MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jobs_throwaway | 2026-02-27 02:38:30+00:00
> The technology can just be requisitioned, there is nothing a corporation or a private individual can do about that.

I strongly doubt this is true. I think if you gave the US government total control over Anthropic's assets right now, they would utterly fail to reach AGI or develop improved models. I doubt they would be capable even of operating the current gen models at the scale Anthropic does.

> Or the models could be developed internally, after having requisitioned the data centers.

I would bet my life savings the US government never produces a frontier model. Remember when they couldn't even build a proper website for Obamacare?
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-27 02:39:05+00:00
Somewhat off topic, but related: I worked at this place that made internet security software. It ran on Windows, and on various flavors of Unix.

One customer complained about our software corrupting files on their hard disk. Turns out they had modified their systems so that a newly-spawned program was not given a stderr. That is, it was not handed 0, 1, and 2 (file descriptors), but only 0 and 1. So whenever our program wrote something to stderr, it wrote to whatever file had been the first one opened by the program.

We talked about fixing this, briefly. Instead we decided to tell the customer to fix their broken environment.
by lambdaphagy | 2026-02-27 02:39:07+00:00
I agree that the risk of an accidental strike was a huge problem with the theory of nuclear deterrence, but the question is: compared to what? In expectation or even in a 1st percentile scenario, was MAD worse than a world where the USSR is a unilateral nuclear power? For that matter, what would it have taken to get a stronger SALT treaty sooner?

I think you need to have people thinking through this stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk?

I’d love to know that the “no killbots, come what may” strategy is sound, but it’s not clear that that’s a stable equilibrium.
by massysett | 2026-02-27 02:39:40+00:00
Yes, and despite every single one of these world-changing inventions, people in rich countries still go to work every day, even though UBI is generally not a thing. People claim AI will eliminate large numbers of jobs. Maybe it will, just like the tractor did. But new jobs are created. I would never have guessed that “influencer” would be a thing!

This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useless” fear is as old as, say, electricity, and even older than cheap computing. It hasn’t happened.
by peteforde | 2026-02-27 02:39:55+00:00
Yeah, okay but... look, I concede that someone who shouldn't be doing anything except watching passive entertainment could absolutely take insane advice from an LLM (or a sociopathic human) and seriously hurt themselves.

But raw dogging capacitors in CRTs is such an overtly straw man argument in this conversation. People who are cleaning bathrooms for the first time can hopefully be trusted not to drink the bleach, right?

If someone licks a running table saw because an LLM said it would be fine, we're talking about entirely different problems.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-27 02:40:02+00:00
What do these lasting success stories have in common?

• Self-reinforcing chemical metabolisms

• DNA as a template for reproduction

• Multi-cell cooperation

• Multi-cell specialization

• Nerve cells

• Neural ganglia

• Nervous systems

• Brains

• Self-awareness

• Language

• Written language

• Books

• Printing press

• Wireless communication

• Transistors

• Digital memory

• Computer processors

• Networking

• Internet

• AI

Answer: They all introduced dramatic qualitative and quantitative improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness, interaction, speed, reliability, flexibility, adaptability, and application of information.

AI is on its way to being self-designed. It is already assisting in its own design, speeding up work, by doing "mundane" things that would otherwise take people more time to do.

Intelligence has not been an S-curve technology.

AI, the systematic automation, manufacturing and increasingly recursive improvement of intelligence, is not an S-curve technology.
by tomhow | 2026-02-27 02:40:15+00:00
Mathematical quality scoring doesn't work well for moderation of human behaviour in a community. Context matters a lot. A user may get huge numbers of upvotes for comments they make about a technology or their profession, but then attract many downvotes and flags when they're commenting about politics. This is particularly true when political topics involve war or other life/death matters (which is a major reason why those kinds of topics are difficult on HN – they can bring out the worst in otherwise very positive contributors).
by snickerbockers | 2026-02-27 02:40:30+00:00
The OP specifically mentions this in the context of "systems" (a vague, poorly-defined term) and "classified networks" in which Anthropic products are already present. Without more details on what "systems" these are or the terms of the contracts under which these were produced it's difficult to make a definitive judgement, but broadly speaking it's not a good thing if the government is relying on a product which Anthropic has designed to arbitrarily refuse orders by its own judgement.

