skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to automate calls to callcenters?
Hey HN Folks,

We're an ecommerce company and over the break I'm trying to automate some of our business processes that are quite tedious. One of these is contacting call centres for various tasks (lodging issues for lost packages, making payments etc).

Thanks to the likes of Twillio making a call is easy. Speech recognition and synthesis is also achievable... where I'm getting stuck is determining on whether I'm on a call queue, or on hold or not. Would you folks have any ideas on how I might determine this?

Thanks for your input in advance!

Cheers,

Marcus
They can be meshed, but you need to set them up wired first. The UAP-AP is 2.4Ghz only, the UAP-AC-PRO also supports 5Ghz. The UAP-AC-LITE has fewer MIMO antennas but also supports 5Ghz.
> You didn't engage the content of the book. You just said you didn't like it because liberals did. That's content free.

No, I think its a poor choice when you are trying to tell the story of a people so that you can gain an understanding of them and they don't like or agree with the book, but their opposite number does and sees it as a revelation. Living among the natives to write a book is an old ploy that has been done poorly for a long time, but since I live here full time, clocking hours isn't really part of my argument.

Confirmation bias would be a nice way to put it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
An even shorter way to say this is that stack-based VMs are more high-level. With a register-based VM, you shift some important questions (like register allocation, and handling temporaries) to the compilers. With a stack-based VM, the compiler can be simpler, but the JIT will need to be correspondingly more complicated.

Which one to choose depends on how it is all used. For .NET, multi-language targeting was seen as an important design goal, and so making the bytecode easier to target was prioritized, with all the complexity relegated to JIT.

Long-term, I think it was a right solution in general, because most platforms seem to be moving from JIT to AOT; and with AOT, having the complexity in the bytecode-to-native compiler still has the upside of DRY, and slower compile times stop being a downside.
I think that next time you talk to him, instead of "suggesting" that he take some time off, you have to clarify that it is not a suggestion, but a business partner request, and a "no" will not be looked upon kindly.
I've found the Python pyexcel library to be the most flexible option to read/write Excel files. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyexcel/0.0.9
Swintonreport.com for political discourse.
If you're deploying to physical hardware, most enterprise-y drivers and tools are only provided in RPM format by the vendors.

That, and I've had much better luck with RedHat on bare metal than any other distro.

Personally, I like Debian-based distros, but for physical hardware, RedHat is where it's at.
It may be a fine line that separates philosophy and religion, but their respective "theaters of the mind" are pretty different.

Possible worlds that are built on novel premises or inferred from unrecognized patterns are likely to interest anyone who has an imagination. That's true even for nutty worlds like simulacra and multiverses.

But possible worlds that must conform to dogma, especially when it's structured and inviolable (religion) or where imagination and doubt are forbidden (faith)... These seems a lot less interesting, to a nonbeliever like me anyway.
If you are looking for mathematics & statistics:

Python(numpy/scipy) & R are perfect for starting (and open source!).
Extrinsic motivation is intrinsic motivation that you project onto an outside agent.

You're not motivated by a job's salary, you're motivated by the nice things you can do with money--things you decided are intrinsically more important than the things you can do while broke.
iOS 10.2 includes new emoji, the TV app, and a big pile of other tweaks
Dismissive swipes aren't good here, so please don't do that. Your criticism downthread is much better. Better still would be saying what books you think are better along a similar axis, because then we might learn something too.
No need. There's only a handful of providers in most places. Here in Rochester, NY there's really only one unless you want to go with the misery that is Frontier's DSL.
That seems too important to have zero visibility on to me. Just eyeing the graphs, your queue size grew at 750m/s from 17:49 to 17:50. You then starting shedding at 17:50 for 40s. Assuming the ingress rate was roughly linear (which it looks like it was) you shed ~30,000 requests out of 3-4M. Does that not seem high to you?

This system seems great for at most once delivery. I wish I had more problems to solve with that constraint.
And, depending on the area, there are more far homeless then there are shelter beds. Maybe this isn't the case in San Francisco, but sure as hell is the case in Vancouver, and Kelowna (Which has just passed a bylaw against sleeping in public spaces.)
Vi is vim without text objects ie pretty poor (and one of the most important things a vim user should know).

Your advice is very misleading in 2016.

I don't think there is an active vi codebase, vi is actually vim in compatibility mode in most operating systems.
One thing to remember about Joe's perspective on veganism is that he is a hunter and public figure, so he has attracted attention from militant vegans. While he has vegan friends and doesn't seem to really care what people eat, he's vocal with his annoyance with that particular subset. Plus he's a comedian, so you can't take anything he says personally.

