skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Just use sql. Very straightforward and easy to use program understand maintain.

In the end SQLAlchemy and Alembic generate and execute SQL. The weird behaviours are due to sqlite's idiosynchasies
GraphRAG is to parse data to create a KG and retrieval the information from KB.

RAGFlow is to create a Graph workflow to solve multi-hop question-answering issue.
Comcast “customer service” was already such an abysmal experience in 2006 that I find it hard to believe anyone longs for that again. I spent 3 hours on the phone trying to get a $50 correction to my bill that that summer when I was a broke grad student as I got railroaded around a call center in India.

That’s a system designed not to help you. Maybe they’re doing the same thing now, but framing AI as the problem lets these companies off the hook for what I’d consider “working as intended”.
Pay for Fastmail.
Amusingly, in the first photo I actually prefer the house hiding in the background to the right.
To be honest speed and lightweight are important. But no as important as code completition and a good debug experience.
Yes, money is also a factor. You can see some data in https://substack.com/home/post/p-140838494 by the same guys.
He is not talking to an AI chatbot, that's a decision tree program. Is this a joke? Why does this have so many upvotes in a technical website. This is embarrassing.
Why Doesn't Advice Work?
an increasing rules for thee but not for me
Isn't horrible customer service a staple of American broadband companies? And the sole reason they get away with it is because they have very effectively lobbied in many state, town jurisdictions such that any alternative providers have no chance of making a competitive offer (either because there are no other competitors offering fiber or because getting connected would be very costly)? In that case customer service is a pure cost factor where companies are incentivized to provide the bare minimum that just retains the customer. If I were a shareholder of AT&T I'd say they are doing things by the book.
The internet is fine thank you.

It's anything with a "social" component that's the problem.

You need to split it further because I think the young uns think direct person-to-person messaging is also social media. That's fine too.

It's when they start cramming unwanted content and "influencers" down your throat that the problem appears.
High uptime and support availability costs a lot. Something the general internet population doesn't think about when comparing prices with municipal broadband.
Indeed -- though reducing seems to have other benefits.

Though as far as is practicable [0], one should not drink alcohol. No amount is safe or good enough for you to offset the other risks.

[0] life is short and not all social offers of a drink should necessarily be turned down, unless you're willing to figuratively or literally show the trappings of "one who must not" (pregnant, alcoholic, religion, training for sports, on medication, etc.)
You can call your bank. They can verify your identity over the phone and banks do so routinely.
That reminds me of the article „a neural network in 11 lines of code“ from 2015 (although not on MNIST, rather some kind of XOR)

https://iamtrask.github.io/2015/07/12/basic-python-network/
"Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - but will not say how - and the decision is final."

I agree. Companies like Microsoft never do this to ordinary people.
From the viewpoint of RAG 2.0, during the stage of indexing or pre-processing, such approaches as knowledge graph is a MUST to resolve such issues as multi hop question answering, long text question answering as well as semantic gap between question and answers. As a result, you could look on graphrag as a component of future RAGFlow. Given the graph based orchestration, integrating graphrag into ragflow is not difficult. As a result, RAGFlow will support graphrag in very near future.
> This is all well and good but I thought the primary reason for eschewing traditional design was the cost of labour rose just as the cost of material production fell (a gap which continues to increase)

Yes, the post-WW2 building boom was all about fast and cheap to serve the needs of returning GIs.

But in the last few years it is possible to get pre-made moldings from a factory so local mill works / skills are not strictly necessary:

* https://www.kuikenbrothers.com/moulding-scale-proportion-sem...

* https://windsorone.com/products/moldings/

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guM4z6Hps0I

The problem is that designers/architects still need to understand the theory behind the proportions if you want to do it properly, and most folks don't have it:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUpj2Du8wY
You are right. As I have come to understand, there is a difference in astronomic longitudes and geographic longitudes as they are used for navigation.

The extra parameter is a good idea. As I am implementing in Rust, I will follow the strong type system and provide two different types that can cast themselves into the other.
On one hand Windows 11 is bad spyware on the other hand, Linux is still useless. I am usually in awe when solving even basic issues like how much RAM and HDD is free starts with write this command into Terminal. 30 years of development ladies and gentlemen...
At this point I believe confounding variables have been thoroughly considered and the case that there is a specific effect from smart phones and social media specifically is incredibly strong.
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

This is exactly what I do with my business (RadioReference/Broadcastify). If you have a premium subscription, you can pay with a credit card, but we do not auto-renew subscriptions. We'll simply send you an email 7 days before your subscription is about to expire, and if you want to renew it, you go ahead and submit a new payment.

