skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally agree with you on chatbots, but you just committed the same "sin" as him! To most people, and probably to that chatbot, WiFi == Internet == Ethernet. Actually, I doubt specifying Ethernet would have helped him at all. When it asked him if he was having trouble with his WiFi, he should have just said yes, and then "spammed 0" if that didn't help. Or maybe he should have just immediately started spamming 0. Now that I think about, for anything more technical than unplugging the device, you should probably start with asking for a human.
None of those appliances are autonomous
There's no _particular_ reason to adopt RISC-V either, they'll just compete on price because there's no license to pay. So the Linux comparison applies in that even when RISC-V reaches performance parity with ARM/x64, the installed base of the incumbents will be enough to prevent mass migration.
Shibboleth https://xkcd.com/806/
Well, the bar is pretty low so I suppose you’re right.
I never use Google docs. This is a great reminder of why I have no reason to start. Thanks.
Causation or correlation? Rarely do parents force phones on their kids; they give in to their kids asking. This could say something about those kids, or perhaps about parents who give their kids what they ask.
He started at GitHub 3 years after the article was written. Don't think GitHub's interview process takes that long. ;)
>AI Chatbots have been outperforming human agents in every category imaginable.

Would love to see a source for this claim.
This is easy to say as a consumer but on the other side of it you’ve got to realize, most people are not like your average HNer. In my experience, customers are unwilling to dedicate even 60 seconds to reading documentation, FAQs, bright blinking banners, etc. The majority of “customer support” is answering questions and solving problems that have extremely simple answers and very obvious and well-documented solutions. It’s not something you want to spend money on, it’s usually worth it to throw an LLM at them and let go the ones that refuse to read. Even on the employee side, no one wants to be on calls all day dealing with people that are intentionally ignorant, it’s rage-inducing.
I don’t see Be My Eyes or other similar efforts as “implied” to be equivalent to humans at all. They’re just new tools which can be very useful for some people.

“These new tools aren’t perfect” is the dog bites man story of technology. It’s certainly true, but it’s no different than GPS (“family drives car off cliff because GPS said to”).
I guess I don't really understand the point of expecting distinct solutions to all converge toward the same general case. All of the criteria on your list are already fulfilled by Postgres, MySQL, etc. -- why dilute the optimality of SQLite for its specialized use cases just to target other use cases that are already served superbly with other tools?

This is like arguing how great bicycles would be if they had four wheels, enclosed cabins, and gasoline engines.
Sugar is a problem. A hundred or so years ago, you may eat a pound or five of sugar over a year. We are now eating like 40lbs a year.

But sugar is not the only problem. Why do ancient skeletons all (mostly) have great, straight teeth and strong jaws? That is not sugar. I suspect it is soft foods.
That mail comes with rules. It presorted and so even though it is a lot cheaper to mail for them, because everything is in order there is a lot less work for the mail system and so they still make money on it in general.
IIRC Colorado has or had such a law. I took advantage of it to cancel Xbox Live back in the day by updating my billing address and then canceling the service (despite not living in Colorado).
Average people would switch to a $10/month service instead of $12/month. For internet, mobile plans, people in all sorts of circles brag about what a deal they were able to get with a service provider by haggling. Even when it's a $2 monthly difference. They are proud about their negotiation skills and how they pitted the service providers against each other to make the lowest bid.

Maybe once after they have received unsatisfactory customer support, they would consider switching, but passionate, skilled, caring and creative customer support would cost far, far more than that. Even if you employ enough customer support to provide a human out of the gate for everyone, you would only get people following the same script as the basic chatbot would. People and especially creative people wouldn't stay at this job for long, dealing with entitled customers. In most cases, it's mostly a thankless, dead end job that will get to your mental health.
I dont think I have ever seen numbers on any of these "books", they often don't have covers... I imagine some of them if reviewed poorly may never even make it to market.
The general trend is towards customer contact that does not have any agency. At least if you're connected to an AI, you can feel less guilty about hating their guts.
If you do not think writing and debugging code is an important part of software development requiring specific skills, talents, and experience, I don’t want you anywhere near any software development team I’m working on.

Paul Graham has made multiple fortunes based on the premise that good programmers can learn the soft skills for business much easier than the average business person can learn to code. Mountains of money have been made from this premise.
Kernighan is also a co-author of The Go Programming Language book, at least of the 1st edition.
Or perhaps three ERP systems in a trench coat.
I think support is going to get worse before it gets better.

From a quick glance the chatbot described in this post it is clearly moving through a dialog tree and not LLM based. The outsourced support agent is likely also just moving through some sort of script. I don't think the chatbot necessarily made the experience much worse than typical AT&T support.

