Friday, October 31, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Futurelock: A subtle risk in async Rust

Futurelock: A subtle risk in async Rust
28 by bcantrill | 0 comments on Hacker News.
This RFD describes our distillation of a really gnarly issue that we hit in the Oxide control plane.[0] Not unlike our discovery of the async cancellation issue[1][2][3], this is larger than the issue itself -- and worse, the program that hits futurelock is correct from the programmer's point of view. Fortunately, the surface area here is smaller than that of async cancellation and the conditions required to hit it can be relatively easily mitigated. Still, this is a pretty deep issue -- and something that took some very seasoned Rust hands quite a while to find. [0] https://ift.tt/tOr7IlP [1] https://ift.tt/h3jp7iL [2] https://ift.tt/7othqR4 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrv5Cy1R7r4

New top story on Hacker News: My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4
30 by secure | 22 comments on Hacker News.


Thursday, October 23, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Tommy – Turn ESP32 devices into through-wall motion sensors

Show HN: Tommy – Turn ESP32 devices into through-wall motion sensors
7 by mike2872 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! I would like to present my project called TOMMY, which turns ESP32 devices into motion sensors that work through walls and obstacles using Wi-Fi sensing. TOMMY started as a project for my own use. I was frustrated with motion sensors that didn't detect stationary presence and left dead zones everywhere. Presence sensors existed but were expensive and needed one per room. I explored echo localization first, but microphones listening 24/7 felt too creepy. Then I discovered Wi-Fi sensing - a huge research topic but nothing production-ready yet. It ticked all the boxes: could theoretically detect stationary presence through breathing/micromovements and worked through walls and furniture so devices could be hidden away. Two years and dozens of research papers later, TOMMY has evolved into software I'm honestly quite proud of. Although it doesn't have stationary presence detection yet (coming Q1 2026) it detects motion really well. It works as a Home Assistant Add-on or Docker container, supports a range of ESP32 devices, and can be flashed through the built-in tool or used alongside existing ESPHome setups. I released the first version a couple of months ago on Home Assistant's subreddit and got a lot of interest and positive feedback. More than 200 people joined the Discord community and almost 2,000 downloaded it. Right now TOMMY is in beta, which is completely free for everyone to use. I'm also offering free lifetime licenses to every beta user who joins the Discord channel. You can read more about the project on https://ift.tt/hgiKJyr . Please join the Discord channel if you are interested in the project. A note on open source: There's been a lot of interest in having TOMMY as an open source project, which I fully understand. I'm reluctant to open source before reaching sustainability, as I'd love to work on this full time. However, privacy is verifiable - it's 100% local with no data collection (easily confirmed via packet sniffing or network isolation). Happy to help anyone verify this.

Friday, October 17, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down IP Rights Holders

GOG Has Had to Hire Private Investigators to Track Down IP Rights Holders
34 by haunter | 14 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: We packaged an MCP server inside Chromium

Show HN: We packaged an MCP server inside Chromium
8 by felarof | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, we just shipped a browser with an inbuilt MCP server! We're a YC startup (S24) building BrowserOS — an open‑source Chromium fork. We're a privacy‑first alternative to the new wave of AI browsers like Dia, Perplexity Comet. Since launching ~3 months ago, the #1 request has been to expose our browser as an MCP server. -- Google beat us to launch with chrome-devtools-mcp (solid product btw), which lets you build/debug web apps by connecting Chrome to coding assistants. But we wanted to take this a step further: we packaged the MCP server directly into our browser binary. That gives three advantages: 1. MCP server setup is super simple — no npx install, no starting Chrome with CDP flags, you just download the BrowserOS binary. 2. with our browser's inbuilt MCP server, AI agents can interact using your logged‑in sessions (unlike chrome-devtools-mcp which starts a fresh headless instance each time) 3. our MCP server also exposes new APIs from Chromium's C++ core to click, type, and draw bounding boxes on a webpage. Our APIs are also not CDP-based (Chrome Debug Protocol) and have robust anti-bot detection. -- Few example use cases for BrowserOS-mcp are: a) *Frontend development with Claude Code*: instead of screenshot‑pasting, claude-code gets WYSIWYG access. It can write code, take a screenshot, check console logs, and fix issues in one agentic sweep. Since it has your sessions, it can do QA stuff like "test the auth flow with my Google Sign‑In." Here's a video of claude-code using browserOS to improve the css styling with back-and-forth checking: https://youtu.be/vcSxzIIkg_0 b) *Use as an agentic browser:* You can install BrowserOS-mcp in claude-code or Claude Desktop and do things like form-filling, extraction, multi-step agentic tasks, etc. It honestly works better than Perplexity Comet! Here's a video of claude-code opening top 5 hacker news posts and summarizing: https://youtu.be/rPFx_Btajj0 -- *How we packaged MCP server inside Chromium binary*: We package the server as a Bun binary and expose MCP tools over HTTP instead of stdio (to support multiple sessions). And we have a BrowserOS controller installed as an extension at the application layer which the MCP server connects to over WebSocket to control the browser. Here's a rough architecture diagram: https://dub.sh/browseros-mcp-diag -- *How to install and use it:* We put together a short guide here: https://ift.tt/59c8yhG Our vision is to reimagine the browser as an operating system for AI agents, and packaging an MCP server directly into it is a big unlock for that! I'll be hanging around all day, would love to get your feedback and answer any questions!

