MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Boosted LightFace – A Hybrid DNN and GBM Model for Facial Recognition
by serengil | 2026-03-03 17:40:22+00:00
Hey, I'm the author of this work and the maintainer of DeepFace.

In this paper, we ensemble the top 5 DeepFace backbones and feed them into a GBM model instead of relying on a single embedding model.

On LFW, this surpasses FaceNet512’s 98.4% accuracy and the reported human-level accuracy of 97.5%, achieving 99.1%.

We deliberately avoid retraining on LFW to prevent benchmark overfitting. The base models are trained on large-scale datasets, and we only learn a boosting layer on top of their similarity scores.
by sosodev | 2026-03-03 17:40:34+00:00
My understanding, from listening/reading what top researchers are saying, is that model architectures in the near future are going to attempt to scale the context window dramatically. There's a generalized belief that in-context learning is quite powerful and that scaling the window might yield massive benefits for continual learning.

It doesn't seem that hard because recent open weight models have shown that the memory cost of the context window can be dramatically reduced via hybrid attention architectures. Qwen3-next, Qwen3.5, and Nemotron 3 Nano are all great examples. Nemotron 3 Nano can be run with a million token context window on consumer hardware.
by dilap | 2026-03-03 17:40:41+00:00
The fundamental nature of the model is that it consumes tokens as input and produces token probabilities as output, but there's nothing inherently "predictive" about it -- that's just perspective hangover from the historical development of how LLMs were trained. It is, fundamentally, I think, a general-purpose thinking machine, operating over the inputs and outputs of tokens.

(With this perspective, I can feel my own brain subtly oferring up a panoply of possible responses in a similar way. I can even turn up the temperature on my own brain, making it more likely to decide to say the less-obvious words in response, by having a drink or two.)

(Similarly, mimicry is in humans too a very good learning technique to get started -- kids learning to speak are little parrots, artists just starting out will often copy existing works, etc. Before going on to develop further into their own style.)
by hn_acker | 2026-03-03 17:40:43+00:00
Interesting new phenomenon:

> And in Malliotakis, the Court reached out to block a state trial court ruling before the state supreme court had even had a chance to rule on the matter—for what appears to be the first time … ever.

[...]

> But Malliotakis presents a bigger problem—the Supreme Court doesn’t even have jurisdiction to hear appeals from state courts until and unless the highest court in the state has ruled on the issue. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, “This procedural defect should be fatal. In every other case in which this Court has granted emergency relief from a state-court decision, the State’s highest court either denied it first or failed to act promptly on a request for it.”
by maverick74 | 2026-03-03 17:40:44+00:00
> Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them.

I totally disagree!!!
Yes, everyone works with computer, phone, tablet, whatever, nowdays!

But does generation z "knows" about what a computer is?

Absolutely not!!!

While tech has advanced and graduated IT personal know more than previous generations (obviously!), all the rest, while they do know how to do their jobs, they know nothing about computers!!! They are pretty much like everyone else that didn't know what a computer was in generations x and previous!!!

However, contrary to previous generations, because they do interact with the tech, they represent a higher security risc for them and for others!

... Because they know nothing about it!!!

It's like giving a box of matches to a neanderthal in the middle of the woods...

Almost everyone in the "Gen x and previous" that interacted with the tech, did know what they were doing (past the initial learning phase)!!!

This does not happen after gen x!
by GauntletWizard | 2026-03-03 17:40:50+00:00
SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard
by k9294 | 2026-03-03 17:40:52+00:00
You can test Gemini 3.1 Lite transcription capabilities in https://ottex.ai — the only dictation app supporting Gemini models with native audio input.

We benchmarked it for real-life voice-to-text use cases:

<10s 10-30s 30s-1m 1-2m 2-3m
Flash 2548 2732 3177 4583 5961
Flash Lite 1390 1468 1772 2362 3499
Faster by 1.83x 1.86x 1.79x 1.94x 1.70x

(latency in ms, median over 5 runs per sample, non-streaming)

Key takeaways:

- 1.8x faster than Gemini 3 Flash on average
- 1-2 sec transcription time for short recordings
- ~$0.50/mo for heavy users (10h+ transcription)
- Best-in-class WER and formatting instruction following
- Multilingual: one model, 100+ languages

Gemini is slowly making $15/month voice apps obsolete.
by convolvatron | 2026-03-03 17:40:56+00:00
this is not at all restricted to your case. try 'distributed system engineer' or even 'software engineer'. for the latter, one is an engineer of software, and the other is one that engineers with software. both perfectly valid jobs. it doesn't help that the interviews for the latter adopt the questions and expectations of the former, even though they are different jobs.

its entirely possible to go through the software engineer hiring pipeline, and end up in a situation where the organization and the new employee have a fundamental disagreement about the slate of work.

somehow in the giant waterfall of money, our ability to even talk meaningfully about our work to each other got lost
by gruez | 2026-03-03 17:41:10+00:00
Yeah, the claim of

>The researchers estimate that the increase in the retail price to consumers was about 6.9 percent. This was on the $23 pre-tariff retail price, so it amounts to $1.59, which, in dollar terms, exceeded the tariff revenue collected.

