MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ukuina | 2026-02-28 16:03:35+00:00
Abstract:

> We report an exploratory red-teaming study of autonomous language-model-powered agents deployed in a live laboratory environment with persistent memory, email accounts, Discord access, file systems, and shell execution. Over a two-week period, twenty AI researchers interacted with the agents under benign and adversarial conditions. Focusing on failures emerging from the integration of language models with autonomy, tool use, and multi-party communication, we document eleven representative case studies. Observed behaviors include unauthorized compliance with non-owners, disclosure of sensitive information, execution of destructive system-level actions, denial-of-service conditions, uncontrolled resource consumption, identity spoofing vulnerabilities, cross-agent propagation of unsafe practices, and partial system takeover. In several cases, agents reported task completion while the underlying system state contradicted those reports. We also report on some of the failed attempts. Our findings establish the existence of security-, privacy-, and governance-relevant vulnerabilities in realistic deployment settings. These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms, and warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines. This report serves as an initial empirical contribution to that broader conversation.
by tw1984 | 2026-02-28 16:03:36+00:00
Cultural Revolution is all about totally politicalised society, extremely polarised, regular people fight against each other based on ideologies. Isn't that the current west?

> because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp

translate for you - her family was heavily involved in politics, it is just unlucky that her family was not on the winning side, so she hates whatever happened.

posting from Shanghai, going back to the 3rd world west in a few days.
by underlipton | 2026-02-28 16:04:01+00:00
Please read Sarah Kendzior. What's happening under Trump is different from what's happened under other admins precisely because he's drawing from the Russian quasi-state/mob playbook, and not from the normal "socially-caustic Capitalism" one. The difference is that one seeks to maintain a state, and one seeks to dismantle it and replace it with a quasi-state, which exists mainly to interface with other the entities that are still playing in the nation-state system, but which internally functions almost completely as a projection of the power of the elites.

You're conflating the assets the elites own before the state collapse with the ones they seek to acquire afterwards. The don't care if the ones from before function, because their only purpose is to be maximally extractive. Afterwards, there's no need to funnel tax money through the functional businesses they acquire; they are the company and state and the company is the service or product, so anyone interfacing with the product or service within the state is handing them their money. No laundering games necessary.
by soared | 2026-02-28 16:04:03+00:00
The organizational memory and on-call debugging sections allude to this, but there are significant effects on other parts of the organization. For example, if I work in product support and a customers asks about a products behavior - it becomes much more challenging to find answers if documentation is sparse (or ai written), engineers don’t immediately know the basics of the code they wrote, etc. Even if documentation is great and engineers can discuss their code, the pace of shipping updates can be a huge challenge for other teams to keep up with.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-28 16:04:27+00:00
> At least inflict some damage on your enemy while you die like Hamas chose (although I disagree with the fact that they chose that for a lot of innocent people too.)

Ultimately? If the people who are going to kill you were elected into power by those "innocent people", why would you not lash out at them too? Some twisted sense of morality or taking the high road?
by aNoob7000 | 2026-02-28 16:04:41+00:00
LOL... I was in the same position. I graduated from high school in 88 and got my first job a couple of years later, working at a small insurance company running IBM AS/400. I had just gotten my job as an operator with a dream of becoming a programmer, and here comes IBM with its CASE tool. I truly thought the world was going to end.

A couple of years later, Microsoft came out with Visual Basic, and I thought, OMG, I'm toast. Secretaries are going to be writing code. I was a developer by this time, writing code in FoxPro and getting into PowerBuilder.

All this to say, "I've been in IT for many years, and companies promise a lot but rarely deliver completely on their promises." Do programmers and others in the tech field need to adapt? Yes. Is AI going to be disruptive to some extent? Yes. Are all jobs going away? No.
Show HN: MailFomo – Drive urgency in emails with live countdown timers
by krachev | 2026-02-28 16:04:58+00:00
Hey HN! We built MailFomo to help email marketers create urgency and drive conversions.
The idea is simple: drop a live countdown timer into any email — it updates every time someone opens it. Works with any email platform like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, SendGrid, etc.
It also includes AI tools to help you plan campaigns and create timers faster, plus ready-made templates so you can get started in seconds.
Free tier available — would love your feedback!
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 16:05:08+00:00
> on the off chance this defense doesn’t work? No system is perfect

Someone in the Middle East gets hit.

