MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aboringusername | 2026-03-01 07:07:50+00:00
Unfortunately that's a rather vanishingly small list now.

I would not be surprised if, in a few years, these options are gone from all android devices.

People mention GrapheneOS but that relies entirely on Google.

Yes they are working with an OEM (leaked as Motorola) and we'll see how that goes, it may be the last hope.
Ask HN: Long-term recoverable digital vault without a master key?
by YuriiDev | 2026-03-01 07:08:10+00:00
I’m exploring a long-term encryption design where a master key is never stored — only reconstructed.

The goal is a vault that can be recovered 10+ years later without writing down or backing up any master password. The only dependency should be stable long-term human memory.

The approach:

Instead of storing a password, the final encryption key is derived from multiple personal answers in sequence using Argon2.

k0 = seed

k1 = Argon2(answer1, salt = k0)

k2 = Argon2(answer2, salt = k1)

...

kn = Argon2(answern, salt = kn-1)

Final key = kn.

Properties:

No concatenation of answers

No static master password

Each step depends strictly on the previous

Memory-hard derivation (Argon2 at every step)

Brute forcing cannot be parallelized across answers

The vault is structured as nested encrypted layers. Each layer contains the next question and the next encrypted payload. You must answer each question correctly to decrypt the next layer. The file never stores the master key — only encrypted guidance for reconstructing it.

There’s a working prototype. Deterministic reconstruction works as long as the answers and seed remain unchanged.

My open architectural question is about the root seed (k0).

Right now k0 is derived from the container hash. But it could be any deterministic reproducible value.

What would be a robust long-term root of trust for a system that must remain recoverable after 10+ years without storing secrets?

Constraints:

Must be reproducible

Must not depend on external services

Must not introduce a new single point of failure

Must remain stable over a decade

Is using a file hash reasonable?
Should k0 be user-derived?
Should it be fixed and public?

More fundamentally: is relying on long-term human memory as a cryptographic reconstruction mechanism inherently flawed?

I’d especially appreciate critique around entropy assumptions, threat models, and long-term survivability risks.
Show HN: ExamJungle – AI-driven exam simulators for IT certifications
by Alex_Weinberg | 2026-03-01 07:08:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building ExamJungle, an educational platform for IT certification prep (AWS, Azure, CompTIA, etc.).

Most existing resources are just static PDF dumps or basic quiz apps. We’re trying to build something more interactive by integrating "Caesar AI." It’s designed to do more than just give an answer key; it explains complex infrastructure concepts and can dynamically adjust question difficulty based on a user's weak points.

Key features:
- Realistic timed environments that mimic the actual exam UI/UX.
- Caesar AI for on-demand technical explanations.
- Peer benchmarking and performance analytics to track readiness.
- Mobile-responsive for studying on the go.

I’d love to get your feedback on the AI implementation and the overall UX of the practice paths.

Thanks!
by saghm | 2026-03-01 07:09:00+00:00
Nixon's issue wasn't a lack of support in the courts but in Congress[1]:

> On August 7, Nixon met in the Oval Office with Republican congressional leaders "to discuss the impeachment picture," and was told that his support in Congress had all but disappeared. They painted a gloomy picture for the president: he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House, and in the Senate, there were not only enough votes to convict him, but no more than 15 or so senators were willing to vote for acquittal. That night, knowing his presidency was effectively over, Nixon finalized his decision to resign.

The contrast with how compliant the majorities in Congress are today to the whims of the White House cannot be overstated. The past decade has pretty much completely eliminated any semblance of a Republican Party that stood for anything other than the whims of Trump. Everyone either got on board or was exiled from power; the third highest member of House leadership got driven from Congress for taking a stand on the events of January 6, whereas the senator who in a debate in 2016 alleged that Trump's small hands implied a similar proportion for one of his less-visible body parts faded into the background for the next eight years and was rewarded with a prominent position in the cabinet this time around.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Richard_Nixon#Re...
by roncesvalles | 2026-03-01 07:10:25+00:00
In my opinion oatmeal is better as a spicy-savory rather than a sweet dish. You could add black pepper and a bit of salt to it and maybe a hot sauce for even more flavor. Montreal steak spice also works well.

