skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chat Bots
Has anyone ever used a chat bot and been happy with the interaction? Every time I encounter one online it just really annoys me. Perhaps I'm just not the target market, but usually whenever I actually try chatting to someone on a website (or call their phone for that matter) I have exhausted all ways of accessing the information and I need a human to perform some action for me and the chat bot is literally just in the way.

Part of me thinks perhaps some people can't search the web and need a chat bot but another part of me thinks that it's just a (futile) attempt by companies to reduce the cost of supporting their products.

My own experience trialing website chat also backs this up. We tried chat to see if customers would be more likely to convert after chatting with us. Nobody wanted to chat with us and the only customers we spoke to were existing customers who previously would have emailed us to achieve what they wanted to achieve. My learning from that is that people would just rather do the thing online without ever interacting with a human.

So are chat bots just another way to extract money from large corporations at their (and our) expense or is there actual value in them ?
Behold!: https://squirdle.fireblend.com/
Please understand my lack of education in this subject.

According to other comments Marxist governments have committed heinous crimes. I have asked questions about whether or not those crimes are the result of Marxism or the people who enforced it.

I understand that there is a large stigmatisation against criticizing capitalism and the free market in America. Capitalism and free market politics seem, as I have no real education for this type of thing, as though they've become symbols of America. And symbols and ideology are usually venerated.

I am left to wonder a few things:

If Marxism truly is responsible for suffering at scale, then why are there people still fervently attached to the idea? Is it a lack of historical context? Is it the same kind of idea why some people become neo-nazis; some romanticized ideation how the world should work?

Further despite any of this, why do people still espouse the idea of class distinctions? (This sounds like a very right sounding question).

Regardless of any political or economic theory or ideas, I personally think that there is a distinction between the interests of people who work for a wage ,the "average"person, and the people who govern / own property/production/govern. To dismiss this would ignore the whole industry of lobbying. With which the entire point is to further corporate interest in government. Whereas these interests may not necessarily be maligned against the average person, they are not in the interest of the average person.

I apologize for my ramblings as I don't have anybody to discuss this with. My final question becomes this: is Marxism a flawed system but still has some good ideas in it?
I’ve come to wonder if Google’s “don’t be evil” secretly always meant “don’t be truly evil, just skirt the edge of being evil”. It’s much more profitable being in the grey zone.
Doesn't work effectively for Quordle.

You have 9 guesses. This takes up 5 of them, then you need to be correct for each of the 4 words.
“Don’t be evil” is a slightly edgier version of the typical corporate value of “Do the right thing” which I’ve seen in many companies. Sounds good, but vague enough to be meaningless.
I applied in October last year, and at that time the waiting list was zero days, so I received our /24 instantaneously.

Some nice data on the prices of IPv4 addresses:
https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales
Pg's license is like BSD/MIT. So long as they provide attribution why would they bother trying to do a clean room reimplementation?
love it, i just wish that was a simple toggle to enable global loudness filter like on windows / macOS

having to manually tweak the volume for everything is a pain

i know about easyeffects, but that's not what i want and it consumes too much CPU
Conflating reserve currency with loan backings is like mixing Thursday with vaseline - it makes no sense.

For example, UK has at most $87B of foreign currency reserves, a fraction of which is USD. [1]

UK has 9.2T in privately owned homes [2]. So reserve currency can back at best a tiny, likely sub percent, of all home loan amounts.

And, this is the kicker, the UK does not hold reserve currency to loan to anyone. It's an assert they hold at the national level.

So cost increases there (and other countries listed above) are not the result of US being a reserve currency. Don't make up wild claims.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[2] https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/u-k-home-values-have-...
Way back when apple first released boot camp for the intel macs, I worked retail. A customer came in one day fuming mad and demanding a refund of their new MacBook. They described a series of issues they’d been having for the past month, some of which were known issues that were addressed with a firmware update months earlier and some of which sounded like nothing that should be able to happen in OS X at all.

After some taking the customer allowed us to take a look at things before we did the refund. It turned out her nephew, whom she had turned to for help setting up her new computer decided for her that she didn’t need a mac, she needed a mac running windows. He had resized the Mac OS partition to as small as it would go, installed windows and configured boot camp to boot entirely into windows. As a result all the problems she’d had under windows remained (made worse by not having antivirus because “macs don’t need antivirus”) and she never got any of the firmware updates because Mac OS was never booted and never checked the update servers.

Boot camp was an involved process at the time, with plenty of scary warnings and no official support at all. But the end user never even saw them because the “tech” person in their lives just set it up anyway.

The result of this was a few hours of employee time and and out of policy assurance of return long after the normal return policy if the customer still wasn’t happy trying the proper Mac and Mac OS experience for a while.

