skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since the OP failed to mention the other reasons: ideological purity and profit motive come to mind.

Edit: I failed to mention that the libertarian groups, at least in the US, are also a consistent reservoir and breeding ground for reactionaries. Another plausible explanation is that a lot of (ultra-wealthy) people have even worse politics, but launder their views through "free minds, free markets."
Agreed, there are no truly free capitalist markets in the US, except maybe black markets.

The USPS is damn good at delivering the mail, I don’t trust any private company to treat a first-class letter with the care the USPS generally does.

The Post Office actually makes money, but they’re legally required to fund a new hire’s entire projected pension at the time of hiring which lets Republicans point at how the post office loses money when it was done that way on purpose.
One of the most memorable passages from Cliff Stoll’s “Silicon Snake Oil” was about the reliability of snail mail. How you could scribble a person’s name on a postcard, mess up a lot of details, and it still manages to get to them.
Why do you think the Royal Mail serves rural areas?
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To do that ideally we need more people.

The US has only a mere 350 million people. China has over a billion EXTRA.

As Rommel is reputed to have said: "God is on the side of the big battalions." There is really no contest between China and the US. China has more men of military age, more STEM graduates, and more manufacturing capacity than the US. In fact China has more of those than all of the West combined. ('West' = 5 eyes plus Europe and Japan)
These are all excellent arguments in favor of keeping the US Postal Service, but insufficient/inadequate arguments in favor of maintaining the USPS's legal monopoly on first class mail.
I don't just "attempt". Links, preferably no graphics (VGA textmode, no X11), has been my main browser for over 20 years.

Recent versions of links should remove the DNS prefetch code.

More menu items should have single key shortcuts. For example, Save formatted document, Flush all caches, Kill all connections and Submit form.

There should be a single key for toggling to html-numbered-links like there is for toggling to displaying images ([IMG] if no graphics).
Full freelance since 2013. I traveled and lived abroad for six years. I wrote some articles about my experience on typicalprogrammer.com.

I make more than many salaried programmers I know, less than quite a few. I work 4 hrs/day, 5 days/wk on average, so by hourly income I do about as well as my friends at Google and Apple.
These people are moved by blind ideology, they operate like religious fanatics. The Kochs simply do not believe that any socially owned service should exist. This kind of people are a danger for everyone. And you must be sure that the USPS is not the last target. Public schools, libraries, everything is in their crosshairs.
> "For over 12 years, Michael Carter perpetrated a brazen scheme that defrauded victim account holders whose investments he was supposed to protect," US Attorney for the District of Maryland Robert Hur said in the release.

...

> "The Advisor's employment was terminated as soon as his activity came to our attention, and we immediately reported the matter to the appropriate law enforcement and regulatory authorities and have been cooperating with their investigations," the spokesperson said.

12 years! Their fraud detection dept is really on its game.

> In the case of one victim, referred to as Victim 1, Carter admitted he had met the woman at her home and "answered Victim 1's phone in order to authorize the transactions, unbeknownst to Victim 1," as a way of overcoming the financial institution's multifactor verification system, the Maryland court said.

How incredibly brazen, and an attack vector I guess M.S. didn't consider. Geez.
It's about 20kloc.

I encounter seemingly nonstop opaque type errors that come usually when I upgrade TS versions. I'll stipulate this was mostly written when we decided to add TS, and I was new to TS when I added it, but I tried really hard.

As an example, it took me a full week to properly add type definitions to a HOC, and I had to rope in a couple other engineers across that time who had more TS experience. Eventually I got it working, but decided to deprecate the HOC cause the file exploded from being about 50loc to well over 250.
Creating migrations when changing an enum in Python using SQLAlchemy
The reason for public involvement in the postal service is to ensure parcel and letter carrying to all. I have many friends in rural Montana who would not have parcel or letter service if a strictly profit oriented company were the only delivery service.

Or the price of delivery would be so exorbitant as to be prohibitive. UPS and FedEx only offer delivery to these locations because they see it as a required feature to remain competitive with USPS.
The common argument is if USPS did not have that monopoly, then other providers would enter only the profitable regions.

The result would be the USPS would not have the revenue to serve the unprofitable regions, and would either be forced to end service in the unprofitable regions or simply collapse.
C needs a main function because all matters of initialization and module dependencies are left to the programmer.

C has no concept of a module A depending on a module B.

If C had top-level executable statements, there would be no defined order to them. Proof: C++ has a way of executing top-level code via file-scope definitions of class objects that have constructors and destructors. The order of these is not defined by the language; it depends on how the object files are linked and such.

