MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are the main measures of AI progress?
by ericlamb89 | 2026-01-03 16:02:43+00:00
I’m interested in how AI progress is currently evaluated and trying to build a list of the major approaches people actually use.

I’m aware that all of these measures have limitations and that many are controversial or imperfect. My goal is discovery and understanding, not to defend or attack any particular framework.

I’d love to hear:

- What measures, benchmarks, or methodologies you think belong on this list

- What you see as their key strengths and failure modes

- How (or whether) you personally use them to interpret AI progress
by michaelt | 2026-01-03 16:02:50+00:00
There was a brief period, from the fall of the Soviet Union to Bush's invasion of Iraq, where "rules-based international order" was not a joke, and in fact was taken pretty seriously by quite a lot of people.

Democracy, free trade, free speech and freedom of religion had "won" over the soviet union. International treaties were reducing stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons. The WTO had just started resolving trade disputes through negotiation rather than trade wars. International peacekeeping forces were preventing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, even though there wasn't anything like oil motivating the peacekeeping forces. Planners of the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda were being prosecuted by an international war crimes tribunal.

Then-UK-Prime-Minister Tony Blair believed in this stuff pretty earnestly - in fact he wanted to get a UN resolution authorising the Iraq invasion so badly he was happy to submit fabricated WMD evidence to get it.

Of course, even at the height of the "rules-based international order" there were always some stark inconsistencies - especially in the middle east, for example.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2026-01-03 16:03:32+00:00
> message at the top about the feed being meant for news readers

There's no real reason to take this position. A styled XML document is just another page.

For example, if you're using a static site generator where the front page of your /blog.html shows the most recent N posts, and the /blog/feed.xml shows the most recent N posts, then...?
by semini08 | 2026-01-03 16:04:08+00:00
Location: Indianapolis, USA

Remote: Flexible

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies:

- Full-stack development: React, Vue, TypeScript/JS, TailwindCSS, PHP, Python, Java, PostgreSQL, MySQL, FHIR

- UX: Figma, User Research, Contextual Inquiry, User Testing

Resume (one-pager): https://philipadeoye.com/docs/PhilipAdeoyeMS-HCI-concise.pdf

Resume (long form): https://philipadeoye.com/docs/PhilipAdeoyeMS-HCI.pdf

Email: semini08+hn@gmail.com

Website: https://philipadeoye.com/

I am a bit of a jack of all trades, learn what needs to be learned to get the job done, work in any industry kinda developer. I'm always learning something new. I also have a strong UX background and skill-set and enjoy working in all phases of the software development lifecycle from user research through requirements gathering, crafting mockups, creating code, and testing with real users.

Over the past 10 years, I've mostly worked in healthcare and research, but open to anything. I am also very friendly, easy to get along with, and caring.
by sejje | 2026-01-03 16:04:15+00:00
We'll have to address it if it ever happens. I doubt we're the first to consider it happening, including the folks who drafted the amendment.

I don't really think you're that clever, no offense. Other humans can think of "what ifs" just the same as you.

There's probably a historical record of how they arrived at the language, if you care about that kind of thing.
by senko | 2026-01-03 16:04:36+00:00
> Isn't this suitable for a Bayesian classifier? Label some data (manual + automation using substrings) and use that to train a classifier and then it should be able to predict things for you fairly well.

Sure, maybe, if I label enough data? At the number and variety of transactions I do, it wouldn't be be much better than hardcoding.

> It's that every run, every commit has a financial cost (tokens).

Ballpark figure for total cost for the Gemini OCRs for now (for me and a few hundred other people who have downloaded the app), for the past 6 or so months, is a few minutes of my hourly rate.

Absolutely not worth the manual grind for me.
by stickfigure | 2026-01-03 16:04:44+00:00
If two wrongs didn't make a right, we wouldn't punish people who commit crimes.

It should be up to the Venezuelans to decide who leads them. Maduro decided to ignore the will of the people when he held power through clear and blatant election fraud. If some sort of global public service could reach out and punish all politicians who do this, the world would be a better place.

