MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Ctx – Context manager for Cloud,K8s VPNs, SSH tunnels, secret managers
by vlebo | 2026-01-23 20:19:19+00:00
Hey HN,

I built ctx because I was tired of the mental overhead of managing multiple client environments. Every context switch meant: change AWS profile, switch kubeconfig, start the right SSH tunnels, set the right env vars, remember which VPN i need to connect to.
Miss one step and you're deploying to the wrong environment.

The problem: Existing tools are siloed. kubectx handles Kubernetes. aws-vault handles AWS. direnv needs .envrc files everywhere. SSH tunnel managers don't know about your cloud context. Nothing ties them together.

ctx does one thing: Atomic context switches across all of these at once.

ctx use client-a-prod

# Now your shell has:

# - AWS_PROFILE=client-a-prod

# - KUBECONFIG pointing to their cluster

# - Nomad/Consul env vars set

# - SSH tunnels to their bastion started

# - VPN connected

# - Secrets loaded in env

Key features:

- Single YAML per context defines everything

- CLoud SSO integration - detects expired sessions, triggers login automatically, caches tokens so switching back is instant

- Browser profiles - ctx open grafana opens Chrome/Firefox with the right profile (useful when each client has different SSO/Google accounts)

- SSH tunnels auto-start on context switch, auto-reconnect on failure

- Production safety: color-coded prompts, confirmation required for prod contexts

- Per-terminal isolation - different terminals can be in different contexts simultaneously

- Shell integration for bash/zsh/fish

Written in Go, single binary, no dependencies.

GitHub: [https://github.com/vlebo/ctx/]

I'd love feedback on the design. The config format took a few iterations to get right - balancing simplicity with flexibility for complex setups.
by toast0 | 2026-01-23 20:19:54+00:00
Is your car really not connected/connectable?

I have a 2014 car that's connectable but no driver assistance; I had a 2017 (delivered mid 2016) with lane keeping and emergency braking which seemed pretty new and exciting, and it's connectable, all I would need to do is pay a big annual fee and also setup a 3g CDMA network. Couldn't do much with either if it's connected; I pulled the 3g modem from the 2014 when it was convenient cause I was worried it was using power while off.

Not that lane keeping needs a connection, just that I'm surprised they put it on a car without a modem.
Show HN: Cryptography, JWT, and ASN1 Debuggers
by TheBestTvarynka | 2026-01-23 20:20:03+00:00
Hello HN,

For the last 3 years, I have been working on a tool that helps me debug ASN.1-encoded data (keys, certificates, Kerberos/CredSSP/SPNEGO/etc tokens, and more), cryptographic operations, and JWTs.
This app is available online; you can try it [0] (no sign-in/up needed).

First, this app supported only various cryptography operations.

Then, I started working with JWTs a lot, and I did not like jwt.io design at all. So, I made my own JWT debugger without ads, banners, and other crap.

And last but not least, I also implemented the ASN1 debugger over the years. The best feature is that you can edit the ASN1 tree directly on the page [1].

I'm happy that I wrote this tool. I use it often to help me debug my protocol implementations. I know that some of my friends use the JWT debugger and ASN1 parser from this tool. Maybe some of you will find it helpful too.

The app is open-source [2]. All computations are performed on the client side. Related submissions: [3], [4].

[0]: https://crypto.qkation.com/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255464

[2]: https://github.com/TheBestTvarynka/crypto-helper

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255464

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46267963
by jordanbeiber | 2026-01-23 20:20:15+00:00
Using AI doesn’t really change the fact that keeping ones and zeroes in check is like trying to keep quicksand in your hands and shape it.

Shaping of a codebase is the name of the game - this has always been, and still, is difficult. Build something, add to it, refactor, abstraction doesn’t sit right, refactor, semantics change, refactor, etc, etc.

I’m surprised at how so few seem to get this. Working enterprise code, many codebases 10-20 years old could just as well have been produced by LLMs.

