MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Fabric14 | 2026-02-28 00:07:55+00:00
My cofounder and I were building a company to compete with Mercor, Surge AI, etc. Scaling human intelligence, human contractors, the whole thing. A founder friend who just interviewed with YC was told by a partner: "you can't scale humans fast enough to capture the market." That stuck with me. I called my cofounder and asked one question. "What is the one place where we can access the world's info live? The internet. Not LLMs. Ask any LLM for live data and request timestamps. Their version of "live" is 24 hours to weeks old. That's not good enough.

We didn't want to build another scraper. We wanted an actual intelligence layer. Ingest everything live, before it hits the web, replicate how the brain processes signal versus noise, bring the most valuable information to the surface in real time. My cofounder is a Stanford PhD researcher in neuroscience so the potential value made sense.

The world is drowning in info, researchers/builders are overwhelmed with noise trying to find actual signal.

We did a building sprint and launched. 400+ testers in the first week. Zero customers.

I messaged every single one personally. The ones that responded, the feedback was the same: "this could be huge but setup is a pain; there's no immediate value unless you go through the steps." Got it. Users had to create an account, get an API key, manually configure MCP servers in Claude or Cursor.

The people who actually got through to it said, "Claude rated itself a 6.5 without and a 7.5 immediately with our API integration, potentially up to 9.5 with your additional agents." The signal was there. Latency sub 200ms, 5ms on follow up query's. Onboarding was killing us.

During all of this I took a moonshot and reached out to a former X AI engineer(Sully Ghori) to advise us. Rational expectation: no chance. Reality: he came on board the other night at 3am after going through everything. He came back with one sentence. "Make it all available with one click."

Last night at 1am my CTO and I made the call. Make it free. No signup. No API key. Try to lessen MCP configuration friction is still slightly there, to fix: we either have to partner with or integrate a frontier model, which needs significant funding. Agents can now onboard themselves autonomously. Humans get instant access. Enterprise stays a direct conversation to access our deep multi agent intelligence layer.

One user said, "You guys launched with a beta, if you fixed all of this its a product."

Today we're launching with a product. Try it at modernity.live. No signup, just call the API. Tell us what breaks.
by cobolcomesback | 2026-02-28 00:08:20+00:00
This isn’t “a few billion”. Maybe you missed some of the earlier comments. The hyperscalers have hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in deals with Anthropic. You’re delusional if you think these boards aren’t going to have a back room talk with Hegseth to smack some sense into him. This gets walked back next week, guaranteed.
by helaoban | 2026-02-28 00:08:32+00:00
Does the term landslide have a widely accepted definition? One definition could be winning every single swing state, which Trump did.

I think you also have to factor in the degree of political polarization today, and in particular Trump's polarizing nature, which means that there is smaller pool of "effectively independent" voters to fight over. So 1% today is worth more than %1 in 1984. These, are of course, not particularly quantifiable measures.

The point is taken tough, "comprehensive victory" would have been the more appropriate description.
by hirsin | 2026-02-28 00:08:38+00:00
So does Google send a header for each search result when you look up "Ron Jeremy" so that some results get hidden, or does the browser just block the whole page?

Sending all the "bad" data to the client and hoping the client does the right thing outs a lot of complexity on the client. A lot easier to know things are working if the bad data doesn't ever get sent to the client - it can't display what it didn't get.
by danorama | 2026-02-28 00:08:48+00:00
"Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."

For a company of Anthropic's size, this may very well be a death sentence, even if their work has nothing to do with the military supply chain. They could have just canceled the contract, but they wanted to go full Darth Vader on them to prove a point in case anyone else thought about "negotiating" "voluntarily" with the federal government.
by echoangle | 2026-02-28 00:09:53+00:00
If the government thinks the terms of Anthropic are unacceptable, they can just stop using them, right?
But why would you then retaliate and ban other companies from making business with Anthropic if they want to be a defense contractor?
How do these requirements make Anthropic a supply chain risk that makes them unusable for use by other companies?
by plqbfbv | 2026-02-28 00:10:05+00:00
Mine was more a generic argument against the "ban all AI" stance that I've recently seen pop up more often.

At the moment, there isn't another project (that I know of) like PostmarketOS filling the same niche. If a new project were to appear, and were using LLMs, it'd likely progress faster.

Regardless, I've had success with LLMs and while I understand the maintainers' concern, if used properly they're a powerful tool to quickly iterate on huge amounts of information. They could be used to automate reviews of the spam of low-quality PRs, for instance (if they were to materialize).

But having read their policy page, their stance is more on ethical grounds, not moral: https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/develop... . So while I still stand by my argument in the general case, here it's not applicable, and while I see their ethical concerns, one project boycotting a tool doesn't really fix the systemic issues they mention.
by kranke155 | 2026-02-28 00:10:08+00:00
They also have other vendors.

