MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hinkley | 2026-02-27 17:45:13+00:00
I did a microbenchmark recently and found that on node 24, awaiting a sync function is about 90 times slower than just calling it. If the function is trivial, which can often be the case.

If you go back a few versions, that number goes up to around 105x. I don’t recall now if I tested back to 14. There was an optimization to async handling in 16 that I recall breaking a few tests that depended on nextTick() behavior that stopped happening, such that the setup and execution steps started firing in the wrong order, due to a mock returning a number instead of a Promise.

I wonder if I still have that code somewhere…
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-27 17:45:16+00:00
> Regularly visiting the bakery is, for reasons I've mentioned, a lot of friction for one purchase.

That is still not "really hard to come by" as per your original claim. It's very common (not just in large cities!) to have a local bakery where you can get good bread. Whether you choose to go or not, it is available to you.
by gip | 2026-02-27 17:45:27+00:00
The challenge for Americans is: can the political work of defining and protecting our values be outsourced to a company like Anthropic?

Anthropic (and others), whether due to financial/regulatory/competitive, will at some point permit their products to be used for any lawful purpose. Even if they attempt to restrict certain uses today. That arrangement is unlikely to hold.

Americans should vote for the right candidates and elect leaders who will carry and defend their views. I don't think there is any other way.
by vharuck | 2026-02-27 17:45:41+00:00
If the title doesn't make a difference, then there's no point to insist on it. People say "the Pentagon" as shorthand for "military leadership in Washington." Not using the shorter term wouldn't do much beyond making news articles longer.

This administration says "Department of War" because they want to project an aggressive image. I support anyone who uses the legal name "Department of Defense" in an effort to reinforce an aspirational goal for the department and to remind others that the Executive Branch shouldn't be allowed to remake the entire government at will.
by throw__away7391 | 2026-02-27 17:46:09+00:00
I basically agree here, but I would add that the framing here can sometimes sometimes be better described as “extortion”. Politicians have tremendous power and influence over many industries, I’ve seen the inside of a few situations where the politicians framed themselves as “taking on big business” where behind closed doors they were 100% calling the shots and handing executives directives on what they could or could not say publicly. The companies had no choice but to play along. When I see a big company take exactly the same public position as the current regulatory regime or administration in power, I don’t assume that they necessarily have any choice in the matter.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-27 17:46:16+00:00
>AI wasn't involved in this case, but it's good to have both AI and a trained doctor in the decision loop.

That doesn't necessarily follow from your story. The AI's specificity and sensitivity are important, which is why we need to study this stuff. An AI that produces too many false positives will send doctors off chasing zebras and they'll waste time, which will result in more deaths.

An AI that produces too many false negatives will make doctors more likely to miss things they otherwise would have checked, which will result in more deaths.

The other real problem with using AI in a medical setting is that AI is very very good at producing plausible sounding wrong information. Even an expert isn't immune to this. So it's even more important that we study how likely they are to be wrong.
by ctoth | 2026-02-27 17:46:49+00:00
I'm sorry, what?

> Previously, you were able to have _some_ reasonable expectation of security in that trained engineers were the ones building these things

When was this? What world? Did I skip worldlines? Is this a new Universe?

The world I remember is that anybody could write a program and put it on the Internet. Is this not the world you remember?

Further, when those engineers were "trained" ... were there no data breaches before 2022?
Show HN: PDF reader with interactive visualizations for any concept
by vignesh_warar | 2026-02-27 17:47:12+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a PDF reader that can generate interactive visualizations right inside the document. The goal is to reduce the “intuition gap” when reading dense papers: select a concept, click Visualize, and it tries to produce a solid visual interactive app where you can rotate/zoom/step through (not just a text explanation).

Upload any PDF, select text, click Visualize.
Demo (no signup): https://zerodistract.com/try/pdf/67cdee74-810b-4f1b-af7d-010...
Product link: https://zerodistract.com

I’d love feedback, especially on what feels useful vs. distracting, and where it breaks.
by cassepipe | 2026-02-27 17:47:31+00:00
> But I can understand how the loneliness and coldness of the world makes people more particularist

I am like and stand more on the disillusioned/disappointed side but on the other hand let's not for forget that individuals diverge quite a lot from one another and that for some "Everyone's in it for themselves" has not been a sad conclusion but happy justification for their behavior.
by fcarraldo | 2026-02-27 17:47:37+00:00
OpenAI is usable through Azure for Government up to IL-6.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azuregov/azure-openai-authori...

