skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely agree with you on this. I think somewhere in the middle-ground is perfect, obviously.

I think I should be able to ask your chatbot how their day is going, but I don't think I should be able to shitpost with it for 3 hours.

The reason I bring up Chatbot is because they seemed to at least have the conversational part figured out.

Also, Siri is really not such a part of this conversation because it is honestly the only chatbot that I can think of that accomplishes a portion of what we're talking about here.
> What I find odd and even more disturbing is that this seems to be a uniquely American trend

This is not true.

This can be observed in many "western" countries to different degrees.
Improving Workflows
Maybe you should write a function that does the right thing, and then use it to tell you the correct output :/
These articles are all the same, complaining about adtech without any real understanding.

It's just tech, quite literally plumbing, that lets marketers put messages in front of people and see what happens next. The internet has made it more capable than ever but how it's used varies greatly and there are both great and terrible examples.
Step 4 was implemented in the USA with SSDI. There's heavy emotional baggage to tag people as permanently totally disabled merely because the economy is too small to let them participate. Also its kinda a mess mixing essentially fake claims (from a medical disease perspective) vs real claims. So the same program takes care of a guy with 100% disability back pain who sells his pain pills (a whole nother problem) and plays video games all day but is actually physically healthy while merely economically dead, with another dude missing some limbs or brain damaged.

Its weird but mostly seems to be working rather than your step #5.

Around 1 in 20 people in the USA are on SSDI. The exact ratio of who's economically damaged vs physically damaged is unclear but you can guess by looking at rate graphs over the last couple decades, since the 80s perhaps.
That "digits=18" in R example probably bothers me more than it should.
Hi Cliff! I love these klein bottles and have always wanted ask if you'd consider trying to make one that can function as a chemex style coffee maker? Somewhat like the wine bottle but with an opening the right size for a chemex filter would be so cool.
I have now seen enough deployments of puppet, salt, ansible, etc. to last me a lifetime and then some. Trust me. People have managed to turn configuration formats into unreadable monstrosities as well. At least with a real programming language I would have sensible debugging capabilities and maybe some refactoring tools to help but with a half-baked YAML programming language I have no such recourse.
Why does PHP produce 0.3 instead?

edit: Not sure how I missed that. Thanks!
Cliff, thank you for writing that book! It is what got me, like many others, seriously into exploring computers (in legal ways!).
Interesting article.

Another related article I found interesting: https://www.coverfire.com/articles/queueing-in-the-linux-net... Discusses some of the queues in the Linux network stack.
I sympathize. I think that, unfortunately, it is a larger-scale psychological problem. Many people are fair-weather friends and we don't realize it until certain types of storms come in. The sad reality is that a lot of people are simply disappointing when stressors are applied.

I'm a practicing Mormon and I want to let you know that I have a lot of respect for your experience here. I think it's better than the experience of many who've left the Church and allow what often begin as justified frustrations to turn into resentment, hostility, and occasionally even spiteful, hateful obsession (all aboard the /r/exmormon train CHOO CHOO).

Perhaps more surprisingly, I also think it's better than the experience of many who stay in the Church, but decline to probe, or refuse to be intellectually honest with themselves.

We should inquire into these issues and IMO, it's better to spend some time being honest and sorting it out, which can include withdrawal from activity if one feels that's necessary to be consistent, than to continue to do things to keep up appearances and push yourself into a much more dangerous internal conflict.

I find that those who have these unresolved problems with the Church that truly trouble them, but have attempted to repress them for the sake of appearances or congeniality instead of addressing them responsibly, eventually break down and become the bitter, obsessive types referenced above. That's terrible for everyone, themselves included.

So while we clearly disagree on some religious matters, I think intellectual and personal consistency and honesty are much more important than blindly or desperately clinging to something you can't feel OK about (and I would add that it's my opinion that the Church doesn't want people to do this, either).

Thanks for your comments, I really do enjoy your perspective. I don't live in Utah anymore but I'd love to get a bite with you at some point if we're ever in the same place at the same time. Feel free to email @ gmail if you're going to be in Central Florida.
Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558871 (1.5 years ago, 240 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846926 (6.5 years ago, 128 comments)
The C++ code could use std::numeric_limits<double>:: max_digits10 instead of the magical 17!
Downvotes: I've worked in advertising for over 10 years. Most copywriters try to avoid the direct yes/no questions in headlines. For effective headlines, go scan the cover of a Cosmopolitan magazine.
Show HN: Wake N Charge to stop Alarm
> Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line

Well put, sir. I hadn't managed to put that into words quite as succinctly but you've pinpointed exactly my feelings and my reasons for skepticism.

