MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Topfi | 2026-01-29 16:16:51+00:00
I have yet to experience any degradation in coding tasks I use to evaluate Opus 4.5, but I did see a rather strange and reproducible worsening in prompt adherence as part of none coding tasks since the third week of January.

Very simple queries, even those easily answered via regular web searching, have begun to consistently not result accurate results with Opus 4.5, despite the same prompts previously yielding accurate results.

One of the tasks that I already thought was fully saturated as most recent releases had no issues in solving it was to request a list of material combinations for fabrics used in bag constructions that utilise a specific fabric base. In the last two weeks, Claude has consistently and reproducibly provided results which deviate from the requested fabric base, making the results inaccurate in a way that a person less familiar with the topic may not notice instantly. There are other queries of this type for other topics I am nerdily familiar with to a sufficient degree to notice such deviations from the prompt like motorcycle history specific queries that I can say this behaviour isn't limited to the topic of fabrics and bag construction.

Looking at the reasoning traces, Opus 4.5 even writes down the correct information, yet somehow provides an incorrect final output anyways.

What makes this so annoying is that in coding tasks, with extensive prompts that require far greater adherence to very specific requirements in a complex code base, Opus 4.5 does not show such a regression.

I can only speculate what may lead to such an experience, but for none coding tasks I have seen regression in Opus 4.5 whereas for coding I did not. Not saying there is none, but I wanted to point it out as such discussions are often primarily focused on coding, where I find it can be easier to see potential regressions where their are none as a project goes on and tasks become inherently more complex.

My coding benchmarks are a series of very specific prompts modifying a few existing code bases in some rather obscure ways, with which I regularly check whether a model does severely deviate from what I'd seen previously. Each run starts with a fresh code base with some fairly simple tasks, then gets increasingly complex with later prompts not yet being implemented by any LLM I have gotten to test. Partly that originated from my subjective experience with LLMs early on, where I found a lot of things worked very well but then as the project went on and I tried more involved things with which the model struggled, I felt like the model was overall worse when in reality, what had changed were simply the requirements and task complexity as the project grew and easier tasks had been completed already. In this type of testing, Opus 4.5 this week got as far and provided a result as good as the model did in December. Of course, past regressions were limited to specific users, so I am not saying that no one is experiencing reproducible regressions in code output quality, merely that I cannot reproduce them in my specific suite.
by dartharva | 2026-01-29 16:16:59+00:00
Except depression rates are rising at similar or worse levels in other places too, including sunnier/tropical regions and the ones with "better" diets.

The main instigator of depression is still societal as the postmodern era is pushing everyone into seclusion and addicting them to constant individualized dopamine hits, increasing the miserable effect on one's chronic mood and exacerbating one's self-consciousness about it.
Ask HN: LLM and Human Coding Benchmarks?
by weli | 2026-01-29 16:17:10+00:00
I think LLM-only benchmarks do not give me the full story of how good certain models will perform in my daily coding tasks.

I rarely have a problem with all of the requirements laid out and just the implementation is missing.

Are there any LLM coding benchmarks that have a human in the loop? That would be more helpful for me. Maybe with a large subset enough of humans you can take the average without the human performance being the main differentiator.
by mikestew | 2026-01-29 16:17:23+00:00
so you win X race/competition once and then what?

So now you're on a Wheaties box and making millions in endorsements, that's what.

Even if it shortens their life, many athletes would take a drug that guarantees athletic success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman%27s_dilemma The results have been disputed, but the take-away for me is that athletes have a variety of motivations, and the perceived rewards might be very different than what you might find rewarding.
by wincy | 2026-01-29 16:17:31+00:00
I had severe SAD to the point of having a mental break where I told my wife I was flying that very day to Miami to get away from the cold. I didn’t end up flying to Miami, which is likely why I’m still married…

So I ended up spending $300 on LED bulbs, both corn bulbs and 200W equivalent, bought some 7-Way splitters for my ceiling fan so it’s holding 28 light bulbs (people have joked I have a “biblically accurate ceiling fan” because it’s so bizarre looking, like a weird glowing biblical angel), and get about 10,000 lux in my home office now. As a bonus, I don’t have to run a space heater in my home office (since I only need it in winter, I’d have been using that electricity anyway via a space heater). Solved the issue completely for me.
by SR2Z | 2026-01-29 16:17:59+00:00
> Cars are driving passengers around Austin now with nobody in either front seat.

This is a good example of Tesla being sketchy: https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/teslas-unsupervised-robotaxis...

Musk made the announcement before earnings, put a few cars on the road, and now has pulled them all back because the earnings report is out.

