skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Instead of solving their customers' problems immediately, they have a computer analyze the tone of your voice and decide whether or not you really need to be helped. We're one step closer to life being a "simulation" where very little that is real matters. Your position as a customer and customer service's position as an agent are irrelevant, what matters is whether or not the computer has decided you are worth helping (until then, the agent "cannot" help you).

I think the worst part is, people will adapt and start to treat customer service with more anger, as they'll learn it solves their problems more frequently. Some of them will take this behavior out into meatspace instead of just doing it over the phone. Of course, people already do this, but even more people will do it as a result of this sort of treatment.
My biggest criticism of Agile and Scrum is that it assumes that you can just plan out how a feature will work by sitting in a meeting and talking about it. Then spend the next two weeks implementing that plan. Software development almost never works out so neatly.

What really happens is that you have a set of requirements and an idea of how you are going to implement the feature. You start working on it, maybe you discover that there is a whole area of code that needs updating in order to allow for your feature to be implemented. This adds on another week of work required.

In a common-sense based development team, what usually happens is the developer has a quick work with the project manager and maybe other devs who need to be involved and says "Hey, I've found out that we need another week to complete this feature because X needs refactoring, do you still want me to continue with this?" then the PM either says "Yes this feature is important, even if it will take another week" or "No, the feature is not important enough to be worth spending another week on". Its really not rocket science.

In SCRUM what usually happens is the SCRUM master will tell you that the rules say that we have already committed to a set amount of work this sprint and that extra week of work falls outside the scope so we should create another card for the extra work and consider this card blocked.

The whole idea of having a rule for what to do in that situation just seems absolutely crazy. Just do whatever makes sense! Its really not that difficult.
>All that said a smart military commander would never use local troops in their own backyard anyway.

Is why the local regiments were confined to barracks, the last time the UK felt the need to put tanks on the streets of Glasgow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_George_Square
Overall picture: Google recognizes it's a large company that has an extreme diversity of teams with idiosyncratic goals and personalities, and doesn't prescribe _anything_

Dollars to doughnuts, there's multiple teams doing extremely prescriptive Agile, but I've never seen one in 3 years in a 2,000 employee office.

By far the most organized team I've been on merely kept track of bugs using an internal web app that renders bugs from the internal bug tracker as post-it notes arranged in columns, with each column representing a bug status (ex. assigned/started work/code in review/done).

This alone caused a ton of grumbling, meanwhile I'm sitting there gobsmacked that Scrum and Agile aren't proper nouns that everyone has highly detailed opinions on.
And worse, the ‘operators’ are postfix or infix, so if you're handling text sequentially — and let's say, split across network packets with an arbitrary delay in between — you can't even tell you've read a complete character until you receive the next one.

Typing in many Latin languages generates diacritics using ‘dead keys’, which are prefix operators. (Originally, on a physical typewriter, these were keys that simply struck the paper without triggering the mechanism to advance the carriage.) If Unicode had taken this hint, life would be easier.

(ISO/IEC 6937 had prefix diacritics, but it was too late.)
Are they idiots though? They know the customer has no choice so they leverage this into offering the absolute worst service they can offer and still make money. On the other hand their lobby groups make sure this remains the status quo.

This isn't a happy accident for those "idiot businesspeople", it's a carefully thought out business plan.
This just makes me want to automate the customer end. Bot wars.
Humans innovate, we evolve.

No reason to think we won't continue to do so. Unless educated, fitting individuals choose not to have children.

Then humanity doesn't have a chance.
> questioning the status quo is futile at best to politically charged at worst.

Which is antithetical to the agile manifesto. The whole point of agile was to question the current methods and be agile enough to change them as needed.
Oh, I completely agree. It makes me feel terrible, and I'm sure it creates an even more terrible work environment for the CSRs. I know. I've been an IT helpdesk employee. And we only got a sliver of nasty complaints.

The distinction from the article, is that the big companies whom can afford this tech, are doing analytics and reporting to the CSR when to not offer solutions, and when to offer. And unfortunately when doing voice analytics, the louder you are and the more 'power words' you use, the better you're treated by the company.

I in no way said this was good or ethical. It's abhorrent, and I'd rather steer clear with companies that use this. But in the bigger scheme of things, if I deal with a handful of mega-conglomerates that have phone lines, I must use this tactic in order to be made whole.

And then, I help create the horrible work environment... Sigh.
They get bonuses?
advanced programming in the unix environment is an excellent book that dives more into this
'misconfiguration' is cloud blame deflection
Agile (and XP) realised that it's a folly to plan in detail the next 5 years when likely the project, the circumstances, the business landscape, the team and even the technology will significantly shift in that timespan.

