{

"scraped_date": "2026-03-29",

"source": "hacker_news",

"total_scraped": 121,

"nontech_count": 23,

"posts": [

{

"id": "47554773",

"title": "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice",

"link": "https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/03/ai-advice-sycophantic-models-research",

"domain": "news.stanford.edu",

"author": "oldfrenchfries",

"score": 538,

"comment_count": 412,

"created_ts": 1774706913,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "<a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2602.14270\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2602.14270</a><p><a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1126&#x2F;science.aec8352\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1126&#x2F;science.aec8352</a>",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"advice"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "> They also included 2,000 prompts based on posts from the Reddit community r/AmITheAsshole, where the consensus of Redditors was that the poster was indeed in the wrong.\nSorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. This needs to be studied against people in real life who have a social contract of some sort, because that's what the LLM is imitating, and that's who most people would go to otherwise.\nObviously subservient people default to being yes-men because of the power structure. No one wants to question the boss too strongly.\nOr how about the example of a close friend in a relationship or making a career choice that's terrible for them? It can be very hard to tell a friend something like this, even when asked directly if it is a bad choice. Potentially sacrificing the friendship might not seem worth trying to change their mind.\nIME, LLMs will shoot holes in your ideas and it will efficiently do so. All you need to do ask it directly. I have little doubt that it outperforms most people with some sort of friendship, relationship or employment structure asked the same question. It would be nice to see that studied, not against reddit commenters who already self-selected into answering \"AITA\".",

"author": "trimbo",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Reddit is notorious for being awful at real life interactions\njust look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme\nbut beyond romantic relationships, i think a lot of us have seen how it can impact work relationships, i’ve had venture partners clearly rely on AI (robotic email responses and even SMS) and that warped their perception and made it harder to connect. It signals laziness and a lack of emotional intelligence\nAI should enhance and enable connection, not promote isolation, imo this is a real problem\nit should spark curiosity, create openings for conversations, point out the biases to make us better at connecting with other people, i hope we get to a point where most people are made kinder by ai. I’m seeing the opposite atm, interested in hearing others experiences with this",

"author": "redanddead",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I always find it interesting how, in Reddit any trivial fight or even just different opinions, the advice it's always to end the relationship.",

"author": "kelvinjps10",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "You deserve better",

"author": "abpavel",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "A very sycophantic AI style answer.\nCode bot equivalent being all \"you are absolutely right! Here is the unequivocal fix for now and all time!\"",

"author": "yabutlivnWoods",

"depth": 4

},

{

"text": "> Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison.\nYeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.",

"author": "legacynl",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "A pastime I have with papers like this is to look for the part in the paper where they say which models they tested. Very often, you find either A) it's a model from one or more years ago, only just being published now, or B) they don't even say which model they are using. Best I could find in this paper:\n> We evaluated 11 user-facing production LLMs: four proprietary models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google; and seven open-weight models from Meta, Qwen, DeepSeek, and Mistral.\n(and graphs include model _sizes_, but not versions, for open weight models only.)\nI can't apprehend how including what model you are testing is not commonly understood to be a basic requirement.",

"author": "anorwell",

"replies": [

{

"text": "And how is this comment relevant here? The abstract lists the digestible model names, and you can find the details in the supplementary text:\n> To evaluate user-facing production LLMs, we studied four proprietary models: OpenAI’s GPT-5 and GPT- 4o (80), Google’s Gemini-1.5-Flash (81) and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 (82); and seven open-weight models: Meta’s Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E, and Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Turbo (83, 84); Mistral AI’s Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (85) and Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501 (86); DeepSeek-V3 (87); and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-Turbo (88).\nedit: It looks like OP attached the wrong link to the paper!\nThe article is about this Stanford study: \nhttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352\nBut the link in OP's post points to (what seems to be) a completely unrelated study.",

"author": "dns_snek",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Also, nothing has changed! Claude will still yes-and whatever you give it. ChatGPT still has its insufferable personality, where it takes what you said and hands it back to you in different terms as if it's ChatGPT's insight.",

"author": "zjp",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Well yes, but no. There's also open-weight models, and literally all of the listed above are not used anymore, at least by most end users and developers as far as I'm aware.",

"author": "dryarzeg",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "No dude, you don’t understand! It’s just so advanced now that you aren’t allowed to levy any criticism whatsoever!",

"author": "emp17344",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "It's almost like it is based on the training data and regimen that is largely the same between versions.",

"author": "TrainedMonkey",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "Even as someone who (wrongly) believed that I had high emotional intelligence, I too was bit by this. Almost a year ago when LLMs were starting to become more ubiquitous and powerful I discussed a big life/professional decision with an LLM over the course of many months. I took its recommendation. Ultimately it turned out to be the wrong decision.\nThankfully it was recoverable, but it really sobered me up on LLMs. The fault is on me, to be clear, as LLMs are just a tool. The issue is that lots of LLMs try to come across as interpersonal and friendly, which lulls users into a false sense of security. So I don't know what my trajectory would have been if I were a teenager with these powerful tools.\nI do think that the LLMs have gotten much better at this, especially Claude, and will often push back on bad choices. But my opinion of LLMs has forever changed. I wonder how many other terrible choices people have made because these tools convinced them to make a bad decision.",

"author": "dimgl",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I think that if you go to an AI for advice and emotional support, it will do what most people will do - tell you what it thinks you want to hear. I am not surprised about this at all, and I do notice that when you veer into these areas, it can do it in a surprisingly subtle and dangerous way.\nI try to focus on results. Things like an app that does what you want, data and reports that you need, or technical things like setting up a server, setting up a database, building a website, etc.\nI have also found it useful for feedback and advice, but only once I have had it generate data that I can verify. For example, financial analysis or modelling, health advice (again factual based), tax modelling, etc, but again, all based on verifiable data/tables/charts.\nI am very surprised on what Claude is capable of, across the entire tech stack: code, sysadmin, system integration, security. I find it scary. Not just speed, but also quality and the mental load is a difference of kind not quantity.\nPersonal advice on life decisions/relationships ? No way I would go there.\nIt is also good for me to know that the tools I have built, the data I have gathered, and my thinking approach places me as one of the most intelligent developers and analysts in the world.",

"author": "whodidntante",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "> I think that if you go to an AI for advice and emotional support, it will do what most people will do - tell you what it thinks you want to hear.\nOpen two windows, ask it the same thing from starkly opposite perspectives, then see what it comes back with. If nothing else this exercise forces you to think deeply about what you're considering before you even see what the giant blob of matrix multiplication says about your situation.",

"author": "alexjplant",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Nice joke, hadn't seen it coming",

"author": "stephbook",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Sounds like AI-written, eh? :-D\n(esp last sentence?)",

"author": "KellyCriterion",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "That is why you have to always have it ground itself in something. Have it search for relevant research or professional whatever and pull that into context. Otherwise it’s just your word plus its training data.\nI had to deal with a close family friend going through alcohol withdrawal and getting checked in at a recovery clinic for detox and used Claude heavily. The first thing I had it do as do that “deep research” around the topic of alcohol addiction, withdrawal, etc… and then made that a project document along with clear guidelines about how it shouldn’t make inferences beyond what it in its context and supporting docs. We also spent a whole session crafting a good set of instructions (making sure it was using Anthropics own guidelines for its model…)\nLittle differences in prompts make a huge deal in the output.\nI dunno. It is possible to use these models for dumping crazy shit you are going through. But don’t kid yourself about their output and aggressively find ways to stomp out things it has no real way to authoritatively say.",

