MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fschuett | 2026-02-24 02:59:38+00:00
Okay, so will companies now vibe-code a Linux-like license-washed kernel, to get rid of the GPL?

> The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data.

Yes, and? Isn't Stallmans first freedom the "freedom to study the source code" (FSF Freedom I)? Where does it say I have to be a human to study it? If you argue "oh but you may only read / train on the source code if you are intending to write / generate GPL code", then you're admitting that the GPL effectively is only meant for "libre" programmers in their "libre" universe and it might as well be closed-source. If a human may study the code to extract the logic (the "idea") without infringing on the expression, why is it called "laundering" if a machine does it?

Let's say I look (as a human) at some GPL source code. And then I close the browser tab and roughly re-implement from memory what I saw. Am I now required to release my own code as GPL? More extreme: If I read some GPL code and a year later I implement a program that roughly resembles what I saw back then, then I can, in your universe, be sued because only "libre programmers" may read "libre source code".

In German copyright law, there is a concept of a "fading formula": if the creative features of the original work "fade away" behind the independent content of the new work to the point of being unrecognizable, it constitutes a new work, not a derivative, so the input license doesn't matter. So, for LLMs, even if the input is GPL, proprietary, whatever: if the output is unrecognizable from the input, it does not matter.
by totetsu | 2026-02-24 03:00:33+00:00
With this renaming of AISI to CAISI[1], and the resignation of its founding director[2] Elizabeth Kelly, It seems that the position has sifted to, don't let any concerns about social harms stop tech companies doing what ever they want, and also lets make a show of how bad China is. I think any public comment outside of the narrow definition of AI Risk as risk to national security, might fall on deaf ears.

[1] https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2025/06/stateme...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ai-safety-institute-di...
by iryndin | 2026-02-24 03:00:46+00:00
I pulled the latest .com zone snapshot (updated Feb 22, 2026) and analyzed 160M active domains across 2,895 registrars, focusing on creation/expiration/update dates plus nameserver infrastructure. The report includes year-by-year growth, name-length saturation, registrar concentration, and NS-based classification, plus “new” cuts like an 18-month expiration forecast, DNS update recency, registrar portfolio vintage, and day-of-week registration patterns.
by selridge | 2026-02-24 03:01:05+00:00
This is speculation, but I suspect the training data argument is going to be a real loser in the courtroom. We’re getting out of the region where memorization is a big failure mode for frontier models. They are also increasingly trained on synthetic text, whose copyright is very difficult to determine.

We also so far have yet to see anyone successfully sue over software copyright with LLMs—-this is a bit redundant, but we’ve also not seen a user of one of these models be sued for output.

Maybe we converge on the view of the US copyright office which is that none of this can be protected.

I kind of like that one as a future for software engineers, because it forces them all at long last to become rules lawyers. If we disallow all copyright protection for machine generated code, there might be a cottage industry of folks who provide a reliably human layer that is copyrightable. Like Boeing, they will have to write to the regulator and not to the spec. I feel that’s a suitable destination for a discipline. That’s had it too good for too long.
Project Falcon
by JohannaWeb | 2026-02-24 03:01:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building Falcon, a chat-first desktop app that uses Bluesky’s AT Protocol for identity.

The idea is simple:
Bluesky gives you portable identity (DID), but it doesn’t have structured communities like Discord servers. Falcon experiments with adding a server/channel layer on top of AT Proto identities.

Stack:
- Electron + React + TypeScript
- Spring Boot backend
- AT Protocol integration (handle → DID resolution)
- Currently moving from REST-based messaging to WebSockets

Right now it’s a solo project and still early, but fully functional:
- Sign in with Bluesky app password
- Create servers & channels
- Send messages
- Identity tied to AT Proto

I’m especially interested in feedback on:
- Real-time architecture choices (keeping a monolith vs introducing a gateway)
- Whether chat belongs on top of AT Proto, or if it fights the protocol’s design

Repo:
https://github.com/JohannaWeb/ProjectFalcon

Would appreciate technical feedback more than product hype.
by umanwizard | 2026-02-24 03:02:21+00:00
Plenty of countries that are well-run democracies don’t have separation of powers between the legislature and the executive — the UK is one of many examples.

