Nordstjernen, Northstar, Southstar: minimalist webbrowsers in C and Rust

Posted by Propelloni 1 day ago

Counter58Comment36OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by Deeg9rie9usi 1 day ago

See: https://lwn.net/Articles/1102738/

Comment by throwaway27448 20 hours ago

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1142659&po...

Pretty damning tbh

Comment by 0rzech 5 hours ago

That thread is like the "«AI-era»" version of the "MongoDB is web scale" meme video. It's absolutely worth reading all the way from the beginning to the end, especially given the plot twists. ;)

Comment by vrganj 21 hours ago

> Røsdal ignored the question about human code review and replied that he would appreciate feedback from someone else: ""Preferably from someone who actually works on real software development in 2026, someone with education in computer science, also considering that software development has changed with the introduction of AI llms"".

Yikes. What an asshole.

Comment by scott01 18 hours ago

The response to that was just gold. An excerpt:

> I decided to run a little experiment. So I asked a frontier model developed by my employer ...

Comment by ronsor 20 hours ago

"AI llms" is an awkward phrase I've never seen before.

Comment by otabdeveloper4 19 hours ago

Lots of "AI influencer" jackasses pretending to be software developers and/or engineers nowadays.

Comment by wofo 1 day ago

Ugh, that's nasty. Pushing slop down the throats of Debian and Arch maintainers is _not good_.

Comment by roryirvine 23 hours ago

...especially when combined with an attempt at social engineering that's so clumsy that it comes close to being outright bribery!

Comment by wofo 23 hours ago

This quote from the mailing list is spectacular:

> If the Northstar browser is included in Debian Linux, I will do my utmost to make the browser successful and ensure it works well in Debian, and I will make sure that the Debian project and Debian contributors like you, and the four of you in particular, will be rewarded.

Comment by ordu 23 hours ago

It looks like the author is a socially clueless person, who was touched by an AI and realized they could write a code. No experience of shipping the code or a feel for what is acceptable behavior.

If it is so, it is a good reason to not include their browser into major distros, but in any case their advice "try to maintain it for longer and get some reputation first" make my (hypothetical) psychological portrait redundant. I mean, if I'm right, they would probably lose interest and/or completely alienate distros in a year or so.

Comment by 12_throw_away 19 hours ago

> It looks like the author is a socially clueless person

xz-utils was 2 years ago now. It's surprising to me that people are still willing to apply any presumption of good faith and authenticity to interactions like this, especially after:

- "begging and praying" to include an unknown project in the distro

- offering what for all the world looks like an extremely clumsy bribe

- pushing a project full of contradictory and blatantly untrue claims

We don't have to - and in fact absolutely should not - evaluate projects based purely on "technical merit"! The people behind the project matter at least as much as "code quality."

And we absolutely should not be presuming good faith on the part of random people on the internet who have gotten ahold of our email addresses! Ask to see some credentials before turning your wallet over to the Wallet Inspector!

Comment by ordu 10 hours ago

> It's surprising to me that people are still willing to apply any presumption of good faith and authenticity to interactions like this

1. I don't think that that attempt for open bribery can mean anything except social cluelessness. Their intentions doesn't matter, because their actions as they are can achieve only a rejection of his package. We can try to find a hypothesis that would assume that the effect of their words is exactly what they wanted it to be, but I think it would be too much into the opposite territory, the territory of paranoia, "ahh all people are trying to kill me", something like that.

2. I think you are confusing a presumption of good faith with a presumption of a basic courtesy. I can be very suspicious, but (if I were a debian maintainer) I want those maillists to be functional. And it means basic courtesy and a presumption of good faith. There is no need to accuse the other side of what you suspect them to explain your suspicions to them and everyone watching.

And if my words seem to you like I have no suspicions or ignore them, well... I'll treat it as an evidence of how good I am.

If you read my message, it doesn't presume bad faith, but it doesn't presume good either. It focuses on observable behavior, proposes a hypothesis about personal traits, but it touches their motivation only in passing. "they realized they can write a code" can be seen as a description of a motivation, but for me it is not, because it doesn't explain their particular way to apply their new abilities to write code. Why browser, why to package it for debian? Why they are so insistent on it?

Comment by ordu 10 hours ago

edit. Ah, I forgot, there was a weak attempt at humor too. You see, the person is definitely socially clueless, but they try to social engineer their way into debian. I was laughing while reading their communications, because if they are of a bad faith, they are hopeless.

Comment by c22 14 hours ago

Hey! Who are you? The credentials inspector? Now hand over that wallet...

Comment by krapp 19 hours ago

Unfortunately, "try to maintain it for longer and get some reputation first" is no longer feasible. Most software written now is vibe-coded by people with little or any experience writing code, much less shipping it, nor any respect for the culture they are supplanting. Reputation no longer comes from the old guard, it comes from hype entirely within the LLM community around projects that are pushed directly to prod without so much as a glance from a human being.

