MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2026-01-28 21:40:20+00:00
The price/scaling of training another same class model always seems to be dropping through the floor but training models which score much better seems to be hitting a brick wall.

E.g. gemini-3-pro tops the lmarena text chart today at 1488 vs 1346 for gpt-4o-2024-05-13. That's a win rate of 70% (where 50% is equal chance of winning) over 1.5 years. Meanwhile, even the open weights stuff OpenAI gave away last summer scores between the two.

The exception seems to be net new benchmarks/benchmark versions. These start out low and then either quickly get saturated or hit a similar wall after a while.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-28 21:40:25+00:00
>I'm hopeful that the pressures on the administration prevent a massacre in Minneapolis, but it's a possibility

More than 50% of Americans polled in the days after the Kent State shooting blamed the protestors for being shot.

Plenty of those people are still alive, and happy to support current "ICE"

Some of the people who threw rocks at a little black girl having the gall to go to a white school are still alive.

There's so much hatred. It's core to their identities.

More people will die, in more obviously fucked ways, and more people will insist that being alive around ICE is somehow a crime. They will literally raise GoFundMes for gestapo murderers. They want execution squads. "If only we finally kill those no good liberals, we can have a good country". They reject your right to life if you don't agree with their goals because they fundamentally do not want a democracy, but an authoritarian system that propagates their personal belief system.

These people are your neighbors. Your family. Your friends. Your coworkers. They come to your church and nod along to the sermon about helping those in need, and then they go home and post on facebook about how that guy deserved to die and they celebrate it.

The USA had a civil war, and killed 600k of it's young men, and a large portion of the country wanted to sweep it under the rug, and still work towards that goal today. Entire groups were spun up to the express purpose of insisting that the civil war was about anything other than slavery despite the literal text of documents from all the slave states saying otherwise.

Americans need to wake the fuck up and read some history. Democracy is a historical aberration, and authoritarian dictatorships can be successful and stable for generations. Nobody can help us. Nobody can save us but ourselves.
by HNisCIS | 2026-01-28 21:40:25+00:00
Lets assume auto-complete does continue to progress at a rate that threatens most knowledge worker jobs and then we manage to automate the rest by using it.

There is a particular mental disorder where people will horde wealth at absolutely all costs, personal or societal, until everyone else is dead (see NZ bunkers). We commonly see this as "the billionaire class".

IF things go in that direction we need to be ready to depose all of these billionaires. I mean that quite seriously.

IF this future comes, there is a very quickly closing window where preventing them from killing all of us for their own gain is possible. After a point, surveillance and their control over state violence will be so complete that it's impossible to do anything about it.
by locusofself | 2026-01-28 21:41:08+00:00
Sure, but at some point in the past, "Amazon India" was not a thing. Nor was "Microsoft India" and so forth. Surely you can understand what it feels like to be an American tech worker in a super high cost of living area, looking at reduction in headcount and continual offshoring of jobs as time goes by. I live in Seattle area, work at one of these big companies, I work with people in India almost every day and have been to India three times on business. When parts of my department's work was allocated to a new team in India, of course I was nervous about that.
by zahlman | 2026-01-28 21:41:17+00:00
> I don't know how else to read it.

None of the argument has to do with "harassment", although of course that is not okay.

I mentioned the whistles specifically because it impedes communication between officers. Better communication between officers might, for example, have led to Pretti not getting shot, because they might have been able to understand better that he had already been disarmed. Hence "Can you imagine how this level of noise interferes with a job that involves verbal communication with both coworkers and civilians?", which was omitted from a reply that quoted the rest of the paragraph.

There is speculation that the first shot may have come from an accidental discharge of Pretti's gun, as it was carried by the officer who took it away. That could reasonably have spooked other officers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagious_shooting is a relevant concept here) who didn't have a clear view of everything that was going on. (There is also footage where Pretti appears to be reaching for where the gun would be, after it had been taken. Someone might not have realized it had in fact been taken.)

Refusing to comply with orders, and obstructing officers, justifies arrest. Presenting threats of death or serious injury during the arrest is what justifies self-defense actions. "Murder" is definitionally an unjustified killing; the entire point of a self-defense argument (and LEO do have some legal protections here that civilians don't, along with their responsibilities) is to establish that a killing was not murder. To call it "murder" is therefore assuming that which is to be established.

I am not asserting that a self-defense action is justified in Pretti's case. But I am saying that people are making the argument, and that there is a clear basis for it.
Show HN: Spar – Built a tool to help improve store conversion rates
by 6farer | 2026-01-28 21:41:35+00:00
Last year my co-founder and I were talking about ecommerce store owners hitting small conversion issues that could easily be fixed—but nobody had the time or expertise to actually identify what was broken and validate fixes.

