MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by i_think_so | 2026-03-05 17:55:41+00:00
> Hitting MediaWiki:Common.js is the absolute nightmare scenario for MediaWiki deployments because that script gets executed by literally every single visitor

...except for us security wonks who have js turned off by default, don't enable it without good reason, disable it ASAP, and take a dim view of websites that require it.

Not too many years ago this behavior was the domain of Luddites and schizophrenics. Today it has become a useful tool in the toolbox of reasonable self-defense for anybody with UID 0.

Perhaps the WMF should re-evaluate just how specialsnowflake they think their UI is and see if, maybe just maybe, they can get by without js. Just a thought.
by noemit | 2026-03-05 17:55:47+00:00
A full size wool scarf cannot go thorough a ring. You are probably thinking of a silk scarf. I have a wool scarf next to me from Kashmir and it went down about 25 cm. The full scarf is a bit over a meter.

Looked up Pucci - looks like a designer that makes silk scarves. Silk is a totally different material. The Luddites were wool and cotton weavers.

Making wool thin enough for a meter long scarf to go thorough a ring requires the individual strand of wool to be very thin. Both making it thin and weaving that thin strand is the craft that was lost. Go look at wool yarn next time you are at a store and see how thin they can get it.
by adev_ | 2026-03-05 17:56:00+00:00
> "low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit.

Directional laser beams are orders of magnitude to jam compared to radio wave. That alone makes it of big interest for military applications, even with 500 ms latency.

There is several known cases where the jamming caused the loss of costly military drones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

Laser comms could prevent that entirely.
by kristianc | 2026-03-05 17:56:20+00:00
> One of our first customers is a staffing firm that searched for a scheduling solution for almost eight years. Their coordinators manage hundreds of candidate-client interviews where each side needs separate email threads, separate Zoom accounts to avoid double-booking links, and calendar invites connecting parties who never directly communicate. A client reschedules one interview and it cascades into four others. A candidate responds on SMS to a thread that started on email. Vela solved this in just 10 minutes of onboarding.

My very strong advice would be to pick one of these use cases and niche hard. Multi channel, multi party scheduling isnt a problem anyone thinks they have (even if they actually do). They wake up thinking they have 40 truck driver shifts to fill tomorrow.

Deputy cleaned up by going after rota scheduling for independent coffee shops. Logistics sounds like a great shout. Each have messy edge cases which you can develop a strong solution around but you'll get crushed trying to go horizontal in this space. Best of luck!
by bbor | 2026-03-05 17:56:27+00:00
It is true that they have a particularly robust, distributed backup system that can/has come in handy, but FWIW the timing matters to them. English Wikipedia receives ~2 edits per second, or 172,800 per day. Many of them are surely minor and/or automated, but still: 1,036,800 lost edits is a lot!
by mistercheese | 2026-03-05 17:56:46+00:00
> the most important duty of the submitter is to vouch for it

When shipping pressure comes, I’ve seen this to be the first thing to go. Despite formalizing ownership standards, etc… people on both the submitting and reviewing end just give up understanding Ai slop when management says they need to hit a deadline.

Probably no company would actually do this, but I wonder if we should actually actively test the submitter’s understanding of the code submitted somehow as a prerequisite to moving a PR to ready for review. I’m not sure if it will be actually hopeful, enforcing people to understand the code, but maybe at least we’ll put the cultural expectation upfront and center?
by mikehostetler | 2026-03-05 17:57:04+00:00
By using Signals and Plugins, all data between agents can be encrypted. I've seen a Jido implementation doing this already.

It's use-case specific though - security is a much bigger topic then just "agents in containers"

The point of Jido isn't to solve this directly - it's to give you the tools to solve it for your needs.
by john_strinlai | 2026-03-05 17:57:08+00:00
the sudden influx of low quality UI addons has certainly been interesting to watch!

but, i dont think it is really an ai problem in this specific case. the biggest addons in wow have been like that since way before ai was a thing (elvui, weakauras, plater, etc.). they all have a thousand settings.

and, to be honest, in the specific case of WoW, i am totally fine with it. i dont want 10 different addons to change how my UI looks. i want 1 addon to do it. and there is just so much stuff to edit that of course you are going to end up with a thousand settings.
by WalterSlovotsky | 2026-03-05 17:57:13+00:00
Xerox was a photo copier company. Actually, they were more of a photo copy company as most of their revenue came from charging the customer by they number of pages photo copied. This was the lens through which they looked at what was being produced at PARC, how is this going to cause my customer to need to make more photo copies. How is having working RPCs going to result in more photo copies being made?