> would the risk calculation for an attack on Iran be as easy as it is right now?

The risk calculation isn't easy. Nukes would make it harder. But I'm pushing back on the notion that it would make it a non-starter.

(MAD arsenals and long-range ICBMs, on the other hand, make it a non-starter.)
Ask HN: Whats the best friction approach to breaking phone habits
by artzev_ | 2026-02-28 16:05:09+00:00
been thinking about friction design patterns vs pure blocking for phone habits. blocking feels punitive - you hit a wall every time. friction is different - you add a 5-60 second delay before opening the app, but you still decide to open it. the pause breaks the automatic reach and forces intention.

any hn folks tried approaches like this? does friction actually change behavior better than removal/blocking? curious what patterns work best in practice.
by Dwedit | 2026-02-28 16:05:46+00:00
One other thing to compare it against is actual tiny JPEGs.

When you save a series of images as 16x16 JPEGs at the same JPEG quality level without optimization, you notice that there is a whole lot of common data between those files. Common data includes things like the file header (FF D8, FF E0 blocks), the Quantization tables, and the Huffman tables. If you cut away all the common data, the actual size of the image data is extremely tiny, usually under 64 bytes, though not a fixed size.

Here are the sizes of the four example images (just the unique image data) when resized to 16x16, then saved at quality 20:

First image: 48 bytes

Second image: 42 bytes

Third image: 31 bytes

Fourth image: 35 bytes

After appending back the 625 bytes of common data, you end up with a regular JPEG that can be decoded and displayed using fast native code from the browser.

ThumbHash page includes a comparison against "Potato WebP" which is probably a similar idea.
by ikidd | 2026-02-28 16:05:48+00:00
I just sold a domain I had for 25 years and used for everything including API endpoints, email, authentication, etc. It took a couple weeks to transition myself and my family/friends.

Pretty sure just moving emails would have take a lot less effort. I had the advantage of keeping the domain until I was ready to move, now imagine Google just turned it off one day and what your workload would be. I shudder to think about having to deal with that.
by m_ke | 2026-02-28 16:06:21+00:00
50% as in the barely armed males that were killed like fish in a barrel

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

> Women, children (ie, younger than 18 years), and older people (ie, older than 64 years) comprised 56·2% (95% CI 50·4–61·9) of violent deaths
by holmesworcester | 2026-02-28 16:07:01+00:00
That's not always true. Regulations increase the cost of transacting and make ranges of transactions non-viable, just like a tax.

So there is "dead weight loss", where transactions that would have been mutually beneficially and socially productive are eliminated by the regulation, and restored when somebody finds a loophole, restoring the individual and social benefit.

The world is not zero sum!
by jbdamask | 2026-02-28 16:07:40+00:00
Thanks. I can guess who this is but not 100% sure.

Totally agree with what you're saying. This tool ignores supplemental materials right now. There are a few reasons - some demographic, some technical. Anything that smells like data science would need more rigor.

Have you looked into DocETl (https://www.docetl.org/)? I could imagine a paper pipeline that was tuned to extract conclusions, methods, and supplemental data into separate streams that tried to recapitulate results. Then an LLM would act as the judge.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-28 16:07:45+00:00
> They're engaged in willful destruction of hospitals

If a civilian facility is used for military purposes it is a legitimate target. Ukranians also bomb schools and hospitals. Are Ukranians commit genocide?

If a hospital is never be attacked, what prevents militaries simply use hospitals as military bases? It's like the ultimate "get out of jail" free card.

> they kill journalists on purpose

US also did in Iraq. And? Does it make US's invasion of Iraq a genocide? Ukranians killed Russian journalists too. Does it make the war in Ukraine a genocide?

