skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The post office is chronically underfunded as a result of hostile federal regulation (mostly put in place by people who want to privatize it and prevent rural customers from getting the low-cost service mandated by law).

So yeah, the post office is a great example: Of what happens when critical services are underfunded.

The post office is also not a traditional federal agency - a directly state-operated power company would have a very different administrative and funding structure.
> Because it would complicate having multi-billion dollar exits

This is a flippant response to a deep question.

Mutuals work well for utilities because they're not required to invest for the long term, require public support and largely operate on existing physical capital. External capital is, to date, the best system for sponsoring disruptors and for building out new capital.

Just as private ownership isn't the solution for everything, it isn't anathema for everything. Presuming so is falling for the same mental shortcuts that produced PG&E.
> What do we have to lose?

There are 365 days in a typical year. That's the theoretical limit for how many days Californians can go without power. That should give you an idea how much you have to lose from a power availability aspect. On top of that, there are millions upon millions of acres of unburnt land in California. A even more mismanaged PG&E could result in many more fires than we've seen thus far.

Basically, there is a LOT you can still lose.
Recently read "Quiet" by Susan Cain, about introverts and extroverts. Highly recommended :)
They aren't placing the trades on the market, they are market making internally - they are not losing money from this until a large group of people win and cash out.
I'd say generating an entire coherent essay like this would constitute a solid pass of the Turing test. I don't think we're that close to that yet (or alternately the singularity is right around the corner, because you could feed that same bot a corpus of AI papers and have it write new publishable ones.)
I recently discovered that the stock i was hand-wavingly promised never materialized. 10 months in to this job it's caused a cascade of reflection and 'why bother' moments.

So first, thanks for this question.

At prior jobs, I've hit points of "I dont want to be here, but i'll see it out because of x vesting point." Personal history has shown vesting to be a lottery ticket as has been said elsewhere. Its only paid out once and to the tune of about 4k total.

What i've landed on at this job is that I really dislike many aspects of this job; the domain, the location, the open office plan, and a lot of apples-to-apples comparisons when really theres a basket of varied fruits.

That said.

I get to do work here at my own pace and on my own terms. It's why I took a job at a smaller startup to begin with. Even as I struggle with the finer points (with some other insights in this thread), and moral points aside, I find that a lack of options means I'll at least see the year out here. I gave up a lot to prove myself in a slightly new area of the profession, and that experience is what I'm choosing to use as my "stock" instead.
The Volocopter has 18 rotors (fixed, electric motor, with 1 degree of freedom - doesn’t get much simpler) attached to 9 battery packs, and at least 4 can fail (even more when they are “nicely” distributed) and it's still controllable and landable. And they could still throw in a ballistic rescue parachute.
No, thank god. I was hired as technical lead for the team put together when my new employers inherited a medium-sized low profile social network primarily popular in SA and SEA from their parent company. We got a report on something in the supposedly mostly unused photo sharing feature and discovered there were no moderation tools at all, so the first thing I had to do was build something to even verify the reports. At that point it turned out to be necessary to do a sweep and legal thought it should be done by hand, so my coworkers spent days going through it. It would have been grueling for them even if they hadn't run into the awful material.

(I escaped having to help because my sole minion was the kind of guy who decompresses a several gb bzipped log file as root in _/root_ and wanders away while it's running.)
> We have many examples of well-operated state-owned power companies.

Are any of those examples in California?
"Technical debt" is not a computer science term. And, the most canonically tech-world facet of your hot take is complaining about something and then failing to recommend a solution.
I'm going to use my municipal utility as the benchmark. It's awesome. I previously was under SCE. After moving, I'm now serviced by my city-owned utility.

They're faster for service, cheaper on rates, don't shut my power off when it's windy, their website is better.

The DMV is always the go-to when people fear government providing a service. Why? Yeah, wait times can be up to a couple hours. But the service I get when I'm called has always been fine. And the only reason I have to appear in person is when I've been lazy about paying registration or getting my smog check.

For 90% of what I want to do, I just use their website on my own time and with no hassle. Or AAA. Or make an appointment at the DMV and wait about 30 minutes.

Complaining about the DMV is like complaining about airline food. Neither of those are really that bad, and I suspect if the money was spent to make them first-class experiences, we'd all just start complaining about the cost instead.

Private sector companies only perform better than the government when they're in a competitive space. As far as I'm concerned, a private monopoly is usually worse than the equivalent government-provided service. (see: Comcast vs. municipal broadband)
Makes sense to me. 1/0 is not the same as 2/0, etc.
Can you explain it in regular terms? I don't really follow what you're going for here. Buying out PG&E sounds like a bit more than a patch.
You looked at a limited set of populations from 10k to 50k (micropolitan) is there a reason?

in all of the US 62% live in incorporated areas.