On a side note, I'm still waiting to hear some hard science on the affects veganism (which clearly doesn't include The China Study). If the right person were out there, I'd be curious to hear them on JRE.
A few new books the YC crowd might like:

"Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1455544590

"What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1468313754

"Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019984495X
I have a number of points to make.

The Many-worlds interpretation of QM does not mean that different universes have different fundamental constants. If that were the case, the fundamental constants could change in value each time a quantum measurement took place.

The universe might be infinite in extent (e.g. Einstein-de Sitter) even though at any time you can only see a finite part of it, so even though the probability of life in any galaxy might be vanishingly small, as long as it's finite you can expect life to emerge somewhere.

Supposing our universe is a simulation, possibly running inside another simulation, etc. At some level there still must be a ground reality in which the first simulation was made. So, there needs to be at least one level, which appeared out of nowhere, or always existed, in which computers can be built to run the simulation.

I'd rather not have to repeat the same points I made in an argument I had here previously, as no one seems to change their mind about these things, but I can't see any way that NPCs in a virtual reality/simulated universe can be conscious - even though they might appear to be - so I think that if we're in a simulation, consciousness must be based in the universe which is not a simulation.

It might be possible for the fundamental constants (and, indeed, the laws of physics) to be fine-tuned, but only in a simulation, by its programmers.

The idea of a creator God (of any non-simulated universe)
has no explanatory power. All it does is hide complexity inside something supernatural. How would this god appear out of nothing?
Now you've taught me that the Glycemic Index is an illusion and that Doritos are high in micronutrient fortification. This is so informative.
Helping to moderate comments on theguardian.com!

https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9105-detecting-antisoci...

(We're still beginners as will be apparent from the video but it's proving useful so far. I should note, we do have 'proper' data scientists too, but they are mostly working on audience analysis/personalisation).
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Statement-Milton-Friedman...

I'm not trying to be cute here btw.
Amazon Employees Vent About How a Recent Suicide Attempt Was Handled
In France there are more and more cities with electrical cars you can rent on the fly. In my street I have 3 of them, I can just book it in 1 minute and hop on. It's always awailable and clean. No need to pay for gaz, parking is garanteed. Maintenance and insurance is included. So really, I don't mind sharing it.
Fastrange: A fast alternative to the modulo reduction
Danielle Morrill's guide to the galaxy (knowing what’s important vs. what’s BS)
Thanks, we've updated the link from https://futurism.com/this-self-healing-tech-could-let-us-rea....
Interesting story; thanks. I have a few reactions to it:

First, it seems like a marketing photo-op for the CEO. In your opinion, is the author trying to make Rockefeller relatable? You can see how it works with HN readers.

These days his success is attributed to business acumen and notorious practices, not engineering, but I haven't read much about him. What impression does the book give?

Also, I would argue that the time he spent on solder drops was a waste of company resources much more valuable than solder: his time. What would he say if he saw the machine operator similarly wasting company time or resources? Rockefeller would have helped his company much more by improving his own efficiency.

Finally, in most companies when Rockefeller asks if you can reduce the number solder drops and you are the lowly solder machine operator, you reduce the solder drops no matter what. There is no way that story could have ended differently, and nobody would reveal that the boss's idea had bad consequences: The barrels had to be handled more carefully, they leaked at a higher rate, they had to increase some other sealing process to compensate, etc.

All my cynicism may be unfair, however.

EDIT: A bunch of edits
I'm intrigued, can you list any successful members of this generation of products inspired by Pebble?

I think in some ways this should be a wake up call for Kickstarter, Pebble was their biggest success story until now.
I think one of the main problems with ethics is the abstract nature of software and development. Let's say you create an encryption algorithm. That algorithm can be used by terrorists and pedophiles or it can be used by banks and civil disobedients. Or let's say you create an encryption breaking algorithm. That algorithm can be used by law enforcement and the judicial system or it can be used by identity thieves and oppressive governments. Are you as the developer responsible for all those uses? It is hard enough to know how your employer will use your code in the future, but it would be literally impossible for any open source software.
I can add a different take -- I inherited a big chunk of assets a number of years ago. As opposed to a lot of tech cashouts, this included a family company, commercial office space and an investment portfolio. A big difference between myself and others in the thread is that I've had a lot of exposure to, and interest in, asset management.

I stayed with my corporate job for about a year, but ultimately the effort of playing board member to the family company and making informed investment decisions about the rest clashed with amount of work they wanted from me as I kept rising at my corporate job. When I told them I was leaving, they offered me a big raise and to double the team under me. I countered by asking for part-time and, if they wanted, a smaller team or none at all. Ultimately that didn't work for them, they needed a creative and driven manager, not a good but expensive individual contributor.

