800 HN 'wake me up when AI can' comments get 100,000 votes on whether the bars were cleared
ArtificialOther · x · 2026-11-11
The blog post "Wake me up when AI can..." collected 800 HN comments from 2016–2026 of the form "wake me up when AI can…" / "I'll believe it when…" and let visitors vote on whether each bar had been cleared. It hit the HN front page on Oct 1st; by Friday night over 100,000 votes from nearly 9,700 people were cast.
- Core insight: people normalize fast — a few days with a new model builds intuition that would have been unthinkable earlier (e.g. letting Claude debug a performance regression overnight).
- Turing test: 8% of statements were Turing-test variants, the clearest case of moving the goalposts — the plain version gets a clear "yes", but adding qualifiers drops the pass rate.
- The post pairs cherry-picked historical claims with their vote outcomes for readers to judge.
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