I really don't see how anybody could think a private defense contractor should be entitled to countermand the military by leveraging the control it has over products it has already sold. Maybe the terms of their contract entitled them to some discretion over what orders the product will carry out, but there's no such claim in the OP.
by prsutherland | 2026-02-27 02:41:30+00:00
Seems like if AI is such an accelerator, leveraging 4,000 more people using AI will generate that much more shareholder value.

Any layoff that blames AI and doesn't address the fact that the company is saying it would prefer to make less, they are lying.

Rational actors should be pushing to grow when others are fearful. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
by prescriptivist | 2026-02-27 02:41:47+00:00
> People on here act like we don’t know if AI will be useful. And I’m sitting over here puzzled because of how fucking useful it is.

Yes, it's very strange to read AI threads here because the general tone is so different than, say, at the company I work at, where hundreds of engineers are given enormous monthly token budgets and are being pushed to have the LLMs write as much code as possible. They're not forced to, and no one is reprimanded for not adopting Claude Code or Codex or Cursor. But there's been a strong tonal shift in technology leadership in the last month that basically implies that this is how it is going to be done in the future whether one likes it or not.

As for me, I've been writing all of my code via Claude for a while now, and I don't think I will ever go back to working in an editor writing code the way I did for most of my career. Nor do I want to.
by anbealbocht | 2026-02-27 02:42:26+00:00
Hi HN, I'm John. I built Ordain with a friend to let anyone commission the AI short film they want to see. You write a brief, attach a bounty, and creators submit films. Payment runs over Bitcoin Lightning.

We have five open commissions right now, $100 to $1,000 each. Topics range from Kafka's lost writing to AI consciousness to nuclear energy. Any AI tools accepted, any country, creators keep full copyright. Submissions close March 23.

The site is a static page on Netlify. Payments happen peer to peer over Lightning. No middleman, no fees, no incorporation. Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the idea
by sowbug | 2026-02-27 02:43:01+00:00
That's a perfectly fine belief to have. I might even agree with you. But you're not really advancing a discussion thread about a company's strong ideals by pointing out some past behavior that you don't like. This is especially true when the behavior you're bringing up is fairly common, if perhaps lamentable, among U.S. corporations. Anthropic can be exceptional in some ways while being ordinary in the rest.

(I have no horse in this race. But I remain interested in hearing about a former employee's experience and impressions about the company's ideals, and hope it doesn't get lost in a side discussion about whether NDAs are a good thing.)
by eitally | 2026-02-27 02:43:09+00:00
The trick to applying these days is to have a contact on the inside that can tell you what the hiring manager is actually looking for, vs what's in the public JD, and then to refer you.

That doesn't scale to 10 jobs/day for very long because almost nobody has a network that big. If you don't land something through referral to the hiring manager, it's mostly a crap shoot these days.
by jobs_throwaway | 2026-02-27 02:43:41+00:00
I'm capable of getting all that IP for free, its trivial with a laptop and an internet connection

I pay multiple LLM providers (not $200 a month) because the service they provide is worth the money for me, not because they provide me any IP. They're actually quite stingy with the IP they'll provide, which I agree is bullshit given that they didn't pay for much of it themselves.
Ask HN: How do you handle duplicate side effects when jobs, workflows retry?
by shineDaPoker | 2026-02-27 02:45:02+00:00
Quick context: I'm building background job automation and keep hitting this pattern:

1. Job calls external API (Stripe, SendGrid, AWS)
2. API call succeeds
3. Job crashes before recording success
4. Job retries → calls API again → duplicate

Example: process refund, send email notification, crash. Retry does both again. Customer gets duplicate refund email (or worse, duplicate refund).

