skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chatbots suck, because AI just isn't good enough or empowered enough to actually help in 99% of requests.

ChatBOXES on the other hand are amazing, a few reasons why:

- You can't accidentally hang up and have to re-dial and wait on hold

- There's an incentive for the company to respond while the customer is there, because they might disappear at any moment (unlike email)

- There's a record in writing

- It works with people with poor language skills

- No hold music & you can see where you are in the queue

- Support teams can scale by handling multiple conversations at once and using copy/paste from scripts, terms etc.

- You can include hyperlinks, screenshots etc. to make things super clear or open up other tools (e.g. screen share)

- Contact details, email address etc. can't be misheard

- No bad signal / fuzzy line

- You can data mine the requests to figure out common requests and optimize for them

Long live the chatbox!
Which neruological condition(s) cause sensitivity to popup animations? Not questioning the validity of the claim just interested to learn more.
He has citizenship and at least one house in NZ.
Great read, Adrian! I've been following your work since you launched the UX Bear.

To sum up my experience with chatbots: I've had deeper conversations with clippy than with most chatbots.

Still, I strongly believe that guidance is needed online, especially in E-Commerce. That's why I've recently (in fact, we are signing our seed round later today) created Neocom [1], which merges the good parts about chatbots with real expert knowledge.

[1] https://neocom.ai
Name recognition and media image is incredibly important. Former MI5 and MI6 personnel have often credited British Intelligence's association with the James Bond franchise as being a huge asset in recruiting informants.
Honest question: what makes NZ safer than other countries? I assume it depends on the scenario? Political turmoil could make sense (I don't know enough about NZ politics), global warming probably less so?
Show HN: Tefter for Teams – lightning-speed access to all your essential links
custom cursor; dark bg - dark cursor; so yea;
see how the cursor transitions when on text by flipping sideways to blue;
idk I thought its 'cute';
I smell a hilarious post-apocalypse remake of The Odd Couple coming up!
Yep, It's not just Clippy, it's anything that I would want to dismiss and then it doesn't persist.

https://coworker.com has this annoying banner at the moment advertising their global pass.

Nice X to close. I refresh page and it's back. If I clear my cookies or my adblock causes a javascript error, then fair enough. Otherwise, persist my decisions please.
Checklist of Essentials for Your WFH
I had an idea similar to this one some time ago. I called it "moderation feeds".
Hey folks,

I'm Giorgos, one of the makers of Tefter for Teams.

We have been developing and testing Tefter for Teams for a few months now, starting from a Slack app - https://tefter.io/go/slack, then overhauling our extension Omni - https://tefter.io/go/extension - and establishing feature parity on tefter.io

Our goal is to get your team on the same page faster with lightning-speed access to all your important links, from any device and Slack.

Team members will spend less time looking for documents in Confluence, Google drive, <insert tool>. All it takes is to ask our Slack bot with “@tefter search some-feature” for our bot to respond with all the relevant links instantly. Quick search is also available in our extension, surfaced with the alt + k key combination.

For commonly used links, there is our aliases feature, think of it as a golinks.io replacement. You can assign a word to a URL and then refer to that word for the full link to appear. For example, you could assign standup to https://zoom.us/j/4242842784237571337 which would be difficult to memorize. Then, with the extension installed, you just type in the browser’s address bar go/standup and hit enter.

Tefter is also great for onboarding team members, invite them to your Tefter team and all the important links will be at their fingertips, neatly organised and full-text searchable, with support for PDF search..

Here’s a video of our Slack app https://youtu.be/zKIDCNRR_z4 and here’s one of our extension Omni https://youtu.be/OhJCsui7suQ

We'd love to get some feedback and I'd be happy to answer any questions!
Still pretty hilarious that they only managed to get some $100k worth of Bitcoin.

Imagine if instead they tweeted from Musk saying something along the lines of Tesla batteries being faulty and they all need to be recalled. Buy some Tesla puts beforehand and that right there is instant millions.

Heck, even selling the rights to this hack would have gotten them millions.
not the most stable or economically strong...

but yeah sure. very pretty with pleasant people.
Cookie Store API Lands Chrome 87
Looks like it's trying to emulate how the cursor works on iPadOS. I can appreciate the experiment, and I think the execution here is quite good (doesn't feel sluggish at all to me). However, I agree that this just isn't something websites should do.

On an iPad, the site shows it's own context sensitive cursor below the iPadOS cursor, for extra weirdness.
One thing I remember from those times : even knowing there was an encyclopedia on the school library computer, I would not use it, because it just sounded impractical. I would need to ask for permission to use the computer, then wait for it to start, then figure how to do a search, while the competitive proposition was just picking the encyclopedia volume for the correct letter and finding my page!