So we built Spar to handle that loop automatically. It analyzes any ecommerce store (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, headless, doesn't matter) by crawling it like a customer would. It finds conversion gaps you don't know about, prioritized by impact, and gives you specific A/B test hypotheses for each issue instead of just generic best practices.

It works with any publicly accessible store and gives you results in minutes. It identifies issues across your pages (we're getting cart and checkout completed soon).

The idea generation is tailored per store. Free to sign up. Let me know if you want access to more of the gaps.
by linkjuice4all | 2026-01-28 21:42:58+00:00
I realize dang has already tagged this (and I get it) but I don’t know who is actually benefiting from this. This is deceptive as it doesn’t represent a traveler’s actual/expected experience and just adds more slop to the pile. This is a case where you should pay actual photographers to take verified pictures of the places you are recommending people visit. Why would someone cheapen their brand like this?
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-28 21:43:06+00:00
"Carrying this speculation a step further, it is possible that the available tools have been compromised either in individual instances or en masse. Even where security products are open-source, adequate security evaluations are difficult to conduct initially and difficult to maintain as the products evolve. Typical users upgrade their software when upgrades or packages are offered, without even thinking of the possibility that they may have been targeted for a Trojan horse."

Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press: Cambridge, 2007), 372

Italics are mine
Show HN: TiniText – Small tools for transcription, summaries and drafts
by neliousness | 2026-01-28 21:44:23+00:00
Hi HN,

This is my first time sharing something like this here. I built TiniText to solve a problem I kept running into myself: I needed simple tools for transcription, summaries, and drafts, but most options felt heavier than necessary for everyday use.

Instead of building a large platform, I focused on small, single-purpose tools with predictable behavior and minimal setup.

The app supports:
- Audio transcription (single and multi-speaker)
- Text summarization with adjustable detail
- Simple draft generation (blogs / meeting notes)
- A few practical text utilities

It’s production-ready but still early, and I’d really appreciate feedback on:
- where the UX feels unnecessary
- what’s missing for real-world use
- whether “small focused tools” is still a compelling direction

Happy to answer questions.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-28 21:44:28+00:00
> Mother Nature doesn't give a shit

Sure. That's not required for natural selection to work.

But any species that reliably returns to its birthplace like penguins and salmon and elephants must have some tiny proportion of the population that wanders off and gets lost occasionally to be able to spread to new areas.

Sometimes it'll be a storm or a big ice crevasse that does it, but there's no reason it can't sometimes be this.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-28 21:44:42+00:00
I agree that a regressive tax like sales tax is not "fair" at all.

I had a coworker that argued for a flat tax—considered that fair. I explained that anything less than a progressive tax was going to make the poor pay more and the wealthy pay less. Really, that's fair?

You should be so lucky to have enough that you're in the highest tax bracket.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-28 21:44:47+00:00
I was always surprised there wasn't an uproar about these. A substantial chunk of Americans, i.e. a huge portion of evangelicals, devoutly believe a few things:

* The Bible book of "Revelations" is an accurate prediction of things that will happen exactly as described.

* Revelations predicts that in "the end times", it will become impossible to buy or sell anything without "the mark of the beast" on their forehead or right hand.

* The "mark of the beast" would be administered by the Antichrist.

From Revelations 13:16-17:

"And the second beast required all people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark—the name of the beast or the number of its name."

I grew up in an extremely religious part of the US with a large evangelical population, and I know firsthand hard that a lot of people believe that all of the above is literally, precisely true. I do not; please don't feel the need to tell me why the above is not true. However, a lot of my family and old neighbors would 100% agree with all of the above statements.

And yet, they seemed to have no problem with buying stuff from Amazon with a palm print, or using Sam Altman's creepy Orb eye scanner thing. I'm genuinely surprised at how little fuss there was about them.
by observationist | 2026-01-28 21:45:35+00:00
You'd think at some point it'll be enough to tell the AI "ok, now do a thorough security audit, highlight all the potential issues, come up with a best practices design document, and fix all the vulnerabilities and bugs. Repeat until the codebase is secure and meets all the requisite protocol standards and industry best practices."

We're not there yet, but at some point, AI is gonna be able to blitz through things like that the way they blitz through making haikus or rewriting news articles. At some point AI will just be reliably competent.

Definitely not there yet. The dark factory pattern is terrifying, lol.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-01-28 21:45:46+00:00
That just means you can't perceive it. Sorry, but raster scaling is how Apple's algorithm works, and just because you can't see it doesn't mean it is not the case.

For the record, this isn't just visual. Rasterising to a framebuffer that is considerably larger than the physical resolution and then scaling produces a tangible effect on battery life. Not that it matters much with the impressive efficiency of the M-series SoCs, but it is there nonetheless.
by Anvoker | 2026-01-28 21:46:04+00:00
> The second sentence is false. Lots of people blindly follow things and don't understand consequences until they brick their devices. Those who don’t break something won’t notice if they’ve silently backdoored themselves.

