skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The trains in the UK are an outlier here. You're not wrong, it's outrageously expensive — it was cheaper for me to rent a car for 24 hours and drive from London to Bristol and back than it was to take the train. Between London and Newcastle it's sometimes cheaper to fly (and I don't even mean with a budget airline!). This is utterly insane. It doesn't need to be this way though. Trains work great in continental Europe. In fact the trains here in Poland are fantastic.

I'm a total petrolhead and I'm often irritated by the kind of cyclist that hates all cars and anyone who drives one, but I would like to see fewer cars on the road. Trains are an excellent way to achieve that goal (just not the way the UK does it).
The goal of the UPU was to have one rate for international shipping based on sending country vs. per destination pricing. Countries agreed to eat the costs. This produced things like the International Postal Coupon which are great.
Ask HN: Scaling a company from founders to a small team?
Does anyone know how to, or has anyone around here taken a team from the founders to becoming a small team? (without investment money)

I read a lot about scaling a business from a small team onward ... but not a lot on getting over the hump to build a stable small team (4-18 people).
Would you say the current balance is correct?

I don't think I'd go as far as the op, but the current arrangement is causing me to lose respect for the whole setup.

IP should be there to enable people to make more stuff and no more. It seems that we should be testing how minimalistic we can make it, not how maximalistic, as is currently the case.

The blurred lines case isnt going to result in more music being made, it's going to result in less, Marvin Gaye isnt going to make another album, because he's dead.

I would guess for low overhead type things a 5 year copyright term wouldn't result in less music being produced, and it shouldn't be down to me to prove that, it should be down to whoever wants longer copyright terms to prove that that will result in more content being created.
Vast majority of people don't drive just because a road got wider either. Build a 2x3 highway pointing nowhere and you'll get just a dozen of enthusiasts hold an illegal race on an empty road...
Here's a good article on this shipping quirk:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...

I think it's good for the US economy as well as the environment. It makes no sense for something to ship further to bring shipping costs down.
In Our Time by the BBC. Old man invites 3 professors in a field to discuss anything from kinetic theory to the Peloponnesian War
Take the however-many billions of dollars each city is currently spending to build new (or bigger) freeways.

Spend that same money on buses instead.

Instead of millions of cars that carry 1 person to a max of 5, lets have thousands of buses that carry ~40-80 people.

In the years to come when there are less vehicles on the road, we can start closing roads, like Paris does (or did).

Or, you know, do absolutely nothing. Improve nothing. Move forward with nothing. Complain about everything, and every idea to improve stuff.
>I, and I think a lot of HN readers, are strongly of the impression that Palantir sells a platform and toolkit for mass data analysis specifically meant for human tracking across large government datasets

They do

https://southfront.org/palantirs-user-guide-mass-surveillanc...

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/palantirs_sur...

https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente-The-W...
There's a fantastic Planet Money episode about the Universal Postal Union[1] and why this is a problem.

Basically, the UPU assumes that a country will send about the same amount of international mail that it receives. There may be an imbalance between any two countries, but in aggregate, it assumes that these imbalances will net out. Furthermore, the UPU sets rates based on the sending country's costs. Since China was classified as a developing country, it was very cheap for Chinese to send mail into the international mail stream. This was justified because China's last mile delivery for mail received from other countries is also very cheap.

However, with the huge US-China trade imbalance, these assumptions no longer hold. U.S. shippers were at a major disadvantage because of this.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...
Wal-Mart merchandise is not shipped via international post. This UPU situation has no influence here.
> working very well

Source needed.

> Many programmers do live-coding sessions as they work on open source products.

Dance monkey dance.
The USPS has been getting money from taxes to offset the debt they run each year. For many years now they have been in the red.

Fortune wrote about it back in 2015[1] and you can read the 2018 financial results[2].

Some tax money goes to the USPS.

[1] https://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/
[2] https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2018/pr18_093....
Ah sorry, I read your ivdep sentence and the second part of your post as independent, i.e,. that the compiler should be able to assume this (even without ivdep).

I realize now you were saying "[With ivdep] and in this specific case, the compiler should be able to assume..."

It makes sense now.
> It's crazy the number of people expecting our SASS pricing to be negotiable.

I don't know about expecting, but in most cases where we've been buying SAAS software it absolutely has been negotiable. Above the obvious 10bucks a month type stuff that isn't worth the time.
Denthor of Asphyxia!

I didn't remember what it was by read those back in the early 90s as well, learning to program on a 486 with an early SVGA card. I think I downloaded them on a trial of AOL, my parents wouldn't/couldn't pay for AOL but I sucked all those tutorials down when I had a chance.

