MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tzs | 2026-03-11 21:46:21+00:00
That tax is a "use" tax. It is basically for having/using things in the state that you didn't pay state sales tax on.

You don't have to tell the state why no sales tax was paid--maybe you bought it in another state but maybe you bought it at a garage sale or from someone on Craigslist or something like that that doesn't collect sales tax.

The use tax is only legal if it is complementary to the sales tax (which means that the total you pay cannot be more than the sales tax rate) so that if you did buy it out of state and paid sales tax in that state your state can only charge you the difference between what the sales tax would have been in state and what you paid to the other state.

That does mean that you will have to tell the state where you got it if you want to get the reduced use tax rate, but as a practical matter most people only pay use tax on items that they have to tell the state about anyway, such as cars, where they will be telling the state that information even if no use tax is owed.
by jedberg | 2026-03-11 21:46:29+00:00
Those sentence constructions that are "tells" were also learned from good writers though. But here, I'll let you be the judge. This was a comment I wrote 100% myself on reddit, which was both downvoted and I got multiple DMs referencing it and telling me to "stop posting this AI slop":

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pyjkuf/i_...

Granted, it was in a thread about AI and maybe people were on edge, but I was still accused, which to be honest hurt a bit after the effort I put into writing it.
by zahlman | 2026-03-11 21:46:38+00:00
> It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.

It's a ton of friction compared to ordinary use of a forum; and while I've emailed several times myself, it comes with a sense of guilt (and a feeling that my "several" is probably approximately "several" above average).
by nessus42 | 2026-03-11 21:46:39+00:00
I have an M2 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM that I bought three and half years ago. For browsing the web, listening to music, watching TV and movies, using Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc., it's still perfectly fine.

OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
by gwern | 2026-03-11 21:46:45+00:00
I would have to consider carefully if I thought I was a high-enough quality candidate that it would be interpreted as a countersignal rather than a signal.

If I, gwern, specifically, were to apply, I might; because I know I am widely read on HN and I've talked with any number of YC partners etc, and they all know I take care in writing, and so me not capitalizing is a deliberate message rather than laziness or incompetence. They may or may not appreciate the message, but they won't infer the usual things, at least.

If I were anyone else and my application just one of thousands in the flood? You'd better believe I'd capitalize and spellcheck my YC application: https://gwern.net/blog/2023/good-writing
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-11 21:46:45+00:00
>They've been claiming Iran is about to destroy Israel every 6 months for the past 40 years too

Remember STUXNET? Have you thought for a second that maybe if their centrifuges and nuclear facilities weren't constantly attacked and sabotaged by US and Israel every step of the way for the past few decades, plus having their top nuclear scientists assassinated every now and then, they could have had nukes a long time ago when those warnings were issued without those constant roadblocks setting them back?
by nekusar | 2026-03-11 21:46:47+00:00
Without someone actually saying as such, we only have stuff like emdashes and specific word patterns to go by. And someone even moderately vested in hiding AI in plain sight will coach the LLM to use common vernacular.

And with LLMs making blog posts as diss tracks... damn, who knows what this world is coming to.

But the whole "Only Humans, we dont serve YOUR KIND (clanker) here" is purely performative.
by timacles | 2026-03-11 21:46:58+00:00
Imo AI tends to “fill in the blanks” of what you want to hear. It’s insidious in that regard because it will make a whole seemingly logical and consistent argument purely on what it thinks you want.

Except it’s bullshitting the whole time. While you think this is what you wanted to convey.

Not sure where I’m going with this, but my point is if I pasted this comment into ChatGPT it would make up an argument I never made to support my case that didn’t exist in the first place. Exploring things is useful but just be aware it’s designed to pull bs out of it’s ass and is distinctly not interested in exploring truth or having a real conversation
by ordu | 2026-03-11 21:47:59+00:00
> a word doc editor of some sort (Word, Gdocs, LibreOffice, etc); then enable Review Changes and annotate your post for 10 minutes; then, review and accept your changes individually and re-read what you’ve written.