Unless you bother to read up on the commands that it accepts you find yourself greeted 50% of the time with "I don't know how to do that". Now we're on the same turf as any good UX problem - power-users (who have the incentive to learn an interface) vs casual users (who don't and shouldn't have to). Chat bots seem to be targeting the latter but they require the time investment of the former.
Linked List Common Problems and Solutions
> Wrong: you see 10KB/s download speed because you are not throttling the incoming packets but the outgoing packets!

Yep. TC's default is to policy outgoing traffic, which in OP's example is a bunch of TCP ACKs essentially. Instead, they should be using ingress keyword, something like described here:

http://blog.stevedoria.net/20050906/ingress-policing-with-li...

Caveat emptor: ingress rate-limiting is hard. Long story short, it all boils down to what you do with non-confirming packets: There are two alternatives, and both are rather sub-optimal. You can either buffer/delay packets in kernel space (default, which leads to bufferbload and memory waste), or drop (which author linked above opted for, which leads to excessive retransmits and bandwidth waste).
Rexx has decimal arithmetics so 0.1+0.2 is 0.3 ...

http://www.rexxla.org/events/2001/mike/rexxsy01.PDF
Technology has made maintaining a job infinitely easier for the elderly compared to physical labor jobs.

The problem is that many who approach old age are not trained in technology
Isn't this essentially social security disability?
Thing is, data is relational, and data isn't an object

Only if you are more concerned with the data first approach instead of thinking about the domain first.

It's much better to use views of data, eg. "get me what I need to display a listing page in an eshop" - which entails getting the price, photos, title, description, delivery cost etc. - in a single list that you can then use - the database can do this for you - and all the underlying details are abstracted away, better yet - your app server will never have to CARE that at some points product.photos changed from being a simple array of strings to a fully fledged table - because the view remains the same.

It's only "much better" until everyone wants there own one off view that has to be kept in sync with the code and reverting/branching/versioning has to keep in sync with what the hundreds of brittle views, stored procedures, etc. that are being created. Instead of treating the data store like a dumb data store. By putting as much logic in the business later as possible. I can not only branch, version, etc. I can completely unit test my whole application and mock out the data store.

Okay so you're saving the entire list of 'followers' of a user inside the user document
What happens when you have a really popular user with a million followers...
What do you do when you update a user who happens to follow thousands of other users...

Mongo best practices are to think about the orthoganility of your relationships - one to few, one to many, or "one to quintillions" and choose whether to embed based on that.

But going back to thinking in terms of DDD an aggregate roots, a user would be an entity, an address of the user would be a value type that belongs to the user - embed it into the document. A user's followers would be entities, that would be a related object that should be able to change independently. In that case use Mongo references.

and all the underlying details are abstracted away, better yet - your app server will never have to CARE that at some points product.photos changed from being a simple array of strings to a fully fledged table - because the view remains the same.

If I'm changing the representation of the data. I still have to change it somewhere - whether the database -- where you don't have proper versioning, branching, source control -- or the app server. If you're changing the representation in the app server in more than one module/microservice, you're doing it wrong. With a microservice/module, I can still represent the data as old clients expect by versioning the API and have much better tooling than have five different versions of the view that never die.
I feel the AI hype is similar to the cleantech hype in the 2000's

everyone jumped on bandwagon for FOMO (fear-of-missing-out)
Ask HN: What does HN think of Open vSwitch?
I have been using it for a project for half a year, and it has been wonderful. It seems very powerful and packs a lot of features. But I do not see popularity of it that I think it deserves. Not here, not on the internet, tutorials are limited. Maybe I am looking at wrong direction, anyways. Do I over-estimate it or is it really that good but only a few people know it? It is even supported on Windows with Hyper-V virtual machines.

http://openvswitch.org
Sure.

Basically, I set up SSH on a server somewhere (I actually have many), and a local SSH key (I don't use passwords with SSH). The SSH server can be a cloud server or a physical one; it doesn't matter. Then, I create an alias in my .zshrc or .bashrc configuration file to easily create a tunnel to that server, like this:

alias <alias_name>="ssh -D 8080 -f -C -q -N <username>@<host>"

Then, I go into my network settings and create a local SOCKS 5 proxy that points to the port I'm tunneling through (8080 in this case). Once I've done this, everything between me and the remote server is encrypted, and it appears that I'm browsing from the remote location. This works well for services that are not available in my country, as long as I can set up a server in the country I want to appear to be coming from.

If you want to keep the SSH tunnel open all the time, you can use autossh, like this:

autossh -M 20000 -p <port> -D 8088 -f -C -q -N <username>@<host>
Google employee collapsed on the job; coworkers say corp. culture is to blame
> just how in blazes do these actually make money?!