We’ve never been good at paying debt and you kind of need a bit of OCD to keep a code base in check. LLM exacerbates a lack of continuous moulding as iterations can be massive and quick.
by csb6 | 2026-01-23 20:20:23+00:00
The "historical tradition" justification for rulings the Supreme Court seems to favor in recent years when determining if something is constitutional is fascinating. Presumably this court would have ruled that the original Bank of the United States was unconstitutional since it had no "tradition" of existence at that point in time. I guess new traditions were made unconstitutional around 1850 and the existing ones were grandfathered in.
by starik36 | 2026-01-23 20:20:46+00:00
We've had FSD trial for 4 months in the middle of last year. I work from home so I can't really justify $100 a month. However, we did take a few trips (about 60 miles in each direction) to see family through downtown LA.

I was honestly stunned by how far the tech has come. It basically drove us door to door without a single intervention.
by mrandish | 2026-01-23 20:21:06+00:00
You nailed it. Cool idea. Nice design. Great demo. Fun toy.

I'm sure I'd have a good time playing with it for an afternoon and come up with some sounds I like. And, in principle, I'm all for more ways to create music existing - especially ones which are interactive and tactile. But the reality is, if I bought this device it would end up spending most of its time in the basement graveyard with all the other cool tools that are too narrow, too big, too hard to interface, store/recall patches, etc.

I decided several years ago to refocus on a stack that's purely microphone (or other a/d converted input) + MIDI controllers to a DAW driving infinite layers of internal real-time digital synthesis, analog modeling and effects plug-ins. There are fabulously expressive MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) controllers now which can capture every nuance of input my hands, feet and breath could ever provide. As you highlighted, the feeling that creating in a digital audio workstation is "too easy" or maybe somehow 'soulless' - is all in my head. That lurking suspicion analog circuitry or electro-mechanical waveforms are more authentic or pure is just magical thinking.

Always believing that the next new box's cool-looking tactile input, novel interaction model or unique set of opinionated constraints will unleash my creativity - is just getting in the way of actually sitting down and making myself create with all the insanely powerful, wildly creative, infinitely flexible, hyper-productive digital tools I already have. Being able to save and recall entire racks worth of patching at the press of a button isn't soulless or limiting - unless I let it be. Feeling like I need just-one-more new device to inspire me with its defaults or constrain me with its limits - is the limiting constraint I finally realized was holding me back.
by jdmoreira | 2026-01-23 20:21:06+00:00
It was never really about typing the code for me, or solving trivial tasks in isolation.

It was always about building the right abstractions, great api surfaces, growing codebases without having them collapse under their own weight, etc.

I still get to do that everyday with claude code and arguably faster. I just have to be on top of it at all times. So I've kept having fun!

What I don't understand is the people that stopped reading and iterating on the code. That's just insanity to me!
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-23 20:21:45+00:00
My Linux drives are all encrypted, and one of the wonderful features of this is that there is no entity or force on this planet that can decrypt them.

What happens if I forget my keys? Same thing that happens if my computer gets struck by a meteor. New drive, new key, restore contents from backups.

It's simple, secure, set-and-forget, and absolutely nobody but me and your favored deity have any idea what's on my drives. Microsoft and the USGov don't have any business having access to my files, and it's completely theoretically impossible for them to gain access within the next few decades.

Don't use Windows. Use a secure operating system. Windows is not security for you, it's security for a hostile authoritarian government.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-23 20:22:01+00:00
> self-driving features will require ongoing maintenance and updates for the next several years

Autopilot is not self-driving, it is lane-centering with traffic aware cruise control. It has not gotten any maintenance or updates in years, as far as we can tell.

