MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What makes AI agent runtime logs defensible under adversarial audit?
by catarina_eng | 2026-02-19 21:12:02+00:00
Modern AI agents can execute tools, write to databases, and trigger irreversible actions.

Most teams rely on traditional logging (OpenTelemetry, SIEM, DB audit logs). But under adversarial conditions (audit, litigation, incident response), those logs depend on platform trust and cannot typically be verified independently of the system that produced them.

I’m exploring whether agent runtime evidence should be:

-deterministically canonicalized

-hash-chained

-signed

-optionally externally timestamped

-verifiable offline

The goal isn’t observability. It’s defensibility.

Open questions:

1.Is RFC 3161-style timestamping sufficient to deter practical backdating, or is some form of multi-witness anchoring necessary?

2.In real distributed agent systems, where does replayability break down?

3.At what scale or risk threshold does this move from overengineering to necessary?

Not looking for blockchain/ledger answers — more interested in models that integrate with existing infrastructure.

Trying to understand whether this addresses a real integrity gap in production systems.
by ggreer | 2026-02-19 21:12:04+00:00
California has lots of restrictions on firearms. When I lived in the state, I had to get a firearm safety certificate (which involved paying some money and taking a multiple choice test), present my ID for a background check, get my thumb print taken, submit two forms of proof of my address (such as utility bills), demonstrate safe handling of a firearm, and wait 10 days. A cell phone bill didn't count as proof of address, only fixed utilities like water & electricity. I'm sure this denied many renters the ability to purchase firearms. Also I could only purchase firearms on California's roster (a whitelist of firearm makes and models). Popular firearms such as 4th generation Glocks were not on the roster, though cops were allowed to buy them. Also firearms couldn't have threaded barrels (it's a felony to put one on your gun) and magazines were limited to a capacity of 10 rounds.

Carrying a handgun for self-defense was impossible, as the local authorities only gave out permits to those with political connections. This caused a scandal in 2020 when the Santa Clara County Sheriff was caught issuing concealed carry permits to some bodyguards at Apple in exchange for iPads.[1] Thanks to Bruen[2] it is now possible for any law-abiding citizen to get a permit if they jump through all the hoops (which includes fingerprinting, a psych eval, and examination of your social media posts), though it can take over a year to process the application and costs can exceed $1,000.

At some point the law changed to require a background check to buy ammunition, which always failed for me. I never figured out why, but my guess is that my name didn't fit in the state's database. This sort of thing happened to around 10% of legal gun owners in the state. I never got it sorted out before I moved away.

1. https://www.reuters.com/business/apples-security-chief-accus...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Rifle_&_Pistol_...
Show HN: CursorLens – Open-source screen recorder/editor for product demos
by blueberrycongee | 2026-02-19 21:12:28+00:00
Hi HN — I built CursorLens, a free and open-source screen recorder/editor for product demos and walkthroughs.

It started as a fork of OpenScreen, but I reworked a lot of the capture/editing pipeline for a more native macOS workflow.

Current features:

full-screen or window recording
native cursor hide/show behavior on macOS
camera overlay + microphone recording
timeline editing (trim/crop/zoom/cursor effects/annotations)
subtitle generation + rough-cut workflow
multi-aspect export (16:9, 9:16, 1:1) and batch export
audio export controls (gain, loudness normalization, limiter)
It’s still in beta, so stability can vary by machine.

Repo: https://github.com/blueberrycongee/CursorLens
Releases: https://github.com/blueberrycongee/CursorLens/releases

I’d really appreciate feedback on:

recording reliability across setups
editing UX (especially rough cut/subtitles)
export speed/quality tradeoffs
by StableAlkyne | 2026-02-19 21:12:49+00:00
Related, I was talking to a computational chemist at a conference a few years ago. Their work was mostly at the intersection of ML and material science.

An interesting concept they mentioned was this idea of "injected serendipity" when they were screening for novel materials with a certain target performance. They proceed as normal, but 10% or so of the screened materials are randomly sampled from the chemical space.

