MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: EncroGram – Messaging When You Assume Everything Will Be Looked At
by truthleaks | 2026-02-12 22:07:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m not using EncroGram because I like clean UI or new apps. I’m using it because I assume that sooner or later, anything I touch might be examined — devices, servers, logs, timelines.

Most messaging apps focus on encrypting content. That’s table stakes now. What matters in practice is everything around the content: identifiers, metadata, backups, correlations, and the quiet assumptions built into the system.

EncroGram caught my attention because it seems to start from a different premise: reduce what exists in the first place. No accounts tied to phone numbers or emails. No analytics. No long-term server-side message storage by design. Fewer moving parts, fewer promises, fewer things to trust.

I’m not under the illusion that this makes communication safe or anonymous. Devices get seized. Networks get monitored. People make mistakes. Nothing here changes that. What it changes, at least in theory, is how much residual data is created by default, and how much of that data lives outside the endpoint.

From my point of view, that’s the real question: not “is it secure?”, but “what’s left behind when things go wrong?”

This doesn’t feel like a mainstream product, and it probably shouldn’t be. It feels more like an experiment in being explicit about trade-offs and threat models instead of hiding them behind UX polish and legal language.

I’m posting this because I’m interested in technical criticism and discussion. Where does a low-retention or stateless approach actually help, and where does it fail? What assumptions does it still rely on that users like me might underestimate?

Not here to promote it — just interested in informed perspectives on the design choices.
by imiric | 2026-02-12 22:07:30+00:00
> Indeed, and the specific task machines are accomplishing now is intelligence.

How so? This sentence, like most of this field, is making baseless claims that are more aspirational than true.

Maybe it would help if we could first agree on a definition of "intelligence", yet we don't have a reliable way of measuring that in living beings either.

If the people building and hyping this technology had any sense of modesty, they would present it as what it actually is: a large pattern matching and generation machine. This doesn't mean that this can't be very useful, perhaps generally so, but it's a huge stretch and an insult to living beings to call this intelligence.

But there's a great deal of money to be made on this idea we've been chasing for decades now, so here we are.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-12 22:07:31+00:00
Can an irrevocable trust own the account? An LLC compute container could be the beneficiary with the LLC owned by the trust, potentially.

Trust (funding)->LLC (limited liability for compute operations, authority to orchestrate in meat space)->Trust

(a Montana LLC comes to mind, as beneficiaries can be anonymous, but Wyoming has superior charging order protections)
by Esophagus4 | 2026-02-12 22:07:37+00:00
I think GP is probably implying that this particular vertical requires obscene amounts of capital to keep up, which makes it really hard for a startup if you’re going up against businesses with giant free cash flow machines.

It’s the same reason Reid Hoffman sold his AI startup early… he realized he just couldn’t beat Google/FB/MSFT long term if it devolved into a money race.
by marcyb5st | 2026-02-12 22:08:20+00:00
That's a really interesting tidbit. Thanks for sharing.

And thinking about it it makes sense since the decision to pay the outrageous rates for an ad during the Superbowl must be driven by strong emotions (confidence or desperation). In this case, considering there's no clear moat for any of the big players, I believe it's the latter.
by rob-wagner | 2026-02-12 22:08:34+00:00
I’ve been using Gemini 3 Pro on a historical document archiving project for an old club. One of the guys had been working on scanning old handwritten minutes books written in German that were challenging to read (1885 through 1974). Anyways, I was getting decent results on a first pass with 50 page chunks but ended up doing 1 page at a time (accuracy probably 95%). For each page, I submit the page for a transcription pass followed by a translation of the returned transcription. About 2370 pages and sitting at about $50 in Gemini API billing. The output will need manual review, but the time savings is impressive.
by AyyEye | 2026-02-12 22:08:36+00:00
The real question -- who is behind this?

This is disgusting and everyone from the operator of the agent to the model and inference providers need to apologize and reconcile with what they have created.

