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I went back to Linux and it was a mistake

https://www.theverge.com/report/875077/linux-was-a-mistake
1•timpera•1m ago•1 comments

Octrafic – open-source AI-assisted API testing from the CLI

https://github.com/Octrafic/octrafic-cli
1•mbadyl•2m ago•1 comments

US Accuses China of Secret Nuclear Testing

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-has-been-clear-wanting-new-nuclear-arms-control-treaty-...
1•jandrewrogers•3m ago•0 comments

Peacock. A New Programming Language

1•hashhooshy•8m ago•1 comments

A postcard arrived: 'If you're reading this I'm dead, and I really liked you'

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2026/02/07/postcard-death-teacher-glickman/
2•bookofjoe•9m ago•1 comments

What to know about the software selloff

https://www.morningstar.com/markets/what-know-about-software-stock-selloff
2•RickJWagner•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Syntux – generative UI for websites, not agents

https://www.getsyntux.com/
3•Goose78•13m ago•0 comments

Microsoft appointed a quality czar. He has no direct reports and no budget

https://jpcaparas.medium.com/ab75cef97954
2•birdculture•14m ago•0 comments

AI overlay that reads anything on your screen (invisible to screen capture)

https://lowlighter.app/
1•andylytic•15m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Seafloor, be up and running with OpenClaw in 20 seconds

https://seafloor.bot/
1•k0mplex•15m ago•0 comments

Tesla turbine-inspired structure generates electricity using compressed air

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-tesla-turbine-generates-electricity-compressed.html
2•PaulHoule•17m ago•0 comments

State Department deleting 17 years of tweets (2009-2025); preservation needed

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/07/nx-s1-5704785/state-department-trump-posts-x
2•sleazylice•17m ago•1 comments

Learning to code, or building side projects with AI help, this one's for you

https://codeslick.dev/learn
1•vitorlourenco•17m ago•0 comments

Effulgence RPG Engine [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFQOUe9S7dU
1•msuniverse2026•19m ago•0 comments

Five disciplines discovered the same math independently – none of them knew

https://freethemath.org
4•energyscholar•19m ago•1 comments

We Scanned an AI Assistant for Security Issues: 12,465 Vulnerabilities

https://codeslick.dev/blog/openclaw-security-audit
1•vitorlourenco•20m ago•0 comments

Amazon no longer defend cloud customers against video patent infringement claims

https://ipfray.com/amazon-no-longer-defends-cloud-customers-against-video-patent-infringement-cla...
2•ffworld•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Medinilla – an OCPP compliant .NET back end (partially done)

https://github.com/eliodecolli/Medinilla
2•rhcm•24m ago•0 comments

How Does AI Distribute the Pie? Large Language Models and the Ultimatum Game

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6157066
1•dkga•24m ago•1 comments

Resistance Infrastructure

https://www.profgalloway.com/resistance-infrastructure/
3•samizdis•28m ago•1 comments

Fire-juggling unicyclist caught performing on crossing

https://news.sky.com/story/fire-juggling-unicyclist-caught-performing-on-crossing-13504459
1•austinallegro•29m ago•0 comments

Restoring a lost 1981 Unix roguelike (protoHack) and preserving Hack 1.0.3

https://github.com/Critlist/protoHack
2•Critlist•31m ago•0 comments

GPS and Time Dilation – Special and General Relativity

https://philosophersview.com/gps-and-time-dilation/
1•mistyvales•34m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Witnessd – Prove human authorship via hardware-bound jitter seals

https://github.com/writerslogic/witnessd
1•davidcondrey•34m ago•1 comments

Show HN: I built a clawdbot that texts like your crush

https://14.israelfirew.co
2•IsruAlpha•36m ago•2 comments

Scientists reverse Alzheimer's in mice and restore memory (2025)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/12/251224032354.htm
2•walterbell•39m ago•0 comments

Compiling Prolog to Forth [pdf]

https://vfxforth.com/flag/jfar/vol4/no4/article4.pdf
1•todsacerdoti•40m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cymatica – an experimental, meditative audiovisual app

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cymatica-sounds-visualizer/id6748863721
1•_august•42m ago•0 comments

GitBlack: Tracing America's Foundation

https://gitblack.vercel.app/
12•martialg•42m ago•1 comments

Horizon-LM: A RAM-Centric Architecture for LLM Training

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04816
1•chrsw•42m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Wikipedia: Sandbox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox
93•zaptrem•1w ago
I was learning about Wikipedia recently and thought it was interesting there was a global, public page specifically for writing random stuff to learn how to use their editor. I assumed there would be something like this on a per-user, invisible to the public level, but not a global level like this page.

