skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2008, I was taking COS 217 at Princeton - our final project was to write a program to play Othello competitively. We were told to use alpha-beta-pruning for grading, but that there would be a tournament at the end of class, so we could tweak our programs for that (the assignment was insanely hard, so of course no one had time to tweak).

To my surprise, I won the tournament, despite having done the bare implementation with no tweaks! I didn’t get a perfect grade on the assignment though - apparently I had miss implemented the queue for the alpha-beta search, and had completely reversed the queue ordering.

Of course, searching “in reverse” through the alpha-beta tree turned out to be the difference that won me the tournament. It was rather humiliating, but a good lesson on sheer luck’s role in academic approaches to AI.
workers who are paid well usually dont have tip jars.
Oh wow you should definitely give this a shot again. Type hints in Python save the entire language for me.

People do have bad habits of cramming everything into dictionaries but if you do some type hinting and use data classes heavily you’ll really have a good experience.

I could take or leave mypy personally.
BEopt: Building Energy Optimization Tool
Brought to you by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
This comment is so wrong it hurts.

> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual.

Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. It's a strategy to try to get you to go online, use an automated system, or annoy you until you give up. Trust me, if I'm calling into a business something has already gone horribly wrong. The automated line lying about "higher than normal call volume" (bullshit, hire more people) or "You can find the answers you need on our website" (nope, that's why I'm calling in) only pisses me off. It has never in my life provided information that I found useful.

> If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all!

What does this even mean? Of course understaffing saves the company money.

> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead.

Yes, because I have a real choice on what electric, gas, water, internet company I use /s. For non-monopoly companies (growing increasingly rare) I often can't help that I currently have their product, I might buy an alternative (if one exists) next time around but "vote with your dollars" doesn't really work here well.

> Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs".

No, it's not. It might be a metric for human workers but they literally don't care if it takes you 10x longer to find the answer as long as they don't have to pay a human it's a win. I've worked for companies with call centers and I assure you the only thing they care about is reducing that headcount, the outcome for the customer doesn't even rank.
How does tipping improve their bargaining power? Seems to me like it would weaken it (“why do you need a higher base wage? You get so many tips!”)
This reads like you think women are below men though. I assume you don't mean that, but it's hard to think up an alternate explanation. Power dynamics maybe? I dunno, I could list thousands of women more powerful than a youtuber or whatever he is.
I wonder if there was someone in King Louie's court that had a similar statement.
Spark has datasets, which I think lets you do this, although it’s only supported in Java and Scala, not Python.
Who would've thought that locking young people in for 2 years in their youth phase could have detrimental effects on their mental health.

Not saying that is the only part, of course.
Pointless when heavy industry utterly dwarfs computing.

Might be nice for embedded devices though, but they already run C/C++...
That is an interesting thought. Google, for most consumer products (and a good number of business ones) notoriously has next to no phone support at all. Is this an indication of being a market leader or of being a digital monopoly?
Statistically speaking, a book on RDBMS SQL or Java EE with a urine drug testing kit.
Depends on the call centre. Some are great and answer your question straight away. Others are newspeak-laden smokescreens designed entirely to either funnel customers into doing what the company wants, or to waste their time until they give up.

“Thanks for calling $corp, press 1 to pay a bill or 2 to give us a 5 star rating. Press 3 to hear these options again.”
This is a real benefit of public corporations: anyone with significant ownership is public. The names of the owners and executives are trivial to find.
I appreciate the effort to actually ask around which hardware works well with a given software, rather then buying on price/spec/style and later complaining that some feature or other isn't working.

I haven't bought a laptop in years, both my Chromebook Pixel, my Dell M6800 (desktop replacement -- you wouldn't want to lug it around) and a cheap Lenovo ThinkPad 11e still work fine (the Pixel is EOL'ed so I might debianize it soonish, but the highly reflective screen and the mediocre keyboard make it unsuitable as workstation). Can't think of a Linux problem with either (the Dell was actually listed as supported by Ubuntu). I use the Dell with a mouse, as the touchpad experience is poor (regardless of OS).

The ThinkPad has a surprisingly good keyboard, unfortunately the screen is rather underwhelming, else it would be an awesome network terminal. Good value in any case.
Do you believe this experience will affect your perception long-term? How?
Nonsense, you're doubling down on the false premise. The problem with the ultra rich isn't solved by a one time tax on their accumulated wealth, its solved by ongoing redistribution of the profits from industry into workers pockets.

A classic case that was borne out this year is the dichotomy between Warren Buffet and the average railway worker. Railways took in massive profits over the pandemic, and precision scheduling literally killed workers to get there. All the while our supply chain breaks down.
Rape is more about desire for control and power over the other, not about sensuality and sexuality. So no. Mere sexual desire is not enough.

