skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's way worse in Canada. Similar arrangement where politicians love to gut its budget for short-term gains, and it lives in a weird category somewhere between business and utility. But delivery times (and reliability) are atrocious here in Canada.

In the US, I mailed something to my mom across town, and she got it the same day that I put it in the mailbox. I rarely saw a letter delivery take more than 2-3 days. Here in Canada, it may take over a week to send mail in the same province. Takes over a month when my mom sends me a letter from the US.

IMHO, they shouldn't get subsidies. They should be a public utility. They provide a necessary channel of communication between citizens and their goverment: taxes, passports, ballots, voter registration, etc. happen through USPS. In my experience (admittedly, I've been in Canada for a decade, so this is probably out of date) they've been much more reliable than any other shipping service, and I don't think any other private carrier does letter mail.
Postal banking works really well in the countris in which it exists.

The best way to help USPS is to use them as your default shipping method: do so.
I agree that those are real problems that need to be dealt with. I don't think suppressing the effects of a loss against a lower-rated player solves them very well, though. The suppression could just be applied in those cases instead of in every case where there's a large rating disparity.

There are plenty of cases where a highly-rated player loses to a low-rated player fair and square. In those cases there should be significant rating adjustments -- at least more significant than a normal game between similarly-rated opponents -- but this system removes those to combat edge cases. I think it would be more effective to deal with those edge cases directly.
It often feels like the social contract in American society is breaking down. Many of the rich elite in the US care nothing for the common person, and only adhere to their bubble of the wealthy and powerful. Crushing institutions that help people, or blocking the creation of new ones that might, are done so for ideological reasons even if practically speaking they might work or help people out.

At some point the wealthy and political in the US might have somewhat acted in the interest of the American people. But now it feels like almost every move is to the detriment of the average person.

If things continue like this, America is in real trouble.
In France, that is one way that the postal service survived.

Actually, the banking service is also "universal" (every post office provide the service), allowing very remote places to have banking and postal service in one place. So even in remote places where it is not profitable for <bigBank> to open an office, there are always a post office around. The financial services are broad, bank account, checks, loans, credit cards, stocks/bonds, currency exchange, etc.

Another service is notary (the postal office can certify some official papers), civil services (the postal office can process ID/passport renewal), and you can pay your taxes or fines too :)

Combined with a solid IT infrastructure, a tiny post office can do a lot, with few employees. A lot more than just delivering spam or even parcel.
>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.

This is a common talking point, but is factually incorrect.

(1) The USPS hasn't made any of those payments since 2013. Their current financial woes aren't caused by the requirement since their not making the payments.

(2) Pensions are required to be fully funded. In practice that's a bit more theoretical than actual, but the USPS isn't being treated any different.
FedEx "SmartPost" and UPS "SurePost" are both basically "drop your package off with FedEx/UPS, and they'll put it in the regular mail for you".
> It's just mind blowing why we should care about companies more than people.

Theres a middle ground here, ya know? At the end of the day we need companies that turn a net-profit by offering goods and services that ultimately lead to the tax revenue to fund those libraries, post offices and schools.

> So what if it's harmful to competition?

Again, it's a ideological positon. In the mind of people like the Koch brothers, it might be post offices and libraries today, but it might be [insert industry here] tomorrow. And that industry might be your industry. I don't share that view, but i see where they are coming from.
I get a say every time I vote.
Ah. The property angle suddenly lets all the pieces fall into place. Now it makes sense.
> mekster suggests the project change the license

When have I suggested the project change the license???
I only said it is possible.
As I said, regularly losing mail. Regularly misdelivering mail. A lot of effort to get someone to even acknowledge the problem or even myself.

My mailbox stuffed with junk mail all the time (even if I have permanent sticker telling them not to do so). I've even talked to the USPS delivery person and told her not to do so. Next week, same issue. Rinse, repeat.

I've never, ever, ever had a problem with Fedex or UPS. They've been 100% professional and everytime I had to interact with them either on the phone or in a store, I always got good service. With USPS, this was the rare exception rather than the rule.
Not the author, but...

> Does the author also prefer talking to people who wear face-masks?

Right now, yes, yes I do.

> Do they shun syntax highlighting?

Syntax highlighting performs an actual service, as opposed to being cruft.

> Why take all the fun out of life?

This isn't taking the fun out of life, it's making a tool more useful.

> Why live like a Unix tool, taking in a plain text stream?

