MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: BrowserOS -- browser agents with GPT-OSS, local llms
by felarof | 2025-08-22 17:27:00+00:00
Hi HN – we're the founders of BrowserOS.com (YC S24), and we're building an open-source agentic web browser. We're a fork of Chromium and our goal is to let non-developers create and run useful agents locally on their browser.

--- When we launched a month ago, we thought we had the right approach: a "one-shot" agent where you give it a high-level task like "order toothpaste from Amazon," and it would figure out the plan and execute it.

But we quickly ran into a problem that we've been struggling with ever since: the user experience was completely hit-or-miss. Sometimes agent worked like magic, but other times the agent would get stuck, generate a wrong plan, or just wander off course. It wasn't reliable enough for anyone to trust it.

This forced us to go back to the drawing board and question the UX. We spent the last few weeks experimenting with three different ways a user could build an agent:

A) Drag-and-drop workflows: Similar to tools like n8n. This approach creates very reliable agents, but we found that the interface felt complex and intimidating for new users. One tester (my wife) said: "This is more work than just doing the task myself." Building a simple workflow took 20+ minutes of configuration.

B) The "one-shot" agents: This was our starting point. You give the agent a high-level goal and it does the rest. It feels magical when it works, but it's brittle, and smaller local models really struggle to create good plans on their own.

C) Plan-follower agents: A middle ground where a human provides a simple, high-level plan in natural language, and the LLM executes each step. The LLM doesn't have to plan; it just has to follow instructions, like a junior employee.

--- After building and trying all three, we've landed on C) as the best trade-off between reliability and ease of use. Here's the demo https://youtu.be/ulTjRMCGJzQ

For example, instead of just saying "order toothpaste," the user provides a simple plan:

1. Navigate to Amazon

2. Search for Sensodyne toothpaste

3. Select 1 pack of Sensodyne toothpaste from the results

4. Add the selected toothpaste to the cart

5. Proceed to checkout

6. Verify that there is only one item in the cart. If there is more than one item, alert me

7. Finally place the order

With this guidance, our success rate jumped from 30% to ~80%, even with local models. The trade-off: users spend 30 seconds writing a plan instead of just stating a goal. But they get reliability in return. Note that our agent builder gives a good starting plan, and then the user has to just edit/customize it.

--- You can try out our agent builder and let us know what you think. We're big proponents of privacy, so we have first-class support for local LLMs. You can try GPT-OSS via Ollama or LMStudio and it works great!

I'll be hanging around here most of the day, happy to answer any questions!
by diggan | 2025-08-22 17:27:10+00:00
I used tar/unzip for decades I think, before moving to 7z which handles all formats I throw at it, and have the same switch for when you want to decompress into a specific directory, instead of having to remember which one of tar and unzip uses -d, and which one uses -C.

"also always extracts into a subdir" sounds like a nice feature though, thanks for sharing another alternative!
by otoolep | 2025-08-22 17:27:20+00:00
Post author here. Few things.

You are right that when someone (a human) submits a PR it didn't cost me anything (short of my time to review it). But those folks are not a team, not someone I could rely on or direct. Open-source projects -- successful ones -- often turn into a company, and then hire a dev team. We all know this.

I have no plans to commercialize rqlite, and I certainly couldn't afford a team of human developers. But I've got Copilot (and Gemini when I use it) now. So, in a sense, I now do have a team. And it's allowed me to fix bugs and add small features I wouldn't have bothered to in the past. It's definitely faster (20 mins to fire up my computer, write the code, push the PR vs. 5 mins to create the GitHub issue, assign to Copilot, review, and merge).

