MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kettlecorn | 2026-02-27 23:13:38+00:00
Canada is another option. Canada has significant AI research institutes going back decades ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mila_(research_institute) ) that have produced much of the foundational research that backs today's AI models.

For Americans and international researchers it's easy to get visas there quickly. It's not far at all for Americans to relocate to or visit. Electricity is cheap and clean. Canada has the most college educated adults per capita. The country's commitment to liberalism, and free markets, is also seeming more steadfast than the US at this point in time.

Canada faces obstacles with its much smaller VC ecosystem, its smaller domestic market, and the threat of US economic aggression. Canada's recent trade deals are likely to help there.

I say this all as an American who is loyal to American values first and foremost. If the US wants to move away from its core values I hope other countries, like Canada or the EU, can carry on as successful examples for the US to eventually return to.
by fasbiner | 2026-02-27 23:13:49+00:00
What are you talking about? Why are you using imprecise language like "popped the camera open?"

You've run into a site you view on chrome/firefox/safari accessing your camera without granting access a few times now?

Can you give us an example of a site that does this so we can reproduce? Or could you retract your statement and clarify that you did grant camera permissions for that site previously?

Otherwise, you're saying very casually there's a huge bug and security issue that no one else has detected but you personally have seem multiple times.

I've run into people on the internet misremembering things or not understanding how the browser works more times than I've run into browsers allowing access to system devices like the camera without a permission prompt.
by _fat_santa | 2026-02-27 23:14:05+00:00
The disconnect here for me is, I assume the DoW and Anthropic signed a contract at some point and that contract most likely stipulated that these are the things they can do and these are the things they can't do.

I would assume the original terms the DoW is now railing against were in those original contracts that they signed. In that case it looks like the DoW is acting in bad faith here, they signed the original contact and agreed to those terms, then they went back and said no, you need to remove those safeguards to which Anthropic is (rightly so) saying no.

Am I missing something here?

EDIT: Re-reading Dario's post[1] from this morning I'm not missing anything. Those use cases were never part of the original contacts:

> Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War

So yeah this seems pretty cut and dry. Dow signed a contract with Anthropic and agreed to those terms. Then they decided to go back and renege on those original terms to which Anthropic said no. Then they promptly threw a temper tantrum on social media and designated them as a supply chain risk as retaliation.

My final opinion on this is Dario and Anthropic is in the right and the DoW is acting in bad faith by trying to alter the terms of their original contracts. And this doesn't even take into consideration the moral and ethical implications.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
by NewsaHackO | 2026-02-27 23:14:12+00:00
I wouldn't say it's clear. People keep pointing to the wording used in the statement to say it, but I wonder if it has to do with constitutionally; domestic surveillance of people in the US without a warrant is against the constitution, and surveillance of non-citizens outside the U.S is not. Can they even be compelled by the executive branch to do an action that may be unconstitutional?
by nickysielicki | 2026-02-27 23:15:05+00:00
This could kill Anthropic.

The designation says any contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the US military can’t conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Well, AWS has JWCC. Microsoft has Azure Government. Google has DoD contracts. If that language is enforced broadly, then Claude gets kicked off Bedrock, Vertex, and potentially Azure… which is where all the enterprise revenue lives. Claude cannot survive on $200/mo individual powerusers. The math just doesn’t math.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-02-27 23:15:18+00:00
> They are a "supply chain risk" if they can willy-nilly break their contract with US govt and enforce arbitrary rules to service.

It is the US govt that seeks to break their contract with Anthropic.

The contract they signed had the safeguards, so they were mutually agreed upon. These safeguards against fully autonomous killbots and AI spying of US citizens was known before signing.

This conflict now is because the US govt regrets what they agreed to in the contract.
by sampo | 2026-02-27 23:15:45+00:00
> Aren't all the AI companies saying that AI poses even a greater threat to humanity?

