skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: rtrvr.ai – AI Web Agent for Automating Workflows and Data Extraction
Hey HN,

I'm excited to share rtrvr.ai, a Chrome extension that brings the power of AI agents to your everyday web browsing. It's designed to automate complex web tasks, extract structured data from any website, and integrate with your favorite tools as you browse using AI Function Calling [ie: “Send this page summary as Slack message”].

The core idea is to let anyone, even non-developers, leverage the power of web automation and data extraction using natural language. Imagine being able to:

Automate lead generation: Extract hundreds of LinkedIn profiles to Google Sheets, complete with AI-generated, personalized intro emails.

Process PDFs in bulk: Pull data like revenue, expenses, and totals from hundreds of local or online PDFs directly into your spreadsheets.

Navigate and extract from paginated lists: Tell rtrvr.ai, "For each YC Partner, go to their LinkedIn profile and retrieve their name, headline, job, and college," and it'll do it.

Automate workflows across multiple tabs: For example, fill out job applications on Careers tab using information from the LinkedIn tab.

Function Calling: Integrate with APIs like Snowflake and Slack directly from your prompts using simple @ notation or letting the AI infer what tool to use with natural language.

GraphBot: Generate charts and visualizations from website data with natural language commands.

Recordings: Ground the agent with site interactions recordings to ensure accurate and repeatable task execution.

Sheet Context: Use Google Sheets data as context for your web tasks.

Scheduling: Run automations on a schedule in the background.

Sheets Workflow: You can feed a Google Sheet with a column of URLs (like LinkedIn profiles), and it will open each url as a tab, extract data, and even generate content (like intro emails) back into the sheet. It can handle multi-step workflows with prior output dependencies, effectively representing a DAG.

I see rtrvr.ai as a step towards a more intelligent and interactive web. I believe this tool can be a game-changer for marketers, sales professionals, SMBs, and anyone who needs to extract information from the web efficiently. Would love to hear your feedback, suggestions, and any use cases you can think of!

Website: rtrvr.ai
Chrome Store Listing: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rtrvrai/jldogdgepmc...
Youtube Intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wajCM6208cc
I think the 55% is the overall result, not the rating of a single submission.
> not a signal that there is a trend toward significantly higher wages

It wouldn't be a prediction if it was already true
Numbers Are Leaves
To be clear: this is a logo suggested by a person who isn't affiliated with the perl foundation, nor the roku foundation, so it's not so much new logo as it's a suggestion for a new logo by a community member.
I don’t see cuts to Medicare or SS. Medicaid will be gutted though.

Also skeptical of a 2025 recession. Likelihood increases by a lot in 2026 though.
> blessed with “the golden hands” in that I could almost always get protocols working.

Very funny. My friends and I never used the phrase "golden hands" but we used to say something similar: "so-and-so has 'great hands'".

But it meant the same thing.

I, myself, did not have great hands, but my comment was more about the intellectual process of conducting research.

I guess my point was that:

* I've already dealt with more talented researchers, but I still contributed meaningfully.

* Hopefully, the "AI" will simply add another layer of talent, but the rest of us lesser mortals will still be able to contribute.

But I don't know if I'm correct.
This is wrong thinking about evolution. The potentially beneficial mutations are already out there in the population. They gain dominance in the population after a large die-off of folks who don't have them and the remaining survivors reproduce.
I don’t think the 2-3x as much in 15 years time is likely to be true. When interest rates start out low there is much less scope for appreciation than when they start out high. So if you buy when mortgage rates are at 3% you can’t expect the big gains you get when mortgage rates fall.

My personal rule of thumb is that rents remain fairly stable as a proportion of earnings under balanced supply and prices are then a function of rents / mortgage rates.

Over the past 15 years median household income has gone from $50k to $80k while mortgage rates more than halved from 6.5% in 2006 to 3.1% in 2021. Most of that 2-3x increase is from the fall in rates.
Furthermore, the author mentions ClojureScript earlier in the piece.