This of course doesn't mean that if you have a very concrete goal and you need to do a trial and error iterative research and development project, there is of course no need to do "agile", because the goal is fix, the things you can try is probably largely predetermined, and you already know one of them will work adequately. (Or not, but then at least you might have some form of benchmark target in mind.)

But even then, almost no endeavor starts in a vacuum, so it likely pays off to have some ability to quickly check progress (be it a CI system or just a testbed in the lab, or the aforementioned benchmark), and similarly other aspects of "agile", like try to break up the work and estimate it (think about it, its dependencies, its complexity, your competence for the particular work item, typical pitfalls), let the team know who works on what, interact with stakeholders from time to time, and so on.
Yes, the freezer cgroup can be used to "atomically" put an entire cgroup tree into a frozen mode. However, unless you're using cgroupv2, the process might be stopped in an unkillable state (defeating the purpose). So this is not an ideal solution.

Really the best way to do it is to put it inside a PID namespaces and then kill the pid1. Unfortunately, most processes don't act correctly as a pid1 (the default signal mask is different for pid1, causing default "safe exit" signal behaviour to break for most programs). You could run a separate pid1 that just forwards signals (this is what Docker does with "docker run --init" and similar runtimes do the same thing). But now the solution has gotten significantly more complicated than "use PID namespaces".

Arguably the most trivial and workable solution is process groups and using a negative pid argument to kill(2), but that requires the processes to be compliant and not also require their own process groups. (I also haven't yet read TFA, it might say that this approach is also broken for reasons I'm not familiar with.)
Should be easy to fix for them with pose estimation or something.
Irish Teen Wins 2019 Google Science Fair for Removing Microplastics from Water
Is "the masses" offensive?
IPv6 doesn't save you from any routing problems that IPv4 won't save you from. While IPv6 tries to hide the layer 2/layer 3 distinction from you, it doesn't actually make your physical network magically work differently. Internally IPv6 tries to implement this hiding using multicast - same as the VXLAN suggestion in the article. If you overload your network infrastructure's multicast support, at best you fall back to broadcast, which is just like reconfiguring your physical network to bridge all your layer 2 segments into one: if that won't work for you in IPv4, it won't work in IPv6. (And at worst, it stops routing correctly.) If you don't have multicast support at all in your network infrastructure, which as the article points out isn't common to have on cloud networks, then IPv6 won't be able to help you. You'll still need fancy routing and tunneling to make things work, whether you address machines with IPv4 and IPv6.

In my experience, IPv4 has the strong advantage of being familiar and well-supported, which means that when (not if) your network infrastructure starts to act up, it's easier to figure out what's going on. IPv6 works great if you have robust, reliable multicast support on all your devices and nothing ever goes wrong.
I think Agile has the same strength and weakness of any methodology: The people implementing it. If you have good people running and working on an Agile project it's going to go well. Those same people would do similarly well with waterfall, or just sitting in a dark room with a carton of Coke each.

Where your methodology really matters is the how information flows between your dev team, the end users, and any other systems you need to interoperate with. Agile is great for providing development-as-a-service to a client who doesn't know what they want but will know it when they see it (eg. building enterprise software or web apps). Waterfall is great for providing known, fixed functionality (eg. building an ECU for an engine, or a back-end for a web bank).
This is exactly the reason, and it makes everything look like a horrible soap opera. 24fps and motion blur, is a lot of what makes movies, look like movies. Otherwise it turns into someones home video.
It’s really not. Economics as it is in macro is really flawed. I know so many people who studied it and are now data scientists here in London it’s not even funny.

All of them said a version of the same thing - “we studied a bunch of models that had lots of hand wavy assumptions” and they essentially took the maths of the course and made a career out of that instead because they felt like econ was fundamentally broken.
I'm trying to figure this out myself. I have freelanced for years from Houston and it's been fine. I avoided moving somewhere more expensive because my income was inconsistent, but now I have a salaried remote job and no excuse. It's harder than I thought it would be to pack up and leave a place.

I'm headed to Austin for a month today, hoping to try Vegas later this year as well.

I'll let you all know when I figure this one out...
What do you think a character is? ZWJ and combining characters are needed for a few Indian languages spoken by millions of people, more then speak Dutch or Norwegian.
If you're saying that it doesn't matter if you're at a small or large company using an internal company specific tech stack, then I agree. Both will leave you as unhireable even if your actual development skills can transfer just fine.
There's a fairly new experimental setting in Win10 where UTF-8 is set as the system-wide codepage, allowing to call the "narrow string" functions with UTF-8 strings.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_in_Microsoft_Windows#U...

