skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is definitely a massive breakdown of old social institutions that have not adapted to the modern world. People don't need to be closely knit to their families and local religion in order to survive anymore, and they are simultaneously discovering how awful these institutions habitually are.

To improve families, I imagine we'd have to wait for a significantly large generation to mature whose parents started a family through informed choice rather than social/cultural/religious pressure.

Alternatively, we could regress by taking away people's freedoms (especially women's) and force everyone to be dependent on traditional power structures just like the "good old days."

Personally, I'd rather move forward, but it's not entirely clear what that looks like.
> Note that this is an issue with industrial and medical systems - the insurance for these is such that the manufacture is liable unless they have taken every possible precaution to prevent misuse.

Is that an accurate statement of the legal liability? If the vendor clearly states in the sales contract that it disapproves of unauthorised customer modifications, that such modifications will invalidate product safety and regulatory compliance testing, and that it excludes all liability for customers who ignore those warnings – and the customer does it anyway – why should they be liable?

> This is a very different issue from consumer devices.

I think it is indeed different, but in a different way than you think. Products sold directly to ordinary consumers, courts accept that most consumers won't read or won't understand the sale contract, and so are more likely to invalidate exclusions of liability contained therein. Industrial and medical devices are not sold directly to individual consumers; their purchasers are usually corporate entities (whether a business or a not-for-profit enterprise such as a hospital), which can be assumed to have ready access to legal counsel; and the staff of the entity involved in the purchase can be expected to have a professional level of understanding of the technology, safety/regulatory/compliance risks involved, etc. Given that, courts are far more likely to uphold exclusions of liability (including exclusions of liability for unauthorised customer modifications), than for a contract of sale to individual consumers.

Furthermore, the vendor can put in the sale contract that the customer indemnifies the vendor for any liability caused by the customer's unauthorised modifications. Such an indemnity is far more likely to be upheld in a B2B contract than a B2C one. And unlike the B2C case, the customer is likely to have significant financial resources, and its own liability insurance, making such an indemnity much more meaningful in practice. The vendor can also do customer due diligence, such as asking customers to provide evidence of their own liability insurance – something which is rarely practical in the B2C space.
I had a team recently who were getting really frustrated with Node. They are systems people, integrators that sort of thing. I have been careful about pushing my own prejudices onto them. I made a throwaway comment about how x problem would be so easy in Python and one of the senior guys asked to try it. I showed them Flask about a month ago and they are over-the-moon. The next day they were showing what they had built!

Now they have plans for a whole set of simple webapps. It's like a new lease of life!
What a ridiculous article. Why is this on HN

Not sure why you find it ridiculous. The part you quote, taken on its own, seems valid, reasonable, sensible.

You ridicule it, but I don't see why.
But you know that's simply not true.
I was a smoker in my 20s and quit finally in my 40s.
Are you suggesting my f'ed up choices were in some way better than taking a load of selfies in my twenties and growing out of it in their thirties?
Lunar cowboys arent gonna be robbing no wire, nosirree, lunar rail is a necessity.
It’s the same with the tipping that seems almost everywhere these days. Instead of the workers being paid properly by the company the customer gets guilt tripped to tip and when you don’t tip the worker is angry at the customer, not the company.
48-72 hours, no water (showers) on the eyes for a week to ensure the top layer of the eye has sealed up after photoablation.
Python is weak on front-end web and mobile, but I suppose its impossible to expect Python to be great at everything. For the number of niches it can fill, I think Python is still ahead.
We're telling them they are doomed with climate change, guilty for past generations sins, they were locked out of school and activities, coerced into a vaccine for something that is harmless to them. I showed my teenage boy chat gp3 and he's like what's the point of school now.
> We will soon look back and realize that social media and phone addiction was worse for people’s health than smoking.

What specific statistics will we look at to realize that social media is worse than 500,000 deaths per year (in the US) due to smoking?
I think we're conflating two things. A seller has to refund / replace / repair any merchandise that is defective or not as advertised, and that's true in the US and in the EU.

A seller does not necessarily have to accept returns if you changed your mind, found the item cheaper somewhere else, or just don't like it. Pretty sure that's also the case in the EU.
It's common in most of the world for families to have multi-generation households.

