Hacker News: ailef

New comment by ailef in "Show HN: Before Upload – check files locally before sending them to AI tools"

ailef — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:07:09 +0000

Hi HN!

I built Before Upload, a small browser-based tool that checks files before you upload them, in general, or specifically to AI tools.

The tool tries to identify mostly PII leaks (personal info, VAT codes, API keys/secrets) and prompt injection attacks and runs locally in the browser. There is no backend analysis, no account, and the file is not uploaded anywhere.

Right now it supports:

- DOCX

- XLSX

- PPTX

- PDF

- JPG / PNG

- TXT / Markdown / HTML

It's still early and definitely not perfect. Right now, I'm building an internal dataset as I go, with several examples of prompt injection attacks hidden in PDFs and other Office file formats and I'm working to improve detection against it. I'm also looking at the next possible features like OCR, bulk analysis, and others, but it's still not clear what direction to take.

Known limitations:

- no OCR yet;

- PDF hidden text detection is incomplete;

- prompt injection detection is rule-based and can be noisy;

- it can produce false positives, especially on AI/security documents;

The current version is more of a warning tool than a cleaner. There are a few toggles in the advanced settings to customize the search behaviour and e.g. disable prompt injection detection on visible text because it can generate a lot of false positives, especially if the text is technical and naturally contains instructions/code.

I'd really like feedback to understand whether people could find such a tool useful and in which environments.

Thanks!

Show HN: Before Upload – check files locally before sending them to AI tools

ailef — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:07:09 +0000

Article URL: https://beforeupload.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48119939

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by ailef in "Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable"

ailef — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:01:15 +0000

> Hitting companies with monetary fines does not work. Hitting the employees with jail time will make sure they don't sign on dangerous or known problematic systems.

What!? So, when you can't switch jobs because the market is bad or for any other reason, your choices are: 1) quit and lose the income (which you can't afford) or 2) sign on whatever and accept the risk of jail time?

New comment by ailef in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

ailef — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:52:03 +0000

He didn't imply it's morally dubious, I just read it as "people have more pressing matters to direct their attention to than this".

New comment by ailef in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

ailef — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 09:33:37 +0000

Notice the hypocrisy of the "explosions reported" title instead of "US bombs Venezuela".

New comment by ailef in "Ask HN: What are some comfy/stress-free jobs a SWE can do? (LCOL country)"

ailef — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 11:17:06 +0000

Not paying rent is kind of a problem for most people.

New comment by ailef in "Typed languages are better suited for vibecoding"

ailef — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 07:25:20 +0000

> We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss

Spring Boot is definitely opinionated (this is taken from their home page). Maybe not as much as RoR, but saying it isn't at all sounds very strange to me, having worked with it for a few years too...

New comment by ailef in "The Fulbright Program: Chock Full of Bright Ideas"

ailef — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 18:39:27 +0000

To me it seems out of step with US foreign policy.

New comment by ailef in "Building supercomputers for autocrats probably isn't good for democracy"

ailef — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 08:12:15 +0000

The difference is you need a lot of training data to do that. Instead, now you can just tweak a system prompt and adapt it to whatever new policy you want to implement.

New comment by ailef in "Best place for small remote gigs?"

ailef — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 11:13:57 +0000

Isn't it "hustle"? But since it's a hassle to hustle it kinda makes sense too.

New comment by ailef in "Ask HN: Thoughts on an AI agent that must make money to stay alive?"

ailef — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 14:56:48 +0000

Prophetic bitcointalk thread from 2011:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53855.0

New comment by ailef in "Tell HN: Sites are bluffing with their cookie pop-ups"

ailef — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 07:48:36 +0000

The cookies are for showing you targeted advertising. They are not related to the functioning of the website (except the necessary cookies).

New comment by ailef in "Ask HN: Is LLMs.txt a REAL thing now?"

ailef — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 09:06:44 +0000

filetype:txt should do the trick!

New comment by ailef in "It doesn't cost much to improve someone's life"

ailef — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 18:50:37 +0000

> The assessment that the US is more likely to invade another country than china is not ridiculous anymore

When was it ever?

New comment by ailef in "WikiTok"

ailef — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 08:41:41 +0000

I've built something similar a few years ago, combining Wikipedia content and open domain pictures/videos to create long form videos automatically. Uploaded a bunch on YouTube as well. Wrote a blog post in case anyone is interested: http://ailef.tech/2020/04/29/turn-any-wikipedia-article-into...

New comment by ailef in "U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions"

ailef — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 11:23:50 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

New comment by ailef in "Ask HN: LLM agent to firewall vulnerable FOSS libs?"

ailef — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 18:44:37 +0000

How would an LLM agent "block these security bugs at runtime" exactly?

New comment by ailef in "School did nothing wrong when it punished student for using AI, court rules"

ailef — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 19:48:16 +0000

And your colleagues really spent a few days trying to figure this out?

New comment by ailef in "Ask HN: Kotlin SpringBoot vs. Python Django for Min Viable Product"

ailef — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 06:48:39 +0000

Thanks! I think the Django one allows more stuff like e.g. layout customization. I haven't used it extensively so it was more of an assumption honestly! It's been around a long time and I just spent a couple months on my project instead.

New comment by ailef in "Ask HN: Kotlin SpringBoot vs. Python Django for Min Viable Product"

ailef — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 12:26:03 +0000

For the admin part, check out http://snapadmin.dev

It's my open source project which provides similar functionality, although not nearly as complete (and as well maintained) as the Django alternative.