skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But what does "break even" even mean in the context of public infrastructure? If you're okay with calling that income a "tax" why doesn't public subsidy through... taxes count as breaking even? Nobody complains that highways don't "break even" but it's not like toll roads pay 100% of road upkeep...
Renaming files with mv without typing the name two times
Nobody in power has suggested this as a possibility.

Why would anyone go on record to say they're going to let a key infrastructure service fail? No one would do that. We can only speculate on what their intentions are, but it's reasonable to say a lack of evidence is not necessarily evidence they won't let it fail.
In an ideal world, healthy profits are just taxpayer money saved that can be re-invested or returned to the budget. In reality this never happens because there's an incentive to spend, spend and overspend.
California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact
Unfortunately, this isn't how Twitch operates, either.

Twitch is primarily an ad platform. That's where they make most of their money, and why they're making changes to increase ad impressions. Subscriptions used to give you site-wide ad-free. Now it's only for that channel.

See Devin Nash streams for insight into the business of Twitch. It's not public info, so it's a lot of reading between the lines and anonymous first-hand accounts, but I imagine it's accurate.

The direct-pay model is vastly preferable because it keeps advertisers from controlling content, and Twitch certainly has shown greater success here than I've seen before. But it's not happening on Twitch. At least not like it should.
Show HN: How we reduced our Twilio costs 80% by switching to iMessage
“The Postal Service receives NO tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.”
https://facts.usps.com/top-facts/
Corresponding press release: https://www.helmholtz-hzi.de/en/news-events/news/view/articl...
The administration absolutely wants to privatize the USPS, see page 68: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Govern...

Part of the plan includes a transition to a model "that delivers mail fewer days per week and to more central locations (not door delivery) [which] would operate
at substantially lower costs."

The plan notes "USPS already has over $100 billion in unfunded liabilities, a substantial
capital investment backlog, has posted losses for over a decade, and has no clear path to profitability
without reform."

Except the primary reason the USPS has posted losses for over a decade is that, in 2006, Congress passed a law requiring the USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits (supported by both sides of the aisle I should add) unlike any other Government agency or private industry competitor.

It really isn't hard to understand, the USPS is not playing by a fair set of rules and is losing as a result.
Maybe it's an unchecked, all-powerful evil that hoards people's data, ineffective at making people buy or believe in things they don't want or need?
Up next: 3d flappy bird
You've never owned a business and it's telling.
Yes, digital care packages sure will go over swimmingly. Nothing like some home-cooked bits...
message: Missing Authentication Token
I guess the keyword here is "obsessing". Software performance and maleability have serious impacts on business and can not be overlooked. But there is an optimum, and it is usually much lower than what most developers want to create.

Honestly, I've learned to take fulfillment from the value my software adds to people, instead of it's abstract quality. But well, I still overengineer things all the time.
Hi all! Like many people here we wanted to reduce our monthly expenses given the time, and found Twilio to be one of the highest line items. When we dug into the data, we found that 80% of our users were iPhone users and thus could receive iMessages.

Thus we built Balto - an API to send iMessages, and were able to transition our entire customer list successfully (as well as take advantage of iMessage features like unlimited messaging, read receipts, apple pay, etc.)

Would love HN thoughts/feedback! We also have a customer facing version if you’re not a developer (https://usebalto.com/) and wrote a blog documenting the journey for those interested (https://usebalto.com/blog/balto-origin-story%20) :)
> because they probably interacted with Joe in produce at some point recently

> because I pulled a shift with him recently

It's more likely they are scared of their customers rather than Joe.
Because Joe is just a person who contacted with contagious clients and they will never contact him again. They've probably already sanitized their store.
But they will have to contact other clients who infected Joe and there is nothing they can do to avoid that.
I think this position is a little too extreme. Many ads fit your description, but some don't. In many parts of the United States, for instance, you simply need a car to live life, and car ads have the power to shape car buyers' choices in these areas. In a case like this, it's not true that they're buying "something they don't need in the first place".
I've been using Spectacle [1] for 3 years now and it's been great. Note: it appears to have been discontinued in favor of Rectangle [2]

It's the first thing I landed on after switching to primarily OSX at work (I used i3 when I had a Linux dev box) so I'm not sure if it's the best among the alternatives; but I've been pretty happy with it.

[1]: https://www.spectacleapp.com/

[2]: https://rectangleapp.com/
I'm surprised "pricing transparency" isn't included here. A vender that requires you to call a salesperson and do the sort of negotiation on price that is mentioned here is always going to take advantage of you.

My policy is: no pricing on the website, requirement to call a salesperson to talk price? No buy. I'm even willing to pay more to a company with transparent pricing that doesn't require negotiation. It gives me predictability, rather than have to worry that once they've "locked me in" they're going to jack the price and crank all the gears.
I was teaching a hands on workshop (meetup) on how to use the Twitter API a few months ago, and the hardest part for everybody was getting those API keys, clicking through several pages, checking boxes, having it emailed to you.

