Thread

Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met

202 points · 271 comments · stabbles

joegibbs · 1790897129 · focus · HN ↗
There's one of mine in there where I predicted in 2023 that it would be 20 years until AI would be reliably able to entirely build and deploy arbitrary applications from a prompt. I was off by about 18 years on that one!
1. ASalazarMX · 1790898900 · focus · HN ↗
  One challenge of mine is a self-hosted AI doing my full tax return, without errors that would get me in trouble. Bonus points if it exploits legal loopholes.
  I want AI to replace me in my chores, not in my enjoyable activities.
  1. tehjoker · 1790900377 · focus · HN ↗
    That particular one is solved in other countries. The tax authority just sends you a bill and you text yes or no. Only people with very complex situations need to file.
    They don't do this in this country because (a) it's a political project to make people to sympathize with the rich by feeling their pain (b) it's a great scheme for legalized corruption by creating incentives to build companies around a fake problem.
    avadodin · 1790900836 · focus · HN ↗
    Literally everything could be derived automatically by the government in current year so filing taxes feels like entrapment, but I like that idea.
    They not only do that —saving you so many worries— but then you get to be medieval about it and say: no, I challenge the tax authority to a duel.
    twoodfin · 1790906281 · focus · HN ↗
    Literally everything could be derived automatically by the government in current year…
    The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most important transfers embedded in the tax code. It provides about $70B to low-income workers every year.
    Take a look at the eligibility criteria:
    <a href="https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-income-tax-credit/who-qualifies-for-the-earned-income-tax-credit-eitc" rel="nofollow">https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-in...
    You can claim the EITC if you are married, not filing a joint return, had a qualifying child who lived with you for more than half of the tax year and either of the following apply.
    - You lived apart from your spouse for the last 6 months of tax year, or
    - You were legally separated according to your state law under a written separation agreement, or a decree of separate maintenance and you didn't live in the same household as your spouse at the end of the tax year.
    …
    You can claim the head of household filing status if you're not married, had a qualifying child living with you more than half the year, and you paid more than half the costs of keeping up your home.
    No, the government can’t derive this all “automatically”.
    rerdavies · 1790912169 · focus · HN ↗
    Your government really needs to fix that. That's nuts.
    TheDong · 1790912410 · focus · HN ↗
    In more civilized countries, you file your current address and all change of address forms with the government, you register any separation agreements with the government, etc.
    The government absolutely should know enough to apply this reasonably accurately, and things that they can't correctly derive (like 'paid more than half the costs of keeping up the home') should simply not be part of tax law, or should be a checkbox when registering your address of "I am head of household" so the government knows.
    The US government can't derive all this, but they should update it so they can.
    Heck, with the NSA's hooks into banks and cell phone companies, there's a non-zero chance they actually could derive this all now if they wanted.
    kelseyfrog · 1790913173 · focus · HN ↗
    > a checkbox when registering your address of "I am head of household" so the government knows.
    The American mind cannot handle such invasions of privacy.
    bryanrasmussen · 1790919754 · focus · HN ↗
    >and things that they can't correctly derive (like 'paid more than half the costs of keeping up the home')
    In most situations where you paid significantly more than half deriving this information should be easy.
    Obviously edge cases where someone paid 55% would not be easily derived, but probably most people wouldn't care too much about that.
    twoodfin · 1790944243 · focus · HN ↗
    “In <current year>, the Feds could derive this automatically and just send me a postcard.”
    “No, they can’t.”
    “But they should be able to!”
    Personally, I don’t want a battered wife fleeing her husband to have to file a form with the IRS for tax purposes, but mostly I’m just tired of this kind of hn thread.
    wildzzz · 1790968076 · focus · HN ↗
    If I start doing odd jobs on the side for cash, there's zero papertrail of my income other than maybe text messages between me and customers. How would the government know how much money I make? Should I force my customers to file a 1099-NEC? Should I be required to get an EIN because I want to mow my neighbors lawn for cash?
    If you're working a W2 job or contracting for a big company, the government is probably aware of your income and that's where we should be focused on automating tax returns but if your income comes from regular people, they likely have no idea.
    Unless you turn the entire national security apparatus around to surveil citizens' income, I don't think it's ever possible for the government to know everything.
