14849
Top stories from https://news.ycombinator.com (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot Also check https://t.me/designer_news Contacts: @philr
Plastic chemical phthalate causes DNA breakage, chromosome defects, study finds (Score: 150+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gRsw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gRsw
OpenFeature – a vendor-agnostic, community-driven API for feature flagging (Score: 150+ in 14 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gQdf
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gQdf
Quit Social Media (2016) (Score: 150+ in 18 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gPu7
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gPu7
Smarter Than 'Ctrl+F': Linking Directly to Web Page Content (Score: 151+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gQHU
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gQHU
The brain's waste clearing lymphatic system shown in people for first time (Score: 150+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gQq2
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gQq2
The Lion of St. Mark's Square in Venice Is Chinese (Score: 150+ in 17 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gNUV
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gNUV
Why Safety Profiles Failed (Score: 150+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gPHZ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gPHZ
Understanding Gaussians (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gERs
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gERs
Bitwarden SDK relicensed from proprietary to GPLv3 (🔥 Score: 158+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gPUW
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gPUW
Post World War II Food (Score: 151+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gNSH
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gNSH
Security research on Private Cloud Compute (Score: 150+ in 6 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gNYS
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gNYS
Quantized Llama models with increased speed and a reduced memory footprint (🔥 Score: 152+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gPfj
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gPfj
Launch HN: Skyvern (YC S23) – open-source AI agent for browser automations (Score: 155+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gNGt
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gNGt
Hey HN, we’re Suchintan and Shu from Skyvern (https://www.skyvern.com). We’re building an open source tool to help companies automate browser-based workflows using LLMs.
Our open source repo is at https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/Skyvern, and we're excited to share our cloud version with you (https://app.skyvern.com) :)
Skyvern allows you to define a single (or a series of) goal-based prompts to instruct an agent to complete complex tasks on websites. Here’s a quick demo of Skyvern: https://www.loom.com/share/76b231309df74a528061fcf102e1967f
We built this to solve a specific problem: building browser automations often requires companies to either hire people and scale out operations teams to do tedious manual work, or hire developers to use products like UI-Path or Selenium to build automations.
Code-based solutions always run into the same problem: they’re brittle (wow this website added a new pop-up dialog and my script broke), and fail to achieve the same objective across multiple websites (how can I fill out a contact-us form on hundreds of different websites?)
We did a Show HN a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706004), and
since then, we’ve onboarded customers for a wide variety of use cases: generating insurance quotes on websites like Geico.com; applying to jobs on websites like lever.co; automating filing permits in local government portals; registering new corporations for employment identification; fetching invoices from hundreds of different portals such as hydroone.com; automating purchasing on a handful of e-commerce websites like zooplus.com; and filling out contact us forms on a bunch of random smb websites (such as HVAC websites).
To be able to service all of these, we’ve built and open-sourced quite a few interesting features:
(1) a fully-featured React application allowing you to see every action Skyvern is taking in real-time;
(2) livestreaming browser instances to allow our users to see what Skyvern is doing when running inside of a docker container;
(3) authenticated sessions, integrating with Bitwarden and allowing users to specify Email + Phone + QR-code based 2FAs;
(4) “workflows” allowing users to chain multiple goal-based prompts together, which can handle tasks like invoice downloading, or automating purchasing pipelines;
(5) processing HTML Elements (ex. identifying + summarizing SVGs) and performing website interactions (ex. Iterating over dynamic autocompletes to fill in address information correctly)
(6) “cached workflows”, allowing Skyvern to memorize previous interactions (ie text inputs) and re-use them in future runs.
We’ve also been blessed with a few model advancements to solve some of the cost concerns the community brought up. Skyvern’s token costs went down 80% from $15 / 1M tokens (GPT-4V) to $2.50 / 1M tokens (GPT-4O)
Despite the model costs going down 80%, Skyvern is still quite expensive to run, so we give every new user $5 of credits to try it out and see if it can be useful for you.
We would be honored if you could give it a try at https://app.skyvern.com and share some feedback with us, and we look forward to any and all of your comments!
How I Got a Digital Nomad Visa for Japan (❄️ Score: 152+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gB2p
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gB2p
Show HN: 2048 turned 10 this year, I built an updated version to celebrate (🔥 Score: 152+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gN4L
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gN4L
Hi all!
My name is Gabriele Cirulli, I’m the original creator of 2048. Ten years ago, someone posted 2048 on HN[1] and suddenly it seemed like everyone was playing it. Back then, I wrote a bit about my experience during those weeks[2].
Even after all these years, that experience still feels a bit surreal to me. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who connected with the game, whether in small or significant ways, and for the stories shared along the way. Some people expressed how they were going through tough times and found some comfort, however small, in playing 2048.
