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4,157 ideas

Drive any macOS app in the background without stealing the cursor

Hi HN, Francesco from Cua here. I hacked this project together last weekend, inspired by the Codex Computer-Use release and lessons learned from deploying GUI-operating agents for our customers.The main problem: when a UI automation process controls a desktop app today, it usually takes over the human’s session. Your cursor moves, keyboard focus gets stolen, windows jump to the front, and you have to stop working until the agent is done. That is why we have historically avoided encouraging users to run these processes directly on their host machine, instead relying on VMs or GUI containers for concurrency and background execution.But computer-use - the tools we give agents to operate computers like humans - does not scale cleanly that way. As models get smarter, agents need to share hosts safely, run in the background, and avoid collisions with the human or other agents using the same machine.We realized macOS has no first-class API for "drive this app without touching the cursor". CGEventPost routes through the hardware input stream, so it moves your cursor. CGEvent.postToPid avoids the cursor warp, but Chromium treats those events as untrusted and silently drops clicks at the renderer boundary. Activating the target app first raises the window and pulls focus, defeating the point of background execution.Cua Driver is our attempt at a real fix: a background computer-use driver for macOS that lets an agent click, type, scroll, and read native apps while your cursor, frontmost app, and Space stay where they are. The default interface is a CLI, so it is easy to script or call from any coding agent shell.Try it on macOS 14+:/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trycua/cua/main/libs/cua-d...)"The first internal use case was delegated demo recording. We ask Claude Code to drive an app while 'cua-driver recording start' captures the trajectory, screenshots, actions, and click

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

72FL score
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A free ESG stock screener that publishes its losses and methodology

Hey HN, JSS(JumpstartSignal) is a free, ESG-filtered daily stock screener. I built it after some really badly-timed quantum computing stock buys, so I felt I needed to learn more about systematic, longer-horizon approaches and the underlying technicals instead of chasing themes. Three things about it that might be of interest:1. Methodology is fully documented at https://jumpstartsignal.com/how-it-works/ 5-stage pipeline, 54 signals tested individually plus 1,836 combinations evaluated, walk-forward validation across 25 hold periods. Nothing hand-tuned to a single backtest window.2. Many wins, misses, and losses are published as case studies e.g. https://jumpstartsignal.com/case-studies/nvda/ walks through the 32 times the system flagged NVDA starting at $5.44 in 2018. https://jumpstartsignal.com/case-studies/sedg/ shows a -49% loss, and https://jumpstartsignal.com/case-studies/tsla/ explains why the system never flagged Tesla (it passed Stages 1 and 2 on 207 days but only peaked at 20/100 in scoring vs the 70 needed for OPPORTUNITY tier). https://jumpstartsignal.com/results/ also shows the 10 best entries alongside the 10 worst.3. A genetic algorithm picked the signal weights, but constrained to maintain alpha across multiple market regimes (otherwise it overfits to a single bull market). The constraint dropped some "best in backtest" configurations that only worked 2018-2021.Topline: 2012-2025 backtest at SPOTLIGHT + OPPORTUNITY tier produced +163% alpha vs SPY (results page has the per-trade breakdown).Daily watchlist emailed free; reports + results + case studies are publicly browsable without signup.Happy to take questions about methodology, what the system gets wrong, or why specific tickers landed where they did.

Hacker News4mo agoToolAI

72FL score
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