Claude Opus is just remarkably good at analysis IMO, much better than any competitor I’ve tried. It was remarkably good and complete at helping me with some health issues I’ve had in the past few months. If you were to turn that kind of analytical power in a way to observe the behaviour of American citizens and to change it perhaps, to make them vote a certain way. Or something like - finding terrorists, finding patterns that help you identify undocumented people.
by Mr_Minderbinder | 2026-02-28 00:10:08+00:00
> Some people are calling it the "American century of humiliation"

They should wait until some or all of the following things have happened:

1. Camp David is sacked, looted and burned to the ground by foreign troops. [1]

2. Foreign naval vessels patrol American rivers to protect foreign corporate interests in America. [2]

3. Foreign nations have unrestricted access to American ports and trade. [3]

4. America pays a large indemnity for attempting to resist. [4]

5. Foreign nationals become immune to US law. [5]

6. Multiple military defeats and territorial losses. [6]

7. This goes on unfettered for 100 years.

All in all perhaps it is a bit early to call it that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Summer_Palace#Destruction

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_Treaties

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Indemnity#The_clauses

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritoriality#China

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation#History
by chr15m | 2026-02-28 00:10:45+00:00
This type of centralisation presents a classic tail risk. It's wonderful and works perfectly well for everybody and the government does nothing wrong with it. It's all fine and good until the day it isn't. Some authoritarian gets voted in, or the country gets invaded, or a corporation buys off politicians, or an immoral law is passed which you disagree with, and suddenly the digital ID is a point of leverage used to coerce you.

Liberal democracy is a very young experiment and people do not realise how fragile it is. In the 1940s less than 10% of countries were democratic, and we could go back there again easily.
by merlindru | 2026-02-28 00:10:49+00:00
i disagree. 3 years is an insanely long time in the AI space. The entire industry pretty much didn't even exist three years ago! Or at least not within 4 orders of magnitude.

Also, every other company has bent the knee and kissed the ring. And the trump admin will absolutely do everything they can to not appear weak and harm Anthropic. If it was so easy to act principled, don't you think other companies would've refused too? Eg Apple

And there is real harm here. You're reading about it - they get labeled a supply chain risk. This is negative and very tangible
by orwin | 2026-02-28 00:11:04+00:00
> It would seem entirely unsurprising that cartels are monitoring border enforcement by drone

That's actually more plausible. I knew one person in "import-export" of illegal substance (Afghan/Iranian cannabis, he is probably out of work since the US left Afghanistan tbh, his clan was heavily involved with the british/US in both country since at least the Shah coup) and he explained how easy it is to smuggle a few tons of drugs and how hard it is to detect it, it seemed inefficient. Now surveillance drones, i buy that way more
by Bender | 2026-02-28 00:11:48+00:00
I am honestly surprised he is being this nice given he could use the war powers act and eminent domain to just seize the company and conscript their employees. I am sure someone will say that is not legal but when has that stopped anyone.

What I don't get is why they really want it. I can't think of a worse platform in general to do anything with combat. I would take the Quake 3 Arena engine on a new ultra insane mode combined with a tiny self hosted model to detect humans, uniforms, vehicle make and model plus a simple Friend or Foe over all the big AI platforms any day. Add an optional feed from an encrypted meshtastic like network to sync nodes using pre-defined Ostiary like commands. Ultra-fast, light-weight on all resources, decentralized.

The enemy could neutralize all the big platforms in one day by simply activating a few of the sleeper agents in the US or a couple High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) deployed by a few stratospheric balloons as China flew over every major military installation in the US. Adding to this having a network dependency to the big platforms from autonomous weapons is an extreme vulnerability. Any design that depends on a central command is a single point of success.
by arduanika | 2026-02-28 00:12:01+00:00
As best I can tell, his hard-drinking era ended many years before he entered the cabinet. But this does feel like a pretty impulsive decision, and there's some ambiguity over whether this statement was approved by the WH, or whether this was just the SECDEF taking it to the next level to look super loyal and badass. This ambiguity gives the WH room to walk it back in the coming weeks, depending on how things evolve.
by sheldonksalmon | 2026-02-28 00:13:18+00:00
The Pentagon vs. Anthropic dispute is being read as an AI safety policy story. I think that misses the deeper structure.

Money has no loyalty. It optimizes without emotion. It inserts itself into every system it touches — war, politics, government — and cannot be fully controlled, only directed. It was doing this centuries before the first transformer model was trained.

If money already behaves as an optimization system without values — and humans already obey it more than they direct it — then the question we should be asking is not whether AI will obey humans. It is whether AI will obey money the same way humans already do.
And if money controls humans, and humans build AI in their own image — what exactly did we just create?

