MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-28 01:28:48+00:00
The administration's approach to contracts, agreements, treaties and so on could be summed up as 'I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.'

The basic problem in our polity is that we've collectively transferred the guilty pleasure of aligning a charismatic villain in fiction to doing the same in real life. The top echelons of our government are occupied by celebrities and influencers whose expertise is in performance rather than policy. For years now they've leaned into the aesthetics of being bad guys, performative cruelty, committing fictional atrocities, and so forth. Some MAGA influencers have even adopted the Imperial iconography from Star Wars as a means of differentiating themselves from liberal/democratic adoption of the 'rebel' iconography. So you have have influencers like conservative entrepreneur Alex Muse who styles his online presence as an Imperial stormtrooper. As Poe's law observes, at some point the ironic/sarcastic frame becomes obsolete and you get political proxies and members of the administration arguing for actual infringements of civil liberties, war crimes, violations of the Constitution and so on.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-28 01:29:06+00:00
"So no one is really choosing to use Google Search. It's being chosen for them."

Google tries to argue that based on so many people using it that it must be the best

But only a small percentage of people actively _choose_ to use it

Very few people know about "settings", "default settings" or how to change them

If they knew how, then would they change them

If the default was something other than Google, then would people chaange the settings to Google

Google pays billions becuse it knows most people will never become aware of settings or try to change them
by adastra22 | 2026-02-28 01:29:32+00:00
> Whatever they were asked to do, they should just be upfront about.

Anthropic is not being asked to do anything, except renegotiate the contracts. The DoW Claude models run on government AWS. Anthropic has minimal access to these systems and does not see the classified data that is being ingested as prompts. It is very unlikely that Dario actually knows what the DoW wants to do with these models. But even if he did, it would be classified information that he is not at liberty to disclose.

However the product they provide likely has safety filters that cause some prompts to not be processed if it is violates the two contractual conditions. That is what the DoW wants removed.
by decidu0us9034 | 2026-02-28 01:30:06+00:00
I'm not sure it's worth entertaining these hypotheticals. Just another absurd CA law that's impossible to comply with. "When you set up your account and it asks for your birthdate." What does this mean? "Setup" what account? "It" what? Some graphical installer? What if I don't want to use one? How would this protocol be implemented in such a way where it's not trivially easy for the user to alter the "age signal" before sending a request? The "signal" is signed with some secret that you attest to but can't write? So it's in some enclave? What if my smart toaster doesn't have an enclave? Does my toaster now have to implement software enclave? I'm not aware of a standard, or industry standards body, or standard specification, or implementation of a specification, around this "age signal" thing. Is this some proprietary technology that some company has a patent on, and they've been lobbying for their patent to be legally mandated? If so that's very concerning and probably has antitrust implications (it is ironic that ever-tightening surveillance of people is a downstream consequence of all this deregulation of corporate persons; fine for me but not for thee I guess). I would love to know the full story here, since this is being shopped around in several states, but I haven't seen any sort of investigative journalism about this which is disappointing. This whole thing is really curious.
by tacostakohashi | 2026-02-28 01:30:14+00:00
The other thing I would say is, for this kind of decision, you're looking for a "hell yes!" / "this is a no brainer" / "i can't afford to miss this opportunity". It's like hiring someone, buying a property, getting married, or even changing jobs... If it's not that, then it's a no, stay where you are, sit on your hands, keep waiting for something better.

If you're comparing option A and option B, and comes down to 48% A vs 52% B... if it's toilet paper or car insurance, fine, choose option B, but if it's moving countries buying a property or something, then the right answer is do nothing, keep waiting for option C, option D, etc to come along.
by lysace | 2026-02-28 01:30:14+00:00
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

I think mistercheph is right to be concerned. This bill applies to all "operating system providers", defined thusly:

(g) “Operating system provider” means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

Regarding penalities:

1798.503. (a) A person that violates this title shall be subject to an injunction and liable for a civil penalty of not more than two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) per affected child for each negligent violation or not more than seven thousand five hundred dollars ($7,500) per affected child for each intentional violation, which shall be assessed and recovered only in a civil action brought in the name of the people of the State of California by the Attorney General.
by autoexec | 2026-02-28 01:30:22+00:00
> The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients... These are obviously false. The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, but curing cancer is hard, so they only manage about two-thirds.

I don't see the contradiction here. The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible. "What it does" is cure as many patients as possible. The fact that as many patients as possible is currently (presumably) two-thirds is irrelevant. If major advancements in medicine or new types of cancer emerged which changed the percentage of people cured it wouldn't matter at all. "What it does" and "the purpose of the system" is still unchanged.
by Mawr | 2026-02-28 01:30:29+00:00
Removing car capacity by 50% and adding 1000% bike capacity at 1% of the cost is good, actually. It's not really 1000% of course, it's infinity% — the average cyclist is not capable of cycling on the roadway, so a bike lane literally enables them to do the activity at all; the value is immeasurable.

