MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: We packaged an MCP server inside Chromium
by felarof | 2025-10-17 16:22:07+00:00
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://git.new/browseros-mcp

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!
by amiga386 | 2025-10-17 16:22:18+00:00
Validating a public person's birthday using Wikipedia?

*laughs in Taylor Lorenz*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#R...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#B...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age

Also, in case you're wondering when it is, here's Taylor Lorenz's own Flickr page, which she can delete any time she wants, but hasn't: https://www.flickr.com/photos/taylorlorenz/6265483352/
by slavik81 | 2025-10-17 16:22:46+00:00
> What drives EV resale value is the health of the battery, which is influenced more by recharge cycles and straight up passage of time.

The resale value drops much faster than the battery health. Hyundai has been tracking the degregation rates of the batteries in their Ioniq 5 vehicles and they've been holding up surprisingly well. Most of them have >90% battery capacity at over 100k miles. Their data was sparse for 250k miles, but half of them were still over 90% capacity.

I had trouble finding the original video, but the data is included in this summary: https://youtu.be/s3DMd0e4loQ?t=17s
by maerF0x0 | 2025-10-17 16:23:06+00:00
> works fine in stores and restaurants. Why would the government be different?

I'll posit a hypothesis: Scale and morality interpretation differences.

I've yet to have a > $1000 restaurant bill (not even close), and the experience I got and the reciprocity instincts in me compel me to correct it if say they were to forget to charge me for my guac or give me more change than i was owed.

Whereas in the Gov't there is scale that tempts people to choose immoral paths, and also there's a morality of efff the government in a lot of people's minds. It's an abstracted entity of which we mostly do not enjoy the experience and cannot treat humanely (it's not a person).
by rkomorn | 2025-10-17 16:23:15+00:00
Relatedly, somewhat, I've been reading a lot of 19th century French literature (because I'm French and because my sister is a literature teacher who's been "assigning" me stuff to read).

It has been somewhat shocking to see how relevant the writing is seen through a 21st century lenses. Whether it's how media works, how cliques of people function, etc.

It truly feels timeless in a way that I've found very surprising. It also very much supports notions that people don't change even if means and methods do.
by throwthrow0987 | 2025-10-17 16:23:29+00:00
React is dead easy to create a component and get going with whatever you want to create. But as your application grows it is really difficult to test. The React testing library sounds good in principle, but once you have useEffects, hooks, the DOM, and every other side effect running interwoven with your component logic, it becomes difficult test. Obscenely difficult. I think there's some tradeoff operating here. I want a front end framework that makes it a little easier to test, happy to go through some more pain to write components.
by cooperadymas | 2025-10-17 16:23:42+00:00
Many wise people would agree with you.

“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”

"The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
by SeanAnderson | 2025-10-17 16:24:24+00:00
I think the answer, like almost everything in software engineering, is, "It depends."

How well defined are your requirements? Do you need/want a prototype to play around with to get a better perspective on your needs? What scale of project are you building? How novel is what you're trying to build - is it a technical play or is it more a marketing/sales play that just needs some software behind it?

Building prototypes with AI is very empowering. Rewriting large, technical codebases is a recipe for frustration. Shipping lots of "micro-SaaS" products using AI seems reasonable as long as you get value quickly and move onto the next one rather than going deep for years. They might also work well for smaller games.

A lot of people will say that you don't internalize what you've built when using AI. This has the potential to be true, but it doesn't necessarily need to be true. I was surprisingly pleased by how much deeper I thought about functional requirements after working with AI to create a functional spec., then a technical spec. from the functional, then an implementation plan from the technical. AI asked me numerous times for clarification in areas that, on first pass, I thought were clear, but had more issues than I realized. I do not think I would have gotten to as good of results had I just had the AI write code without planning, but there's nobody to stop me from attempting that.

Similarly, being able to build a working prototype in hours, not days, let me realize a lot of other issues much more quickly. There was functionality that sounded good on paper, but, once I got to actually play with it, was no good. This could've been achieved with a no-code solution, but building it with AI got me to effectively the same result without having to learn another tool and then translate designs from that tool into code.

