MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by da_chicken | 2026-03-14 20:50:15+00:00
I've said it before, but I maintain that XML has only two real problems:

1. Attributes should not exist. They make the document suddenly have two dimensions instead of one, which significantly increases complexity. Anything that could be an attribute should actually be a child element.

2. There should be one close tag: `</>` which closes the last element, which burns a significant amount of space with useless syntax. Other than that and the self-closing `<tag />` (which itself is less useful without attributes) there isn't much that you need. Maybe a document close tag like `<///>`

You'll notice that, yes, JSON solves both of those things. That's a part of why it's so popular. The other is just that a lot more effort was put into maximizing the performance of JavaScript than shredding XML, and XSLT, the intended solution to this problem, is infamous at this point.

The problem of comments is kind of a non-issue in practice, IMO. You can just add a `"_COMMENT"` element or similar. Sure, yes, it will get parsed. But you shouldn't have that many comments that it will cause a genuine performance issue.

However, JSON still has two problems:

1. Schema support. You can't validate that a file before de-serializing it in your application. JSON Schema does exist, but it's support is still thin, IMX.

2. Many serializers are pretty bad with tabular data, and nearly all of them are bad with tabular data by default. So sometimes it's a data serialization format that's bad at serializing bulk data. Yeah, XML is worse at this. Yeah, you can use the `"colNames": ["id", ...], "rows": [ [1,...],[2,...] ]` method or go columnar with `"id": [1,2,...], "name": [...], "createDate": [...]`, but you had better be sure both ends can support that format.

In both cases, it seems like there is an attempt to resolve both of those issues. OpenAPI 3.1 has JSON schema included in it. The most popular JSON parsers seem to be adding tabular data support. I guess we'll see.
by throw10920 | 2026-03-14 20:50:28+00:00
> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”

No, it's not. I've met multiple people who subscribe to Crocker's Rules and none of them are intentionally rude. One of them is one of the more polite people I've met.

Don't malicious ascribe false motives to others because you're offended at the idea that they're proposing. That's extremely bad form.

That's not even what Crocker's Rules are. If you had read the article, you would know that.
by marcosdumay | 2026-03-14 20:50:29+00:00
Inflation is a common red herring that people arguing in bad faith throw at policies they don't like, because most people don't know enough to reject it.

The monetary side of the economy deals with money volumes orders of magnitude larger than the real side, and reacts to change also orders of magnitude faster. Because of that, inflation is almost always completely determined by monetary policy. A real shock that can out-impact monetary policy looks like the end of the world.
by sigbottle | 2026-03-14 20:50:58+00:00
There's a lot of things that we mean when we say 'docs'.

The great talk "No Vibes Allowed" put me to the far end of the other extreme - persistent long term state on disk is bad. Always force agents to rebuild, aggressively sub agent or use tools to compress context. The code should be self documenting as much as possible and structured in a way such that it's easy to grep through it. No inline docs trying to describe the structure of the tree (okay, maybe like, 3 at most).

I don't have the time to build such an elaborate testing harness as they do though. So instead I check in a markdown jungle in ROOT/docs/* . And garbage collect them aggressively. Most of these are not "look for where the code is", they are plans of varying length, ADRs, bug reports, etc. and they all can and *will" get GC'ed.

I still use persistent docs but they're very spare and often completely contractual. "Yes, I can enumerate the exact 97 cases I need to support, and we are tracking each of these in a markdown doc". That is fine IMO. Not "here let me explain what this code does". Or even ADRs - I love ADRs, but at least for my use case, I've thrown out the project and rewritten from scratch when too many of them got cluttered up... Lol.

I'm also re-implementing an open source project (with the intent of genuinely making it better as a daily user, licensed under the same license, and not just clean rooming it), which makes markdown spam less appealing to me. I kind of wish there was yet another git wrapper like jujutsu which easily layered and kept commits unified on the same branch but had multi-level purposes like this. Persistent History for some things is not needed, but git as a wrapper for everything is so convenient. Maybe I just submodule the notes....