United States 281,423,231 175,062,893 62.2 106,360,338 37.8

https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0082...
So you're saying it's impossible to fix bugs with patches? Not that the content of the patches is what matters?

If the bankruptcy and blackouts don't work, we need a new approach to the bug fixes. De-privatizing the power company is one thing that might work, given that it's a technique that works for other areas' power.
Unless they themselves become the bullies.
> With me it started with a positive hydrogen breathe test at a naturalpath.

Naturopaths are quacks though. You shouldn't be able to get any prescriptions based on their recommendations.
From wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Power :

As of January 1, 2015, SVP and the City of Santa Clara have the lowest average system rates for electricity in California for any electric utility serving over 10,000 customers.
Experience is subjective and varies depending on which one you go to, my first interaction was at the Oakland DMV where I had an appointment for the drive test, they got round to me close to 2hrs after my appointment. The DMV in San Francisco has horrendously long lines with very slow processing times.
>The cost of doing that is making the wallet largely useless for purchasing anything over 50$.

I don't think I ever spend that much in a single day though. The limit will differ from person to person.

>The independent ability to send all your money to a recovery address is a new security risk.

It's not new and it's not a risk. You could always send all your money to another address. And the recovery addresses are meant to be trusted. I could send my money to a secondary wallet sitting in a safe or to a trusted family member. That isn't a risk.

>Further, you need to notice the issue which means you could be our far more than 50$ unless you happen to be checking how much is in the wallet constantly.

Your balance is printed in big letters whenever you open the wallet. It's hard to not notice really. There's also these things called automatic notifications, not difficult to set up.

>So, this is strictly worse than using a credit card.

But this is supposed to replace cash not credit cards. It is objectively better than cash in terms of consumer protections.
Not if they're advertising "unlimited" service.

In my view, the entire problem is that they want so badly to say "unlimited" while at the same time not allowing actual unlimited use.

The problem could be easily resolved at no cost -- all the companies have to do is stop using the word "unlimited".
Noting the boots are not his and he risked nothing personally in the process. hedge fund = betting other people money.
Yes. For one example, a poster in another thread talked about how much they love their local municipal power company.

You can see a partial list of public-owned utility companies in CA here: https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/utilities...
Stealing the swipe action like that is really scummy.

Otherwise it’s a pretty interesting article. Lots of amazing space projects going on lately.
I worked at a fiduciary that went down so feel confident speaking to this. You're still not getting it. It's not like other startups that fail where you just get some temps and hope it solves itself. You have a specific timetable from the moment you lose your license to transferring every cent out. Past that window, there are penalties and further legal problems with the SEC. It's safe to say anybody – even slimy companies – are in full overdrive as this is going down.

ACAT is not that simple. Most brokerages charge you a fee of upwards of $50 to do it. If the brokerage is going down and they must invoke an ACAT for you, they eat the fee. Again, it's misinformed to be incurring charges and even potentially taxable events because of your philosophical beliefs in the success or failure of a company.
As a Mac user, I don’t feel it. I know people get really particular about this shit, but I spend roughly 4 hours every year making macOS do what I want. That’s it. When I ran Ubuntu, it was about 8-12 hours every 6 months. When I ran Windows it was... it was a lot more. Backwards compatibility isn’t as important to me as shit just working. My current setup hasn’t been changed in about 2.5 years. Early 2017 is the last time I opened system settings at all. Sure I periodically install a homebrew package or two, but I consider that to be a part of the normal workflow, not an OS tuning thing. All my other daily software and even stuff I don’t use frequently just works.

I know that sounds like I am some kind of fanboy. I assure you I am not. I wish I could go back to Ubuntu where I feel most at home. But the fact that I think so little about my OS that I forget it is there is what makes this so easy for me to stay.
I mostly agree with you but this is a fairly uncharitable read of small town Americans. You say yourself that socialism won’t fix the plight of their towns dying out, so they’re not wrong to be against socialism in this case. Furthermore, moving to a major city is expensive, so it can be very difficult even if the desire is there. Having family or a struggling farm or business that depends on you is another way to get stuck in a small town. If they get to the city they may not have a support network. Even immigrants have a support network of other co-immigrants, usually.

It seems that the big complaint isn’t against socialism but against offshoring and globalization. Money and factories leaving the country for cheap labor abroad. Not sure that socialism has the answer to this any more than capitalism.

Encouraging businesses to open up in these towns could be good policy. Other towns should close, but there would need to be some help buying people out of their homes where most equity resides. There are programs for doing this in some flood-prone areas already, so maybe they can do the same for these rural towns.
What kinds of problems do you run into with Boost on Bazel? Are there no available build files you can just drop and use directly?
Boost may have been a bad example, since it is a common dependency, without any sub-dependencies.