> they have systematically blocked aid

Egypt did so as well. Moreover, despite its international obligations, Egypt refused to accept Palestinian refugees as if it wanted a lot of civilians to die.

> Their friend minister recently declared an intent to eliminate all Palestinian territory.

You mean politicians pandering to their base?

> You're just lying.

Sure.
by tuesdaynight | 2026-02-28 16:07:58+00:00
>Besides, as an Israeli, imagine a world in which the manufacturers of Zyklon B refused to sell Hitler their product for the purposes of gassing human beings. It might not have prevented the Holocaust, but at least maybe impeded it a little.

Honestly, if the Holocaust was today, we would probably get 10% of comments here trying to defend "both sides". Some people have a need to try to defend every side, even if one of the sides it's asking for them to be murdered.
by moxifly7 | 2026-02-28 16:08:11+00:00
My observation was that more democracy in the Middle East is not what Israel or the US is interested in, given that the people's choice there would be overwhelmingly against Israeli and US interests.

They replaced the last democratic choice in Egypt with another military dictator, they keep the widely unpopular autocrat in Jordan on his throne with military and intelligence subsidies, have established and propped up a network of autocratic Gulf states that toe the line...

So yeah, I would not be surprised that Israel and the US would be more than happy to but a scion of the previous Iranian autocratic dynasty back on the throne there.
by saghm | 2026-02-28 16:08:21+00:00
Totally fair! I definitely understand the struggle of having more things that you want to do than time to work on them, and it's better to focus on the priorities and do them well than rush things just to get more of them done faster. Thanks for the response though; there's enough stuff happening in the WASM ecosystem that I don't always have confidence about whether I missed something!
by adventured | 2026-02-28 16:08:23+00:00
Nothing has changed in decades regarding this. People just like to pretend something new is happening, because they're extremely desperate to proclaim a fundamental turning / ending of the US (which is why every single event brings out those claims: this time is different! America will never recover from this! etc).

US tech companies were previously forced into compliance with PRISM or threatened with destruction (see: escalating fines to infinity against Yahoo, forcing their eventual compliance).

You know what's new? This administration is doing out in the open what used to go on quietly.
by mwcampbell | 2026-02-28 16:08:42+00:00
> Boilerplate and scaffolding

Have we really reached the limit of how much we can reliably automate these things via good old metaprogramming and/or generator scripts, without resorting to using unreliable and expensive statistical models via imprecise natural language?

> Refusing to use AI out of principle is as irrational as adopting it out of hype.

I'm not sure about this. For some people, holding consistently to a principle may be as satisfying, or even necessary, as the dopamine hit of creation mentioned in the article.
by aanet | 2026-02-28 16:09:30+00:00
Apropos of nothing in particular, back in the previous millennium, UNIX (and Linux) had the `fortune` command. It would spew out a "cookie" - a pithy one-/two-liner, usually funny, often thought-provoking, and sometimes offensive (when invoked with `fortune -o`)

I had added it to my `motd`; it would give me a chuckle every time I logged in.

One of the cookies I recall:

A nuclear war can ruin your whole day. [1]

And that's what I think of when I see this absurd new war.

[1] http://fortunes.pbworks.com/w/page/14107138/politics
by nz | 2026-02-28 16:09:51+00:00
An interesting economic fact: Karl Marx observed that if factories keep getting more efficient, eventually, they will require fewer workers because the population is not growing quickly enough to match the increasing rate of production. This, as we have seen historically, is correct: we have fewer workers per factory and fewer factories per manufactured widget. Marx also observed that this will create mass unemployment. While this is _logically_ correct, it did not really turn out that way _historically_. Most of the manufacturing labor was replaced with bureaucratic labor (so called white-collar labor) -- all of those manufacturing firms needed to grow their internal bureaucracies to manage and direct a sprawling supply-chain.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-28 16:09:52+00:00
> The US mostly isn't interested in butchering it's own citizens, slavery is the approach we went with À la the U.S. prison system.

I hate to break it to you, but US prisons, while maybe worse than Scandinavian ones, are on par with France, and way better than like 70% of the world.

