skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey HN,

I've just released BrowserState, an open-source TypeScript/JavaScript library that provides persistent memory for browser automation stacks. It lets you seamlessly persist and share browser sessions across local storage, Redis, AWS S3, and Google Cloud Storage. It's immediately compatible with popular automation tools like Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, and AI browser agents that expose userDataDir.

Why I built BrowserState:
I've been doing browser automation for over 7 years, starting during the YC batch of 2019 when tooling was minimal and learning often meant hitting painful roadblocks. Sessions frequently broke, authentication was fragile, and bot detection was relentless. Now that browser automation is widespread, I wanted to tackle one of the biggest recurring issues: reliably preserving browser states across runs and environments.

How BrowserState helps:

Persistent Sessions: Fully restore browser contexts including cookies, local storage, IndexedDB, service worker caches, and extensions.

Bot Detection Bypass: Maintain consistent fingerprints and browser identities, drastically reducing bot detection risks.

Easy Onboarding: Zero setup—just mount your state and automate immediately.

Scalable & Portable: Easily share sessions across servers, local development, and cloud infrastructure without vendor lock-in.

The Redis backend just launched and is stable for production use. AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage are also stable, but I'd love your feedback from real-world applications.

Quick start:

npm install browserstate

Example (Redis):

import { BrowserState } from 'browserstate';

const browserState = new BrowserState({
userId: 'user123',
storageType: 'redis',
redisOptions: { host: 'localhost', port: 6379 }
});

// mount user session
const userDataDir = await browserState.mount('session123');

// Use with any browser automation framework
// Example with Playwright:
const browser = await chromium.launchPersistentContext(userDataDir, {
headless: false
});

// When you're done, save changes
await browser.close();

// Save changes back to Redis, GCS, etc
await browserState.unmount();

BrowserState is fully open-source (MIT licensed), immediately usable, and requires no signup.

GitHub: https://github.com/browserstate/browserstate

I'd appreciate your feedback, questions, and suggestions—thanks!
How are the farmers selling to China at better prices and then the consumers also buying from China at higher prices than the local farmers.

How does it not short circuit and the farmers just sell locally for the price of the goods from China?
As one example: 10 years ago we had winters with typical snowfall and summers that weren't constantly in the extremes. 10 years from now we'll have some other notable difference that is noticeable in everyday life, particularly given the disappearing groundwater around the globe (we can even set aside the guaranteed continued loss of biodiversity) and rising ocean temperatures.

We won't be in a post-apocalyptic hellscape in 10 years if that's your measuring stick for negative effects.
Maybe. Can you?
and reverse for legal bad behavior is how he was treated by system
So if your point is an LLM is something like a person kept in a coma inside solitary confinement -- sure? But I don't believe that's where we set the bar for art: we arent employing comatose inmates to do anything.

> I generally consider these two to be the same thing.

Sure words themselves bend and break under the weight of hype. Novelty is randomness. Everything is a work of art. For a work of art to be non-novel it can only incorporate randomness.

The fallacies of ambiguity abound to the point where speaking coherently disappears completely.

An artist who finds a cave half-collapsed for the first time has an opportunity to render that novel physical state of the universe into art. Every moment which passes has a near infinite amount of such novel circumstances.

Since an LLM cannot do that, we must wreck and ruin our ability to describe this plain and trivial situation. Poke our eyes and skewer our brains.
That's what happens when the entire education system is optimized for grades instead of the use and acquisition of knowledge. In this case, LLMs are just laying bare our failings as a society.
> Distortion (other than perhaps mild distortion) has never been fully accepted in roles where the multiple voices of a complex harmony part would be distorted together.

I'll fight this by agreeing with you. Saturation (a form of mild distortion) on the master is what I like to refer to as "the shit" because a nearly imperceptible amount really makes a track cohere. It takes a super light touch though, but I'd bet (without evidence) it's used on most tracks today.
Yeah, there's some sense to the idea that one ideal kind of lawmaker is someone who has broken the laws but still remains a good person doing good things. I don't personally think that's the case with Trump, but apparently a lot of other people do.
This level of rigor should be the standard for every financial institution, and those that handle things that consumers consider valuable (such as their personal data).

Or, at the very least, consumers/clients should have the ability to opt in to this kind of paranoia, without meaningless sacrifices of convenience. Those of us in the US can't.
Must-understand, with_default_isolation_level, Rails World CFP and more
Yes, why not? To the best of my knowledge Norway is still thriving. Ideally more countries would get on board with such ideas and there will be fewer palpable places for them to relocate to.

