skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been looking for years for something to replace a custom rendered excel-like table I have.

The table has a complex layout:

- One fixed top row (date), two or three fixed columns on the left.

- Data are rendered horizontally; the number of rows does not change, but the number of columns can be in the hundreds.

Does your library support column-oriented data like this (you mention "60+" columns)? Does anyone know of any library which can easily render something like this? It's surprisingly hard to find something which lets you fix left hand columns and also render as many columns as I need.
I agree, we should just realize and agree that universal postal service cannot be profitable and accept the cost (tax), like we do for military expenses for instance.

Having said that, having a universal postal service requires physical presence in lots of remote areas. And those remote areas not only lack postal service, but also banking, tax services, and even why not grocery shopping. I do not see why we could not let the postal service provide those extra services, especially in the remote areas. People in big cities would likely have a different bank, they have access to a DMV near by, or supermarket. But, in a remote area, how a retired person can cash his social security ? renew his driver license ? Maybe there is a "service" opportunity that would make those remote post office more sustainable. I do not see why the postal office could not provide other services especially in remote areas where they lack. The physical location of the post office becomes a more valuable asset.
> ...I’m inclined to align with privatization. Everything can be regulated to a degree that requires basic service levels.

When companies get big enough to serve the entire nation, a few million USD in fines won't make them stop.

> But you can’t fake incentive. What is the USPS incentive to do better?

It's an intrinsic goal, set by those who truly do want to serve better. You can hire for that. USPS would have an easier time hiring the right people if they weren't hamstrung by billionaires weakening their foundations.
> Are you kidding? They're all the markets nobody talks about because they're working.
Go to the store and buy a chair. There are a hundred different kinds. Any kind you like. The barrier to entry is low. There are many competitors.

I was operating under the assumption that a market that has tariffs on foreign goods [0] is not ‘truly free’ but perhaps you disagree.

[0] https://myhfa.org/tariff-relief-doesnt-apply-to-furniture-fr...

> USPS problem is a lack of competition

Do you expect a private company to service every single rural address that currently receives mail for the same or lower price? We can’t even get ISPs to wire the entire country.
Is it being subsidised though? Or is it actually the other way around?

I've not seen any citation which claims the junk mail part of the USPS is unprofitable.

To be clear, I hate junk mail. I've just seen this claim made a few times without citation.
Ask HN: What are the SAFE terms on the “Standard Deal”?
In short, the YC "Standard Deal" [1] is $125k in return for 7% of the company using a post-money SAFE. How they get that 7% is a bit confusing... There is not a predetermined cap and/or discount on the SAFE? That is, without knowing the terms of the later priced round where the SAFE converts, what SAFE terms define a 7% equity stake?

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/
Whats wrong with sending a ballot via UPS?
Of course our VC is around $5k at the moment. We are getting our data from ICE, the most reliable stock data source in the world right now.
Best Regards.
Build a toy quantum computer at home
Seconded, that book lit a fire under me.
> But why not just 1 lifetime of different kinds of data? Heck, why not an environment of 3 years of multi-media data that a child would experience? That wouldn't cost insane amounts of money (or probably anything even close to what we've spent on deep learning as a species).

How would you imagine creating such an environment in a way that allows you to train models quickly?
If I understand that correctly, one of the private carriers should be offering to deliver letters at ~$1.10 per ($0.55 to USPS plus $0.55 internal cost). The closest I've seen is closer to $10.

The USPS tithe isn't the bottleneck, but it would definitely make sense to unwind once a private carrier could break the $2/letter barrier.
Artifically low prices, endless and expensive litigation (unless you count that as government siccing), corporate espionage, bribery, acquisition, extortion, etc.

Is it really that hard to think of what you could do with a coporate money and know government intervention?
This isn't a decision that can be made within the executive branch (I think). Congress would have to pass laws that enable "bureaucrats to get paid more."
when the cost of his letter is 10x more than he was charged, and the of mine is 10x less than i was charged, i don't pay more? seriously you don't understand? wow.

we go to dinner. you get a side salad, and i get a steak and some wine. we split the bill down the middle. cool? i'm not trying to diss you. i want to be friends with you.
jexcel still maintains an open source community edition https://github.com/paulhodel/jexcel , no such thing exists for this project.
The problem is that the political factions in the US who are in favor of eliminating USPS monopolies are also almost universally opposed to the government subsidizing USPS.
Any time I read something like this, the safe assumption is that this is how they’re telling their investors that the problem wasn’t a couple of recent business school grads trying to get rich quick parachuting into a business they don’t understand:

