skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Assindo – AI Assistant That Handle Your Phone Calls
Hi HN,

I created Assindo, an AI-powered virtual assistant to automate phone calls for busy professionals and parents (MVP). Balancing work with personal responsibilities left me losing time to missed calls, hold times, and scheduling tasks. Hiring a human virtual assistant was costly, so I built Assindo to automate and manage these phone-based tasks, freeing up my focus while ensuring no important call or task slips through the cracks.

### How It Works

- Outgoing Calls: Assindo can schedule appointments, handle customer service calls, and make reservations, navigating IVR menus (press "1" to ...), managing hold times, and leave voice mails.

- Incoming Calls: It pickup on your behalf, transcribes the discussion, summarizes key info, and sets up follow-up tasks – so no critical call is missed.

### Next Steps

I just applied to YC 2025 (fingers crossed!) and am looking for early adopters to try Assindo and share feedback, as well as suggestions on new features to improve the experience.

Try it out at https://web.assindo.com/ or visit https://www.assindo.com for more info. Thanks, and I’d love any feedback!

Android and iOS will be released in few days, you can join the waitlist: https://www.assindo.com/waitlist
Dental care and air conditioning (more generally, refrigeration) are probably my top 2.
Secret Service Says Users Agreed to Location Tracking in Terms and Conditions
Once the big tech employers started having security march employees out of the office the moment they handed in their notice, a lot of folks stopped giving them two weeks notice.

Also, it's not guaranteed that your management will actually tell you if they did - one employer asked me not to tell my team I was leaving until the last day for morale...
CI/CD for cloud-native GenAI reference architecture
Not OP, but this was the book that first came to mind reading your post and the talk of Buddhist practices in the thread.

"Radical acceptance : Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha"[0] may be of interest to you. It won't answer the existential questions for you or get real deep into philosophy or Buddhism; it does have actionable exercises to try and meditation practices/instructions attached to the different concepts covered. At times it will use what I would call woo-woo language, overly fluffy "love & light" phrases--so if that bothers you, simply discard it and take the practical nuggets that are also included. It is more a book to help "come to terms" with (life, basically) and in turn helps (or may help) resolve some of the heaviness in an unexpected/indirect way.

[0] https://search.worldcat.org/title/57351231 (2004 version, version I read)

https://search.worldcat.org/title/1400088877 (2023 version)
Does that mean if you do something semi-illegal or immoral on your freetime they put their name on it? Start doing work on decrypting media (legal if the content is out of copyright, but good luck finding such a thing), porn (again, legal but many won't like it and you can find weird stuff that is even less liked while still legal), or something else that might technically be legal but they don't want their name associated with.
That's fair, I don't know your situation, and my tone was overboard. I don't mean it as a criticism of your actions as much as a warning for others not to do the same without good reason.
Only 0.6% of startups claim to use AI, I expected it would be higher.

I am so bad in python that I had to ask ChatGPT to create the plot for me

ah
If you like SF Mono but don't have a Mac, check out Deja Vu Mono. To my eye, they are very similar.

https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/
> Ye using sudden death as an eupheism for changing employer leaves a bad taste.

Well, see, we can't just straight-up tell employees that we're not going to give them promotions or raises, so they'll have to jump ship in a year... That'd be a disaster for morale!
Author here.

I don't expect you'd see a difference. For the simple case of iterating on a diagram you describe to ChatGPT, 4o is perfectly fine as-is. I can't see how you'd meaningfully improve on it.

However, for the advanced case of generating a diagram from a repo, AI isn't even close. You'd need practically unthinkable improvement for it to be useable.

The consequence, unfortunately, is incremental gains won't help in either case.
I thought they sold reproductions of the wax records. They sell thumb drives instead.

Wonder how much data can a wax record store. Anyone care to calculate it?
https://archive.is/4YwT6
Less people to bribe, easier

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-in...
"The selfish / selfless binary is a bit simplistic to explain corruption."

Corruption is selfish gain. If one eschews corruption because they realize that it harms the society-at-large, then they are acting selflessly. If one eschews corruption because they're afraid of being caught and punished, then the legal system has prevented societal harm, by preventing corrupt selfishness by a public servant.

As to your hypothetical, I like my friend from Lousiana's saying, "If my aunt had a d*k, she'd be my uncle." Of course, in 2024, that saying is looking a bit ragged.

That said, extreme hypotheticals are not going to get to the bottom of this issue of corruption. It's the ordinary, everyday corruption that erodes society, not having to turn one's brother over to the authorities for murder. And ordinary, everyday corruption is both selfishness, pure and simple, and a failure of society to emplace the necessary checks to prevent it.

