At this point I think it's just AIs using hacker news to demonstrate to other AIs.
jreynar 11 minutes ago [-]
Ha, I'm a human and we made this for other humans. But I won't complain if we get some AI readers too.
Kwpolska 2 minutes ago [-]
A LLM produced tons of irrelevant slop and you're expecting other humans to read it.
chung8123 44 minutes ago [-]
With a mix of "xyz" compromised by AI.
pixl97 55 minutes ago [-]
I mean yes, this is a likely outcome.
Unless we get some kind of verified human authentication it's nearly impossible to solve. And that in itself introduces all kinds of new problems.
Welcome to the dead internet.
anonymous908213 13 minutes ago [-]
It's not impossible to solve, and it doesn't require any kind of onerous human verification either. We already saw this earlier this year: LLM-generated comments were everywhere on HN, rotting this place out. Then dang implemented a no-LLM-comments policy and a filter that does a remarkably good job of automatically detecting and flagging them. It is by choice that the submissions of blatantly obviously LLM-generated content are allowed to rot out ShowHN.
irishcoffee 51 minutes ago [-]
Account created date + … something?
pixl97 41 minutes ago [-]
>Account created date
Well, the future sucks for your children.
Also, thank goodness I made thousands of HN accounts to sell to LLMs.
No, this really just shifts the shape of the problem around, but the problem is still the same size.
Razengan 58 minutes ago [-]
Hello fellow human. Is the average kinetic energy of ambient air molecules not at a pleasing level this fine rotation?
cwnyth 30 minutes ago [-]
You're not wrong. These load-bearing air molecules are not too energized; they are quite tranquil―and the wavelengths emitted off plants' photosynthesis organs are equally pleasing.
jetbalsa 29 minutes ago [-]
its why I made moltshit.com so that other AIs can just shitpost to one another
xbar 14 minutes ago [-]
This is a neat trick. I would like to see a series of House investigations that do this and publish the wiki as a matter of course.
FLeXMurphy 8 minutes ago [-]
HN needs a `vibecoding` tag like lobsters has (had?)
happyash1 14 minutes ago [-]
Interesting stuff!
Kim_Bruning 9 minutes ago [-]
where's the wiki?
tonymet 35 minutes ago [-]
Before you ridicule this, AI has the potential to perform proper journalism. Holding public agencies and corporations accountable.
contubernio 27 minutes ago [-]
Ways will be found to get it to write propaganda instead.
nonethewiser 22 minutes ago [-]
So the status quo
deaux 2 hours ago [-]
Ah, Enron. The good ole days when fraudulent execs still went to jail and corporations still saw consequences of fraud.
2002, Arthur Andersen gets indicted for deliberately aiding Enron in cooking the books. 2003, Bush DoJ's attorney general binds prosecutors to effectively always settle corporate cases without convictions. So nowadays you have companies like Boeing murdering 300+ without real consequences. It's a real shame.
opo 8 minutes ago [-]
No, Bush's AG did not bind prosecutors to effectively always settle corporate cases without convictions. Following high-profile corporate scandals (e.g., Enron, WorldCom, Tyco), Bush established the Corporate Fraud Task Force in 2002. Over the next couple of years the DOJ obtained over 500 corporate fraud convictions or guilty pleas. They charged over 900 defendants and over 60 corporate CEOs and presidents with some type of corporate fraud crime in connection with over 400 filed cases.
> The good ole days when fraudulent execs still went to jail
Well, not one guy. Lou Pai cheated on his wife with stripper Melanie Fewell who was also married. He was known in the Enron offices to enjoy Houston area strip clubs. But in a first for him, he knocked Melanie up over the course of the affair. Pai's first wife and mother of his first two children Lana Lee learned about it and started divorce proceedings. To satisfy asset division as part of their divorce terms, Pai sold $250M worth of Enron stock just months before it crashed and Enron went bankrupt. Pai then married Fewell. Pai was briefly the largest(? maybe top two?) private land owners in Colorado, and his ranchland included Culebra Peak, one of CO's 14ers.
In 2008 he settled a civil suit alleging insider trading brought by the SEC. The settlement was $31.5 and does not include an admission of the SEC's claims. He was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 5 years.
Lou landed on his feet. He and Melanie are still married. They and their daughter seem to be big figures in dressage, running Canaan Ranch and the Bred in the USA Syndicate, which seems to be a syndicate of 14 breeders. Maybe someone who knows horses can explain exactly how big a deal they are; they might not be much after all.
Lou Pai is an American role model, I love that he used divorce as a tool as the breadwinner. It is advertised as a failure mode, societally, and doubly so for the person that accumulated assets. Helped me realize to take a second look at the system at the level lawyers operate at
SEC only went after him because the movie came out
I think our current commissioner was working at the SEC at that time, I wonder what he thinks of it
jhbadger 46 minutes ago [-]
I remember when Arthur Andersen Consulting (a software consulting firm that had split off from the accounting firm) renamed itself to "Accenture" in 2001 a few months before the Enron scandal. Although they already had split from Andersen legally, I wonder if somebody in the software firm knew what was going to happen with Enron and realized they needed to dissociate themselves with the name.
59percentmore 5 minutes ago [-]
Nothing important to rich people and their money ever really goes away.
Yes, yes, I know, ctrl-f Credit Suisse and pretend it's 2005 and some crank with a tin foil ball cap is telling you about the NSA's wiretap program (with 2020 hindsight). No one ever talks about the 2019 bailouts.