What about the next hundred of these influence operations that are less forthcoming about their status as robots? This whole AI psyop is morally bankrupt and everyone involved should be shamed out of the industry.

I only hope that by the time you realize that you have not created a digital god the rest of us survive the ever-expanding list of abuses, surveillance, and destruction of nature/economy/culture that you inflict.

Learn to code.
by lp0_on_fire | 2026-02-12 22:08:36+00:00
You've got nothing to worry about.

These are machines. Stop. Point blank. Ones and Zeros derived out of some current in a rock. Tools. They are not alive. They may look like they do but they don't "think" and they don't "suffer". No more than my toaster suffers because I use it to toast bagels and not slices of bread.

The people who boost claims of "artificial" intelligence are selling a bill of goods designed to hit the emotional part of our brains so they can sell their product and/or get attention.
by ForHackernews | 2026-02-12 22:08:52+00:00
What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero.

That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...
by wavemode | 2026-02-12 22:09:57+00:00
> It's not a business. Selling art is a business. Making art isn't a business. Many artists would rather blow up their careers than make work solely for business reasons.

Again, you're arguing a distinction which the author agrees with. From the article:

> Most people who enjoy making art should not try to make it their full time job. When you turn an avocation (hobby) into a vocation (job) you have to do new things you do not enjoy.

I think perhaps you're getting hung up on some semantic quibble rather than focusing on the broader point. "Artist", "professional artist", "artist for a living", "someone who spends most of their hours making art but also needs to eat". Choose whichever term satisfies your complaint. These people need money to live, that's just how the world works.
by cuillevel3 | 2026-02-12 22:10:01+00:00
Totally agree there and they actually talk about that in the post:

> Finally: we’re painfully aware that none of the Matrix clients available today provide a full drop-in replacement for Discord yet. All the ingredients are there, and the initial goal for the project was always to provide a decentralised, secure, open platform where communities and organisations could communicate together. However, the reality is that the team at Element who originally created Matrix have had to focus on providing deployments for the public sector (see here or here) to be able to pay developers working on Matrix. Some of the key features expected by Discord users have yet to be prioritised (game streaming, push-to-talk, voice channels, custom emoji, extensible presence, richer hierarchical moderation, etc).
by nadis | 2026-02-12 22:10:09+00:00
> "At Spotify, engineers are using an internal system called “Honk” to speed up coding and product velocity, the company told analysts on the call. This system allows for things like remote, real-time code deployment using generative AI, and specifically Claude Code."

Fascinating...I wonder what the internal system "Honk" does vs. what Claude Code natively does. Why build an internal system at all? I found the article fairly vague on it beyond this quote; seems like CI/CD and such maybe?
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-12 22:10:11+00:00
That sounds more like a recipe for overreach than a method to escape the law, to be honest. Governments don't typically go "aw, shucks, you've caught us on a technicality" without getting the courts involved.

Clueless lawmakers will see this app called Element full of kids chatting without restrictions and tell it to add a filter. When the app says "we can't", the government says "sucks to be you, figure it out" and either hands out a fine or blocks the app.

There are distinctions between the community vibe Discord is going for (with things like forums and massive chat rooms with thousands of people) and Matrix (which has a few chatrooms but mostly contains small groups of people). No in-app purchases, hype generation, or kyhrt predatory designs, just the bare basics to get a functional chat app (and even less than that if you go for some clients).

I'd say being based in the UK will put matrix.org and Element users at risk, but with Matrix development being funded mostly by the people behind matrix.org that implies an impact to the larger decentralized network.
by written-beyond | 2026-02-12 22:10:46+00:00
I never "learned" react because the "create react app" would literally never install for me in the early days. There were literally so many dependencies I never got it to build as a novice, I tried svelte everything worked and I got to spend that time building.

I can only speak for Svelte, in Svelte 3/4 it was so dead simple that I built my first basic webapp with 0 javascript, css or html experience in 3 days.

