MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Community-driven, blind comparison of search engine results
by maltsev | 2026-01-21 17:03:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Search Bench as a small experiment to compare search engines without showing which engine produced which results.
It was inspired by the idea behind the LLM Arena, but applied to search.

How it works:

1. You enter a query.

2. You see two result sets side-by-side (search engine names hidden).

3. You pick which is better, or mark them as similar.

Methodology

- Each vote is a pairwise comparison (ties count as 0.5 win each).

- Ratings use a Bradley–Terry model with iteratively updated ability scores, normalized by geometric mean.

- Final scores are log-scaled (1500 + 400 * log10(ability)), like ELO but derived from the Bradley–Terry model.

- Pair selection is adaptive, prioritizing under-sampled search engines and close matchups via an uncertainty × closeness weighting.

This definitely isn't an objective ranking: queries and voters are self-selected, results vary by context, and what counts as “better” depends on the person.
Right now, the dataset is small (≈200 comparisons, mostly from me), so I'm especially interested in seeing:

- Whether results change with more independent voters.

- Whether there's a real quality signal at scale, or if most differences disappear once brand bias is removed.

If you have a minute, comparing a few queries yourself would be very helpful!
I'd also appreciate critique, especially around statistical validity, bias sources, aggregation methods, or ways this could be gamed or misinterpreted.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 17:03:13+00:00
> Like, you probably want to look up the Quantified Self movement, as they do lots of social science like research on themselves.

I guess I was looking for something bit more concrete, that one could apply themselves, which would answer the "if they have measured their results? [...] Can you provide data that objects this view" part of parents comment.

> then flip a coin to use an LLM or not is the best you're gonna get within the constraints.

Do you think trashb who made the initial question above would take the results of such evaluation and say "Yeah, that's good enough and answers my question"?
by etc-hosts | 2026-01-21 17:03:18+00:00
I closely follow all of this, to the detriment of my job.
I'm amused that the US State Dept's PR is that "Maduro is selling oil to our enemies."

We've frozen Venezuela out from buying or selling anything from any other country. This is how economic sanctions work. If a company or country does business with Venezuela, we block them from doing business in the USA.

What else is Venezuela supposed to do? Of course they're going to sell oil to countries that we don't like. It's the first thing that happens when we place severe economic sanctions on another country.
by logicchains | 2026-01-21 17:03:29+00:00
>Germany, France and the UK should also revise their other US policies, regaining control of their US territories

Europe's problem is there's about as much chance of this succeeding as of Taiwan conquering mainland China. Decades of prioritising welfare over warfare and economic growth have left Europe technologically and militarily completely unable to compete with the US, in spite of Europe's significantly larger population. Europe couldn't kick Russia, a country with 10x lower GDP and a decrepit army, out of Ukraine; how could it hope to deny any land to the US?
by jerich | 2026-01-21 17:03:33+00:00
It sounds so dystopian, but as someone who’s been searching for a while, I would enthusiastically use a site that charged $5 to apply to a job, with a guaranteed human review. I would target the most relevant postings, make my case in a cover letter, and signal to the hiring team that I believe in my qualification. But mostly, I’m paying to keep out the “I’ve sent out 1,200 resumes with no luck” people.

I guess it’s a shortcut to part of the advice in the article—requires realistic focus and targeting, but skips the cold emails.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-21 17:04:00+00:00
Erenshor is sort of what you want, its fully offline, reminds me of Runescape. All the other players are NPCs technically.

I have thought of the same btw. There's also an actual Idler MMO on Steam I think is Free to Play called Idleon or something like that, its more side scroller though. You can play it and progress, or you can idle and let your character level as well.
by arcfour | 2026-01-21 17:04:08+00:00
That seems a bit fatalistic, "we have lost so much because curl discontinued bug bounties". That's unfortunate, but it's very minor in the grand scheme of things.