Niklaus Wirth's Modula-2 language has syntax for this. Every module has an anonymous block of code that is executed at program initialization time. Modules declare dependencies on each other, which cannot be cyclic. If A uses B, then B's initialization code runs before that of A.

There is a single root module on which nothing else depends, and that module's initialization code runs last. In that initialization code, you can do the application startup; it serves as main.

I think some other languages in this broad family are that way also, like Ada.

Embedded systems written in free-standing dialects of C still choose to start with a function, though not necessarily main. For instance, Linux starts with a function called start_linux. That's not the first code in vmlinux that executes; there is assembly code above that, typically in a module called entry.S which will branch to start_linux.

This is very easy for embedded developers to deal with. There is no special run-time support for special global initialization blocks: it's just a function call named by a symbol that you can use as a branch target in the assembly code.

Even in Lisps, though there is no concept of a main function in dialects like Common Lisp, you have to specify a startup function when you save an executable image. This is because an image is not simply a collection of top-level forms that are to be evaluated, unlike a Lisp source file. It is not obvious what has to be executed when the image is restarted. Without the ability to specify a startup function, a possible choice might be this: that when the image is re-started, the save-image function (whatever it is called in the implementation) will appear to return a second time, perhaps with a value indicating "I'm now returning again due to the image being re-animated".

A compiled C program, at a very basic level, is analogous to a Lisp image.

A Lisp system loads some .fasl files, and then saves an image, specifying a startup function.

Similarly, in a C toolchain, the linker loads .o files and saves an image, recording in that image an entry point where to begin executing.

As a rule of thumb, if it's image-based, then it probably needs a startup function, unless there is an equivalent language feature for handling startup.

That applies to the booting of operating system images also. Consider:

MS-DOS has "autoexec".

Unixes run /sbin/init.

U-Boot has the bootcmd variable.

All of these are like a main startup function.
The Royal Mail will usually deliver a letter anywhere in the country next-day for a 76p. Can't really ask for more than that in my opinion.
Ideological is close; If you are a billionaire, you didn't perform a billion dollars worth of labor; you got that way being the recipient of profits of significant fractions of entire industries based predominantly on other people's labor.

If you make money this way, untapped resources don't necessarily look like untapped oil fields, instead they might look like entire industries that (with friendly legislators) can suddenly be opened up private profit (especially yours), or industries that can be captured into monopolies, or nations whose current economic situation can be exploited in ways that put large amounts of money into your pocket.
At a previous company, for a very complicated web app with some offline caching aspects, we used the latest git commit hash of each build as a public-facing unique version id in the help menu. This made it dead simple to use proper semver versioning internally without needing to correct user expectations about version numbers, while still having easily tracked unique IDs in bug reports.
in the interest of clarity: some marketers also use first class mail so there is some marketing mixed in with the first-class mail numbers.

https://www.mw-direct.com/blog/posts/first-class-mail-vs-sta...
The New Yorker needs editors

More of less
> Are they better than the status quo though? Yes. No question.

The socioeconomic situation in the U.S. is so poor that some of the top things public schools offer their attendees is food, water, shelter, and socialization. The people benefiting from these aspects have 0% of attending private schools. The fact that public schools are struggling with their educational duties is a political one and not one inherent to the service being public.
True, USPS also subsidizes inefficient, environmentally unfriendly living.
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Because you don’t agree with his position. I bet when Bloomberg offers hundreds of millions of dollars to support green energy you suddenly feel great about billionaires working to save the planet.
I found this post a shame. (The post itself, not putting it here; I love seeing math posts on HN, and automatically upvote. Bringing hackers and mathematicians together is highly worthwhile for both.)

Usually Tao's posts are so insightful, and crystallise some idea so perfectly that it feels like I was just on the cusp of discovering it myself—a rare talent, and hard to cultivate since it goes against the ego. In this case, though: I'm a professional mathematician, and as prone as anyone in my discipline to use mathematical language to describe not strictly mathematical things, but the pseudo-mathematisation here ("Notation^{-1}(C)", for example) seems more like wit than clarity. Not that there's anything wrong with wit, but in this case it seems to me that it's at the expense of, rather than a pleasant addition to, the central point.

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?