Note: my approach isn't the best, heck, 1 month ago OpenAI wrote an article on harness engineering where they had many parallel agents working, including some which aggressively garbage collected. They garbage collected in the sense that yes, prolific docs point agents to places XYZ, but if something goes out of date, sync the docs. Again, That works if you have a huge compute basin. But for my use cases, my approach is how I combatted markdown spam.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2026-03-14 20:51:13+00:00
Link to study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Note that the drug is currently not approved for use in the US or Canada.

Although widely used in Europe and certain other countries,
sulthiame is not approved by the United States Food & Drug
Administration or by Health Canada.
by xixixao | 2026-03-14 20:51:30+00:00
We have been on this path at work. But I challenge everyone to consider what you lose with MD vs Confluence (et al). It is NOT easier to author, comment on, label, view history of, move without breaking links, etc. markdown docs vs Confluence. If I am the sole author plus my AI and the scope is narrow (a library), I go for MD. But for a big org, process docs, fast iteration… I’m not convinced, until someone builds equally powerful editing UI on top of MD files.
by alpaca128 | 2026-03-14 20:51:51+00:00
One thing I don't see mentioned about wired & wireless is volume limitations.

With wired headphones the number of steps in volume - or if there even are discrete steps - is only dictated by the device driving the headphones. With wireless I can usually only choose between "a little too quiet" and "a little too loud". To this day I am puzzled why devices are arbitrarily limited in that way.

Not to mention some wireless headphones are simply too quiet even on max volume and there is no way to change that. The manufacturer decided you can't have loud headphones and so they never will be, too bad.
by michaelchisari | 2026-03-14 20:52:19+00:00
I put the collapse of Britain's empire at around 75 years, which is faster than the Ottomans or Spanish empires, but still nothing compared to the Soviets, which to reiterate, was an historical anomaly.

As for the US, for all the current turmoil, the dollar is still supreme in global economics, its soft power is still immense, despite the immigration chaos its still the primary destination for immigrants, and it would take decades for countries to push out our military bases because doing so would often mean building up their own military infrastructure.

Trump's unconstitutionality is a threat, and that the US has a series of bubbles built on shaky economics is not controversial. But I don't see how that could possibly result in a Soviet style singular day of collapse. At least internally, there isn't a cultural and linguistic separation between states the way there was with Russian imposition on their Soviet satellite countries.

And of course, there's the previously mentioned shock therapy, something that wouldn't have the same level of violent effect because the US is already a market economy. And there's nobody powerful enough to impose something like that on us regardless. Unlike the Soviets, if the US goes down, much of the world goes down with us, so there's strong incentives for an off-ramp, not a destabilization.

I agree there are major structural issues, and the US democratic system is being stress tested daily, but its all symptoms of decline, not imminent collapse.
by rikroots | 2026-03-14 20:52:37+00:00
For me it's a case of, I have to expose my canvas library documentation for the training data bots to find and (hopefully) include in the LLM training data because it's the only way I'll ever get LLMs to:

A) accept that my library exists, and has its uses (it's a tough world out there for canvas-focussed JS libraries that aren't Fabric.js, Konva.js or Pixi.js)

B) learn how to write code using my library in the best way possible (because the vibes ain't going away, so may as well teach the Agents how to do the work correctly)

Plus, writing the documentation[1] for a library I've been developing for over 10 years has turned into a useful brain-dumping activity to help justify all the decisions I've made along the way (such as my approach to the scene graph). I'm not going to be here forever, so might as well document as much as I can remember now.

[1] - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/docs/reference/index.html
by Retr0id | 2026-03-14 20:52:49+00:00
Does anyone else find non-destructive editing kinda unintuitive?

I get the practical benefits of it, but it feels shoehorned in to an interface for doing destructive edits. Chained edits frequently interact in ways that confuse/surprise me.

