MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I Built Zero-Knowledge .env Sharing
by AleksDoesCode | 2026-02-19 20:46:02+00:00
Hey everyone,
English is not my native language. This post was polished with AI, but the content is mine.

I run a small dev agency in Germany. Every week someone shares database credentials, API keys, or a .env file via Slack or email. Not because they don’t care: because there’s no frictionless alternative.

Vault setups are heavy. Enterprise tools are expensive.
I just needed: upload → share link → done.
But encrypted before leaving the browser.

So I built SecretDrop.dev.

What it does

Files encrypted client-side (AES-256-GCM, PBKDF2 600k iterations)

Built entirely on WebCrypto

No third-party crypto libraries

Server stores only encrypted blobs

Recipient decrypts in their browser

No account required (password mode)

The server cannot read files, filenames, or passwords.

Premium mode

Encrypt with recipient’s public key (ECIES)

No shared password

Digital signature verifies sender identity

Only intended recipient can decrypt

Why

The real competitor isn’t Vault.
It’s “paste in Slack.”

I optimized for:

Zero setup

Dev workflow simplicity

Default secure behavior

Free tier includes encrypted password-protected sharing. No credit card.

I’m exploring:

VSCode extension (right-click .env → share)

CLI tool (secretdrop share .env --expires 24h)

Would this fit your workflow?
Any concerns about the crypto model or threat assumptions?

Happy to go deep on the architecture.
by wduquette | 2026-02-19 20:46:13+00:00
I don't have any real problem with words that are reserved absolutely and words that are reserved just in particular places. My point was more that in Algol-derived languages control structures look like control structures. And even in languages that implement `map()` and other higher-order functions, you can tell that it's a method/function call and that these things are being passed to it and those other things are not without going and looking up what `map()` does.
by NewJazz | 2026-02-19 20:46:16+00:00
due to the nature of safety in Rust, I’d find myself writing boilerplate code just to avoid calling .unwrap(). I’d get long chain calls of .ok_or followed by .map_err. I defined a dozen of custom error enums, some taking other enums, because you want to be able to handle errors properly, and your functions can’t just return any error.

This can be a double edged sword. Yes, languages like python and typescript/JavaScript will let you not catch an exception, which can be convenient. But that also often leads to unexpected errors popping up in production.
by topspin | 2026-02-19 20:46:22+00:00
Thing is you can make a 3d printer; it's basically CNC stuff with a different tool. I suppose fabricating your own 3D printer needs to be legally ensnarled as well.

Purely performative power grabbing. There is no epidemic of ghost gun violence. These measures would not stop it if there were. The new legal thicket this creates will exclusively harm innocent people.

This is about notching a victory: making someone conform to some prerogative of a pressure group. Nothing more. Behind it are wealthy pearl clutching virtue signalers. In front of it there are non-profit grifters and politicians with campaigns to fund. Everyone mouthing obligatory clown world narratives.
by XorNot | 2026-02-19 20:46:33+00:00
No the point is that if the IRS was at maximum efficiency, more funding wouldn't increase revenues because tax law is tax law: you can't market it or expand the customer base.

But if every new dollar currently produces much more then a dollar in returns, it means it's underfunded because taxes that should be collected, that by legal analysis would be planned for in budgeting, aren't.

And that matters for a great many things, but one reason is that if you pay taxes and want a tax cut then one reason you're not getting it is because actual revenues are lower then they should be due to uncollected taxes.

AKA tax fraud steals from the honest tax payer.
by tadfisher | 2026-02-19 20:46:36+00:00
On the other hand, no one from the pro-gun camp is involved with or wants to involve themselves with drafting common-sense gun regulations to reduce the impact of mass shootings while respecting Constitutional rights. Everything from that side seems to revolve around arming schoolteachers and permitting more guns in more spaces.