Then it turned out Twitter refused half of the attendees the API key.. (maybe they thought it was spam coming from the same wifi, same time).

So then I just gave out my API key to the rest of the class, and in a few minutes it was blocked..

For a service that has a history of empowering users to protest and to spread news in crisis situations, it's a shame their API is so locked down.
I wonder if this could be used instead of image based computer management for enterprise settings. Basically the team managing the systems have some settings, employees have their own overlay (to account for personal preference in tools or directory structure), and then you just install the entire machine at the start of every day.

It seems really complex though, so I'm not entirely convinced it's a good idea.
I do this. Just yesterday, I changed a large piece of software.

I didn't have any source code for it. I think it may have been written in C++, but that didn't matter. I had the *.exe file, which was all I needed.

I used IDA Pro to study the software. You could use Ghidra, Binary Ninja, or Hopper Disassembler. They are pretty similar. I used xxd and joe to modify the software. You could use dd and echo, or a proper hex editor.

I found the function that was annoying me, practically causing the software to be malware. I inserted the bytes 33 DB (a XOR opcode) near the end of a function, then removed the bytes CC CC (alignment padding) from right after the function.

I seem to have hit most of the points in that article. The big miss was the unreasonable dream of "all experience levels". That just won't ever be reality. Mastery of a disassembler is not a beginner skill.
Can second this.

Also audio libraries on linux. ALSA vs whatever. Had a lot of issues with my particular hardware & Arch.

Also way back when, X itself. Back when it was likely to not work on many systems (~2001). I spent so many hours going back and forth to use my friend's computer & internet to Altavista some help.
Does the speed matter? How exactly?
I am genuinely curious: at Scalyr we _can_ be very fast but it is a balance with the cost that we want to pass on as price savings. Same with self-hosted Elastic: one can fine-tune it to be fast but minding the cost constraints gets it slower. WDYT?
This doesn't seem to be a common opinion, but I generally don't understand why USPS is critical infrastructure. Vote by mail is just about the only essential service they provide that I can think of, and that could potentially still be supported in other ways without USPS the other 364 days of the year.

Many of the justifications I've come across of why mail is essential seem to center around transmission of information being essential, and I 100% agree with that. But these days important information does not need to be transmitted by mail. The fact that many important services are still tied to hard-copies of paper - like mailing checks, mailing bills, mailing a warning when a bill has been missed, etc. causes some completely unnecessary problems. It's easier to keep a phone number or email address active for many years, but an address for a large percentage of the population is temporary. I've seen the argument made that not everybody has internet access, and that this is an equality issue that physical mail is still necessary for less privileged people. But many poor people are more likely to have a cell phone than have stable housing with a stable mailing address. And public libraries provide internet access for those who don't have it otherwise.

Also, and this part is arguably a first world problem but it's still a big annoyance, the junk mail that props up USPS is completely out of control. How is an essential government service entirely ad-supported like USPS is? That seems crazy. Imagine if the fire department made you watch some ads after they put out your fire.

I'm not arguing for getting rid of the USPS now, we do seem to need vote by mail at least for a while longer until we have a better, sufficiently secure alternative. I just think all these arguments about how essential it is to the fabric of modern society are bit outdated.

Edit: anyone who is downvoting me care to comment on what I'm wrong about?
You can check out Ever Loved: https://everloved.com/

It's an online tool for funeral planning. They have a marketplace for caskets, urns, headstones, etc.

Article here:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/12/casket-prices-ever-loved/

I first heard about Ever Loved from this Hacker News discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22314381
iirc, some of the original advertisers got decentish click volume, particularly if they had bought multiple squares. Each one of them got 5x their investment in SEO because the PageRank of the original got so high with news pulbications linking to it.
I'd like to see some data on this. I know a lot of small businesses that rely heavily on USPS Priority flat rate for shipping goods.
Maybe the title should indicate what kind of project?
HN comments rarely make me laugh out loud, thank you :)
I.T. Doesn't Matter (2003)
Not OP, but a registry works anywhere, whereas a custom runtime doesn't (managed node groups in EKS, GKE, AKS etc).

Additionally, once you use a custom runtime, now you have to deal with multiple runtimes in your cluster. You can no longer easily just run pods, you have to ensure they run on the nodes with the runtime for the images you want.
Show HN: Phelia – React for Slack Apps
> Despite how much I like Cloudflare and this specific service, I want to block trackers at the DNS level. 1.1.1.1 is probably the most reliable and fastest resolver there is on earth, but that does not fit my use case either.

Isn't this a bit poorly timed, considering the recent Cloudflare DNS announcement?

