skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a company [0] in this space.

The fundamental problem is that a lot of customers will reach out on operationally expensive channels (chat, calls) about questions that are easily answered from a FAQ, knowledge base or on the website.

In-chat article lookups or AI chat bots with ability to offer some information are trying to divert otherwise unnecessary requests.

I do think AI chatbots are part of the future. Those powered by an LLM would do a better job than your example.

0: https://www.enchant.com
Abstraction and Complexity
Copyright duration is not really a factor in the FSF’s actual goal, which is for software to be distributed with user-modifiable source code. Copyleft licenses are a means of achieving this through the existing copyright system with its ludicrous durations. But making copyright terms much shorter would help, yes, because any released source code or even binary files could be used, reverse-engineered, and modified without permission.
For reference, they apparently referenced a study that was noted by its own authors to be incorrect in claiming that there were piping plovers sightings that were decreasing.

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1811120996914757818

Quoted below:

What’s worse, this story is super misleading!

In one instance it claims, “three years of data collected by the Coastal Bend group near the SpaceX site indicated a 54 percent decline in the threatened piping plover population through 2021.”

This is false. The frequently cited study conducted by Newstead and Hill (2021) is outdated and unreliable for describing potential piping plover population trends over time.

The 2021 study did not consistently perform field visits during the same time of year. In some years, surveys included periods when piping plovers were actively migrating and in other years surveys only included months when winter residents were likely to be present. They also did not always check both kinds of habitat that are present during each survey.

Point being, the piping plover population being sampled was inconsistent across years. This is important because the occurrence of piping plovers at any given location at any given time is highly variable. Presence or absence may be due to a wide variety of factors unrelated to changes to the population size; birds may simply be someplace else. And, the more times they looked for piping plovers in a year, the higher their population estimate was.

It's also important to understand piping plovers do not nest in Texas. With very few exceptions, piping plovers observed in Texas are either migrating to or from wintering areas further south along the Mexico Gulf Coast or in the Caribbean, or reside in the vicinity over winter. Piping plovers tend to return to the same wintering areas year after year, even when conditions at those wintering areas change due to extreme weather or human-caused disturbance.

Now here’s the kicker: In response to questions about the reliability of their study, Newstead and Hill reanalyzed their data and published a follow-up report (2022) which found no significant change in population abundance of piping plovers at Boca Chica over time. A decreasing trend in abundance over the first three years of the study was balanced by an increase in the final year of the study (once data from additional survey visits was added to the analysis).

For our part, we have conducted nine years of monitoring using a protocol developed with US Fish and Wildlife Services, and for the past two years we have ensured consistent sampling throughout the year by surveying monthly. The findings show little to no strong evidence of trends, either increasing or decreasing, for any of the target species, including piping plovers.
Indian Merchants Process 69% of Transactions via Digital Mode
I am going to both agree and disagree.

For the most part, I definitely don't want a subscription since I want to keep the product indefinitely, don't want to deal with recurring fees, and don't want to see stuff that I am interested in disappear (whether it is the rotating licensing agreement for IP on streaming services, or a feature vanishing/moving to a new tier in a software update). Then there are issues with automatic billing, sometimes due to the mistakes you mentioned and sometimes due to hostile terms in the EULA. That being said, one has to be careful with credit card purchase even if they aren't recurring.

Yet there are also products that I don't want to purchase outright. Streaming services are appealing since they offer access to a large library. Few people would be able to afford purchasing everything they use. Even if they could afford it, they may not want to manage an accumulating pile of stuff that they will use only once or twice. While I am thinking of streaming services, I would imagine that the same would apply to software for some people.

Someone mentioned that your suggestion would offer too much friction. I don't really see that being the case. If you're subscription ends on the 15th of the month and you log in on the 20th, they can simple present one-click dialog box offering a renewal. If you don't want stored credit card information (either as a business or as a customer), it looks like the major browsers handle storing credit card information on the client's side. (Note: I don't know how reliable or secure this is since I don't use it, but I have seen the feature in multiple browsers.)
I recommend reading this paper, as it gives some understanding of the things that are possible with an infected toolchain: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

Some modern compiled languages such as Zig and Go can be officially bootstrapped from a C toolchain. And a C toolchain can be bootstrapped with Guix using only a 357-byte blob. This gives some good confidence that you can bootstrap a malware free toolchain using auditable source artifacts.

Rust however, does not have an official way to be bootstrapped from a C compiler, which means developers must use a previous version of the compiler to build a new version. In this situation, you can never be sure a malware was not injected in a previous version of the compiler (see the Ken Thompson paper for an example). There's no way to know because you are using a unauditable blob to create another blob.

