MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sarchertech | 2026-02-26 23:57:47+00:00
Compilers take a formal language and translate it to another formal language. In most cases there is no ambiguity, it’s deterministic, snd most importantly it’s not chaotic.

That is changing one word in the source code doesn’t tend to produce a vastly different output, or changes to completely unrelated code.

Because the LLM is working from informal language, it is by necessity making thousands of small (and not so small) decisions about how to translate the prompt into code. There are far more decisions here than can reasonably fixed in tests/specs. So any changes to the prompt/spec is likely to result in unintended changes to observable behavior that users will notice and be confused by.
by mempko | 2026-02-26 23:57:52+00:00
If it's true that AI is creating productivity gains (and I think it is), then a company has two options. If every employee is X more productive, then you can either cut people and increase profitability, but sacrifice growth. Or you can be creative and see this as an opportunity to develop new features, new lines of business and new products. The choice depends on the creativity of the business leaders. Judging from Jack's post here, he chose option one. Which suggests to me he is deeply an un-creative business leader taking the easy path.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-26 23:57:57+00:00
More cynically, Anthropic is trying to sell Claude to the British [0], Indian [1], and Japanese [2] public sector. Working with the DoD/DoW would put these contracts at risk and reduce their TAM, because Anthropic isn't training independent models on a nation-to-nation basis.

This is also why countries like China, Japan, France, UAE, KSA, India, etc are training their own sovereign foundation models with government funding and backing, allowing them to use them on their terms, because it was their governments that build it or funded it.

[0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government

[1] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships...

[2] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office
by gip | 2026-02-26 23:58:14+00:00
AI is a transformative technology that will reshape how companies are run. More layoffs may be coming unfortunately. But on the other end, more companies and more products will be created. More competition overall, including for Block.

The overarching risk, imo, is America turning against tech and its leaders / billionaires. I think this is slowly happening. And why not, if the People decide that tech is not bringing good things to our modern society anymore, that should be respected.
by stopbulying | 2026-02-26 23:58:31+00:00
Odd that Manafort was paid tens of millions by the former president of Ukraine and is also pardoned by Trump, who he is an advisor of.

Odd that Internet Research Agency (Prigozhin, Putin) were paying for info ops to get Trump elected.

Likes flying to Scotland and hotels in Russia on a gold-plated plane after multiple bankruptcies.

FWIU there was unpaid debt to Deutsche Bank of over $400m as recently as 2016.

Trump could not get a loan in 2016 without underwriting it himself, due to having defaulted on so much debt.

Will they be able to negotiate peace and arms treaties as dutifully obligated?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035266 :

> Bannon's company Cambridge Analytica was a subsidiary of SCL Group, a British psyops/infoops firm that explicitly intended to tamper in foreign elections.

> US money paid to such firms also paid for Brexit.

SCL Group Trump: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Scl%20group%20t...

SCL Group:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group

> Mercer, Bannon, Nix, EmerData, Prince

It doesn't look like it was possible to contain the Ballstein Battenmount situation.
by 2300_ld | 2026-02-26 23:58:36+00:00
Came across this and wonder what others think.

Personally I'm not convinced it is AlphaGo but it's an interesting architecture and this guy claims to have had good results.

(I'm also not a lawyer so I can't confirm or deny)

Basically a directed acyclic graph, where the system tries to achieve the goal - via three agents in a simulated court - over and over again until it finds a reasonable breakthrough.

There's clearly a grasp of game theory in there but I'm not sure if legal strategy is the place for it.

The guy has a point though, that legal technology is very very boring, and it's good to see innovation.

If it is capable of novel or relatively "elite" (his words) legal strategy out of the box then there implications too. Does this tech just get bought up and out or is it made available to a wider audience?
by mothballed | 2026-02-26 23:58:36+00:00
I agree with your premise because this seems to be the modern interpretation of the courts, but it is not the historical interpretation.

The historical basis of the bill of rights is that they are god given rights of all people merely recognized by the government. This is also partially why all rights in the BoR are granted to 'people' instead of 'citizens.'

Of course this all does get very confusing. Because the 4th amendment does generally apply to people, while the 2nd amendment magically people gets interpreted as some mumbo-jumbo people of the 'political community' (Heller) even though from the founding until the mid 1800s ~most people it protected who kept and bore arms didn't even bother to get citizenship or become part of the 'political community'.
by atleastoptimal | 2026-02-26 23:59:20+00:00
I was concerned originally when I heard that Anthropic, who often professed to being the "good guy" AI company who would always prioritize human welfare, opted to sell priority access to their models to the Pentagon in the first place.
The devil's advocate position in their favor I imagine would be that they believe some AI lab would inevitably be the one to serve the military industrial complex, and overall it's better that the one with the most inflexible moral code be the one to do it.
by tombert | 2026-02-26 23:59:37+00:00
I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever.