Either Anthropic is seen as the clear leader (it certainly is for coding agents) or this is a political stunt to stamp out any opposition to the administration. Or both.
by strangattractor | 2026-02-27 17:47:40+00:00
"Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, unexploded ordnance (UXO)—including landmines, cluster bombs, and artillery shells—has killed over 40,000 people and injured or maimed more than 60,000 others." - Google AI Overview "How many children were maimed by landmines after the vietnam war"
by Doohickey-d | 2026-02-27 17:47:49+00:00
For at least some codebases, I'm not sure this is a useful metric. Because you don't usually put the whole codebase in your context at the same time.

For example in my current case, there are lots of files with CSS, SVG icons in separate files, old database migration scripts, etc. Those don't go in the LLM context 99% of the time.

Maybe a more useful metric would be "what percentage of files that have been edited in the last {n} days fit in the context"?
by LogicFailsMe | 2026-02-27 17:48:29+00:00
And who exactly (no not the Illuminati, the mole people, the Tartarian Empire or Atlantis etc) is giving him orders? Names please.

But you're right that the Epstein (guessing Mosad IMO) op had sure ensnared a lot of people who should have known better but I guess they're just like us in the sense that they only have enough blood to run one head at a time. To my knowledge though, Tim Cook, Bezos and Zuckerberg aren't in the Epstein files. So what's their excuse?

However, that still doesn't explain the secret space program to mine adrenochrome from missing kids on Mars. Because WTFF? https://www.space.com/37366-mars-slave-colony-alex-jones.htm...

But still, WHO is giving him orders? Or are you just assuming he must be following orders because the alternative that he's genuinely large and in charge is terrifying? That our republic basically mostly rolled over for him in less than one year perhaps even moreso?
by joecot | 2026-02-27 17:48:38+00:00
The value proposition is that the people selling it are telling the buyers that trans and gay people will corrupt their children. Not that it might turn out their children are trans or gay, but that trans and gay people will cause them to be trans or gay. Amp this up with hoaxes like schools having cat litter boxes for children who identify as cats.

They're being sold fear, and they're buying it.
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-27 17:48:41+00:00
This is such a silly point to argue over. From 1789-1947 we had a "Department of War", which then merged into "Department of Army" under the newly formed (in 1947) National Military Establishment (NME) which was changed in 1949 to "Department of Defense" because N-M-E sound like "enemy".

It's not like these names are part of some sacred part of American identity, and "defense" has always been laughable as a euphemism. The DoD refers to themselves as the DoW [0] now, so it's completely reasonably to refer to the department as DoW. And of all the places to put your political energy, defending a laughable euphemism of a name that was used because the previous iteration of the name sounded funny seems like a sub-optimal use of that a energy.

0. https://www.war.gov/
by switchbak | 2026-02-27 17:49:04+00:00
I think people get really worked up guns and 3d printing quickly. A lot of those folks are printing accessories for common firearms. I mod up my mtb bike, my work area, my coffee workstation - I'm not surprised that gun enthusiasts would want to tweak their weapons to suit their desire.

I think it's cool in a nerdy way, and I might even do it if: I was into shooting (I find it boring), and my government hadn't outlawed anything related to 3d printing and firearms entirely.

Of course there is a crew of people that want to print guns (not just accessories) for libertarian or criminal purposes - That seems like a lot of time to waste given how easily you can access guns (in the USA anyway). I'm not convinced that's a huge community, but I could be wrong.
by gus_massa | 2026-02-27 17:49:04+00:00
The preferred style here for the titles is more dry, something like "Matchlang: A pattern matching language that replaces regular expressions. Full parse trees, no ReDoS" or a shorter version like "Matchlang: A replacement for regular expressions. Full parse trees, no ReDoS".

If you write in the title "Regex is dead" people will get skeptical and ask for proofs.
by xienze | 2026-02-27 17:49:05+00:00
> Ime, most companies rather buy a subscription than give their developers API keys (as it makes spending predictable).

The downside with subscriptions is that your work with the LLM will grind to a halt for a number of hours if you hit the token limit. I was doing what I consider very trivial work adding Javadoc comments to a few dozen files using Claude Sonnet on the $20 plan and within 30 minutes had been told to sit out for a couple hours. The reason was that Claude was apparently repeatedly sending the files up and down to fill in the comments. In hindsight, sure, that's obvious, but you would think that Claude would be smart enough to do some sort of summarization to make things more efficient. Looking into it, it was on the order of several million tokens in a very short amount of time.

It really made me wonder how in the hell people are using Claude to do "real" work, but I've heard of people having multiple $200/month subscriptions, so I guess that could work. Definitely seems like a glimpse into the future of what these services will truly cost once people are hooked on them.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-27 17:49:34+00:00
> I think this is one reason it is important to cast unethical behavior in terms of lack of competency

That will result in feigned virtue and Pharisaical letter-of-the-law sophistry. You can't secure morality by system and incentive alone, as important as these may be (the law is a teacher). Indeed, if you try to attain virtue by appealing to crooked desires, then you've already subverted the very preconditions of the moral life.