I see a few approaches:

Option A: Store processed IDs in database
Problem: Race between "check DB" and "call API" can still duplicate

Option B: Use API idempotency keys (Stripe supports this)
Problem: Not all APIs support it (legacy systems, third-party)

Option C: Build deduplication layer that checks external system first
Problem: Extra latency, extra complexity

What do you do in production? Accept some duplicates? Only use APIs
with idempotency? Something else?

(I built something for Option C, but trying to understand if this is actually a common-enough problem or if I'm over-engineering.)
by akdev1l | 2026-02-27 02:45:19+00:00
if statements are pretty simple

if $command; then
<thing>
else
<thing>
fi

You may be complaining about the syntax for the test command specifically or bash’s [[ builtin

Also the choice of quotes changing behavior is a thing in:

1. JavaScript/typescript
2. Python
3. C/C++
4. Rust

In some cases it’s the same difference, eg: string interpolation in JavaScript with backticks
by bmitc | 2026-02-27 02:45:32+00:00
I don't have experience in basically all of these industrial processes, so I can't really comment there. I strongly support environmental protections, but I have no idea if what California does actually does that.

A separate but related topic is the warnings California requires of products. It's gotten a bit out of hand because every product you buy has the same warning, which completely dilutes what I hope was the intention. Even buying something as simple as an electric guitar comes with the "can cause cancer" warning because it can have nickel parts on it (usually for the bridge and tuners and frets).
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-27 02:45:39+00:00
So edgy; is being an apologist really the noble calling you think it is? Both are just words, mappings to concepts in our minds; "genocide" is an invented term, but it has a widely shared definition that the UN helped formalize, and in the minds of many, many people all over the world, the term applies here.

"War" could one day be waged against whatever group you belong to, as well. You may wish for the country waging it to follow the Geneva Convention so that your sons gain a small chance of becoming POWs and returning to you, instead of being destroyed by an autonomous drone. Comments like yours endorse the actions that are being done; we're beginning to recognize the term "hasbara" for them.
by socalgal2 | 2026-02-27 02:45:50+00:00
It is fun but it's also not universal. While every house and apartment I've lived in in the USA had an oven, the default in Japan is no oven. 1 to 3 burners, and possibly a broiler is the norm.

If you want an oven you get microwave/oven combo.

Might be similar in Korea? China? Taiwan? India?
by yunnpp | 2026-02-27 02:46:47+00:00
It's good to be driven by ideals, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

I think avg(HN) is mostly skeptical about the output, not that the input is corrupt or ill-meaning in this case. Although with other companies, one can't even take their claims seriously.

And in any case, this is difficult territory to navigate. I would not want to be in your spot.
by nicowesterdale | 2026-02-27 02:46:50+00:00
I wrote a, I hope, amusing breakdown of the structural reasons why off-the-shelf Large Language Models physically cannot "see" a chess board, and continue to make illegal moves, and teleport pieces as seen in Gotham Chess' latest videos.

https://www.nicowesterdale.com/blog/why-llms-cant-play-chess
by kcplate | 2026-02-27 02:47:15+00:00
> Provide documentation and numbers, otherwise this alleged "significant" contribution is just hand-waving.

Last I heard Google employs around 70k people just in California and that has its genesis in Page and Brin inventing something. Thats pretty damn significant. Those people pay taxes, give to charities, etc…

> It's a total perversion of the fundamental idea of capitalism that governments are competing for companies and wealthy people. That's not how capitalist competition is supposed to work.

Exactly what authority or controlling doctrine are you appealing to here? Of course regional governments are going to try and attract local investment.
by pembrook | 2026-02-27 02:47:27+00:00
The whole thing reads to me like he's not deflecting blame at all, he's explicitly saying he's putting the employees through this.