All that said, it is practically guaranteed you will reach a point where, despite best efforts, using AI will result in some excess code complexity that might need to be triaged with a learned mind. The bar for when this occurs is certainly being raised as the tooling and methodologies improve, but it's still there. The more strategies you can employ to stave that off the better.
by wildzzz | 2025-10-17 16:24:30+00:00
I have been dealing with a moldy furnace caused by AC condensate overflow. I bought a small ozone generator. It had a timer for up to two hours or an indefinite on button. I was leaving for the weekend and wanted it to run for a while. I had planned to run it for the entire two days I'd be gone. I bought 3M organic vapor filters so I could go back into the house and crack open windows when I returned just in case. I would have taken the panel off the furnace and just run the generator inside the enclosed utility room. I continued to do some more reading and found that I likely would have destroyed all of the insulation on the wiring inside the furnace along with anything else plastic in that room and likely nearby rooms. Instead, I just ran it for the max two hours immediately after I left the house. Everything was fine when I got back but the furnace still smelled a bit.
by KingOfMyRoom | 2025-10-17 16:24:34+00:00
Ideally, I want this to grow into a proper startup. I’m starting solo for now, but as things progress, I’d like to bring in more people. I’m not a tech, product or design person, but AI gives me hope that I can at least get an MVP out and onboard a few early users.

For auth, I’ll be using Supabase, and for the MVP stage I think Lovable should be good enough to build and test with maybe a few hundred users. If there’s traction and things start working, that’s when I’d plan to harden the stack and get proper security and code reviews in place.
by Rothnargoth | 2025-10-17 16:24:39+00:00
Blocking before the traffic reaches the application servers (what you're doing) is the most effective and cost/time efficient.

It sounds like the bot operator is spending enough on AWS to withstand the current level of abuse reports.

If you really wanted to retaliate, you could try getting a warrant to force AWS to disclose the owners of that AWS instance.
Show HN: Blueblocks, a letter-packing word game
by j6m8 | 2025-10-17 16:24:51+00:00
Hi HN :) If you've ever played a game like scrabble or bananagrams you probably know the gratifying feeling of packing your letters into a dense little grid.

blueblocks gives you letters and assigns points for the _bounding box_ of your valid-words solution; smaller area is better!

every day has a "perfect" dense solution... NYT-style, mondays are easiest, sat-sundays are hardest!

feedback welcome! hope you enjoy :)
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-10-17 16:25:49+00:00
> We saved 76% on our cloud bills while tripling our capacity

The claim here is that their cloud bills lowered. Nowhere is mentioned the cost of engineering and support. This will increase their overall cost, which is not mentioned here at all.

When you are a startup, you don't have a lot of headcount. You should be using your headcount to focus on your product. The more things you do that eat up your headcount's time, the less time you have to develop your product.

You need a balance between "dirt-cheap cost" and labor-conserving. This means it's a good idea to pay a little bit of a premium, to give you back time and headcount.

> How much does a 2x CPU, 4 GiB RAM container cost on AWS Fargate? Just over $70/month. We run two worker instances, which need these higher resources, along with smaller web instances and all the other infrastructure needed to host an application on AWS (load balancer, relational DB, NAT gateway, ...). All together, our total costs for two environments of tap grew to $449.50/month.

The classic AWS mistake: they're talking retail prices. AWS gives every customer multiple opportunities to lower costs below this retail price. You don't have to be an enterprise. In fact, you can ask them directly how to save money, and they'll tell you.

$70/month is the retail price of Fargate on-demand (for that configuration). Using a Compute Savings Plan[1], you can save 50% of this cost. Additionally, if you switch from x86 to ARM for your Fargate tasks, the cost lowers an additional 25%. So with Graviton and a Compute Savings Plan, their Fargate price would have been $26.25/month, a 62.5% savings.

And there's more to save. Spot instances are discounted at 70%. NAT Instances save you money over NAT Gateways. Scaling your tasks to zero when they're not needed cuts costs more. Choose the cheapest region to pay the least.

