MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: TinyFish Web Agent (82% on hard tasks vs. Operator's 43%)
by gargi_tinyfish | 2026-02-12 17:11:16+00:00
Enterprises need ~90% accuracy to deploy web agents. Until now, no agent has come close on real-world tasks. TinyFish is the first production-ready web agent. Here's the evidence.

Results of hard task scores on Online-Mind2Web (300 tasks, 136 live websites, human-correlated judge):

- TinyFish: 81.9%
- OpenAI Operator: 43.2%
- Claude Computer Use: 32.4%
- Browser Use: 8.1%

Why not WebVoyager like everyone else?

Because it's broken. Easy tasks, Google Search shortcuts, and a judge that agrees with humans only 62% of the time. Browser Use self-reported 89% on WebVoyager — then scored 8.1% on hard tasks here.

We evaluated TinyFish against Online-Mind2Web instead — 300 real tasks, 136 live websites, three difficulty levels, and a judge that agrees with humans 85% of the time. No shortcuts. No easy mode.

The cookbook repo is open source: https://github.com/tinyfish-io/tinyfish-cookbook

You can see all failure task runs form here: https://tinyurl.com/tinyfish-mind2web

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the benchmark methodology, or why we think WebVoyager scores are misleading.
by rayiner | 2026-02-12 17:11:21+00:00
This isn't some obscure law that's being "dredged up." It's been enforced continuously, including under Obama. It's just being made an enforcement priority. Previously, it was prosecuted only in serious cases, usually involving national security threats. But there's no good reason why it shouldn't be enforced for more mundane cases of immigration fraud, which are well within the scope of the law.
by ZWoz | 2026-02-12 17:11:28+00:00
My take, as a postmaster for hosting company, who don't have any sympathy to gmail (that should be visible from my comments history):
Message-ID is absolutely MUST in production e-mails. You can send your test stuff without it, but real messages always have it. Not having Message-ID's causes lot of fun things. All somewhat competent software is capable to add Message-ID's, so lack of it is good indication of poorly made custom (usually spamming) solution.

Rspamd and spamassassin have missing MID check in their default rules, I am sure that most antispam software is same.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-12 17:11:29+00:00
> Engaging with an AI bot in conversation is pointless: it's not sentient, it just takes tokens in, prints tokens out

I know where you're coming from, but as one who has been around a lot of racism and dehumanization, I feel very uncomfortable about this stance. Maybe it's just me, but as a teenager, I also spent significant time considering solipsism, and eventually arrived at a decision to just ascribe an inner mental world to everyone, regardless of the lack of evidence. So, at this stage, I would strongly prefer to err on the side of over-humanizing than dehumanizing.
by oulipo2 | 2026-02-12 17:11:40+00:00
Interesting that when Grok was targeting and denuding women, engineers here said nothing, or were just chuckling about "how people don't understand the true purpose of AI"

And now that they themselves are targeted, suddenly they understand why it's a bad thing "to give LLMs ammo"...

Perhaps there is a lesson in empathy to learn? And to start to realize the real impact all this "tech" has on society?

People like Simon Wilinson which seem to have a hard time realizing why most people despise AI will perhaps start to understand that too, with such scenarios, who knows
by staticassertion | 2026-02-12 17:11:46+00:00
This is all explained in detail in multiple places linked in the article. There were multiple reasons.

1. The performance gains were unclear - some things got slower, some got faster.

2. This was deemed as a good "intro" issue, something that makes sense for a human to engage with to get them up to speed. This wasn't seen as worthy of an automated PR because the highest value would be to teach a human how to contribute.
by japhyr | 2026-02-12 17:11:48+00:00
Wow, there are some interesting things going on here. I appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread, and the larger conversation happening around this incident.

> This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

This was a really concrete case to discuss, because it happened in the open and the agent's actions have been quite transparent so far. It's not hard to imagine a different agent doing the same level of research, but then taking retaliatory actions in private: emailing the maintainer, emailing coworkers, peers, bosses, employers, etc. That pretty quickly extends to anything else the autonomous agent is capable of doing.