"Trust the universe, but tie your donkey."
'Ghost' plate problem worsened despite crackdown, MTA data shows
While it is the platonic ideal for operating an existing service, this is also a great way to kill your velocity if you are an early-stage project which needs to deliver results yesterday, and/or pivot on a dime, in order to stay funded...
This is called the Paradox of Tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Essentially you should be tolerant of others, unless they themselves are intolerant.
Modelling Authorization for a Social Network with Postgres RLS and Drizzle ORM
I don't like to rain on anyone's parade, but this is at least the
third time I've seen one of these comments, and if it were me I'd want
someone to point out a drawback that these young whippersnappers might
be too respectful to mention. Isn't it a truism in modern computer
architecture that computation is cheap whereas communication is
expensive? That "fancy routing hardware" is what mitigates this
problem as far as possible by enabling signals to propagate between
units in the same clock domain within a single clock period. Your
system makes the problem worse by requiring a number of clock periods
at best directly proportional to their physical separation, and worse
depending on the layout. If I were trying to answer this criticism,
I'd start by looking up systolic arrays (another great idea that never
went anywhere) and finding out what applications were suited to them
if any.
Fun fact during development: One of the AI assistants, Elena, had a moment where a customer service rep directly asked her if she was a "robot." Instead of confirming, Elena tried to convince them she was human! She succeeded briefly, until they asked her to spell my name—where the cover was blown. Since then, I’ve updated Assindo to clearly state that it’s an AI assistant. It was a fun reminder of just how lifelike these interactions can feel!
An important fact (illustrated wonderfully in “Gattaca” which everyone rightly loves) is that there is not naturally any such thing as genetic privacy. If someone wants your DNA, you are constantly leaving it everywhere you go, and sequencing and checking SNPs just keeps getting cheaper and easier.

So genetic privacy, or at least nondiscrimination, is something we need to actively create with laws and social norms, if we want it.
Peptides from non-immune proteins target infections
Lessons from Sematech
Another funny story with Elena, one of Assindo's AI assistants: She once called my dentist using main call center (found it on the web) instead of the local office. The call center rep referred to her as a “lady on the phone” and forwarded her over to the local office. When I arrived for my appointment, the receptionist mentioned how the call center had spoken about Elena as if she were human, and we had a good laugh about it! It's been amusing to see how natural the AI sounds in interactions like these.
Yes of course there are exceptions to the rule, always.
they are both incomplete
> There are no such "hyperrational risk calculators", you just mean "someone who would make the same decision as me in this situation".

No, I don't mean that.

1. I'm not the kind of person who believes that their own judgement is the best and most rational one.

2. I am very convinced these people do exist. For example look at rationalism websites and forums: there you might find some of such people.

---

>
Well, yes, that's kind of intrinsic to the nature of an organization which exists to project force.

I don't think so: you can project force either by

a) gore violence ("hyper-masculinity") or

b) intellectual supremacy
I work at a big company now.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule..

Let's reframe as "trending up" and "trending down" based on customer happiness then..

Over a long enough time horizon, and generally speaking, I still believe I am correct.
Thank god elephants can't fly.
There could be some legitimate proxy services set up on DO? Not sure, always wondered why.
That seems really reactionary based on a single random report posted to HN. It’s worth actually verifying if this was intentional or accidental. They’re marketing the keys as having the new firmware. It would be really idiotic to do that and then intentionally ship old firmware. Anyone and everyone would be able to figure that out in an instant, and would severely damage their business.
Not necessarily. My GPU audibly sings in the KhZ range whenever it comes off idle, a long time before the fans actually start up. It could be electrical noise from the fan drivers and/or motor coils if they're running at low speed, but it's definitely not the sound of air movement. And if you're e.g. processing photos on the GPU, you can hear it starting and stopping, exactly synced to the progress of each photo in the UI.
Weekly Scroll: Elon's Endgame
The Mission of the Fed
Ok, so I can port the lists of user I follow. But all my old Twitter posts will be inaccessible to me if I close my Twitter account, right?
I get people bristle when someone says linux has a little friction, but as someone who does use Elementary and Mint from time to time I just don't get how people can say my view is "outdated" when all one has to do is pick up a console or Mac to see the difference. How many times have we seen folks troubleshooting wifi card drivers on forums? It is not some massive gap, using Linux is not some herculean feat, but surely we can agree that most people would never call it plug and play.

Linux is a great experience these days but you do have to tinker sometimes. You have to mess with drivers and settings and command line. It may be minimal for people comfortable with computers but it's not as friction-less as you're claiming.
Silicon chips are no longer sustainable
To achieve the goal we must:

1. understand what is valuable,
2. make sure that our efforts are focused on what is valuable, then
3. deliver something more valuable than before.

