Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)

There's a ton of boring and rote maintenance tasks on the English Wikipedia that are too complicated for a bot but are simple enough for regex to mostly be accurate. Stuff like fixing spelling errors, links to article names, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser

Right now the tool (AutoWikiBrowser, linked above) is slow, old, Windows-only, and tough to maintain. AI will easily replace this. Heck, I'm already using it to generate the regex rules.

mubou · 19h ago

Automating tasks is exactly what AI/ML should be used for. My concern is that they're going to be using LLMs to "translate" other-language articles into English and vice versa. LLMs are horrendously bad at this, compared to models trained specifically for translation tasks. They make shit up, invent phrases that weren't in the source text, etc., and with how much blind faith people put in ChatGPT, you can be sure a lot of those hallucinations will go unchecked.

The funny part is, Wikipedia is the #1 data set used for all sorts of machine learning training (not just LLMs). I hope they at least mark articles that were translated/edited by AI, because otherwise the AI machine is gonna start feeding back into itself sooner or later.

layer8 · 19h ago

Automation is exactly what current-day generative AI should not be used for, because it lacks reliability and reproducibility.

I agree that it shouldn’t be used to translate Wikipedia pages without thorough review either.

mubou · 19h ago

Sorry, should have been more clear. I meant "AI" in the sense that people refer to anything using machine learning as "AI". (Honestly "AI" is such a meaningless term. LLMs are anything but intelligent.) But I agree. For most tasks, a non-gen AI model trained specifically for that task is significantly better. People are just taking the output of gen AI and using it as-is, rather than treating it as a tool to be leveraged as part of something larger and programmatic, like all ML before it.

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2025)

Ask HN: Can't launch my Android app – Google couldn't verify your identity

Feedback on Tool I Created?

Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)

Anyone Else Sick of Stripe?

Proposal: Reimagining Spring Core in Go

Ask HN: 3rd Week at FAANG and feeling imposter syndrome

VPNSecure deactivated all lifetime subscribers

A affordable retrocomputer compatible with the C64

What are the AI MCP servers wish you existed?

Ask HN: Memory-safe low level languages?

Ask HN: What's a good system to remember to wear my reading glasses at my desk?

Ask HN: Parents of young kids: how do you teach that hitting is not acceptable?

Payment processors shouldn't be able to charge through an expired card

Ask HN: Email Client

Ask HN: Are there any apps to track grocery prices in local stores?

Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

Ask HS: Career Advice for Someone Struggling

Ask HN: Sold my company, parents passed away – feeling lost. What now?

Ask HN: What are your favourite daily puzzle games?

Ask HN: What Is the Hacker News for Medicine?

Ask HN: What benchmarks are you using to judge AI models?

Ask HN: Can vibe coding competitions be challenging and fair?

Ask HN: What Makes a Good Datasheet?

Ask HN: Do you know niche job board for jobs that are NOT remote?

Ask HN: I don't want to work in software anymore. Where do I go?

Ask HN: Resources for LeetCode Grinding?

New Way to Fund Solo-Founders?

Ask HN: When will Wayland eclipse X?

Ask HN: Alternatives to Deploys per Million Metric?

I want to help clear EU skies from US clouds

Ask HN: Did someone dig into the JFK files?

Ask HN: What's the modern distributed data processing stack?

Kronotop: Horizontally scalable, distributed, transactional document database

Ask HN: How do you get into systems programming

Ask HN: Recommended resources for C++ bindings generation project?

Ask HN: Is there a list of projects that will *not* adopt AI?

Ask HN: How to fix issue and find the origin of bug in codebase?

Wikipedia is using (some) generative AI now

Comments (4)

Ask HN: Is there a list of projects that will not adopt AI?