This is a little more than doing it publicly - remember, Musk has been saying FSD will be functional every year for more than a decade.
by zestyping | 2026-01-29 16:18:02+00:00
When you generate real-time video of realistic-looking talking characters, the definition of success is fooling people into believing they are talking to a real person when they aren't.

If you pursue this, your explicit goal is deception, and it's a massively harmful kind of deception. I don't see how you can claim to be operating ethically here if that's your goal.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-29 16:18:16+00:00
>Would you say the same about a man who (perhaps accidentally) killed his wife 20 years ago and covered it up? "He's already lost his wife, time served, no reason to investigate."

There is a massive gulf of intent there and I think it speaks volumes that you cannot (or worse, decline to) identify it.

>Speaking as a parent,

And also speaking as a person who's been espousing the opinions you've been espousing thus far, that's more than just "parent"

>giving a 12 days old infant Tylenol is clearly absurd and just as unreasonable as giving them booze.

People are stupid. Shit happens. I know it seems wild now and everyone turns into a screeching moron about it now but the "suck on a finger dipped in booze" thing was not abnormal (note for said screeching morons: I did not say "considered tasteful") for decades. Doesn't surprise me that someone would give an infant a fraction of a pill of Tylenol as a sleep aid not knowing they have the opioid type and that the fraction they chose is enough to kill the kid one shot.
by appplication | 2026-01-29 16:18:58+00:00
I’m not super plugged into scala but I work with Spark quite a bit and my observation has been the whole scala 2.13 -> 3 transition is a huge mess for just about everyone who touches it. I don’t have enough hands-on context to understand why it’s so painful but it seems to be similar or worse to the python 2.7 -> 3 transition in terms of sticking friction.
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-29 16:19:08+00:00
My experience is that until you get the concentrated areas you don't get the actual diversity of the foods. When you have large areas of the same culture you start to get regional restaurants from the culture, specialty restaurants from the calture, because the market is big enough and business needs to distinguish themselves. You also get the ingredients as there's a big enough market to import them. When you don't have the concentration you just get the generic representation of the food from that country.
by microtonal | 2026-01-29 16:19:18+00:00
Android strict attestation is popular because fraudulent cloned banking apps are a rampant problem for banks, not because they're trying to "stick it" to 200 GrapheneOS users.

Where I live in Europe, Fairphones are becoming fairly popular (as in, I encounter non-tech people using Fairphones). A subset of those users run /e/OS (anti-Google/big tech sentiment is growing pretty strong). This is increasingly becoming a risk for Google, because if /e/OS takes off big time in Europe, it would be easy to support a European app store besides Google Play and F-Droid (which the /e/OS App Lounge already support), leading to a loss of 30% on app spending.

Google will abuse their remote attestation implementation to shut out competitors. If all they cared for was security, they would have worked with other Android-based operating system vendors that support bootloader locking to come with an industry-wide standard.
by webdevver | 2026-01-29 16:19:24+00:00
right click -> "explain this for me" has been a life-changer. nothing infuriated me more than having to ask someone to elaborate only to get some high-and-mighty "you wouldn't get it" type response.

now the AI calmly and professionally goes into all technical details, allowing me to independently realize that yes, indeed; I wouldn't get it, and my mammalian ego is at peace.
by marcusverus | 2026-01-29 16:19:39+00:00
Fair market value: the price at which a thing would change hands between a willing and informed buyer and seller.

A company's market cap is, by definition, its fair market value.

> Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.

You're right that it's not priced according to underlying assets, but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings; the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots. Both offer the prospect of being the first mover into markets which could be worth trillions. It's speculation, sure, but not mere "vibes". The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
by rubyfan | 2026-01-29 16:20:09+00:00
I don’t read it that way. I think the point is it doesn’t make sense that apple is taking a cut of a transaction that is not in their payment rails*. Apple can still be compensated for their App store service without using a model that takes 30% of all transactions, e.g. a listing fee, an app review fee, etc.

*And anything on their payment rails should have a normal transaction fee, e.g. Stripe’s retail rate is 2.9% + $0.30.
by m-hodges | 2026-01-29 16:20:14+00:00
Cool!

> Artemis II will fly a relatively simple trajectory. After launch, it will make two long, high, looping orbits around the Earth, before pointing toward the moon, firing its engine and pulling itself away from the grip of earthly gravity. It will follow the safe profile Kraft long ago rejected, flying around the far side of the moon and coming home without a lunar orbit, to end a 10-day mission. But those 10 days will serve as a critical test for NASA’s giant Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket and the Orion spacecraft, preparatory to lunar landings by Artemis III, IV, V, and beyond.
by devmor | 2026-01-29 16:20:20+00:00
> That's not how business works. The App Store in current form would not exist without all the collective investment that went into all of Apple's hardware, for instance.