Separation between the executive and the judiciary is important, but separation from the legislature doesn’t really seem to be.

Even among countries that do have such a separation, the US is unique in making it so difficult for the legislature to pass anything, which IMO is the most serious flaw in its system. The permanent deadlock is what creates such a temptation for the executive to circumvent the rule of law and try to seize power wherever it can.
Show HN: Falcon – Chat-first communities built on Bluesky AT Protocol
by JohannaWeb | 2026-02-24 03:02:38+00:00
I’m building a chat-first community app that uses Bluesky’s AT Protocol for identity.

Current architecture:
- Electron client
- Spring Boot backend (monolith)
- REST for servers/channels
- Planning WebSocket-based messaging

As a solo builder, I’m trying to balance simplicity with future scalability.

At what point would you introduce:
- a separate WebSocket gateway
- pub/sub (Redis, etc.)
- or keep everything in one Spring app until it breaks?

Curious how others approached real-time chat systems early on.

Project for context:
https://github.com/JohannaWeb/ProjectFalcon
by Permik | 2026-02-24 03:03:02+00:00
Assuming US, I think that the gov't can't actually compel speech from an entity e.g. force to keep signing the canary.
Warrant canaries are the way entities can circumvent the narrow case where the gov't actually can restrict your free speech, by creating a case where your lack of speak is telling. By this framework we can then come around again to the first point.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-24 03:03:19+00:00
Identity doesn't work that way. Doesn't change where my family came from, my families traditions, what identity bits my family chose to hang onto, or how we try to understand the world.

Good job keeping up your culture of being petty judges of us though. At least when your ancestors did it we were your neighbors and you had good cause (we were the wrong religion or whatever your ancestors hated in us and your family got to live and stay and mine had to flee and die). It's kinda pathetic to care after you ran us off to still try to tell us how to be and to define us instead of letting us define ourselves.

Wild to see you so proud to be petty, small, and hateful of people that did nothing to you all but want to be friendly.
by umanwizard | 2026-02-24 03:03:48+00:00
They should stand trial in a US court, and if they’re acquitted, they should be set free, like anyone else. That’s a pretty fundamental principle of the rule of law.

If they’re indeed innocent and can’t be deported because nobody will take them, then they have to be allowed to stay in the US. That’s unfortunate but not really their fault given that the US brought them into its jurisdiction against their will in the first place.

It seems transparently unfair to capture someone and then keep them forever because nobody else wants them.
by brigandish | 2026-02-24 03:05:28+00:00
Ethnicity and nationality are not the same, though they have until very recently overlapped to an enormous extent. Someone might well be of anglo-saxon ethnicity and be American.

Being British myself, I find it fun to tease the yanks about all manner of things, but actual animus of the kind you’re displaying just looks like a massive chip on the shoulder.
by kamaal | 2026-02-24 03:07:36+00:00
>>If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly?

You mean to say if the unit and functional tests cases are given the system must generate code for you? You might want to look at Prolog in that case.

>>Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself

We have been able to do something like this reliably for like 50 years now.
by skeledrew | 2026-02-24 03:09:52+00:00
> modern indentured servitude

Can confirm those targeted by H1B visas, etc don't think like that at all. I was in the US for a while on a F1 visa, which allowed me to work for a couple years, and I was super grateful for the opportunity. Had a couple positions with wages I heard some ranting was "too low", while I found it very livable and was even able to save a significant amount. I can imagine it being very similar for others who've come from places where earnings really are a pittance for many.
by snowhale | 2026-02-24 03:10:04+00:00
The framing of AI agent 'security' in most regulatory discussions conflates two distinct problems: (1) agent action authorization — does the agent have permission to take this action on behalf of this user, and (2) agent context integrity — is the information the agent is acting on accurate and untampered.