“[we] knew that the USPS would not be able to work out its own problems, so perhaps naively, we hoped to partner with USPS to provide an alternative to the physical delivery of postal mail to a subset of users, hoping this would spur further innovation and cost savings.”
It's a strange interpretation only if you focus on just the vocal minority that talks about formal requirements. Here are two quotes by Hillel Wayne (https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/why-dont-people-use-formal-...), whom I've found to have the most balanced take:

"The problem with finding the right spec is more fundamental: we often don’t know what we want the spec to be. We think of our requirements in human terms, not mathematical terms. If I say “this should distinguish parks from birds”, what am I saying? I could explain to a human by giving a bunch of pictures of parks and birds, but that’s just specific examples, not capturing the idea of distinguishing parks from birds. To actually translate that to a formal spec requires us to be able to formalize human concepts, and that is a serious challenge."

"It’s too expensive doing full verification in day-to-day programming. Instead of proving that my sort function always sorts, I can at least prove it doesn’t loop forever and never writes out of bounds. You can still get a lot of benefit out of this."

The post makes a strong case, IMO. Formal methods can be valuable, but they don't have the track record yet for anyone to believe they're the #1 essential thing about programming.
What are you on about? UPS and FedEx will happily charge you more to deliver to high cost locations, whereas getting a 50lb parcel overnighted from one low cost location to another is usually around $30 if you have a volume rate.

There is hefty price discrimination against high cost to serve customers baked into UPS and FedEx's model, and smaller couriers like DHL and Amazon Shipping happily blacklist large parts of the USA due to price.
What you fail to take into account is that with a privatized postal service, non-profitable routes will stopped being serviced even if it's essential to the population.
What's wrong with a government-run grocery store? I can quickly think of a hundred reasons why I would support such an idea. And no reasons yet why I wouldn't support it. But you make it sound like a government-run grocery store is massively crossing a line for you. So I am curious about that.
The problem with such reasoning is that whites do not benefit equally or wholly. A key component to English-style racism is that it was intended to keep all poor people down by splitting them along racial lines. Poor whites had it slightly better by design to keep them from joining up with other poor peoples in part for fear of losing what they had. The systems we have in place today are descended from that system (and when you know how to look for it, other similar systems not having to do with race are obvious). When you use phrases that, however true of some whites, impugns all whites, you’re perpetuating that system. This is true regardless of how complicit those whites have been. Even from a pragmatic view, it certainly doesn’t win any allies. To then defend such slurs by pointing to systemic racism is both somewhat ironic and also unconvincing to anyone who already finds it distasteful.
How do you apply this logic to US healthcare? Regulation doesn’t seem to have helped with costs, accessibility and population health.

Regulation doesn’t seem to have helped in terms of bang for buck.
How can that be true? Every assembly function in Go moves its arguments from memory relative to the stack pointer. If the arguments were in registers instead it would break every assembly function. Does gccgo not support asm?
I won't pretend tsconfig/webpack or any other bundler out there is "fun" to work with but once I get my TS support working in a project it is a joy to write in TS. I already liked JS (if that didn't make you hate me I like PHP too and have gotten paid to write it for a decade now) but TS really pushed me over the top.

I avoided TS like the plague because I didn't want another layer added in and I thought it was just coffeescript++ but after taking the plunge on 6to5 (renamed to babel) because "well these features are coming to JS soon anyway or have already landed in stable browsers" it was just a hop, skip, and a jump over into TS (in for a penny...). Modern JS is actually really fun to work in and TS takes to the next level with peace of mind I never had with just JS.
Then propose a plan for how to make USPS green while maintaining efficiency, and we can have a vote on it.
Longest Single Letter .com Domain Name
>Again, it seems impossible for you to even grasp that they might geniuely believe that their way of doing things might lead to better outcome for all, including people living in poverty.

Genuine belief does not excuse reality blindness or intellectual stop points.

I genuinely believe the world would have so many fewer problems if people would just stop being dicks.

Alas, I am neither justified nor reasonable to present that as an answer to every problem. I have to stop, consider the details of what is there, the history of the edifice, the use case it fulfills, the fact the existence of the service is guaranteed by the Constitution, and that if you want it changed, it's going to take a Constitutional Convention, plus a 2/3's ratification amongst the States. If I want what I consider a problematic piece of the infrastructure of the United States of America to go away, I must come to terms with reality.

>>The existence of billionaires combined with Citizens United is an actual problem, the post office is not.