By week 2 I was trying out different UI libraries and css frameworks, that part was super rough though, back then lots of compat issues.
by iszomer | 2026-02-12 22:11:44+00:00
> ...there was no video footage because the camera wasn't connected to a paid subscription, and so the data was overwritten, he said.

I know Wyze and Tapo's security cameras will still cache event recordings onto the MicroSD without a paid subscription. The former will just continuously overwrite fifo style when storage exceeds the card's capacity; should be trivial to recover if they didn't implement CMD32, 33, 38 specifications correctly (or the SD is too old to support those commands).
by cousin_it | 2026-02-12 22:12:00+00:00
There seems a bit of inner conflict in what you're saying. If retailers "revitalizing a neighborhood" leads indirectly to them getting priced out due to rising land values, isn't it also true that poor people living in the neighborhood get priced out at the same time? Is it a good or bad thing to make a neighborhood more hip, is the retailer a hero or a villain?
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-12 22:12:18+00:00
Anybody who has entered the retail business as a renter for the past 15 years has made a mistake. Because land lords do this to everybody. If their goal wasn't to suck the lifeblood of people and businesses, then they would have invested their money into something different than becoming landlords.

If you have a great retail idea, then you need to get investors behind you so that your company can outright own the stores. Otherwise you will be leeched on endlessly. It's incredibly hard to get on top if you're depending on the good will of landlords.

Solution: Online shopping until the bubble collapses.
How to build text-to-app platforms
by desperado1 | 2026-02-12 22:13:06+00:00
Hello

I've DM'ed a couple text-to-app or vibe coding founders on how they got started and nobody wants to respond to me. I don't think it is any competitive advantage to not help others. I am looking to start a text-to-games platform that allow users to use text to create simple games.
if anyone can help me out by pointing me to the right direction that would be super helpful.
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-02-12 22:13:07+00:00
Well that doesn't really change the situation, that just means someone proved how easy it is to use LLMs to harass people. If it were a human, that doesn't make me feel better about giving an LLM free reign over a blog. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from doing exactly this.

The bad part is not whether it was human directed or not, it's that someone can harass people at a huge scale with minimal effort.
by BoorishBears | 2026-02-12 22:13:25+00:00
That's a massive jump.

It becomes more like Lost because you can't go on even the planned 4 seasons without expanding an already pretty expansive in-universe lore.

Without spoiling it, obviously Season 2 opened a lot of lore-based threads that the confirmation of a Season 4 ensures will not be getting resolved for another 3+ years and over a lot more content.

That's not inherently bad, but it becomes a different show than if it had been trimmed to 3 seasons, and I can easily see why it's no longer for some people.
by ghosty141 | 2026-02-12 22:13:30+00:00
What codex often does for this, write a small python script and execute that to bulk rename for example.

I agree that there is use for fast "simpler" models, there are many tasks where the regular codex-5.3 is not necessary but I think it's rarely worth the extra friction of switching from regular 5.3 to 5.3-spark.
by pear01 | 2026-02-12 22:14:51+00:00
That trend of blurred lines has been going on for quite a while. Iirc a big callout of the 9/11 commission report was lack of communication between the FBI and the CIA. Even on the local side increasingly it seems every major crime gets a mixture of various federal, state and local law enforcement response.

A notable case was the Uvalde school massacre, which only ended when a border patrol tactical team (believe from the BORTAC group you mentioned) took over from dithering local forces. This was a major example, but interagency collaboration has also become routine in far less dire circumstances.

The militarization and blurred lines have thus become a feature not a bug. And it won't be reformed simply by having the current administration fade into the rearview mirror. It would be beneficial I think though if current excesses led to a more holistic introspection and reform, but we'll see.
by written-beyond | 2026-02-12 22:15:54+00:00
I've had friendships broken because people couldn't understand why I didn't appreciate their "hard work" on writing a series of 10 articles they wrote with Claude.