Computing just wasn't in their DNA and those people at Xerox who did see the potential in PARC never had the leverage to reorient the company to take advantage. This is almost always the result when a for profit corporation invests in fundamental research that is not intimately related to their primary revenue source.
by soulofmischief | 2026-03-05 17:57:25+00:00
We are both trying to steer an internet towards a place we want to be.

The em dash is just a bonus, the grammatical structure is the giveaway. I'd invite Blanchard to argue that it wasn't LLM-generated.

I use AI tooling all day every day and can easily pick out when something was written by most popular modern models. I welcome an agentic web; it's the inevitable future. But not like this. I want things to get better, not worse.
by stanford_labrat | 2026-03-05 17:57:43+00:00
every few months i like to ask chatgpt to do the "thinking" part of my job (scientist) and see how the responses stack up.

at the beginning 2022 it was useless because the output was garbage (hallucinations and fake data).

nowadays its still useless, but for different reasons. it just regurgitates things already known and published and is unable to come up with novel hypotheses and mechanisms and how to test them. which makes sense, for how i understand LLMs operate.
by moritzwarhier | 2026-03-05 17:57:57+00:00
Why do you think AI could magically decrease entropy and create "post-scarcity"? Whatever that means.

If we wouldn't be greedy, corrupt, hedonistic and wasteful, fossil fuels would already provide "post-scarcity".

That's the foundation of modern industrial societies and the wealth we enjoy.

Problem is, humans don't seem to be interested in preventing scarcity.

Why would we then instruct some AI with humanistic and utilitarian goals?
by 1718627440 | 2026-03-05 17:58:09+00:00
> To reach a deeply nested project, you must provide the exact path: `cd ~/src/work/clients/acme/frontend/src/components`

In key presses that is 'cd ~TABsTABwTABTABaTABfTABsTABcENTER', if it is an often used project, I likely have it in CDPATH, so it's 'c acmTABfTABsTABc' or if I am actively working 'CTRL-Rfro CTRL-R CTRL-R'.

To me it sounds like a solution looking for a problem. Why should I give up predictability when it won't really save keypresses. Not that keypresses are that expensive anyway.
by mikehostetler | 2026-03-05 17:58:17+00:00
Jido originally used Langchain for LLM calls - but it wasn't a fit so I built an entire LLM client package to work with Jido called ReqLLM

https://hex.pm/packages/req_llm

ReqLLM is baked into the heart of Jido now - we don't support anything else
by jkaplowitz | 2026-03-05 17:58:23+00:00
Yeah, but the purpose of an encyclopedia like Wikipedia (a tertiary source) is to relatively neutrally summarize the consensus of those who spend the time and effort to analyze and interpret the primary sources (and thus produce secondary sources), or if necessary to cite other tertiary summaries of those.

In a discussion forum like HN, pointing to primary sources is the most reliable input to the other readers' research on/synthesis of their own secondary interpretation of what may be going on. Pointing to other secondary interpretations/analyses is also useful, but not without including the primary source so that others can - with apologies to the phrase currently misused by the US right wing - truly do their own research.
by maccard | 2026-03-05 17:58:35+00:00
I'm not OP but - an interview typically has a power imbalance. They have a job and you want the job, therefore the balance tips in their favor. If the candidate is a headhunted candidate (imagine a video game studio trying to hire a creative director from another studio) rather than a cold application, then the power is flipped and the company is trying to convince the candidate to join them.
by tzury | 2026-03-05 17:58:37+00:00
For the first time in the last 17 years that I am a member of this community I am not going to read pg’s essay. I simply cannot.

I used to live in Sederot, 1.5 miles from the border with Gaza, then October 7th happened, and what followed, and yet I had to take his tweets sometime dozens per day, and in most off the time one-sided.

Well, not that I am proud nor okay with the fatal impact on innocent children in Gaza, but see, about a year later, I took my wife and our new born baby and moved to Abu Dhabi, hoping to live in peace.

And so we were, till last weekend as ballistic rockets intercepted above our heads and one fell 30 meters in the yard in front of us. As I am writing these lines, the hole in the ground is still present.

Missles, rockets and drones are daily events here, and watching Paul Graham reposting Iran supporters on social media simply knock it. The man I respect the most when it comes to tech industry, has no idea what voices he echoes in his X account.

He built this website. He founded YC, he inspired thousands of super successful founders. No one will take it from him. But I simply cannot read texts he produces. It is a physical rejection in my body.
by Kiboneu | 2026-03-05 17:58:47+00:00
> Cleaning this up is going to be an absolute forensic nightmare for the Wikimedia team since the database history itself is the active distribution vector.

