Prompt: hello there new hotness. i feel like HN is dead. It is toxic, and can't appreciate the new. It's also only 40K MAU (posters and commenters, analyzed from the big query dataset). Suer there's a bigger audience of readers, from 40K is like a big youtube video comments section. I feel it's actually kind of irrelevent. YC too. Thoughts?
"No-style" would break the modern web even more than No-Script does, unfortunately. CSS is just too integral to layout and functionality now.
A more robust alternative to disabling features is isolating where they execute. Instead of stripping out CSS/JS and breaking sites, you stream the browser session from a remote server.
If a zero-day like CVE-2026-2441 hits the parser, it crashes (or exploits) the remote instance, not your local machine. You get to keep the rich web experience (CSS, JS, fonts) without trusting your local CPU with the parsing logic. It’s basically "air-gapping" your browser tab. Not perfect, as attackers could still add a third step to compromise your remote and flow back to your local, but isolation like this adds defense in depth that then needs to compromise a much narrower attack surface (the local-remote tunnel) than if you ran it locally.
This is truer than you think. It's a good selective pressure for engineers to evolve the less rational parts of their nature. And to those clutching pearls about security, reality doesn't care about your imagined fears - just what you can build. The fears to which you cling because you think it says "I'm still needed", are not real. And...were you making secure code and systems before this? You weren't. So get over yourselves, and embrace the new. Or become what you fear: redundant. Not because engineering skills were no longer important, but because you refused to develop the other things that were. The time is now.
Estimated: 10 - 15 minutes work each. Total 1 - 2 hours of work, plus posting to HN and reading and replying to comments.
- A full auto-updating static interactive archive of HN with various queries and new views: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com
Estimated: 4 days of work
- A "most cited" HN-ecosystem ranking of topics that span multiple discussions over time ranked by the topics whose discussions/comments were most cited by other HN comments: https://hacker-backlinks.browserbox.io/
- BlueDot - a universal cloud-console TUI that lets you search, compare and rent VPS across 6 clouds (GCP, Hetzner, AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean and Vultr), right from your terminal: https://tui.bluedot.ink
Estimated: (my own thinking - weeks over years), coding: 2 days of work
- An email-bridge for your CLI AI agents to let your drive them from email while you're out, leaving your laptop at home: https://ai-chat.email
Estimated: 12 days of work (so far)
- A little open-source tool to mute your macOS mic to zero as well as detect Siri listening overrides and open settings so you can toggle: https://github.com/BrowserBox/NoSpy
Estimated: 1 hour of work
- A set of AI "taste & doctrine" files to teach your agents code that belongs and give them procedures for checking semantics for quality, or case-by-case human overrides, to keep codebases higher quality and more maintainable, rather than just ensuring syntax parses: https://ai-lint.dosaygo.com
- An impressionistic Windows 98 desktop called Windows 98½ with real Web Browsers: retro UI wrapper around BrowserBox using the new BrowserBox WebView Embedding API - a showcase for my corporate work and a cool 90s tech nostalgia art project in one, what could be better! :)
Estimated: 5 - 6 weeks of work for the Desktop (over the last 1 - 2 years), and 7 years of work for BrowserBox (rn > 90% pre-AI).
- Structropy - Towards a metric of organization. An adaption of qualities of the metric of Shannon entropy toward not just "surprise" but strucutre, to try to fill the gap that Shannon leaves where "highly random" is "high information" but "low organization". Loosely based on expected sorting time of new inserts. https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/structropy
Estimated: months of thinking over years, then 1 - 2 days of coding
And a few more even bigger ones. And that's just the last 3 months!
I use AI-Lint to enforce basic code hygeine and design taste across languages, and force it to develop test iterations it can run on its own and tell it to iterate until the tests go green.
Really? This is not mine but I tried this a minute ago and it worked fine. I had to login (new account). But it's WORTH IT! The detail in this is incredible. Beautiful re-imagining. Highly recommend.
Ha! That's a cool idea. Regarding proxying web sites: that is essentially what this is, but the agent is a "browser proxy" so the web requests go through a browser and the rendering happens on the browser in the server it's on.
BrowserBox actually has a crazy win9x compatibility mode that opens an IE6 compatible client. The issue with native Win 98 browsers is not so much the web content support (which is, admittedly, very basic), it's the lack of modern cipher suites in HTTPS, so an actual proxy would need serve everything HTTP.
For "era-appropriateness" you could add a Chrome extension to BrowserBox that gracefully downgraded all pages to look antique but doing so in a way that can interface with DOM and JS directly - a fine-grained level of control is where browser-based approaches have advantages over rewriting-proxies.
In the past I experimented with running Electron apps heedlessly on servers and have BrowserBox connect to the apps so you could stream these apps. However it was limited to Electron (or other browser-as-render-engine type GUI apps). It was tricky tho due to Electron quirks and never that compelling for me.
OP here. I’m reposting this with a focus on the tech stack because I think the "retro" look buried the lede last time.
The Problem with Web Desktops:
We've all seen cool Windows 95/98 JS recreations (like 98.js.org), but they all hit the same wall: the browser inside them is fake. You can't load modern sites (Google, YouTube, HN) inside an iframe due to X-Frame-Options, CORS, and mixed content security policies.
The Solution (BrowserBox):
This project is a frontend for a tool I'm building called BrowserBox.
Remote Isolation: When you open IE in this demo, you aren't opening an iframe. You are spinning up a remote browser session in a Docker container on my server.
Streaming: The view is streamed back to the client (using standard web technologies), and your clicks/keystrokes are sent to the server.
Result: You get a "real" internet connection inside the simulation that bypasses all client-side restriction. You can watch YouTube or browse HN from inside the virtual desktop.
The Stack:
Backend: Node.js / Puppeteer-ish control (raw CDP, custom bookkeeping)
Frontend: Vanilla JS / Custom retro UI framework
Infrastructure: Dockerized browser instances
I built this because I missed the "Wild West" feel of the 90s web, but I also wanted to show that remote browser isolation doesn't have to be clunky enterprise-ware.
Give the browser a try (sound on for full immersion) and let me know if the latency holds up for you.
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