MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xpe | 2026-02-27 04:04:22+00:00
> If they don't oppose directly, large bureaucracies know how to drag their feet until the midterms at least, if not until 2028.

While I grant the spirit of this point, I don't think it applies to this situation. The "bureaucratic resistance" explanation doesn't fit when you think about what would happen next. Here is my educated guess based on some research:

- contract termination: Hegseth can direct the relevant contracting officer(s) at the Pentagon to terminate the contract. This could happen within days. Internal stonewalling here might add weeks of delay, but probably not more than that.

- supply chain risk designation: Hegseth signs a document, puts it into motion. Then it becomes a bureaucratic process that chugs along. Noncompliant contracting officers probably would be fired, so this happens within weeks or a few months. Substantial delays could come from litigation, to be sure -- but this isn't a case where civil service stonewalling saves us.

- Defense Production Act: would require an executive order from Trump. This would go into effect right away, at least on paper. It would very likely lead to litigation and possibly court injunctions.

My point is that non-compliant civil servants at the Pentagon probably can't slow it down very much. (I recommend they do what their oath and conscience demands, to be sure!) Hegseth has shown he's willing to fire quickly and aggressively. I admire people who take a stand against Hegseth and Trump -- they are a nasty combination of dangerous and corrupt. At the moment, they appear weaker than ever. Sustained civil pushback is working.

Let's "roll this up" back to my original point. I responded to a comment that said "I doubt anyone at the Pentagon is pushing for this.", asking the commenter to explain. I don't think that comment promotes a better understanding of the situation. It is more useful to talk about the components of the situation and some possible cause-effect relationships.
by themacguffinman | 2026-02-27 04:04:22+00:00
Not this, because this is completely unprecedented? In fact, the Pentagon already signed an Anthropic contract with safe terms 6 months ago, that initial negotiation was when Anthropic would have made a decision to part ways. It was totally absurd for the govt to turn around and threaten to change the deal, just a ridiculous and unprecedented level of incompetence.
by harsha_photon | 2026-02-27 04:04:51+00:00
How did a company as large as Google miss this?
They’ve said they’ll only fix the leaked keys — but how are they identifying those? What if their discovery method doesn’t catch all the compromised keys?
If they’re filtering based on a cutoff date (for example, before the Gemini API launch), that would only address part of the issue. What about keys created afterward that may also be affected?
The default scope of new created is all APIs why is this ??
by nothrabannosir | 2026-02-27 04:05:28+00:00
The aws cli has a set of porcelain for s3 access (aws s3) and plumbing commands for lower level access to advanced controls (aws s3api). The plumbing command aws s3api get-object doesn't support stdout natively, so if you need it and want to use it in a pipeline (e.g. pv), you would naively do something like

$ aws s3api get-object --bucket foo --key bar /dev/stdout | pv ...

Unfortunately, aws s3api already prints the API response to stdout, and error messages to stderr, so if you do the above you'll clobber your pipeline with noise, and using /dev/stderr has the same effect on error.

You can, though, do the following:

$ aws s3api get-object --bucket foo --key bar /dev/fd/3 3>&1 >/dev/stderr | pv ...

This will pipe only the object contents to stdout, and the API response to /dev/null.
by dakolli | 2026-02-27 04:05:33+00:00
Maybe its replacing the simplistic forms of backend web development and the keast capable frontend devs. If your job was building with DaisyUI/Tailwind you're prob replaceable by this tech. People building their first SaaS are amazed (its literally heroin for non technical idea guys). But serious engineers I know, old heads, don't seem to be that impressed and neither am I.

I don't see it competing with anyone doing anything serious, outside of ML engineers and lets be honest, they always sucked at writing code, hated writing code so its not surprising how much they sing it's praise.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-27 04:06:33+00:00
I think this is really missing the point of the question. I know that it is common for endowments to be invested "in the market" - people believe that's the most responsible thing to do. But the question was about why do things the normal way? Why link up market performance of a set of investments with funding mechanisms for OSS? If you're going to be bold and try to fund something that is, in market and economic terms, quite off-norm, why do that using entirely normal systems that are at the core of a capitalist economy?
by noduerme | 2026-02-27 04:06:55+00:00
This is at best a superficial attempt to show that Anthropic objects to what is already in play.