I'd qualify that with "the existence of billionaires [where large chunks of the capital flowing through them is not cycling back through the country via taxes] is a large threat to the country". Citizen's United alone is a bloody travesty against the very fabric of civic interaction, as a legal fiction by definition skews the equation away from all votes being equal; particularly when media exposure and marketing becomes more important in the act of campaigning than actually knowing what it is your Constituent's actually want, and the fact it is only management who gets to direct the support or capital of the legal fiction with no regard to wishes of the workers (in the case of a corporation directly) or well, workers again, in that it is infrequently seen that wages have gone up in anywhere near the proportion of income/revenue of corporate entities has. Therefore, it is rather obvious that value is likely being tied up in corporate or capital-gains tax write-offs in the forms of donations to possibly independent, yet aligned PAC's.

>I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

I realize that's the polite response, but for whatever reason, it has just always rung as condescending to me. I prefer a heartfelt "I disagree", or "I beg to differ;" but to each their own. Would still debate with over a beer or two.
Can you refute the claim that TimescaleDB uses such a huge disk space that is 50 times larger than other time series database?

I see no reason to use it over VictoriaMetrics.

https://medium.com/@valyala/high-cardinality-tsdb-benchmarks...
> That tweet sounds like what you see on r/clojure all the time, a cult.

Check any Clojure forum - clojureverse, clojurians slack, mailing-list. Talks from conferences. Clojure/conj , ClojureD, ClojureX, etc. Click around, check the profiles. Then you'd probably see that majority of Clojure users are not that young. Most of them come to Clojure after learning other, very often multiple programming languages. Many of them have tried all sorts of different tools before finally discovering Clojure.

You see it over and over again, people claiming that Python, and other popular PLs have little to offer in comparison to Clojure ecosystem. And your only explanation is "it's a cult"? Yeah, sure. Clojurists are just a bunch of losers who simply failed to learn Python. It is a pretty cool cult to be in, it is based on ideas endorsed by people like Guy Steele, Gerald Jay Sussman, Paul Graham, Matthias Felleisen, Brian Goetz, and many others.
Yes I have looked at it and it's unusable for my application because it is orders of magnitude slower than InfluxQL. Fairly logical if you think about how Flux works, it's very hard to optimize a query engine with a language where every step is supposed to be discrete.
cost and ease
Isn’t that how you review all candidates?
ohhh you think weird stuff doesn’t happen in C compilers? heh
I would disagree. Billionaires and mega companies are able to pioneer and validate ideas that smaller companies may not be able to due to financial or operational restraints.

But once an idea is validated smaller competitors come in and start picking off verticals. Shopify and it’s 100,000+ stores are around in large part due to Amazon not only validating and producing best practices for the e-commerce model but also in building the foundational infrastructure (AWS) for smaller companies to leverage.

There are major benefits to having mega companies and billionaires around, and particularly having them in your country. Albeit, I agree, we do need to come up with a better tax strategy for the ultra wealthy.
I tried to answer upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23912394), but the long and short of it is that it takes about 3x longer to start the program for my example (35 MB no compression, 27 MB after ldflags="-s -w", 8 MB after UPX) after UPX compression than before.
We are building a just-in-time distribution network on top of USPS (Bottomless - YC W19) We're able to deal with their slowness because we predict demand in advance using data from a smart scale.

It's quite astonishing how unreliable USPS is. We frequently see packages get routed to a totally incorrect part of the country, derailing shipments for several days.

Also, it seems like even USPS doesn't know when their packages will arrive. The estimates they give are worse at predicting arrival time than just inputing distance into a simple regression!
How is privatizing the Post Office "reactionary"? The origins of the USPS are in a pre-Revolutionary grant from the British Crown. It's always been a public service.

And what is "worse politics" but a begging of the question? Ok, privatizing the Post Office is worse than keeping it public; I agree. The question is why they believe that.
Yeah, my comment wasn't geared towards fixing those downstream issues before fixing the upstream ones. I'm not arguing "pay the existing employees more and expect output to magically change".

When I said we should look at successful country strategies, I expect those strategies will include things like "don't let legislators and lobbyists be apart of contract details -- only high level requirements" and "outlaw the bribery that you call donating to a legislator's political campaign". Perhaps even change the government worker model to encourage small enterprises within existing government (like USDS, 18F, etc) and empower them to help earlier in the design process -- like during requirements gathering.
“Showering them with more money” in these scenarios is “give them some more stock” to try to offset the 90% of their income they just lost due to the stock becoming near worthless.
Ridiculous that it took Twitter this long to stop being used as a weapon by right-wing extremists. Now, if they could do something about the US president who spreads more white supremacist propaganda than any other account on the platform.
True plain text -- as opposed to something like Markdown or another "plain text markup" format -- is hard for a reader mode, because you're going to have to put some effort into deducing the structure of whatever document you're looking at and that could be highly idiosyncratic from author to author. I don't think that's necessarily a reason not to do it, of course, but I can imagine it's why it's not high priority -- reader mode is already having to deal with all the ways modern web sites have found to make HTML highly idiosyncratic.
In your view, is there a middle ground between labor theory and corrupt capitalism?
I can imagine a future without the USPS. A future where I don’t have a weekly chore of sorting through the spam to decide which to throw away and which to recycle.