Could take it to the next level with green peas, diced carrots and other things.

In fact once you go savory, you'll never go back. Sweet oatmeal grosses me out.
by dingaling | 2026-03-01 07:10:40+00:00
It doesn't really act that way, as (1) it can't be accessed with keyboard shortcuts and (2) it's difficult to scan for the desired feature as it's a visual jumble of buttons and text. Oh, and it might not be visible! Sometimes features can only be found in pop-out dialogs.

Having used Office products for 30+, my most-used feature of the Ribbon is Search, because I don't have time to waste hunting through a poorly-organised heap.
by prateekdalal | 2026-03-01 07:10:54+00:00
Hi HN,
Over the last 3 days, I shipped a major update to Kakveda (OSS).
The goal: unify infrastructure monitoring, observability, Kubernetes visibility, profiling, DB monitoring, and RUM into a single open source stack.
What’s included in v1.0.5:
• Full host metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network, processes, load, temp)
• Docker metrics + diagnostics
• Kubernetes inventory (nodes, pods, deployments, services, configmaps, secrets)
• Realtime service map (dependency graph)
• APM error grouping + exception replay
• Service-level latency/error percentiles
• Continuous profiling + trace correlation
• Database monitoring (slow queries, fingerprints, explain support)
• RUM (web vitals, frontend errors, user activity)
• SLO / error budget diagnostics
• Cross-telemetry correlation
• Unified native agent (infra + APM + K8s)
Most vendors (Datadog, AppDynamics, etc.) provide these features across multiple paid modules.
Kakveda provides them in OSS.
Would love feedback from infra/SRE folks on architecture and scalability considerations.
Repo:
https://github.com/prateekdevisingh/kakveda
by tsoukase | 2026-03-01 07:11:00+00:00
After 5000 years of human organised war history we are here:

* the weapons can annihilate the world and extinguish civilization in a few hours

* a massive asymmetry between the enemies in any metric is evident

* the strikes and battles are surprisingly of small scale, targeted and not decisive

Why on earth isn't the diplomacy used to solve the status after an imminent warning to make Iran an extension of Indian ocean with weapons of mass destruction?
by philipswood | 2026-03-01 07:12:02+00:00
Dune quote:

> It is said that the Duke Leto blinded himself to the perils of Arrakis, that he walked heedlessly into the pit.

> *Would it not be more likely to suggest he had lived so long in the presence of extreme danger he misjudged a change in its intensity?*

Be careful of letting your deep, keen insight into the fundamental limits of a thing blind you to its consequences...

Highly competent people have been dead wrong about what is possible (and why) before:

> The most famous, and perhaps the most instructive, failures of nerve have occurred in the fields of aero- and astronautics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists were almost unanimous in declaring that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, and that anyone who attempted to build airplanes was a fool. The great American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, wrote a celebrated essay which concluded…

>> “The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.”

>Oddly enough, Newcomb was sufficiently broad minded to admit that some wholly new discovery — he mentioned the neutralization of gravity — might make flight practical. One cannot, therefore, accuse him of lacking imagination; his error was in attempting to marshal the facts of aerodynamics when he did not understand that science. His failure of nerve lay in not realizing that the means of flight were already at hand.
by abhitriloki | 2026-03-01 07:12:09+00:00
The unban is fine, but the part I keep thinking about is the TOS change that was retroactively applied. The PR adding these restrictions to the ToS was merged just days before bans started going out - people were banned for behavior that wasn't clearly prohibited when they set things up. That's the part that feels off to me.

The new self-service reinstatement flow is a genuine improvement. A warning email + recertification form beats a silent permaban any day. But the two-strikes-and-you're-out policy still sits on top of an automated system that's already shown it can misfire (hence this mass unban). If the detection logic sweeps up legitimate usage a second time, there's no recovering from that.