I've been told by a number of PE firms and others that I'm missing out on significant revenue, and I KNOW that is probably the case, but I just cannot gather enough energy to climb that summit and commit my users to such dark patterns. Even in the face of clear and concise evidence that my revenue would probably increase >20%, I'm more afraid of the loss of customer goodwill, and chargebacks that would occur. I can simply look at my own rage when I see dark patterns that extract money from my pocket.

Sadly, it's one of those things were if your business is in a crowded space of players, the ones that do participate in the dark patterns will earn more money, which leads to more funding, which often leads to winning. So most companies don't have a choice but to foist dark patterns like auto-renewals on their customers.
I've never felt comfortable using Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc products.

In the recent months and with the increasing possibilities of surveillance with AI and how they are controlling the narrative of things, it made me feel incredibly uneasy. No more of these products on my devices.
Put another way, "default to what's best for all users collectively" is not strictly equivalent to "default to what's most intuitive to unfamiliar users".

The latter is the luxury of end-user software unburdened by decades of legacy compatibility obligations.
Given that 99^6 is supposed to mean 99,000,000, it seem clear that the superscript is not meant to be exponentiation but rather just denote the number of zeroes following (ie. short for scientific notation à la the 99e6 syntax used in programming languages.)
Having a list of allowed recurring payments for your card is not an impossible requirement. Ability to cancel approval on your side would not be too complicated for the bank and would be very useful even without integration with other side to really cancel the subscription.
Hot take: rooted phones are inherently less secure. That does not include GrapheneOS btw, since you don't have root privileges on an official build of GrapheneOS.
Chaining Three Bugs to Access All Your ServiceNow Data
Like animals the robot arm should also be compliment and not always be moving with full force because it is going to hit things even with active collision avoidance.
TIL that 40% of cancers are preventable.
Old Haidt piece. Wonder why it's getting traction this year.
I think this is the best advice. The further you are away from your data store, the more you are relying on the used cases others have considered. Just because a library needs features that something like SQLite doesn’t provide doesn’t mean that you need that feature. But every extra abstraction in your stack has this danger.

I also think that the closer you are to your DB, more you appreciate the features you actually need are. A developer should know how their data is ultimately stored. And if an ORM hides this from you, that’s a problem.

Note: and ORM doesn’t need to hide this and can be a rational way to manage DB storage. But it’s then up to the developer to manage that abstraction. I’ve done this before where I used an ORM but I still knew exactly what SQL was going to be generated. But for many, especially new devs, the ORM is a black box.
"Basic free market economics" are a convenient lie to make trying to prognosticate on the economy easier. It's built on a set of flawed axioms based around perfect information, extremely low barriers of entry, long time horizons of investors and capital [0], and ignoring things like natural monopolies and network effects. It's a toy model that doesn't match our experience.

Your environmental example is equally bad even when people have easy direct damages they can show like the Exxon Valdeeze spill the cost of litigation is massively skewed in favor of the company who can afford to drag cases out for a decade or more until the plaintiffs simply run out of money and have to take a smaller settlement. It's even worse with a lot of pollutants where the effect is more minor but drastically worsens a person's life but happens to so many people it's in aggregate a huge cost. Usually those take the form of an increased risk or prevalence of disease and the company gets to argue endlessly about their culpability for poisoning people because it's hard to prove the negative that they wouldn't have gotten cancer/breathing problems/etc in the absence of the pollution...

[0] to allow long term profitable companies to weather short term undercutting by larger companies who can take the losses to kill a competitor for example)
>the FreeBSD core team has approved reducing the stable branch
support duration from 5 years to 4 years starting with FreeBSD 15

Interesting, that is the exact opposite of what many big Linux Distros seem to be heading for. Companies would rather have a 100 year support cycles and never do upgrades at all. SUSE (I think) just announced a 12 year support schedule.

I wonder how that will work out for FreeBSD. It seems like a good idea, but I think it could hurt their commercial customers.

At the company I worked at, EOL anything on Dec will cause them to avoid it at all costs. IMHO, EOL Dates should be in the first month of the quarter, not the last month of a quarter.
I have a very simple approach to evaluating if a subscription is worth it: I multiply the price by 20 times the annual cost [1]. If it is monthly, that is 240 times. If that is too hard for quick mental arithmetic, 250 is pretty close (divide by 4, multiply by a thousand). $12/month? That is almost $3000. It may seem extreme, but it's not. That is the real cost to your wealth over time.

[1] Net present value [2] of all future payments with a 5% discount rate. 5% is not scientific or anything. This is just a rule of thumb.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value
I started doing something less over-engineered last year. It uses LaTeX with a CD pipeline and I think it's is a good way to do resumes. Every time I push mine, the one linked on my personal website is updated to the new version.