No amount of disclaimers, not taking responsibility or sign tapping would have gotten a better response, and not taking that responsibility even though Apple explicitly disclaimed responsibility would have resulted in brand damage, costs in terms of returns and restocking and the loss of future sales that (later happy) customer represented.

In the end, customers aren’t impressed with your signs and disclaimers. If apple is the product vendor, they will demand apple fixes it.
As far as we know, humanity is the only example of the universe becoming aware of itself.

As far as we know, there isn't / hasn't / won't be anybody else out there, ever.

Until we know better, any other presumption must be rejected as wishful thinking.

What we DO know is that the conditions that can support life (and consciousness) on Earth rely on an incredibly fragile balance, especially on cosmic timescales.

Maybe there's no second planet like earth, but we have a lot to learn if we are to prevent the absolute extermination of consciousness in the universe, so we better get on with it, and fast.

Sure we may debate on how we try to achieve this: should we get on the Moon, on Mars, in space habitats, make earth resistant to cosmic catastrophes, transfer our consciousness into computers or teach machines to become conscious in our place?

But debating this is actually moot. Billions of people. Massive parallelism. We've been working on all those fronts now for decades, and there's progress.

Right now, a company making cheap steel rockets is on it's way to crack cheap space travel. That's a pretty good step for all humanity, in my opinion.
(offtopic)

Such questions on HN should start with "Ask HN:". Also, your title is not descriptive, which would make people skip it.
Everything you just wrote sounds like a good thing to me. The fact that housing is structured around lending in the US is part of the problem. It should not require a loan to get a roof over your head, and combined with zoning making basic housing illegal, there's a lot of perfectly sound shelter that cannot be legally constructed in the US.
It's not impossible, but people are stubborn and the voices of home owners/drivers dominate the conversation over anything else.

Those things are scalable -- LA's light rail network is one of the biggest in the country and it's incredible efficient. Over a million people (of a city of 4 million) use LA Metro on a daily basis.

There's no reason LA's fundamental character as a city would change if we allowed duplexes in already dense neighborhoods or as much BRT as possible. But instead we've prioritized voices like the Bel-Air Homeowners Association or some NIMBY idiots in Santa Monica to make policy decisions and are stuck with environmental review on projects that demolish, say, 4 parking spots to build 40 affordable housing units.
A strategically placed powerful magnet outside Mars can protect from the solar wind. There is an orbit that places the orbiting body always on the line between Mars and Sun. Place a superconducting magnet there that generates a few Tesla. Due to the distance from the planet, even though the magnet will deflect more distant particles to relatively small angles, this should still be enough to keep Mars completely in the "shadow".

Of course you'll have to and solar-powered thrusters to keep it on the orbit, and fly regular missions to replenish fuel in the ion drives. But thil looks doable even with today's level of technology, given enough money.
I am the same, but with the enhancement of using Resilio Sync to automatically sync the file between devices.
I really don't know. I barely trust the one I built myself, especially for the automatic, cloud based ones, I just don't know.
What did it look like?
Nah, I quite appreciated it. It amuses me quite a bit how bizarrely specialized a lot of trash software are, which mobile platforms tend to heighten. From blatantly fraudulent ads that depict bogus gameplay, to Dr. Phil shilling Solitaire Grand Harvest on his show, the plain tawdriness of the trash app game ecosystem is fascinating. And who even wants to play slots on their phone anyway?
In American capitalism the investors are the real customers, not the consumers.
Any data that support these theories would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Aside from the possibility of self incrimination, the whole IANAL thing is mostly just a meme. People are more than happy to feign expertise on epidemiology or any number of topics but legal advice should only be trusted if it comes from a Lawyer.
What definition are you using for pedantic here? I’m a bit confused and might learn something today.
No weak key here, and you may be right, but my main concern is that encryption is only strong in a given time period.

If someone could gain a copy of a known high-value ciphertext, they may not be able to crack it now, but time is on their side, and I can't recover the file once it is out there. My only recourse is to speculatively rotate passwords inside the file.
Ask HN: Most elegant API development stack?
Oversimplified, modern API development is about providing data fetching and data modification with security and permission constraints. Underlying these are business rules.

In your experience, what language/framework/toolkit enables API development with the least amount of plumbing (leaving you to focus on the models and business rules)?

If possible, please link to a good example which illustrates your stack.
Carta releases an Annual Equity Report with similar compensation analysis across race, ethnicity gender. https://www.cartaequitysummit.com/2021-report/
You might want to allow specific machines to be addressable from the internet. Also, NATs were buggy back then and many pieces of software simply wouldn't work unless you had a real IP address. VLANs and other advanced router features didn't really exist, either.
As a side-note, as soon as I added some DNS A records pointing to a testing server, it started getting spammed by bots trying to hack into the server (accessing all sorts of random paths that might be exposed, like .env or common PHP files). Not sure what the solution to this is, apart from not adding DNS records for testing servers, maybe only allow access to the server from specific IPs? But that makes testing harder, if you send a link to someone with a dynamic IP.
Strongly agreed!

