MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why is secure remote server access still so painful for small teams?
by brintha | 2026-02-02 13:39:59+00:00
I’m curious how others here are handling remote server access today.

In small teams, I keep seeing the same pattern repeat: VPNs that are fragile, SSH access tied to specific networks, firewall rules that nobody wants to touch, and onboarding that’s more painful than it should be.

Most of the time, the need is simple:

check system health

SSH in quickly

maybe open a remote desktop session occasionally

But the tooling around access often feels designed for much larger organizations with dedicated network teams.

We ran into this enough times that we started rethinking our own setup and documenting what actually caused the most friction. I wrote about the underlying problem here, not as a solution pitch but as a reflection on what kept breaking for us:

https://www.lynxtrac.com/why-we-built-lynxtrac-remote-access-without-vpn-headaches

Genuinely interested in hearing:

what works reliably for you?
what breaks most often?
what you’d never want to manage again?
by hoherd | 2026-02-02 13:40:18+00:00
I had the exact same experience and did the exact same thing. I also moved my backups from HFS+ to zfs, and got more serious about my backup strategy.

If I had to start over I'd go with rustic-rs or borg backup.

FWIW I do still use `tmutil localsnapshot` for local macOS snapshots where you can use the Time Machine UI to restore files.
by kqr | 2026-02-02 13:40:23+00:00
I have been using Termux to SSH to other machines for quite some time, but only relatively recently did I have a flash of insight: I can use Termux to write applications for my phone in Perl (!).

A year ago I used it to solve Advent of Code problems on my phone during my work commute. It was lovely. I have also used it to get access to a resampling calculator and a mental logarithm trainer on my phone.
by michaelcampbell | 2026-02-02 13:40:30+00:00
> Everyone is building tools for tool builders to make it easier to build even more tools.

A lot of hobby level 3d printing is like this. A good bit of the popular prints are... things to enhance your printer.

Oddly, woodworking has its fair share too - a lot of jigs and things to make more jigs or woodworking tools.
by bruce511 | 2026-02-02 13:40:55+00:00
Sorry, I should be more clear.
Yes there is a procurement process. But that happens out of band to the support request.

The problem with support contracts, or support requests solved by an upgrade, is that the User needs it now, not after a procurement process.

Doing procurement annually is easier because it can be planned for, budgeted for etc, and happens on a separate thread to the actual support.

Even when they overlap there's enough grace to keep the User happy while waiting on the customer.
by mrsssnake | 2026-02-02 13:41:01+00:00
No, it does not have any more access than any other app, as it work on unrooted devices too.

That said, it has to be compiled for older Android SDK level because newer levels prevent apps to run executables they downloaded on their own and not bundle with the APK, even isolated. Android may disable compatibility with the older SDK some day but for now it works.
by throwawayheui57 | 2026-02-02 13:41:06+00:00
That was a question.

From the source: “While we are not authorized to carry out activities beyond the scope of our projects — which focus on marginalized communities in Iran — we continue to offer medical support to hospitals.”

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/where-we-wo...

It seems that they are present physically but don’t have proper authorization for activities beyond the scope…

Compare it with their missions elsewhere (i.e. Gaza, which I’m not against btw):

“In Palestine, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provides humanitarian assistance to people affected by violence and displacement, and has scaled up activities to assist people affected by Israel’s war and siege on Gaza.”

Why the difference?

Do you get the point of the original comment now?
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-02 13:41:26+00:00
Sure. It's any system where the 77% want something really bad, and the 23% don't. For example, a system where 77% of people want drug traffickers executed and 23% don't. That's a system where listening to the 23% is better than listening to the 77%.

A system like this cannot remain stable, and because it's unstable, it is not good.
by rizzo94 | 2026-02-02 13:41:38+00:00
I feel your pain on the 'user-hostile prisons' of modern IMs. The friction of manually copy-pasting photos and messages into an LLM just to set a calendar invite is a massive tax on time that shouldn't exist in 2026.