New top story on Hacker News: Forgejo v13.0 Is Available

Forgejo v13.0 Is Available
5 by birdculture | 0 comments on Hacker News.


Sunday, October 12, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Nielsen Norman Group on iOS 26 usability

Nielsen Norman Group on iOS 26 usability
10 by ulrischa | 0 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Agent Shell 0.5 Improvements

Agent Shell 0.5 Improvements
10 by xenodium | 1 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant – The Contemporary Horror of AI

Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant – The Contemporary Horror of AI
15 by measurablefunc | 2 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions

Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions
9 by alpaca121 | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I’ve always liked having background noise while working or falling asleep, but I got frustrated that most “white noise” or ambient sound apps are either paywalled, stuffed with ads, or try to upsell subscriptions for basic features. So I made Ambi, a small iOS app with a clean interface and a set of freely available ambient sounds — rain, waves, wind, birds, that sort of thing. You can mix them, adjust volume levels, and just let it play all night or while you work. Everything works offline and there are no hidden catches. It’s something I built for myself first, but I figured others might find it useful too. Feedback, bugs, and suggestions are all welcome. https://ift.tt/TVhNL4C...

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: I built a local-first podcast app

Show HN: I built a local-first podcast app
13 by aegrumet | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I worked on early podcast software in 2004 (iPodder/Juice) and have been a heavy podcast consumer ever since. I wanted a podcast app that respects your privacy and embraces the open web—and to explore what's possible in the browser. The result is wherever.audio, which you can try right now at the link above. How it works: It's a progressive web app that stores all your subscriptions and data locally in your browser using IndexedDB. Add it to your home screen and it feels native. Works offline with downloaded episodes. No central server storing your data—just some Cloudflare/AWS helpers to smooth out browser limitations. What makes it different: - True local-first: Your data stays on your device - Custom feeds: Add any RSS feed, not just what's in a directory - On-device search: Search across all feeds and episodes, including your custom ones - Podcasting 2.0 support: Chapters, transcripts, funding tags, and others - Auto-generated chapters: For popular shows that don't have them - AI-powered discovery: Ask questions to find shows and episodes (this feature does send queries to a 3rd party API, and also uses anonymized analytics while we work out the prompts) - Audio-guided tutorials: Interactive walkthroughs with voice guidance and visual cues The basics work well too: Standard playback features, queue management, speed controls, etc. I'm really interested in feedback—this is more passion project than business right now. I've been dogfooding it as my daily podcast app for over a year, and I'm open to exploring making it a business if people find it valuable. Curious if there are unmet needs that a privacy-focused, open web approach could address.

Sunday, October 5, 2025

New top story on Hacker News: What GPT-OSS leaks about OpenAI's training data

What GPT-OSS leaks about OpenAI's training data
48 by fi-le | 1 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: ut – Rust based CLI utilities for devs and IT

Show HN: ut – Rust based CLI utilities for devs and IT
12 by ksdme9 | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, I find myself reaching for tools like it-tools.tech or other random sites every now and then during development or debugging. So, I built a toolkit with a sane and simple CLI interface for most of those tools. For the curious and lazy, at the moment, ut has tools for, - Encoding: base64 (encode, decode), url (encode, decode) - Hashing: md5, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512 - Data Generation: uuid (v1, v3, v4, v5), token, lorem, random - Text Processing: case (lower, upper, camel, title, constant, header, sentence, snake), pretty-print, diff - Development Tools: calc, json (builder), regex, datetime - Web & Network: http (status), serve, qr - Color & Design: color (convert) - Reference: unicode For full disclosure, parts of the toolkit were built with Claude Code (I wanted to use this as an opportunity to play with it more). Feel free to open feature requests and/or contribute.