See above.
A lot of people have replied to this, but in what way is a brain a neural network trained on old data? That does not make any sense at all.
If you’re a billionaire, it’s likely hard to understand why you’re the problem (as well as an economic system configured that allowed such wealth concentration).
I worked as an attorney for 6 years. The employer I worked the longest for is a major US law firm; you would probably recognize the name. I worked there for four years. Each year I received a high review -- averaged 4.3 out of 5. I had just received a promotion (I wasn't associate/partner track so we worked differently). Then my group started bleeding cash due to an abruptly changing market.

There was no single massive layoff. Instead there was a 6 month period of people slowly fading away. The most bizarre experience of my professional life. Then one Monday, with zero warning, I was brought into a meeting with my supervisor and HR and was told I was being let go. There was an extremely flimsy excuse related to performance; when I asked why it wasn't reflected in my reviews they had no answer.

So from feeling like I had good job stability and support to out of work in about 1 hour flat. I obviously saw the writing on the wall in general but never would have expected me to be one that was asked to leave. My only guess is the promotion made me a target due to higher salary. Luckily I took that as a sign from the universe that it was finally time to attempt the career switch to software dev that I had been planning and working towards for 4 years, and I made it, so for me it was oddly a net positive.

Now I'm not claiming I was some legal superstar. But there were a lot of very good workers that were let go. And the legal job market is brutal. The vast majority of lawyers in this country do not fit your TV view of lawyers. Most of them are your standard 9-5 types working for well under 6 figures with astronomical loan burdens. And good luck telling a lawyer to freelance.

So yes, I agree with you.
If they wanted a better outcome for all then they wouldn't be billionaires, IMO. The fact that they exist is the sign of a problem that they're happy to exploit and automatically warrants suspicion about their motives.
Ex-Google Engineer: Glitch Blocking Websites Could Have Revealed Mysterious List
Does your friend use Links (or lynx/others)? I thought most visually impaired people use a normal browser combined with a screen reader (NVDA or Voiceover).

Of course, designing with accessibility in mind is important, but I would argue supporting Links isn't.
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.

The terrible thing - you CANNOT opt out of the junk mail, at least in the past (hopefully this has changed).

I have no interest in the USPS as a result. What type of business that is supposed to be providing a service FORCES its future and current customers to kill trees for junk mail that will go into the trash.

If the govt didn't allow for spam filters on email, email would be dying too.
It's not so much a government agency as it is a public corporation. In the days when the postal service was founded, large corporations were rare enough that they had to be created and initially funded by the government. Now we have financial markets and concepts that allow for the streamlined creation of large corporations, but it's closer to the modern concept of a utility than anything else.
Sixteen Vital Lessons from 60 Days of Writing Online
Wasn't shareholder AGM virtual this time because of the Covid situation? So it makes sense why it would only be family members present physically, if it was streamed from his ridiculous 20 odd floor residence.
USPS is not subsidized. It has always been required to pay for itself through delivery fees.
There's no incentive for public companies to serve rural areas.
> 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.

Yes, and that makes it even worse. They’re so out of touch with common people and so insulated from routine everyday life, their opinion shouldn’t count for anything.

I don’t care if joe programmer on HN or Jeff the General Contractor at the bar are advocating for dismantling the post office because of libertarian ideology, because they have neither the power nor resources to affect change.

I do care when insanely wealthy billionaires who are completely insulated from the rest of society argue for horseshit like this because they have power to change it, and it’s for ideological reasons.

It’s pure narcissism to argue for a position that would negatively affect millions of people when the one arguing for change wouldn’t suffer one damn bit and in effect disregard everyone else’s suffering for their ideological bullshit position.

The existence of billionaires combined with Citizens United is an actual problem, the post office is not.
I saw this linked reading a different LWN and couldn't resist posting. I'm not sure why I haven't heard this before since imho this rivals "The case of the 500-mile email" [0] and "Car allergic to vanilla ice cream" [1] of crazy bug finds.

Any other famous bug stories I should know?

[0] https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

[1] http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/smann/IceCream/humor.html
They can have all the opinions they want. Ultimately, a handful of billionaires' opinions and lobbying efforts should not be enough to destroy public institutions.
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.

Just to be clear, we don't have any problem with schools or libraries. We just think the model of having governments collect taxes and then pay for those things is broken. In consequentialist terms, it's broken because it removes competition from the equation, and competition generally leads to progressively improving products and services, and/or lower cost goods and services. In deontological terms, it's broken because taxation is theft.
"Democracy in Chains" is irredeemably flawed, and has been completely discredited by a series of prominent reviewers.[1][2] There are many more reviews which reveal the scope of fabrication in this book, but it suffices to say that the work should be considered 'fiction', perhaps in the 'fantasy' category.

