MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timr | 2026-02-28 02:49:15+00:00
> Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.

Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons.

Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.
by alexlitz | 2026-02-28 02:49:27+00:00
For one the specific 36 parameter version is impossible without float64 so you might guess the corollary that it is not exactly amenable to being found by gradient descent. I think the question of how you can structure transformers and neural nets in general so that they can both very parsimoniously represent things like this and have it be amenible to learning by gradient descent.
by remarkEon | 2026-02-28 02:49:59+00:00
So your position is that the United States doesn't get to have it's own Skynet, because Skynet is bad, and that if it really wants to it should fork the Chinese Skynet so that it can have a Skynet if it wants it so much.

Do you see the problem here. Genuinely don't think we would've won WWII if these people were running things back then.
by bhawks | 2026-02-28 02:50:17+00:00
| then they went back and said no, you need to remove those safeguards to which Anthropic is (rightly so) saying no.

So one thing to call out here is that the assumption that DoW is working on specifically these use cases is not bullet proof. They simply may not want to share with anthropic exactly what they are working on for natsec issues. /we can't tell you/ could violate the terms.

It is also dumb that DoW accepted these terms in the first place.
by alsufinown | 2026-02-28 02:50:33+00:00
totally valid concern, and honestly, its one we thought about deeply when building this. We dont have access to your conversations with the AI. Full stop. But beyond just saying that, we built the product with this fear in mind from day one, security isn't an afterthought, it's the foundation.
look man we're founders too. We fine-tuned an open-source model on YC content and startup knowledge not to harvest ideas, but because we wanted something that actually gets the founder experience. The goal is an AI that knows who you are, understands your business, and helps you move faster like a co-founder who's always available and never drops context. It's also fully agentic. It can build a budget sheet, manage your tasks, send emails, be a brainstorming partner. we use it ourselves daily and genuinely can't imagine running the company without it.

We have a waitlist open right now. If you're curious, drop your email and we'd love to jump on a call and walk you through it no pressure at all.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-02-28 02:51:17+00:00
Why is DoD contracting with Anthropic exclusively rather than OpenAI or Google? Their models are all roughly as powerful and they seem both more capable and more willing to cozy up with the military (and this administration) than a relatively scrappy startup focused on model sentience and well-being. Hell, even Grok would be a better fit ideologically and temperamentally.
by A1aM0 | 2026-02-28 02:51:29+00:00
You’re right: structured assessments are old news.

The thing I’m testing is not “new tests,” but a tighter system: derive the rubric from real team tasks, apply the same rubric to both public evidence and live assessments, and make every score traceable (with lower weight on easy-to-fake AI-era signals).

If that doesn’t improve consistency/speed/quality vs current hiring loops, then it’s just old process with new branding.
by foobarbecue | 2026-02-28 02:51:37+00:00
> If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.

There's more to NASA than Artemis! NASA's robotic spaceflight programs generate extremely high science return at relatively low cost. Missions like Psyche, Europa Clipper, and Dragonfly are humanity's real explorers.

And their aeronautics work is valuable as well. Low-boom, etc.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-28 02:51:37+00:00
Addressed elsewhere in the thread. I could easily envision a Supreme Court decision based on reasoning such as, "Clearly the intent of the framers was that American citizens should not be forced to provide goods or services to the military against their will."

Dumber stretches of logic have certainly emerged from SCOTUS. If Wickard v. Filburn makes sense to them, so could this.

Maybe not from the present bench, but perhaps from a hypothetically less-partisan one.
by cyrusradfar | 2026-02-28 02:51:56+00:00
Op here - grateful you gave it a look but want to clarify TM can’t be used for this use case.

UNF is one install command + unf watch to protect a repo on every file change, takes 30s.

Time Machine snapshots hourly, not on every change, so you can lose real work between snapshots. This may have changed or I missed something but I reviewed that app to see if it was possible.

And while tmutil exists, it wasn’t designed to be invoked mid-workflow by an agent. UNF* captures every write and is built to be part of the recovery loop
by piskov | 2026-02-28 02:51:56+00:00
> Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil?

Being built as in not operating yet?

12 nm gpu is what? Nvidia 1080/2060 level? Those top researchers mentioned would love to train on that. Also how many gpus would be made annually?

Also what about CPU? You gonna use risc-v? With what toolchain?

Chinese could pull it off in a few years, yeah.

