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alexblackwell_

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Joined
Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 5:48 AM UTC
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25 items

About alexblackwell_

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Recent public activity

  1. comment
    Comment #47810305

    Feel free to try it out and let us know if you have any issues. I was personally skeptical, but it now does about 70% of my "reverse engineering" work. Sometimes needs a bit of gui…

  2. comment
    Comment #47810285

    Web apps like this are few and far between, and piggy-backing on the session/anti-bot tokens from your browser usually works. In really complex cases we do help companies on a whit…

  3. comment
    Comment #47810275

    Interesting. We essentially do the same thing, but with MITM. We have a chrome extension internally, but have found it's a bit of a clunky interface. Might be releasing one soon. T…

  4. comment
    Comment #47810255

    You can prompt the mcp to do this. Honestly considering adding this as a skill in the agent chat. Internally we do this all of the time for our white glove integrations.

  5. comment
    Comment #47799082

    The requests still route through your servers/the data still lives with you. Kampala is a powerful tool but I don't see people replacing the actual apps with it. Most of our custom…

  6. comment
    Comment #47799040

    I wouldn't consider what we do evasion really. We are using real tokens that you have received from your browser as a result of browsing the web. Any good anti-bot will have enforc…

  7. comment
    Comment #47799013

    My broader point is that these ToS clauses are often so broad and vague that they're essentially unenforceable and not meaningful in practice. For example, "Do not use bots" covers…

  8. comment
    Comment #47798601

    sorry a bit confused on your question here. If you're asking about JSON RPC we handle this via parsing. The AI can then handle deducing structure most of the time given enough cont…

  9. comment
    Comment #47798397

    gRPC obscures the keys not the values. Enums and signed ints are sort of tricky, but the latter is just a mapping problem and the former can be figured out through some logical ded…

  10. comment
    Comment #47798310

    Noticed you have two comments here. I think my response to your other comment best answers this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47798259 ). Definitely open to discussing thi…

  11. comment
    Comment #47798259

    The goal is not to scrape sites en-masse, but to allow people to automate their existing workflows and actions that they perform already via a browser. I understand the concerns ar…

  12. comment
    Comment #47797859

    Yep essentially. I would argue that we're probably closer to a MITM proxy like Proxyman than Wireshark. We don't do general packet sniffing (yet), although internally we use our ow…

  13. comment
    Comment #47797516

    Definitely get that. Being hammered by scrapers is a massive PITA (especially with latest aggressive AI crawlers). We focus primarily on allowing people to automate their existing …

  14. comment
    Comment #47797408

    Yep we handle gRPC and websocket. gRPC is a bit sketch/hard to do because of the way the protocol is designed. FWIW not many sites implement gRPC (some google sites and spotify bei…

  15. comment
    Comment #47796628

    Yeah agreed this messaging is a bit confusing. Our focus is on helping people build automations, not do any mass-scale scraping.

  16. comment
    Comment #47796380

    Thanks Ben! For session re-auth we attempt to agentically find the session refresh/login endpoints and make those part of the flow as an auth provider. This can be a bit sketchy th…

  17. comment
    Comment #47796322

    Unfortunately we can’t do much around SSL pinning yet. Not sure how deep you want to go, but there are several Frida scripts that patch common pinning implementations. I also think…

  18. comment
    Comment #47796161

    I’ve probably spent on the order of months of my life in proxyman/charles/burp/powhttp. All are great, but I’ve never been completely satisfied with the UX/features for building au…

  19. comment
    Comment #47796005

    We’ve essentially been using that “recursion” to tune our agent. Having the agent build itself is not something I would have ever thought of though. Curious if you find it genuinel…

  20. comment
    Comment #47795876

    It was the (generated) name of the Conductor workspace when I started the project. We were going to rename it before launch but the name stuck lol :)

  21. comment
    Comment #47795853

    Super cool. I think this is where most automation is heading . Would be curious if you could one-shot the auth flow using Kampala and completely ditch the browser. Also FWIW you ca…

  22. comment
    Comment #47795657

    Zatanna is a DC comic book character. I’m not sure if either of us have even read comics, so not sure where that came from. For Kampala, when I started this I was trying Conductor …

  23. comment
    Comment #47795393

    We’re currently running a variety of stuff for TLS/HTTP2. If you download you can see the full trace of the connection. We dump the TLS connection byte for byte with the different …

  24. comment
    Comment #47795125

    Oops now realizing that pattern where we send you to bottom latest download link is definitely confusing. Fixed so that the top button sends you straight to Download now.

  25. story
    Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

    Hey! I am Alex and together with my co-founder Tarun built Kampala ( https://www.zatanna.ai/kampala ). It’s a man-in-the-middle (MITM) style proxy that allows you to agentically re…