MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Kwpolska | 2026-03-14 15:55:57+00:00
XML is beloved by tax authorities. The Polish tax authorities really love their e-documents and online filing. Except their XML documents are completely human-unreadable, since the schemas are based on field numbers in paper forms. Even in the brand new National e-Invoicing System, designed from scratch, with no paper forms, most fields have names like ‹P_19N›1‹/P_19N›. You read the XML schema to find out it is a "Marker of lack of delivery of goods or provision of services exempt from tax under Article 43 paragraph 1 of the [VAT] Act, Article 113 paragraphs 1 and 9 of the Act or regulations issued under Article 82 paragraph 3 of the Act or under other provisions" (Google Translated, because of course everything is in Polish). So my invoice is saying "yes [1], I am not [N] exempt from tax under $allThatNonsense [P_19]".

In unrelated news, the main author of the VAT Act is offering tax consulting services, as Registered Tax Advisor #00001.
by gnabgib | 2026-03-14 15:56:23+00:00
spiegel.de (46 points, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376848

welt.de (4 points, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376832

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas
by gnabgib | 2026-03-14 15:56:35+00:00
spiegel.de (46 points, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376848

welt.de (4 points, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376832

apnews (4 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47377431

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas
by Waterluvian | 2026-03-14 15:56:43+00:00
This is the optimistic take I’ve held.

Bots get so good that they become indistinguishable from humans. If that’s true then it doesn’t actually matter if your community is all bots. But it does matter because authenticity matters to humans. They will seek authenticity where they can successfully sense it, which will be in-person.

Human simulacrums will one day cause a repeat of this issue. Then we’ll have a whole Blade Runner 2049 issue about what exactly is authenticity?
by dylan604 | 2026-03-14 15:56:47+00:00
I was wondering if I was just having reading comprehension issues myself.

TFA: These kinds of studies have led to the identification of, so far, of about 200 confirmed impact craters on Earth, Koeberl said. "Impact crater studies have actually grown in importance over the years and are an interdisciplinary effort. We encourage young researchers from all over the world to submit grant proposals,"

So the new is that we can find more craters?
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-03-14 15:57:20+00:00
Naw, I just yesterday caught something in test that would've made it to prod without AI. It happens all the time.

You can't satisfy every single paranoia, eventually you have to deem a risk acceptable and ship it. Which experiments you do run depends on what can be done in what limited time you have. Now that I can bootstrap a for-this-feature test harness in a day instead of a week, I'm catching much subtler bugs.

It's still on you to be a good engineer, and if you're careful, AI really helps with that.
by thebigspacefuck | 2026-03-14 15:57:23+00:00
Grok 4.20-beta1 scores above GPT-5.4-high and just behind Opus 4.6 on LMArena for Text https://arena.ai/leaderboard

I guess for coding if you’re not first you’re last, but this is damn impressive considering. It looked like they pulled the coding model from the benchmarks, but it was similar.
by derefr | 2026-03-14 15:57:23+00:00
Yep. Anyone saying a MacBook of any kind is comparable to the average school Chromebook has clearly never touched a school Chromebook anywhere other than in a Best Buy. $300 plastic computers are different in kind (of materials) to $1000 plastic computers.

Planned obsolescence is real—but rather than being malicious adulteration, it is the simple result of aiming for a BOM where the only viable parts and materials the OEM can get their hands on at that price point, have engineering tolerances far below the use-case they’re applying them to.
by zackmorris | 2026-03-14 15:57:40+00:00
A -> (expletive) -> B

I think we're all in denial about how bad software engineering has gotten. When I look at what's required to publish a web page today vs in 1996, I'm appalled. When someone asks me how to get started, all I can do is look at them and say "I'm so sorry":

https://xkcd.com/1168/

So "coding was always the hard part". All AI does is obfuscate how the sausage gets made. I don't see it fixing the underlying fallacies that turned academic computer science into for-profit software engineering.

Although I still (barely) hold onto hope that some of us may win the internet lottery someday and start fixing the fundamentals. Maybe get back to what we used to have with apps like HyperCard, FileMaker and Microsoft Access but for a modern world where we need more than rolodexes. Back to paradigms where computers work for users instead of the other way around.

Until then, at least we have AI to put lipstick on a pig.
by kevwil | 2026-03-14 15:57:56+00:00
I can appreciate how "building social is hard" in 2026, but is trying to be social on the internet still a worthy goal? The world has such problems with isolation and distrust that I'm not sure "online" is the solution. If Digg can do something different and help heal the world, more power to them, but I'm not holding my breath. That's not a slight to Digg, but more a comment on the slipping mental health of the world.
by pardon_me | 2026-03-14 15:58:00+00:00
> Being able to be brutally honest with each other about our misunderstandings

Being specific to misunderstandings is an element that's overlooked.