To beetwenty's point, the C++ ecosystem in general lacks the the level of support for dependency ecosystems that you find in Maven, pip, gem, npm, etc.

Bazel external dependencies are in fact a real pain point. See the 3+ year old Bazel Recursive WORKSPACE proposal. [1]

I was at the first Bazel Conf in 2017, and the external dependencies meeting was quite the row.

[1] https://bazel.build/designs/2016/09/19/recursive-ws-parsing....
Not if the equivalent value was the same. The briefcase is easier and less conspicuous to transport.
I posted this because I think it is a very interesting phenomenon that Google gets away with this. The underlying sites' content is shamelessly ripped and repurposed as though it is Google's own without so much as a 'by your leave'. This keeps 100% of the ad revenue for Google, the website does not even see the impression and has no idea where its traffic went. Effectively this turns the web into Google's content database from which it can send - or withhold - traffic at will.

The linked text contains this passage:

"We display featured snippets when our systems determine this format will help people more easily discover what they’re seeking, both from the description about the page and when they click on the link to read the page itself. They’re especially helpful for those on mobile or searching by voice."

That's about as disingenuous as it gets. People that find what they were looking for in this way will never make that click and with more and more traffic going to mobile the fraction that gets siphoned off like this is only getting larger.

This relegates the rest of the web to mere 'data provider' of Google rather than to see them as independent operators on a level playing field.
Not great. Monitoring my mental health is critical for me. I caught a severe TBI 8 years ago and things have never been the same. I hate the way my brain works now. I hate not being able to concentrate, not remembering a lot things, having to take stimulants, anti-seizure meds, and anti-depressants just to feel a bit normal. I especially hate the personality changes, however minor some of them are. I miss my old self more than anyone can imagine. Yes, I have therapists, physiatrists and doctors all on my side but every single day is still a struggle. It's taken a toll on my family and kids. Some days it seems like they're the only things keeping me going. It's easy to get down and to start wallowing in self-pity, but you just have to keep going. One thing, one step at a time. It could be worse.
The creator admits this in the README:

The use of react is hereby not sctrictly necessary and much of the code found in SwissMap.js is also valid for other programming environments.

The usefulness of combing react and d3 is that you can create reusable and composable components, instead of creating something news every time you need a specific chart/map. This makes it easier to create more complex things like dashboards or UIs.
Yubikey just announced a key with a fingerprint reader today.
offer tax-free mandated psychiatric and clinical checkups every six to eighteen months

Right after the mandatory yearly liver exams for everybody who buys booze
My bet was on a mix of just a predictable edge case and Google not prioritizing testing when users have stopped activity. I don't think they sat down and decided the kind of people who care about the inactive account manager were especially good targets for manipulation. I'm sort of surprised that they didn't use the info that they have on last logins instead of the web activity tracking, but there's probably some architectural reason it was easier.
No, it’s like a car dealership not extending credit to someone with bad credit but who will gladly take a bank check.
The current regulations aren't working, in part because PG&E is a private company that is free to prioritize profit and dividends over line maintenance. It seems like they've been doing that.
First... how can they fuck things up worse than PG&E has? Right now they have unreliable power, dangerous infrastructure, and some of the shittiest rates.

Second: Here in Oregon there are tons of smaller power companies mostly owned by local cities, counties, or non-profits. https://www.oregon.gov/energy/energy-oregon/Pages/Oregon-Uti...

There is very little of the animosity towards these utilities I used to see in California about PG&E. They are run well and keep rates reasonable. I just wish we had a similarly run replacement for Comcast.

Whether California could do something similar, I have no idea. It's pretty surprising how different the culture about this kind of thing is between the two adjacent states. The big issue is item 1 above... PG&E sets an awfully low bar. Maybe if PG&E's management got personally fined when a fire broke out and stopped getting paid when there was a blackout.
How 1989 Reshaped the Modern World
>If you're not a subject matter expert, I personally would prefer you not comment at all.

This is silly. Subject matter experts in adjacent or even irrelevant fields often have a lot to add to discussions. HN would be really boring if only only 'subject matter experts' chimed in discussions.
I'm fairly sure they're based on WebKit, actually. Can't say I've ever seen Chromium inside non-Android mobile/TV browsers, but I could be wrong.
PG&E has close to 16 million customers and over 70K square miles, I doubt there's any municipal utility that operates at that scale but I could be wrong.
The necessary behavioral changes are not trivial to execute without a state/county takeover given that PG&E has still been prioritizing executive compensation, dividends, and profit.