That you think cycling is a hobby is exactly the issue. I don't get to work by bike as a hobby, I do it to get to work, and get all the benefits of cycling at the same time. Win-win.

It's also quite deluded to think the USA has been putting non-negligible effort towards improving cycling for the last 40 years, to the point that you'd notice any difference in car traffic. Hate to bring it to you, but the reason traffic's getting worse is there are more and more cars, but there's only so much space and cars scale horribly. Hence, bikes and public transportation. Those scale exceptionally well and are the perfect solution for 95% of all city trips.

The USA is in 99.9% designed for cars. You're essentially complaining that the most dominant mode of transport is getting mildly deprioritized and is on the path to being only 99% dominant. Cry me a river.

Oh, and the reason you drive a car and not say, use public transport, is that for the last 50+ years the USA has invested into car infrastructure instead of public transport. So the car is not a mode of transport that you have chosen, that you prefer, that you like, it's one that was forced upon you. That you can't see it is somewhat hilarious, but really — just sad.

Just ask yourself: Do you have any other real choice than to own a car and drive everywhere?
by billywhizz | 2026-02-28 01:32:46+00:00
that sounds way off. there is a big perf hit to async, but it appears to be roughly 100 nanoseconds overhead per call. when benchmarking you have to ensure your function is not going to be optimized away if it doesn't do anything or inputs/outputs never change.

you can run this to see the overhead for node.js Bun and Deno:
https://gist.github.com/billywhizz/e8275a3a90504b0549de3c075...
by TehCorwiz | 2026-02-28 01:33:50+00:00
This conflict has zero to do with AI in the grand scheme of things. We had a whole supreme court case about refusing service to customers. Remember that? Private companies can choose which customers to service. And let's be clear about what's being sold. It's not a product that changes hands, it's a service provided continually. And as anyone except the enlisted military troops can, said vendor can choose which efforts to help with. If what the government wants is so onerous as to find no vendors to offer it then that says something doesn't it?
by sensanaty | 2026-02-28 01:33:53+00:00
I might be being a bit conspiratorial, but is anyone else not buying this whole song and dance, from either side? Anthropic keeps talking about their safeguards or whatever, but seeing their marketing tactics historically it just reads more like trying to posture and get good PR for "fighting the system" or whatever.

"Our AI is so advanced and dangerous Trump has to beg us to remove our safeguards, and we valiantly said no! Oh but we were already spying on people and letting them use our AIs in weapons as long as a human was there to tick a checkbox"

I just don't buy anything spewing out of the mouths of these sociopathic billionaires, and I trust the current ponzi schemers in the US gov't even less.

Especially given how much astroturfing Anthropic loves doing, and the countless comments in this thread saying things like "Way to go Amodei, I'm subbing to your 200 dollar a month plan now forever!!11".

One thing I know for sure is that these AI degenerates have made me a lot more paranoid of anything I read online.
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-02-28 01:34:03+00:00
You're assuming a lot about Elon's ability to assemble and execute a process competently. They will probably end up hiring people off this list and firing them later.

I think what is much more interesting is what OpenAI and Google will do. There's probably some threshold of signatories where the companies in question do not fire everyone when they decide they want the DoD's business, the question will be how many people have to sign to cross it... and will enough people sign.

I don't think Google would bat an eye at firing 500 people to secure a DoD contract, but would they fire 5,000?
by txrx0000 | 2026-02-28 01:35:11+00:00
This is why you can't gatekeep AI capabilities. It will eventually be taken from you by force.

It's time to open-source everything. Papers, code, weights, financial records. Do all of your research in the open. Run 100% transparent labs so that there's nothing to take from you. Level the playing field for good and bad actors alike, otherwise the bad actors will get their hands on it while everyone else is left behind. Start a movement to make fully transparent AI labs the worldwide norm, and any org that doesn't cooperate is immediately boycotted.

Stop comparing AI capabilities to nuclear weapons. A nuke cannot protect against or reverse the damage of another nuke. AI capabilities are not like nukes. General intelligence should not be in the hands of a few. Give it to everyone and the good will prevail.

Build a world where millions of AGIs run on millions of gaming PCs, where each AI is aligned with an individual human, not a corporation or government (which are machiavellian out of necessity). This is humanity's best chance at survival.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-28 01:35:43+00:00
It does not matter. If Anthropic had been precise in this narrow way, there would have been some other nitpick to raise.

