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Show HN: Mermaid Formatter – CLI and library to auto-format Mermaid diagrams

https://github.com/chenyanchen/mermaid-formatter
1•astm•15m ago•0 comments

RFCs vs. READMEs: The Evolution of Protocols

https://h3manth.com/scribe/rfcs-vs-readmes/
2•init0•21m ago•1 comments

Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

https://altermag.com/articles/kanchipuram-saris-and-thinking-machines
1•trojanalert•21m ago•0 comments

Chinese chemical supplier causes global baby formula recall

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/nestle-widens-french-infant-formula-r...
1•fkdk•24m ago•0 comments

I've used AI to write 100% of my code for a year as an engineer

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1qxvobt/ive_used_ai_to_write_100_of_my_code_for_1_ye...
1•ukuina•27m ago•1 comments

Looking for 4 Autistic Co-Founders for AI Startup (Equity-Based)

1•au-ai-aisl•37m ago•1 comments

AI-native capabilities, a new API Catalog, and updated plans and pricing

https://blog.postman.com/new-capabilities-march-2026/
1•thunderbong•37m ago•0 comments

What changed in tech from 2010 to 2020?

https://www.tedsanders.com/what-changed-in-tech-from-2010-to-2020/
2•endorphine•42m ago•0 comments

From Human Ergonomics to Agent Ergonomics

https://wesmckinney.com/blog/agent-ergonomics/
1•Anon84•46m ago•0 comments

Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sphere
1•cyanf•47m ago•0 comments

Toyota Developing a Console-Grade, Open-Source Game Engine with Flutter and Dart

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fluorite-Toyota-Game-Engine
1•computer23•50m ago•0 comments

Typing for Love or Money: The Hidden Labor Behind Modern Literary Masterpieces

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/typing-for-love-or-money/
1•prismatic•50m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A longitudinal health record built from fragmented medical data

https://myaether.live
1•takmak007•53m ago•0 comments

CoreWeave's $30B Bet on GPU Market Infrastructure

https://davefriedman.substack.com/p/coreweaves-30-billion-bet-on-gpu
1•gmays•1h ago•0 comments

Creating and Hosting a Static Website on Cloudflare for Free

https://benjaminsmallwood.com/blog/creating-and-hosting-a-static-website-on-cloudflare-for-free/
1•bensmallwood•1h ago•1 comments

"The Stanford scam proves America is becoming a nation of grifters"

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/students-stanford-grifters-ivy-league-w2g5z768z
3•cwwc•1h ago•0 comments

Elon Musk on Space GPUs, AI, Optimus, and His Manufacturing Method

https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/elon-musk-on-space-gpus-ai-optimus
2•simonebrunozzi•1h ago•0 comments

X (Twitter) is back with a new X API Pay-Per-Use model

https://developer.x.com/
3•eeko_systems•1h ago•0 comments

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

https://github.com/dmtrKovalenko/zlob
3•neogoose•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Deterministic signal triangulation using a fixed .72% variance constant

https://github.com/mabrucker85-prog/Project_Lance_Core
2•mav5431•1h ago•1 comments

Scientists Discover Levitating Time Crystals You Can Hold, Defy Newton’s 3rd Law

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-scientists-levitating-crystals.html
3•sizzle•1h ago•0 comments

When Michelangelo Met Titian

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/michelangelo-titian-review-the-renaissances-odd-couple-e34...
1•keiferski•1h ago•0 comments

Solving NYT Pips with DLX

https://github.com/DonoG/NYTPips4Processing
1•impossiblecode•1h ago•1 comments

Baldur's Gate to be turned into TV series – without the game's developers

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24g457y534o
3•vunderba•1h ago•0 comments

Interview with 'Just use a VPS' bro (OpenClaw version) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU
2•dangtony98•1h ago•0 comments

EchoJEPA: Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Echocardiography

https://github.com/bowang-lab/EchoJEPA
1•euvin•1h ago•0 comments

Disablling Go Telemetry

https://go.dev/doc/telemetry
2•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•0 comments