At the start of last year, I wanted to breathe new life into the game as it was starting to show its age. I quit my job last October to work on 2048 full time and spent a year building this new version (the original took just 5 days!). I wanted to pay tribute to what made 2048 great while modernizing and polishing the experience.
The idea of adding powerups came when Prime Gaming and I connected to see if we could create a special version of 2048 for their members, with some exclusive extras. Some of those powerups made it into the main game, though there’s still a Classic[3] mode just like the original for those who prefer a more hardcore experience. The old site is also still online[4].
2048 is now my full-time focus, and I’m excited about the ways it can keep improving. I wanted to share this update with the community where it all began, both for a bit of nostalgia and to hear your thoughts and feedback!
Thank you all so much!
— Gabriele
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566
[2]: gabrielecirulli/2048-success-and-me-7dc664f7a9bd">gabrielecirulli/2048-success-and-me-7dc6" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@gabrielecirulli/2048-success-and-me-7dc6...
[3]: https://play2048.co/classic
[4]: https://classic.play2048.co
Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care much more about battery life (🔥 Score: 157+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gRH6
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gRH6
Brush – A new compatible Gaussian splatting engine (Score: 150+ in 19 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gPmH
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gPmH
Yes, we did discover the Higgs (Score: 154+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gKyM
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gKyM
Rustls Outperforms OpenSSL and BoringSSL (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gFts
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gFts
Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020) (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gJa9
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gJa9
Boeing 787s must be reset every 51 days or 'misleading data' is shown (2020) (Score: 150+ in 12 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gPwq
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gPwq
Israel launched a dozen attacks on UN troops in Lebanon, says leaked report (Score: 150+ in 11 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gPmy
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gPmy
Zigler: Zig NIFs in Elixir (Score: 151+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gP3z
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gP3z
iOS 18.2 Lets EU Users Delete App Store, Safari, Messages, Camera and Photos (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gLuU
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gLuU
Never Missing the Train Again (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gJyt
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gJyt
Show HN: Satoshi9000 analog BTC key generator (mechanical) (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6gLuQ
I built this machine so I could generate Bitcoin keys that I could trust. Air-gapped and simple to use and understand (mechanical).
The Satoshi 9000 demo: https://youtu.be/bJiOia5PoGE
The key value proposition of the machine is that it generates analog randomness in the physical world and converts it into digital (1’s and 0’s) randomness. Seamlessly.
But it occurs to me that it may have other uses beyond crypto keys for your own use, such as:
* Randomized clinical trials. Clinical trials need a high degree of transparency for ethical reasons; also, for legal reasons should it come to light after the trial has ended that patient selection and treatment selection was not random or in some way biased (say, by the researchers themselves). The machine described herein can provide that transparency to young and old patients, technical and non- technical.
* Non-technical management. Many network engineers in need of security keys have bosses that are non-technical. Such managers might prefer security keys (and their generation) which are easier for them to understand.
* Estate planning. Suppose members of a family were to inherit digital assets (such as
Bitcoin, for example). Not all members of the family are technical and understand Bitcoin. However, each will still need to generate a secure Bitcoin key to receive their share of the inheritance. The machine described herein might help in that task because its source of randomness is more easily understood by laypeople and each can generate their own private key in private (in isolation with the machine).
* Anywhere where the users have to have an intuitive understanding of how the randomness is being created; whether they are 5 years old, or 95 years old, and all ages in between.
I'm curious to know if any of the folks over at HN can think of other use cases?
Cable companies ask 5th Circuit to block FTC's click-to-cancel rule (🔥 Score: 150+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gNYU
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gNYU
Show HN: I built a task manager that separates "do" and "due" dates (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gKae
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gKae
Hi HN,
I’m the founder of Zesfy, a productivity app that I’ve been developing over the past few years. It’s designed to seamlessly integrate your tasks with your calendar, allowing you to transform your to-do lists into actionable events in just seconds. Here are some of its key features:
- Task Progress: Automatically update your progress based on subtasks completed
- Step: Create step-by-step breakdown of the subtask
- Target: Organize tasks with due date
- Session: Insert multiple tasks to calendar event
- Space: Filter event from specific sets of calendars
JetBrains Rider is now free for non-commercial use (🔥 Score: 150+ in 56 minutes)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gNtb
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gNtb
Ask HN: Website with 6^16 subpages and 80k+ daily bots (Score: 154+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6gJwm
Last year, just for fun, I created a single index.php website calculating HEX colors to RGB. It takes 3 and 6 digit notation (ie. #c00 and #cc0000) and converts it to RGB value. No database, just single .php file, converting values on the fly.
It's little over a year old and now every day there's 60k-100k bots visiting and crawling the shit out of two-trillion-something sub pages...
I am out of ideas what to do with this site. I mean, it's probably one of the largest websites on the Internet, if counted by sub-pages...
What cool experiment/idea/stuff should I do/try with this website?
I'm sure AI could be (ab)used somehow here... :)