20-30 years ago eco-terrorists bombed and burned down a number of biological research laboratories and other targets, because of the perceived risks of gene technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front#Notable...

Given all the current talk (and the famous scifi movies) about the risks of AI, I am a bit puzzled how there are no similar activists groups trying to sabotage AI facilities.

What is it that made the risk from gene manipulation feel so much more real and leading to actions, than the current AI risk? The Terminator movie franchise is more famous than any scifi movies about gene technology. (Edit: I guess Jurassic Park franchise surpasses The Terminator.)
by thewebguyd | 2026-02-27 23:15:52+00:00
Basically, if you are a federal contractor, the designation means the DoD can force you to certify that Anthropic tech is not used in the fulfillment of your government work. Because it's just a DoD designation, and an executive order and not added to the NDAA, you can still use Claude for non-government (federal) touching work.

So using Claude Code to write software for the DoD is now a no go, you'd be in breach of procurement directives now.

If they go as far as to convince congress to add Anthropic to the NDAA, that would be a nationwide ban like Huawei making it illegal for any federal contractor to use the tech anywhere in their business.

But for now, even fed contractors can still use Claude in their business, just not directly for government work.
by abstractspoon | 2026-02-27 23:16:46+00:00
Something feels very off about this piece. Yes, the underlying mechanisms may not be wholly correct - every hypothesis undergoes improvement over time - but the people themselves and their dysfunction are presumably not in doubt.

I'm not a psychopath but when stressed and overwhelmed I can definitely give the appearance of being both emotionless and having zero empathy despite being a very empathetic person generally and having high emotional sensitivity. I suspect that science, being written by normies, prefers to set neuro-divergents as far apart from themselves as possible and thus tend to overstate the differences especially when you consider the historical origins of the theories
by netsharc | 2026-02-27 23:16:47+00:00
Sheesh, an actual Whataboutism. The fact that "the US does it too!" won't help Grandparent poster/his wife if they get detained in China. GP says "there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now", most likely they are dual citizens, or were born in China, and from China's point of view, one can't lose the Chinese citizenship, and they're detaining their own citizens.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-27 23:16:51+00:00
If this were the late 80s I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But it isn't. Every device under the sun seems to have a web browser and wifi built into it at this point. Even most TVs are "smart" these days. If you told me that your refrigerator had a web browser and an app store I would assume you were entirely serious.

The internet is full of amazing things but it is simultaneously a largely unfiltered cesspool.

Imagine you live in the suburbs, but at some point the house to your left got demolished and replaced with a casino that doesn't ID anyone. The house to your right got demolished and replaced with a liquor store that doesn't ID anyone. And the house across the street got demolished and replaced with the headquarters of a local group of political extremists.

Sure, there also happens to be an award winning library a couple houses down. But that's largely irrelevant when it comes to the question of how you're supposed to raise children in this environment.
by xomiachuna | 2026-02-27 23:16:56+00:00
3d shape classification is different from matching a set of well-known, mostly fixed patterns (like eurion constellation) necessary to detect currency.

With 3d shapes of non-governmental origin this is at best difficult and at worst intractable. Consider the fact that many parts of a gun can be split into multiple printable pieces to be later assembled, making it very nontrivial to decipher the role of the shape.

With currency, the government has the controls for the supply of the target shape (it can encode hidden signals onto banknotes) and effectively controls the relroduction side (through the pressure on printer manufacturers). But it cannot control the supply of gun-part-shapes (it is not the only source for it), and since the problem is likely intractable - neither can it enforce the control on the 3d printing side.