Even Linus is adding LLM generated code to the Linux kernel. No one cares anymore, that world is dead.

Comment by qphe95 23 hours ago

I personally think its pretty nasty how they treated this single developer, they could just reject him instead of writing a long hit piece on him.

Comment by roryirvine 21 hours ago

That would be a fair reaction if the author had stopped as soon as Debian had explained to them why their behaviour was so risky. But they didn't - they went on to do the same thing to Arch.

At that point, it became hard to write it off as mere misguided enthusiasm and LWN were being entirely responsible to write it up in the way they did.

In fact, if you search HN you can see that it's been pushed repeatedly here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/nordstjern...

There's a pattern of behaviour on display which, though it's not entirely clear if it was intended to be malicious, does end up looking remarkably like a clumsy replay of the Jia Tan attack.

Comment by augment_me 23 hours ago

How do you otherwise make an example of shit you dont want in your codebase?

There is an attention cost of pushing unverified slop onto others, public shaming and bans is a valid way to prevent this behaviour.

Comment by qphe95 23 hours ago

Does this actually prevent this behavior? Does writing a hit piece somehow magically disable ai slop in the debian inbox or do certain contributors just enjoy going on an ego trip?

Comment by nkrisc 20 hours ago

In what way is it a hit piece?

Comment by otabdeveloper4 19 hours ago

> developer

Yes if by "developer" you mean "Claude prompt typer".

Comment by totallygeeky 19 hours ago

Those security holes seem damning for a project that was assuring everyone it was ready for prime time. Flatly unacceptable for something that they're actively lobbying folks to get on board with.

Maybe less time running tokens to develop the engines and more time running security passes before running to tell the world.

Comment by netsharc 1 day ago

Ha, nice homage to the Netscape "loading" GIF: the N in the corner. When Netscape was connecting to a website and loading the page (over your dozens of kilobits per second modem), there would be shooting stars behind the N (1). Because navigators relied on the night sky, I suppose.

(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/6oqzjv/the_netsc...

I've managed to pimp my Vivaldi installation to have the animated N as well: it allows custom user profile icons, and when you set it to an animated GIF, it animates as well. Add a custom CSS for the browser UI so that the profile icon is square and not circular: we're back in the 90's!

Comment by emilbratt 20 hours ago

If I understand this correctly, Andreas Røsdal wants people to adopt first before putting in work. Thats the wrong way around. You make a great project -> people notice and like it -> you improve -> more people notice.. and circle continues.

Comment by Propelloni 1 day ago

Minimalist web browsers written from scratch in C (Nordstjernen, Northstar) or Rust (Southstar).

Comment by vrganj 21 hours ago

So one dude spent a bunch of tokens on not one, but three separate overambitious projects?

Comment by lysace 1 day ago

So, is the creator Norwegian, Danish or neither?

Comment by kalleboo 1 day ago

Claude is from the US

Comment by bedstefar 1 day ago

I went to figure that out. Norwegian

Comment by lofaszvanitt 9 hours ago

I pray every night for a fast browser, because Chrome is getting slower and slower. And this fckd up sqlite implementation of history bookmarks etc is also a gargantuan fuckup. When you have multi year histories and gigantic amount of bookmarks, it is just ridiculously slow.

Comment by VoidWhisperer 12 hours ago

Interesting how he said (when facing issues getting packaged for Debian and Arch) that the project was stopping AI as of Oct 2026[0].. but if you check the projects, as of writing this comment, one of them had a Claude co-authored commit dated 7 hours ago [1].

Edit: Just to clarify, I would love to see more browser engine diversity, especially open source, but the guy running the project saying one thing and doing the opposite kind of rubs me the wrong way.

[0]: https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-web-browser/co...

[1]: https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/northstar-web-browser/co...

Comment by artifact_44 13 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by RemingtonDavies 20 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by yusufcengiz 21 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by yusufcengiz 21 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by shevy-java 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by cinntaile 1 day ago

Why are you posting this here? This thread is not about you?

Comment by bastawhiz 1 day ago

> You can't go about "we will dethrone chrome" while you pursue "brigaders will be perma-banned".

The two things seem entirely unrelated

Comment by krapp 1 day ago

I mean, HN tells me it's trivial to one-shot any software of any complexity with AI, so I guess. And if it's open source, of course it was possible to fork it before AI came along. I never understood why HN took it as axiomatic that it was impossible to build a browser without millions of dollars of funding and an entire corporate staff, particularly when the entire core is OSS. People here are weirdly fatalistic about it.

It's obviously possible to build a browser, as it's possible to build any kind of software. We're here in a thread about a browser that someone other than Google built. Competing against Google has nothing to do with the viability of building a product to compete against Google.