Also, the fault there lies squarely with charlatans who have been asked/told not to submit "AI slop" bug bounties and yet continue to do so anyway, not with the AI tools used to generate them.

Indeed, intelligent researchers have used AI to find legitimate security issues (I recall a story last month on HN about a valid bug being found and disclosed intelligently with AI in curl!).

Many tools can be used irresponsibly. Knives can be used to kill someone, or to cook dinner. Cars can take you to work, or take someone's life. AI can be used to generate garbage, or for legitimate security research. Don't blame the tool, blame the user of it.
by etruong42 | 2026-01-21 17:04:21+00:00
(As a US citizen self-identified moderate) I think I understand some of the intentions of de-dollarization. Being the reserve currency is an exorbitant privilege of forcing the world to allow the US to essentially print money that the world ends up using. It is not a privilege that "the average American" gets to enjoy for many, many reasons. It might be telling that no other nation is trying to fill that role of reserve currency with their own currency; perhaps it's not as much of a privilege as we might think. Given the political climate, both domestic and foreign, I think de-dollarization has large potential upside for the well-being of humans.

I see the US trying to position itself so that it is no longer the world power/world police, or at least significantly reduce the magnitude of the role it plays as the world police. This will bring about a new world order and upend existing diplomatic relationships which will bring about chaos and uncertainty.

I disagree with kidnapping Maduro and posturing to annex Greenland on the grounds of national sovereignty; I actually like the rules-based world order (even if I am not so attached to the USD being the reserve currency).

The actions of the Trump administration clearly and perhaps even intentionally puts the US hegemony at great risk and thus also invites much chaos. This, I still humbly see the possible upside. The Trump administration is also accelerating the deterioration of the rules-based world order. This, I do not particularly support, though I see the possible counterargument that this is only accelerating what was game-theoretically inevitable anyways.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-21 17:04:26+00:00
Trump can only dream of the support Hitler had. Thousands turned out to salute Hitler. Trump can't fill a small stadium anymore, and he knows it. AT MOST, he might have had 50% support; AFAICT Hitler was adored by a vast majority of Germans (at one point). Hell, Austria VOLUNTEERED to be absorbed by Germany.

Trump absolutely would set up ovens for his public targets today if he thought he could. He doesn't have a shred of moral fiber. His followers are openly supporting evil. But his demagogue skills are third-rate; he didn't even win a majority of the popular vote (49.8%) amongst the minority that bothered to vote.

And his followers? They don't even have the courage to pull off a successful peaceful public protest. They aren't going to enlist and invade anything further than their local snack-mart.

--

> the USA is a country of racists.

Everyone is racist to some degree; good people try to rise above it. I guarantee your country is full of them, too. Racism is most definitely not the black-and-white distinction people pretend it is (no pun intended). It's a biological Original Sin.
by lossolo | 2026-01-21 17:04:46+00:00
> There needs to be UX requirements on the process from day one against which the end result is judged. (E.g. "a company should be able to register in x days", "a complete application should be no longer than y pages", "application costs should be less than z euros").

It was announced you will be able to create company fully online and will have it ready in max 48h.
by adornKey | 2026-01-21 17:04:58+00:00
Current systems are indeed very vulnerable to professional manipulation - there is no real defence yet - and there are powerful players. But democratic sampling won't help much. Only the wrong guys are interested in voting - and once mass hysteria has set in any democratic majority will vote to censor anything that brings them out of their panic loop. Witch hunting lasted for hundreds of years.

I think just tagging things accordingly would be a lot better than raw censorship. In good old places of Usenet just tagging things as Spam worked quite well. Just filtering out some tags and putting some guys in a kill-file was good enough. But it required manual labour - and eventually that was too much. But with AI now I think tagging could be done efficiently.