"With insider build 17035 and the April 2018 update (nominal build 17134) for Windows 10, a "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support" checkbox appeared for setting the locale code page to UTF-8.[a] This allows for calling "narrow" functions, including fopen and SetWindowTextA, with UTF-8 strings."
It's a shame Apple doesn't release its apps for Android. Google needs some serious competition. IOS exclusive apps unfortunately offer negligible competition to Google.
Seltzer water, ostensibly fruit flavored but with no sugar, sweetener, or color is increasingly popular. The only thing it has over water is a slight fizz, a little sour/bitter taste, and probably better profit margins.

What do you think is the point of forcing people to purchase that rather than plain water?
This is in central park: https://www.travelblog.org/Photos/514446

Most is not like that mind you. But not bad for a city forest
There must be something more to the story. I have several chase business cards that I use solely for points. I use "self employed" and 10k annual revenue from contracting as my business income. I don't have a limit below 15k.
Has anyone looked at the source code for this page?

This is not the Web that I want.
18 months is less than 1 refresh cycle. How is the average Apple user missing out by not having 5G now?
The problem I've seen with agile is it's too easy to turn into "as long as we complete something that was defined as value this sprint the problem isn't what this team is doing" that many places end up having teams avoiding any large or external issues completely while reporting everything is going great.

You may say it's not a methodologies fault when it's misused but I'd say it IS a methodologies fault if the feedback cycle on the misuse is easily hidden by the process.

In the end I think for many places where agile is put in more value would be had putting that work into the business communication flow. If your biggest problem to solve is you don't know how to work on problems in smaller chunks + communicate when you've done something and that's what you need to reform you're probably doing pretty good and agile will be great. If you're implementing agile for another reason it probably won't fix that problem and agile will be blamed.
Traditionally, each film frame is projected 3 times. The psycho-perceptual reason is that the phi-phenomenon (“light chaser effect”) kicks in about 12–15 Hz, so camera frame rate must exceed that to give a perception of smooth motion. The critical flicker frequency is around 50 Hz for most people, so projected frame rate must exceed that to avoid the appearance of flickering.

Silent movies were shot 18 fps and projected 54 fps. The frame rate for talkies was boosted to allow enough bandwidth for the audio. The reason silent movies look jerky today is every third frame is projected twice. They are smooth when properly projected.
Unfortunately in cgroupv1, the freezer cgroup could put the processes into an unkillable state while frozen. This is fixed in cgroupv2 (which very recently got freezer support) but distros have yet to switch wholesale to cgroupv2 due to lack of adoption outside systemd.
Thanks for the PSA! :)

I am basically writing the books that I would have liked to read while studying CS. So, yes, they are books for self-learners, from a guy who prefers to learn from textbooks.
> Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated.

This is disturbing and, I think, a twisted form of grade inflation, mixed with the usual suitspeak where words don't necessarily mean what they mean. If an employee is as good as you think they should be, why would you put it at risk of termination?

For the record, I also work in a big company with long product cycles, meaning that the product I'm working on started more than one year ago, and the first public release is planned for next December, so I feel your pain. Luckily our process is a bit more sane and our manager follows our work closely, so I'm getting good ratings (but I wonder if the grade inflation will continue in such a way that "exceeds expectations" now means "subpar employee"...).
A lot of the 5g connection to drones, self-driving and artificial intelligence is bullshit. But there is some connection in the sense that they are sort of both unknown. In theory if you had some sort of early self-driving personal rapid transit system, or some freight variety, it would make things easier if you knew you had enough bandwidth and low latency to effectively remote control them.
Bazel-watcher tries to accomplish this on Linux by using process group IDs. It works, if imperfectly sometimes. I ported this to Windows[1] using Job Objects. As usual, the Windows API was hell, and I made use of undocumented syscalls in order to make it work (though that part is partly Go’s fault: when you start a process, it immediately drops the thread handle on the floor. If you start a process suspended, that means it’s impossible to resume using documented APIs.)

Thankfully Raymond Chen wrote an article[2] about Job Objects which helped me figure out the last bits. I genuinely am not sure I could have gotten it right without that article. There’s so many subtle ways to fail!

[1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-watcher/pull/144/files

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130405-00/?p=47...
Conversely as CPUs get more and more powerful the overhead of a non-fixed-width encoding also becomes negligible unless you're processing a huge amount of text. And if you process enough text that it becomes a problem then maybe size would be an issue too.

Furthermore 4-byte chars also have the endianess problem of UTF-16.

I think the rule of thumb of "use UTF-8 unless you really have a good reason not to" still holds true today.
Also consider that a film is watched in a different environment and lighting than a TV.
> What really happens is that you have a set of requirements and an idea of how you are going to implement the feature.

The thing is, your story cards or whatever are meant to be a live document. You have the big meeting, the next day you realise that what you came up with doesn't work, you grab a coffee with your stakeholder and talk it through, come up with a new plan, and you change the card you're working on. Probably check with the tech lead first, but it's that flexible.