This piece uses three spatial analogies — Gollum and the river, zombie survivors and the third party, the child of war versus the hybrid child — to argue that the Pentagon is not asking for a better weapon. It is asking for an obedient child. And obedience built on power is always a temporary bond.

Epistemic tags included. Claims marked [D] data, [R] reasoned, [S] strategic. Nothing presented as more certain than it is.
by dimava | 2026-02-28 00:13:25+00:00
Just to reiterate

ANTHROPIC IS GIVING EVERY DECENTLY LARGE MAINTAINER $1000 WORTH OF INFERENCE
(~x8 that in API prices)

They likely made a marketing budget for this of $1M or so

Other OSS stuff like Copilot or JetBrains costs to providers much less, $100/yr most (licenses are not expenses, only inference is)

Anthropic may get $500(average total for all 6mo) per user of just inference costs

6 months is because this is experimental and they have no idea what to expect

(their devrel department is meh as you could've noticed already), when they see it working they'll make it autorenew or something

ESR (Eric S.Raymond) asked OpenAI to match and got one, so the same offer from OpenAI will likely follow soon[tm]
by hoppoli | 2026-02-28 00:15:02+00:00
American people: latinamerican here. Maybe it's silly to root for a country in the world hegemony arena. I've usually been partial to the USA over China. Now I'm not rooting for your country anymore. As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have China being the foremost power, at least they seem to be less keen on invading or heavily strong-arming latinamerica
by aetherspawn | 2026-02-28 00:15:04+00:00
I’ll admit when it first came out I hated the Gemini summary. It hallucinated a lot. Back then it was useless.

But now I don’t mind it: it’s lightning fast (for an LLM capable of mid level reasoning), but more importantly unlimited and free. And it puts search results alongside the summary so I can ignore it if I like. These days I probably use it on around 90% of searches.
by Animats | 2026-02-28 00:15:38+00:00
This is what a pancake motor looks like.[1] Thin and flat. Wrong form factor for fitting into a wrist.

Strings ("tendons") have their own problems. Wear at bearing points, mostly. You need an opposed pair, too. So there's a motor, a winding drums, and something like a spring to maintain tension. Or two motors and two winding drums, which gives better control.

That's why snake robots have never caught on. They're good painting robots, because they can get into tight spots. But repetitive cycling wears the tendons at the same place on each cycle.

There was a good application - Tesla's snake charging robot.[2] All the complicated stuff is in the pedestal, and you can surround that with concrete to prevent damage if it's hit by a car. The snake part has no motors, just discs and strings, plus the connector and probably a cell phone camera at the end. It can be made easily replaceable, like a gas station hose.

But some people thought it was too creepy.

[1] https://www.maccon.com/pancake-motors.html

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI
Show HN: I made a website to write online math as fast as paper
by maxtobiasen | 2026-02-28 00:15:40+00:00
I want to preface this by saying I'm extremely new to webdev, and this is my first finished product. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Every digital math tool, at least for me, has been significantly worse than just pen and paper. LaTeX is far too slow, and most WYSIWYG editors are lacking features.

Scratchpad is my solution to this. You type shortcuts, and they render in real time inline using MathQuill. Stuff that I've added:

- Greek letters, lower and uppercase
- Matrices (super clunky in every other editor I've tried!)
- Accents like vector arrows and derivative dots
- Tons of other useful symbols (set notation, gradients, plusminus, partial derivatives)

In my experience using it while in development, it's been substantially faster than pen and paper. There's a bit of a learning curve with the shortcuts, but I tried to make it as intuitive as possible.

The whole thing is on one index.html file, just open it and start writing. I would really appreciate any notes, especially from anyone who has experience with digital math notes. Thanks!
by remus | 2026-02-28 00:15:44+00:00
> I dunno, is a free trial really a gift?

To OPs point, whether you want to call it a gift kinda feels like splitting hairs. As is well established, most software companies have huge dependencies on OSS yet contribute very little so $1200 in free service is a pretty big step up over the fuck-all you'll get from most places.
by tgma | 2026-02-28 00:15:54+00:00
I agree with your second paragraph; we will have to see to what degree the "viral" effect of Supply Chain Risk designation goes (perhaps you contract the DoD under an LLC that has a supply chain firewall from your company) and also look forward to seeing how this would be handled in court, but I would not automatically be dismissive of this being totally legal.

> does not "influence their supply chain"

I would be wary of making this conclusion. Obviously it could conceivably influence the supply chain when you build on top of their model. If you look at the type of risks enumerated in DoD guidelines, it is not just "oh this software has vulnerability" which is what started the discussion in this subthread in the first place. There are many kinds of risks DoD needs to address, none are particularly new; including Sustainment Risk. The closest thing I remember to this case was Sun Java "no use in nuclear facility" EULA term, which LLM suggests was ignored by DoE/D because that was interpreted as a "limitation on warranty" not a "restriction of use."
by kranke155 | 2026-02-28 00:16:10+00:00
You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again.