Read this, and the other posts this guy has written. He has worked with a number of F2P companies on designing and implementing their business model, always trying to get them to build nice systems, and has learned a lot about the inhuman ones.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949...

TL;DR: Almost all F2P games, except for like 10 or so on the PC, exploits brain faults common to almost all humans. They lead them from a fun skill-based game experience to an abusive "pay to be able to play at all" model. (Like in arcade machines, only lives are disguised as power ups, and easily gained without cash early in the game cycle.) If people started out in the latter mode they'd balk at paying for an unknown, but this way they're driven to stick with it due to the memories of the start, as well as the thinking of "i spent this much time already". (sunk cost fallacy)
Having worked developing conversational interfaces for the last six months, I concur entirely.

The wrong people are doing the wrong job, too fast and without any forethought, to capitalize on the tech news hype cycle more than anything else.
I wish I had a million+ reader outlet to push my specific brand of political agenda.
While in general I support your opinion, there is one critical question: where should the line between legal and illegal be drawn?

For example, consider DLCs, a form of IAP. In the Fallout universe, what you get as a DLC would in other franchises be an entire game... should this be made illegal too?

In my opinion, not - but instead it should be made illegal to ship games with bus so serious it requires weeks of waiting for multi-GB patches so they're barely playable...
Bold. Singed by the entire editorial board.
The growth rate of a function obviously has nothing to do with the first few values, I don't know why you would assume those were the ones that surprised me, or that I don't know how to calculate them. What I wanted to point out is that this function approaches its limit (100%) very slowly, much slower than 100(1-1/n), or even 100(1-1/log(n)).
Any time you're generating percentage data that should sum to 100, not appreciating floating point math will burn you.

For those interested, the largest remainder method (https://gist.github.com/hijonathan/e597addcc327c9bd017c) is useful for dealing with this.
That reads like the code equivalent of involuntarily burping in polite company.
Someone should figure out the mean length of time between article repeats on HN. And then find some correlation with university degrees and job tenure.
Making a chatbot is really hard, because you need a lot of data and it needs to be of good quality. You cannot use a random chat message log and train your model, it will usually have way too much noise. Instead I highly recommend that you build it from scratch. Then you will start getting great results. You also have to use a proper spell checking algorithm and understand the basics of how a full text search engine actually works and know the purpose of using stop words and synonyms.

I would love to present our virtual assistant "James" to the rest of the world, but we have only recently started to build english training data. Currently it only understands english with the use of synonyms, so it isn't working as well as it should.

If you're interested in trying it out you can play with it on the webpage of one of the largest banks in Norway http://srbank.no, the chat icon is at the bottom right. You can ask questions in English, but it will unfortunately only answer in Norwegian at this time, so you have to use google translate too see if it answered correctly. "James" do support language detection though, but we have just recently starting to add the english answers. In a few weeks and James will answer in English :-)

Currently James can predict over 1500 intents related to banking and insurance. Here are some of the more complex questions James can handle:

Want to open a savings account for my daughter

Can I adjust the limit on my sons bank card

What can you tell me about my pension

Do you have a pension calculator?

I was out drinking last night and lost my credit card

If anyone says that chatbots aren't working and will never work, I can say this with real data to back me up, it works very well! The feedback we have gotten the last few months has been amazing! And I'm 100% sure that chatbots will become a big industry the next years. Complex UI's will finally be good riddance.

Feel free to ask me anything if you have any questions.
Every other time I have suggested upvoting someone past a karma threshold so they could do a thing, I got downvoted into the negatives. Because, clearly, someone hitting 250 karma and getting to pick their own header color is an enormous threat to the social pecking order and quality of discussion by completely destroying the signal value of karma ranking.

I shall be back next year to repeat this experiment and see if it works again (assuming I remember).
Which civil war were you in? Where and when did this take place?
I am not a writer, but I am a long-time movie fanatic, and I have a screenplay I want so badly to write but don't know where to begin. Any tips on that?

I wrote, I think, ten pages just going in blindly and think they probably suck, but wouldn't even know who to ask if that was true.
PHP converts 0.30000000000000004 to a string and shortens it to "0.3". To achieve the desired floating point result, adjust the precision ini setting: ini_set("precision", 17).
Any specific point there you want to disagree with? or just spewing your specific brand of political agenda to a lesser audience?
The only "train wreck" here is either that of the media itself as it cracks up and the Democrat Party, or that which the media is trying to create. They lost the elections (note the plural), despite the 2.7 billion extra dollars Hillary spent on getting the "voters" out in LA county and NYC. So the media is trying to create with this utterly phony narrative "Russian hacked our election, and Trump is a Russian agent." Trump and his people are not Russian agents, many Democrats have as many or more business contacts with assorted Russians (like Bill, Hillary, and Podesta). There will be no evidence advanced to support that wild conspiracy theory just as there hasn't been so far. And the Russians--if in fact it was them, we do not really know because the FBI has not actually examined the DNC servers--didn't hack the election but the DNC, which failed to protect its system (sound familiar?). Anyone who seriously believes Hillary lost because of Podesta's emails or "fake news" planted by Russian trolls should have their head examined.