EU? Nah. Started thinking about sovereignty too late compared to China
by doodlebugging | 2026-02-28 02:52:44+00:00
The best way for AI companies to fight this would be to remind those who request this capability that the AI knows exactly where they live, where they hang out, and that any one of them can also be targeted by a rogue AI system with no human in the loop. Capabilities that they are requesting could jeopardize them, their personal assets, and their families if something goes haywire or, in the much more common case, where the AI is used as an attack tool by an outside adversary who has gained unauthorized access.

All of this should remain a bridge too far, forever.
by avaer | 2026-02-28 02:52:46+00:00
Honestly though, would it help if those in charge voiced their honest opinions?

The current political climate is this is the kind of thing that will get you "investigated" and charged with crimes.

And the government has already threatened that it will commandeer these companies whether they like it or not.

If someone in charge wants to make a difference, there might be more effective things to do than to speak out in this instance.
by arjie | 2026-02-28 02:52:53+00:00
This is a pretty classic mistake most people who are in high-profile companies make. They think that some degree of appealing to people who were their erstwhile opponents will win them allies. But modern popular ethics are the Grim Trigger and the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. You cannot pass the purity test. One might even speculate that passing the purity test wouldn't do anything to get you acceptance.

Personally, I wish that the political alignment I favour was as Big Tent as Donald Trump's administration is. I think he can get Zohran Mamdani in the room and say "it's fine; say you think I'm a fascist" and then nonetheless get what he wants. But it just so happens that the other side isn't so. So such is life. We lose and our allies dwindle since anyone who would make an overture to us, we punish for the sin of not having been born a steadfast believer.

Our ideals are "If you weren't born supporting this cause, we will punish you for joining it as if you were an opponent". I don't think that's the path to getting what one wants.
by pdonis | 2026-02-28 02:53:07+00:00
See my response to Mauling Monkey upthread on why the cold temperature of the Challenger launch actually wasn't the major issue it was made out to be.

Note also my comments there about other SRB designs that were known well before the Shuttle and the range of temperatures they could launch in. Those designs were used on many unmanned flights for years before the Shuttle was even designed. So in this respect, the unmanned test work had already been done. The Shuttle designers just refused to take advantage of all that knowledge for braindead political reasons.
by vineyardmike | 2026-02-28 02:53:54+00:00
Most of these questions are actually answered in the law itself. You could be your own investigator in seconds.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

Your toaster is not impacted. You’re turning a law that, yes, has some open questions around implementation, into a way bigger scare and conspiracy.

> operating system provider, as defined, to provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder, as defined, to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store and to provide a developer, as defined, who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface regarding whether a user is in any of several age brackets, as prescribed. The bill would require a developer to request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.

Let’s be honest here. 99% of general purpose computing devices targeted at consumers make an “account” when you setup for the first time. Even Linux if just to name a home directory. It’s pretty obvious what an account is. Especially when it only applies to bundled app stores. What App Store has no account anyways?

It allows the operating system to define the interface. No patent or proprietary system. No surveillance.

It actually requires operating systems and developers to not abuse this data or use it for anticompetitive purposes.

There is no attestation. It’s entirely self reported and unverified.

The law says user interface. Not graphical interface. Do with that as you will. A OS producer who has an App Store probably has a graphical interface, but if not they surely figured out how to interface with users already.
by krautburglar | 2026-02-28 02:54:20+00:00
You have 1) stolen everybody's shit and put it behind a paywall, 2) cornered the hardware market in some RICO-worthy offensive that has priced one of the few affordable pasttimes for young people out of reach, 3) changed your climate story (lie) on a dime, and started putting the horrible power-guzzling data centers on any strip of land within spitting distance of a power plant. I hope you all go out of business, and I hope it happens French Revolution style.

Of course they were going to use it for military purposes you spiritual abortions, and there is nothing your keyboard-soft hands can do about it.
by busyant | 2026-02-28 02:56:27+00:00
this reads like someone who hasn't seen dementia up close. I don't see his behavior as much different than term 1. simply more malevolent.

there's no obvious word searching. he's always been simplistic and unencumbered by the need for logical consistency. he was never a word smith. he has his stock phrases (eg, "many people are saying...<insert lie>"), which he uses as a crutch, but also to great effect.

as someone who HAS seen dementia from a to z, I don't see it here.
by timr | 2026-02-28 02:57:24+00:00
> That is misinformation. It would be essentially a death sentence for a company like Anthropic, which is targeting enterprise business development.

"Misinformation" does not mean "facts I don't like".

> No one who wants to work with the US government would be able to have Claude on their critical path.