So of course you're going to have wildly-overreaching proposals making it through committees and put to the vote, because no one from the other side is there to compromise with. Americans prefer to debate on the news circuit instead of the committee floor.
by BigTTYGothGF | 2026-02-19 20:46:40+00:00
> 256 bits is not enough there

Yeah, but the question is: who cares?

Suppose you and I are both simulating card shuffling. We have the exact same setup, and use a 256-bit well-behaved PRNG for randomness. We both re-seed every game from a TRNG. The difference is that you use all 256 bits for your seed, while I use just 128 and zero-pad the rest. The set of all shuffles that can be generated by your method is obviously much larger than the set that can be generated by mine.

But again: who cares? What observable effect could there possibly be for anybody to take action if they know they're in a 128-bit world vs a 256-bit one?

The analogy obviously doesn't generalize downwards, I'd be singing a different tune if it was, say, 32 bits instead of 128.
by technothrasher | 2026-02-19 20:46:46+00:00
"In high school, I loved playing text-based TRS-80 adventure games written by Scott Adams. Moved to write an Adams-style adventure myself, I set it in the Arctic."

So many of us growing up at that time were inspired by Adams. I think he quite literally is responsible for a huge number of people becoming programmers and game designers. I was lucky enough a few years ago to be able to thank him personally for what he did for me as a kid. He was very gracious and humbly admitted that he gets that a lot.
by cpcloud | 2026-02-19 20:46:55+00:00
This UX was a bit iffy for me, but I thought I'd experiment with it and decided to go with it.

When you edit an ID column, it opens a form editor to edit the entire row at once.

The thinking was to make all columns editable _in some way_, but ID columns are autogenerated and thus not designed to be directly manipulated.

I thought: since the ID represents a unique entity, in this case document, then it made some sense to make editing that editing the whole row.

That said, this is a bug even with the explanation I just gave: editing on the ID column of Docs doesn't show all the row's data in the form. Will fix that shortly.
by enlightens | 2026-02-19 20:47:20+00:00
> On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#:~:text=226-,P...
by Gormo | 2026-02-19 20:47:22+00:00
Most "progressive" policies are, and have always been, scams aimed at tricking people into allowing the state to consolidate more power to use for ulterior purposes.

A great deal of regulation is sold to the public in the name of "safety", "equality", etc., but actually functions to entrench vested interests or inhibit competition in various industries.

Political solutions to social problems will always be turned to the advantage of whomever has the most political influence -- and that's always some narrow faction, and not the public at large.
by Animats | 2026-02-19 20:47:30+00:00
> By putting capital ahead of everything else of course capitalism gives you technological progress. If we didn't have capitalism we'd still be making crucible steel and the bit would cost more than the horse [1] -- but if you can license the open hearth furnace from Siemens and get a banker to front you to buy 1000 tons of firebricks it is all different, you can afford to make buildings and bridges out of steel.

The history of how steel got cheap is not really capital-based. It wasn't done by throwing money at the problem, not until the technology worked. The Bessemer Converter was a simple, but touchy beast. The Romans could have built one, but it wouldn't have worked. The metallurgy hadn't been figured out, and the quantitative analysis needed to get repeatability had to be developed. Once it was possible to know what was going into the process, repeatability was possible. Then it took a lot of trial and error, about 10,000 heats. Finally, consistently good steel emerged.

That's when capitalism took over and scaled it up. The technological progress preceded the funding.
by dwattttt | 2026-02-19 20:47:32+00:00
> It is much much better for an API to be kinda crappy (but stable) for historical reasons

But this does more than just add a maintenance burden. If the API can't be removed, architectural constraints it imposes also can't be removed.

