skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have hit on the EXACT reason that the USPS is so critical. There are huge areas of the US which are not serviced by other private delivery services. And even in areas where those services do reach, I imagine the cost is extremely high.

People in Barrow, Alaska deserve access to mailing services as much as people in NYC. Without that, there is no reliable way to contact everyone in the US for the purpose of the Census, Voting (where mail-in voting is available), Jury Duty notifications, Selective Service, etc.

There are critical government services that still must be run over "snail mail" and to pass that off to a private institution which will not be able to service all areas equally will lead to more inequality.
See also his book git commit murder ("If Agatha Christie ran Unix cons"):

* https://mwl.io/fiction/crime
You can FedEx an absentee ballot. There is no requirement to use USPS.
> I've actually wondered if a better plan for wood flooring is to treat it like my deck, a simple yearly oil based coating vs a hard finish.

We just put in a wood floor and went with Tung oil [1] as the finish. I don't know how well it'll hold up, but what sold me on the idea is that you can just re-apply the oil as needed.

We have three young kids, so who knows how well it'll hold up. I guess we'll find out.

[1] https://www.realmilkpaint.com/shop/oils/half-and-half/
The major problem the USPS has is the 2006 law requiring them to prefund employee pensions at the time of retirement, which no other business has to do. Changing that to normal accounting alone would substantially transform their finances.

A secondary problem is that Congress will interfere with decisions to reduce service in unprofitable areas but not officially subsidize it. This makes the post office appear to be unprofitable because we see the cost of having service in rural areas but don’t directly record the costs to the people who live there and the business which otherwise would not happen without that service.
We're working on open sourcing our entire SSG in the next 3-4 months.

As it currently stands the SSG is super opinionated and we did several things quite unconventionally, so we are validating some of our ideas by building out another site besides elderguide.com to make sure these decisions indeed work across a lot of use cases.

Once this second site is out the door we want to add TS support natively to the SSG and then we'll release it.
The www subdomain serves the wrong cert. https://www.commaok.xyz/ gives you an SSL error but https://commaok.xyz/ does not.
I am working on a solution. Without giving it all away, it’s an app for phones that can record audio and video and recognize a fire using ML and AI. It alerts nearby emergency responders based on GPS from the phone.

Initially this service will be ad-supported. When you launch the app you see a short video ad before the app will record the fire. With such a sharply defined demographic the ad impressions should get a good price.
> I don't actually entirely understand the purpose or effect of Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy. I thought browsers already blocked cross origin requests without CORS headers in the response that allow it.

CORS applies to XHR/fetch APIs, not browser loading of subresources specified in the HTML of the page.

COEP optionally extends CORS-type protection to subresources.
The Sherman anti-trust act
This made my day. Thank you so much
as I recall a reporter quipped to Seymour Cray that Apple uses a cray to help design the mac to which Dr Cray replied he uses a mac to design his supercomputers
Some software used to check that the version name string started with "Windows 9" to determine if it was running on a "Windows 98" or "Windows 95" system as opposed to 3.x, NT, XP, etc. Yes, there are internal major and minor version numbers available, however that didn't stop people. Ergo, jumping straight to "Windows 10" which would cause software that did this to find "Windows 1" in the string triggering a message like "This program requires at least Windows 95..." or whatever instead of immediately crashing because it made a system call to an API that hasn't existed for 10 years. Or worse, silently corrupting data because of other OS API changes.
From that article, it's not clear what USPS is getting the blame for here. Reading between the lines, it sounds like a startup asked them to reroute their customers' mail to them, and USPS said "no we don't do that"?

They ultimately found a way around it but shut down due to lack of sign-ups[1], so it seems like USPS saved themselves some time.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/outbox-shuts-down/
Yes, without the USPS lots of people would have to drive into the nearest town to get anything, and presumably letters would become completely cost-prohibitive to send even to people in cities.

But even setting these things aside, USPS is almost always a better experience as either sender or receiver than any of the other competitors in the US.
Did people stop reading literature? Or they just don't advertise it?
Why does the postal service need to turn a profit? It's a government agency. Are any other government agencies required to be profitable?
Best Hacker I Know
I never thought I was ever gonna be able to fix my credit score as low as 300 to 750 within 7 days. This pro hacker Albert Vadim literally saved me. He has done so much for me I can’t really explain. You can contact him here. EMAIL- Vadimwebhack(AT)Gmail,com WHATSAPP +17025301177
He just helped of mine hack an entire cellphone with just a phone number, she’s monitoring everything from phone.
Ah, sounds like Fedex and DHL in Seattle.
Show HN: Ip2country free&fast lookup written in rust
Skimmed this long PDF after getting clickbaited by the headline and it begins with the premise that without the USPS, we would be left only with email

>The federal agency plays a crucial role in U.S. supply chains, commerce, and basic communication—which email simply cannot replace—by processing and delivering nearly 500 million pieces of mail on an average day.