If people like to filter out all the tags (sarcasm, math, physics, ...) they can have it - but the way how things work now is that a lot of important information just gets censored by stupid people everywhere. Just hiding information from everybody is quite harmful - being seriously uninformed already killed a lot of people...
by dang | 2026-01-21 17:04:59+00:00
If you can find an instance of me saying we're not biased, I'd love to see it, because I'm pretty sure I've never said that.

What I've said, and believe, is that of course we're biased, because it's impossible not to be and because unconscious bias is a thing, but that we at least try to mitigate the effects of it, and have a lot of practice at doing so. Are those efforts negligible? I doubt it. I think HN would be a different place if we weren't trying to do that.
by shaunxcode | 2026-01-21 17:05:04+00:00
I will say it was a mind blowing experience to learn after decades of buddhist practice other people were LITERALLY seeing things (and in some cases trying not to). I never found it detracted from my experience as learning to NOT get distracted by that stuff is half the battle for a lot of people. So it can be a warp whistle in some ways. It is also why I am probably more interested in playing/listening to heavy doom music as it is hypnotic in its monotony. I reckon it is why I am fixated on genera lisp, smalltalk, self esque environments as they are more tangible for creating scenes on the screen that match how I am thinking about code (inside out and all that).
by chauhankiran | 2026-01-21 17:05:10+00:00
As robots are creating products, they are using all the space possible making human to interact difficult (think about opening a screw). Previously, those products created by human hands, making it possible to interact by other human hands (as maintainer).

Now, I think same about making programs by AI. They do sometimes in such a way that makes future maintenance harder.

The problem comes when price is not cheap.
by PL_Venard | 2026-01-21 17:05:20+00:00
Good point on smart contracts: that's one approach I'm exploring.

Trying to figure out if this should be:
- Crypto-native from day 1 (smart contracts + stablecoins)
- Fiat-first with crypto as backend (abstract the blockchain)
- Pure fiat (traditional banking APIs)

What would you actually use?
by pdyc | 2026-01-21 17:05:22+00:00
Wow, this is great. I practically gave up on rendering large data in EasyAnalytica because plotting millions of points becomes a bad experience, especially in dashboards with multiple charts. My current solution is to downsample to give an “overview” and use zoom to allow viewing “detailed” data, but that code is fragile.

One more issue is that some browser and OS combinations do not support WebGPU, so we will still have to rely on existing libraries in addition to this, but it feels promising.
by fsckboy | 2026-01-21 17:05:53+00:00
(I'm personally more on your side of the argument than not, but need to point out literal details of the "standard" that is under dispute)

the article says if we transported back to the early 80's people would have said "it doesn't run Flight Simulator", so what that would have meant?

the original Flight Simulator for the IBM PC--first independently produced, then purchased by Microsoft--booted itself directly from the floppy; meaning, you had to reboot in order to run it; and it had its own "custom operating system" or really no operating system at all, something more like a kernel, or just an app.

yes modern "PC compatibles" do have some means of running that old software, but it won't work out of the box atm.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-21 17:06:01+00:00
Awesome, I've been getting more into messing with the nuts and bolts of my childhood Gameboy Color, one project I want to eventually do is to recreate it with modern hardware, and then take something similar to GB Studio and embed it into the hardware so I can read cartridges straight to a custom built clone. I've seen some impressive clones already like FPGBC but I would love to build my own. It's a slow burn project, but I also am fascinated by emulators for the platform as well.
by johndough | 2026-01-21 17:06:06+00:00
And even if WebGPU is enabled, the implementation might still be broken or inefficient in various ways. For example, Firefox uses some ridiculous polling-based approach [1] to check for completion, which disqualifies the implementation for many performance-critical applications.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1870699

And there is the issue of getting the browser to use the correct GPU in the first place, but that is a different can of worms.
by zahlman | 2026-01-21 17:06:38+00:00
I'm genuinely confused. Do 80% of home shoppers seriously not realize that the climate at one end of a city is going to be substantially the same as at the other end of the city? Or do Americans really relocate that far, that commonly? What's the point of attaching the "climate risk score" to a real estate listing, when it's realistically going to be the same score in every aspect for every listing you consider?