If you are unfamiliar with Venezuela, this is a good primer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZHXW1vOBI4

From a few days ago, "The Crisis in Venezuela. Explained." It's from Warfronts, one of Simon Whistler's projects. He is neither American nor lives in the US.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-03 16:04:45+00:00
Same as the win32 ABI - stability over time. I've been able to build up two decades worth of muscle memory because the product has been very consistent over my career. Rider has "only" been on the market for 8 years. I've actually tried this and many of the alternatives. It's not that they're invalid tool choices. They just don't stick for me.

Relearning things like hotkeys for step [in/out/over] is a nonstarter. I don't really have patience to customize a complex tool like VS or Rider. I've made a point of getting comfortable with the default settings so that no employer or client can ruffle my feathers with locked down machines, etc. You can put me on a completely vanilla windows+VS dev box in an air gapped environment and I would be as happy as a clam.
by estearum | 2026-01-03 16:04:46+00:00
And again, supply will always be constrained below "affordability" by virtue of there being no profit available at affordable price points given the costs of inputs. So yes, if we imagine a world where supply isn't constrained first by the actual cost structure of construction, then clearly artificial constraints are the sole problem and solving them would solve the problem overall. But that's not the world we live in!

From your random paper:

> Fig. 5 shows the event study results for the change in log hedonic rents. In contrast to the housing supply, we find no statistically significant effect of upzoning on rents.

So it looks like your paper actually agrees with mine.

As I've said over and over: we should overhaul zoning for sure. However there is not good evidence that will solve affordability, and there's basically zero evidence that it is the cause of "all" the problems, as you so boldly claimed.
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-03 16:05:42+00:00
There is a difference between "0 tolerance", which affects mainly users, and "no entry", which prevents the product to reach your border.

In the case of Sweden, it is mainly a symptom of non-european immigration, using their criminal networks to import the product. Netherland is dominated by Moroccan mafia, France by the Algerian mafia, and so on. Remigrating them would likely solve a big part of the problem.

> controlled selling

Yes, that's already the case in most countries: I can get opioids such as morphine in the case of surgical operation. Many ADHD teens get derivatives of amphetamines. No one is against this.
by mardifoufs | 2026-01-03 16:06:30+00:00
I think the big difference is that python 3 took over rather quickly once it hit a threshold. There was a clearer path for adoption too: as more major packages started supporting python3, adoption accelerated and eventually python2 support was dropped. For IPv6 it's a lot less straightforward. You could cling on to IPv4 with basically 0 practical downsides in the current ecosystem as everything that supports IPv6 also supports IPv4, and IPv6 only networking basically doesn't exist. Even mobile users with only IPv6 adresses get to use IPv4-only services through some translation layer that every ISP has to provide when running IPv6.
by bradley13 | 2026-01-03 16:06:51+00:00
The point of backwards compatibility would be to allow IPv4 devices to work on an IPv6 network. Not to run a parallel stack.

127.0.0.1 needed to be a valid IPv6 address, along with all the others. Pick a particular prefix, say 0...* and any address with that would be extended to 128 bits. That would have been backwards compatible.
by CjHuber | 2026-01-03 16:06:54+00:00
I‘m not making a moral judgement here. I‘m saying even if the attack happens for different reasons than those you have been told (honestly a US classic), the search for a coherent reason behind it (no matter if justifiable) cannot end by saying „It doesn’t serve us. He is a stupid president, he promised us something and did something else he’s so incompetent“ because incompetent has to mean in regards to something. And if his goal really is narcissistic validation and money, well then he surely either is very lucky currently or not incompetent.
by susam | 2026-01-03 16:07:14+00:00
I do not deliberately measure traffic. And I certainly never put UTM parameters in URLs as a sibling comment mentioned, because I find them ugly. My personal website is a passion project and I care about its aesthetics, including the aesthetics of its URLs, so I would never add something like UTM parameters to them.