Yes. That is what the rule means. Or at least "the department of war". It's not clear to me that this applies to the whole government.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-28 02:57:32+00:00
A question - being considered a supply chain risk is the same as being sanctioned? Or does it only affect their ability to be a defense supplier in the US (even if transitively?)

It's an honest question by the way - not trying to throw any gothas.

Just trying to understand if comoanies or people that don't orbit defense contracting are free to operate with Anthropic still or risk being sanctioned too.
by panick21 | 2026-02-28 02:57:59+00:00
Difference is SLS has received 2 billion $ a year for 15 years in a row, while SpaceX get that much once and has to actually cover any extra cost themselves. Why do people just totally ignore money when it comes to SLS.

Not to mention that SpaceX got funding in like 2021, and SLS in 2011.

And SLS works, then why can it only launch every couple of years. I mean what good is a rocket that is so hard to produce that the whole politics and everything around it changes between launches. They basically have to teach a whole new group of people about SLS for each launch.

> while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.

If you want things launched to the moon, SpaceX, BlueOrigin or ULA could have done that many times every year for the last 15 years just as well.

Starship isn't just another 'look we can launch some stuff to the moon', its much more, and therefore much more difficult.

You are praising SLS for doing the very, very, very minimum that it should have been doing since 2017. And it will do it at most 3 times until 2027.
by LarsenCC | 2026-02-28 02:58:16+00:00
Agreed, the pattern is converging across the industry. The Unikraft setup is where it gets interesting for us with sub-second boots (or sub 100ms even), scale-to-zero that suspends the VM after a few seconds of idle (frees resources), and dedicated bare metal in AWS so we're not sharing hardware.

We haven't open-sourced the control plane glue yet but it's something we're thinking about. browser-use itself is open source. The sandbox infra on top is the proprietary part for now.
by dmix | 2026-02-28 02:58:37+00:00
> I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate

Are they working remotely for US companies? In Canada that’s very much still the case everywhere you look

> Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.

I assumed this discussion was about rejecting working for US companies who would be susceptible to the executive branch’s bullying, not whether you can you make a US tier salary off American companies while not living in America
by hparadiz | 2026-02-28 02:58:39+00:00
Over the past week I started a new project in C with GTK on Linux just for fun. I wanted to see how far it could take me. I didn't expect this at all.

One week later and I've built the task manager of my wet fever dreams in pure C. The architecture is something I never, ever would have had the time to do. It would have taken years.

I also straight up learned more about event buses, plugin architecture, and memory in the past week than I had the past 5 years.

[Screenshot]
(https://i.imgur.com/y6XhxMy.png)

Now I've got a DevOps tool that can capture stdout and stderr on a cron sub processes even when the cron is doing nothing with it. I can stream it somewhere at will.
by xXSLAYERXx | 2026-02-28 02:59:01+00:00
How long can we push this narrative? It was a terrible situation and I can't imagine the minutes of complete fear she must have felt. I pray for her family. But to then draw a conclusion to say this is evidence that we are in some sort of fascist decline, because of this incident, takes away from the innocent lose of life. And greatly exaggerates the skill and aptitude of the killer. People spew the fascist narrative every chance they get. I'm sure most of us who like strawberries will be picking strawberries come June.
by thimabi | 2026-02-28 02:59:15+00:00
> I'd prefer to see board (or executive) level signatories over lay employees -- the people who can enforce enterprise policy rather than just voice their opinions

Although it would be nice to have some high-level signees there, I think we shouldn’t minimize the role of lay employees in this matter. Without having someone knowledgeable enough to build and operate them, AI models are worthless to the C-suite.
by deaux | 2026-02-28 02:59:21+00:00
The usual suspects have stood up to it. Ben & Jerry's, Patagonia. In the former case it led to an illegal takeover by Unilever for which they're now being sued (or more accurately, the spinoff). Capgemini sold a US division over working with ICE, though that's a French company.

So yeah, extremely few have.
by lightyrs | 2026-02-28 02:59:48+00:00
> Have there been any mistakes in signature verification for this letter?

>

> We are aware of two mistakes in our efforts to verify the signatures in the form so far. One person who was not an employee of OpenAI or Google found a bug in our verification system and signed falsely under the name "You guys are letting China Win". This was noticed and fixed in under 10 minutes, and the verification system was improved to prevent mistakes like this from happening again. We also had two people submit twice in a way that our automatic de-duplication didn't catch. We do periodic checks for this. Because of anonymity considerations, all signatures are manually reviewed by one fallible human. We do our best to make sure we catch and correct any mistakes, but we are not perfect and will probably make mistakes. We will log those mistakes here as we find them.
by solenoid0937 | 2026-02-28 02:59:58+00:00
Come on. That is because this is a negotiation between Anthropic and the DoD and they understandably don't want to burn bridges.

