skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your second point is misleading, because you make it sound like USPS is being required to do something it’s competitors do not have to do. That is incorrect. In fact, it’s a misleading talking point often peddled to make it seem like Congress is somehow sandbagging the USPS: https://www.cnbc.com/id/45018432; https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/05/13/why-aoc-is-mo....

FedEx and UPS both have pension funds that are nearly fully funded (90%+). That means they have 90% of the funding required to ensure they can pay all projected claims without paying out of current revenues. The wrinkle with USPS is that it also offers health benefits, and USPS employees generally are not on Medicare. FedEx and USPS indirectly pay for health benefits by paying employer payroll taxes into Medicare, but USPS obviously had to fund those benefits itself.

Before 2002-2003, the USPS did not save for those benefits at all. It paid them on a pay-as-you-go basis. It was paying $5 billion per year for those benefits, and facing a huge funding crisis. (FedEx and UPS were not because their pensions are nearly fully funded and their employees are eligible for Medicare.) So Congress passed broadly bi-partisan legislation requiring the USPS to save for its health benefits. This is a relatively unusual requirement among public employers, but public entities are also facing a massive crisis from unfunded health benefit obligations. Private employers don’t have this problem because their employees participate in Medicare. (And what will likely happen with many public entities is that their employees will be bailed out by being brought into Medicare, even though they didn’t pay into Medicare during their working lives.) Moreover, USPS hasn’t been able to make the required payments anyway, and has defaulted on more than half of them.

Congress isn’t forcing USPS to deal with some unfair disadvantage. It’s simply requiring USPS to be prepared to fulfill its obligations to employees, something which FedEx and UPS are already in a position to do. In fact, not requiring pre-funding of benefits would give USPS an unfair advantage in the short term, because private employers are forced to pay employer-side payroll taxes into Medicare and SS for those benefits while the USPS is not.
Firefox got most of its early momentum from tech-savvy users recommending it to their friends and family.

Many of us use retina MacBooks, and none of us can honestly recommend it since we can't use it ourselves.

I understand from the bug report that it's not a trivial solution, but then again the new JS engine wasn't trivial either. Mozilla is going to have to step it up and realize that its own version of advertising is making power users want to evangelize.
Does the article suggest that we shouldn't take it seriously? No. It just says the media is being sensationalist, and in some ways (the article doesn't say this)...it could honestly be driven by mild racism. Since a lot of it points at a South American (not-white-enough) country being too incompetent to take care of the situation...when stats back up the very fact that incidents are actually declining. That being said, the Brazilian government has refused most western aide.
I’m curious if no one is interested in reading less of RSS feeds, effectively curating them and only reading them once a day.

A few years ago I had over 300 feeds in Google Reader, and even migrated them to Feedly and Reeder, but eventually I ditched them to my most important 10 and built something to get any new things only once a day (won’t link here so people don’t think I’m spamming).
Healthy dose of existential crisis. Sunday is a good day.
Sometimes waiting can lead to lost opportunities.

I bought a used original Kindle for text to speech. Newer models dropped the feature. (I think only the Fire tablets still have TTS, but only as part of accessibility.) Sure they can still be had used, for now. Once all break or Amazon drops support then it'll probably never come back.

Multiplayer games suffer from a wave-like network effect. If you wait too long to try the game the community may have moved on. Only the hardcore remain, and they may not be the nicest members.
a simple radio receiver works without a battery. we built those in school. the electricity induced by the radio signal is enough to drive a small speaker.
Syncing will likely be limited to the third-party sync, I believe.
They already do that, it's called Amazon Logistics and it's a horrible service compared to other options here in the UK (Royal Mail, UPS, Hermes, etc.).
I find the term 'full time' unnecessarily ambiguous.

Certainly 'employee' suggests something contra to 'contractor', but there's no reason someone working 40 hours a week can't or shouldn't be considered full-time regardless of their permanent / contractor status.

I can't tell if this is irony, in the context of being 'precise in your communications' and advice to 'edit ruthlessly':

> You must ruflessly cut out bullshit, bloat, ...
>if you're doing something Debian-based - make it Devuan-based, it's pretty straightforward.

It's also pretty straightforward to switch Debian systems back to sysvinit.
the fact that they've not fixed it for literally years, despite having hundreds or thousands of reports?

I'll believe they have a fix when I see it with my own eyes, which probably won't be for another 6 months because switching my browser workflow isn't something I want to do every couple of weeks to try out a new nightly with big promises.
The interesting thing about the black box is that it is square to the frame of the image and slightly skew to the text boxes in the original intelligence product. This indicates the image posted is not simply a camera phone snap posted directly to Twitter, the image was edited before it was posted
Sometimes, you're not stuck at 32-bit. When I was using my stockpile of ThinkPad T60 units, luckily, I was able to upgrade the CPUs to 64-bit easily. (Reportedly, most T60 motherboards supported 64-bit, even though most shipped with 32-bit, and the CPUs are socketed, and can be swapped without much laptop disassembly.)

