skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Lightpanda, an open-source headless browser in Zig
We’re Francis and Pierre, and we're excited to share Lightpanda (https://lightpanda.io), an open-source headless browser we’ve been building for the past 2 years from scratch in Zig (not dependent on Chromium or Firefox). It’s a faster and lighter alternative for headless operations without any graphical rendering.

Why start over? We’ve worked a lot with Chrome headless at our previous company, scraping millions of web pages per day. While it’s powerful, it’s also heavy on CPU and memory usage. For scraping at scale, building AI agents, or automating websites, the overheads are high. So we asked ourselves: what if we built a browser that only did what’s absolutely necessary for headless automation?

Our browser is made of the following main components:

- an HTTP loader

- an HTML parser and DOM tree (based on Netsurf libs)

- a Javascript runtime (v8)

- partial web APIs support (currently DOM and XHR/Fetch)

- and a CDP (Chrome Debug Protocol) server to allow plug & play connection with existing scripts (Puppeteer, Playwright, etc).

The main idea is to avoid any graphical rendering and just work with data manipulation, which in our experience covers a wide range of headless use cases (excluding some, like screenshot generation).

In our current test case Lightpanda is roughly 10x faster than Chrome headless while using 10x less memory.

It's a work in progress, there are hundreds of Web APIs, and for now we just support some of them. It's a beta version, so expect most websites to fail or crash. The plan is to increase coverage over time.

We chose Zig for its seamless integration with C libs and its comptime feature that allow us to generate bi-directional Native to JS APIs (see our zig-js-runtime lib https://github.com/lightpanda-io/zig-js-runtime). And of course for its performance :)

As a company, our business model is based on a Managed Cloud, browser as a service. Currently, this is primarily powered by Chrome, but as we integrate more web APIs it will gradually transition to Lightpanda.

We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Where should we focus our efforts next to support your use cases?
Bit of both, I'd think.
Because it is not zero sum and some people are up for this. I wouldn't say no unless it was someone I wanted to avoid. And that is very few people.

You made me laugh though!
Planning a renovation of my 1947 rowhome in DC, and I’m really looking forward to adding an ERV.
A Kilometer High Cliff on Comet Churyumov – Gerasimenko
Buried gem:

“””
Kolman’s mother is a former newspaper writer who was dubbed "The World’s Worst Mom" after she let [his younger brother] ride a New York City subway alone at the age of nine. She parlayed the infamy into a reality TV series of the same name, wrote a book about over-parenting titled Free Range Kids and now travels around the world lecturing on the topic.
“””

Nice to see independence-focused parenting churning out some high quality adults.
Nintendo, hire this man!
Why is important but that is a very different thing from the desing documents I used to have to write, those would not tell you why.
If you develop on Linux you generally probably don't star linux/kernel. But you do star other projects developing on Linux.

Ditto if you develop Django, you star Python libraries, not Django downstream plugins.
Intel didn't have a software stack moat.
Awesome context, thank you!
The star data from the first phase.
In general true, but some governments are better than others. For example, would you prefer to live in Xinjang (being Uigur) in China, or let's say in Europe?

Also a government of a country can change. Being raised in a communist Poland I was quite used to all government officials treating you quite famously badly. This was still pretty much in full swing around 2004 (many years after the all of Communism) when I emigrated to the UK. Then I went back, full time around 2019. Imagine my surprise when I had one of my first dealings with a tax office (I was registering my company for Vat online and I put in a wrong start date) and it wasn't through registered mail requesting I attend in person at so and so time (to wait 3 hours) and be told I'll be getting a fine. Nope, they rang me, on my phone, and asked if I can please amend it. So I thought, wow, they must have employed a new person who hasn't learned how to put people down properly yet. But then in the course of my business I dealt with social services and such and the same pattern repeated. Now, it is not all dancing cats and roses, the juidiciary is still pretty bad I'm told, but it's not so much about corruption these days, more about ineptitude, slowness and doing their own interpretation of the laws, which they aren't allowed to do in non-precedents system(they can continue mainly because of their independence - can't force people to actually obey the law if they are the law without turning it into a dictatorship, so waiting for them to retire seems to be the only option). So things are bit more nuanced than "all government is equally bad".
Thanks for the recommendation. I've been looking into copywriting to improve this aspect. But I wasn't sure if it works in the tech industry because most copywriting advice seems to be geared at B2C copy where you write for a generally less informed audience.