I think the requirement that at least two participants need to make some effort to keep the conversation going, is generally an extremely good thing.

For the very rare thread where I hope for a belated reply, I'll keep a tab open and refresh it every day or two until I give up or it expires.
Because my passwords are stored in the cloud but they are only decrypted on my PC. If a nation state or another attacker gets into the password manager I use, they have my encrypted passwords just the same as if they rooted some Linux box I have an account on. The stakes are roughly the same.

A passsword manager (PM) makes random passwords easier. A PM keeps me from re-using passwords. A PM gives me a relatively secure place to store vital information, and it also lets me use it on multiple computers and stays in sync.

Do I trust them implicitly with everything? No. That would be foolish. It's a calculated risk, and the benefits outweigh the risks.
I have slowly gone all in on Home Assistant over the past 5 years and I think it is an amazing community, and amazing open-source success story, and fantastic software.

I will say that programming your house yourself can be fun (you can literally do anything) but you also have to then keep up with all the technical debt and changes over time. I still don't think it's a great choice for non technically minded folks that would find that level of tinkering and fixing overwhelming - but I must say that Home Assistant is moving positively in that direction by really focusing on UX - and having a giant community keeping integrations updated, even unofficial reverse-engineered ones, is great.
> I'm positively certain that in all of your examples people have pushed into new areas because of food, to find new land to live on, to find riches, to find the promised land or other mythological reasons

First of all, you can’t be positively certain of those. We don’t have access to the reasoning of why the Vikings decided to cross the Artic to America, or Polynesians crossing the Pacific.

Second of all, let’s say they did go to look for food. Are you sure they ran out of land to grow food, or forest for hunting that they had to look for new land? The answer is quite resounding no. Likewise, we don’t have to exhaust all of the resource on Earth before exploring other planets.

Finally, what were those mythological reasons you listed there, if not the desire of human being to explore?
Thank you for the reply!

Not to be nitpicking, but it’s not (only) the cookie that requires consent, but the storage and the use of the data itself. So if your customers do not have a cookie consent yet, they might even have _more_ work to do to implement your solution because they still have to ask for permission and store the answer.
Hi, i'm the lang designer and implementor here.

We absolutely do not normalize newlines as that would defeat the purpose of raw literals. The point here is that your content is not interpreted as that's the pain area that people are hitting today. How you write your literal is what you get at the end of the day.

Note: if the content needs to be `\n` then just use that actual newline in teh code. WRT to the file line endings and whatnot, my recommendation is that you never use tools that arbitrarily change that behind your back as it does already have impact today in C#. For example, that will break standard `@""` strings today.

If your line endings are important, then your tools should be setup to respect what you wrote and not change them. All editors can be setup this way, as can git. And that would absolutely be my recommendation on how you should structure things for your code if newlines are relevant.
The book Strong Towns covers this extensively. The modern standard of doing all new development at the peak standards basically ensures that neighborhoods can only ever go downhill, and leads to all kinds of other problems. It's a good read.
Otter.ai has saved reporters hours transcribing interviews. Caveat emptor
To go a bit on a tangent: I love TV shows where it really is shot where it is set, and the location is a big part of the show.

Examples: Magnum P.I. (Hawaii); Miami Vice (Miami); The Equalizer (NYC).
Where re(make)(boot)s exist, I'm talking about the originals.

On the other hand, it can be a little annoying when, e.g. in The Good Wife, NYC is standing in for Chicago.

On a third hand, I love how Murder, She Wrote represents many different places with the same backlot sets, throwing in bits of stock or second unit establishing shots.
Human nature - it is a b*tch. Let's face it - as you say, most people are looking out for themselves; they rarely, if ever, think about the cashier or stock clerk who's working 3 jobs and still not making it. And it's not a "screw everyone else" sort of attitude, it's more of not even thinking about it because they're absorbed with their own lives.

Only when folks are faced with how such a reality affects them, such as when a company lays them off and they have little marketable skills after toiling away in a throwaway job for 10 years, do they actually give any real consideration to how others live - because they now are facing the same sort of conditions and giant concrete roadblocks.
> Why would Marxism be a signal for avoiding the movement?

Because lots of people have been affected by propaganda (both Leninist and capitalist) equating Marxism with Leninism (and it's descendants), and Leninism has a legitimately horrifying track record.
The 50-loc Python unit test framework
Why? They are getting double the average janitor salary. Why would they want to leave?
> Mr. Leissner said he wasn’t surprised by the need for bribes, saying he believed they were somewhat common in Asia. He was also aware the bribes were illegal, he said, but the deals brought him praise.

