The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: A 10KiB kernel for cloud apps
Show HN: Tabstack – Browser infrastructure for AI agents (by Mozilla)
Hi HN,<p>My team and I are building Tabstack to handle the "web layer" for AI agents. Launch Post: <a href="https://tabstack.ai/blog/intro-browsing-infrastructure-ai-agents" rel="nofollow">https://tabstack.ai/blog/intro-browsing-infrastructure-ai-ag...</a><p>Maintaining a complex infrastructure stack for web browsing is one of the biggest bottlenecks in building reliable agents. You start with a simple fetch, but quickly end up managing a complex stack of proxies, handling client-side hydration, and debugging brittle selectors. and writing custom parsing logic for every site.<p>Tabstack is an API that abstracts that infrastructure. You send a URL and an intent; we handle the rendering and return clean, structured data for the LLM.<p>How it works under the hood:<p>- Escalation Logic: We don't spin up a full browser instance for every request (which is slow and expensive). We attempt lightweight fetches first, escalating to full browser automation only when the site requires JS execution/hydration.<p>- Token Optimization: Raw HTML is noisy and burns context window tokens. We process the DOM to strip non-content elements and return a markdown-friendly structure that is optimized for LLM consumption.<p>- Infrastructure Stability: Scaling headless browsers is notoriously hard (zombie processes, memory leaks, crashing instances). We manage the fleet lifecycle and orchestration so you can run thousands of concurrent requests without maintaining the underlying grid.<p>On Ethics: Since we are backed by Mozilla, we are strict about how this interacts with the open web.<p>- We respect robots.txt rules.<p>- We identify our User Agent.<p>- We do not use requests/content to train models.<p>- Data is ephemeral and discarded after the task.<p>The linked post goes into more detail on the infrastructure and why we think browsing needs to be a distinct layer in the AI stack.<p>This is obviously a very new space and we're all learning together. There are plenty of known unknowns (and likely even more unknown unknowns) when it comes to agentic browsing, so we’d genuinely appreciate your feedback, questions, and tips.<p>Happy to answer questions about the stack, our architecture, or the challenges of building browser infrastructure.
Show HN: TinyCity – A tiny city SIM for MicroPython (Thumby micro console)
Show HN: OpenWork – An open-source alternative to Claude Cowork
hi hn,<p>i built openwork, an open-source, local-first system inspired by claude cowork.<p>it’s a native desktop app that runs on top of opencode (opencode.ai).
it’s basically an alternative gui for opencode, which (at least until now) has been more focused on technical folks.<p>the original seed for openwork was simple: i have a home server, and i wanted my wife and i to be able to run privileged workflows. things like controlling home assistant, or deploying custom web apps (e.g. our customs recipe app recipes.benjaminshafii.com), legal torrents, without living in a terminal.<p>our initial setup was running the opencode web server directly and sharing credentials to it. that worked, but i found the web ui unreliable and very unfriendly for non-technical users.<p>the goal with openwork is to bring the kind of workflows i’m used to running in the cli into a gui, while keeping a very deep extensibility mindset. ideally this grows into something closer to an obsidian-style ecosystem, but for agentic work.<p>some core principles i had in mind:<p>- open by design: no black boxes, no hosted lock-in. everything runs locally or on your own servers. (models don’t run locally yet, but both opencode and openwork are built with that future in mind.)
- hyper extensible: skills are installable modules via a skill/package manager, using the native opencode plugin ecosystem.
- non-technical by default: plans, progress, permissions, and artifacts are surfaced in the ui, not buried in logs.<p>you can already try it:
- there’s an unsigned dmg
- or you can clone the repo, install deps, and if you already have opencode running it should work right away<p>it’s very alpha, lots of rough edges. i’d love feedback on what feels the roughest or most confusing.<p>happy to answer questions.
Show HN: HyTags – HTML as a Programming Language
This is hyTags, a programming language embedded in HTML for building interactive web UIs.<p>It started as a way to write full-stack web apps in Swift without a separate frontend, but grew into a small language with control flow, functions, and async handling via HTML tags. The result is backend language-agnostic and can be generated from any server that can produce HTML via templates or DSLs.