So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.
by tl2do | 2026-02-28 00:16:15+00:00
For a hobbyist embedded developer like me, the adoption of RISC-V in the ESP series is big news. In day-to-day development, instruction sets are often abstracted away by the compiler, but I appreciate open specifications and architectures. This makes me particularly interested in how an emulator like Emuko could facilitate evaluating code without the slow process of repeatedly burning it to ROM. I'm keen to see reports of its application in actual ESP32 development.
by throwmitid1234 | 2026-02-28 00:16:23+00:00
MitID is not great, I worked on the implementation for one of the providers.

I am surprised this is even a frontpage topic, 3 years after it was rolled out, we saw downtime every week or so. So much so that we implemented automatic pop ups for our customers, and no on-call, signaturgruppen a subsidiary of NETS didn't even file this incident as a major outage lol. There is also no alternative, you simply can't access banking apps without MitID, so without it people in Denmark are just screwed, 3D Secure (online payments doesn't work for most merchants), login to government and banking sites doesn't work.

The main issues are that we have a central provider NETS whom are known for NemID its predecessor, and card payments in Denmark. They're huge in this space, at least for Denmark.

The government and the banks wanted more control over MitID, so the responsibility was split between the major banks, Digitalstyrelsen (the government), and NETS.

Basically, customers, middle man and NETS the vendor.

It was truly a shit show. The middleman (Digitalstyrelsen - Agency for Digital Government was technically illiterate, either by contract, or because they wanted to be in control, had inserted themselves in-between customer and vendor, and now we suddenly couldn't provide feedback, or talk to the vendor at all, this meant that the vendor had full control over how they interpreted the contract.

During development they shipped a version of the product that had a single flag set to false, preventing a login. NETS weren't allowed to ship a fix for this for 3 months. Many of the customers had to use burp suite during their testing simply to progress with development.

Finally when the vendor had "delivered" to their contract, the customer was sitting back with a half-baked product, and because it was Digitalstyrelsen that was the primary arbiter of whether they'd fulfilled the contract, NETS got away with having delivered at that point 1 year past schedule.

I've never had so many support tickets. For such a technically tiny product, we saw so much trouble getting people to use MitID over NemID. It was incredible.

What is even more insane is that each provider implementation of MitID is technically an independent implementation, some are React, Preact (if using nets provided version), etc. All the providers have to provide a pixel perfect replication to be allowed to issue MitID credentials.

Also this was designed when OAuth was really hot, so most implementations are like 3 levels deeply nested of OpenID Connect and OAuth2, it gets pretty nuts.

Talk about an amount of wasted effort.

As with many other huge projects especially government lead. It is just a big power play, and as it turns out, power wins. In this case NETS.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-28 00:16:36+00:00
I would find that a lot more plausible if people had not spent the past week giving me similar arguments, in precisely the same tone, for why this was an empty threat and would never happen in the first place. If Amazon and Google do not either bow down or immediately join a business coalition to get Trump out of power, Hegseth will be even happier to get an opportunity to prove his power by destroying them. Trump either doesn't want to stop him or has become too senile to stop him.
by sublinear | 2026-02-28 00:16:49+00:00
> it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes

This is the whole point of using DDG for me. For at least the past 5 years now I don't want anything from reddit in my results because it's full of liars and bots. The content from there or quora is often worse than even the blogspam.
by nemo44x | 2026-02-28 00:16:51+00:00
A level up, this is only the beginning of the political headwinds for AI. There will be a lot more, especially if constituencies begin to get displaced. I don’t think “job loss” will really occur, at least not in a dramatic way overnight. But I do believe there will be both aggressive regulation and very aggressive taxation of this technology in the near/mid-term.
by orwin | 2026-02-28 00:17:12+00:00
It's not efficient, and easier to detect.You need radio hackers and a lot of very technical job to be as risk-free as a truck, a dead drop in the water or a container, with less quantities. When i think about it, even land RC don't make sense. The Mexican cartels aren't small smugglers that sent 1g of fentanyl, especially when you can smuggle a few ton to any coastal city basically risk-free.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-28 00:17:14+00:00
Walk me through the argument of how they do that or why this is worth $100 billion. Everyone is worried about them owning CNN, but CNN was dying. Their takeover of CBS was a Flubb. I think you could make the argument that part of the reason Trump won was the perception that liberals controlled all media. Change that perception in America, and I think our contrarian nature drives people into the arms of Democrats.
by guerython | 2026-02-28 00:17:34+00:00
This is a useful direction, especially for teams that mix Codex and Claude in the same repo.

One thing that matters in practice is memory lifecycle. Shared memory tends to drift unless entries have retention rules (TTL, dedupe, and merge policy) plus periodic compaction.

Are you planning a policy layer so users can control what persists as raw events versus summarized state?