Is seemingly contradicted by goldman sac's report, which claims consumers only paid 55% of the tariff increase.

https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/57938/goldman-sachs-us-co...
by AlexandrB | 2026-03-03 17:41:12+00:00
This whole debate is cyclical[1]. I expect in a few years everyone will be complaining about not enough daylight in the mornings and DST seasonal changes will come back.

> Permanent daylight saving time was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in January 1974, but there were complaints of children going to school in the dark and working people commuting and starting their work day in pitch darkness during the winter. By October 1974, President Gerald Ford signed a law repealing year-round daylight savings time.

It's a perfect example of "the public" not really knowing what they want or perhaps different factions (unknowingly) wanting different things and not realizing this until the change actually happens. This isn't helped by how these ideas are often oversold as having no downsides instead of being realistic about what the trade-off is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History
by ajross | 2026-03-03 17:41:41+00:00
> The MBA is an amazing value, and appears to have only gotten slightly cheaper.

Looks to me like the base model went up by $100, no?

The whining is just whining. It's a fine laptop, but it's not significantly improved from the one they shipped a year ago. Add to that the fact that laptops as a whole are well on the way down their commoditization slope and the general HN desire to cheer about Great New Apple Devices, this is for sure a backwards step.
by mikestew | 2026-03-03 17:41:58+00:00
Could we just link to the original source instead of Gizmodo’s editorialized bad take?

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-418890A1.pdf

I’ll start by saying that it pains me to have to defend anything out of Carr’s mouth, but “loyalty” isn’t anywhere in that doc. Carr calls for a pledge to air PSAs and what have you, not loyalty. And when he complains of civic illiteracy, is he wrong? Ironically, how do we think we got into this mess of the current administration? Is Carr wrong in calling for the airing of things like School House Rock? Is it so bad to start the broadcast day with the national anthem? (Trick question, because when I was a kid some 50 years ago, I remember the broadcast day ending with the national anthem. Was never up early enough to find out what they did at the start of the day.)

The way Gizmodo words it, you’d think Carr is requiring that all broadcasters air blatant government propaganda. And maybe the FCC document is just a dog whistle, I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. But the original document takes about five minutes to read, and I strongly suggest you read it and judge for yourself, rather than get all riled up from TFA’s editorializing.
by pull_my_finger | 2026-03-03 17:42:05+00:00
I use Cookie AutoDelete on Firefox and it's great. It works with Firefox Container Tabs (groups have their own cookie settings), and let's you greylist (allow cookies from a particular domain pattern until the tab is closed) or whitelist (always allow from the domain pattern). I set it up for my kids computers also. The default is to blacklist (cookies aren't set), and I can whitelist for particular sites where they need say persistent login.

Definitely in 2026 kids should be getting tons of education in public school about how to safely browse the internet, both for personal data privacy and for safety against stalking, doxxing, grooming etc in the same way millenials were grilled about source checking internet resources like Wikipedia.
by righthand | 2026-03-03 17:42:08+00:00
No one really. Code is for humans to read and for machines to compile and execute. Llms are enabling people to just write the code and not have anyone read it. It’s solving a problem that didn’t really exist (we already had code generators before llms).

It’s such an intoxicating copyright-abuse slot machine that a buddy who is building an ocaml+htmx tree editor told me “I always get stuck and end up going to the llm to generate code. Usually when I get to the html part.” I asked if he used a debugger before that, he said “that’s a good idea”.
by anon7000 | 2026-03-03 17:42:22+00:00
So the $1600 Studio Display does not have 120hz.

Here’s some monitors you can buy at that price point:

- 6k 32” monitor (similar PPI) (Acer PE320QX)

- most high-end 4k displays (even OLEDs) with 144hz+ refresh rate

32” 4k isn’t great PPI, but it’s still fine PPI, at a reasonable distance. Double the refresh rate is a much more noticeable improvement to me than 40% better pixel density, at a distance where retina matters a bit less than laptops & handhelds. And you can get that for less than half the cost

Plus, you can get it with multiple outputs & KVM to switch between MacBook & PC. And still run it off a single USB C cable.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-03 17:42:55+00:00
Titles mean even less across organizations. Any interviewer worth their salt is going to hire you and level you based on how they ascertain the level of scope , impact and dealing with ambiguity you dealt with.