    How it should work is that the government should show you everything they already know and prompt you to fill out anything they don't and then you submit it. The majority of people would immediately benefit from this. They don't do this for a few reasons: number one being the tax prep lobby that wants to make doing your taxes a burden such that even regular people feel the need to spend money or have their personal financial information gathered by private companies. The second reason is that if the government is already aware of how much you've made, chances are you've already paid your taxes and would either be looking at a refund or other tax credits, the government is effectively spending money to make it easier for you to take money away from it.
    TheDong · 1790991617 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree with this fully, this is how a lot of civilized countries work.
    For 90% of the population, taxes are automatic, and the few people who do side-jobs or have lemonade stands or deal drugs have to file their own taxes separately.
    I'm not opposed to that, I just want the 90% case of "single or normal family + W2 employer(s)" to be covered automatically.
    User23 · 1790902989 · focus · HN ↗
    Actually you can do this in the USA.
    You can just ask the IRS for your "tax transcripts" and do the data entry. People don't do this because it leaves tons of money on the table.
    Now you might say that a tax game that rewards skilled play is bad. But are you sure about that? Because everyone with influence over the system (who all happen to be skilled players) happens to be quite fond of the game, observably speaking.
    crote · 1790906239 · focus · HN ↗
    > People don't do this because it leaves tons of money on the table.
    In my country I literally got a letter from the government if I could please file my taxes, because they believe the automatic deductions are too high so I am likely owed a back payment. In a previous year (I am not very good with non-timing-critical paperwork) they even called me on my personal cell to inform me about something similar.
    The slogan of our tax collection agency is "we can't make it more enjoyable, we can only make it easier". If you're a regular employee and your taxes - deductibles or not - are a hassle, then that's 100% a political choice.
    tehjoker · 1790996378 · focus · HN ↗
    What income bracket are you in? I get very few benefits from doing it myself and I have to pay money to a preparer (online or otherwise).
    In other countries, you can still do it yourself, you just don't have to do it if it's simple.
    AnthonyMouse · 1790919088 · focus · HN ↗
    > They don't do this in this country because (a) it's a political project to make people to sympathize with the rich by feeling their pain (b) it's a great scheme for legalized corruption by creating incentives to build companies around a fake problem.
    It's worse than that. Nobody is actually sympathizing with Mark Zuckerberg, the reason US taxes are complicated is so Congress can confuse people about how they really work.
    One of the examples in this thread is the complexity of the EITC. The EITC is one of the most "efficient" tax credits -- it's much better to give people money (or not take it from them to begin with) than having systems of complicated vouchers for some specific thing or another with a bunch of strings attached and bureaucratic paperwork. But that same efficiency means that if it was working as it was supposed do, most of the lower middle class would be getting a piece of it. So why is it so complicated?
    First, to hide this part of it: The end of the phase out range for an individual with no dependents, i.e. the most money they can make and still receive it, is $19,540. Which is to say, is less than what you make by working a full time job at the minimum wage in 30 states. None of those people get any of it. Neither do the people who are unemployed, because you also don't get it if you don't have any earned income. The primary way to receive any of it is to have a child -- but not too many of them, because you get no additional credit for having more than three. Moreover, the caps for married couples are only a little higher than they are for single people, so a married couple in California with two incomes gets nothing even if they have three children because the credit is fully phased out by making their state's minimum wage.
    And second, because if they make it complicated enough then even some of the people who are eligible for it won't notice.
    The combination of these is the reason a credit that should be going to a significant percentage of the population is somehow only ~1% of the federal budget. Because then Congress gets to pretend to be helping people while minimizing the amount of helping people they actually do.
    sokoloff · 1790933560 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s entirely fair to have a policy debate about how the phase in and phase out should work (what levels, what slopes, and what factors) or whether an Nth child should add to the EITC for various values of N.
    But realize that changing it is a policy debate not a “this should be going to a significant percentage of the population [but isn’t because of tax code complexity]” debate point.
    (I happen to agree with you that this type of credit is highly beneficial.)
    AnthonyMouse · 1790958503 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not about whether the EITC is a good policy. If someone thinks it's a bad policy then they should argue that we shouldn't have it.
    But that's a different matter than pretending to have it while disguising the fact that it's structured to make sure hardly anybody actually gets it beneath a layer of impenetrable complexity.
    sokoloff · 1790960925 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure I follow exactly. I think of all tax policy as being "whatever the tax code says it is". There's no pretending; the policy is written and I don't know who or what is pretending to be different.
    If EITC increases are capped at 3 children, it's because the policy that was passed made that choice. If we want to debate whether that cutoff should be 2 or 4, that's a valid policy debate.