Paper money being almost non-fungible is a great achievement, but is it as easy to make any mesh nonfungible as well?
by Spivak | 2026-02-27 23:17:11+00:00
It seems to come down to whether you expect the next law to be taking the enforcement mechanism away from the parent. If the law was, "major operating systems must ship parental controls that actually work" I doubt you would see much pushback. Parental controls is an oft cited reason to give your kids Apple devices. Expanding that everywhere would be great. But I don't want to have to present my government ID to use my own computer.
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-27 23:17:12+00:00
> Microstamping requirements for guns

Eh, sounds kinda reasonable. Ammo already has unique serial numbers embedded in the butt of every cartridge (in some countries, not sure about the US), and guns do leave somewhat unique marks on the bullets upon firing so... sure, why not. Surprised it took that long TBF, the necessary technology has been commercially available since the early 90s, I think?

> 3D printers should have a magical algorithm to recognize all gun parts in their tiny embedded systems

Yeah, this one's seems unnecessary. Is weapon manufacturing without a license a crime? If yes, then whoever 3D-prints a gun can be prosecuted normally.

> Now, you need to verify your age... on your microwave?

Or on your gas stove. A travesty, really: I was taught how to operate a stove when I was in the second grade and never burned any houses down, thank you very much.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-27 23:17:14+00:00
Hegseth's had a busy week: trying to kill Anthropic, attending the State of the Union, fighting Scouting America, and his regularly scheduled efforts to shame fatties & trans kids... Unlike so many in the orange one's inner circle who are just incompetent (say, Kash Patel for one), this dude is both incompentent a very bad, bad person.
by mbgerring | 2026-02-27 23:17:20+00:00
No, stop, I understand the politics here, but I’m asking about the technical fundamentals.

LLMs produce output of unknowable and unpredictable accuracy, and as far as we know, this is a mathematically unsolvable problem. This shit should not be within 1000 miles of a weapons system. Why are we even talking about this?
by chungy | 2026-02-27 23:17:29+00:00
> It's more powerful than your PC back in the late 1990s.

Sounds like a fun thought, but almost certainly untrue: https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm42

All new PCs sold in the late 1990s handedly beat these specifications. On CPU, storage, RAM, and display. The DM42 firmly remains an embedded system that's just enough for the calculator software and not much more.

If you want to take it back to the early 1980s, you start reaching the claim being true.
by fluidcruft | 2026-02-27 23:17:56+00:00
I was pondering the same thing and to me the answer is a contractor sold something to the DoD and Anthropic pulled the rug out from under that contractor and the DoD isn't happy about losing that.

My speculation is the "business records" domestic surveillance loophole Bush expanded (and that Palantir is build to service). That's usually how the government double-speaks its very real domestic surveillance programs. "It's technically not the government spying on you, it's private companies!" It's also why Hegseth can claim Anthropic is lying. It's not about direct government contracts. It's about contractors and the business records funnel.
by bitwize | 2026-02-27 23:18:36+00:00
Y'all are like Dilbert with the shock collar on, "It's not so bad." It's requiring all operating systems, apps, and online services to add age checks. It adds friction to the process of developing stuff. If there's something you do not want to do especially in California of all Goddamn places (swear to God, Wozniak would be spinning in his grave if he had one) it's add friction to the software development process with government-mandated code paths. But what do I know. This is a site actually called Hackernews, where the answer to all large-scale social problems is "that's why we need more government regulation".
by afavour | 2026-02-27 23:18:48+00:00
Very on topic: Rob Grant left the show after the sixth series. I think the lack of his influence was immediately apparent, a lot of the depth was lost. Like how the transition from series 2 to series 3 got a lot more action-y, 6 to 7 started to lean more on established tropes etc (IMO).

Also of note: Grant and Naylor wrote a series of Red Dwarf novels that were surprisingly good. They really fleshed out a lot of the character behind Lister and Rimmer. One novel goes deep on the concept of Better than Life, a one episode throwaway in the show but expanded to true horror in the novel.

They split (same time as they split on the show) and wrote separate novels in different continuity in the end. IMO Grant’s was notably better.
by elxr | 2026-02-27 23:18:57+00:00
When it's poorly explained, no.

Outside of a small handful that do go in-depth, these "switching off of Google" people just repeat the same thing over and over again, and expect everyone to instinctively agree with their views.