> Some of it can seem a bit sleazy to IT folks

That's what I mean. Using copywriting techniques can make one seem fake if you don't know what you're doing.
> Dismisses the entire article which, as far as I can tell, is pretty factual.

AFAICS it can be factual about IBM's incompetence, and Microsoft being a sleazy underhanded anti-competitor also be true.
> They are very cheap noname phones, branded with the name Nokia

I thought only HMD [0] had the right to put the Nokia brand on a phone, and had several former Nokia executives in their leadership able to validate whether a device is "worthy" of that brand. Which made sense since Nokia as a company and brand still exist albeit in a different field, and junk branded with this name can tarnish the image.

Edit. I see HMD may transition away from the Nokia brand. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global#:~:text=The%20compa....

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_is_dropping_its_nokia_branding_...
You've missed what Arduino is for. The Arduino software/hardware combination is not meant for professional hardware and software engineers who know what they're doing. You're complaining about the quality of the software, elsewhere you'll find EEs bemoaning the fact that most practical use cases of an Arduino could be replaced with a 555 timer chip.

In any event, you don't HAVE to use the Arduino software. If you hate it so much, stop using it! The Arduino software just wraps existing open source "normal" MCU toolchains, you can use those directly instead.
It's important to differentiate worries here.

Issue #1: The platform owner itself uses the platform algorithm(s) to manipulate public opinion

Issue #2: Third parties use the platform to manipulate public opinion (e.g. Romania)

#1 could be solved by algorithmic transparency.

#2 could be solved by more realtime transparency into content.
It has been argued before [0] that Leibniz notation being embraced in mainland Europe and not adopted in England/UK was the reason England fell about a century behind. First heard of this in MIT Calc undergrad course on YouTube, but would be too tedious to find which video, hence ran a search on the Internet.

[0] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/7704/was-english-mat...
Littering is against the law despite murders going unsolved ~50% of the time.

TikTok doesn't have to be the greatest threat of all time to be subject to regulation around its ownership or behavior. Other problems can be addressed too. It's not like the entire country can only do one thing at a time.
Awesome man! well done
Mosaic is a distributed, sovereign social application protocol for the Internet
Quite click-baity...
> It also has WhatsApp though.

Not for much longer.

I also got a Nokia 6300 to use for tethering and it works well for that.
Thoughts on AWS Nitro Enclave ⇔ AWS KMS Interactions
I still don't really know what you are talking about. The only thing I am getting here is that standard ratification happened to fast? What standard extensions exactly were ratified to early?

So please, actually say what you mean and explain what mistakes were made, how things would be different if not for those mistakes.

> SiFive

Semiconductor is an old industry and getting started in it was always hard. That not ever company that does something with RISC-V is 100% successful all the time isn't really surprising or relevant. And SiFive by itself also doesn't have the power to push things threw.
Abstract:

We present PReQuaL (Probing to Reduce Queuing and Latency), a load balancer for...
This is a pretty short, but significant list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_adversar...

It's censorship and also import controls and also turning off one propaganda faucet.

> On December 6, 2024, a panel of judges on the U.S. District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the company's claims about the constitutionality of the law and upheld it.

Let's see whether SCOTUS barks at it.
Why I over-engineered this blog?
i'm not on tiktok and have never seen a tiktok about this issue but i care about it. same with a lot of my friends who are not on tiktok. same with hn god paul graham.
Show HN: Ditch spreadsheets for job tracking and gain insights about your search
I built ApplyNexus to eliminate the tedious manual writing of job applications on a spreadsheet and to add easy access for your job applications on your phone for when you get a call. It also provides you analytics tailored to your job search.