> just a piss poor excuse for bad management and short-sighted vision

I mean, the guy has built multiple publicly traded companies and scaled them to thousands of employees from the ground up (an exceedingly rare feat), and is admitting he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.

I'm sure you would have done a much better job, though. As an HN commenter, you definitely wouldn't have overhired, because you're endlessly pessimistic and deathly afraid of risk. But you also would have never gotten the company off the ground in the first place because this. What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-27 02:47:43+00:00
I use Codex CLI in my daily usage since just with my $20/month subscription to ChatGPT, I never gets close to the quota. But it trips up over itself every now and then. At that point I just use Claude in another terminal session. We only have a laughable $750 a month corporate allowance with Claude.
by snickerbockers | 2026-02-27 02:47:55+00:00
>I's enheartening to see that leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table to be guided by values.

I'm concerned that the context of the OP implies that they're making this declaration after they've already sold products. It specifically mentions already having products in classified networks. This is the sort of thing that they should have made clear before that happened. It's admirable (no pun intended) to have moral compunctions about how the military uses their products but unless it was already part of their agreement (which i very much doubt) they are not entitled them to countermand the military's chain of command by designing a product to not function in certain arbitrarily-designated circumstances.
by missedthecue | 2026-02-27 02:48:14+00:00
Because there isn't an unlimited amount of productive work to be done. Sure, a bowling ball factory in a world that demands unlimited bowling balls should take the productivity multiplier AND retain the employees, because they ought to make all the bowling balls they possibly can.

But CashApp jira tickets are not a bowling ball factory in a world with unlimited bowling ball demand. At a certain point, you're just paying people to sit around, or even worse, pretend they're busy.
by order-matters | 2026-02-27 02:48:53+00:00
how is it a conflict of interest for a google product to have a bias towards using google products?

As users we must hold some accountability. AI is aiming to substitute for humans in the workforce, and humans would get fired for recommending competitor products for use-cases their own company is targeting.

If we want a tool that is focused on the best interest of the public users, then it needs to be owned by the public.
by nine_k | 2026-02-27 02:49:20+00:00
Per-socket circuit breakers are very much a thing here in the US. I assume they are mandatory in wet environments like bathrooms and kitchens. I think they are adequate to protect against a local leak from the live wire to the ground wire, which would likely mean that the connected device is broken or got water inside it, and may be dangerous to touch.

I suppose that a device that suddenly starts to consume far more current than normal under normal voltage is likely broken / fried inside, and it's too late to save it by blowing a fuse. The fuse just prevents a fire, but an automatic circuit breaker in a socket would likely do the same.

There is the case of overvoltage due e.g. to nearby lightning strikes. I suppose a fuse is unlikely to save your computer in such a case, it's too slow. Fast-acting power line protectors exist though, and are cheap and ubiquitous.
by ojbyrne | 2026-02-27 02:49:48+00:00
It’s not clear to me whether you’re characterizing that as trenchant business advice or cynical bullshit. Meta has had several rounds of layoffs now so it surely can’t be the former.

Also Guy Kawasaki probably isn’t the first to say this, but I’d guess he predates Zuckerberg: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/
Show HN: Eth.zig – Pure Zig Ethereum library, 19/26 benchmark wins vs. alloy.rs
by kookamo | 2026-02-27 02:51:23+00:00
Hi HN, I built eth.zig -- a complete Ethereum client library in pure Zig with zero dependencies (no C bindings, no system libraries, just zig build).

It covers ABI encoding, RLP, secp256k1 ECDSA, Keccak-256, BIP-32/39/44 HD wallets, ERC-20/721 wrappers, JSON-RPC (HTTP + WebSocket), ENS, EIP-712, and Multicall3.

The interesting part: it beats Paradigm's alloy.rs (Rust) on 19 out of 26 benchmarks. ABI encoding is 1.92x faster, u256 division is 4x faster, Keccak-256 is 1.37x faster. alloy.rs wins on secp256k1 signing (precomputed EC tables) and a few paths where Rust's sol! macro generates specialized code.

