MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by parineum | 2026-02-28 06:35:38+00:00
At the end of the day, they're still burning cash. Even if inference is cheap, it's also not hard to compete on. They aren't going to be a trillion dollar
inference company.

Eventually there will be a race to the bottom on inference price to the customer by companies that aren't trying to subsidize their GPU investments.

OpenAI is spending money because they think they need to for their business to survive. They're hoping that the next big breakthrough just requires more compute and, somehow, that'll build them a moat.
by KingMob | 2026-02-28 06:35:47+00:00
I visited Vientiane in Laos a couple years ago. One of the more depressing places to visit there is the COPE Center.

It's a group that provides prosthetics to people who have lost body parts due to landmines left over from the Vietnam War.

Even decades later, there are areas in Laos that have so many unexploded bomblets, it's dangerous to do stuff there, or even build.
by rdtsc | 2026-02-28 06:36:25+00:00
That's always been the loophole. But it involved an extra step so they are just trying to get rid of that one annoyance.

Here is an interesting thing to think about which country spies on Americans the most and how? Are there New Zealand commandos sneaking around the shores tapping cables? Moles working in the AT&T for the Canadian government? What happens if one of those individuals get caught, are they quietly allowed to leave and if they commit any crimes when caught do the charges get erased magically? Otherwise if that doesn't happen there is danger they'll grab our spies in their countries in turn. Or they just blatantly pass lists around of who works for whom so they don't interfere with each other as that would preclude getting the data back through the loop to the NSA.

There is of course another loophole and that is private entities collecting data. The Constitution doesn't anything about that, so the government figures it's fare game if they just pay a company to collect the data and then they query later. They didn't collect it so it's not "spying".
Show HN: I built GeoQuests where people can request photos of a place
by Swain123 | 2026-02-28 06:37:30+00:00
Hi HN. I had faced an issue where I wanted to know how a place I was travelling to looked like. Like everyone else I looked at google maps and snap chat too. But Google streetview images were usually old and snapchat snaps lacked control. So I built GeoQuests for anyone who wants to know what’s going on on Earth.

You drop a quest at a real location. People see it on the map, go there, and complete it by taking a photo when they’re close enough. The app checks the image's GPS coordinatee, time of the image and if the image fits the request's description. I am using Gemini to verify the image.

Basically you, pin a place -> others discover it on the map -> they go there and complete the quest with a verified photo.

You can browse the map, see public quests and create quests. Wanted some feedback on the project.
by kelnos | 2026-02-28 06:38:55+00:00
Yup. I have the $20 plan, and I've been focusing full time (and then some) on my open source projects. I usually hit the limit 2-3 hours into the 5-hour limit window, and have to wait for it to reset.

In a way it's kinda nice, because it forces me not to rely on it too much, and I mostly use it for more mechanical changes, nothing that I'd consider "creative" (because I enjoy that part of programming!). But it's also frustrating if I'm, say, building a planning document or getting suggestions or help with debugging, and suddenly I hit the limit and have to context switch.

So if I get into this program, I will probably enjoy Max 20x a lot, and then be really bummed when the 6-month period is over. Not sure if I'll be bummed enough to fork over the cash for it to continue, but I'm sure I will be very tempted to do so.
by ipaddr | 2026-02-28 06:38:58+00:00
Do you think the food bank gives you all of your meals everyday? One day not open and people are eating each other.

They wouldn't ransack home in rich neighbourhoods for food for a million reasons (too far, too weak, roads are closed, rich homes have security, rich people have as much food at home or less compared to an average person). They would break into the supermarkets first, then each others homes around them before what was left would organize and go searching.

The checks helped and were the right call but we weren't close to a zombie outbreak.
by apgwoz | 2026-02-28 06:40:54+00:00
> with their demands that the government already knows exactly where they live, where they hang out…

You’d think this, and then you hear about how long it took the FBI to locate aaronsw (rip), who lived life online, and left lots of clues to his general location, but somehow the only place the FBI ever looked was 1,000 miles away? I guess you could say that was 15 years ago, but we had domestic spy programs 15 years ago, too.
by cagz | 2026-02-28 06:41:34+00:00
The use of data for model training is a simple toggle, very easy to opt out of during the initial setup.

