skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Mail delivery and shipping are crucial, not the USPS. There are plenty of other private companies that can and do show the ability to do what the USPS does - only more efficiently

This is a completely false statement. Private shipping companies do not do what USPS does, and in fact private shipping companies often partly use USPS. See for example FedEx SmartPost [1].

Private shipping companies have the exact same problem that all private companies have: they only have the incentive for profit. That means that people that are not profitable will receive no service from them. For private shipping companies, that means people in rural areas will either be completely unable to get mail, or will need to pay ridiculous prices for mail (think >$20 for a letter).

The only reason Amazon and other online retailers offer free shipping in the entire US is because USPS is mandated by law to subsidize shipping to expensive rural areas. No other private shipping company can or will do this because it goes entirely against the motive of profit.

If USPS is out of the picture that means people in rural areas will not be able to receive mail anymore or will need to pay ridiculous rates for delivery and mail. The benefit of that is that people in cities might pay a few cents less on postage. Emphasis on might. The more likely reality is that shipping costs will go up for everyone and the profits made by only servicing people in cities will be privatized. A great win for the CEO of FedEx, but a loss for all other citizens of the US.

[1] https://www.reveelgroup.com/fedex-smartpost/
NE governors promise to cautiously ease Covid-19 restrictions
I just got an ad via FedEx from some "growth hacking" company. The main category of mail I get from USPS are bills and monthly statements, not ads, anyway. They also deliver most of my packages from online stores.
> I'm not opposed to ads at the beginning and end, but numerous _jarring_ cuts in a ten minute video to play a couple of ads every two or three minutes? No thanks.

This problem is a solved problem. It’s called YouTube Premium.
It looks like Osapy acts as a proxy to an arbitrary destination server. Requestbin and similar tools are for receiving and saving HTTP requests, but not proxying them out to somewhere else. So that's an important difference.

Although I'm having trouble getting it to work. Seeing the same token error others are reporting.
Thank you! Genuinely warms my heart to hear it :)

We've been using our own "Visual SDK" to build large parts of MintData for the past few years.

It's 100% written in TypeScript/React, using decorators (cough: annotations!) and allows us to:

1) add new spreadsheet functions in TypeScript

2) wrap any React component

3) we get the auto-magic property panel UI "for free" & it instantly talks to/from the spreadsheet

For our cloud/backend imperative layer:

4) we use our own real-time stream processor (think: Apache Storm but minus the Clojure stacktraces)

5) the SDK lets us quickly write flow blocks in Java using annotations & connect to all sorts of enterprise-y systems (SQL/NoSQL stores, Queues, File Systems, etc)

@slifin -- in terms of engineers writing & selling those layers, we're open to it -- ping me if you have ideas & we can give you access to the docs & SDK.

--

[1] I'd put a link here, but the flamethrowers have come out on this thread :)
I wish it were my implementation.
There's this thing called the speed of light... And RAM access speed. Probably more. It'll be more of a step than a revolution I guess.
My ELI5 interpretation: “Since good leadership is probably not going to come from the President, we’re going to create our own “mini-country” and provide good leadership within it.”
This is presumptuous of a level of trust that is not there.

There is no talent shortage, and if there is, it's of management, not the ability to write code. The difference between a good developer and a code monkey is that the first is self-managing. They have to be, to do their job. But even they can't do it without clear communication about the project---and cash, of course.

That the shortage is of management, not developer talent (if you protest that there is a developer shortage, I have bad news for you about where the shortage of management ability is), means that the interviewer is generally in the power position.

Ergo:

How great can the conversation be on such unequal terms? I'm not saying I haven't had good conversations with interviewers or interviewees, but it can't be expected to be a regular thing. What I really think is a smorgasbord of hunches, folk wisdom, and Alan Kay quotes---but I would never be so rude as to express such in an interview.

Buy the girl a drink first, sheesh.
Yes, it's awesome.
You shouldn't be downvoted... you're expressing valid questions that should be understood. With issues like mail, voter-id, etc you really need to remember that there are 300+ million people in the United States, and most of the others that you know are like you. You gotta walk a mile in others' shoes.

I come from a place in rural upstate NY where broadband is only available to about 75% of the population, the legacy POTS system is being allowed to fail, and cellular service is available to about 50%. Should my former neighbors be cut off from functioning in modern society because they can't get mail?

Today, I own a home and have to pay property taxes and garbage bills. Should my ability to keep my home be contingent on my phone service? What if my phone carrier screw up and ports my number without my permission? What if I screw up, don't update my credit card and have service suspended?

The other alternative, public libraries, are also being starved of funding in many areas.