From the first link:

> While climate risk is affecting attitudes, it isn't to the point where majorities of buyers are considering a move to a region they consider less risky. About half plan to remain in areas that pose the same climate risks they already face. Some are even thinking about moving to areas with more risks. Only 23% reported that they are considering homes in areas that they believe to be safer from the dangers of climate disasters.

... So then I don't understand what they are doing with the information.
by PL_Venard | 2026-01-21 17:06:38+00:00
Does Mercury actually support this? Or are you describing scheduled payments
(which still require manual setup each time)?

I'm looking for:
- Dynamic rules based on revenue amount
- Multiple variable destinations
- Percentage-based splits
- One-time setup, runs forever

Maybe I'm missing a Mercury feature? What's the workflow you use?

Im a Brex user and interested by this
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-21 17:07:33+00:00
> People use Discord and Slack because they have to

I disagree that anyone HAS TO use Discord. Slack on the other hand, yeah I can see how that would be the case. However, the industry would have not adopted Slack if it wasn't good as it was, the landscape was ripe for something new. Sadly Slack barely updates with anything meaningful.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-21 17:07:45+00:00
The issue is this sends a negative message to Mercosur member states like Brazil, who are actively being wooed by the US such as by creating a US-Brazil Rare Earths Deal [0] and wooing Brazilian oligarch Batista brothers [1] (the oligarchs who owns much of Brazil's and North+South American agricultural capacity [2] and are the power behind the throne in Brazil) to get near-exclusive rights on distributing Venezuelan oil [3].

Now that the deal is de facto frozen, any remaining goodwill between Mercosur states and the EU will burn away (especially because Lula put his personal reputation on the line right before a highly contested election in Brazil and because Spanish politicians constantly meddle in South American culture wars [4] due to familial, financial, and linguistic ties), leaving the EU even more alone in an already lonely and dangerous world.

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/401a9e84-3034-4375-bf39-56b92500c...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/brazil-billionaire-b...

[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/d293237e-e39f-4f4c-89e7-4c52cf937...

[3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-19/irmaos-ba...

[4] - https://apnews.com/general-news-d45baf0e625d4e0fa540b7a472bc...
by nullocator | 2026-01-21 17:07:58+00:00
I think otherwise. [0]

The deck across the board is consistently stacked in Trumps favor in terms of domestic adjudication, often times by people he appointed, the system is hopelessly corrupt.

- [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/31/jack-smith-h...
by geerlingguy | 2026-01-21 17:08:08+00:00
If you want to refresh an old memory, it actually stands for "Personal Computer Memory Card International Association" but nobody knew that. And it was later called 'PC Card'... then there was the faster ExpressCard that wasn't backwards compatible.

It was fun being able to expand your computer's IO capabilities by adding on a network card, modem, USB, FireWire, etc. with these modules. It's similar to Framework's little USB-C-based modules, though those modules are just too small for a lot of circuits without a very creative design.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-21 17:08:41+00:00
1. Are those topics being censored? You don't seem to know that is true, you're just making assumptions about what reach should be. They open sourced the ranking algorithm and just refreshed it - can you find any code that'd suppress these topics?

2. The media also amplifies people's interests which is why it focuses on bad news and celebrity gossip. How is this unique to social media? Why is it even bad? I wouldn't want to consume any form of media that deliberately showed me boring and irrelevant things.
by iepathos | 2026-01-21 17:08:42+00:00
The default output from AI is much like the default output from experienced devs prioritizing speed over architecture to meet business objectives. Just like experienced devs, LLMs accept technical debt as leverage for velocity. This isn't surprising - most code in the world carries technical debt, so that's what the models trained on and learned to optimize for.

Technical debt, like financial debt, is a tool. The problem isn't its existence, it's unmanaged accumulation.