Identical functionality is available from many competitors with no subscription. This is a noteworthy decision for Tesla because AP has long been one of their defining features, dropping it is a big step backward just as the market caught up.
by xp84 | 2026-01-23 20:22:40+00:00
We should easily be able to, but the problem of tech illiteracy is probably our main barrier. To build such a system you’d need to issue those credentials to the end users. Those users in turn would eagerly believe conspiracy theories that the digital ID system was actually stealing their data or making it available to MORE parties instead of fewer (compared to using those ID verification services we have today).
by pixl97 | 2026-01-23 20:22:42+00:00
>ather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible

The particular problem here is it is very likely that the easiest people to replace with AI are the ones making the most money and doing the least work. Needless to say those people are going to fight a lot harder to remain employed than the average lower level person has political capital to accomplish.

>seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top,

I was born on a farm and know quite a bit about the process, but in the process of trying to get corn grown from seed to harvest I would still contact/contract a set of skilled individuals to do it for me.

One thing I've come to realize in the race to achieve AGI, the humans involved don't want AGI, they want ASI. A single model that can do what an expert can, in every field, in a short period of time is not what I would consider a general intelligence at all.
by btown | 2026-01-23 20:22:50+00:00
Claude Code's only saving grace is that it's pretty good from a fresh session - it can largely find and re-load into context what it needs to load. If I see my context ticking down, I ask it to give me a summary and TODO list, and either copy it, or have it put that into a docstring of what it's working on. Then just start a fresh session on that file. Shouldn't need to do this, for sure, but it gets it done in a pinch.

My largest gripe with Claude Code, and with encouraging my team to use it, is that checkpoints/rollbacks are still not implemented in the VS Code GUI, leading to a wildly inconsistent experience between terminal and GUI users: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/10352
by shykes | 2026-01-23 20:22:52+00:00
I am painfully aware of this narrative. All I can say is that it is a false narrative, deliberately pushed by Red Hat for competitive reasons. There was a deliberate decision to spend marketing dollars making Docker look bad (specifically less secure), at a time where we were competing directly in the datacenter market.

Ask yourself: how many open source projects reject PRs every day because of design disagreements? That's just how open source works. Why did you hear about that specific case of PRs getting rejected, and why do you associate it with vague concepts like "arrogance" and "insecurity"? That's because a marketing team engineered a narrative, then spent money to deploy that narrative - via blog posts, social media posts, talks at conferences, analyst briefings, partner briefings, sales pitches, and so on. This investment was justified by the business imperative of countering what was perceived to be an existential threat to Red Hat's core business.

It opened my eyes to the reality of big business in tech: many of the "vibes" and beliefs held by the software engineering community, are engineered by marketing. If you have enough money to spend, you can get software engineers to believe almost anything. It is a depressing realization that I am still grappling with.

The most damning example I can give you: we once rejected a PR because it broke compatibility with other platforms. Red Hat went ahead and merged it in their downstream RPM package. So, Fedora and RHEL users who thought they were installing Docker, were in fact installing an unauthorized modified version of it. Later, a security vulnerability was discovered in their modified version only, but advertised as a vulnerability in Docker - imagine our confusion, looking for a vulnerability in code that we had not shipped. Then Red Hat used this specific vulnerability, which only existed in their modified version, in their marketing material attacking Docker as "insecure". That was an eye-opening moment for me...
by DrBazza | 2026-01-23 20:22:53+00:00
We're talking about historically, up until now. They've continued to bring online more fossil fuel and nuclear plants in last decade, whilst Europe has done the complete opposite. It's only this year that fossil fuel plants are predicted to peak in China. The point being plentiful 'anything' forces prices down, including energy, and China are doing exactly what I said in the previous point: not shutting down nuclear or fossil fuels yet.

For example - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/charting-chinas-evol...

Europe on the other hand, has shut down nuclear and fossil fuels over the last decade and removed a source of cheap energy from the grid. And by cheap I mean, the build costs, are a sunk cost.
by shakna | 2026-01-23 20:23:09+00:00
All "Global Reader" accounts have "microsoft.directory/bitlockerKeys/key/read" permission.

Whether you opt in, or not, if you connect your account to Microsoft, then they do have the ability fetch the bitlocker key, if the account is not local only. [0] Global Reader is builtin to everything +365.

