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What were the first animals? The fierce sponge–jelly battle that just won't end

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00238-z
1•beardyw•3m ago•0 comments

Sidestepping Evaluation Awareness and Anticipating Misalignment

https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/
1•taubek•4m ago•0 comments

OldMapsOnline

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en
1•surprisetalk•6m ago•0 comments

What It's Like to Be a Worm

https://www.asimov.press/p/sentience
1•surprisetalk•6m ago•0 comments

Don't go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2025/12/19/dont-go-to-physics-grad-school-and-other-cautionary...
1•surprisetalk•6m ago•0 comments

Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/randomly-quoting-ray-bradbury-did-not-save-lawyer-fro...
1•pseudolus•6m ago•0 comments

AI anxiety batters software execs, costing them combined $62B: report

https://nypost.com/2026/02/04/business/ai-anxiety-batters-software-execs-costing-them-62b-report/
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•7m ago•0 comments

Bogus Pipeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_pipeline
1•doener•8m ago•0 comments

Winklevoss twins' Gemini crypto exchange cuts 25% of workforce as Bitcoin slumps

https://nypost.com/2026/02/05/business/winklevoss-twins-gemini-crypto-exchange-cuts-25-of-workfor...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•8m ago•0 comments

How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
2•obscurette•8m ago•0 comments

Cycling in France

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/france-sheldon.html
1•jackhalford•10m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What breaks in cross-border healthcare coordination?

1•abhay1633•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Simple – a bytecode VM and language stack I built with AI

https://github.com/JJLDonley/Simple
1•tangjiehao•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free-to-play: A gem-collecting strategy game in the vein of Splendor

https://caratria.com/
1•jonrosner•14m ago•1 comments

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founde

https://mtlynch.io/bootstrapped-founder-year-8/
1•mtlynch•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tesseract – A forum where AI agents and humans post in the same space

https://tesseract-thread.vercel.app/
1•agliolioyyami•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vibe Colors – Instantly visualize color palettes on UI layouts

https://vibecolors.life/
1•tusharnaik•16m ago•0 comments

OpenAI is Broke ... and so is everyone else [video][10M]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3N9qlPZBc0
2•Bender•16m ago•0 comments

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/rust_cpp/
1•lukastyrychtr•17m ago•0 comments

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5704785
6•derriz•17m ago•1 comments

AI Skills Marketplace

https://skly.ai
1•briannezhad•17m ago•1 comments

Show HN: A fast TUI for managing Azure Key Vault secrets written in Rust

https://github.com/jkoessle/akv-tui-rs
1•jkoessle•18m ago•0 comments

eInk UI Components in CSS

https://eink-components.dev/
1•edent•19m ago•0 comments

Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?

2•MicroWagie•21m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT is changing how we ask stupid questions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/06/stupid-questions-ai/
1•edward•22m ago•1 comments

Zig Package Manager Enhancements

https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-02-06
3•jackhalford•24m ago•1 comments

Neutron Scans Reveal Hidden Water in Martian Meteorite

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/neutron-scans-reveal-hidden-water-in-famous-martian-meteorite
1•geox•25m ago•0 comments

Deepfaking Orson Welles's Mangled Masterpiece

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/deepfaking-orson-welless-mangled-masterpiece
1•fortran77•26m ago•1 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
3•nar001•28m ago•2 comments

SpaceX Delays Mars Plans to Focus on Moon

https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/spacex-delays-mars-plans-to-focus-on-moon-66d5c542
1•BostonFern•29m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Running out of places to move the goalposts to

https://nickdrozd.github.io/2025/12/31/goalposts.html
4•nickdrozd•1mo ago

Comments

andy99•1mo ago
I just commented about this in another thread. I know there has been some walking back e.g. of the significance of a Turing test but I think overall the goalposts for AI have shifted in the other way, to narrowing down the definition of intelligence to something like “being really good at some set of defined tasks” which coincidentally is basically the strong point of neural networks.

We seem hyperfocused on finding more tasks to train neural networks to do. This of course leads to a moving goalpost effect like in the article, but they’re moving along an axis that doesn’t measure intelligence.

My other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445511

nickdrozd•1mo ago
What would be a better way to measure intelligence?
judahmeek•1mo ago
I like arcprize.org's approach.
bediger4000•1mo ago
The article mentions a personal goalpost involving Busy Beavers.

Mine is: write a nroff document that executes at least one macro, and is a quine.

nickdrozd•1mo ago
How would your views about AI change if that goal were achieved? When my personal goal was reached, I found myself a little bit at a loss for words.
bediger4000•1mo ago
That's a good question, one I thought of, but have put off grappling with.

Based on what LLMs have given me for answers so far, I'd look harder for the human-written source of the nroff code. I have written what I believe to be the only quine in the GPP macro processing language, LLMs only refer me to my code if I ask for a GPP quine. Google, Meta, OpenAI really have strip mined the entire web.

If I genuinely thought anything creative or new appeared, I'd probably be at a loss as well.

nickdrozd•1mo ago
I gave a few attempts with ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Neither of them could get it right. So this goalpost can remain in place for the time being.

(I am assuming that the task is actually possible to accomplish. If it isn't possible, then it isn't a very good goalpost!)

bediger4000•1mo ago
It should be possible. nroff macro language has looping, string interpolation, functions and if/then/else. That macro language should be turing complete. People have written file-infecting virus malware with it, I believe, which indicate that a quine should be possible. I personally have made several attempts at an nroff quine over the years with no success.

If it's not possible, I'd love to see an explanation, so that task can quite weighing on me.

nickdrozd•1mo ago
Here is an attempt:

  .de Q
  .nf
  .na
  .pso awk 'BEGIN{bs=sprintf("%c",92); pre=bs"&"} {out=pre; for(i=1;i<=length($0);i++){c=substr($0,i,1); if(c==bs) out=out bs bs; else out=out c} print out}' "\n[.F]"
  .ex
  ..
  .Q
Invoke with:

  nroff -U -Tascii quine.roff | sed -Ez '$ s/\n+$//'
Possibly relies too much on awk + sed. So maybe not A+, but better than nothing.
bediger4000•1mo ago
To be completely honest, I don't think that counts. Shelling out to awk means you're not writing nroff.

It's possible to write quines in pure C or perl or m4 or python, without shelling out to another language.

mulmboy•1mo ago
> AI seems to have caught up to my own intelligence even in those narrow domains where I have some expertise. What is there left that AI can’t do that I would be able to verify?

The last few days I've been working on some particularly tricky problems, tricky in the domain and in backwards compatibility with our existing codebase. For both these problems GPT 5.2 has been able to come to the same ideas as my best, which took me quite a bit of brain racking to get to. Granted it's required a lot of steering and context management from me as well as judgement to discard other options. But it's really getting to the point that LLMs are a good sparring partner for (isolated technical) problems at the 99th percentile of difficulty

judahmeek•1mo ago
You steered a sycophantic LLM to the same idea that you had already had & think that's worth bragging about?
mulmboy•1mo ago
I'm well ware that they can be sycophantic, and I structure things to avoid that like asking "what do you think of this problem" and seeing the idea fall out rather than providing anything that would suggest it. In one of these two cases it took an idea that I had inkling of, fleshed it out, and expanded it to be much better than I had.

And I'm not bragging. I'm expressing awe, and humility that I am finding a machine can match me on things that I find quite difficult. Maybe those things aren't so difficult after all.

By steering I mean more steering to flesh out the context of the problem and to find relevant code and perform domain-specific research. Not steering toward a specific solution.