It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis • Hacker News Board

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#21

Post by dist-epoch » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

0x696C6961 wrote: post #6

It would be cool if the POW could be done ahead of time. That way I don't get stuck waiting while I'm working. Some type of credit/tokens that my browser could then spend.

Then we could implement an exchange, so that if you generate too much Anubis POW, you could exchange it with others.

We could link it to a site, you generate for HN, I for Reddit, but it so happens that you visited Reddit more and I HN, so we depleted our Anubis POW, so we could exchange some Reddit Anubis with some HN Anubis.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#22

Post by CarVac » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

chews wrote: post #2

It's wild to me that PoW systems are how we sort the bot problem... the bummer is that all this "work" is just wasted cycles, at least in crypto there is a token you can sell.

PoW was originally anti-spam technology.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#23

Post by ssl-3 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #21

0x696C6961 wrote: post #6

It would be cool if the POW could be done ahead of time. That way I don't get stuck waiting while I'm working. Some type of credit/tokens that my browser could then spend.

Then we could implement an exchange, so that if you generate too much Anubis POW, you could exchange it with others. We could link it to a site, you generate for HN, I for Reddit, but it so happens that you visited Reddit more and I HN, so we depleted our Anubis POW, so we could exchange some Reddit Anubis with some HN Anubis.

And then, we can inextricably link it to a new cryptocurrency -- let's call it BotCoin -- and make Sam Altman pay for it!

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#24

Post by dist-epoch » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

throawayonthe wrote: post #15

Retr0id wrote: post #4

See also: https://github.com/eternal-flame-AD/pow-buster - Browser extension that already used WASM to accelerate the anubis solver, among others. https://github.com/kasper93/anubis_webgpu - Browser extension that uses webgpu, for another order-of-magnitude speedup (depending on your GPU of course).

afaik argon2 should make the GPU less helpful

Argon2 is already GPU-accelerated.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#25

Post by raincole » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

It's still very unclear to me how Anubis is supposed to work in the long term or even the medium term. The assumption is that scrappers, a.k.a. AI companies, a.k.a. those who hog all the RAM, are short of memory...?

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#26

Post by kelvinjps10 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #21

0x696C6961 wrote: post #6

It would be cool if the POW could be done ahead of time. That way I don't get stuck waiting while I'm working. Some type of credit/tokens that my browser could then spend.

Then we could implement an exchange, so that if you generate too much Anubis POW, you could exchange it with others. We could link it to a site, you generate for HN, I for Reddit, but it so happens that you visited Reddit more and I HN, so we depleted our Anubis POW, so we could exchange some Reddit Anubis with some HN Anubis.

Basically reinventing crypto one step at the time.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#27

Post by fc417fc802 » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #25

It's still very unclear to me how Anubis is supposed to work in the long term or even the medium term. The assumption is that scrappers, a.k.a. AI companies, a.k.a. those who hog all the RAM, are short of memory...?

The assumption is that there will always be some population distribution in terms of effort expended as well as in terms of problems caused. At present it's the lowest effort actors that are causing the highest number of problems. So an 80% (or even just a 20%) solution largely solves the practical problem faced by site operators.

If against all odds it turns out that skiddies (or agents or AI billionaires or what have you) are willing to burn inordinate amounts of RAM and CPU just to scrape autogenerated cgit pages that are of approximately zero value to them to begin with then I guess we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#28

Post by lxgr » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

0x696C6961 wrote: post #6

It would be cool if the POW could be done ahead of time. That way I don't get stuck waiting while I'm working. Some type of credit/tokens that my browser could then spend.

Or something that shadier websites could calculate ahead of time in your browser, then spend on your behalf.

I feel like Anubis is ironically speedrunning a lot of discoveries the crypto folks have already made several years ago...

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#29

Post by brendoelfrendo » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

greatgib wrote: post #13

junon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps understanding why it exists is a good start, as opposed to flinging childish language around.

[flagged]

It's funny, because on the scale of things that are annoying an uncool, I find someone saying the word "retarded" as a pejorative in the year 2026 to be far, far more annoying and uncool than a harmless anime-inspired mascot for an open source project.

Re: It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

#30

Post by lxgr » Sun, Sep 06, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

kingstnap wrote: post #16

> hey Claude vibeslop me a CUDA Anubis solver" route is on its way to being fundamentally dead. Lmao yeah no. I don't think a little argon2 is going to change shit all. I mean the thesis of Anubis itself is "scrappers are compute limited (in ways that consumer devices are not)" which has its own massive flaws.

Yes, I also strongly suspect that this is only going to move more parts of scrapers onto consumer devices. The egress proxies are already there, why not use a little bit of the compute as well?