MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: SecretMemoryLocker – File Encryption Without Static Passwords
by YuriiDev | 2025-08-25 16:39:42+00:00
I built SecretMemoryLocker (https://secretmemorylocker.com), a file encryption tool that generates keys dynamically from your answers to personal questions instead of using a static master password. This makes offline brute-force attacks much more difficult. Think of it as a password manager that meets mnemonic seed recovery, but without storing any sensitive keys on disk.

Why? I kept losing master passwords and wanted a solution that wasn't tied to a single point of failure. I also wanted to create a "digital legacy" that my family could access only under specific conditions. The core principle is knowledge-based encryption: the key only exists in memory when you provide the correct answers.

Status: * MVP is ready for Windows (.exe). * Linux and macOS support is planned. * UI is available in English, Spanish, and Ukrainian.

Key Features:

* No Static Secrets: No master password or seed phrase is ever stored. The key is reconstructed on the fly.

* Knowledge-Based Key Generation: The final encryption key is derived from a combination of your personal answers and file metadata.

* Offline Brute-Force Resistance: Uses MirageLoop, a decoy system that activates when incorrect answers are entered. Instead of decrypting real data, it generates an endless sequence of AI-created questions from a secure local database, creating an illusion of progress while keeping your real data untouched.

* Offline AI Generation Mode: Optional offline Q&A generator (prototype).

How It Works (Simplified):

1) Files are packed into an AES-256 encrypted ZIP archive.

2) A JSON key file stores the questions in an encrypted chain. Each subsequent question is encrypted with a key derived from the previous correct answer and the file's hash. This forces you to answer them sequentially.

3) The final encryption key for the ZIP file is derived by combining the hashes of all your correct answers. The key derivation formula looks like this:

K_final = SHA256(H(answer1+file_hash) + H(answer2+file_hash) + ...)

(Note: We are aware that a fast hash like SHA256 is not ideal for a KDF. We plan to migrate to Argon2 in a future release to further strengthen resistance against brute-force attacks.)

To encrypt, you provide a file. This creates two outputs: your_file.txt → your_file_SMLkey.json + your_file_SecretML.zip

To decrypt, you need both files and the correct answers.

Install & Quick Start: Download the EXE from GitHub Releases (no dependencies needed):

https://github.com/SecretML/SecretMemoryLocker/releases

Encrypt:

SecretMemoryLocker.exe --encrypt "C:\docs\important.pdf"

Decrypt:

SecretMemoryLocker.exe --decrypt "C:\docs\important_SMLkey.json"

I would love to get your feedback on the concept, the user experience, and any security assumptions I've made. Thanks!
by empath75 | 2025-08-25 16:39:46+00:00
You don't. He basically defines numbers like pi and e not as numbers, but as iterative functions, which you can run to whatever level of accuracy that you want. It's sort of a silly argument, because _all_ numbers can be treated like the output of a function, including the real numbers, so he has basically smuggled in all reals through the back door, because any real number can just be thought of as a function with increasingly precise return values with an infinitely long description, just like pi is.
by dmonitor | 2025-08-25 16:40:03+00:00
Youtube needs a far greater amount of bureaucracy than it has, despite how scary that word is to tech people. Google's automated approach is clearly not capable of keeping up with the scale and nuance of the website.

It's worth stating, though, that the vast majority of youtube's problems are the fault of copyright law and massive media publishers. Google could care less if you wanted to upload full camrips of 2025's biggest blockbusters, but the powers-that-be demand Google is able to take it down immediately. This is why 15 seconds of a song playing in the background gets your video demonitized.
by flanbiscuit | 2025-08-25 16:40:07+00:00
> My absolute favorite mouse is the MX Ergo from Logitech.

I switched to using Logitech's MX Vertical mouse and I love it. There was a learning curve period, especially when it came to finer grained movements, but I'm totally used to it now and it feels much more comfortable and natural to me that any other mouse I've used. It has a USB-C port and I can switch between 3 different Bluetooth connections (press a button, connects to my work laptop, press it again, connects to my personal one). I'm not much of a power user so I don't customize the buttons but I know it's possible with an app. I don't use the app.

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/shop/p/mx-vertical-ergonomic-...
by frankus | 2025-08-25 16:40:08+00:00
For just straight up assembly of one-sided SMT boards (i.e. not reclaiming components from a donor board), a $30 plug-in electric skillet and a solder paste stencil from the PCB manufacturer (or patience and a solder paste syringe) works far better than it has any right to. https://www.instructables.com/Simple-Skillet-Surface-mount-S...
by larrysalibra | 2025-08-25 16:40:18+00:00
You're right, it is an easy technical fix.

Mainland China lets people opt out of phone calls that come from outside of the Mainland...it's a feature one can turn off on an on their mobile plan.