Personally, I'd rather live in a country which didn't use AI to supplant either its intelligence or its war fighting apparatus, which is what is bound to happen once it's in the door. If enemies use AI for theirs, so much the better. Let them deal with the security holes it opens and the brain-drain it precipitates. I'm concerned about AI being abused for the two use cases he highlights, but I'm more concerned that the velocity at which it's being adopted to sift and collate classified information is way ahead of its ability to secure that information (forget about whether it makes good or bad decisions). It's almost inconceivable that the Pentagon would move so quickly to introduce a totally unknown entity with totally unknown security risks into the heart of our national security. That should be the case against rapid adoption made by any peddler of LLMs who claims to be honest, to thwart the idiots in the administration who think they want this technology they can't comprehend inside our most sensitive systems.
by ninjagoo | 2026-02-27 04:07:53+00:00
> If the military is using it in some mission critical way, they can't be fighting the model to get something done. No such limitations would ever be acceptable.

You'd be surprised at what is considered acceptable. For example, being unable to repair your own equipment in battle is considered acceptable by decision-makers who accepted the restrictions.

https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/icymi-...
by mandevil | 2026-02-27 04:07:58+00:00
The thing is, as an outsider to Twitter but with 20 years of experience doing software dev including some time at internet scale web and mobile, I don't think that the basic "fetch a timeline" backend plus two front end apps and a web interface is that hard, a small team (<100 engineers) definitely could do that with modern cloud infrastructure. But that's not what the Twitter product was. We've just described nothing more than the bait to lure the product, which was advertisers running ads.

Most of the effort in the original Twitter- engineering and everything else- was about getting advertising revenue. That meant
1) Having good data mining to identify user interests to match ads against
2) Having a strong user experience like Meta Ads or AdSense for the ad buyers
3) Keeping the conversations such that advertisers wanted to be associated with it, both automated and manual censorship
4) Having good relationships with advertisers, both large clients and agencies

That was where the majority of Twitter's (dev and non-engineering both) effort was going, to bringing in the revenue from advertisers. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter advertising fell dramatically immediately, at basically the same time he gutted all of the people doing the advertising. That was why he tried "buying a blue-check" and so many premium features, because he got rid of all the infrastructure necessary to have a serious ads platform. And premium doesn't work, of course, as anyone with experience in the Internet world could have told him. Which is why the value of the company- and its revenues- have declined so dramatically since the acquisition.

Bluesky is basically doing the same thing as X right down to also not running ads, which is how they also manage to run on a small team. Last I checked they'd raised less than 20m, and have basically no revenue, so they are able to operate very lean. It's for the same reason that Twitter is a lot smaller now: ads are a huge engineering and non-tech effort. As Alphabet and Meta remind us, it can be insanely profitable, but you need a lot of people to get it right.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-27 04:08:24+00:00
I think my point is that grants may not be the way to get what is desired. Most people need predictable, long term income. You can get stuff done with grants, no doubt. But that's not the question - the question is can you build long term sustainable maintainance mechanisms for OSS. I hope you're right and I'm wrong.
by dotancohen | 2026-02-27 04:08:36+00:00
Why is there any controversy about defending one's nation being "good" or "bad"?

I can not believe what I am reading here, and how the single comment supporting defending one's country is so heavily downvoted. Qatar has poisoned Western online communities such that all defence of the United States is considered taboo? I don't even live in the US and I am frightened by what I see here.
by Maaz-Sohail | 2026-02-27 04:08:41+00:00
Hi HN, I built pdffreeeditor.com, a free online PDF toolkit. It’s intentionally “boring”: do the job fast, don’t force accounts, and try not to feel sketchy.
I recently did a pretty big SEO + structure cleanup (canonical/meta/schema duplication + internal linking), and now I want feedback from real humans on the part that actually matters long-term: UI/UX clarity, trust, and which features are genuinely missing.

Main pages I’d love feedback on (pick one and be ruthless):

Edit PDF: https://pdffreeeditor.com/edit-pdf/ Goal: “edit PDF online free” intent, quick edits/annotations, simple flow.

Compress PDF hub (cluster I’m trying to make a ‘star’): https://pdffreeeditor.com/compress-pdf/ Goal: fast compression with clear tradeoffs (quality vs size).

OCR PDF / extract text (hard category, needs trust): https://pdffreeeditor.com/ocr-pdf/ Goal: scanned PDFs → searchable/copyable text. (Accuracy depends on scan quality — trying to be honest about that.)

Sign PDF (quick form signing): https://pdffreeeditor.com/sign-pdf/ Goal: sign & download without an account.

A few “real life” use-case pages I’m testing (does this format help or annoy you?):

Compress for email.

Compress for WhatsApp.

Compress for portal upload.

Compress to 1MB.

Compress to 500KB.

Compress without losing quality (best-effort).

“Is my PDF scanned?” helper page.

What I’m specifically asking for:

Trust: At what moment do you hesitate? What feels shady or unclear?

UX: Where do you get stuck? What’s a “bounce point” in the flow?

Speed/feedback: Is progress/status clear enough during processing?

Compression expectations: Do the options make sense, or would you prefer simpler controls?