Also, the end product is open source anyway, so there is no case of IP being leaked into training data. What remains is that they can use, with your permission, the overall coding practices of a great programmer to fine-tune Claude's code and models. As in, how one approaches planning or troubleshooting. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps every maintainer should decide for themselves whether they want to contribute back or not.
by kelnos | 2026-02-28 06:42:16+00:00
That's fair, but I think it's also not unreasonable for Anthropic to want some sort of "compensation" for giving something away for free (even if it's just a paltry 6-months, which screams "sales tactic"). The terms around getting free stuff sometimes have things that aren't compatible with something about how we do things, and that's fine; we just don't get to take advantage of the free stuff.
by phs318u | 2026-02-28 06:42:37+00:00
Thank you for responding. Everyone wants to think they will “do the right thing” when their own personal Rubicon is challenged. In practice, so many factors are at play, not least of which are the other people you may be responsible for. The calculus of balancing those differing imperatives is only straightforward for those that have never faced this squarely. I’ve been marched out of jobs twice for standing up for what I believed to be right at the time. Am still literally blacklisted (much to the surprise of various recruiters) at a major bank here 8 years after the fact. I can’t imagine that the threat of being blacklisted from a whole raft of companies contracting with a known vindictive regime would make the decision easier.
by layer8 | 2026-02-28 06:42:39+00:00
I don’t understand your first comment. At that point, Altman’s tweet didn’t exist yet, and is immaterial to the reading of Anthropic’s and Hegseth’s statements.

To your second comment, it was clear enough to me to be the most plausible reading of the situation by far.

We state what we think the situation is all the time, without explicitly writing “I think the situation is…”.
by baconner | 2026-02-28 06:43:02+00:00
Respectfully, it's very hard to see how anyone could look at what just happened and come to the conclusion that one company ends up classed a "supply chain risk" while another agrees the the same terms that led to that. Either the terms are looser, they're not going to be enforced, or there's another reason for the loud attempt to blacklist Anthropic. It's very difficult to see how you could take this at face value in any case. If it is loose terms or a wink agreement to not check in on enforcement you're never going to be told that. We can imagine other scenerios where the terms stated were not the real reason for the blacklisting, but it's a real struggle (at least for me) to find an explanation for this deal that doesn't paint OpenAI in a very ethically questionable light.
by SllX | 2026-02-28 06:44:02+00:00
> Maybe a better answer would be for US states to adopt the parliamentary system?

Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think it would change outcomes as much as people would think, but to scope limit this back to California again because electoral law discussions just fucking spiral anytime there’s no geographic constraint, the root of California’s lawmaking problems is that the legislature is both poorly structured and poorly balanced against the direct democratic approach we have taken for so much of our lawmaking. I don’t think that’s inherent to the non-parliamentary system we have in place, but a result of incremental rule changes stemming from decades of ballot propositions that are supposed to solve a problem, but don’t and tend to have negative knock-on effects that fly under the radar.

Or put another way: the legislature is for legislating. It doesn’t need a competing power structure, and it doesn’t need to be balanced by anything other than a good functional Executive power and a good functional independent Judiciary. If you have that as your starting point, then maybe there’s room to discuss if there are any real advantages of a Parliamentary system instead.
by wolframhempel | 2026-02-28 06:44:10+00:00
I assume this is in response to OpenAI working with the Pentagon (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/27/tech/openai-pentagon-deal...).

I'm afraid that AI weapons will follow a similar dynamic to nuclear ones where, as much as we'd like to avoid them, someone will build them. Which means, everyone will need them. I'm worried that we're repeating the pre-Ukraine war mindset of US Tech keeping their distance from defense while other countries have a joined tech/military base.
by SilentM68 | 2026-02-28 06:45:11+00:00
Mr. AI analyzed the wording in the link and said:

California Assembly Bill 1043 requires OS providers (including Linux) to add age verification at account setup, prompting users for birth date/age to signal age brackets to apps in covered stores.
It may violate privacy by enabling data collection/misuse beyond age checks, similar to UK/Discord issues; no explicit civil rights violations noted, but could restrict access for adults/minors if misapplied.
Benefits: Enables age-appropriate app content, protecting minors.
Drawbacks: Privacy risks, enforcement hurdles (e.g., Linux disclaimers like "not for California use"), aligns with global trends amplifying concerns.

An updated deep dive by Mr. AI returned the following analysis:

Official link: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Revised pros: Enhances child safety via non-PII age brackets for app compliance; data minimization limits info shared; anticompetitive prohibitions prevent misuse; good faith shields from liability.
Revised cons: Setup requires age input, risking misuse despite safeguards; enforcement challenges for open-source OS like Linux; increased developer liability for signals; potential access restrictions from errors or misreports. No clear privacy/civil rights violations for adults/minors, but implementation costs and global trend concerns persist.

My thoughts:
California lawmakers keep turning the screw more and more to the left with AB 1043 being introduced by Democrat Buffy Wicks. Though it has bipartisan co-authors (8 Democrats, 3 Republicans) and passed the Assembly unanimously (58-0), it still feels a bit authoritarian to me. The California Assembly political divide is very left leaning with Democrats controlling 60 seats and Republicans 20 for a total of 80 with Democrats controlling a supermajority.

What's to stop someone from building their own Distro using LinuxFromScratch to bypass this new restriction? Nothing, in my view!