Bribes are not just common but necessary to get things done wherever the government is involved.

In this case, Goldman at least had the option of not paying bribes and forgoing the deal. That is a good position to be in. Often the choice is between paying up and being subjected to extreme harassment.
That's ridiculous. I can't imagine tip toeing around people like that. There's a big difference between being rude and being to the point. What you're describing is manipulative, patronizing, and weird.
Not answering your question, but among my gamedev circle, "fun" is seen as a useless word because there are so many different possible meanings (challenging, soothing, exploratory, nice graphical effect feedback, nice music, social, etc) and often are contradictory with each other. We've seen countless times people setting merely "fun" as their goal, and then getting horribly depressed when the nebulous "fun" is never struck upon, with no clue how to make any ground in that direction.
> My sister had multiple properties where her bid was beat out by someone offering $100k+ over ask

This really isn't bad, consider Toronto, Canada where house that's over 100 years old (tear downs) cost well over 1 million and increase in value by over $2000 a week, yeah you heard that right.

There are houses outside the city (almost anywhere in Southern Ontario)that were anywhere from 200k -400k pre pandemic that are now approaching 1-2 million. I have seen 50 year old 1200 sq/ft Condos in Toronto go from 300k pre pandemic to now 800k. I believe by the end of this year the average price of a house in Toronto Canada will be approaching 1.5 million plus and is probably on a trajectory of 3-5 million in the next 5-10 years. Before you say it can't keep going, it's been on this path for the last 15 years and is showing no sign of letting up.

Governments are bankrupt and can't raise interest rates meaningfully ever again.
How can a solo founder SaaS "be used" to access financial institutions? Do you mean simply creating a bank connection through an API like Plaid? People in Russia may have bank accounts in the US, you know?
As you noted, Apple's fsync() behavior is defensible if PLP is assumed. Committing through the PLP cache isn't how these drives are meant to operate - hence the poor behavior of F_FULLSYNC.

But this isn't specific to Macs and iDevices. Some non-PLP drives also struggle with sync writes on FreeBSD [1]. Most enterprises running RDBMS mandate PLP for both performance and reliability. I understand why this is frustrating for porting Linux, but Apple is allowed to make strong assumptions about how their hardware interoperates.

[1] https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/slog-and-power-los...
'more' links for long threads wasn't HN's initial design. It's a performance workaround and therefore bs in its own right. I'm slowly making progress on a reimplementation of Arc, which will hopefully allow this to go away.
We're talking about "e" as it is used as an open other-initiated repair, the fact that it has a dozen other usages is irrelevant here. "E" (and sometimes "a", though I believe that might be regional and more context-dependent) is definitely used as an open other-initiated repair word in Japanese, meaning they can be used in the place of "huh" in the following dialogue pattern:

"Hey, what time is it?"

"Huh?"

"I said, what time is it?"
It's a real concern of mine and it's driving me towards considering building a custom home, at this point it's almost cheaper to do, especially since much of the work I can do myself and already have the necessary skills and tools. It's really and truly absurd what people are being expected to pay in comparison to what they get... I feel like most of the houses in the US are actually unsafe to live in because they don't care in construction about efficiency, indoor air quality, or mitigating common environmental concerns in those areas like radon gas. The minimal building codes in the US are truly obscene, and yet these slapdash houses are now priced for 3-4x what they are actually "worth" given the inflation rate.

I have a 5 page document of bullet points making simple asks/requirements for a new home build, and most of them are focused on safety, reliability, and efficiency, and none of them would be done by default by any builder in the US, most are required by law in Europe. It's kind of nuts.
The last two years have shown that the educated portion of the population was just as easily deceived by false populist promises, and just as easily provoked into channelling their frustrations onto an undeserving scapegoat.
Rewritten in Rust: Modern Alternatives of Command-Line Tools (2020)
Heh... at "build day" only the son of the person with the tools was allowed to use any of them. I ended up building a real clunker and felt terrible for years when it lost every race to better-engineered systems. I didn't get any real parental help.

This time around (by which I mean, my son was in cub scouts and doing the derby) I helped my son by showing him some basics of woodworking and how to make something that looked right and rolled properly, but beyond that it was all him. He didn't win any races, but wasn't bummed about it at all.

Following that, I bought a bunch of pine blanks, read a few papers on how to make faster cars (those nail axles are REALLY DUMB), bought Fusion 360, designed a car, and flip-milled it on my personal CNC, over a period of a year (it's never raced). it amuses me to no end that imposter syndrome and OCD drove me to be a well-compensated software engineer with enough free time to build his own pinewood derby racecar in his own time on his own terms.