skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
USPS pension funding gets brought up quite a bit as some kind of a conspiracy, but that doesn't appear to be accurate.

The issue for the postal service is that the law was changed so that the USPS would start funding their retirement health care costs since they are promised to the workers and the projected costs had exploded. This was supported by a bipartisan commission, the GAO, and the Postal Service itself:

>...Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.

>Prior to 2006, the Service simply paid retirees’ health benefit premiums when they came due. The Service put aside no money when it promised the future benefits. Paying benefits when they come due rather than funding them in advance is known as the pay-as-you-go or unfunded approach.

>Early this century, Congress, the Administration, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), and a bipartisan presidential commission expressed concern about the lack of funding. Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.

>In 2002-2003, it was discovered that the Service was contributing far more than necessary to fully fund its pensions, and Congress allowed the Service to contribute less. Congress decided the pension “savings” could help patch the retiree health benefit underfunding. In 2006, as part of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), the Postal Service Retirement Health Benefits Fund (RHBF) was established. Most of the Service’s contributions to the new fund could be paid using the pension “savings.” PAEA was bipartisan legislation with broad support.

https://taxfoundation.org/postal-service-reform-postal-servi...

>...If they didn't have to prepay pensions (something no other government agency, or private company in the world is required to do, or does), they'd be in great shape.

In relation to this, the USPS has posted this as part of a fact sheet:

>...More recently, the USPS Fairness Act was passed by the House. It would eliminate the requirement to prefund
retiree health benefits and forgive our current defaulted prefunding payments. However, ultimate passage of the bill will not reduce our underlying retiree health benefits liability, nor improve our cash flow or long-term financial position.

https://about.usps.com/news/delivers-facts/usps-delivers-the...
I expect there would also be the effect of every time you need something from him, it was the first time, so he had to wing it or think on his feet.

With 4 people, you've got a good chance that you're at least the second person to ask the question.

In a situation where he's harping on you for something, it would be hard to tell if this is just how he is, or he's specifically picking on you. If everyone is getting the same grief, then it's just how he is, not how he is with you.

Additionally, how many times do you want to give the same speech? Either you give up on something, or you gather everyone and address it at once (at which point you are not necessarily the target).
Ah The Onion!

https://www.theonion.com/facebook-cracking-down-on-misinform...

"Facebook Cracking Down On Misinformation By Warning Users Who Share Links From Facebook"

https://www.theonion.com/mark-zuckerberg-argues-high-taxes-o...

"Mark Zuckerberg Argues High Taxes On Wealthy Could Stifle Innovation In Human Suffering"

:)
And the renaissance man has tons of structure encoded in his brain on birth already. Just like GPT-3 does before you give it a prompt. I'm not saying this is fully equivalent (clearly a baby can't spout correct Latex just by seeing three samples), but you simply cannot just handwave away thousands of years of human evolution and millions of years of general evolution before that.

The renaissance man is very obviously not working solely based on a few years of reading books (or learning to speak/write).
You’ve clearly spent a good deal of your time creating this. Bravo. What steps can I take to find more time to dig in projects of my own? Assuming this is not what you make a living out of.
> "... we would be required to turn over predominantly irrelevant documents ... such as ... personal financial documents, and private information about family members of employees,”

Sounds like the kind of documents useful for investigating (at least) fraud, kickbacks, and hiding assets.

So, EU antitrust regulator seems to be doing it's job (thus far).
Also there's this app called MagicPrefs that allows you to bind things to gestures, including rebinding the system ones. I use it to bind three-finger click as middle click and at this point I can't fathom not having it. It supports all kinds of Apple trackpads and the magic mouse. This implies that all touch gestures, regardless of the shape of the device, share most of the underlying code.
The metros in Lausanne, Switzerland and in Copenhagen, Denmark are automated.
Don't forget Colgan Air Flight 3407 where the pilot was either too sleepy, or simply didn't know what he was doing.
This is the part that troubles me about this:

> “The exceptionally broad nature of the Commission’s requests means we would be required to turn over predominantly irrelevant documents that have nothing to do with the Commission’s investigations, including highly sensitive personal information such as employees’ medical information, personal financial documents, and private information about family members of employees,” Facebook associate general counsel Tim Lamb said in a statement.

Why does FB even have employee medical information and personal financial records? I can sort of understand how they might inadvertently end up with small snippets of medical information via their HR process (e.g. Sally Software Engineer submits a request for maternity leave), but, other than possibly account numbers for stock accounts and deposit accounts, I'm scratching my head as to what they even mean by "medical information" and "personal financial documents."
Is it common practice to have the servers running your production (not in the manufacturing sense) cloud services join the AD domain that has your office staff in it? Why? That doesn't even make any sense from a convenience PoV.