Which I had money cause, Florida looking good about now.
by kelnos | 2026-02-28 06:45:22+00:00
I mean, some people can have one of your quoted opinions, and some people can have the other. That's fine, people can not like this for their own reasons.

I applied for this, but it puts a bad taste in my mouth. I've been working on open source for over 20 years now, and while I don't expect any compensation, being offered something like this feels a little icky. If they really want to "thank" me, give it to me for free indefinitely. They've benefited immeasurably from all the open source code they've sucked in as training data. Their product literally would not exist without it.
by MarsIronPI | 2026-02-28 06:45:31+00:00
Have you tried Eat[0]? It's a reasonably fast terminal emulator that integrates with Eshell so that all commands run in Eshell have full terminal emulation (but they're still run in the original Eshell buffer, which makes it better than `eshell-visual-commands'). I haven't had any terminal emulation problems since switching to it.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat

With regards to completion, I use corfu, which gives me nice inline popups. I use the bash-completion package, so I don't have issues with programs that don't provide Eshell completions (which are basically all of them).
by kstrauser | 2026-02-28 06:45:39+00:00
So, what happens when you test it on 11 digit numbers? I don’t mean that as a gotcha or “LOL dumb transformer” snark. More like, does the accuracy start to drop as you add digits? Or instead, maybe it’s the transformer equivalent of a stack overflow and it outputs a picture of a burning spoon or something?

And for that matter, what’s it do with 9 digit numbers? Like, is it more accurate with them, or are these little guys mainly good at adding numbers with exactly 10 digits?

Basically, are the failures modes a gentle increase in inaccuracy, or spectacle failure outside their parameters?
by as1mov | 2026-02-28 06:47:33+00:00
Were computers common in schools in India in the early 90s? I was born in 1993, so this is a bit early from my time, but when I was in a (government) school computers started appearing in the early 2000s. They became common in households way later, probably around the late 2000s.

Also funny that your name clicked something in my head to check your profile, and yep you're indeed the Flash guy!

Back in the 2005-2010 era I was making Flash games as a hobby and used to browse a bunch of related forums/sites (flashkit, gotoAndPlay) for tutorials. Your name always stuck out since you're one of the few Indians who were well known for their expertise :)
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-28 06:47:35+00:00
Did Sam Altman say that he wouldn't allow ChatGPT to be used for fully autonomous weapons? (Not quite the same as "human responsibility for use of force".)

I don't want to overanalyze things but I also noticed his statement didn't say "our agreement specifically says chatgpt will never be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance." It said something that kind of gestured towards that, but it didn't quite come out and say it. It says "The DoW agrees with these principles, and we put them in our agreement." Could the principles have been outlined in a nonbinding preamble, or been a statement of the DoW's current intentions rather than binding their future behavior? You should be very suspicious when a corporate person says something vague that somewhat implies what you want to hear - if they could have told you explicitly what you wanted to hear, they would have.

But anyway, it doesn't matter. You said you don't think it should be used for autonomous weapons. I'd be willing to bet you 10:1 that you'll never find altman saying anything like "our agreement specifically says chatgpt will never be used for fully autonomous weapons", now or any point in the future.
by wood_spirit | 2026-02-28 06:48:07+00:00
OpenAI step in to work with defence department on stuff so questionable that another company took a public stance to distance itself from?

Myself, I’ve always “followed the money” when the current administration has taken public positions on things from media company mergers to data centres etc. So a bit of me wonders how much of the “anthropic is a threat to national security” is genuine and how much is about getting another company into lucrative defence contracts instead?

Trump family has major investments in data centers etc and is heavy benefiting from OpenAI footprint bit they recently didn’t in anthropic citing it’s political leanings
by saghm | 2026-02-28 06:48:18+00:00
Is the support for Python code provided as a Rust library by any chance, where you could do something like pass in a simple python function, run it in wasmer, and then get back the result? I know a lot of complications would come into play around supporting C-based dependencies and support for the WASM APIs for stuff like I/O, but I recently was looking into this for a use case where the goal is to be able to prevent stuff like direct use of I/O in favor of only supporting a few specific APIs provided directly to a WASM engine for the code it's executing, and the conclusion I reached was that the only viable options for that currently available would require either shelling out to something external or manually loading in a WASM-compiled interpreter and implementing the glue code to use that to execute Python myself.
by kristopolous | 2026-02-28 06:48:28+00:00
That's the logic of monsters:

Step 1: We believe the enemy is a monster who does [terrible act].

Step 2: To counteract this, we must do [terrible act].

Result: we maintain we are the "good guys" because we were "forced" into it by their presumed behavior.

He who fights with imagined monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

That quote is 140 years old. Is that enough time to heed it?
by gsnedders | 2026-02-28 06:49:06+00:00
If you send a flag ever, then absence of a flag is also fingerprinting surface.

