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I got paid minimum wage to solve an impossible problem

https://tiespetersen.substack.com/p/i-got-paid-minimum-wage-to-solve
1•self•1m ago•0 comments

Claude Code 2.1.0 Released

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/f34e2535b4fcf5fcc6cb0b566111c588b04873ee/CHANGELOG.md
1•kerim-ca•1m ago•0 comments

The AI Econ Seminar

https://cameron.stream/blog/econ-seminar/
1•forthwall•7m ago•0 comments

CSIS: What Just Happened in Venezuela? and What Comes Next?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp24V1Ygn04
1•stopbulying•11m ago•0 comments

Greg and the Eternal Brunch – A Philosophy Fairy Story

https://lagomor.ph/2025/02/greg-the-eternal-brunch/
1•ChilledTonic•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Titan AI Explore – A curated hub for AI tools, tutorials, and projects

https://www.titanaiexplore.com/
1•chynnahe•11m ago•0 comments

Darwin-photos: Back up iCloud Photos without bloating your Mac

https://github.com/cleanexit0/darwin-photos
1•cleanexit0•13m ago•0 comments

Don't be fooled – everything has changed for the global economy

https://www.ft.com/content/9c8212b8-568f-4ea2-829a-9b7a13b93f1d
1•petethomas•20m ago•1 comments

Z-Image-Base renamed to "Z-Image-Omni-Base" – gen+edit model from Alibaba

https://old.reddit.com/r/ZImageAI/comments/1pm66e6/not_zimagebase_but_zimageomnibase/
1•nmr521521•20m ago•0 comments

Finding high signal people – applying PageRank to Twitter

https://thefourierproject.org/people
1•jfg0•24m ago•0 comments

Urban Surveillance

https://computer.rip/2025-12-26-Flock-and-Urban-Surveillance.html
2•firloop•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cymatica.app

https://www.cymatica.app/
1•_august•27m ago•0 comments

Patterns in deterministic settlement/dispute con in P2P/oracle-resolved systems?

1•Lions2026•29m ago•0 comments

The Monroe Doctrine After 200 Years: Strategic Hinge Period in US History (2023)

https://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2023/08/the-monroe-doctrine-after-200-years-a-strategic-hin...
1•walterbell•32m ago•3 comments

Show HN: Knowing What Matters is coNP-complete (Lean 4 formalized)

https://zenodo.org/records/18140966
1•trissim•35m ago•0 comments

The most popular Go dependency is

https://blog.thibaut-rousseau.com/blog/the-most-popular-go-dependency-is/
1•thunderbong•36m ago•0 comments

AI Is Plastic

https://stephen.bochinski.dev/blog/2026/01/07/ai-is-plastic/
2•sbochins•38m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Any Perler bead / pixel art hobbyists? Looking for feedback

https://www.perlerbeadpattern.com/
1•pacewang•41m ago•0 comments

AI browsers are straight out of the enshittification playbook

https://www.coryd.dev/posts/2025/ai-browsers-are-straight-out-of-the-enshittification-playbook
4•cdrnsf•48m ago•0 comments

Larry Page is moving business out of CA ahead of a proposed billionaire's tax

https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-leave-california-wealth-billionaire-tax-koop-google-20...
4•Alupis•50m ago•4 comments

The game that knows when you're not paying attention

https://patternrecall.vercel.app/
1•mshubham•51m ago•0 comments

Smothering Heights – JP Morgan Asset Management Outlook 2026

https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional/insights/market-insights/eye-on-the-...
1•prisenco•53m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Graph:Easy ported to TypeScript with GPT-5.2

https://tomisin.space/graph-easy-ts/
1•AntiRush•55m ago•0 comments

Kernel bugs hide for 2 years on average. Some hide for 20

https://pebblebed.com/blog/kernel-bugs
34•kmavm•58m ago•8 comments

Show HN: SludgeReport.io – like that other site but AI, Tech, Startup News

https://sludgereport.io/
1•stets•1h ago•2 comments

PMU Counters on Apple Silicon

https://blog.bugsiki.dev/posts/apple-pmu/
3•signa11•1h ago•0 comments

SimilarWeb: Gen AI Website Traffic Share 2026 Jan [pdf]

https://www.similarweb.com/corp/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/attachment-Global-AI-Tracker-6.pdf
1•shenli3514•1h ago•1 comments