    If EITC credits are capped at just under $20K of income, that's perhaps because the policy targeted the very lowest income working poor and by policy did not allocate funds for the next tiers of income earners. Again, that's a policy debate to be had.
    AnthonyMouse · 1790961304 · focus · HN ↗
    So there's policy (we should have something in the general shape of a credit for working people who make below the median income) and there's policy (the amount of the credit is X if you're married and have two children and have a combined income of Y).
    The issue is that Congress is making the details of the second type of policy complicated on purpose to conceal the fact that they're not really doing the first one, while making it seem like they are to mollify the people who want something like that.
    sokoloff · 1790964049 · focus · HN ↗
    > we should have something in the general shape of a credit for working people who make below the median income
    That wasn't the framing of the EITC when introduced. The framing when introduced was in opposition to basic income proposed by Nixon and instead to offer a temporary stimulus via refundable credits to the working poor that would roughly offset their social security taxation, to ensure that "work pays more than welfare," and to try to stimulate the economy to exit the severe recession of 1974.
    It had nothing to do with supporting working people in the 4th and 5th decile of income. Getting that policy agreed to is a policy debate that hasn't been had.
  2. notJim · 1790901632 · focus · HN ↗
    In recent years, I have not been able to find a human CPA who can accomplish this feat. (If anyone has a reco who's taking new clients in the US west coast, feel free to email me.)
  3. underlines · 1790905069 · focus · HN ↗
    i filed my swiss taxes for 2025 in 2026 (april) by dumping everything (local tax law, tax guide, my and my wife's documents, bank statements, income statements, etc.) into a folder and asking claude to fill it out. i had nothing to fix. submitted it.
    colordrops · 1790917149 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not specifically familiar with swiss tax law but european taxes are typically far more simple than american taxes.
    I have a relatively straightforward tax return and still found significant mistakes on 3 out of the last 4 years of returns filed by CPAs.
    lbreakjai · 1790929415 · focus · HN ↗
    I did mine and my wife's. Mine is really easy but my wife's situation is a bit harder, because she both works as an employee and as a freelancer. Claude was able to make sense of the excel spreadsheet sent by the accountant, and to translate it into what was expected on the tax portal.
    It beats the tax advisor we hired two years ago, who made a significant mistake.
    aleph_minus_one · 1790930797 · focus · HN ↗
    > I'm not specifically familiar with swiss tax law but european taxes are typically far more simple than american taxes.
    The German tax system is one of the most complicated one in the world.
2. BobbyTables2 · 1790909327 · focus · HN ↗
  I’m right with you there.
  It also didn’t help that for a very long time, simple adaptive filters and basic neural networks were branded as “artificial intelligence” despite having very basic capabilities and little mystery on how/why they worked in their narrow use case.
  I didn’t believe the recent hype for a very long time. But having tried out the latest models, I’m kinda shocked. In 1 minute it comprehends a complex niche code base and points out subtle errors with very little noise. A senior engineer we would have taken months to do less. Coverity would have cost dearly and generated far more false positives than substance.
  1. brokenmachine · 1790932324 · focus · HN ↗
    > In 1 minute it comprehends a complex niche code base and points out subtle errors with very little noise. A senior engineer we would have taken months to do less.
    They of course operate faster than humans, but this is hyperbole. Unless your senior engineer sucks.
    LEDThereBeLight · 1790941089 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t know, it has taken me months to onboard onto any codebase I’ve ever worked on.
    BobbyTables2 · 1791158749 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re right, 1 minute is hyperbole - it may have taken a full 5-10 minutes.
    The very best people I’ve ever worked with would have taken at least week to find and prove even 1 or 2 of the lowest hanging findings.
    It would still take a few months for them to really digest everything and come up with substantial ideas for improvement.
3. isolay · 1790910760 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
4. well_ackshually · 1790925188 · focus · HN ↗
  If you don't specify any amount of complexity, or whether or not it's slop that collapses under pressure, sure, but in the case even a first year CS student passes that test.
5. aleph_minus_one · 1790930746 · focus · HN ↗
  > There's one of mine in there where I predicted in 2023 that it would be 20 years until AI would be reliably able to entirely build and deploy arbitrary applications from a prompt. I was off by about 18 years on that one!
  If you take "arbitrary" seriously, we are still very far away from it.
