skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the notation is intentionally pseudo notation on purpose.

A large part of math is knowing notation and definition. When I started studying higher levels of Mathematics a big part of me that was keeping my understanding was figuring out the notation and the definitions.

Graph theory is so notorious for this that I can remember a joke that everyones notation for graph theory is slightly different.
is that the USPS or just the free market?
Americans understood this fully well 100 years ago. That's why we nowadays still have laws against monopolies (antitrust). The antitrust laws were created not just for an abstract reason, they were meant to curtail the power of the Robber Barons of the time, who managed to create powerful companies and control large parts of the country's economy and politics. Due to propaganda spread by the same kind of people, we are now almost in a similar situation, with a small group holding almost unmitigated power over the country. At this point billionaires are only disputing among themselves for the direction of the country, they really don't care the least for what you and me think.
BoxLock – Providing secure unattended delivery technology
This sort of thing is exactly what USDS works against. However, it won't be solved until federal agencies hire on people with the skillset to effectively manage technology.
India has a better solution: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-election-lone-voter...
Do you have a citation for that? I’m going on https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis...

“
If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years.”

…

“ Allowing USPS once again to pay the costs of retiree health care costs on a pay-as-you-go basis as the rest of the federal government and two-thirds of private industry currently do, is the biggest step that could be taken to assure long-term financial sustainability”

…

“ Restricting USPS retirement assets to investment in special Treasury bonds has negatively impacted returns, relative to corporate pension funds, and therefore required USPS to set aside larger sums of money to meet its financial obligations to retirees.”
Here's a decent list centered around photography:

https://pixls.us/software/
> Why does the postal service need to turn a profit?

It doesn't have to turn a 'profit' in the literal sense, but it needs to make more money than their current spending because they have to pay future pensions.
The USPS is damn good at delivering the mail

That hasn’t been my experience in the least. Terrible customer service, packages lost, packages requiring signatures left on door step.

And the best is when my package says “delivered” yet shows up 3 days later.
What a silly remark.

How many billionaires do you know? Billionaires are gods amongst men - why would you think they couldn’t dispose of you by public or private means?
? Are you suggesting the USPS is simply a job works program?
> It isn't- for most, it is about preventing the waste that tends to happen when organizations (be they corporations or government bureaucracies) become complacent and uncompetitive.

You have a much different experience with companies than I do then. I have been hung up on by UPS customer service. I have had to simply stop ordering from Amazon because they were delivering greater than 50% of books damaged, forcing me to waste time and money returning them despite numerous reports and complaints. There was nothing I could do and not a single person cared. It's because these companies don't care about providing a service. They care about making money. And my problems as a customer weren't enough for them to lose money on, so they weren't problems to them.

Does the USPS have problems? Yes. But at least in those cases I can actually find an actual person, usually local, to speak to. But that isn't the point. You're arguing that somehow companies aren't complacent when that is my exact opposite experience, especially with delivery companies.

> That doesn't mean that you should assume the worst from the people you disagree with.

Where did I do that? Especially in the case of USPS, the Koch's complaining about so-called unfair competition is exactly caring about companies more than people.
GMO PG is famous option for EC but more enterprisey.
https://www.gmo-pg.com/en/service/mulpay/
you don't have to use LESS-THAN and GREATER-THAN in an SGML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_La...
Or, they've really been wanting to do this for a while, and the economic situation provides political cover.
Is there any API you can go through to get the UUID of the current ABI, all the ones seen by the system, or all of the ones for each windows ABI without network access?

Trivially, you grab the UUIDs from a server somewhere. A smarter trick is to get these UUIDs from the system you're running on.
How much does it cost to provide accurate pricing?

Often the cost of metering can drastically outweigh the economic value of a simple, easy to understand/predict shipping service. This is why flat rate packaging is so popular across FedEx, UPS and USPS.
I think the idea that there needs to be a philosophical line drawn is a fallacy. We could simply do things we want and not do things we don't want on a case by case basis.
> Agreed, there are no truly free capitalist markets in the US, except maybe black markets.

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.

> The Post Office actually makes money

The problem with the Post Office isn't that they don't make money (though having to be bailed out by the taxpayer is unacceptable for any reason, and the pension thing was at the behest of the USPS union rather than the Republicans). The problem with it is that they have a monopoly on carrying mail which prevents customers from enjoying the benefits of competition.
Sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#U...

By law, private corporations aren't allowed to deliver anything to your mailbox, only the USPS can.
What if you believe or know that the environmental regulatory environment for fossil fuel extraction is bound to change, or has to change? Say, due to climate change?

