skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> [...] their opinion shouldn’t count for anything.

Dangerous path there, buddy.

> [...] to argue for a position that would negatively affect millions of people [...]

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.

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

I guess well have to agree to disagree.

Kind regards from me (definitely not a billionaire and not even close to a millionaire)
On the surface, the Constitution specifically cites a role for the federal government in operating a postal service.

Now, why does it have exclusivity for letter service? I don't know the history.

I'd rather look at how it can do an already pretty good job, better. I know I go to USPS when I ship anything.

Why isn't it in the banking business? Why doesn't it operate an official email / Identity Provider? Among other services that a correspondence service, a federal service with the most physical public spaces, could offer?
It's potentially not a bubble but a bet against other car manufacturers who are

a) supposedly five years behind Tesla on some of the EV technology
b) struggling to catch up

So, either Tesla continues to gain market share and expand into the SUV and pickup market or they end up licencing their technology - a win either way. The clock is ticking in Europe as far as diesel bans coming into force so they don't have forever to just do business as usual.
I think the belief is that a competitive business would be incentivized to offer a better service than a government monopoly.

This doesn't work out though in rural areas where it's unprofitable for a business to open a branch or provide service. This would be the case for postal service in large parts of the country just like it's the case for Internet providers.
> Example Fact: I observed that in a sample of X smokers who smoked Y cigarettes a day, Z developed lung cancer.

> Example non-Fact: Smoking causes approximately Z rate of lung cancer.

Apart from the specific problems we have ever proving causality. both these statements are still conclusions based to varying degrees on beliefs which may be wrong. The people in the study might have lied. The cancer test might have been flawed. Ultimately the feeling of knowing a fact is an emotion. In science all we can do is be as careful as possible in stating how an experiment or study was performed and what happened. People certainly gain in their confidence of these broader statements as the evidence piles up. But from the perspective of science this reliance on beliefs created by previous studies is a form of bias which can be a bad thing.
Yes, Microsoft skips windows 9 because some code use "Windows 9" for windows 95/98:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/new_wind...
I see what you mean, but I've never used an API where you could wrap arbitrary sets of API calls in a transaction on the remote side. In general once you are in the distributed systems world there are no transactions.

I think that would make for a very hard to use API. You would need to send all the API calls at once without receiving responses for the individual calls. So if you were doing something that requires 4 api calls you would need to send all 4, even if the first one is going to fail anyway.

So you wouldn't be able to get/create a customer ID and use it in the next API call to create a subscription. You would need to generate all the IDs locally first.

Even after all that, the transaction could commit on the stripe side, and you still might not get a response back that it worked. So how would you ask stripe "did this collection of API calls work?"

With their API you either get a customer id back, or you get an error, or you get nothing back. Then you either get a subscription id back, or you get an error, or you get nothing back.

* If you get a customer id back you go on to create the subscription.
* If you get an error or nothing back you keep retrying until you get a customer id back. Then you go on to create the subscription following the same retry logic.

The impotency key ensures when you get the subscription id back you have created the customer exactly once, and the subscription exactly once.

Having a "dangling customer" is not a problem - when you fix whatever is wrong with your "create subscription" call you don't create a new customer - you just link that existing customer to the subscription. You'll have the customer ID at that point.
If you're interested in evaluating and rating/ranking agents, it might be worthwhile checking out DeepMind's multidimensional Elo rating system (https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02643) which attempts to solve some of the issues with Elo and Glicko. Most notably, the ability to handle non-transitive interactions (like rock, paper, scissors) and the presence of redundant duplications of matches that might erroneously inflate ratings.

Shameless plug, I've created an R implementation of it here: https://dclaz.github.io/mELO/
This is tough because I don't want to straw man them, but I'm not sure I've ever heard a hardcore libertarian really argue that their policies would be better for the whole of society.

Generally it seems like they think that minimal government leads to better results in a social Darwinism or "get rid of the parasites" sense.

I've also never really seen them seriously recon with the question of what you do with people who cannot compete, and at some point I feel like that crosses the line into intellectual negligence.

Again, I don't want to try to demonize the other side and I really wish I could think of a good example, but I really cannot.
More likely, it's because billionaires see $$$ to be made in divesting the government of a cheap public service. It's the same idea behind the privatization of everything the government does. Cheap, clean water? Why is the government giving this out for pennies when we could be making a killing?

It's greed, simple as that. These people are corporatists that believe if there's money to be made, they should be allowed to regardless of the ethical consequences.
Hard transfer ban clauses are rare, usually they are ROFRs. Some boards may push back, but they do see the benefit of the founder having an aligned support network and we believe many will let this happen.

