System card: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/3a4153c8-c748-4b71-8e31-aecbde944...
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Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with Cosmic Desktop Environment Released
2025-12-11 @ 19:03:45Points: 63Comments: 12
Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1
2025-12-11 @ 18:52:08Points: 61Comments: 19
Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
2025-12-11 @ 18:17:19Points: 82Comments: 103
GPT-5.2
2025-12-11 @ 18:04:47Points: 294Comments: 241
Litestream VFS
2025-12-11 @ 17:59:10Points: 101Comments: 32
Show HN: Sim – Apache-2.0 n8n alternative
2025-12-11 @ 17:20:11Points: 52Comments: 8
You can run Sim locally using Docker, with no execution limits or other restrictions.
We started building Sim almost a year ago after repeatedly troubleshooting why our agents failed in production. Code-first frameworks felt hard to debug because of implicit control flow, and workflow platforms added more overhead than they removed. We wanted granular control and easy observability without piecing everything together ourselves.
We launched Sim [1][2] as a drag-and-drop canvas around 6 months ago. Since then, we've added:
- 138 blocks: Slack, GitHub, Linear, Notion, Supabase, SSH, TTS, SFTP, MongoDB, S3, Pinecone, ...
- Tool calling with granular control: forced, auto
- Agent memory: conversation memory with sliding window support (by last n messages or tokens)
- Trace spans: detailed logging and observability for nested workflows and tool calling
- Native RAG: upload documents, we chunk, embed with pgvector, and expose vector search to agents
- Workflow deployment versioning with rollbacks
- MCP support, Human-in-the-loop block
- Copilot to build workflows using natural language (just shipped a new version that also acts as a superagent and can call into any of your connected services directly, not just build workflows)
Under the hood, the workflow is a DAG with concurrent execution by default. Nodes run as soon as their dependencies (upstream blocks) are satisfied. Loops (for, forEach, while, do-while) and parallel fan-out/join are also first-class primitives.
Agent blocks are pass-through to the provider. You pick your model (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, vLLM), and and we pass through prompts, tools, and response format directly to the provider API. We normalize response shapes for block interoperability, but we're not adding layers that obscure what's happening.
We're currently working on our own MCP server and the ability to deploy workflows as MCP servers. Would love to hear your thoughts and where we should take it next :)
Days since last GitHub incident
2025-12-11 @ 16:52:37Points: 165Comments: 91
Things I want to say to my boss
2025-12-11 @ 16:35:48Points: 185Comments: 150
Show HN: GPULlama3.java Llama Compilied to PTX/OpenCL Now Integrated in Quarkus
2025-12-11 @ 15:59:33Points: 16Comments: 1
tornado --devices tornado --version
# Navigate to the project directory cd GPULlama3.java
# Source the project-specific environment paths -> this will ensure the source set_paths
# Build the project using Maven (skip tests for faster build) # mvn clean package -DskipTests or just make make
# Run the model (make sure you have downloaded the model file first - see below) ./llama-tornado --gpu --verbose-init --opencl --model beehive-llama-3.2-1b-instruct-fp16.gguf --prompt "tell me a joke"
Deprecate like you mean it
2025-12-11 @ 15:52:30Points: 28Comments: 74
Launch HN: BrowserBook (YC F24) – IDE for deterministic browser automation
2025-12-11 @ 15:18:51Points: 45Comments: 26
Why we built this: When we were going through YC, we were a company that automated back-office healthcare workflows. Since the interoperability ecosystem in healthcare is so fragmented, we started using browser agents to automate EMRs, practice management software, and payment portals directly through the web. When we did, we ran into a ton of problems:
Speed: High latency on LLM calls vs. a scripting approach
Cost: We burned through tokens with all the context we needed to make the automations reasonably accurate
Reliability: Even with detailed instructions, context, and tools, agents tended to drift on multi-step tasks in unpredictable ways
Debuggability: When drift did occur, we were essentially playing whack-a-mole in our prompt and re-running the whole automation to debug issues (see above: speed and cost issues made this quite painful)
More and more we were just giving our agent scripts to execute. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that scripting is a better approach for web automation for these sort of use cases. But scripting was also too painful, so we set out to solve those problems with BrowserBook.