They claimed this had led them to several interesting candidates across several problems.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-19 21:13:00+00:00
> Suicidal people aren't a valid reason for my rights to be restricted, sorry.

You also have a right to travel around the country, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to drink and drive. There are plenty of valid, constitutional reasons for firearm ownership to be restricted to qualified individuals. When these restrictions are in place, many fewer people die. It is what it is.
by andoando | 2026-02-19 21:13:18+00:00
But the intent is to make as much as money as possible with zero care for the users well being.

I worked at Tinder for example and you would think that company in an ethical world would be thinking about how to make dating better, how to make people more matches spending less time on the app. Nope, we literally had projects called "Whale" and the focus was selling on absolutely useful and even harmful features that generated money
by maplet | 2026-02-19 21:13:34+00:00
Looking at the website, it's hard for me to tell that this is for stock images rather than stock markets. I think you are intentionally playing the double meaning but it can be confusing.

Also, the web console has some warnings/errors you should be aware of:
- Clerk: Clerk has been loaded with development keys. Development instances have strict usage limits and should not be used when deploying your application to production. Learn more: https://clerk.com/docs/deployments/overview
- Some CORS and RSC errors
by 0x457 | 2026-02-19 21:13:51+00:00
> Which makes the kind of regulations they _want_ around firearms (i.e., regulate/tax them out of existence) kind of tricky.

Not really. They do whatever regulations they want all the time. It's just sometimes federal government steps in and forces certain local laws to not be enforced.

I was able to get CCW permit in LA only due to such intervention.
by onyx228 | 2026-02-19 21:14:18+00:00
I've spoken to a german news outlet a while back, and that was my contention too: I don't know if the article will be any good.

My suggestion was as follows:

Start the article by providing the dry facts - the meat of the article - in a super condensed format, so people get it as quickly as possible. Then, ask for money to get the rest - the analysis, the "whodunit", the "how we got there", the background, the bio's, and everything else. And then tell people: "If this interests you, you can pay $0.xx to read the rest of our article about it, including: (insert bullet points I just mentioned)"

The first section acts as proof that the person writing the article did their research; the rest is for those who are genuinely interested in the topic. It prevents disappointment and tells you clearly and transparently what you're getting for you cents.

I don't think the company did it in the end. They're struggling.
by culi | 2026-02-19 21:14:23+00:00
I feel like they're actually dropping slower. Chinese models are dropping right before lunar new year as seems to be an emerging tradition.

A couple of western models have dropped around the same time too but I don't think the "strides on benchmarks" are that impressive when you consider how much tokens are being spent to make those "improvements". E.g. Gemini 3.1 Pro's ARC-AGI-2 score went from 33.6% to 77.1% buuut their "cost per task" also increased by 4.2x. It seems to be the same story for most of these benchmark improvements and similar for Claude model improvements.

I'm not convinced there's been any substantial jump in capabilities. More likely these companies have scaled their datacenters to allow for more token usage
by frumplestlatz | 2026-02-19 21:14:24+00:00
I included it because I think it's a counter-balance to how framing and selective information disclosure has been used to shape perception; in many accountings, you either see "five deaths within 36 hours", or just "one death", but neither mentioning the only death that day was a civilian veteran that was among the rioters.

I assume that's because, in this context, a rioter dying is less shocking than a police officer, politician, or other civilian, and "veteran" is more likely to humanize or engender empathy. I'd guess that's also why you objected so strongly to its inclusion, and sought to reframe the perceptive field.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-19 21:14:33+00:00
<< What really has not been solved is long context and continual learning (and world model stuff but I don't find that interesting).

I wonder about that. In a sense, the solution seems simple.. allow more context. One of the issues, based on progression of chatgpt models, was that too much context allowed for a much easier jailbreak and the fear most corporates have over that make me question the service. Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those people missing 4o for telling me "I love you". I do miss it its nerfed capability to go across all conversations. Working context is was made more narrow now. For a paid sub, that kind of limitation is annoying.