Pffff... I'm not going to install LibreOffice for that, or to figure out how to make Gdocs to work with uBlock.

There is a much easier way. Open LLM chat, type there "Proofread please for grammar, keep the wording and the tone as it is, if it doesn't mess with grammar. Explain yourself." and then paste your text. I don't really know what the tools you mentioned do, but any "free" LLM on the Internet will point to things like missing articles, or messed up tenses in complex sentences.

You recommend choosing self-improvement, but I just don't believe I can figure out how to use articles. With tenses I think I can learn how to do it, but I'm not going to. I remember there is some obscure rule how to choose the right tenses, but I was never able to remember the rule itself. I'm bad with rules, it is the reason I chose math as my major. There are almost no rules in math, you are making your own rules. The grammars of languages are not like that, they have rules which can't be easily inferred, you need to remember them. Grammars have exceptions to rules, and exceptions to exceptions, and in any case they are not the rules, but more like guidelines, because people normally don't think about rules when they are talking or writing.

No way I'm starting to learn rules now, I'd better continue to rely on my skills. But LLMs can help me see when my skills fail me.

> It’s your right if you desire to join the Collective and be a uniform lego brick like the others, but then your no-longer-fully-human posts are no longer welcome at HN.

I believe you (as most of fervent supporters of the rule here) gone too far onto philosophy with this, too far from the reality and practice. You can't detect AI in my messages, because they are mine. Even when I ask LLM to find words for me, it is me who picks one of the proposed alternatives, but mostly I manage without wording changes. I transfer the LLM's edits by hand by editing the source message, so nothing unnoticed can slip into the final result. If I took the effort to ask an LLM to proofread, it means I care about the result more than usual, so I'm investing more effort into it, not less.
by dang | 2026-03-11 21:48:04+00:00
Of course they're important, but they're also implicitly encoded into the culture. Cutting something from the guidelines doesn't mean the rule is canceled. HN has countless rules that don't appear explicitly in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I think I'm going to put that one back, though, because it's not a hill I want to die on and I know what arguing with dozens of people simultaneously feels like when you only have 10 minutes.
by mattashii | 2026-03-11 21:48:14+00:00
Possibly, ballot sheet size?

The national elections in NLD have a single ballot in the whole country, with 10+ parties who each get a column of their candidates on the ballot, and with one box for each of the candidates. In these elections for the 150 seats of parliament, often there are 200+ candidates listed total. As a result, the ballot sheets need to be quite large and so are quite far into the 'unwieldy' part of the handling spectrum.

This size issue also complicates verification and counting, because you have to verify that of all checkboxes, exactly one is filled in, and sorting/counting needs to do this for practically every ballot.

There has been some experimenting with changing the ballot to a 'party' and 'list number' ballot, where you fill in the party of your chosen candidate together with their number on the party list, but AFAIK that has not (yet?) been approved for wider use.
by formerly_proven | 2026-03-11 21:48:51+00:00
MAE is kind of obvious, because healthy ears are incredibly sensitive. 0 dbSPL translates to attowatts on the eardrum displacing it just a few pm, with hair cells firing on sub-nm movements (after mechanical amplification). It is completely unsurprising that just the thermal effect of RF being pulsed in the general direction of the head can become audible in the right circumstances.
by rozap | 2026-03-11 21:48:51+00:00
These people are literal leeches on society. Like I get it, nobody likes paying tax. But the simple fact is: if society would crumble due to everyone acting the way you act, then you're a leech. Whether it's paying taxes, running scams, or doing crime.

It's frustrating to me that people shirk responsibility for their actions when they act in the way that economic models would predict. As if acting like a rational agent within a system voids any responsibility you have as a member of society.

See any/all of the following and tell me how often you hear similar lines of thinking among techies:

* "Well, I can get rich quick by running this scam, and it's not technically illegal, so, me being a rational agent, I'll run this scam"

* "Sure, Facebook may be contributing in large part to the downfall of western society but those RSUs taste so sweet"

* "I'll use the Oregon infrastructure but if I live across the river then I don't have to pay for it. And I can buy things without sales tax in Oregon!"