Also the bigger structural issue that nobody here seems to fully resolve: the headless/stdio mode is literally documented for automation use. The CLI's own docs encourage building tools on top of it. At what point does "wrapping gemini-cli" become a ToS violation? The answer right now is "we'll know it when we see it," which is not a policy, it's just discretion with no guardrails.
by jasomill | 2026-03-01 07:12:15+00:00
Sure, and probably no worse for the world at large, or for the majority of Iranians.

An improvement over the current regime isn't exactly a high bar.

Even speaking as a someone who generally detests the policies of both Trump and the current Israeli administration, while I don't expect the entirety of the IRGC to go quietly into the night, I can't help but see the removal of the Ayatollah as a good thing.

As for the broader question of democracy in the Middle East, I believe the answer is yes, though not quickly or easily. But an independent, democratic Iran coexisting peacefully with Israel and the US, however unlikely, would certainly be a good start.
by michaelbrave | 2026-03-01 07:12:56+00:00
Same, I've sorta ended up converging on make a rough plan, get second and third opinions from various AI's on it, sort of decide and make choices while shaping the plan, which we turn into a detailed specsheet.
Then follow the 'how to design programs' method which is mostly writing documentation first, then expected outcomes, then tests, then the functions, then test the flow of the pipeline. This usually looks like starting with Claude to write the documentation, expectations and create the scaffolding, then having Gemini write the tests and the code, then have codex try to run the pipeline and fix anything it finds that is broken along the way.
I've found this to work fairly well, it's looser than waterfall, but waterfall-ish, but it's also sort of TDD-ish, and knowing that there will be failures and things to fix, but it also sort of knows the overall strategy and flow of how things will work before we start.
by kelnos | 2026-03-01 07:16:02+00:00
That's not learning, though. That's just taking new information and stacking it on top of the trained model. And that new information consumes space in the context window. So sure, it can "learn" a limited number of things, but once you wipe context, that new information is gone. You can keep loading that "memory" back in, but before too long you'll have too little context left to do anything useful.

That kind of capability is not going to lead to AGI, not even close.
by abhitriloki | 2026-03-01 07:16:33+00:00
The real tell here is what OpenAI's contract actually says vs what Altman is claiming it says. Reading the actual agreement text - "The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control" - that phrase "where law...requires" is doing enormous work. It means if the DoD decides their policy doesn't require human control in a given scenario, then it doesn't require human control. That's not a redline, that's a rubber stamp.

Anthropic's position was categorical: no mass surveillance, full stop. Not "no mass surveillance unless we decide it's lawful." That's a fundamentally different thing.

OpenAI swooping in to say "we don't think Anthropic should be punished" while simultaneously signing the very contract Anthropic refused to sign is one of the more brazen PR moves I've seen in this industry. It's like someone breaking into your house and then writing a letter to your landlord saying you shouldn't be evicted.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-01 07:17:10+00:00
> Though only 5gig Ethernet? Can’t they do usb-c / thunderbolt 40 Gb/s connections like Macs?

Does the network speed matter that much when TFA talks about outputting a few tens of tokens per second? Ain't 5 Gbit/s plenty for that? (I understand the need to load the model but that'd be local already right?)
by znnajdla | 2026-03-01 07:17:37+00:00
> The entire point of LLMs is that you don't have to spend money training them for each specific case.

I don’t agree. I would say the entire point of LLMs is to be able to solve a certain class of non-deterministic problems that cannot be solved with deterministic procedural code. LLMs don’t need to be generally useful in order to be useful for specific business use cases. I as a programmer would be very happy to have a local coding agent like Claude Code that can do nothing but write code in my chosen programming language or framework, instead of using a general model like Opus, if it could be hyper-specialized and optimized for that one task, so that it is small enough to run on my MacBook. I don’t need the other general reasoning capabilities of Opus.
by abhitriloki | 2026-03-01 07:18:20+00:00
The part that resonated most with me was the contrast between activities that feel like things you "should" be doing vs. things that actually pull you out of your head.

