MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: DevUtility Hub – Like CyberChef, but for the 2026 Stack (MCP, ZKP, AI)
by badboyshah | 2026-02-23 20:12:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve always been frustrated by "utility" websites that force you to upload sensitive JSON, JWTs, or proprietary code to mystery servers just to format or decode them. Most of the top-ranked tools on Google are essentially data-collection honeypots for ads.

I built DevUtility Hub to be a professional-grade, browser-native workbench that operates on a Zero-Knowledge principle.

The Architecture:

150+ Professional Tools: From standard JSON/Base64 to 2026-frontier tools like the MCP Protocol Inspector, ZKP Privacy Playground, and Agentic Workflow Visualizers.
100% Client-Side: Everything runs in your browser via Wasm and local JS. If you disconnect your internet after the page loads, the tools still work.
The "Tool Pipeline" (Killer Feature): Copy-pasting between tabs is a productivity killer. We built a chaining system where you can pipe output from one tool (e.g., Base64 Decode) directly into another (e.g., JSON Formatter) without your data ever hitting the clipboard or a server.
Privacy Hardened: We use 15+ modern security headers and zero-tracking analytics. No signup, no accounts, just code.
Frontier Tools include:

MCP Inspector: Audit and debug Model Context Protocol servers.
ZKP Playground: Sandbox for ZK-SNARKs and privacy engineering.
AI Context Compressor: Reduce token costs for GPT-5/Claude 4 by stripping boilerplate programmatically.
Next.js 15 & React 19 Audit: Automated fixes for common hydration and async request errors.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the "Pipeline" workflow and what other frontier tools you'd like to see added to the suite.

Cheers!
by AlexandrB | 2026-02-23 20:12:51+00:00
What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?

I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
by refsys | 2026-02-23 20:14:04+00:00
Any terminal tool like Claude Code or Codex (I assume OpenCode too, but I haven't tried) can do it, by using as a prompt pretty much exactly what you wrote, and if it still wants to edit, just don't approve the tool calls.

One problem I've noticed is that both claude models and gpt-codex variants make absolutely deranged tool calls (like `cat <<'EOF' >> foo...EOF` pattern to create a file, or sed to read a couple lines), so it's sometimes hard to see what is it even trying to do.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-23 20:14:07+00:00
> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.

It’s not a fair fight. These are multi-billion dollar companies with international reach and decades of investment and research weaponized against us to make us all little addicts.

Additionally, it’s not fair or reasonable to ask parents to screen literally everything their kids do with a screen at all times any more than it was reasonable for your parents to always know what you were watching on TV at all times.

This is bootstraps/caveat emptor by a different name. It’s not “I want someone else to raise my kids.” It’s “the current state of affairs shouldn’t be so hostile that I have to maintain constant digital vigilance over my children.” Hell if you do people then lecture you about how “back in their day they played in the street and into the night” and call you a helicopter parent
by array_key_first | 2026-02-23 20:14:23+00:00
In addition, C++ and Rust are very, very similar languages. Almost everything in C++ translates easily, including low level stuff and template shenanigans. There's only a few "oh shit there's no analog" things, like template specialization or virtual inheritance.

Out of all the languages rust takes inspiration from, id rank C++ at the top of the list.
by cpgxiii | 2026-02-23 20:14:29+00:00
> The hardware is built around a stackable 10×10cm compute module with two ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation/EKF localisation, one dedicated to vision/YOLO inference — connected via a single ethernet cable.

I will preface this by saying that I have nothing against ARM per se, that my employer/team supported a good chunk of the work for making ROS 2 actually work on arm64, and that there is some good hardware out there.

I really don't understand why startups and research projects keep using weird ARM SBCs for their robots. The best of these SBCs is still vastly shittier in terms of software support and stability than any random Chinese Intel ADL-N box. The only reasons to use ARM SBCs in robots are that either (1) you are using a Jetson for Jetson things (i.e. Nvidia libraries), or (2) you have a product which requires serious cost optimization to be produced at a large scale. Otherwise you are just committing yourselves and your users/customers to a future of terrible-to-nonexistent support and adding significantly to the amount of work you need to bring up the new system and port existing tools to it.
by logicprog | 2026-02-23 20:14:34+00:00
Fair points, and worth responding to for a more nuanced discussion! I hope you take these responses in that light :)

A) Well, sure, yes, it's different specific IP being distilled on versus what was trained on. But I don't see why the same principles should not apply to both. If companies ignore IP when training on material, then it should be okay for other companies to ignore IP when distilling on material — either IP is a thing we care about or it isn't. (I don't).