You're trying desperately to find a way that things can be at least a little normal, and I really do get it. It would be great if such a way existed. But it doesn't. I recommend you take a social media break like I'm about to, take the time you need to mourn the era of normal politics, and come back with a full understanding that the US government is not pursuing normal policy objectives with bad decisions. They hate you and they hate me for not being on their side, and their primary goal is to ensure that we're as miserable as they can make us.
by parl_match | 2026-02-28 01:35:50+00:00
> Or could you retract your statement and clarify that you did grant camera permissions for that site previously?

I never said anything about granting permissions. I can respond to your other points, in turn, but first I would like you to confirm that I am who you think you are responding to :) I am not OP.

In case you don't think I'm OP, then, well I was being imprecise. Yes, it requires browser/app/manifest permissions. Your paranoid and aggressive tone implies you're not giving me any benefit of the doubt, as I speak informally in a casual web forum discussion about understanding what happened.
by credit_guy | 2026-02-28 01:36:35+00:00
> each next model costs 10x the last

Yes, but there's a chance that actually training is done more or less for free by companies like OpenAI. The reason being that they do a gigantic amount of inference for end users (for which they get paid), but their servers can't be constantly utilized at 100% by inference. So, if they know how to schedule things correctly (and they probably do), they can do the training of their new model on the unutilized compute capacity. If you or I were to pay for that training, it would be billions of dollars, but for them it is just using compute that otherwise would be idle.
by dataflow | 2026-02-28 01:36:47+00:00
> The micro stamping law is in no way reasonable because removing the micro stamping from the end of a firing pin is laughably trivial. The only people who won’t do this are people who weren’t going to break the law in the first place.

I'm curious, so if (when?) California ends up successfully hunting down some criminals with this, what is your new position going to be? They were going to get caught anyway, or something like that?
by harrall | 2026-02-28 01:38:11+00:00
No it’s a mindset thing.

Some people think all problems should be fixed with regulation.

Some people think all problems should be fixed with free market / responsibility.

California and liberals tend to lean to the former. A place like Texas and conservatives tend to lean to the latter.

I think both camps are crazy because it’s a case-by-case basis where you need to consider second and third order effects. But man talk to a die hard regulation supporter or die hard free market supporter and you just want to say “the world isn’t just simple rules like that.”
by adastra22 | 2026-02-28 01:38:44+00:00
I don't think you understand. This supply chain risk designation is viral. Every Claude model provider now has to decide whether to (1) drop Anthropic models, or (2) drop every single government contract, every contract with government contractors, or any customer who has any customer to any degree of connection to a government contract [which is effectively everyone], or (3) go to jail.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-28 01:38:47+00:00
Anthropic has enough investment money and enough additional investor interest that they can ride this out longer than this administration. It won’t be good for business, of course, but it’s not the end of their world.

> it will just be perfect proof that you cannot be both moral and successful in the US.

I hate this situation as much as anyone, but it’s a unique, first of its kind challenge. I don’t think it’s generalizable to anything. This is a unique situation.
by orangea | 2026-02-28 01:39:04+00:00
The first half of the article says "namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp aren't 'security boundaries' because if the kernel had a bug it could be used to escape from a sandbox". Then in the second half it says "use gvisor and do all this other stuff to avoid these problems." This presentation feels kind of dishonest to me because the article avoids acknowledging the obvious question: "well what if gvisor has a bug then?" I mean, sure, another layer of sandboxing that is simpler than the other layers probably increases security, but let's not pretend like these are fundamentally different approaches.
by tl2do | 2026-02-28 01:39:27+00:00
That's a solid approach, and for high-level logic, it's definitely the way to go.

I find that a lot of my development time is actually spent on lower-level tasks—like writing custom string operations—since we don't have the rich standard libraries of a host environment.

This is exactly where an emulator really shines for me. It enables a "device-less" workflow where I can work through those low-level details on a sofa at a cafe without needing to bring the physical hardware along just to verify the behavior.
by gpm | 2026-02-28 01:39:39+00:00
Any knife vendor who

1. Found out you used their knives to go murdering

2. Sells knives in a fashion where it's possible for them to prevent you from buying their knives (i.e. direct to consumer sales)

Would almost certainly not "be more than happy to continue to sell to you". Even if we ignore the fact that most people are simply against assisting in murders (which by itself is a sufficient justification in most companies), the bad PR (see the "found out" and "direct to consumer" part) would make you a hugely unprofitable customer.
by harmmonica | 2026-02-28 01:39:49+00:00
A lot of words and somehow still missing the point. This is a pretty straightforward question: should the US government be able to force a company to do business with it based the government's unilateral terms? I think the answer to that ought to be no, they should not be forced. And there's no other discussion to have.

You can discuss whether a corporation is violating some law, and punish them if they are, but I don't think jumping from "corporation doesn't want to do business with the gov" to "corporation is a national security risk" makes any sense.

What a fuckin' joke.
by ibeckermayer | 2026-02-28 01:40:20+00:00
> Isn't that basically the same as me giving you $80? I don't see at all how that's me "basically getting that investment back".