e.g. A hypothetical API that guarantees a callback during a specific phase of an operation means that you couldn't change to a new or better algorithm that doesn't have that phase.
by guitarlimeo | 2026-02-19 20:47:32+00:00
I liked the original title better "The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited". I think that sums up my grievances towards AI - amazing technology and certainly a booster to anyone's life, but what is the cost? Why AI companies get to download, consume and transform all copyrighted works essentially for free (I think there were some lawsuits that resulted in the companies paying), but normal people have to pay millions if they wanted to access all that data and pay to the original creators? I'm also not so ok with the workforce being displaced, but it's what happens with technological progress. But am not ok that it's displacing the writers while benefiting from their prior work without paying them a cent.
by sanswork | 2026-02-19 20:47:45+00:00
People already can't be bothered clicking on the paywall busting links to view articles because the friction is too high. Having to decide if something is potentially worth 20 cents seems easy when you have to make that decision in your mind a single time for something you're obviously interested in but in reality it becomes multiple times a day for things that you are maybe only slightly curious about the fatigue will add up very quickly and I double anyone would do a second reload(if they do the first load at all).
by ram2497 | 2026-02-19 20:47:57+00:00
Most edge computing projects fail because they get too bloated and hard to manage. I built Edge Veda to fix that.

The Core Idea: > Instead of giving an app a fixed amount of memory or CPU (which usually leads to crashes), Edge Veda uses 'Composite Budget Contracts'.

How it works:
* Smart Allocation: The app and the device 'agree' on a budget based on the device's Current Capabilities at that exact moment.
* Less Mess: It uses a simplified Project Structure so you don't get lost in the code.
* Easy Entry: I wanted a clearer Learning path for developers entering the edge computing space.

Our Roadmap is focused on making these 'contracts' scale across massive networks.

Is 'Budgeting' resources better than 'Limiting' them? I'd love your feedback.
by daveguy | 2026-02-19 20:48:07+00:00
Of course the second amendment isn't allowed in his courtroom. It's literally not allowed in any courtroom in the country. It's a courtroom. The only people permitted to have guns in a courtroom in the US are the bailiffs and the judge. Was that a reading comprehension issue, or are you just trying to rile people up?

Sports Arenas and Jails are two other places you might be surprised to learn don't allow the second amendment.
by simianwords | 2026-02-19 20:48:54+00:00
>Yes it is. It is still exactly as simple as it sounds. If I’m doing math billions of times that doesn’t make the base process somehow more substantial. It’s still math, still a machine designed to predict the next token without being able to reason, meaning that yes, they are just fancy pattern-matching machines.

I find this argument even stranger. Every system can be reduced to its parts and made to sound trivial thereby. My brain is still just neurons firing. The world is just made up of atoms. Humans are just made up of cells.

>here’s actually a few commonly understood theories of existence that are generally accepted even by laypeople, like, “if I ask a sentient being how many Rs there are in the word ‘strawberry’ it should be able to use logic to determine that there are three and not two,” which is a test that generative AI frequently fails.

This shows that the author is not very curious because its easy to take the worst examples from the cheapest models and extrapolate. Its like asking a baby some questions and interpreting humanity's potential on that basis. What's the point of this?

> The questions leftists ask about AI are: does this improve my life? Does this improve my livelihood? So far, the answer for everyone who doesn’t stand to get rich off AI is no.

I'll spill the real tension here for all of you. There are people who really like their comfy jobs and have got attached to their routine. Their status, self worth and everything is attached to it. Anything that disrupts this routine is obviously worth opposing. Its quite easy to see how AI can make a person's life better - I have so many examples. But that's not what "leftists" care about - its about security of their job.

The rest of the article is pretty low quality and full of errors.
by delichon | 2026-02-19 20:49:09+00:00
> The state should prosecute people who make illegal thing, not add useless surveillance software on every tool in every classroom, library, and garage in the state.