Vison Awards 2025 – Architizer

https://architizer.com/blog/tag/vision-awards/
1•sargstuff•1h ago•0 comments

The Anatomy of an Outstanding AI-Assisted Rendering

https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/stories/anatomy-of-an-ai-assisted-rendering/
1•sargstuff•1h ago•0 comments

OpenAI Would Like You to Share Your Health Data with ChatGPT

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openai-would-like-you-to-share-your-health-data-with-i...
5•geox•1h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

LMArena is a cancer on AI

https://surgehq.ai/blog/lmarena-is-a-plague-on-ai
195•jumploops•22h ago

Comments

observationist•5h ago
There's something deeply ironic about this being written by AI. Baitception, even.
dust42•5h ago
Oh my goodness yes, I almost missed it that the text is (mostly?) AI written. That said I agree that LMArena elo scores are pushing models in the wrong direction. They move more towards McDonald's than quality food.
denismi•4h ago
"The Brutal Choice"

Is there an established name for this LLMism?

I don't need a "Reality Check" or a "Hard Truth". The thought can be concluded without this performative honesty nonsense or the emotive hyperbole.

This probably grates me more than any other.

duncancarroll•2h ago
This was my first thought as well
aratahikaru5•1h ago
How can you tell? (honest question, I really can't)

The article makes strong points, includes real data and quotes, shows proof of work (sampling 100 Q&A), so does that even matter at this point? This doesn't feel like "slop" to me at all.

ryan_n•1h ago
Yea I also didn't think this was written by ai, it sounded human enough to me. It's kind of a bummer that there's all these patterns that LLM's follow in their output that cause people to have a knee jerk reaction and instantly call it ai slop. I know there is a ton of ai garbage out there these days, but I really couldn't tell with this article.
joe_the_user•44m ago
The text definitely the "jump from dramatic crescendo to dramatic crescendo" quality of certain LLM texts. If you read closely, it also has adjective choice that's more for dramatic than appropriate to the circumstances involves (a quality of LLM texts it also helpfully explains).

I don't know if this proves it's an LLM text or whether that style is simply spilling out everywhere.

dk8996•5h ago
Seems like they just raised 150m at 1.7B valuation. Crazy.
koakuma-chan•5h ago
Who? LMArena? That's actually crazy.
echelon•5h ago
Are they selling:

A. model improvement tests, suites, and benchmarks

B. data on competitors' evals

C. test answer keys

D. alpha to VC firms

E. all of the above

???

koakuma-chan•5h ago
Apparently they are selling model evaluations, powered by their volunteer users.
Y_Y•4h ago
I'm taking the Red Cross public next. With the price of healthcare these days my earnings projections are uber-extreme.
ares623•3m ago
They're selling "I'm an AI investor" stickers to show off at the next family reunion
minimaxir•5h ago
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/06/lmarena-lands-1-7b-valuati...
keketi•5h ago
We need a service that ranks AI model ranking services. Maybe powered by AI instead of humans?
echelon•5h ago
Just look at Open(ugh)Router. That's a good, though not fully accurate, view of where dollars are going.

It'd be nice if it were actually open and we could inspect all the statistics.

a-dub•5h ago
maybe it would work if they could encourage end users to be rigorous? (ie, detect if they have the capability to rate well and then reward them when they do by comparing them against other highly rated raters of the same phenotype)
sharkjacobs•5h ago
Any metric that can be targeted can be gamed
kelseyfrog•4h ago
Then target it with metrics worth solving[1].

1. Ex https://mppbench.com/

falcor84•4h ago
But that seems to be measuring "superintelligence" rather than just AI, no?
positron26•4h ago
If the metric is a latent variable summarizing subjective judgements, yes.
g947o•5h ago
> Voilà: bold text, emojis, and plenty of sycophancy – every trick in the LMArena playbook! – to avoid answering the question it was asked.

This is hard to swallow.

