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LingoScreen – Localize product images and screenshots in seconds, not days

https://lingoscreen.com
1•tpierce89•1m ago•1 comments

How did IRC ping timeouts end up in a lawsuit?

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/73777.html
2•dvaun•3m ago•0 comments

Tool search is dead, long live skills

https://nicolaygerold.com/posts/tool-search-is-dead-long-live-skills
1•the_mitsuhiko•3m ago•0 comments

GitHub is going to start charging you for using your own hardware

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/17/github_charge_dev_own_hardware/
1•jjgreen•4m ago•0 comments

Top Open Source licenses in 2025

https://opensource.org/blog/top-open-source-licenses-in-2025
1•TangerineDream•5m ago•0 comments

Looking for a Remote Job in Python/Django/Flask

1•hanslett12•5m ago•0 comments

Tool search should not be search but discovery

https://nicolaygerold.com/posts/tool-search-should-not-be-just-search-but-discovery
1•the_mitsuhiko•6m ago•0 comments

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https://remotelygood.us
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Show HN: A Full-Control Cloud That Puts You in Charge of Your Deployments

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1•octave12•8m ago•0 comments

Mass hacking of IP cameras leave Koreans feeling vulnerable in homes, businesses

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-12-17/national/socialAffairs/Mass-hacking-of-IP-ca...
1•giuliomagnifico•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Hopeless – Removing API Bloat Before It Reaches Your LLM on Legacy API

https://www.hopelessapi.com
1•Ugyen_Tech•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: MCPShark Viewer (VS Code/Cursor extension)- view MCP traffic in-editor

11•mywork-dev•9m ago•0 comments

Unemboldening

https://www.gpxz.io/blog/unemboldening
1•bckygldstn•10m ago•0 comments

Please, Stop Talking About "Tradeoffs"

https://pushtoprod.substack.com/p/stop-saying-tradeoffs
1•mooreds•13m ago•0 comments

Cheese Mites and Sludge Worms: The Origins of Grossout Cinema

https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/cheese-mites-and-sludge-worms-the
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How SQLite Is Tested

https://sqlite.org/testing.html
2•whatisabcdefgh•13m ago•1 comments

Indiana Attorney General sues porn sites for failing to block VPNs

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1•delichon•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Planes.fyi – 3D aircraft and airport visualizations

https://planes.fyi
3•ryry•14m ago•0 comments

FCC chair suggests agency isn't independent, word cut from mission statement

https://www.axios.com/2025/12/17/brendan-carr-fcc-independent-senate-testimony-website
10•jmsflknr•14m ago•0 comments

What Is an Incident, Anyway?

https://jensrantil.github.io/posts/what-is-an-incident/
1•mooreds•17m ago•0 comments

Strategic CISO: Timing Your Security Assessment for Executive Impact

https://www.adversis.io/blogs/timing-your-security-assessment-for-executive-impact
1•mooreds•18m ago•0 comments

Decompiling the Synergy: Human–LLM Teaming in Reverse Engineering [pdf]

https://www.zionbasque.com/files/papers/dec-synergy-study.pdf
1•matt_d•19m ago•0 comments

I think Substrate is a $1B Fraud: Part 1

https://foxchapelresearch.substack.com/p/i-think-substrate-is-fraudulent-part
1•agrocrag•19m ago•0 comments

Billionaire real estate developer is waving a red flag over data centers

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/17/billionaire-real-estate-developer-red-flag-data-centers.html
2•thelastgallon•21m ago•0 comments

Go 1.26 Release Candidate 1 is released

https://go.dev/doc/go1.26
3•typical182•22m ago•0 comments

The $140K Question: Cost Changes over Time

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Show HN: Qqqlang – a syntax-free language for image synthesis

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1•fagerhult•24m ago•0 comments

Why outcome-billing makes sense for AI Agents

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4•rajvarkala•27m ago•1 comments

A Comprehensive and Precise Spec

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/
1•kklisura•27m ago•0 comments

The Pledge

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3•feross•27m ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor

12•sarreph•1h ago
Hey HN! We’re Rory, Chris, and Felix from Kenobi (https://kenobi.ai). Kenobi lets you add AI-based content personalization to any website. As a site owner, you install our personalization widget with a script tag, just like you would for e.g. a chatbot integration. As a visitor, you interact with the widget (right now by providing a company name) and Kenobi changes the site content to suit you.

We’ve built a demo that anyone can try here: https://kenobi.ai/start

We believe that large parts of the web are about to go from being static to dynamic because of how adept LLMs are at transforming rendered HTML. And right now we’re focussing on B2B landing page content (as opposed to application UIs) because there is a lot of commercial opportunity for increasing top-of-funnel inbound conversions.

Our journey to Kenobi today is a long and snaking one. You may notice from the post title that we did YC’s Winter 2022 batch (I know that 4 years is practically ancient in YC-dog-years). Kenobi is a hard pivot from our original idea that we got accepted into YC with — a company called Verdn which did trackable environmental donations via an API. Since the summer, we’ve been hacking on different ideas… We started with personalized UI screenshots for outbound campaigns, but then people told us they wanted transformations to their actual site[0] — so we built an agentic workflow to research a visitor-company and “pre-render” changes to a landing site for them. Ultimately, there was too much friction in getting people to incorporate personalized URLs into their cold outbound campaigns[1]. Besides, people kept asking for us to do this for their inbound traffic, and so our current iteration was born.