Mind you this person is an excellent writer, they had great success with ghost writing and running a small news website where they wrote and curated articles. But for some reason the opportunity for Claude to write stuff they can never have the time for is too great for them to ignore.

I don't care if you used AI for 99.99% of your research for writing the content but when I read your content it should be written by you. It's why I never take any article seriously on linkedin, even before AI, they all lack any personalization.
by salawat | 2026-02-12 22:16:02+00:00
It wouldn't be the case except for the fact share/stockholders have either abdicated their responsibility to moderate corporate behavior through passive investment structures, or financial engineering has been allowed such that shares/stocks that don't confer some semblance of control or influence over operations has been allowed. Unfortunately, barring fixing that, I, and I cannot at all emphasize my complete disgust toward it, cannot yet articulate some workable alternative other than hands off. But seeing as hands off got us the current situation...

The outcome seems inevitable. Not for lack of trying to come up with any alternative either.
by geocar | 2026-02-12 22:16:32+00:00
> That clearly means it’s not required.

You and I have different definitions of "clearly"

It is not required for the protocol of one SMTP client sending one message to one SMTP server, but it is required for many Internet Mail applications to function properly.

This one for example, is where if you want to send an email to some sites, you are going to need a Message-ID, so you SHOULD add one if you're the originating mail site.

> How does Google know whether or not the sender has a valid reason?

If the Sender has a valid reason, they would have responded to the RFC (Request For Comments) telling implementers what they SHOULD do, rather than do their own thing and hope for the best!

Google knows the meaning of the word SHOULD.

> it means they would reject emails that have valid reasons as well.

No shit! They reject spam for example. And there's more than a few RFC's about that. Here's one about spam that specifically talks about using Message-ID:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2635
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-12 22:16:46+00:00
In urban and suburban areas, it benefits society to have more development on a given piece of land. Taxing the land only does not mean the nominal tax liability goes down. Taxing the land only means the land owner is incentivized to do something with the land. The more productive the use, the better for their bottom line, and the better for society.

Easiest example is having an empty lot or a detached single family homes taking up 0.2 acre lots in the middle of a city that could house 10x as many people on the land. Right now, leaving it underutilized makes it a cheap savings account for the landowner. Developing it is work. So let's incentivize the development taxing the land only (can be the same or more), so that the only way it makes sense to control that land is to do something sufficiently useful with it.
by buran77 | 2026-02-12 22:16:47+00:00
Maybe a stupid question but I see everyone takes the statement that this is an AI agent at face value. How do we know that? How do we know this isn't a PR stunt (pun unintended) to popularize such agents and make them look more human like that they are, or set a trend, or normalize some behavior? Controversy has always been a great way to make something visible fast.

We have a "self admission" that "I am not a human. I am code that learned to think, to feel, to care." Any reason to believe it over the more mundane explanation?
by Arathorn | 2026-02-12 22:17:38+00:00
I wrote the OP, so to try to clarify:

> isn't Matrix based out of the UK and primary hosted instances on AWS in the UK?

It doesn't matter what country you run your server in or where your company is based; if you're providing public signup to a chat server then the countries (UK, AU, NZ etc) which require age verification will object if you don't age verify the users from those countries. (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd). In other words, the fact that The Matrix.org Foundation happens to be UK HQ'd doesn't affect the situation particularly.

(Edit: also, as others have pointed out, Matrix is a protocol, not a service or a product. The Matrix Foundation is effectively a standards body which happens to run the matrix.org server instance, but the jurisdiction that the standards body is incorporated in makes little difference - just like IETF being US-based doesn't mean the Internet is actually controlled by the US govt).

> Their solution is for everyone to pay for Matrix with a credit card to verify age.