[0] https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/entra-docs/commit/2364d8da9...
by rayiner | 2026-01-23 20:23:16+00:00
This is the key point but the article somewhat misapprehends it:

> With the Federal Reserve, however, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have applied a different view: that the Fed’s monetary policy — the setting of short-term interest rates and management of the money supply — historically hasn’t been overseen by the executive branch

More precisely, setting interest rates isn’t an “executive power.” Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” So the question is whether the Fed is exercising the executive power.

The Fed doesn’t set interest rates as a government agency ordering private actors to do what the government says. Instead, it acts as a private market participant to influence the behavior of the private banks that transact with it: https://www.stlouisfed.org/in-plain-english/the-fed-implemen...

In this core rate-setting function, the Fed doesn’t have to be a government agency at all. This core rate setting function doesn’t involve prosecuting people, creating regulations with the force of law, or otherwise using the coercive power of government to control private conduct. The fed does some of these things through banking regulations, but they’re ancillary to this rate setting function. You could spin those functions off into a government agency subject to presidential control without affecting the independence of the core rate setting function.
by dceddia | 2026-01-23 20:23:27+00:00
So I’m probably in a similar spot - I mostly prompt-and-check, unless it’s a throwaway script or something, and even then I give it a quick glance.

One thing that stands out in your steps and that I’ve noticed myself- yeah, by prompt 10, it starts to suck. If it ever hits “compaction” then that’s beyond the point of return.

I still find myself slipping into this trap sometimes because I’m just in the flow of getting good results (until it nosedives), but the better strategy is to do a small unit of work per session. It keeps the context small and that keeps the model smarter.

“Ralph” is one way to do this. (decent intro here: https://www.aihero.dev/getting-started-with-ralph)

Another way is “Write out what we did to PROGRESS.md” - then start new session - then “Read @PROGRESS.md and do X”

Just playing around with ways to split up the work into smaller tasks basically, and crucially, not doing all of those small tasks in one long chat.
by jpalepu33 | 2026-01-23 20:23:51+00:00
The discussion around checked vs unchecked exceptions always comes down to ergonomics vs safety.

Having worked extensively with Node.js (callback hell, then Promises), I appreciate how error-as-value patterns force you to think about failure cases at every step. But the reality is most developers don't - they either:

1. Ignore the error case entirely (leading to silent failures)
2. Bubble everything up with generic error handling
3. Write defensive code that becomes unreadable

Rust's Result<T, E> with the ? operator found a sweet spot - you have to acknowledge errors exist, but the syntax doesn't make it painful. The key innovation is making the happy path concise while forcing acknowledgment of errors.

For Kotlin specifically, I'm curious how this interops with existing Java libraries that throw exceptions. That's always the challenge with these proposals - they work great in greenfield code but break down at library boundaries.

The real question: does this make developers write better error handling code, or just more verbose code? I'm cautiously optimistic.
by enragedcacti | 2026-01-23 20:24:00+00:00
It is in the EU but in the US ADAS won't be mandated until 2029. It would tank your IIHS rating though and all major mfgs have met a voluntary pledge to have >95% light duty vehicles ship with autobraking by 2023: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/automakers-fulfill-autobrak...
by alecbz | 2026-01-23 20:24:31+00:00
> it's called "documentation" and "requirements"

What I mean is an artifact that is the starting point for generating the software. Compiled binaries can be completely thrown away whenever because you know you have a blueprint (the source code) that can reliably reproduce it.

Documentation & requirements _could_ work this way if they served as input to the LLMs that would then go and create the source code from scratch. I don't think many people are using LLMs this way, but I think this is an interesting idea. Maybe soon we'll have a new generation of "LLM-facing programming languages" that are even higher level software blueprints that will be fed to LLMs to generate code.

TDD is also a potential answer here? You can imagine a world where humans just write test suites and LLMs fill out the code to get it to pass. I'm curious if people are using LLMs this way, but from what I can tell a lot of people use them for writing their tests as well.