> In the coming months, we will provide the ability to define additional configuration settings for 1.1.1.1 for Families. This will include options to create specific whitelists and blacklists of certain sites. You will be able to set the times of the day when categories, such as social media, are blocked and get reports on your household's Internet usage.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families...
Youtube has about three orders of magnitude greater revenue than Patreon. Do you think Patreon could grow 1000 times by scaling to the size of Youtube?

I love the direct-support model as a consumer/viewer, but I have significant doubts that it competes with ad dollars nearly as well as people would like it to.
> Its "delivery confirmation" is outright fraud.

elaborate?
> It’s true that the first time they realized you could completely remap the keyboard in Word, they changed everything around to be more to their liking, but as soon as they upgraded to Windows 95 those settings got lost, and they weren’t the same at work, and eventually they just stopped reconfiguring things.

Who is "we"? That didn't describe me in 2000 and describes me even less today.

Being able to moving the taskbar is bad because his friend shot herself in the foot this one time, but "we all love Winamp skins" -- because the person whose winamp turned unusable because they double clicked the wrong file just didn't happen to be friends with Joel. Sure, don't make software for me, but don't try to rationalize it with such gymnastics.
Going by the strict definition of a book [1] a file, a webpage or a website isn’t a book either.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book
This is very exciting. I have been browsing /shownew lately here and this is another project that is very inspiring.

I have a hard time staying focused when watching programming tutorials, or any educational content really. I felt so much more relaxed and focused having the ability to let my character jump around while watching the content.

Plus this will be a great tool with the social distancing measures being taken.

Thank you for sharing!
What private companies are delivering mail to rural areas in the middle of Montana? And how much do you think they charge to deliver a single letter to someone an hour away? (Answers: No one - they contract the work to the USPS, and at least $10 per letter)
> ...for operating expenses

Weasel words. See https://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/
Wow, I wonder if your series will help me? I'm on a sabbatical and one of the goals is to complete my Japanese studies -- been learning on and off since I was 14.

I'm intermediate and can hold my own okay-ish conversationally, but I need practice scenarios and to strengthen my jōyō kanji.

Most textbooks are taxing because they start from basics and it takes a while to find the practice I need. Advanced textbooks give me little practice and make too many assumptions.
I didnt believe it could be said in few sentences the gist about the things I do and why my approach is unique. Thank you.
That may be true, but people tend to assess risk in a not entirely rational way.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200801/10-ways-w...
Why would you need a survey question to track YouTube habits? Google already has that data, why wouldn't they just correlate that to a future purchase you make?
Well that is the line we are always fed but it hasn't been true[0] since day one. In effect they are under similar rules to most private pensions in funding out to 25 years with requirements to project what their 75 year liability would be. Another view [1]

Simply put, the use of the Postal Service has dropped a lot but the number of employees retired or eligible to retire has not. In other words, they have so many eligible for full benefit retirements that they were not even trying to service the debt and instead likely to end up defaulting it to the PBGC which would have gutted payments and left retirees in a lurch.

So what would you have?

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/id/45018432

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/05/13/why-aoc-is-mo...
Most likely because Container Linux (previously CoreOS) is nearing end-of-life. Your options are to move to Fedora CoreOS or Flatcar Linux, so it's likely they decided to go with a more vanilla distro instead of migrating to one of the more similar options.
A million dollar Dark City :)
(y)
So do you have any go to tips or shortcut (keys) that are your favorite?
Anyone know whether the name was derived from the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off?
Possibly relevant:

> President Trump tweeted Monday that the "decision to open up the states" following shutdown measures taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus lies with him, not governors.

https://www.axios.com/trump-coronavirus-reopening-governors-...
USPS is not "funded by taxes". Or at least it's not designed to be. It's not a part of the government either.
What is safety culture? Why does it matter?
1. The USPS receives no tax subsidization.

2. The USPS is the only organization in US History that was mandated by Congress to fully fund its pension for 75 years into the future (i.e. potentially for employees that are _yet to be BORN_).

Details like that are what make the USPS a ripe target.
> I've seen the same person argue

Really? You remember who says what on HN?
Free Support for your Covid-19 Projects
I would look at it this way - I've read several times that COVID is ten times as lethal as the flu; therefore it seems reasonable to me to take precautions that prevent 90% of cases and not worry about the remaining 10%.
Magicpak: Build minimal Docker images without static linking
If the title had been "Urbit Is Not for Normies: How Urbit Will Save the Elect from Eternal September" I would agree.

As it stands, the intent here seems to be to disarm the reader's own insecurities about how whether they are able to (or welcome to) grasp what the Urbit project is about.
Which API are you trying to call
? This doesn't look like one of my error messages.
Microsoft tried to siphon off the gamers with Mixer. Paid significant amounts of talent, built a reasonably good technical platform, leveraged Xbox, and gamers and game livestreaming are definitely one of the most profitable parts of YouTube for Google.

