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
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... :)
Pretty.c (Score: 151+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gM2V
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gM2V
Show HN: RF Hunter – Find hidden cameras and other devices (Score: 150+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gLKe
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gLKe
This project is an RF Signal Scanner built using an ESP32, AD8317 RF detector, and various other components. It's designed to detect and measure RF signals in the environment and display the signal strength on an OLED display. It's useful to find hidden cameras, wiretapping devices, and other RF-enabled devices.
TSMC cuts off client after discovering chips sent to Huawei (Score: 152+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gLYS
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gLYS
Playstation Vita Architecture (Part 1) (Score: 151+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gL5K
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gL5K
What happens when you make a move in lichess.org? (Score: 151+ in 14 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gJhJ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gJhJ
Goldman and Apple 'illegally sidestepped' obligations to credit-card customers (🔥 Score: 150+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gKA4
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gKA4
Show HN: Agent.exe, a cross-platform app to let 3.5 Sonnet control your machine (🔥 Score: 160+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gKwk
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gKwk
Adding row polymorphism to Damas-Hindley-Milner (Score: 152+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gJ2B
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gJ2B
Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written? (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/c/6gziP
I recently came across the concept of "useless" programs - pieces of code that serve no practical purpose but are fun, creative, or challenging to write. These could be anything from elaborate ASCII art generators to programs that solve imaginary problems.
I'm curious to hear about the most interesting or creative "useless" programs the HN community has written. What was your motivation? What unexpected challenges did you face? Did you learn anything valuable from the experience?
Some examples to get the ball rolling:
1. A program that prints the lyrics of "99 Bottles of Beer" in binary.
A text-based game where you play as a semicolon trying to find its way to the end of a line of code.
A script that translates English text into Shakespearean insults.
Share your creations, no matter how quirky or impractical. Let's celebrate the joy of coding for coding's sake!
Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license (🔥 Score: 155+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gHuB
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gHuB
Meta Bans Accounts Tracking Private Jets for Zuckerberg, Musk (🔥 Score: 153+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gH6F
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gH6F
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
NetGuard – rootless Android outbound per-app OSS firewall, like LittleSnitch (Score: 150+ in 11 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gLSv
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gLSv
Async Rust in Three Parts (Score: 150+ in 20 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gK4v
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gK4v
AWS data center latencies, visualized (Score: 152+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gM46
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gM46
Show HN: Wall-mounted diffusion mirror that turns reflections into paintings (Score: 152+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gLuw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gLuw
Probably pay attention to tokenizers (Score: 152+ in 12 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gJwb
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gJwb
Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week (🔥 Score: 156+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gLhg
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gLhg
The global surveillance free-for-all in mobile ad data (Score: 153+ in 9 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gJBD
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gJBD
An Illustrated Guide to Maritime Signal Flags (❄️ Score: 150+ in 5 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6guPP
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6guPP
Solving Sudoku in Python Packaging (❄️ Score: 153+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gB3G
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gB3G
The Forest Service Is Losing 2,400 Jobs–Including Most of Its Trail Workers (Score: 150+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gHpH
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gHpH
How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance (🔥 Score: 152+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gHjM
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gHjM
The Tragedy of Google Books (2017) (Score: 152+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6gGqa
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6gGqa