I ended up upgrading from T60 to somewhat newer, less-well-designed other ThinkPad series, mainly for a larger display, so that I wasn't tied to my desk as much. And I still transplant original T60 keyboards into the somewhat newer models, since, after the T60, Lenovo started making the keyboard flex.
Responding to the first part, the headline goes "Forget the Amazon hype". It's not hype it's literally fire.
Firefox will make text on some pages tremble and vibrate like jello. It’s quite a sight.
The config file format is the least of your worries (unless you're running Sendmail, ofcourse). It's about havimg to know about DKIM/SPF/dns weirdness/ etc, and having to stay up to date; about blacklists and greylists and the social dynamics around it; about mailbox storage and backups and users complaining about quotas and attachment sizes and that sort of shenanigans; about how will I let my users set auto responders and filters etc (just send them a link to the sieve man page! Lol); about having to worry about being called over the holidays because every custom server has its own peculiarities. And his talk about 'it used to be hard but not any more!' - yeah sure, just like the dozens of times people said that over the last decades? There's a 'year of Linux on the desktop' analogy in here somewhere.
I think the answer is that in the late 80s/90s, academic CS decided that the important topics in this area centered on completely asynchronous networks. The super famous, but trivial, FLP "theorem" gave a respectable foundation for work in the area (even though it pretty much says, you can't get anywhere with a completely asynchronous network). There was a lot of very interesting work prior to this period that was just discarded. For example Liskov's paper on using timeouts

https://www.yodaiken.com/2018/07/16/practical-uses-of-synchr...

Viewstamps depends, implicitly, on timeouts. You send a message a number of times and if you don't get a response, you abort. In the completely asynchronous world, there is no way to do that.
Very well put.

IME talking with our sysadmins face-to-face, I think a lot of the initial hostility was caused by emotional reactions like: This is different, I don't like it! (Don't get me wrong, it's a behavioral pattern that makes sense up to a point.). I think everybody I've spoken to actually ends up appreciating a lot of things about systemd. (But in these situations, I happened to be their employer, so that definitely biases the conversation even if these conversations weren't really about anything related to their job situation, specifically.)

I also get the impression that a big part of this is due to a lack of 'patterns' or easy recipes to get as much info as possible from the journal. Everybody can intuit the workings and benefits of a text file, but text files have drawbacks that are very subtle and hard to intuit at a visceral level. I think this is partially a lack of good defaults for journalctl. I think it would be better if it (by default) showed much more information and allowed users to turn off unwanted info.
It's a loose term with little meaning.. or at least, without more effort to restrict the data. Even in your examples.

I would think, if "most evolved" with no other information was used, some type of bacteria or small, rapidly breeding being would vastly be "most evolved". As evolution is merely about change over time, the number of iterations would be all that matters, I would think?

I know nothing of the scientific terms backing any of this, so perhaps there are measurable scientific methods for determining "most evolved". But I suspect it is a common, mostly useless term.
I’ve come across it before but never considered it that way- I too find the delta in what I’m doing vs want to be doing very important to keep in mind for achieving goals and maintaining focus, so it sounds like this might be a way to do it more effectively. Have you ever tried doing it digitally?
I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but isn't there more biodiversity that hasn't been fully explored in the Amazon compared to forests in temperate climates? That's what I'm more worried about.
What exactly changed in the last ...5? 10? years that has simplified the process?
I just wish they had a restore feature like chrome does.
On firefox, once you close gracefully, there doesn't seem to restore the whole previous session without using an extension.
Who has an 'account' with xkcd? Confused.
News Explorer syncs with itself via iCloud, not a third party service. So no other fees involved if you’re already paying for iCloud.

I migrated from Inoreader and it turns out it works pretty fine. Would like to see this possibility with NNW.
Is it possible that this is somehow forbidden by EU law, that's why me, being EU citizen, never encountered it?
Mind me asking what CMS that is?
https://semantic-ui.com/
They put out a title with such poor statistical reasoning that they might as well have said "Forget about the Syrian civil war, the number of violent deaths globally have gone down!". I hope it is clear from this second example that the headline is just putting two pretty unrelated things next to each other and hope it gives clicks.

You can mount a coherent critique of the media hype cycle without resorting to bascialy false reasoning.
running an adblocker?
> But once child abuse could be leveraged into gobs of power, suddenly child abuse advocates were loudly everywhere.

Or, alternatively, those parents (who as you rightly point out, in previous generations, didn't really have anywhere to go), and more importantly, the victims, realised that speaking out didn't come with as high a social cost as previously thought. And that when they did speak out, the many people who would have had little, if any, exposure to this kind of thing, were horrified at the detail.