(EDIT: I was scared about making this post, since there's rightfully a lot of respect and appreciation for Tao—and I hope it's clear that I concur on both counts—and I wasn't sure how my reticence on his post would go over; but I'm super glad I asked. Thanks so much to everyone downthread; these are wonderful responses and I feel that it benefited me a lot to read them.)
The cost of sending a letter to any address in the US is the same. The cost of delivering that letter varies wildly. Think New York City vs. rural Alaska only reachable by plane. If USPS did not have monopoly, they would be severely undercut in profitable areas and would only service hard-to-reach areas where prices would spiral out of control. So if you want to keep the price of a stamp the same nationwide you need to grant a monopoly. It's the same reason regulated utilities own the power lines.
I'm baffled as well, especially given how mediocre their website is (and yes I know they have more than just their website).

Usually with those type of comments someone replies explaining that we don't get it and that you MUST have 20000 people to support a website like LinkedIn
A lot of investors, including Sam Altman, have said that SV isn't the best place anymore. It's not worth it for them to move out, but I doubt they'd do SV now if they had a choice. SV was popular because as Paul Graham said, everyone was optimistic and always smiling, but this really isn't the case anymore.
These people feel the same way about schools. There has been a massive effort underway for many years to privatize schools. It has been most successful in New Orleans, where Katrina provided the "shock" necessary to make it politically feasible to privatize them. Arizona is another test case.

I assume they feel the same way about libraries and every other government service, but not sure if they've made any headway there.
It's an interesting article and worth a read. Here's an outline link from elsewhere in the thread.

https://outline.com/VBSEgq
The same could be said for the never ending and needless military campaigns we're in.
but what about dictators in nuclear armed countries? an whatabout african armies in zimbabwe killing people? whatabout hitler? the existence of hitler was far more harmful than billionairs.
Do you honestly think any private company would offer services like that to EVERY US address for $0.55/per?
Right, and that exposes the reality that the USPS is at best, a state run subsidization scheme for rural mail delivery. But if that's the case, why subsidize it indirectly through selectively inflated prices, which regressively hurt poor people in urban markets)?

Sounds like if the problem is that rural mail is socially important, we ought to subsidize it directly.
Ask HN: What would you need to read in a book about Tech Evangelism?
I've been a technology evangelist for several years, and today the Nth person told me I should write a book about it.

The first question should be: what do people want to see in that book?

So, fellow HNers, if you are a tech evangelist or want to be one, how can a book help you best?
DNA is not a neural network, (and neither is a brain, for that matter). The comment is still decidedly nonsensical.
I think that's just proof that "the next future" of web development is going to be owned by languages like C# (that __already__ allow you to write decent client side web apps) and other already popular not dynamic languages

After C# of course yet another DSLs.
I am a (very) hobbyist web dev, almost always working with vanilla HTML+JS. I seeing a while lot of people here who are saying that Typescript is an absolute must.

As someone who has no clue, and with all do respect, why would TypeScript be worth moving from just hitting save to introducing a build system and dependencies?
It’s not just “they.” Postal privatization is common, and subsidies are closely watched: https://www.oecd.org/daf/competition/sectors/1920548.pdf. The Danish post, for example, is a private company owned by a Swedish company, and subsidies are closely tracked.
The USPS is self supporting from postage. Your taxes aren't funding a "broken" business model. But they are funding a bunch of people trying to interfere with, and force the USPS out of business.
it's not lazy, it's simple! ;)

i don't think its intended as a stable target and will probably change at some point. the top google hit was a 3rd party site, and this issue is still open [#16922 doc: document assembly calling convention](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16922)

btw the source i linked in my original comment links to a proposal to allow passing args in registers
Ask HN: Sales email from anonymous website visitor
Twice in the last week, I've gotten a sales email from a saas startup shortly after visiting their public site. One was a YC company and the link was from here.

Are they perhaps using a service that offers unique emails for anonymous website visitors, from third party cookies?
Yeah, I started to try and skim that, then realised I was not going to do it justice to summarise it!

For example, discussion of 'spiritual income streams' and advowsons, and other obscure topics. I wonder how many people have knowledge in medieval ecclesiastical accounting...
"Inflation, as this term was always used everywhere and especially in this country, means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check. But people today use the term `inflation' to refer to the phenomenon that is an inevitable consequence of inflation, that is the tendency of all prices and wage rates to rise. The result of this deplorable confusion is that there is no term left to signify the cause of this rise in prices and wages. There is no longer any word available to signify the phenomenon that has been, up to now, called inflation. . . . As you cannot talk about something that has no name, you cannot fight it. Those who pretend to fight inflation are in fact only fighting what is the inevitable consequence of inflation, rising prices. Their ventures are doomed to failure because they do not attack the root of the evil. They try to keep prices low while firmly committed to a policy of increasing the quantity of money that must necessarily make them soar. As long as this terminological confusion is not entirely wiped out, there cannot be any question of stopping inflation." - Ludwig von Mises

Your 60% drop claim is rather vapid considering I could pull any other arbitrary time horizon and give you a massive increase in purchasing power.
It's also likely because they are trying to suppress mail-in ballots. These are overwhelmingly used by people who can't get to a polling station because eg it is too far away and they don't own a car - in other words, they are poor.
Which really doesn't seem to have helped the market capture by massive companies...with enough money behind it, it's unlikely the new private post company would be regulated.
Rocket can now compile with stable Rust
Hello! You must be a fellow Googler.