Case in point: I'm currently adding change-data-capture to rqlite. Development is going faster, but it's also more erratic because I'm reviewing more, and coding less. It reminds me of when I've been a TL of a software team.
by wildzzz | 2025-08-22 17:27:45+00:00
I had a QA inspector asking me a question on teams about some procedure steps before we ran a test. I answered them and he replied back with this message absolutely dripping in AI slop. I was expecting "ok thanks I'll tell them" and instead got back "Thank you. I really appreciate your response. I'll let them know and I'm sure they will feel relieved to know your opinion." Like wtf is that. I had to make sure I was talking to the right guy. This guy definitely doesn't talk like that in-person. It's not my opinion and I highly doubt anyone was worried to the point they'd feel relief to hear my clarification.
by antasvara | 2025-08-22 17:28:21+00:00
For what it's worth, that's how the Montessori school I went to worked. I have my critiques of the full Montessori approach (too long for a comment), but the thing that always made sense was mixed age and mixed speed classrooms.

The main ideas that I think should be adopted are:

1. A "lesson" doesn't need to take 45 minutes. Often, the next thing a kid will learn isn't some huge jump. It's applying what they already know to an expanded problem.

2. Some kids just don't need as much time with a concept. As long as you're consistently evaluating understanding, it doesn't really matter if everyone gets the same amount of teacher interaction.

3. Grade level should not be a speed limit; it also shouldn't be a minimum speed (at least as currently defined). I don't think it's necesarily a problem for a student to be doing "grade 5" math and "grade 2" reading as a 3rd grader. Growth isn't linear; having a multi-year view of what constitutes "on track" can allow students to stay with their peers while also learning at an appropriate pace for their skill level.

Some of this won't be feasible to implement at the public school level. I'm a realist in the sense that student to teacher ratios limit what's possible. But I think when every education solution has the same "everyone in a class goes the same speed" constraint, you end up with the same sets of problems.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-22 17:28:28+00:00
You pay the current owners as of the date of dissolution. The current owners bought into the HOA from the past owners, and thus assume future liabilities (or profits) from the HOA.

Edit: If/when it becomes known that there will be some kind of a payout, people selling their homes will need to adjust the price and/or expect some kind of credit from the buyer at closing.
by bityard | 2025-08-22 17:29:01+00:00
I am a big fan of his channel but in a lot of his videos lately, the tone has been somewhere between holier-than-thou and outright preachy. Just because you spent a week researching a semi-obscure topic enough to present about it on YouTube of all places doesn't make you an authority on the matter, and it absolutely doesn't mean you're suddenly qualified to dismiss people who disagree with your conclusions.

I prefer his videos where the vibe was more along the lines of, "Hey, I've been playing with this neato old technology lately, what say we nerd out about it for 38 minutes or thereabouts?"
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-22 17:29:26+00:00
£75 a month seems very reasonable for sports nerds, compared to the cost and availability in the past

People don’t want to ly for content, that’s as old as the hills.

I don’t do sport, and I wouldn’t fund such a terrible exploitative industry (televised sports is all about getting people hooked on gambling), but I’ve certainly spent that much for entertainment I do like in the past - and far more. A night at the theatre will cost a lot more than subscribing to all the sports channels. A weekly cinema visit too.
by strix_varius | 2025-08-22 17:30:08+00:00
This article was a well-thought-out one from someone who has obviously really used Go to build real things.

I quite like Go and use it when I can. However, I wish there were something like Go, without these issues. It's worth talking about that. For instance, I think most of these critiques are fair but I would quibble with a few:

1. Error scope: yes, this causes code review to be more complex than it needs to be. It's a place for subtle, unnecessary bugs.

2. Two types of nil: yes, this is super confusing.

3. It's not portable: Go isn't as portable as C89, but it's pretty damn portable. It's plenty portable to write a general-purpose pre-built CLI tool in, for instance, which is about my bar for "pragmatic portability."

4. Append ownership & other slice weirdness: yes.

5. Unenforced `defer`: yes, similar to `err`, this introduces subtle bugs that can only be overcome via documentation, careful review, and boilerplate handling.

6. Exceptions on top of err returns: yes.

7. utf-8: Hasn't bitten me, but I don't know how valid this critique is or isn't.