How much a few decades can change… I would call painful the idea of manually looking for a page in a book rather than doing a computer search, nowadays.
This happened once.
> "As a status class, the intelligentsia includes artists, teachers and academics, writers, and the literary hommes de lettres.[3][4] Individual members of the intelligentsia are known as intellectuals."

I would love to see analysis under which Stalin was intellectual. And people I mentioned (except maybe programmers) are not.

> "In Russia, before the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the term intelligentsia described the status class of educated people whose cultural capital (schooling, education, enlightenment) allowed them to assume practical political leadership."

Yeah, pretty much anyone able to participate in politics. Which literally means every person participating in Russian politics is intelligentsia by this definition. Notably, while not all officers and capitalists participated, those who did would be counted as intelligentsia. And they did participate and even achieved some.

> "In Eastern Europe, intellectuals were deprived of political influence and access to the effective levers of economic development; the intelligentsia were at the functional periphery of their societies."

Can confirm that intellectuals were hated by communists.

Calling communists intelligentsia is one way to delegitimize them, precisely because of their disdain for this class. That was strong political point and rhetoric, but fails when you then try to make it a point about impact of education on person.
Isolated and well developed probably, and small nation.

They have effectively eradicated COVID, have you seen videos from their elections?
> offering huge corporation some millisecond savings

millisecond savings for all their users, which adds up to saving man-years every day. It is literally preventing people wasting lifetimes of effort looking at loading spinners.

If you can do better, propose it, but don't force other people to waste lifetimes of effort otherwise.
How to Write a Better Weblog (2002)
Which you can see him performing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSKKPuNoA1g
Quarantine crunch time raises cancer concerns
I was "unschooled" for some years. I was near the top of my class at school (not because I was smart, just because I paid attention and worked hard), and hence my teachers gave up on me. Expending time on a kid who is likely to get A's without intervention does nothing to improve the school's metrics/ranking.

I would have been fine in a good private school but my parents weren't rich and couldn't afford the fees. Somehow I convinced my parents to let me educate myself, and at least for me it was successful. I finally had time to teach myself programming, which at the time was not taught in school.

Would I recommend it to others? Kids should try school first and see if they benefit from it. Some kids love school and do very well out of the system. However, if school is failing your kid, they might be better off without it.
$100k is a huge amount for a 17 years old kid.
Using GPU in Google Colab and Kaggle to Train ML Models
Using GPU in Google Colab and Kaggle Notebooks to Train Machine Learning Models faster
Discord is mostly small groups, which aren't strongly coupled to each other. It's pretty easy to move a small group. I am part of a couple of small groups which have migrated between platforms several times. I don't think Discord has a network effect anything like Facebook's.
Actually, that sounds kind of a good idea to me.

Like, have http://my.number/ return the phone number for identification (though it would need some permission, I don't want every app to have access to it).

Make a HTTP POST with some data to http://my.number/validate and have it signed by the carrier, validate it against a list of public keys per carrier. Not sure why that wouldn't work today? It could even be a private/reserved IP address routed by all carriers to their auth service.

Edit: obviously, it wouldn't work over Wi-Fi without some cooperation at the OS level.
>Does Tom effectively still hold some rights

In the United States, copyright is automatic and exists until expired. Nothing in the federal statute allows an entity to terminate copyright, effectively putting works in the public domain.

The United States also allows authors (and heirs), except work-for-hires, to clawback copyright transfers and terminate licenses after 35 years. This is an inalienable statutory right, which means it cannot be waived even with a contract.
This analysis completely misses the mark and spreads a lot of untruths.

The two major points are:

1. Discord makes money by letting users elevate their status, while offering core feature for free.

2. It is 10x better than other offerings.

Regarding 1, immediately after making that statement, the author lists perks such as bigger upload file size limits, better audio quality, screen sharing resolution, etc. These features are not about status, they are core. I therefore do not accept the premise that Discord is "free to play" like the mentioned League of Legends. Ironically, live game coaches for League of Legends will tell their customers to not share the screen on Discord, but on Skype, due to better quality and latency, for free.

Regarding 2, the 10x factor is obviously marketing speech for "significantly better", but even that is factually wrong. As mentioned in 1), a lot of core features such as audio and video quality are limited, unlike rivaling software. Even IRC offered unlimited file sharing of even gigabytes in size (and therefore had a community around it). Meanwhile Discord will not even allow you to share short video clips less than a minute of length due to file size.
Skype is being criticized, but what's conveniently being left out is that Skype rose to fame before it was bought by Microsoft and had its architecture changed from peer-to-peer to server-client. Skype used to be much better than it is now and used to have less limitations, and was give-or-take better or worse than Discord. Certainly no 10x here.