Show HN: HyTags – HTML as a Programming Language
This is hyTags, a programming language embedded in HTML for building interactive web UIs.<p>It started as a way to write full-stack web apps in Swift without a separate frontend, but grew into a small language with control flow, functions, and async handling via HTML tags. The result is backend language-agnostic and can be generated from any server that can produce HTML via templates or DSLs.
Show HN: Xoscript
Show HN: Xoscript
Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level turn-taking without ASR
For the past year I've been working to rethink how AI manages timing in conversation at Tavus. I've spent a lot of time listening to conversations. Today we're announcing the release of Sparrow-1, the most advanced conversational flow model in the world.<p>Some technical details:<p>- Predicts conversational floor ownership, not speech endpoints<p>- Audio-native streaming model, no ASR dependency<p>- Human-timed responses without silence-based delays<p>- Zero interruptions at sub-100ms median latency<p>- In benchmarks Sparrow-1 beats all existing models at real world turn-taking baselines<p>I wrote more about the work here: <a href="https://www.tavus.io/post/sparrow-1-human-level-conversational-timing-in-real-time-voice">https://www.tavus.io/post/sparrow-1-human-level-conversation...</a>
Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level turn-taking without ASR
For the past year I've been working to rethink how AI manages timing in conversation at Tavus. I've spent a lot of time listening to conversations. Today we're announcing the release of Sparrow-1, the most advanced conversational flow model in the world.<p>Some technical details:<p>- Predicts conversational floor ownership, not speech endpoints<p>- Audio-native streaming model, no ASR dependency<p>- Human-timed responses without silence-based delays<p>- Zero interruptions at sub-100ms median latency<p>- In benchmarks Sparrow-1 beats all existing models at real world turn-taking baselines<p>I wrote more about the work here: <a href="https://www.tavus.io/post/sparrow-1-human-level-conversational-timing-in-real-time-voice">https://www.tavus.io/post/sparrow-1-human-level-conversation...</a>
Show HN: Webctl – Browser automation for agents based on CLI instead of MCP
Hi HN, I built webctl because I was frustrated by the gap between curl and full browser automation frameworks like Playwright.<p>I initially built this to solve a personal headache: I wanted an AI agent to handle project management tasks on my company’s intranet. I needed it to persist cookies across sessions (to handle SSO) and then scrape a Kanban board.<p>Existing AI browser tools (like current MCP implementations) often force unsolicited data into the context window—dumping the full accessibility tree, console logs, and network errors whether you asked for them or not.<p>webctl is an attempt to solve this with a Unix-style CLI:<p>- Filter before context: You pipe the output to standard tools. webctl snapshot --interactive-only | head -n 20 means the LLM only sees exactly what I want it to see.<p>- Daemon Architecture: It runs a persistent background process. The goal is to keep the browser state (cookies/session) alive while you run discrete, stateless CLI commands.<p>- Semantic targeting: It uses ARIA roles (e.g., role=button name~="Submit") rather than fragile CSS selectors.<p>Disclaimer: The daemon logic for state persistence is still a bit experimental, but the architecture feels like the right direction for building local, token-efficient agents.<p>It’s basically "Playwright for the terminal."
Show HN: Webctl – Browser automation for agents based on CLI instead of MCP
Hi HN, I built webctl because I was frustrated by the gap between curl and full browser automation frameworks like Playwright.<p>I initially built this to solve a personal headache: I wanted an AI agent to handle project management tasks on my company’s intranet. I needed it to persist cookies across sessions (to handle SSO) and then scrape a Kanban board.<p>Existing AI browser tools (like current MCP implementations) often force unsolicited data into the context window—dumping the full accessibility tree, console logs, and network errors whether you asked for them or not.<p>webctl is an attempt to solve this with a Unix-style CLI:<p>- Filter before context: You pipe the output to standard tools. webctl snapshot --interactive-only | head -n 20 means the LLM only sees exactly what I want it to see.<p>- Daemon Architecture: It runs a persistent background process. The goal is to keep the browser state (cookies/session) alive while you run discrete, stateless CLI commands.<p>- Semantic targeting: It uses ARIA roles (e.g., role=button name~="Submit") rather than fragile CSS selectors.<p>Disclaimer: The daemon logic for state persistence is still a bit experimental, but the architecture feels like the right direction for building local, token-efficient agents.<p>It’s basically "Playwright for the terminal."