8. Memory use: imo GC is a selling-point of the language, not a detriment.
by surajrmal | 2025-08-22 17:30:19+00:00
newpavlov seems to operate in a theoretical bubble. Until something like he describes is published publicly where we talk more concretely, it's not worth engaging. Requiring special buffers is very typical for any hardware offload with zero copy. It isn't a leaky abstraction. Async rust is well designed and I've not seen anything rival it. If there are problems it's in the libraries built on top like tokio.
by genshii | 2025-08-22 17:30:27+00:00
Fair, but I think the JavaScript ecosystem is unique in that the language is very separate from the thing that executes/compiles it. When you write Go, 99.9% of the time you're writing for the Go compiler.

When you write JavaScript (or TypeScript that gets transpiled), it's not as easy to assume the target is Node (V8). It could be Bun (JavaScriptCore), Deno, a browser, etc.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-08-22 17:30:27+00:00
It's fascinating seeing all the comments elsewhere anytime Waymo starts testing in another city along the lines of, "ah, but how will they handle X, Y, and Z here?? Checkmate, robots!" despite having already launched service in several other cities.

Granted, NYC is the biggest city in the US, so maybe that sort of reaction is more reasonable there than when people in Dallas or Boston do it.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-22 17:30:50+00:00
If your portfolio of 100 internet companies in 2000 included 99 that went under and AMZN, you'd still be well above water after many years of being below water.

The problem today is that essentially nobody IPO's anymore so it's basically impossible to own 100 AI companies to ensure you include the next AMZN. NVDA is likely the CSCO of AI companies, but what's the AMZN?
by kelem | 2025-08-22 17:30:55+00:00
I played around with Convex and tried an integration with dbcrust, but it feels quite different from conventional databases. I really like the idea of moving business logic as close as possible to the database, but I can’t see a natural way to integrate it — it feels a bit forced. I read this article: https://stack.convex.dev/translate-sql-into-convex-queries , but it suggests that dbcrust would need to deploy tasks to a Convex instance. I’m not sure that’s the best approach, and I don’t see any clear alternative. I’d be very glad to hear any suggestions on this. I’d love to integrate Convex into dbcrust since convex is such a great product.
by zzzeek | 2025-08-22 17:31:46+00:00
Go is the kind of language you use at your job, and you necessarily need to have dozens of linters and automated code quality checks set up to catch all the gotchas, like the stuff with "err" here, and nobody is ever going to get any joy from any of it. the entire exercise of "you must return and consume an error code from all functions" has been ridiculous from go's inception, it looked ridiculous to me back when I saw it in 2009, and now that I have to use it for k8s stuff at work, it's exactly as ridiculous as it seemed back then.

With all of that, Go becomes the perfect language for the age of LLMs writing all the code. Let the LLMs deal with all the boilerplate and misery of Go, while at the same time its total lack of elegance is also well suited to LLMs which similarly have the most dim notions of code elegance.
by saguntum | 2025-08-22 17:32:01+00:00
Plenty of other responses, but I just wanted to say that your conspiracy theory about a politician marrying her brother for a visa is a complete lie. This article traces the origin of the theory, outlines who has spread it (not surprising), and generally debunks the issue: https://www.yahoo.com/news/everything-know-persistent-unprov...

I felt this important to call out because using specific examples as a caricature illustrating a purported more general point is a common discursive tactic used to dehumanize larger groups of people. "Look at what this member of group did, aren't they all barbarians?"

Since I assume your ideology is more individualistic, maybe try viewing people as individuals instead of throwing an entire group of people together and instituting collective blame for purported wrongs.
by rootnod3 | 2025-08-22 17:32:42+00:00
I don't think so. Most companies that went under in the 90's bubble are definitely not doing well today. Lycos? The stuff that survived was 99% stuff that didn't have to rely on the bubble to begin with. MS or Oracle were doing fine even with the bubble bursting because their core business was not relying on it. But if the AI bubble burst, the AI shops are gonna go bye bye.
by mceoin | 2025-08-22 17:32:53+00:00
This is completely excessive, but we threw our AI at solving fantasy sports analysis and added a bunch of native integrations and python libraries. It's pretty decent, and fun to just chat with the data.