I only occasionally look at the HTTP 'Referer' header in my web server logs and filter them, out of curiosity. That is where I find that a large portion of my daily traffic comes via RSS feeds. For example, if the 'Referer' header indicates that the client landed on my website from, say, <https://www.inoreader.com/>, then that is a good indication that the client found my new post via the RSS feed shown in their feed aggregator account (Inoreader in this example).

Also, if the logs show that a client IP address with the 'User-Agent' header set to something like 'Emacs Elfeed 3.4.2' fetches my '/feed.xml' and then the same client IP address later visits a new post on my website, that is a good indication that the client found my new post in their local feed reader (Elfeed in this example).
by augusto-moura | 2026-01-03 16:07:28+00:00
Sleep and suspend are still kinda buggy on Linux, and probably will be for the near future. This is more of a vendor thing (as most of the annoying problems in Linux) than a dev thing. To the point where I mostly avoid it, I either shutdown the laptop completely or just let it plugged on a desk 24h

Things are improving, and we should see this fixed in the next years I assume. This is the good thing about it, Linux will probably be fixing all annoying bugs in the next few years.
by hamdingers | 2026-01-03 16:07:49+00:00
I'm not sure you understand what you're proposing. If you end IPv4 support on your product, all you're doing is banning the users on ISPs that don't have IPv6 support.

The people feeling the pain would not be in any position to fix the problem, and their experience will be that your site is down which leads to support burden and reputation risk for your product. If your support tells me to switch ISPs I'm going to roll my eyes and find another product that works.
by stickfigure | 2026-01-03 16:07:52+00:00
Before jumping in with an opinion on this event, it's a good idea to bone up on the modern history of Venezuela. I recommend this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZHXW1vOBI4

From a few days ago, "The Crisis in Venezuela. Explained." It's from Warfronts, one of Simon Whistler's projects. If you're looking for bias, he is neither American nor lives in the US.
by cman1444 | 2026-01-03 16:08:44+00:00
Indeed. If I'm Xi, I'm invading Taiwan tomorrow. Russia invading Ukraine, USA decapitating Venezuela....there's not even a pretense that international law matters any more.

It's also clear that Trump only respects power, which China clearly has. He already backed off tariffs with the critical minerals threat. Unlikely he'd come to Taiwan's aid in my opinion.

With political polarization in America, you can bet all kinds of fingers would start pointing at Trump in America, saying he enabled it by meddling with Venezuela. Stock market collapse from TSMC blockade would enhance this even moreso. I wouldn't count on much, if any, rallying around the flag effect.
by hearsathought | 2026-01-03 16:08:52+00:00
Welcome to the wonderful world of news/media. Try this with US/China, EU/russia, Israel/Palestine, etc. Note the framing, word usage, etc. Both sides could do the same thing but the headlines diverge. One side gets "aggressive", "destablizing", "terrorism", etc. The other gets "defensive", "stabilizing", "anti-terrorism", etc. Not to mention who gets called a "dictator/authoritarian". That one is real funny.
by sneak | 2026-01-03 16:09:16+00:00
The third rule of acquisition, quite obviously. But you seem to be forgetting the sixteenth.

More importantly: you are forgetting the meaning of “acquisition”. The instant the author released the software as free software, it was no longer “theirs”. It became everyone’s. The authorship is from that instant irrelevant.

It was “acquired” by the user in a moral sense at the time it was licensed by the original author (for a payment of $0, chosen by the author), not at the time the licensee began using it to make millions.

The original author chose the moral obligation placed upon the recipients of this gift, and they EXPLICITLY chose zero when they picked the license. To donate money to them later is to contravene their expressed wishes.

You can pretend that “they didn’t really mean that” but they are free to commit any text whatsoever they choose in ./LICENSE, and they chose one that declares THEIR OWN PERSONAL OPINION of the payments morally obligated by use of the software to be zero.
by senorcrab | 2026-01-03 16:09:54+00:00
Freshman university textbooks have what you need. Two of the most popular are:

- University Physics by Young and Freedman

- Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick, Walker

- Modern Physics by Krane

You might guess that real physics is not actually in freshman textbooks, and you are right. Modern physics requires rigorous mathematics.

