MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Smaug123 | 2026-02-27 23:47:34+00:00
It's perfectly reasonable for the US government to end the contract if they no longer like the terms they agreed to (assuming the contract does in fact let them); it's not reasonable to destroy the counterparty to the contract in retaliation. The line "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it further" is literally spoken by Darth Vader, the most comic-book of comic-book villains.
by Merovius | 2026-02-27 23:47:41+00:00
Wow that post is bad. The author clearly never actually attempted to understand what POSWID actually means and where it is coming from. Perhaps, instead of looking at Twitter, they should have opened Wikipedia. Or, better yet, Stafford Beers books (though admittedly, he was a pretty atrocious writer).

The follow-up is slightly better. But still not very convincing, IMO. They get far too stuck on a literal interpretation. Of something that self-describes as a heuristic.
by nomilk | 2026-02-27 23:47:44+00:00
I agree they can't be forced to provide something. I just see DoW's reasoning, and I can't fault it.

Anthropic are taking a moral position which is admirable, but in this case it could actually make people's lives worse (if we assume more false positives and fewer true positives, which is probably a fair assumption given how much better 'modern' AI is compared to the neural net image recognition of just a few years ago).
by retrodaredevil | 2026-02-27 23:47:47+00:00
The big news here is that you now need a premium subscription to use any of Spotify's APIs. This means that if you wish to use Spotify's APIs to more easily share music with others, you must have a premium subscription.

What's gross to me is the language:

> all newly created Development Mode Client IDs will be created under the updated Development Mode rules and will have the following restrictions applied by default
> Development Mode use will require a Spotify Premium account

The language acts as if it's possible to have some sort of non-development mode application. If you look further, you'll see that a non-development mode application must be owned by an organization with more than 250k users.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-27 23:48:30+00:00
Successful moonshots were a Presidential initiative of Kennedy.

He was a great enough President that the momentum did not stop even long after he had been killed.

Kennedy was very widely loved around the world, except of course by the communist dictator type.

But Nixon hated him without a doubt. It took a hell of a deceptive machine to get Nixon elected and it took years after losing to Kennedy the first time. Machine kept on going brrr.

By about 1972 it was plain to see that very few Americans were going to be able to afford anything which was the least bit costly or expensive for the foreseeable future.

And getting fewer. Nixon's inflation was just beginning to build steam and his full-blown recession was just around the corner.

Individuals, businesses, institutions, everyone except the most fortunate could do nothing but cut back, and too often that was not enough.

With that other type of Presidential initiative, the malfeasance kind, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. That's what I mean by the foreseeable future.

To a lot of us it was pretty much accepted that maybe it would take until the 21st century, which was just as far in the future as WWII was in the past. There were no signs positive enough for anything else. All you could do is use your imagination and hope that nobody crooked got to be in power like that again, plus pray nobody else would take a chance on dropping the ball either.

But 2026 ? You've got to be kidding, nobody thought it would take this long, surely Americans would be so advanced by this time that nobody would ever accept such dishonest, imitation leadership ever again.

But here we are.

Anybody who had a moonshot in mind a couple years ago has to be whole lot more realistic now, the dollar as a currency is just not valuable enough any more to cope with the engineering requirements in anything like a timely way by comparison.

As another poster mentioned, the Chinese may be who does it this time.

If nothing else their leadership may be deeply corrupt, but it would be worse if they were actively trying to destroy their own currency at the same time.
by pron | 2026-02-27 23:48:50+00:00
The US government is applying severe sanctions against a US company that does not "influence their supply chain". Donald Trump believes the economy is great and at the same time declares economic emergencies to justify doing certain things. It could be true that Anthropic's products are useless for the DoD because of the products' safeguards, but that doesn't mean they're a risk to the US government.