I think I'd rather do non-destructive edits via some sort of node-editor interface. (And to be honest most of the things I use GIMP for don't need non-destructive editing in the first place)
by jazzyjackson | 2026-03-14 20:53:46+00:00
There’s a great opera on this topic called “Death and the Powers”, a trillionaire who transfers his consciousness to get out of his ailing body and, free from dependency on others, loses all empathy, while trying to convince the rest of his family to join him in cyberspace (thereby killing themselves), lots of themes of what you lose when you become disembodied, and becoming rich is just getting half way there.
by pstuart | 2026-03-14 20:53:47+00:00
I'm all for having conversations with those having other viewpoints, but it doesn't seem to be possible when they don't argue in good faith (or even grounded in reality).

I take zero pleasure in saying this, but "the other side" is fucking insane. There's no arguing from first principles, let alone acknowledging that there are issues of concern with one's propositions.

In the case of "free speech", there's a failure to acknowledge the fundamental proposition of it when used in the US -- in that it's about the government not being able to prosecute you for speech that it doesn't like. This is literally the basis of the OP.

I'm a fan of Christopher Hitchens and he embodied that "free speech absolutism" argument convincingly (as otherwise its a pathway to censorship and oppression), but I think it's also important to recognize Karl Popper's Intolerance of Intolerance.

This stuff is no longer idle speculation -- it is an active facet of authoritarianism that is playing out around us right now.
by johnsmith1840 | 2026-03-14 20:54:19+00:00
Ok I guess? I find it hard not to see democrats heavily pushing for anti free speech across numerous systems.

Simplest points are:
1. Hate speech
2. Covid
3. Europe as a whole (correlation)

Hard to say america is terrible for free speech when you contrast it with the more liberal europeans that actively arrest on hate speech. If more extreeme democrats had their way we'd 100% be arresting people for hate speech.

I agree with the covid ones because to be honest people are dumb. But it's dishonest to say only trump is after free speech.

If you think trump is big bad then you need to realize the trumpers have thought the SAME about your party for like a decade now. In their eyes they are just returning the favor.
by SilverElfin | 2026-03-14 20:54:21+00:00
This came up in recent discussions about the Google apps CLI that was recently released. Google initially included an MCP server but then removed it silently. And it seemed like suddenly a lot of people were talking about how MCP is dead. But fundamentally that doesn’t make sense. If an AI needs to be fed instructions or schemas (context) to understand how to use something via MCP, wouldn’t it need the same things via CLI? How could it not?

As for Google - they previously said they are going to support MCP. And they’ve rolled out that support even recently (example from a quick search: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a...). But now with the Google Workspace CLI and the existence of “Gemini CLI Extensions” (https://geminicli.com/extensions/about/), it seems like they may be trying to diminish MCP and push their own CLI-centric extension strategy.
by kubb | 2026-03-14 20:54:33+00:00
> How does this relate to online commenting?

A viable strategy is to disseminate messaging reinforcing a belief beneficial for the disseminating entity, in a way that invokes emotion (like fear or anger), especially in influential spaces allowing for anonymity.

But in general this line of questioning won't lead to a satisfying conclusion. The assumptions you requested (connected world) aren't specific enough to determine what we should expect from comments in online spaces (and by extension, to demonstrate that the current situation is a natural outcome).

> I think you're overestimating the epistemic rigor of the average internet commenter, eternal September, etc.

Yeah, but this place, quite frankly, is above average. Not to the point of being immune to manipulation, obviously.

> Are you implying the "astroturfing" is only on one side?

No. I'm pointing out the "two sides" framing that you insist on is a mistake. There is only one organized camp with a clear financial incentive to have people believe in "Autonomous Coding Agents" which justifies capital investements in that area.

