler. At prior megacorps I was a senior person at and was in these discussions in key markets occupancy costs can be $15,000/person. That’s not chump change.

However I would take 10% less to stop having the debate.
They already do so. The card data is not stored 'in plain text', but encrypted at rest. But for the Hotels there are interfaces that allow these to be exposed to the Hotel employees (accesses of such information are logged). Just prior to displaying them they are decrypted.
Seeing the title of the article, it was surprising surprised to not use the use of xmlhttprequest to invent the category of JavaScript driven apps, by Microsoft no less.

Let’s be sure to call the programming style of using this function Ajax, and then create Microsoft Outlook for web as the first browser side Javascript app and modern JavaScript framework.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
It's amusing how they released it without nailing the arity first.

Amusing in the sense of aaah good old Ruby still having the same development style that made me stop using it long ago.
Apple and Paramount Considering Discounted TV+ Streaming Bundle
If execs cared about the macro economy they would simply pay their workers more. But they don't, they care about their company. They are hired, paid, and legally obligated to act in the best interest of the company. Not the country.
This screenshot[1] is a great example of what you're talking about.

* Awful typography (especially bold text)

* Ugly gray background in foreground window

* Windows 95-era buttons in the foreground window

* Weird left padding in the (ugly) dock

* Terminal window has window controls on the right for some reason, and they look like they're from Windows?

All that said, it's still in preview (v0.4pre4), and these things can all be corrected. But I think they'd do well to slap "early preview" all over the place so people don't write it off.

[1] https://ravynos.com/images/ravyn_0.4.0_pre_desktop.png
But this also means you're fucked if you're blind and taking blindfold off doesn't make any difference.

This is not about religion, man. This is about accessibility.
It effectively moves hundreds of millions of people every year between every major city at faster than car, slower than plane speeds. It may not be immediately profitable to the rail line operator but the factories that employ the workers that use the lines certainly benefit, no?
This can be made better or worse by processes and tools.

After years and years in Slack workplaces, I’m now witnessing firsthand how Teams can effectively throw sand in the gears of remote work, simply due to how its UI is designed. The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings. It kills serendipity, splits attention in unhelpful ways, and, thanks to the astonishing bad idea of how they crammed a threaded model—and only a threaded model—into a single-channel chat interface for Teams chats, makes those feel disorganized and high-friction. It’s like the tool was deliberately designed to create ad-hoc, hidden silos.

A simple choice of tool can make a big difference in the effectiveness of remote workers. Business processes and such can have just as big an effect. A lot of that stuff improves in-person work, too (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) so adjustments to improve remote work tend not to even be trade-offs.
Model alignment protects against accidental harms, not intentional ones
My observations agree with your anecdote, but in my experience it was the youngest employees who go into the office for social interaction. Meaning, fresh grads to ~26 year olds. They openly admitted they didn’t want to sit in their 600 sqft apartments all day and that they didn’t have anyone to talk to otherwise.

This sounds more like a way deeper loneliness and community problem than a workplace problem.
Anyone using Eliza for more than a couple of minutes will quickly pick up on its tricks. Even in their cherry picked example it barely makes it a few messages in before the illusion starts to shatter with awkward lines like "Do you think coming here will help you to not be unhappy?". It might pass the turing test once or twice by sheer luck but it's clearly not competitive with a human conversing in general.
I think you missed the point. It isn't the CEO who cares about the specific building they're in. It's people like the Blackrock CEO on who massive amounts of investors (and by extension your retirement portfolio) depend on. Or the people who own the newspapers depending on a healthy economy, of which a huge percentage is commercial real estate. Or, as GP said, these basically-oligarchs that sit on a few boards and can steer CEOs to make nonsensical return-to-office plans to advance their investment strategies and view of how the world should work. It's a lot bigger than a single tenant in a single office.
Anthrobots: Scientists build tiny biological robots from human tracheal cells
My perspective is that the Turing Test is now obsolete. Two months ago Peter Norvig and a friend of his wrote an article arguing that the goal posts have moved in measuring AI. I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982, and when I watched my niece’s family last night passing around my iPhone running ChatGPT Pro, just the looks on their faces as they were having spoken conversations, in all matter of topics, and asking for images to be generated and refined, I felt that AI is here.

LLMs remind me of Plato’s metaphor of humans only seeing the shadows on a cave wall, not true reality. LLMs are trained on text and images and are disembodied. The learn from an information lossy projection, but still an interesting “reality.”

We are likely to get real AGI when APIs are embodied, and toss in a few new technologies and optimizations to run cheaply on edge devices.
Cicadas Are So Loud, Fiber Optic Cables Can 'Hear' Them
Harman Phoenix – new color negative film
> To be fair, if something is on Mac, it is usually on Linux.

