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kybernetikos
sinkless
JavaScript2017–2020
kybernetikos / sinkless

sinkless

A sync-less (more or less) password manager. With emojis! 👍

2Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
18GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A sync-less (more or less) password manager. With emojis! 👍

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-06-19 16:51:35 UTC to 2020-03-15 15:38:04 UTC.

01232017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
> It looks like Lesspass also uses a counter property. Kinda amazed that two people independently arrived at such a similar idea. :) The system I made "sinkless" https://github.com/kybernetikos/sinkless does the same thing. Its a pretty obvious solution to the problem of needing to able to change passwords, and it also solves situations where sites have crazy extra restrictions that can't be reduced to just the alphabet. My system also shows you emojis so you know when you've got your password and site settings right. Most of the other complaints are also over blown, but the lack of 2fa is a genuine loss.
In Lesspass – open-source stateless password manager
In my system, you have a number of additional pieces of information that are used to generate the password, including a counter and a salt. If you need to change your password, you would typically just increment the counter. You can also do this if the password policies don't allow your password for some reason. This does mean that you need to remember what the version is. Fortunately this information doesn't need to be kept secret. I also have a system that generates emojis based on your settings, so as long as you remember the emoji that goes with the site, you can just increment it until you get the right one, so it's down to you whether you store the version number somewhere or remember the emoji. I use URLs by default, but you can enter anything you want into the 'purpose' field. It's still pretty raw, but it's at https://github
Read the rest
.com/kybernetikos/sinkless Most of the complaints people have about deterministic systems don't really hold up in practice for me. Protecting them by 2fa would be better of course, which deterministic can't do and lots of the good password managers do, but I really dislike having to worry about syncing state beyond just emailing it to myself. One thing that would be awesome would be if someone came up with a standard machine readable way of describing the limitations on passwords for sites (allowable characters, number of characters, any restrictions on previous values / sequences etc), and all good sites could embed that information, and poor sites could be looked up in a third-party service.
In Evaluation of five password managers
I use a system that I wrote https://github.com/kybernetikos/sinkless (incidentally it uses a similar system to this article - PBKDF with SHA512 - in browser plugins) that supports many of these situations. * The character sets can be entered manually. They form public information and are stored locally, can easily be exported as csv. * Each password has a 'version' which you can increment. The version is considered public information and is stored locally and can easily be exported as CSV. In order to help you know that you've got the version correct, there is a visual indicator - an emoji. * The version can be used to rotate passwords after a breech. * My system stores all the settings that have been used on this client and lets you export them and import new ones. This lets you see if you have an account on a service. * I don't have
Read the rest
an explicit way of storing the username, but there are ways - you can include the username in the salt. * The ability to list all accounts that a particular client has seen gives a partial solution to your need to see all known accounts. > Solving any one of these problems requires a secure place to store state, but once you have a secure place to store state you can just store the passwords themselves. This is not true. All of these things are settings related, and can be considered public information, which means you don't need a secure place to store this state, you can store it nearly anywhere, drop box, email, plain text on a website if you want. In a gist etc. Also, even if it were true, storing the actual passwords means that you have a single point of failure - if the password storage is compromised the whole thing is compromised.
In Why traditional password managers are flawed

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