Right now with Kenobi you pick a page that you’d like to make customizable, and choose [text] elements that you’d like to make dynamic. You can define custom prompting instructions for these elements, and when someone visits your page, our agentic workflow researches their company, and presents the updated content as quickly as possible, usually within a few seconds.[2] You also get a ping in Slack every time this happens so you know who is using your site.

We’ve been experimenting with features such as generating custom imagery that actually looks good and native to the page design, and pulling in company data sources so that e.g. the right case study can be presented based on a visitor’s industry and ICP profile. Our most requested feature is deanonymizing traffic so that Kenobi’s personalization can happen automatically as visitors land on your page — this is coming very soon, as right now you have to specify where you’re coming from.

It’s surprised us just how much business value we’ve gotten from knowing who (most probably) is on the page and asking for a personalized experience. We’ve seen response rates 3x of what we would normally from following people up from companies we know visited our site.

There are many players in this space already, and everyone seems to have their own angle. We are keen to hear thoughts on what people think the future of the personalized internet looks like!

Cheers from London!

P.S. - there's also a video that Chris recorded showing the end-to-end Kenobi experience right now https://www.loom.com/share/bc0a82a2f2fd40f695315bae80e8f5d8

[0] - Many of them had tried AI “microsite” generators but found the maintenance of managing a separate website(s) just for closing deals to be burdensome and inefficient.

[1] - Despite having a CSV export and Clay integration option for our pre-generated website changes, getting people to weave the URLs into their email sequences (everyone uses different tools) seemed almost insurmountable without building what would ostensibly be our own sequencing software.

[2] - We use light foundation models with grounded search for the research step, and translate these into markup changes via another light LLM pass and our own DSL which is optimized for speed.

Comments

candiddevmike•1h ago
There are so many problems with this idea (privacy, security, accessibility, deceptive advertising, design) that I'm impressed it actually got funded. If you're just going to have a LLM generate most of the content, why even sell this as a personalization thing and just have a LLM generate the entire website on the fly per request?
sarreph•1h ago
Fair criticism! We actually got funded for a different idea (this was a pivot) so perhaps you're onto something.... Jokes aside -- and to address your points.... Privacy: Visitors currently opt-in and provide only the company they are from (no other PII). Security: Our current version handles only text (we have images + dynamic content in the works), but we do our best to build a sanitisation pipeline around this, it's the same kind of problem that any arbitrary-code widget builder needs to account for. Accessibility: I'm keen to hear what concerns or ideas you have here since we are interpolating content and copying existing structure (so that a11y is kept as intact as possible). Advertising: Companies choose to integrate this themselves on their own website, so if anything we see it as forming part of their marketing strategy.
chrismjelde•44m ago
Also re: ‘deceptive advertising’ - if what you mean is that the output of the model will misrepresent what the host site actually sells/provides, that does happen on occasion, and it’s a top priority for us. We’re constantly working to reliably improve what Kenobi outputs in any given situation. It’s partially a research problem (i.e. deeply understanding the host website, and the nuances of their offerings, as well as research on the visitor, where the time window is seriously constrained), and it’s a model + prompting problem.

One of the ways we want to enhance Kenobi is to allow the host site to plug in more data sources (e.g. an FAQ, KB, etc). This helps solve the research problem, and it also increases the utility of the tool because more the very generic website can be be customized in more nuanced, specific, and esoteric ways, depending on the visitor.

srameshc•1h ago
I am trying to make a constructive feedback and not just critical if I sound that way by anychance. I spent a bit of time but it's hard to get the product. Instead of the team photo on home page, you could show some images of what you mean by the product personalization. Honestly people don't have much time to read through and understand a product , which has a simple value proposition.
sarreph•1h ago
> You could show some images of what you mean by the product personalization

This is a great point, we've heard this elsewhere so I will be adding a section to our site for this. Thanks!

twelvechess•1h ago
Ok, your UI/UX is amazing, the experience is awesome. But for me, I don't immediately understand what you do and for whom. What I understand: You tailor my website to the visitor on my site (landing page), which would be pretty cool as an add on. What I don't understand: How you would do that, how do you create a personalized experience for a visitor you don't know something about?
chrismjelde•1h ago
Glad to hear you enjoyed the UI/UX and experience! The ‘how’ is a key question - right now the visitor inputs what company they’re from, and with that info we send out a research agent that compiles a) context on that company, and b) combines that with the deeper research its already done on your domain — essentially it marries up what it knows about you, with what it quickly learns about the visitor, to the customise whatever sections of the website you’ve given Kenobi permission to transform

Obviously a lot of companies have vastly different personas, and this is a harder problem to solve which we are working on.

topnde•52m ago
What they do is ask the visitor from which company they come from. Behind the scenes, this is what I imagine happens: - Kenobi scrapes that website and understands what it does - Has some prompts to transform the text in your website through the lens of your user: eg "Transform this text [your website text here] to appeal to a visitor from this company that does the following [scraped content here]"

Of course internally it might be much more complex than this but this is how I would do this if I had to build it.

