skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagine I give you a list of words and ask you to remember them. 5 minutes later, I ask you to give me those words in reverse order. Not too hard, right?

Now imagine if those words I gave you were in Vietnamese, or some language you don't speak. Suddenly the task becomes much more confusing. You aren't remembering a small handful of objects and ideas, but instead trying to juggle the individual syllables in your head.

Math notation sucks because none of it maps to things non-mathematicians know. Every time a new symbol is introduced, whether it be a greek letter or a operator, it's one more mapping your brain has to create to remember it. And on top of this, you also have to remember the English names too. Yes I said names - most math concepts have so many different names it's crazy. Even basic arithmetic can't escape this. There are two names for multiplication (multiply, product) and four common notations for representing it (*, x, ·, and whatever you call it when two variables are next to each other).
This completely ignores things like the Tragedy of the Commons. Similarly, it ignores the idea some things may be a fundamental right. If the mail is completely privatized, who makes sure I can mail things at all regardless of my wealth?

And some day you may ask why wealth should be a barrier to entry to anything.
I guess you just know the wrong (right?) billionaires.
Time to Tell America’s Dogs This Arrangement Won’t Last Forever
What do you find objectionable about Medium's terms? They need some sort of permission to publish your work. This is basically boilerplate language for any website that shows user-generated content, including social media, blog hosts, etc.

> You own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium.

> By posting content to Medium, you give us a nonexclusive license to publish it on Medium Services, including anything reasonably related to publishing it (like storing, displaying, reformatting, and distributing it). In consideration for Medium granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Medium may enable advertising on the Services, including in connection with the display of your content or other information. We may also use your content to promote Medium, including its products and content. We will never sell your content to third parties without your explicit permission.

> You can delete any of your posts, or your account, anytime. Processing the deletion may take a little time, but we’ll do it as quickly as possible. We may keep backup copies of your deleted post or account on our servers for up to 14 days after you delete it.

https://policy.medium.com/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...

Edit: compare with HN's terms:

> User Content Transmitted Through the Site: With respect to the content or other materials you upload through the Site or share with other users or recipients (collectively, “User Content”), you represent and warrant that you own all right, title and interest in and to such User Content, including, without limitation, all copyrights and rights of publicity contained therein. By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
Okay, we can agree that those political factions are wrong / bad. I'm just trying to have a nuanced discussion on the merits of a public postal service vs a public monopoly on paper mail.

It's possible to half agree with those political factions while still wanting to keep government subsidized public mail.
Yes but ideological means tt's a systemic crippling of government pillars in order to collapse the federal government or otherwise render it inept.
Laziness? It’s easier to destroy than to create.
> Why have a war in Ukraine, if you can just put your own president in charge? And manipulate everyone’s opinion?

They did and he got removed in a revolution in 2014.

> Why not fix issues in Belorussia?

Belorussia is a dictatorship with a firm grip on the media and public opinion.

> Why not win over all the other ex soviet states back?

Because they didn't forget the occupation, and some others had a war on their hands if they went a bit too much west (Georgia, Ukraine).
The postal service is a good example of a government function that provides some services that cannot be made efficient.

My dad lives part-time in an unincorporated village in Alaska which has a population of 13 as of the 2010 census. Once a week, the USPS essentially charters an airplane to deliver mail there, for which senders pay the same rate they would to send mail anywhere else. The postage obviously doesn't come anywhere near covering the cost of delivery. Without this subsidized mail delivery, which is often used for groceries and other supplies, the full-time population would likely drop to zero. While it's likely that at some point in the future, if that kind of mail service continues to exist, drones will make it more efficient, it will always be much less efficient than delivering mail to people who live in cities.

It's reasonable to ask whether it's desirable to continue to subsidize people choosing such a lifestyle, and there's a good argument to be made that it is not. Many of the people who live in remote parts of Alaska have a rugged individualist mentality and a dislike for the idea of subsidies, but tend to get quiet when theirs are mentioned.
No, but the person I was responding to might have been implying that.

I think it's a "stable" job, although the retirement benefits and so on that a USPS letter carrier gets, for example, are not what they once were, and the post office also relies more on "non-career employees" than they used to.
A more charitable interpretation might be that someone who wants postal to be private might want a more focused central public organization. If our representatives aren't thinking about postal services maybe they'll be better at other, more important things.