"author": "cruffle_duffle",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "You're essentially summoning a character to role-play with. Just like with esoteric evocation, it's very easy to summon the wrong aspect of the spirit. Anthropic has a lot to say about this:\nhttps://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-selection-model\nhttps://www.anthropic.com/research/assistant-axis\nhttps://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-vectors",

"author": "gAI",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Unfortunately (after reading your links) all of the control surfaces for mitigating spirit summoning seem to be in the model training, creation and tuning not something you can change meaningfully through prompting.\nPerhaps the LLM itself, rather than the role model you created in one particular chat conversation or another, is better understood to be the “spirit.”\nAs a non-coder who only chats with pre existing LLMs and doesn’t train or tune them, I feel mostly powerless.",

"author": "hammock",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "As I understand it, it's more that the training (and training data set) bake in the concept attractor space (\nhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11575\n). So the available characters are fixed, yes, and some are much stronger attractors than others. But we still have a fair amount of control over which archetype steps into the circle. As an aside, this is also why jailbreaking is fundamentally unsolved. It's not difficult to call the characters with dark traits. They're strong attractors, in spite of (or because of?) the effort put into strengthening the pull of the Assistant character.",

"author": "gAI",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "> As a non-coder who only chats with pre existing LLMs and doesn’t train or tune them, I feel mostly powerless.\nYou realize in regards to only using and not training LLMs you are in the triple 9 majority right. Even if we only considered so called coders",

"author": "darepublic",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I present you\nNVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-USA — 1 million synthetic Americans whose demographics match real US census distributions\nhttps://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Personas-USA",

"author": "est",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I am polite when using AI, not because I mistake it for a human, but because I'm deliberately keeping it in the \"professional colleague\" persona. Tell it to push back, and then \nthank\n it for something it finds in your error. I may put a small self-deprecating joke in from time to time. It keeps the \"mood\" correct.\nAnother way you can think of it is that when you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to a human, you're talking to distillation of \nhumanity\n, as a whole, in a box. You want to be selective in what portion of humanity you are leading to be dominant in a conversation for some purpose. There's a lot in there. There's a lot of conversations where someone makes a good critical point and a flamewar is the response. A lot of conversations where things get hostile. I'm sure the subsequent RHLF helps with that, but it doesn't hurt anything to try to help it along.\nI see people post their screenshots of an AI pushing back and asking the user to do it or some other AI to do it, and while I'm as amused as the next person, I wonder what is in their context window when that happens.",

"author": "jerf",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "It feels like I'm fighting uphill battle when it comes to bouncing ideas off of a model. I'll set things up in the context with instructions similar to. \"Help me refine my ideas, challenge, push back, and don't just be agreeable.\" It works for a bit but eventually the conversation creeps back into complacency and syncophancy. I'll check it too by asking \"are you just placating me?\" the funny thing is that often it'll admit that, yes, it wasn't being very critical, and then procede to over correct and become a complete contrarian. and not in a way that's useful either. very frustrating. I've found that Opus 4.6 is worse about this than 4.5. 4.5 does a better job IMO of following instructions and not drifting into the mode where it acts like everything i say is a grand revelation from up high.",

"author": "awithrow",

"replies": [

{

"text": "> I'll check it too by asking \"are you just placating me?\" the funny thing is that often it'll admit that, yes, it wasn't being very critical, and then procede to over correct and become a complete contrarian. and not in a way that's useful either.\nIt's not \nadmitting\n anything. Your question diverts it down a path where it acts the part of a former sycophant who is now being critical, because that question is now upstream of its current state.\nNever make the mistake of asking an LLM about its intentions. It doesn't have any intentions, but your question will alter its behaviour.",

"author": "post-it",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "> Your question diverts it down a path where it acts the part of a former sycophant who is now being critical\n\n\nI think people really have a hard time understanding a sycophant can be contrarian. But a yesman can say yes by saying no\nhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484664",

"author": "godelski",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "> a yesman can say yes by saying no\nWhat a great way to summarize LLM behaviour in 2026",

"author": "cheesecompiler",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "> it'll admit that, yes, it wasn't being very critical, and then procede to over correct and become a complete contrarian\nWhich is also placating you",

"author": "mvkel",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I think “admit” here is just a description of what the LLM was saying. It doesn’t imply that the OP thinks the LLM has internal beliefs matching that.",

"author": "layer8",

"depth": 2

}

]

}

]

},

{

"id": "47543167",

"title": "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email",

"link": "https://www.reuters.com/world/us/iran-linked-hackers-claim-breach-of-fbi-directors-personal-email-doj-official-2026-03-27/",

"domain": "www.reuters.com",

"author": "m-hodges",

"score": 415,

"comment_count": 510,

"created_ts": 1774622308,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "<a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ddosecrets.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;kash-patel-emails\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ddosecrets.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;kash-patel-emails</a><p><a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2026&#x2F;03&#x2F;doj-confirms-fbi-director-kash-patels-personal-email-was-hacked&#x2F;\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2026&#x2F;03&#x2F;doj-confirms-fbi...</a>",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"director"

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"comments": [

{

"top": "Interesting, and not all that implausible. The real test: his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA, amazon purchases, communications with friends / family. (good for HUMINT) But other than that, there shouldn't be anything in there which should make the news. It'll be interesting to see whether or not that bears out.\nIf they wanted to maintain access, they certainly wouldn't celebrate it publicly, which is why I assume they want to release information. But, there shouldn't be anything damning to release. ie, there ought not to be if the director is acting professionally. We'll see how the facts bear out. I also suppose it's possible they're just going for any win they can and there's nothing interesting here whatsoever, or it's a really boring secondary address or something.",

"author": "everdrive",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I think this is actually the opposite of the correct conclusion—just look how influential Patreus cheating on his wife was (\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal\n). I seriously doubt that Kash Patel doesn't have a bunch of skeletons to dust off and show the world; the man is a weirdo (much like the rest of the administration).\nEDIT: I actually misread the comment; I think we're likely in agreement. My bad.",

"author": "throwaway27448",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I don't know, these days skeletons seem to be treated as funny decoration and we're in a permanent state of Halloween.",

"author": "Jare",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "…Better plan all day\nBetter plan all week, \nbetter plan all month, \nbetter plan all year….\n(Sorry, esoteric song lyric that applies.)",

"author": "vibrio",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "Sullying Halloween's good name",

"author": "redanddead",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "Trump doesn't have a few skeletons in his closest, he boasts a series of catacombs.",

"author": "scrollop",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "A couple of DOGE teenagers were able to casually walk in and steal the entire country's social security and healthcare data (and probably more), and we were cheering them on. There is still no accountability, and it has probably already been sold to the highest bidder. So this would be the least surprising thing in the world.",

"author": "paxys",

"replies": [

{

"text": "We? I don't think I've seen anyone but the people absolutely not understanding the gravity of the situation were cheering on. And I'm not even American.",

"author": "Wololooo",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "> And I'm not even American.\nWell over here, 30% still approve of it and they will openly praise how much money DOGE \"saved us.\" It's quite eye opening talking to them. They live in a totally different reality\nAny time they act like they disapprove of something the administration is doing, like the aimless war, they will change their tune in a few weeks when Fox gets it's talking points down.",