If you imagine a world where you have a header, Accepts-Adult-Content, which takes a boolean value: you essentially have three possibilities: ?0, ?1, and absent.

How useful of a tracking signal those three options provide depends on what else is being sent —

For example, if someone is stuffing a huge amount of fingerprinting data into the User-Agent string, then this header probably doesn’t actually change anything of the posture.

As another example, if you’re in a regular browser with much of the UA string frozen, and ignoring all other headers for now, then it depends on how likely the users with that UA string to have each option: if all users of that browser always send ?0 (if they indicate themselves to be a minor) or ?1 (if they indicate themselves to be an adult or decline to indicate anything), then a request with that UA and it absent is significantly more noteworthy — because the browser wouldn’t send it — and more likely to be meaningful fingerprinting surface.

That said, adding any of this as passive fingerprinting surface seems like an idea unlikely to be worthwhile.

If you want even a weak signal, it would be much better to require user interaction for it.
by spongebobstoes | 2026-02-28 06:49:42+00:00
anthropic previously agreed to deploy their models in this context with nothing but a contract to enforce their red lines -- they even disabled their safety systems!

per announcement, openai can include safety systems of their own making, including ones to prevent their red lines from being crossed. that seems to be a more robust solution, including in the face of an untrustworthy government
by utopiah | 2026-02-28 06:49:45+00:00
It sure does but it's hard to get a bigger wallet than public money in the US. I do think it's fundamental as an individual to take a moral stance, even if it's entirely pointless, for one owns psychological well-being but honestly here I believe the whole point is precisely to decouple from the need of consumers who are clearly NOT paying for AI. Relying on income from governments is a smart move.

So yes, do cancel if you were paying for OpenAI. Stop using it entirely even, but don't necessarily expect to slow down their encroachment, sadly.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-28 06:50:15+00:00
The flip side of "Hegseth is an unqualified drunk", a position which I've always held and still maintain, is that he very well might crash out over nothing instead of asking clarifying questions or suggesting obvious compromises. This is the same guy who recalled the entire general staff to yell at them about the warrior mindset. Not an excuse for any of this, but I do think the precise nature of the badness matters.
by pmontra | 2026-02-28 06:50:30+00:00
Because passkey managers have no idea what a service is using its passkey for. They could warn that deleting a passkey could make all sort of bad things happen, but for most services it will be only the loss of access. What the alternative could be? "Before deleting this passkey you must contact this site and ask them what data you will loose. I give you a week. Come back here a week from now and confirm your desire to delete this passkey. I will not make you delete it before that day. See you!"
by arw0n | 2026-02-28 06:50:38+00:00
There seems to be a massive misunderstanding here - I'm not sure on whose side. In my understanding, if the DoD orders an autonomous drone, it would probably write in the ITT that the drone needs to be capable of doing autonomous surveillance. If Lockheed uses Anthropic under the hood, it does not meet those criteria, and cannot reasonably join the bid?

What the declaration of supply chain risk does though is, that nobody at Lockheed can use Anthropic in any way without risking being excluded from any bids by the DoD. This effectively loses Anthropic half or more of the businesses in the US.

And maybe to take a step back: Who in their right minds wants to have the military have the capabilities to do mass surveillance of their own citizens?
by Nevermark | 2026-02-28 06:51:01+00:00
Let’s put it this way, The DoD is buying pencils from a company. Should that company be prohibited from using Claude?

You are confusing the need to avoid Anthropic as a component of something the DoD is buying, with prohibitions against any use.

The DoD can already sensibly require providers of systems to not incorporate certain companies components. Or restrict them to only using components from a list of vetted suppliers.

Without prohibiting entire companies from uses unrelated to what the DoD purchases. Or not a component in something they buy.
by cagz | 2026-02-28 06:51:31+00:00
I think their intention is not mining your data (easily opt-outable) or hoping that you maintain the subscription after 6 months. It is rather making large open source project maintainers give AI a proper go.

Believe it or not, there are still a large amount of great tech professionals out there who are sceptical about AI. Many tried AI a year ago and has the impression that "It was alright but had limitations". AI came a long way since then, and it is going to improve even faster over the next 6 months. So this is Anthropics invite for you to join that journey.

In turn, of course this fuels the adoption by superstars (maintainers) endorsing the models.
by abstractspoon | 2026-02-28 06:52:18+00:00
The subconscious runs the entire show. We only become conscious of 'things' whether visual, auditory, or mental, because our subconscious allows us to. I've never considered my subconscious a dark place, but it can seems so to others to whom it operates as a black box. With some effort over the last 20 years I have substantial access to my subconscious that I never had before. Our consciousness is but a thin veneer on our subconscious. Once we accept that, lots of behaviours, thoughts and feelings, become both understandable and accessible.