Do you just expect Anthropic to totally blow up all bridges to the government? What do you actually want them to do?

Reading your comment history I'm not sure they could do anything to satisfy you.
by panick21 | 2026-02-28 03:00:07+00:00
Starship is irrelevant. SLS was dumb already in 2011 when Starship doesn't exist. Its a dumb system and was never the right system. NASA own analysis showed that.

People who defend SLS on the bases that Starship isn't good don't get it. It doesn't matter if Starship exists. SLS should have been canceled even if you assume the state of the rocket industry in 2015.

Anybody with half a brain and 3h time to do analysis on the topic could figure this out.
by aguyonhackern | 2026-02-28 03:00:30+00:00
The US would not be net negative growth without government spending. Other components of GDP grow a lot, outside of recessions.

Sure if you immediately stopped government spending today we'd have negative growth today but that's not because other things aren't growing, it's because you just removed part of the base that existed last year. That would be true of literally pretty much any economy ever, or anything that's growing and you decided to remove a chunk of the base from.

And yes I absolutely believe the government does not have better generative AI than Anthropic or its competitors.
by 6510 | 2026-02-28 03:00:54+00:00
Fill the arena with HR ladies and have them do a battle royal to produce a half decent set of interview questions.

Put the electables in isolation cells fromwhere they one by one end up on the Tee Vee, give voters an app with AYE, NEY and Uhh? The questions are red by the winning HR lady but also appear on the app.

Then, after the job interview, we give the job to the most satisfying candidate!

It's not necessary but I would also add a series of certificates and diplomas for the voter to show they actually have some kind of idea what the job involves. The level 1 certificate should be supper simple and easy to create. It will grant you 0.1 extra vote power. There could be as many levels as we want but to grow beyond [say] 50 votes should require a mythical effort impossible to attain for 99% while we aim to reserve the right to cast 5000 votes for 1 to 5 people with supper human abilities.

The top 20 should have to explain their AYE's and their NAY's to the Tee Vee audience.
by jltsiren | 2026-02-28 03:01:00+00:00
High density over a large area is a rare exception. Public transit is mostly used in regions that are locally dense but have low-to-moderate population density over the entire region.

Consider a low-density urban area with 1500 people / square km (~4000 people / square mile). You could achieve that with a uniform sprawl of single-family homes on half-acre lots, or with a network of towns / villages / neighborhoods surrounding the city center. The former generates more car traffic, while the latter makes public transit useful for a large fraction of trips. And the latter also makes local services viable, as there will be enough population within a walking distance.

And if you have a 2+2 lane street with enough bus traffic to justify bus lanes, most of the capacity is in the inner lanes not used by the buses. Urban buses stop frequently, making the traffic flow much worse than in lanes without buses.
by dmix | 2026-02-28 03:01:08+00:00
This administration has repeatedly shown it will try to bully or take an outrageous negotiating position just to gain featly. Whether they get anything or whether the dispute is actually what the label says is always questionable. That’s the benefit of realpolitik when you’re a superpower, you often don’t actually need anything you can just make an example of people to keep the flock in check.
by munro | 2026-02-28 03:02:13+00:00
ChatGPT needs to catch up hard, for me their model is unusable and I cancelled my subscription 5-6 months ago, so to me this post is hot air. I need to see results, going back to try Codex 5.2, then 5.3, downloading their new desktop client, their VS code extension, their weird browser, is time I wish I had back.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-28 03:02:31+00:00
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4339

The reason that no one involved in the game's development objected to the word "warfighter" is that the U.S. Defense Department has used "warfighter" as a standard term for military personnel since the late 1980s or early 1990s: Thus Earl L. Wiener et al., Eds. Human Factors in Aviation, 1988

Warfighter is literally the Department of War's Amazonian or Googler or any other cringe term you'd see in company PR or recruiting material.
by panick21 | 2026-02-28 03:03:09+00:00
True but we know for a fact that it doesn't consume 4-5 billion $ a year for the last 15 years like SLS/Orion because SpaceX couldn't afford that. If you actually do some basic math and look at SpaceX revenue and so on, you can make some pretty decent guesses. And SpaceX is analyzed in detail by lots of people.