But I did have a number of questions like,

Wouldn't it be bad if we abolished the post office since there's always been one in my neighborhood?

Why does this person have a particular issue with a quasi-governmental agency that is a rounding-error in the federal budget? What about the trillions in defense and deficit spending?

Isn't 90% of what comes to my mailbox spam that I just forward on to the landfill?

Do most other countries have a public postal service? Why or why not.

Don't I avoid the post-office at all costs unless there's an automated kiosk that happens not to be out of service?

Why is this on Hacker News?
I actually tend to agree with you about the USPS. The thing is, it seems like a lot more could be done by the USPS. An obvious example would be postal banking, where they could serve as a bank that would provide services to all, especially those who struggle to get accounts at commercial banks. I've also heard perhaps wilder ideas—for example, what if they got into other logistics-heavy spaces like food delivery? In Finland, they apparently piloting a program to mow people's lawns.
So basically you're monetizing smoke detectors.
I'm surprised Olin college hasn't come up in this discussion yet (http://www.olin.edu/). They're small, but essentially went with this model, at least for a while. They're more undergraduate-focused though, so I don't know if they'll ever garner the "reputation" of MIT and Stanford's impactful research programs.
Thanks.

And yes, needs/utility vary.

Any CPM, Classic Mac, or BeOS experience by chance? (Or others.)
Your first sentence isn't even true and you can go right here and read the table that shows their revenue sources:
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-... To spoil it for you: in 2019, First-Class Mail and Shipping and Packages made significantly more revenue than Marketing Mail. Yes, USPS needs some new revenue streams. They do provide significant value that others cannot meet, which is daily mail delivery to anywhere in the USA. But yes, they need to find other unique services too.
The existence of billionaires is far more harmful to competition than government is.
I came here to say this. I grew up in an extremely rural area. It's still extremely rural, forty years after I move away. When I was a teenager there was one grocery store, no department stores, no electronics stores, no restaurants. Just the grocery store, the feed store, the auto parts and hunting goods store, and mile upon mile of pasture.

And the post office. The mail came every day. Sending a letter to anywhere cost $0.25, just like your were mailing it from New York City. It was, literally, a lifeline.
Thank you for taking the time to respond instead of just downvoting. However, this is an Ends Justifies the Means argument, which I have always disagreed with and also disagree with here.
If USPS didn't exist, do you think FedEx start delivering to those places?
Except demanding that all people in the US to be reliant on the successful use and ownership of a sufficiently reliable computing device is a very real form of discrimination. Arguments of cheapening electronics can be made, but just the issues that many people are having with remote learning is pretty strong evidence to the contrary.
> That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize. Anything with any significant value is already sent via Amazon, FedEx, DHL or UPS, or hand-delivered (in the case of really valuable stuff).

Hundreds of millions of people use first class mail to pay their bills, rent, etc. and for all sorts of other things where those other delivery services would be needlessly expensive. The "basic problem" is that the post office is not permitted to set prices for first class mail or vary them where they lose money with every delivery, and yet they're expected by some to be run profitably "like a business."

> The USPS has to be reformed and it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people.

Because what the country really needs right now is a greater number of unstable jobs.
USPS is actually an extremely effective lightweight parcel courier. Their rates aren't great for big, heavy stuff, but for typical ecommerce volume their rates are very competitive. They're also the only major courier who is anywhere close to maintaining their pre-covid delivery times. Outbound UPS delivery times from my area, for example, have more than doubled since March (from avg 5 bus days, to two weeks), while USPS volume is maybe a day slower on average. (avg 2.5 days up to avg 3.5)
This is extremely narrow minded world view, America is not the world. Id you really think so you should rethink your imperialistic world view and do better, if you don't then stop using the white skin color in your sentences and do some traveling.
Sounds very interesting. Any plans on open sourcing?
You can give a look as https://write.as/, never used it but heard a lot of good about it.

Also try to find websites linked to what you are writing about. For instance, for articles about programming, https://dev.to/ offers a very good platform, and so does https://hackernoon.com/. Both guarantee that you completely own what you write there.

But to me the best solution is still to have you own blog. Many platforms will offer you a Wordpress or Ghost blog for a small amount each month (I would stay away from free platforms, most of them still own your content), and if you feel comfortable with a little tech steps, you can try a static blog generator such as Jekyll or Eleventy, and host it on GitHub or Netlify.