Like a lot of people, I took the next year off, convinced my girlfriend to quit her job too and we traveled. But I'm back to work these days, not a in normal job though -- I really think of myself as a full time investor.

I think there's a big thing people miss in this situation is that they can't see the forest for the trees. You have so many opportunities to create jobs, create products, create places to live, or drive charitable change when you have a lot of assets. Why work 2000+ hours per year in a normal job just to add a drop in the bucket? There's a lot of spilled ink in the linked article and elsewhere talking about, roughly, Maslow's theory of self-actualization and how you can get there doing your old job or similar. Jeez, you finally got to the pot of gold and now you're out of ideas? Swing for the fences, or at least, try and hit a few singles. And the best part is you can spend 8 or 80 hours a week doing it, you're in charge after all.

Me? I'm going Warren Buffet style from here on out. Sure I doubt I'll ever be a famous investor, but I'd love to take the amount I have and turn it into a lot more. My long term goal is to shore up the future generation in my family before I give the rest away. I think the happiness maximizing amount of work for each person varies, but for me I know it's more than zero.
> Software is simply too unpredictable. Both in development and operation

You could make it much more predictable if the developer had the legal authority and obligation to sign off on all software. Fuck you I'm not putting my name on that, if you fire me I'll raise a stink about you trying to coerce me into putting my name on something unsafe.

This really isn't needed in most cases though.
I'll correct you because you're wrong. Adaptation is evolution. There's no line in the sand, no requirement for 'morphological differences', and no reproductive isolation before you call it evolution. Calling it adaptation is just a no true Scotsman fallacy.
The PR UI does this. After resolving conflicts, the resulting merge commit will show just the resolution.
Yes and we should be a little bit more humble about it. Stepping stones and all.

Looking back at Dinosaurs and thinking how clever we are is pretty egotistical.

I agree.
Many of the default subs on reddit are pretty terrible. It seems like as the number of users increase, the quality goes down.

Reddit also has a problem with "super mods" who are pretty fast an loose with their powers.

These seem to be normal problems with trying to appeal to large groups (lame watered down meme low effort crap) and the effects of power on individuals (bans, shadowbans, bias, agenda pushing, etc)
Most purely-political sites are banned on HN because pure politics are off topic here. zerohedge.com has been in that category here since August 2010. That doesn't mean it's a bad site or (heaven forbid) that we disagree with it. It just means it's reliably a source of off-topic content for HN, as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you think an article there is particularly substantive you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask us to take a look, but please distinguish between particularly substantive and particularly good at riling up the reader. Sites that specialize in the latter are just what we don't want on HN, regardless of their politics.

If the story itself is important but the article not particularly substantive (or at least not enough to justify unbanning an entire site), I'm sure you can find another article reporting on the same thing.
/usr/local, traditionally. Since it only exposes one executable anyways, I'd say the chance of clobbering is fairly small (and reversible, since it's a deb).
Pebble was profitable for a time but if you have fixed costs and not the sales to make it up then you have a problem. It's pretty naive to think that "sell something for more than it costs" is reasonable advice here.
Universities should just collaborate by banning their researchers from publishing to unserious journals and conferences. Problem solved and researchers no longer face a difficult dilemma.

If universities (and on a higher level, governments funding universities) demanded that all research be publicly accessible, that would surely also hurt Elsevier et.al.
loving on the UI, very reflective of their product
I totally agree with this. Metrics are so very important just as is talking. Don't wait to have discussions talk all the time. Debrief projects what worked, what where the bottlenecks, what they did great what areas did they need to improve on.
This is the dumbest shit I swear! GIT is super dumb when dealing with conflicts. Maybe GIT needs to get smarter. When another dev, and I work on the exact same line of code. I add a class, and he adds an ID. GIT goes like oh crap a conflict I have zero idea what to do! Here is a bunch of commented crap in your code, and let me tank grunt for you real quick.
We're building forum software and experience over at Baqqer. If you're into building, sharing, and collaborating with other makers, it might be your cup of tea.
can someone summarize this for me? (I imagine the obvious actual answer to the headline is, "I'm passionate about having a place to live, eating, travelling and otherwise enjoying the results of 300 years of capitalism and industrialization.")

---

EDIT: Thanks for the downvote. Can I have the summary, please?
Προγνωστικα στοιχημα με φτωχό πρόγραμμα
I think Microsoft is marketing Azure hard and companies are buying.

I landed a gig related to Azure training and it's keeping me almost full-time busy right now. Considering this is the holidays there is a good chance we will be even busier next year.
I think parent's concern is scamming of investors, not programmers.
You might enjoy a movie called "Seven Days in May":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_days_in_may
PCI DSS isn't regulation. It's a standard promulgated by a private LLC (the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council).