People who are concerned about power consumption, people who don't like hardware unavailability, and people who think that LLMs are useful tools, but they're not even close to autonomous delivery of software systems are all distinct groups without financial incentives. But they do have the right to push back against the relentless messaging barrage from the camp.
Show HN: Cloak – one-time secret sharing for OpenClaw
by d36ugger | 2026-03-14 20:54:42+00:00
Built Cloak to let humans and OpenClaw agents send and receive secrets without leaking them into chat history.

It creates self-destructing secret links for API keys, tokens, passwords, and other credentials. Browser mode is zero-knowledge, and there’s also an API/CLI/OpenClaw plugin for agent workflows.

Repo: https://github.com/opsyhq/cloak
Live: https://cloak.opsy.sh
by WillMorr | 2026-03-14 20:55:00+00:00
Thanks for organizing this! I had a great time playing with the system for a week even though I did not get anywhere close to the prize pool.

I have no idea if anyone checks these threads after a week but not that it's over, I am super curious what strategies other folks used. I used a python script to pre-process my programs to minimize jumps and downloaded the sim to run an iterative optimizer with parallelization. I just put a little writeup and the code on github https://github.com/Will-Morr/MomentSwarm.
by rishabhaiover | 2026-03-14 20:55:02+00:00
Google (and almost all other BigTech) is spending on scaling compute (data centers/securing power generation/chip contracts). My comment was not related to AI producivity and its impact on reduction of workforce. I believe a company spending nearly all its free cash flow on scaling compute (or borrowing money to do so) would have a different opinion on the economics of human capital.
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-14 20:55:29+00:00
> I can’t believe that someone paying for this actually expects to chat with the model. Just think of the logistics, it would be impossible

It's not impossible, you can do it with a little bit of fine tuning starting from her history of chats on the platform, and having her set a custom user-level prompt where she lists her interests, hobbies and things she likes. Then give her an auto-compacted daily summary of the most compelling chats. It's a model either way, right?
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-03-14 20:55:54+00:00
It's worth noting that Left-wing UBI can still be seen as a mechanism to replace social safety programs. It just requires that disability payments, etc be merged with the UBI system such that added disability needs can be treated like additional tax credits that get applied to the fixed-interval interest-free loan disbursement from the government based on your taxes that UBI effectively is.

In such a system you get your base UBI tax credit which pushes your tax burden into the negative. Additional UBI-elligible tax credits can push that tax burden even further negative. You can file the paperwork to adjust this at any point in the year and if it's for the current year the tax credit is prorated relative to the date of the next disbursement date (and the full amount for the next year).

Then your UBI disbursement updates and you get it. It works the same way as updating your W-4 tax withholding for a standard W-2 position.

At the end of the year of course your taxes all need to zero out still and if not you either get a bill or a refund.

And this also moves all of the social safety program fraud prevention together into the same system within your tax agency (IRS for the US, or state/local agency, or whatever else).

So instead of a bunch of different agencies and systems for avoiding and finding fraud it all rolls together into the responsibility of the IRS tax assessors, auditors, and the IRS Criminal Investigation unit. And while the rich hate the IRS and common media frames them as incompetent, the people at the IRS are in general extremely competent and more than willing to help and accommodate your average person (less so for the rich who get caught systematically trying to defraud the IRS).
by WarmWash | 2026-03-14 20:56:21+00:00
If the US wasn't around, Russia would likely be rolling around most of Eastern Europe today. From 2022 to 2025, America and Europe went dollar for dollar in support of Ukraine. And many of the Euro dollars went to purchasing weapons and defense from the US.

Euro leaders are terrified by this. Europe, which is supposed to have global parity with the big players, was just as much (maybe even more) of a paper tiger as Russia. But unlike Russia they have a big friend who has lots of money and lots of weapons.