Wouldn't you want to at least temporarily stop your competitors from profiting from the last couple decades of massive unregulated oil sales, and at the same time try to dump as much of your product as you could?
Thanks for sharing your anecdote, but you left out the rest of the sentence that provides context for the word ‘mail’ when you quoted me. I was explicitly referring to first-class letters, not packages. I believe first-class mail is better left to the USPS.
If you're brave enough, you can make spaghetti code in any language
Another thing to consider with a lot of these games is that they're not static. The game changes and this can boost one player's rating up when their preferred champions/heroes/whatever are strong at that time. Even if the game didn't change, there are so many different characters that's play differently enough that the player's results with them could end up at a rather different rating.
> I'd like to hear especially from anyone who isn't a professional mathematician: did you feel that this post improved your understanding of the purpose and function of good notation?

No, but I did learn about new dialects and conceptualize mathematical notations better. I think for someone new to languages/notations the first set of detailed bullet points are useful. For more experienced practitioners I think it sums up to "use the right tool for the job".

What I found very interesting was the latter set of bullet points where he presents a sort of Rosetta Code (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code) of math. I am familiar with thousands of computer languages but not a mathematician and not familiar with what I'm sure are hundreds (thousands/more?) of Mathematical notations, so the few examples he lists here have me intrigued.
What is the difference between a bug report and a feature request? Is it simply that a bug report is something the system should already be doing, either because it's an advertised feature or it's something which is universally expected from that kind of software, while a feature request is about something which the system does not do, does not advertise that it does, and is not expected to be there by default? If so, we should be able to "invert" any bug report into a feature request (and vice versa), which could gain some insight by looking at it in a different way.

Another thing we could do is write a feature request — which often over-specifies what should be done in a classic up-front design way — like a bug report, which usually only specifies a goal which we can't yet achieve, rather than how it should be achieved.

Yet another thing which would be interesting is TDD-style tickets. Rather than simply explaining the happy path to a goal they could explain the various things which could prevent someone from reaching that goal: invalid inputs, missing permissions, inaccessible dependencies, missing UI, etc.
Speaking of Holbein and bones, that anamorphic skull in his famous painting "The Ambassadors" has always made me feel simultaneously puzzled, annoyed, curious and amazed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambassadors_(Holbein)
Ah, just wonderful!
The idea that it’s purely narcissistic is without merit. Privatization is about fostering competition to ensure better products are created.

Just because the USPS works as is does not mean it couldn’t be better. This is a classic “I like things the way they are” problem. Where the other possibilities are unknown and inexperienced and so are not given equal weight to a decision.

I don’t particularly care whether the postal service is privatized or not. But the more we keep failing at things like public schools the more I’m inclined to align with privatization. Everything can be regulated to a degree that requires basic service levels.

But you can’t fake incentive. What is the USPS incentive to do better?
> What's next to kill off? Libraries? Public schools?

I would vote for this. Whatever we spend on public libraries, that money could be used to bring every residence land-line high-speed internet access.

I would also defund all public schools. Charter schools seem to be the future, but the legion of bureaucrats don't want to let go of their communist indoctrination pipeline.

As a tax payer, I don't want to subsidize people sending letters or packages. Much of the back haul and distribution has already been contracted out anyway.

> It's a minimum of $11 for UPS to come pickup your package at a residential address

Yeah, that's the real cost of that service. The fact that it's free for the USPS doing it means you're using other people's money.
Avoid character-by-character processing when performance matters
Why can't the US Gov bail out the USPS like big banks?
> So if you want to keep the price of a stamp the same nationwide you need to grant a monopoly.

The conclusion does not follow. If it is important that the price of delivery to remote Alaska be cheap, then why not just subsidize it directly?
In the docs they precisely tell that this is not supported https://www.datagridxl.com/docs/features-limits
you do not pay the rest.
Fedex, UPS, and DHL handle these, in part, by contracting last mile delivery in those locations to the USPS.
umm, no. it's illegal. a competing post service was launched, with variable rates, and the gov shut it down. by law, your rate has to be flat.
I have a similar story, but my rates aren’t quite that great. What part of the country are you in and what stacks are you writing in for contracts that pay at that level? I tend to top out around 100/hr in the Midwest, just short of that post covid.
according to the labor theory of value google should be rewarded less than altavista depending on which performed more labor
Indeed, FedEx and UPS already do this where their services overlap with those of the Postal Service.