  1. eleventen · 1790931235 · focus · HN ↗
    What is the strict definition of arbitrary you feel we haven’t reached? Right now the limit is scale and complexity, not domain or “type” of application.
    dwattttt · 1790933376 · focus · HN ↗
    > reliably able to entirely build and deploy arbitrary applications from a prompt
    You're maybe thinking that we can build and deploy arbitrary "kinds" of application. Being able to "build and deploy arbitrary applications" would mean I could ask for any scale or complexity in my application.
    dmd · 1790934246 · focus · HN ↗
    Find me even one human in the world who meets your criteria, then.
    edit: I guess I misread this. I thought you were saying "well, AI isn't smart until it can solve any arbitrary problem in the whole world"
    dwattttt · 1790934821 · focus · HN ↗
    ... I don't think there is? I don't see what bearing that has on the original question either.
    EDIT: to forestall further back and forth, I don't think there'd be any controversy if the problem statement said "common applications"
    aleph_minus_one · 1790937946 · focus · HN ↗
    > I don't think there'd be any controversy if the problem statement said "common applications"
    I would claim "common applications" is also controversial because what is a "common application" depends insanely on the area in which you work. Even if you exclude some highly advanced scientific applications (because you don't consider these to be common), in many industrial sectors there exist applications that have grown over multiple decades, and which encode an insane amount of knowledge about the respective sector and its workflows; this is a central reason why these applications are so hard to replace.
    zahlman · 1790934871 · focus · HN ↗
    Now that is moving the goalposts. The entire subthread has nothing to do with whether AI can match humans in any particular endeavour. It's simply about one user's past prediction about an AI capability.
    lukeschlather · 1790957531 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, it depends on how you define "complexity." LLMs are totally rewriting the notions of what's hard for a computer but easy for a human. LLMs have really bad spatial reasoning. I would have to play around a bit, but I'm very certain you could come up with a prompt where an AI is incapable of properly generating a "simple" app that has some important layout constraints.
    And just generally, anything that requires the LLM to understand something LLMs don't understand, it's going to fail. I'd hesitate to give an exact example without trying Astra/Fable but I'm sure they exist.
    pessimizer · 1790958527 · focus · HN ↗
    One-shot a minesweeper clone that isn't screwed up in an insane way. Bonus points if you choose a language/platform that LLMs aren't likely to have already seen a minesweeper clone done in/for already.
    Right now, they can't build anything without help that isn't buggy in unintelligible ways. If you push the thing feature by feature, have a lot of tests and a lot of instrumenting, and you check that it isn't cheating or lying after every step, you can get a lot of work done.
  2. desterothx · 1790949435 · focus · HN ↗
    I would argue you need to prove p=np before using the term arbitrary
    aleph_minus_one · 1790952613 · focus · HN ↗
    P vs NP does not mean what people think it means:
    - Even if we have P=NP, it is not even known whether there will ever exist a "practically useful/fast" algorithm for solving NP-complete decision problems.
    - If P != NP, it is perfectly reasonable that there exists an algorithm that is for all practical purposes "fast" algorithm (say, some O(n^{log log log log log log log n}) algorithm with a very small hidden constant) for solving NP-complete decision problems.
    - It is entirely possible that average case complexity is the much more important complexity measure than the worst-time measure that is used for defining the P and NP complexity classes. If you are into this kind of questions, you might enjoy the article
    Fifty Years of P vs. NP and the Possibility of the Impossible
    <a href="https://cacm.acm.org/research/fifty-years-of-p-vs-np-and-the-possibility-of-the-impossible/" rel="nofollow">https://cacm.acm.org/research/fifty-years-of-p-vs-np-and-the...
    and the paper
    R. Impagliazzo
    A personal view of average-case complexity
    <a href="https://www.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~krajicek/ri5svetu.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~krajicek/ri5svetu.pdf
    --
    Also, in the realm of complexity theory, the question of P vs NP is just a small puzzle piece.
    Just to give one example: isn't the question of P vs PSPACE much more exciting. If you believe in P != NP, P != PSPACE is a trivial corollary. But we can't even exclude P = PSPACE.
    Seriously: there exist so many complexity classes (some of high potential practical importance) for which we often basically know nothing except for the trivial inclusions.
6. bunderbunder · 1790951808 · focus · HN ↗
  Everyone's picking on what's meant by "arbitrary", but it's the "reliably" and "entirely" bits that get me to raise an eyebrow.
  I think there's a whole lot of survivorship bias going into our perception of how effective AI is at building arbitrary applications without significant hand-holding.
  1. linuxftw · 1790954803 · focus · HN ↗
    5.6 Sol, Astra, Opus/Sonnet 5.5 can build and deploy entire applications end to end.

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