I've not done much frontend work, but I'm not sure ClojureScript aficionados would generally feel that TS has much benefit over JS when CLJS is in the picture as well. Salt your JS to your own taste imo
IMHO, the mamul form is even better for golf, F(n) in O(n log n)
AIs are a "master of all trades", so it is very unlikely they'll ever be able to admit they don't know something. What makes them very unreliable with topics where there is little available knowledge.
Yup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42496587
I made a thing that told me the number of people who are more internet famous than me is equiv to the population of Albania, and lets you calculate how (ir)relevant you are. There are way more people who are micro-famous than I was expecting.
0.3B / 6.25B = ~5% which is pretty good. If they can boost it somehow then even better.
Thanks for the feedback! We want to add more model information to make it easier.
Intel has come a long way since butchering the Atom brand. When Atom was new, it had absolutely pitiful performance - much worse than what we got from its contemporaries, particularly considering how much power they took.

It's interesting to consider that this was the best that Intel had in the low power world in 2008, and this was after seeing how much of a misstep they made when they declined to work with Apple on processors suitable for the iPhone.

Even their later Atoms, like the Atom x7-E3950, were bad in real world performance, often being beat by low power AMD CPUs that were years older, like the Athlon 5350.

I'm surprised that Intel kept the Atom name after delivering such poor performance that "Atom" became synonymous with "woefully underpowered", but it seems to make sense that Atom is now just a low power, node optimized version of a previous full performance architecture.
Yes, electronics are often washed...in ultrapure water. Very briefly, and then immediately dried.

LCDs are definitely not sealed enough, many capacitors are electrolytic, and fiberglass is not impermeable to water (in fact, water-logged fiberglass is an issue for boats in areas where weather causes freeze-thaw cycles.)

Your dishwasher is full of mineral deposits, food waste particles, and likely quite a bit of mold. Getting rid of all of that would involve dissolving deposits with vinegar or citric acid, then running some lye or similarly aggressive treatment to get the mold and organic waste out. That's a lot of hassle.

You can't put "soap" in a dishwasher unless you want a giant bubble factory. So now you're looking at trying to find a specialty cleaner.

Most people's water is not nearly pure enough for the keyboard to not have issues afterward. You MIGHT get away with it if you thoroughly blasted it with compressed air and then dunked it in distilled water.

That's a huge amount of hassle.

Unless something has been spilled on the keyboard, just periodically brush out debris and then hit it with compressed air...
Currencies rarely "go away". They are usually replaced by new ones, and the government will buy the old currency and pay you in new currency. Imagine the mayhem if a government decided that all money everyone owned would suddenly be completely worthless!
I'm not sure this is still true. I'm just a hobbyist but esp-idf, for example, supports C++23.
LangSmith integrates with OpenTelemetry: https://blog.langchain.dev/opentelemetry-langsmith/
Sure, but is this host incapable of performing 1k req/s? It's a crazy world if we have a DBMS that can parse a query, execute reads and writes against a database file, and return the results faster than it can be string concatenated into an html response.
Hypothesis Around the Pricing of Agentic AI
Infinite side quests with AI are going to get wild.
And one might also wonder still if we need a general language model to mow the grass or just a simpler solution towards to problem of driving a mower over a fixed property line automatically. Something you could probably solve with wwii era technology, honestly.
Weren’t concepts supposed to fix this? Apparently they made it into the 2020 standard. I haven’t touched the language in many years - did they not help?
Userscripts > extensions
The most nasty thing about antipsychotics is that getting off them causes psychotic symptoms - even in healthy people. So you if you get psychotic for some reason (even meditation can induce it) and start taking those drugs, you can be later very easily gaslighted into a serious mental disorder.
Probably because not using mutable default arguments is python 101. Just something you don't do or think about. But this is indeed clever use of that gotcha.
I think the first and most important part is the context. In ChatGPT I need to feed in the context every time. An AI agent sitting in my spreadsheet already has access to all my sheets and workbooks. Therefore it can help me with the task right then and there.