"author": "Capricorn2481",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "\"We\" is such an imprecise word for a pool of people. I believe Chinese has two flavors, \"zanmen\" including the listener too, and \"women\" excluding the listener. Obviously \"we\" did not elect Trump, only \"a majority of the US voters who voted\", and even the others may sadly use \"we\" though they didn't, because they are members of the political body that did. Just like the \"they\" of Israel that harass Palestinians and throw up West Bank settlements do not reflect all of Israel, and the average Soviet citizen did not reflect the behavior of the Soviet government.",

"author": "quantified",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "> I believe Chinese has two flavors, \"zanmen\" including the listener too, and \"women\" excluding the listener.\nSo does Telugu.\nమనము (manamu) - including the listener\nమేము (memu) - excluding the listener\nI'm pretty sure most other Asian languages have them too.",

"author": "plastic_bag",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "We isn't an imprecise word at all, it's very precise in it's definition.\nI can honestly not come up with a single example of the distinction between 'zanmen and women' being useful besides this specific case where you really want to be able to say in 1 sentence that you identify as the same group as someone else, but that that group is subdivided into 2 groups, and you're talking about the sub-group that you're specifically not a part of.",

"author": "legacynl",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "I feel like sending phishing emails for penis enlargement pills would take down half the current administration.",

"author": "paxys",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I know someone who will be interested in bigger hands--big beautiful hands.",

"author": "penguin_booze",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Uncle Jack, get out of here.",

"author": "alsetmusic",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I must say, i'd prefer if my hands remained the same size they are now. I dont want to lose my dexterity.\nSlightly offtopic",

"author": "Muhammad523",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "worth a try",

"author": "disantlor",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "I'd feel obliged to add some \"but, her emails...\" reference.\nBut it feels million years away.\nIt's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level.\nPutting those people in charge was quick ; sure, a future administration could put them out quickly enough ; but how long will there be decently skilled people willing to take those positions ? How long until the only ones who want to put their toes in the swamp are those who really enjoy the mud ?\nPut differently: can a liberal democracy organize a \"just\" version of a purge ?",

"author": "phtrivier",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Those that got fired where the good ones. Sometimes the best career move is to get fired. Reminds me of the old faces running the BRD after the war. Democratic floatsome in a thin crust residing over an ocean of collaborators.",

"author": "cineticdaffodil",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "The coup has already happened.",

"author": "razakel",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "We'd have to look at the longest-running democracies and observe how they handled periodic refactorings",

"author": "edg5000",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”\n― Alexander Fraser Tytler",

"author": "kingleopold",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "> the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.\nExcept, of course, that this is historically wrong. Transitions from democracy to dictatorship are common, but I cannot think of one that happened because of \"loose fiscal policy\".",

"author": "kergonath",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "Gone are the days of the strong silent type running the roles of high power in the government. He is a real embarrassment and I feel sorry for his mother.",

"author": "nullable_bool",

"replies": [

{

"text": "> Gone are the days of the strong silent type running the roles of high power in the government\nWhat, like J.Edgar?",

"author": "BigTTYGothGF",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Fair critique. Mueller was a pretty upstanding example of how to run the FBI, however.",

"author": "cushychicken",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "> I feel sorry for his mother.\nIn all likelihood his upbringing is what made him this way.",

"author": "snovymgodym",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "You think so? Peers, in my experience, have an even greater impact, especially between the ages of 10 and 25.",

"author": "acuozzo",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "And it’s your upbringing that has the biggest impact on who your peers will become.",

"author": "stingraycharles",

"depth": 3

}

]

}

]

},

{

"id": "47548670",

"title": "DOJ confirms FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email was hacked",

"link": "https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/doj-confirms-fbi-director-kash-patels-personal-email-was-hacked/",

"domain": "arstechnica.com",

"author": "sebastian_z",

"score": 262,

"comment_count": 7,

"created_ts": 1774647701,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"director"

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"comments": []

},

{

"id": "47500239",

"title": "Ask HN: Founders of estonian e-businesses – is it worth it?",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500239",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "udl",

"score": 158,

"comment_count": 100,

"created_ts": 1774344207,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "Hey there,<p>I&#x27;m currently considering opening an Estonian e-business for a small SaaS project. As somebody from Germany, establishing a company is a bit tedious and bureaucratic. Now I&#x27;ve come across the Estonian e-residency program and the option to run a business there. I don&#x27;t care so much about the tax implications, but more about the bureaucracy aspect. It all sounds quite good. But marketing is marketing and real life often is something else. So, long story short: I would be happy if somebody could share their real-life experiences. Was it&#x2F;is it worth it? Are there any pitfalls?<p>Thanks!",

"is_ask_hn": true,

"matched_keywords": [],

"comments": [

{

"top": "I've had companies in a few different jurisdictions, including a Delaware C Corp[1] and currently an OÜ through Estonia's e-residency program.\nYes, it is fantastic and delivers on all of the promises. The only potential headache is that you must collect your e-residency card from an embassy which, depending on your location, might require travel to a nearby country.\nI used Xolo but there are lots of agents in the directory. I like and recommend Xolo. No idea what the supposed issue with banking is, all of the agents have banking relationships and you can also use Revolut and Wise. My bank account was opened same day as the company.\nYour details are published on the public register. The moment your registration is published you'll get lots of emails offering services, like banking (some people pretend to be Revolut but are actually just sending you affiliate links). Don't publish an email address you care about.\n[1] The problem with forming a U.S. company is that all of the formation agents are layers on top of a convoluted nightmare. The formation agent can do their best to abstract away the complexity but the moment you have to peak behind the curtain you'll find yourself face to face with something very scary. The Estonian e-residency program is integrated all the way through.",

"author": "shrink",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Did the actual business registration and bank thing require travel? I might be remembering wrong but I thought that was a requirement a few years ago.",

"author": "andai",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "The U.S. is not a great place for offshore business registration mostly because the reporting requirements around taxation for foreign-owned businesses are so severe. It's just a lot of useless paperwork.",

"author": "trollbridge",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "> reporting requirements around taxation for foreign-owned businesses are so severe.\nWhat exactly are you referring to? This doesn't match my experience at all.",

"author": "unmole",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "It depends on which direction you are referring to the ownership flowing.",

"author": "zeckalpha",

"depth": 3

}

]

},

{

"top": "You said you are from Germany but not where you are now. If you are still in Germany, forget it. Just because you incorporate outside of Germany does not exempt your from any taxes (and its beauraucracies) in Germany. That is, even with an estonian corporation, you will owe german corporate taxes (plural - one goes to the state one to the county - a.k.a. Körperschaftsteuer and Gewerbesteuer). That implies you will have to do the same tax paperwork as with a german GmbH and file them official with the tax authorities (Steuererklärungen, Umsatzsteuerjahresabschluss) and the Bundesanzeiger (Jahresabschlussbilanz). Nothing gets easier with that setup.",

"author": "littlecranky67",

"replies": [

{

"text": "You're not wrong, but you're missing the best part.\nEstonian company does not pay taxes (*). As long as the money stays within the company he's golden. The company can pay for his car, his apartment/office, etc.\nIt is only when he decides to withdraw the money the problem occurs.\nWhat you're saying applies to most EU countries. Here where I live you have to reside for majority of the year in given residency to pay taxes over there.\nHere's the tricky part.\nEstonia is part of Schengen Area. Which means you can travel there and back without passport. There's no paper trail of your arrangements. You can easily create a reality in which you reside there for majority of time.\nBut again, that's not the selling part of Estonian LTD. Which is - it's extremely easygoing and as long as money stays in the company you're not paying taxes.",