Most current frameworks focus on (1) and miss (2). An agent that has perfect permission controls but draws from a poisoned or incomplete context window is still dangerous. For operations use cases, context integrity is arguably the harder problem — agents pulling from CRM, email, and ticketing systems simultaneously have large attack surfaces through injected data.

The NIST RFI would benefit from a clearer taxonomy here. Authorization and context integrity require different mitigations.
by doom2 | 2026-02-24 03:10:06+00:00
GPU prices went through the roof for crypto and then the pandemic and never really recovered to pre-pandemic prices before once again spiking because of AI demand. So where's the increased supply of Nvidia cards to account for all the continued demand? And why haven't RAM manufacturers announced plans for increased production (instead of pulling out of the consumer market altogether)?

The past 6 years of GPU pricing (the 5080 launched at $1000, currently $1500-1800 at Microcenter) don't exactly fill me with confidence that RAM manufacturers will increase supply to meet demand and bring down prices again.
by kamaal | 2026-02-24 03:10:28+00:00
You are just validating the point that code is spec.

For your proposed system to work one must have a deterministic way of sending said spec to a system(Compiler?) and getting the same output everytime.

Input/Output is just one thing, software does a lot of 'side effect' kind of work, and has security implications. You don't leave such things to luck. Things either work or don't.
by elictronic | 2026-02-24 03:11:01+00:00
The younger generation is growing up where the internet is a giant dumpster fire of enshitification that a tanker full of gasoline just got poured on in the form of AI chatbots. With agents becoming even easier the equivalent of script kiddies are going to make it so much worse.

Privacy with respect to the government was one of the final pillars, but when everything placed on the internet is absorbed by the alphabets of government agencies, and the current admin does searches of it as their leisure they understand nothing is anonymous anymore.

It's funny that this is what the younger generation is going to think Millennials and older are completely stupid for still supporting. The current structure only benefits corporations and bots.
by jmspring | 2026-02-24 03:11:10+00:00
This is honestly one of the more naive takes I've seen in awhile. People includes more than people that frequent HN. My wife and I are discussing I'd like to keep finance and related things in a password manager. She is in the social sciences (has a couple of degrees) and isn't a fan.

The majority of computer users are not on HN.

You profile says "Trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. DM me if you have ideas." - I would recommend exploring connections and opinions outside tech.
by Davidzheng | 2026-02-24 03:12:11+00:00
There's a lot of value in the implementation of many strong and fast algeorithms in computer algebra in proprietary tools such as Maple, Wolfram, Matlab. However, I (though of course believe that such work needs to be compensated) find it against the spirit of science to keep them from the general public. I think it would be good service to use AI tools to bring open source alternatives like sympy and sage and macaulay to par. There's really A LOT of cool algorithms missing (most familiar to me are some in computational algebraic geometry)

Additionally I think because of how esoteric some algorithms are, they are not always implemented in the most efficient way for today's computers. It would be really nice to have better software written by strong software engineers who also understands the maths for mathematicians. I hope to see an application of AI here to bring more SoTA tools to mathematicians--I think it is much more value than formalization brings to be completely honest.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-24 03:12:56+00:00
The problem isn't just the code, it's the use of incredibly brittle but eminently fashionable modes like GCM and CTR, and algorithms like ChaCha20 that only work in CTR mode. Older modes like CBC are pretty abuse-resistant, repeat an IV or use an all-zero IV and the whole thing is very lightly less secure while with something like GCM you get a catastrophic failure of security. And if you use CBC+HMAC you typically get key separation as an inherent property of the setup. The solution isn't to gaze into the middle distance and say "well everyone should just use SIV" (which has problems of its own) but to default to safer modes that don't fail catastrophically when used in the straightforward, obvious way.
by brigandish | 2026-02-24 03:13:46+00:00
> But Europeans are diverse mutts as well.