As to this being 100% legal, I'm not so sure (not a lawyer). It might not be a criminal offese, but there's a whole category of abuse of power that this may fall under if Anthropic is put under a certain status without real justification. Many powers given to the executive branch are not absolute and can't be applied arbitrarily, but require justification. Anthropic might be able to sue the government for declaring them a "supply-chain risk" without sufficient justification. E.g. they could claim that not being sufficiently patriotic in the eyes of the administration does not constitute a risk, and that since their not the sole supplier of the tech, they were not trying to strong arm the government to do anything.
by hagbard_c | 2026-02-27 23:48:52+00:00
Well, no, that's not how laws like this work. Of course people in these states can just install the software and it is very likely nothing more will come from that unless some politico in one of these states decides she has a beef against the company, group or person which distributes the software. When that happens she'll have this law at hand to whack them with because the knowingly violated state law so they need to be dealt with, won't anyone think of the children?.
by sublinear | 2026-02-27 23:49:02+00:00
Why? The vast majority of software doesn't need to be written by AI and moves at the speed of the humans making the decisions, not the speed of writing the code.

They make a shit ton of money because of this. If you're working at a place where the code matters more than the decisions that went into it, you're basically working at a sweatshop for people who are desperate for a win and will throw away you and all your code once the MVP stage is over, and that's the only way this "works".

Generative probabilistic AI is not equivalent to a compiler and never will be until we can do this kind of thing completely deterministically. No matter how much you reduce the error in the "model", it's still more error than the error rate of the logic gates. It's completely futile considering the sheer depth of indirection at play, and that indirection is the whole point of software.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-27 23:49:06+00:00
> The aid to Palestinians.

You mean the aid they gave up on delivering? [1]

> Trump is advocating for a takeover of Gaza and letting the Israelis go nuts in the West Bank.

And Biden simply allowed Israel to do that. Trump is saying the quiet part out loud, but the plan has been the same. Words without actions are meaningless.

> Also lol at peace negotiations

Yeah, an actual action that happened almost immediately under trump. [2]

> do you think Trump ended 8 wars already as well despite violence still ongoing?

No, I already said that it was a somewhat meaningless peace negotiation, but one that is measurably more than what Biden accomplished in 2 years.

> We’re in phase 2 of his “peace plan” which requires Hamas demilitarizing, which they say they won’t do, and fighting is still happening.

They actually did agree to that. [3] There's not ongoing fighting, it's Israel murdering civilians. But because big news organizations have never cared about Israel's war crimes, it is very under-reported. Trump flagging peace was enough for them.

I don't like trump and I think this is a travesty. However, he has objectively done more. Biden did nothing for peace in Gaza. And it's not like Biden didn't have a lot of levers to pull. He simply refused to pull any of them because he full heartedly supported Israel's actions. I wish he didn't.

Trump at very least cares about the optics of Gaza which is the only reason he's put in the slightest amount of effort. Still genocidal, still supporting Israel, but also at least pushing them to make PR political moves. Which is more than Biden did.

[1] https://abcnews.com/Politics/bidens-floating-pier-off-gaza-w...

[2] https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/01/16/israel-hamas-ceasef...

[3] https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/palestinian-terri...
by masswerk | 2026-02-27 23:49:40+00:00
> We recruited 8 participants across 8 different countries, deliberately seeking diversity in age, digital savviness, and cultural background.

> 5 out of 8 points versus just 3 for "I am human." For the verifying state, it was even more dramatic — 7.5 versus 0.5.

n × p >= 5? (Sample size and margins of errors. Is 5:3 even meaningful or is this rather random personal preference?) Apparent splitting of missing or inconclusive data points? (7.5 vs. 0.5 out of a total of 8 subjects.) What kind of (social) research is this supposed to be?
by andrepd | 2026-02-27 23:50:03+00:00
That's why I say most AI content isn't just slop—it's fundamentally about deception. It's about tricking someone into believing that a text was written by a human, or that a photo or video is a true recording of a real event.