This is analogous to requiring text editors to verify that a document does not contain defamation, fraud, incitement, fighting words, child porn, etc., before it saves the file. In first amendment terms that led to the conclusion that prior restraint on publication is incompatible with the amendment. The same doctrine should be extended to the second amendment for the same reasons: the alternative is intolerable surveillance.
by TruePath | 2026-02-19 20:49:43+00:00
Could you clarify exactly what you think is an illegal tie-in? Because it seems like what you are upset about is literally the opposite -- Anthropic unbundling their offerings so you aren't required to buy the ability to offer third party access when you purchase the ability to use Claude code and their other models. Unless I really misunderstand you, your complaint is literally thaf

The laws prohibiting tie-ins don't make it illegal to sell two products that work well together. That's literally what the laws are designed to make you do -- seperate products into seperate pieces. The problem tie-in laws were designed to combat was situations like Microsoft making a popular OS then making a mediocre spreadsheet program and pushing the cost of that spreadsheet program into the cost of buying the OS. That way consumers would go "well it's expensive but I get excel with it so it's ok" and even if someone else made a slightly better spreadsheet they didn't have the chance to convince users because they had to buy it all as one package.

Anthropic would be doing something much closer to that if they did what you wanted. They'd be saying: hey we have this neat Claude code thing you all want to use but you can't buy that without also purchasing third party access. Now some company offering a cheaper/better third party usage product doesn't get the chance to convince you because anthropic forced you to buy that just to get claude code.

Ultimately this change unbundled products the opposite of a tie-in. What is upsetting about it is that it no longer feels to you like you are getting a good deal because you now have to fork over a bunch more cash to keep getting what you want. But that's not illegal, that's just not offering good value for money.
Ask HN: Is structured community validation a real alternative to cold outreach?
by dmitryivanovdev | 2026-02-19 20:49:46+00:00
A founder posts about their idea, gets a few "looks cool"
comments, and walks away with nothing useful. I keep seeing
this happen.

Community posts disappear fast. Launch platforms want a
finished product. Cold outreach is slow.

I'm testing whether a structured project page (problem,
solution, early evidence) lets potential users make a real
yes/no call in 30 seconds without signing up. And whether
indie founders will give structured feedback to each other
out of reciprocity.

Maybe users need to try something before they know if they
want it. Maybe founders won't bother with a form and just
drop a link anyway.

Has anyone tried collecting structured feedback from
communities in a repeatable way? What broke?
by dexwiz | 2026-02-19 20:49:52+00:00
Something I've never seen in these analyses is drinking. Millennials are heavy drinkers. Both craft brews and cocktails were defining generational traits. Not everyone is a drinker but it appears they are heavy drinkers compared to other generations.

The theory behind the ultra marathoners is that extreme distance running disrupts the epithelial layer and microbiome in the gut. Wouldn't drinking have similar effects?
by solaire_oa | 2026-02-19 20:50:14+00:00
Additionally, the boredom atrophies any future collaboration. Why make a helpful library and share it when you can brute force the thing that it helps? Why make a library when the bots will just slurp it up as delicious corpus and barf it back out at us? Why refactor? Why share your thoughts, wasting time typing? Why collaborate at all when the machine does everything with less mental energy? There was a article recently about offloading/outsourcing your thoughts, i.e. your humanity, which is part of why it's all so unbelievably boring.

Online ecosystem decay is on the horizon.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-19 20:50:23+00:00
I mean, I agree, and that is one of the reasons I left the Windows ecosystem. My partner has Windows on her work laptop and ... oof.

But still...

> I assume if you ship your new computer somewhere without Internet, you simply cannot use it?!

This is true of new Macs too, for the MDM enrollment check. The OOTB installer will not complete without internet access. Back in the days of Monterey you could "black hole" those DNS records, but not any more. No functional access to at least half-a-dozen Apple services and you cannot complete OS installation.
by jajuuka | 2026-02-19 20:50:35+00:00
Feckless democrats who want to appear tough on guns. Instead of taking on the NRA or lobbying groups they go after low hanging fruit to tout as victories to their base. It generates votes and wealth for the rep. Same thing with anti-trans bills from the right. Legislation that can pass through targeting small enough collectives that they don't have to worry about bad press.