I'd also add, that in the past, many "beat cops" would have been at a loss as to how to deal with these issues. Of all crimes reported, police apparently hated "domestics" the most, as there was no clear guidelines for them to follow.

It's very easy for people to ascribe other causes to these things when you have little experience with kids, and no experience with abuse. Not everything is a deep-state ploy to entrench power and control.

EDITED: their > there. And a bunch of other grammatical errors.
Seriously, why do I always spot a mistake after I've hit submit?
That's a bug with gmail and those who use gmail should be aware they may be missing emails.
Last week, a Brave browser developer documented the first-time startup phase of the competition through the eyes of a packet analyzer in a "What Happens.."-Series. Of the ones inspected, "Firefox [was] one of the most active upon installation." and ".. the only one to immediately collect telemetry data too"[^1].

Reading through his findings in detail and others responses - and what is read in this article I do not find much issue in the aggregate: bringing attention to nitpicks through bugtrackers, an organisation has the opportunity to make a concerted housekeeping effort to streamline the onboarding again. It is customary for websites and software to accumulate cruft over time from different internal teams with different goals. So it is best to turn to the bugtrackers, gently raising awareness with descriptive and good issue tickets.

[1]: https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...
And that is exactly the marketing card that have been played. The dev out numbers the sysadmin and ask for SystemD. Then it's to the sysadmin to live with the numerous bugs and non-standard and hardly documented ways of the Beast.
Here is the link to the actual paper and post on HN.

Alternate Day Fasting Improves Physiological and Molecular Markers of Aging

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812636
The article handwaves this by pointing out that it’s “proof-of-work”. Which is a fancy way of saying “it requires a bunch of work, continuously as the rules change over time”.

Which is why I’d consider it “hard” to run my own mail server. The complexity of running a daemon with a config file isn’t the issue, nor is it that any individual task of SPF/DKIM/etc is complex. It’s that I generally want to put 0% of my time into making sure my emails are being received, and I’m receiving other peoples’ emails.
They have forums where you can discuss the comics and other things.

https://forums.xkcd.com/
one word: anthropocentrism. it's easy to have a bias towards your species when it's the one that frames the experience of your entire existence.
Can you think of a significant stretch of time, before the advent of the loneliness epidemic, when people were any less stuck in their bubbles? Unless we've only just discovered loneliness, there can't be much of a correlation between loneliness and bubbliness.

I think your argument about symmetrically different people being compatible is probably accurate, but this points to happiness in the bubble. A bubble is really a collection of people who perceive the world with the same basis, more so than share all the same opinions. Since the bubble shares a basis, there is more likely to be people in that bubble that are truly symmetric to you on the substituent axes of the bubble's basis, than say a person in any other bubble.

There is an underlying assumption to my argument, that opinions within the bubble are somewhat uniformly distributed along each axis, but this has been the majority case in any bubble I've been in.
I'm interested in something similar. I currently tame various firehoses by using regex filters in QuiteRSS. That makes switching to NNW a non-starter right now.

But, both of these readers still make the assumption that I want to keep a feed reader open all day every day to check feeds and interrupt me when new ones come in. I'd like something that runs on a server and emails me a link to an rss "digest" once a week. I currently imagine that digest being a "newspaper" stream where the full content of every feed item is listed in chronological order. You can skip ahead to the next item with 'n' if you don't want to finish the item you're on.

I'm sure I'll get around to building it one day.
"hype" is referring to the reporting of it in the news and social media, not the fire itself.
thanks for a detailed reply.

Could you talk about the daily standup, appraisal, reward structures that make this happen.

Also...and this is the most important and slightly political question.. how do you hire or train for these 2PTL or STO ? do they come from engineering...or are they analysts/business backgrounds ?
Ji v0.4 released, new: repo, website, NPM module, CLI integration
Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves
I've tried this a while back, and found it near impossible. The fasting days aren't too bad; hungry but with a lot of energy. The eating days however are killing; your breakfast is bound to be huge, after which you feel bloated and sluggish. The rest of the day I tried getting in sufficient amount of calories, which always failed, making you feel lazy and full all day. At the end, I usually managed to get in 130-140% of daily advised calories on the eating day, which starts taking it's toll after 5 or 6 rounds.