But I will say this: today, we often view morality as some made-up "rules" and artificial constraints that usually don't have anything to do with much of life. Being intelligent is often seen as opposed to being good: the good man is imagined as a chump, while the intelligent man is crafty. But that's just an expression of ignorance, including ignorance of what is actually good for human beings. It is not good for a man to be immoral. Immorality is self-harm.

Morality is a matter of every decision we make. Ethics is practical philosophy concerned with how one lives. Every decision is a matter of morality. When making a decision, why choose one way or another? Well, at the very least, we make what we take to be a good or the best choice. Of course, the immoral man presents something bad or worse as good or better in his own mind in order to be able to choose it. That's why people rationalize the evil choices they intend to make. But the aim and orientation of the will is the good, and so the evil man must first bullshit himself.

In that sense, to choose the good is to choose wisely which is indeed a kind of competence that requires knowledge, wisdom, and humility (which is to say, a sober view of reality, and that includes oneself). Indeed, the first classical cardinal virtue is prudence, which is the habit (as in possessed and actualized excellence) of being able to determine the right decision in a situation. And the right decision is always a moral one.

Prudence itself is the cornerstone of the remaining cardinal virtues: one cannot be just without first being prudent; one cannot be courageous without first being just; and one cannot be temperate without first being courageous. You need to know what is right before you can be just, as what is wrong is never just; you need to be just before you can be courageous, as bravado or recklessness are not courage; and you need courage to be temperate, as you cannot act as you ought if you don't have the courage to do so.

So, what we really need is an authentic moral education and a culture that ceases to fear a robust and sound morality rooted in the objectively real, because it sees it as a threat to its misguided notion of "liberty". We must reconnect with classical tradition so that we can profit from its insights and its wisdom and return to a dialogue spanning centuries and millennia. We cannot do it alone, and things will never be perfect, but this will give us strength to face the immorality of the world - and above all, in ourselves - and a foundation for a healthier culture.
by bonzini | 2026-02-27 17:49:52+00:00
To be honest, it's quite likely that someone who applies is already paying $20/month and would save them for 6 months, so the extra shock is only $60. And it's quite easy to set up a calendar event to remember to unsubscribe.

I have had subscriptions renewed unwillingly and it was always clear to me that, as much as I disliked this practice, the expense was always my fault.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-27 17:49:54+00:00
>You can, of course, genuinely live modestly with minimal consumption. Keyword minimal. You just always consume to an extent.

This is ideal for some people, and/or at certain times, I've done it.

But it's still only half the equation.

I prefer to produce much much rather than consume.

I want to produce so much real tangible value added, that the amount I consume is negligible by comparison.
by daxfohl | 2026-02-27 17:49:57+00:00
Temporal had a far greater impact on dev velocity than AI ever did. It's not even close. It saves not only coding, but design, planning, coordination, maintenance, etc that AI doesn't even touch. But that's not very buzzy, is it.

From what I hear, that's kind of true across the industry. I wonder how things would be different if all these press releases pointed to Temporal as the cause rather than AI. It's kind of weird to think about. (Not that I think Temporal is the reason behind the layoffs either, but just as a thought experiment).
by y-c-o-m-b | 2026-02-27 17:50:09+00:00
My belief is they are terrified of China and this seems evident when you take into account the moves they're making with Venezuela, Iran, and the increased adoption of authoritarian tactics. We're trying to play catch-up with China's rapid rise as a super-power and the AI infrastructure is one of the few major developments we still have control over, for now. I sympathize with Dario, he's stuck in a very bad position on this. We do not want China to operate on this level while we sit back with one hand tied behind our backs. On the other hand, this administration is making extremely poor decisions and arguably causing extensive harm domestically and internationally, so it's a lose-lose situation for Dario really.
by expensive_news | 2026-02-27 17:50:13+00:00
I was one of the solvers. It took me about a week to figure out. This is what I wrote out in my submission with the answer:

> After looking at the final two layers I was somewhat quick to intuit that this was some sort of password check, but wasn’t entirely sure where to go from there. I tried to reverse it, but it was proving to be difficult, and the model was far too deep. I started evaluating the structure and saw the 64 repeated sections of 84 layers that each process 4 characters at a time. Eventually I saw the addition and XOR operations, and the constants that were loaded in every cycle, and the shift amounts that differed between these otherwise identical sections.

> I thought it was an elaborate CTF cryptography challenge, where the algorithm was purposely weak and I had to figure out how to exploit it. But I repeatedly was getting very stuck in my reverse-engineering efforts. After reconsidering the structure and the format of the ‘header' I decided to take another look at existing algorithms...