I think the big challenge with promise of AI chatbots (not in this example though), is that somehow you can just replace your entire support team with a bunch of bots, and free up your reactive support team to do other things. We (Olark: https://www.olark.com) have definitely seen this in our customer base and try really hard to walk people back from this perspective, but even then we are going to see more and more unstaffed chat solutions (e.g. every drift bot ever, and most intercoms) before things swing back to some hybrid of AI and humans.

That said, a very simplified version of the way I think about how AI chatbots and what the future of support looks like might help you:

1) Big enterprises (or regional monopolies) who are mostly monopolies selling to consumers, where they have to just be good enough that regulators don't come after them (or sometimes compete on price (AT&T, Comcast/Xfinity, Verizon, power company)), these folks will always offer the cheapest support they can get away with.

2) Companies that still win business with human relationships. These folks will likely over index on AI and provide worse service if they BELIEVE that they are winning business based on some sort of non-relationship based factors.

3) Small businesses with small teams wearing multiple hats all the time, where providing AI support lets them offer a better service than they'd be able to provide (e.g. we now can answer 50% of questions 24/7 instantly). They will over index on AI until it hurts the bottom line.

I still believe human relationships matter, and figuring out how to create hybrid bot / human customer service to enable humans to do their best work is still huge unsolved opportunity.
> Also not being a LISP guy, is it really so common to roll your own everything? Would you write your own JSON parser, is it that easy in LISP?

As someone who has dabbled in lisp: IME, everything is easier - enough so that I more-often _consider_ inventing something that solves my subset of the problem.

I suspect this contributes to the poor library availability situation (I understand that's improved markedly in recent years, but still).
> Note that the human support rep didn't even have access to the chat history.

Yeah... that's unlikely. They often do and just ignore it.
I don't remember feeling depressed about my Internet usage before social networks existed. Just making a point to try and separate those two, as impossible as it seems these days.
Google also stopped using Gmail for ad targeting.
I am doing the same recently. It took me a while to learn this (because I started life without much access to money). Buying convenience is a thing!
Some examples: I pay for my search (Kagi). I picked my home builder by how they took my wishes into account. Instead of the chain restaurant, with disinterested staff, go to the one where the person behind the counter is the owner.
I think good customer services can be your special sauce when making a business!
That's the beauty of this masterpiece
There are too many people and too much investment for there to be a singular focus or any coordinated shift in focus.
AT&T gigabit internet tends to be $1,200 a year and has incredible margins on profitability.
Vaping: A harm reduction tool or a public health concern? Experts weigh in
Tech is mostly made from men and you don't need to share your sexual preference with anyone, so I don't really see a problem. Make some money and get back.
netflix special ... when?
Write queries and join between Snowflake and Postgres with GlareDB [video]
> but i learnt hard lessons on how to not applying for the wrong company.

Can you share what you have learned?
AI-Extracted Asian Building Footprints
Biology is because it’s a prerequisite for medical fields increasingly dominated by women.
> If you notice anything you are worried about, see a doctor.

Yeah, good luck with that. I've had several relatives who all eventually died of cancer who tried to get their symptoms checked for years only to get bullshit answers like "it's only stress" or false, or incomplete diagnostics.

Personally I have a quite severe back pain issue and I have not managed to find a doctor to send me for an MRI for over 12 years now.
I used to run supply chain tooling for a big manufacturing firm and, at one point, some dev got into a fight with a security-focused sysadmin somewhere who refused to allow the use of sftp for file transfer with trading partners (things like forecasts and order documents from suppliers)... so instead of either escalating or creating an alternative architecture, the dev unilaterally decided to leverage the fact that ports 20-21 were inadvertently open externally and use standard FTP for this. Nobody was fired and nobody really knew because it was an app supported by one person and as long as the business process didn't fail everything was "ok".
I feel that's the best case, a smart conversational system that knows its limit and can off-ramp you to a human if need be. In addition, I don't _want_ to talk to a human, via phone or otherwise. We all had horrendous CS experiences ("are the lights on you router blinking?" - "yes! I just told you that there is packet loss, arghhh" so I actually prefer a smart non-human system in the vast majority of cases.
Came here to say this.

This blog was founded to convince others of the harm of smartphones. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the authors have significant confirmation bias.

Everything they claim needs to be taken with a big grain of salt.
Haidt is also marketing his book via the blog.

It would be much more credible if he designed proper scientific studies and punished them in relevant Journals after peer review.