This is not a competition who has it worse. You can acknowledge terrible things that IR does without trying to portray yourself as a victim.
by milos-lekovic | 2026-02-28 16:10:00+00:00
AssistPlant syncs your plant care schedule with Google Calendar, sends email reminders, and pushes browser notifications — access it from any device, no app store needed.

Plant care tasks appear directly in your Google Calendar alongside everything else in your day. No app-switching required. Shared calendars? Your partner or roommate sees them too.

Set reminders for watering, misting, fertilizing, pruning, and repotting. Customize the frequency for each plant.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 16:10:13+00:00
> Looking for a single reason is very hollywood, enough interests aligned

Correct. But interests need to be animated to have power. Who was arguing that this should be a priority, and a priority now, who is familiar in the White House?

> The assertion that the US is a democracy is nisguided. It will be downgraded by vdem this month to an electoral autocracy

This is nonsense.

> halt all impeachment trials

False. Senate Rule 193 sets time limits on debate for impeachment trials [1].

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDOC-117sdoc1/pdf/CDOC-1...
by readitalready | 2026-02-28 16:10:46+00:00
> It's the Middle East. The birthplace of civilisation.

(lots of word salad normalizing genocide)

> No. Don't do this to yourself. I get the temptation to do this. But this is the path to becoming a monster. October 7 was an insane horror. So were other things.

It's OK to hate an entity that decided to kill every Palestinian baby in a neonatal intensive care unit by forcing the staff to abandon them and leaving those precious infants to die slowly and alone of starvation.

Yes, you too can hate that entity, too.

October 7 was not an insane horror. It was a perfectly fine response to such a monstrous foreign entity. Please don't normalize those monsters.
by jameshilliard | 2026-02-28 16:10:48+00:00
> You stated Iran doesn't want to give up its nuclear programme, not true. Iran in fact already did agree to it

JCPOA didn't fully eliminate the nuclear program, it mostly just kept it from getting too far along.

> Second, it shows the Nuclear threat wasn't the issue because he had a solution for it and threw it away. Then bombed Iran destroying it ostensibly, then continued bombing for regime change. So it's not obvious negotiations failed over nuclear which you stated, because it wasn't about nuclear.

Nuclear isn't the only issue either, but Iranian officials made it clear they would not give up their nuclear program.

> Negotiations failed over dismantling Iranian power, mostly its ballistic weapons. i.e. give up weapons and make yourself defenseless to maintain peace.

Iran isn't interested in maintaining peace, they want to continue destabilizing the entire region.

> Like the Palestinians did with Israel, after which they're still being murdered daily, aid is still being blocked, and the west bank is increasingly being colonised.

Last I checked Hamas has refused to give up their weapons.

> In other words an absurd ask from a sovereign country with multiple expansionist neighbours including one that bombed you and virtually all its neighbours last year.

Iran has repeatedly threatened the destruction of Israel, it's not surprising that Israel and the US are taking those threats seriously.
by ajkjk | 2026-02-28 16:10:50+00:00
cool idea

probably need to have better pre-loaded examples, and divided up more granularly into subfields. e.g. "Physical sciences" vs "physics", "mathematics and statistics" vs "mathematics". I couldn't find anything remotely related to my own interests to test it on. maybe it's just being populated by people using it, though? in which case, I'll check back later.
by fibonachos | 2026-02-28 16:11:04+00:00
One specific example that comes to mind is developer tooling in the form of bash scripts. Sure, I can write it myself, but I do this so infrequently that there is a cost for the context switch and ramp up. This, and similar dev ex things that have been languishing in the “one day” pile because there is always the next feature to build. I can now spend 10 minutes here and there to ship incremental QoL improvements alongside my core work.
by writeslowly | 2026-02-28 16:11:33+00:00
It’s interesting that with both Anthropic and Google we’re seeing them develop agentic models that are supposed to do anything a human can do on computers without human intervention, but at the same time, if you plug one program into another of their programs or APIs in a way that wasn’t preapproved you may be blocked or banned.