USPS may deserve to decline or evolve. But killing it in the middle of a crisis for stupid political reasons is not a strategy.
No Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts? I would think at least Massachusetts would want in.
Linux 5.7-rc1 stats show that Covid has not affected kernel dev productivity
I'm not the person you're looking for on that, but I have read a number of pieces by people who have been there and experienced it. In those articles, the word "gaslighting" appeared enough to prominenetly stick in my brain.
USPS makes Canada Post look like a Bond villain by comparison.
Perhaps it allows them to begin to open borders between each other, but keep borders to other states closed? If those three states' economies are very interlinked it might let them get closer to normality.

Legally, is this possible in the US?

In Australia for example each state has closed or is controlling their borders with each other, and this seems to largely be a decision for each state (I don't think there's a federal law either way). I could imagine some states choosing to open up while others remain closed. Or if two states made big sacrifices but got the issue under control, while the others lagged behind, those two could open borders between themselves while remaining closed outside.
I imagine it more like 3 people standing in the furthest corner from the person peeing because the lifeguard isn't enforcing any rules except "no one can leave the pool".
Any time renaming gets more complicated than (a) bash curly braces or (b) rename command (Perl script that applies sed expression to each file name), I break out Emacs wdired.

Then you can use all the Emacs tools to perform a mass edit across multiple file names, and get them right before committing to the rename. Multiple cursors makes a great addition, as does iedit-mode.
He wanted to shut down travel from China in January, something he got reamed for politically by the media and the left. Damned if you do and all that.
The context here is that Trump said earlier today that he was in charge of when to "open up the states."

This (along with the NE pact) is probably a big "no, you're not" to Trump.
> I fear that tomorrow

Why fear? This is my dream!

The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. The smaller less populous states aren't going to just give up their outsized power voluntarily.

California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime.
> Health outcomes and science – not politics – will guide these decisions.

And I definitely promise you that my news organization will have no bias or slant, and will only report facts.
European Governments Weigh If It’s Time to Let Some Airlines Disappear
It's not necessarily as flexible as to encompass such sub-federal cooperation: "No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...

I'm curious if these recently announced state pacts will be challenged in court. But legal or illegal, it doesn't excuse the poor job of federal management.
We basically have three channels per team.

- an 'ATC' channel for communicating outside the team
- a dev channel for team members and honorary members
- an offtopic channel for chat

All three are mostly async with new code reviews/reminders posted to the dev channel. There are other forms of communication but these are the day-to-day ones. Any significant discussions/findings get documented elsewhere.

This simple process works pretty well, but I guess it's because people follow the expected conventions which may take a while to develop.
Wildfires 'edge closer to Chernobyl nuclear plant'
Ah, and the flipside that many of us are familiar with - all the responsibility, none of the authority to fix it. Great recipe for burning down entire companies and driving away talent.
I'll echo this. Every time I use GIMP, I have to google and re-google what I want to do, skip through a Youtube video for the pertinent parts, discover that the youtube video is for an outdated version, google again, yaddy yadda yadda. Even for something as simple as putting red text over an image, or cropping down a picture, it just takes forever to figure out the magic incantations to get google to return something like what I am looking to do. Yes, I am sure that it is great for complicated image manipulation once I have been using it for a few months. I've even sat down to learn it before, spending a few evenings for a few months trying to grok it. But 95% of the time that I need image processing it's for incredibly simple stuff. Honestly, MSpaint is sufficient for ~90% of my needs and it takes 1/20th of the time just to load, let alone get anything done. GIMP makes great stuff faster than anything else. But I do not want to make great stuff, I just want to put an arrow pointing at a button on a screen capture.
In this case, I would be vastly more comfortable if the answer were "No, Doreen, you really are as dumb as you think. Their plan is 1... 2.... 3...."

The US governmental system has a long history of injecting bureaucratic nonsense that takes on a life of its own and ends up with outcomes like "teaching to the test" instead of being a net benefit.

I would feel differently if this were an announcement of a joint task force for sharing data to help each state make the best decisions possible. But this sounds to me like it will just make it harder for each state to make a decision on their own and that it probably doesn't really add any value. And that concerns me.
It might.

On the other hand, I think if the authors of software concentrated on 2 and 4, they could hope for third parties to help with 1 and 3.

Doing things the other way round seems much more difficult.
I hope he does, and in the process both increases his ownership of this fiasco and dispels any notions that his party still has any real support for "States' rights".
Celebrating 20 years of Apache Lucene
34355435
>I generally don't understand why USPS is critical infrastructure

Private citizens and businesses need to get physical things from point A to point B regardless of where point A and B are in the country. It should be self evident that the infrastructure needed to do that is critical. As for whether or not the USPS is the best way to do that, there's been some constitutional arguments and debate that's taken place over the last 250 years.