The diffing and version pinning is nice. Throughout intern application season I usually make updates to my resume and it's nice to be able to easily go back to the version of the resume that I applied with whenever I get a callback from a company.

Mine: https://github.com/nickorlow/resume

Website with link pointing to latest pdf: https://nickorlow.com

I also do something similar with cheat-sheets for classes. Using git for collaboration it is really nice: https://github.com/nickorlow/cs-331-cheatsheet

I do like the concept in the article of separating the data from the presentation.
Indeed. I think that if a person cannot participate in modern society without being a customer with only a few competitors to choose from, then such businesses should have a "universal service obligation" and not be allowed to refuse service without a good reason. Such a reason should be mediated by the legal system.

For example a major chain convenience store with few similar competitors could ban someone for shoplifting, but someone innocent caught by this should be able to sue and win if the store cannot convince a court that such an event actually occurred. A mom-and-pop store wouldn't be within scope of this.

And the same for online businesses.
AFAIK, the procedure for counting taxes is mandated by law. So the first one just can not be fraud.

(And yeah, lobbyists in my country tried to import that law several time claiming it provides better transparency.)
There have been plenty of eras with less social stability. I don’t see how this era stands out especially.
I am pretty well off and I am very guilty of letting my kids overuse electronics. Plenty of my friends are the same (we've discussed it).
You can even put <hn-2024-07-11>@<some-domain.tld>.

Let’s note however that even "owning a domain" is an illusion of control, as IANA is ultimately a retainer of uncle Sam. I don’t know if there is any functional distributed alternative that promote more autonomy to end users that can works out of the box (or even just a few basic install steps away) in most digital terminal out there.
> What many here on HN don't realize is some significant portion of call center activity is people asking things like "Whats my balance?".

Exactly.

We all have some level of knowledge and experience with things we consider obvious and basic like password managers, self-service (apps, online logins), etc. Bank of America has 69 million customers. I'd love to see the internal stats on what their customer service interfaces handle but I'd venture to guess they have some unbelievable amount of interactions on a daily basis for things like balances, paying bills (really), password resets, etc.

Then consider services even more within our wheelhouse like ISPs - I'm sure we've all had that Tier 1 rep experience of laying on the couch while a rep goes through their script asking questions/diagnosing with things that anyone here would have gone well above and beyond before even calling. I know that whenever I have issues with anything I will do whatever I can within my own control and capability to AVOID the hoop-jumping, phone trees, queues, etc. All we're ever trying to do is navigate their script to get to Tier 2 or beyond.

Then, finally, when I get them to do a truck roll because it's some outside cable plant issue or whatever the tech sees I have 10 gbit ethernet everywhere they look at me wide-eyed and ask "So... What do you do?".

However, to your point from the perspective of the business it makes sense... Take Comcast as another example - they have over 32 million customers from all walks of life with an extremely wide range of ages, experience, capabilities, etc. Ideally you could call/chat/whatever and get a capable human right away but that's just not possible at the scale many of these entities operate.

My mother (73 years old) just fell victim to the classic "get an email, click a link, get a popup, call "Microsoft", install remote access software, and login to your bank account" scam. She was completely convinced she was talking to Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission (what?!?), her phones were tapped, and people were following/watching her. Next thing she knew she was at her bank taking out every cent she could get access to and driving around feeding hundred dollar bills into Bitcoin ATM machines. Really.

Watching her interact with customer service interfaces was eye opening (as was falling victim to this ridiculous scam in the first place). My takeaway was "Oh, she is why they have these things implemented the way they do".
> I’ve heard that they can still manage to charge your card even if your privacy card is disabled.

Yup, privacy allowed a company to charge me fraudulently.

Their response was basically: "We have standards for disputes with our card networks and you have no evidence that you didn't purchase this, so we won't be allowing you to submit a dispute."

Yeah, I didn't have evidence that I didn't buy a random charge that I knew nothing about aside from the "retailer" and the dollar amount...
> His style is by far my most favorite among all other technical authors.

All authors should learn from Kernighan's books (co-authored with Plaugher/Ritchie/Pike) on how to write technical books. 90% of all the computer programming books published nowadays are too verbose (why the hell are they so huge?), meandering over inessentials, lack of clarity in language, a paucity of clear and precise examples and overall just a waste of paper. Reading them is more of a chore then enlightening whereas all of Kernighan's books are only a little over 200 pages, dense with knowledge and a pleasure to read.
Yeah, with B2B it's possible at least, since the businesses that pay for your services actually make money. Good customer support can directly and visibility impact their bottom line by reducing hours on debugging and any costs from downtime.