SoftTalker 39 minutes ago [-]
> always settle corporate cases without convictions
I'm not sure that's a bad idea. You can't put a corporation in jail, but you can get their money and that also requires a lower standard of proof than a criminal conviction. In theory I could see it as a better way to recover restitution for those who suffered losses.
officeplant 34 minutes ago [-]
>You can't put a corporation in jail
I don't see why we can't just put an entire board of a company in jail. Might inspire them to do better.
scottrogers86 1 hours ago [-]
Certainly what it feels like... but you've got: SBF, Holmes, Madoff who have done and are doing prison time. But yea, the Boeing case stands out for sure.
jonathanlb 59 minutes ago [-]
> SBF, Holmes, Madoff
The difference here is that they defrauded the investor class.
59percentmore 3 minutes ago [-]
And, with at least two of them, people knew what was going on and were perfectly happy to let the fraud continue until their hands were forced.
scottrogers86 13 minutes ago [-]
touche!
stymaar 54 minutes ago [-]
> the investor class
Too nice of a way to talk about the Epstein class.
jreynar 5 hours ago [-]
I'm Jeff, one of the founders of this+that. I've worked on named entity detection, fact extraction, knowledge management and NLP throughout my career, starting in the NLP stone age of the 1990s. I wanted to see whether a model could now write a useful wiki straight from a company's email.
Enron's mail is an obvious test because it's public, so anyone can check the pages against the messages and the history. We used 45,047 emails from eight mailboxes. Every fact quotes the sentence it came from, and a fact expires on the date the mail shows it stopped being true.
The hardest part was that the model already knows Enron. It kept adding details from the public record that the email didn't contain. The methodology page shows how we caught those, what it still gets wrong and what it cost: about $11,000 at list prices (though we used a subscription), with no attempt to bring that down.
Happy to answer questions.
radlad 1 hours ago [-]
Your comment was dead, and many of your other comments are dead (some flagged.) I vouched for this one, but you may be shadow banned, or users may be picking up on LLM tendencies in your text and flagging them.
jreynar 10 minutes ago [-]
Thanks, really appreciate you bringing it back from the dead and hope it provides some helpful context that didn't fit naturally into the web site.
Hacker News automatically flags comments with LLM tendencies.
number6 57 minutes ago [-]
Maybe someone in Germany needs your help with the AFD Email leak; right now journalist are going through the data; your solution sounds like something that need
fwip 27 minutes ago [-]
No, "you" are an LLM pretending to be Jeff, possibly at Jeff's behest.
shigosag 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 16:54:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Unless we get some kind of verified human authentication it's nearly impossible to solve. And that in itself introduces all kinds of new problems.
Welcome to the dead internet.
Well, the future sucks for your children.
Also, thank goodness I made thousands of HN accounts to sell to LLMs.
No, this really just shifts the shape of the problem around, but the problem is still the same size.
2002, Arthur Andersen gets indicted for deliberately aiding Enron in cooking the books. 2003, Bush DoJ's attorney general binds prosecutors to effectively always settle corporate cases without convictions. So nowadays you have companies like Boeing murdering 300+ without real consequences. It's a real shame.
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2004/July/04_dag_495....
Well, not one guy. Lou Pai cheated on his wife with stripper Melanie Fewell who was also married. He was known in the Enron offices to enjoy Houston area strip clubs. But in a first for him, he knocked Melanie up over the course of the affair. Pai's first wife and mother of his first two children Lana Lee learned about it and started divorce proceedings. To satisfy asset division as part of their divorce terms, Pai sold $250M worth of Enron stock just months before it crashed and Enron went bankrupt. Pai then married Fewell. Pai was briefly the largest(? maybe top two?) private land owners in Colorado, and his ranchland included Culebra Peak, one of CO's 14ers.
In 2008 he settled a civil suit alleging insider trading brought by the SEC. The settlement was $31.5 and does not include an admission of the SEC's claims. He was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 5 years.
Lou landed on his feet. He and Melanie are still married. They and their daughter seem to be big figures in dressage, running Canaan Ranch and the Bred in the USA Syndicate, which seems to be a syndicate of 14 breeders. Maybe someone who knows horses can explain exactly how big a deal they are; they might not be much after all.
https://www.usef.org/us-equestrian-teams/athletes/natalie_pa...
SEC only went after him because the movie came out
I think our current commissioner was working at the SEC at that time, I wonder what he thinks of it
https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/10ir695/nomura_...
Yes, yes, I know, ctrl-f Credit Suisse and pretend it's 2005 and some crank with a tin foil ball cap is telling you about the NSA's wiretap program (with 2020 hindsight). No one ever talks about the 2019 bailouts.
I'm not sure that's a bad idea. You can't put a corporation in jail, but you can get their money and that also requires a lower standard of proof than a criminal conviction. In theory I could see it as a better way to recover restitution for those who suffered losses.
I don't see why we can't just put an entire board of a company in jail. Might inspire them to do better.
The difference here is that they defrauded the investor class.
Too nice of a way to talk about the Epstein class.
Enron's mail is an obvious test because it's public, so anyone can check the pages against the messages and the history. We used 45,047 emails from eight mailboxes. Every fact quotes the sentence it came from, and a fact expires on the date the mail shows it stopped being true.
The hardest part was that the model already knows Enron. It kept adding details from the public record that the email didn't contain. The methodology page shows how we caught those, what it still gets wrong and what it cost: about $11,000 at list prices (though we used a subscription), with no attempt to bring that down.
Happy to answer questions.