[1] https://repost.aws/questions/QUVKyRJcFPStiXYRVPq-KU9Q/saving...
by 10729287 | 2025-10-17 16:26:17+00:00
Debian. I’m not trolling, it’s easy to install, very stable, and KDE, while allowing everything to be customized, is awesome out of the box. It’s way more oldschool than what I’m seeing of Zorin there but for the oldschoolers the feeling of owning his computer again has no price. I’ve been a pop!os user too for quite a long time and it’s very polished, but too fisherpricish for a desktop to me.
by keyringlight | 2025-10-17 16:26:53+00:00
I think Valve have been very careful with where they put their efforts (hardware and software), their scope isn't that broad so much as it needs to have a direct link to steam. It's similar to why I don't think we'll have SteamOS released by Valve for generic hardware in the foreseeable future, because they're concentrating on their specific usage on the Deck.

Going broad means they need to support a whole lot more, and they probably can't tell users "go google it" in a similar fashion to how MS can't shrug off windows problems entirely when they happen for their users. The geeks are perfectly content with using a range of existing distros and there's little gain in adding one more, besides those that want the Valve/Steam brand umbrella to cover even more of PC gaming like they own the platform.
by josteink | 2025-10-17 16:27:11+00:00
I bought one to replace my aging Amazon Kindle Oasis, after the DRM move.

I've loaded it up with the epubs I have in my Calibre library (which ironically contains mostly books I've bought from Amazon before they made stripping DRM unreasonably hard).

Now I won't buy anything from Amazon because I can't strip the DRM, and hence can't read the books on my e-reader of choice.

Their loss, not mine.
by rglover | 2025-10-17 16:27:36+00:00
It's all about saving time. If you don't care about a particular implementation, just that it works, you're more likely a candidate for a framework. If you do care (or just want to understand how it works), then less so.

One of the biggest follies I've seen on the web is people calling themselves <framework> developers. No. You're a developer who uses a language and you prefer a specific framework written in that language. And if you don't understand that language, it really doesn't matter what framework you do or don't use—you'll be lost no matter what (or making messes that someone more qualified will have to clean up later).

All of that said: learn your language, learn the syntax, and you'll be able to pick up any framework built for it with a quick read of the docs (unless the docs suck or are non-existent, then it's best to move on to the next option).

Do the things that make you productive. All of this "best practices" crap is a farce. There is no best practice, just popular and unpopular opinions. Do what makes sense to you.
by hylaride | 2025-10-17 16:27:43+00:00
> Tesla mostly focused on the American market anyway.

Not true at all. In 2023, before the brand became toxic, they sold more cars outside the US than internally. They were a huge percentage of the market in parts of Europe, especially Scandinavia. There was a lot of noise about the manufacturing centres in Germany as Tesla fought around labour laws and traditions, too.

They also bet big on China where they almost got to the point where they were selling as many cars as in the USA. Elon fell hook, line, and sinker for the classic Chinese government move to invite them into the market and then steal the tech and flood the market with domestic brands (this is not to say that they haven't improved on it, though).
by dangus | 2025-10-17 16:28:08+00:00
No, you completely missed the point. The new model is still ~$30,000 but it has better range/charges faster/drives better.

That doesn’t really happen as dramatically with gasoline cars. The powertrain and driving experience of a 5 year old gas car isn’t noticeably different than a current one.

If you buy a 5 year old EV you might get one that charges slow, doesn’t have a heat pump, has worse battery chemistry, battery health management, and the list goes on.

Heck, the Leaf is a perfect example because you’re stuck with chademo fast charging charging instead of CCS or NACS. I wouldn’t touch one with a 9 foot pole unless I planned to exclusively charge at home.

Also, don’t take my comment to mean that I think used EVs are a bad choice, many of them can work very well for many years and use cases as long as you are properly informed.
by boyneyy123 | 2025-10-17 16:28:10+00:00
Hi HN,

Three years ago, I was struggling to keep track of the events and services in a growing event-driven system at an organization I was working at.

No events were documented, and we fell into a big ball of mud... (easy to do! with event architecture IMO)

2021 Christmas I started building EventCatalog as a weekend project to solve that — and it slowly grew into something much bigger.

EventCatalog is now an open source tool to document and visualize event-driven architectures — events, services, domains, diagrams — all in one place.

What started as a personal tool has turned into a community project used by teams to bring clarity to complex EDA systems. I’ve been working on it solo for 3 years, refining it with real users, adding governance features, imports/exports, and now even a Studio for visual modeling.