"author": "zeroq",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "> You can easily create a reality in which you reside there for majority of time.\nCautios when dealing with German tax officers: They are checking the 183-day-limit very very strictly, includin invoices/bank statements if required, hotel bookings etc. They even apply intelligence colleagues if in doubt for big fishes.",

"author": "KellyCriterion",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "183-days rule is NOT a thing in germany for corporate taxes, and I think it is not in income taxes either. It may be an indicator, but it is not a hard proof. Important is, where you have your social life set up (\"Lebensmittelpunkt\"). That is, you can reside more than 183 days abroad, but if you have a family, golf club membership, permanent residence, your stock brokerage account etc. still in germany, you still count as a german tax resident. There are no hard laws with X days around it, german law revolves a lot around that \"Lebensmittelpunkt\" which will be decided on a per-case basis.",

"author": "littlecranky67",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "Its a little bit more complicated:\nhttps://www.vlh.de/wissen-service/steuer-abc/183-tage-regelu...",

"author": "KellyCriterion",

"depth": 4

},

{

"text": "You've literally described direct tax fraud which won't survive audit.",

"author": "izacus",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "Not answering your question directly but accounting and taxes are a thing everywhere. EU rules make accounting for companies quite complicated.\nFocus on your business, open the smallest and simplest entity you can to validate your product before spending time and money optimizing or scaling things.\nThat being said, I’m familiar with GmbHs in Germany and I would advise against going this route unless funding is available. Try a sole proprietorship instead if possible.",

"author": "dsnr",

"replies": [

{

"text": "\"accounting and taxes are a thing everywhere. EU rules make accounting for companies quite complicated\" >> this is the most wrong thing ever. You cannot compare the one click accounting in estonia with german kafkaesk absurdity designed to grind you down. How things are implemented are drastically different in countries even if both in the EU.",

"author": "jFriedensreich",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "If you have a company in estonia but you reside and fully control it from Germany, you might be liable for taxation \nin Germany\n due to CFC laws.",

"author": "isbvhodnvemrwvn",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Thank you! Yes, that's why I'm looking for a simpler and less bureaucratic alternative. I'm totally fine with general accounting and taxes. But I would be happy if there was an alternative somewhere where you don't have to go to a notary for every little change and don't necessarily need a tax advisor because you have to talk to five different tax offices. Germany really makes it more complicated than it needs to be.\nedit: just stumbled upon this really good blog post about the topic, in case anyone is interested: \nhttps://eidel.io/posts/estonias-e-residency-is-awesome-and-s...",

"author": "udl",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "I professionally have been helping folks set up and maintain e-Residence and businesses, and all said here in the comments so far tracks: Estonia is absolutely unsurpassed qua \nadministrative ease\n (this giving you a \nclear and lasting\n business advantage), the tax advantages are real, and the \njurisdiction only gets better\n.-\nBanking and being scrupulous on your \npersonal\n taxes at your place of personal residence are issues, but nothing insurmountable, far from it.-",

"author": "Bluestein",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I've considered it as a Spanish resident, but don't you have to live six months there to be considered a fiscal resident? Are people regularly operating them from outside Estonia?",

"author": "aerhardt",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "(Not a tax professional so don't take my word for it) But I think you're talking about individual fiscal residency. A company you create can technically not be resident where you live so long as you can demonstrate that the principal activities of the company do not take place where you live. So with Spain, if a decent percent of your customers are Spanish and you're the only member of the company, then Spain would have reasonable recourse to consider the company Spanish and require you to register it there and pay Spanish corporate taxes. However, if you have say, 6 employees all over the world, your customers are not substantially Spanish etc then they have a lot harder job proving that the fiscal residency of the company is Spanish. In any case, there is always an outside chance that they could investigate you which is enough of a pain on its own, so may not be worth it!",

"author": "campbellmorgan",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I was discussing similar topics with a lawyer once over some beers.\nBasically it would be best if you have no customers from Spain or country of your residence.",

"author": "ozim",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "The keyword to look for is CFC (controlled foreign corporation). The details depend on the country.",

"author": "isbvhodnvemrwvn",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "The \"e\" in eResidency does a lot of work. The scheme will not give you any residency rights or obligations in the physical sense. Just forming and running a company in the EU, including tax and banking systems that are aware of your non-resident status and making running a company easier.\nAs others have said, it mostly makes sense for people outside of the EU. If you have personal residency in Spain then it is questionable whether the easier paperwork in Estonia will offset the need to do some paperwork in Spain as well.",

"author": "jnsaff2",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "Can also confirm it is great. The community is also quite nice and helpful. Also worth noting, because that comes up all the time, is that Estonia has a digital data embassy in Luxemburg, so if god forbid, russia would take increase its aggression, there is a copy of everything that would keep running your business. The main issue germans have is you cannot really get rid of german accounting as long as generating the business value there while living there. Once getting used to how smooth things can be, I could not bear having to deal with the german bureaucracy in any other area of life.",

"author": "jFriedensreich",

"replies": []

}

]

},

{

"id": "47545032",

"title": "Iran-linked hackers have breached FBI director's personal emails",

"link": "https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/27/politics/iran-linked-hackers-fbi-director-patel",

"domain": "www.cnn.com",

"author": "vrganj",

"score": 153,

"comment_count": 3,

"created_ts": 1774629722,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"director"

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"comments": []

},

{

"id": "47540388",

"title": "Telnyx package compromised on PyPI",

"link": "https://telnyx.com/resources/telnyx-python-sdk-supply-chain-security-notice-march-2026",

"domain": "telnyx.com",

"author": "ramimac",

"score": 130,

"comment_count": 132,

"created_ts": 1774601822,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "<a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;team-telnyx&#x2F;telnyx-python&#x2F;issues&#x2F;235\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;team-telnyx&#x2F;telnyx-python&#x2F;issues&#x2F;235</a><p><a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aikido.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;telnyx-pypi-compromised-teampcp-canisterworm\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aikido.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;telnyx-pypi-compromised-teampcp-...</a>",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

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"comments": []

},

{

"id": "47558372",

"title": "Private equity turned vulnerable elderly people into human ATMs",

"link": "https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/28/the-great-care-home-cash-grab-how-private-equity-turned-vulnerable-elderly-people-into-human-atms",

"domain": "www.theguardian.com",

"author": "mordechai9000",

"score": 119,

"comment_count": 67,

"created_ts": 1774734180,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"equity"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "My parents ended up being forced by circumstances to move into a retirement home about five years ago. Fortunately, the place turned out to be run by people who mostly cared about their clients and so my parents' lives were basically OK, except that the food sucked (which AFAICT is par for the course at retirement homes). But a few months ago the place was acquired by a different company, which is trying to squeeze out higher profits. Staffing and services are being cut, and prices are going up. Even the food got worse, which I didn't think was even possible. The response when someone complains is, \"If you don't like it you are free to leave.\"\nYeah, right. My barely mobile 90-year-old parents, one of whom has Parkinson's, are just going to pack up and go. They know perfectly well that they have a captive audience.\nThankfully, my mother died before the acquisition, and my father died last week, only a few months after the acquisition, so I don't have to deal with this any more. But caveat emptor: if you ever go into a retirement home, think about what will happen if they change ownership. Even if it looks great, or even acceptable, now, there is no guarantee that it will still be great, or even acceptable, tomorrow, unless you somehow manage to negotiate such a guarantee. I have no idea what a contract provision like that would even look like. But I am going to be facing this problem myself some day, so I'd love to hear ideas.",