Speak for yourself, because

> If their great-great-grandfather was Scottish, they then assume everyone before him was 100% super duper Scottish

That is, indeed, the correct assumption to make. I would recommend having a look at the work done on population genetics at Oxford University’s People of the British Isles project[1]. Even their homepage should relieve you of some misconceptions:

> The People of the British Isles (PoBI) project was initiated by Sir Walter Bodmer in 2004, in an effort to create the first ever detailed genetic map of a country. The United Kingdom’s history bristles with immigrations, wars and invasions, so the PoBI researchers faced a tremendous task in investigating how past events impacted the genetic makeup of modern British people.

> Results included a map (image below) showing a remarkable concordance between genetic and geographical clustering of our samples across the United Kingdom.

[1] https://www.peopleofthebritishisles.org/
by 453yuh46 | 2026-02-24 03:13:47+00:00
Saami were sparsely populating large areas - so they did not exactly live side by side with other people. And the more people came to live where Saami were herding their reindeers, the less space they had left to herd them. Throw in to that climate change into that as well. But to the contrary to what you are claiming here, Saami did assimilate into Norwegians and Norwegians also put a lot of effort in assimilation of Saami - mainly during the times, when religion was dominant form of identity, so it was done with good intentions - like all the major crimes against humanity.

Vikings were a product of mixing people of different origins. And that is a consistent result across whole Europe. The same thing applies in Western Europe, just as in Eastern Europe. And that applies to Norwegian vikings, even if they had a chance to colonize some empty lands - they still also took wives from other places than just Norway.
by roger110 | 2026-02-24 03:14:09+00:00
"The web platform object model inherits a lot of 1990s OOP flavor, with garbage collection, deep inheritance hierarchies, and so on. Rust’s ownership model is not a natural fit for that."

I'm confused about this part. What part of the browser did they want GC and inheritance for? I'd get it if they were writing the UI in this, but the rest of this post is about the JS engine. They weren't going to 1:1 map JS objects to Swift objects and rely on ARC to manage memory, were they?
by jmye | 2026-02-24 03:14:35+00:00
> It's most definitely a serious comment from a serious person.

It literally isn't, no matter how many lies you make up about it. What politicians did in the 90s has no relevance today and pretending they're the same is, again, unmitigated horseshit from someone who thinks everyone will just nod with him when he screams that 1+1=3 now.

For the rest? "I know you are but what am I" should've been left in elementary school. What you're saying is bullshit. You're using words you don't understand because you think making things emotional will get you points, you're pretending that Ukraine is just throwing people away and not, you know, ensuring that it continues to exist as a country, and you don't even know what the fuck "events leading up to ... 2013" means, given that it's followed by "and then a hostile foreign country invaded. Twice."
by snowhale | 2026-02-24 03:16:12+00:00
The core issue with OpenClaw on personal machines isn't just the attack surface — it's the trust boundary collapse. Personal machines have mixed-trust contexts: work credentials alongside personal accounts, cached auth tokens from dozens of services. An agent with broad access operates in an environment where the cost of a compromise is asymmetric.

Enterprise deployments of AI agents solve this differently: scoped credentials, audit logs, explicit action authorization per-user. The 'install on your laptop' paradigm trades all of that for convenience.

The interesting design question is whether you can get personal-machine convenience without trust boundary collapse. Probably not, without fundamental changes to how OS-level permissions interact with agent action APIs.
by orbital-decay | 2026-02-24 03:16:21+00:00
Sandboxing is necessary but you still have to trust it with the thing it's supposed to operate on, that means it should be able do the job correctly and be resistant to prompt injections (social engineering in the case of that human worker example). In its current state neither is really possible. It's a system of a highly experimental nature, use your own damn sense, don't give it too much and don't rely upon it.
by porcoda | 2026-02-24 03:16:49+00:00
The em-dash metric is silly. Some people (including me) have always used them and plan to continue to do so. I just pulled up some random articles by Wolfram from the before-LLM days and guess what: em-dashes everywhere. One sample from 2018 had 89 of them. Wolfram has always written in the same style (which, admittedly, can be a bit self-aggrandizing and verbose). It’s kinda weird to see people just blowing it off as AI slop just because of a —.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-24 03:16:54+00:00
In the old Superman comic books he had a "Fortress of Solitude" that only he could get to.