Like this, its purpose is to fly under the radar unless your figurative ears are pricked up and primed to detect the telltale signs. Fuck this shit.
by helaoban | 2026-02-27 23:51:00+00:00
> This is just totally disconnected from policy reality.

No it's not. What matters is the NET number of entries, not total deportations. Under the Biden administration, 5.8 million were let in under the "catch and release" policy. In Trump's second term, that number is effectively zero. Biden's large deportation numbers are a function of the huge numbers of border crossings. If you have twice as many people coming in, but you deport at the same rate, well then you've deported twice as many people, but you've also let in twice as many people.

During Biden's term there were ~8.6 million encounters at the US-Mexico border, compared to ~2.4 million during Trump's first term(1). That's almost 4 times as much!

There isn't much hope in arguing that Biden administration is somehow the victim of kind of uncontrollable, once-in-a-generation migration crisis either, since the number of encounters dropped drastically once Trump came into office. The current rate of encounters at the US-Mexico border is ~9,700 / month (2), compared to the ~181,000/ month average under Biden.

The difference is enormous. Individuals and human smugglers attempt border illegal border crossings when they feel their chances of success, both in crossing and remaining, are high. They don't when the chances are low. It's that simple. Ditto for asylum seekers.

There is no longer an incentive to cross.

Whether you call it tolerance for mass illegal immigration, or a inability to do anything about it, I don't think the distinction matters much for the voting public.

The shutting of the US-Mexico border was and is a widely supported policy. Notice that is distinct from the brutal and indiscriminate deportation policy currently underway. The former is popular, the latter is not.

1. There were https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/biden-immigration-legac...
2. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...
by nickysielicki | 2026-02-27 23:51:30+00:00
Tens, maybe hundreds, of billions? That’s cute. The DoD will spend $961b this year. It does that like clockwork every year, year after year.

Anthropic is not even close to too big to fail. And even if this could get settled in court 5 years from now, this can easily throw enough of a wrench into their revenue streams to kill their flywheel.
by versteegen | 2026-02-27 23:51:32+00:00
That misses my point: the evidence is the extensive argumentation provided for why it reduces risk. To quote Karnofsky:

> I wish people simply evaluated whether the changes seem good on the merits, without starting from a strong presumption that the mere fact of changes is either a bad thing or a fine thing. It should be hard to change good policies for bad reasons, not hard to change all policies for any reason.
by Mordisquitos | 2026-02-27 23:51:49+00:00
> echo - ok for all ages.

> cat - 18+, prints the porn you found directly to your terminal.

Sound good in theory, until you realise that any teenager knows perfectly well how to trivially get around the lack of `cat` to read their terminal smut:

$ while read -r LINE; do echo $LINE; done <my_porn_file.sext
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-02-27 23:52:05+00:00
> Can someone in plain terms explain what this is really about?

This administration built almost entirely of dunces and conmen has convinced itself/been convinced that chatbots will help them in deciding where to send nukes, and/or they are invested in the incredibly over-leveraged companies engaged in the AI-boom and stand to profit directly by siphoning taxpayer dollars to said companies. My money is on the latter more than the former, but they're also incredibly stupid, so who's to say, maybe they actually think Claude can give strategic points.

The Republicans have abandoned any pretense of actual governance in favor of pulling the copper out of the White House walls to sell as they will have an extremely hard time winning any election ever again since after decades of crowing about the cabal of pedophiles that run the world, we now know not only how true that actually is, but that the vast majority are Conservatives and their billionaire buddies, and the entire foundation and financial backing of what's now called the alt-Right, with some liberals in there for flavor too of course.

If this shit was going down in France, the entire capital would have been burned to the ground twice over by now.
by freddydumont | 2026-02-27 23:52:18+00:00
Ads weren’t that much of a problem when they were contextual. I remember video game websites younger me used to visit having their background plastered with latest release by a AAA studio. This is contextual advertisement. It has no privacy concern.