[1] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jel.20181502

[2] https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jack_rakove_reviews_dem....

[3] https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/14/15967788/democrac....
A language is both the abstractions that it implements, and the way it implements them. Any problem in the code you write could be solved by changing the compiler as much as it could be solved by changing the code. The two parts of the system are inseparable. I’d say a language can only be as good as its best compiler.
Maybe they're using Windows? That's the only case I can think of.
I live in a rural area. The nearest USPS delivery is at a post office 11 miles away. UPS and FedEx deliver to my front door. It has been the same in two other rural areas I've lived in. New Mexico, California and Arizona. I've never lived in a place that USPS delivered to that UPS and FedEx did not.
Wow, maybe they have some valid reason for that, but from where I'm standing it just seems like an extremely lazy and thoughtless design choice that belongs in a prototype and nowhere else.
In theory yes, they should be allowed for their opinion. However their hold on society is much bigger than the 1 vote they are allowed. With their billions, they can contribute to elect and influence politicians. So while the view to destroy the USPS is well funded, what about the small business or lower income people that rely on USPS as an affordable and needed service (in the middle of a pandemic no less)? Who can they lobby? They just have 1 vote and not billions.

So while in theory I agree with your premise that they are allowed to lobby for whatever they want, the reality is that their influence on society is way overboard and should be limited (limited political contributions!).
> C.B. Richard Ellis (CBRE), the company holding the exclusive contract to negotiate sales for the $85 billion postal real estate portfolio, has sold off 52 postal properties for at least $79 million less than their fair market value. Worse, the buyers included its own business partners and shareholders, including Goldman Sachs. CBRE is chaired by Richard C. Blum, the husband of US Senator Dianne Feinstein, a family Byrne says has a history of accessing public pension funds to make private investments

The more I learn about Feinstein the more unhappy I become.
I feel like the odd man out in discussions like these. I don't like Typescript and I regret pushing to integrate it into a project at work.

I've found it vastly increases incidental complexity and affords little to no benefit to me. The IDE completions are nice, but ultimately not worth the price, in my humble and honest opinion.
It's awful to see such a large reduction in force when MSFT overall is up 30% year to date. I haven't heard of other FAAMG companies making similar moves.
Sure, but with the amount of wealth and power that they have, it goes beyond lobbying. If there were any sense of the other side getting equal bargaining power, maybe people would be less upset.
Something I've taken to doing is a pre-mortem with my team. A few months before launch I say "Let's fast forward and pretend the project failed. Why did it fail."

This usually catches a list of things to make sure you're keeping an eye on.
Where I live, a salaried person will have tax automatically withheld and paid to authorities by their employer each week/fortnight. Someone self-employed usually has an estimate they pay quarterly or monthly, and then adjustments at the end of the financial year if the situation has varied from the estimate. I'm just saying I stockpile between tax bills (holding the cash against my mortgage to minimise interest) and my general style of living/spending means I can just redraw from the mortgage to make tax payments.
Great questions, it will be on our FAQ page
I've never thought of making a youtube channel about it but I have started and stopped a few articles in a series I was planning on creating a song from start to finish with open source tools. I've just never really had the time, or to be honest motivation to sit down and work on it.
> That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize.

Probably because as a chartered non-government company they have a politically appointed Postmaster General who takes their orders from the POTUS. No company is required to fund pensions for 75 years. No company has their prices set by Congress. And no company has been a bigger political football than the USPS.

> it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people.

I believe they have tried in the past, oh what's that, blocked because Postmaster General doesn't want it.
In my several decades of experience sitting at desks writing code and staring at screens, I’ve found desks and chairs fall into two groups: ok and miserable. If I can sit comfortably for a couple of hours I feel productive. I don’t believe a different chair or keyboard setup would give me a 10X improvement, or even 2X. With so many other ways to improve my productivity — including not sitting at a desk for too long — changing my seating position or typing setups falls way down on the list of things I would experiment with.