OCR expectations: What minimum output/UI would make you call it “useful”?

Missing feature: If you used PDF tools this month, what’s the #1 thing you needed that most tools mess up?

Constraints / honesty (not trying to oversell):

Scanned/image PDFs can’t be edited like normal text PDFs until OCR — I try to explain this clearly.

Compression has tradeoffs: image-heavy PDFs can’t shrink dramatically without visible loss.

I’m optimizing for “get in, do the job, get out” more than enterprise workflows.

If you try any single page and tell me what’s confusing, ugly, slow, or missing, I’ll treat it as a bug report and iterate quickly.

Homepage (if you want the overview): https://pdffreeeditor.com/
by tqi | 2026-02-27 04:09:02+00:00
Bets on how long it takes to get back to 10k employees?

Imo companies cannot fucking help themselves but continue to grow. Meta is already back above 2021 headcount, after cutting 20k employees in 2022. Managers want to Senior Managers want to be Directors want to be VPs. The best way to do that is to grow "scope" aka people under you. And since Jack wants to be Elon and Elon wants to be God, they will happily buy that story...
by SecretDreams | 2026-02-27 04:09:09+00:00
> I dissented while I was there, had millions in equity on the line, and left without it.

Is this a reflection of your morality, or that you already had sufficient funds that you could pass on the extra money to maintain a level of morality you're happy with?

Not everyone has the luxury to do the latter. And it's in those situations that our true morality, as measured against our basic needs, comes out.
by pavo-etc | 2026-02-27 04:09:46+00:00
The quality difference between Andor and The Mandalorian is so stark that I don't even think they are comparable. The Convert is a fine episode I guess, but next to Andor it's amateur.

Andor is prestige TV. The Mandolorian feels like a childrens show by comparison.

If you think The Convert was good, please, please watch Andor.
by benatkin | 2026-02-27 04:09:55+00:00
The headline should be changed, because it is moving from one closed source repo to another closed source repo, and on HN misleading headlines tend to be corrected even if they're deliberate on the part of the authors.

simonw correctly describes it as "not technically open source" - though OSI doesn't have the trademark, the term open source, capitalized or not, refers to the what the Open Source Definition codifies. There are other terms such as shared source, for this sort of stuff.
by TOMDM | 2026-02-27 04:10:04+00:00
Anthropic doesn't get to make that call though, if they tried the result would actually be:

8 AIs running on 8 machines each with 10 million GPUs

AND

2 million AIs running on 2 million machines, each with 10 GPU's

If every lab joined them, we can get to a distributed scenario, but it's a coordination problem where if you take a principled stance without actually forcing the coordination you end up in the worst of both worlds, not closer to the better one.
by nradov | 2026-02-27 04:10:05+00:00
There's a lot more to healthcare than just fintech. I've been the field for decades and I've never seen such rapid progress before in areas like clinical and administrative interoperability, digital health, software as a medical device, telehealth, clinical decision support, cost transparency, etc. Despite the structural problems with incentives that create that make the financial side so dysfunctional, there has never been a better time to build.
by tonyarkles | 2026-02-27 04:10:53+00:00
> I predict we will see a lot of domain experts without engineering background spin up incredibly successful apps. Just like the Tea app many of them will crash and burn from poor engineering.

This rollercoaster is going to be wild to ride over the next decade. I've done a few experiments where I've intentionally "vibe coded" either a few features for an existing project of mine or for a few completely clean-sheet ideas.

I completely agree with you. There are going to be a lot of domain experts who do successfully spin stuff up.

> But there will also be enough people who've grown wise to this and after reaching some success with their app spend the resources to have others mitigate all the unknown-to-them issues

Here's the part that shocked me when I tried this... it did not take long for the no-engineering-guidance codebases to turn into complete disasters. Like... in an afternoon I had a pretty functional application that filled a gap for me. It was also... I don't think it'd remain even remotely maintainable for more than a week based on the direction it was going.

We live in interesting times.
by jjmarr | 2026-02-27 04:11:20+00:00
It also doesn't mathematically make any sense. If you now have 130% developer capacity, then the percentage of developers you need to keep is `x` defined by 130%*x = 100%, x ≈ 76.9% implying you'd lay off about 23.1% of developers.

Percentage increases are not the same as percentage losses.
by gilfaethwy | 2026-02-27 04:11:25+00:00
Humans are also non-deterministic, though. Why does replacing one non-deterministic actor with another matter here?

I'm not particularly swayed by arguments of consciousness, whether AI is currently capable of "thinking", etc. Those may matter right now... but how long will they continue to matter for the vast majority of use cases?