You can be a “CTO” of your little 5 person company - you might be leveled as an mid level software engineer at BigTech
by phendrenad2 | 2026-03-03 17:42:57+00:00
People should know that you can't "just" turn down a promotion. You might be leaving management in a tough position where they were hoping to rely on you to fill a gap, and by turning it down, you're making it hard for them to be objective. They might default to seeing you as unreliable, and cut off future advancement opportunities (the ones you actually want). It's not fair, but that's how people think. This isn't a big problem when the money is free and everyone is trying to poach employees. You can just jump ship. But in this hellish economy, everyone is stuck. So take that damn promotion.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-03-03 17:43:14+00:00
Now, I'm not gonna endorse the original position, but on some level it's also a non-troll. Enough time spent at a soup kitchen will turn just about anybody into Ron Paul. If you want someone to have realistic opinions on social welfare programs based on their actual impact in reality and not emotion and indoctrination then putting them into an organization that's actually trying to maximize good done for their budget and/or in contact with the recipients is a good way to do it.
by rurp | 2026-03-03 17:43:16+00:00
Agreed on all three points, but I think this is pretty obviously terrible in the long run. The open internet was one of the greatest common goods in human history. That ecosystem is quickly being exploited to death by a handful of tech companies. Those companies are generating a lot of revenue in the short term, and the rest of humanity is losing a great deal.

I can't even begin to count how many times I've found interesting and useful information from an old forum/article/guide that was supported by some ads or simply an avenue to engage with people. Those incentives are now gone.

Tech companies have no ethics and their leaders think it's in their interest to continue the exploitation, so that's what is going to happen. The only effective way to prevent a tragedy of the commons situation on this scale is major government action and there is zero political will for that at this time.

In the long run there will be some sort of reaction, maybe site curation will make a comeback. A few big name sites will probably resist the slop and survive as an institution. But the internet many of us know and love is being pummeled to death before our eyes.
by palmotea | 2026-03-03 17:43:45+00:00
> Funny how this logic doesn't seem to apply to Republicans. They run the absolute worst candidate I've seen in my entire life -- in any democratic country -- and they get everything they want.

Complaints about the other side will get you nowhere.

And the lesson I got from Trump's win the real cause is Democrats are were so out of touch that they allowed someone as bad as Trump to win. The turn towards fantasy politics, where liberals just need to be more liberal and maybe bigger assholes and suddenly we get everything we want is completely unrealistic. All it will do really do is just ratify the Trumpian dysfunction.

> At no point did they feel the need to compromise in any way or adjust their positions any closer to the left. Apparently pounding the table until you win is a viable political strategy in America.

Are even you paying attention? Trump totally did adjust their positions closer to the left. When was the last time you heard about Social Security privatization, for instance? Trump also threw generations of right-wing free-trade economic policy out the window to pursue tariffs.

> No offense, but I'm not sure you have much strategic sense here either. Your take on how politics works in the US strikes me as utterly naive.

It's a lot more realistic than what you're offering. If you're not thinking about the valuable things you really want that you're willing to sacrifice, you're not being strategic.

A lot of people are angry, and looking for catharsis in fantasy. That's really dumb and won't end well.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2026-03-03 17:43:49+00:00
Are those young people really doing the wrong thing by accepting? They are getting on and solving their problem, they have probably never had any personal harm done by "some weird dark-pattern cookie trickery".

It's almost like forcing (almost) every website to add these cookie banners has desensitised people to what they're actually saying.
by ceejayoz | 2026-03-03 17:43:56+00:00
> (But hey 1% of people died, as predicted if we did nothing at all... )

You're at a football stadium with 100k people. A thousand of them die suddenly. Do you feel safe?

> Less store hours. Higher prices. Inflation.

At this point, that's just greed. They figured out what the market would bear.
by autoexec | 2026-03-03 17:44:18+00:00
We have all kinds of evidence for it (for example, here's an article about the data sold to insurance companies https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...) and we've had evidence for a very very long time (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-brokers-selling-personal-i...)

The data collected about us online is extensively used against us both online and offline. The multi-billion dollar industry around collecting and selling every scrap of data about you and your personal life didn't spring up because nobody was making money from it.
by cortesoft | 2026-03-03 17:44:25+00:00
> I'd be willing to bet the data being collected by tracking your browsing history has already been screwing you over in various aspects of your life, online and offline, but you won't be told when it happens or why.

Ok, can you give me a plausible example of what that harm could be? This seems in line with the exact thing I said in my comment; every time I ask how it could harm me, I am given vague statements about tracking and data. Charging me more if they think I can afford it is surely a thing to worry about, but there are so many ways to do that without tracking that I already need to take actions to defend against that (comparison shopping, price history tools, etc).

