The best Hacker News stories from All from the past day
Latest posts:
Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp
Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu
Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits
Tell HN: Beware confidentiality agreements that act as lifetime non competes
Just a note of warning from personal experience.<p>Companies don’t really need non-competes anymore. Some companies take an extremely broad interpretation of IP confidentiality, where they consider doing any work in the industry during your lifetime an inevitable confidentiality violation. They argue it would be impossible for you to work elsewhere in this industry <i>during your entire career</i> without violating confidentiality with the technical and business instincts you bring to that domain. It doesn’t require conscious violation on your part (they argue).<p>So beware and read your employment agreement carefully.<p>More here <a href="https://www.promarket.org/2024/02/08/confidentiality-agreements-can-act-like-noncompetes/" rel="nofollow">https://www.promarket.org/2024/02/08/confidentiality-agreeme...</a><p>And this is the insane legal doctrine behind this<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_disclosure" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_disclosure</a>
Microsoft suspended the email account of an ICC prosecutor at The Hague
Samsung embeds IronSource spyware app on phones across WANA
YouTube's new anti-adblock measures
Compiling LLMs into a MegaKernel: A path to low-latency inference
Infinite Mac OS X
Open source can't coordinate?
EU Eyes Ditching Microsoft Azure for France's OVHcloud
Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
Hi HN - we're Nithin and Nikhil, twin brothers and founders of nxtscape.ai (YC S24). We're building Nxtscape ("next-scape") - an open-source, agentic browser for the AI era.<p>-- Why bother building a new browser?
For the first time since Netscape was released in 1994, it feels like we can reimagine browsers from scratch for the age of AI agents. The web browser of tomorrow might not look like what we have today.<p>We saw how tools like Cursor gave developers a 10x productivity boost, yet the browser—where everyone else spends their entire workday—hasn't fundamentally changed.<p>And honestly, we feel like we're constantly fighting the browser we use every day. It's not one big thing, but a series of small, constant frustrations. I'll have 70+ tabs open from three different projects and completely lose my train of thought. And simple stuff like reordering tide pods from amazon or filling out forms shouldn't need our full attention anymore. AI can handle all of this, and that's exactly what we're building.<p>Here’s a demo of our early version <a href="https://dub.sh/nxtscape-demo" rel="nofollow">https://dub.sh/nxtscape-demo</a><p>-- What makes us different
We know others are exploring this space (Perplexity, Dia), but we want to build something open-source and community-driven. We're not a search or ads company, so we can focus on being privacy-first – Ollama integration, BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys), ad-blocker.<p>Btw we love what Brave started and stood for, but they've now spread themselves too thin across crypto, search, etc. We are laser-focused on one thing: making browsers work for YOU with AI. And unlike Arc (which we loved too but got abandoned), we're 100% open source. Fork us if you don't like our direction.<p>-- Our journey hacking a new browser
To build this, we had to fork Chromium. Honestly, it feels like the only viable path today—we've seen others like Brave (started with electron) and Microsoft Edge learn this the hard way.<p>We also started with why not just build an extension. But realized we needed more control. Similar to the reason why Cursor forked VSCode. For example, Chrome has this thing called the Accessibility Tree - basically a cleaner, semantic version of the DOM that screen readers use. Perfect for AI agents to understand pages, but you can't use it through extension APIs.<p>That said, working with the 15M-line C++ chromium codebase has been an adventure. We've both worked on infra at Google and Meta, but Chromium is a different beast. Tools like Cursor's indexing completely break at this scale, so we've had to get really good with grep and vim. And the build times are brutal—even with our maxed-out M4 Max MacBook, a full build takes about 3 hours.<p>Full disclosure: we are still very early, but we have a working prototype on GitHub. It includes an early version of a "local Manus" style agent that can automate simple web tasks, plus an AI sidebar for questions, and other productivity features (grouping tabs, saving/resuming sessions, etc.).<p>Looking forward to any and all comments!<p>You can download the browser from our github page: <a href="https://github.com/nxtscape/nxtscape">https://github.com/nxtscape/nxtscape</a>
Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
Hi HN - we're Nithin and Nikhil, twin brothers and founders of nxtscape.ai (YC S24). We're building Nxtscape ("next-scape") - an open-source, agentic browser for the AI era.<p>-- Why bother building a new browser?