Not sure if a charitable interpretation is warranted but I can imagine good intentions leading to the same actions.
This is hard to answer without more context. For example: where in the world do you live, do you have a family or other dependents, are you employed, if so what, do you have any other sources of income, how old are you, what is your tolerance for risk, what is your IQ & EQ level etc. A good financial advisor would take all of these things into account before giving advice.
its also one of the fastest
these things were a choice
Those high rates for delivering to faraway locations are because it is costly to deliver to those places.

It is often useful to require individuals pay for services they consume -- and for that payment to reflect the cost of the service.

What is the benefit gained by socializing the cost of remote deliveries instead of linking the price with the cost?
No, because using planes to deliver to regional distribution centers is much more efficient.

How do planes and distribution centers get mail to people at sea for months at a time?

The USPS does not deliver mail directly to the majority of reservation residents

You're not wrong. But there are plenty of people in remote places on the rez who do get mail hours from the nearest trading post. Just because they're not the "majority" of people doesn't mean they don't deserve to be served.

The USPS does not serve normal consumers in very rural areas with standard mail features.

Either you and I define "rural" differently, or you haven't spent as much time in rural places as I have.
> 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.

Sorry, you mean that billionaires and megacorps are able to profit off of ideas pioneered and validated by publically-funded research institutes? I don't see how their inability to do so would be a loss to society.
> the people teaching them can usually kick back in a unionised job

I agree with most of what you say about competition and I wanted to upvote, but this dig at unionized teachers really makes me angry.

Many, many teachers are extremely highly motivated because they love the students they see every day and cannot stand to do any less than their best for them.
Doesn't the US healthcare system, when compared to other countries, stand as a direct example of how private companies aren't inherently better at equitable essential service provision?
Because the Postal Services Act 2011 mandates it, as does the EU, and it has been a source of financial difficulty in any case.

The UK is the size of the state of Oregon and about five times as densely populated. The UK also has a much more powerful central regulatory apparatus -- there is no US body that has as much power over private carriers as Ofcom has over Royal Mail.
That was kind of the point - getting some wild ass ideas :)

But for a bit more contexts. No kids, 36 years old, only dependent is my partner who also works but earns less.

I have a high paying job and a mortgage.

I appreciate I'm not giving a lot but indulge me :)
Yes, federating child porn or threats will cause other instances to block media content and perhaps toots from your instance, as other instance admins do not want to babysit filtering what your instance relays to theirs.
UPS and Fedex can be 3x the price to deliver to remote areas. I work for e-commerce company and we ship Usps to certain zip codes with USPS. I am sure USPS loses money on these shipments especially to Alaska where the surcharge can be up to $30 with UPS.
I'm a programmer by trade, so my knowledge of mathematics as a whole is limited by what I happened to learn doing my undergrad in CS, so a lot of the mathematic-specific examples in this post were lost on me.

What I found particularly insightful here is applying this mathematical notation to programming languages and their syntaxes. His notation described as
```
Notation:{well-formed expressions}→{abstract objects in 𝑋}
```
isn't too far off from what most programming languages implement at some level.

As a result of this, what properties do programming languages share with mathematical notations, and why are some languages deemed more "expressive" than others? How much does the "expressiveness" of a certain language in a domain lead to better understanding of the abstractions beneath them?

To answer your question; I don't think this post explicitly increased my understanding of notations (especially not in the context of mathematics), but rather led me to ponder the importance of them in communicating & extending abstract concepts effectively across domains.
Have you actually modeled out the potential payouts?

How did you choose the 1% number (percent of their equity that each founder contributes) as well as the pool size of < 25?

My quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:

Expected payout to each member would be:

1% * avg_valuation_of_companies_in_pool * avg_percent_ownership_at_exit

Assuming an average valuation (in the literal sense, total exit value of all co's in the pool / number of co's) of $100M [2] and assuming that the founders own roughly 15% at exit, the expected payout would be only $150K excluding taxes, which seems quite low.

[1] Modeling should be somewhat doable leveraging public data. For example, you can use YC company data in https://ycombinator.com/topcompanies https://ycombinator.com/companies and simulate what the payouts would be if you were to choose 25 companies from a given batch at random.