I am not saying I don’t think companies can take data they have access to and use it to extract more value from me… I am saying I don’t thing opting out of cookies is going to do much to change that, for better or worse.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-03-03 17:44:29+00:00
even better would be a solution that didn't require even proxy or direct government log in.

like if you could be issued an E-id that could perform a local signature/challenge-response that allowed the site to confirm an age bracket (like 12 or below,13-17,18-20, 21+), assert the entity that issued the id but not assert a stable identifier (not even pairwise) and not pass any data between other parties.

Obviously not foolproof, credentials can be stolen (same in your scenario) but the site doesn't need to care, they should be legally in the clear. Basically it would let you anonymously assert your age.
Google violates its 14-day deprecation policy for Gemini 3 Pro Preview
by goolulusaurs | 2026-03-03 17:44:46+00:00
According to this page: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models#preview Preview models are given at least two weeks notice between deprecation and shutdown. However, the deprecation of Gemini 3 Pro Preview was announced on February 26: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/changelog, which is less than two weeks before the planned March 9 shutdown date. (two weeks later would be the 12th).
by avaer | 2026-03-03 17:44:47+00:00
I've spent way too many years chipping away at genai gaming, here's my 2c.

First, the intersection between someone who understands and cares about genai (and keeping up with the SOTA), with someone who wants to put in the work and compromise to make great games, is slim.

Think about the intersection between a procedural generation/shader programmer, someone focused on making a really fun and compelling game tech be damned. The skills don't really overlap. One requires deep knowledge, technical mastery, geometric thinking, algorithmic optimization, and time in a dark room, and the other requires empathy for humans, brutal iteration, artistic taste, and a knack for storytelling (even if just to sell the player on your game). You basically need both for your "ai game" to even qualify as an ai game. And in an industry that's so anti-ai it's hard to find teams where these two personalities meet and vibe enough to work on a game together.

Secondly, is model performance: quality, speed, cost. I don't think the industry has yet crossed the threshold where generation is high enough quality, fast enough for players, and cheap enough that it amortizes compared to traditional gamedev. You see tons of AI used in development but deploying this stuff to the front lines doesn't really napkin math. That will change though.

Third, game engines are NOT designed for genai. They are decades of optimization for a completely different pipeline, both technical and human: pitch -> publisher -> game engine -> art team + coders -> trailer -> marketing -> release -> support. Adding even simple very, very basic genai requirements to this (say, dynamic texture generation and loading over the network, streaming character dialogue) completely breaks decades of assumptions of how games are built and shipped (e.g. everything mega-super-duper-compressed and loaded to statically allocated gpu buffers). So doing anything new means throwing away large parts of the game engine. And if you pitch not using 70% of the game engine, or making your own, to a 20 year game veteran/studio boss calling the shots in this industry: well, your game will not be getting funded.

This will all get fixed though. The technology jsut came faster than the industry could adapt.

Looking forward to GDC this year!
by notepad0x90 | 2026-03-03 17:44:50+00:00
It's not paranoia, look at this thread alone and the responses from @xigoi , even on HN which is heavily moderated and leans to more liberal views. Terrible people are plenty. I'd think after the past few elections in the US that was obvious. Violence isn't the only reason to be cautions with strangers, mistreatment is another reason, having a negative interaction in general is unpleasant.

The solution is not to pretend people's experiences are invalid, or that somehow reducing the risk of harm is wrong, but to find ways to adapt, and be prepared to handle or dismiss negative interactions, as well as value the benefits of positive ones.
by godelski | 2026-03-03 17:45:18+00:00
But that has nothing to do with pre-approved.

In America there's definitely things you're not allowed to put on TV. Obviously you can't just put hardcore porn on, but you also aren't allowed to directly lie. Though I'm sure what the standards are for lying are different. There's laws against false advertising, libel, and so on.

But pre-approved is very different. And honestly, if you're making calls to get misleading ads taken off TV then is the pre-approved system even working? How do you know they're not just filtering out things they don't like? It's a pretty difficult type of restriction on speech.

As an example, are they preventing ads running talking about the UK's relationship to Epstein? Or calls to release their files? Every country has files, not just the US. Given the response to Mullvad I'd assume you couldn't place those types of ads on TV.
by GauntletWizard | 2026-03-03 17:45:41+00:00
SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard
by asah | 2026-03-03 17:45:56+00:00
so that's not true - I worked for years in the grocery business and prices DO come down and in fact, I've seen evidence all over the NYC market of prices falling recently.

examples include eggs for $2.99 in some places (!), and other competitive categories like unbranded meat and cheese, pasta, and more.

prepared foods seem to be slower, I'm assuming because labor costs continue to rise.