From the article, “The model in Norway is that everyone should contribute relevant to ability and therefore those that have a greater ability to pay taxes, should pay a little more.” This seems more than fair, particularly while failing tax systems are leading to unprecedented levels of inequality.
I can strongly recommend their ENG and ML positions. Great people, actual problems to solve.
The eval thing is listed as a potential performance cost, but it's actually super important for performance, because it allows the parser to statically know that sloppy eval is never called inside a function, and that variables can therefore be optimized away.
I think for many of us saying this out loud (or typing it out on sites like this) is a coping mechanism.

During Trump 1, there were some adults in the room -- congress seemed to be less complacent, the cabinet appointees had more independent (and more pragmatic) judgement, and the scale of purges across the government felt like nothing compared to what's currently going on.

There's none of that now. Congress is complacent and arguably complicit in an ongoing constitutional crisis, the admin is just breaking a number of laws without even putting in the work to have plausible deniability, and with every passing day the corruption's growing to levels that many of us who've been born and raised in the modern economic west just haven't seen in a few generations.
> Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?

This was my experience. I’m not a programmer but I enjoy playing around with Python. I work with it a lot more and make far more complicated programs now because I don’t have to spend half an hour trying to find a solution to my problem on StackOverflow.

The issue I found is that I don’t bother trying to build anything on my own anymore, so even though I’ve learned a lot about designing programs, my knowledge of Python has probably actually declined.
Huh? Nobody's forcing me to "take the AI at its word". It's the easiest thing to verify.

And I've got enough of the social side of scholarship already. Professors don't need me emailing them with questions, and I don't need to wait days for replies that may or may not come.
"would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans."

I'm tired of this line. We are animals first and foremost. Complicated animals, but animals nonetheless. We will never consistently be this. The best of us will try but most of us will animalistically react to the incentives in front of us in selfish ways.

We are better of thinking of systems and the incentives they create than hopelessly waiting for us to become not animals. Aligning good goals with personal profit is the name of the game.
I think about it in a naive way, but one that seems to vibe with what I see: Britain is rich. It has huge amounts of capital wealth, property, culture, etc. It just trails in productivity and income. It's like a comfortable, house paid off retiree with a part time job, mostly living off accumulated wealth and prestige.
> NOAA Research is still doing its work, but we won't be able to access it anymore?

You are not thinking far ahead enough. This is just the first step.

Step 1: these Amazon and Google cloud contracts are extraneous; let's cancel. The public can always find an alternate way of getting the research data.

Step 2: the number of times such research data is accessed has drastically decreased, suggesting that the public has not found them useful; let's cancel the research projects.

Step 3: these researchers aren't doing any research any more; they don't seem to have any work output; let's fire them for cause.
I was hoping someone would bring up Bullshit Jobs. There are definitely a lot of people spending the majority of their time doing "work" that doesn't have any significant impact to the world already. I don't know that some future AI takeover would really change much, except maybe remove some vale of perception around meaningless work.

At the same time, I wouldn't necessarily say that people are currently fine getting dopamine hits from social media. Coping would probably be a better description. There are a lot of social and societal problems that have been growing at a rapid rate since Facebook and Twitter began tapping into the reward centers of the brain.

From a purely anecdotal perspective, I find my mood significantly affected by how productive and impactful I am with how I spend my time. I'm much happier when I'm making progress on something, whether it's work or otherwise.
Yes, that the current trend in the western world. Money is all that matters. There's only lowest accepted quality. Anything above that is a waste of money, profits that are lost. Nobody wants masterpieces. There is no market for that.

That lowest-accepted quality also declines over time, as generations after generations of people become used to rock-bottom quality. In the end, there's only slop and AI will make the cheapest slop ever. Welcome to a brave new world. We don't even need people anymore. They're too expensive.
My aunt shares AI-generated memes about hispanic and palestinian people crying as they are rounded up by ICE. Her key motivation above all others is making particular groups of people she hates suffer. Everything else is acceptable as long as she gets that.

It's a concerning vision for the country.
1. Yes, some of them. Spent a little time in New Mexico. I've travelled through the gulf states and Alabama. Particularly outside of Albequrque and Santa Fe, the general level of deprivation in NM was quite clear.

2. I'm glad that people in the UK have access to healthcare. I'd be very happy if that went to the US. That doesn't change the raw GDP figures though.

I agree it may change the experience they have of being poor if you aren't also deprived of medical care. But here's another thing - people in the UK are less satisfied than ever with the NHS as well - it appears to be floundering.

(In answer to the below "people have always been less satisfied with the NHS" - perhaps so, but this time it's serious, they haven't been this less satisfied before - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/02/patient-sati... )
Helping customers find products and services to their needs is a good and worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, the typical role of marketing is to convince people that they have problems that only the marketed product can fix.
Consider how many people never realized that Jim Jones didn't have their best interests at heart and now consider that we've fully automated the process that brought those people to that point.
Getting so tired of HN, every thread has these kinds of vague, ignorant, semi-political comments. Just a throwaway opinion with some unrelated quote to appear smart, not related to the posted link, nothing added to the discussion.