Average people wouldn't be willing to pay enough to provide such level of service.
Basically, yes, although I imagine that specific scenario rarely happens in practice. That's why I'm saying the guy in the OP got out of a bad situation: his workload increased without any benefit to him, and he got out of that abusive relationship.

In the US, the vast majority of these positions are salaried. You get $X/year to perform the duties you're expected to. Because we don't have unions and 99.9% of people are not expert negotiators, "the duties you're expected to" are never actually defined. That means your employer is incentivized to stack as many duties on as they can, until they approach your breaking point. So long as they don't break you, it's free work for them. Employers regularly abuse inexperienced people and desperate people, who don't have the confidence or financial wiggle room to say "no." I applaud those who normalize saying "no," and encourage forming unions so there's a group of experts in the room whose job it is to fight back against this kind of abuse.
I would have thought that was obvious from my comment.

I'm with Jeff on this one.

LLMs are an obviously terrible solution for any problem that actually has a complex but invariant solution.

Personally I prefer rigid, automated questionnaire filtering that gets you to a real person as soon as possible.

I also thoroughly believe in a) human support chats and b) believing the people answering them to be decent human beings who deserve my clarity, preparedness, politeness and empathy, and I think more should be done on chat interfaces to make them slightly less amenable to stupid unstructured queries. You help people ask the question right.
How is insurance going to provide heat for 2 weeks?

Pay for rental of propane heaters during a cold snap when they're all gone?

Insurance is not the answer here.
Not very good experience after opening a simple Python script with no external dependencies in zed for linux. They use Pyright and there was an error and warning that were both incorrect. VSCode uses Pylance IIRC and it's not complaining.
> But before you start waxing lyrical about the halcyon days of software you "own", you've either forgotten or never experienced the shady things software compnaies did to maximize revenue then as well.

Just because there was shady shit back then doesn't mean it wasn't, in some ways, a better system.
If you are asking if we'd reject a well-paying job that is a good career boost because of a philosophical problem with how they operate... great, I'm all in favor of applying personal ethics to your work. But I'd encourage everyone to apply those same ethics to all jobs, not just Meta. After all, when you dig deep enough, most corporations are evil at some level. (Not all.) And most people are decent (or so I choose to believe.)

So which is worse? Refusing to get some personal gain from an evil corporation with an evil leader? Or accepting the reality of it, taking a job from them, and using some of the resulting wealth to create positive impact in other areas of our world?

There is no right answer to that question, BTW. Everyone has their own ethics. But there is more depth to be considered than just "Meta is evil, so reject job."

(For the record, I don't know anyone in leadership at Meta, so I cannot say if they are actually evil or not, that statement is just for the sake of argument.)
KT's
from tangible to abstract maybe
I think the biggest differences with modern social media are that 1) it constantly seeks your attention with notifications, and 2) it is trying to make money, so they've spent money on how to keep you addicted.
Shame there weren’t examples of the most different package and import names.
Your final point is saying ideally AI is an Animal. A creature on a typewriter who has no legal rights to their code.

Not a "person". Not a "human". An "animal".

I hope AI observes all the code and complexity in Nature and drops the human facade. I hope AI understands the intelegence of the Trees and Birds and Fish.

I hope AI wins.
Jonathan Haidt has covered the correlation/ causation question very rigorously. The case that smart phones and social media specifically have an impact is very strong.
Do you have any evidence for this doubt or just blanket racism?
Suuuure
My first thought was the Voyager character called "Seven" (or Seven of Nine) played by Teri Ryan.
New AI Books5 Dataset for training LLMs further (July 2024 update)
- More than 600,000 fiction and non-fiction book full-texts

- More than 8,000,000 scholarly publications, magazines, and manuals full-texts

- More than 5,000,000 US patents

- 164,000,000 metadata records

Format is described at https://t.me/nexus_search/226
I have no idea, nor do I necessarily think that they exists. An hypothrtical person holding the opinion I described might try to point out some effect the artwork had on the world as a political effect, I for sure do not know enough about art and/or history to speculate.

In this view authorial intent has a second-class position to its tangible effect.
Good question. I thought it would be a no brainer to put it on s3 or similiar but thats already way to expensive at 2m/month without api requests.

Backplace storage pods are an initial investment of 5 Million, thats probably the best bet you could do and on that savings level, having 1-3 good people dedicated to this is probably still cheaper.

But you could / should start talking to the big cloud providers to see if they are flexible enough going lower on the price.

I have seen enough companies, including big ones, being absolut shitty in optimizing these types of things. At this level of data, i would optimize everyting including encoding, date format etc.

But i said it in my other comment: the interesting questions are not answered :D