Comments

tonymet•1w ago
There are both, every user has their own sandbox. But this one is there to encourage first time visitors and the uninitiated to make changes , so they know that anyone can contribute uninhibited.
kemayo•1w ago
Though, just to be clear, the per-user ones are also public. They're just a convention where if you make a subpage of your user page and call it "Sandbox", nobody is going to complain about the encyclopedic value of your edits.
tonymet•6d ago
True , though I just discovered category scans still hit your user sandbox. Kind of silly
bawolff•6d ago
If you really want something private, there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ExpandTemplates (or of course just hit preview and dont save)
firasd•6d ago
It's interesting to think about how complex the wikipedia text is compared to something like github flavored markdown or even standard html tables (although I guess it eventually renders into standard html so it's not more complex than the latter when all other html elements are considered in addition to <table>)

For example the swatch internet time infobox is dynamically updated

{{short description|Alternate time system by watch maker Swatch}} {{Infobox | image = [[File:Swatch beat Logo.svg|200px|alt=Logo of Swatch Internet Time]] | caption = Logo of Swatch Internet Time | title = Time{{efn|at page generation }} {{purge|(update to view correct time)}} | label1 = 24-hour time (UTC) | data1 = {{nowrap|{{#time:H:i:s}}}} | label2 = 24-hour time (CET) | data2 = {{Time|CET|dst=no|df-cust=H:i:s|hide-refresh=yes}} | label3 = .beat time (BMT) | data3 = {{nowrap|@{{#expr: floor( {{#expr:{{#expr:{{#expr:{{#time:H|now + 1 hour}}3600}}+{{#expr:{{#time:i}}60}}+{{#time:s}}}}/86.4}} )}}}} }}

stogot•6d ago
I’ve spent countless hours at employers fixing Xwiki syntax errors mixed with HTML. The parsing engine must be complex
decimalenough•6d ago
That's putting it lightly, since Mediawiki templates are Turing-complete.

I'm not up to speed on my parsers anymore, but I believe Parsoid remains the most complete implementation, while mwlib is a reasonable compromise.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers#Known_imp...

bawolff•6d ago
I always found it ironic that the table syntax is designed to resemble ascii-art type tables, and then literally nobody writes it in a way that looks like an ascii art table.
notpushkin•6d ago
Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

But the spaces around | make it easier to read, than, say, CSV.

fao_•6d ago
Honestly it continually surprises me how people forget about TSV

It's the perfect format, more or less! CSV, but no difficulty around commas, and the only major risk being an editor that converts tabs to spaces

hmry•6d ago
I agree it's great, but that risk is so major that I stopped using it. "There's a 50% chance that your editor will invisibly corrupt the data you enter, and another 30% chance to corrupt the entire file" is just not usable...

Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

yellowapple•6d ago
You'd think more editors would be smart enough to recognize that it's a TSV file and therefore should preserve the tabs, in much the same way that you'd think editors would be smart enough to recognize that something's a Makefile and therefore should preserve the tabs.
notpushkin•6d ago
It gets tricky when you have a TSV inside Markdown. I don’t think I’ve ever seen tabs used for indentation in Markdown in the wild, though it probably does work.

We could, however, make the Tab key insert spaces if the cursor is in the beginning of a line, and a literal \t if it’s in the middle. This way, you can write a TSV table pretty much anywhere you want.

rf15•6d ago
Lack of control over your editor's behaviour shouldn't be acceptable on this level. Just like making tabs/spaces visible, control like this ahould be a basic feature of every editor.
fao_•6d ago
> Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

Even vim lets you set that per-buffer so that's more of an editor problem than anything else, lmao

echelon•6d ago
> Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

For now. I get the feeling we'll have tooling everywhere that does this soon.

I was recently tab-completing a Markdown table and whatever autocomplete model I had just fixed the table up without any intervention.

notpushkin•6d ago
Yeah, it’s not terribly hard to do that even without AI (Prettier can do it, for example). But there’s a lot of places where the tooling just isn’t available. Then again, it’s probably not a big deal if your GitHub comment markup isn’t perfect.