A sizable chunk of heterosexual men (and possibly women), on the other hand, would indeed have sex with available women at every opportunity, if they could not get in trouble for it - you know, like the stigma of adultery, divorces, and stuff.
How do you evaluate this metric?
I think smartphones are the worst invention of this century. They bring all the addictive services (not just social media but also news, gaming and such) everywhere, with minimum resistence.

Before smartphones every silent moment, every moment of boredom people had to figure out something to do, make do with what was available. Now the phone is always the path of least resistance and instant gratification, which does nothing good to our brains.

Too often I find myself and my partner just staring our phones while our child is playing. I wish I could destroy these cursed devices.
> it's hard to see what will reverse it

Legislation. Consumer protection laws need to be in place so that the calculus is shifted to a point where providing refunds etc is cheaper than (risk_of_getting_caught * penalty_of_getting_caught)
This is most likely a very US-centric view of the world. As someone who primarily worked in India and the Middle East, where tipping culture doesn't exist, it wasn't so much of an issue.

With that said, workers in the US tend to have significantly more bargaining power than those in countries with more diverse and relaxed labour laws.
My experience is that customer service is often trying to convince me that there is no problem or that my problem is my fault and there's nothing they can do about it. I bet many people here can sympathize with me when I say I know from experience that when customer service asks what operating system I use, the correct answer is "Windows," even though I run Linux, because I will never get help with any issue of I admit I'm using Linux (even for issues not at all related to my OS, like issues with my router - I don't call for Linux issues, because I can diagnose and fix those!). They will tell me Linux isn't supported... By their browser app or broadband service or what have you.

The less connected you are to a real person, the more true this is. Email is the worst. If you include any detail remotely atypical, they will latch right on to it. It's not like writing a ticket where if you include everything you think might be relevant, it will be appreciated and used to troubleshoot in good faith. It's more like they're building a case against you and any extraneous information you include will be used to achieve a summary judgement against you.

(I've had lots of great customer service experiences with smaller businesses and startups, over email and phone calls, but for giant organizations it's a terrible, adversarial process that often doesn't resolve my issue.)
> We were able to travel for miles in most directions without being barraged by No Trespassing signs - each of them backed up by disproportionate penalties and an ever present risk of life-changing criminal records.

That didn't happen until 9/11, so older millennials had largely the same experience.
> Is it possible maybe the problem is they are just a bit too entitled on average, and when things don't go perfectly they can't cope?

Precisely. The world has never been safer or as rich, and it seems like my generation is extremely lacking in independence.

Everyone has to be told to do things, it's like they have no concept of what to do without being commanded. I feel like many simply can't come up with answers on their own. No one can answer the question of how a person should their life. It's subjective. But like a muscle, it's completely atrophied. When you're never given independence, you don't recognize how to listen to your own desires or judgement.

For me this explains perfectly the underlying situation behind the overbearing paternalism (from society & government) that so many apparently desire now.
Used to be a vBulletin forum until Summer 2020.
Do you have examples? Is it all going towards Rust or are there other big tech-backed contenders?
The problem isn’t that people are ultrarich. See PG’s essay on the merits of inequality. The problem is rentier parasites.
Omg yes, and workers against consumers. "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich." No, they will eat each other.
> but damn if 20-somethings aren't emotionally fragile at a level the world has never seen before.

38 year old here.

I do wonder if the sense of "emotionally fragile" has something to do with how we (America? Canada?) had been accustomed to only having ppl speaking about emotions once they'd sorted it out. Maybe ppl talking more about their emotions earlier looks a lot like ppl talking about things they don't understand yet.

But maybe they're more likely to turn out as better ppl than you or I if they're communicating more and earlier and working things out, albeit with a whole lot of untenable conclusions while younger :)
How would you go about finding out how to access the manager of some department within MegaCorp? All one can do these days is fill out some contact form and maybe someday getting an email from some noreply email address. I'm also chuckling at the thought of me mentioning that I'm a stock holder.
This feels very detached from reality.
The problem here is that workers now want to be "paid properly" (what ever that means) and still get tips.

There have been restaurants have tried non-tipping models, consumers and staff both hate it. First the highly productive staff often make less under that model (where poor performers make more), consumers hate it because the menu prices increase, and you end up with McD's level customer service where drinks are never refilled, and service overall degrades.
Simply "disagreement" implies that there are valid opinions and perspectives to engage about. What we have now is a culture so polarized that you are literally evil to the other side if you disagree. We can't afford to have simple disagreements because if the other tribe destroys you, you need your tribe to support you.