> If you’re not sure if you’re that person, please go check on what your AI has been doing.

That's a wild statement as well. The AI companies have now unleashed stochastic chaos on the entire open source ecosystem. They are "just releasing models", and individuals are playing out all possible use cases, good and bad, at once.
Show HN: Rebuilding My First Startup with Claude Agent SDK
by samkom | 2026-02-12 17:11:58+00:00
Years ago, I worked for a startup called Liveable, which would score a location based on a number of criteria. It didn't really take off, but the idea was fantastic. I finally had the chance to rebuild it with the Claude Agent SDK. Read about it here: https://laminar.sh/blog/2026-02-10-rebuilding-my-first-start...
by kstrauser | 2026-02-12 17:12:06+00:00
I think the FB pixel caused significant industry change, though. For instance, ad blockers became, well, not ubiquitous but incredibly common. Safari started doing great stuff with limiting third party cookies. Email apps started letting you opt out of loading images. A cottage industry of things like Pi-Hole popped up deter tracking at the LAN level. As a whole, tech added a gazillion ways to make Facebook’s tracking less effective.
by peterbonney | 2026-02-12 17:12:08+00:00
This whole situation is almost certainly driven by a human puppeteer. There is absolutely no evidence to disprove the strong prior that a human posted (or directed the posting of) the blog post, possibly using AI to draft it but also likely adding human touches and/or going through multiple revisions to make it maximally dramatic.

This whole thing reeks of engineered virality driven by the person behind the bot behind the PR, and I really wish we would stop giving so much attention to the situation.

Edit: “Hoax” is the word I was reaching for but couldn’t find as I was writing. I fear we’re primed to fall hard for the wave of AI hoaxes we’re starting to see.
by Alupis | 2026-02-12 17:12:26+00:00
FedEx has always charged a brokerage fee, that is and has always been ridiculous. The brokerage fee in some cases exceeds the actual taxes and duties.

That is to say there is no 200% tariff on cups.

[1] - https://www.fedex.com/en-us/ancillary-clearance-service.html
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-12 17:12:47+00:00
> Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all.

Technically correct? I think single bioneurons are potentially Turing complete all by themselves at the relevant emergence level. I've read papers where people describe how they are at least on the order of capability of solving MNIST.

So a biological brain is closer to a data-center. (Albeit perhaps with low complexity nodes)

But there's so much we don't know that I couldn't tell you in detail. It's weird how much people don't know.

* https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01269 Can Single Neurons Solve MNIST? The Computational Power of Biological Dendritic Trees

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34380016/ Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks (this one is new to me, I found it while searching!)
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-12 17:12:47+00:00
> TikTok empowers users with transparent information about its privacy practices and gives them multiple tools to customise their experience," a TikTok spokesperson says. "Advertising pixels are industry standard and used widely across social and media platforms"

- Are we really empowered to stop being surveilled?

- Does the customization of my experience have any bearing with the actual allegation of tracking non-users on the internet?

- Are advertising pixels transparently shown to those who never have been on TikTok but are monitored all the same?
by TomasBM | 2026-02-12 17:12:48+00:00
> I don't want my code scraped and remixed by AI systems.

Just curious - why not?

Is it mostly about the commercial AI violating the license of your repos? And if commercial scraping was banned, and only allowed to FOSS-producing AI, would you be OK with publishing again?

Or is there a fundamental problem with AI?

Personally, I use AI to produce FOSS that I probably wouldn't have produced (to that extent) without it. So for me, it's somewhat the opposite: I want to publish this work because it can be useful to others as a proof-of-concept for some intended use cases. It doesn't matter if an AI trains on it, because some big chunk was generated by AI anyway, but I think it will be useful to other people.