Similarly, an AI on a writing platform such as Overleaf can suggest better sentences because it already has the context of the entire essay.

The second important part is actions. ChatGPT can output a table, but an AI agent in my spreadsheet app can directly make changes to the tables. Similarly, the AI agent can summarize an online meeting, and email / slack the team members their respective tasks as discussed.
>the cellulose from a paper teabag

You have a mistaken understanding of paper teabags. They are made of paper, but during manufacturing the paper bag is sprayed with plastic to finish it

(And no, I’m not talking about the silky plastic pyramid style ones. Just the cheap paper ones)

Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10389239/
Thankfully they break down the results per material, so you can care about the other materials and ignore the cellulose results if you like. So, yes, the different types of material are distinguished from one another.

> The tea bags used for the research were made from the polymers nylon-6, polypropylene and cellulose. The study shows that, when brewing tea, polypropylene releases approximately 1.2 billion particles per milliliter, with an average size of 136.7 nanometers; cellulose releases about 135 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 244 nanometers; while nylon-6 releases 8.18 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 138.4 nanometers.
Another interesting set of ssh apps is https://pico.sh/ . These focus on networking and lightweight hosting (pastes, simple blog), all via ssh or rsync.
Show HN: Experiments in AI-generation of crosswords
Hi HN, I've been experimenting on-and-off over the years trying to automatically generate crosswords [1]. Recently I've been feeling like my results are good enough that I want to share them and see what other people think. I'm not trying to claim that these could appear in, say, the NYT in their current state, but honestly the velocity of progress makes me feel like I will inevitably be able to automatically generate NYT-quality crosswords within just a year or so.

A write-up is here: https://abstractnonsense.com/crosswords.html

And you can play the crosswords here: https://crosswordracing.com
(They should work well on both desktop and mobile, and there's a leader-board for each crossword if you want to leave your name when you solve one).

[1]: Just in case anyone is interested, my very first attempt at this problem was way back in 2006! I used multiple wordlists (e.g. list of British monarchs, with reign dates), and wrote little functions to generate clues from each list (e.g. "British monarch who ruled from {date1} to {date2}"). Even with randomized synonym substitution and similar tricks, this approach was too labor-intensive, and the results too robotic, for it to work well. Can't complain though, that project led to me getting hired as the first engineer at Justin.TV!
Does that work due to Ruby having Python-like broken semantics for evaluating the default value expressions for optional arguments? (I have no idea.) Or does it work due to the object denoted by {...} being a real literal?

If the default value expression is evaluated on each call to the function in which it is required rather than at function definition time, and if the { ... } syntax is a constructor that creates a fresh object, then this wouldn't work; one of those two conditions (or both) must be broken.
Narrative Jailbreaking for Fun and Profit
The annoying cleanup and wasted coffee seems specific to the espro.
Cleaning a normal one is really quick and I don't mind the remainder of fines as they quickly settle at the bottom of the cup.
I don’t quite understand this - by 30k pages, is this the number of entries in your index? Did you mean 30M?

At the <100k scale I just full compute / inner product directly, and I don’t mess with vector stores or added complexity. No ANN algo needed — they’ll all be slower than actual exact kNN re ranking. (10k7684 =30MB, a scan over it and a sort is on the ~100us or faster). frankly, I’ve even sent at the 5k scale to client and done that client side in JS.

Often, I find i use an ANN algo / index to get me my nearest 10k then I do final re ranking with more expensive algorithms/compute in that reduced space.

The original HNSW paper was testing/benchmarking at the 5M-15M scales. That’s where it shines compared to alternatives.

When pushing to the 1B scale (I have an instance at 200M) the memory consumption does become a frustration (100GB of ram usage). Needing to vertically scale nodes that use the index. But it’s still very fast and good. I wouldn’t call it “dangerous” just “expensive”.