When you're early in your career, there's this pressure to optimize your off-hours correctly - networking events, side projects, gym routines, following the news. You accumulate them all and still feel hollow because none of them require your actual presence in the way that 6 kids staring at you in a gym waiting for instructions does.

Coaching youth sports specifically has this property where you cannot half-ass it. You can zone out at a networking happy hour, you can passively skim Twitter while doing some of these "enriching" activities. But when a 12-year-old is confused about why they're supposed to set a screen and looks at you for the answer, that is the whole moment. There's no background processing.

I think this is the actual mechanism behind a lot of "finding meaning through service" stories - it's less about altruism and more about the fact that responsibility to others forces you into full attention. Which happens to be the same thing meditation is trying to get you to do, just with external stakes.
Proton/SimpleLogin disabled my paid account for using my own email
by alexlyee | 2026-03-01 07:18:35+00:00
I've been a paying user of simplelogin for a long time. recently, they completely locked me out of my account because my custom domain's destination inbox points to forwardemail.net.

support claimed forward email is a "temporary email provider" and a "forwarding service" that violates their ToS by creating mail loops.

here's the thing: I own my custom domain. and forward email is my actual IMAP/encrypted sqlite storage provider. I'm not forwarding anything, it is my permanent final inbox.

when I tried to explain this to support and pointed out the hypocrisy (gmail allows aliases and forwarding too, but they obviously don't block gmail), they literally DISABLED my account in the middle of the support ticket. "Your account is disabled. Please contact SimpleLogin team to re-enable your account."

I got busy, and now my yearly bill just bounced. I can't log in to update my card, password resets silently fail, and i can't even export my data to move to addy.io. my subreddit post on r/SimpleLogin was also silently blocked by the mods.

it feels like since the proton acquisition, they are just using "anti-abuse" as an excuse to blindly ban smaller, open-source email infrastructure providers. they want you using proton or gmail, nothing else. has anyone else run into this walled-garden behavior from them recently?
by kuberwastaken | 2026-03-01 07:18:36+00:00
I'm half shocked this wasn't on HN before? Haha I built PicoGPT as a minified fork with <35 lines of JS and another in python

And it's small enough to run from a QR code :)
https://kuber.studio/picogpt/

You can quite literally train a micro LLM from your phone's browser
by kir-gadjello | 2026-03-01 07:19:00+00:00
I think we are at this point where the hard ceiling of a strong model is pretty hard to delineate reliably (at least in coding, in research work it's clearer ofc) - and in a good sense, meaning with suitable task decomposition or a test harness or a good abstraction you can make the model do what you thought it could not. StepFun is a strong model and I really enjoyed studying and comparing it to others by coding pretty complex projects semi-autonomously (will do a write up on this soon tm).

Even purely pragmatically, StepFun covers 95% of my research+SWE coding needs, and for the remaining 5% I can access the large frontier models. I was surprised StepFun is even decent at planning and research, so it is possible to get by with it and nothing else (1), but ofc for minmaxing the best frontier model is still the best planner (although the latest deepseek is surprisingly good too).

Finally we are at a point where there is a clear separation of labor between frontier & strong+fast models, but tbh shoehorning StepFun into this "strong+fast" category feels limiting, I think it has greater potential.
by abhitriloki | 2026-03-01 07:19:29+00:00
This paper is a great time capsule. The thing that strikes me re-reading it now is how rigorous the process was compared to what most companies do today - 17 iterations of usability testing on the Start button alone, watching users try to figure out how to run programs and literally tracking where their mouse went.

The "focus groups said this, but users actually did that" distinction throughout the paper is something a lot of product teams still haven't internalized. The section on users not understanding file systems maps almost perfectly to issues we still see in software today - people create files and then genuinely can't find them, not because the file system changed but because the mental model problem was never really solved, just papered over.

What's also interesting is how much of the work was about setting user expectations rather than changing functionality. Training users to understand what the taskbar did, vs. redesigning the taskbar itself. There's a pragmatism there that feels underappreciated - sometimes the right answer is explanation, not redesign.