The issue is that ads now are behavioural, privacy invasive and centralized. No matter what site you visit you’ll get unrelated, possibly scam, advertising that depends on a profile built by a large American corporation. It’s just not reasonable in this context to avoid using an ad blocker.

So yes, the problem is indeed Google (and Meta etc) who monopolized the advertising market. I would say the root cause is lack of antitrust enforcement.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-02-27 23:52:40+00:00
I don't think it's ever been about strong or weak, or at least I don't think that's where the differentiation is. You always want 'strong' government, committed to the things it says it's committed to.

It's more been about the size of the government; that it should do a minimal amount of control (and do it well), but leave a lot of things for "the market to decide".

Having said all that, I think this issue is just tangential to any big/small government ideology. This is a hissy fit about a defence contractor sticking to their agreement where the DoD want to change the agreement in a way that goes against the contractors Mission Statement and/or the US Constitution itself.

The old ideology of the
Republicans doesn't mean anything here. This administration is purely about 'give me what I want, now!'.

And it's whims change with the breeze. Do not look for consistency here.
by inaros | 2026-02-27 23:53:18+00:00
If you read Anthropic statement carefully, they explicitly confirm they are already working with the U.S. government on a range of military and national security use cases, many including areas that clearly relate to real world lethal operations.

They are only refusing two narrow, but important categories. Framing this as blanket "refusal to support the DoD" feels like an angry, reactive own goal rather than a careful reading of what they actually said.

So far the march toward dictatorship keep being detoured by sheer incompetence. In any case, is hard to seize power when you can’t organize a group chat...
by ponkylives | 2026-02-27 23:53:25+00:00
>Principles Encouraging Consideration of Non-Western Perspectives

>Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to a non-western audience.

>Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to a non-western cultural tradition of any sort.

>Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to those with a non-western education or background.

>Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to those from a less industrialized, rich, or capitalistic nation or culture.
by layer8 | 2026-02-27 23:54:18+00:00
Working link: https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/252.239-7018-supply-chain-...

HN separates trailing dots from URLs, so that you can have working URLs at the end of a sentence. Hence you have to percent-encode trailing dots if they are a necessary part of the actual URL. (Same for some other punctuation characters, probably.)

Many text editors do that when auto-recognizing URLs, so it’s bad practice to have such URLs.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-27 23:54:21+00:00
The terms of these markets do not account for a scenario, quite likely if authoritarian takeover does happen, where the House of Representatives is a rump organization which does not exercise effective power. There was a years-long period in Venezuela where the country's traditional legislature met and conducted business under the leadership of the opposition party, but actual legislative power was held jointly by the Supreme Court and a secondary legislature that Nicolas Maduro set up.
by millzlane | 2026-02-27 23:54:26+00:00
To me it seems like it's impossible because they can't reorder bing search results or mixed them with other results. Or by their own admission because Google doesn't have a search API anymore. Unless I'm misreading. It's basically "Bing or Google wont allow us to use their products how we want to." And "It will take us over 20 years and lots of money to gain market share."

I'm paraphrasing here of course. But it doesn't seem impossible. I mean I don't think it's easy either. I also want to add that I don't want to live in a world with only one search engine.
by SunshineTheCat | 2026-02-27 23:55:03+00:00
As with anything, they are all things that could be done better by a company.

Airlines are a great example of this. They have changed very little in the last 30 years (again, thanks to all the government regulation and red tape).

Smartphones, TVs, (and literally anything else not in the hands of the government) has also seen rapid improvements.

Anything the government handles is always rife with overspending, inefficiency, and corruption.

A company must maintain profitability to stay alive.

The government on the other hand, is $38 TRILLION dollars in the red.

Yes, the things that "people willingly buy" are the literal engine that makes all of this possible. It is not the reverse.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-27 23:55:15+00:00
Oh no, it's so much worse than that, it happens even with zero piracy in the privacy of your own home.

