Hey HN! We're Arnav and Jeremy and we're building Browser Buddy, a recommendation system you can chat with to find quality Internet writing based on your interests and aspirations.

As we've grown up, this writing was a source of inspiration that helped us discover ideas and opportunities we didn't even know we were looking for (ex. applying to YC because of PG's essays).

But despite so many new creators and websites coming online, the best of the open Internet remains hard-to-find, scattered across personal sites (https://www.paulgraham.com/, https://www.eugenewei.com/), niche publications (https://www.noemamag.com/, https://worksinprogress.co/), and various independent publishing platforms (https://bearblog.dev/, https://substack.com/, https://medium.com/). Outside of "social" media platforms, there's very high friction to get into a new subject or stumble upon credible people who write about your interests.

We feel there should be an easier (and mobile-friendly) way to find fantastic media and curate this intentional, interesting information diet for yourself.

Browser Buddy is an iOS app that curates this interesting, thought-provoking writing for you from across the Internet. It's particularly good to explore topics like programming, startups, math, philosophy, machine learning, and design.

Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmEeo4mjc7U

Here are some example recommendations:

"I'm trying to grow my early stage consumer internet company": https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the... https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-...

"I want to learn how to build beautiful web interfaces": https://frankchimero.com/blog/2015/the-webs-grain/ https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/

"Teach me the history of the Internet": https://www.mic.com/impact/how-geocities-webrings-made-the-9... https://computerhistory.org/blog/history-of-the-future-octob...

"I'm trying to read more about games and game theory": https://franklantz.substack.com/p/playing-balatro https://joecarlsmith.com/2022/03/16/on-expected-utility-part...

"I've been getting into network science and network theory": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/seeing-like-a-network

We trained a language model to recommend webpages how people do through hyperlinks. Hyperlinks can be an expressive way to describe a webpage (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/07/01/the-rhetoric-of-the-hy...), but there's a lot of spam and low-quality linking online that would serve as bad training examples. We found the structure of the link graph to still be a fantastic way to understand what content is salient, and used it heavily to filter and build our dataset. The resulting model is best for expressive, exploratory queries where you describe what you are looking for (like a prompt to an LLM) rather than entering in keywords (like a search on Google). This model is the main "curation" step in our system that picks from our index of ~150 million (and growing) webpages.

We built Browser Buddy to try and recreate the feeling of getting a thoughtful recommendation from a smart friend. Our early users have described it as a "refreshing stream of timely and timeless writing", "serendipitous discovery", "rabbit holes that feel joyfully unfunneled". We are iterating on the concept and how it's presented, but we really value the HN community and would love to hear what you all think:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/browser-buddy/id6752281959

Thank you for your time and being a part of the Internet we love!

Jeremy (jeremy@browserbuddy.com) and Arnav (arnav@browserbuddy.com)

Ehtml

Feeling Old: 44 Is the First Big Aging Cliff for Millennials

Linguistic Sightseeing: The Germanic Languages, Part I

Workplace hierarchies are gravity wells

One-Third of US Families Earn over $150k

Talent sorting in Germany is flawed

TrueMeter: AI Energy Agent That Optimizes Utility Bills

Creating AI Ready Data

Multivox: Volumetric Display

Corn's clean-energy promise is clashing with its climate footprint

47 Days to Demo. 47 GameDev Lessons Learned

Fog of War

Anthropic Interviewer: What 1,250 professionals told us about working with AI

Ask HN: Anyone here self-hosting databases and needing advanced features?

Show HN: Giftl – A simple, free gift registry

Beyond the dollar: Helping newsrooms reach sustainability

The End of the Train-Test Split

Launch HN: Browser Buddy (YC W24) – A recommendation system for Internet writing

Firecrawl getting blocked due to headlesness

Managing a Windfall

Released After 27 Years on Death Row Due to Now-Disgraced Bite Mark Testimony

Steve Cropper, legendary guitarist for Booker T and the MGs, dies aged 84

KiTTY Terminal Graphics Protocol

Migration and the Persistence of Violence

Show HN: CSVtoAny, CSV Local File Converter

AWS Developer Experience State of the Nation with Ali Spittel

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Bacillus Safensis LG01 Highlights Its Prospects in Biotechnology and Biocontrol

DPU-KV: DPU Offloading for In-Memory Key-Value Stores

We suffered MongooseJS so you don't have to

Show HN: Copy-ip.com – Go to copy your public IP to clipboard