Phew, never have I seen in my life the goalposts move so fast.
It seems like even yesterday that the threshold for impressing someone is that the machine would have to be good at pretending to be a person. Now the threshold is that they have to be able to invent special relativity.
I wish I could, but there are so many people posting on here who explicitly signal their bad intentions that it's hard to maintain high-minded charity.
I agree there are a lot of people who do that on HN.
But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49801324 is obviously not one of them. There is a very natural and obvious interpretation of the post that has nothing to do with the motivations it's accused of having, and the only thing that results in seeing those motivations is prejudice. It's a single-sentence, top-level comment, written by someone who has been here since 2010 and isn't infamous enough for me to recognize the username.
It seems like even yesterday that the threshold for impressing someone is that the machine would have to be good at pretending to be a person. Now the threshold is that they have to be able to invent special relativity.