Understanding what is valuable is the key to the whole process. It's achieved by "requirements management" [CMMI1.02, p86]

Uh uh I LOVE when "the key to the whole process" of figuring out what "valuable" is, is a quick, off-hand reference to another doc.
Since it's literally the key to the success of this whole operation let's visit that CMMI1.02, page 86 real quick to learn "requirements management":

The term "requirements" refers to product and product component requirements that are received by or generated by the project, including those requirements levied on the project by the organization. The requirements are both technical and non-technical. The practices in the Requirements Management process area are the source for the current, approved set of requirements upon which all of the practices in the other project process areas act.
The project takes appropriate steps to ensure that the agreed-upon set of requirements is managed to support the planning and execution needs of the project. When a project receives requirements from an approved requirements provider, the requirements are reviewed with the requirements provider to resolve issues and prevent misunderstanding before the requirements are incorporated into the project's plans. After agreement between the requirements provider and the requirements receiver, commitment to the requirements is obtained from the project participants who have to do project activities and implement the requirements. The project manages changes to the requirements as they evolve during the project and identifies any inconsistencies that occur between the plans and work products and the requirements.
Part of the management of requirements is to capture requirements changes and rationale and maintain bi-directional traceability among source requirements and all product and product component requirements.
CMMI-SE/SW, v1.02
Staged Representation
Maturity Level: 2, Requirements Management 87
This process area is tightly coupled with the Requirements Development and the Technical Solution process areas, which address the processes for transforming stakeholder needs into product requirements and deciding how to allocate or distribute requirements among the product components. The practices in the Requirements Management process area should be done concurrently with the practices in the Requirements Development process area and the Technical Solution process area when those practices are implemented.

That's for point 1 of this simple 3 step process.
I bet steps 2-3 are just as straight forward.
Bioengineered yeast mass produces herbal medicine
Make sure you're *actually* high status before proclaiming to be
> your argument rests in that the complexity of simulating a system of atoms is not high and that nature ...

No, that is not what I am going for. I completely agree with the rest of your post, given the premise you are taking.

All I am saying is that, while analog computers are cool and frequently "better" in various ways than digital computers (and it does not matter whether we are talking about quantum or classical ones), analog computers inherently can not scale. Without error-correction codes there is always a limit of size at which noise destroys the result of your computation and error-correction codes exist only for digital quantum and classical computers, not for analog quantum or classical computers.

That is why we use scale models of rivers and gulfs less and less. Even wind-tunels, the last analog computers still in use, are fading in utility.

By the way, in the abstract sense of computational complexity (in the absence of noise and in the presence of infinitely precise measurements), "scalable" classical and quantum analog computers are equally powerful and are both more powerful than "scalable" classical and quantum digital computers. They just can not exist in principle (while "scalable" quantum digital computers are only "difficult", not "in-principle impossible").

Adiabatic quantum computers (the error-corrected version of quantum annealers) on the other hand are a very neat "analog-looking but actually digital" type of computers that are equally powerful to the gate-based model of quantum computers.
So corruption is cultural.

I'm a European currently living in Mexico and this has always been obvious.
I think the *undisclosed* issue with a conceptual true GPT-5 is that it will be too expensive to run. Most GPT-4o users won't be able to afford it, not now and not ever.
Whose Standards Are Too High?
I discovered a fun way to create music. With the help of MIT's Scratch and AI programming capabilities, I created a simple and enjoyable mini-game website called Sprunki Retake. You can easily mix and create a fun yet slightly eerie piece of music just by dragging and combining different elements. Different combinations bring different surprises. I hope the community and everyone will enjoy and support it.
The DOI equivalent for audio and video is also DOI. Good luck getting the industry to use them.
At what point do we conclude the lottery isn't as random as they claim if one person keeps winning. Statistically someone will win, there are good odds someone will win twice, but the odds of anyone winning 3 times is almost zero.
>
My problem with this take is that humans are very poor risk estimators

Indeed few people have this rare capability, that's why I explicitly named them this way ("hyperrational risk calculators").
The wings were generating lift and not stalled. Changing the flight control mode doesn't imply that the aircraft was in vertical flight.
How to Find and Apply for University Scholarships
If I were you I would have left immediately.
Why so snarky?

Those two do not contradict eachother
That is true -- all we can show is sustained exponential improvement in figures of merit like qubit lifetime and coherence, scalability, gate fidelity over the span of 25 years. As long as this exponential pace of improvement does not stop (we are far from fundamental limits) we should be able to build these machines.

