skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The company I work for has a large, competent and expensive support team. Every single customer state it's their #1 reason they're with us. Yet nobody in the business, investors, or dev teams want to believe it and there's a huge pressure from business to automate, and from the devs to 'do as the other companies do it'. We're building UIs nobody wants to use; our customers would much rather call us, and have us solve their problem in a 1min conversation rather than spend hours figuring it out by themselves. The company is extremely profitable btw
Essentially an infinitely powerful god is not a consistent concept. Whether that is a feature or a bug is a matter of opinion.
Plot twist: running this just made sea level rise another quarter-inch, and you're causing one.
That means lot of space for Human race to expand in.
Running "clean build" should do the trick though, it will delete the ./build directory.
Or do you mean the local maven repo?
Ditto as an Australian. To be fair, we have a valid historical reason for prices down here always including tax - GST (our name for VAT / sales tax) was only introduced in 2000, and before that there was never any tax involved at point of sale - so it would have been too big a cultural change for "the marked price" to suddenly not be "the exact price that you pay". (Tipping is also rare here, same as in most of Europe.) So, yeah, the American way of "marked price plus tax plus tips" seems like egregious fraud to us too.

Although, over the past decade or so, "credit / debit card surcharge" fees (generally of 1-2%, but sometimes much more) - which aren't included in the marked price - have become pervasive here. And they're often charged (both online and in-store) when there is no alternative form of payment available (either a really lousy alternative - e.g. "pay by bank transfer, but we won't give you the product until the transfer has cleared, which may take up to 3 business days" - or literally no alternative at all, which is supposed to be illegal, but plenty of businesses seem to get away with it). But I guess it's a good sign, that quite a lot of people here complain loudly about such fees - maybe in the USA, the vast majority just resign themselves to it being yet one more gotcha creeping into everyday payments.
The problem is that it enables products of such low quality they arguably should not exist in that form. Try reporting something scammy or harmful on Facebook. The report will be ignored because it would take away too much profit. (Too much for what? We don't know. Maybe FB could not exist in its current form if there was not-horrible "customer" service. Well, maybe it should be a little different then.)
That is a fair point. I was asking whether the cause was bad parenting and not smart phones itself. The mental health issues reference was pointless and makes no sense.
Oh that is just excellent. I love the pathetic excuses they came up with trying to weasel their way out of having to honor promises made by their agents.

> Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.

This is disappointing, though. Can I weasel out of contracts if I say that the information I'm providing may not be accurate before signing?
The Recommended Glasses of Wine per Week index could be a RNG source.
Laws don't do much if they are not enforced. As is the case with this law. Regulations on anti-consumer behavior are very poorly enforced, and there's often in practice no penalty for violating them.
True, and it should also be pointed out that after finally getting connected to a human, they fared no better than the bot. Probably because they were both droids reading from a script, but alas.
> Which is why gnu/linux without a terminal is totally usable and therefore accesible to the non programmer. /s

Have you used modern Fedora? I have an old Thinkpad at home that I put Fedora on last year as our "sofa" laptop for web shopping etc. I took careful note of what I needed to do to set it up and that involved nothing on the command line to get to something good that my wife could happily use (not a techie, never used Linux).
In the UK at least, the main difficulty in getting referrals for MRIs is that the evidence for their efficacy at improving outcomes is low enough that unless there are other indicators you're usually referred for physiotherapy first.

But at the same time for those willing to go private you can get a same day MRI for down to a few hundred pounds many places.
wrong for you, right for me

everyone on your team should be using a auto-formatter
One of my banks uses email two factor auth- if I lost access to the email account and had no accessible backup email set I can see how being locked out of the email account would deny access to the bank account.
My grocery story requires email 2FA to log into it these days. Losing access to my email address would probably be more work than if I found myself having to move house.
The blog set me up for a really gorgeous typeset resume with lines in the intro like “More visual flair and typesetting control”.

With that expectation set, the end product was severely underwhelming. The visual flare is non-existent.
> Would you write your own JSON parser, is it that easy in LISP?

No, that's more of a Haskell thing to do (you start with your own parser combinator, of course).

