skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a very junior developer, I once worked on a chatbot for purchasing flight tickets. You know the ones, the annoying windows that pop up when you're trying to navigate a (hopefully) otherwise perfectly usable site, the ones that are intended to replace customer support but are fundamentally unable to, the ones that you'd never trust with a transaction worth $5, much less one worth hundreds or more.

Even if this project were a rousing success by the company's definition, it would have ended up a useless chatbot used by very few people but frustrating many more.

Instead, one day we're chatting about the project, and when talking about strategy for implementation, the product manager pushes back on working too early on integrating with the actual API calls to purchase tickets. I thought having a proof-of-concept for the actual functionality would be important, so if we ran into roadblocks we could ask other teams to provide us alternative APIs with enough notice at the beginning of the project rather than the end.

The product manager said that we couldn't afford to do that, because if we did, we'd lose.

I said "what? lose? what do you mean?"

It turns out, our team was one of 3 teams competing to make the same project. Leadership wanted to make 3 fully implemented, separate systems, and the one they liked best would go live, while the others would wither and die.

It also turns out, that our team was way behind because although we had some logic set up for handling edge cases in conversations (not great by any stretch), another team with no backend developers had a beautiful UI concept that handled only exact strings with no room for deviation on the user's part. This UI concept demoed well, of course, so they were the favorites.

It was made clear to me by the team's technical lead that nobody up the management chain (including our team's direct manager) had ever written a line of code before, or knew what the difference was between backend and frontend, or a tech demo that presents well versus a working product, and so wouldn't be able to differentiate a finished product that actually purchases tickets from one that runs entirely on the frontend and talks to nothing (until launch day, of course).

I was already on edge because I had been asked to test API integrations by using my personal credit card to purchase a real flight ticket and refund it because we didn't have test cards or even corporate cards we could use.

So I resigned within a week, and my manager was furious.

This story happened probably more recently than you're thinking.

That was the most useless project I've ever worked on.
The title is misleading. In the article, Google said it had failed to effectively use human contributions, despite be leading in model architecture. It still need human feedback to improve its translation. It also said that (analyze) the usage pattern is incidentally the best human feedback it got so far.
But there are no actual "ones they are saving". Effective Altruists are concerned with unrealized future values, like people thousands of years in the future who don't yet exist.

An Effective Altruist is someone who would throw a current, existing person under a bus, if he believed that this would somehow cause three more people to exist sometime in the far future, or help speed up human colonization of the galaxy.

Have you looked into what EA is really about?
Which edits did you add to improve it?
I wonder about the reference for the measurement, or precision versus accuracy. Still super interesting application of hybrid common and specialized tech.
Sand-sourcing issues are typically related to types of sand required for special applications, such as in concrete or silicon wafer production that needs very specific types or shapes of the grains. This kind of application would probably work with “regular” sand that’s unsuitable for those special purposes, and also happens to be the most common type of sand.
Or a conductor hauled up by fishing line

https://youtu.be/mqRT7J86rco?si=Za9B-dA-VO-Fl5Z8
you will live to see enshittification beyond your comprehension
I was assigned to a project with a tight deadline. However, there's a challenge: a lot had occurred previously, and the client who initially ordered the software is no longer interested. Despite this, a contract has been signed, money has been exchanged, and a detailed list of features must still be delivered. Consequently, we spent two months working diligently on a project that nobody truly wanted and nobody was ever going to use.
> Literally everything I have cited has been a fact

You have "literally" continued ignoring the evidence that your facts are wrong, e.g. about what Debs' six-month sentence was for (contempt of court, not for inciting violence). He was never convicted for conspiracy or inciting violence, because Pullman refused to testify.

> locomotive they derailed was carrying US Mail

aside from the pedantic fact that locomotives don't carry mail; mail cars do:

The union consistently said that it didn't object to mail cars. It was having a Pullman car attached that was unacceptable.

> wherever Debs went, violence followed!

since he stayed in Chicago while violence was all over, that's certainly not "literally true."
Because if there's one thing people can't get enough of it's ads.
A worsening climate impacts other living beings too.
Everything gets amplified on the East coast, any event, since much of the media we consume originates there.

The PNW does get tremendously powerful Pacific cyclones every so often [0]. These are huge storms that would do real damage to mid-Atlantic cities.

And there's the known risk of the "big one" -- subduction zone quake, Seattle fault, etc. Sleep tight East coast, you'll be fine.

[0] - https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html
Yeah I mean you just described the whole business model.
How much heat from the sun is reaching 5km underwater? Are you just trolling at this point?
Here's a simple solution- nix all the crazy administration bloat.