I have been using it for months and it's really been helpful for me. I hope you'd benefit from it just as much as I have.

Thanks!
The Acorn Archimedes had an OS with GUI in a 512KB ROM. That would be your BIOS nowadays.
Thank you for your feedback. It will be very valuable to me. Can I ask what browser you are using on your iPad? I guess Chrome will solve your problem on your iPad. I will try to look into it.

As you mentioned, this is a first step and the main goal is to help build muscle memory for common progressions. And also how chords solve into each other, not just learning the chords themselves.

With the great feedback I got here, I am planning to improve it so that more people can enjoy it.

Feel free to join the mailing list to get the updates.
Microsoft removes "Suggested Actions" from Windows 11
I have had three HMD phones now, all have had very good call quality when used in Europe.
I am so interested in this submission (based on the title), but that's such a big wall of text, even the LOTR trilogy looks more manageable

If you have read it, do you regret the time you spent on it? Just trying to get some "goodreads" reviews, with or without spoilers, before committing to it...
Officially they (generally) don’t. But judges are people; most judges around the world have a political alignment, even if they keep it better hidden.
You might feel like that, but it's only because you don't know it describes a category. As I said, please find a more appropriate job if you're in a hiring position.
Hey guys, I am the guy behind the OpenERV company, who designed the TW4 and WM12 ERV units.

I'm sorry I don't have a bunch of units ready to ship out, as the site says it's still in beta, I am to be honest kind of taking my time because I have another project, the big quiet fan, which is actually funded a little better, and thus I've been directing most of my time to that. But I do advance this a bit most days. I have a twitter where I tweet my progress : @open_erv, and also I'm on bluesky.

I have shipped a few units to other engineers who have/will test the units so I can share third party confirmation for any skeptics.

To clarify some of the discussion, it is not a counterflow heat exhanger, it is a regenerative type. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_heat_exchanger. I prefer this type because they can recover latent heat more effectively than recouperative (such as counterflow) type, and latent heat is 40-50% of the total energy content of the air, seasonal average in Ottawa or Toronto.

I am hoping to get the machine tested by the PassiveHaus institute to show beyond doubt how good the efficiency is with a third party test. I have no doubt, I have tested it myself, though.

These can theoretically handy any temperature differential, but the TW4 and WM12 are currently made of a polymer that I wouldn't trust in an extremely hot climate combined with direct sunlight. For that reason, I am focussed on cold climate scenarios. I am pretty sure it will not frost up even in extremely cold weather like -30. I used it last year in my window and had no problem, and it did get to like -25 at least iirc.
"I don't like this so I must prevent others from enjoying it"
Pre SMS / high connectivity this would have been common. Someone rings the house phone and that's your evening gone.
"Free" (no cost to make the phone call) Internet access was widely available in the UK, on pretty much the same terms as the USA — pay £20/month for X minutes per month.

In addition, and popular for a while, was pay-per-minute access where the ISP didn't charge the customer directly, but took part of the phone call cost. I don't know if this method of payment to an ISP existed in the USA.

That far fewer (only 9%) of British households had Internet access was probably more related to the cost of the computer and modem, and the country generally having less wealth than the USA.
So no more discussion of licenses, especially open source licenses? No discussion of copyright? Patents? DRM?

What about encryption? Do we only discuss technical merits and never mention surveillance?
HMD (Human Mobile Devices)[0] has exclusive rights to produce phones under the Nokia brand.

Now, HMD has decided to drop the Nokia name from the new phones because it's not helping them. Nokia has lost its glory, and HMD took the right step to use its name.

People who have old Nokia phones should keep them as it is like a lost meaningful art.

