MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Seamless Auth – open-source passwordless authentication
by bccorb1000 | 2026-02-18 14:22:28+00:00
I hope this finds you with your minds open!

I’ve been building an open source authentication system called Seamless Auth.

It is designed the idea:

Authentication should behave like infrastructure, and help promote security, and be easy to reason about.

Seamless Auth is:

Fully open source

Passwordless only (WebAuthn, passkeys, OTP)

Cookie-based session validation

No redirect-based login flows

Designed to run inside your own infrastructure

The core is framework-agnostic, with adapters for Express today. There is also a React SDK that exposes authenticated session state without client-side token management.

It supports:

Server-side session validation

Explicit CORS and origin configuration

Isolated infrastructure model for you to self-host

A production-shaped local development flow with Docker

You can run it locally with 3 commands thanks to the open source CLI tool:

npx create-seamless my-app
cd my-app
docker compose up

This spins up a template UI (react), a template API (express), the auth server, and a database (postgres) complete with migrations.

The project grew out of frustration with:

Redirect-heavy OAuth flows

Shared multi-tenant auth servers

Magic SDKs that hide too much

Development environments that do not resemble production

and worst of all... forgetting my damn password!

The goal is not to replace everything. It is to offer a transparent, inspectable, infrastructure first alternative for teams that care about understanding their authentication layer.

I would appreciate feedback on:

Architecture decisions

Security assumptions

Developer experience

Tradeoffs I may be missing

Repository:
Auth Server: https://github.com/fells-code/seamless-auth-api
CLI: https://github.com/fells-code/create-seamless
React SDK: https://github.com/fells-code/seamless-auth-react/tree/main
Server SDKs: https://github.com/fells-code/seamless-auth-server

Documentation:
https://docs.seamlessauth.com

Happy to answer questions.
by close04 | 2026-02-18 14:22:49+00:00
> LinkedIn is a masquerade ball dressed up as a business oriented forum. Nobody is showing their true selves

That's the main trait of almost all social media. A parade of falsity, putting on the show for everyone else, being what you wish you were and what everyone else dreams of being or envies.

LinkedIn is about boasting and boosting the professional life, other social media is for the personal life. More or less equally fake.
Show HN: I built an app that forces me to drink water before I can open TikTok
by danndecl | 2026-02-18 14:23:09+00:00
I wasn’t trying to reduce screen time but trying to drink more water.

So I built an iPhone app (SwiftUI) that locks selected apps using Apple’s Screen Time APIs.
To unlock them, ThirstTrapp activates the front camera and watches for ~15 seconds while I drink.

On-device vision checks for:

- a face
- a drinking container (glass/bottle)
- and a plausible drinking gesture (container overlapping mouth region over time)

If that sequence is detected for ~15 seconds, the apps unlock for a configurable window (e.g. 2 hours). Then they lock again until the next drink.

It doesn’t try to stop me from scrolling. It just makes hydration the entry fee. And since I'm addicted to scrolling I will actually drink. It’s slightly absurd, but it’s been more effective for me than reminder apps ever were.

All processing happens on-device. No images or video leave the phone or are stored. No account registration or login.

Curious what you think - especially from a technical perspective.
by thatcat | 2026-02-18 14:23:15+00:00
A educational program using "your future earnings" as collateral only really has a claim to some percentage of the delta between what you earn and what you would earn without the degree (after 4 years experience), which would incentivize them to not to structure programs in a wasteful manner or misrepresent the future economic value of a given program.

In many cases, that delta is negative. The school and lender should at least be forced to disclose that reality when you're filing FAFSA and taking secured loans.
by snowpid | 2026-02-18 14:23:54+00:00
"The interest of the free world. In my opinion. Is to promote freedom and not give power to countries that are not free or democratic (which is most of the world)"

Currently I see Netanyahu and Trump as very opposing forces to freedom.

What is the difference between a free country and a dictatorship? In a free country even the government can be sued and brought into prison. Netanyahu (might be corrupt) and Trump (who is clearly corrupt) hate this fact. Hence they might be change the free democracies. And supranational justice is one way to make head of the states be responsible for their actions. Hence it is in the interest of the free world to support the ICC etc. And oppose people like Trump and Netanyahu.
by srean | 2026-02-18 14:24:13+00:00
Oh I did not think you were advocating anything. I was just thinking aloud.