While technically true, this argument doesn't provide any merit to the discussion. The App Store backed purchase for the Patreon subscription would not exist at all without the creator's work and investment in creating their form of content.

In the absence of the App Store, the creator would still have access to their patrons via mobile web and payment via the methods already provided by Patreon. The app is merely a convenience - it's a hard sell that this convenience is worth 30% of the creator's revenue through the platform.
by hgs3 | 2026-01-29 16:20:23+00:00
> it's been mostly static

In a well-functioning competitive market, no company should be able to rest on its laurels. The problem is industries have consolidated and trustbusters are nowhere to be found.

Notice when tech is new (the web, smart phones, AI) there's an initial burst of competitive companies? That's because the market hasn't consolidated yet. Ask yourself how many dot-com millionaires would realistically be able to duplicate their success in 2026, given the same product but launching today.

Aside from consolidation, discoverability is a huge problem, especially in the era of AI slop. Building a superior product is easy, getting it noticed and building traction is hard.
by RegW | 2026-01-29 16:21:23+00:00
I'm a bit confused about if it does calls. It doesn't mention it for most of the page, but then says:

> DIY Phone

> Use the Comet and the Linux stack for calling*, messaging and mobile data as an alternate to your walled and closed smartphone. Contribute to the Linux ecosystem for mobiles.

So I guess this means it can, but it's not supported and you need to contribute the software. So perhaps it has the hardware, and perhaps it might work.
by vasco | 2026-01-29 16:21:38+00:00
I can say that as someone that does this for a job for a while, it's starting to be useful in many domains related to SRE that make parts of the job easier.

MCP servers for monitoring tools are making our developers more competent at finding metrics and issues.

It'll get there but nobody is going to type "fix my incident" in production and have a nice time today outside of the most simple things that if they are possible to fix like this, could've been automated already anyway. But between writing a runbook and automating sometimes takes time so those use cases will grow.
by Zak | 2026-01-29 16:22:05+00:00
> I didn’t realize I was buying a ticket to Disneyland where the seller of the product decided how I interacted with everything the device enabled.

If you're the sort of person who posts on HN and you bought an iPhone after they hit the $1000 price point, you probably did know that.

It surprises me a little that so many people who do know still make that choice.
by w-m | 2026-01-29 16:22:22+00:00
At the current rate of progress I'm wondering how long it will take for llm agents to be able to rewrite/translate complete projects into another language. SQLite may not be the best candidate, due to the hidden test suite. But CPython or Clang or binutils or...

The RIIR-benchmark: rewrite CPython in Rust, pass the complete test suite, no performance regressions, $100 budget. How far away are we there, a couple months? A few years? Or is it a completely ill-posed problem, due to the test suite being tied to the implementation language?
by alkonaut | 2026-01-29 16:22:39+00:00
> ~17 deaths per 100K drivers per year. 40K+ fatalities overall.

I also think one needs to remember those are _abysmal_ numbers, so while the current discourse is US centric (because that's where the companies and their testing is) I don't think it can be representative for the risks of driving in general.
Naturally, robotaxis will benefit from better infra outside the US (e.g. better separation of pedestrians) but it'll also have to clear a higher safety bar e.g. of fewer drunk drivers.
by wincy | 2026-01-29 16:22:48+00:00
I spent $300 on high lumen output light bulbs. 28 200W equivalent LED bulbs and 2 LED corn bulbs. Just a TON of light. Depending on severity either run it all day (late January and February tend to be the worst months), but even 10 minutes in the morning helps substantially. Just a lot of light. You can get hung up on high CRI and full spectrum but just do it badly first, then if it works worry about perfecting the setup. I just kept buying more bulbs and as I bought, I felt better and better.

Edit: this was the blog that gave me the idea, it comes up on hacker news a lot. https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/
by CMay | 2026-01-29 16:22:52+00:00
> So where do you see the potential threatening behavior?

If you are laying hands on officers, leaning your weight against them, not obeying their commands, asking them to assault you (verbally, potentially), resisting arrest and struggling on the ground, that string of behavior should concern anyone. Imagine you AREN'T a police officer and someone is behaving that way to you. Of course you'll be on guard more than if it was just someone walking down the sidewalk with their bag of groceries.

