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danielshton Show HN: Lightpanda, an open-source headless browser in Zig

Very impressive! At Airtop.ai we looked into lightweight browsers like this one since we run a huge fleet of cloud browsers but found that anything other than a non-headless Chromium based browser would trigger bot detection pretty quickly. Even spoofing user agents triggers bot detection because fingerprinting tools like FingerprintJS will use things like JS features, canvas fingerprinting, WebGL fingerprinting, font enumeration, etc.

Can you share if you've looked into how your browser fares against bot detection tools like these?

danielshton We Automated the Most Thoughtful Secret Santa in Tech History

It was incredible to see our CEO do this in like 15 mins. LLM based web automation is the future, but is also fun and whimsical

danielshton Show HN: Intelligent Browser for Web Automation Powered by AI

Heya, Marcos from Airtop here.

You're right, it won't book your flight, but what it will do is (in your example) scrape Google Flights and return all the flights that:

1. Leave from Newark 2. After 6:30PM 3. That cost less than $200 4. Take no longer than 4 hrs 29 min 5. with only 173 kg CO2e

So you can be THAT specific and then it will tell you exactly what to book

danielshton Show HN: Intelligent Browser for Web Automation Powered by AI

You can create a free account via our website: https://www.airtop.ai ! You should check out the Studio once you create your account so you can experiment with some prompts and examples

danielshton Show HN: Intelligent Browser for Web Automation Powered by AI

Heya, we don't have a Discord server just yet, but it's super cool to know there's sufficient interest in having one. For now, though, I'd be happy to answer any questions here or over emails.

danielshton Show HN: Intelligent Browser for Web Automation Powered by AI

You can probably scrape that too! What sort of data would you be looking to get?

danielshton Builder.io: Design to Code

I'm not affiliated with this company or product in any way. I'm actually curious what the community thinks of it and if anyone's found it useful. Every product like this I've tried recently will do a good job of outputting some code that builds the UI, but never does a good job of writing code in the style that matches the rest of my code base, or using our custom components that often wrap other component libraries and implement our design system. If people have tried this, or other products, and you've found them useful to build non demo, non side project code, can you share your experience?

danielshton Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2022)

Switchboard | Fully Remote (within the 4 US timezones) | https://boards.greenhouse.io/switchboard

At Switchboard, we believe teamwork should be the best part of work. We’re building a platform designed for remote collaboration at its core, allowing teams, regardless of their location, to be more productive, organized, and spontaneous. Teams can focus on getting more done together, cut out meeting-related grunt work, and have more “hallway” conversations whether they are sitting across the room, across the office, or across the world.

We're hiring Frontend and Platform architects, fullstack product engineers, platform engineers, and designers. Feel free to apply directly on our job's board: https://boards.greenhouse.io/switchboard

or reach out to me directly: daniel {at] switchboard [dot} app (VP of Engineering here)

danielshton Chrome suddenly caps WebMediaPlayers to 75 without warnings

Subsequent bug thread dealing with the fallout: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=123264...

danielshton Linus and Pull Requests (2012)

Reasonable people can disagree on things like formatting, features, or the superiority of one interface/product over another... all fair game. And Linus’ contributions give him an enormous amount of credibility and leeway to have it his way. But when you treat people with such disrespect (ex. By calling them a moron), you lose all credibility and respect in my book. There should be no excuse for treating people with disrespect no matter who you are or what your contributions have been. I’m not surprised given his reputation, but I’m still incredibly disappointed

danielshton Companies are fleeing California. Blame bad government

As I read the discussion, one interesting question came to mind. There are so many cities that want to be the next "tech hubs", and many of them have been promoting that label (with or without merit) for years. I can't tell you how many articles like this one [0] I've read.

But in reality, many of these cities are making an honest effort to live up to that label by attracting talent, corporate HQs and investment to make these claims real. Texas' tax policies are one example [1]

In contrast, I see SF and the broader Bay Area making moves in the opposite direction. One such example is the new CEO wealth tax [2], along with others that make SF seem hostile rather than welcoming. It's no surprise that companies want to leave.