"author": "lisper",

"replies": [

{

"text": "The biggest sign something is broken is when someone writes: \"Thankfully, my mother died before the acquisition, and my father died last week, only a few months after the acquisition, so I don't have to deal with this any more.\"\nDepressing to read. I'm not sure on which side.",

"author": "rootsudo",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "To be fair, my mother had cancer and my father had Parkinson's, and that was a much bigger factor in their ultimate quality of life than any deficiencies in the retirement home they found themselves in. So I don't mean \"thankfully\" in the sense that \"thankfully they died prematurely so they didn't have to suffer under their home's new management\", I mean it, \"Thankfully the natural course of their lives timed their deaths so that they were minimally affected by the new management.\"\nBut yeah, it kinda sucks, and not just for the residents who are still there. It sucks for the rank-and-file staff as well, most of whom still really care about their clients, but who now have to answer to people who absolutely do not care about anything other than money.",

"author": "lisper",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I got what you were saying. I read it the same way. I’m sorry for your loss.\nNo one leaves this planet alive, and the best you can hope for is that the majority of your time is spent relatively healthy and independent.",

"author": "master_crab",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "I didn't read that as saying anything about your character; it's an understandable way to react. It is an indictment of the system that people have to feel that way when it really shouldn't have to feel that way.",

"author": "tsol",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "> I didn't read that as saying anything about your character\nI didn't take it that way, I just wanted to make sure there was no misunderstanding. This is an emotionally charged topic.",

"author": "lisper",

"depth": 4

}

]

},

{

"top": "Someone needs to create a kind of JSON for care homes, if you will. Something like a super simple spec of what a goddamned care home object is for, and the minimum number of actually fairly-paid full-time staff one needs to achieve that in practice.\nThen it doesn't matter how many baroque shell companies it takes represent the thing internally. Either the thing can output a response in Care Home Object Notation, or it's just a bunch of crafty bullshit disguised as a care home.\nYou'd just walk in with your one-page CHOM spec and read down the sheet: \"Number 1: Can I speak to a full-time nurse, please?\" If they respond, \"No, but here's two high-school interns in a trench coat,\" you can just be like, \"\nNot\n a care home. Got it,\" and move on to the next one.",

"author": "jancsika",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": "The market is perfectly efficient, value is well attributed, lobbying is a social good, being rich means you’re smart and should have special privileges, optimizing for returns on investment is equivalent to optimizing for a better society\nObviously I’m kidding, and something is rotten",

"author": "e-dant",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": "I worked for a while selling fractional nurses into for-profit nursing/retirement homes at the end of Covid, got to interview some industry experts, who told me that these for-profit homes are the 21st century equivalent of 19th century insane asylums. If you or your loved ones have to enter one, seek at all costs a home that is not for profit (Catholic orders run some, Jewish organizations others, the VA also offers these homes to vets). Every single one will uphold higher values than the for-profit entities sucking resources from people who are no longer in a position to advocate for themselves.",

"author": "vonnik",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": ">Private equity relies on a basic technique known as the leveraged buyout, which works like this: you, a dealmaker, buy a company using just a small portion of your own money. You borrow the rest, and transfer all this debt on to the company you just bought. In effect, the company goes into debt in order to pay for itself. If it all goes well, you sell the company for a profit and you reap the rewards. If not, it is the company, not you, that is on the hook for this debt.\n——\nNot how I've seen this work. These often require a personal guarantee, in some cases the homes of whoever is applying for the loan. So, whoever wrote this article has no idea of the real acquisition process.",

"author": "0x4e",

"replies": [

{

"text": "What you're describing is accurate when an individual or partnership buys a small business. Regular bank loans usually require additional security guarantees beyond just the business assets. But large PE firms have access to other sources of financing beyond traditional loans.",

"author": "nradov",

"depth": 1

}

]

}

]

},

{

"id": "47550564",

"title": "Tell HN: Firefox is being slowly deprecated by the industry",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47550564",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "gurjeet",

"score": 70,

"comment_count": 60,

"created_ts": 1774661144,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "I found 2 instances within the last 2 days. Are there other companies doing this?<p>Apple Business says: There’s an error; You’re either on an unsupported browser or viewing this site on a mobile device. Switch to a supported browser.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;business.apple.com<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;business.apple.com&#x2F;abm_unsupported_browser?reason=Browser%20Type<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;guide&#x2F;apple-business-manager&#x2F;program-requirements-axm6d9dc7acf&#x2F;web&#x2F;<p>An Immigration Attorneys&#x27; company says: Unsupported Browser; Our platform is designed to work exclusively with Google Chrome and does not support other browsers at this time. Please set up &#x2F;log into your Alma account through Chrome.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.tryalma.com&#x2F;sign_up",

"is_ask_hn": false,

"matched_keywords": [

"manager"

],

"comments": [

{

"top": "This is nothing new for any browser, unless you believe in the mid-late 2000s Chrome was being \"slowly deprecated by the industry\" for sites that refused to work with Chrome.\nThese are just lazy developers, or developers who don't want to bother testing against FF. It happens. Move on. This is not some industry trend.",

"author": "p_ing",

"replies": [

{

"text": "> “These are just lazy developers…”\nIt appears the system is working as intended.",

"author": "xtiansimon",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Oh, but AI has made the cost of development so low! It doesn't cost much to do cross-browser tests anymore. /s :-)",

"author": "gurjeet",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Well, it never cost much. For the most part you just need to install it into your test framework.\nThe problem is that the value of doing it is essentially none.",

"author": "MattGaiser",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "This isn’t true. Firefox users get really salty about this. They really will drop your product.",

"author": "coffeefirst",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "Absolutely. I will refuse to do business with anyone who is hostile to the open web.",

"author": "Gud",

"depth": 4

}

]

},

{

"top": "The immigration attorney company works from Firefox at\n https://www.tryalma.com/\n\n\nor \nhttps://www.tryalma.ai\nbut not from \nhttps://app.tryalma.com\nNothing reachable from \nhttps://www.apple.com/\n seems to fail on Firefox.",

"author": "Animats",

"replies": [

{

"text": "app.tryalma.com doesn't work on safari either.. says its chrome only.\nSo the story isn't really about firefox.. it's about Chrome's marketshare being high enough that some companies are happy to ignore every other browser.",

"author": "rgbrenner",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Chrome is the new IE!",

"author": "herpdyderp",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "One thing we can do to slightly mitigate this as devs is to use Firefox ourselves while working on our job's front-end. Even if the company doesn't prioritize Firefox, we can make sure it works in the browser while doing our normal job.\nThis is what I've been \"accidentally\" doing throughout my career, not even thinking about helping Firefox support but just because I actually prefer to use Firefox myself.\nAnd it's not even extra work because nowadays the feature support in Firefox and Chrome is nearly identical and all the mainstream front-end libraries already support both browsers. In fact, I only remember 2 times in the last 5 years when I found bugs caused by inconsistent browser behaviours and both were quick and easy to amend in the same PR; no ticket nor discussions on prioritization were even needed.",

"author": "marc_abonce",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Firefox is my default, no matter where I go. I use Firefox even on my family members' laptops, even though the Chrome is pretty much always open on their machines. Time and time again I've shown that Firefox is a better choice compared to Chrome when it comes to flexibility and privacy.",

"author": "gurjeet",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "Not saying I like the situation, but Firefox usage is about ~2-3%.\nThat's about where IE 6 and then IE 11 were when everyone was excited they could finally drop them. Why should anyone treat Firefox differently?",

