Hacker News: mrskitch

New comment by mrskitch in "Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it"

mrskitch — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:40:18 +0000

I enjoyed reading the first few chapters, but wanted a PDF as well. I run browserless.io, so threw a quick script together to PDF-ify this. Gist is here: https://gist.github.com/joelgriffith/0e6a2a774317e845206ca8d....

You can pretty much just create a free plan and run this in our debugger, which will compile the chapters and return PDF. Pretty fun little challenge.

New comment by mrskitch in "NetQL: Web Automation Framework"

mrskitch — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 02:27:10 +0000

This seems decent in Theory, though I'm not familiar if GraphQL mutations can handle conditionals. Cool idea though, but that might be a deal breaker for a lot of folks

I Ripped My Open Source Product Apart for a Complete Rebuild

mrskitch — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 20:07:20 +0000

https://www.browserless.io/blog/2024/02/21/rebuilding-browserless/

In the spirit of open source, I want to share the process as well as the product. Here's the story of our full rewrite for v2 of Browserless, down to building our own custom libraries and routing.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39485463

Points: 13

# Comments: 1

Browserless.io Now Supports GPU's

mrskitch — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 16:18:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.browserless.io/blog/2023/08/31/browserless-gpu-instances/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37407301

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Browserless Now Works in LangChain

mrskitch — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 21:18:06 +0000

Article URL: https://www.browserless.io/blog/2023/07/18/langchain-browserless/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36779241

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Using browserless.io to train your LLMs

mrskitch — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 19:31:06 +0000

Article URL: https://www.browserless.io/blog/2023/06/14/train-llm-browserless/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409270

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

How to horizontally scale headless Chrome

mrskitch — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 18:59:17 +0000

Article URL: https://www.browserless.io/blog/2023/02/23/horizontally-scaling-chrome/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34914815

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

We pick puppeteer over Selenium almost every time

mrskitch — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 21:21:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.browserless.io/blog/2023/02/02/why-we-pick-puppeteer-over-selenium-almost-every-time/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34633260

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by mrskitch in "Starring your repo does not give you permission to spam me"

mrskitch — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 16:54:59 +0000

Thanks for that -- we did have quite a few good conversations over emails. I did read each personally and respond to them. Didn't justify the means.

New comment by mrskitch in "Starring your repo does not give you permission to spam me"

mrskitch — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 14:06:32 +0000

Hey folks, Joel here, I'm the original maker behind browserless. You've seen us before on HN -- I'm very sorry for this situation.

We didn’t intend to SPAM you or send unsolicited emails, we just wanted to ask for feedback. Being an open-source/boostrapped service, feedback is really important for us, so that’s why we thought it might be a good idea to reach out to people directly. But now it's clear that that was a wrong decision. We stopped doing that and won’t do it again.

Sorry, it won’t happen again.

New comment by mrskitch in "Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)"

mrskitch — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 04:29:34 +0000

Wanted to say that browserless was on this podcast recently, and was great experience. I’d definitely recommend others do it as well

New comment by mrskitch in "The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it"

mrskitch — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:18:29 +0000

Just JS for now since it compiles and runs entirely in the browser

New comment by mrskitch in "The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it"

mrskitch — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 02:59:40 +0000

You’ve got it: the core service listens for inbound Upgrade http requests, starts a browser, then funnels the connection into the browser.

This debugger simply sits on top of all that, and puts the code/execution context in the browser versus the server. Cloud flare is simply detecting that our server IP is a known headless chrome instance, and is serving their bot detection check

New comment by mrskitch in "The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it"

mrskitch — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 02:53:07 +0000

You can use our demo debugger (the address is in this blogpost). It might not match your version of puppeteer exactly, but it’s a close enough proximate that it’s still valuable

New comment by mrskitch in "The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it"

mrskitch — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 02:20:34 +0000

Yup, There’s a lot going on here. Currently the tool uses a fixed IP for the running browser. That’s why you’re seeing that Cloudflare issue.

As far as the hovering goes, the canvas element is “mirroring” interactions back through to the underlying page. When Devtools are active, this triggers chromium to render hover effects in its GUI. This then gets sent back to the canvas element in the debugging page.

It’s a lot of network traffic and Synchronization... but once everything is setup it works fairly seamlessly

New comment by mrskitch in "The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it"

mrskitch — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 02:15:38 +0000

Sure! Puppeteer is a node-based library, and pretty much all the web-apps out there that let you run puppeteer code do it in an elaborate node sandbox. This tool gets around that by running puppeteer in your own browser, making it a lot faster and more secure

New comment by mrskitch in "The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it"

mrskitch — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 00:57:05 +0000

Just familiarity with puppeteer, eventually this tool will support both. Puppeteer has less “moving parts” for now

New comment by mrskitch in "The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it"

mrskitch — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 00:42:07 +0000

You can actually install our docker image or use the npm module:

https://github.com/browserless/chrome/blob/5627f1ef041ec23f3...

New comment by mrskitch in "The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it"

mrskitch — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 22:56:56 +0000

Hey, Joel here, mostly responsible for this tool. Happy to answer questions — one thing not well covered is getting puppeteer to run in the browser, especially a webworker. Can talk more about it if there’s interest!

The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it

mrskitch — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 22:22:44 +0000

Article URL: https://docs.browserless.io/blog/2021/03/10/new-live-debugger.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26429746

Points: 91

# Comments: 30