This advice tends to be taken onboard (often to extremes) by those who take it as a free pass to just say whatever comes to their mind, whenever they like, without explaining how they arrived there. Any excuse to avoid putting in effort to be understood or be conscious of the fact that human beings have emotions.

We are not robots.

I'm glad commenters here are aware of this, as HN sentiment is getting close to the point of treating each other as machines, whilst we train bots to have better communication skill such as empathetic reflection, and allow them more creativity and freedom.

Some people are more patient and sympathetic towards computers making mistakes and not following commands perfectly, or being too verbose, than we are with our fellow human beings.
by Twey | 2026-03-14 15:58:15+00:00
Sometimes what you're trying to get them to do is understand something that you (think you) understand.

There's a reason software has tutorials as well as reference documentation. Sometimes telling someone something directly isn't as effective at getting them to understand it as explaining it more slowly or obliquely. Sharing your learning journey to arrive at the understanding is (one possibility for) presenting a working path to understanding.

Hence also the famous joke about ‘monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?’
by AStrangeMorrow | 2026-03-14 15:58:24+00:00
Yeah absolutely, at this point I also start new chats after 3-4 prompts. Especially with thinking models that produce so many tokens.

Usually things go smoothly but sometimes I have situations like: “please add feature X, needs to have ABCD.” -> does ABC correct but D wrong -> “here is how to fix D” -> fixes D but breaks AB -> “remember I also want AB this way, you broke it” -> fixes AB but removes C and so on
by moate | 2026-03-14 15:58:39+00:00
>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.

You don't think there's reasons pass laws banning AI...datacenters?

Because what state is banning the concept of AI? They're banning/restricting the creation of a type of infrastructure within their borders because they feel that is detrimental to their citizens. Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.
by anilakar | 2026-03-14 15:58:48+00:00
Agree. Writing code has always been the most time-consuming part that distracts me from actual design. AI just emphasizes the fact that anyone can do the keyboard mashing while reading code is the actual skill that matters.

Give a woodcutter a chainsaw instead of an axe and he'll fell ten times more trees. He'll also likely cause more than ten times the collateral damage.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-14 15:58:58+00:00
I've been learning to apply these lately and it has been pretty eye opening. Combined with Fourier analysis (for example) you can do what seems kind of like magic, in my opinion. But it has been possible since long before LLMs showed up.

Totally different categories and different use cases, but the more I learn about LLMs the more I discover there's a powerful, determinsitic, well-established statistical model or two to do the same thing.

Really, LLMs are kind of like convenient, wildly inefficient proxies for useful processes. But I'm not convinced they should often end up as permanent fixtures of logical pipelines. Unless you're making a chat bot, I guess.
by RobRivera | 2026-03-14 15:59:07+00:00
I'm trying to wrap my head around here.

So there are tests that leverage mocks. Those mocks help validate software is performing as desired by enabling tests to see the software behaves as desired in varying contexts.

If the software fails, it is because the mocks exposed that under certain inputs, undesired behavior occurs, an assert fails, and a red line flags the test output.

Validating that the mocks return the desired output....
Maybe there is a desire that the mocks return a stream of random numbers and the mock validation tests asserts said stream adheres to a particular distribution?

Maybe someone in the past pushed a bad mock into prod, that mock validated a test that would have failed given better mock, and a post mortem when the bad software, now pushed into prod, was traced to a bad mock derived a requirement that all mocks must be validated?
by j3k3 | 2026-03-14 15:59:12+00:00
Thats because an LLM can access breadth at any given moment that you cannot. That's the advantage it has.

E.g. quite often a sound (e.g. music) brings back memories of a time when it was being listened to etc.

Our brains need something to 'prompt' (ironic I know) but stuff in the brain to come to the front. But the human is the final judge (or should be) if what is wrong / good quality vs high quality. A taste element is necessary here too.
by kjksf | 2026-03-14 15:59:26+00:00
Good lord. WebAssembly was sold as "portable assembly for the web". It's in the fricking name. Web. Assembly. Assembly for the web.

It was supposed to solve the problem of: some computers run x86, some arm, we need something that is equivalent, but portable across different cpus

What business is it for WebAssembly to know about complex types? What x86 instructions is there for `(type $t (struct i32))` ? Or doing garbage collection.

We would be better off standardizing on a subset of x86 and writing translators to arm etc. Or standardize on arm and translate to x86.

We know it can work. Apple did it with rosetta. Microsoft did it with Prism. I don't think WebAssembly implementation generate faster code than rosetta or prism.