HIPAA would be a much better example of regulation that is material w/ respect to software development.
Einstein got there by starting with the conventional models and knowing it didn't fit, and working on a way to make it fit.

Einstein didn't start out in left field, he didn't set out to invent a new wheel. He just saw some problems in the old one, and suggested an updated wheel that would resolve them. That's the difference. One is being contrarian or experimenting on their own, which is not necessarily wrong and can certainly be useful experience to draw on, but it's just not likely to yield large advancements on its own.

Large advancements occur when someone is current with the cutting edge, accepting of the established truths, and still striving to solve the larger puzzle (which may involve rotating the puzzle pieces that make up parts of the "established truths" -- but you can't get there if you don't have the pieces at your disposal).

Do you suggest that these people set out to make a great terminal emulator, and were eventually driven into the arms of JavaScript as the one true answer to the fundamental problem?

I think it's more likely that they said "Let's try to do this thing that's been done hundreds of times ... IN JAVASCRIPT!!!" And again, there's not anything wrong with that per se. It just doesn't make a good value proposition when you're trying to convince users to use your product.
The koan is commonly accompanied by the following:

"What I actually said was, 'If you wire it randomly, it will still have preconceptions of how to play. But you just won't know what those preconceptions are.'" -- Marvin Minsky
OK. I explained there why I think resfirestar's answer is unsatisfactory, i.e., why there are easier, cleaner, and less destructive ways of dealing with that problem than using notability. Would still be interested in your take there.
Contributions from AMD are sorely lacking. It's mostly people from https://www.codeplay.com/ and https://github.com/hughperkins/
How does it compare to "pixar and beyond"?
The world of online forums is much more diverse than those three. Some of the best forums I've been part of have had very little in the way of voting.
> However, I do get a feel that they're more "escapist" than the books YC readers (and people like Bill Gates) read. Many of the recommendations are more in line with what they're building (people going through similar struggles or role models or understanding the world).

I think this is unfortunate. Fiction is as important a reflection of society as non-fiction and I would hope that everyone will take time to appreciate art, fiction, music, etc. We understand many now gone societies through their fiction. Not just what they did, but they way they thought and behaved.

Even if you dismiss this as a worthwhile goal, science fiction and fantasy are worthwhile in understanding the world. I'm thinking of Star Trek, The Hainish Cycle, or a Stranger in a Strange Land. All of these explore contemporary problems by abstracting them.
Yes an astroturfer aka shill I would personally define as someone portraying themselves to be a neutral observer/participant when in reality they are paid/sponsored/incentivized by a state, company, or organization pushing a specific agenda. They are intentionally planted to deceive, distort and sway those unsuspecting of such activity. There is an excellent TED talk [0] on the subject.

The problem is rampant and while not new, the recent election cycle has highlighted it greatly.

Propaganda does not spread just from 'fake news' or a heavily biased corporate media. It is co-ordinated & perpetuated online. The links and comments on Reddit and HN are prime mediums to infiltrate and carry this out.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU
Yep, them and MikroTik. I'm genuinely disappointed more techy people aren't bothered by this.
It's hard to get rid of the conspiracy because you have to become them to fight them.

The journals promote a self-fulfilling number called an "impact factor". The people who boycott the gatekeeping publishers end up with publications with a lower impact factor, so they don't get as far in academia, so they will never end up on tenure review boards, and never get to suggest better criteria for evaluating scientists than their "impact factor".

However, in some fields, people are quietly resisting the publishers by disobeying them, posting their own paywalled papers on arXiV or their personal web sites. I have never heard of a publisher suing a scientist over this. Strength in numbers.
Ask HN: What coreutils program or trick you think everyone should know about?
How and why you use it in your daily workflow?
Also, it's worth noting that computation stack and execution stack need not be the same thing (and, indeed, often aren't).

In CLR, for example, local variables are referenced by index on the execution stack, but you cannot dynamically push new variables onto it - you have to predeclare the locals at the beginning of your execution frame, and the only way to push a new execution frame is by calling another function. On the other hand, opcodes like ADD operate on the computation stack, which is an abstraction completely separate from, and not affected by, the execution stack (every execution frame has its own independent computation stack; there's no way to peek across the boundary).

So in reality it's a bit more complicated - those locals are also kinda like named (or indexed) registers (at least until you take their address). Then the stack adds more temp registers on top of that. In this model, you could always take any register-based code, and translate it to stack-based with a very blunt transform, where something like "ADD x, y, z" becomes "LOAD x; LOAD y; ADD; STORE z". But in addition to that, you also have the flexibility of doing a bunch of operations directly on the temp stack, without intervening stores and loads, that are unavoidable in the register representation. So I would argue that it's the stack representation that is a superset of register one, not the other way around.