> And it's not like you can't go read the code if you want to understand how it works

In-theory sure, but this is true of assembly in-theory as well. But the assembly of most modern software is de-facto unreadable, and LLM-generated source code will start going that way too the more people become okay with not reading it. (But again, the difference is that we're not necessarily replacing it with some higher-level blueprint that humans manage, we're just relying on the LLMs to be able to manage it completely)

> I truly do not understand why so many people are hung up on this "I need to understand every single line of code in my program" bs I keep reading here, do you also disassemble every library you use and understand it? no, you just use it because it's faster that way.

I think at the end of the day this is just an empirical question: are LLMs good enough to manage complex software "on their own", without a human necessarily being able to inspect, validate, or help debug it? If the answer is yes, maybe this is fine, but based on my experiences with LLMs so far I am not convinced that this is going to be true any time soon.
by jpalepu33 | 2026-01-23 20:24:34+00:00
The title is misleading but the actual work is impressive - they optimized their Protobuf usage, not replaced it entirely.

This is a common pattern: "We switched to X and got 5x faster" often really means "We fixed our terrible implementation and happened to rewrite it in X."

Key lessons from this:

1. Serialization/deserialization is often a hidden bottleneck, especially in microservices where you're doing it constantly
2. The default implementation of any library is rarely optimal for your specific use case
3. Benchmarking before optimization is critical - they identified the actual bottleneck instead of guessing

For anyone dealing with Protobuf performance issues, before rewriting:
- Use arena allocation to reduce memory allocations
- Pool your message objects
- Consider if you actually need all the fields you're serializing
- Profile the actual hot path

Rust FFI has overhead too. The real win here was probably rethinking their data flow and doing the optimization work, not just the language choice.
by rayiner | 2026-01-23 20:24:37+00:00
What’s unusual about it? A bunch of guys wrote a document with rules. What they did and did not do after establishing those rules is pretty relevant to understanding what the rules mean, right?

Say Linus Torvolds wrote legally binding rules for the design of the Linux kernel. How he designed the Linux kernel after writing those rules would be quite relevant to what the rules mean, right?
by trilogic | 2026-01-23 20:25:02+00:00
Historically speaking, March is a redish. The bloodbath with income declarations, bankruptcies and shifting investments. Then gold at 5k can´t be good right, the 5keyers can´t find any better but relying in gold. In my (wrong opinion) it can slip to 6k super fast, is enough a bad news or a "bad" political decision.

Any thought?

Edit: Trend following never let you down.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-23 20:25:22+00:00
Elon has been posting everyday about how awesome FSD is, interspersed with fearmongering about how white people will disappear, how “white culture” is at risk, and the need for remigration / ethnic cleansing to take back our country. It’s hard to take technical claims about FSD seriously when these other posts are completely deranged.

But some claims he makes seem like they’re plain factual. For example he’s claiming that Robotaxi rides in Austin don’t have human supervision now (https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2014397578352226423). Is that true or is it that they’re just remotely monitoring them instead of sitting in the car?

Elon also retweeted Bloomberg’s fawning review of how perfect FSD is (https://xcancel.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2014721293950590985), but I also see lots of people saying FSD is far less reliable than something like Waymo, and that intervention is frequently needed. To me it seems like all of a sudden, when it became obvious that Waymo is far ahead and Tesla’s stock is overvalued and China’s FSD competitors have caught up, there has been a push to say FSD is ready to be on streets just like Waymo.

Is this just a dangerous experiment on the public? Or has it actually improved in some way? Have they said what specific software improvements they built to make it ready for the public?
by ssalazar | 2026-01-23 20:25:47+00:00
It looks most similar to a Rhodes piano-type electromechanical keyboard, where tuned metal elements are somehow actuated and then sonified with a guitar pickup.
Unlikely theres any FM which would require independently digitizing each of the resonators and just generally a lot of complexity that doesnt seem warranted.

The similarity in timbre isn't coincidental though -- FM is noted for its ability to emulate complex timbres like bells/metallic tones (such as electric pianos) that are challenging for more traditional subtractive synthesis architectures.