The problem is that the USPS monopoly is not as valuable as it used to be as less and less business is conducted by mail. In the long term the government is going to have to subsidize its necessary services, because those services are not and cannot be competitive advantages.
I didn't mention public vs private. This isn't what the debate is about, although telling that you brought it up unprompted, because most of these programs are government funded and are not private schools (there have been programs where public students are funded to attend private schools...these existed decades ago, and are not anything like today's programs...those did work too though btw, it just wasn't possible to do this at scale). The issue is introducing competition (and btw, this isn't a left/right issue either...in the 90/2000s almost every left-wing govt moved in this direction...it is amazing how quickly people forget things that were common knowledge in the recent past).

The socioeconomic situation in the US isn't poor. It is tragic that someone thinks this but I would suggest leaving the US for a few days. Suggesting that schools are there to prevent some kind of public health catastrophe is ludicrous. The irony of incredible fortune is being unable to understand that you are fortunate.
Whoa there! You’re asking a lot for Americans to know how anything works outside the US.

It’s similar in Canada - a number of previously run public services were privatized (DMV equivalent, liquor stores, etc). And the level of service improved dramatically. I remember how awful the DMV was - crappy customer service, limited locations, terrible hours. Now I can go and register my car at 8pm on a Wednesday with a 5 min walk and no line. Many of the Canada Post centers are privately run as well - the big box stores use their employees to run it.

I was kind of shocked to come to the US and see how they’re still stuck where Canada was 30 years ago.
Buying up all the land that contains a particular resource then guarding it, thus permanently locking said resource away is one way to monopolize a market vertical.
Hmm, I'm going to have to take another look at this then because I get auto-complete of variable properties in my html (IDEA + Vue plugin) but I don't get warnings about a variable possibly being null or undefined. But that may be outside the realm of possibility to check easily.
Biggest participatory film project ever made
In July 2010, tens of thousands of people picked up their cameras and followed a simple invitation: show what your day looks like. 80,000+ clips were submitted from 189 countries. This is now being repeated for 2020.
Twitter bans 7k QAnon accounts, limits 150k others as part of broad crackdown
I hope the billionaire is successful. For some reason every other courier that delivers to my address manages to bring my deliveries right to my doorstep - UPS, FedEx, DHL, Amazon, GrubHub, local pizza restaurants, etc. all manage to enter my apartment complex, locate my unit, and leave my items right at my door. The only exception is USPS, which consistently leaves a slip in my mailbox pretending that they "had no access" to my apartment, even though the gates are wide open during the daytime when they arrive. Instead of delivering my items, every time I have to drive several miles to the Post Office the next day, mask up for Covid, and wait in the long line to retrieve my packages.

Every aspect of my experience with USPS is dissatisfying - they can't be defunded soon enough.
LearnFromAnyone Alpha Release Update
Vue with TS, on VSCode and Vetur, with Vetur Template Interpolation enabled (VTI) also typechecks the template.
Part of a matchmaking algorithm that increases user engagement is telling a story about how it's more fair though.

Like our tolerance for losing is acquired. Most normal people losing in League for the first time stop playing, usually forever. Just randomly visit your friend's match histories in League, frequent players have many days of long losing streaks.

If you're just conditioned to play despite losing, great, in a Darwinian way (surviving, being around to be measured) you will be representative of the average player in League. And there are so many League players with such long retention you cannot possibly argue that skill-based matchmaking is the core component of user engagement.

His dataset is interesting because it will necessarily overrepresent people who kept playing despite the old system. That sort of refutes its importance - I mean sure people complain but they keep playing, so was it really that important? So what if complaints go down?

Those are important goals, and also, it's still an interesting twist in multiplayer game design. You just gotta interpret it as a commentary on a whole system even if it doesn't narrowly talk about a scientific objective like performance prediction.
A record year for LGBTQ representation in film – for gay white men
I don't think UPX triggers (my) virus scanner. The McAfee daemon on my work laptop barfs at the EICAR Test File (https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB5974...) but it ignores the UPX binary right next to it.
It’s nice to be able to choose schedules and prioritize work based on metrics. There’s also the fact that you could e.g. drop support for Windows 8.0 if you find out that only 0.1% of your users were using it.
It wasn’t that long ago that our agency had thousands of people with laptops who travelled often (2007). We used to give them two batteries, a home charger and a car charger. You could get almost four hours on a full battery and that was not running a ton of software and no WiFi or wireless. Seemed common if you travelled to have more than one battery. Now it seems like you just want one of those battery backups to bring with for times when you don’t have a plug nearby.
Gaining access to WhatsApp account through social engineering
What is private industry's incentive to do better?
It'd be a nightmare to maintain, as Firefox devs inexplicably and randomly rename config names, sometimes modify their purpose, or just plain remove them.
Not sure what the philosophical argument is, but it sounds like we're using artificially inflated prices (due to lack of competition) in urban areas as a sort of roundabout way of providing mail to rural areas. The comment to which you replied seems to suggest that it's better/simpler to just provide loss-making mail services to rural areas funded through progressive taxes and be done with it, like we do for other services we deem socially necessary (military, education).
First exoplanet candidate fully discovered by amateurs
They can finance the dumping of product at below market rates until they run the competition out of business, then corner the market for themselves.
I'd just push back - technology is a tool to accomplish the missions of government.