In short: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."
by ma2kx | 2026-03-11 21:48:54+00:00
As a non native English speaker my own words wouldnt be in English. If I express myself in English I soon struggle for the right words. On the other hand I think when I read some English text I'm quite capable of sensing the nuances. So it feels when I auto translate my text to English an than read against it again and make some corrections, I can express my thoughts much better.
by ncr100 | 2026-03-11 21:48:59+00:00
Need to say versions of this more often, "That is not how it works here."

A very powerful and clarifying comment made by a European reporter, to a US Envoy of the Trump administration, during the first Presidency. (January 2018 press conference involving Pete Hoekstra)

It was in response to the Envoy bullshit and lie about how he didn't say some anti-Islam thing (claiming that the Islamic movement had brought "chaos" to the Netherlands and that there were "no-go zones" where politicians were being burned). Then one reporter -- Roel Geeraedts, stated: "This is the Netherlands. You have to answer questions." And finally another reporter followed up with the top quote.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-11 21:49:04+00:00
> like the emdash alarmism, AI never invented emdash, nor did it invent using it frequently. Its training was full of examples, so many that AI picked up using it frequently

Look at my comment history. I emdash. But I adapted by removing the spaces around them—AI hasn’t similarly adapted.

Most comments on HN with emdashes aren’t slop. But if it starts getting into Wernicke word-salad territory and there are emdashes? With spaces? At that point, it’s fair to flag.
by BeetleB | 2026-03-11 21:49:05+00:00
> Spellcheckers exist, you don't need an AI to change your voice.

How is using an AI to spell check changing my voice?

Yes, thank you - I know spellcheckers exist, as my comment clearly states. The amusing thing is that an LLM who had access to the thread would have alerted you to a basic error you're making.

> Also, if you have standards, you can always train yourself to spell better!

"You can always ..." is not an argument against alternatives.
by general1465 | 2026-03-11 21:49:26+00:00
Shore anti-ship missiles are a thing. Also you can use regular artillery to shell ships this close to your shores - Ukrainians are able to hit a tank-sized target on 10+ kilometers with regular 155mm artillery. There is no reason why Iran should not be able to achieve the same thing with ship-sized targets.

Additionally Iran has navy drones like Ukraine does. And Russians effectively run away from them and hid in Novorossiysk harbor.
by ubauba | 2026-03-11 21:49:28+00:00
Great to clarify the guidelines. Many HN discussions have been dissolving into debates about whether posts are AI or not.

But the argument of "If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it" assumes that prompts are basically equivalent, which is not the case.

There's a risk of reducing everything to Human -> authentic and AI -> fake. Some people's authentic writing sounds closer to LLMs, and detectors are unreliable.

The problem is not so much AI generated content that has an interesting point of view generated from unique prompts, but terrible content produced for metrics to harvest attention, which predates AI.

Anyways, happy posting!
by amiantos | 2026-03-11 21:50:08+00:00
It's funny you mention this, I got a Commodore 64 Ultimate the other day and one of the first things I did was load up the BBS client and browse some BBSes. Those are from before my time (my first PC was a Compaq Pentium 166) so I never got to experience them for real. But if the rest of the internet collapses under the weight of bot traffic, BBSes are quite nice.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-03-11 21:50:16+00:00
Climate change impacts on cocoa production in the major producing countries of West and Central Africa by mid-century - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016819232... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2025.110393 - Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
Volume 362, 1 March 2025, 110393

Climate crisis contributing to chocolate market meltdown, research finds - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/13/climate-... - February 13th, 2025
by graypegg | 2026-03-11 21:50:19+00:00
Odd! I think this is the bill?

https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3755/publications

It's rather hard to read because the amendments are written as a diff, but it seems to imply the undisclosed number is 87 peers. I guess they need to decide amongst themselves who the lucky 87 are?