It was way different than what eventually appeared in the movies.

One of the major differences was not the visuals, but the thought process he was going through before, during and after his visit or stay.

Since it was a comic book, there was a smooth transition between the normal text dialog bubbles when talking to people back & forth, to where they only related his thoughts while he was by himself.

Maybe lots more people could use a refuge of some kind more than they think.
by kmeisthax | 2026-02-24 03:19:06+00:00
Half the process of jailbreaking electronics involves reverse-engineering. There's some promising work in that direction, but reverse-engineering is still not AI's strong suit.

Also, you'll actually need to hook up Claude to all the debug interfaces and pins present on the chip you're trying to break.

Also also, if this worked at all the feds would put a gun to Anthropic's head to make Claude refuse to do anything that might break DMCA 1201.

Law is code.
by superice | 2026-02-24 03:19:35+00:00
Aside from the legal question whether the manufacturer allows you to do so, I’m pretty excited about somebody vibe coding firmwire to a 35 ton machine with a bunch of big attachments at the back and plenty of ways to mangle the bodies of careless operators without the rpm so much as audibly rising from strain. Should give us plenty of videos to traumatize the next generation of children with a little bit too much internet access at an early age. I feel nostalgic for those days.

(This is sarcasm, pretty please don’t vibe code car firmware, let alone anything more dangerous than that)
by areoform | 2026-02-24 03:19:59+00:00
I think analyses like these are motivated reasoning. In 2000, I'm sure you could have said that after infrastructure costs the internet and the web added "basically zero" to US economic growth. And there were people saying that!

Someone I deeply respect, Clifford Stollm wrote a book called “Silicon Snake Oil — Second thoughts on the information highway" in 1995.

And while he was and is a brilliant person, Stoll was wrong. Smart people are terrible at predicting the most consequential changes in our future – even when they're familiar with the technology. I wrote a bit about my thesis why here, https://1517.substack.com/p/inside-v-outside-context-problem...

Don't make his mistake. Don't look away from the change being wrought. The world has changed and our history now has a new, sharp dividing chapter "Before ChatGPT | After ChatGPT"

and that chapter will go down right next to "Before Trinity | After Trinity"; "Before PC | After PC"; "Before 'Internet' | After 'Internet'"†

† Yes, I know I'm referring to the Web. But we're still using the dark fiber from the .com boom.
by servo_sausage | 2026-02-24 03:21:08+00:00
Yeah, not compared with the extra money being spent on compute directly. $200 gets you a fair amount of extra processing power, and that's if one LIDAR is even enough, with the solid state style currently around we need several.

Things like when to change lanes, do I need to yield for that ambulance, or what is that pedestrian going to do, are not really improved by point clouds.

I still want the massive point clouds for validation and ground truth, but not for driving.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-24 03:21:58+00:00
One difference between Anthropic and others is that Anthropic is crawling publicly visible information, and their argument is that this is fair use. Whereas these Chinese LLMs are circumventing an account creating process and terms of service to misuse non public information.

Lots of people think Anthropic training their own LLM is the same but it really isn’t.
by ncallaway | 2026-02-24 03:23:22+00:00
I'm sure company policy would technically prohibit them from accessing company resources from their personal computer; or if it does allow access to company resources from their personal computer then their corporate tech policy very likely does apply to their personal computing.

If the executive bought it for a personal mac mini for personal use only, with no interaction with company resources, then the person probably wouldn't have told the story.
by xmcp123 | 2026-02-24 03:23:27+00:00
MoltBook is vibe coded. It passed its own API key via client side JS, and in doing so exposed full read/write access to it’s supabase db, complete with over a million API keys.

That is groundbreaking for a product held in such high esteem, just not in a good way.

I lack the words to explain my frustration at this timeline.