The Suez Crisis happened 70(!) years ago, the article is talking about where modern day UK spends its money. It's literally right there in the opening sentence, if you only bothered to open it:

>Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question - why do we seem so broke?

Aside from strictly technical topics, this community is now worse than Reddit.
It's a common misconception that IR35 only affects a narrow group of high-earning professionals - TV presenters, consultants, and the like. But that framing misses the wider picture and, frankly, suits the narrative that was used to sell the legislation to the public.

In reality, IR35 has had a broad and damaging impact on a much wider group of skilled workers - IT contractors, engineers, healthcare professionals, tradespeople - many of whom built small, legitimate limited companies as a way to work flexibly, compete fairly, and build some financial security. It was one of the few viable paths to independence left, and IR35 has made it effectively unworkable for many.

Large corporations didn't like losing contracts and talent to smaller, more agile competitors. IR35 conveniently removed that competition by making small operators too much of a compliance risk to hire. Meanwhile, public sector bodies were discouraged—sometimes even penalised—for engaging small suppliers, further consolidating the power of the big consultancies.

The media focus on celebrity cases wasn't accidental. HMRC gained free publicity and public support by targeting high-profile individuals - knowing it would reinforce the idea that IR35 was closing tax loopholes rather than quietly dismantling a thriving small business ecosystem. The result is a workforce with less autonomy, less incentive to go above and beyond, and fewer opportunities to build something for themselves.

This isn't just about tax - it's about economic structure, incentives, and who gets to participate in the rewards of their own labour. And when those opportunities disappear, so does productivity, innovation, and local economic resilience.
Those aren't nearly close enough to be considered stolen. Possibly allusions (which is not stealing), but even then, the only similarity of the bests is "The best" usage. Nothing about the rest of the lines, or before, are similar enough to be "stolen" (potentially the Ginsberg troping Yeat's "full of passionate intensity" of the worst into his best's "madness, starving hysterical", but that too is allusion, not stealing).

The best lack all conviction, while the worst //
Are full of passionate intensity.

vs

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, //
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

How is this stealing in any form?
? It's basic empathy, I'm sure you've watched some TV in your lifetime that involved people doing things you could also do yourself (like, as someone else said, play sports)

Watching other people play video games (or sports) isn't my thing personally, but to each their own.
Republicans have for a long time wanted to end free weather information and hand that job over to for-profit companies like AccuWeather[1]. Trump v1 nominated AccuWeather's CEO to run the organization[2]. Project 2025 calls for breaking up NOAA and commercializing it[3]. This is not some hidden agenda, and you don't have to speculate about their intentions. As is the case for everything these guys do, they are open and brazen about it.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/07/noaa-pro...

2: https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/14/politics/noaa-nominee-accuwea...

3: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-what-pro...
Why do people even think this? Bots almost always just use headful instrumented browsers now. if a human sitting at a keyboard can load the content, so can a bot.
Gary's angle is wrong. He's got a book to flog and a channel to promote.

It's crystal clear we can build new houses and new businesses, so suggesting 'wealth' is a zero sum game is ideological folly.

As to his thesis, here's the demolition of mathematics within it: https://birchlermuesli.substack.com/p/copy-garys-badeconomic...
I wasn't trying to say the contents of the ads aren't novel- just that what they're selling very often isn't.

Its also so very rarely factual - the idea is more for you to believe that 'Disney Land is an important milestone for all happy families'. Or 'Stella Artois is the type of beer a sexy intellectual orders - that's you right?'

I completely believe that ads are a huge part of our culture.
It's even worse when paired with the ability for a local authority to go bankrupt when it can't cover the bills and be forced to sell off major capital assets (e.g. buildings, sometimes of significant public interest like concerts halls, leisure centres and other community venues).

Of course the actual place continues to exist so the local authority will continue to exist in another form, this time with fewer major capital assets and they're paying rents to the people who now own them instead.

As pointed out in the article you could see this happen when something entirely out of the authorities control (e.g. spending on SEND children due to the massive increase in eligible children in Central Bedfordshire's case) causes it too.
Fascinating! I wonder what the modern day equivilent would be...

I'm betting a computer in this digital age, hence the rise of electronic music.
> Are you legally required to carry a means of communication? If not, how can this possibly be enforced?

Obviously not... If you have no means to communicate you are not required to communicate. I don't know why you'd think otherwise.

> For example, how fast can I drive to get to a telephone if I don't carry one or otherwise cannot use it?