> How is an essential government service entirely ad-supported like USPS is?

Because Republicans hate taxes and unions, and the USPS is one of the largest public sector unions that they can't get rid of (due to aforementioned Constitutional requirements) so they force the USPS to over-fund themselves without taxes.

>Imagine if the fire department made you watch some ads after they put out your fire.

Imagine if Congress told fire departments across the country that they weren't allowed to take tax dollars to fund themselves.
>It's harder to afford stable housing with a stable mailing address than it is to afford internet access.

Gotta disagree. You aren't required to have stable housing to have a stable mailing address. The USPS provides services to all.

https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Is-there-mail-service-for-the...
Do you, personally, more often receive packages, or junk mail?

Extrapolate.
I would pay real money for a linux distro that works as well as ChromeOS or macOS that doesn’t have all the phone-home endemic to both (yes, Macs phone home like mad even with iCloud and all of the analytics off).
Ah, thank you. That actually makes some sense and is heartening.
Ticketmaster changes policy, no longer offering refunds on postponed shows
> If only we had some sort of united group of all the States, where the response could be coordinated and centralized for maximum effectiveness.

We do, however by design that body does not have authoritarian control over things like 'shelter at home' regulations.
I guess the same can be said for roads, water, electricity, and any other utility. And it also points out that the one thing that is for-profit is completely unavailable in any modern form out here - internet and phone. Our options for internet are dial-up (35/mo, no download/upload cap as if that matters) or satellite (75/mo, 15gb up/down cap monthly). Phone has copper home phone options at 60/mo. Cell doesn't work.

Not everyone can live in cities, is my only argument for you. My work, and the work of those I serve, relies on my existing in a rural area. Food comes from somewhere. I know it sounds hand wavy and dismissive, but that's the truth for me, and my area.

Without some amount of cooperation and working together, who would want to live out here where there is nothing? Then who grows the food?
This is so cool! It would be great if the worlds were more explorable and had more places to go.
It would be interesting to compare this project to simply converting 6502 assembly into LLVM IR, and letting clangs optimization passes work their magic.

Obviously self modifying code would be hard to handle, but every other case ought to work, and the auto-vectorization ought to do amazing things to some loop-heavy code.
NextDNS is great for all my devices. let's me access Handshake domains easily from https://dns.live

The default blacklist for NextDNS is really good too; stops a lot of Windows phone home stuff too, and can easily see all that.

Don't add a bunch of blacklists though or websites break
Why does this work? I always thought brackets were used to select a set of files. For example

foo-bar-{baz,quux}.txt = foo-bar-baz.txt
foo-bar-quux.txt
JSCalendar: A JSON representation of calendar data
Five Bullet Sunday – Upgrade your life
I'm not able to find examples of that. Can you point to any mainstream media outlets "reaming" him over that decision?
for those that don't know.

It was a advertising gimic page. You buy pixels (1$ per) and make anything you want, they put your link to those pixels.

Don't click. (I clicked "guitars" and got a wrong OS notice, my adobe was out of date.. ).

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com
I think what's probably more relevant is the chaos of trying to get aid from the federal government, combined with Trump and Kushner's declaration that any national stockpile is for the federal government, not the states, even though nobody lives in the federal government, we all live in states or similar entities.

I think they flipped the fuckit bit.
If the Fed had done the right thing by raising interest rates, and the government didn't interfere in the market with massive spending, USD could have remained the reserve currency for the foreseeable future. But nobody in Washington has the guts to do the right thing. Especially the Fed.

Also, if this "pact" leaves the United States, that is when I'll be leaving the shithole called CA. I'm not paying for the free riders anymore.
The ancient Greeks thought that plants gained mass by stealing it from the soil. Not that wrong.

Later on a Belgian scientist (Jan Baptista van Helmont) thought that he had discovered that plants gained nutrients from water, using an experiment that weighed a plant over time versus the weight of the soil over time.

Even later on a British scientist (Joseph Priestly) discovered gas exchange from plants by measuring how much time had elapsed before a flame could be re-ignited after allowing the flame to deprive the experiment area of oxygen.

Even more later on a Dutch scientist (Jan Ingenhousz) correlated light with the process of gas exchange, then met up with the previous British scientist (Joseph Priestly) and discovered that the gas output from the process was oxygen.

Read about it all here : https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zq8s2nb/revision/4
Then again, that one group of states would become a Single Point of Failure.