The fact he doesn't publish properly is consistent with my hunch that his claims wouldn't stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Do you think reading the manual is supposed to make those problems disappear or make them less frustrating for some reason? These kind of personal attacks just because their opinion differs from yours is low effort, specially given that they clearly mentioned "official recommendation" in multiple places implying they did go through the manual.
It's still somewhat common, but over the past couple of decades we've created package managers like QuickLisp that allow calling external dependencies in Common Lisp as easy as it is in Python (and even systems to allow us to interact with Python to get access to its ecosystem), plus a version of Common Lisp (Armed Bear Common Lisp) that runs on the JVM to get access to that ecosystem (not to mention the Lisp-adjacent language Clojure).
This distinction is a great example of Christopher Alexander’s “selfconscious” vs. “unselfconscious” ways of building.

Unselfconscious buildings slowly evolve in response to challenges faced by the inhabitants, and thus are marked by an almost organic tendency to shape to the environment. Functions emerge as innovations to solve problems at the speed of societal evolution — the mud huts of 50,000 BCE looked remarkably similar to the huts of 25,000 BCE.

Selfconscious buildings have prior “intent”, requiring elaborate upfront planning to express the will of the (often singular) architect. The building isn’t just a solution to a set of problems — it’s a shape, a statement, something intended to be seen and considered, intended to evoke feelings, maybe even to make some people uncomfortable.

I don’t recall if Alexander says this explicitly, but I’ve always felt that selfconscious architecture is a form of conspicuous consumption by power elite. By wasting resources to communicate messages in stone and steel, a society is saying to rivals (and to itself) how much it matters. The intent of this message is the same whether it’s the Durham Cathedral or the Louvre Pyramid.

(Ironically, I’d also argue that most “modern buildings” now fall into the unselfconscious camp — cranking out block after block of orange aluminum clad five-over-ones is a well-established and reliable way of putting square meters on site. It’s just unfortunate that accidents of history and economics led to the dominance of this stark and antihuman aesthetic.)
they start asking early
Static home appliances don't move around and the space of possible dangerous failure modes is limited. This stuff is easy to test for safety. And a refrigerator failure isn't a potential safety issue.

LLMs tend to fail in novel ways that are impossible to reason about. What is the expected failure rate for mistaking a human infant sleeping on the floor for a large doll that needs to be picked up and put away? You can't prove that the rate will be zero. We don't have good ways to model and estimate those failures rates in such complex systems.
> You don't want to replicate the mess, rather to know which LANs/VLANs your servers need access to, so you have some planning to do, but the day you unplug everything you don't have to mind where the cables were going.

This assumes the Xen project keeps half decent, fairly up to date documentation. I could see them not founding admin work as much as they should.
Yes, in theory, you write an email. But in practice, most of the big companies do their best to hide any human-observed mailbox behind a quick and sloppy "customer support FAQ with a useless search bar" page.
> It's very silly to state the following to a dumb chat bot

It was the first message. We don't know if the author knew the decision tree will come first. Usually the initial prompt is something like "please describe the issue".
Studios mostly pitch to publishers for funding (and maybe expertise/services like PR and console porting).
DuckDB's memory model works perfectly well. I have run tests to benchmark the hash aggregation performance with different OLAP databases today, prepared a dataset with 10^9 rows and various distinct values. Within 32GB memory, DuckDB can finish the count distinct query (although it's slow). Others may tell me it runs out of memory, since all of them have the ability to spill to disk temporarily.
Ask HN: Alternatives to Fastmail?
A year or two ago I cut the Gmail cord for all the usual (privacy) reasons. I had seen FastMail mentioned here and went with FM. Unfortunately, the relationship isn't working out.

1) They seem to have a hyper-sensitive spam filter to the point things are refused and never even make it into spam. E.g., A client's newsletter I subscribe to suddenly stopped showing up.

2) Their app on my phone is now randomly logging me out and asking that I log back in. PITA

I need to switch. Soon. Suggestion?
The author generously omit the long jurney through the negative side of external dependencies. This is somewhat frivolous and too unbalanced to be reliable this way. The truth must be somewhere inbetween again.
Generally speaking, mud wrestling jobs exist in traditional IT departments, not tech product companies, and the jobs pay far less than those where the code is the product. For better or for worse, but the existence of "big balls of mud" is largely a result of "you get what you pay for" mentalities in non-technical CIOs & CTOs... or industries where IT spend is below some low threshold (e.g. 1% revenue).
I don’t disagree but there’s no reason to think the ISP understands wifi and internet the same as the chatbot. The help being offered by the chatbot for wifi issues may have been specific for troubleshooting wifi issues and irrelevant for fixing a slow wired connection.
That's good to hear! As long as you're happy and you discussed these things with eachother it's all good.
how to prevent the agents from just telling the game player the secret?
This is well known fact by now I would say. The social dilemma docu shows some pretty interesting data - The Social Dilemma - Influence of Social Media on Teen Depression and Behavior

They were showing some pretty concerning data of the first generation that grew up with smartphones in school.