Well, worm didn't get root -- so if wikimedia snapshots or made a recent backup, probably not so much of a nightmare? Then the diffs can tell a fairly detailed forensic story, including indicators of motive.
by robinhouston | 2026-03-05 17:59:00+00:00
Thanks for the pointer. I already had Avigad’s paper open on my computer, but I haven’t read it yet.

I take the point about the output – as opposed to the process – being “close to worthless”; though I suspect it’s only a matter of time before some result whose correctness ‘was never in doubt’ is found to be incorrect as a consequence of an attempt to formalize it.
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-05 17:59:34+00:00
And people liked that model, see the huge backlash when Adobe went subscription for creative suite.

I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I upgrade my camera maybe once every ~7 years. Cameras have largely been good enough since 2016 and the 5D Mark IV. I have a pair of R6 mk II that I'll probably hold onto for the next 10 years.

Point being, Lightroom has more or less been feature complete for me for a very, very long time. For about the price of 1/year subscription, I could have purchased a fixed version of Lightroom with support for my camera and not had to buy it again for another 10 years.

We are getting milked for every nickle and dime for no reason other than shareholder value.

It actually discourages real improvements. Before the subscription model, if Adobe wanted to sell me another copy of Lightroom they had to work really hard to make useful features that people actually wanted, enough to the point they'd buy thew version.

Now, they don't have to. You have to keep paying no matter what they decide to do.
by GuB-42 | 2026-03-05 17:59:35+00:00
Thank you, I wasn't aware of this, this is the kind of thing I wish people were more aware of, kind of like fuzzing, but for tests.

About fuzzing, I have about 20 years of experience in development and I have never seen fuzzing being done as part of a documented process in a project I worked in, not even once. Many people working in validation don't even know that it exists! The only field where fuzzing seems to be mainstream is cybersecurity, and most fuzzing tools are "security oriented", which is nice but it doesn't mean that security is the only field where it is useful.

Anyways, what I do is a bit different in that it is not random like fuzzing, it is more like reverse-TDD. TDD starts with a failing test, then, you write code to pass the test, and once done, you consider the code to be correct. Here you start with a passing test, then, you write code to fail the test, and once done, you consider the test to be correct.
by drooby | 2026-03-05 18:00:05+00:00
No offense, but this comment makes virtually zero contact with reality.

Our entire civilization runs on your "polite lie" of owning non-physical things. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing agreements, NDAs. Trillion dollar companies are built on the legal enforceability of intellectual property. The software you're using to type this comment exists because someone owns the code.

Calling information "entropy" doesn't make contract law disappear. We decided collectively that people and institutions can own ideas, and we built the modern economy on that decision. You can argue that's a fiction, but it's a fiction that everything around you depends on.

You can't invoke "universal laws of information" to dismiss public claims to training data while the companies training on it aggressively enforce their own IP. They patent their architectures. They copyright their outputs. They sue competitors for misuse. They clearly believe in ownership of non-physical objects when it benefits them.

You don't get it both ways.
by shevy-java | 2026-03-05 18:00:30+00:00
This is unfortunate that Wikipedia is under attack. It seems as if there are more malicious actors now than, say, 5 years ago.

This may be unrelated but I also noticed more attacks on e. g. libgen, Anna's archive and what not. I am not at all saying this is similar to Wikipedia as such, mind you, but it really seems as if there are more actors active now who target people's freedom now (e. g. freedom of choice of access to any kind of information; age restriction aka age "verification" taps into this too).
by kbolino | 2026-03-05 18:00:41+00:00
There are a couple of ways to approach this information. One is to compare to the past. For example, comparing with 2008-2009 [1], they now spend 3.75 times as much on hosting, but 48 times as much on salaries, illustrating a tenfold relative growth in salaries compared to hosting. While hosting is not now nor ever was their only relevant expense, it is a good anchor point.

Another key difference over the last 15 years is the introduction of awards and grants, which didn't exist then but now comprise $26.8M (15%) of their expenditures. This is where most of the ideologically controversial spending actually goes, rather than the salaries per se, but even more to the point, this one line item is more than 3 times their entire inflation-adjusted budget from 15 years ago ($5.6M times 150% CPI = $8.4M).

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/WMF_Annu...
by keerthiko | 2026-03-05 18:00:54+00:00
"I may play your game if you trim away a core appeal factor for the people who already play your game by splitting the active player base" is not that convincing a feature request to a gamedev.