[0] https://www.hmd.com
Look up the price of a blauberg Vento or a Lunos e2. They are ~$1800 CAD, and they get a fraction of the airflow. Computers have a large ecosystem behind them and have been in development for a very long time. This is still at the start of the deployment curve.
EU signs $11B deal for sovereign satellite constellation to rival Starlink
I never understand these "experts should use this and that in $CURRENT_YEAR+1"... experts are supposed to be able to decide what to use and why, instead of getting subjective opinions from a .io website
Show HN: I Made GIF Hosting Self-Hosted
Is there a strategy here?
Did they agree on to be later breed, boil then breed their kids and boils them too? This is crazy. We all know the reason we feed them is for our own interest.
I totally understand that point too actually.
>If censorship is wrong, then it is wrong. If censorship is just fine, the n it is just fine.

This is it, and it's so laughably simple that anyone who doesn't get it should check CO levels in their home before arguing.
The more nefarious play would be to have the TV stop functioning if the EULA is rejected but only after the return period has passed.
Now that's a name I haven't heard in many years! I remember running Dillo on my HP Jornada 720 back in 2006 or 2007.
Show HN: Textmarky – convert between Markdown, YAML, and latex formats
China and the US are in a deepening cold war. Our political systems are fundamentally opposed so conflict is inevitable (given there is no higher authority to manage our relations). If you are looking for some specific justification for a ban, you're missing the forest for the trees.
Searching for Unicon brings up multiple results. Which one do you mean?
Thank you very much. My goal with this game is to not only teach individual chords but also to delve into basic practical harmony, chord resolutions, and common progressions. This comprehensive approach is designed to support those interested in performing famous pieces, providing accompaniment, and even creating their own compositions.
You can repost a few times. The guidelines don't give precice numbers, but you reposted it like 10 times. That usually makes people angry and may flag your posts. Also the mods may ban your account/site.

We all agree that it takes a lot of effort to make this, but too many repost are bad for the site. Reposting too much will burn the goodwill of the comunity, and instead of helpful comments people will start to write snarky comments or just flag your post.

One usual trick is to write an interesting blog post about an interesting problem you solved writing the app. It must be interesting becuase otherwise people will thin you are just triying to spam.

How much technical info can you publish without telling all the secret sause? Do you have a list of banned apps? Browser support? Can you detect people watching one post vs doomscroling? Does it detect automatic updates like YouTube? Only Android or also OSX? I usually ask for other languages support, but I think it's not relevant here.
Yeah, is nothing to do with that, it's "reds under the beds"-level fear of China.

It was fine when it was US companies...
https://lmarena.ai/

Check out the lmsys leaderboard. It has an overall ranking as well as ranking for specific categories.

OpenAI are also serving gpt4o mini. That said afaiu it’s not known how large/small mini is.

Being more useful than GPT3.5 is not a high bar anymore.
Interesting backstory:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/ten-commandments-tablet-up-for...
that would imply, rather simply, that we would have more ethical companies if public ownership was forbidden. but i don't think that would be true.
Maybe RIF-balancing is a better term.

Fascinating that 2-3 probes per request is a sweet spot, intuitively it seems like a lot of overhead.
It takes a few worms and lots of leafs. Got a friend in that industry and the partnership with Brazil is flourishing.
It's actually a regenerative heat exchanger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_heat_exchanger.
I'm surprised that S3/AWS hasn't blogged or done a white paper about their approach yet. It's been something like 7 years now since they moved away from standard load balancing.

If you think about an object storage platform, much like with YouTube, traditional load balancing is a really bad fit. No two requests are even remotely the same in terms of resource requirements, duration etc.
Taxing social media companies and using the tax proceeds to fund transparency initiatives would be interesting. E.g. grants to researchers and civil society labs

Make them pay to monitor the problem they potentially create.
TL;DR A tarpit that detects network wide scans (e.g. nmap) and starts to slow down the scanning as much as possible by intercepting the scanning.
Plastic-Eating Insect Discovered in Kenya
Only skimmed it...but yeah, not worth reading. Unless you're one of today's 10K, it's mostly obvious stuff. And if there's any real structure or "big picture" to the article, I couldn't spot it.
> Serving in the US, with big US cloud partner was meant to be a way to create confidence.