Generally speaking, my feeling is that most code doesn't need to be carefully-crafted. We have error budgets for a reason, and AI is just shifting how we allocate them. It's only in certain roles where small mistakes can end your company - think hedge funds, aerospace, etc. - where there's safety in the non-determinism argument. And I say this as someone who is not in one of those roles. I don't think my job is safe for more than a couple of years at this point.
by Xeronate | 2026-02-27 04:12:06+00:00
I understand the vision, but how does this work on a global scale. e.g. American employees refuse to build this, but China's don't.

Edit: I originally ended with "What would have happened if Germany had a nuclear bomb and America didn't?", but I think it distracted from the point I was trying to make so moving this to an edit. I'm not trying to ask "is the US the bad guy". I'm trying to ask how to balance personal anti war sentiments with the realities of the world (specifically in this case keeping up in an arms race).
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by jsnell | 2026-02-27 04:12:49+00:00
Where are you getting that from?

The article is crystal clear that these uses are not permitted by the current or any past contract, and the DoW wants to remove those exceptions.

> Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now

It also links to DoW's official memo from January 9th that confirms that DoW is changing their contract language going forwards to remove restrictions. A pretty clear indication that the current language has some.
by omoikane | 2026-02-27 04:13:18+00:00
> if all your friends were jumping off of a bridge would you do it too?

Probably.

https://xkcd.com/1170/

Although in the context of the parent comment, majority of Googlers probably aren't working on things directly related to controversial topics, instead they are probably working on mundane and non-external facing projects like "how do I migrate my libraries from this deprecated dependency to this other shiny new thing".
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-02-27 04:14:09+00:00
This is the recommendation I have heard peers, both technical and managerial, echo for years in one form or another:

4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys
for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate
business problems into technical requirements. This means
also understanding the industry your company is in, how to
manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers
and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a
business case for technical issues. If you cannot
communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to
Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will
prioritize it.

The above involves one thing people can possess which GenAI cannot; understanding stakeholder problems which need to be solved and then doing so.
by njoyablpnting | 2026-02-27 04:16:05+00:00
Very well-executed version of this. I think this is the right interface for video editing going into the future.

I've spent a bit of time on something related, AI-generating motion graphics videos from code, also editable/renderable in-browser. Here's a few things I ran into:

- I see you mentioned being aware of Remotion in another comment, in my experience Remotion is not the right tool for adding motion graphics to what you're building. There's a few reasons for this, but basically declarative markup is not a great language for motion graphics beyond anything very basic. Also, in-browser rendering is only going to work with canvas-based components. I also wasn't a huge fan of their license.

- WebCodecs may not be as reliable as you think. I've verified several issues where I get a different output across browsers and operating systems, and even different permutations of flags, browser and OS. Is there a reason why your tool needs to be browser-based?
by rand_r | 2026-02-27 04:16:56+00:00
> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.

It may seem like this, but up to now, you haven't been able to divorce a story from its creator because every story has an author, whether it's a novel like Harry Potter or a movie that has a writer and director. When you're experiencing the story, in the back of your mind, you always know that there is someone who created the story to tell you some kind of message. And so you can't experience something like a movie without trying to figure out what the actual message behind the movie was. It is always the implicit message behind the story that makes it valuable versus just the elements of the story.

The story has more weight because it is the distillation of somebody else's life and most likely, if it's a successful story or book, it is the most important lesson from that person's life and that's what makes it more valuable compared to the random generation of words from a computer.

The food analogy is that a cookie baked and given to you by a friend is going to taste far better than anything you buy in a store.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-27 04:17:04+00:00
Ex historian here, now engineer. I would gently suggest you’re underestimating the magnitude of some of the transformations wrought by the technologies that OP mentioned for the people that lived through them. Particularly for the steam engine and the broader Industrial Revolution around 1800: not for nothing have historians called that the greatest transformation in human life recorded in written documents.

If you think, hey but people had a “job” in 1700, and they had a “job” in 1900, think again. Being a peasant (majority of people in Europe in 1700) and being an urban factory worker in 1900 were fundamentally different ways of life. They only look superficially similar because we did not live the changes ourselves. But read the historical sources enough and you will see.

I would go as far as to say that the peasant in 1700 did not have a “job” at all in the sense that we now understand; they did not work for wages and their relationship to the wider economy was fundamentally different. In some sense industrialization created the era of the “job” as a way for most working-age people to participate in economic life. It’s not an eternal and unchanging condition of things, and it could one day come to an end.

It’s too early to say if AI will be a technology like this, I think. But it may be. Sometimes technologies do transform the texture of human life. And it is not possible to be sure what those will be in the early stages: the first steam engines were extremely inefficient and had very few uses. It took decades for it to be clear that they had, in fact, changed everything. That may be true of AI, or it may not. It is best to be openminded about this.