QEMU did it simply (albeit slowly).

WebAssembly is becoming another JVM. It's not simple. It's not fast. It's not easy to use.

But now we're stuck with it and the only path is to add and add and add.
by tanbablack | 2026-03-14 15:59:27+00:00
Really like the content negotiation approach. Serving clean markdown via Accept headers has a nice security side benefit too.
agents that receive structured markdown don't need to parse raw HTML, which is exactly where indirect prompt injection payloads hide.

Unit42's March 2026 research found 22+ techniques used in the wild to embed hidden instructions in HTML — zero-font CSS, invisible divs, dynamic JS injection. If more sites adopted this pattern and agents preferred the markdown path, a whole class of web-based IDPI attacks would be bypassed by design.
by goodmythical | 2026-03-14 15:59:52+00:00
Havin not read the underlying theory, is the society of one constructed with the belief that one has relations to one's self?

That is, I could see that the idea of a society of two could be derived from a society of one in that I could extend my desire to be kind to my past, present, and future selves, to a desire to be kind to selves that are not my own.

Kind of like a computing network being a generalisation of the network that exists inside anyone one machine in that networking is just i/o with more steps and more wire?
by themgt | 2026-03-14 16:00:13+00:00
Interpret: China is a CSIS project aimed at facilitating a more nuanced understanding of global strategic issues through a library of translated materials matched with expert commentary.

Americans are so propagandized and paranoid that they see a DC blob foreign policy think tank translating Chinese PLA source documents and start wondering if there's a nefarious plot afoot. "Understanding the enemy?! That sounds like an axis of evil conspiracy!"
by dguest | 2026-03-14 16:00:29+00:00
I really like the street sign analogy.

But in my case it was the other way around. I work in a Kowloon Walled City of code: dozens of intersecting communities with thousands of informally organized but largely content contributors. It looks like chaos, but it works ok.

Code formatting really did feel like a new neighbor declaring "you know what this place needs, better-marked bus lanes!" as though that would help them see the sky from the bottom of an ally or fix the underlying sanitation issues. As you might imagine, the efforts didn't get far and mostly annoyed people.

But as the GP said, it all depends on the culture. If you pick up and move to Singapore you'd damn well better keep your car washed and your code style black.
by submeta | 2026-03-14 16:00:35+00:00
Totally disappointing. But coming from Germany, no surprise. German intellectualls and media totally ignore the suffering in Palesine. And fully suppress any solidarity with Palestine. By defunding, by cancelling, by smear campaigns (look up how they--overnight--deligitimised Greta Thunberg), by basically not reporting about what's going on there. And if you are state employed, you can basically bet on it losing your job once you show soliarity with Palestine.
by pwndByDeath | 2026-03-14 16:01:23+00:00
I agree that free speech is free speech, the private org that runs the platform has a veto, the assumption that these platforms are the equivilant of stepping into the street to stand on a box is a not realistic.

Even HN is only quasi-free speech, there are rules that will get one censored.

If you love freedom, there are mailing lists and other platforms but they arnt as high on dopamine and the audience gets a little bit more sketch.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-03-14 16:01:48+00:00
Let's say I put out a bag of candies for halloween or something for anyone to come and take without restrictions. A few of them take most of the candies, then go around the corner and sell it for a significant profit, so much that they are billionaires now, but I've only grown poorer.

Would I have any right to be pissed off? No. Once I shared the candies, I have surrendered all entitlements over them.

Furthermore, let's say I put some legal text on the candy wrapper that said "if you get sick from eating it, i'm not responsible. if you sell it, you have to pay me 10%. If you cook something with the candy and resell that product, you have to share your new recipe with the world." and a bunch of other ridiculous things. But I put it out there for anyone to take, reading the wrapper and accepting the terms was not a condition the public needed to meet before being able to obtain the candy. Not only that, if you put out poisonous food for the public, what you put on the wrapper doesn't absolve you from responsiblity. Being able to offer things for free to others doesn't grant you rights to control their future commercial activity, unless they specifically agreed to that. It is also outlandish and ridiculous to claim you can have a say in someone's recipe's confidentiality simply because they modified your ingredient candy before using it as part of their recipe.

---

# LICENSE

I am not responsible for how you interpret this comment. By reading this, you accept fully that I am not responsible for any libel, economic or otherwise any harm caused to you, or any entity you represent.

If this comment is used to train AI or used as part of any technology that profits commercially in any way by transforming this comment, the individuals or incorporated entities implementing that technology agree to disclose all transformations made to this comment, the underlying technology used for that transformation, and agree to pay 10% of their net profits from all commercial activity to me, the author of this comment.
by user_7832 | 2026-03-14 16:01:57+00:00
Funny you mention it; I actually have been thinking of this as a startup/solution for ages (especially since covid). I realized that it's likely a fair bit more difficult (you'd need significant control of both software as well as hardware stacks.)