The most embarrassing thing for modern UI is that we've regressed on discoverability. Win95 menus were verbose but you could find stuff. Current flat design paradigms have traded discoverability for aesthetics in ways that this team would have flagged immediately in their first usability test.
by abhitriloki | 2026-03-01 07:20:04+00:00
This is genuinely useful. The main use case I keep running into is wanting to keep a server or NAS in sync with my vault without having to spin up a full desktop environment just to run Obsidian. Previously you were stuck either using third-party sync solutions (SyncThing works but you lose Obsidian-specific features) or paying for sync and accepting that your server would never be a first-class participant.

The headless mode opens up some workflows that weren't really practical before - running scripts against your vault on a server, having a backup machine that stays current without a UI, CI/CD pipelines that can read from or write to your notes. None of these are huge individually but together they make Obsidian Sync feel much more like a proper sync infrastructure rather than a consumer feature.

One thing I'd want to know: does the headless client handle conflict resolution the same way the desktop client does, or is it more conservative? That's where I'd expect edge cases to show up in a server context where you might have multiple machines trying to sync at the same time without human oversight to resolve conflicts.
by ergocoder | 2026-03-01 07:20:04+00:00
I'd bet on WW3 not happening in the next 20 years.

US's military power is too strong. Russia is in such a bad shape that it can't even win Ukraine. China never goes to any war; their equipments suck as we saw in the Venezuela occurrence.

Nobody is going to help Iran. China and Russia only see Iran as the enemy of my enemy. Other than that, Chineses and Russians are likely disgusted by Iran's culture e.g. how they treat women. It would be like wtf why are we helping people like this?

The world will continue being policed by US and Europe.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-03-01 07:20:09+00:00
LOL. "I often remind clowns (his word) of my PhD from MIT when I was 23, my tenure at NYU 30 (sic), my six books, publications in Science and Nature, or the machine learning company that I founded and sold to Uber. Sometimes I mention my Senate testimony."

He should get together with Musk and commiserate about how worldly success is no substitute for adoration on Twitter.

That said, I doubt he's wrong about the nature of this debacle. A thousand years from now, the ghosts of Altman and Amodei are still going to wander the earth in search of ways to dunk on each other.
by Oreb | 2026-03-01 07:20:42+00:00
I honestly don’t understand why Liquid Glass provokes so strong reactions. To me it’s not that radically different from the old design. I don’t love it, and I don’t hate it. There is nothing new that in any way impacts how I use or experience my iPhone, my iPad or my Mac. My reaction to Liquid Glass was pretty much a neutral “looks a little bit different, I guess” before forgetting about it.
by hereme888 | 2026-03-01 07:21:41+00:00
The hooks seem too aggressive. Blocking all curl/wget/WebFetch and funneling everything through the sandbox for 56 KB snapshots sounds great, but not for curl api.example.com/health returning 200 bytes.

Compressing 153 git commits to 107 bytes means the LLM has to write the perfect extraction script before it can see the data. So if it writes a `git log --oneline | wc -l` when you needed specific commit messages, that information is gone.

The benchmarks assume the model always writes the right summarization code, which in practice it doesn't.
by rwyinuse | 2026-03-01 07:24:17+00:00
The end result is, and will always be garbage if there is no "human in the loop" to test whether the result meets the requirements, and telling LLM what to do if it doesn't.

Like somebody else said, there is still a need for QA (and usually for requirements gathering too), that's a part of the development cycle. Developing software that is meant to be used by humans with zero humans involved isn't realistic.
by kelnos | 2026-03-01 07:24:22+00:00
I don't think it was irresponsible to publish it, but I do think it was irresponsible to publish it without clearly disclosing at the top of the crates.io README that it was built entirely by AI, and that you haven't reviewed the code (assuming you haven't).

If I were looking for an XML parser/generator library, I might stumble across this and think it might be production-quality, and assume it was built by humans, or at least that humans had fully vetted and understand the code.