I don't believe a single word this article says. Apparently the "real author" (the human being who wrote the original prompt to generate this article) only intend to use this article to generate clicks and engagement but don't care at all about what's in there.

atleastoptimal•5h ago
The general conceit of this article, which is something that many frontier labs seem to be beginning to realize, is that the average human is no longer smart enough to provide sufficient signal to improve AI models.
cyanydeez•4h ago
They need to spend money on actual experts to curate their data to improve.

Instead, finance bros are convinced by the argument that number goes up.

Terr_•4h ago
Sometimes it feels like:

    def is_it_true(question): 
        return profit_if_true(question) > profit_if_false(question)
AI will make it cheaper, faster, better, no problem. You can eat the cake now and save it for later.
aspenmartin•4h ago
Wait you know that frontier labs do actually do this right?
8f2ab37a-ed6c•4h ago
Is that not exactly what https://www.mercor.com/ does?
Y_Y•4h ago
But when you're a moron how can you distinguish?

I'm being (mostly) serious, suppose you're a stuffed ahort trying to boost your valuation, how can you work out who's smart enough to train your LLM? (Never mind how to get them to work for you!)

aspenmartin•4h ago
I do a lot of human evaluations. Lots of Bayesian / statistical models that can infer rater quality without ground truth labels. The other thing about preference data you have to worry about (which this article gets at) is: preferences of _who_? Human raters are a significantly biased population of people, different ages, genders, religions, cultures, etc all inform preferences. Lots of work being done to leverage and model this.

Then for LMArena there is the host of other biases / construct validity: people are easily fooled, even PhD experts; in many cases it’s easier for a model to learn how to persuade than actually learn the right answers.

But a lot of dismissive comments as if frontier labs don’t know this, they have some of the best talent in the world. They aren’t perfect but they in a large sene know what they’re doing and what the tradeoffs of various approaches are.

Human annotations are an absolute nightmare for quality which is why coding agents are so nice: they’re verifiable and so you can train them in a way closer to e.g. alphago without the ceiling of human performance

fc417fc802•4h ago
> in many cases it’s easier for a model to learn how to persuade than actually learn the right answers

So we should expect the models to eventually tend toward the same behaviors that politicians exhibit?

c0balt•3h ago
Maybe a happy to deceive marketing/sales role would be more accurate.
RA_Fisher•3h ago
100% (am a Bayesian statistician).

Isn’t it fascinating how it comes down to quality of judgement (and the descriptions thereof)?

We need an LMArena rated by experts.

Lerc•2m ago
As a statistician, do you you think you could, given access to the data, identify the subset of LMArena users that are experts?
zqy123007•2h ago
they always know, they just have non-AGI incentive and asymetric upside to play along...
atleastoptimal•4h ago
that’s why Mercor is worth 2billion
wongarsu•4h ago
Sure, on the surface judging the judge is just as hard as being the judge

But at least the two examples of judging AI provided in the article can be solved by any moron by expending enough effort. Any moron can tell you what Dorothy says to Toto when entering Oz by just watching the first thirty minutes of the movie. And while validating answer B in the pan question takes some ninth-grade math (or a short trip to wikipedia), figuring out that a nine inch diameter circle is in fact not the same area as a 9x13 inch square is not rocket science. And with a bit of craft paper you could evaluate both answers even without math knowledge

So the short answer is: with effort. You spend lots of effort on finding a good evaluator, so the evaluator can judge the LLM for you. Or take "average humans" and force them to spend more effort on evaluating each answer

michaelmrose•1h ago
Maybe you need to have people rate others ratings to remove at least the worst idiots.
Yizahi•4h ago
Yep, it's like getting a commoner from the street evaluate a literature PhD in their native language. Sure, both know the language, but the depth difference of a specialist vs a generalist is too large. And neither we can't use AI to automatically evaluate this literature genius because real AI doesn't exist (yet), hence the programs can't understand the contents of text they output or input. Whoops. :)
ryandrake•4h ago
Popularity has never been a meaningful signal of quality, no matter how many tech companies try to make it so, with their star ratings, up/down voting, and crowdsourcing schemes.
PaulHoule•2h ago
Different strokes for different folks: I mean who is to say if Bleach or Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World is better?
gpm•1h ago
No, it's that the average unpaid human doesn't care to read closely enough to provide signal to improve AI models. Not that they couldn't if they put in even the slightest amount of effort.
ehnto•1h ago
Why would an unpaid human want to do that?
alterom•1h ago
Exactly — they wouldn't.
kazinator•1h ago
Firstly, paying is not at all the correct incentive for the desired outcome. When the incentive is payment, people will optimize for maximum payout not for the quality goals of the system.