Big props to Joseph Wilson (@pseudo-r) who maintains the unofficial ESPN API. https://github.com/pseudo-r/Public-ESPN-API. Reliably the best service for interacting with fantasy sports data and AI.

This was an interesting project to work on, mainly because the quality and popularity of API docs for various services really does impact the experience of untrained LLMs using them out of the box. It was fun to experience this outside of our regular B2B context, and my big takeaway from this project was just how much people are underestimating the importance of this as we experience the rise of the agentic web over the next 3 years. (Agents are users too!)

We included some easter egg cricket features, but we haven't found a free service the AI likes enough to bundle that in officially yet, so that'll come at a later date. (We're Aussies, so of course the fantasy Cricket analysis will improve over time : )
by encom | 2025-08-22 17:33:27+00:00
Remember when products came with service manuals and schematics? I miss those times. Today you're just supposed to throw your electronics into the ocean instead of replacing its battery. In some important ways, environmentalism has regressed. But apple.com/environment has pictures of lush forests and windmills so I guess we're fine.

Edit: I'm picking on Apple because they're so sanctimonious about it, but of course it's not an issue unique to them.
by andrewaylett | 2025-08-22 17:34:22+00:00
Americans complaining about extra-territorial application of laws?

As much as I dislike the OSA, if you're not in the UK you can -- and probably should -- just ignore it. Unless you care specifically about interacting with users or businesses in the UK, in which case you probably need to comply.

Unlike the USA, we're generally incapable of successfully demanding everyone everywhere go along with whatever overreach we might think up.
by whalesalad | 2025-08-22 17:34:33+00:00
The remarkable thing to me about Go is that it was created relatively recently, and the collective mindshare of our industry knew better about these sorts of issues. It would be like inventing a modern record player today with fancy new records that can't be damaged and last forever. Great... but why the fuck are we doing that? We should not be writing low level code like this with all of the boilerplate, verbosity, footguns. Build high level languages that perform like low level languages.

I shouldn't fault the creators. They did what they did, and that is all and good. I am more shocked by the way it has exploded in adoption.

Would love to see a coffeescript for golang.
by ajaioslaja | 2025-08-22 17:35:41+00:00
As a senior engineer, I can say I probably wouldn’t like working with you.

For a dev worth paying for, the crucial details of some code is discussed prior to the PR in a way that the PR review becomes an afterthought. You can follow this process with an LLM but the PR review is still brutal. It doesn’t do what you say and it doesn’t learn (in a deterministic way a good human dev does).

High performing teams do not have many changes nor comments in a PR (on average, obviously).
by sbene970 | 2025-08-22 17:36:06+00:00
The "Clipboard History"[0] Gnome extension also does this quite well in my experience. I also recently switched from Windows 11 (to Ubuntu), very happy so far.

Edit: Supports pinning and binding it to Super+V as well!

[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4839/clipboard-histor...
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-22 17:36:43+00:00
It's standard to set the null hypothesis to be a measure zero set (e.g. mu = 0 or mu1 = mu2). So the probability of the null hypothesis is 0 and the only question remaining is whether your measurement is good enough to detect that.

But even though you know the measurement can't be exactly 0.000 (with infinitely many decimal places) a priori, you don't know if your measurement is any good a priori or whether you're measuring the right thing.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-08-22 17:36:51+00:00
[dupe]

Discussions:

Tech, chip stock sell-off continues as AI bubble fears mount

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187

Is the A.I. Sell-Off the Start of Something Bigger?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715

Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-22 17:37:00+00:00
I'm cautiously optimistic about this self-driving thing. Waymo at least seems to have figured out a lot of it.

Would it be way better to make walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use developments, and reliable and frequent public transit?

Yes. Yes it would.

But, in lieu of that, self-driving has a lot of advantages in the long run, even if the technology isn't 100% perfect right now.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-22 17:37:02+00:00
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Occam's razor is "the simplest explanation is most likely to be true". Hanlon's razor is a special case of Occam's razor if you assume that stupidity is simpler than malice, which is a hard statement to prove in concrete terms, but intuitively seems to be true.
by np1810 | 2025-08-22 17:37:23+00:00
Thank you FFmpeg developers and contributors!

