HN user

vasusen

384 karma

Cofounder, Donobu (https://www.donobu.com). vasusen-> at-> donobu dot com

https://x.com/vasusen

Posts25
Comments62
View on HN
www.npmjs.com 18d ago

Freedom from NPM. Happy 4th

vasusen
3pts4
www.nature.com 5mo ago

Cancer might protect against Alzheimer's – this protein helps explain why

vasusen
4pts1
github.com 1y ago

Show HN: Checking Pope's election results with smoke test script for chimney

vasusen
26pts12
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Show HN: Donobu – Mac app turns prompts into deterministic browser tests

vasusen
13pts0
www.youtube.com 1y ago

Make AI Mediocre Again – Cadbury 5 Star Ad [video]

vasusen
2pts0
www.stanforddaily.com 7y ago

Data breach allowed students to view other students’ admission personal data

vasusen
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: Drone spying in our backyard [video]. Options?

vasusen
5pts2
medium.com 7y ago

Measuring outcomes of high schoolers taking Computer Science courses

vasusen
1pts0
medium.com 8y ago

Insitro: Rethinking drug discovery using machine learning

vasusen
2pts0
www.nytimes.com 8y ago

It’s True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider. And Humans Are to Blame

vasusen
3pts0
time.com 9y ago

How China Floated to the Top in Solar

vasusen
5pts0
scroll.in 9y ago

Indian schools using WhatsApp to enslave mothers and children’s independence

vasusen
2pts0
news.nationalgeographic.com 9y ago

First: Badger Buries Entire Cow in Shocking New Video

vasusen
1pts0
blog.wepay.com 10y ago

Can a card game make your team stronger? Absolutely

vasusen
7pts0
blog.billclerico.com 11y ago

Half a Decade After Demo Day

vasusen
82pts11
www.salon.com 12y ago

West Coast apocalypse: How “earthquake storms” could devastate California

vasusen
23pts11
timesofindia.indiatimes.com 12y ago

Security fears over Election Commission-Google tie-up

vasusen
3pts0
timesofindia.indiatimes.com 12y ago

In the land of the holy cow, fury over beef exports

vasusen
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Ask HN: How does your company handle downtime internally?

vasusen
3pts1
www.businessweek.com 13y ago

Behind the Internet of things is android and its everywhere

vasusen
5pts0
www.businessweek.com 13y ago

After Small Acquisitions, Yahoo Goes Big With Tumblr

vasusen
2pts0
blogs.worldbank.org 13y ago

How India’s Unique ID System is Changing Lives

vasusen
2pts0
www.businessweek.com 13y ago

Inside Operation InVersion, the Code Freeze That Saved LinkedIn

vasusen
9pts3
swaminomics.org 13y ago

West should learn from India’s high patent standards

vasusen
1pts0
www.nytimes.com 13y ago

Self-Copying Seeds Spur a Patent Case

vasusen
3pts0

We moved our SDK off public npm onto a private registry we host.

Our customers mainly use Donobu's SDK to run their end-to-end tests in CI/CD, with AI self-healing and triage. It was unlicensed but on public npm on purpose, so `npm i` just worked.

NPM registry has had a rough year. When we looked at alternatives, we realized self-hosting packages is not that hard anymore. Our customers continue using `npm i`. They just add a .npmrc pointing at our registry; reusing their existing Donobu API key for auth was a nice bonus.

.npmrc was the only thing needed:

  @donobu:registry=https://api.donobu.com/npm/
  //api.donobu.com/npm/:_authToken=${DONOBU_API_KEY}
ChatGPT Health 7 months ago

Under non-urgent cases this sometimes takes 3-4 months in the US every time I experience the need to "ask an MD"

They need to make it eligible for Class Action lawsuits to be filed if these are ignored. I wrote a script to routinely test opt out on websites and was stunned to see almost 50% had it implemented incorrectly. This includes high-flying tech companies that went public recently.

Under California’s CCPA / CPRA, most enforcement power lies with the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) and the California Attorney General, not private individuals. This limits the actual downside to a company vs. an unbounded downside of class-action lawsuit threat.

The reason isn't technical. This isn't implemented because the entire card-processing ecosystem is hooked on the chargeback fees (min $15 to $100). It starts becoming a lucrative revenue stream for Visa/Mastercard/Stripe/Adyen/WorldPay/Fiserv and the entire ecosystem.