No one really "knows" how to grow businesses so the easiest way to spend a lot of money quickly is hiring lots of people, whether or not they are "necessary". Then this free money dries up, interest rates go back up, and now they're stuck with all these employees that they didn't actually need.

Some companies like Google and Microsoft just accepted that assholes like me will call their CEOs incompetent and fired lots of people in 2023, but I think other CEOs were kind of embarrassed and held off. Now they can use AI as a scapegoat and people won't act like they were idiots for hiring twice as many people as they needed.

Also, I got declined by Block a year ago. Glad I was now.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-26 23:59:52+00:00
Transfer limits are selected by each network participant. Four years ago they were moving half a trillion dollars (~$490B) a year, 1/4th of total credit card volume. I’ll come back with 2025 numbers when time permits.

I move thousands of dollars a month with Zelle, so I know it’s possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32512052
by elefanten | 2026-02-27 00:00:20+00:00
Exactly and that danger grows as the ability to do so in increasingly automated and targeted ways increases. Should be very obvious now looking at the world around us.

Also, failing to consider the legal and rights regime of the attacker is wild to me. Look at what happens to people caught spying for other regimes. Aldrich Ames just died after decades in prison, and that’s one of the most extreme cases — plenty have got away with just a few years. The Soviet assets Ames gave up were all swiftly executed, much like they are in China.

Regimes and rights matter, which is why the democracy / autocracy governance conflict matters so much to the future trajectory of humanity.
by collabs | 2026-02-27 00:00:26+00:00
Yes, exactly this.

> As an American I would dramatically prefer the Chinese government to spy on me than the American government, because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do anything about whatever they find out.

> spy on me

People forget to substitute "me" for "my elected representative" or "my civil service employee" or "my service member" or their loved ones

I, personally, have nothing significant that a foreign government can leverage against our country but some people are in a more privileged/responsible/susceptible position.
It is critical to protect all our data privacy because we don't know from where they will be targeted.

Similarly, for domestic surveillance, we don't know who the next MLK Jr could be or what their position would be. Maybe I am too backward to even support this next MLK Jr but I definitely don't want them to be nipped in the bud.
by iancmceachern | 2026-02-27 00:00:39+00:00
>> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.

> never heard that.

This book was a big deal, promised it ("Makers, the next industrial revolution")
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/makers-chris-anderson/11109...
by jez | 2026-02-27 00:00:45+00:00
Another fun consequence of this is that you can initialize otherwise-unset file descriptors this way:

$ cat foo.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash

>&1 echo "will print on stdout"
>&2 echo "will print on stderr"
>&3 echo "will print on fd 3"

$ ./foo.sh 3>&1 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null
will print on fd 3

It's a trick you can use if you've got a super chatty script or set of scripts, you want to silence or slurp up all of their output, but you still want to allow some mechanism for printing directly to the terminal.

The danger is that if you don't open it before running the script, you'll get an error:

$ ./foo.sh
will print on stdout
will print on stderr
./foo.sh: line 5: 3: Bad file descriptor
by ishandeveloper | 2026-02-27 00:01:07+00:00
We've played around with this and honestly have a lot of respect for what the Remotion team has built. Fun fact, I tinkered with it back in 2021 when they made those GitHub Wrapped videos, it was one of those projects that made me think differently about video on the web :)
Cardboard is a bit different though, aimed at non-developers who want to edit raw footage through natural language without writing any code. Motion graphics is on the roadmap and Remotion would hopefully be a natural fit when we get there.

Cool to see the space evolving from so many directions! :)
by helaoban | 2026-02-27 00:01:35+00:00
Exactly my point. The question of whether the government should be able to use AI for targeting without the involvement of humans or not is a wartime question, since that's the only time the military should be killing people.

Under such a scenario, requisition applies, and so all of this talk is moot.

The fact that the military is killing people without a declaration of war is the problem, and that's where energy and effort should be directed.
by macsmax | 2026-02-27 00:01:41+00:00
My background is Linux systems, I am not a developer. I wanted a service that converts Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube links into universal ones. That meant a FastAPI backend, Next.js frontend, and React Native apps. Three codebases in tech I'd never used.

I used Claude to write the application code while I handled infrastructure (Docker, nginx, CI/CD, monitoring). The biggest lesson wasn't about AI generating code, it was about context management. A steering doc and a living todo.md turned the AI from a forgetful assistant into a consistent collaborator.

Total cost including Apple Developer fee, hosting, and a test Android phone: ~£410. Blog post covers the full breakdown, what it would cost without AI, and the "black box fear" of running code you didn't write.
by Normal_gaussian | 2026-02-27 00:02:36+00:00
Is it more sane, or is it just what you are used to?