If that centralized and coordinated leadership is incompetent and/or corrupt, there is no Plan B.
Good catch; updated
If anyone is wondering, yes, ad blocking works on this format too, with a custom rule. We are ready for future marketing shenanigans!
It's not going to happen, if nothing else, because CA is going to be grasping for federal budget bailouts later this year. Lockdown is going to crush state budgets.
I personally think this is a pretty cool way to discover websites. I was browsing for a while, just looking at everyone's ads and clicking on a fair few of them.
It's possible for both 1 and 2 to be right.

Suppose that if you're peddling cheap junk and snake oil, advertising is effective, because nobody will have heard of your product by word of mouth (no one would recommend it and previous victims are ashamed to admit being suckered), but if you spam enough people you'll reach enough suckers to exceed the advertising expense.

But if you're peddling a popular and quality product, everyone has already heard of it and additional advertising has low marginal utility because you were going to get most of the sales anyway.

This furthermore doesn't get you out of the prisoner's dilemma, because even if buying advertising is only break-even rather than profitable, your competitor is doing it so you have to do it too or they gain a volume advantage over you and use that to kill you on unit pricing. But then you all do it and all that happens is that everyone pays money to cancel each other out.
That's exactly why that works, the shell expands it, so

mv foo-bar-{baz,quux}.txt

becomes

mv foo-bar-baz.txt foo-bar-quux.txt
There is already an extension thac blocks sponsored parts. I think it was called sponsor block. Works very well
He let who knows how many Americans back in from China without testing or quarantining them. Not much of a travel ban.
So you have this information and see only downsides? I'm curious if this is a perception-only exercise for you, or if you are taking steps to execute on that perception in a way that helps you and others prepare and pivot as needed.

Or do you really see literally endless downside, and have thus decided to lock yourself out of actions you can take now to prepare for future upsides?

If so that would suck, because this could line up an epic self-fulfilling prophecy on a personal level. Still, a lot of people do that, and regret it later. They may get a few prophet points here and there, but that's it.

Now is the perfect time to take risks on a wide variety of factors, including those I mentioned above. But if you are only primed to foresee disaster, you probably can't do that. The comment seems to point at a low level of risk tolerance.
Running Raccoon as a one one show:

https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/

It's a privacy solution that allows you to download apps from Google Play without having Big G claw into your smartphone.

The tech stack is quite extensive: Java for the application itself (Eclipse toolchain), LAMP for hosting the billing system (build on php, bootstrap and fatfree) and the website (build with Hugo using bootstrap).

COVID-19 hit hard. Even though I see more downloads, people seem to have become cautious with spending money.
> it's just lying to get people to buy something they don't need in the first place, because if they needed it, they wouldn't need advertising.

"If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

In the real world, you definitely 100% need to get in front of people to convince them that your solution solves their problems. Or make them realize they have a problem in the first place.
Like that Go (board game) was in there.
Unfortunately, the policy here in the bay area has been to entirely shut down some trails, while leaving others open, concentrating people into the few permitted locations.

The resources are clearly available to block off the trailhead parking, so they are also available to reduce the the same locations to 50% capacity instead.
Three concrete takeaways that are new to me, as an Oregonian:

* Nursing homes, long-term care facilities, etc. will get some priority and focus.

* Socioeconomically-disadvantaged communities are taking indirect impacts from mitigation measures, and they will also get some priority and focus.

* We will not return to anything resembling normal until we have a way to efficiently test, track, and isolate at scale.
Disclosure: I'm not a seasoned c/c++ developer. Just started working with just 3 days ago using 0.0.5 release, it's a young language, but very nice to work with even now. Just starting to do more non-trivial things, but it's a nice alternative to doing stuff with c. Managed to do most of what I could with c after some trial and error and using the offical docs, including using C libraries without much issue. Great work Andrew and everyone else working on Zig!
Ah yeah, that was a toy example to highlight how services are defined/enabled as k8 is notoriously known to be f'ing hard, involved, complex and intense to setup.

"Services.<service>.enable" is very similar to freebsd and /usr/local/etc except with standardised language to configure every daemon.

As for channel ecosystem and having control. Pin and override using layers — https://github.com/digital-asset/daml/blob/master/nix/nixpkg...

Then use https://cachix.org/ for stupid fast builds via caching.
Interesting - just found weird behaviour in pihole. It's asking upstream to resolve "pi.hole" according to nextdns. That shouldn't be happening
Since CA has done nothing but cultivate disease for years now, I'm guessing this another one of those Orwellian names like "Patriot Act", or "No Child Left Behind, or whatever, that achieves the opposite of what is claimed.