Interestingly though, I found that usearch package worked great and let me split and offload indexes into separate files on disk, greatly lowered ram usage and latency is still quite good on average, but has some spikes (eg. sometimes when doing nearest 10k though can be ~1-3 seconds on the 200M dataset)
Yes, Freud was who I was referencing; the references to the mother, pacifier, and constantly looking for approval from women made me think of Freud's fringe theories about the Oedipus complex. He was also big into the symbolism of dreams, and thought that one explanation for trains in your dreams were the phallic representations of your repressed sexual desires.
> No the transfer of defense spending to social spending was an explicit policy in the 80s/90s, that was refered at the time as "the peace dividends".

The idea of "Peace dividend" at no point implied a dichotomy between social spending and military spending. It was referring to the purported trade-off between military spending and the economy as a whole, in all of its aspects: the taxation or public debt needed to maintain a strong military, civilian workforce vs military manpower, civilian industry vs military industry, and yes, military vs civilian government expenditure — of which "social" spending is just one of many.

Note that the idea of the "Peace dividend" was popularised by George H.W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher, hardly proponents of increased social spending.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_dividend
I always find it interesting when people assume that just because something is out of their awareness is dead…

I learned Perl not too long ago and it is an absolute beast at text processing, a lot less annoying than Python and pip install and cpan seems to have everything in it, implemented multiple times.

The language doesn’t hold your hand at all, doesn’t have tooling like fancy LSP and such, but it is quite usable. With that said, I’d probably hate to use it in a team since you can do the same thing in a dozen different ways!
There are only 2 hard problems in computer science:

1. Naming things

2. Memori^H^Hdamn it^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hization.

P.S. I see what you did there. You botched your cache invalidation, and so lost the answer.
I wish I could go back to the days of doing almost anything at all without having to tell a server what a motorbike or traffic light is.
You avoid a lot of things in a monolith. But normal services mapped to your org chart tend to be pretty nice. I hate how people spam "micro" service talk as if that's the end game for putting a physical boundary between software.
Actually I think going for zero would be an admirable goal here, if pursued in a healthy balance stopping short of obsessive phobia-driven mania. But that aside, nobody is denying that there are other sources of various harmful substances besides kitchen utensils. In no way, shape, or form does that invalidate the perfectly logical sentiment of "I wish I could have zero synthetic plastics and flame retardants entering my body so I at least stopped putting plastic utensils in my mouth and food." You do not need more studies, measurements, thresholds, comparison of relative contribution of various sources, or a feasibility analysis of sealing yourself in a giant glass terrarium to justify every word of that basic sentiment including "zero."
> Windows has become the "It just works" platform.

This makes me cringe every time I see it. Seriously. Maybe if you ignored the security issues and drivers that didn't work with new releases and performance issues, old versions of Windows worked well.

Windows 11 is an endless battle with things that don't work. Number one on the list is laptops that don't sleep. It's to the point that when I hear "that sound" I start looking for the laptop with the closed lid that didn't sleep. My son had to disable his mousepad because it would randomly move the cursor and click while he was typing. My wife couldn't get the camera on hers to work. The list could go on...
As others have mentioned, Tesla is already implementing similar advancements. More broadly, a new AI framework called Genesis has emerged, capable of training robots in just minutes using purely synthetic data. It generates a virtual environment for the robot to "perceive" and train within, even though this environment doesn't physically exist.
This is just one example. Another could involve an AI specifically trained to diagnose illnesses based on genetic information in DNA. The insights gained from this virtual scientist could then cross-pollinate with other AIs, enhancing their training and capabilities as well.
It was a knock-off/copy of apps that pivoted or shut down in previous years(circa 2015) for the same reasons. They simply failed to take the lessons learned from apps like Secret, Yik Yak, and Whisper about facilitating wanton anonymous post on the interwebs
See section 2 of the paper.
For context for our younger audience members: Perl was the Python of its day back a little over 20 years ago. It was, at one time, hugely popular.