Many live service games that are punishing for new players are still thriving like LoL and DOTA2. Much that punish-factor can be resolved by good matchmaking, putting new players mostly with each other.
by goodmythical | 2026-03-05 18:01:08+00:00
I'm with you. Keep fighting the good fight.

Can't wait until people give up this lunacy.

It's exactly the same "back in my day" bullshit that's always existed.

What do you mean you typed this? If it isn't handwritten, I won't accept it. What do you mean you drove to work? Do you not have the dedication to walk? You can't be a good fit for this company if you're so lazy that you have to drive to work.
by bbor | 2026-03-05 18:01:12+00:00
It warms my heart that there's basically a 0% chance that they ever approach this camp's viewpoint based on the Herculean effort it took to switch over to a slightly more modern frontend a few years back. I'm glad you don't think of yourself of a Luddite, but I think you're vastly overstating how open people are to a purely-static web.

Also, FWIW: Wikipedia is "specialsnowflake". If it isn't, that's merely because it was so specialsnowflake that there's now a healthy of ecosystem of sites that copied their features! It's far, far more capable than a simple blog, especially when you get into editing it.
by paxys | 2026-03-05 18:02:18+00:00
My experience is actually the opposite.

In the old days there was no expection when and if users would upgrade, so vendors had to take extra care to ensure compatibility or they would lose business. People in a single office could be running 6 different versions of Microsoft Office, and the same file had to be viewable and editable on all of them. A company may decide to upgrade to Office 2010 but stay on Windows XP, so the Office division had the finanical incentive to ensure that newer versions would work on an older OS.

Nowadays the standard is "you must be on the newest version of everything all the time, or the software won't work". Don't want to upgrade to Win 11? Want to use Firefox instead of Chrome? Don't want all the bells and whistles that come with the newest version? Too bad.
by bluefirebrand | 2026-03-05 18:02:19+00:00
I would argue that chatbots still barely pass the turing test

They have such obvious patterns and tells that humans have already picked up on them and they can eventually sus out that they're talking to an LLM

For instance I heard recently about someone talking (verbally) with an AI voiced customer support. They were very convinced, so they asked the support agent to calculate the product of two large numbers, and it replied with the result instantly

I would argue that fails the chinese room
by mr_00ff00 | 2026-03-05 18:03:41+00:00
“ If models stopped advancing today, we could still reach effective AGI with years of refining harnesses.”

Unless you’re a machine learning engineer with something to share, our current models are not even close to general AGI, and won’t make it.

My understanding (as just an engineer) is that LLMs continue to improve at crazy rates, but it’s clear this is not the answer for AGI.
by sciencejerk | 2026-03-05 18:05:04+00:00
Based on comments here, I'm thinking that a lot of the Flock opposition is affiliated with the anti-ICE movements. Flock seems to be viewed here as a tool to persecute and hunt down law-abiding government enemies, potentially bypassing civil liberties.

I don't deny that Flock systems could and may have been used in that manner, but that doesn't seem to be its main purpose or use. Presently I'm seeing Flock as a net win for most law abiding persons, and I believe that its use should and can be highly restricted and monitored as a tool to make the country safer. No reason to throw the baby out with the bath water
by aleda145 | 2026-03-05 18:05:16+00:00
Really cool! During my university years I had a lot of fun with scheduling 200 interviews for different 20 companies for a career fair.

Created a problem statement and then solved it with Gurobi, repo here: (https://github.com/aleda145/interview-scheduling-kontaktsamt...)

Agents feel like the perfect fit for the whole rescheduling loop that happens in the real world!

Have you had to use an optimization solver yet? If so, which one?
by NickC25 | 2026-03-05 18:05:21+00:00
Sadly, you're right on the money here, nobody will ever spill the beans.

Problem is Willie knows everything (he was the president for fuck's sake) and is just lawyer-speaking his way out of admitting that he along with multiple former presidents (including the current one) were/are compromised by a hostile nuclear-armed foreign actor's (read: "ally's") intelligence agency. He can't sing, or the whole charade comes apart.

The contagion fallout is massive. This involves several of the wealthiest people on the planet, tech leaders, business leaders, politicians in powerful countries...and involves several major geopolitical actors...and involves some unspeakably disgusting actions to children.
by shevy-java | 2026-03-05 18:05:29+00:00
Hmm. The "active request" is quite common though. I agree that this is unfair, since it is theft, IMO, but Finland is not the only one forcing active engagement to get your money back. Even when the government stole that money from the people.

> we can and should trust the authorities.

Well, Finland has a fairly competent government usually for the most part. That mantra will not work in many other countries though - such as Germany. Just look at what Merz is doing; his left hand does not know what the right hand should do ...