AznHisoka•1h ago
What types of info are you looking at when you are personalizing?

One idea would be to track what recent technologies/products they’ve bought recently (or what products they’re using) using Bloomberry. ie. If they’ve started using Okta, it might mean they’re investing in security tools [1]

[1] bloomberry.com

sarreph•1h ago
Felix handles our personalisation pipeline so will let him chime-in. We do some fast-scraping (cached where possible) to understand the host site, and pull in as much extra page data as possible. We also use other (firmographic) sources like Apollo.io.

Neat idea to track the technologies they've bought _recently_ though! I think capturing buying signals (and inferring intent that way) would be a neat addition to the pipeline!

fxn-m•54m ago
We use apollo and gemini 2.5 flash lite with web search in a quick pass to ground and enrich data on the visitor. Right now, the queries are generic, as opposed to constructing more "tailored" queries based on what the host might be pitching to that visitor.

We're definitely going to be looking into finding more relevant signals on a case-by-case basis, and this kind of idea fits really neatly into that paradigm!

motoxpro•1h ago
If you go to their website and click the "Personalize" toast at the top and enter a random domain (e.g., google.com, hydroflask.com, etc.) it will change all the copy on the site for you.
sarreph•1h ago
Thank you yes, we perhaps should have made that a little clearer in the post body :')
fakedang•48m ago
Had high expectations for the website, but maybe because it's bugged or likely because you're using a cheap LLM, Kenobi identified my tech company as a yacht-building/sailing/marine company and tailored the content accordingly.
fxn-m•32m ago
Damn, that’s unfortunate. We found the logs and looks like apollo returned empty for your domain. I just pushed an update that uses the same enrichment workflow as the rest of the app and looks like it correctly IDed your co. we're using gemini 2.5 flash-lite under the hood, and if it's not grounded it can come up with some whacky results! we'll shortly be shelving it for flash-3-lite as soon as we can
warthog•29m ago
Tried a couple times but it failed
sarreph•18m ago
Thank you for flagging! Are you able to share the input you tried so we can diagnose it for you?

Failed requests that are coming in (people are trying some wild inputs!!) we are keeping an eye on and adding to our edge cases pile to fix asap!

edent•19m ago
Where's the evidence that users want this?

By users, I mean the people who browse marketing websites. Do they think having their company name / information in your copy is going to be helpful or creepy?

Oh, and did the IP owners give you permission to take Obi-Wan's name in vain?

I tried several different domains and the copy was so generic it gave no indication of being personalised.

sarreph•14m ago
In general the case that we’re building for here is the one where we are able to do two things effectively: “streamlining” content, so that instead of 7 different use-cases on a maze of a brochure site, as a visitor you see the top one or two use case you actually care about, in way more detail.

Second, we want to show B2B visitors’ brands in context. I.e. showing you what it would look like if your company was using the service in question with social proof from your industry peers. We don’t have our image tech in the on-demand demo right now, but companies that we have helped pre-render copies of their site with dynamic images (especially e-commerce brands), found higher engagement on their outreach as a result.

Fairburn•16m ago
Yikes
oersted•15m ago
I was quite underwhelmed by the demo, I'll try to be as constructive as I can.

The core functionality I expect for such a service is for it to automatically detect who I am, I've seen other marketing services do this, there are ways to map IPs to companies and other techniques. Of course, it's rather creepy and not super helpful to the user, but it may have its (shock) value for making certain kinds of products stand out.

And the personalisation itself... Anyone can make a call to an AI + Search service and generate a new version of the HTML with some slightly modified text, which was not all that different, appealing or accurate in the tests I made. I would suggest upgrading to a higher quality model, proper AI can do much better than this if given the right context.

I suppose it's nice that you are making this easy, if you built your site with a visual website builder this wouldn't be completely trivial to replicate. But still, not a very defensible business for now. I suppose that with good marketing and a serious roadmap to beef this up it could be a viable idea.

sarreph•8m ago
Appreciate the candid feedback!

The number one request we have is to integrate deanonymisation, so you’re right on the money there. That’s coming in the next couple of weeks or so…

Wrt the changes being text-based for now, we do actually have image and complex element and layout generation working, but have kept it as an experiment for pre-rendered pages until we are confident we can get it right in most cases. (Some early beta users used Kenobi to send out in some cases thousands of customised landing pages with imagery)

We‘re also starting our on demand product with text only precisely because we want to hear what people think we should be working on next as we are a super small team of three!

oersted•2m ago
I do appreciate you taking the time to respond. I wish you luck.

I suppose I was frustrated due to a mismatch of expectations and the fact that I do things like this every day with AI, it feels rather trivial to me.

But I can see how it may appeal to a wider market. I remember coming across a couple websites that were doing this automatically pre-AI, simply detecting who I was and displaying it in some basic ways. And yeah it was a bit weird, but it sure stuck in my mind for a long time, and it was a data-broker type company anyways, it triggered the thought "well if it can do this with me, it must have good data about everyone".