I used to drink lots of coffee earlier but now my caffeine metabolism seems to have ground to halt. Anything more than two mugs and night's sleep is history. Even that infrequent second mug pushes it a lot.

In all fairness, my mug is around 2 to 3 espresso shots.

Have to find myself some good local decaf. That's not easy in India.
by rapnie | 2026-02-18 14:24:20+00:00
Gitlab has also indicated not to be interested as a company to develop this themself, and esp. not given all the other demands they get from their customer base. The epic you refer to had been closed for this reason, but was later reopened for the sake of the community. For there to be federation support in self-hosted Gitlab instances, a further community effort is needed, and right now AFAIK no one is actively working on any ActivityPub related user stories.
by Brybry | 2026-02-18 14:25:10+00:00
In the US it can be a pretty big deal, even if rights holders don't take you to court.

You can basically get banned by your ISP and it's not like there are a lot of ISP options.

ISPs in the US that are lax about it have been sued for millions[1] (and even in one case a billion, pending supreme court decision). [2]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/cox-settles-disp...

[2] https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/alerts/2026/february/4/s...
by satvikpendem | 2026-02-18 14:25:14+00:00
They literally state that they used LLMs to build it in the second sentence of their initial comment so not sure why you frame it as something they weren't upfront about.

As for it being a bubble that will stop completely, that ship has long since sailed and I assume you're inadvertently using LLM generated code somewhere in your software stack already, due to news reports saying certain companies are already using LLMs in their codebase.
by bflesch | 2026-02-18 14:25:44+00:00
I think Linux/LUKS software encryption was a very big challenge and they solved it with multiple approaches

- 2004: Linux LUKS disk encryption [0]

- 2008: ring −3 / intel management engine [1]

- 2010: AES instruction set [2]

- 2009: TPM [3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Unified_Key_Setup

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module
by draj6669 | 2026-02-18 14:26:08+00:00
Every strategic discussion starts with understanding what’s happening in the market. Clairity gives business teams a fast, structured view of key players, trends, and shifts — without weeks of research.

For agile organisations, this means starting conversations with clarity instead of assumptions.

Register and try Clairity.uk today to see how it works in practice. Contact us at clair.ai@clairity.uk
by o3dd | 2026-02-18 14:26:12+00:00
I wrote awhile ago on here that he should stick to his domain.

I was downvoted big time. Ah, I love it when people provide an example so it can finally be exposed without me having to say anything.

Unfortunately this is a huge problem on here - many people step outside of their domains, even if on the surface it seems simple, but post gibberish and completely mangled stuff. How does this benefit people who get exposed to crap?
by nerdjon | 2026-02-18 14:26:15+00:00
You are making a wild jump here, you can trust without blindly trusting. How dismissive you are being in multiple comments about people having legitimate security concerns is extremely concerning.

This is such a fundamental security concept that we even have a commonly used phrase “trust but verify”.

You don’t have to just go based on your favorite books, but instead yourself find the list of torrents that need extra seeders and commit to those. Do a sanity check of the torrent and move on.

The risks of this blind trust is just way too high.
Show HN: TextAnimations.online – Generate MP4/GIF animations from a prompt
by bilalba | 2026-02-18 14:26:21+00:00
Recently I had to make an intro animation for a product demo, and the quickest way I could think of doing was to screen record an LLM-generated HTML/JS page with the animation.

I turned that idea into a polished project here. It is super fun to play with. I've been creating all kinds of custom-text GIFs to send to friends.

Under the hood, it is generating HTML and recording the video client-side.

Would love to hear feedback on it!
by streetfighter64 | 2026-02-18 14:26:33+00:00
Well yes, it would pretty clearly be classed as "prompt injection" given that it's trying to get the LLM to give them money or "persuade" a human to give them money. Of course the fault lies mainly with whoever deployed the LLM in the first place, but I still think it's misguided to try to convince LLM "agents" to make financial transactions in order to benefit yourself. It'd be much more ethical to just block them.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-18 14:27:02+00:00
> Nobody really understands a job they haven't done themselves, and "arguing" that 90% of them are "bullshit" has no other possible explanation than a combination of ignorance (you don't understand the jobs well enough to judge whether they are useful) and arrogance (you think you can make that judgement better than the 90% of people doing those jobs).