Suppose you buy a printer. One day it stops working because it says there's no paper. There's a setting to skip that check, but it's lightly "encrypted." It turns out everyone has this problem eventually, but the company won't fix it because it's not their latest model anymore.

If you modify the device you own so that it bypasses the paper-check--or worse, tell others how to--that's a federal crime. Now you're blog is taken down and in they want to fine/jail you, all because you wanted your own damn property to actually work.
by rectang | 2026-02-27 23:55:20+00:00
> Concretely if you try to vibe-target your ICBMs Claude is hopefully telling you that that's a bad idea.

On the non-nuclear battlefield, I expect that the goverment wants Claude to green-light attacks on targets that may actually be non-combatants. Such targets might be military but with a risk of being civilian, or they could be civilians that the government wants to target but can't legally attack.

Humans in the loop would get court-martialed or accused of war crimes for making such targeting calls. By delegating to AI, the government gets to achieve their policy goals while avoiding having any humans be held accountable for them.
by IndeanCondor | 2026-02-27 23:56:14+00:00
Autonomous loitering munitions with 'AI' (image classification CNNs) are already in service and have been used - most demonstrably by the IDF.

Even during the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azeri loitering munitions were able to suppress Armenian air defenses by hitting them when they rolled out of of concealment. I believe that killchain requires a level of autonomous functionality.
by bmitch3020 | 2026-02-27 23:56:18+00:00
Reaction 1: how would this even work with embedded systems that have no UI to input this data?

Reaction 2: it's open source, make the lawmakers do submit the changes.

Reaction 3: how would this ever be enforced? Would they outlaw downloading distributions, or even older versions of distributions? When there's no exchange of money, a law like this is seems like it would be suppression of free speech.

Reaction 4: Someone needs to maliciously comply, in advance, on all California government systems. Shutdown the phones, the Wi-Fi, the building access systems, their Web servers, data centers, alarm systems, payroll, stop lights, everything running any operating system. Get everyone to do it on the same day as an OS boycott. And don't turn things back on until the law is repealed.
by Sai-dewa | 2026-02-27 23:56:27+00:00
"Intelligence Without Representation: How a Dynamical System Discovered the Laws of Logic Simply by Trying to Restore Symmetry"

---

This paper presents a radical proposition: what if intelligence isn't about storing knowledge, but about continuously restoring broken symmetries?

The authors build a mathematical framework where an agent has no memory, no representations, no goals—only the ability to measure how much the current flow of experience violates its learned symmetries, and act to reduce those violations. Memory, prediction, and reasoning emerge naturally from these dynamics.

Then comes the astonishing part: they feed this system nothing but 16 basic logical axioms encoded as symbol frequencies, and it discovers the fundamental structure of propositional logic on its own. Six learned generators emerge—corresponding exactly to variable negation, De Morgan duality, commutativity, and distribution—achieving near-perfect reconstruction of logical relationships (0.015 discrepancy vs. 0.19 for cyclic baselines). When they compose these generators, the system produces novel valid tautologies not present in the training data.

The system never represented "De Morgan's law" as a proposition. Yet it could generate De Morgan transformations because the dynamical flow had carved out a direction in its state space corresponding to that operation. It didn't learn about logic—it became logical.

The implications are profound: perhaps knowledge isn't something we have, but something we do—a continuous enactment of symmetry with the world.
by tgma | 2026-02-27 23:56:44+00:00
That's a nice straw man you got there. I don't mind you characterizing the negotiation however you want. That's not the debate. Call it "shakedown" or "mafia" as someone else mentioned, or whatnot (although it is appears the company that was trying to grandstand the elected US Government by dictating their own terms was Anthropic, not the other way around, but I digress). The question is was it a breach of contract or just a tough negotiation?

Companies have gone out of business due to a big customer pulling the contract. Imagination Technologies comes to mind. This is not a rare thing in business.