I had high hopes for the OpenClaw approach too, but the 'security sirens' you mentioned are real—self-hosting a control plane that bridges to WhatsApp/Messenger is a maintenance nightmare if you actually value your privacy.

I’ve been tracking a project called PAIO (Personal AI Operator) that seems to be attacking this from the exact angle you’re looking for. It’s essentially a privacy-first integration layer that uses a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) architecture. The goal is to provide that 'one-click' connectivity to the walled gardens (WhatsApp, etc.) without you having to sacrifice your data or build the bridge yourself from scratch.

It’s the first tool I’ve seen that treats AI as a personal 'operator' rather than just another chatbot. Might be worth a look if you’re tired of the manual slog but don't want to risk the security 'fire sirens' of unproven scripts. Have you found any other bridges that actually handle the WhatsApp/FB Messenger side reliably, or is everything still just a 'beta' promise at this point?
by rizzo94 | 2026-02-02 13:43:06+00:00
Exactly. The 'Are you sure?' prompt is basically the 2026 version of the 'I agree to the Terms and Conditions'—we all just click it until something breaks. The scalability of agentic workflows is currently hitting a hard ceiling because of this exact security anxiety.

I’ve been looking for a middle ground between 'full shell access' and 'useless sandbox.' I recently started digging into the PAIO (Personal AI Operator) approach to this. What’s interesting is how they use a BYOK architecture alongside a hardened gateway to manage those tool calls.

It feels like the first attempt at a 'one-click' integration that actually prioritizes the privacy layer so you aren't one hallucination away from a wiped home directory. It addresses that 'security not in risk' requirement by acting as a buffer rather than just a raw pipe to the shell.

Curious if anyone else has tried routing their agents through a privacy-hardened operator like that, or if the consensus here is still that anything short of a local, air-gapped VM is a non-starter for agentic workflows?
by tgma | 2026-02-02 13:43:18+00:00
> You haven't done so.

Theory: "the DFU port seems to be the USB-C port on the right side of the Mac [p], not on the left side."

Reductio ad absurdum: "[p] port R is DFU => [q] we should be able to execute DFU process on port R (and not port L)" We execute DFU on port R and it fails [NOT q], therefore [NOT p], so the theory cannot be correct. QED
by Dev_Master | 2026-02-02 13:43:21+00:00
I built Pro Image Cropper Plus, a Streamlit app for fast, precise image cropping with:

Batch uploads and export (ZIP all images)

Undo/redo and reset zoom/crop

Presets for Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and custom ratios

Filename templates and output format selection (PNG, JPEG, GIF)

Keyboard shortcuts for navigation and editing

It’s designed to speed up workflows for content creators, designers, and anyone handling multiple images.
by akagusu | 2026-02-02 13:43:44+00:00
It's not my definition of AI, but the concept people collectively have as it was popularized by literature, movies, tv shows, games, and others.

All those media bring more or less the same concept of AI that is completely different from LLMs.

Corporate marketing transformed LLMs into AI telling people that what people think about AI is the same as LLMs when actually it's not.
by michaelcampbell | 2026-02-02 13:43:57+00:00
It feels like our (US) political system; people in their camps refuse to believe any data proposing a benefit of the "other" camp.

For me, the rise of the TUI agents, emerging ways of working (mostly SDD, and how to manage context well), and the most recent releases of models have pushed me past a threshold, where I now see value in it.
by dotancohen | 2026-02-02 13:44:03+00:00
I often use a Bluetooth keyboard with Termux. But as a mechanical keyboard affectionate with a veritable museum of ergonomic and mechanical keyboards, the Samsung S-Pen is good enough for terminal work. I use SSH, VIM, and lately Org mode in Termux. If I'm at a desk I still use a Bluetooth keyboard, but if I'm out then the S-Pen is a fine enough substitute.