For a nonrigorous introduction/overview:

- The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose

If you want to actually learn almost all of physics at a high level:

- Course of Theoretical Physics by Landau

Note that Landau is extremely difficult.

If you want to learn the math needed for modern physics (topology) in the context of physics, nonrigorously:

- Geometry, Topology, and Physics by Nakahara
by DustinEchoes | 2026-01-03 16:10:10+00:00
It’s tragic how similar this was to the Station fire in 2003

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire#Fir...

- sparklers light acoustic foam on fire

- no one takes it seriously at first

- fire quickly grows and people start moving towards the exit.

- not enough exits + too many people + panic results in a crowd crush at the entryway

- bystanders try pulling people out of the crush but aren’t successful

- fire explodes in size and kills everyone trapped inside.
by silon42 | 2026-01-03 16:10:18+00:00
Once upon a time (maybe even before pthreads) I made an automatic version of this using SIGALARM for profiling.

I made a wrapper (using LD_PRELOAD) around XSelectInput that would trigger the signal 0.1 seconds after a keyboard/mouse (or other event) was received... Then it would dump stack traces every 0.1 seconds where "slow" UI code was being executed (before next call to XSelectInput).
by ycombinary | 2026-01-03 16:10:44+00:00
There's psychology, but 99% of it is for the American public.

The rest is for Trumps bank account.

Also, Trump stated himself on the Howard Stern show that he wouldn't sleep with 12 year olds.

Not 18 year olds, 12 year olds.

You can argue historical standards, but he's absolutely a paedophile based on his OWN freely offered statements.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-03 16:11:02+00:00
My prediction [0]: It will take roughly 100 years for IPv6 to be ubiquitous enough to shut off IPv4. That's not intended as hyperbole, if anything it's an understatement.

Because, it's not going away: You can talk all you want about how IPv6 should have been a more straightforward expansion of the address size, but this is all in the rear-view mirror at this point. IPv6 is going to be with us forever, you may as well get used to it. It's already everywhere in 5G deployments, ISP's like Comcast use it for 100% of their out-of-band management, China is making huge progress moving to it as part of their 5-year plan, India is progressing nicely in their transition, the list goes on. We're already way too far along in the transition to abandon it in favor of something else.

But it's not going to happen any quicker than we've seen, either: There's no urgency (no "must-have" use case) except for what organizations are imposing on themselves. Yeah, IPv4 addresses are more expensive, but you don't really need many of them as a business (you can get by with a small handful of public ones, and just using L7 load balancers and SNI for everything) nor as an ISP (CGNAT can get you a long way.)

So we have a situation where things are migrating very slowly, mainly only in places where it makes sense (mobile deployments, home ISP's where the users don't actually administer the network), and generally mostly for new deployments. This is a recipe for IPv4 to be around for a very, very long time. We're used to technology moving at breakneck pace, but that's only the case for the higher-level stuff. The core infrastructure like the internet protocol is likely the textbook example of slow-and-steady, and a case where it's actually not crazy to think of centuries-long timeframes for things.

[0] Barring any unforeseen black-swan events like a world war destroying all technology and having to rebuild from scratch or something. Or a competent international agreement to aggressively migrate to it (I don't know which is more likely.)
by mothballed | 2026-01-03 16:11:17+00:00
Having a democracy heavily weighted in voting numbers by people with the smallest timescale left (and no prospect of being drafted into the armed forces) to consider has consequences. This compounded by the fact younger voting block often unable to spend much time in voting related activities due to working 2,3 jobs to afford the housing that cost boomers 1/2 the price in real terms, either because housing was cheaper or it was legal to live in an urban ~hovel that would now be declared violating one of a million regulations that have since been enacted.
by johnnyfived | 2026-01-03 16:11:31+00:00
There'd first have to be an intense evaluation and standardization process for AI / measuring AGI now. All current benchmarks are tailored to one use case (e.g. SWE) or are evaluations that can be gamed and manipulated.