The real point IMO, and other commenters have written about this in great detail already, is the ease of onboarding. The article only talks about the ease of joining a channel etc. and compares that to Skype for example, but calling somebody in Skype is also only 2 clicks. It's really account creation and server joining (click a link). And the fact that competitors drove their software into the ground.
HTTP 2 is faster though. Especially over mobile networks.

Simple doesn't always mean better.
As I said, that is arguably the reason. But I think we have passed the point where that is actually the reason now.

A group like that is looking to achieve a mission-oriented result, not just hang out with like-minded people. So convenience is a factor. But I know a few people who have set up Facebook groups this summer while being annoyed at Facebook, in the correct believe that that's where the people are.

It's different for other kinds of communities. E.g. a gaming community tends to set up a Discord group, and a programming language community, well... I'm no longer sure if there's a single "place" for those any more.
Relate to OP here. I also built a travel chat bot[1] (now dead) in early stages of chatbot boom. Initially it felt like conversational UX is so much better. But very soon I realized I myself was not using what I built. What we don't realize is how efficient we have become using websites through that navigating through chatbot UX definitely feels waste of time.

[1] https://www.itnry.com
i still remember using encarta. I used it more than wikipedia on those days :D It worked so nice offline . Miss those days :(
Yes, but don't you think that your proposed scheme it is very easily traceable and reversible?
I am an engineer at a profitable chatbot company (HelloTars).

I can't entirely agree with the points mentioned in this article.

Yes, a chatbot is not ready to replace human support.

However, there are other areas where they show good results.

We have been helping customers with lead generation chatbots for the last four years.

What we have learnt is customers would instead engage with a chatbot than filling up lengthy forms. Because chatbot nudges users to give information.

Also in websites where you have a lot of information to convey, ex: banks, mortgages, etc. again chatbot makes sense. Because it helps give information that's selective to the customer. And they don't have to struggle through a lot of information presented to them at once.

We have customers who use our chatbot link directly on google ads.

We have also noticed our customers maturing over time and demanding more functionalities on the chatbots.

To summarize, no chatbots are not dead. They are only beginning. However, you need to narrow down on a specific problem and solve it.
I think I had Encarta 97 or 98 and reading all the pages of the stuff I liked, even printing them. At some point I memorized most of the texts of those pages.
Don’t Give Up – Get Better: Why can’t writers sell their work?
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My grandma used an original HP Deskjet (from 1988) on a Pentium one computer running Wordstar and Wordperfect 5 on MSDOS until she moved to an elderly home in 2015. My dad replaced the rubber rolls on the printer a few times, and I think he had to refill the old cartridges with 3rd party ink, but other than that it still worked perfectly.

No idea what happened to it though... I suspect finding replacement parts for the things that wear out has become close to impossible, but I doubt that thing was broken in any other way.
A lot, and I mean a lot of Data Scientists are just what we called Business Analysts, Analysts, etc.

There's no cohesive group of Data Scientists, and they come from all walks of life. Economics, Business Administration, Life Sciences, Computer Science, Engineering, etc.

There absolutely are professional Data Scientists out there, that haven't touched more than Stats and Probability 101. (But FWIW, a lot of DS - even though they may lack the formal education, pick up these things underway)
This put an even more extreme emphasis on being on the paranoid side, and not leaving anything to the chance, not less.
congrats, its awesome! maybe a way to federate between other known-working sites would be a fun idea
there are many ways to download wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
Welcome to Sarcasm – Please enjoy your stay
This is not true for everything, like speaking. If you don't learn language in the critical period, you will never master it.
>...long period of time without power and society basically collapses.

Im hoping this is a joke.

I live in a country that had terrible electricity issues. Much to say there are no riots on the streets and society has not even come close to collapse. (Everyone from the president to schoolkids makes fun of the utility on Twitter) People just make fun of the fact that they have to BBQ more often than not and change diets slightly to account for the lack of constant refrigeration. More people have invested in solar solutions for creature comforts like lights and such.

Moral of the story is, people have just become a wee bit less reliant on the energy grid. Renewable sector is booming too.

So I'll just stop right here. Because some humans have clearly forgotten the human race has existed for millenia without electricity.
That's a lot of words to support your pedantry. What did your own personal anecdote add to your point?

I suppose you prefer I use lots of words in place of the hyperbolic word "only" to satisfy your need for an equal level of granular evaluation of the unsuccessful education of kids in inner city locations.

What you've described as successful teaching describes learning through about 3rd grade. So one would hope that yes, after 12 years of school, kids would learn four years of basic skills.
We had a very permissive culture around the PC equipment, pretty much if a computer was free you could use it. There was no authentication or use policies. That did change towards the end of my schooling when networking and internet access was finally rolled out. Novell Netware ruined everything!
This naturally happens on land which is steep and causes clouds to form as winds blow ocean air over them.