This kind of diet also ignores non-eating related properties of a meal, i.e. a time to socialize, take a break or a it just being a routine activity. The day that I'm not eaten felt pretty weird, it's surprising how strong the habit of eating is.
What do you use for your bank account?
I've wondered how much time and money Americans spend on rectifying billing problems between health care providers and their insurance. I imagine(with only anecdotal evidence) it might be greater than the amount of time and money Americans spend on needlessly complex tax filings.
Few ideas:

* this one from Paul Graham: you retain more from reading than you think you do http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

* this one from James Somers: actively engage (don't read without a pen and paper, explain stuff to yourself as you go) http://jsomers.net/blog/kenjitsu

To my mind, 'what' trumps 'how'. A casual reading of 'Mrs. Dalloway' brings a greater reward than n airport non-fictions.
Looks like there is a forum for the site, which is now down due to the breach. I had no idea it existed, let alone had half a million accounts.
80% of my clothes are sportwears for a long time. It gives the feeling that you are a pro. A professional athlete, and a professional at your career, your performance totally relies on you.

Nothing looks more professional than someone sitting at a desk in yoga pants or a tracksuit. Yes indeed.

You know what else looks professional? A military or public services uniform. This guy should get a firefighter outfit to wear while sitting at a desk typing code. Then he'll feel really professional.
Everything is easy to folks that have the time to grok the tech.

I like to write software. I don't like running a Linux server, although I know that i could learn to be an excellent admin.
It's just that every second I spend learning Linux admin, is a second I'm not spending learning Swift.

So I just use shared hosting for my sites; even though I'm perfectly capable of running a VPS.
From some historical data on fire coverage in the Amazon here: https://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon

This doesn't really seem to be that big of a deal. It appears to be worse than previous years, but nothing to write home about. If it's such a huge crisis that we need non-stop media coverage about it, why wasn't it 80%-of-a-crisis last year or the year before?

I think the answer, which the article is addressing, is that people's ignorance of the issue has allowed media outlets to keep pushing a sensational story, when the reality is much more banal. I think that fairly classifies as "hype".
> They put out a title with such poor statistical reasoning that they might as well have said "Forget about the Syrian civil war, .."

The correct analogy here would be "Forget the hype about the Syrian civil war" if there was inaccurate information being spread about that war.

That has nothing to do with downplaying the actual severity of the war.
This is a great article. I can't remember the last time I saw so many concrete details about how and why a product went from zero to profitability.
Same here, except to Charter, who has apparently just blacklisted swaths of DigitalOcean IPs, probably for some reason. So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience.
Imagine not having friends whose social media posts are critical of the US.
The article points it out, but it used to be harder than it is now.

These days (for a long time now, really), it's hard to set one up that's, say, an open relay by accident. The default configs are pretty much all you need, just replacing a couple of values with those that are custom. Basically, what you're saying is exactly what they're debunking. Also, the article isn't "just execute these 20 commands", it's deliberately non-technical.

I've been running a tiny Postfix mail server since ... 2000 or so, still doing so today. It had grown in to a bit of a monster configuration over 17 years or so, complete with a custom PHP interface to allow me to add user accounts, etc. I learnt a lot doing that, but a couple of years ago I started it all from scratch, with a default config and writing the config into my ansible setup so I don't have to remember it. It was very easy to do. Since then, I've touched that configuration once.

One thing I will mention because I haven't seen it around enough, and didn't know of it until someone said it in passing: if you're getting smap-trapped by gmail a lot, turn on TLS support for outgoing. Made a lot of difference. For postfix that's just adding:

smtp_tls_security_level=may

to main.cf. Don't know why that isn't default.
If I am reading correctly it looks like the alternate day fasting group had less total caloric intake per week. Which might be the key thing here. As usual.
What happens if multiple people claim the same horse?
Work at a email provider. Mail is not "hard", definitely tricky. Deliverability is a problem, spam is a problem. How do I know? We spend a lot of time working to improve on our services because of these issues.

In general : computers don't solve the issue of trust. End of story.
I totally agree with this and this is actually something that my Engineer Brain and Product Brain are constantly in conflict about. I ran gitignore.io for 6 years and it was not "hard" to run. It was two commands on a web server. The problem was when I was on vacation or at work and AWS/Heroku crashed and I got flooded with GitHub issues/Tweets telling me the service as down[1][2]. All of a sudden, I have to go take a look.

Martin Fowler said something in a talk a few years ago[3] and I think it speaks to this exact mindset. This post is lacking any economic reasons for people to run their own mail server — tell me why me running my own mail server saves me time and/or money.

As another tangent, I'm actually looking at running my own mail server. For me, it's privacy which coincidentally is not even mentioned once in the article.

[1] - https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/369

[2] - https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/2

[3] - https://youtu.be/DngAZyWMGR0?t=460
The only thing about my iphone6s I wish was better is the camera.

In terms of cultivating better/more positive habits, it's probably better to just buy a standalone mid range digital camera.

Run the iphone until it dies/stops being supported by updates and apps that I care about.
If you aren't already, try not eating carby breakfasts. Meat and eggs are my goto.
Me, too. I mean, a xkcd forum is not that surprising but half a million users while I never heard about it existing?

Could that have been a honeypot? At least partly? That's something xkcd would do.