For example, name something of real political consequence that it is acceptable to disagree about. It is a struggle to come up with a single example.
> I’ve been waiting for Wolfram to open source it for 10 years as I can’t afford it,

Wolframscript is free (not guaranteed to stay that way, as it isn't Open Source, but free for now).

It can AFAIK do pretty much all Mathematica can.

Only part missing is the Mathematica IDE/GUI/Notebook which I personally dislike profoundly anyways.

Best of all, since it's a batch tool, it can be integrated in a Makefile and/or data processing pipeline without that nasty GUI showing up at all.

https://www.wolfram.com/wolframscript/
That's objectively false for almost any metric you can come up with. Maybe the problem is that media gives such distorted view of reality?
std::isfinite
That's not what the literature says about differences in income - there, skills are indeed very relevant (though of course sheer luck and superstar dynamics matter a lot at the very high end). Wealth is a whole other ballgame, it's a stock not a flow; it grows globally when asset values rise (as they clearly have in recent times, due to r < g); and at an individual and subcultural level when people refrain from drawing down on it, preserving a long time horizon often across many generations.
And at that level you get people who absolutely don't care if some Joe Shmoe was unhappy with their service or something.
I would have liked to see "age play" in the list though

There's "rapid age regression" at 70,3
> automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close

I usually just talk complete nonsense to these prompts (but valid English sentences). That way the automation gives up when it can parse the sentences but can’t intuit meaning from them.
If a business is pushing for tips (those dumbass Toast POS consoles that now often start tipping at 20%), the workers are underpaid. Tipping is getting out of control, and businesses just need to pay more.

Tipping is a stupid concept. Japan has the number three economy in the world and they'll refuse tips.

Watch https://youtube.com/watch?v=V4sbYy0WdGQ&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE and tell me that he's wrong.
Your final point is not at all controversial!

The very point of CBT is not to dwell on how you feel. Instead be active and take control of yourself.

For me that meant running/long cardio sessions.

I worked with a Dr who used CBT, and I explored various techniques for dealing with my thoughts.

The mind is a though machine, thats what it does. You just have to learn how to turn it off sometimes!

People should not be fed ideas around satisfaction, success, happiness and so on. Because so often those emotions are mapped to results of our society's ideal of a perfect human.

Walking and talking in a social group is what humans have evolved to do, but yet we've ironed that experience out of lives.

Drive to work, use a Peloton alone at home, come to an office and dont talk when you should be working. Don't say anything online as it'll be used against you and so on...

Our society is just awful.
Young adults are only internalizing the deeply stressful and hopeless times we live in: soaring prices, low wages, typical milestones of adult life - cars and houses, for example - harder to reach, etc.

Life has been hard even for people who have an established career, let alone for the ones who have to start from the beginning. I find it incredible that this is never cited in this kind of article, but then I remember that it was probably written by a boomer and then I'm not surprised anymore.
That’s not what denormalize means, how long have you been doing this again?
How to Get That Staff Engineer Promotion
If tipping can ever be mandatory on a bill, it’s a good sign the employees are getting screwed.
Could be because your generation went out, explored the world without boundaries and have found that it's scary? Then, imbued with this fear, tried to protect their children at all costs.

Maybe the coddled generation will raise non-coddled children since they will be unaware of the dangers out there.
I went to 2 different hot pot restaurants in the last 2 days with wildly different experiences. Both were "all you can eat" style, where you periodically ask for additional orders of meat and vegetables to add to the hot pot.

The first had QR codes at the table, where you _must_ order using your phone. You cannot have multiple phones ordering at the same table at the same time. It hard-limited you to making orders only once every 10 minutes. This can be particularly problematic when the same limit applies to all tables, regardless of the number of people at the table. Orders would variably be delivered by a person or one of those BellaBot serving robots [1]. I had no problem pulling my plates off the tray and pressing the button to dismiss it, but other tables clearly struggled with it. At some larger tables, the robot would stop near the far end of the table and a person would have to get out of their chair to fetch their own food. Sometimes a server would see it happen and assist the table, but it was sad to see older people struggling with it.

The second place I went to had paper menus which you just checked off what you wanted. There was no limit on how much you could order at once, and they didn't arbitrarily throttle you.

Both restaurants had a similar number of tables with 3-4 staff in the dining room at any given time. The first restaurant was actually a miserable customer experience, with the only take-away being how interesting it was that the novelty made the experience so much worse. I will unlikely go back to that first restaurant, while the second one will always be on the rotating list that me and my wife go to.