Under the hood, it runs a standalone TypeScript REPL wired directly into an inline browser instance, with built-in tooling to make script development quick and easy. This includes:
- A fully interactive browser window directly in the IDE so you can run your code without context switching
- A Jupyter-notebook-style environment - the idea here is you can write portions of your automation in individual cells and run them individually (and quickly reset manually in the browser), instead of having to rerun the whole thing every time
- An AI coding assistant which uses the DOM context of the current page to write automation logic, which helps avoid digging around for selectors
- Helper functions for taking screenshots, data extraction, and managed authentication for auth-required workflows.
Once you’ve created your automation, you can run it directly in the application or in our hosted environment via API, so you can use it in external apps or agentic workflows.
At its core, BrowserBook is an Electron app, so we can run a Chrome instance directly in the app without the need for cloud-hosted browsers. For API runs, we use hosted browser infra via Kernel (which is a fantastic product, btw), relying on their bot anti-detection capabilities (stealth mode, proxies, etc.).
Scripted automation can be unpopular because scripts are inherently brittle; unlike “traditional” software development, your code is deployed in an environment you don’t control - someone else’s website. With BrowserBook, we’re trying to “embrace the suck”, and acknowledge this “offensive programming” environment.
We’ve designed from the ground up to assume scripts will break, and aim to provide the tools that make building and maintaining them easier. In the future, our plan is to leverage AI where it has shown its strength already - writing code - to minimize downtime and quickly repair broken scripts as the deployed environment changes.
Browser agents promised to solve this by handing the reins to an LLM which can handle inconsistency and ambiguity. While we think there are some applications where browser agents can be genuinely helpful, tasks that need to be done reliably and repeatedly are not one of them.
We’d love for you to try it out! You can download BrowserBook from our website here: https://browserbook.com (only available for Mac so far, sorry!) And of course, we’d appreciate any feedback and comments you have!
An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions
2025-12-11 @ 15:01:44Points: 65Comments: 35
Pop Goes the Population Count?
2025-12-11 @ 14:30:28Points: 37Comments: 8
Show HN: An endless scrolling word search game
2025-12-11 @ 14:01:22Points: 5Comments: 2
The core game works without an account using the pre-defined games, but signing up allows you to generate games using any topic you can think of.
I’d love feedback on gameplay, performance, and whether the endless format feels engaging over time. If you try it, I’d really appreciate any bug reports or suggestions.
Thanks in advance!
Craft software that makes people feel something
2025-12-11 @ 13:45:08Points: 155Comments: 68
A “frozen” dictionary for Python
2025-12-11 @ 09:51:47Points: 174Comments: 123
The Cost of a Closure in C
2025-12-11 @ 07:21:33Points: 167Comments: 66
Patterns.dev
2025-12-11 @ 01:18:55Points: 517Comments: 121
Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
2025-12-10 @ 20:29:12Points: 770Comments: 296
Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
2025-12-10 @ 17:23:53Points: 538Comments: 241
Size of Life
2025-12-10 @ 16:02:57Points: 2423Comments: 271
Show HN: Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them
2025-12-09 @ 16:10:37Points: 85Comments: 34
I built this because I recently caught myself almost pasting a block of logs containing AWS keys into Claude.
The Problem: I need the reasoning capabilities of cloud models (GPT/Claude/Gemini), but I can't trust myself not to accidentally leak PII or secrets.
The Solution: A Chrome extension that acts as a local middleware. It intercepts the prompt and runs a local BERT model (via a Python FastAPI backend) to scrub names, emails, and keys before the request leaves the browser.
A few notes up front (to set expectations clearly):
Everything runs 100% locally. Regex detection happens in the extension itself. Advanced detection (NER) uses a small transformer model running on localhost via FastAPI.
No data is ever sent to a server. You can verify this in the code + DevTools network panel.
This is an early prototype. There will be rough edges. I’m looking for feedback on UX, detection quality, and whether the local-agent approach makes sense.
Tech Stack: Manifest V3 Chrome Extension Python FastAPI (Localhost) HuggingFace dslim/bert-base-NER Roadmap / Request for Feedback: Right now, the Python backend adds some friction. I received feedback on Reddit yesterday suggesting I port the inference to transformer.js to run entirely in-browser via WASM.
I decided to ship v1 with the Python backend for stability, but I'm actively looking into the ONNX/WASM route for v2 to remove the local server dependency. If anyone has experience running NER models via transformer.js in a Service Worker, I’d love to hear about the performance vs native Python.
Repo is MIT licensed.
Very open to ideas suggestions or alternative approaches.