The article probably refers to Italy as one country where it's commonplace, meaning the progress into adulthood includes gaining your independence while staying in the familial house.
Yeah. I just tried, but only the banner is removed :(
You mean Stripe Climate? It's ambitious but if I read the launch press release correct Stripe put in $1m USD of its own money and the majority is funded Stripe's customers donating 1% of their revenue. I don't see them using free cash flow or a significant percentage of their own revenue on the project. The team organizing funding of the climate projects is not inside Stripe https://frontierclimate.com/ [Edit: turns out it does belong to Stripe "Frontier is a public benefit LLC wholly owned by Stripe Inc."]
I forget where I read it - maybe it was a creative writing exercise somewhere - but the hivemind was tasked with coming up with "a replacement for the car wash in Breaking Bad". Along with the usual suggestion of laser tag (a la Saul Goodman) as a way to launder cash while looking like a legitimate business was the humble escape room. Why? They're high traffic (well, they can _be_ high traffic, on paper), low per-transaction amounts (nothing near the $10,000 reporting threshold).

If I had to guess I'd say that the escape room(s) for which you're selling tickets are in some kind of legal trouble and your company as a vendor of tickets to those escape rooms is also being investigated. (It's unclear to me if you're the owner of the corporate entity that owns/runs these escape rooms or if you're simple a ticket seller to various escape rooms, e.g., a "Groupon but for escape rooms".)

Many friends who sell spare computer parts on eBay have had their PayPal accounts frozen over the years, so they've developed a process whereby if they're relying on a payment processor (PayPal for eBay transactions; stripe for other transactions) they will set up a 'cash out to my bank account' process on as often a cadence as possible. Ideally nightly if that's an option. I haven't used Stripe, but does anyone know if there's a setting whereby you can say "punt my Stripe balance over to my bank account every X days"?

Also, there's a push to use payment processors and 'neobanks' (see below) to basically do parts of the IRS' job for the IRS (or I should say that the government is allowing these private corporations to take on the role of governmental agencies probably in return for campaign finance contributions):

- https://www.propublica.org/article/chime

- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/the-chime-banking-ap...

Immigrants, children of undocumented immigrants, the recently incarcerated, the poor, etc. are the Chime customer base. One of the draws with Chime is that you can get your paycheck a few days early, so it's literally a payday lender, but calls itself a "neobank". As digital surveillance increases in the ability to connect transactions across disparate systems I expect these sorts of actions by Stripe, Chime, and other fintech companies to increase in frequency.

Sorry I don't have any "here are 5 steps to take to get your account back to normal" guides, but I wish you luck and - like others are suggesting - I would probably retain legal counsel.
Wow. Why did you say 'still'? I use python a more than decade, with other languages as well (go, typescript). And I even don't think to abandon it. I do so many things with it, that it would be nonsense.

Yes, the drawbacks are here (async is not as good as in Go, typing I would say is rigid, packaging is not perfect at all). But I have a lot of projects where it just doesn't matter.
I would argue automated call centers are a problem.

If you end up needing to call someone since you've exhausted all other avenues you do want to talk to someone.

At that point you will either:

- waste a lot of time navigating prompts until you give up or reach a human.

- automated call center will decide that prompt it gave you is the correct one and close your call... (had this happen a lot...)

- automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close...

And all metrics will show great for the company while you've given up or you start looking for other companies.

Sure, lots of problems are solved by pointing to correct manual... although that would be an argument if product is user friendly enough.

Now... on southwest airlines case... what manual could you look up to fix your cancelled flight?, how do you deal with that?

Personally, I have had a cancelled flight on vacation. I could not find someone to talk to, automated prompts and calls closed. I booked another airline flight home and asked for a refund and compensation after the fact... This might not be an option in a lot of cases.
> It’s such a strange blend of wanting to let your kids roam while being more aware of dangers that exist, both online and off.

Unaccompanied roaming is, by it's nature, offline-centric.

The primary, actual risks to children who are roaming are those that involve law enforcement and intolerant adults.

What does not present a meaningful risk to unaccompanied children is strangers.

> For my son, Scouts have been wonderful for his independence. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

I was in scouting leadership for 15 years. Units that function in a way that remove adults from the picture are as good as you say. It doesn't come close to replacing what we've taken from kids but it's better than the nothing they have now.
Functions are first-class objects. If you want a multi-line lambda thats just a function.
What was the task and why was it hard with express?
This is why my #1 metric to choose a service provider is support capability. Things will always go wrong and if the point of contact with the customer does not have any agency to fix things effectively, I will not deal at all. The exception is the norm, and front facing employees must be able to act instead of just reading a script and hoping the problem will solve itself.

That phrase about recorded apologies is just dystopian.
I find a lot of developers don't actually have an understanding of how things work at fundamental level - what they do know amounts to "type this, and do that, and you'll get this" and can't really explain why one tech stack is superior to another and how we should be making architectural decisions.
Or even better, rewrite the python code in Rust! Like Asahi Lina did.
https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/
> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead.