For my blog (https://scastiel.dev) I use Eleventy, hosted on Netlify, with my own domain name. Works like a charm :)
Laughable, because a large number of tech workers in SV are from India, and a large percentage get their undergrad degrees in India, most come here for Masters degrees, but a majority go to engineering schools all over the US.
USPS has locked mailboxes at the curb (in cities). In apartment buildings, the boxes may even be inside the building. The other deliverers don't do that. I've never had a USPS package stolen, because they either deliver it to the lockbox or to you.

UPS/Fedex/FBA/DHL just drop it in front of my house and don't even bother ringing the doorbell. It rains here a good amount and if you don't notice your ghost package fast, maybe it gets soaked through.

Fedex has lied to me multiple times about attempting delivery on days they never did.
Anecdotally, I lived in one place where I never got a _single_ FedEx package correctly delivered of the dozens that were sent to me.

This was a normal apartment, in a normal apartment building, in a fairly nice part of town. The only way I ever got a Fedex package (several were sent back as "undeliverable") was if I knew it was coming in advance, to go online with the tracking # and instruct them to hold the delivery for me at the local Fedex office. Then I could pick it up in person.

Fortunately, the local Fedex office was only 2 blocks away from my apartment on the same street.

USPS delivered 100% of my letters and packages on time.
So, get rid of the “you have to make a profit” requirement, fund it via taxes, and charge the spammers normal rates.
I agree, I probably do my best thinking while not staring at a screen. But I'm asking about seating for work that requires a computer.
UPX binaries throw off most endpoint security models and so we have a chicken and egg problem where its more common use is for malware authors than commercial software vendors. But once UPX binary signatures are in significantly wider use new models can be developed to better score legit binaries.
Depends on the team is the popular answer.
They're already a significant value that others cannot meet. That's why a billionaire wants to kill it and ingest the money elsewhere.

The elimination of money orders from the USPS alone would push more people to already-abusive payday lenders.
It's still bad - some groups are better than others, but it's like buying a lottery ticket. An acquaintance was just shattered by his experience there as a recent data point.
I can't understand this.

I use firefox as my daily driver, but I still test in chrome and links.
Its easy to point at a greedy billionaire who wants to ruin [insert public service here] so that he can squeeze out another dollar for himself.

But have you considered that they _genuinely_ belive that minimal government and more privatization leads to overall better results? It might just be that they have good intensions, that they really wish for a better outcome for all.

I don't share that view, but i do think that there is a fraction of hardcore liberterians that truly believe we'd be better of without many of the government-founded services such as libraries, schools etc. - and while i do not agree with that, those people are still entitled to their opinion and are allowed to lobby for it.
I would argue that the "correct" behavior of a RAM chip is an abstraction over the actual physical behavior.

That abstraction leaks when the actual physical behavior of a RAM chip differs from the abstract specification that it implements.
> The USPS's primary revenue source is as a Spam delivery service.

I suggest doing some research before presenting guesses as fact.

Marketing email was 23% of USPS's revenue (53% of volume) in 2019.
Don't you have to pay estimated taxes anyways? Or do you just mean within the quarter between estimated tax payments? (I am salaried and already just budget by quarter for everything)
> Also, he's... extremely problematic, to say the least, in many other areas.[0][1][2]

Regarding that drama

https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web

https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/

https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/1174433654942007297

https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/09/30/in-defense-of-richard-stal...

https://medium.com/@whoisylvia/richard-stallman-has-been-vil...
$8 covers the cost for a family to send one letter a month for a year to their loved one in prison.
I dont think the problem with the Kochs is their tunnel vision.
macOS/iOS have this concept already:

CFBundleVersion: The version of the build that identifies an iteration of the bundle. This key is a machine-readable string composed of one to three period-separated integers, such as 10.14.1. The string can only contain numeric characters (0-9) and periods.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/in...

CFBundleShortVersionString: The release or version number of the bundle. This key is a user-visible string for the version of the bundle. The required format is three period-separated integers, such as 10.14.1. The string can only contain numeric characters (0-9) and periods.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/in...

Android similarly has versionName and versionCode.

The problem is that no matter what, someone somewhere is going to parse something that was never intended for non-human consumption. Or code ends up making assumptions that it shouldn't about a machine-readable version.

I have code which parses CFBundleVersion. It assumes the version follows Apple's docs. But guess what? CFBundleVersion is just a string and nothing enforces Apple's guidance so I was surprised (I shouldn't have been) to have to deal with an internally distributed iOS app that had the word "debug" tacked on to the end of its CFBundleVersion.
16.99M Couchsurfing.com emails leaked, no passwords, under investigation
That’s one way to think about it, but smoke detectors aren’t programmed in Rust, Typesscript, React, don’t run in a K8S cluster, aren’t serverless, so I think I have some technical advantages.