Effective Nihilism

https://www.effectivenihilism.org/
1•abetusk•1h ago•1 comments

The UK government didn't want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi...
5•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments

No 10 blocks report on impact of rainforest collapse on food prices

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/no-10-blocks-report-on-impact-of-rainforest-colla...
3•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: I'm 17, built a face-verified social network to fight fake accounts

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whitelotus.social&hl=en_US
18•whitelotusapp•4mo ago
Hi HN,

I’m Arun, 17, from India. While my friends scroll Instagram and Snapchat, I’ve been obsessed with building something different. I don’t want a regular job — I want to push technology.

So I built WhiteLotus — a social app where every account is face-verified. No bots, no fake profiles, no spam. Just real people.

Core ideas:

AI-powered face verification (1 account per person)

1-on-1 private chats (only with friends)

Photo-based posting (keep it visual, keep it real)

“Kingdoms” (Fire, Water, Earth, Air tribes) for community vibes

Leveling system that shows how active and trustworthy you are

“TrustNotes” where friends can write notes about you

Right now, it has ~44 users. Growth is… hard. I’m shipping alone in Flutter + Django, fixing bugs, and trying to figure out how to get beyond 1 new user a day.

I know Instagram and Snapchat are addictive giants — but I believe there’s space for something real. A place where you don’t worry if the profile DMing you is fake.

I’d love feedback from this community:

Does this solve a real problem?

What would make you switch or at least try it?

How should I think about growth as a solo indie?

Even if nobody uses it, this journey has taught me more than any job ever could. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

WhiteLotus on Play Store

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whitelotus...

Thanks for reading

Comments

MindBreaker2605•4mo ago
Great approach, but is this viable in the time of ai, like if someone try to fool using ai generated content
sgjohnson•4mo ago
While it’s impressive, we generally hate Face/ID verification on social media around here…
whitelotusapp•4mo ago
good point but the world can be free of fake profiles and it is like the new internet
jrockway•4mo ago
I am not sure if fake people are a real problem for social media. Real Names ends up being pretty lame, people are more open and interesting when using a pseudonym. To me, it's clear that you understand the value because you are using a pseudonym here! White Lotus the App doesn't have a face, but it can still use social media productively.

What is annoying on social media are bots, reposts, commercial spam, etc. To me, it would make sense to go after undesirable content rather than undesirable accounts.

l___l•4mo ago
> to go after undesirable content rather than undesirable accounts.

Good idea!

cprepos•4mo ago
Safety is the real worry here. If you lose people’s PII it can be used for malicious purposes. You don’t want a dictator being able to take a picture of a protesting crowd and identify people based on that. Make sure you’re following best practices and trusting no one.
mathgeek•4mo ago
> You don’t want a dictator being able to take a picture of a protesting crowd and identify people based on that.

This is already a reality and while it’s a very valid concern, I wouldn’t be too worried about such a small scale project making the difference in that problem.

cprepos•4mo ago
Small scale projects can explode. Clearly the poster is ambitious! Just wanted to remind to have care as people would be trusting them.
jacquesm•4mo ago
Not a chance that I would use this. All it does is put more privacy sensitive data and pictures out there for AI to train on and use for fakes after services like these inevitably get hacked.
JoshTriplett•4mo ago
How do you expect to handle fake faces?

Do you expect the "Kingdoms" thing to increase or decrease tribalism ingroup/outgroup conflict?

esafak•4mo ago
Fake profiles are a problem when the site is big enough to attract bad actors. Yours is too small for that so you are solving a problem that does not exist yet. But you are asking people to their sacrifice privacy.