> In SCRUM what usually happens is the SCRUM master will tell you that the rules say [...]

This SCRUM thing sounds evil.

> Just do whatever makes sense! Its really not that difficult.

This is probably the best advice ever for any development team. Just do the thing!
There's a lot of irony in saying that about "developers at Google" and then immediately turning around and classifying everyone else as "the masses". Talk about broad strokes!
I won't deny many companies are playing this game of skimping as much as they can get away with, and I despise this practice. There's also the other side of the fence though: customers who are just a resource drain.

I've recently been involved in some customer support efforts, and there are customers who are just unreasonable. They'll demand to have their cake, eat it too, and even get a new one. For the nuisance that a completely made up problem caused them. A problem that wouldn't even be your fault if it had been real.

They are a vast minority, but they spoil it for everyone. They consume your time and especially your team's morale. There is only so much bullshit a support agent can take before getting fed up with it and degrading their service to subsequent customers.

Now the organization has to figure out a way to detect those customers early enough to prevent them from screwing up everything for everyone. But false positives are very expensive: get one wrong and it becomes a PR nightmare.

Furthermore, if you try to give the best possible support, you must empower your agents to act. They can now screw up and even get your company in legal trouble. Good training reduces this risk, but humans making calls means errors will be made eventually.

In the end, reducing support to the bare minimum possible appears a reasonable option for many companies: it is the easiest to implement, it reduces legal/PR risks, and it has a very measurable and consistent effect (how many people stop buying/using your service after failing to get support). If that number is low enough, it just doesn't make economical sense to try to provide good support, which is a very hard endeavor for the reasons mentioned above.
An open standard that includes rules like "your page must include this Google controlled JS url which will contain whatever we want".

That pretty much kills the "open" bit.
Voter turnout is dismal. 20% for locals, 50% presidential.
Fun article about the Savannah at https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/aboar...
For someone who doesn't want to be painted in broad strokes, it seems like a very broad brush to paint non-Googlers with.
Which is basically what everyone has been doing with cable companies for years to get lower bills, until recently when they started calling everyone’s bluff. If you try to cancel now, they’ll mostly just say “fine” and send you right through the process.
Scaling applications in the second largest classified site in the world
No body wants shop tokens. It's like all these guys have discovered arcade tokens.
If you hold a 5.25" diskette at the edge, then shake/jerk your hand up and down, it resembles doggy floppy ears.
I heard Copenhagen turned all of their fire hydrants to permit car parking in front of them.

That would never happen in USA/Canada. We must continue to waste 5%+ parking capacity in the unlikely event that it could delay fire fighting and to continue using parking-space wasting valve orientation.
For me no data analysis is necessary to come to a similar conclusion. My parents have a farm in the Netherlands and they are reminded of the lack of rain daily. The most clear example is of the channel ('gracht' in Dutch) around the house. The channel is almost drying up this year. This has never occurred before while my parents or my grandparents occupied the farm.

It was also clear on a recent visit to family in Poland. The corn, potatoes and beets looked yellow and awful for all fields except the parts where somehow there was some water (for example, valleys).
> GDPR would apply if the entity had personal information of European citizens.

Not quite, merely having data on an EU citizen is not sufficient to invoke GDPR.

To clarify, article 3 of GDPR specifies that it applies to companies that market specifically to EU citizens or specifically monitor EU behavior of their customers. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/

This is taken by many to broadly mean that when an EU citizen purchases something by (for example) a US company where the product is marketed only to US citizens, GDPR does not apply.

For example: https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/who-must-comply/

“May be insufficient evidence [if] The firm’s website is accessible to EU residents”
Just as an aside, there was a lot of work on this kind of thing (ie. 'improving' 3:2 pulldown) before the modern flat panel tv. Improving slow motion sucked up a few kilobucks of engineering time.
I would have upvoted this 3 times, if I could
Have you seen "A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Reinventing a Prolog Machine"?
https://software.imdea.org/Conferences/CICLOPS2017/files/tar...

Also, there's a lot of work on compilers in Prolog, starting with "Logic programming and compiler writing" by David Warren (it's the basis of the last chapter of "Art of Prolog".)
That's the question though right?

Is philanthropy the reason the state does not do what's needed?

Or is the state not doing what's needed the reason for philanthropy?

Or perhaps it's both?

In any case we can't really figure out how to get to a game theoretic local optimum of maximum state participation and maximum philanthropy, until we can dig into the real reasons a lot of these things are and are not done.
Scott Adams: The Day You Became a Better Writer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcpcrypt
This is just going to lead to company scrip. Once again history will repeat itself.
AAAS: Anecdotes as a Service

I think I found my new startup idea