Python doesn't really have much that makes it a sensible choice for scripting.

Its got some basic data structures and a std-lib, but it comes at a non-trivial performance cost, a massive barrier to getting out of the single thread, and non-trivial overhead when managing downstream processes. It doesn't protect you from any runtime errors (no types, no compile checks). And I wouldn't call python in practice particularly portable...

Laughably, NodeJS is genuinely a better choice - while you don't get multithreading easily, at least you aren't trivially blocked on IO. NodeJS also has pretty great compatibility for portability; and can be easily compiled/transformed to get your types and compile checks if you want. I'd still rather avoid managing downstream processes with it - but at least you know your JSON parsing and manipulation is trivial.

Go is my goto when I'm reaching for more; but (ba)sh is king. You're scripting on the shell because you're mainly gluing other processes together, and this is what (ba)sh is designed to do. There is a learning curve, and there are footguns.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-27 00:02:49+00:00
The reason why there is an explicit call out for surveillance on American citizens is because there are unquestionable constitutional protections in place for American citizens on American soil.

Those unquestionable protections are phrased with enough hand-waving ambiguity of language to leave room for any conceivable interpretation by later courts. See the third-party 'exception' to the Fourth Amendment, for instance.

It's as if those morons were running out of ink or time or something, trying to finish an assignment the night before it was due.
by mempko | 2026-02-27 00:02:54+00:00
Excuse me for making some pretty sharp statements. Twitter is objectively a worse product now. Musk is a deeply uncreative person who doesn't seem to actually like people and attracts people to him that are the same way. This shows in his truly uninspired products. Tesla is way behind the Chinese now. xAI is a copy cat. SpaceX seems to be taking old Soviet ideas. Musk I go on?
by empath75 | 2026-02-27 00:03:01+00:00
Speaking of rolling your own things, i had claude knock out a trello clone for me in 30 minutes because i was irritated at atlassian.

I am already using it for keeping track of personal stuff. I’m not going to make a product out of it or even put it on github. It’s just for me. There are gonna be a lot of single team/single user projects.

It is so fast to build working prototypes that it’s not even worth thinking if you should do something. Just ask claude to take a shot of it, get a cup of coffee and evaluate the results.
by willio58 | 2026-02-27 00:03:09+00:00
> i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

So deeply ironic considering he claims he’s doing this because AI can do the jobs these people did.

These billionaires will learn one day that removing humans doesn’t stop at the bottom layer. It’ll continue to happen at layers above until their own position starts to be put into question. They’ll realize those people who are removed due to AI taking their jobs still need to put food on their tables. It’ll take time, but ultimately there are only so many ways that can go. The answer will be extreme taxation on the billionaires.
by esperent | 2026-02-27 00:04:08+00:00
> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.

Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype.

But these didn't:

Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, tv, cars, gps, bicycles...

So you can't really start an article by picking inventions that fit your narrative and ignoring everything else.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-27 00:04:28+00:00
I've been working on the same libre project for more than 25 years, and making a living from it for about 15, so I have my own perspective on this.

The biggest issue that I see is that even for things that are in some respects "finished", grants on the order of $5k do not change the maintainance picture very much at all. If there's a sudden crisis with critical infrastructure, people will step. But that's precisely what we want to move away from, and to do that the funding needs to be living-wage level, not single-issue grants.

It is awesome when those grants happen, and specific new features or compatibility are worked on. But the sustainability question is really not about that kind of work, for the most part. Somebody needs to actually be the guy in Nebraska and they need to consider that their role. Possibly it is just one role among a few, but it needs to be bigger than a one-and-done $5k-sized role.

The question is really how to redirect the streams of revenue that currently flow toward capital so that the people who work on OSS can do this as a living, not a part time calling. I don't see grants as a significant part of that.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-27 00:04:51+00:00
One piece of context that everyone should keep in mind with the recent Anthropic showdown - Anthropic is trying to land British [0], Indian [1], Japanese [2], and German [3] public sector contracts.

Working with the DoD/DoW on offensive usecases would put these contracts at risk, because Anthropic most likely isn't training independent models on a nation-to-nation basis and thus would be shut out of public and even private procurement outside the US because exporting the model for offensive usecases would be export controlled but governments would demand being parity in treatment or retaliate.

This is also why countries like China, Japan, France, UAE, KSA, India, etc are training their own sovereign foundation models with government funding and backing, allowing them to use them on their terms because it was their governments that build it or funded it.

Imagine if the EU demanded sovereign cloud access from AWS right at the beginning in 2008-09. This is what most governments are now doing with foundation models because most policymakers along with a number of us in the private sector are viewing foundation models from the same lens as hyperscalers.