My point is, I know there are some interesting trade-offs to be made ( mostly because I am navigating those on local inference machine ), but with all those data centers one would think, providers have enough power to solve that.. if they so chose.
by TheDong | 2026-02-19 21:15:07+00:00
Yes you can, and Go has done exactly that.

Realize the "log" api is bad? Make "log/slog". Realize the "rand" api is bad? Make "rand/v2". Realize the "image/draw" api is bad? Make "golang.org/x/image/draw". Realize the "ioutil" package is bad? Move all the functions into "io".

Te stdlib already has at least 3 different patterns for duplicating API functionality with minor backwards-incompatible changes, and you can just do that and mark the old things as deprecated, but support it forever. Easy enough.
by slopinthebag | 2026-02-19 21:15:28+00:00
Those deps have to come from somewhere, right? Unless you're actually rolling your own everything, and with languages that don't have package managers what you end up doing is just adding submodules of various libraries and running their cmake configs, which is at least as insecure as NPM or Crates.io.

Go is a bit unique a it has a really substantial stdlib, so you eliminate some of the necessary deps, but it's also trivial to rely on established packages like Tokio etc, vendor them into your codebase, and not have to worry about it in the future.
by simianwords | 2026-02-19 21:16:21+00:00
> One thing I do believe in are the words of Karl Marx: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The creation of a world where that is possible is not dependent on advanced technology but on human solidarity.

The author doesn't understand Marx but merely parrots leftist talking points. Marx strongly claims that without change in technology, feudalism would not have changed to capitalism.
by oska | 2026-02-19 21:16:36+00:00
Every organism must have an immune system which is essential to (but does not guarantee) their survival. Just the same, a society has xenophonia as its immune system. That does not make it 'bad', even though it can produce very ugly effects.

I do not agree with your expansion of xenophobia to the behaviour of a people outside their own country. I do not agree that xenophobia is objectively bad. I also do not agree that "the xenophobia of Japan was the seed for a fascist genocidal rampage" and I doubt that many, if any, historians would agree with such a simplistic assertion either.

Since you seem to have a very closed mind on this subject (i.e. xenophobia == bad, bad, bad) and further discussion seems pointless I'll leave it here.
by rurp | 2026-02-19 21:16:39+00:00
Very true, and it's not just creepy elites either. Before I got into tech I worked a blue collar job that involved zero emailing. When I first started office work I was so incredibly nervous about how to write emails and would agonize over trivial details. Turns out just being clear and concise is all most people care about.

There might be other professions where people get more hung up on formalities but my partner works in a non-tech field and it's the same way there. She's far more likely to get an email dashed off with a sentence fragment or two than a long formal message. She has learned that short emails are more likely to be read and acted on as well.
by Edman274 | 2026-02-19 21:17:01+00:00
Handle it this way - a user has Silver tier coin subscription, gold tier coin subscription, and platinum tier coin subscription that they pay in per month. I'll set hypothetical prices at 15, 30 and 60 dollars. Over the course of a month, you look at articles without making decisions about whether to buy them one way or another - you just have your "tab" and the article loads as-is. Then, at the end of the month, mycrowpaymint.biz tallies up how many articles you read * each article's relative cost multiplier from what different news sites (15% forbes, 30% percent NYT, 10 percent utne reader, 45 percent random YouTube videos) and then remits the subscription revenue to each publisher based on the percentage used. For flexibility's sake, maybe the publisher was hoping to get 17 dollars coin based, PAYG revenue off of a 15 subscription at 80 percent utilization, but them's the breaks, because in other months they'll get more revenue than they would expect because a customer engaged with less content overall. Obviously, the existence of tier limits would be for those cases where someone tries to look at a thousand different articles on a silver plan, and perhaps Financial Times would only allow Platinum subscribers to work with this plan, but the reduction in friction, ease of subscription management for the customer, and equitable financial allocation would (I believe) make such a scheme viable.
by vhiremath4 | 2026-02-19 21:17:32+00:00
I am on the same site. It’s trash and doesn’t even come close to detailing the internal dynamics.