For the first time since Netscape was released in 1994, it feels like we can reimagine browsers from scratch for the age of AI agents. The web browser of tomorrow might not look like what we have today.<p>We saw how tools like Cursor gave developers a 10x productivity boost, yet the browser—where everyone else spends their entire workday—hasn't fundamentally changed.<p>And honestly, we feel like we're constantly fighting the browser we use every day. It's not one big thing, but a series of small, constant frustrations. I'll have 70+ tabs open from three different projects and completely lose my train of thought. And simple stuff like reordering tide pods from amazon or filling out forms shouldn't need our full attention anymore. AI can handle all of this, and that's exactly what we're building.<p>Here’s a demo of our early version <a href="https://dub.sh/nxtscape-demo" rel="nofollow">https://dub.sh/nxtscape-demo</a><p>-- What makes us different
We know others are exploring this space (Perplexity, Dia), but we want to build something open-source and community-driven. We're not a search or ads company, so we can focus on being privacy-first – Ollama integration, BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys), ad-blocker.<p>Btw we love what Brave started and stood for, but they've now spread themselves too thin across crypto, search, etc. We are laser-focused on one thing: making browsers work for YOU with AI. And unlike Arc (which we loved too but got abandoned), we're 100% open source. Fork us if you don't like our direction.<p>-- Our journey hacking a new browser
To build this, we had to fork Chromium. Honestly, it feels like the only viable path today—we've seen others like Brave (started with electron) and Microsoft Edge learn this the hard way.<p>We also started with why not just build an extension. But realized we needed more control. Similar to the reason why Cursor forked VSCode. For example, Chrome has this thing called the Accessibility Tree - basically a cleaner, semantic version of the DOM that screen readers use. Perfect for AI agents to understand pages, but you can't use it through extension APIs.<p>That said, working with the 15M-line C++ chromium codebase has been an adventure. We've both worked on infra at Google and Meta, but Chromium is a different beast. Tools like Cursor's indexing completely break at this scale, so we've had to get really good with grep and vim. And the build times are brutal—even with our maxed-out M4 Max MacBook, a full build takes about 3 hours.<p>Full disclosure: we are still very early, but we have a working prototype on GitHub. It includes an early version of a "local Manus" style agent that can automate simple web tasks, plus an AI sidebar for questions, and other productivity features (grouping tabs, saving/resuming sessions, etc.).<p>Looking forward to any and all comments!<p>You can download the browser from our github page: <a href="https://github.com/nxtscape/nxtscape">https://github.com/nxtscape/nxtscape</a>
Hurl: Run and test HTTP requests with plain text
Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly
Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly
Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix
Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix
Show HN: I wrote a new BitTorrent tracker in Elixir
Hello everyone!<p>I'm currently in a journey to learn and improve my Elixir and Go skills (my daily job uses C++) and looking through my backlog for projects to take on I decided Elixir is the perfect language to write a highly-parallel BitTorrent tracker.
So I have spent my free time these last 3 months writing one! Now I think it has enough features to present it to the world (and a docker image to give it a quick try).<p>I know some people see trackers as relics of the past now that DHT and PEX are common but I think they still serve a purpose in today's Internet (purely talking about public trackers). That said there is not a lot going on in terms of new developments since everyone just throws opentracker in a vps a calls it a day (honorable exceptions: aquatic and torrust).<p>I plan to continue development for the foreseeable future and add some (optional) esoteric features along the way so if anyone currently operates a tracker please give a try and enjoy the lack of crashes.<p>note: only swarm_printout.ex has been vibe coded, the rest has all been written by hand.
Bento: A Steam Deck in a Keyboard