We believe that this exception to the ROFR or transfer restriction becomes a standard clause built into most term sheets in the future.
I don't even have to open the link to know that it's that budweiser ad. That's where my mind goes too when I think about the name of the app.

I think whatsapp has a nice ring to it, even if people doesn't know how to write it. Surely being able to write it on a store search is important, but not as important as sounding good.

-----

And does people get the name of Waze? It took me a while, because in this case not being a native English speaker is a real problem.
Try not to pick on specific instances for the sake of argument. US military power and it's geopolitical position, combined with a bunch of other things made dollar the reserve currency. Fed is printing money yet there is no inflation except asset inflation. Noone can threaten us military, hence we will be for foreseeable future the country people will pour money on.
I agree with you in that wealthy people are given too much power in the U.S. In the U.S., becoming wealthy has somehow become a fast pass to do basically whatever you want and inflict change that could affect millions of people negatively or be self-beneficial (to the wealthy person) or both.

Allowing individuals to accumulate so much wealth is just not good for the common people, and the fact that our government is so inept at managing money isn't a good enough reason to allow individuals to reach such power and wealth. If they are allowed to accumulate such wealth, there should be much stronger laws preventing their influence in government policies.
Agreed on that point.

A better mechanism, IMO, even though it doesn't catch all the cases: provisional ratings, where you don't affect other peoples' ratings much for the first n games (and where your rating moves faster, too).

Effectively it acknowledges you have less of a prior when you've played few games.
I think it's certainly worth comparing which model produces more superior outcomes. We ought to compare the per capita expenditure, and the median delivery time.

But also regardless of which is better, why is it all-or-nothing? Why can't UPS/Amazon/FedEx/DHL ALSO co-exist with the USPS? Today, they are prohibited from delivering any first class mail to a mailbox, by law.
How large is your TypeScript project? What were your type issues before you integrated?

My work has benefited from TypeScript because we can now propagate changes to our unstable API throughout our medium sized application using the compiler. We are fairly certain that all of our components are integrated if the compiler is silent. Before this certainty, we would frequently push broken API integrations to production.

The complexity of TypeScript doesn't seem to benefit projects that are already clean and tested. TypeScript gave us some confidence of correctness when we had disorganized code and inadequate test coverage.
I would go to Reddit WSB pag and buy $3000 TSLA calls
> The amount of narcissism these people (the Koch's, for example) have is just astounding. If you're a billionaire, what could possibly be a reasonable explanation for why you even care about the post office? Why are these people so hell bent on hurting people to feed their own narcissism?

Because they believe it’s bad for the public welfare. As you acknowledge, they have no other reason to care.
Alali: New way to put chemical and biological molecules onto quantum computers
ALALI was created to make it really simple for biological and chemical models to be used in tandem with quantum algorithms.
Central banks already ensure that if multiple people the money is promised to want to make withdrawals at the same time, they can all have the cash.

But if a mortgage requires people to lock away funds for quarter of a century (because the bank can only loan out the funds if someone has the money tied up for that long) then whoever's lending is [i] diverting the funds away from more productive activity [ii] going to expect a very high interest rate because they don't see their money for such a long time and [iii] likely to be richer on average than the current beneficiaries of banking activity. Reducing transfer from productive to unproductive activity and the scale of transfers from poor to rich are desirable: maturity transformation is therefore a feature of the system, not a bug

[n.b. if you force banks to borrow long and lend short you've eliminated the fractional reserve mechanism anyway]
Its called the internet. This new tech even enables you to learn things as you need to, often for free, instead of packing in 4 years of stuff then trying to remember it later.
100% with you on limited political contributions and other forms of kickbacks
> The chart doesn't show the relative volumes of mail. For every priority mail package at $14.95 that same $14.95 buys HUNDREDS of pieces of junk mail.

Volume has nothing to do with revenue, which is precisely what the original poster pointed to and was being refuted:

> The USPS's primary revenue source is as a Spam delivery service.
Thanks! I am capable of running my own (heck, I even wrote my own blog engine in 2002!! Didn't even call it blog back then), but I know I don't have time to maintain it properly.

Also, what I like about Substack and Medium is how easy it is for people to subscribe and discover. Their "distribution" is great.

I know write.as, what it lacks is a stronger distribution.