This is why someone created mrustc, a Rust compiler implemented in pure C++, so that Rust can be bootstrapped from a C toolchain (see also: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/understanding-how-the-rust-com...).

The mrustc solution is not good because there are essentially 2 implementations of the same compiler that have to be kept in sync. It would be much better if Rust used a solution like Zig's: https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/
I think your possible scenarios -- very rare life, energy trap or great winnower / cliff -- actually are all pretty positive in terms of Drake - to me the major point the equations make is just this: if you see any aliens at all, it is likely that you are late to the game of getting extrasolar, and due to the timescales involved, it is most likely that you are very very late to the game.

That said, if, say in a billion years, we survive as a race, and still haven't met anyone, then some of those drake choices are very different than we imagine them -- and we must have somehow gotten really lucky, or there is something else very strange going on. Regardless, it would likely be pretty bad news to a single-planet lifeform to meet us at that point, or at least tectonic, depending on how altruistic society as a whole would be at the time of the meeting.
The palette is very reminiscent of the C64 default palette to me, though not exactly the same.

EGA also used 16 colors out of a possible 64 (although the the 16 colors from CGA were most often used), and the colors here also approximate a selection from the EGA palette: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter#/med...
A lot of people get real obsessive about the "worlds best" thing, take a motorcycle for example, but them themselves lack the technical skill to actually require that level of equipment. Looking for the "best" whatever all the time is a sign you don't know what you are doing.
I find an odd sort of comfort in the fact, that ISP-support seemingly is bad everywhere and has been for centuries.

I remember that 20 years ago we had a problem with our self-bought router and a technician came, fixed the issue without telling us how (although it was our router, where he changed the config) and then just went off.
It was probably trained / fined tuned on existing support interactions :)
We already have home robots in the form of vacuum cleaners. If you're referring to humanoid robots for domestic chores then forget it, 10 years is way too optimistic. The safety problems alone of having a powerful heavy robot moving around with people and pets will take decades to solve. AI in the form of LLMs is effectively impossible to test for safety critical applications with so few system constraints. The risk of product liability lawsuits will prevent this technology from being sold anytime soon. Some limited industrial use may be feasible because there the robots can be carefully monitored and have limited interactions with humans.

Plus there are remaining hardware problems in terms of power and actuators that will take longer than 10 years to solve in a cost effective way.
A few things stand out to me here.

* Most notably, the ai bot is repeating itself and serving very standard looking messages. I don't think this is an "AI" chatbot in the sense of an LLM. It's just a dialogue tree with some parsing.

* The author's communication is... bad. Don't say "connect to support rep". Say "talk to human".

* It's very silly to state the following to a dumb chat bot:
> Hello! I just received and installed the new AT&T router/fiber modem, and ... the Internet speed is just as slow as before. I pay for 1 Gbps symmetric, and I'm getting 8 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up. On 6/28, the average connection speed went from 1 Gbps down to 100 Mbps. On 7/8 the average speed went from 100 Mbps to 8 Mbps. This is all measured both on the device at the fiber, and through a separate monitor I have wired into the 1 Gbps network.

I would recommend "slow internet".

Also saying "Slow internet, not slow wifi" is probably causing the bot to believe you're asking about wifi specifically because it's not an "AI" bot in the trendy sense of the word and it just sees the word wifi.
As it sometimes happens, I actually have a next day update. An HR representative organized a meeting from one day to the next, and iterated in no uncertain terms that they will not negotiate any severance and the only result for my actions is dismissal. All one needs to know about loyalty from a company. :)
Is there really an SQLite hype going on? I am getting a whiplash because of this pivot. From extreme complexity (Microservices! Kubernetes!) to extreme simplicity (Server-side rendering! Zero build! EC2!)
Periodically I review my bank statements and account settings to ensure I'm only being charged for services I actively use and want. Coz I had similar problem. Yet the subscription model offers convenience still.
Moon not Luna
> but there are so many potential problems - what if you loose access to your account and basically won't be able to cancel the subscription?

What do you mean by "basically"? You write a mail.

> what if they accidently charge you for who knows what?

Then you write a mail. Businesses are not all that keen on manually resolving issues like this, so they will try to avoid them.

> what if you simply forget you even had a subscription?

Yes, not using the things you paid for seems something you would want to avoid, in one of two ways. This is not a subscription problem.

> Subscriptions should be able to be paid by invoices - you receive an invoice before next billing period and if you don't pay, account is locked,

Why should the service provider hope for your compliance to pay for an already rendered service?

These hypotheticals seem awfully contrived.
> Why isn't there yet a "two clicks away unsubscribe" law?

