Hacker News: jreynar

New comment by jreynar in "Show HN: We had AI write a wiki from 45k Enron emails, every fact cited"

jreynar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:24:59 +0000

I completely agree. It's hard to imagine this ever being perfect both because of AI and because people make mistakes in communications all the time. In our own usage of it we've found it essential to check things that seem suspicious once they're in the company brain. But, the more important gate, and one we expect may remain longer than people would like, is that we ask people to approve changes to a company brain that are proposed. Even this isn't perfect but it is a key defense from the brain turning into slop. And it's different than this demo, which was much closer to fully automated.

New comment by jreynar in "Show HN: We had AI write a wiki from 45k Enron emails, every fact cited"

jreynar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:01:56 +0000

Cool idea. If a journalist wants to try this on an email corpus they have (legitimate) access to, send them my way. I'd be happy to help.

New comment by jreynar in "Show HN: We had AI write a wiki from 45k Enron emails, every fact cited"

jreynar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:59:52 +0000

Hmm...maybe I've tripped people up by calling it a wiki. You can dig into a category by following the nav links at the top, e.g. to organizations (https://www.thisandthat.chat/enron/class-organization.html) and then from there dig into a specific one, such as the California Public Utilities commission by clicking on https://www.thisandthat.chat/enron/california-public-utiliti...

New comment by jreynar in "Show HN: We had AI write a wiki from 45k Enron emails, every fact cited"

jreynar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:44:57 +0000

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.

New comment by jreynar in "Show HN: We had AI write a wiki from 45k Enron emails, every fact cited"

jreynar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:43:18 +0000

Ha, I'm a human and we made this for other humans. But I won't complain if we get some AI readers too.

New comment by jreynar in "Show HN: We had AI write a wiki from 45k Enron emails, every fact cited"

jreynar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 12:03:28 +0000

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.

Show HN: We had AI write a wiki from 45k Enron emails, every fact cited

jreynar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 12:02:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thisandthat.chat/enron/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50207620

Points: 64

# Comments: 55

We rebuilt the DOS prompt and called it AI

jreynar — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:56:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/the-prompt-you-keep-retyping/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50074887

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Agents do now what got Smart Tags pulled from IE in 2001

jreynar — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:13:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/who-owns-a-page-after-it-leaves-your-server/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49814912

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

We timed 65 DynamoDB PITR restores. You can't predict the 66th

jreynar — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:03:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/how-long-a-dynamodb-restore-takes/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49711255

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Why the software industry needs a lot of regulation

jreynar — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:30:19 +0000

Article URL: https://petewarden.com/2026/09/10/why-the-software-industry-needs-a-lot-of-regulation/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695087

Points: 15

# Comments: 9

The Oldest Architecture in Computing

jreynar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:55:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/09/the-oldest-architecture-in-computing.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656912

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The extended mind was always personal

jreynar — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:16:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/the-extended-mind-was-always-personal/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49609932

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

What can we learn from 12M empirical research results?

jreynar — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:36:09 +0000

Article URL: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/09/02/metascience-corner-what-can-we-learn-from-12-million-empirical-research-results/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49570516

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Bayesian Workflow PDF from Andrew Gelman

jreynar — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:50:43 +0000

Article URL: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/25/bayesian-workflow-free-pdf/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49514693

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jreynar in "How much of HN is AI?"

jreynar — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:04:20 +0000

The post tracks two rather different things. AI is almost certainly the hottest topic in tech right now, just like mobile was hot after the iPhone launched or cloud was a decade ago. AI-generated text is a separate complaint, and it's the only one I think is controversial. Slop, no thanks. A human using AI tools to write better is fine by me, even if a tell or two slips through.