Common lispers write their own testing framework - I guess that's Peter Seibel's fault ;)

https://sabracrolleton.github.io/testing-framework

https://gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-building-a-unit-test-...

https://gigamonkeys.com/book/
Agreed. They're just too big to care.
Where does Kubernetes take over in a TF environment?
What are the politics of "starry night"?
"traders"?
When did you start using the Internet? I was already using social networks (Multi-user BBS's and FidoNet) before I even first got onto the Internet in 1988, and then immediately got on to Usenet and IRC for social networking.
This is a reasonable criticism. I don't know how I can prove it as screenshots are not hard to fake, but here they are in any case. Also I emailed them and still haven't gotten a response, so I'm not inclined to be very understanding seeing as this appears to be happening quite frequently to people.

https://imgur.com/a/xLj3tqd

my company site is infoproc dot co. it is currently down. but if you google it you can see it has been indexed. And you can search for my company on linkedin if you want to know who I am.
A number of those issues are present even without subscriptions. For example, let's say you take it back to 2003, and buy Photoshop outright instead of subscribe. $700 piece of software, but when your computer dies and you need it on a new system, can't find the license key?
infoproc dot co. which is currently down.
Opposing information from mayoclinic with a link to a webmd post (i refuse to even call it an article), with zero actual scientific information in it, reduces the value of your comment. Which, otherwise, I fully agree with. There is no "although" here. Alcohol is bad for your health. That doesn't mean you should or should not drink X amount, that is anyone's free choice. But we don't live in the Dark Ages where it was suposedly good for you (...only compared to the alternative being bacteria ridden waste water).
If the Web is freeware... I wonder what options remain for licenced online information.
Young-ish cancer survivor here. I would add "9a. Don't ever go to a tanning salon" to this list, per my oncologist. There are genetic factors that caused my cancer, so naturally I was worried about recurrence. Her comments to me? "Do you smoke? No? Good. Don't start. Do you visit tanning salons? No? Good. Don't start." The rest falls into "trying to live a moderately healthy lifestyle". Oh, and definitely #6. If something doesn't seem/look/feel right then have a doctor check it out.
This. I wonder why people say India will be the next China, as if they are still living in the past. The future is about cheap energy powering robots, not cheap labor. The era of growth based solely on cheap labor is slowly ending with robotization.
No, that's wrong. The media mail rate is for books and other similar media, and it specifically may not be used for advertising.
Totally this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935688 - China's clean energy pushes coal to record-low 53% share of power in May 2024

That clean energy is even cheaper than their already cheap coal powered power stations - they are going to go even further eating our manufacturing breakfast.
Enforcing auto-formatting is a common practice in my experience.
Currently working on a project where the repo will refuse commits that are not following the repo-specific formatting settings.

I think it is a sane default in 2024.
That's going to be spicy - things like product launches often have 100-1000x the call volume than a typical day, so training up 100x workers temporarily is going to suck - I used to train apple's tech support.
These companies want to become as ubiquitous as a public utility. Therefore they should be regulated like a public utility
I agree, and that to me is the plan for almost every industry. A good example of this is BMW's subscription for various options. Between this and spyware, it is getting crazy out there.

But it seems this has slowed down a bit, at least from what I have seen. I expect it will accelerate once companies find a better way to spin "subscriptions/spyware".

IIRC, some Massachusetts repair law was/is hated so much by the auto manufactures, when you but a new car in that state, internet connectivity is disabled. Is that still true ? If so, I wonder if they are ignoring the law or trying to find a way around it.

FWIW, I have started telling people I know who say they "need" a new PC, to spend for a MAC. I would prefer Linux for them, but you know how that would go for non-tech people. With that said, I may use a close friend for an experiment with Linux to see what happens.
Were there entirely ad-powered business models with customer facing support before the Internet?

I can think of magazines and radio, but by definition they had localised reach, and there was no actual "users" that might need support, unlike many Internet ad-funded freeware.
Yeah I wish I could say build tools are simple.
1JPM was until I had to deal with transitive dependencies.
The recursion going on there broke my mind quite a bit.
I gave up on software and bought a steinberg ur44c. Almost zero latency for eq and compression so you can monitor your self in real-time.
Data Privacy in the Era of AI
That is a good point for this individual article!

However, the broader issue that Microsoft has infiltrated OSS and its organizations successfully by hiring and donating remains. It would not surprise me at all if they now hire people with an ostensibly "freedom fighter" background for credibility.

Look at how many people here cite his (former?) membership in the Pirate Party for credibility! Party membership means nothing. Politicians (in general!) change their minds, can be bought, etc. The Green Party in Germany started out as a peace party and has been used repeatedly to lend credibility to the Kossovo and other wars.
It’s often the case no product in a category offers good human to human customer support.
> [Wikipedia] Network effects are typically positive feedback systems, resulting in users deriving more and more value from a product as more users join the same network.

> [Your article] (Lisps) is essentially immune to the network effect.

You're making a strong inverse argument of "nobody got fired for using Java" against Lisp specifically.
Somehow this argument does not seem to hold for copyright enforcement of works that have been shared over BitTorrent and it's predecessors for decades.
it will probably be downvoted to hell, but it seems like there isnt many that argue the field of plumbing needs more women, more women laying down sewage pipes etc.