"Lots of people", how many though? Can that number be reduced? What number would be acceptable?

I feel like it _has_ to be possible to devise an unlocking procedure that dissuades most people from self-harm.

The problem is often treated as intractable, but intuitively this seems really unlikely to me. I don't think more than a tiny percentage of Xiaomi owners, for example, would go through the bootloader unlock process which often has a mandatory wait period attached to it without a reason more compelling than an impulse to randomly and blindly follow instructions on the internet.

I would like to see user studies with good methodology before other people decide to barter long-term freedoms away for insufficient benefit.

Why do I so rarely see people who are concerned about the security issues of bootloader unlocking calling for designing hassle and warning into the process. Instead, it's more common to hear that in the name of the average user, all escape hatches must be removed.
by pcarroll | 2026-01-28 21:46:13+00:00
Hole punching actually works most of the time. A lot more often than you might think. But enterprise firewalls usually don't allow it. And some home routers fail when you check all the anti-intrusion options. But it's the same for other VPNs.
In the residential and small-business space, it's pretty rare. You might need to point it out to the network guy. If the customer wants the service, they should be open to it.
by thinkingtoilet | 2026-01-28 21:46:18+00:00
It has dramatically increased revenue, more than expected. Also, if you're the type of person who thinks you shouldn't pay your fair share, feel free to move somewhere else. We have the best schools in the country. We have a strong social safety net. We have a high quality of life. Shit, we live longer than almost any other state. So please, if that's not your thing, take your money and leave immediately.
by matheist | 2026-01-28 21:46:48+00:00
They don't appear to care about the images of the immersions or their complements, aside from them not being related by an isometry of R^3. They're not doing any topology with the image.

In other works, they have two immersions from the torus to R^3, whose induced metric and mean curvature are the same, and whose images are not related by an isometry of R^3. I didn't see anything about the topology of the images per se, that doesn't seem to be the point here.
by mwigdahl | 2026-01-28 21:47:15+00:00
Despite the false advertising in the Tears for Fears song, everybody does _not_ want to rule the world. Omohundro drives are a great philosophical thought experiment and it is certainly plausible to consider that they might apply to AI, but claiming as is common on LessWrong that unlimited power seeking is an inevitable consequence of a sufficiently intelligent system seems to be missing a few proof steps, and is opposed by the example of 99% of human beings.
by chaps | 2026-01-28 21:47:29+00:00
Really glad they brought up Outer Wilds -- it's exactly the sort of game where the tiniest detail is a spoiler. Knowledge discovery's the game, so any piece of information about the game that doesn't need to be discovered is like cutting ahead to the next chapter in a game. Like playing on someone else's game file.

Wish someone would wipe my memories of that game so I can play it again.
by watwut | 2026-01-28 21:47:35+00:00
> Think what the villages around the concentration camps must have known and yet did nothing.

If you mean extermination camps, they knew. They were also part of occupied, conquered and heavily terrorized lands. They occasionally did something, terrorist attack against Germans here and there, usually retaliated against by killing a lot of random citizens. Usually motivated by plight of own people.

Extermination camps were located in Poland - German plans involved moving away and killing all Polish, so that they can be replaced by Germans. Germans seen Jews as primary danger to be exterminated fast, Slavic as secondary lower value being to be exterminated slowly in time. Polish army lost the war. And random villagers were not in position to do anything about the highly violent occupying army.

(And yes, Jews were at danger of being denounced by anti semitic locals too. Turned out one could be subject of racial oppression and being oppressor himself).
by franzvill | 2026-01-28 21:47:44+00:00
Thanks for flagging this! You're absolutely right about network security.

The spec does require TLS - from Section 4.1:
> "All HTTP endpoints MUST use TLS 1.2 or higher"
> "Clients MUST verify TLS certificates"

The `http://localhost:8080` example is just for local development/demo purposes.
In production, all discovery endpoints and AgentCard fetches must use HTTPS.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-28 21:47:53+00:00
> It's hard to imagine an interface that would be easier to fit in a small viewport than this.

It's a website. We already have responsive design between desktop and mobile. You're essentially asking for a third modality that is essentially purely text and buttons without margins or padding, something that would work for closer to Apple Watch screens. You're showing a case where you need everything 3x larger in each dimension, which gives you nine times less usable space on your screen. Asking interfaces to work in one-ninth the usual space of an already space-constrained phone screen seems unreasonable to me.

If you need 3x magnification in each dimension and want to browse the web, you really just need a larger device. That's an accomodation that exists. Tablets exist. This isn't the equivalent of needing curb cuts and wheelchair ramps, because larger screens are already available for this level of visual disability.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-28 21:48:26+00:00
According to Google's help site, no Pixel has a desktop mode (like you can find at Motorola, Samsung and others).