B̶r̶i̶b̶i̶n̶g̶ Lobbing.
Right, so if I drink straight-up HFCS it'll be fine provided I also stick trace quantities of antioxidants and pollen fibre into it? But if I don't do that, it'll be terrible for me?
The problem is that this is not an AI chatbot, at least not in the sense the term AI is thrown around right now. Chatbots like this have been wasting people's time for a few years now. A modern LLM should not have any problem to detect whether the user has a problem with the connection or their wifi.
I'm still optimistic that support chats are a field that may actually see improvements through (otherise overhyped IMHO) LLMs.
Using unsafe in our Rust interpreters: easy, debatably ethical performance
Anything delivered as a subscription that does not have correlating employee and infrastructure expenses for the business is just a trick to get you to overpay & support an otherwise unprofitable business idea.

I am thinking, particularly of these asset / resource libraries where you try to purchase one thing for a project and they say “hey subscribe for monthly access to all our assets”. That’s never a good value.
Turns out unemployement is rising due to automation, not "economic collapse" :')
It would be bring less complexity using https://devenv.sh/ to provide the tooling :-)
Just out of curiosity, does Copilot license allow the use of its output to train other similar AI code generators?
The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers.

I own a small business and I would rather shut my doors than force my paying customers through AI cattle gates to struggle for help. I can understand that providing customer support on a massive scale is hard, but it is arguably the MOST important part of the customer experience, maybe even more so than the product itself. It seems incomprehensibly short-sighted to abstract it away in the name of short-term profits.
I made this framework to reduce complexity in large web applications.
It focuses on the data model first and CRUD access to this data.

Eicrud is in active development and issues are taken seriously. If you want to try the tool and have any questions I'll happily answer them.
> but the convenience of Spotify is impossible to match and I sometimes subscribe.

Pratically speaking, what does it mean to "sometimes subscribe"?
Firstly, while it's the default, it's not mandatory. As the author discovered you can use STRICT to make the columns typed, and types to be enforced.

The reason it remains unaltered by default is because one of the goals (and accomplishments) of SQLite is that the on-disk-data-file is completely backwards compatible, and cross-platform. This is a very important feature in some situations, and not lightly tossed aside because some old default or system is not in vogue anymore.
Show HN: A Simple Visual Stock Screener
I made this over the weekend because I was unhappy with other products.
Seems pessimistic. I already have an oven that can burn the house down, a dishwasher that might flood out my kitchen, a refrigerator that can fail and ruin a fortune in perishable foods. Hell, my lawn mower might remove a foot!

Why is a robot that might step on the cat, somehow inconceivably more hazardous?
Their YouTube channel also posts some factory overviews from time to time: https://youtu.be/v6jb6PP4APc?si=nIYxsEJkWD-B-ZEL
There's a recent ruling on the `verbatim` aspect:

>The judge disagreed, however, on the grounds that the code suggested by Copilot was not identical enough to the developers' own copyright-protected work, and thus section 1202(b) did not apply.[...]
>Judge Tigar earlier ruled the plaintiffs hadn't actually demonstrated instances of this happening, which prompted a dismissal of the claim with a chance to amend it.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/github_copilot_dmca/
I would argue that a 1FA unguessable password used once is just as good. Certainly better than the case where the provider offers account resets using just SMS thus having effectively 1FA SMS.
Is it paradoxical that family names (used by a group of people) are more differentiated than personal names (used by one person)?
Checkout DietPi, simplifies configuration, logging, software install and much more.

https://dietpi.com/
The alternative would be to run the JSON through e.g. jq/sed and make it dump out a chunk of C++ that would create an object with proper fields and subobjects. This C++ code will have about zero template chicanery; instead, it would just call constexpr constructors which, I imagine, would be entirely boring — this C++ code will be compiled much faster.
It’s SAP or a similar ERP wearing a fake moustache
It should really be federally mandated that card issuers maintain a webpage with all your recurring subscriptions and give you one-click access to cancel.
Fun fact, Windows 8 changed the decimal separator for the South African locale from a period to a comma.

My theory is that some academic or idiot government official told Microsoft they're not using the official separator who duly fixed it. But in practice every "normal" person in the country used a period as a separator.

By default, Excel now uses a comma separator for decimals. Which unless I change it, makes it especially fun when I want to paste values into my banking website which (like most of the country) uses a period as a separator.

Really, it would have been way more pragmatic if South Africa just changed its official decimal separator.

