June 25, 2026
Secret tool, chaotic comments
Show HN: Secs-man, a secrets manager you can (not) rely on
A backup tool tried to talk about safety, but the comments obsessed over its very awkward name
TLDR: Secs-man is a new tool for backing up sensitive files so you can still recover them even if the app disappears. Commenters instantly turned the launch into a mix of name jokes, confused questions, and side-by-side comparisons with rival tools, making the reaction almost bigger than the product.
A new Show HN project called secs-man showed up with a serious mission: help people back up their most sensitive files in a way that doesn’t trap them inside one app forever. The pitch is simple even for non-experts: if the tool vanishes tomorrow, you should still be able to unlock your own data with common command-line basics and some patience. In a world where people panic about losing passwords, keys, and private files, that promise hit a nerve.
But the community? Oh, they immediately turned this into a naming-and-vibes event. The loudest joke by far was that “secs-man” reads like “sex man,” which completely derailed the room in the most internet way possible. One commenter flat-out demanded a pronunciation guide, which honestly became the unofficial slogan of the thread. Another person was less interested in the name and more confused about what the tool actually does, asking if it’s basically just an encryption tool with an outside key. That sparked the biggest real debate: is this refreshingly independent and practical, or is it still too tied to one encryption choice under the hood?
Then came the classic Hacker News energy: someone politely name-dropped a rival tool, fnox, and wondered whether secs-man was too narrowly built compared with more flexible options. So yes, the product launched as a careful backup tool for secrets, but the real show was the comments section splitting into three camps: people giggling at the name, people asking “wait, what does it actually do?”, and people instantly comparing it to competing tools.
Key Points
- •The article presents secs-man as a secrets backup tool designed so encrypted data can be decrypted and restored without relying on secs-man itself.
- •secs-man is intended for local and remote machine secrets management and is positioned as suitable for local-only backups of highly sensitive data.
- •The project’s philosophy is to avoid software lock-in by decoupling encryption, decryption, and restoration from any single application.
- •The article says the intended recovery path should work with a terminal, coreutils, age, and manual effort, with a manual recovery process documented separately.
- •secs-man is not published in common package repositories and must be installed directly from its repository via Nix-based methods or cargo, while the secs-man-ssh script must be copied separately.