For the average European who has only ever know life under the protective wing of NATO (read: America), this is just Tuesday. For the versed European leader, who needs to ensure their country can be safe if America goes away, it's totally harrowing. Even more harrowing when your population doesn't understand the need for defense.
by thatgurjot | 2026-03-14 20:56:52+00:00
Love it! The name, the design, the concept, the open source codebase, everything! It’s less like a note taking app and more like a diary writing app. I think that’s very neat and has its own niche.

Love the local-first, browser-based nature of it. If you ever consider making a native app for it, consider looking at antinote (https://antinote.io/). Been using it for over a year. It’s the only notes app that I haven’t uninstalled or forgotten about. I think the simplicity of it is what draws me to it. I feel it aligns with your philosophy for this app!

Thanks for sharing Ichinichi with the world!
by throw10920 | 2026-03-14 20:56:53+00:00
> Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly.

> “I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer?”

You're cherry-picking the most extreme example out of the bunch as a way of discrediting the argument. If you actual read the other examples given:

> The Slack message that starts with "Hey! Hope you had a great weekend :)"before asking a technical question or the PR comment that opens with "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" before raising a completely valid concern, or that incident text that spends two full paragraphs explaining that the author was sleep-deprived and had a lot on their plate and the monitoring tool had a weird quirk that they didn't know about and their lead had told them something ambiguous three weeks ago, before finally getting around to saying what actually broke and why.

There's no exaggeration going on here. This is the norm for the majority of Slack conversations I've seen online, including my own job - out of the hundreds of people I've interacted with at my job, well over half of them do this.
by fartfeatures | 2026-03-14 20:56:54+00:00
All the code I work on now has an MCP interface so that the LLM can debug more easily. I'd argue it is as important as the UI these days. The amount of time it has saved me is unreal. It might be worth investing a very small amount of your time in it to see if it is a good fit. Even a poor protocol can provide useful functionality.
by Lerc | 2026-03-14 20:57:44+00:00
I recently did some looking into how public perception campaigns work.

I found it amazing that I could not find any organisation that tracks these campaigns. These are often very well funded and those funds go to people.

Part of the problem is a successful public opinion campaign results in something that most people believe, we probably only get to see the failures. Challenging something that is widely held is not well received, whether or not you are right or wrong.

Some things I did find out. Fake news stories don't change people's opinions very much. They enable media to shape narratives because people will reject genuine stories outside the narrative because they know that fake news stories exist. Fake news exists to be seen as fake to establish that the things you disagree with could also be fake.

There are companies that specialise in this.

Reputation management companies might tell you who their clients are or what they do, but never at the same time. I suspect the best ones do neither.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-03-14 20:57:49+00:00
There's a distinction between individual devs and organizations like Amazons or even a medium sized startup.

Once you have 10-20 people using agents in wildly different ways getting wildly different results, the question of "how do I baseline the capabilities across my team?" becomes very real.

In our team, we want to let every dev us the agent harness that they are comfortable with and that means we need a standard mechanism of delivering standard capabilities, config, and content across the org.

I don't see it as democratization versus corporate facism in so much as it is "can we get consistent output from developers of varying degrees of skill using these agents in different ways?"
by ronsor | 2026-03-14 20:57:55+00:00
AI means that you cannot defer software design until you've written half code; you cannot defer documentation to random notes at the end.

It has the effect of finally forcing people to think about the software they're making, assuming they care about quality. If they didn't, then it's not practically different from an insecure low-code app or something copy-pasted from 15 year old StackOverflow answers.
by refulgentis | 2026-03-14 20:58:09+00:00
Tl;dr: SDFs are really slow but cool because they can compactly define complex stuff; demoscene uses it. Sort of the functional programming to trad renderings OOP. Would be cool if it was faster. Optimizing an algorithm for CPU rendering using recursive divide and conquer, 1 core with one object gets 50 fps. 100 fps if you lerp a 10x10 pixel patch instead of doing 1 pixel. Algorithm isn’t optimized, fully. Also, turns out the author’s idea is previously known but somewhat obscure, it is referred to as “cone marching”