The latest Pixel models have DisplayPort, but their operating system only provides screen mirroring or app window mirroring on an external monitor. Unlike Pixel, the phones with a true desktop mode can display multiple windows on the monitor, and presumably they can have a selectable resolution for the monitor. I assume that for screen mirroring the monitor is used at the same resolution as the phone screen, i.e. either 1080 lines or only slightly more.

Moreover, while the help site states that DisplayPort exists in Pixel 8 and newer, Google does not bother to advertise the existence of this feature in its online shop, where there is no mention about this in the phone specifications.
by joshstrange | 2026-01-28 21:48:33+00:00
When the App Store first launched I think 30% was pretty fair fee for Apple to collect, but that was a long time ago, and before IAP/Subscriptions. Apple might still be entitled to some percentage but they've expanded to cover more and more things (like this Patreon change or Kindle back in the day) and now we have moved far, far beyond the pale.

Apple (perhaps like all corporations but I'm focusing on Apple) is a greedy company that has massively lost it's way. Tim Cook support fascists and/or anything to improve the bottom line, especially if it increases "services" [0]. Alan Dye (thank god he is now busy screwing up Meta) shipped the worst UI revamp I've seen in a while from a company Apple's size and the iOS/iPadOS/visionOS/macOS software is all in dire straits. And they managed to do all of this while alienating developers left and right and playing chicken with governments around the world [0] instead of relaxing their hold on their platforms.

But who cares? The stock price went up. /s

I was overjoyed to see Alan Dye leave (and Jony Ive) and hope that we don't have to wait too much longer to bid Tim Cook adieu. Whoever takes over next has a lot of work ahead to dig out of the hole Tim Cook dug for Apple.

Tim Cook might be the best thing for shareholders but he has been horrible for product quality (software and hardware) and for democracy.

[0] Pay no attention to how much of services revenue came from the Google search deal with the majority of the rest coming from casinos for children and adults alike.

[1] Like the EU DMA, which, I have publicly and privately voiced my dislike of parts of it but Apple has no one to blame but themselves. By keeping a white-knuckle grip on their revenue they forced governments across the world to pass laws (often bad IMHO) that fragment and confuse the entire iOS market.
by breve | 2026-01-28 21:48:53+00:00
> Musk told the World Economic Forum in Davos last week that Tesla would begin selling humanoids by the end of 2027: "I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one."

Sure. He also thought there would be a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...
by 8bitsrule | 2026-01-28 21:49:00+00:00
Interesting. My experience over a decade was that (expensive) Apple hardware was unreliable or poorly designed ... from the IIsi to the iMac. One exception: the murdered Power clone was great. The iMac vertical screen-stripe fiasco (affected hundreds of users within the warranty period, before they shut down the forum, then took years to respond to) was capped with a hard-drive fail after a year. My 'never again' still in effect 15 years later.

My home-made AMD tower is in its 6th year (running Linux) with no, zero, fails.
by vel0city | 2026-01-28 21:49:05+00:00
The text of the 14th Amendment in regards to birthright citizenship:

> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside

So now that we have that to reference...

> The 14th amendment was passed primarily to protect slaves whose families had been in the country for generations

Where is the generational requirement?

> presence of whose ancestors was explicitly solicited by slave-owning citizens

I don't see anything explicitly talking about slavery here.

Sure sounds like someone is trying to rewrite the amendment here. Sure seems to me it says "all persons", not just "all persons who were multi-generational slaves before the passage of this amendment".

> was not designed to reflect considerations like mass amounts of illegal immigration

You mean all those immigrants didn't think about the idea there could be massive amounts of immigration? The passage of the 14th Amendment happened in 1868. That's 18 years after the massive wave of immigration from the Irish Great Famine of 1845. That's after the massive migration of Asians during the California gold rush of 1849. You really think the writers were just fully ignorant of the potential of mass migrations?

I'll grant you they probably would not have imagined the amount of social safety net we have today, but I just can't agree they couldn't think about massive waves of people migrating for economic reasons. Those were definitely very salient issues at the time. Although it wouldn't be until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1889 that they actually took real action to significantly close the gates of US immigration. And they did so on racial lines, go figure.

My family came here before the passage of the 14th Amendment by pretty much just showing up and staying here for a couple of years. Their kids automatically became citizens at their birth even for the parents that never actually applied for citizenship. This is how it was for most of this country's history.

You've still not directly given me a reason why birthright citizenship is immoral. I've given you arguments as to why it is moral; it prevents the creation of an underclass of residents without full rights, something I'd hope we could both agree is immoral and bad. Can you tell me how granting citizenship to children of those without proper residency is somehow immoral?