[2] $100M is likely in the right ballpark. According to https://www.ycombinator.com/ :

> Since 2005, we've funded over 2,000 startups.

> Our companies have a combined valuation of over $100B.

the average valuation of YC co's would be ~$50M; if you exclude half of those that are in recent batches (haven't had time to realize their value and don't really contribute towards the $100B total) it might be closer to $100M.

Under a FounderPool model, an example of this would be a pool of 20 co's in which 2 companies end up exiting for $1B each and the rest essentially $0.
A billion ways.

Here's just one: run at a loss until your competition is driven out of business. Then raise prices once you're a monopoly again. (This isn't a hypothetical either, but a standard practice.)
I love this concept!
I wrote nothing about savers. Both the loan (bank asset/customer liability) and the deposit (bank liability/customer asset) are created from nothing at the same time when the bank originates a loan.

The loanable funds model, which it appears you are alluding to, is observably an operationally incorrect fantasy.
The problem with certain types of libertarians (which the Koch brothers believe(d) they are) is that they overdo the market fundamentalism to the point of turning it into religion. At that point, anything that is not "of the market" turns into a religious war, with all the stupidity of all religious wars.

Markets are phenomenal things for the majority of goods and terrible things for a few goods (like common defence, the judiciary and pollution control). The post office is in the latter case - some people need to subsidize the system in order for (say) rural deliveries to take place.

The benefit of having a single universal system is important in a world where an enormous amount of things that are necessary to a functioning society (say, jury summons, or voting pamphlets or other government paperwork) need to be accessible to every single citizen in the democracy.

Eventually the Internet can replace most of these things, but then the government of a democracy needs to ensure that literally every citizen has free and reasonable access to the internet without meaningful burden, lest it disenfranchise the poor and the rural.

Oddly, the whole "defund the post office" thing seems to be mostly a Republican issue. I say oddly, because the Democratic base tend to be from more densely populated states and from larger cities in those states. These people are least likely to be affected by a lack of post office as commercial delivery services can supply the majority of their mailing needs in a pinch. The people most affected are people in large states like Texas, especially those outside of the cities, where it's less economical to deliver to.

Not to mention all of the other federal services that post office provide that would ultimately go away if the post office did. Things like passport processing, for example.

Honestly, I'm still kind of amazed at how people can be convinced to so consistently call for things that are against their own interests in the name of some abstract idea like "religion!" or "the market!.
In Sweden we have quite the opposite experience.

Privatization of the postal service has led to much worse service, closure of postal offices, long delivery times in less densely populated areas (read non profitable), and Loss of mail; to make profit, the companies hire the lowest grade, temp-workers they can get their hands on. Sometimes these people figure it is easier to burn or throw away mail rather than to do the actual work of delivering it.
It’s not silly at all. I’m far more afraid of the government who has the power to lock me up for the rest of my life (as has the system set up to do so) than some random billionaire.
See also LV2/JACK CV: https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20701
> Because the Postal Services Act 2011 mandates it

Exactly.

> there is no US body that has as much power over private carriers as Ofcom has over Royal Mail

I thought regulating inter-state commerce and especially mail was something the US federal government has historically done?

In fact isn't there even a federal law enforcement agency specifically for it?
Congratulations on launching, but consider distilling a part of the project and making it available under a free and open source license like MIT or Apache or BSD.

There are many commercial and open source products on the market, some more established and less expensive than your offering. From the business standpoint, it's easy to sell something like ag-grid because many developers have experience with its open source offering, so we know that we can find experienced people on the market to help if necessary. Your project doesn't benefit from that community and doesn't benefit from having a lower price point (it's comparable to what ag-grid charges)
The biggest challenge in recruiting technical talent to the government is the GS payscale. This program is being recommended to Congress, so I assume it's an attempt to indirectly increase compensation by offering free tuition to people who commit to government employment- it also is likely attempting to target college age kids, who could accept government payscales more easily than someone who already works in the private sector and has gotten used to higher compensation. Schmidt is no dummy, and I expect that this would work, but it's still a hack around the fundamental problem of IT compensation scales that are roughly 50% of private sector levels.