And a future where I don’t have giant boxes “delivered” into my tiny mailbox that could fit maybe a stack of 25 envelopes.

And a future where 20% of packages don’t arrive.

I can see why people want to avoid this.
It's not the water per say. A car, laptop or airplane that is in fresh water will not work without an overhaul.

The salt water produces corrosion that fresh does not. That is why military aircraft operated near the sea get washed so much. Both inside and out, including the engines.

We would come back from overwater flights over the Atlantic and either go through a 'bird bath' which is basically a car wash for aircraft. Or they would drag a fire hose out, hook it up and spray everything down. It was pretty cool to watch the exhaust gas temps when the started dumping fresh water into the engine inlet.
Yeah I think regulation is the way. When I lived in Australia, the law and setup was this:

- The in unit smoke detectors can be triggered to warn occupants. No emergency services are called. If you have a cooking mishap or any kind of smoke, it will trigger, but just to wake the people in the unit up or annoy your neighbors.

- There are also smoke detectors in the hallway. Once this is triggered (presumably real fire), emergency services are notified and on their way. The building alarm will also sound. If it is found to be a false alarm, the tenant who triggered it is fined.

I think it's really reasonable. Small mishaps don't need to have a big response, but tenants do need to be notified. Once it's big enough (smoke in the hallway), then a response is justified.
"It's just mind blowing why we should care about companies more than people."

So food is really important and vital. Should the government be in charge of growing and distributing food?

Of course not. This experiment has been tried with horribly deadly results. The basic fact of the matter is that the market is far more effective at fairly distributing goods and services. If you look at the major sources of inequalities today in our society, they are in education, policing, and the justice system, all of which are under public control. Interestingly enough, the tort system, which is partly under private control, is far more fair than the criminal justice system that is under public control, which is why killer cops never go to prison but their victims get million dollar damage payments. (as the old axiom goes, if the king controls criminal punishment, the kings friends get away with murder).

The point is, it's a total non-sequitur to assume that just because a decentralized system is the primary means of distributing something therefore implies that it only exists to make corporate profits at the expense of us poor people. Individuals like myself who are for wider privatization believe so because we care about people. I think people will be better off if the government isn't in charge of growing food, and I think people would be better off if more systems were privatized. It's not because I have a fetish for companies, it's because I think the general welfare would improve.
The GP was justifying USPS's monopoly on first class mail. A government-run grocery store sounds pretty great. A government-run monopoly on grocery stores...not so much.
I am a physicist. Abusing mathematical notation is sort of what pays the bills for us, so... :D Seriously, though, why should meta-mathematics, not use math like notation. The post can be rewritten without that semi-formal notation and not change much, but I don't mind it all. If it is wit, I appreciate the enjoyment.

I am bookmarking the post as I found it valuable for next time I invent notation.
There are very few that will celebrate De Beers implementation of this monopoly business model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Legal_issues
Thanks!

On the one hand, it seems unfair. On the other hand, since they don't have any cost-competitive offerings, it seems like a non-issue. I'm a big fan of the USPS, but if it looked like FedEx could help push the letter rate down, I would be a fan of revoking that law. (If a private carrier committed to serving 100% of the USPS coverage area.)
It's not clear that Labour were on "the anti-Brexit side":

"If the Labour Party win the General Election they want to renegotiate Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal and put it to another public vote alongside the option of Remain."[0]

Perhaps if you think that the public would have voted to Remain, then that's an anti-Brexit policy, but perhaps Putin just liked the idea of the chaos that such a referendum would bring (and possibly the supposed benefit of having Corbyn as PM).

[0] https://home.bt.com/news/latest-news/what-is-labours-brexit-...
You're probably referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22055145
I'd imagine UPS (a courier) is a fair bit more expensive than USPS (a national postal service)?
Off topic here but this line:

> I desire every program that I use daily to be compiled from source so that I can dig in whenever I need to fix bugs, add features

For those who alter software they didn't write, how do you maintain those changes? I assume pull requests for bug fixes to the maintainer's repo, but what about mods? Do you run a diff during every update?
Try mindfulness meditation, it is almost magical.
Procrastination just kind of went away. Am I super productive 100% of the time? No, I still watch Netflix. But these negative thought loops and self-hate that makes procrastination feel so nasty go away.

I use the app 'Waking Up' from Sam Harris, and I find it absolutely brilliant.
You’re commenting like you won, but everyone else is just confused what your original point was.