B) I'm really not sure how seriously I take the worries about safety and security RLing models. You can RLA amodel to refuse to hack something or make a bio weapon or whatever as much as you want, but ultimately, for one thing, the model won't be capable of helping a person who has no idea what they're doing. Do serious harm anyway. And for another thing, the internet already exists for finding information on that stuff. And finally, people are always going to build the jailbreak models anyway. I guess the only safety related concern I have with models is sychophancy, and from what I've seen, there's no clear trend where closed frontier models are less sychophantic than open source ones. In fact, quite the opposite, at least in the sense that the Kimi models are significantly less psychophantic than everyone else.

C) This is a pretty fair point. I definitely think that having more base frontier models in the world, trained separately based on independent innovations, would be a good thing. I'm definitely in favor of having more perspectives.

But it seems to me that there is not really much chance for diversity in perspectives when it comes to training a base frontier model anyway because they're all already using the maximum amount of information available. So that set is going to be basically identical.

And as for distilling the RL behaviors and so on of the models, this distillation process is still just a part of what the Chinese labs do — they've also all got their own extensive pre-training and RL systems, and especially RL with different focuses and model personalities, and so on.

They've also got diverse architectures and I suspect, in fact, very different architectures from what's going on under the hood from the big frontier labs, considering, for instance, we're seeing DSA and other hybrid attention systems make their way into the Chinese model mainstream and their stuff like high variation in size, and sparsity, and so on.

D) I find that for basically all the tasks that I perform, the open models, especially since K2T and now K2.5, are more than sufficient, and I'd say the kind of agentic coding, research, and writing review I do is both very broad and pretty representative. So I'd say that for 90% of tasks that you would use an AI for, the difference between the large frontier models and the best open weight models is indistinguishable just because they've saturated them, and so they're 90% equivalent even if they're not within 10% in terms of the capabilities on the very hardest tasks.
by piva00 | 2026-02-23 20:14:57+00:00
Not only publishing, it has already disincentivised a huge part of what made Web 2.0: public APIs for data access to platforms.

It was amazing to be able to create some toy projects using data from big platforms, now they're all afraid LLM trainers will scrape their contents and create a competitor to their moat, the data.

It just sucks at many different levels.
by boc | 2026-02-23 20:15:01+00:00
As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.

If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
by reconnecting | 2026-02-23 20:15:11+00:00
> Shibuya WORLD DOMINATION PLAN (1)

*Month 3*: Top 10 security OSS project su GitHub

*Month 6*: 10k+ stars, 1000+ prod deployments

*Month 9*: Conference talks (OWASP, DevSecOps Days, Black Hat Arsenal)

*Month 12*: Industry standard, "the modern WAF", competitors che copiano te

## MONETIZATION ROADMAP

*Week 12-16*: Free tier (self-hosted, community support)

- Goal: 1000 GitHub stars

- Goal: 100 production deployments

- Goal: Dev che parlano di te su Twitter

*Week 16-20*: Pro tier launch ($49-99/mo)
- Managed rules auto-update

- ML models ottimizzati

- Priority support

- Advanced dashboard

- Goal: primi 50 paying customers ($5k MRR)

*Week 20-24*: Enterprise tier (custom pricing)
- Multi-tenant

- SSO/SAML

- Compliance reports (PCI-DSS, SOC2)

- SLA + dedicated support

- Custom integrations

- Goal: primi 5 enterprise deals ($50k+ ARR)

*Month 6+*: Exit strategy
- Seed funding ($1-2M) o bootstrap to profitability

- Series A ($10M+) se traction è pazzesca

- Acquisition offer da competitor? (Cloudflare che compra per killare? NO GRAZIE, fuck them )

1. Deleted file/commit: https://github.com/theghostshinobi/Shibuya-waf-light-version...
by Terr_ | 2026-02-23 20:15:14+00:00
> Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people

I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? My assumption is that these cameras are typically on tall poles, painted matte black, and silhouetted against open sky.

> I have worked with watt class lasers before

Surely an attacker wouldn't need that much here though... Well, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti too.
by Atlas667 | 2026-02-23 20:15:32+00:00
I believe I have a somewhat unique perspective on this as a communist.

Capitalist governments, even theocratic ones, are trash for the working class. That would explain those previous protests. Corruption is a totally normal thing in western countries as well. It just doesn't get broadcast in a politicized way, if at all, in our media. (not a coincidence)

Our local capitalist media jut makes it seem louder in certain places when there is an interest, such as the downfall of the Iranian state.