Calls from outside the Mainland always cause a warning to pop up on the receiving user's phone that says something like "this call is coming from outside of the mainland, be careful of being scammed".

I can imagine there are many reasons the US doesn't fix this..one of which probably that much of US customer service is outsourced to people outside the US!
by rpcope1 | 2025-08-25 16:41:00+00:00
There land did not come with any water rights (something you've got to ask about for any land out here not already hooked up to a metro water system), and thus you are entirely at the mercy of others and not guaranteed anything. Why you would ever choose to build/buy a home without some relatively senior water rights or a metered water connection is entirely beyond me.
by rglullis | 2025-08-25 16:41:03+00:00
> Curious that what is probably the most corrupt administration in the history of the USA, the one actively taking away their citizens’ freedoms as we speak, is the one embracing cryptocurrency to the max.

Your memory is quite selective. El Salvador has been pushing for Bitcoin way before that, so we already have our share of Banana Republic (which is the US is becoming) promoting cryptocurrencies.

Second, the US is "embracing" Bitcoin by backing it up and enabling the creation of off-chain financial instruments. It is a complete corruption and the complete opposite of "trustless systems".

Third, the corruption of the government and their interest in cryptocurrency are orthogonal: the UK is passing bizarre laws to control social media, the EU is pushing for backdoors in messaging systems every other year. None of these institutions are acting with the interests of their citizens at heart, and the more explicit this become the more we will need to have systems that can let us operate trustlessly.

> For another, they didn’t invent the concept of trustless systems and cryptography.

But they are the ones who are actually working and developing practical applications. They are the ones doing actual engineering and dealing with real challenges and solving the problems that people are now facing, such as "how the hell do we deny access to bad actors on the open global internet who have endless resources and have nothing to lose by breaking social norms"?
by hd4 | 2025-08-25 16:41:08+00:00
The real story with Omarchy is Hyprland. Feels like the first time the desktop Linux is not only fun but that there's a far better case being made for switching to desktop Linux over Windows, not only because of less resource usage, but also a new (old) paradigm in tiling windows, repackaged in a way that doesn't make people want to smash their computer.

Hyprland itself comes with such nice defaults that it isn't surprising at all that it's getting as much attention as it is, for better or worse.
by Bender | 2025-08-25 16:41:14+00:00
Why can someone from outside the US make my phone ring?

There are applications to block international calls but that only helps if the number is not spoofed. People that have SS7 lines into the telco system can spoof as just about any number. I wanted to kill those circuits but my employer at the time said, "they are paying their bills, arent they?". This was in the 90's. I guess the laws are every so slowly starting to catch up.
by jacob2161 | 2025-08-25 16:41:40+00:00
Thanks for the comments. I'm a fan.

Yeah, I think "PRAGMA optimize" here on startup is basically a no-op and only costs microseconds but I should just remove it.

Seems like the ideal thing is to spawn a goroutine and run optimize periodically. Many Go daemons I run will have uptime measured in months so running on shutdown isn't super useful there.

Another one I might add is running `PRAGMA wal_checkpoint(PASSIVE)` periodically from a goroutine, which is something I've done in some of my daemons. Because otherwise a random write suffers from increased latency due to having to checkpoint.

Probably makes sense to open a dedicated read/write connection just for running `PRAGMA wal_checkpoint(PASSIVE)` at some regular interval to keep ahead of any autocheckpointing?
by rockemsockem | 2025-08-25 16:42:38+00:00
I feel like you're trying to misunderstand.

Let's review the easy to parse things that have been said

> I suppose you could say the same thing of Germany in the 1930s. The parallels aren’t even that hard to find as there are literal rockets being built in both cases.

You're obviously comparing both Elon and the current admin to Nazis. Which is insane, i.e. a view of things incompatible with reality, if you actually believe that.

> We used to have a rule for people like you on the Internet.

It's obviously Godwin's law. You aren't part of some oppressed class that I'm singling out, idiots have tons of power these days (look at the Whitehouse).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

> You’ll likely find similar when looking up SpaceX profitability in 2025.

> So, again, these things only exist because of the US government.

> Do we agree on this yet or do we need to delve further somehow?

If you read carefully you'll see that I said that SpaceX would not have existed from its conception if not for the US government. But I asserted that it is no longer necessary and that is absolutely true. You pointing out that a basket of money includes dollars from the government (i.e. starlink revenue) doesn't even come close to disproving that. Google gets paid from government contracts too and their existence is not contingent on those contracts.

This conversation is over. I hope you will investigate facts and appreciate nuance more in the future.
by fooofw | 2025-08-25 16:42:44+00:00
pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be:

pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf

I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme).