All the news stories about ghost guns being 3D printed didn't hurt either. So they can sell a narrative of protecting people.
by dajas | 2026-02-19 20:50:45+00:00
the candidate experience angle is definitely worth its own post because i don't think it's black and white. plenty of companies get thousands of applications and are still dissatisfied with the talent quality (although i'm skeptical of this, i don't dismiss it entirely). others get thousands and simply can't process the volume, with 75% left unreviewed (ask me how i know).

if you work in big tech and you've ever referred an extremely qualified friend who's also in big tech and watched it get ignored despite 10 open support engineer or 20 account executive roles they'd be perfect for, that's exactly the incentives and infrastructure problem i'm describing.

AI might help with these problems for both recruiters and candidates though. pre-AI the pitch for many recruiting tools was about skills and keywords (garbage in, garbage out). but now we can use LLMs to reason positive signals related to qualification (compared against the job description, does resume/application show experience match based on years, sales quotas, industries, programming languages, etc.). the goal is surfacing more qualified candidates for human review, which matters a lot when a recruiter is literally waiting 5-10 seconds for one application to load in workday while every incentive they have pushes them to just source someone off linkedin instead.
by ahazred8ta | 2026-02-19 20:50:48+00:00
A typical stellar-mass black hole of 3.3 solar masses has a radius of 10 km, 10,000 meters. At 100 meters outside the event horizon there is a 10:1 time dilation. At 1 meter outside there is a 100:1 time dilation. At 1 cm outside there is a 1000:1 time dilation.

But because you're traveling at almost the speed of light while you're falling in, it only takes you a few microseconds to fall past these points and get to the event horizon. If there was a mirror 1 mm outside the event horizon, a photon could start from 1000 km away, fall in, hit the mirror, and climb back out in 1/100th of a second, even allowing for time dilation. The spaceship will only spend a very tiny fraction of a second in the high time dilation area, even as seen from outside.
by eli | 2026-02-19 20:50:49+00:00
I think this is even harder to make work than straightforward micropayments with crypto or paypal or similar.

Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.)

Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they get paid a lot of money and/or can be assured it somehow will not cannibalize their direct sales.

Who owns the customer relationship? Publishers have been burned pretty much 100% of the time they cede that direct relationship to someone else.

Also, it's been tried: see Scroll, Apple News, Flattr, Coil, Brave BAT...
by jaen | 2026-02-19 20:50:59+00:00
Complexity-wise, this version is more complicated (mixing different styles and paradigms) and it's barely less tokens. Lines of code don't matter anyway, cognitive load does.

Even though I barely know Raku (but I do have experience with FP), it took way less time to intuitively grasp what the Raku was doing, vs. both the Python versions. If you're only used to imperative code, then yeah, maybe the Python looks more familiar, though then... how about riding some new bicycles for the mind.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-19 20:51:35+00:00
I tend to agree, but the big problem is "who will operate this?".

The music model worked because a heavyweight like apple was able to come in and negotiate with a huge number of labels while simultaneously allowing access to unlabeled content. That expanded with Spotify, though they got there by effectively stealing the music for as long as possible until they were established.

I can't see how that'd work with news. Especially since so many of the news outlets exist and have been created to run propaganda for the owners. A decent number of them are effectively just funded by billionaires that want to push their agendas.
by graybeardhacker | 2026-02-19 20:51:36+00:00
I pay for the Ground News app. It's an aggregator that (somehow) gets me all the articles on a topic, shows me how factual each source is and which way they lean politically. It summarizes the articles so I can ignore the click-bate headline and know whether I want to read more.

I'm honestly not sure why this isn't the standard. It solved all my news problems and fills all my news needs.

I'm honestly not sure what these tiny news sites that have paywalls are thinking. The chances of me paying a monthly fee for news from a single source, let alone a tiny, local, single source, are less than zero.