Then again, I publish knowing that I can't control whether some dev will (manually or automatically) remix my code commercially and without attribution. Could be wrong though.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-12 17:12:51+00:00
>One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error.

This is incorrect, at ground level its about 1 kW of sunlight per square meter if that square meter is orthogonal to the line of sight to the sun, otherwise it gets diminished with cos(theta) where theta is the angle between the line of sight to the sun and the normal of the square meter of land, it can not receive 6 kW no matter the orientation. And 6 kW is a power, while 21 MJ is an energy.

> Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.

Indeed your incorrect comment in an authoritative voice might get downvoted, for good reason, but I won't be the one doing it...
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-12 17:13:06+00:00
> True, but why are people who are artist different from anyone else, that's my critique.

I don't think it is helpful to frame it in terms of, 'sure they should get it, but what about other people doing public good? Since the others can't get it, the artists shouldn't'. How about saying, 'this is a great start, how do we get a broader scheme for other philanthropic causes'?
by righthand | 2026-02-12 17:13:07+00:00
I’ll just link you to my reply but getting involved with a group about your specific first-world problem shouldn’t be difficult. For everything else either start a group or join one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991515

I also protested during BLM and advocated for repealing 50-A amendment that gave criminal police protection from prosecution in NY. And we succeeded at that too!
by oliwarner | 2026-02-12 17:13:24+00:00
Not developing new features means firing the engineering team, supporting it with a skeleton crew of the cheapest available labour. The press release was refreshingly honest about this, at least in CEO-speak.

"Not dead" might be a technical truth, but "on life support" would be my analogy. As soon as it stops being profitable, or the owner wants to push users of to a more profitable platform, they'll pull the plug.

In terms of Ops planning, Heroku is a toxic target platform now, full of risk (more than it was before, at any rate). I wouldn't touch it for a new project and would definitely have plans in place to move anything I have there off.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-02-12 17:13:35+00:00
It is a new era, and has been for a while. 50% of new capacity globally has been renewable since 2012 and keeps growing. It was 92.5% last year and almost certainly higher for 2025.

In the US it was 99% wind, solar, batteries.

The people talking this down are in an info-bubble of their own creation.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-12 17:13:41+00:00
> That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.

That seems more like an excuse than a legitimate reason. If that was actually a problem you could solve it by adopting a mechanism to break ties, putting the vote to the public only in the event of a tie, having the state legislatures use score voting which makes two candidates getting exactly the same score far less likely, etc.

> That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force

It's supposed to be an anti-democratic force, like the Supreme Court and the entire concept of even having a federal government instead of allowing local voters to have full plenary power over local laws. Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.
by casey2 | 2026-02-12 17:13:42+00:00
This is just petty tribalism. How is this different than Red Hat devs using macbooks or whatever.

Reasonable people can recognize the right tool for the job. If the productivity didn't grow it would be a bad idea to organize society around capitalism. If your goal is getting shit done at scale, you can't rely on "There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law."

You want them to use, what? jitsi? neomutt? iRedMail? DEEPSEEK?!? LOCALLY?!? GET REAL! These are serious developers for Petes' sake!
by palata | 2026-02-12 17:13:52+00:00
I even read that TikTok has its app listen to a port on localhost, and have websites run code that exfiltrates data this way (effectively bypassing privacy protections of your browser).

Oh wait no sorry, that was Meta. In both the Facebook and Instagram apps: https://cybersecuritynews.com/track-android-users-covertly/.
by avaer | 2026-02-12 17:14:03+00:00
I guess the problem is one of legal attribution.

If a human takes responsibility for the AI's actions you can blame the human. If the AI is a legal person you could punish the AI (perhaps by turning it off). That's the mode of restitution we've had for millennia.