I _really_ dislike having to read a menu on my phone or struggle with some low-quality ordering software. From what I could tell, the first restaurant saved nothing on staffing from their "automation."

1. https://provenrobotics.ai/bellabot
I don't know what you're missing, but if this is basically a screenshot tool, each of flameshot and spectacle are very good, and in the near future spectacle will also do video recording, I think.
Agreed. Not only is tipping a scourge but it doesn't even try to hide what it is, you paying the worker for doing the minimum. In a lot of apps/websites you have to enter a tip before any service is rendered and you have no option to change it later if the service is bad.

For some services like Uber Eats/DoorDash I've heard that orders will just sit on a shelf because the tip isn't high enough to entice someone to "claim" that order. Tipping is mandatory if you want to get your food in any reasonable timeframe.

Tipping has spread further and further into our economy and into areas it never should have existed (I'd argue it shouldn't exist at all but it's moved well past "traditional" and reasonable places). Services have the audacity to charge you a membership fee and then essentially require tips on top of that (Looking at you Kroger Boost, I've got a blog article worth of issues with that service).
These look almost like standard Central European bathrooms. Except for the floor drain which when it happens is usually in the middle of the shower with the whole floor slanted towards it.
> workers who are paid well usually dont have tip jars.

I'm sure that's why I don't see tip jars at grocery store checkouts, because the workers there are so well paid. Moreover, if you work at a job that society thinks is socially acceptable to ask for tips, why would you leave money on the table just because you're paid $25/hr?
One perspective on tipping that made me feel a little different is that it can act as a form of progressive pricing or a sliding scale or “pay what your can afford”

It allows places to keep base prices as cheap as possible, which means lots of people can afford to eat out, but people who can afford to pay more can do so. It’s sort of like raising the minimum wage but but having the costs only impact people with higher incomes.

Yes, plenty of rich people are stingy and terrible tippers, so it’s not a perfect analogy. But I try to tip a lot everywhere I go and that’s how I think about it.
So if I put out a tip jar, by definition, I am not paid well?

I do not care if people think I am not paid well, if they want to tip me, I am more than happy to accept it.
> we got rid of the leadership hierarchies we hated

When I look around, I see plenty of leadership hierarchies that are worthy of hate.
No, they’re not “dowel bar retrofits.”
It’s called a rumble strip. They’re everywhere in the west.
See here: https://thehog.com/blog/2019/04/17/what-are-the-four-types-o...
You fall asleep at the wheel, or drive distracted, and cross that strip you WILL NO LONGER be asleep or distracted.
It scares the living crap out of you when you hit them.

Or, they’re a good way to clean the dirt out of your treads.
Nit to pick. Code cannot be owned. Rights to code may be owned. They are not the same. Otherwise, you’re spot on in my book.
Looks like you added the inventory cost twice? $5 a unit in the unit math and then the $52k. Also do you need to pay the tax immediately?
This is what you get when you have an economy dominated by financial paperclip maximizers.

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
"Income" and "wage" are used interchangeably in this context - income derived from labour, ie salary, bonuses etc. That's what "income inequality" generally refers to.

"Wealth inequality" is what's relevant if you're concerned about the mega-rich like Jobs. If your assets are big enough you can live off of them without any labour - through rents, dividends, sale of assets etc.

It's interesting if income inequality is going down considering that wealth inequality is worsening in the developed world due to the recent massive inflation of housing assets.
Yes. A polite machine is just annoying. Having a computer program say "thank you" is meaningless.

I've always wanted a navigator for my car that was rude. "Wake up! You should have turned back there, you fakking kahnt! A bleedin' monkey could drive better than that!" A library of a few thousand insults should keep it from getting too boring.

This goes back to the game Empire I wrote long ago. It was the only game I'd heard of where you weren't liberating cities, you weren't the good guy. You were the bad guy - subjugating cities, putting them under iron control, crushing your enemies. Your underlings replied with "yes master". Your armies would march off the boat and drown if you ordered it.
> They never have any idea about what is going on, and add excessive delay getting to someone who can actually look at and override or fix whatever broken thing in their system is causing the problem.

This is by design and replaces arguing with their clueless first level support staff who could be solving easy problems. I'm not saying it's right, just that it's intentional and likely cheaper.

I don't actually mind the chat bots which are smart enough to successfully redirect the simple stuff to the appropriate KB's, and escalate to a human being (even if on chat) when they have run the gauntlet. These are rare, and almost certainly require a well-oiled machine to get right. Total junk without a huge KB, which is well maintained and indexed.
I don't know, I've had pretty bad service recently at places where you tip. I still top 20% out of guilt, but it might be that service in general is poorer now.