People have no idea what’s actually going on inside, but I guess it’s simpler to just be upset and take sides. There are people associated with DOGE (Sam included) who are tirelessly doing unsexy and thankless work while not being sensational like Trump or Elon. But they still get trampled on by people who simply want to be upset and ignorant.
by makestuff | 2026-02-19 21:17:32+00:00
Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150.

I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.
by xienze | 2026-02-19 21:18:19+00:00
I think you’re making the mistake of assuming that this thing that we can’t really verify (because we can’t make sure <person voting> = <person registered> at the polls) isn’t happening, precisely because we can’t accurately verify it. It’s not a theoretical concern that voter rolls can be stale (because of not removing dead people or people who have moved in a timely manner) or otherwise inaccurate. And attempts to actually purge voter rolls always meet stiff resistance as some nefarious ploy to disenfranchise voters. There is at any time a non-zero chance that you could vote using the name of someone who’s either dead or not around any more. So why so much resistance to safeguarding against that? Nevermind the added benefit that a national ID card could be used as a real replacement for Social Security numbers. But again, so much resistance to something that every other country thinks is a good idea. Which is even more assuming since we point to “well everyone else does it that way” for so many issues. But voter ID? Oh, well that’s complicated, couldn’t possibly work here.
by greedo | 2026-02-19 21:18:54+00:00
My annual premium for insurance was roughly $2400/year. Since then, it's gone to about $6k per annum. Even compounded at whatever the S&P500 returns for a 40 year interval, I'm pretty sure I'm ahead of the game. If you think I've lost $600K by having work provided insurance, we're not dealing with the same level of reality.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-02-19 21:19:06+00:00
In other words, AI partially solves the technique problem, but not the taste problem.

In the arts the differentiators have always been technical skill, technical inventiveness, original imagination, and taste - the indefinable factor that makes one creative work more resonant than another.

AI automates some of those, often to a better-than-median extent. But so far taste remains elusive. It's the opposite of the "Throw everything in a bucket and fish out some interesting interpolation of it by poking around with some approximate sense of direction until you find something you like" that defines how LLMs work.

The definition of slop is poor taste. By that definition a lot of human work is also slop.

But that also means that in spite of the technical crudity, it's possible to produce interesting AI work if you have taste and a cultivated aesthetic, and aren't just telling the machine "make me something interesting based on this description."
Ask HN: An approachable book on programming concepts/computer basics for a teen?
by jamesgill | 2026-02-19 21:19:31+00:00
My teenage daughter is taking an 'intro to programming' class in high school, and the class is starting with Scratch/App Inventor to introduce concepts (algorithms, etc.).

To inspire her a bit, I'd like to supplement this with an easy, approachable print book (even a graphic novel-type) that would introduce her to fundamental concepts like algorithms and even basics of 'how computers work'. Caveat: she's not tech-averse, but has had very limited tech exposure (yes, really). Grateful for any suggestions.
by moffkalast | 2026-02-19 21:19:33+00:00
It really depends on the situation. I think there's an argument for generating in a lower level strongly typed language, where most of the work of writing the pointlessly verbose parts is eliminated, any errors are found by the compiler immediately, but it still leaves the option for handwritten optimizations when needed. Sort of how one can drop down to C in python for the parts that need more performance.
by ThunderSizzle | 2026-02-19 21:19:45+00:00
Already could file free with free tax usa.

Not that impressive.

I'd be more impressed we got rid of income tax on salaried people entirely, or permit families the same type of deductions that businesses get, and only tax my actual profit - I can't deduct my overpriced housing, or my utilities unless I have a home office for ny own business.
by keeda | 2026-02-19 21:19:57+00:00
Yes, we as a society urgently have to figure out how to learn and educate with AI. There are even studies showing that students who use AI to do their work do not learn the necessary skills.