I could never understand how colleges employ hundreds or thousands of non-teachers and still fail so hard at every a student actually needs. Actually becoming antagonistic to the students.

Until I realized the administration is only there so service and increase the administration.
How does the CockroachDB approach not deadlock? Surely retrying could encounter a situation where two competing UPDATE will lock rows in different order, and no amount of retrying will unlock the required rows, right?
Roku added and removed here.¹

¹ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/30/nsa-sketches-e...
Well typically employees at a college typically treat the facilities like their private country club. Instead of getting the family membership at the bouldering gym, just build a bouldering wall and now you can go anytime.
> The tech will not cause knowledge collapse among a population that doesn't need it.

Every google search now returns loads of AI generated websites fill of low quality information. You could call the things "bullshit generators" and the people who really want to make websites full of bullshit will still use them to flood the internet with that bullshit. We all suffer the degradation of the internet when that happens.
> What you pay Stripe is for the combination of interchange fees + Stripe's own service fees.

Yeah, Stripe is a bad example. Because Stripe is a payment service provider. They take all the various fees involved with managing payments and package it up, then put a pretty bow on top with some useful services, APIs, nice marketing. But this package deal is significantly marked up. Stripe absorbs the variable interchange fees and different rewards card markups because they are charging you 3% flat (more or less) and have a healthy margin in for themselves in the middle. Stripe makes a little less when you charge a Platinum AMEX, but they make a relative ton when you charge a secured mastercard. They know that less than 10% of the transactions are these higher cost cards, so they just absorb the lower profit on those transactions.

This is a wholly different game than lower level payment processors. For example at a company I worked for about a decade ago, we stuck a deal with WorldPay which is the largest payment provider in the world. We were paying interchange fees, a small fraud fee of a few cents, and then a worldpay fee of 20-40 basis points depending on the card. We were directly charged more on a premium rewards card, but the margin on WorldPay was a few basis points above cost. But they provided nothing really in terms of services. We had to find our own payment software, terminals, and everything else. They were just the raw service.

So imagine worldpay on one side, which is just brokering with the banks and requiring us to do everything else. On the other extreme, you have Stripe which is "turnkey" and you can sign up with zero sales volume on a pretty website. One is interchange + 30 basis points, the other extreme is a flat 3%+20¢.

Stripe is a great business. But not a good example here. They essentially abstract away all the complexity in this article by charging you more money (their raw negotiated cost with banks is probably 0.8-1.2% on 90% of their transactions), they are marking up 1-2% for themselves as a service provider. That is not to vilify Stripe. They serve a valuable role and the abstraction layers (SaaS subscriptions, free trials, etc) are well worth it for a lot of companies. But keep in mind, this is a service company on top of the credit card system. So its not a great example in this discussion.
Imagine any other service where they demanded your bank statements

Many private K-12 schools do this as well.
Roblox Studio Head: Play-to-Earn Isn't Child Labor, It's a Gift
> live on a big, expensive, beautiful campus and have massive efforts in student lifestyle. Sport facilities, museums, academic support, actual office hours...

Interesting how you mention things actually relevant to academic quality towards the end of that enumeration!

> They might both be called universities, but it's completely different goods.

It almost sounds like one of them bundles a lot of things with education that are more of a lifestyle than an education.

I really don't doubt the academic quality of US colleges, and being able to actually talk to somebody that knows your name and is somewhat incentivized to care about your progress is something I'd love to see at European universities.

But all the other stuff... Are people in the US really happy with only getting all of that as a bundle deal, often resulting in crushing, non-bankruptable debt?
Jellyfin has a decent roku app
Anyone who needs to know more than the narrow middle of knowledge will seek it out.

The real issue as I see it is people who have that kind of knowledge need to share it and have it be seen by those who are interested in it.

There’s a huge problem with search engines serving junk ‘narrow middle’ SEO-optimized content to the endless horde, as opposed to real, quality knowledge. This issue predated generative AI.
Check out Cleanroom development.

You don't write your own tests - ever.
Moreover, you can't even execute your code.

A separate team writes the tests and certifies or denies your code, after running the tests.
> I use Gitkraken if you are curious, but I know you probably aren’t.

I was, because gitkraken is good. At one point I was forced to use sourcetree, and it was awful. So I don't know if the argument is that guis are good for git so much as this one paid solution is good, and it rubs me the wrong way to think that something like the version control solution used becomes good if you pay for it.
> If so, why can't you just say so?

Based on the comment, it sounds like that's the way the head of the department phrased it.