I think the root of the problem is, almost everything else you use in Markdown is easy to do by hand. There’s just no good syntax for tables like this, I guess.

jbaber•6d ago
Often enough I just make a regular html table, the 'pandoc -f html -t mediawiki' or 'pandoc -f html -t markdown' as the case may be.
popalchemist•6d ago
It's basically wordpress era PHP templating.
sph•6d ago
Day 1: we’ll adopt a simple markup language because our users are not programmers

Day 2: our users have complicated needs so we’ll basically reinvent Lisp expressions, but worse.

Day N: whatever this markup language is

——

I’ve seen this happen so many times it’s not even funny anymore. Well, at least it’s not YAML.

Inityx•6d ago
> so we’ll basically reinvent Lisp expressions, but worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

bawolff•6d ago
Ironically it wasn't even intentional. Wikipedia users discovered a way to create an if statement by themselves, originally there was no conditionals.

Anyways, now a days you can use lua, so most of the wikisyntax is just glue code calling a lua program

susam•6d ago
I just went back to check whether I have a sandbox on Wikipedia. Turns out I do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Susam_Pal/sandbox

I am not a regular contributor to Wikipedia but the little time I have spent contributing there has exposed me to its very elaborate culture, with barnstars being one artefact of that culture, alongside policy acronyms everyone seems to know by heart, WikiProjects organised around every imaginable topic, userboxes that are little badges that say something about you, etc.

By the way, I added a few userboxes for the Logo programming language, in case there are any Wikipedians out here who happen to love Logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:User_logo

bityard•6d ago
Pretty much all wikis would have a "Sandbox" page for trying out that particular wiki's individual syntax and features.
chungy•6d ago
I'd wager that most wikis use the MediaWiki software, which is what Wikipedia runs on.

One particular thing that comes to mind though, is that Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org/) has a private local-only sandbox: https://fossil-scm.org/home/wikiedit?name=Sandbox. It saves to your browser's persistent storage, but never on the server.

anthonyIPH•6d ago
Tried to edit on my mobile (T-Mobile - US) and got this:

  Your IP address has been blocked     from editing Wikipedia.

  Blocked by Xaosflux

  Block will expire in 7 months

Curiosity led me to Xaosflux's Wikipedia page where I see they have been active since 2005 with over 85k edits!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xaosflux

pixel_popping•6d ago
I've had the desire to contribute so many times, but each time I was blocked. I don't think Wikipedia accurately measures how much contribution they lose because of the hostile treatment of new editors and what I believe are poorly implemented editing policies. Their policies likely haven't been revised since a decade or more, they should do a survey about it.
sheept•6d ago
in most cases you should be able to create an account and edit even if your IP address or range is blocked
reddalo•6d ago
I'm not trying to defend Wikipedia at all costs, but you should also think about how much spam and trolling would happen on their platform if they didn't have these annoying blocks for non-registered users.

I run a pretty simple SaaS with a free tier and the amount of spam that I have to manage is high; I don't want to even imagine how difficult it must be to run a website where anybody can edit pretty much anything.

gbear605•6d ago
Unfortunately large IP groups like mobile phones often need to be blocked because it’s the only possible way to constraint anonymous spammers.
bawolff•6d ago
Typically this just means you have to create an account.

Mobile ips are often blocked because of the sheer amount of spam and they switch so much that its difficult to block individual offenders.

saagarjha•6d ago
They block logged in users too.
bawolff•6d ago
Sometimes yes, but usually not at a mass range level except in extreme circumstances.

The block in this case appears to be this one: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GlobalBlockList?targ...

In that specific case, logged in users are still allowed, however you cannot create new accounts when visiting from that range, so you have to already have an account, or go somewhere else to create one.

The error message blocked users get should link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_T-Mobile_I... with more info on how to still edit.

saagarjha•5d ago
I can never edit Wikipedia when I have private relay enabled unfortunately :(
bawolff•5d ago
Well yes, the entire point of a private relay is to make it impossible for websites to be able to distinguish between you and a spammer.

There are exceptions to this policy, but you generally need to have a really good pre-existing reputation to qualify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption

saagarjha•4d ago
I mean, I am logged in, I feel like that is pretty strong signal of who I am
bawolff•4d ago
When anyone can create a large number of sleeper accounts, it isn't really. Its not like you provided ID when you made your account. So the compromise is that if you accured enough reputation you can ask for an exception.