Mochi.js: bun-native high-fidelity browser automation library
Hi HN,I’m sharing mochi.js (https://github.com/0xchasercat/mochi), a Bun-native, raw-CDP browser automation framework. It's designed to make programmatic browser use more effective by focusing on consistency and measured parity with regular traffic, purely from the JS layer, against stock Chromium.The most common forms of browser automation focus heavily on client-side line by line probes, which are mostly cosmetic. This makes people feel better but it doesn't have much relevance to actual WAF or anti-automation defences.Mochi.js focuses on what actually matters, allowing you to get past captchas, WAF's and most defence mechanisms. In fact, in some cases it actually outperforms chromium forks simply by virtue of not having to lie.The foundation is built on a probe manifest based on analyzing several WAF's and trying to cover most of the ground that matters, and from there building upwards while ensuring every decision is backed by data. Solves turnstile/interstitial automatically, single digit fpjs suspect score, very good client-side results, though browserscan and a few others are known limitations that are fundamentally conflicting with what WAF's probe for.I'll be here if anyone wants to discuss the details, check out the docs and github. It's completely free and open source, MIT, strictly no relationship to any proprietary products whatsoever. No affiliation to patched chromium forks, or SaaS.But I also want to talk about why I built this, because the current paradigm of "bot detection" is fundamentally broken.Traditionally they would probably try to label my repository a malicious tool, or at best, a grey hat one.Let's take Turnstile for example, If you attach a debugger to see what data they are extracting from your hardware, their script intentionally self-destructs. When they try to extract your data—acting as a guest on your silicon, using your electricity, without asking, the indu
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A technically sophisticated browser automation library that solves real WAF evasion problems but operates in a legally/ethically ambiguous space with limited legitimate monetization paths.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Technically sophisticated: data-driven approach to WAF evasion vs. cosmetic solutions
- Honest positioning: acknowledges the broken bot-detection paradigm
- Real problem: legitimate automation is genuinely difficult
- Open source credibility: MIT license, no proprietary ties
- Proven effectiveness: reportedly beats Turnstile, achieves low FingerprintJS scores
Risks
- Legal/regulatory: facilitates circumventing security controls; potential CFAA violations depending on use case
- Ethical ambiguity: while creator argues detection is broken, tool enables fraud, scraping, and abuse at scale
- No business model: free + open-source + hostile to commercialization = no revenue path
- Reputational: will be labeled malicious regardless of intent; attracts wrong users
- Regulatory capture: as detection improves, tool becomes obsolete; arms race dynamic
- Liability: creator liable if tool used for fraud/abuse despite MIT license
- Market timing: WAF vendors will actively work to detect/block this; short shelf life
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
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Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality.Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and reranked with code-aware signals. Everything runs on CPU since there's no transformers involved. On our benchmark of ~1250 query/document pairs across 63 repos and 19 languages, it uses 98% fewer tokens than grep+read and reaches 99% of the retrieval quality of a 137M-parameter code-trained transformer, while being ~200x faster.Main features:- Token-efficient: 98% fewer tokens than grep+read- Fast: ~250ms to index a typical repo on our benchmark, ~1.5ms per query on CPU (very large repos may take longer)- Accurate: 0.854 NDCG@10, 99% of the best transformer setup we tested- MCP server: drop-in for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode- Zero config: no API keys, no GPU, no external servicesInstall in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" sembleOr check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/sembleBenchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarksModel: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16MLet us know if you have any feedback or questions!
AI
Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
AI
Consus (YC F24) – LLM gateway for companies handling sensitive data
Hey Hacker News! I'm Eric, the founder of Consus. We route all AI requests to ITAR restricted and controlled unclassified information (CUI) compliant infrastructure. Consus itself satisfies ITAR restrictions, and we recently completed our FedRAMP equivalency audit against the 410 FedRAMP High controls. FedRAMP High is the U.S. government’s strictest security baseline for cloud services handling sensitive unclassified data. A breach of this data could cause severe or catastrophic harm. Achieving FedRAMP equivalency, or authorization, is required before processing CUI information.Demo: https://youtu.be/6MYxJe6P4oYAerospace and defense is experiencing rapid growth. Unfortunately, most companies are struggling to use AI because of necessary data protections & compliance risk. These companies can move even faster if they could use the AI tools that most other industries take for granted.I spent most of my career prior to Consus in aerospace & defense. I launched national security payloads at SpaceX, and was an early employee at Castelion. I’ve watched first hand how compliance red-tape makes it difficult for companies to adopt new technologies and trust vendors that touch their sensitive data. For example, I worked with a satellite manufacturer that doesn’t allow any AI tools, even for non-sensitive work.Even as AI has become extremely useful over the past 9-12 months, I was surprised by how many aerospace & defense companies refused to touch it. They could see how it could be helpful, but they were scared about model providers training on their data, violating an ITAR rule, or risk losing new business because of a failed cyber assessment. These are all rational fears.There were a lot of ways to solve some/all of these problems, but we focused on building a compliant AI inference layer that can "plug" into any AI tool or workflow. Just as OpenRouter integrates with most tools, Consus can connect to tools like ChatGPT or Clau
AI
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