Huawei tried a similar confidence building tactic by paying UK cyber spooks to scour their code to show they don't have backdoors. The so called Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre. Didn't work out for them either.
Holy shit do you actually work for the U.S. State Department?

Reuter reported this: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

U.S. social media absolutely are controlled by the U.S. government, and we can, and have been able to get any user data we want from them.
This is more closer to throwaway code than design docs.
What's New in Ruby 3.4
The TW4 is light years ahead. Higher flow, better efficiency, much quieter, wind compensation, Internet of things functionality. It's not just yet another machine of the same kind. The heat exchanger is very different, the whole design and construction is quite different.
Can’t achieve perfection so goodness is out of question?
> jotted down

As an MCP fan, am curious! Care to share. Link maybe? Or even just a comment would be great!
Yep, all bait, no meat
> what other approaches to auth seem to be promising

Speaking on behalf of a regulated enterprise, more SaaS (who may be interested to support MCP so AIs can use their SaaS, not just people), should — for both people and agentic tools — be OIDC first, without charging an "SSO Tax".

"Sign in with" is now effectively ubiquitous, gets you out of the business of user credentials liability and password management flows, and for businesses ticks the same boxes as SAML SSO if you build in (extra work, granted) a DNS validation and domain name match.

In the USA, for B2B, some 85% of SMB are able to "Sign in with Microsoft" (HN tends to ignore this customer base), a majority of the rest can "Sign in with Google". By "wallet share" for B2C, you need "Sign in with Apple" and the rest are again "Sign in with Google".

I am not with, nor using, WorkOS, but appreciate this paragraph in their OIDC vs. SAML explainer:

Use OIDC to: add enterprise SSO to your app in a dramatically easier way, most IdPs support it. It’s also an obvious choice if you’re already using OAuth 2.0 to access users' data (for example, to access a user’s Google files or Facebook profile data).

https://workos.com/blog/oidc-vs-saml

Once you've done this, as WorkOS mentions you can use this from browser perspective to access other APIs such as social sites, but for things like MCP (we're all building TRON!) if you're building from services perspective, you can build to let agents leverage “OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant” or similar, and for bonus points “OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange”.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8628

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8693

Even consumer users understand these device login flows by now since they use SaaS from TV sets:

https://www.netflix.com/tv8

https://myaccount.microsoft.com/devicelogin
>Deliberately misinforming people, especially under a foreign state payroll, is illegal.

First of all if you have any evidence of TikTok engaging in it, you should present it since even our government have said there is no such evidence and that possibility remains hypothetical.

Secondly no, it's not illegal to spread misinformation, no matter the motive. The First Amendment absolutely guarantees that right.
Drones and the Cost of Lost Trust
Location: India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Open to relocation opportunities

Technologies: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Python, Node.js, MongoDB, APIs (OpenAI, LangChain), Full-Stack Development, AI/LLM Integration

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vmasalCO_Ajr_zlj1OtvKIJvKQD...

Email: visveshkhanna@gmail.com
I’m unfamiliar with the additional context, I think. Any pointers on what’s happening?
Harvard Institutional Data Initiative
Playing video games boosts IQ in children
I wish this was as common as having a fridge in the house. The productivity gains from people not being sleepy and tired from shit air would be insane.
Except the "environment" in question here is entirely of our own making. There is nothing natural about it.
1969 01 X-4 Plato Tutor Manual Avner Tenczar
Thank you, this is correct. Using my class 2 sound meter, if I stand in my house in nowhereland cornwall with power shut off to the whole house, it's 38 dBa. 37 dBa is audible in that environment but nearly inaudible in a normal environment where your computer cooling fan is making 45 dBa at 1 meter, etc. 42 dBa is pretty quiet too, my furnace makes 43 dBa at 1 meter from the duct when it turns on. And that 42 dBa is a full 60 cfm, full blast. That's more than twice the airflow of competing units like the blauberg vento. You don't turn it up that high when you are sleeping.
They should ban domestic stupid memes and brainrot, too.
All social media is a fertile ground for propaganda and manipulation by bots. The only way forward is to ban politics in all social media.