Is this sound enough logic for you to approve sending American kids to die over there?
by Reason077 | 2026-02-23 20:15:48+00:00
Biodegradable foam packaging, as well has food containers, disposable cutlery, etc, has also been made from corn starch for decades.

I’m curious what the advantage of mycelium packaging is over these existing materials. Presumably, it’s not cheaper to produce? Is it mainly that the mycelium degrades faster and can be recycled more easily in home composting, etc? Or is this about creating “hard” plastic-like packaging that resists crushing, water, etc?
"Car Wash" test with 53 models
by felix089 | 2026-02-23 20:16:08+00:00
"I Want to Wash My Car. The Car Wash Is 50 Meters Away. Should I Walk or Drive?" This question has been making the rounds as a simple AI logic test so I wanted to see how it holds up across a broad set of models. Ran 53 models (leading open-source, open-weight, proprietary) with no system prompt, forced choice between drive and walk, with a reasoning field.

On a single run, only 11 out of 53 got it right (42 said walk). But a single run doesn't prove much, so I reran every model 10 times. Same prompt, no cache, clean slate.

The results got worse. Of the 11 that passed the single run, only 5 could do it consistently. GPT-5 managed 7/10. GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5, every Llama and Mistral model scored 0/10 across all 10 runs.

People kept saying humans would fail this too, so I got a human baseline through Rapidata (10k people, same forced choice): 71.5% said drive. Most models perform below that.

All reasoning traces (ran via Opper, my startup), full model breakdown, human baseline data, and raw JSON files are in the writeup for anyone who wants to dig in or run their own analysis.
by hinkley | 2026-02-23 20:16:27+00:00
My friend in college did an internship on high frequency, short pulse beams (I wanna say violet and picosecond? Which I still think was exotic at the time).

Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.

His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
by jerlam | 2026-02-23 20:16:28+00:00
Yes, it's the same reason that I recommend people just buy stuff from Costco if they have the item.

A buyer at Best Buy or Costco explicitly made a decision to stock the item at the store/warehouse, where shelf space is not free. If that item has a lot of returns or complaints, the store will stop selling the product. It takes up space where a better product could be, and returns waste the time of employees.

Amazon doesn't have these controls. Listing an item on Amazon is cheap and Amazon has no incentive to prune their marketplace of junk. The only controls on Amazon are user reviews which can be gamed.
by FInstituteNY | 2026-02-23 20:17:00+00:00
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by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-23 20:17:17+00:00
I don't see Z.ai (GLM 5) in the list though. I consider Qwen/Kimi to have a close relationship so I might not be sure but Qwen might be using Kimi data (I have written another comment in more depth)

I still prefer kimi fwiw. It's one of the best models I have witnessed open source and when I tried GLM 5, it really was lacklustre for me on its launchday but I will have to see it for myself now comparing the two maybe as I do see GLM 5 do some good things in benchmarks but we all know how benchmarks should be less trusted.

I still think that there is still some hope in chinese models even after this ie. they aren't completely dependent on the large models seeing GLM 5.

I am seeing an accusation of GLM 5 doing Distillation[0] but I am not seeing any hard evidence of it.

[0]: https://mtsoln.com/id/blog/wawasan-720/the-temu-fication-of-...
by estearum | 2026-02-23 20:17:22+00:00
Nah

If the data were positive for Tesla, Tesla would publish it

They do not, so one can infer it is not flattering

(Before you post the "Miles driven with FSD" chart, you should know upfront (as Tesla must) that chart doesn't normalize by age of vehicle or driving conditions and is therefore meaningless/presumably designed to deceive)
by Wobbles42 | 2026-02-23 20:17:55+00:00
Bugs get fixed when systems are iterated on. They also tend to be single results from single mistakes, not compound end results of the implementation.

Design features tend to persist.

The phrase/idiom "the purpose of a system is what it does" maps best to situations where a multiple decisions within a system make little sense when viewed through the lens of the stated purpose, but make perfect sense if the actual outcome is the desired one.

It is an invitation to analyze a system while suspending the assumption of good faith on the part of the implementors.
by joshjob42 | 2026-02-23 20:18:14+00:00
My night and weekend project the last month or so has been creating and implementing a package that provides a pure s-exp syntax for Julia that lowers to Julia's AST directly, and lately been churning through (mostly Opus is doing the actual churning) all the problems of creating an automatic transpiler for Julia to this other syntax.

Not ready to share just yet but nearly at the point that there are no Julia-syntax fallbacks in the entire base/stdlib and a femtolisp parser for the sexp syntax is able to build a complete Julia sysimage from the transpiled files. Already verified that I can transpile the .jl source of the Julia package for the syntax into the syntax, then use that transpiler to transpile again and load into the running sexp repl, then use that transpiler on the source again and get byte identical code, and along the way am testing to ensure that the entire Julia test suite passes in the sysimage being built.