It also caused some annoying issues on our .NET with SQL Server software project. For example SQL seed scripts inserting decimal values would break depending on if they were being run on Windows 7 or 8. On the upside, it did teach us all to have our code be properly locale aware.
Free software isn't about solving your problems, it's about solving mine and enabling you, and others, to solve yours, and theirs. It's about if I've been generous enough to give, anyone who takes can't undermine my generosity by not also sharing. You having a problem that isn't solved by what I've made available, or is bigger/different than the problem I was solving, isn't my problem to solve or even know about. If you want to make your problem mine to solve, you can hire me. Everyone has problems, some of those problems are exactly the same, some of them overlap, and some are completely disjoint. If we have the same problem and my software is useful to solve that problem, you are welcome to use it, but you may find out that the problem I set out to solve for me does not exactly overlap with your problem.
It was like that before chat bots. You always got some low-grade script-reading human support before being escalated to people who can fix things. The following actually happened to me in the early 1990s.

I had my own phone line installed in a house where I was renting a room (to be able to use a dialup modem freely). It had crosstalk on it, probably due to a ground fault. But try to explain that to the support person. "Sir, have you tried another phone jack?", that sort of thing. After mounting frustration, I finally found the password: "I can hear other people on my phone line!" That solved it. Click. Real tech person "Oh, so you have crosstalk on your line? Probably a ground fault. We'll send someone right out".

Frankly, an AI chatbot can follow the "script" that the initial support person followed, just as easily.
I think conversion rate and support cost associated with 2FA-OTP are worse enough for SMS to still be worth it, especially as a phone number also gives you a good marketing ability and a reasonably unique identifier for a user.

If not, everybody would be using OTP already.
The subscription model offers significant convenience, particularly for services that provide ongoing updates and support. But it does have some cons! I was dealing with potential access issues.
Idk man I've had a Xiaomi Redmi phone for over 4 years and it's honestly a rock solid stable device that hasn't given me any need to switch yet.

Camera is decent, screen is good, battery life is good, performance is good. Like honestly, I'd probably never buy a flagship from them, but for a beater phone I wouldn't get anything else.
Have they got their own version of Android? All those issues sound like software issues.

I prefer stock Android, I just don't trust any manufacturer to change it, and I don't see why on earth it's needed. Just gimme the most vanilla version of the OS.
The thing is, he was having trouble with his WiFi. He, like most computer scientists, is dedicated to the True Name of Things, which I can respect, but also, in this day and age, WiFi == Internet. I know it literally doesn't, but the uh, vector embedding, for WiFi and internet? Very similar.
I agree it can be good, but it needs to take into account "exceptional" scenarios.

e.g.

Recently moved and got ATT fiber, got the setup package and set it all up... Nothing. No connection to the fiber.

Go outside, see the literally severed fiber strand outside my home where it ran into the living room.

Took over an hour of support calls to schedule the technician out. Had me step through all the "turn it off and on again steps".

Then they called me 5x the day before to try and "trouble shoot" the issue with a call center agent.

Each time I had to tell them, its physically broken, there will not be a fix over the phone. It seemed as if the fact I was a first time setup made them completely forget that something could actually be wrong. All their automation said it was my fault.
While that does work for the people listed as author, it does miss Katherine derivative “Kay.”
I have that gold plated US insurance that you pay a lot for. Just last week, I was rushed to the hospital due to my heart. We don't yet know what tried (or is actively trying) to kill me. The cardiologist ordered an emergency MRI.

Three weeks. I am told to wait three weeks. The doc wants it last week. We are having to call around and mess with coverage questions. Similar for my dad and a specialist. Waiting a month while having breathing issues.

People wait already for emergency medical situations, but we pay a premium. And I am still not sure what my 20% shared cost is gonna be for the ambulance and hospital stay. And yes, that factored into my decision to even be treated, which, had I stayed home, may have killed me.

Fuck our system. Medical should not be for profit. It should cost money to run because it should be a service.
It's gotten so bad, that I have started to actively look for for products and services with known good customer support. E.g. I switched to an internet provider for SMEs. Costs around 20% more, but has dedicated IPv4/IPv6 IPs and offers a real human help desk.
'Syriana' was superb. Didn't explicitly depict a WH or US President, but it did feature Congressional hearings.
SHAP is not all you need
Annoyingly, these days its very hard to get around with just a dumbphone, since so many websites want you to use some kind of authentication app to be able to use it. I need a smartphone to be able to access anything microsoft right now, including a lot of stuff at my work
My understanding is that, unless you are not a fresh grad on the junior role, you are expected to dive into the tickets to churn out lots of code in your particular existing expertise. That's what appreciated if you want a promotion.
Totally agree! There should be more flexibility to accommodate different preferences and concerns regarding payment methods.
the clue to the difference is, perhaps, however, right there in the name....