Right now I'm on an S24 Ultra, before that a Note 10 Lite, and before that another Note 10 Lite.
by ce4 | 2026-02-02 13:44:13+00:00
I use it for lots of stuff, remote scanning from an old Canon flatbed scanner attached to my NAS (powered by a really ugly phone-local bash script, nothing else), rsync, renames (or the like using one liners), ssh tunnels to different destinations (to circumvent IP blockages) and of course YT downloads (using the source git folder and running it using "python -m yt_dlp $OPTIONS $URL" - when it breaks, a git pull is all it needs most of the time, I also have local patches that are not upstreamed)
by bartread | 2026-02-02 13:44:16+00:00
Yeah, and you know how to know this is true?

This story has already dropped three quarters of the way down the front page and has a grand total of 72 points. Topics that people really give a damn about on this site often garner 1000 - 2000 points and stay on the front page for 36 hours or more, but nobody cares about this.

They’ve already lost the HN audience and there’s certainly an element of where we go everybody else eventually follows, because I suspect we skew influential in the companies we work for.
by rizzo94 | 2026-02-02 13:44:34+00:00
This is a brilliant use of the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Using query_knowledge as a tool rather than a generic REST endpoint is definitely the right move for reducing hallucinations in legal/contractual contexts. The citation preservation over WhatsApp is a particularly nice touch—that's usually where these workflows fall apart.

My only concern with the self-hosted Docker + Docling + ChromaDB stack is the 'maintenance tax.' It’s great for a solo dev, but for a production-grade personal assistant that needs to stay 'always-on' without me babying the container, I've been looking at PAIO (Personal AI Operator).

They seem to be aiming for this exact 'Private RAG' sweet spot but as a managed, one-click service. Their BYOK architecture is what sold me; it keeps the security risk low because it’s using your own keys, but you get that fortress-level privacy that’s hard to replicate in a home-server setup without a lot of manual hardening.

Are you planning to add support for other 'operators' like PAIO, or is the goal to keep ClawRAG strictly as a standalone self-hosted primitive?
by ajb | 2026-02-02 13:44:50+00:00
Wow. Glad it worked out. There were at least some good high school CS teachers in the 90s. Ours knew that a lot of kids joined the class who were burned out on school, and insisted on going beyond the curriculum to the point where those guys would have a chance at a coding job right out of school - if they put in the work. We also had to implement binary arithmetic from scratch (booleans) although I think that was in the curriculum.
by trymas | 2026-02-02 13:45:00+00:00
> When I see politics in software updates or documentation, nothing happens

I find this take deeply ironic.

And here due to alleged political take of some software (Notepad++), __state sponsored software__ was used to attack users of said software. Something actually happened!

You don't want to see politics in any software, but may be (or already are) a victim of political software attack (from state sponsored tracking, to sanctions, to political psy-ops through software distributing (social) media).

> <...> Maybe I tell my adblocker to remove the messaging, and carry on with my task.
>
> I can engage with politics in a social context, when political messaging isn't interrupting something else I'm doing; that's a better place for activism, IMHO.

You are clearly annoyed by ads, like many of us - maybe you should get public attention to change policy about ads? How they are annoying? How there are unskippable Ads in TV services that I pay money for? How there are big enterprises using their monopoly/oligopoly powers to make you stop being able to adblock ever again? Or do you only block ads you deem "political"?

_______

States (and not only them) will use software and even open source software (open source IMHO is also a political take/view) to get to you if it's ever needed. Though congrats you just got extra social credits in __both__: China's and Palantir's databases!
by tormeh | 2026-02-02 13:45:22+00:00
The situation is absolutely insane, but it's also productive, but real security would slow everything down a lot. The moment you ask some corporate bureaucrat to put their signature down on a piece of paper saying that such and such dev tool is approved for use, they're going to block everything to avoid the responsibility implied by their approval. I can't really come up with a system that both works and is secure. The only exception is signing up for an integrated environment where Microsoft or Apple provides the OS, compiler, and editor. Oops - Apple doesn't sell servers, so only Microsoft offers this. Hope you like C#.

In theory you can mix and match, but in practice most bureaucrats will insist on single-sourcing.
by zdc1 | 2026-02-02 13:46:10+00:00
Yep. Grandfathering, deprecation. It's a new implementation of the same concepts.