That's fine if you disagree, I'm not aiming to be the authority on bullshit jobs.

This doesn't change the fact that you and I are cattle for corpo/neo-feudals.
by rkangel | 2026-02-18 14:27:06+00:00
Which step in this logic do you not accept?

When profit for a company is in conflict with human good, regulation is needed (e.g. health and safety rules)

Facebook causes harm, disproportionately so for younger people

Meta is aware of this, but due to a profit motive does not take serious steps to do anything about it (only token efforts)

Meta (and other social media) needs regulation
by atomicnumber3 | 2026-02-18 14:27:59+00:00
No no, but you don't understand! Of course I would be in the guild, I'm me. Everyone else is just you, so naturally they probably won't be. If they don't allow me, who would they let in??

(Sarcasm of course.) Isn't it weird how much of a quirk this mentality is? Almost reminds me of how everything though they were part of a select few who got to be secret agents in Club Penguin. "I believe every word you just said, because it's exactly what I wanted to hear."
by tim333 | 2026-02-18 14:28:35+00:00
Yeah as a technical matter $4.3bn wiped out is kind of wrong. If I issue a billion iffy coins, sell one for a dollar and then it goes to zero that's more one dollar wiped than the theoretical billion.

I'd say this is $600m transferred from investors to insiders.

An interesting question is how much of that $600m was degen gamblers and how much was bribes.
by coldlestat | 2026-02-18 14:28:39+00:00
> I just don't see a world where every corporation is building their own accounts, crm, hr software.

I agree on that point. But I think the industry will still take a huge hit. As SaaS may not be killed by any random individuals, but big corps.

-

We just moved from sharing skills about good practice for a few functions to skills about good architecture/design/marketing practices.

It's just a question of time before we get skills about "good features in a CRM". And there is a high chance, a LLM will generate them in a few minutes ^_^

We could already do them for a few software, like notepads and ticketing software.

IMO any fully virtualized business will become trivialized through global knowledge sharing.

-

I don't think META/MICROSOFT/OPENAI will close their eyes on the "Amazon Basics" strategy. IMO they will (soon?) provide high scale replacements for simple and expected softwares.

Right now it would require them a lot of defocus. But soon it will be just a new product, an agent away.
by palmotea | 2026-02-18 14:28:45+00:00
> Hard miss. GP is right, and your assumptions say more about you than about me. :^)

No. If that's the case, your statement was unclear: since you didn't specify who else thinks those people were cattle, the implication is that you think it.

And the interpretation...

> It seems more like they're implying it's those at the top think that about other people.

...beggar's belief. What indication has "the top" given to show they have that kind of foresight and control? The closest is the AI-bros advocacy of UBI, which (for the record) has gone nowhere.

I was half a mind to point that out in my original comment, but didn't get around to it.
by ses1984 | 2026-02-18 14:28:49+00:00
When you frame it that way, it’s really not that different. The issue isn’t the access control system itself, more so that it’s really asking too much of people who don’t have the skills or understanding to manage it. Teams of trained professionals get it wrong when the scope is limited to a single application or suite of applications, and you think grandma is going to properly manage access control over her entire digital footprint?
by nextjsdev | 2026-02-18 14:29:05+00:00
Links:

GitHub: https://github.com/jblh/nextworks-cli
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nextworks
demo: https://nextworks-demo.vercel.app/
97s walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YKmGFmFY5c

Quick try:

npx create-next-app@latest
cd <your-app>
npx nextworks@latest add blocks --sections --templates
npm install
npm run dev

Feedback I’m looking for (alpha):

- install failures / env incompatibilities (Next.js, Node, package manager, OS)
- runtime/build issues from the generated code
- confusing or missing docs / CLI output

Feedback thread: https://github.com/jblh/nextworks-cli/discussions/2

Note: it installs by copying files into your repo and may patch app/layout.tsx (App Router) or pages/_app.tsx (Pages Router). I’d recommend committing first and reviewing the diff.
Show HN: Kkr-Query2xlsx – SQL Runner to XLSX/CSV (GUI+CLI, SQLite Demo)
by kkrysztofczyk | 2026-02-18 14:29:08+00:00
Hi HN - I’m sharing a lightweight SQL query runner I’ve been using internally for years and finally packaged for others.

kkr-query2xlsx runs SQL (GUI or CLI) and exports results to:

* XLSX (supports templates - useful for formatting / existing sheets)

* CSV (custom delimiters / encodings)

It includes a SQLite demo, so you can try it without any database setup. MIT-licensed.