This has the classics like:
- "Google’s services are actively worse than the alternatives" (not actually listing which services they're talking about. Not showing specific features or design decisions which are worse than the alternative. Youtube is certainly not worse than the alternatives.)
- "I do my best to boycott bad things"
- "but big tech is bad"
- "The old adage of “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” is certainly true here." (do we need to hear this banality for the thousandth time?, also there's plenty of actually free services, like this site we're discussing this on.)
Show HN: AgentGate – Stake-Gated Action Microservice for AI Agents
by selfradiance | 2026-02-27 23:19:12+00:00
AgentGate is a small backend microservice that enforces stake-gated execution of actions.

The idea is simple: as AI agents reduce the marginal cost of sending bids, API calls, negotiations, etc., systems designed around human friction become vulnerable to synthetic pressure.

AgentGate requires:

Identity registration with an Ed25519 public key

Bond lock before action execution

Cryptographically signed action execution and resolution

Replay protection (timestamp window)

Per-identity rate limiting

Progressive minimum bond requirements

Actions remain capital-backed until resolved. Outcomes determine refund, partial burn, or full slashing.

This is not a token project and does not depend on blockchain. It’s a local-first microservice (Node + SQLite) designed to sit in front of agent systems or marketplaces to reintroduce economic friction.

There’s a runnable toy-agent example in the repo that demonstrates end-to-end signing and execution.

I’m interested in feedback from people building autonomous agents or agent marketplaces. Is stake-backed gating something you would consider using?
by neya | 2026-02-27 23:19:17+00:00
> I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.

Welcome to 90% of HN blog post submissions :))

I switched to Proton mail 2 years ago. Now I'm in this weird limbo where I want to go back but I can't because Proton's email search is so bad that I often default to Gmail where I still keep forwarding a copy of all my emails just for searching them later on. And this is even with the setting to search through the contents of the mail being turned on.

You might think "well, that's no biggie, I can manage that" but no. I didn't realise how important searching your email was until I was at a bank and they kept asking me some documents from years ago that were only inside my email.

The proton client on the phones are particularly bad and unusably slow in such emergency situations. Now I can't switch back to Google workspace because I started using a lot of the email aliases provided by Proton and it's going to be a clusterfuck once I unsubscribe.

Live and learn.
by Analemma_ | 2026-02-27 23:19:29+00:00
I don't know why you keep bringing up breach of contract, it is not relevant to this discussion at all. No, the government did not breach the contract AFAIK, they just decided they didn't like it anymore, and instead of either withdrawing or entering into a negotiation about it, they decided to use threats to try and get their terms at metaphorical gunpoint.

The actual terms of the contract aren't even relevant, this is purely a matter of tort law and whether you can bully someone into a new contact because you woke up one day and decided you didn't like the one you agreed to.
Show HN: Taskdog – Terminal-based task manager with schedule optimization
by kohei-wada | 2026-02-27 23:19:36+00:00
I wanted a CLI task manager like Taskwarrior but with automatic schedule optimization. Couldn't find one that did both, so I built Taskdog.
Everything runs locally with SQLite. There's a CLI, a TUI (Textual), and a REST API. Recently added an MCP server so Claude Desktop can manage tasks too.
Happy to answer questions about the architecture or scheduling approach. If you know of better scheduling algorithms, I'd love to hear about them.
by alejohausner | 2026-02-27 23:19:41+00:00
From what I’ve heard on “the history of English podcast”, after the Norman and invasion written English disappears completely for about a century. This is because the clergy and lawyers were the only literate people at the time, and they were all French. When it re-emerges, it doesn’t have much French in it yet, because only the common folk spoke English, and the norman upper class spoke French, and they didn’t interact that much. It actually took another 100 years or so for French words to percolate into the language.