I was taking Pascal in school but learned a ton more from those tutorials. I wrote an asteroids type game and got tons of eye rolls from the teacher as the other students were playing my game after I shared the source. I had done the whole years curriculum in a month or two and then sat there and wrote games in class. The teacher didn't really care as I'd just about matched his knowledge by the middle of the year. He was a great teacher, had a PhD in math which was pretty darn rare for high school.

Those tutorials had a significant effect on my chosen career path.
The actual consequence will be Chinese sellers using US warehouses and drop-shipping from there.

Others send over a container with each ordered good and slap a local post’s label on it.

Possibly that local post’s label is attached in China and the container just gets dropped off at a USPS DC by the private freight forwarder.

It’s already fairly common.

Overall, a few more US jobs, and maybe more USPS revenue for what are now domestic shipments.

Edit: OR these buyers Shift to Amazon, which can deliver for less than USPS can via private courier, and pool every more items per delivery.
The USPS gets a monopoly on its gigantic market from the government. That is an enormous government subsidy. It is very much not like any other business.
Not really a helpful or fair comparison. Global shipping emits more carbon dioxide than India, but that's literally apples to oranges.

It might be easier for the shipping industry to reduce it's emissions, or it might be easier for India. The benefit(s) of India polluting is spread across 1.3 billion people. The beneficiaries of polluting by the shipping industry is presumably the whole world, though the benefits are unevenly spread. It might be easier or more impactful for one to reduce while the other doesn't, but again, we can't know without more data.

A better comparison would be between shipping and air freight. Or make the case that we don't need to ship if we can produce locally instead. Maybe it could be supplemented by saying that if the cost of the externality (pollution) was borne by the producer of the products, then it would incentivize local production.
You're free to make contracts with NDA clauses. You're free to buy from companies that have licenses with NDA clauses. And, most importantly, you're free to offer your services with the most transparent license you can imagine, so that you'll gain tons of contracts from the competition.
If a company is building the tools for a surveillance agency (which we know they are), you can't simply wave around the world "consulting" because they are not the end user of said tools to erase all responsibility.

If a gun manufacturer sells weapons to a dictatorship, even if there is no embargo and the deal is legal, you can absolutely judge the scummy ethics of the company in question.
How many tickets have you bought for live coding shows?
Modular housing that grows with your life. Biggest problem there is effective expansion joints that would hold the houses together.

Affordable container ship that is electric.

A personal finance software that solves upper-middle class issues (eg. primary income, side business, rentals, etc.).

A product/service that makes CROs obsolete in drug development (CROs = 25% of cost of drugs; admin overhead)

Idk, those are some that immediately come to my mind.
The liberal (not progressive) argument is this: To solve the issue of undocumented immigration, we should:

1. enforce e-verify nationwide. If a company is caught employing undocumented workers and the company is not using e-verify, the executives are put in prison. Documentation fraud from the immigrant remains a crime punishable by prison and deportation.

2. Regardless of deporting or not, those in detention should be treated humanely, given food, water, shelter, and adequate space. Parents and children should not be separated. For those not charged with a crime, it should not be built the same way as a prison -- It doesn't have to be the Four Seasons to be humane.

3. ICE raids terrorize legal residents and citizens of color. As mentioned in #1, any such "raids" should be against HR. If you make employers accountable, the problem becomes much smaller. Yes, if someone is arrested and is undocumented they should be deported. No, we shouldn't be breaking down doors and sending militarized teams to do so.

4. Immigration reform is a completely different topic.
Then why is he completely ignoring this topic in his argument?
Do US sellers have access to this slow shipping option? If so, it's curious why they wouldn't (based on the comments in the link) offer it as an option to compete with Chinese sellers.
Facebook's New Threads App Is for 'Close Friends'
The problem here is really that public spending has been vilified through decades of propaganda. The general public will vote against any taxation increase to pay for public works, even if those works would, in the end, lead to better lives for themselves.
Probably, since everything is bilateral in agreements and negotiations. The point isn’t to minimize costs but to even out the playing field. US companies drop-shipping overseas will likely pay more, but that’s a consequence deemed overall worth it for the US local economy and market.
I think what is left and right have been evolving since the 60s. Leftism is being fought over now between anarcho-capitalists vs labor while the right is being fought over between big business vs nationalists.
On the flip side, access to my website’s content isn’t a right either.
Sulfur dioxide emissions at sea are not that damaging compared to in land. They did make some zero emission cargo ships but it was pretty expensive due to crew complement for the reactor.
I create SimpleDocServer for one of my customers as a quick-and-dirty Confluence replacement based entirely on Markdown. So if your point is information delivery and you are OK to collaborate on content creation via Git (or any other similar tool) then it might fit your needs. https://www.helpinator.com/simpledocserver.html
Warehousing won't solve the greed problem at USPS. The $5 poll tax on all shipments is just insanity. Stamping "priority mail" on 1st class packages and using red, white, and blue boxes doesn't justify their greed and incompetence, no matter what the USPS execs think ....