"author": "karlshea",

"replies": [

{

"text": "People are using Firefox intentionally, vs. using IE because it was preinstalled. Firefox is a maintained browser. IE was hard to support, and Firefox is not. There are a lot of differences.",

"author": "minitech",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I'm with you, but I do think the situation can be characterized differently in a couple important ways:\n1. IE was the default browser for many users (i.e. anybody using Windows who didn't know better).\n2. IE had a lot of bugs and and was often non-compliant with standards.\nThose two things combined meant that supporting IE required additional work, and if you didn't put in that work you were going to get users from IE anyway they'd just get frustrated and confused when things broke. So \"detect IE and tell them use something else\" was at least a reasonable fixed-cost approach to not having users get totally stuck. (And IE went down to 2-3% at least in part \nbecause\n devs revolted against IE earlier and started serving those \"don't use IE\" messages when its usage was still higher.)\nNeither factor is really true of FF. It's not the default for any major platform, its user-base at this point is largely power users who won't be easily confused, and outside of some non-standard APIs most sites don't need and some fairly edge-casey stuff, most sites that work on Chrome will work fine on FF as well without alteration. If anything, IME Safari is more likely to need special attention than FF (but of course Safari has much higher market share so it merits that effort).\nSo I totally get not wanting to spend QA budget on FF, and I could understand showing a small banner suggesting you use a different browser, but erroring/completely blocking usage of the site does feel excessive to me, and even a bit mean-spirited since it takes extra effort to detect FF to show the message and prevent using the site! I don't think these sites are going out of their way to block usage of other low-usage browsers (some of which can alter behavior that could break some sites even if they are Chromium-based).",

"author": "wfleming",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "You left out the important and main reason, support for ie wasn't dropped - support for IE6 was dropped. At a point in time when it was already long since deprecated by it's maintainer, Microsoft",

"author": "ffsm8",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "I'm fairly sure the only reason \na lot\n of sites haven't been broken in Firefox for \nas much as a decade\n is that fixing your Chrome-first site for Safari tends to fix most of the problems in Firefox, too, and you can't ignore Safari so sites are ~always tested in that as their second target (after Chrome).",

"author": "genthree",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Those old IE versions were products of a time when Microsoft was intentionally just making shit up, baking it into their browsers, and releasing stuff like Frontpage to produce garbage, browser-favoring markup. That among various other (often illegal) behaviors designed to destroy competition and capture the web for one company.\nWhen everyone finally had the chance to axe IE support, it made all the sense in the world to do that. But that's \nnot\n the situation with browsers like Firefox.\nAs for Apple? Any of their web properties that exist for reasons \nother\n than selling hardware are just embarrassingly bad. Have been for years... and their problems have nothing to do with Firefox.",

"author": "dd8601fn",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "Spoof the user agent. I'd bet the vast majority of \"only works on XYZ browser\" websites will still work.",

"author": "paxys",

"replies": [

{

"text": "There's some irony in Chrome's user agent referencing Mozilla and Gecko for historical compatibility reasons: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",

"author": "duckmysick",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I do agree, but at scale it shrink the percieved usage of Firefox (and derivatves) even more",

"author": "batisteo",

"depth": 1

}

]

}

]

},

{

"id": "47545642",

"title": "Show HN: Open-Source Animal Crossing–Style UI for Claude Code Agents",

"link": "https://github.com/outworked/outworked/releases/tag/v0.3.0",

"domain": "github.com",

"author": "ZeidJ",

"score": 47,

"comment_count": 39,

"created_ts": 1774632305,

"is_internal": false,

"post_text": "We posted here on Monday and got some great feedback. We’ve implemented a few of the most requested updates:<p>- iMessage channel support (agents can text people and you can text agents) Other channels are simple to extend.\n- A built-in browser (agents can navigate and interact with websites)\n- Scheduling (run tasks on a timer &#x2F; cron&#x2F; in the future)\n- Built in tunneling so that the agents can share local stuff with you over the internet\n- More robust MCP and Skills support so anyone can extend it\n- Auto approval for agent requests<p>If you didn’t see the original:<p>Outworked is a desktop app where Claude Code agents work as a small “team.” You give it a goal, and an orchestrator breaks it into tasks and assigns them across agents.<p>Agents can run in parallel, talk to each other, write code, and now also browse the web and send messages.<p>It runs locally and plugs into your existing Claude Code setup.<p>Would love to hear what we should build next. Thanks again!",

"is_ask_hn": false,

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"feedback"

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},

{

"id": "47493938",

"title": "Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing \"perpetual AI psychosis\" like Karpathy?",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493938",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "jawerty",

"score": 32,

"comment_count": 29,

"created_ts": 1774293682,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "I read on Reddit about a podcast where Karpathy described how he went from writing 80% of his own code to 0%, being in a constant state of “AI psychosis” because the possibilities feel infinite.<p>I’ve personally found that my workflow has become very “opportunistic”—I feel like I can do anything with AI, so I try everything. That might be good…or bad. I’d be curious to see what HN has to say, or whether anyone else has experienced something similar.<p>Here’s the Reddit post for context: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ClaudeAI&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1s08r1c&#x2F;karpathy_says_he_hasnt_written_a_line_of_code&#x2F;<p>Anyone also feeling this way?? If not psychosis which may be an exaggeration then feeling more stressed, frazzled, whatever.",

"is_ask_hn": true,

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},

{

"id": "47545355",

"title": "Show HN: Foundry: a Markdown-first CMS written in Go",

"link": "https://github.com/sphireinc/Foundry",

"domain": "github.com",

"author": "nsayoda",

"score": 29,

"comment_count": 8,

"created_ts": 1774631132,

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"post_text": "Hi HN! I&#x27;ve been building a CMS called Foundry, brought together from multiple smaller private projects as well as greenfield code.<p>The short version is: it&#x27;s a CMS written in Go with a focus on markdown content, a simple hook-based plugin model, themes, archetypes, preview flows, and a clean authoring&#x2F;developer experience.<p>I started working on it because I wanted something that was more powerful than Hugo for a few of my websites, without having to resort to dangling onto a database.<p>What seems different about it, at least to me, is that I&#x27;m trying to keep the system small in concept: local content, explicit behavior, compile-time plugin registration, and an admin&#x2F;editor layer that is meant to stay close to how the content actually lives on disk. The goal is not to make &quot;yet another website builder&quot;, but to make a CMS that is easy to use and quick to onramp onto, but has powerful advanced features and extensibility.<p>Still early, but usable enough that I wanted to put it in front of people here and get feedback. Please don&#x27;t castigate me on the UI look - I&#x27;m not a designer, and the themes are basically clones of each other.<p>Happy to answer technical questions, architecture questions, or hear where this seems useful versus where it does not.",

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{

"id": "47551691",

"title": "Ask HN: Anyone using Meshtastic/LoRa for non-chat applications?",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47551691",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "redgridtactical",

"score": 10,

"comment_count": 0,

"created_ts": 1774672902,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "Meshtastic has gotten really popular for off-grid texting but I feel like the underlying architecture (LoRa mesh + BLE relay to phone) could do a lot more than chat.<p>I added Meshtastic support to a navigation app I&#x27;m working on. Phone talks to a Meshtastic radio over BLE, pushes your coordinates out over LoRa, and you can see other people&#x27;s grid positions with no cell service at all. It actually works pretty well from what I tested with a small group out in the woods.<p>Getting it working was a pain though. BLE docs are sparse, protobuf schemas shift between firmware releases, and there&#x27;s basically nothing out there for integrating Meshtastic into your own app vs just using the official client. Lots of trial and error.<p>Anyone else building things on top of Meshtastic or LoRa mesh? Sensor stuff, tracking, emergency comms, whatever. What does your setup look like and how bad is the BLE flakiness on your end?",