I tried reaching out to some feminist organisations to make some campaigns for this, and they were 100% not interested.

it seems the "increase female %" only covers jobs that are super cleanly in office spaces
Perhaps they could have, but why? What would be gained in hiring him to sit there and do nothing just because in the past he wrote some code that a company happened to find useful?
Your CV is a lot closer visually to what I was expecting from the original post. Varied font sizes and use of different regions on the page. Easy to take in at a glance.
Try to demodulate QAM64 without knowing what it is. It will look just like little bit elevated noise. Now imagine that aliens will be using as effective as possible modulation. There is close to zero chance to figure out what is being transferred.

Furthermore it also makes no sense to just scream in all directions so you will use highly directed microwave beam or laser. If you are not in the path of such communication, you will hear silence.
well, consider the life of an immigrant ( mine ).
i have bank accounts in India and the US.
when i need to access my Indian accounts from the US, they provide me a 2fa code via sms and email.
i don't have international roaming on my Indian SIM. Its active, but not really working in the US.
losing email access means i lose access to some of my bank accounts.
I assume that humans are in short supply and can only deal with one person at a time, while machines are cheap and can deal with hundreds of people at a time. Thus for simple things the machine is better for lack of wait.

I assume humans can understand English and translate from the words I know to the correct technical terms needed. When I'm in an area I'm not an expert in a human can guide me to the correct technical things much quicker than a machine which often uses words I don't know.
That’s not what media mail is. Media mail cannot contain advertising.
Was this decision made in Redmond or in Israel? Microsoft has offices in Israel and these offices are likely responsible for things happening in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel is currently at "war" with Gaza and having Israeli employees of Microsoft having the ability to disable anyone's account calling civilians in Gaza is pretty horrible.

Is Microsoft via Skype and Hotmail participating in what Israel's leaders are call the "complete siege"? https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-ministe...

No appeal and no explanation available does suggest to me the shutdown orders may have come from Israeli security services or the Israeli army.
Who are your customers? Other businesses or average people?
There's no guarantee that the money you pay will continue to be invested in customer service.

I have worked at a dozen startups, good customer service is an early market requirement, you hire good support staff, give them direct connections to the dev, you make their manager on equal footing.

Once things are humming along and the product isn't such a tire fire, it's "Oh we can promote the good ones to a services department and then export the rest off shore to a company that dgaf"

It's just a matter of time, not money.
but surely you can show up at your bank with identification and get the email changed?
Plainly false. They operate without my direct supervision, mostly.
Customer service is seen as an overhead by most large businesses (and likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon are the worst at dealing with anything non standard). In my work with utilities businesses even though they've had great feedback previously for customer service it's still seen as something to cut to the max. Companies who have previously had local call centres with 1000s (or more) staff were gradually being moved to cheaper locations, not just to save cost, but also to save massive pension and benefits liabilities. Once all these people have gone service drops off dramatically, but then even the offshore people are being phased out. This is just not seen as a priority.

The only time I go to customer services is to get support for a non standard problem, I'm happy to go to online information to get the answer that I need so when I do need to contact someone it's usually something complicated to resolve. For older people though there really is no way for them to resolve even simple problems if they are not able to deal with technology.
Google has Google One that includes support (including by phone) and Drive/Mail/etc storage. You can literally pay them to get support and other things if you want to.

I don't know how well it's selling, but going off Internet comments here and there, people seem offended they are asked to pay to get support for an otherwise free at the point of use service.
Especially if they don't give you access to you data (impossible in the EU thanks to the GDPR). They have to be taken to court for this.
Merge|Product Marketing|Fintech|Fulltime|Onsite London|5 days in office

Merge is a London-based company that helps global businesses collect, hold, and move money globally across multiple currencies via an API platform.

Learn more about us here: https://www.merge.money/

Apply for the role here:https://app.dover.io/apply/d9744acf-e0f3-4c49-9259-2f13c91e3...
The headline presents this as a false dichotomy when the answer is "both".

For people who were already smoking then vaping is a useful harm reduction tool. For people who don't smoke (especially children) it's a health concern - albeit a potentially smaller one than smoking one.
Cool project! How do you compare with Microsoft's graphrag? https://github.com/microsoft/graphrag
I maintain a list of podcasts here:

[1] https://taylor.town/podcasts

I believe all of these are weekly, and they were all "must-listen" for me at some point in the past :)

• 99 Percent Invisible: design

• Radiolab: science(?)