And I'm also hearing grumblings about entry level talent that is absolutely clueless without AI, which does not help the junior hiring scene at all.

At this point it seems clear that people wishing to learn a discipline should restrict their usage of AI until they have "built the muscles", but none of our educational, testing, recruitment and upskilling practices are conducive to that.
by claytongulick | 2026-02-19 21:20:01+00:00
> maybe we should change that and have a simpler system with much less complexity

Wholeheartedly agree, but I see the root cause of the issue being income tax itself. As soon as you tax income, you'll go down and endless rabbit hole of what's fair to tax, how much, what kind of income, investment income vs wage income, percentage vs flat rate, etc...

That gave us the mess we have.

I like the idea of consumption tax exclusively (would require an amendment). You're taxed on your purchases.

It's easy to drive behavior (more tax on some things... tax on cigarettes, yachts and private jets) and easy to make more fair (exclude grocery staples).
by tptacek | 2026-02-19 21:20:03+00:00
Right, I'm not arguing developers don't read their own code or their teammates code or anything that merges to main in a repo they're responsible for. Just that the "it's only worth reading if someone took the time to actually write it" objection doesn't meaningfully apply to code in Show HN's --- there's no expectation that code gets read at all. That's why moderation is so at pains to ensure there's some way people can play with whatever it is being shown ("sign up pages can't be Show HN's").
by hnnp0329 | 2026-02-19 21:20:12+00:00
Silly nitpick but I think a better analogy would be the coach takes the blame for bad ownership decisions.

In my years watching sports coaches are almost always the first one to be made the fall guy and I've witnessed plenty of situations where I can't really say they're the one at fault. There are two simple reasons in my opinion. Teams invest WAY more money in players so they have to try to commit to them even if the player is potentially not good enough and owners are never going to go "wow I made some bad decisions I should sell the team". All of this is to say coaches are the cheapest and easiest ones to pin the problems on.
by SetTheorist | 2026-02-19 21:20:55+00:00
"It's that the people running them are committing ethical crimes that have not been formally illegalized."

I think it's even worse than that - they are committing actual crimes that many people were punished severely for in the previous decades, (for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...)
by 15155 | 2026-02-19 21:20:58+00:00
> A broken federal government means guns are easily exported from red states with practically zero gun laws to blue states where they are used to commit crimes

So why are the crime rates in most of these "red states" you are referring to often so much lower?

> Any basic research will yield many studies (including from the American government) showing that the majority of guns used in crimes in Mexico are traced back to the States

I couldn't give less of a fuck if this were true "research" or not: this isn't my problem, nor is it a valid reason to restrict my rights.

Also, please: a multi-billion-dollar criminal enterprise can't build or buy a machine shop and enslave or hire some machinists? They can build submarines and drones, but just couldn't possibly operate without US firearms? What reality do you live in?
by nphardon | 2026-02-19 21:21:06+00:00
If you tell your doctor that a parent had polyps removed (say, recently), that will give you your best chance of getting one. Most likely, if you're in an even remotely progressive area, your doc wants you to have one, but their hands are tied by the insurance company. Afaik you dont have to provide any proof of your claim re parental polyps.
by philsnow | 2026-02-19 21:21:43+00:00
> The forced changeover from coal gas to natural gas is largely credited with a reduction of suicide by 40% after it was done.

The mechanism of that reduction very well could be reducing the level of depression in the populace and thus suicidal ideation, rather than just making the means less handy (or of course, some combination). Coal gas, like any other gas used for combustion, doesn't burn perfectly and UK homes likely had persistent amounts of carbon monoxide roughly all the time since heat gets used not-quite-year-round.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning#Chro... :

> Chronic exposure to relatively low levels of carbon monoxide may cause persistent headaches, [...], depression [...].