I foresee that withing 6 months China will have 100M square feet of dropshipping warehouse space in Vietnam. This is another in a line of Trump "look busy, change nothing" initiatives, the only difference this time (vs the border do nothing initiatives) is that this time the problem is real, unlike the non crisis at the border where immigration is near a multi decade low!
Any tax beyond that which internalizes actual externalities will just decrease market efficiency, your opinion on what goods are 'unnecessary' and how far an object in a supply chain can move before it becomes 'excessive' notwithstanding.
Companies don't ship goods around just for the hell of it; they do it because it serves some business purpose.
Out of curiosity where did you buy?
Yes and yes. I don’t see any other outcomes.
I think it pretty much goes without saying that such a transition would need to occur gradually, probably over the course of decades if you ask me.
If the tried and true method of getting paid is through concerts, Patreon, crowdfunding new albums, or selling CDs in the street, I don't think the market is as "unfair" as xhkkffbf is arguing.

I agree that this has nothing to do with the propriety of people taking content with a price tag for free. But I think muddling the market sense of fairness (I don't want to/cannot perform in a concert; people should pay me for selling MP3s online) and the ethics of copying data is dangerous. Especially when we are solving the problem through legislation.
Expensive to run. A big reason North American systems are so heavily subsidized is that they are really cheap to ride. Very few flat-rate systems have good (>=60%) farebox recovery, yet the majority of NA systems are flat-rate.

It's something of chicken-and-egg thing, though. It's hard to charge reasonable prices when a system is inconvenient, but it's hard to build a convenient system without demonstrable demand.
4.5 million gallon tank 225 tons per day I can't believe people think their cars can even hold a candle to this type of fuel consumption.
We can complain about conditions in child protective services, too. No system is perfect. I suspect this is a tactical criticism, and the conditions aren't the real objection, but rather the fact that we're not just releasing everyone to freely live in the interior.

Are you implying unwanted mass immigration was bad for the native Americans? Is it good for the Europeans now?
My top picks would be:

Fake news and media credibility. In the 21st centurty it's become hard to trust content, especially viral content shared on social media like WhatsApp. Hopefully we make progress on this front.

Sustainable funding models for the fourth estate in developing nations. The lack of sustainable funding leads to slashing of investigative journalism in developing countries which makes corruption more rampant. Solving this issue will help unearth fraud and keep the government in check.

Climate Change discourse and discourse for the masses. It's difficult to convey facts to the masses today in a reliable manner.
Garbage.

How do you take a bag of mixed garbage and perform a fractional distillation of it, pulling out components and recycling and reusing them efficiently, until you are left with a tiny residue, ideally nothing, of true waste? How do you do this in a cost effective manner without relying on absurdly cheap labor and lax health, safety and environmental protection regulations?
Universal Postal Union is a UN body that manages the relationships between different national post offices. They set standard rates and stuff for all member countries so that each country doesn't have to negotiate a treaty with any other country it wants to send international mail to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union
Which part? The German electronica?
Agreed.

But ... minification is totally relatable and "better error messages" is less-so. The problem with benchmarks is they over-emphasize things that are measurable. Honestly, I don't care as much about binary size as I do about, e.g. maintainability. But the latter is harder to quantify.

It's not Elm's fault they have to play that game. People search for, "fastest javascript framework" when maybe that's not what they actually want. Maybe all they want is a good friend.
As dang has explained [1], there's a lot of randomness around what makes it to the front page, but if it's a big, current story, it will be posted by enough different people that it will make it there soon enough.

It sucks when you were first to submit it but miss out on the karma, of course, but such is life.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20randomness%20front&s...
It’s neither a tariff nor a shipping restriction. The UPU affects all international shipping, so Singapore or China is all the same.
I was commenting on your remark about USPS lacking pricing power. I wasn't really disagreeing with you, just pointing out some of the moat between them and pricing power.
There are local peculiarities, but we share a common core built around science an technology. You can learn to drive a car anywhere on earth. You'll learn the same maths, physics, chemistry and biology. You can use phones everywhere. That is culture, globally shared.
For stuff I compile from scratch I just use a symlink-based package manager I found online:

https://zolk3ri.name/cgit/zpkg/

It seems very minimal but supports my requirements. It makes sense to me, because everything gets installed (usually via make install) to ~/.local/pkg/foo-1.0/ and the like, and then symlinks are created to, say, ~/.local/{bin,etc,include,lib,man,share,var}. According to the source code, it is configurable via environment variables. It seems to share similarities with GNU's stow.
I know. This was the first of the 3 times I ever felt good and even eager about a new feature [promised to be] introduced in a new version of Windows. I felt a huge pity it was cancelled. It could have been picked up by other systems (like Linux and Mac) already if it was actually released that time (provided it was engineered well enough to be usable).