A few observations from my experience:

1. One-shotting - if you're prompting once and shipping, you're getting the "fast and working" version, not the "well-architected" version. Same as asking an experienced dev for a quick prototype.

2. AI can output excellent code - but it takes iteration, explicit architectural constraints, and often specialized tooling. The models have seen clean code too; they just need steering toward it.

3. The solution isn't debt-free commits. The solution is measuring, prioritizing, and reducing only the highest risk tech debt - the equivalent of focusing on bottlenecks with performance profiling. Which code is high-risk? Where's the debt concentrated? Poorly-factored code with good test coverage is low-risk. Poorly-tested code in critical execution paths is high-risk. Your CI pipeline needs to check the debt automatically for you just like it needs to lint and check your tests pass.

I built https://github.com/iepathos/debtmap to solve this systematically for my projects. It measures technical debt density to prioritize risk, but more importantly for this discussion: it identifies the right context for an LLM to understand a problem without looking through the whole codebase. The output is designed to be used with an LLM for automated technical debt reduction. And because we're measuring debt before and after, we have a feedback loop - enabling the LLM to iterate effectively and see whether its refactoring had a positive impact or made things worse. That's the missing piece in most agentic workflows: measurement that closes the loop.

To your specific concern about shipping unreviewed code: I agree it's risky, but the review focus should shift from "is every line perfect" to "where are the structural risks, and are those paths well-tested?" If your code has low complexity everywhere, is well tested (always review tests), and passing everything, then ask yourself what you actually gain at that point from further investing your time over-engineering the lesser tech debt away? You can't eliminate all tech debt, but you can keep it from compounding in the places that matter.
by marojejian | 2026-01-21 17:09:08+00:00
archive:
https://archive.is/67Kcg

I've watched innumerable videos of people losing their lives to drones when they thought they were safe: Hiding under a tank. Motionless, pretending this is Jurassic Park. Half-submerged in water, pretending to be dead. Crammed deep inside a pipe.

Throughout history, one check on even authoritarian regimes is that humans humans have to execute their orders. Quite often, the conscience of soldiers has been decisive, even when this only results in their reluctances. It's no coincidence that revolutions such as the French and Russian began with protests by women, who soldiers saw little honor in slaughtering. Even diluting this check is a dangerous idea.
by keybored | 2026-01-21 17:09:31+00:00
My bad. I will be more mindful tomorrow when someone at a big tech company yet again make-a-mistake in the same direction of AI hyping. Maybe with a later addendum. Like journalists that write about a Fatal Storm In Houston and you read down to the eighth paragraph and it turns out the fatality were among pigeons.

> when writing an untargeted promo post.

lol.
by elektronika | 2026-01-21 17:09:41+00:00
> Other people have more work to do because you chose to do less.

Not voting in America does not increase the burden of other people. My state has voted the same in Presidential elections for two decades. Local politicians almost always run unopposed and I don't think anyone in my lifetime has won here without an endorsement from the party in favor, so they are picked behind closed doors. Our state governor elections can swing, but ultimately one vote is a vanishingly insignificant portion of that.

I vote every year out of habit, but putting the "I VOTED" sticker conspicuously on a trash can probably makes more of a difference than casting my ballot. The two party system is designed to give people an outlet for feeling like they made a difference without any risk of change for the people in power. See how people like Musk and Zuckerberg cozy up with Trump just as easily as Obama.
by dang | 2026-01-21 17:09:54+00:00
Re your first statement: certainly I've addressed that issue many times, but I can do it again: I don't believe that claim is true. It merely feels true to people with strong political passions, because everyone always over-weights the contributions of their enemies and under-weights the contributions of their own side. The significant thing—I was going to say "the ironic thing", but it isn't ironic—is that this class of politically passionate users all have the same perception even though they may have entirely opposing beliefs. In this they resemble each other more than they do anyone else.

I don't understand your second statement.