[1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam
by usefulcat | 2025-08-25 16:43:07+00:00
"Fort Garland uses 120 acre-feet of water per year — that’s 120 acres covered by 1 foot of water. Sales to people in cisterns account for about 1 acre feet per year, Pacheco said. Revenue for the water sales to rural residents totaled $43,000 per year, about 15% of total revenue."

Lack of water is not the problem here, especially now that the town's pump has been fixed.
Show HN: Ubik – A new AI workspace for everything research. Search/Write/Cite.
by ieuanking | 2025-08-25 16:43:53+00:00
Hi HN,

Ubik is built to strengthen and speed up the research process. With powerful academic search and PDF annotation tools, Ubik's AI agents can find, cite, and highlight quotes in relevant academic papers.

Our core belief (my friend and I) is that AI should help bring out the best in humans. What does this mean?

Reading, annotating, and citing real work (PDFs)!

Upload, or search and add papers to your workspace. Our AI Agents can create notes that can be referenced contextually when prompting using the @ sign to increase accuracy and efficacy. Ubik helps turn ideas into high-level work with citations.

If you aren't writing research papers or don't need to search for academic sources, Ubik is still a great everyday, general AI workspace. With access to 20+ models, web search, a text editor (canvas), and unique PDF highlighting tools, Ubik helps humans develop critical thinking skills while using GenAI.

We are Ubik. You are Ubik. Everything is Ubik.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-25 16:44:23+00:00
> I would like to see a better Inferno but it would be a lot of work. 64 bit support and memory protection would be key along with other languages. It would make a better drawterm and a good platform for web applications.

Doesn't Wasm/WASI provide these same features already? That doesn't seem like "a lot of work", it's basically there already. Does dis add anything compelling when compared to that existing technology stack?
by lokar | 2025-08-25 16:44:38+00:00
I agree, none of this was really necessary. The board/city was broadly within their rights not to sell (and down the road, as water supplies become more strained they may in fact not have extra water to sell).

But the board handled the situation very poorly. The job of being on a board like this is often to sit patiently while people complain and perhaps yell. Try to keep things calm and moving along, let everyone make their statement.

They should have just accepted the feedback and then scheduled discussion on various options for some future meeting, with a final vote even further out.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-25 16:45:14+00:00
Interesting. In nature, I suppose I am most aware of a gradient from a saturated azure sky above to a much whiter sky on the horizon. This would seem to be a trivial saturation gradient.

For a spot color (from a gel covering a light) the light diffuses further from the center of the projected light — two spot colors (with different gels) then, next to each other, would give a kind of gradient from one color to the next as you walk a line from the center of one light to the other.

I wonder what the closest analog to this is algorithmically?

I guess where I am going with this is: is there precedent in nature as to how gradients are supposed to work (and therefore an analog which we should try to model) or are we going strictly on how the human eye perceives color and what algorithm we think "looks" right?
by latexr | 2025-08-25 16:45:44+00:00
I know researchers (think field biology) who need to enter data into SQLite databases with bespoke apps but on occasion it’s imperative to edit or search the database directly. I’ve helped them do that on some butt-ugly app they had installed whose name escapes me. Looking at Base, my immediate thought was to buy it for them.

Additionally, while I know my way around and even enjoy the command-line, on occasion I bump into some app’s SQLite database that I want to explore. I can see myself using a GUI for those instances to help me find the data I’m looking for faster.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-25 16:45:50+00:00
>I can imagine there are many reasons the US doesn't fix this..one of which probably that much of US customer service is outsourced to people outside the US!

This. Gotta have your round robin of foreign call centers be able to spoof the main customer service line numbers for whoever they're contracted to represent.

Personally I think that should all be done in software these days, not something supported at the teleco level but what do I know.
by cxr | 2025-08-25 16:45:56+00:00
woodruffw writes in the corresponding HN thread:

> security scanners are a simple example, but Linux distros, Homebrew, etc. all also process Python package distributions in ways that mostly just assume a ZIP container, without additionally trying to exactly match how Python's `zipfile` behaves

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44829881>

This doesn't necessarily unlock any new capabilities, but in light of the xz exploit (whereby you have a repo over there that ostensibly corresponds to the package published right here, but with the latter actually comprising a different payload of runnable code), it's not inconceivable that an attacker would take advantage of the behavior between different implementations to level up the obfuscation/misdirection and evade detection for longer.

(FWIW I regarded at the time (and still regard) the hoopla around the PyPI/Astral blog posts a tad overblown, with the purported threat vague at best—especially where the claims about the ambiguity of the ZIP format that are at the crux of the issue are already dubious. On the latter point, it's nice that the authors of the USENIX paper contrast between implementations that use the "standard" method versus otherwise.)
by 9rx | 2025-08-25 16:46:08+00:00
Given that communism is a sci-fi imagining of what the world will look like in the age of post-scarcity, the last point is unquestionably true. We have never achieved post-scarcity. It remains science fiction.