And ditto for test coverage quality gates. I've seen that pattern used to get a frontend codebase from 5% coverage to >80%. It was just a cycle of Refactor -> Raise minimum coverage requirement -> Refactor again -> Ratchet again, with the coverage gate used to stop new work from bringing down the average.
by michaelcampbell | 2026-02-02 13:46:50+00:00
I have a few shell scripts using `getopts` that have a `-!` flag to make it go; the default is dry-run.

And it's pretty nice. The downside is if you get used to that behavior in things that don't have it the consequences can be bad. (Like the common `alias rm='rm -i'`. No, that's just a trap; don't do it.)
by actsasbuffoon | 2026-02-02 13:46:59+00:00
Ironically, I find LLMs far better at helping me dive into unfamiliar code than at writing it.

A few weeks ago a critical bug came in on a part of the app I’d never touched. I had Claude research the relevant code while I reproduced the bug locally, then had it check the logs. That confirmed where the error was, but not why. This was code that ran constantly without incident.

So I had Claude look at the Excel doc the support person provided. Turns out there was a hidden worksheet throwing off the indices. You couldn’t even see the sheet inside Excel. I had Claude move it to the end where our indices wouldn’t be affected, ran it locally, and it worked. I handed the fixed document back to the support person and she confirmed it worked on her end too.

Total time to resolution: 15 minutes, on a tricky bug in code I’d never seen before. That hidden sheet would have been maddening to find normally. I think we might be strongly overestimating the benefits of knowing a codebase these days.

I’ve been programming professionally for about 20 years. I know this is a period of rapid change and we’re all adjusting. But I think getting overly precious about code in the age of coding agents is a coping mechanism, not a forward-looking stance. Code is cheap now. Write it and delete it.

Make high leverage decisions and let the agent handle the rest. Make sure you’ve got decent tests. Review for security. Make peace with the fact that it’s cheaper to cut three times and measure once than it used to be to measure twice and cut once.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-02 13:47:18+00:00
Microsoft's brands are historical markers. There's an era when a new Microsoft product is .NET, and an era when it's Azure, and one where it's 365 etc. If you have a new Doodad, if you say "Microsoft Doodad" the other divisions hate you because that's not their thing. Brand it "Hot Brand Name Unrelated Word" and now you're part of the family even though you have no product purpose and your customers will forever be confused.

"Azure Active Directory" wasn't Active Directory, and who'd have guessed a year ago that "365 Co-pilot" would mean the Office applications in 2026. Yes really.
by boneitis | 2026-02-02 13:48:38+00:00
Another nifty utility to use in tandem is scrcpy[0].

Inside or outside of Termux, it allows you to interact with your android device in general from the comfort of your main computer/laptop over ADB.

It becomes a super multiplier for Termux when I don't want to deal with the hassle of connecting a separate keyboard to my android phone/tablet.

(A heads up, I have to use the `--render-driver=software` switch in order for scrcpy to work at all on my laptop.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrcpy
by markus_zhang | 2026-02-02 13:48:53+00:00
As a side topic, I wish we still had something like Windows 3.1/95/98, that has a touch of personal usage (focuses on multimedia/gaming instead of business/server).

Do you still remember Microsoft Home? My first Windows gaming experience, other than Minesweeper and Solitaire ofc, was the Fury3 demo, which contains only one level from the licensed game, on a Windows 95 Home Entertainment CD. There were also Encarta and other Home products that never took off. The only problem is frequent BSOD, which was solved by the NT kernel, so I guess XP was the pinnacle of personal computing OS, although it does fail some DOS and earlier Windows games.

Do we still have a compatible OS nowadays? Linux is mostly for server and business, and while it has gained some popularity as a desktop OS, it definitely still have a long way to reach the intimacy that early Windows offered, and I doubt it will ever regress back to a "Home computer OS". But maybe we can build on top of that. I mean we can build software on top of Linux that provides the friendly vibe.
by a1o | 2026-02-02 13:49:19+00:00
It’s amazing how much worse outlook got and how fast it got so much worse. It also can’t handle screens with different scales, it sometimes inexplicably fails to render an email, printing can produce files of different size - using the web version produces smaller pdfs than the desktop version. I miss thunderbird a lot since the company forced Outlook use and also removed the classic outlook option - or maybe it only has the weird white space version now.
Ask HN: Why do AI coding platforms force to use one model for a task?
by NBenkovich | 2026-02-02 13:49:22+00:00
When I use AI for coding, I don’t use one model.