Windows build: https://github.com/kkrysztofczyk/kkr-query2xlsx/releases
Feedback/bugs (please avoid sensitive data): https://github.com/kkrysztofczyk/kkr-query2xlsx/issues/new/c...
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-18 14:29:11+00:00
One thing you need to add is that UB can be incredibly subtle and almost impossible to spot even by people with decades of programming experience. However, the compiler - and we're talking almost exclusively gcc here - will spot it and silently break your code. It won't warn "hey, I've spotted UB here!" even with every possible warning enabled, it will just quietly break your code without giving you any indication that it's done so.

It's some of the most user-hostile behavior I've ever encountered in an application.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-18 14:29:29+00:00
> I posted a Show HN two days ago for a children's book generator - type a story idea, get a fully illustrated printed book shipped to you. Offered a free printed book including shipping to the HN community via voucher code. Got 7 points, 2 comments, and zero voucher redemptions. Nobody even ordered the free book.

As someone who taught their kid to read using the DISTAR alphabet, and then moved on from there, your idea just doesn't sound like it has any value.

I wrote (without LLMs) about 2 dozen "books" for 3.5yo to 5yo; none of them had any pictures in them, so having them professionally printed is a waste of time and money.

When it comes to teaching kids to read, what you need is volume, not prettiness. Your idea is appealing to only to the people who teach reading the wrong way (schools, mostly). Kids learning to read from books with pictures in them learn slower.
by nunobrito | 2026-02-18 14:29:57+00:00
Hello,

To send a simple text as "Hello" it takes 18 seconds which is excessively long.

There is a library called rattlegram which is well tested and would transmit the same data in less than half a second: https://github.com/aicodix/rattlegram

I'm developing with more people a platform called geogram, which basically looks into transmitting data with radios, bluetooth, wifi, USB-C cables or anything you have. We don't have modem over the phone yet. Maybe I can invite you to join so we can solve those obstacles together?

The website is https://geogram.radio
by yoavm | 2026-02-18 14:30:03+00:00
Assuming you are referring to non-books kind of content: I assume that if this happens to anyone, we'd learn about it and all stop seeding AA's content until they explain what happened and how they're making sure it doesn't happen again. The poor person this happened to will have to explain that this wasn't at all what they thought the software was doing.

As I said in other comments - yes, this requires some kind of trust in the AA project. Personally, I tend to have more trust in this kind of projects than in big corporations, of which people are happily running their binaries without blinking. However, I'm not trying to convince people to trust AA - this project is simply meant for those who want support them.
by thrance | 2026-02-18 14:30:24+00:00
Far from "harming my cause", vindictiveness wins elections. Weakness toward the fascist idiots currently tearing this world appart only made them stronger, and worsened the situation.

I have empathy for those wronged by our messed up economic systems, and I believe the policies and candidates I advocate for will help everyone in the end, but I reserve the right to not extend my empathy to those who consistently chose mindless hate over actual solutions. At some point, there must be consequences for siding with these evil fucks over and over and over again. Let these consequences be a very negative public perception of the views they hold, which is very much deserved at this point.

Also, I am absolutely better than Trump and his supporters: I'm not a child rapist and I don't support those who are. And even suggesting that calling out pedophilia is equivalent to practicing it is very messed up.
by o3dd | 2026-02-18 14:30:30+00:00
What is happening is nonsensical.

OAI wants to keep the hype train going. That is all. OpenClaw is just a project that attracted the interests of people messing about with LLMs. Which as a proportion of economically active people is.... tiny.