Most imagine post-scarcity will be awesome. While one can never know for sure, for all intents and purposes, the first point is also true. To the best of our knowledge, achieving post-scarcity will be awesome. It is why everyone, even (and in particular!) the USA, is striving to get there someday.

Communism imagines that statehood will come to end, so "countries", in the context of communism, doesn't make sense. It is likely confusing "communism" with "Communist Party".
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-25 16:46:25+00:00
"Underground" usually also means degraded containment (micro-tears in 15cm thick steel), seeping water soluble heavy-metal salts, off-gassing Radon, and sometimes literally on fire when using the wrong brand of kitty-litter to clean up toxic waste.

When (not if) the salt caverns collapse from rotten concrete, they hope it will remain stable and dry. Even vitrified ceramic containment isn't perfect, but seems better than a caveman bucket technology. We will have to disagree about it justifying fission tech sustainability. =3
by jimnotgym | 2025-08-25 16:46:59+00:00
This is a great primer. I used to work in this field, but not as a colour scientist.

> So why do we have so many different color spaces?

I think there was a missing piece here. Different representations of colour are useful for different things. I'm not going to give any secrets away but...if your trade involves finding out how close one colour is to another, then something that represents colours as points in space could make the maths easier. Then if you wanted to know if one colour was brighter than another, then something that represents a colour with a separate 'brightness factor' would make that trivial.
by mothballed | 2025-08-25 16:47:05+00:00
Many people haul water in Colorado because the bootstrapping method of drilling your own well is now heavily restricted, and of course the same people stopping you from drilling the well (government) is happy to monopolize and sell you the water.

Meanwhile you can use percussion drilling to drill a well of virtually arbitrary depth, at very little cost, as was done by the Chinese for thousands of years to depths well below 500ft with not much more than bamboo and rocks.
Show HN: Stagewise – frontend coding agent for real codebases
by glenntws | 2025-08-25 16:47:11+00:00
Hey HN, we're Glenn and Julian, and we're building stagewise (https://stagewise.io), a frontend coding agent that inside your app’s dev mode and that makes changes in your local codebase.

We’re compatible with any framework and any component library. Think of it like a v0 of Lovable that works locally and with any existing codebase.

You can spawn the agent into locally running web apps in dev mode with `npx stagewise` from the project root. The agent lets you then click on HTML Elements in your app, enter prompts like 'increase the height here' and will implement the changes in your source code.

Before stagewise, we were building a vertical SaaS for logistics from scratch and loved using prototyping tools like v0 or lovable to get to the first version. But when switching from v0/ lovable to Cursor for local development, we felt like the frontend magic was gone. So, we decided to build stagewise to bring that same magic to local development.

The first version of stagewise just forwarded a prompt with browser context to existing IDEs and agents (Cursor, Cline, ..) and went viral on X after we open sourced it. However, the APIs of existing coding agents were very limiting, so we figured that building our own agent would unlock the full potential of stagewise.

Since our last Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44798553), we launched a few very important features and changes: You now have a proprietary chat history with the agent, an undo button to revert changes, and we increased the amount of free credits AND reduced the pricing by 50%. We made a video about all these changes, showing you how stagewise works: https://x.com/goetzejulian/status/1959835222712955140/video/....

So far, we've seen great adoption from non-technical users who wanted to continue building their lovable prototype locally. We personally use the agent almost daily to make changes to our landing page and to build the UI of new features on our console (https://console.stagewise.io).

If you have an app running in dev mode, simply `cd` into the app directory and run `npx stagewise` - the agent should appear, ready to play with.

We're very excited to hear your feedback!
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-25 16:47:18+00:00
It's genocide to defend your country these days. It's amazing how good pr and a concerted media campaign can shift a narrative so far that it's taken for granted, even by pro Israel people that they have to defend against charges of genocide. It's the sort of thing put out by people who want zero accountability and are looking to deflect blame (the UN, Qatar and every other Arab state who helped create this crisis). Yeah I know you're going to say that's netanyahu, but it's obviously not because he would deal in good faith with anyone who would reciprocate. On the very rare occasions that happens he does. He's so far honoured the ceasfires and politically he's offered many concessions to which are usually rejected, because most of the time people are dealing with him and his government in bad faith.
by hn_throw_250822 | 2025-08-25 16:47:40+00:00
I still use the older blue ball (ahrem) mouse that takes in a AAA battery. But being able to replace switches to something a bit better would be a godsend.

I’m looking at the price list for this job and I’m shaking my head. Up here in Canada shit is so expensive I foresee a future where the person with the hot air rework station has more business than the shops because a mouse like the normal MX is almost $120, and fixing stuff in the long term may prove to be more economical due to our stagnant wages. A lot of electronics and appliances can survive for a very long time with a few part changes or upgrades.