Do other people see it this way too? Has SF or the Bay Area enacted policies to attract or retain tech talent, investment and innovation? Or is the valley's success due to a strong network effect that has been self reinforcing (more talent means more investment means more talent, etc). Have California, SF or Bay Area policies in the last 20 years truly encouraged the flourishing of the tech industry, or has it happened despite these governments? Really curious to hear what people think.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/jpmc-2018/are-these-ci...

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10141...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/san-francisco-approves-taxes-on-c...

danielshton Companies are fleeing California. Blame bad government

Very illustrative example. So in this thread, I'm reading the opinion that "it's not the fault of government, it's the fault of the voters". But your point (hope I'm not misrepresenting it), aligns more with "it's actually the voters who are fickle and don't always vote in a way that's aligned with their best interests".

So what are we left with? :(

danielshton Companies are fleeing California. Blame bad government

Is the same true of Tesla? I know of plenty of people who work or would like to work for Tesla. Another group of companies that haven't received as much attention in the recent "SF exodus" narrative are Google and FB. Google has been opening large offices outside of SF for years and is slowly contributing to the growing of tech hubs around the country. Google's Boulder office comes to mind as a good example.

I'm not aware of any large FB spokes, but FB remote work allowance might end up having a similar effect. Not to mention the many startups that have realized that the distributed model works fairly well if you know how to do it, and opens up a large talent pool. I currently work for such a startup and we don't plan on going to back to a central SF office model post pandemic.

danielshton Companies are fleeing California. Blame bad government

That's a great point... and in theory the government elected by the voters is supposed to reflect he will of those who put them into office. But in practice, I don't always see it panning out that way. Prop 22 being a good recent example. California voters elected a state assembly, which passed AB5. But then Prop 22, by direct referendum overturned AB5. So wouldn't this be a case where the government didn't act consistently with the will of the voters?

danielshton Companies are fleeing California. Blame bad government

I'm really curious to hear what the community has to say about this perspective. This is very compelling argument to me, but I've heard other compelling arguments on the other side. These arguments tend to go like this:

1. Big tech has gone unchecked for a long time and it's up to government and regulators to reign them in when it comes to privacy, offering sustainable compensation models for gig workers, limiting an increasing wage gap, and other inequities.

2. The rise of big tech has outpaced the city/area's ability to offer services at low costs. No other industry has seen such a quick rise and it's no wonder prices (including houses) have climbed so much.

I live in San Francisco, and have been disappointed, annoyed, and frustrated at many of the issues this article brings up, including high housing prices, homelessness, property crime, but it seems like an easy out to simply blame the government, or the tech industry exclusively. My guess is there's plenty of blame to go around and the answer might be more nuanced than finding a single scapegoat. What are people's thoughts?

danielshton Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2016)

Viv Labs | Sr. Frontend DevTools Engineer | San Jose, CA | Full-time | http://viv.ai

DESCRIPTION

Viv is the next-generation virtual personal assistant, brought to you by the team that created Siri. In addition to being far more capable and intelligent, Viv will provide a truly open platform and marketplace that lets any developer extend Viv's capabilities for new domains and services. VentureBeat (http://bit.ly/1NSHobJ) named Viv one of the top 15 interesting startups to watch in 2016. Check out this demo (http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/9/11639992/viv-digital-assist...) from TechCrunch Disrupt NY, and watch the power of Viv in action.

Viv's Developer Center provides a set of tools that make it easy for a third-party developer to create AI capabilities on top of their web services, and then publish the new functionality to a marketplace accessible by many users across a variety of devices and experiences. As a Sr. Frontend DevTools Engineer, you will be building a new kind of web-based IDE for a new kind of platform. In this new paradigm, developers write programs to teach Viv how to write its own programs. Come help us pioneer a new way of writing software, one that is a collaboration between the developer and the AI.

REQUIREMENTS

You are excited about our vision and want to collaborate with our team to build an amazing product Intimate knowledge of JavaScript, DOM/browser, and Node.js APIs Experience with React or similar view-binding/reactive or functional UI frameworks Experience collaborating closely with designers in an iterative environment Able to quickly build out web UI from specs/sketches

DESIRED

Experience optimizing and writing performant client-side code Previously built web-based developer/expert tools Familiarity with ACE, CodeMirror, and/or lexers is a plus Experience building Electron apps or browser extensions is a plus

Apply here: https://viv-labs.workable.com/jobs/98839

danielshton Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2016)