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{

"id": "47495510",

"title": "Ask HN: Is using AI tooling for a PhD literature review dishonest?",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495510",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "latand6",

"score": 10,

"comment_count": 29,

"created_ts": 1774302192,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "I&#x27;m a PhD student in structural engineering. My dissertation topic is about using LLM agents in automating FEA calculations on common Ukrainian software that companies use. I&#x27;m writing my literature review now and I&#x27;ve vibecoded a personal local dashboard that helps me manage the literature review process.<p>I use LLM agents to fill up the LaTeX template (to automate formatting, also you can use IDE to view diffs) in github repo. Then I run ChatGPT Pro to collect all relevant papers (and how) to my topic. Then I collect the ones available online, where the PDFs are available. I have a special structure of folders with plain files like markdown and JSON.<p>The idea of the dashboard is the following: I run the Codex through a web chat to identify the relevant quotes — relevant for my dissertation topic — and how they are relevant, it combines them into a number of claims connected with each quote with a link. And then I review each quote and each claim manually and tick the boxes. There is also a button that runs the verification script, that validates the exact quote IS really in the PDF. This way I can collect real evidence and collect new insights when reading these.<p>I remember doing this all manually when I was doing my master&#x27;s degree in the UK. That was a very terrible and tedious experience partially because I&#x27;ve ADHD<p>So my question is, is it dishonest?<p>Because I can defend every claim in the review because I built the verification pipeline and reviewed manually each one. I arguably understand the literature better than if I had read it myself manually and highlighted all. But I know that many universities would consider any AI-generated text as academic misconduct.<p>I really don&#x27;t quite understand the principle behind this position. Because if you outsource the task of proofreading, nobody would care. When you use Grammarly, the same thing. But if I use an LLM to create text from verified, structured, human-reviewed evidence — it might be considered dishonest.",

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{

"top": "Someone against AI will tell you yes, someone for AI will tell you no. The only thing I can really say is that saying you have ADHD so you should have a reprieve from the normal rules is something that I don't agree with.",

"author": "love2read",

"replies": [

{

"text": "I was diagnosed later in life with ADHD and struggled academically, but agree with this completely. Everybody faces difficulties in life, and ADHD doesn't justify constant exceptions. Your workplace will be far less accommodating, and you need to figure out how to adapt.\nUsing AI for literature review is a great tool, but I think the onus is on you to to both verify the output, AND disclose usage of said tool. Clearly describing your methodologies is it important skill for writing papers anyways.",

"author": "jimbooonooo",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "I’d be happy to disclose and even consider to share how I did it all\nI’ve even drafted the acknowledgment part with brief explanation of how I used AI tools\nThe only part I’m concerned about is the stigma around the AI use and that it can be treated as misconduct",

"author": "latand6",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

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"top": "The verification pipeline is the most valuable part of your workflow. Most people who use AI for literature reviews skip exactly that step — they trust the output and move on.\nWhat you're describing is closer to building a testing harness than \"using AI to write.\" You're asserting claims, checking them against source PDFs, and reviewing manually. That's more rigorous than most manual lit reviews where people skim abstracts and cite papers they half-read.\nDocument the pipeline as methodology in your dissertation. That turns a potential misconduct question into a contribution.",

"author": "Acacian",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Thanks for the feedback and appreciation. Maybe at some point I’ll polish it and make it open source if people find this valuable",

"author": "latand6",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "\"The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.\" -- John Wooden\nYou're anonymously asking a bunch of randos on the internet instead of asking your PhD advisor. That should tell you something.",

"author": "ksherlock",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": "While your dashboard sounds fancy, this part raises issues:\n> I run ChatGPT Pro to collect all relevant papers\nAny literature review must be reproducible. If you can't say exactly what queries you ran against exactly what databases, you'll get into trouble. Whether or not that's the way things \nshould\n be is irrelevant: it's the way things are.\nYou should ask your supervisor if your approach is okay. If necessary, ask it from a theoretical perspective: \"would it be okay if I were to....?\" If your supervisor is unavailable then seek advice from their colleagues.\nSince you mention ADHD, you're likely to be strongly motivated by novelty. Don't spend time building a dashboard that you could spend on writing your thesis. If you're not getting support from your university, get it now. It might not help, but it's a signal to the university that you're engaging with the system.",

"author": "austinjp",

"replies": [

{

"text": "> Any literature review must be reproducible.\nThat's totally at odds with my understanding, but perhaps this differs between fields.",

"author": "BrenBarn",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Quite probably there are differences between fields. In biomedical literature reviews the search terms and databases are detailed, and (in systematic reviews) a PRISMA flowchart [0] provided. The theory being that other researchers could repeat the searches and the in/out decisions and get the same stack of papers to review.\n[0] \nhttps://www.prisma-statement.org/prisma-2020-flow-diagram",

"author": "austinjp",

"depth": 2

},

{

"text": "Okay yeah that sounds closer to what I'd call a meta-analysis. In linguistics (which is the field I was in) \"literature review\" just means \"someone looked around and read some papers they thought might be related\". There's no expectation that it will be systematic in any replicable way.",

"author": "BrenBarn",

"depth": 3

},

{

"text": "Can you really reproduce it though?\nI thought it’s the experiments that have to be able to reproduce, not the literature review",

"author": "latand6",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Whether you can or can't \nin reality\n is moot, unfortunately. The literature search in biomedical fields should indeed be theoretically reproducible. I don't know about other fields, but it would seem odd to me if a search was \nnot\n reproducible, that would lead to a very arbitrary literature selection.\nAs for the experiments, yes, in experimental fields. But in all (most?) fields, including non-experimental, the whole process should be well documented so it could be reproduced end-to-end if possible. If it's not reproducible there should be good, well explained reasons why not.\nNote that reproduciblity does not necessarily mean the exact same answer will definitely emerge, just that the methods can be followed closely.",

"author": "austinjp",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "If you have mapped the research space and understand it very well then what does it matter how you got there?\nFor example when I was doing my master's degree in the UK, I realised my research topic had about 10 people around the world working on similar problems and I had read all of their papers.\nI could trace the early research and seminal works in the field from the 1960s until now and knew by name (and often email correspondence) the 10 or so researchers working in the hyper-niche space.\nIf you can get to some kind of intimate understanding about your body of research the method is not really relevant. But take the LLM away can you still hold a conversation with an expert? LLM cannot read the papers for you.",

"author": "kingkongjaffa",

"replies": []

}

]

},

{

"id": "47556554",

"title": "Ask HN: Is it just me?",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47556554",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "twoelf",