(The program we at Google use just to build our bloated programs is itself 180MB.)
Taxes don't fund the USPS, postage does.
In deontological terms, taxation is not theft, because theft is the unlawful taking of property, and taxation is lawful. To argue otherwise requires a fundamental rejection of the legitimacy of the state, and most people are not going to accept that premise, which is why libertarian rhetoric in practice tends to rely on casuistic arguments about waste-fraud-and-abuse, red tape, and so on.
Citation? The linked article says:

>The agency would be in a much stronger financial position had Congress not passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) in 2006, which “requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056,” on a 50-year basis.

> According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in 2019: “If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years.”

>“[N]o other entity, private or public, has to make” such provision for future health benefits of current and future retirees so far in advance. Private companies also can change their health benefits without an act of Congress, unlike the Postal Service. “Current reserves of $47.5 billion could be used to pay expected pay-as-you-go retiree health care costs 10-15 years into the future,” IPS noted.

>The 2006 law also bars the Postal Service from obtaining other revenue by providing “nonpostal services,” such as offering banking services or opening cafes at post offices. And it also limits the ability of the Postal Service to raise rates beyond the rate of inflation.
Your rhetorical questions are founded on a faulty (and incredibly uncharitable) assumption: that "we should care about putting companies over people."

It isn't- for most, it is about preventing the waste that tends to happen when organizations (be they corporations or government bureaucracies) become complacent and uncompetitive.

Whether corporate raiders or rubber rooms for bad union members, any system can get taken advantage of. That doesn't mean that you should assume the worst from the people you disagree with.
Exactly, capitalists think in terms of opening new markets so why let people have for free something from which they can make a fortune? This way of thinking is like a cancer that grows on society.
I guess this is an unusual request but can you please share your variable costs? Like what does it cost you to make a request? Who do you get the data from and so on. Thank you!
The USPS is entirely self-funded and they're still trying to kill it. Good luck getting appropriations for it.
Does anyone know when AMD will have equivalent support?
Lebanon's Crippling Economic Crisis
> If USPS did not have monopoly, they would be severely undercut in profitable areas

So in essence, residents of "profitable areas" are overpaying for mail to subsidize mail service to those in unprofitable rural areas.

But then the next question is: why go through this roundabout subsidization? Why not just subsidize rural first class mail delivery by the state directly?

This also ignores the fact that the USPS does not have a monopoly on sending packages, and is still able to serve package deliveries to rural areas, aren't they?
It’s not worth spending 55 cents to mail it?
I don't know if this works as proof that languages get poorer (overall). What I do know is that it is not uncommon for meanings to evolve and for new words to appear to (possibly?) cover for lost meanings.

Considering that most languages now are considered to be part of handful root-languages (ie. Indoeuropean) the macrotrend I see is for languages to get more diverse - for many a measurement of richness.
I don't understand what this Whataboutism has to do with the topic at hand.
What you're saying about pension payments is all wrong. They have the same obligation to fund promised benefits as any private company (which is different from government entities), and they haven't been making the payments.[1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
The parent is talking about TrueSkill 2 [0], while the trueskill Python library you linked currently only supports the original TrueSkill algorithm [1][2]. TrueSkill 2 takes into account individual scores of players in order to weigh the contribution of each player to each team. The idea is that this allows TrueSkill 2 to converge faster for new players.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/trueski...

[1] https://github.com/sublee/trueskill/issues/27

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/trueskill-r...
> UPS and FedEx only offer delivery to these locations because they see it as a required feature to remain competitive with USPS.

If it isn't profitable to offer delivery there then they would have no reason to compete for it even now, and if it is then they would do it regardless.

But more to the point, it's possible that in a competitive market there would be different optimal solutions. In a very rural area, rather than sending a mail truck on a fifty mile trek through the wilderness to deliver one parcel, everyone in the area might have a mailbox in the town center and pick up their mail whenever they go into town, because that would be cheaper by enough that people would choose it over the more inefficient/expensive alternative. You can't justify the entire USPS just to avoid that sort of increase in efficiency.