I can only imagine in time what will be the picture of the first generation that is growing up now with LLM models everywhere around them.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui0UNXsEGJ8
Only because it isn't worth it for the company to go after you. If they want to fight you a canceled credit card is not a unsubscribe notice and they are likely to win in court.

However if you try to unsubscribe and discover it is too difficult calling the credit card companies and ask them to stop payment can get attention - credit cards companies have consumer protection and they can make things difficult for those making unsubscribe difficult.
I don't see why SMS would need to write to a store, public or not. One can implement SMS-2FA using TOTP for example, it's just that the TOTP secret is not shared with the recipient.
Yes, there's always that one app that prevents you from switching. For some it's their banking app, for others Spotify, etc. So the question is how do we find a middle point between a dumbphone and a smartphone?
A bank card to pay stuff, witch is a smart card, NFC capable, you can use (as is common in various EU countries) to authenticate yourself on your internet banking.

Similarly various countries offers eIDs (some I know Estonia, Belgium, Italy, Germany, France) witch are NFC ISO 14443A/B who are used to authenticate the Citizen on various public services.

Many universities and some high school as well offer an NFC badge witch is a smart card, and could be used to authenticate institution website and so on.

All those examples are already in use since years, but used for limited activities and mostly not advertised. It's just a matter of spread them. In Italy for instance since some years national eID card (CIE) is used to access fiscal services to send for instance you filled tax forms, to pay some tax and so on, while national health service card is used to buy tobacco from every automatic vending machines since much more (to prove you are >18 years old), France start since last year the same with France Connect+ witch as Italy, German etc is the pan European eIDAS system to offer digital docs and services to all. All countries have invented absurd systems to AVOID using eIDAS with smart cards in most cases, while we all have them. Only to push the "app" cloud+mobile model.
EU Regulators Accept Apple Commitments to Open NFC Access to Rivals
Improving Developer Experience Requires Quantitative Data
Oh, one has been spectacularly useful to customers, by hallucinating a new, more customer friendly refund policy that courts held the company liable for:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...

We absolutely need more chatbots like that.
The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Many of the funding models Josh listed are directpayment for creative work being done. If anything, in the current model creative work is often not paid directly (unless done as work for hire where the creative doesn't get to own their creation) but instead is a gamble that you can later on profit from the "intellectual property".
>> I would stick to the most boring stack

Just use sql. Very straightforward and easy to use program understand maintain.
RAGFlow: Modern Agentic RAG Based on Graph
the real shock is how many websites, powered by wordpress, use mysql instead!
Isn't the issue that even the scripts aren't up to scratch.

A chatbot that had the nuances correctly distinguished would not be a concern but it's because the script is not well put together and most likely poorly applied with a bot that it's so painful.
It runs on infra you control, but it is objectively not infra that is on-premise. On-premise means "On my land, in my building, on the infrastructure I own." Self hosted is the correct term
I was not aware of that and it looks like math is an interesting exception. Any theories on what’s responsible for that difference?
The issue is IMO that they have very bad / little / no internal documentation.
The boys are usually as good as the documentation that powers them.
Ah, I see, that makes sense.

But still, the second `Videos` directory of 3.7G is a subdirectory of `Music`, so it should appear below it, no? Same for the two `tmp` directories, they're subdirectories of `.local`, so I would expect them to be listed under it. Right now there doesn't seem to be a clear order in either case.
Many Americans Think K-12 Stem Ed Lags Behind Peer Nations. They're Half-Right
It's kind of addressed in section 5:

"We cannot be certain that the correlations shown in the data are evidence of causality, but we think it is appropriate for those who care for children to act on the preponderance of the evidence (which is the standard in a civil trial) rather than waiting for evidence beyond a reasonable doubt (which is the standard used in a criminal trial."

It's not that social (or medical) researchers are unaware that observational studies can't establish causation, but in most cases when studying human reactions nothing better is feasible. For a proper randomized controlled trials even voluntary enrollments are problematic: the researcher needs to choose and randomize the treatment. How can that ever be implemented for a sufficiently powered study of smartphones/social media use for children (or adults)?
AWS has for years spun resources for you via various wizards and "service of services" and it's not uncommon that the resources are wildly cost-inefficient vs spinning up your own.
And, though easier to study the effect on children, it affects us all.

Instant everything is an addictive stimulant and anxiety source.

Social media encourages intense emotions.

The ability to view only what you wish encourages confirmation bias and helps viewpoints at odds with reality from ever being challenged by reality.

And unlimited feel-good content encourages a runaway desire for more, making reality boring.

Some of us are lucky enough to have self restraint against it all. But the drugs are always lurking a click away.