It's a good question, what I think you're missing is that if the market is valuing me (NVIDIA) at 25x revenue then it's more like I traded you (OpenAI) a GPU it cost me $80 to make for $100 worth of OpenAI stock, and I got a bonus $2500 in market cap of my own stock (which existing shareholders like).

IOW for every incremental "$100" in revenue (circular or otherwise), existing shareholders get paid "$2500" in equity (NVIDIA appreciation + OpenAI shares).

This "works" for NVIDIA and its shareholders as long as they/the market keeps thinking $100 of OpenAI stock is a good price for a GPU. If OpenAI tangibly fails to deliver on this valuation then NVIDIA may wind up in the red on these deals.

Caveat: it's a bit more complicated than that as OpenAI doesn't typically buy/operate GPUs directly afaict, rather they team up with the big cloud providers like AMZN (also part of the deal). But it's an useful way to wrap your head around the economics, I think (open to correction, not a domain of professional expertise).

I don't see anything _inherently_ unethical about this as some comments seem to imply. It's definitely riskier than accepting cash, in which case you're free not to play, but it's a calculated risk based on future expectations of growth by OpenAI. Granted there are some sketchy incentives qua existing shareholders that could materialize in pump and dump dynamics.
by jjk166 | 2026-02-28 01:40:51+00:00
Note that the Bennu asteroid sample had approximately 5 nanomoles of nucleotides per gram, meaning 20,000 moles of nucleotides could be delivered by a single 4 million ton asteroid, which if it were a spherical carbonaceous chondrite would be about 183 meters in diameter. An asteroid about that size impacts earth roughly every 36,000 years, and that mass of meteor material falls to earth each century.

If primordial earth's oceans had nucleotide concentrations comparable to Bennu, then there would be about 10^39 nucleotides in the ocean.
by ekropotin | 2026-02-28 01:41:38+00:00
I think you can't see the forest for the trees.
The issue is not a process isolation, it’s pretty trivial to solve in a lot of ways.
The actual problem is LLMs proneness to the prompt injection. The second you give an agent ability to consume the info from the outside world - like reading emails; you expose yourself to this ginormous security vulnerability.
I genuinely don’t understand how people able to sleep at night knowing anyone can trick the magic process with access to their digital lives to do absolutely anything.
by ofc-tahaabbasi | 2026-02-28 01:41:49+00:00
This came from a real debugging session. My SanDisk Extreme SSD wouldn't eject — macOS just said "The disk couldn't be ejected because the Finder is using it." The usual advice is to log out, but I had 30+ apps open.

I ran lsof +D /Volumes/Extreme\ SSD and found Preview had open file handles on trashed video files, plus Spotlight was indexing. Killed Preview, waited for Spotlight to release, ejected cleanly.

DiskFree packages that workflow into one command. It runs lsof on the target volume, categorizes blockers into user apps vs. system processes (mds, fseventsd, etc.), shows read/write status so you know if something is actively writing, then gracefully closes the user apps and ejects.

Single bash file, ~340 lines, zero dependencies beyond what ships with macOS (lsof, diskutil, kill). MIT licensed.

Happy to hear feedback — especially edge cases I haven't hit yet.
by mindslight | 2026-02-28 01:42:11+00:00
> Should our military be regulated by our elected leaders

Utterly fallacious. Trump is not a leader (rather he is a divider). Nor was he elected to act as a dictator unbeholden to the Constitution or the courts. Corporate control is indeed terrible, but autocratic authoritarianism is worse. That it is only the rare company trying to impart some kind of restraint which is being taken to task for this illustrates this dynamic in stark relief.

It's also pretty amazing how no matter which societal institution we try to invoke to put the brakes on the fascists, we're invariably told that the "proper approach" is actually something else, ultimately culminating in an election, some time down the road, maybe. The fascists won a single election, and so we're told that supposedly serves as a mandate for doing whatever they'd like to our country for the next four years? Yeah, no, fuck off.
by fzeroracer | 2026-02-28 01:43:04+00:00
It's rather amusing that this is the proverbial 'red line', not y'know, everything else this administration has been tearing up and running roughshod over. Maybe this would've been less of an issue if companies were more proactive about this bullshit in the first place?

That's why it's hard for me to feel bad about companies suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end. They dug their grave inch by inch and are suddenly surprised when they get shoved into it.
by kalkin | 2026-02-28 01:43:30+00:00
Companies have to comply with subpoenas (unless they can beat them in court, and with an alternative of going to jail). Subpoenas are supposed to be targeted at individuals and need some kind of process, usually judicial, each time one is issued. Mass surveillance - the Anthropic blog post raises the possibility of using AI to classify the political loyalties of every citizen - is a different thing.