Anecdotally I’ve worked with a few people who spent a lot of time optimizing their work environment, and even more time telling everyone about it and making unsupported claims about their greatly enhanced productivity. I have not seen any actual evidence to support those claims, just evidence that they had found something to do other than their job, like getting a treadmill desk at work.
The code encapsulated into "__main__" assumed to be module-specific, this is the purpose of that pattern. If you want to make some code available for another module, you just refactor it into separate function.
Yes? I think lots of government agencies that deliver services to paying customers are expected to cover their expenses. It's true that some government activities provide, say, non-excludable public goods using tax money, and so are not expected to collect sufficient revenue through distribution, but other government activities are intended to provide a service that can be valued and efficiently purchased by consumers.

For instance, my family's street recently got a public sewer system (to replace septic systems), and the city charged homeowners one-time and recurring fees to cover the expenses of both installation and operation. If the city could not get the homeowners to pay enough to cover the cost of the sewer system, which was a real risk, the system would have been considered a mistake (and a project with similar economic prospects would likely been avoided in the future).
Shameless plug! https://ellx.io/ is a programmable spreadsheet with extended JavaScript for formulas (plus operator overloading and automatic async resolution)
> USPS is not subsidized. It has always been required to pay for itself through delivery fees.

The USPS was founded in 1792 and became self-funded under the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 almost 200 years later, so, no, it hasn't “always” been required to pay for itself.
It is also hard to understand for the droves of people who wish they could become billionaires
Do you think anyone is listening to what you have to say?

This comes back to voice vs. exit, which was being discussed on HN yesterday.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
And the inevitable HN meltdown. The first thread listed here got over 2000 comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20990583

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120806

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21113414

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103133
Anecdata is not data.
We are seeing that companies with profits don’t necessarily mean that they’re paying their fair share of taxes. Organizations that are able to provide important services, even at a loss, deserve further investment.
UPS, FedEx, DHL, all exist and make money.
Just stop to have more idea ... like multi user ... AI study etc. and touching for awhile. A new branch is developed as a base for my future self to work with. Need to do more serious work for my lovely fallen place. In the mean time, I guess I understand why again those hacker in the 70s doing text game (and also one on cathode tube) using the Internet then. It is all addictive. Have to stop :-)
I don't know, I'm still vaguely optimistic that people will realise that breaking the HTML/HTTP document model is causing more issues than it solves. Although we are going to need to address the issue of rendering dynamic content, since as of now HTML allows no real separation between content and representation. This frequently means that even if the content can be read from an HTTP endpoint then it still can't make it into the page without large blobs of JavaScript, just because the way the data is represented is different from the way it's read.
Also, I'm pretty sure people are talking about the EU here, not Europe.
That's not what he said and is kinda rude to be honest.

What I consider to be said is that they optimize for extendability ( not just one use-case) and that those 2000 lines do a lot of things.

Including replicating optimizations that are are not easy to achieve out of the box in their and other solutions. But they mostly found a way ;)
Funny, my last few phone upgrades were in large part because of that.

I went through 3 replacement batteries on my last phone (a Galaxy S5) over the course of 4-5 years because the OEM ones kept bulging (possibly due in part from heat generated by my aftermarket Qi panel).

I find it terribly annoying being pushed to upgrade my device every couple years.

I bought a brand new S10+ and after a year of use there's a noticeable difference in battery life. It's the model with 1TB Flash storage (yes) so I'm not eager to throw away the investment. I wish I could put in a new battery without need for adhesive peeling, a heat gun and luck.

I agree with the comments about user-hostile design in regard to smartphone batteries.
Ask HN: You have $300k in stocks. What would you do?
Ellen Brown's work in writing about banking history, public banking, municipal banking, and banking reform is really worth looking into for people who are interested in the topic.

Even libertarians and conservatives will I believe find something to agree with here as your city and state tax dollars probably go towards servicing private bank fees which could be eliminated by your city or state chartering their own bank and could be further reduced by them offering traditional "meat and potato" style loans to small main-street style businesses at reasonable rates.

The city making a few honest dollars in an open capitalist marketplace to reduce the citizen's tax burden I think would be welcome by by ideological libertarians, conservatives, liberals, socialists, all the major branches. No coercion, no obligation, just more competition, this time to the benefit of easing your tax burden.
What are you talking about? There is a volume column right in the chart. It shows that for every piece of first class mail there is roughly 1.5 pieces of marketing mail
How do these companies perform compared to the USPS? Just knowing that they're privatized without any mention of customer satisfaction, cost, or other comparative metrics doesn't say much about whether it's a good idea. (I don't believe anyone's main contention is that it's "novel")
Solving Tribonacci Sequence with Python