What I learned from the podcast was that what really changed old English into Middle English was the viking invasion around 800. Danes and anglosaxons had different grammar and as a compromise a lot of the germanic cases on nouns, which allowed for arbitrary word ordering in a sentence, got discarded, and English developed the current emphasis on strict word ordering that we have today.
by next_xibalba | 2026-02-27 23:20:19+00:00
Yes, I think Russia's invasion of Ukraine is quite clearly a binary Russia=bad, Ukraine=good. Same for the impending Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Perhaps you could explain the nuances under which Russia was the good guy? Better yet, maybe you could explain it to the Ukrainians who have been displaced, or the family members of those who have been killed, or the soldiers who have been permanently maimed?

Whether you or I like it or not, automatic kill bots will be a thing. It will only be a question of which countries have them and which do not.
by elefanten | 2026-02-27 23:20:38+00:00
How do they feel about and respond when asked about the Taiwan question?

Do they either clam up or act like it's a mortal insult to suggest that an independent democratic nation should not live in fear of impending violent conquest?

Because that's the kind of reaction that makes the reports of "happy life, all's good" a little harder to digest.

Not saying that's a unanimous opinion / response, of course. But it certainly seems to be the default.
by afavour | 2026-02-27 23:20:59+00:00
I’ve read both. It’s been years but Grant’s, Backwards, was notably better than Naylor’s, Last Human.

Backwards spent the first section of the book in the backwards universe, over years. It’s has an interesting exploration of the implications of that universe. By comparison Last Human wraps that up in a few pages and spends most of its time dealing with android assassins.
Show HN: XDP firewall that auto-syncs open ports – built after my VPS got DDoS'd
by kennethhh | 2026-02-27 23:21:08+00:00
A few days ago, someone decided to DDoS the entire IP range of my Hong Kong VPS provider. fail2ban did its job a little too enthusiastically — banned 20,000+ IPs, ran the machine out of memory, and triggered a kernel panic. Great. :/
That's when I realized the problem: fail2ban lets packets hit the kernel stack first, then reacts. Under a real flood, that reaction cost alone is enough to kill the machine. I went down the XDP/eBPF rabbit hole — packets get dropped at the NIC driver level, before they even touch the kernel.
The other thing that annoyed me was manually managing port rules, so I built a daemon that watches for new listening ports via Netlink Process Connector and updates the BPF whitelist automatically.
What it does: ~34–65 ns/packet drop on KVM VPS, auto-syncs open ports, handles IPv6 extension headers, one-liner install.
What it won't do: won't save you if your uplink is already saturated — not a replacement for upstream scrubbing.

Would love feedback, especially if something breaks on your setup. First time posting here — hello everyone!
by mmooss | 2026-02-27 23:21:45+00:00
If you want to choose example of a failed approach to space exploration, NASA is your worst option. It's like choosing Netflix as an example of a failed approach to video multicasting.

NASA's approach to space exploration remains incredibly successful. Look at all the missions operating all over our solar system, including on Mars' surface, and beyond. No other organization comes close.

> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?

How we frame the debate - if you like, the specs that define the rfp - determines the outcome. You define it by efficiency, which is what businesses prioritize and is SpaceX's strength. They take a well-established technology, orbital launch, and make it much more efficient.

NASA prioritizes ground-breaking (space-breaking?), history-making exploration and technology - things never done before and often hardly dreamed of by most people. That can take time and money but they deliver at a very high rate - think of how many missions have failed, compared to recent private missions, such as moon missions, and even those of other space agencies.
by nimonian | 2026-02-27 23:21:53+00:00
I've been on hn for years and I see this kind of sentiment raised all the time. It is not my understanding of the guidelines.

Politics and ideology are not off topic, provided the subject matter is of interest, or "gratifying", to colleagues in the tech/start-up space.

What's important is that we don't use rhetoric, bad faith or argumentation to force our views on others. But expressing our opinions about how policy affects technology and vice versa has always been welcome, in my observation.

So, what do you think about the US government's decision, and why?