Perl is still hidden in dark corners all over Linux distributions and even macOS (which is why it still ships with Perl, but not Python).
What part do you think is going to become obsolete? Because Math isn't about "working out the math", it's about finding the relations between seemingly unrelated things to bust open a problem. Short of AGI, there is no amount of neural net that's going to realize that a seemingly impossible probabilistic problem is actually equivalent to a projection of an easy to work with 4D geometry. "Doing the math" is what we have computers for, and the better they get, the easier the tedious parts of the job become, but "doing math" is still very much a human game.
Encyclopedia Britannica Is Now an AI Company
Organizing and100k articles in a folder hierarchy automatically
And in a few years, IBM will buy Xerox and own Lexmark again.
Ask HN: How do I implement getting real sources from my mini search engine?
Being inspired from a reddit post I'm trying to build a mini search engine(https://kolpz.vercel.app) that gives user exactly what it needs. Concise and straightforward results. I implemented prefixes feature like define, question, pdf, time, weather. For now I added these 5 prefixes. But for the pdf prefix, I want it to give direct pdf download links for the asked book or research paper. I made a very concise prompt for it too. Exactly mentioned which sources to use to find the books or papers for free. But it's generating(Gemini API) totally made up links. Not even a single link is real.

I want to get real source links. How can I do it with Gemini AI? What additional API's can I use to make this happen?

(Reducing the temperature doesn't work that well either)
Perl was obsolete like 10 years ago.

15 is pushing it.

Perl 6 never caught on.

And I should have written "obsolete" in quotes, because it's basically very idiomatic sloppy python and no one is saying python is obsolete.

Démodé is a better description.
I’ll be happy to see all the dark matter, dark energy stuff explained away.
Simply speaking, "l" describes the number of nodes. In the same sense that a particle in a box with sin(nx) wave function has more nodes the higher energy (or momentum) state it is in.

As for why l==0 has no rotation going on at all, one would say that this should be expected. Qualitatively, the symmetric sphere does not change with rotation, so how would we tell if it is rotating or not? And perhaps the next step is controversial, but if there is no way to tell, maybe there is no dependence? This is a similar argument to why the electric field of an infinite plane is constant with respect to distance from it.
cough We're not all that bad... cough
Humans can exhibit some mild torpor like behavior in extreme winter conditions. We are not ‘exclusively’ cold adapted lifeforms. Even if the Neanderthals had more adaptations for surviving in northern climates that does not mean they are exclusive polar specialists like the arctic fox or the polar bear.
Yeah but the selection for who survives is going to be based not on a specific gene, but on membership in the group with the will and power to kill for the remaining arable land.
I use the Mate desktop, which means I've been using the same desktop for 20 years. And that's the way it should be.
Agreed, if you have to have a web server and separate worker servers, then Postgres is likely better than a weird network layer on top of SQLite. But I'd question the true need for need separate worker servers. Is it for performance or functionality, or just hand-wavey stuff like "best practices" or "modern" or "scalability" without any hard numbers attached? If a single server can handle 100,000 simultaneous users, that's quite "scalable".

I guess my point is, a single cloud VM with the (web) app server and a SQLite database will take you VERY far these days in terms of performance and concurrent users. The web server becomes your client-server layer, which can possibly eliminate the need for a separate client-server interface on the database end. Of course each app is different, but it's worth taking a hard look at whether you need that additional server & network connection (i.e. a bunch of app servers sharing the same database, that can't be done with an API). It's good to delete any part or process that you can.

Cloud vendor developer-marketing and resume-driven-development has pushed the industry into ever more complicated distributed infrastructures, but I suspect the needs of 99% of businesses could be handled much more simply, with vertical scaling if needed (larger VM class) before diving into kubernetes, clustering, load balancing, lambda, microservices, replication, etc.
You’re saying “less legislation” in more words.