Not all products/services offer customers (or end users) a choice. Government, wired ISP, and health insurance are usually not a choice.

A lot of times, mobile network and airline are effectively without choice too.
It's not radical. The idea that an inherently biased 3 letter agency should be given any say in who gets to express an opinion publicly is anti-American at its core.

Good thing newer protocols like Nostr kill these attempts to weaken freedom of speech by mongers.
not sure what this comment is supposed to contribute
It’s amazing that your generation was the last one where things were done right. I don’t think every other generation in history has said that exact same thing.
Because it can be. The boards that set it are made up of executives, and it's good for all that the bar for average pay gets ratcheted up.

While a good CEO may be worth a multiple of any line worker, the notion that a CEO will leave for some other pursuit only holds water if the other pursuits hold higher multiples and are readily attained. They would all work for one-quarter the comp if that is all they were offered. As it is, they'll happily work for double also.
Nice. That almost sounds cheap.
Python is nowhere near as "batteries included" as .NET for example.
> In the decades before the pandemic, the wages of lower-paid, less skilled hourly employees steadily lost ground to those of skilled workers, college graduates, managers and professionals. In the two years since, those trends have sharply reversed.

We don’t know if this narrowing in inequality will last.

I'm certainly for economic justice. But how is comparing apples to canned tuna "inequality"?

As another comment already mentioned, wouldn't our time be better spent discussing the extreme delta between the top and everyone else? The delta between service worker and say tech is far less than the delta between that collective average and the top of the financial food chain.

But here we got again. Distracted. And letting the lede tip toe out of the room.
I like most self service things but ordering at e.g. McDonalds is much quicker in person usually. I think even the pared-down menu that is in-vogue is pretty complicated for ordering for more than one person.

I also started phoning in orders instead of using most other services too (Uber Eats, Grubhub, Yelp) because it’s just quicker
> 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.

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

If a company's phone tree can make the consumer drop the call, it saves the company support worker time, regardless of whether the customer request was adequately served.

For a company, the tradeoff where customer may be on the line for 10 hours in a call tree to get an answer a their question, or 10 minutes with a support agent, is fairly easy if you do not care about support.

Phone trees do not automagically save anyones time, and especially not that of the customer.
"On average, rail is four times more fuel efficient than trucks, and emit 75% fewer GHG emissions. This fuel-efficiency can also help to reduce transportation costs significantly, while giving the business a promotional platform for sustainability initiatives."

--- google "efficiency of trains vs trucks
For starters, what does this have to do with the Southwest meltdown, which seems to have been caused in large part by a lack of automation?
this is a good read on the topic: https://blog.osteele.com/2004/11/ides
Is there a way to use an app similar to Privacy to set up a "burner bank account"? Or do you physically go into a bank, credit union, etc. and sign up for a new account as a new member?
Hopefully this will get more people to try using TeXmacs.

Some of us have been waiting for a book like this to be written on TeXmacs for a long time.
It's because there's nothing for them to look forward to.

People keep asking why is X group struggling? And there's been enough articles about different groups that X is basically nearly everyone. Things are not getting better for anyone except the extremely wealthy.
That's why move the freight by rail.
At restaurants with menus that don't require explanation, manually taking an order is more error-prone and distracts wait staff from providing higher value services.
We're not discussing the merits of using "main" over "master" - we haven't discussed that at all. You're making some politically charged (b/c of the phrases and language you're using, I feel it is this way) argument about why it's bad to change terms of things in general. We haven't gotten to the point of discussing the benefits of this specific thing, and to me it seems like you don't want to discuss them (or the lack of them) b/c you're sold on it being a bad thing, no matter what.

It is obviously good to change certain terms. For example, we don't call Asian people Orientals anymore.
Ultra-rich usually do not receive high wages, but they pocketed around 20T(my estimation) in last 5 years through leveraged trades on inflated stocks/private equities and real estate enjoying near zero loans rates.

Now they own very large chunk of American businesses and land/real estate, no need to work for wages.
As a customer, I support workers unionizing to improve their wage bargaining power. Besides tipping, I can’t do much to help them do that. They’ve gotta organize to do it, and call on the NLRB when there’s (always inevitably) Corporate Fuckery [1]. Luckily, the NLRB received a $25M funding bump in the latest Omnibus spending bill signed into law.

[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/cases-decisions/decisions/administrativ...
How does the customer know whether or not a worker is paid properly? It is none of their business, or responsibility.
> In contrast, my sons grew up in a world that is senselessly unforgiving and penalistic, with few breaks from adults and little chance to explore life on their own terms.