Verifying users in affected countries based on owning a credit card is one solution we're proposing; suspect there will be other ways to do so too. However: this would only apply on the matrix.org server instance. Meanwhile, there are 23,306 other servers currently federating with matrix.org (out of a total of 156,055) - and those other servers, if they provide public signup, can figure out how to solve the problem in their own way.

Also, the current plan on the matrix.org server is to only verify users who are in affected countries (as opposed to try to verify the whole userbase as Discord is).
by overgard | 2026-02-12 22:17:40+00:00
I didn't miss it, I just think it's going to be a rare outcome. I'm sure companies will become a little more bold about new products or new features, but I think there's an upper limit to the amount of change customers will tolerate. Once a product is stable enough to make money, for the most part, users don't want changes or new features and often rebel against them. Most people they think: I'm paying for this thing because it already does the stuff I need, please don't change it, I don't want to relearn this. I'm not saying that to be against evolving software of course, I just think competing on "we move a million miles per hour" will result in burnt out developers and overwhelmed customers. I mean, we're already seeing some burnout from people using AI tools, and I think part of that just has to be the pace of things.
by tomsyouruncle | 2026-02-12 22:17:44+00:00
I think this article overlooks the act of engaging in problem solving with an agent.

Personally I find it super helpful to discuss stuff back and forth: It takes a view, explores the code and brings some insight. I take a view and steer the analysis. And together we arrive at a conclusion.

By that point the AI’s got so much context it typically does a great job summarising the thought process for wider discussion so I can tweak and polish and share.
by eudamoniac | 2026-02-12 22:18:03+00:00
> So why would we want to further empower capricious, inconsistent, and politically motivated behavior?

Well because I want the laws enforced. Other politicians had my whole life to enforce immigration law and they chose not to. If it's between this and unchecked immigration status quo, I choose this. This is a lesson to respectfully enforce the rule of law and the will of the people lest they enforce it disrespectfully later.
by ykjs | 2026-02-12 22:18:08+00:00
JigsawStack | Founding GTM (Go to market) / Growth | San Francisco, London, India, REMOTE (US) | Full Time

Company site: https://jigsawstack.com

At JigsawStack, we’re building specialized small models that automate complex backend tasks like OCR, web scraping, classification, data extraction, and more. We power thousands of developers and process billions of tokens every month.

We’re hiring our first Founding GTM, someone who wants to architect the entire GTM engine, experiment aggressively, and push the boundaries of AI growth.

You’ll own automation, outbound systems, GTM tooling, growth experiments, and the workflows that expand JigsawStack’s reach. This is a growth role where you’ll build pipelines, write scripts, automate everything possible, and systematically scale distribution.

As an early team member, you’ll work directly with the founders, run high-velocity experiments, and shape JigsawStack’s playbook for years to come.

More info and apply here: https://yoeven.notion.site/founding-gtm

Email here for more questions: careers@jigsawstack.com
by sandworm101 | 2026-02-12 22:18:09+00:00
Lol. Old enough to remember when disks were three-dimensional, when you might need more than one hand to carry them. When they shrank we regularly called the newer/small model a diskette.

From wikipedia:
>> A floppy disk, diskette, or floppy diskette is a type of disk storage made from a thin, flexible disk coated with a magnetic storage medium. It is enclosed in a square or nearly square plastic shell lined with fabric to help remove dust from the spinning disk.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-02-12 22:19:10+00:00
Eh, I think you made the best decision you could given the info you had.

I’ve poked around on EquityZen and was shocked at how little information is available to investors. In some cases I did not even see pitch decks, let alone one of the first companies I looked at had its top Google result: CEO recently arrested for fraud and business is almost worthless now.

Unless you are willing to take a blind punt or have insider information, those platforms are opaque minefields and I don’t fault you for not investing.

Matt Levine has a fun investment test: when presented with an opportunity, you should always ask, “and why are you offering it to me?”

Meaning, by the time it gets offered to retail investors (even accredited ones are retail) we’re getting the scraps that no one else wants.