I use strong reasoning models to understand a codebase or plan changes, then switch to faster and cheaper models for implementation and refactors. In practice this means mixing providers like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, because different tasks need different capabilities.

So why do AI coding platforms insist on a single model, often from a single provider, for the entire workflow?

Why burn expensive reasoning tokens while writing boilerplate? Why should planning, coding, and review all be done by the same “brain”? Why do users have to manually glue models together when platforms already have full task context?

This feels less like a technical limitation and more like a product decision.

Maybe multi-model coordination is genuinely hard. Maybe handoffs lose context. Maybe this breaks the “one AI engineer” narrative that demos well.

But engineers already do this themselves today.

Has anyone run multi-model workflows on real repos?
Did it fail in non-obvious ways?

Interested in real experience, not demos.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-02 13:50:16+00:00
IIR, grade inflation was supposedly started by the Vietnam-era draft exemption rules - students without high grades lost their exemptions, and professors and colleges were often reluctant to "send them off to die".

Unfortunately, nobody at the table cared much about getting it under control - let alone rolling it back - after the draft was eliminated in '73.

With all the recent stories about Harvard Literature majors being unable to focus long enough to actually read literature, rampant cheating with AI, etc. - maybe they should just give A+'s to all students paying full tuition, A's to those paying up to 80% full tuition, and so on.

And recruiters & such should regard every grade above a 'D' as "occasionally bothered to show up".
by senordevnyc | 2026-02-02 13:50:30+00:00
Yeah, I suspect the people railing against MCP don’t actually use agents much at all. MCP is super useful for giving your agent access to tools. The main alternative is CLI tools, if they exist, but they don’t always, or it’s just more awkward than a well-designed MCP. I let my agent use the GitHub CLI, but I also have MCPs for remote database access and bugsnag access, so they can debug issues on prod more easily.
by GuB-42 | 2026-02-02 13:50:39+00:00
I a big company I worked with, they had a special program for future top managers, they have them do grunt work in several departments for several years before they get the position they are hired for.

We had one of these guys working with us at one point, awesome guy: friendly, humble and good at everything he does, including partying! We only knew he was "special" much later, when he left us to continue his journey.

I have many bad things to say about this company, but this is not it: hiring people who are actually good, making them understand the work the company does by practicing, and thinking long term, hats off.

But back to the subject, even though the guy did actual productive work with us, and did it competently, he wasn't destined to be an expert, he was destined to be a manager and he was only here to get enough domain knowledge for that job. This is not the same path as a technical expert who will keep doing the same job, but better.
by spicyjpeg | 2026-02-02 13:50:50+00:00
Plenty of low-volume industrial software has never really moved on from security dongles. Most modern arcade games for instance still rely on a USB dongle to decrypt game files [1], though nowadays they typically also come with an additional layer of TPM-backed encryption as well as always online DRM (many of them are region locked and operate on a revenue share contract, where the owner has to pay a per-play fee to the game manufacturer).

These measures typically work well against piracy in the markets the game is officially distributed in (mainly Japan), but end up being cracked anyway once the game is popular enough that foreign arcades and private owners start importing older decommissioned cabinets and create demand for a way to get them running again without depending on the manufacturer's servers.

[1]: https://mon.im/2017/12/konami-arcade-drm
by palata | 2026-02-02 13:50:53+00:00
> I claim that usability is not a philosophy but an objective value

Counter-example: many times, what I find more usable is what others find less usable. Unless I'm objectively stupid, usability is subjective.

I hate it when people tell me "Linux should look more like Windows, because Windows is more usable. And if you don't find that Windows is more usable, then you're objectively wrong".