The second nice thing was the new taskbar (with pinnable app buttons and without text) in Windows 7-10. I've even configured the taskbar in KDE (which I use at home) to the same mode.

The third cool thing is cross-app text input autocompletion and correction made available with physical keyboards in Windows 10. Sadly I don't know how to accept a completion suggestion without using mouse, yet the feature already helps me a huge lot (as I write a language I'm not very good at).

If not these 3 things I'd be glad to keep using Windows 95, if only there were security&stability updates and current software and hardware support - newer versions of Windows didn't add any other features I would find useful. Everything else (besides internals which have obviously improved a lot) is either bloat or a minor goody.

Windows 10 has seemingly added universal file tagging support (previous versions could only add tags to files of some formats which allow injecting them in file body) but as long as Windows, KDE and MacOS don't store the tags the same way (so I could tag files on an external drive using Windows and keep using the tags when I attach the drive to a Mac or a Linux machine) this is of little use for me.
Having seen many employees grow their careers quickly by ping-ponging jobs at Microsoft and Amazon (and vice-versa), I’m thinking about a platform for enabling this. Essentially you would put in your level, current company, and genre of jobs you are interested in and the platform would find jobs for you which are the next level up and help you apply. The employer would have no idea you were using the platform. I’ve seen a handful of people boost their salary very quickly this way right out of college.
- voting rights, disenfranchisement, and election security.

- climate change.

- vigorous enforcement of international law guaranteeing human rights for refugees.

- closure of industrial-grade CO2 emission sites like coal power plants.
The Power of Serverless
Agreed! Free software and the complaint is you cannot download it faster than an Encyclopedia Britannica once a second.

You can customise the sources, pay attention to what you want installed/upgraded... or even run a mirror

Someone else mentioned concurrent downloads which sounds like a good idea, otherwise... thankful.
> First off, parking isn't flat & spread out. It is very often stacked & condensed into compact areas known parking garages, some of which sit under housing complexes and so take up no extra real estate at all.

Housing is very often stacked and condensed too, so x square feet of parking is equivalent to x square feet of housing (or retail, or ...). Actually it's even worse than that because LA's parking minimums require the parking to be on the bottom floors - the ones that would be most valuable and convenient for humans.

> I don't have any comprehensive solution to this problem, but what I am pretty sure of is that there's no single silver bullet solution that will massively improve the situation. (or if there is such a solution & I'm just not smart enough to find it, it's not going to be found in parking spaces.)

I'm more and more convinced that eliminating "free" parking is the silver bullet. It's a massive distortion to how we arrange our cities. Once there's a level playing field for parking to compete with other land uses, the market can sort the rest out.
Didn't know that existed. Will definitely check it out.
The Chinese government was not the one subsidizing it. The original UPU treaty [1] stated that countries would pay a flat rate when shipping to another country. This was original passed several decades ago. The USPS only was getting paid $1.50 per package to forward on any parcel that arrived for a USA destination from China. Since no USA tax money was involved, the "subsidizing" gets passed onto domestic shipping in the form of increased fares to help cover the loss in revenue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union
While this is great for Zurich, and I would like to see it applied to a larger American city, but LA and Zurich are incredibly different scales of size. LA (according to Wikipedia) is 1,213.8 squared km, compared to Zurich at 97.8 squared km. I am not an urban planner, but I imagine that size difference would make implementing the Zurich model a completely different challenge.
We don't know that they're below cost. Maybe the market distortion is that internal mail is so expensive.

EDIT: whoops, untrue as below. Disregard this.
I can translate the README:

> This repository contains the code for electronic voting that will be used for Moscow City Parliament elections.

> Purposes of creating this repository

> The repository was created to allow examination of a source code. Although the purpose of the system is electronic voting, we ask to leave comments and open issues only on technical questions. All comments containing political statements will be deleted.

But the code is incomplete. For example, PHP code looks like a "module" for a larger CMS and cannot be run independently. Also, here [1] there is a header that says "prototype" in Russian. And in several files where there should be the rules and explanations for users there is just a placholder, for example in this file [2]. So I assume this is just an early version of code.

This code was published as a part of a challenge to break the encryption used in remote voting.

There is no git history probably because this is just a snapshot, github is not used for development.

[1] https://github.com/moscow-technologies/blockchain-voting/blo...

[2] https://github.com/moscow-technologies/blockchain-voting/blo...