I think you need a better value proposition.

maerF0x0•4mo ago
First of all, good for you, spending your time building something rather than consuming. I see you have a lot of comments about "problems", and that is both typical of engineers and of the internet in general. So make sure you read this 10 times -- Good job going from nothing to something, it's a step people even twice your age struggle to accomplish. Keep going and the more you do it the better you will get!
SirFatty•4mo ago
Why does your age matter?
soiltype•4mo ago
This is a really cool project for a teen and an ambitious goal, so congratulations!

That said, I think the goal and the approach are misguided. It's probably better to take this experience and use it on a different problem, or join forces with an organization that has more momentum.

1. How would you sustain this without ads? If you take subscriptions, that will hamstring growth. You'd be threading a needle even if your app was objectively the most secure, private, and authentic social network. To date, this is an unsolved problem.

2. There are other non-commercial social networks like bluesky or mastodon. Why wouldn't people use that instead?

3. Face verification is a hard limit for me and probably most other people who avoid commercial social media. I don't see any reason to trust a random new app with sensitive PII.

4. Is face verification even meaningful anymore in the age of unchecked generative AI?

rc5150•4mo ago
A little tired of seeing young people introduce ideas starting with their age. Your age literally doesn't matter, it doesn't make you a brilliant developer. Your product should speak for itself. Furthermore, being a teenage developer doesn't tend to signal intelligence as much as it tends to signal naivete.

What AI is powering the face recognition? Did you train it or is it an out-of-the-box product sold by someone else? Is their security up to snuff? Does your platform differentiate actual faces from images? Can it tell the difference between a human face and an AI generated face? What is done with the facial data? How is it stored? Are the "private" chats encrypted? To what standard?

You've told us how old you are, and you have a link to your product, but there's nothing to demonstrate that your product is safe to use, actually private, or doing anything different than just collecting more data to hand to AI.

jampa•4mo ago
I was in your shoes when I was 17. I built a social app to replace Orkut's communities (which Google bought and killed) and a chat app before Discord took off.

Some advice:

- If you want to improve as a developer, keep building features, but if you want to improve as an entrepreneur, avoid that and focus on user growth first. Beware of spreading your small community too thin with new features. In my case, I allowed the creation of new groups too soon, and people became too dispersed.

- AI verification is tricky. If you can build an AI that detects AI-generated content, you could theoretically use that knowledge to build a better model that fools your verification (GANs). One strategy might be going invite-only to create exclusivity, though this has its own drawbacks.

- Social media is too broad a field. Focus on a niche of people who want to communicate but lack a platform. For example, one of my biggest successes came from announcing my chat app during a Dota 2 International tournament—I got 2,200 concurrent users within an hour (this was before Discord).

I've never learned as much as I did when I released my own apps. Even if they go nowhere, the knowledge you gain is invaluable.

a5c11•4mo ago
I think UK government would be amazed, especially now when they try to force identity verification wherever possible. Do you know what UK citizens do instead? They use VPNs to tackle that.

It's not a problem with people hiding their identities, as others have already pointed out. The internet in 90s and early 00s was a much nicer place, despite users hiding behind nicknames on chats and IRC. The real problems are bots and insatiable crave for attention on social medias.

mikae1•4mo ago
Facebook requires video selfie verification[1] these days. I have not been able to register a new Facebook account without passing one. I was able to bypass it with DeepFaceLive though.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/875662883106240/

yjftsjthsd-h•4mo ago
> AI-powered face verification (1 account per person)

How do you prevent people using fake faces, as has already happened to similar efforts[0] and will get easier with face swap AI apps?

[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/gamers-bypass-uk-age-v...

whitelotusapp•4mo ago
Guys saw a lot of comments pointing out concerns about AI face verification

this is how it works

1) user has only access to front camera while doing AI face verification and the ml only allows if photo that has one face

2) user is required to show a hand gesture while taking photo if not i gave clear guide lines to not trust them

3) the face data is stored in cloudinary and it is not being used to train Ai

4) and people who think fake profiles are not a big enough problem listen to me

internet will become a world filled with shape shifters that can take your shape and do bad things imagine that