Merchant's end up getting the short end of the stick in most cases.

Page Object (2013) 10 months ago

It is quite popular in testing circles to write e2e tests that are easier to maintain. However, in practice I have found it to be quite useless due to the time it takes to write good page objects. QA teams usually rely on a complete POM before writing tests on it. I used to joke that by the time my team was done shipping a page object model, our product team would have changed the entire product again.

I used to be in-charge of homepage getting over 1.5M views a day. I would really be curious how this converts. I am assuming Posthog has a lot of metrics.

If I were to bet, while this is fun, it will be a disaster for conversions once the launch hype goes away.

Yes an electron app helps tremendously, especially for managing lifecycle of tabs independently. We use that for creating our AI browser automations at Donobu (https://donobu.com). However, we do have the luxury of just focusing on a narrow AI QA use case vs. Browser-Use and others who need to support broad usecases in potentially adversarial environments.

2011 were definitely not the dark ages!! I used to use Selenium for everything back in the day. I was able to scrape all of Wikipedia in 2011 entirely on my laptop and pipe it to Stanford NLTK to create a very cool adjective recommender for nouns.

I love this website.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Some AI tools can be genuinely helpful. I ran a browser automation QA bot that I am building on this website and it found the following link is broken:

"Every Layout - loads of excellent layout primitives, and not a breakpoint in sight."

In this case, the AI is taking action on my local browser at my instance. I don't think we have a great category for this type of user-agent

My wife decided to not travel to Japan due to an impending warning from a manga for July 2025. I have been making fun of her all month only to get this tsunami warning now!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2025_Japan_megaquake_prop....

The 2021 reprint capitalizing off this revived popularity warned of a "real disaster" in July 2025, causing a minor case of mass hysteria in 2025 when summer trips to Japan from East Asia decreased markedly and several airlines even cancelled flights.

I grew up in India and now live in the US. My mom recently got some ground turmeric from our own farm when she visited us. I am was stunned by how much more duller, brownish-yellow it was compared to the turmeric I buy in Indian stores in the US. Those are usually really bright yellows.

Now, I am really scared that even stuff sold in California is probably lead paint tainted turmeric.

I think the Playwright MCP is a really good example of the overall problem that the author brings up.

However, I couldn’t really understand if he’s saying that the Playwright MCP is good to use for your own app or whether he means for your own app just tell the LLM directly to export Playwright code.

I am not from the deaf community, but my son has severe hearing loss. I really look forward to a world where condition like his simply becomes fixable like bad teeth and he doesn't have to miss out on so many things.

I do this too by pasting only the relevant context files into O3 or Claude 4. We have an internal tool that just lets us select folders/files and spit out one giant markdown.

Thank you so much for creating this folks! A browser navigation agent is key part of our AI QA setup at Donobu (https://donobu.com/). We found the WebVoyager benchmarks severely lacking for complex e2e test cases like logged-in dashboards, onboarding forms, etc.

While the extraction/2fa flows aren't super relevant to us, this saves us time from building our own set of benchmarks. Really appreciate it and hope we can contribute to make this a really large set.

Thanks for building it! It can really help help my 10 yo who is just learning coding. How does it handle potentially infinite loops like below? Currently I get a parsing error after it takes a while.

```python

  while exit != "yes":
    print("\*")
    exit = input("Exit?: ")
```

(disclosure: I am no longer at Coursera)

When Duolingo added that viral post on Growth hacking, it caused quite a stir about the push-notifications and gamification tactics they use. Ultimately, we decided it wasn't worth it for Coursera to veer into edu-tainment.

However, it is interesting to watch how much gamification works in adding and retaining users. In 2023, Duolingo's marketcap was 5x of Coursera. Now at similar revenue it is 20x of Coursera.

As a user, I think Duolingo is over-gamified (stopped using it) but Coursera is severely on the other spectrum where it comes off as too bland/boring to keep up the motivation. I am sure there's a happy medium to be found between reminding users to engage in something hard while doing right by learners.

What worries me most about MCP isn't that the protocol is so poorly created, but that fixing/improving it is only at the mercy of internal teams at Anthropic and OpenAI. It doesn't seem like the folks who are coming up with the protocol are actual engineers trying to implement it as well.

Vaguely seems like a Visa-Mastercard duopoly.