We need to at least start with measures to address that, even if we also need to do other things. Are you arguing that we ONLY need to do those other things, or just that we're doomed?
> I suppose "unlimited" would still be a lie because there is still a limit to how fast your phone will download it.

I disagree. In my view, "unlimited" means that the service provider will not introduce artificial limits. Of course there are natural limits (the speed of the devices involved, network congestion and signal quality, etc.). None of those are the service provider imposing an artificial limit, though.
1600 lya is only 'nearby' compared to 2600, still a lucky find!
No, we should do a second vote, maybe even a third vote in case the second vote result is wrong again as the first one.

Sometimes democracy doesn't work you know, so we have to try harder.
The most populous unincorporated areas have all of the standard amenities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Marin_Keys,_California

That's an unincorporated area, populated by an affluent community, with all the services you'd expect.

I think the answer is actually in the negative becuase the common amenities include pretty basic services like roads, police protection, or grid power. As far as I'm aware that level of disconnect is very rare.
Judge0 IDE – simple and beautiful online compiler
Aside from documentation, how do you judge if an API is good?
What do you suggest them?

Change the law?

How is that not another patch?

I think this is proposal is definitely more than a patch though, it is pretty fundamental.
Tourists can now use Alipay for cashless payments in China
That reminds me, paypal used to have a one time/subscription CC generator browser plugin way back in the day. It was great. I used it all the time and one day it just disappeared.
> Mutuals work well for utilities because they're not required to invest for the long term

...uhm, shouldn't utilities be required to invest for the long-term?
The IBM Watson STT service supports this: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/whos-speaking-speaker-diariza...
Could address this by splitting PG&E up into a bunch of smaller scale utilities that are responsive to the needs of their customers, and model them on other successful small-scale utilities.
It’s a continuous effort in paying attention to my mood, physical exercise, good sleep, journaling, meditation, a healthy diet, and quality time with friends. And even with all of that sometimes things break down. I’ve written a post about my habits here, perhaps someone might find it helpful.

https://jborichevskiy.com/posts/healthy-living/
What makes sugar companies similar to power companies? You haven't described particular regulatory or administrative policies that hurt Venezuela and will be applied here. Every thing isn't equivalent to every other thing.

Why is it automatically the case that (for example) administrative policies set in place by government regulators in Venezuela couldn't already be set in place by PG&E's private administrators?

You can't just respond to every federal agency with "just like sugar companies in Venezuela". It's absurd.
So we collected and aggregated more than 1 billion samples of metrics per second, which resulted in writing more than 30-40 million unique metric datapoints per second to storage. This resulted in more than 10 billion unique time series being stored (each with a very large number of distinct datapoints each).

This was 3.6 trillion metric samples per hour or 2.5 trillion metric datapoints stored a day (after aggregating samples).
True. You could work around it by conditionally extending your ViewContainer to have a default constructor (init()), if the type is EmptyView. Then you can write

var viewContainer2 = ViewContainer<EmptyView>()

But that's probably not what you want is it. Default generic arguments aren't implemented yet, see (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42015081/can-i-assign-a-...). It would have possibly removed the <EmptyView> aspect. So you always have to give a type to ViewContainer, if you provide no way for the compiler to infer it.
Indeed, how can you declare a list with some elements nullable, and some not?

The result should instead be a tuple, but IDK how well tuple size inference would work in a case like that.
Because it's double-wrong. Suicides have been already raised. The other side is: drug addiction destroys families as well.
I'm not sure the FTC really represents our best interests anymore. Seems like it may well be just one more captured agency paying lip service to the public while making sure corporations continue to get away with whatever makes them rich at our expense. In that case, not forcing them to admit guilt would line up quite nicely with their not fining AT&T enough to offset the profits they made by lying to consumers.
> built-in library support for logging, http, zip, gzip, json, yaml, template rendering, RFC3339 datetime reading/writing

That's completely out of scope for a programming language pretending to be taken seriously as a general purpose one (including e.g. systems programming).

Also, your list looks like a pretty arbitrary choice of protocols and formats, why don't we also add support for SSH, SMPT, IMAP, PNG?. In the end, everyone would want their niche protocol/format to be included in the standard.

> the dream: compliant compilers must be able to compile down to static binaries, cross compiling built-in.

Cross-compiling to what architectures specifically? The most used ones are proprietary and I think that disqualifies them from being included in a serious international standard, since you'd need to read the spec and implement it in order to be compliant (I'm not versed in ISO inclusion requirements, so this may be already happening, but it would still be wrong. (grepping "x86" in the offical C standard returns no results though.)).
I see this point of view a lot, but it's got one major flaw: A lot of my trips to the grochery store/Costco/Sams Club include far more things than I can carry. The idea of not owning a car sounds like the exact opposite of a paradise to me.