Frankly, I don't see any offramp other than the DPA even just to make an example out of Anthropic for the rest of the industry.

[0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/mou-uk-government

[1] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/bengaluru-office-partnerships...

[2] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/opening-our-tokyo-office

[3] - https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5115692008
by justsml | 2026-02-27 00:04:56+00:00
Today I found myself copying 9+ keys and values between various UI & ENV configs simply to change between Sonnet on Anthropic vs Bedrock.

Switching LLM models, providers and options should be easy.

> Was it max_tokens? Or max_output_tokens? top_p? topP? Or top_k?

disc: author share.
by simianwords | 2026-02-27 00:05:28+00:00
more money for doing nothing? i don't want to live in a world like that. what part of this is not clear?

two options

- the 4000 employees can still be employed in block - thats around $600,000,000 that goes into literally no value and this is price borne by us consumers

- or the 4000 employees get fired and work in different companies that actually require them so that we as consumers can actually buy more products

by choosing option 1, you not only accept that as consumers we pay more for the product, but also miss out on other valuable work the 4000 employees can do. no good economy runs this way.
by ghshephard | 2026-02-27 00:05:33+00:00
In 20 years - what is more likely for you to be able to trivially go find on Ebay for < $50
- LTO Tape Reader
- Random BD/DVD Player.

Likewise for 100 years, or 200 years. etc...

ALso - Archival media that needs re-copying every 20-30 years is not Archival media by my defintion
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-27 00:06:03+00:00
Yeah this is exactly my view. We've had several years of work on the tech, and LLMs are just as prone to randomly spitting out garbage as they were the first day. They are not a tool which is fit for any serious work, because you need to be able to rely on your tools. A tool which is sometimes good and sometimes bad is worse than having no tool at all.
by gip | 2026-02-27 00:06:47+00:00
The reality is that the US Constitution only offers strong guarantees to citizens and (some of) the people in the US. Foreigners are excluded and foreign mass surveillance is or will happen.

I believe every country (or block) should carve an independent path when it comes to AI training, data retention and inference. That is makes most sense, will minimize conflicts and put people in control of their destiny.
by dheera | 2026-02-27 00:06:55+00:00
I don't think it's about memory shortage.

It's that everything has become 20% more expensive in the past year, I'm being taxed to death, fighting with companies trying to money grab me, my electric bill is now $800, and I'm now too broke to buy a new phone every 2 years when most of my income gets eaten by the "system".

I'll wait until either SPY does another 50% run or BTC does another 100% run and then I'll buy a new phone. Google, you want me to buy your new phone? Do something to make SPY or BTC go up and then we'll talk. Until then my current phone works, and the new features aren't a must-have.
by mothballed | 2026-02-27 00:07:03+00:00
Since at least the progressive era (see the switch in time that saved 9), and probably before, the courts have largely just post facto rationalized why the thing they do or don't agree with fit their desired pattern of constitutionality.

SCOTUS is largely not there to interpret the constitution in any meaningful sense. They are there to provide legitimization for the machinations of power. If god-man in black costume and wig say parchment of paper agree, then act must be legitimate, and this helps keep the populace from rising up in rebellion. It is quite similar to shariah law using a number of Mutfi/Qazi to explain why god agrees with them about whatever it is they think should be the law.

If you look at a number of actions that have flagrantly defied both the historical and literal interpretation of the constitution, the only entity that was able to provide legitimization for many acts of congress has been the guys wearing the funny looking costumes in SCOTUS.
by underlipton | 2026-02-27 00:07:53+00:00
>Traditionally, deserts have been seen as harsh, lifeless landscapes

This is incorrect, depending on the geographic location. Many "deserts" are actually ecologically vibrant, and "greening" them (especially for farming) threatens to destroy a measure of natural diversity.

That said, I think you and the other poster placed emphasis on the wrong part of my post, as my point was less about solar land area coverage as some sort of singular evil, and more about the *opportunity* present in continuing to develop solar technologies so that they impact the environments they're placed in less and less over time. This would mean that efficiency is not the be-all-end-all of development, and that further improvements are possible even after reaching a satisfactory level of efficient generation. The energy economy would not fall off a cliff, as some predict. It would simply shift to solving other problems.

You can see an example of this in computer engineering, with Moore's Law's fall-off and the rise of GPU-based innovation.
by cthalupa | 2026-02-27 00:08:04+00:00
This is a statement you can make.

It's also a statement entirely divorced from reality when you look at the fact that those winning candidates are not in fact doing that, and neither are the candidates that are getting the most national attention like Talarico.

Newsom has a vested interest in making it sound like he's the maverick here that knows the special formula, but it's been obvious to damn near everyone that they couldn't run out the same losing playbook.