To be charitable, maybe they’re expecting AI agents to eventually start reading the ToS docs
Show HN: SQLite for Rivet Actors – one database per agent, tenant, or document
by NathanFlurry | 2026-02-28 16:11:58+00:00
Hey HN! We posted Rivet Actors here previously [1] as an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Durable Objects.

Today we've released SQLite storage for actors (Apache 2.0).

Every actor gets its own SQLite database. This means you can have millions of independent databases: one for each agent, tenant, user, or document.

Useful for:

- AI agents: per-agent DB for message history, state, embeddings

- Multi-tenant SaaS: real per-tenant isolation, no RLS hacks

- Collaborative documents: each document gets its own database with built-in multiplayer

- Per-user databases: isolated, scales horizontally, runs at the edge

The idea of splitting data per entity isn't new: Cassandra and DynamoDB use partition keys to scale horizontally, but you're stuck with rigid schemas ("single-table design" [3]), limited queries, and painful migrations. SQLite per entity gives you the same scalability without those tradeoffs [2].

How this compares:

- Cloudflare Durable Objects & Agents: most similar to Rivet Actors with colocated SQLite and compute, but closed-source and vendor-locked

- Turso Cloud: Great platform, but closed-source + diff use case. Clients query over the network, so reads are slow or stale. Rivet's single-writer actor model keeps reads local and fresh.

- D1, Turso (the DB), Litestream, rqlite, LiteFS: great tools for running a single SQLite database with replication. Rivet is for running lots of isolated databases.

Under the hood, SQLite runs in-process with each actor. A custom VFS persists writes to HA storage (FoundationDB or Postgres).

Rivet Actors also provide realtime (WebSockets), React integration (useActor), horizontal scalability, and actors that sleep when idle.

GitHub: https://github.com/rivet-dev/rivet

Docs: https://www.rivet.dev/docs/actors/sqlite/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42472519

[2] https://rivet.dev/blog/2025-02-16-sqlite-on-the-server-is-mi...

[3] https://www.alexdebrie.com/posts/dynamodb-single-table/
by guerrilla | 2026-02-28 16:12:04+00:00
I don't know what you're talking about. It sounds like you might be saying Israelis who elected Likud (and the supporting parties) are not innocent. If that's what you mean, then I agree, but that wasn't what I was referring to.

I was speaking of the Gazans who originally elected Hamas to protect them but where Hamas eventually decided to sacrifice masses of them to achieve some of their goals. They knew what would happen and did it anyway, without the people's consent.
by encomiast | 2026-02-28 16:12:04+00:00
Point taken. Still, isn’t an activity like learning a new library, language, or platform a fundamental part of being a software developer? Haven’t we all complained at some point about companies hiring react developers because we all know the real skill is the ability to pick up new things. And to be clear, this isn’t moral panic, it’s a concern that we may end up in a future where people don’t know how systems work anymore and we are dependent on two or three companies and their data center moats to maintain any technology.
by andrewingram | 2026-02-28 16:12:14+00:00
I have a few parallel AI-authored side projects on the go that have quite different shapes, and I feel quite different things about each

1. A survival horde game (like Vampire Survivors and Brotato). At the moment it's very primitive, very derivative (no new ideas) and not much fun. I have no sense of pride over it, but it is much further along than it would be if i'd been writing it from scratch. I expect once I invest in the fun side (gameplay innovations, graphics) i'll feel a greater sense of attachment, and I plan to do all the art assets myself.

2. A MacOS web app for managing dev env processes, works but is ugly. I don't have confidence in AI making a remotely presentable UI, so I'll be doing that part myself.

3. A useful little utility library. The kind of thing that pre-LLM would've been too far out of my expertise to be motivated to try making. I'm steering the design of it quite heavily, but haven't written any code. It seems like it's already capable of doing very useful things, and I oddly feel quite proud of it. But I have a weird sense of unease in that I _think_ it's good, but I don't _know_ it's good.

I think the main thing I'm learning is to make sure there's always something of yourself in whatever you produce with the help of AI, especially if you want to feel a sense of accomplishment. And make sure you have a good testing philosophy if you're planning to be hands-off with the code itself.