Basically it took a lot of trial and error, and a lot of clever ways to look at and find patterns in the layers. Now that Jane Street has posted this dissection and 'ended' this contest I might post my notebooks and do a fuller post on it.

The trickiest part, to me, is that for about 5 of the days was spent trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm... but they did in fact use a irreversible hash function, so all that time was in vain. Basically my condensed 'solution' was to explore it enough to be able to explain it to ChatGPT, then confirm that it was the algorithm that ChatGPT suggested (hashing known works and seeing if the output matched) and then running brute force on the hash function, which was ~1000x faster to compute than the model.
by mandevil | 2026-02-27 17:50:14+00:00
And even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.
by ch4s3 | 2026-02-27 17:50:15+00:00
I've been thinking a bit about how to do security well with my generated code. I've been using tools that check deps for CVEs, static tools that check for sql injection and similar problems, and baking some security requirements into the specs I hand claude. I can't tell yet if this is better than what I did before or just theater. It seems like in this case you'd need/want to specify some tests around access.

I'm interested to hear how other people approach this.
by MWParkerson | 2026-02-27 17:50:15+00:00
Pathetic but not unexpected that people are willing to tolerate such a use of AI. However, this is the most principled statement on the military use of AI that a frontier model leadership suite has released. It's also full of "china bad" sentiment that's worth picking over, but in a political and economic paradigm that expects & rewards blatant corruption, this statement still stands out.
by fcarraldo | 2026-02-27 17:50:37+00:00
Yes - Anthropic _does_ incur business risk if their products are misused and this becomes a scandal. Legally the government may be in the clear to use the product, but that doesn’t mean Anthropic’s business is protected. Moral concerns aside, it’s their prerogative to decide not to take on a customer that may misuse their product in a way that might incur reputational harm.

Or it was their prerogative, until the Trump administration. Now even private companies must bend the knee.
by disillusioned | 2026-02-27 17:50:57+00:00
Bullets don't kill people, etc. etc.

If anything represents the logical conclusion of that tired fallacy, it'll be actually autonomous, "thinking" drones which make the targeting decisions and execution decisions on their own, not based on any direct, human-led orders, but derived from second-order effects of their neural net. At a certain point, it's not going to matter who launched the drones, or even who wrote the software that runs on the drones. If we're letting the drones decide things, it'll just be up to the drones, and I don't love our chances making our case to them.
by vijver | 2026-02-27 17:51:11+00:00
this is funny

EULOGY
"Perplexity AI lived a beautiful, chaotic life — it was Google if Google had anxiety and cited everything like a grad student on Adderall. It raised $500M to essentially teach the world that you could just... ask an AI things and get links back, a concept so simple that Anthropic put it in a .md file during a lunch break. We will remember it fondly, mostly because it was genuinely useful for about 18 months before the entire concept of 'AI search startup' became a punchline at Y Combinator demo days."
by hinkley | 2026-02-27 17:51:16+00:00
I think the context that some other responders are missing is that in some functional languages, like Elixir, streams and iterators are used idiomatically to do staged transforms of data without necessitating accumulation at each step.

They are those languages versions of goroutines, and JavaScript doesn’t have one. Generators sort of, but people don’t use them much, and they don’t compose them with each other.

So if we are going to fix Streams, an implementation that is tuned only for IO-bound workflows at the expense of transform workflows would be a lost opportunity.
by Loughla | 2026-02-27 17:51:24+00:00
I'm not trying to have a cynical hot take, but the political class seems not to offer up any candidates that carry or defend my views and the path to these positions requires funding and resources I will never have access to.

The situation in the United States, right now, seems genuinely hopeless. And I'm certain I'm not the only person who feels this way.

What is there to do besides resign myself to what's coming and try my best to ignore the bullshit?
by logicallee | 2026-02-27 17:51:35+00:00
I recently had Claude develop a huge application (barcode scanner, you can click the link to see it if you want, scan whatever you want), it first tried with both major open projects for this but it just didn't work. Then I had it write its own version from scratch. Without any WASM compiler, it hand-assembled WASM - this is like writing byte code without a C++ compiler. I asked for a couple of speed-related adjustments (in its first version it asked the user to hold it steady, which is not necessary), and at my request it accomodated bar codes at different curvatures (one that I had wouldn't scan), and minutes after starting, we were done. This is better than the state of the art libraries, which you can try if you don't believe me. I'm an AI alreadyist - superhuman AI is already here.
by LordDragonfang | 2026-02-27 17:52:00+00:00
The full[1] quote is:

> “Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean?”

...Which is funny, but technically speaking, it's (more or less) a paraphrasing/extrapolation of the very serious political science definition of a state, “a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence in a defined territory”

[1] Minus the last line, which I will allow others to discover for themselves