A more straightforward solution would be to just create a new payscale (say, the Executive Technical Service) for IT professionals and other technical domains where federal compensation lags the private sector. The Senior Executive Service (the payscale for senior leadership like department and agency executives, including most political appointees) has about 8000 members- if you gave this system twice as many people and paid them all $100k more than the GS system would, you'd increase the federal budget by about $1.6 billion a year, or 0.04% of the 2019 budget, almost all of which you'd recover anyway by replacing IT contractors who generally cost the government between $250k and $350k each a year. Unfortunately, this solution would really piss off the big federal contractors, who would heavily lobby against it, which is why it doesn't happen even though more reasonable payscales have been found for federal doctors and lawyers.
> That was not borderline word salad. But you seem to finally have recognized that there's an incentive structure to Capitalism that can and does create negative results.

THAT was how you comprehended that statement? In the hypothetical I posited, capitalism didn't create the negative results, they just exacerbated them because capitalism is able to take an existing system and form supply chains around them that maximize output while minimizing input. If murder is illegal, and capitalism creates a thriving industry around it, you clearly have a problem, but the root cause of that problem isn't capitalism, it's that murder is legal.

To contend that capitalism is the root cause is the epitome of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Tried VictoriaMetrics?

The author compares with other storage engines comprehensively from time to time.

https://medium.com/@valyala
I don't think the Federal Government has any mandate that allows it to start a for profit business, on some whimsical political wind. The USA is designed to allow people to make a living, and it has limitations that prevent it from getting in on someone's lucrative business. Laws supporting free+fair markets on the other hand, are meant to make it possible for private citizens to compete...
you are bot forced to use the usps, you are not actually using it, so you are not paying the rest.

these sort of imbalances generally disappear in aggregate (sometimes your letter goes to a farm) and/or are worth the simplicity anyway, should you ever choose to take part.
Meh... I’ve had issues with first class mail as well. My neighbor getting my letters, I even had a letter torn open and the check taken. Turns out it was a postal employee but at least the postmaster followed up.
+1 on the Monk biography. I also really enjoyed Andrew Hodges' biography of Turing (Enigma). Even if you didn't like the movie that was based on it (I didn't), the biography itself is excellent :-)
> 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?

Yes

I skipped past the long list of properties and went straight for his long list of ways to write the inner product of two vectors and his illustrations of why you want to use different notation in different cases.

Here's a question for you, do you think Tao's primary mission is to be a "professional mathematician" or is he just enjoying the math, enjoying teaching, enjoying notation...?
It's not a matter of _keeping_ government subsidized public mail, because that does not really exist right now. I read "let's keep USPS state owned / public" as suggesting that the existing relationship between the USPS and the US government (a largely self-funding independent agency) should be kept as-is, but that the postal monopoly should be broken up.
The USPS missed a golden opportunity in the 90s. Almost no one had an email address in the early 90s. The USPS was so afraid of email they refused to embrace it.

They could have been the email address of record for everyone in the US if they just set up a forwarding address for anyone who wanted it.

Heck, they could even do it now.

Imagine having a free foo@me.us email address that someone could only send to if they paid for it, like the way mail works now.

That is the business they should get in to, along with killing all the check cashing places by being a bank for unbanked like they used to be.
I think it's fair to have the discussion, but it would make sense that any company that wanted the same privileges as the USPS would have similar obligations. Essentially, if we were to allow competition, we want all entrants to be fully self-sufficient and not dependent on USPS.

For example, if they want access to consumer mailboxes in an area, they need to cover 100% of the addresses USPS covers without routing packages through USPS. That way, they don't have the ability to surgically cherry-pick the most lucrative aspects and leave USPS with the crappy bits due to its mandates.

Given that USPS and FedEx are roughly $10 for a 3-day letter, I don't know which carriers would even want to deliver paper mail.
The Balletic Millennial Bedtimes of ‘Normal People’
> Math notation sucks because none of it maps to things non-mathematicians know.

This doesn't mean maths notation sucks any more than vim's user interface sucks because it doesn't make sense to non-vim-users.

Mathematical notation presumably mostly makes perfect sense to the kind of people who deal with mathematical notation all day long.
Sell covered calls.
A lot of the procrastination loop is hating yourself for procrastinating and then procrastinating as a relief from the discomfort. Meditation helps a lot in staying rational.