I think this would take the form of something more abstract instead of concrete with raw numbers, like a revised Turing Test.
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-03 16:12:29+00:00
It really depends on where you live and the repression. In France, drug dealers paint large ads on buildings, advertising coke and weed, flood telegram channels and so on. If alcohol and cigarettes sellers do it on a massive scale, why wouldn't other drug dealers do the same (if the conditions allow it).

Drug users can be found at every stage of the society, either because of psychological/genetic issues making them more prone to consume, or because it's a cultural thing to do it (e.g alcohol), or there is peer pressure leading to consumption. Your living conditions have little to do about it, really.
by metalman | 2026-01-03 16:12:30+00:00
AI is slumping,recent balather concerning quantum AI , couldn't even generate any hate, and optical AI is another attempt at combining out of date failed hype, with newer failing hype, by someone with excess press release capacity.
All in all it's a bit worrying if this is the best they can do, and maybe next comes whatever happens when moores law, flatlines.
by mixdup | 2026-01-03 16:13:03+00:00
Why? You could easily block their range and it'd be blocked no matter where they went

IPv6 is already a nightmare for dealing with scammers and spammers. It's very often I get weirdly blocked because someone has abused my ISP's (AT&T) IPv6 block that I'm on and Wikipedia or whoever has blocked an entire /48 or something and it's virtually impossible to get a delegation outside of that range
by basisword | 2026-01-03 16:13:08+00:00
>> Trump also said he believes that American companies will be “heavily involved” in rebuilding Venezuela’s oil infrastructure.[1]

There we have it. The real reason for the invasion. Looks like the start of yet another avalanche as you say.

Jan 6th, extrajudicial killings, ICE deportations, threatening to takeover Greenland, and now the kidnap of a foreign country's leader. The world needs to wake up and realise the USA is just China/Russia with better PR.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c5yqygxe41pt
by archerabi | 2026-01-03 16:13:20+00:00
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by Dwedit | 2026-01-03 16:13:27+00:00
The problem with building a secret profile on players based on undisclosed metrics is that could be flagging legitimate programming tools as "risk". What if a programmer who likes to hack and mod other games decides to play a Valve game? You don't know how their "risk" score is calculated.

For example, I've seen other programs refuse to run if you had Sysinternals Procmon running, or various standalone debuggers. Would you be deemed a "risky" user if you used tools like that?
by Baader-Meinhof | 2026-01-03 16:14:01+00:00
To steel-man and provide a more charitable interpretation of last night:

1. Maduro stole an election. He is not legitimately in power. Many other people in power, like the military and other political factions, opposed this and wants him removed.

2. These people quietly oust Maduro in the middle of the night.

3. With the tacit approval of these folks, the US arrests Maduro for previously indicted crimes.

4. The US bombs some bases, providing plausible deniability to Venezuelan military. This was coordinated and the Venezuelans abandoned these sites ahead of time.

5. There is still stability because most of the people in charge are still there. Only the illegitimate president is gone. Venezuela can have a real election now.
by DyslexicAtheist | 2026-01-03 16:14:10+00:00
to continue your list

- Yugoslav Wars (1991-1999)
- The Troubles
- Ethiopian Civil War (1974 - 1991)
- Ugandan Bush War (1981-1986)
- Angolan Civil War (1975 - 2002)
- Mozambican Civil War (1977 - 1992)
- Second Sudanese Civil War (1983 - 2005)
- Rwandan Civil War and Genocide (1990 -1994)
- First Congo War (1996 - 1997)
- Second Congo War (began 1998)
- Sri Lankan Civil War (1983 - 2009)
- Salvadoran Civil War (1980 -1992)
- Guatemalan Civil War (1960 - 1996)
- Nicaraguan Contra War (1981 - 1990)
- Iran–Iraq War (1980 -1988)
- Lebanese Civil War (1975 - 1990)
- Israeli–Palestinian First Intifada (1987 - 1993)