If there's anything that needs audio/video automation, I've always turned to FFmpeg, it's such a crucial and indispensible tool and so many online video tools use it and are generally a UI wrapper around this wonderful tool. TIL - there's FFmpeg.Wasm also [0].

In Jan 2024, I had used it to extract frames of 1993 anime movie in 15 minutes video segments, upscaled it using Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan [1] then recombining the output frames for final 4K upscaled anime [2]. FWIW, if I had built a UI on this workflow it could've become a tool similar to Topaz AI which is quite popular these days.

[0]: https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm

[1]: https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan

[2]: https://files.horizon.pics/3f6a47d0-429f-4024-a5e0-e85ceb0f6...
by ivanjermakov | 2025-08-22 17:37:25+00:00
Fun part that it's immediately obvious to everyone who worked with LLMs. I wonder what future "enhancements" big tech would come up with to make slop speech less robotic/recognizable.

And it's unfortunate that many people would start associating long texts as generated by default. Related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/3126/
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-22 17:37:33+00:00
> is part of a sweeping effort by the banking industry to lock in more favorable rules under U.S. President Donald Trump's administration.

As a plain human, banking has gotten much worse since the regulations about branch banks loosened, which I think coincided with a big wave of consolidation. My locally owned full service bank got acquired, and that got rolled up into BBVA, which is a terrible experience, where you get fleeced for fines with a smile. Join a credit union, folks.

I suspect these national standards will make banking even shittier for the 90%.
by SirMaster | 2025-08-22 17:38:02+00:00
>despite having already launched service in several other cities.

Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?

For example the first thing I can think of new for New York is snow and ice.

It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice.
by NoGravitas | 2025-08-22 17:38:15+00:00
> Like when someone says the only thing stopping LLMs is hallucinations… that is literally the last gap.

What you are missing here is that the "hallucinations" you don't like and the "results" you do like are, in terms of the underlying process, exactly the same thing. They are not an aberration you can remove. Producing these kinds of results without "hallucinations" is going to require fundamentally different techniques. It's not a "last gap".
by iLoveOncall | 2025-08-22 17:39:46+00:00
The number of lines you have to review at once doesn't matter.

Vibe coding is letting AI write code so you spend less time writing the same amount of code (ideally not more, in practice definitely more).

If more code is written you have to review more code. Doesn't matter if you break it down in 10 lines PRs or if you review a million lines at once, you still end up having to review all the code generated.
by jeffbee | 2025-08-22 17:39:49+00:00
The game-theoretic aspect of this is interesting to me. A lawful robot will never make progress in Manhattan because the people will just walk across its path continuously, forever. To be an effective driver in Manhattan you have to intimate that you're willing to hit people, without ever hitting them. If humans believe that the Waymo will categorically never hit them, then the Waymo will never get a turn.
by JadoJodo | 2025-08-22 17:39:51+00:00
> Every single person that doesn't return their cart does so out of laziness. > It is simply her being a lazy asshole.

I can see that this is a very personal issue for you, so I'll just say this: People are complicated, and I would encourage you to have more grace for them. If it bothers you that much to see a cart left by a mom struggling with kids, you might consider offering to return it on her behalf.
by tomjen3 | 2025-08-22 17:40:21+00:00
I have a deep hatred of Go for all the things it doesn't have, including a usable type system (if I cannot write SomeClass<T where T extends HorsePlay> or similiar, the type system is not usable for me).

For NodeJS development, you would typically write it in Typescript - which has a very good type system.

Personally I have also written serverside C# code, which is a very nice experience these days. C# is a big language these days though.
by xnx | 2025-08-22 17:40:24+00:00
> OTOH roads here may be 3 or even 4 levels high at the same point

And here I thought Chicago was complex with lower lower Wacker (just 3 levels).

> GPS is sometimes way off in canyons between skyscrapers

This is probably very challenging for human drivers using navigation, but probably no nearly as much of a problem for a Waymo car with onboard 3D maps of the entire operating area.