Thanks for your tips anyway!
Does it help goroutines and the scheduler?
That name was chosen for the console’s original (if largely abandoned) vision of being a single hub for gaming, live TV, and streaming: https://www.vg247.com/2013/05/28/xbox-one-microsoft-exec-exp...
A billionaire's opinion should not count more than any other random person's opinion.

Genuinely believing something is good on the part of a billionaire has no bearing on whether or not their vote should count once per human or once per dollar.
Why should we listen to someone who probably doesn’t ever open their own mail or pay a bill or send a package regarding the postal service? They don’t have to deal with the change they’re advocating for, they have the resources to actually change things.

> Dangerous path there, buddy.

Their opinion should count as much as any regular person. I’m not arguing for silencing anyone, merely limiting their outsized influence. I should’ve clarified this in my original post.

How would privatizing the mail help the poor? I’m curious.
It’s also extremely hypothetical. And counter examples on why it won’t work is plenty abound. The concept that market and competition will result in better services and price and efficient operations is true only when then there are checks and balances in place. Market collusion, using monopoly power to squish and consolidate power and extort people happen in almost every industry. I do share their concern that govt enterprises can become corrupt or complacent but I don’t share the the view that the solution is privatisation. Our elected government officials are also corrupt, should we throw away democracy?
Well, glad someone else thought this was worth submitting :)
protectionism will never go away
Apple's “Careful Delays” in AR/VR – first mover isn't always the best strategy
85% of people hear their voice when reading / forming thoughts.

And then there are the others [1].

1 https://twitter.com/KylePlantEmoji/status/122171379291396506...
Almost like a warlord. They have the power to rule us (albeit indirectly) with their wealth and lobbying power instead of weapons and fear.
You inherited the DNA which built your brain from your parents. I believe they refer to the historical conditions which created selection pressures for your parents’ ancestors to survive rather than fail to live long enough to reproduce.
You're being downvoted because most people believe it when FedEx or Amazon or UPS say they serve 100% of Americans. There's no way they would do so if they had to have the same footprint as the USPS.

Is Amazon going to run ships around the Great Lakes to deliver mail to vessels moving between ports?

Is FedEx going to send a truck an a four-hour round-trip to deliver a single letter to someone on an indian reservation for 50¢?

Is UPS going to charter bush planes to deliver mail to remote outposts in Alaska, Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands?

There are post offices so far out in the middle of nowhere that while they have a concrete pad for handicapped parking because it's required by the ADA, no customers ever arrive by car, so there's also hitching posts for people's horses, which is the primary mode of transportation. I don't see Amazon doing that. It'll just say, "Wait 20 years for your mail while we work the bugs out of our super-cool drone delivery service!"
> The USPS, libraries, public schools provide basically guaranteed service to anyone, anywhere.

Libraries are a public service. They're free. The people who use them don't have to pay anything for it, which is a boon to those who otherwise couldn't afford it. It's basically a public subsidy for access to books.

The postal service is a business. There isn't supposed to be any subsidy, you pay for it through postage, and they're not doing anything that UPS or FedEx couldn't do just as well. Public libraries don't need a law prohibiting private libraries to keep everyone from abandoning them, but the USPS needs a government monopoly on carrying letters? If the post office was so great then they shouldn't need that -- but then they'd likely fail, because private competitors would do it better and people would stop using USPS.

It's the same thing with public schools. The benefit is that the government pays for them, so no one can say they can't afford to send their kids to school. But that doesn't require the subsidy to go only to schools operated by the government. Give the parents education vouchers and let them choose their school. If the public schools are so great then they'll choose them anyway. The opposition to this comes from people knowing full well that they're not.
You can opt out of junk mail. It is an annoying process that involves finding multiple places to opt out, and takes a few months to take effect because all this shit has a lengthy production pipeline. But it is doable. I get a lot less junk mail than I used to, and if I was willing to put a little more effort in I’d get even less - I had it pretty close to zero in my old place.
Because the energy density problem.
A trailer of fuel holds more energy than a trailer of batteries for the same weight.

No matter how much battery you add, it's always possible to get more range with less weight in fuel, and with less diminishing returns.
It all depends on the team you join.
My team didn’t and all kinds of things fell through the cracks. I came in as the manager two weeks ago and built a new ticket system in less than a week that dictates task priorities and order without need for any analysis. It will go live at end of this week. The goal is to eliminate discriminatory selection of tasks, expose transparency of priorities to supported customers, and make visible task priority to everyone. My subordinate managers will then manage who works what items as dictated by the priorities set by the system.
"[...] —a policy called congregación. This sort of European settlement pattern, featuring nucleated and typically walled urban centers with largely vacant fields surrounding them, was the product of centuries of total war in which walking great distances to one’s agricultural fields was the price people paid for defense. Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican patterns of warfare and land tenure had developed a more dispersed settlement distribution [...]"