That's true only for CLI apps. My most frequently used GUI apps on Mac:

- MailMate

- Affinity Photo

- ACDSee Photo Studio

- NetNewsWire

- ApolloOne

- Textual

- Transmit

- iA Writer

None of them are available on Linux. Most of them are Mac-only (i.e. no Windows version either).
I had the same initial reaction. Seeing something written that can be amounted to $ > person looks wrong.

Yet, importance is subjective. If you're working on your own pet code for your own pleasure, business has no importance. If you want to transform that into your main revenue source, business is the most important thing, because no amount of user love will transform into practical revenue if your software serves no-one.
Maybe,

you :"Which is readily available to any being with a theory of mind."

I'm saying humans do not have this ability. We don't have a valid proven theory of mind, and even if we did, that knowledge would not change how our brains process inputs, and somehow give us access to how we processed an answer. We don't know our 'intention'
I went to a Polo game at a big indoor ring and was amused that the barn cats sat in the bleachers with the crowd at a height where they could look over the wall and see the action.
Having enjoyed "electro blues", for some years I had been searching on YT for "electro bluegrass" without success but today it seems the genre is finally populated. (although from what I have found there's still plenty of opportunity to discover the proper cross between high lonesome and EDM)
There's an ongoing work on a stress test for this. https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15608
BMI Won't Die
Anecdotally having spent several years at my current job in person and now several years fully remote (whole company, full remote) I find it much much easier to do quick huddles and swarm on tasks/ideas. Before you had to convince everybody you wanted to talk to to leave their desks and hopefully find a free conference room and you had to premeditate this by days for scheduling (and free conference rooms). Now we can meet almost right away, no physical context switching.

As with most things it really depends, also having some people be remote and some in person is always going to disadvantage the remote workers and set them up for failure in management’s eyes so no surprise there.
Ask HN: How are you working with pnpm and local development with Docker?
Just starting to look into switching from yarn v1 to pnpm and using it in my local docker environment. I see a lot of examples on using pnpm with docker for the final production build, but am having trouble figuring out the best way to do it for local development.

I usually have a docker-compose.yml file like this

---
services:
node:
build:
context: .
volumes:
- ".:/app"

...

where I bind mount my source code into the container and whenever I need to interact with the package manager, I would shell into the container and run `yarn add/build/etc...`

When doing this with pnpm, I notice that a `pnpm install` creates the `.pnpm-store` directory in `/app`, because of the bind mount, I see the directory in my source folder. I understand this is because of the limitations of how you can't hardlink across filesystems. I can easily gitignore it but I don't really see other people doing this.

Also, with this setup it seems like I'm not getting the benefit of pnpm's global store since every project would have its own local "global" store.
You should test new compiler versions before updating your CI setup. If you get new warnings, you fix them before deploying.
It's really 6 - the ones in remote offices effectively serve as remote workers for the purposes of management effort & management style. One of them is a singleton anyway - he has a desk in the office that is local to him, but he's the only one on the team there, and I don't really care whether he comes in.

Also about half of the rest of the org is remote - folks that collaborate with my team, but who I don't have reporting-line responsibility over. So there's a good sampling across 30-50 people who I interact with as teammates as well.
BoorishBear, please stop with the aggressive, condescending tone. You seem to have some productive counterarguments but they're getting lost in your disrespectful language.
> Why would we expect our reasoning methods to be the only or even the most efficient? If it can get to the correct conclusions, shouldn't that be what matters?

This has epistemological roots.

Knowledge is commonly defined as true justified belief. If I correctly predict that in exactly 10 years from now, it will be a rainy day, that is not knowledge, as while my belief ended up true it was not justified.

Ultimately it is very easy to make correct predictions, you just need to make a lot of them, which is why whenever someone makes successful predictions, we scrutinize their justifications.
That's the same thing I thought: it was the younger people who yearned for the office. Junior employees tended to do worse with WFH, especially those who were onboarding, whereas more senior folks were more comfortable working without much supervision. Younger people also don't tend to have larger homes, with dedicated, quiet office space. Younger employees pinned more of their social life on workmates than older employees who might already have established families and community ties.

Anecdotally, I know that on my team, the younger teammates were the most eager about returning to the office. I'm nearly 50 and wouldn't go back in if you held a gun to my head.
The Turing test can be thought of as having strong and weak versions. The strong Turing test establishes a ceiling past which, philosophically speaking, a candidate is indistinguishable from a person. To pass the strong Turing test, you need a candidate who can get convince the most knowledgeable scientist of their humanity, as well as tell the most discerning 5-year-old a compelling bedtime story. The strong Turing test is hard to beat but just about every conscious human being can do it.