Secondly, it doesn't fix stupidity. A participant who earnestly takes the quality goals of the system to heart instead of focusing on maximizing their take (thus, obviously stupid) will still make bad classifications due to that reason.

tbrownaw•52m ago
> Firstly, paying is not at all the correct incentive for the desired outcome. When the incentive is payment, people will optimize for maximum payout not for the quality goals of the system.

1. I would expect any paid arrangement to include a quality-control mechanism. With the possible exception of if it was designed from scratch by complete ignoramuses.

2. Do you have a proposal for a better incentive?

michaelmrose•1h ago
The average human is a moron you wouldn't trust to watch your hamster. If you watched them outside of the narrow range of tasks they have been trained to perform by rote you would probably conclude they should qualify for benefits by virtue of mental disability.

We give them WAY too much credit by watching mostly the things they have been trained specifically to do and pretending this indicates a general mental competence that just doesn't exist.

kazinator•1h ago
It is glaringly obvious that the average human is not smart enough to the level hat their decision making should be replicated and adopted at scale.

People hold falsehoods to be true, and cannot calculate a 10% tip.

echelon•1h ago
If these frontier models were open source, the market of downstream consumers would figure out how to optimize them.

By being closed, they'll never be optimal.

thorum•5h ago
Aside from Meta is there any reason to think the big AI labs are still using LMArena data for training? The weaknesses are well understood and with the shift to RL there are so many better ways to design a reward function.
dk8996•4h ago
Such as?
nl•4h ago
I don't think anyone has ever used it as training. But yes labs still do seem to target it as goal (which is a different thing).
aucisson_masque•4h ago
> They're not reading carefully. They're not fact-checking, or even trying.

It’s not how I do, and I suppose how many people do. I specifically ask questions related to niche subjects that I know perfectly well and that is very easy for me to spot mistakes.

The first time I used it, that’s what came naturally to my mind. I believe it’s the same for others.

p-e-w•3h ago
Yeah, that quote just reads like the typical “everyone is an idiot except me” attitude that pervades the tech world.

Of course people visiting a website specifically designed for evaluating LLMs do try all kinds of specific things to specifically test for weaknesses. There may be users who just click on the response with more emojis, but I strongly doubt they are the majority on that particular site.

Sharlin•1h ago
Unfortunately I don't think there's any reason to assume that you're a representative sample of LMArena users.
stared•4h ago
When they released GPT-4.5, it was miles ahead of others when it comes to its linguistic skills and insight. Yet, it was never at top of the arena - it felt that not everone was able to appreciate the edge.
johnsmith1840•4h ago
4.5 was easily the best conversationalist I've seen. Not as powerful as modern ones but something about HOW it talked felt inherently smart.

I miss that one, is 5 any better? I switched to claude before it launched.

Vecr•2h ago
> something about HOW it talked felt inherently smart

The thing was huge. They were training the thing to be GPT5, before they figured out their userbase to too large to be served something that big.

kingstnap•1h ago
No replacement for displacement, except applied to LLMs and raw parameter count.
usef-•4h ago
When the Meta cheating scandal happened I was surprised how little of the attention was on this.

Meta "cheated" on lmarena not by using a smarter model but by using one that was more verbose and friendly with excessive emojis.

mirekrusin•4h ago
True and what you can realize/read between the lines is something deeper.

LLMs are fallible. Humans are fallible. LLMs improve (and improve fast). Humans do not (overall, ie. "group of N experts in X", "N random internet people").

All those "turing tests" will start flipping.

Today it's "N random internet humans" score too low on those benchmarks, tomorrow it'll be "group of N expert humans in X" score too low.

big_toast•4h ago
Is there a reason wrong data isn't considered more broadly in its context as still valuable?