It didn't succeed.

If you're a large established video provider it works, but most people aren't film studios.
No one else does what the USPS does. No one else does daily rural mail delivery. The USPS is also not tax subsidized.
Thanks for your hard work! The tool has been extremely helpful in my political science research. I have noticed that a sort of error occurs when I try to scrape too many tweets from too many accounts at once (which I do by referencing a txt file with the account names that I want to scrape tweets from). I've fixed this by just making shorter lists of account names. Is there another workaround I am unaware of?
I didn't know that. That seems to be the root of the issue then. Let the USPS set their own rates.
Soldiers often receive care packages from family, and those ship via USPS. You can't exactly send snacks over the Internet.
Perhaps ease the limits then? What's the endgame here? Let it die? Keep spending tens of billions on it each year in perpetuity while it delivers packages for Amazon and Chinese overseas sellers for next to nothing? Neither is a good outcome for anyone, left or right.
So true. 95% of the mail I get goes straight into the trash. I live in a condo complex with a bunch of centrally located mailboxes. They could save me some time by putting a trash bin right next to the mailboxes.
> which essentially means that I'm maintaining a type of registry

Mhm, there's no state that can't be thrown away and recreated, so I'd argue the overhead of running it is much lower than a full-blown registry.

> Why not have a container runtime that, instead of downloading image layers, instead fetches from a Nix binary cache

It depends on where you want to do this - Kubernetes for example has lots of opinions about images and how they're downloaded, so just replacing the runtime wouldn't be enough.

Nixery is an incremental step towards the end-goal, but there's a lot of mindset shifting that needs to happen first I think.

> Also Nixery is GCE-only

Nope, you can use a disk as the storage backend and then there's no dependency on GCS. S3 support would also be relatively easy to add by just implementing this interface: https://github.com/google/nixery/blob/master/storage/storage...
What’s your use case for this? I scrape a ton of pastebin links and other sources of hashes posted by folks on Twitter about Emotet, trickbot etc. and I’d be happy to point them to a webhook or get them to you another way? Happy to talk through how we do it too.
It's a stereotype with a grain of truth. In general, European tourists seem to be more accomplished or more enthusiastic hikers. You come across a lot of German-speaking people. But also Scandinavian and various others. Like all stereotypes, it breaks down on close inspection.
Zig 0.6.0 Release Notes
This is nice to have, but it doesn't really distinguish between the "logical" differences and the "physical" differences.

As a trivial example, one step in one's setup script might be "install package X". That can end up creating/modifying a lot of files, but many of those differences aren't necessarily meaningful or something one would want to carry into future reimages. And as things progress over time, those diffs might even be "wrong".

I liken it to whittling vs CNC. Either can be the right way to go, but usually at scale we end up doing better with CNC. And the best CNC program is a compact one.
If it's running in a web browser, side-channel attacks are way down the list of problems you need to account for.
This is actually untrue. Have you ever seen a survey in a YouTube ad, asking a question like "have you ever heard of Brand Z?" That's one of several mechanisms for measuring brand awareness lift, seeing the lift in recall over a control group.

Likewise, many advertisers aren't doing brand campaigns, they're doing direct response, that is, trying to get people to directly click to their site and convert.

Finally, advertisers on video sites tend to pay per "completed view" for some definition of completed view, usually at least a significant chunk of the video and not just the first few seconds before the skip button appears.
...or https://hookbin.com
Is this me or does this someone who wants control but not responsibility?
This completely misses the point of the original. That it's dead simple, trivial to navigate, easy to see big buys.

This thing just chugs my phone and feels awful to interact with.
I think depends on the use case. If you just want to test a backend API, e.g. to call ERP/SAP API or a Google API I'm not sure how you can do that.
I mean, if you’re really concerned about people buying more than they need, just so say on your site - obviously a valid concern and don’t think any reasonable person would be offended by a reminder that everyone can make a difference by individually making an effort to do what’s right for them AND everyone else too.
The USPS does not have domain over the pricing structure of its most popular commodity: first class mail. That is regulated to the Postal Regulatory Commission. As for other services offered they do maintain control, which is why priority delivery starts at $7.15. They're also mandated to provide door-to-door delivery with first class mail, so effectively every piece of rural mail costs them money, but they can't do anything about it.
> My reason for suspecting this is how many people came over to the teller's desk to help with handling the deposit, and how long it took with mostly periods of silence. But that said, the deposit happened just fine with no objections raised and no follow-up inquiries reaching me or the nonprofit.

Just confirming what I've read: you suspect that a report was filed, but your non-profit's account has not been closed by the bank?