That's interesting. You can read about the European patterns as far back as classical Greece - when the season came, one city would gather some soldiers, go bust up the other city's fields, set up some triumph marker, and get back home ...
I agree, and I will add that once someone's net worth and exaggerated power are quite apparent, there should be some serious oversight if they are utilizing their money to vote like a block of x billion people. I think there should be more oversight at the government level as well...but the government isn't just one person's opinion.
Former Morgan Stanley financial adviser charged with stealing $6M
imo slides are much more effective if you're a good presenter AND you are recording your presentation.

But most people are not good presenters, and so their slides are either a wall of text OR they're an absence of text that make the slides impossible to parse without a recording of the speaker.

So it's not necessarily that writing is the BEST format, it's just not the worse when it comes to the lowest common denominator.

The other upside that the post fails to notice is that it forces everyone to get used to writing, which will lead to better documentation overall.
This aligns well with a lecture from the University of Chicago I watched recently[0], which explores how many academics use writing as a tool for thinking (What the article describes) and don’t think about the reader. Writing is an incredibly powerful tool to form thoughts.

However, as the lecturer in the video details, don’t expect the writing done for thinking to be useful to readers! When we think, there is usually a certain incrementalism, whereas when we read we’re trying to resolve dissonances in a current mental model. That’s a key distinction, it means you need to make people care or understand why their mental model is broken when writing to informs reader. When we write for our own thinking, we usually understand the general problem already and are just traversing the problem space to better understand different components.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
> specifically cites a role for the federal government in operating a postal service.

It specifically grants Congress the power to operate a postal service. Just because they have the power doesn't mean they have to do it.
Why not pay them directly in a functioning economy, if its worth it? Why do you need to skim from random (!) other ventures to finance this kind of business?

I'm also not sure, if I understand this correctly, but 32% (or 1 third) seems like quite a big "cut" for any service to me - but apparently ratios changed with the internet which allows placing these ads at such a low cost :)
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en

So, do these "digital businesses" create anything, or just skim money? Just because you've built a network of rent-seekers, this doesn't really change the concept.

Also could you explain how physical businesses actually benefit from the "new kind of ads" in a more concise way compared to the weasel-wording "one way or the other" - is more product sold because of ads in a certain area (doubtful, because ads won't change available income), does the percentage of advertising spend go down, when all business go "online" (doubtful as well, or how can you generate growth beyond the growth of the economy, which is the declared target of most adtechy-enterprises?!). So this is frankly neither clear to me nor apparently to you (nor anybody else I suppose), but these are the hard questions society has to answer, before accepting "adtech" as a productive sector of the economy.
Even the informal concept is useful, but I suspect it could be formalized. I'd love to hear from a theoretical CS person about that notion.
Speaking from my anecdata on both the retail customer and business customer side, if you've never had a problem with a given carrier you are damned lucky and should probably go buy lottery tickets.
The Constitution argument merely answers why things are the way that they are, they don't tell us whether the privatized model we see in the UK/Germany/Singapore/Japan is better or worse.

> I'd rather look at how it can do an already pretty good job, better. I know I go to USPS when I ship anything.

When it comes to packages, USPS vs UPS vs FedEx have their pros/cons, but the options mean that most end user's needs are met, whatever they are. The question is why USPS enjoys a state sanctioned monopoly on paper mail specifically.
It is not a novel idea to privatize the postal service. It can be lucrative business, especially if focused on the right areas.

The legacy system is based on the fact that it is public service, equally offered to all citizens, regardless of their gender, race, religion and location. So, it is not a business. A business would focus on the most profitable aspect of the postal service. It would likely not serve some areas, or even discriminate against some people.

I believe, the reason why USPS still has a monopoly in first class parcel mail, it is to satisfy people we claim that USPS should make money. Now, if it was clear for everyone that USPS should not be profitable (like military or education are not profitable), then it would make sense to break all USPS monopolies. Actually, I would argue the other way around, then let's USPS compete also with banks (account, loans, credit cards, stocks/bonds, CDs, etc.), title companies, check cashing business, etc. Which I believe USPS cannot currently. USPS could leverage its geographical coverage to bring banking services to remote areas. I would suggest to combine some services like DMV, so we could renew ID/driver/passports at postal office. We could pay taxes and fine. We could access notary services (titles), etc.