What made this possible is Zig's comptime -- function selectors and event topics are computed at compile time with zero runtime cost. The entire crypto stack (secp256k1, Keccak-256, BIP-32/39/44) is pure Zig.

Docs: https://ethzig.org
Repo: https://github.com/StrobeLabs/eth.zig
Benchmarks: https://github.com/StrobeLabs/eth.zig/blob/main/bench/RESULT...

Would love feedback, especially from Zig and Ethereum devs
by peteforde | 2026-02-27 02:51:36+00:00
I sympathize your your feelings of existential dread without further qualifiers. Big hug!

I personally think that as amazing as LLMs for coding are, LLMs for coding and electronics is like activating the powered robotic exoskeleton for your mind.

As for whether your projects are lower quality (the kids would say "mid"; catch up!) or not... they are higher quality than the ones you made last year, and I heard that the actual best way to learn is by doing. Ideally also asking a ton of questions at each step.

Some nights I lay in bed just relentlessly interrogating ChatGPT in audio mode about transformers and op-amps.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-27 02:51:38+00:00
Perhaps this is too US-centric, but as someone who used to work in health fintech, I strongly disagree.

The US healthcare system is well and truly f'd, but I think 98% of these issue are government and society policy issues. If anything, I see so many companies trying to take advantage of the complete dysfunction in the US healthcare system to be yet another middlemen siphoning money from systemwide inefficiencies.
by busko | 2026-02-27 02:52:07+00:00
Why would they encourage more resource use, increasing their cost?

Gemini should have had it's own API key separate from their traditionally public facing API IDs (which they call keys) and API keys should default to being tightly scoped to their use case rather than being unrestricted.

Who cares if you have three API keys for three services.

Quite frankly putting any API information in things like url params or client side code just doesn't sit right with me. It breaks the norm in a way that could be, and is now security concern.
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-27 02:52:11+00:00
No. It really only binds the corporation, but it does hold the executives/directors personally responsible for compliance so they’d be under a lot of pressure to figure out how to fix enough leaks in the ship to keep it afloat. Any individual director/executive could quit with little issue, but if they all did in a way that compromised the corporations ability to function, the courts could potentially utilize injunctions/fines/jail time to compel compliance from corporate leaders.

Also there’s probably a way to abuse the Taft-Hawley beyond current recognition to force the employees to stay by designating any en-masse quitting to be a “strike / walk off / collective action”. The consequences to the individuals for this is unclear - the act really focuses on punishing the union rather than the employees. It would take some very creative maneuvering to do anything beyond denying unemployment benefits and telling the other big AI companies (Google / ChatGPT / xAI) to blacklist them. And probably using any semi-relevant three letter agency to make them regret their choice and deliver a chilling effect to anyone else thinking of leaving (FBI, DHS, IRS, SEC all come to mind).

Forcing people to work is a violation of the 13th amendment. But interpretations of the constitution and federal law are very dynamic these days so who knows.
by quesera | 2026-02-27 02:53:11+00:00
I agree that he'd have been blindsided like the rest of us. And I agree that he would have put Apple first. That was never a part of my point though.

Jobs had a very strong personality and very strong opinions. Also a good human moral compass, at least in his adulthood.

I admit that I am extrapolating from his thoughts on previous administrations, but I will confidently assert that there is no part of Jobs being that would approve of what's going on today. The man was not ThielMuskAndreesenEllisonEtc. (Someone might point out that he was friends with Larry, which is true, but he did not agree with Larry about some very important things. Jobs was capable of that kind of relationship.)

The degree of appeasement he would be performing on behalf of Apple is a fair subject to contemplate. Whether he'd be besties with Steven Miller and Jeffrey Epstein, is not a reasonable topic to speculate on. The answer is obvious to anyone who knew him at all.