GitHub: https://github.com/event-catalog/eventcatalog

Demo / Docs: https://eventcatalog.dev

If you work with event-driven systems, I’d love your thoughts:

How do you document your events/services today?

What’s still painful or missing in tools like this?

This project has been a long journey — now I’m opening it up to more feedback and ideas from the HN community!

Thanks for reading!
by hyperbrainer | 2025-10-17 16:28:11+00:00
> If an engineer came to you and said “So for this project, I put all the code, input data, output data and comments scattered about one big two-dimensional array with no type safety, no portability, no scalability, no security, no variable names, no code re-use, no unit tests, no integration tests, no abstractions and no error handling”

So, how is this different from engineers and MATLAB?
by MatthiasPortzel | 2025-10-17 16:28:14+00:00
This is only a win for Ruby Central. They haven't conceded anything and they've convinced Ruby Core to endorse them as the correct and true maintainers of RubyGems.

> While repository ownership has moved, Ruby Central will continue to share management and governance responsibilities for RubyGems and Bundler in close collaboration with the Ruby core team.

Andre has previously maintained that he owns a trademark on Bundler and he will enforce it against Ruby Central.

=> https://andre.arko.net/2025/09/25/bundler-belongs-to-the-rub...

So Ruby Central transfers "ownership" of Bundler to Ruby Core. Ruby Central gets to continue to maintain Bundler, and Ruby Core is stuck with the liability. If Andre wants to enforce his trademark, he now has to sue Japan-based Ruby Core and risk the bad optics of that.
by saltwounds | 2025-10-17 16:28:32+00:00
OpenAI and Anthropic's real moat is hardware. For local LLMs, context length and hardware performance are the limiting factors. Qwen3 4B with a 32,768 context window is great. Until it begins filling up and performance drops quickly.

I use local models when possible. MCPs work well, but their large context injection makes switching to an online provider the no-brainer.
by brycewray | 2025-10-17 16:28:38+00:00
Regarding the grayed-out-text phenomenon, my way around this has been to use the Stylebot extension on Chromium- and Gecko-based browsers and apply the following CSS to HN pages:

div div a, div p a { color: darkblue; } div.commtext.c5A { color: #5A0000; } div.commtext.c73 { color: #730000; } div.commtext.c88 { color: #880000; } div.commtext.c9C { color: #9C0000; } div.commtext.cAE { color: #AE0000; } div.commtext.cBE { color: #BE0000; } div.commtext.cCE { color: #CE0000; } div.commtext.cDD { color: #DD0000; } div.commtext.c5A a, div.commtext.c73 a, div.commtext.c88 a, div.commtext.c9C a, div.commtext.cAE a, div.commtext.cBE a, div.commtext.cCE a, div.commtext.cDD a { color: darkred; } div div pre { color: darkgreen; }
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-17 16:28:52+00:00
The US Treasury was one of the initial members of FedNow (US instant payment rails operated by the Federal Reserve), they can transmit funds instantly to any demand deposit account at a bank that is on FedNow rails. I see no issue with deprecating paper checks for transmitting funds when considering instant payment rails exist. One would assume this requires you put your bank account routing and account number on file with the IRS, either in person at an IRS taxpayer assistance center or through their online account portal.

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-to-phase-out-paper-tax-refu...

> Most individual taxpayers already receive their refunds by direct deposit into their bank accounts. During the 2025 tax filing season, the IRS issued more than 93.5 million tax refunds to individual income tax filers, and 93% of those, almost 87 million refunds, were issued through direct deposit. Only 7 percent of individual refund recipients received their refunds by check through the mail.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/organi...

FedNow Is Live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 - July 2023
by nostrademons | 2025-10-17 16:29:09+00:00
It is the case globally. BYD sells EVs starting at $7800 [1][2], and Toyota sells an EV for $15,000 in China [3].

This may also be why Teslas are holding their value better than any other EV. Teslas are usually bought by U.S. consumers, who are forbidden from buying any of the cheaper global EVs by import restrictions. For fleets that buy models that are sold globally, they compete in the global market and are subject to global price declines.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs5h6R2jLUQ

[2] https://insideevs.com/reviews/769113/byd-seagull-good-video-...

[3] https://motorillustrated.com/toyota-launches-15000-bz3x-its-...