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/59-01/0295... Bill 295 2024-25 (Lords Amendments)

“1. (2) (2) No more than 87 people at any one time shall be excepted from section 1.”
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-11 21:50:21+00:00
> real lie here is that there's an ethical superpower

It’s a lie in the way cats are round is a lie—actually a lie, but one nobody brought up.

I don’t think Dwarkesh is arguing for global American hegemony. Just that if AI becomes dominant, having AIs embedded with American cultural values, broadly, is probably better than having ones seeded with Xi Jinping thought.

> China and the US can both be bad, and they're both going to use AI for mass internal and external surveillance and weapon targeting

Agree. But I don’t think any Chinese AI companies get to sue the CCP over it.
by eyasu6464 | 2026-03-11 21:50:28+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. A dashed square marks the area you select for detection, and once it’s finished, the results will appear. You might want to give it another try because I just tested it on the pickleball courts at 1108 S Harvey Ave, Oklahoma City, OK, 73109, ( https://www.useful-ai-tools.com/tools/satellite-analysis-dem... ) on Ultra High and it detected all of them.
by kleebeesh | 2026-03-11 21:50:31+00:00
I'm a random dude on the Internet, but my partner completed her PhD at MIT. While there I knew and knew of a few PhD grads who worked at MIT in some non-tenure-track role (postdoc, staff researcher, etc). Typically for a couple years and then they get a better-paying or more permanent job. But several remained "affiliated" in some way. They kept their MIT website/email, some in academia continued to collaborate to some extent. Things like that. But AFAIK they weren't getting a paycheck from MIT. And it's somewhere between neat and genuinely professionally valuable to be affiliated w/ a prestigious university, so I don't blame them for claiming affiliation. My best guess is he's "affiliated" in a similar way.
by sireat | 2026-03-11 21:50:39+00:00
Basically you have Cremant type sparking wines which are produced from other regions of France besides Champagne. It is just like Champagne just that other French regions like Loire, Alsace, Bordeux etc are not allowed to call it Champagne.

So just like Armanac's are like Cognac's for lower price, good Cremant will be cheaper and more enjoyable that cheaper Champagne (I've not had any really expensive Champagne).

Then you have Cava from Spain which is similar process to Cremants and Champagne.
The difference would be in type of grapes used. A friend of mine swears by Cavas just like I swear by Cremants from Loire region. However my wife hates Cava.

Then Proseccos from Italy again are similar, but quality varies more.

After that we get into more questionable cheaper sparkling wines which usually means some sort of out of bottle insertion of CO2 and even worse version include some other modifications such as sugar.

In general to avoid literal headaches you want BRUTs. Anything semi-sweet or sweet is suspicous.

Again I am not a full wine expert but this is mostly years of ahem experience.
by k310 | 2026-03-11 21:50:40+00:00
> One of the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said officials responsible for creating targeting packages appeared to have used out-of-date intelligence. The second source confirmed that out-of-date intelligence appears to have been used.

Satellites have extreme resolution. Let's ask someone who divulged classified data. [0]

> Based on the resolution of the photo Trump tweeted, though, it appears USA 224 has a resolution of at least 10 centimeters, if not better as Trump appears to have taken an image of a printout. That’s mighty impressive, but of course also potentially useful information to some of America’s adversaries.

10 centimeters, for the American public, is 4 inches.

This is gaslighting.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanocallaghan/2019/09/01/t...
by estimator7292 | 2026-03-11 21:50:48+00:00
Explosions don't work that way in space. Very little energy goes into moving the object. Almost all of it either dissipates into space or is spent breaking a large rock into many small rocks that still hit your planet.

You need to impart kinetic energy and quite literally push the rock away. The only reasonable way to do that is throwing inert kinetic projectiles.

Think about starting a Newton's Cradle by lighting a firecracker under it instead of dropping one of the balls. Technically the firecracker has an order of magnitude more energy, but basically none of it is translated into 'useful' kinetic motion.
by margalabargala | 2026-03-11 21:50:57+00:00
Add to that all the military posturing over Taiwan and it's clear that it's not "China doesn't do what the US does", it's "China hasn't done it...yet."