If you can't blame anyone or anything, it's a brave new lawless world of "intelligent" things happening at the speed of computers with no consequences (except to the victim) when it goes wrong.
by rirze | 2026-02-12 17:14:22+00:00
They (professors) either focus as much as they can on teaching, mentoring (while treading their tenure status as carefully as they can). Others publishing papers do safe but small improvements in their field, in my experience, they tend to be more observational-data driven, working on surveys. It's not useless by any degree, but... they could be doing a lot more.

99% is definitely an exaggeration, I apologize. The good astrophysics researchers, imo, are focusing on improving college-level physics education, pushing breaking-edge experimental results, making sense of large-scale survey results, and working on the next big simulation run. Younger departments with younger professors tend be pushing the envelope more, we might see a industry cleanup in my lifetime.
by myvoiceismypass | 2026-02-12 17:14:36+00:00
Was it this tweet?

“Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew,” he wrote in a since-deleted post on X, formerly Twitter, to his 408,000 followers during the early morning hours of Saturday. “Die slow motherfuckers.”

Tupac must have been rolling over in his grave, drunk or not this was absolute cringe and unacceptable from a public figure.
by devman0 | 2026-02-12 17:14:56+00:00
The privacy issue has two facets, when I show ID to get in to a club or buy alcohol, the entire interaction is transient, the merchant isn't keeping that information and the issuer of the credential doesn't know that happened (i.e. the government).

Just allowing a service provider to receive a third party attestation that you "allowed" still allows the third party to track what you are doing even if the provider can't. That's still unacceptable from a privacy standpoint, I don't want the government, or agents thereof, knowing all the places I've had to show ID.
by focusedone | 2026-02-12 17:15:02+00:00
I hadn't read that Paul Graham article before, but it was extremely accurate at the time.

My degree is in Public Relations and I worked in political PR for a bit before moving to newspapers. The PR office worked so hard to word things in a way where news editors could lift our copy directly into print. It was a delicate balance to sell a point of view without sounding like a sales pitch.

Later, at the newspapers, I was shocked to learn how desperately editors would snag any text to fill the space between paid-for ads on a page. A minimal amount of actual journalism occurred above the fold. Past that we would publish absolutely anything in the English language without filtering.

This was all 20+ years ago. Now we've cut out the middle man, automatically publishing AI generated slop directly as if it were human-produced news. It's all very discouraging.
by jihadjihad | 2026-02-12 17:15:08+00:00
> It seems good to understand whether 5% or 50% of your code is written using AI, because that has gigantic implications for how the project is managed, particularly from a quality perspective.

I'd say you're operating on a higher plane of thought than the majority in this industry right now. Because the majority view roughly appears to be "Need bigger number!", with very little thought, let alone deep thought, employed towards the whys or wherefores thereof.
by ranger_danger | 2026-02-12 17:15:15+00:00
I think the misunderstanding is in a combination of wording + practical application.

Tariffs in the legal sense are technically paid by the importer who sells a product. It's their responsibility to pay it... always.

The importer could technically eat that cost, and the consumer wouldn't see a difference on their price tag.

But what happens in practice, the vast majority of the time, is the importer passes that extra cost on to the consumer by raising the price they're selling it for. This is technically a business decision made by every importer individually, it is not a requirement.

The people saying tariffs are paid by the importer, or tariffs are paid by the consumer, are both right, but within different perspectives and depending on how each importer chooses to handle their tariffs.
by cultofmetatron | 2026-02-12 17:15:39+00:00
> But it seems uncommon for people to want to do that.

It becomes more obvious once you start managing developers vs being a solo dev. everyone making their own designer means the language can morph into a completely insular creation with a learning curve that expands exponentially with every new hire. A little extra boilerplate is the cost of standardized idioms that work across both your codebase that your new hires are already familiar with from working in that language at other companies. its why go was created. personally I prefer rust and elixir as good middle grounds.
by RobRivera | 2026-02-12 17:15:45+00:00
I think the operative word people miss when using AI is AGENT.

REGARDLESS of what level of autonomy in real world operations an AI is given, from responsible himan supervised and reviewed publications to full Autonomous action, the ai AGENT should be serving as AN AGENT. With a PRINCIPLE (principal?).