Being on the ground does not mean you can't be a threat. As far as an officer might know, he could have a second gun holstered under his jacket that he could reach for. When someone is that uncooperative, it is very reasonable to throw away assumptions that they aren't a threat to you.

Whether what the officers experienced justifies escalating to lethal force I don't know, but that is what they'll have to find out.

> As long as you're not attacking an officer/agent with a weapon, that risk should be very close to zero. Otherwise you're sending a very chill message to the general public.

So, if an officer hasn't been shot in the head first, they shouldn't react? Guns can come out quick and kill a person almost instantly. There's very little time to react. That is why officers request people to listen to what they say and respond reasonably so you don't put them in a situation where they miscalculate your threat level. This is true even if you're not dealing with an officer. Someone doesn't have to be a threat and they don't even have to have a weapon, but if you have sufficiently justifiable reason to believe based on their behavior and actions that they are posing an imminent threat to you or others, you can often justify shooting them. You don't have to like that, but if you ever do need to defend yourself, you would be glad the laws are like that. Otherwise people who defend themselves end up becoming a victim twice where they survive an attack and then end up in prison just for legitimately defending themselves.

> So you have no issues with the initial statements by Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino and Stephen Miller?

I don't really know what any of those people were saying, but whether they are right or wrong doesn't justify everyone else being wrong by making false claims. If you want to be better, then don't try to be better by becoming the very people you disagree with.
Show HN: A skill that lets AI agents build hooks apps across 4 coding tools
by runkids | 2026-01-29 16:23:26+00:00
Hi HN,

I kept writing the same hooks for different AI coding tools with slightly different configs:

- Claude Code: ~/.claude/settings.json (PreToolUse)

- Cursor: ~/.cursor/hooks.json (beforeShellExecution)

- Gemini CLI: ~/.gemini/settings.json (BeforeTool)

- OpenCode: ES module plugins

So I made a skill that unifies them. One hook script works across all 4 tools.

It also includes patterns for common use cases: blocking dangerous commands, auto-formatting, notifications, audit logging.

Built two apps using Claude Code + this skill:

- Code Buddy (SwiftUI): menu bar status for AI sessions

- Veto (Rust): risk scoring + Touch ID before dangerous commands

Source: https://github.com/runkids/ai-hooks-integration

Feedback welcome.
by account42 | 2026-01-29 16:23:31+00:00
IMO if your terminal theme does not provide high contrast for "white" text on the default or "black" backgrounds, that's for you to fix. If you want a light terminal then change the color scheme to map "black" to a bright color and "white" to a dark color while making sure that other colors have good contrast to your "black". Don't just change the default foreground and background color and expect every single color using program to fix your mess.
by ndiddy | 2026-01-29 16:23:43+00:00
The thing that worries me the most about Turso is that rather than the small, stable team running SQLite, Turso is a VC backed startup trying to capitalize on the AI boom. I can easily see how SQLite's development is sustainable, but not Turso's. They're currently trying to grow their userbase as quickly as possible with their free open source offering, but when they have investors breathing down their necks asking about how they're going to get 100x returns I'm not sure how long that'll last. VCs generally expect companies they invest in to grow to $100 million in revenue in 5-10 years. If your use of their technology doesn't help them get there, you should expect to be rugpulled at some point.
by yeezyszn | 2026-01-29 16:24:19+00:00
I’m surprised at the comments here. Why should the government set the “right” margin?

If you cap the margin, you’re entrenching the monopoly forever. Allow them to charge what they want, and set tax rates on corporations commensurate with the size of their profits. Make it easier for competitors to start.

The path to a sustainable marketplace does not come from top down enforcement of margins. It comes from competition
by SJC_Hacker | 2026-01-29 16:24:22+00:00
> non computable, non-linear as in given known input parameters you can determine the output parameters.

These two words do not mean the same thing.

Non-linear functions do not mean you cannot determine the output for a given input.

All non-linear means is that the condition f(x+y) = f(x) + f(y) and f(kx) = kf(x) do not hold for arbitrary x,y,k

For example f(x) = x^2 is a non-linear function. Can you determine what f(x) for arbitrary x?

Perhaps you meant what used to be called "chaotic systems", those which were highly sensitive to initial conditions. Yes, they are non-linear but they are completely deterministic. A classic example would be the n-body problem in physics under most conditions.

And I'm not sure what you understand what non-computable means. It means that the computation will not halt in a finite amount of time for a general input. For a particular input, it may indeed halt in a finite amount of time.

Most real numbers are non-computable, such as the square root of 2 or Pi.

Practically speaking however, we can get approximations as close as we want. In other cases, such as the Busy Beaver function, we can set bounds