The app can either call 911 and report a fire, or you can hold it next to an Alexa/Siri/Google home hub or smart speaker, and some toaster ovens, and it will tell the connected device to call the fire department.
The source of the e1000e corruption bug (2008)
It's not just a "post about a historical figure" though, is it? I mean, if you want to spin a fictionalized yarn about Hammurabi I'm sure they'll allow it.

This was a post about a topical issue of public policy. Not Lee the man of 1865, but whether or not to remove a statue of Lee in 2020. Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that Facebook's fact check policy is designed to regulate?

You aren't allowed to lie (though to be fair this was a lie of omission) to influence a contemporary policy debate, and if you do they'll put a warning on your post that points to a clearer exposition of the truth.
Probably because your tax money go to support a “broken” business model in their opinion; without asking you if you want to pay for those services.

Edit: I am not saying it’s a right thing to do, I am just trying to list a possible reason why billionaires might try to fight against it, per OP question
Correct, and that is why schools in many places in the world don't do a great job of teaching students. No competition, no consequences (and compare that to the position students are in...they have to compete like hell, the people teaching them can usually kick back in a unionised job).

Btw, I don't support privatised education either, and the evidence on various programs where it has been tried (charter schools in the US, academies in the UK, etc.) are fairly mixed. Are they better than the status quo though? Yes. No question. Not even close (the implication often is that teachers are able to just do great work without being incentivized...this doesn't reflect reality).

Also, I live somewhere that had a monopolised last-mile provider. Since privatisation, there has been real improvement in service quality and...amazingly...actual innovation. Is the service good? No. It is still more expensive (somehow) than providers with 1/10th of the infrastructure/network. And the "innovation" is largely copying those other providers. But it is actually getting better (and yes, the main issue is a unionised workforce are holding the company to ransom whilst their market share falls through the floor).
Possibly, but at astronomical rates. But almost certainly not, if they were well out of their routes or extremely far-flung, because there would be no ROI and private entities exist exclusively to generate profit. The postal service is a constitutional public service to benefit our citizens.
Something I don't normally see discussed re privatization of US Postal Service is that it doesn't appear to be a novel idea.

Singapore's postal service, SingPost, is a publicly traded company[1].

The UK's postal service, Royal Mail, is a publicly traded limited company[2].

Germany's postal service, Deutsche Post AG, is a publicly traded company[3].

Japan's postal service, Japan Post, is a publicly traded company[4].

I'm also yet to hear a convincing argument as to why the USPS enjoys a monopoly in first class parcel mail. That is to say, sure let's keep USPS state owned / public, but why can't FedEx/UPS/Amazon/DHL compete with the USPS?

[1] https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/quote/S08.SI/

[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/rmg?countrycode=...

[3] https://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/equity/deutsche-post-ag

[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/6178.T?p=6178.T&.tsrc=fin-sr...
Bye-dye (Bi-directional).

Some people/locales pronounce wifi as "wiffy".
James Buchanan's ideas and Koch money are the subject of Nancy MacLean's 2017 book "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30011020-democracy-in-ch...
Olin is pretty recent but came from an older trust, less than 1/2 a billion I think.
Right now is a good time to look into this with a lot of hospitals around the world suspending non-essential surgery to free up resources deal with COVID-19, without having to wait for the next strike.

Still, what do they need to learn - which surgeries have unacceptable risk vs benefits and should potentially not be performed?
1. What guarantees does it offer for ideology neutrality?
2. What guarantees does it offer for the diversity of ideas?
3. What guarantees does it offer for excluding censorship of the expression of thought as a measurable true defense of freedom of thought and expression?
Well, the entire business started with his father Dhiru bhai ambani. It just happens to operate in a different way compared to the organizations we know in the west.
How do you know it is spam?
Subsidizing access to computing devices would be much more beneficial to society than subsidizing junk mail and online shopping.
not gp, but it looks like go's calling convention requires pushing all function args and return values to the stack [1]. thats always going to be less efficient than most C calling conventions, where (iirc) you put what you can in registers and only use the stack if registers aren't enough

EDIT:
and all registers are caller-saved. so when calling a function, all register contents will be saved on the stack (and restored later) even if the function doesn't touch certain registers

[1](https://dr-knz.net/go-calling-convention-x86-64.html)
Because they don't deliver everywhere.

That's one of the biggest operational problems. They don't deliver consistently to rural areas. These companies farm it out. See FedEx Smart Post

https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost.html
It seems like Koch wants to keep pushing consensus to privatize the postal service by weakening funding for it, which is, either intentionally or unintentionally, economically harming it. I'm on the fence over whether 'kill' is the right word for this though.