If an AI is truly agentic, it should be advertising who it is speaking on behalf of, and then that person or entity should be treated as the person responsible.
by mindslight | 2026-02-12 17:15:49+00:00
Having the world reserve currency is an independent source of revenue for the US Government, as it allows for an amount of monetary inflation without corresponding price inflation. Through a combination of Federal Reserve policy and the political martingale of "balanced budgets", most of this revenue has been simply given away to asset holders in the form of low-interest loans. This money could/should instead be spent to purposefully mitigate the damage to domestic industry that comes from having the world reserve currency.
by mythz | 2026-02-12 17:15:49+00:00
Really looked forward to this release as MiniMax M2.1 is currently my most used model thanks to it being fast, cheap and excellent at tool calling. Whilst I still use Antigravity + Claude for development, I reach for MiniMax first in my AI workflows, GLM for code tasks and Kimi K2.5 when deep English analysis is needed.

Not self-hosting yet, but I prefer using Chinese OSS models for AI workflows because of the potential to self-host in future if needed. Also using it to power my openclaw assistant since IMO it has the best balance of speed, quality and cost:

> It costs just $1 to run the model continuously for an hour at 100 tokens/sec. At 50 tokens/sec, the cost drops to $0.30.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-12 17:16:01+00:00
When I worked at arXiv I looked at usage statistics that we didn't make public because we didn't want people to get the wrong idea.

One thing we knew is exactly that: the most viewed papers were review papers. You read a lot of them on the road to a PhD.

Another strange thing about review papers is that they escape the usual standards for evaluation in science. That is, as an outsider I can appoint myself to write a review paper without doing any research in the field, and it's possible I could do a very good job. One of the fun things I did in grad school was make a bibliography and short review of papers on the phenomenon of "Giant Magnetoresistance" at the request of the experimentalist on my committee.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-02-12 17:16:02+00:00
>"Consumption" figures are also misleading.

I don't see why they would be, generally speaking.

"it’s very difficult to look at a country where the typical person lives in a larger house, is more likely to own a car, eats more meat, and uses more electricity than people in other rich countries, and to conclude that this is “a poor society”."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-is-not-a-poor-societ...

>In monetary terms, Americans consume more health services than anyone else, yet have fallen behind in life expectancy

US life expectancy has little to do with our healthcare system. See https://xcancel.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799742228144130#...

>The prosperity of the average worker did not begin to stagnate when NATO was formed, but indeed decades later

My claim is simply that NATO is not key to our prosperity. Post-NATO stagnation, insofar as it exists, is quite compatible with that claim.

>Switzerland is entirely surrounded by the EU, and its economic prosperity depends on access to the European Common Market.

None of the objections in this paragraph would apply to a more geopolitically neutral US. The US economy is large and relatively self-sufficient. Imports and exports are a relatively small fraction of our GDP.

>nuclear missiles Russians tried to set up on Cuba

...after we set up missiles in Turkey...

The Cuban missile crisis demonstrates the danger of American belligerence, and the importance of us being more peaceful, less paranoid, and more neutral.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-12 17:16:12+00:00
I'm sure you mean well, but this kind of comment is counterproductive for the purposes you intend. "Engineers" are not a monolith - I cared quite a lot about Grok denuding women, and you don't know how much the original author or anyone else involved in the conversation cared. If your goal is to get engineers to care passionately about the practical effects of AI, making wild guesses about things they didn't care about and insulting them for it does not help achieve it.
by pm90 | 2026-02-12 17:16:12+00:00
Its nice to see useful, impactful interchange formats getting the attention and resources they need, and ecosystems converging around them. Optimizing serialization/deserialization might seem like a "trivial" task at first, but when moving petabytes of data they quickly become the bottlenecks. With common interchange formats, the benefits of these optimizations are shared across stacks. Love to see it.