They brought him (Pete) over as he seems to have some way of thinking about LLMs in the form of a product. Will he have repeatable success on a large scale? Who knows. I doubt it personally.
by cowpig | 2026-02-18 14:30:53+00:00
NVIDIA is doing circular finance deals with all of the top labs to pump up demand for its products and charging a monopoly rate on those products. Everything in computing is costing more.

Access to capital for everyone else is dropping. And the US economy is being managed by chaos monkeys, causing all kinds of supply chain disruptions. Oligopolies in almost every market are increasingly jacking up prices above market equilibrium rates as they are emboldened by a corrupted FTC.

Despite what Peter Thiel may have led you to believe, Monopolies are not healthy for an economy in aggregate.

Of course the economy is slowing.
by johncoltrane | 2026-02-18 14:31:07+00:00
Because it means making choices, breaking assumptions, etc.. They have made it user-customizable so they don't have to go through all that.

FWIW, the current de-facto standard is set by xterm. Here is a relevant excerpt of its source code:

! Disclaimer: there are no standard colors used in terminal emulation.
!
! The choice for color4 and color12 is a tradeoff between contrast, depending
! on whether they are used for text or backgrounds. Note that either color4 or
! color12 would be used for text, while only color4 would be used for a
! background. These are treated specially, since the luminosity of blue is
! only about half that of red/green, and is typically not accounted for in the
! RGB scheme.
!
! Blue text on a black background should be readable.
! Blue backgrounds should not be "too" bright.
!
! Originally color4/color12 were set to the names blue3/blue
!*VT100*color4: blue3
!*VT100*color12: blue
!
! They are from rgb.txt respectively:
! 0 0 205 blue3
! 0 0 255 blue
! However, blue3 is not readable on a black background.
!
! Another choice was from the Debian settings:
!*VT100*color4: DodgerBlue1
!*VT100*color12: SteelBlue1
!
! From rgb.txt:
! 30 144 255 DodgerBlue1
! 99 184 255 SteelBlue1
!
! Some users object to this choice because the background (color4) is brighter
! than they are accustomed. Others point out that the different weights for
! the red/green components make it appear to be not really blue. Finally, it
! provides poor contrast against color13 and color14.
!
! The current choice uses equal weights for red/green (effectively adding a
! gray to the result). It is brighter than the original choice, and provides
! more contrast between color12 and color13, color14 than SteelBlue1 did.
! Contrast of color4 against black is slightly improved over the original.
!
! Some refinement is certainly possible (you are welcome to try) -TD

Make that what you will :-).
by codethief | 2026-02-18 14:31:08+00:00
So like… a container or a VM?

> if it tried I would get a popup

Ok, that's not implemented yet but using a custom FUSE-based file system (or using something like Armin Rohnacher's new sandboxing solution[0]) it shouldn't be too hard. I bet you could ask Claude to write that. :)

[0]: https://github.com/earendil-works/gondolin
by streetfighter64 | 2026-02-18 14:31:33+00:00
Well, I can go along with your analogy, and say that yeah, I'd be annoyed at the owner of the lemonade stand. Those marathon runners are trampling all my vegetables, and you're just trying to make a quick buck selling lemonade? People (me included) are annoyed at LLM creators scraping the web and gobbling up all copyrighted material, but it's mis-calibrated to get annoyed at Anna's Archive performing some sort of digital selling of stolen goods?
by xacky | 2026-02-18 14:31:51+00:00
I use it, and if you don't like the point of view then make your own AI encyclopedia. I'm fed up of Wikipedia, it's no longer the encyclopedia that anyone can edit since all controversial articles are BLUELOCKed to people who have to make 500 edits outside of their field of interest before they can actually contribute, Wikipedia is doing the same gate keeping that Britannica did. Wikipedia keeps telling established academics and celebrities they are not notable and if you say otherwise they shout COI. Wikipedia needs competition, and they can't keep relying on the gravy train of donations anymore.
by tim333 | 2026-02-18 14:32:41+00:00
It must be hard to differentiate:

Hypothesis 1: Polyphenols

Hypothesis 2: 2-3 coffees a day is a symptom of a normal life

You get that kind of issue coming up a lot in this sort of research. Like people who don't drink at all are probably more likely to drop dead in the next year than moderate drinkers. Not because drink protects but because people critically ill tend not to drink.