The weak Turing test establishes a floor below which we're pretty sure the intelligence on the other side is not a person. CAPTCHA did this nicely for a long time. False negatives aren't uncommon (ever been distracted or tired enough to miss clicking on a stoplight or fire hydrant?) Weak Turing tests are useful for practical reasons. Any quick and dirty "test" is going to be a weak Turing test.

The strong Turing test remains unconquered for now. It remains useful, because its use is primarily philosophical. Once it's been solidly beaten, Pandora's box will be fully open on artificial people.
Holiday Season Gift Ideas for Techies
Run natively on edge devices, personalized AI assistants will get wild and weird
"pouring money into" something is an ambiguous phrase, I'd say tending towards the negative in context, and they do mention renewables later, they talk about their alleged flaws and limitations. And then mislead about the amount of solar production.

There's definately some degree of framing going on here that you'd perhaps not expect from a magazine except in advertorial content.
The result isn't owed to the zeta function. For example, Ramanujan derived it by relating the series to the product of two infinite polynomials, (1 - x + x² - x³ + ...) × (1 - x + x² - x³ + ...). (Ok, it's the square of one infinite polynomial.)

Do that multiplication and you'll find the result is (1 - 2x + 3x² - 4x⁴ + ...). So the sum of the sequence of coefficients {1, -2, 3, -4, ...} is taken to be the square of the sum of the sequence {1, -1, 1, -1, ...} (because the polynomial associated with the first sequence is the square of the polynomial associated with the second sequence), and the sum of the all-positive sequence {1, 2, 3, 4, ...} is calculated by a simpler algebraic relationship to the half-negative sequence {1, -2, 3, -4, ...}.

The zeta function is just a piece of evidence that the derivation of the value is correct in a sense - at the point where the zeta function would be defined by the infinite sum 1 + 2 + 3 + ..., to the extent that it is possible to assign a value to the zeta function at that point, the value must be -1/12.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw is a youtube video (Mathologer) which goes over this material fairly carefully.
>How do you know we wouldn't be off even better with less alienation and exploitation?

Depends who is the "we" here. Much of the lifestyle and perks of living in the developed west are dependent on other less fortunate people being exploited: cheap cocoa and cheap coffee grown in the poorest African nations, cheap bananas, asparagus and other fruits and vegs in your supermarket, cheap electronics made in China with mineral mined by kids in Africa, cheap clothes made in the poorest SE Asian countries, cheap semiconductors etched in Taiwan, etc.

Entire industries and supply chains we take for granted in the west as being commodities now, depend on what is basically modern slavery and environmental destruction we intentionally turn a blind eye on.

So if all those exploited people were to be be less exploited and have the prosperity to choose other careers than to work in mines, farms or sweatshops to supply the wealthy west, then those "we" would be much better off, but then the westerners "we" would be less well off as now we wouldn't be able to afford those commodities we take for granted at the new non-slavery prices.

>No, it would be cool if we were fully fledged human beings and shared some of the shitty work that needs doing more fairly, and stopped exploiting each other.

And who gets to fairly decide the global sharing of that shitty work? Because I don't know anyone who would like to scrub toilets for a living, or collect minerals form piles of scrap, mine uranium and lithium, etc. Do we draw straws? Or the more likely scenario for humanity, have a world war, and the victors get the nice comfy work and the losers the shitty work.

Yes, it would be cool if the human race would give up on the greed driven self enrichment and exploitation of others, and reach a utopic enlightenment where all the shitty work would be done by robots instead of the desperate people of the poorest countries, but we're very far away from that.

A good first step, let's start properly taxing our 1% wealth hoarding corporate elite who thrive on the human and environmental exploitation (cough Saudi Aramco, Nestle, Exxon, cough) while amassing more wealth than the 99% could spend in a lifetime, tax free in offshore heavens.

But since we can't even collectively crack down on that simple thing, I don't have any hopes we'll be able to solve the rest of humanity's issues without any major world conflict and decimation resetting the monopoly board.
Might be a DNS lookup issue.
Is it possible they just wanted you to book direct so they don't pay the Booking.com commission?
Miriway – bringing Wayland to your desktop
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483353 thread from earlier. Warning, contains a bunch of russian trolls.
"Blows up drones"

Is there any reason this would be limited to drones, and not manned aircraft? Or is that just to make the announcement more palatable?
I think it might be enough to tax all electronic ads per viewer-second. It's what directly or indirectly drives most mistreatment of users. Such a tax could be pretty popular too.