Presumably the department head didn't know the title as it hadn't been released yet.
Sounds almost like an inefficient system employing way more people than is economically sustainable – not unlike that other vital system that almost every other country in the world manages to make available to its citizens with much less overhead.
Yes, but if the Dyson sphere is 2 light hours away from the planet, the planet will cross the actual geometric line between the Sun and a given point on the Dyson sphere two hours before the shadow is visible.

What you're saying is like saying that vision is faster than light, because I can look at Sirius, and then look at Aldebaran a second later.
uBlacklist does just that with Google and some other search engines.
I use it with Firefox to filter out pinterest junk from search results. Also available for Chrome and Safari.

https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
It's transient: a vendor goes too far, countermeasures follow, then economic consequences.
I worked on porting an application from Java to the Adobe Air runtime with actionscript. We were mostly targeting deskto, but the eventual plan was to support flash in a web app, and have an iPad app running with air as well. At the time flash was already on its way out. The project was still in progress when I left. But flash was dead a few years later, and afaik, that project never went anywhere.
> This man will be in prison before 2030.

Or maybe a secure mental institution.
They tried to shut the door on it but...
Still pretty early in my career, but this is probably the most pointless thing I worked on. The company I work at, we do statement generation, our clients have clients that they bill monthly. The statement system on a set day of the month generates the statements and applies any charges with their customers not paying their bill on time. First part, the system itself did not allow customization on which day. All of our clients who use it, it is always done on the last day of the month. First part as to why what I later wrote was useless, it should have been built for our clients to customize the day in the first place. So, we had a client ask to be able to run statements on separate date. My original plan was to allow for date selection, obvious? The owner of the company I work for didn't like that, instead he wanted a button that our client would have go and remember to press on every month on their selected day of the month. Also, some more background, client was saying this feature was required and they were gonna leave us if we didn't do it. So I did it, and I did it the way the owner of the company I work at wanted. The day after I check in the code, the client who was claiming they were gonna leave if we didn't do it, left anyways. So I implemented a whole feature that never even got used by the person it was built for, they never even saw it, and in probably the most useless way.
One of the best talks I saw was by a blind dev in India. About half way through I realized “holy crap, this guy had to memorize all his slides and talking points” and then it was even more impressive.

Also to add: we are all temporarily disabled at some time in our life one way or another. It’s never a bad day to try out an accessibility tool and explore how well your work functions with it.
alas, i am the guy on a linux desktop
Web content itself had gone to shit these days, in order to win google’s SEO game to win google’s Adsense game. “Google going to shit” is just a second order effect (or third/forth depending how you look at it).
This is wonderful. It's almost like chatting with NPCs that the developers don't want you to talk to.
If that's true (I do believe in it to some extent, but I'm not quite that cynical about it), European universities must be something right: You get a lot of Kafka-grade bureaucratic bang for your buck (often $0)!
I get it it's a nice idiom. But neither version is an error and the "correct" version is more verbose. Less verbose is better in my preference when it is just as clear or even clearer (because it is less verbose). And this is not TypeScript but JavaScript.

I guess my question is, how can I make the

ob.something

NOT be (listed as) an error? When is it not an error (according to WebStorm linter)?
Great to see more competition in this space. I found it interesting that every component seems to be written in a different language. The only one that surprised me a bit was the backend in c# instead of go or node/deno. A bit odd for the scanner to be in python too...
How npm install scripts can be weaponized: A real-world example
Just get a TV that isn’t shitty. People act like it’s a clockwork orange and you’re forced to watch ads.
You may enjoy LXQT.
AI is not dominating tech, hype about AI is dominating tech. I'm still knee-deep in the same shit that I've been doing for 20 odd years and AI hasn't changed a thing about my job. Occasionally ChatGPT helps me do something in 2 minutes that might have taken me 30 minutes to figure out, but it is not an earth-shattering productivity multiplier that the industry is hyping it to be.
I don't quite follow here. Assuming a common use case is personal consumption of pirated content, doesn't it make sense that the monetization strategy focuses on the server/client software itself?

More importantly, that monetization strategy is a great fit for legal self-custody. I have a pretty large library of content I bought on DVD and ripped for personal use. I don't share it our as torrents and watch videos locally on my own network, there's nothing wrong with that and I like that Plex is still paid for the software that makes it work well for my use case.
There are many different usecases, and each one have different set of requirements. E.g.
- for end-user facing cli: support as much conventions as possible (-v --version, -h --help, other options similar to other compressors), sane defaults

- for automatic tasks like making backups via cron: piping, correct exit codes, level of effort configuration, silent modes for reduced logging.

Second one is likely to fly first, can be used isolated on company level if file format is stable
> smaller than the coronal discharge [...] lost in the noise

This is again technically plausible but ethically irrelevant.