Show HN: Tiny FOSS Compass and Navigation App (<2MB)
Show HN: Tiny FOSS Compass and Navigation App (<2MB)
Show HN: WebTiles – create a tiny 250x250 website with neighbors around you
There is a large grid of 250x250 tiles, on which you are be able to create a tiny website, contained into the tile.
You can basically consider the tile as a mini version of your website, showcasing what your full site has (but it can be anything). You are able to link to your full site, and use any HTML/CSS/JS inside. The purpose is to create beautiful and interesting tiles, that could be used for exploring the indie-web in an easy and interesting way.
Show HN: WebTiles – create a tiny 250x250 website with neighbors around you
There is a large grid of 250x250 tiles, on which you are be able to create a tiny website, contained into the tile.
You can basically consider the tile as a mini version of your website, showcasing what your full site has (but it can be anything). You are able to link to your full site, and use any HTML/CSS/JS inside. The purpose is to create beautiful and interesting tiles, that could be used for exploring the indie-web in an easy and interesting way.
Show HN: OSS AI agent that indexes and searches the Epstein files
Hi HN,<p>I built an open-source AI agent that has already indexed and can search the entire Epstein files, roughly 100M words of publicly released documents.<p>The goal was simple: make a large, messy corpus of PDFs and text files immediately searchable in a precise way, without relying on keyword search or bloated prompts.<p>What it does:<p>- The full dataset is already indexed
- You can ask natural language questions
- Answers are grounded and include direct references to source documents
- Supports both exact text lookup and semantic search<p>Discussion around these files is often fragmented. This makes it possible to explore the primary sources directly and verify claims without manually digging through thousands of pages.<p>Happy to answer questions or go into technical details.<p>Code: <a href="https://github.com/nozomio-labs/nia-epstein-ai" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nozomio-labs/nia-epstein-ai</a>
Show HN: SnackBase – Open-source, GxP-compliant back end for Python teams
Hi HN, I’m the creator of SnackBase.<p>I built this because I work in Healthcare and Life Sciences domain and was tired of spending months building the same "compliant" infrastructure (Audit Logs, Row-Level Security, PII Masking, Auth) before writing any actual product code.<p>The Problem: Existing BaaS tools (Supabase, Appwrite) are amazing, but they are hard to validate for GxP (FDA regulations) and often force you into a JS/Go ecosystem. I wanted something native to the Python tools I already use.<p>The Solution: SnackBase is a self-hosted Python (FastAPI + SQLAlchemy) backend that includes:<p>Compliance Core: Immutable audit logs with blockchain-style hashing (prev_hash) for integrity.<p>Native Python Hooks: You can write business logic in pure Python (no webhooks or JS runtimes required).<p>Clean Architecture: Strict separation of layers. No business logic in the API routes.<p>The Stack:<p>Python 3.12 + FastAPI<p>SQLAlchemy 2.0 (Async)<p>React 19 (Admin UI)<p>Links:<p>Live Demo: <a href="https://demo.snackbase.dev" rel="nofollow">https://demo.snackbase.dev</a><p>Repo: <a href="https://github.com/lalitgehani/snackbase" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lalitgehani/snackbase</a><p>The demo resets every hour. I’d love feedback on the DSL implementation or the audit logging approach.
Show HN: Ayder – HTTP-native durable event log written in C (curl as client)
Hi HN,<p>I built Ayder — a single-binary, HTTP-native durable event log written in C.
The wedge is simple: curl is the client (no JVM, no ZooKeeper, no thick client libs).<p>There’s a 2-minute demo that starts with an unclean SIGKILL, then restarts and
verifies offsets + data are still there.<p>Numbers (3-node Raft, real network, sync-majority writes, 64B payload):
~50K msg/s sustained (wrk2 @ 50K req/s), client P99 ~3.46ms.
Crash recovery after SIGKILL is ~40–50s with ~8M offsets.<p>Repo link has the video, benchmarks, and quick start.
I’m looking for a few early design partners (any event ingestion/streaming workload).
Show HN: Nogic – VS Code extension that visualizes your codebase as a graph
I built Nogic, a VSCode extension currently, because AI tools make code grow faster than developers can build a mental model by jumping between files. Exploring structure visually has been helping me onboard to unfamiliar codebases faster.<p>It’s early and rough, but usable. Would love feedback on whether this is useful and what relationships are most valuable to visualize.