The idea that anyone would be better off with China supplanting the US is asinine. This is the same government that committed the Tiananmen square massacre and still doesn't acknowledge that anything happened.
by SimianSci | 2026-03-11 21:51:06+00:00
The two deals you mention are not at all comparable.

Ukraine's deal was vague promises with vague consequences, which of course materialized into zero ability to stop a land invasion.

The Iranian deal before its destruction was very much concerned with safeguarding against any attempt to "potentially circumvent" and gave auditors alot of freedom to investigate without obstruction.

Your partisan posting in regards to the notion of the war being pointless indicate that you're coming more from a place of emotion than logic. I can empathize, but strongly caution that its important we discuss the facts of arguments rather than gesturing that all but you fail to see the light.
by Amezarak | 2026-03-11 21:51:19+00:00
I’m not sure there was ever a time when they didn’t have taps, but this is definitely not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Even in the days of telegrams, FDR was opening and reading millions of American’s telegrams to use the information therein to target his political enemies.

You can’t build centralized systems that enable spying and not expect people to do the “forbidden” thing. We have to build systems that make this impractical.
by drdaeman | 2026-03-11 21:51:40+00:00
Neither of those solves it, just tries to conserve the status quo.

The issue, as I understand it, is literally a new Eternal November, just that instead of “noobs” there are “clankers” this time.

Personally, I don’t give a flying fuck about things like gender, organs (like skin or genitalia) or absence thereof, or anything alike when someone posts something online, unless posted content is strongly related to one of those topics. Ideas matter no matter who or what produces them. Species fit into the same aspects-I-don’t-care-about list just fine - on the Internet nobody knows^W cares you’re a dog. Or a bunch of matrices in a trench coat. As long as you behave socially appropriate.

The problem with bots is that they’re not just noobs - unlike us meatbags they don’t just do wrong and stupid things but can’t possibly learn to stop (because models are static). Solving that, I think, is the true solution, bringing Internet back to life. Anything else seems to be just addressing the correlations to the symptoms.

Yea, I’m leaning towards technooptimist and transhumanist views - I was raised in culture that had a lot of those. Your mileage may vary.
by altairprime | 2026-03-11 21:51:50+00:00
Valid. It’s a big drawback of HN. I find it helps to report a perceived guidelines violation in “seems like” language rather than “is”, without demanding a specific mod outcome, in cases where I’m uncertain. That is noticeably distinct from “this is completely unacceptable” which I’ve said in a couple of instances, though I still tend to let the mods pick the outcome since that’s their job and I make a specific effort not to participate in sentencing decisions if at all possible.

ps. I acknowledge as well that I’m exempt from feeling guilt for brain reasons, and so if it sounds like I’m not honoring what I would describe as a ‘completely normal’ human response, apologies; I’m trying my best given the lack of familiarity and intend no disrespect towards that reaction.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-11 21:51:51+00:00
>The "Moloch problem" or "Moloch trap" refers to a scenario where individual, rational self-interest leads to a collective outcome that is disastrous for everyone. It describes competitive, zero-sum dynamics—often called a "race to the bottom"—where participants sacrifice long-term sustainability for short-term gains, resulting in a loss for all involved.

Hence why we have to keep feeding the orphan crushing machine.
by docybo | 2026-03-11 21:52:01+00:00
Interesting thread.

Feels like most agent security discussion is still about where the agent runs (VM, sandbox, subnet), not whether the action itself should be allowed to run.

Even in an isolated VM, the agent can still send emails, spin up infra, hit APIs, burn tokens, etc.

We’ve been exploring the other layer: a deterministic authorization boundary between the runtime and the tools.
Runtime proposes action > policy evaluates it > action only runs if authorization verifies.

Doesn’t magically solve prompt injection, but it does turn “agent can do stuff” into “agent can only do explicitly allowed stuff.”