The positions that run those missions - enforcing the law, ruling on the law, running Medicare, etc etc - should be more prestigious. That said, if the government wants to have prestigious technical work, it should be more open to taking big swings (in an agile way) on hard problems, but that requires investment and taking risks.
You keep using the word "unprofitable" to describe services that have a higher cost to provide. These things are premium services. Private companies are happy to provide them to anyone willing to pay their costs plus at least the market rate of return, precisely because doing that is profitable.
It's their class interest, which drives them to view the world in a certain way. So as others are saying, it's ideological. But that ideology isn't a coincidence, it comes from justifying the sort of "work" that they do, day in and day out.
The situation of pensions is that the USPS is required by a law created by republicans to pre-pay their retirement fund for the next 75 years, something that no company in the world does. Not only this, but the money they pay is being diverted to the general government accounts, so it is possible that in the future the pension money is not there anyway, if the government decide not to provide the money in the future. The law had two draconian results: the USPS has to operate in the red, and the government has additional revenue that facilitated the tax cuts proposed by republicans.
I talked extensively about the pros, cons, and tradeoffs in my post "Learning TypeScript as an App Dev and Library Maintainer":

https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/11/blogged-answers-le...
Uh, Ministry for Science?
If there had ever been such a person, even once, it seems like we'd be celebrating them today. If you could send a guy back 200 years to keep all the coal in the ground, you'd do it.
I think the wealthier you are, the fewer "real" problems you have, so sometimes you end up making up problems or creating problems for yourself to chew on.

I think the happiest rich people have a "wall" to push against and a "chair" to sit in when they're tired. Bill Gates has the health policy stuff to work on during the day, and his family to come back to in the evening. Jeff Bezos has Amazon to run, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey have their companies and people to be around, average people have a job.

If you don't have that "thing" to chew on, if you just sit in on a board meeting and sip cocktails on a beach, it's easy to become lonely and feel like life is meaningless. You become like Notch and end up in a depressive spiral where you simultaneously have everything and nothing.

Not a psychologist or anything, just an interesting observation. No man is an island. Until he is, then he's Robinson Crusoe.
Right. The problem with the USPS is that it's both been exposed to "market competition" and also has legal obligations that its competitors do not have. The cost of those legal obligations now far outstrips the value of their statutory monopolies.
There's two separate things here:

(1) Book profit: it appears that they're arguing if you ignore pension cost the USPS is profitable. But that's a meaningless point. Its like saying if you ignore what they spend on gas then they'd be profitable. Obviously you can't just ignore costs when calculating profit. These pension obligations are real costs that have to be accounted for.

(2) Cash flow: This is where pension prefunding comes into play. The USPS is running out of cash and if they didn't have to save it would take them longer to do so. But since they're not actually making the payments the law doesn't impact their cash position.

The USPS has about a 100 billion dollars in pension liability that they can't pay. And they haven't actually made money in like 15 years. Tax payers are on the hook for that and the amount they're on the hook for goes up by billions every year.

From the postmaster general:

>. In order to ensure that we had sufficient liquidity to fulfill our primary statutory mission of providing universal postal service, we were forced to default on $33.9 billion in mandated prefunding payments for RHB for the years 2012 through 2016. Additionally, we did not make $6.9 billion in payments due to OPM in both 2017 and 2018 for normal costs and amortization of RHB, Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), and Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) unfunded liabilities. Without these defaults, the deferral of critical capital investments, and the aggressive management actions described above, we would not have been able to pay our employees, our suppliers, or deliver the mail.

>Due to the factors outlined above, we do not have sufficient cash to meet all of our existing legal obligations, fully pay down our debt, and maintain a sufficient level of liquidity to ensure continuity of postal operations and meet our universal service obligation.

https://about.usps.com/news/testimony/2019/pr19_pmg0430.htm
Public schooling has had a tremendous positive effect on the US and countries world wide.

If it is failing, which it is not, it is for the same political reasons as the USPS is “failing”, which it is not.