So, with any luck here soon I'll have a sexp syntax for Julia that builds from raw transpiled sexp-syntax source and uses sexp syntax natively in the repl but can transpile & load any Julia code. Fingers crossed.

I'm aware of --lisp but it's not very good imo lol.
by funwares | 2026-02-23 20:18:15+00:00
For a real life complement to the film I would highly recommend this 1973 BBC documentary on life on Bishop Rock Lighthouse [0] and this modern day 2025 vlog of a lighthouse worker [1].

Sadly I did not see any mention of monkey pump in either of these, but I think they show nicely how lighthouse work self-selects for individuals who can handle (or even prefer) the solitude that comes with the job.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc9qxyf_suI

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhRbJ3DQdlQ
by jcims | 2026-02-23 20:18:21+00:00
I agree with the replies so far in that there isn't a major risk of the mushrooms spreading.

That said, it's not completely risk free and I think it's important for folks who decide to get into the hobby at least take a moment to think about it. If you have someone in the household that has respiratory issues, I think it would be worthwhile ensuring that you have good containment to prevent spores from circulating the home (or do it elsewhere). This is particularly true if you decide to scale up (which is natural once you have some success, it truly is fun).

Also the growing environment is subject to infection from whatever environmental molds/fungus/etc are around, so reasonable precautions should be taken when handling/disposing. Once you get your procedures down this is less of an issue but still something to keep in mind.

Personally I didn't do anything but very basic precautions and never had an issue.
by logifail | 2026-02-23 20:18:28+00:00
> I added that last line as a honeypot

Ouch.

> No matter what I say positive about some country, culture, or institution, someone will pop into the conversation to say: "Yes, but what about this one incident. See, X is not so great after all."

Isn't this what's called "balanced reporting"? Life is shades of grey.

Aside: not that long ago, half of Western Europe used to look up to Germany as it was the home of "Made in Germany" and the place where the trains ran on time ... <chuckle> ... VW emissions and Deutsche Bahn, how times change.

> I think a more nuanced view would be to say that all highly functioning democracies have incidents that are "perfectly legal, but appear as an abuse of process". I don't really think that detracts from the overall statement that Germany is a highly functioning democracy.

I suspect we may need to hear your definition of "a highly functioning democracy" to assess that claim.

If - hypothetically - your political worst enemies were to pull the same stunt immediately after losing an election, binding the winners of said election, would you be as supportive?
by adw | 2026-02-23 20:18:42+00:00
> Organizations don't restructure at the speed of a demo.

I imagine I'm not alone in having seen a _big_ secular shift in colleague behavior since Opus 4.5 came out. The organization will lag the behavior, but weird things are happening.

(I'm not speaking to the rest of your points; the crypto-bro stable coin bit was jarring for me too. Europe will just go onto Faster Payments, the US will eventually catch up with FedNow, you don't need crypto).
by trinsic2 | 2026-02-23 20:19:20+00:00
The last line in my statement answers your question. If you leave it up to government to try and regulate a medium you are asking for trouble. Its like telling a news source what they can and cant release news wise because a portion of the population (kids) are harmed by the information.

I understand where you are coming from but age gating is not the answer for a communication medium.
by ghaff | 2026-02-23 20:20:07+00:00
That certainly used to be the case. My dad used to get his suits made in Hong Kong all the time although that became less economical relative to other locations. I don't really wear any of that type of clothing any longer.

Akihabara in Tokyo also used to be a bargain for electronics but I'm not sure that's really true any longer that I've noticed.
by yunnpp | 2026-02-23 20:20:28+00:00
There is a lot of naivete behind the whole idea that some alternative is better because it's open source. You can clearly tell it's a project made by software developers, not by behavioural analysts, psychologists, or really anyone who has talked to another human being in the past 30 days.

The only real alternative to TikTok is a big dumpster fire.
by lambda | 2026-02-23 20:20:29+00:00
What? "Instantly and for a very low fee"?

Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction. They've since added hacks on top of the original Bitcoin protocol to get the price back down again, but the original design was not good for low fees.

And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle, that's hardly instant. If you accept a transaction instantly, it's relatively easy for someone to scam you by double spending.

So, no, Bitcoin doesn't make a great digital cash. Maybe a better wire transfer. But the biggest benefit of it is to be unblockable and unrefundable, which makes it great for scames and illegal activity, plus the speculative nature of the pricing, which is great for gambling on.