• Planet Money: economics

• Deep Questions with Cal Newport: productivity

• Dear Hank & Jon: depth/science/humor

• Cautionary Tales: history/science
I guess they will work out on the average wait time over a period, or the company's can just drop the calls to keep it down.
Disinformation from a Russian AI spam farm ended up on top of Google search
You write an email is so last century. These days it's:

"You hopelessly try to get any contact info out of the company's chatbot and fail. If there even is a chatbot. Then you post your problem on the web and submit it to HN and hope it makes the front page."
Depends if there is actually well known standard to format. E.g Go or Rust has very commonly used defaults.
What if your bank account is at Monzo, or any other online-only bank that seem to be the fastest growing personal banking sector at the moment.
Hell, the family dog has some of the same issues.

My point is, robots are not essentially new in their home-environment risks. We accept some level of risk now. The pessimistic view that home robots are impossible to deploy until their risks are reduced to zero, is nonsense.

My theory: we'll have home robots as soon as they're affordable and have a market demographic. Like any other technology.
Looks a lot like a derivate of a truth table, which is often used to debug multiple input combinations and expected output.
> My isp does not use "ai", but presents me with their decision tree

Which, paradoxically, is something that would look a lot like classic AI, from the before-times.
Can you please explain why auto-formatting conflicts with version control/collaboration?
I hope the GPL people get their AI GPL revolution. A trillion dollar GPL data center running an open intellegence from scrapping every GPL program ever made.

People would start releasing works of Art under GPL! Not just Computer Code!
Kuakua
…so they’ll disconnect at the 9m59s mark?
The Threat Modeling Manifesto
Woit seems to have the math person's idea of what physical intuition is, though. What I mean is, even though the basic ingredient of intuition for everyone is experience, because math is so fragmented most mathematicians have different intuition from other mathematicians (depending on the specific set of problems or examples they have personally encountered). Whereas..[the human concept called] physics can be travelled end-to-end in a couple of weeks (says Lenny Susskind)

The guy you're replying to is probably thinking about something more along the lines of the math guys' intuition, because in those days, how many chemists have even thought deeply about benzene..

Physicists are the weird ones here!

the busticket theory of genius tells us however that there won't be any purely theoretical physics geniuses any time soon (i.e. that weeks-wide room has been combed for curiosities already bro)

That said, I hope Lenny Susskind is wrong, e.g. there were commenters on that post that mentioned (in-passing, sadly) several mathematical curiosities that are considered uninteresting to a vast majority of physicists
You're ignoring that the support situation has gotten significantly worse the past decade, while the internet existed.

Try contacting AliExpress support. You used to immediately get a human agent. Now you're trapped in LLM hell.
It's hardly an ideal alternative to ethical business practices, but a few financial tools exist to deal with this. Banks that let you create virtual cards, or a service like Privacy.com, for example.

I've even gone a step further with multiple bank accounts. All of my income goes into an account that doesn't even have a debit card attached to it, and I only allow a couple of sources to even ACH out of that account (like my mortgage). I manually move money out into accounts I use for spending, bills, etc. (not that hard, with tools like Zelle)
Neotraverse: Unbloating traverse and undoing dependency hell
People on HN likely lean towards "If I need it it's usually a flaw with the service" more often (particularly regarding technical services) but the vast majority of customer support for the typical company is either "people who think it's a flaw with the service due to a misunderstanding or 3rd party problem" or "people that couldn't figure out how to pay the bill online because they don't use computers much" type things, not necessarily things that can be resolved for everyone in the next push to prod.

The difficulty in well focused support is it's two different sets of problems and the people finding honest to god flaws in your product or service are usually the extreme minority and so not the focus of customer support workflows.
Why does your grocery store require a login?
In my opinion dystopianess is transported, the more you hold the now as contrast against the old. Take bladerunner- the presence of mechanical animals -the holograms of greenery, the presence of once beautiful buildings (like the Bradburry) held against a industrial produced, soulless item, highlights the decay and despair.

In this case, a caligraphy font https://www.1001fonts.com/calligraphy-fonts.html used, ocassionally on real signs, would be a great way to show the road into the dystopia.

The Hello Dolly footage servers + trinkets serves a similar function.
SwiftUI makes it super easy to get started on macOS. You can have an app editing a custom document format set up in an hour just following the documentation - as long as you don’t care exactly how it works since SwiftUI gives less control.

I think generally Apple’s tutorial content when available is pretty good, making Mac apps is vastly easier today than it was in 2018, and if you’re a React developer a lot of the way of thinking carries over.
Ah, the annoying confusion of Virtue with having an early riser metabolism.

When I was choosing a secondary school for my son, there was one that pushed "being early" as some kind of moral crusade. Despite evidence that teenagers don't actually work well with that. We did not apply to that school.
When I was a youngster, you could call a company and a person would answer. They'd ask what you wanted and route you to the appropriate person. It was nice.
Your doamian come