If you or anyone's seriously interested in pursuing it, feel free to reach out to the email address in my profile page.
by estimator7292 | 2026-03-14 16:02:02+00:00
I think it's interesting that you're refusing to engage with the topic at hand and trying to distract with whataboutism.

You may be shocked and horrified to learn that two things can be bad at the same time, even if we only talk about one.

GP's comments trend digital because we're talking about digital games. GP is on-topic, you are trying to derail and delegetimize the conversation.
by magicalhippo | 2026-03-14 16:02:14+00:00
> Except of course that you do have a list of gays.

If you go to your kindergarten and tell them to stop keeping a list of gays they will look at you weird and most likely dismiss you as a nutjob. Because they don't have a list of gays, they just have a list of kids with their parents' names and pronouns.

That's why I think it's important to keep the distinction rather than conflate the two like you want to.
by ACCount37 | 2026-03-14 16:02:33+00:00
I don't think symbolic approaches are completely useless. It's just that they're solving yesterday's problems 1.12% better. While ML is cracking open entirely new fields - and might go all the way to AGI, the way it's going now.

One is near the end of its potential while another is only picking up steam.

In many ways, the space ML dominates now is the space of "all the things symbolic approaches suck ass at". Which is a very wide space with many desirable things in it.
by tw-20260303-001 | 2026-03-14 16:02:41+00:00
Neither is the US. Neither it was in the last 25 years. Today’s USA looks like Russia with a cowboy at the helm. But what a cowboy that is. An offspring of an immigrant with an immigrant wife who barely speaks English. Comedy shit show. Maybe if he shut up for a bit and let the army act, it would look different. But no, they guy has to blabber. The saddest thing is, it’s not Trump, it’s half of US population.
by jpdb | 2026-03-14 16:03:00+00:00
> If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.

Absolutely! But OP isn't suggesting preamble is unpleasant, they are saying there is little or even no value and to remove it altogether.

Even if OP did in fact mean to suggest this when speaking to them directly, it is unbelievably selfish to ask (let alone _beg_) someone to eschew their voice just so you don't have to read a few more words and "waste calories" to gather the information they believe is important.

The pleasantries and preambles and hollow words _are_ important. People might be adding them without having deep thoughts on them to the point where they explicitly include them, but they want to signal to you that they consider your humanity. That signal isn't noise, it's a very minute sign of camaraderie. If OP doesn't value that signal, that's fine, but pretending it's noise is antisocial.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-14 16:04:01+00:00
> I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more

It's non-linear. If you have a 17GB working set size, a 16GB machine is actively using 1GB of swap, but the 8GB machine is using 9GB. If you have a 14GB working set size, the 16GB machine doesn't need to thrash at all, but the 8GB machine is still doing 6GB.

Meanwhile "SSDs are fast" is the thing that screws you here. Once your actual working set (not just some data in memory the OS can swap out once and leave in swap) exceeds the size of physical memory, the machine has to swap it in and back out continuously. Which you might not notice when the SSD is fast and silent, but now the fact that the SSD will write at 2GB/sec means you can burn through that entire 600TBW in just over three days, and faster drives are even worse.

On top of that, the write endurance is proportional to the size of the drive. 600TBW is pretty typical for the better consumer 1TB drives, but a smaller drive gets proportionally less. And then the machines with less RAM are typically also paired with smaller drives.
by submeta | 2026-03-14 16:04:28+00:00
No we are not. 80% of us are against what Israel does in Palestine. But the Goverment and media will tell you otherwise. It's got nothing to do with our history. Konrad Adenauer--first chancellor--once said:

"The power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated. And therefore I have very deliberately and very consciously — and that was always my opinion — put all my strength, the best I could, to bring about a reconciliation between the Jewish people and the German people."

It was never about guilt, still is not. Germany has learned nothing from its past.
by BurningFrog | 2026-03-14 16:04:30+00:00
I'll spell out the argument:

Wikipedia is fine for uncontroversial facts. The obscure ones can have individual mistakes but it's generally correct.

For controversial topics, it's an eternal battle between factions of "volunteers" trying to present their view of a conflict. The articles reflect which side has the best organized influencer operations. Factual truth may or may not shine through, but as a side effect, not a result of the governing process.

Grokipedia operates by Grok writing what it considers the true and interesting facts. That doesn't mean it's always right, but it's a model far less influenced by influencer operations.

I wildly disagree with the critique based on the wealth of the top executive. I care about the truth and quality of the articles.