Since clouds form so regularly, mapping providers have a lot of difficulty getting a shot of the whole area in daylight with no clouds, so they end up using algorithms to stitch together the best image they can get from cloud-free parts.

In areas with snow, the problem is even worse, because an algorithm to separate snow and cloud is even harder.
I'm sure it is possible to over-rate the contribution of any one factor to winning the war. Where would Britain have been without it's sea power, the RAF, huge numbers of recruits from Imperial colonies, the USA. However that doesn't really reduce it's significance, it just puts it in context. When thinking about the invasion of Normandy we naturally think of thousands of troops rushing up the beaches from landing craft, but without air power those landings would have been impossible. Similarly many of our efforts were enabled or materially supported by high quality intelligence.

I think it's best thinking about it in the same terms as air and sea power. It's another domain of conflict that supports the action on the ground, and in fact in all the other domains of conflict. It can make a huge, even essential contribution, but none of them is decisive on it's own.

The point about GCHQ is interesting and I'd not thought about their importance to the UK in quite those terms but it does make sense. Our armed forces punch well above their weight, but our primary asset is actually our relationship with the USA, and our value to the USA may well be primarily in the Intelligence arena.
Which bank is this? Are there others in this space?
I think what also didn't help that they weren't 100% able to act on all the information, as that would have immediately given away their ability to read the enemy's traffic and they would change their cypher.

So they always had to do things like fake a 'random spotting plane' etc and sometimes even letting attacks happen. So there's always a limit to what you can do with this kind of information to protect its existence in the future.

In WW2 there actually were times where German analysts were getting suspicious as to why the allies were so lucky. But their concerns were trumped by the leadership's enormous confidence in the Enigma.

By the way, the Germans were reading lots of the allies' cyphers too.
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That was under a government that played monopoly with our housing market. Bit different now
Good job! I'll definitely have a look into it.
Since when do national intelligence agencies have globally recognised brands

Ever since they had a need to control the narrative about what they're up to. Intelligence agencies need people to think that they're the good guys. That is brand management.
Whoa, I've used a few times, and never realized its from gchq...
Good job, but it needs more explanation :)
Barrier to enter hardware is too high: you need a lot of investment. Then there are patents.

In China the state pushes for own hardware and they dont care about patents.
Ahhhh the memories. I remember that my dad had a Windows XP PC in his office and sometimes we kids were allowed to play with it.

There was this one funny feature in Encarta, that when you typed something about the moon, it would bring up a 3D simulation of the moon orbiting earth.

Annnd, you could influence the moon's orbit with the mouse so that it ended up crashing into earth.

That was sooo fun!
dash is an Almquist shell. At this point there are several major ones (the Debian one, the FreeBSD one, the NetBSD one, and the BusyBox one) and a whole raft of minor ones (Minix, Cygwin, Android, et al.).

* https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/ash/

And Wikipedia does not say that. It says that the Minix Almquist shell, specifically, had a non-conformant test utility. The Almquist shell did not, after all, have a built-in test command at all to start with, so the standard conformance of that utility wasn't a matter for the Almquist shell.

Once again Wikipedia is wrong, because Thomas Dickey's original page that purportedly supports this claim points out that the Minix test command was an external command and not part of the Almquist shell. M. Dickey even pointed to the source code for the external command on GitHub.

* https://invisible-island.net/autoconf/portability-test.html#...

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Don't%20abbreviate%2...
I don't know whether that change can originate from consumers alone. Maybe I'm just jaded, but imho any plan that starts with "we need to teach people..." is doomed from the start.

Take a capitalistic system and leave it running for a long time, company structures will inevitably gravitate towards these giant over-optimized organizations living off the tiniest margins that no smaller competitor can compete with. Try to change things locally, your neighbour will blow you out of the water.

I think our best chance is utilizing the social contract. Push for legislative change, taxes/subsidies to control for changes that no single individual/organization would ever have incentive to make. It seems like a boring and daunting task, but isn't this the only way to effect actual change? And we need the changes on a global scale. How should we make our markets less efficient if other countries don't?

I think this over-optimization/homogenization is a general problem of humanity now, and it appears in seemingly unrelated areas too like social media, advertising, even music and tv. Perhaps our best chance is to try to introduce some sort of fragmenting force that reintroduces heterogeneity. Inefficiency is not such a bad thing, it's more robust to change, redundant, and ultimately just more interesting.

Getting quite philosophical and ranty now, but I was also thinking, didn't this very change happen already, in nature, many millions of years ago, when lifeforms evolved the ability to die naturally? Species that don't die have smaller chances to survive environmental changes and adapt to resource scarcity. Doesn't this hint at the kind of decisions we need to make as a species? Introduce some notion of organizational death, or renewal, or limiting force, to make room for differentiation?