No, Trump is not a train wreck but a train barreling down pushing every piece of liberal folly and mendacity he can off the rails. He's doing exactly what he promised to do--what a surprise for an elected politician--and that's why the LA Times calls it a train-wreck. ("How can that be? We thought it was just campaign rhetoric!") Because it has to be that, for their narrative to hold, just as Trump has to be a Russian agent, in order to deny the real reasons Hillary lost.

Get a grip. Trump is here to enforce immigration law, renegotiate trade treaties to favor us, recalibrate our strategic posture, rethink Nato and our relation to Russian and rejuvenate Nato in terms of its original mission, a defense alliance not a democracy club meant for everyone, and choose our wars wisely not promiscuously like the neo-cons, including those in the Democrat Party, and scale back a strangulatory administrative state that is operating outside of democratic control.

tldr; There not a shred of evidence for the Russian hacked our election meme.
You'd give UBI to those least able to work and generate an income.
Whats going on in the second D example?
Third example in the article:

PHP converts 0.30000000000000004 to a string and shortens it to "0.3". To achieve the desired floating point result, adjust the precision ini setting: ini_set("precision", 17).

I remember years ago learning something like this and coming to a horrible realization : "My god, they're all strings!"
The problem with VPN services, at least when used to circumvent regional restrictions, is that a lot of other people do the same thing, and the VPN provider ends up getting blocked. I've never had that problem when using SSH.

Also, with SSH, I own both the client and server, and setting it up is extremely easy. Setting up a VPN, when you do own both client and server, takes more effort, I think.
You may be joking, but this can be a good technique for cases where you have a simple but inefficient solution and a complex optimized solution. Ditto for anything that has a special case that can be easily answered.
Mastodon.social, a federated microblogging service, is exploding right now
Why did you decide to build a chatbot, rather than a website/app? It seems like it should always be possible to provide a better experience in an app.

So far I've heard only three compelling reasons: to support users without smart phones, to support voice interfaces or to be accessible through Slack etc.
Almost nobody thinks of DLC when they talk about F2P games, except for the people making decisions in the Google Play store dev while being clueless and divorced from the actual market.

I think there's no need to worry about or bring that up.
> - instant answers to frequently asked questions
> - surveys and polls over chat

I don't understand the bot part of this. First looks like a search box over faqs and second sounds like a web wizard survey .
> What Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” is going to be illegal a year from now in the EU anyway, thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation, aka GDPR. Mark your calendars: on 25 May 2018 will come an extinction event for adtech, because here are the fines the GDPR will impose for unpermitted harvesting of personal data: 1) “a fine up to 10,000,000 EUR or up to 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 4)”‘; and 2) “a fine up to 20,000,000 EUR or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 5 & 6).”

GDPR will be "great stuff" because it imposes user protection and grants basic rights.

- individual mandatory notification for possible adverse impact of data breaches

- right to be forgotten -> right to erasure

- data portability (hello ... Apple Health, Google Fit, Microsoft Office extended/unportable format, whatsoever)

- verifiable explicit consent for data collection (purpose included)

These are the things that makes me proud of the EU, and I just wish that GDPR were made more visible to the general public.
It's stuff that should be a part of very beginning of any CS101. Float arithmetics != Decimal arithmetics
Using taxes to crowd out investment markets...can't go wrong there.
I don't see why that's a more logical conclusion than "I believe God wants me to do x therefore I do x"
Calm down, personal insults aren't necessary. I have to admit I've had the same experience, don't know my phone number and don't carry it with me for the majority of the time and I've needed it twice so far. Once for a Twitter bot and once for a Telegram bot.

Never before have I been asked for a phone number that hasn't been optional from any other service (of which I have quite a few, LastPass counts about 2,200 of them).

(Of course, sometimes I do still take the optional road, two factor authentication is exceptionally nice).
> I don’t know how firstfit policy locks compare to something like WTF::Lock on my Mac mini

As a layperson, it would have been nice to see at least some simple benchmarks substantiating what is being said, after several paragraphs trying to explain why WTF::Lock is not a good candidate, and given it's in the title of the post.