Teenage boys in particular now face an incredibly punitive culture in America. Everything is on video. The online mob will form and demand jail time for the slightest thing. How are teenage boys supposed to learn right from wrong?
Because just like congress, they can vote to give themselves raise and the amount. Can you as a typical employee guarantee yourself a wage increase, and the amount?

Not hard to see your pay increase as much as you want it to, when you're actually in control of setting it and not just accepting what is given.
Unaccompanied roaming is, by it's nature, offline-centric.

Sorta? I think it is fair to say that independent access to the internet is a form of roaming, as well. Used to, it also involved dial-up management and maybe a known profile on Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve. Nowadays, it probably just means a device on the network.
It is a comment about how large projects, at least from my experience, seem to use complex data structures that takes several indirection to follow.

In both C and python I have also see something akin to a mini language inside the large projects, where understanding the code becomes almost impossible without documentation. In C, both macros and pointers to structs with more pointers can do a lot of heavy lifting to hide every detail of how something is being done and just leave the intention. Great if one want to see a high level concept and creating new features, but terrible if you want to know where that one bit of information is being stored and how to inject your own code into the core parts of the project. Similar, large projects in python tend to use meta, monkey patching and other dark magic patterns to really hide the low level details while making it easy to create new features.
Since you're quoting the part about QR codes for restaurants:

I have had good experiences at bars and restaurants where I input my orders online whenever I want, perhaps multiple times throughout the meal, and the waitstaff bring them out promptly. I obviously don't have data, but it feels twice as fast since I never have to wave people down just to relay my orders.

This isn't for everyone, and it's not for every situation. But for the right circumstances applications, this is really quite convenient and pleasant.
Self driving for TSLA cars is not really the benchmark I'd use for "something that works reliably"
I'd say the 2018 edition was even more relevant (and that was late 2018, in fact). Rust was very hard to use prior to non-lexical lifetimes. So the real mass popularity of Rust is very recent.

Also why it's a bit silly to compare Rust to any other language (just pick your favorite: Go, C++, Java/C#, Python/Ruby, Haskell/Elixir, Javascript/TypeScript etc. and expect it to be just as popular. There's a whole lot of legacy projects written in older languages and they have to be maintained, even though some stuff does get ported to Rust in the meantime.)
Wages or income? Two different things. Steve Jobs had a $1 salary, many notable others did, too [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary
This is a bizarre comment. Studies report average effects, not individual effects. Just because your experience doesn't match what they find on average, the study doesn't become bogus!
The mypy experience is awful with numpy and pandas.
> Remote work, deglobalization, stalled technology have started eroding some advantages of higher-skilled workers

Their premise is broken. The largest inequality is not between highly skilled workers and everyone else. It is between the wealthy (top 0.1% or 0.01%) and the rest.
I have that also. About two months ago I went to the optometrist and one of the tests was for alignment of both eyes (I don't recall ever having that test previously).

The doctor says something like "There should be one line in front of each eye, do You see a single straight line?"

I replied "Heck no... the line on this side is higher and pretty far to the left, the other is centered and much lower."

Now with glasses binoculars work as intended. I can also make out some icons on computer screens where before almost none made sense (and the same icons would appear different based on viewing angle). The glasses do wonders for movie and television viewing, too.

One caveat: the glasses have a very restrictive horizontal viewing angle.

No problems reading without glasses. Crazy.

Have an optometrist check for eye alignment next time.
> We will soon look back and realize that social media and phone addiction was worse for people’s health than smoking.

This would be the most optimistic end result of social media and phone addiction. It’s very difficult to even measure someone’s long term social media addiction enough to look back and say “they were better off without it.”
Who would think that chatbots improve customer service? I hate chat bots personally. Am I missing something? Do some people like them?
I'm confused. They're too broke to move away from home, but their mental health is bad because they were coddled while they were at home and now they're no longer at home and struggling, but also more of them live at home later in life than in generations past?

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? That's been my experience, albeit anecdotal. I know this comes off as old man yelling at the clouds, but damn if 20-somethings aren't emotionally fragile at a level the world has never seen before. And they're also all in therapy too and super in touch with their feelings and emotions which is supposed to help, but is actually likely to be a large part of the problem.

To be fair, I don't blame them. I think the blame lies firmly on social media and their need to be "always on". But there actually is such a thing as too much empathy, and we're seeing what happens with it.
Chat bots are a scourge and I can’t believe any company seriously puts them in front of customers.