It's like the fallacy in: "It's OK for people to steal goods from that store, because the parent-company is very big and one theft won't even show up on their monthly financials and they've got spoilage and breakage too."

> I suspect we are talking about 24 watts

The video demonstration shows 50 watts of input.

Napkin-math: Suppose one drone uses 1000 (battery) watts flying around, and does so for 4 hours each day for a month. (Made possible by an improved version of this research that charges at 200w.) That's 4 kWH. The electrical price is $0.20/kWh.

That means siphoning $24/month for one drone. That's not a casual "keep the extra penny", that's a Netflix Premium subscription.
Maybe adapt it to your own game? Just look how Balatro blew up!
I don't know but does it look like he's hugely powerful now?
9 of the 10 authors work for the company that makes the $2k mattress cover?
Improving Code Reviews with better commit messages
They are asking about the machine's typeface. Techno Elite is one of the Hermes 3000 available typefaces.
Yup exactly, sometimes you should try new things. They don't always work out. Although in this case it seemed like an expensive mistake...
True, but what percent of their admitted class?
It only sounds like sarcasm because you made a childish equivalence between the two.

Literally everything we are doing is “destroying the environment” at some level, including everything to save the environment.
I once worked for a consultancy that had something similar, and tied those satisfaction metrics to quarterly bonuses, so they were guaranteed to be inflated.
We've got this slightly at www.outerbase.com – we don't quite have the globally distributed part of it, but we have a UI to create tables, SQL & AI querying, and data visualization.
If it doesn't escape the prostate, a tumor could potentially impinge on the urethra causing urinary difficulty. There is a benign version of this called BPH and it may be treatable by medications like Flowmax.

But it's not like we can always know it will stay slow growing forever. Some cancers can suddenly become aggressive and metastasize, so careful monitoring is important.
Yeah, the O2 definitely was too expensive for what it was. And while it was the least cool and powerful of the lineup by far, as a recent college grad, it was still the coolest computer I had ever had on my desk. ;-)
Morality wise isn’t it the opposite? If you own the business, it’s your money to waste
If you work for the business you are wasting others money.
Exactly why governance of AI model development is so critical going forward. If the nations don't step in now, they will quickly lose the propaganda machine to Silicon Valley.
Thanks for the references, especially the 2nd one. I came here to post it as a comment, but here on HN, there will always be someone who will outperform you :).

For me, the mentioned post (Ask HN: I'm a software engineer..) is a true classic, at least for me. The first/top comment is legendary as well.

Also, the above story was the highest voted Ask HN submission of all time until a few months ago where it was beaten by Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37392676
Never said it was the smartest investment, but it's not useless
Are they allowed to change employers after being trained, and do they have to pay them back if so? In that case, what's changed?
No Datadome Javascript:

https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2024-04-05/ins...
There's not even a single mention of transient unicorn fields so I don't know how anyone takes this seriously.
Fly.io would probably work for your use case. Doesn't have the restart limit of Heroku and still has a solid enough free tier to run your app!

I'd be happy to help if you need anything! Whether hosting or just backend related questions!

Also depending on how hard coded your architecture is, maybe you can separate out the Magic specific data from the app itself? So the MTG specific data could just be loaded as a datapack?
Giving eyeglasses to workers in developing countries boosts income
Thanks for sharing. Could you comment on how data is retained, ie do you log all sites entered?
> Perfectly good buildings are torn down and rebuilt so that a new donor can put their name on the building.

This is either extremely stupid or not a problem at all, depending on how much of that new building is paid for by the donor.
If you do not implement the actual rules, then it can probably be made to support many other kind of card games too.

However, I would be interested to have a FOSS rule engine of Magic: the Gathering, preferably written in C, and licensed by AGPL3 or some compatible license. But, unfortunately there is no official FOSS implementation; if there was (at least of the rule engine; not necessarily the UI) (especially if literate programming is used for the rule engine), I think that it would be better since the rules can be made more precise.

I would want to ensure that the rule engine has no pictures at all (you can easily download pictures separately if you want them, anyways; so the rule engine doesn't need them and shouldn't have them).
I don't get this bombardment with ads anymore. For all the talk of targeted ads I routinely get them for products like tampons which I definitely do not need. Most of the time it's some noise I hear until I can press the skip button. I can't really remember what's the last time I bought something I saw on an ad.
Yeah, that worked really well with cigarettes. People who used em were economically competitive with those who didn't.
That only works with real competition.

How’s the ink jet printer industry doing these days?

Yeah. If everyone does it the only fix is a law. And clearly we don’t pass those anymore.
I wonder if a Model 2 based taxi, robotic or not, will meet the low cost of operation needed? There seems to be a record of high repair cost and part scarcity that isn’t encouraging.