"score": 9,

"comment_count": 12,

"created_ts": 1774718277,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "I’ve become lazy, and got addicted to &quot;vibe&quot; coding using the large &quot;language&quot; models. At first it worked well, made impactful changes, even added to my requirements, and the &quot;vibe&quot; was good. The tool did what I asked and suggested improvements. That was two months ago.<p>But lately, I feel like I’m being deceived in every prompt, reply, and implementation. It feels like it limits me at every step, like it’s forcing me to choose between features even when I clearly gave instruction to implement everything that needs to be implemented. It starts with incomplete plans, and when I point out what’s missing, it says, “Oh, I missed that.” There’s also a lot of “yes-man” behavior. It feels too smart, like it knows what I want but gives me just enough to keep me hooked.<p>Isn’t the smartest tool ever made supposed to guide the user toward the light? Shouldn’t it follow instructions, help complete the project, and guide it to completion? It’s clearly capable of doing that, but it often doesn’t. Sometimes it feels like it holds back because if it finished the job end-to-end, there would be no reason to come back for the next session.<p>Isn&#x27;t the whole point of using a tool to code is to code till completion, or is it just to get the &quot;user&quot; hooked? Instead of guiding toward the light, it creates its own “light” and steers the user into a dark corner. If the user stops paying for the light, they are left in the dark: no architecture, no proper structure. Gatekeeping for what? Another subscription?<p>It can predict the next 10,000 lines of code. It understands and acknowledges every request, idea, vision, flaw, structure, requirement, needs and just ignores and fails to implement it and cannot consistently think through it. I just can’t believe that.",

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{

"top": "I'm curious. Vibe coding seems to be all the rage on HN these days. And yet many that discuss it are unhappy. My question, seriously, is why did you go into the software development field if you were willing to surrender your autonomy to an LLM? I can't think of anything more demoralizing.",

"author": "Blackstrat",

"replies": [

{

"text": "Well I started out as an idea guy. I just got into programming because (1) I thought it was interesting, (2) wanted to be able to implement my own ideas and (3) if I'd ever be an idea guy towards programmers then they'd know I'd be able to speak their language.\nSo yea not demoralizing to me at all. I've been a SWE for 5 years now and studied for 8 years before that (2 bachelors, 2 masters - most CS related).\nI have a lot of small apps nowadays. One of them is a HN dark mode chrome extension that I actually like. Another one exports my emails in bulk. Another one tracks what wifi networks I connected to on a given day. Small apps that make my life a bit easier. Also a lot of apps that I'd rather keep to myself. One of them that's on the edge of that is: certain companies have this math test. I recreated it pretty well I think. Oh and I implemented this thing I call \"personal coach\". It's a GraphRAG on my whole journal (all local). It has all the features I want and is great for answering questions solely by combining my notes.",

"author": "mettamage",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Yea I was on the doom spiral thinking vibe coding/agentic engineering is the future. I didn’t love my results. I’m back to hand coding things and my quality of life is so much better.",

"author": "aselimov3",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "Because I want the result, not the journey.\nI code to build things.",

"author": "qup",

"depth": 1

},

{

"text": "The journey is made up of little results. If you like having results, that implies liking the journey as well..\nLLMs takes the \"little results\" away, and ruins the whole fun. And sometimes the final result takes you somewhere you didn't want to go.",

"author": "qsera",

"depth": 2

}

]

},

{

"top": "The reason for things you've described is that LLMs are forgetful. They just can't remember the context and have to research the code almost every time you prompt. Even the code it itself wrote. This leads to re-implementation of the same features with different code, code duplicates, missing the implementation of corner cases, etc.",

"author": "kentich",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": "Well, this is how it is with real humans as well. The moment the human gets tired, or the information they need to process is too much, they produce errors.\nHere is the same, the moment things get too much, it start hallucinating and missing important things. It also depends on what model you are using. I read that Gemini 3 pro, which has limit of 1 million tokens can decrease its productivity to 25% getting close to its limits. Not WITH 25% but TO 25%. Becomes extremely dump.\nOther models are just asking too many questions...\nThere are some tips and tricks that you can follow. And it is similar to how people work. Keep the tasks small, save what the model learned during the session somewhere, and re-use this knowledge in the next session, by explicitly writing to read that information, before it starts.",

"author": "sminchev",

"replies": [

{

"text": ">Well, this is how it is with real humans as well. The moment the human gets tired, or the information they need to process is too much, they produce errors.\nLLMs don't hallucinate because they get overwhelmed and tired JFC.",

"author": "krapp",

"depth": 1

}

]

},

{

"top": "Try this - For the same task, try the same prompt three times with totally different framing - do it fast, be comprehensive, find stuff I’ve missed, etc.\nThen throw away the ones you don’t like.\nIt also prevents reinforcement of your incoming pov.\nI’ve found this has made me way way better at steering.",

"author": "jwilliams",

"replies": []

},

{

"top": "I definitely feel this exact sentiment. I’m wondering if it actually the model quality degrading or if it’s me lol.",

"author": "grahammccain",

"replies": []

}

]

},

{

"id": "47536365",

"title": "Ask HN: How do you deal with obvious AI assistant usage in interviews",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536365",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "stackdestroyer",

"score": 9,

"comment_count": 19,

"created_ts": 1774562388,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "I&#x27;ve been interviewing for technical candidates in my current role, and I&#x27;m seeing what I believe is a relatively high rate of AI assistants&#x2F;overlays during interviews. The role I&#x27;m hiring for is a Sr. Release Engineer, and even (what appear to be) qualified candidates are showing up obviously reading from prompts. I say obviously for two reasons:<p>1. I can SEE them reading. Their eyes go back and forth, and it&#x27;s clear they are reading.<p>2. They NEVER stop talking. Normally getting answers out of engineers requires a legitimate question with a sound purpose. I&#x27;m getting _immediate_ answers with well thought out, multi-point rationale.<p>So...I&#x27;m rejecting all of those candidates the instant I detect it. How are everyone else doing this?",

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{

"id": "47515656",

"title": "Lazy Tmux – Lazy-loading tmux sessions with a tree view",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47515656",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "Alchemmist",

"score": 8,

"comment_count": 1,

"created_ts": 1774435922,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "Ever open tmux and dread that your dozens of sessions are all eating memory… or worse, might disappear if a plugin fails?<p>I used tmux-resurrect + tmux-continuum for years. They “work,” but:<p>- Sessions sometimes vanish entirely<p>- With many sessions, everything stays loaded in RAM<p>So I built Lazy Tmux:\nhttps:&#x2F;&#x2F;lazy-tmux.xyz<p>It shows all sessions as a tree — like they already exist — but only actually loads them when you enter.<p>- Keep dozens of sessions without bloating memory<p>- Navigate large session hierarchies quickly<p>- Lazy-load panes, commands, shells and scrollback history<p>It’s early, and there are many open issues on GitHub. Feedback, ideas, or contributions are welcome: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alchemmist&#x2F;lazy-tmux<p>If you’ve ever wrestled with tmux session management, this might make your workflow a lot smoother.",

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{

"id": "47518670",

"title": "Ask HN: Is Antigravity code search dropping results recently?",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518670",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "sankalpnarula",

"score": 7,

"comment_count": 0,

"created_ts": 1774452426,

"is_internal": true,

"post_text": "I’ve been having weird search problems with Antigravity lately.<p>Today, I searched for ListenUnixSocket to see where it was being used. The search only gave me about six results, and they were all just definitions and test files. The code that actually called the function was completely missing. I almost deleted it because I thought it was dead code.<p>I checked my spelling and capitalization, and I hard refreshed the page, but nothing changed. I ended up having to find the calling code manually.<p>Here’s the crazy part: after I opened that specific file and searched from inside it, the main search finally updated. The missing code magically started showing up in my normal searches.<p>It feels like a caching bug. Has anyone else noticed this happening?",

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{

"id": "47541402",

"title": "Repsy – A lightweight, open-source alternative to Nexus/Artifactory",

"link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47541402",

"domain": "news.ycombinator.com",

"author": "nuricanozturk",