Shouldn't the model effectively 1. learn to complete the incorrect thing and 2. learn the context that it's correct and incorrect? In this case the context being lazy LMArena users. And presumably, in the future, poorly filtered training data.

We seem to be able to read incorrect things and not be corrupted (well, theoretically). It's not ideal, but it seems an important component to intellectual resilience.

It seems like the model knowing the data is LMArena, or some type of un-trusted, would be sufficient to shift the prior to a reasonable place.

fzysingularity•4h ago
> It's like going to the grocery store and buying tabloids, pretending they're scientific journals.

This is pure gold. I've always found this approach of evals on a moving-target via consensus broken.

zemo•4h ago
this argument is also broadly true about the quality and correctness of posts on any vote-based discussion board

> Why is LMArena so easy to game? The answer is structural. > The system is fully open to the Internet. LMArena is built on unpaid labor from uncontrolled volunteers.

also all user's votes count equally, bu not all users have equal knowledge.

coderenegade•2h ago
As long as users are better than 50% accurate, it shouldn't matter if they're experts or not. That being said, it's difficult to measure user accuracy in this case without running into circular reasoning.
fuddle•3h ago
> It's past time for LMArena people to sit down and have some thorough reflection on whether it is still worth running at all

They've raised about $250 million, so I don't see that happening anytime soon.

londons_explore•3h ago
I kinda assumed they wouldn't need any money because AI companies give them free credits to evaluate the models, and users ask questions and rate for free because they get to use decent AI models at no cost...

Beyond that there is coding up a web page, which as we all know can be vibe coded in a few hours...

What else is there to spend money on?

c0balt•3h ago
They don't need to spend extensively for tokens, but they gain extensively from charging for access once they've become an established player.
utopcell•3h ago
But the question was: what do they need $250m for?
bdangubic•3h ago
everyone needs $250mil :)
fuddle•2h ago
"so that we can move even faster to build new features and improve our product experience for all our users" https://news.lmarena.ai/series-a/
alfalfasprout•3h ago
and AI is a cancer on humanity... this article is clearly LLM written too.
atomic128•3h ago
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
derac•3h ago
Is there any reason to believe LMArena isn't botted by the people releasing these models?
jpollock•2h ago
Couldn't "The Wisdom of Crowds" help with this?

Maybe if they started ranking the answers on a 1-10 range, allowing people to specify graduations of correctness/wrongness, then the crowd would work?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

aipatselarom•2h ago
>Would you trust a medical system measured by: which doctor would the average Internet user vote for?

Yes, the system desperately needs this. Many doctors malpractice for DECADES.

I would absolutely seek to, damn, even pay good money to, be able to talk with a doctor's previous patients, particularly if they're going to perform a life-changing procedure on me.

stonogo•2h ago
Doctors would also pay good money for votes, so I'm not sure that would fix anything.
michaelmrose•1h ago
Raw score is often quite frankly crap. It's often still easy to surface the negative reviews and since people don't at least at present fake those you can find out what they didn't like about a product. If a given products critics are only those whining about something irrelevant, not meaningful to your use case, or acceptable to you and it overall appears to meet spec you are often golden.
BrenBarn•2h ago
Since AI is itself a cancer, maybe this is good? The cancer of my cancer is my chemo.
bigdict•2h ago
> What actually happens: random Internet users spend two seconds skimming, then click their favorite.

> They're not reading carefully. They're not fact-checking, or even trying.

Uhhh, how was that established?

boredemployee•1h ago
> Being verbose. Longer responses look more authoritative!

I know we can solve this in ordinary tasks just using prompt but that's really annoying. Sometimes I just want a yes or no answer and then I get a phd thesis in the matter.

kazinator•1h ago
The average person is dumber than an LLM in terms of having a grasp on the facts, and basic arithmetic.

A voting system open to the public is completely screwed even if somehow its incentives are optimized toward strongly encouraging ideal behavior.

kahnclusions•47m ago
AI is a cancer on humanity
tbrownaw•43m ago
From https://lmarena.ai/how-it-works:

> In battle mode, you'll be served 2 anonymous models. Dig into the responses and decide which answer best fits your needs.

It's not a given that someone's needs are "factual accuracy". Maybe they're after entertainment, or winning an argument.