This would obviously depend on circumstances and how safe you're able to drive without causing more incidents.

This is also why we have courts, and judges, and juries. They look at the totality of circumstances and arrive at judgement.
A lot of non-power users are complementing Google search with ChatGPT. The main reason is that it will give an answer to more specific questions. Like “what are some quotes famous athletes have said about Usain Bolt”.
I remember at one point Youtube had features for that, clickable elements in videos and someone turned that into a choose your own adventure style thing. There's a few productions on Netflix like that as well, and of course DVDs also promised that at the time.

But the interactive video thing never really took off.
> New wealth "creation" is a lie.

Perhaps the bigger issue is old wealth destruction. We live in a world of effectively infinite low cost electronics, clothes and food, but the things which used to be abundant are now actually quite scarce.

Housing is most obvious example here - but the costs of driving (excluding vehicle purchase), childcare, wedding, and energy are now radically higher than ever before. In these areas it feels like we've gone backwards in productivity.
Funny. NOAA spent 2015-now moving all their weather servers off premises and moving from HTML and static images with maybe a bit of client side javascript to entirely web application remote hosted monstrosities that all require javascript to even see. If they'd just stuck with what worked instead of chasing the shiny glimmer of modern web dev they wouldn't be in this exact situation. No doubt they'd be being attacked a different way. But I still miss the old sites that were actually websites. My bet is that the lingering ones like https://forecast.weather.gov/ will be the only remaining after these political attacks.
I think it’s more nuances, it’s saying that our definition of potential, best, etc, doesn’t weigh empathy for our fellow humans heavily enough. It’s an argument to flip that instead of our brightest minds being spent on ads, to instead say we are not rewarding our brightest minds at all but our most mercenary ones.
I doubt that was the intent. They are cancelling contracts willy nilly right now. NOAA is getting hit harder because of their association with climate science but this administration is not doing a lick of diligence on any of these moves.
Show HN: FeedWise – An RSS Reader to Reclaim Your Attention
Hi HN, I'm a solo dev and I've been building FeedWise, a simple RSS reader designed to help you take back control of your attention. I launched it today and would love your feedback!

I found myself overwhelmed by algorithmic feeds on platforms like YouTube and X, losing focus on what truly mattered. I missed the days when I controlled my information diet. FeedWise is my solution: an RSS reader that puts you back in the driver’s seat.

For those who still value the power of RSS, FeedWise lets you subscribe to any RSS feed (articles, podcasts, YouTube channels/playlists, subreddits, newsletters, even Hacker News). You can easily search, filter, mark items as read/unread, as well as mute feeds to temporarily hide distractions and catch up on your terms. It also includes a dark mode for comfortable reading, and device sync is included for everyone.

The mute feature has been a game-changer for me, letting me focus on what's important without the anxiety of unsubscribing and potentially missing out later. It's about reclaiming attention from the noise.

FeedWise started as a personal project to learn new tech stacks (I’d rebuild it every year or so), but it became a tool that genuinely improved my life. Now I want to share it with others who feel overwhelmed by algorithmic feeds.

Questions or critiques are more than welcome. Thanks for checking it out!

https://feedwise.net
I think those environments are bad, most likely? Why would it be a goal to make it so that people break rules?

Making people think about the rules? That is fine and good. Setting them to be broken, though? That just sounds broken.
Not caffeinated enough. I thought the title was referring to mac addresses and I was really wondering how that would work.
I was using OpenRouter + Roo Code extension + VS Code for the last few weeks and it has been a breeze. Roo Code is a Cline open source, comunity driven, fork. It has some additional features compared to Cline that I found very useful. Check it here: https://github.com/RooVetGit/Roo-Code.

When used right with vs code the experience seems almost the same as using cursor, but you can choose your AI provider.

PS: In the last few days I tried Roo Code with Google Gemini 2.5 thinking (signficantly better that Clude 3.7) but found that the OpenRouter option to use Google Gemini 2.5 thinking has a bad rate limit, the solution was to create a google developer account and use the google gemini api directly which dont have such bad rate limit and is also very cheap (I used it a lot and the cost was zero).
Fun fact: JavaScript 1.2 did feature -0 and 0 = +0. Which has quite a number of rather confusing aspects and effects, if you run a script in this context.
It does import/export Excel.
Back in MY day we'd SHOOT NAZIS for FUN but the KIDS these days just want to build a HOUSE out of BLOCKS and raise SHEEP.
Old geezer reaction: Nothing about checking whether he's breathing. Nor if he has a pulse. Nor calling for emergency medical attention if "no" to either of those. Nor...
And Obama. A lot of this is a trauma response from the American right to the election of a Black president.