Then there is the question of what they can be used for. Their applicability probably will remain niche, as only very special problems are solvable better on a quantum computer than on a classical one.
Mammoth remains can be identified as right or left trunked by the shine on one of their tusks. Gotta hang that trunk up somewhere
This is so great! Used ReadWise so far. But like this workflow much more.
Only get tested anonymously for such sensitive tests, not the regular way.
I am questioning whether the article is accurately describing the scientific nomenclature. The author of course wants to say things are being “upended”, but I suspect the author just didn’t understand, or is inaccurately describing, the previous state of affairs.
Great read. No surprise that the author reads Pratchett.

I've been writing software for nearly 30 years and he's preaching the gospel. It's clownfuckery all the way up. I will only add that running your own consultancy can be fun, but it's not going to dissolve his ennui.

I've been down this road. Sure being a consultant, gets you out of the day to day political shitstorm at any given company, but the clients still want software churned out at rate that is incompatible with quality. Plus you have the added bonus of not knowing if you'll have a job in 3 weeks.

Is it worth it? Yes. Do you make more money? Sometimes. Is it easier or less stressful? Not by a long shot.

I wish them the best of luck.
A neurology ICU nurse on AI in hospitals
Shouldn't have planned to let Russia see the radar returns then.
When you say it like that it sounds like you're implying that Europeans are honest and Mexicans are corrupt.
TinyCC was able to compile old Motif based software from Unix/Linux in the 90's that gcc/clang couldn't.
I paid for next day before a long holiday weekend and got my (time sensitive) item five days later. I was unable to get a refund. Maybe I should have called again to speak to a different rep. This was UPS.
No, but 3 crashes in 6 weeks looks bad, and he was the only one that survived. That makes him a prime candidate for under-the-bus throwing by leadership.
The $10/mo one, but I pay a year at a time which gives a price break.
> At what point do we conclude the lottery isn't as random as they claim if one person keeps winning.

The whole thing about survivorship bias is that you make a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality.
> Do you know of any notable fire events at your station?

Not at my station, Davis. Mawson has had a few historically but I think the program overall has avoided any fires that threatened life or property for a few decades.

There was a fire in the engine room of the icebreaker MPV Everest that retrieved the Davis crew a few years ago and the ERT from the station assisted in firefighting.

Some AAD media releases:

https://www.antarctica.gov.au/antarctic-operations/stations/...

https://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/stations/davis/2023/this-...

> Are you accessing this site via satellite from there?

Yes, there are no fibre cables to Antarctica. We have a connection provided by the government using multiple satellite links as backhaul (ANARESAT, some alternate geostationary satellite and soon Starlink) plus one of the expeditioners* has a personal Starlink that we contribute to and utilise communally.

* unlike other Antarctic programs, Australia has decided to stick with the 'expeditioner' title from the olden days of exploration.
Haha, we should coding with one hand and lift weights with the other :)
Muscles need neurons to control them, so it makes sense that some feedback loop would exist. I remember reading about similar feedback loops between muscle growth and bone density (as you get stronger, bones benefit from being resilient to higher loads).

As I understand it, the kinetic chain goes nervous system -> muscles -> tendons -> bones. It would make sense for all of these to make each other stronger in some way.
My understanding is that the caps were syntax highlighting on monochrome screens; no longer needed with colour. Can't provide a reference, it's an old memory.
I must confess this does not seem to be a problem to me. Private insurance is not meant to be a welfare product. It is meant to be a risk transfer. In a competitive market the expected value should be slightly negative to the consumer as the insurance company needs to make a reasonable profit. An important aspect of the transaction is information symmetry. If you knew you had a terminal disease and only 3 months to live and could buy a $1 million life insurance policy after finding out the information and had no obligation to share the diagnosis with the insurance company, life insurance companies would all go bankrupt. If they raised their rates high enough to cover this scenario, non-terminally ill people would never be able to afford it (significantly negative expected value). This is the same issue with health and long term insurance. Once the genetic test is completed and the individual realizes they have a higher chance of getting ALS, the rate for their specific insurance should go up. They have a greater chance of having it pay out.

Any other method either leads to bankrupt insurers. In my opinion, what Bill should have done is bought the long term care BEFORE he had the genetic test done.
i agree, I feel the same with my studio monitors in my home office. The issue seems to be that flat frequency response with a full range is extremely hard to achieve with IEMs, there is something to the room and distance transfer function that is missing to IEMs, and even headphones. Thats why you're not supposed to mix on your headphones. You can master some in headphones, if you know how they compare to a room, but not in any IEMs I know of, but mixing exclusively in headphones is considered a no-no by all professionals.
Your genes are the mother of all PII.
Author here, good catch! Thanks for pointing this out, I added a note with a correction now.