It just seems like an unfathomable level of incompetence required to go from compromising some random Windows workstation all across the hardware that runs your app services. And lest we forget: a ransomware attack is always also a massive data loss attack. Garmin better get to work complying with the law and notifying impacted customers (all of them?).
Sure, but I don't think it's a stretch to say it could have gone a route that left it significantly more modern and with much more of what we would consider western values, as portions of the country were already like that as recently as 50 years ago.

I think any narrative along the lines of "Afghanistan is traditional and tribal and you can't change that" which doesn't address that at all is at best poorly communicated, but more likely working from poor assumptions.
We have the London DLR
Would you store the personal data in "the cloud" (i.e., remotely accessible shared computer)
I'm past the point of caring when pandemic denialists come regret their mistakes, but I am intensely curious about why people come to be a denialist in the first place.

People were in denial during the Wuhan lockdown because China so different from West to start with. But once it hit Italy, there was no logical reason to deny the existence of the pandemic. Understanding how so many people came to believe something so obviously wrong could have some major implications.
Presentation tips for a better product demo
Embedded is generally quite serious about this.

It's not even whether you comply, the issue is that if your company is getting bought you do NOT want the deal to get hung up over software licenses.
Oh come on. That’s a ridiculous equivalency. Buskers aren’t constantly moving through residential neighborhoods at speed, disturbing hundreds in their homes.

I’d be annoyed by a one man band with knee cymbals and a bass drum pacing up and down my cul-de-sac too.
I'm sure getting vetted to be a vendor for DoD/Government projects is super easy.
He's doing the standard "change your mind every couple semesters" thing that most 20 year olds seem to do. Just a few months ago I was teaching him programming, now he's decided becoming a pilot is the thing to do.
Does anyone think that if we go to ground-control backup pilots, they'll be monitoring second-by-second as if they're actually flying, and able to save a situation like US 1549? Or even other less dramatic urgent situations? At that point, why not keep them in the plane?

If you go to ground control monitoring -- the only point of it being that pilots could monitor multiple flights -- you are saying that the pilots are there to fix longer term issues (like flight planning, diversions), etc. Things that don't happen on a few second's timescale.

That might be acceptable on freight/cargo where losing a plane now and then is a risk you can deal with. Not with passengers.

I don't think anyone is willing to go that far.
I wonder what this means in terms of security of the system? Planes are essentially missiles and allowing them to be accessible via a network could open the door to some pretty dangerous outcomes.
An Honest Pre-Flight Safety Demonstration
Can confirm, a team I used to work on in Microsoft pays $$ to use CKEditor in their product.
I found another HN user in Dublin - so it works I guess
They were in the EU until 2018, when two-wheel vehicles that didn't comply to the EURO 4 emissions standard were phased out.

There are still many 2017 and earlier units on the roads, but give it a few years and they'll be gone as well.
In London several of the tube lines are automated. There is a driver but all they do is press a button to close the doors at stations and make announcements to passengers "for safety purposes" (i.e. unions)
This can be so confusing for non-tech literate people too. My mother asked me to help her, saying she was hacked because there was porn in her Google Drive.

It can be really difficult for non-power users to even understand why this is happening or what to do to fix this.
> This is really revealing underlying disparities in childcare access and the inequities in our education system.

COVID tragically exaberates inequities in basically all systems.

If you compare it to WWII or WWI, those wars were obviously awful, but they had a sort of equalizing effect economically. When you drop bombs on cities and factories, the rich — who own all of that physical infrastructure — get harmed more than the poor. Physical wars destroy capital, so they tend to reduce economic inequality.

But this pandemic is the exact opposite. It leaves every physical object untouched and only harms people. And, as has always been the case, it is the poor who always end up in harm's way. So this pandemic is making the poor drastically poorer while leaving the well to-do mostly alone.

It is horrible and profoundly unfair. This is exactly the time where you need a big government that is not afraid to do wealth redistribution to even some of this tragedy out. But, instead, here in the US we have Trump and the kleptocracy who are only interested in redistributing wealth into their own pockets.

If we don't get a better government in 2020, the US is going to be in very dire straits. We need an FDR right now, and not to re-elect Hoover.
It's relatively easy to get the stats of fatal accidents that did happen, but how difficult is it to get the stats of accidents prevented by human pilots? Both are relevant to evaluating the impact of a 100% AI pilot.

I'm assuming the FAA in the United States has lots of records of incidents but I also suspect there could be many unreported incidents too. Companies can strong arm pilots into reporting internally or pilots may decide an incident was not worth reporting due to a potential impact on their career.

Does anyone know if there are regulations that require FAA reporting under specific conditions? What conditions qualify? How is this verified?
"We just should to stop tolerating conventional things using Internet connection."

Given IoT and 5G how can you stop this?
But the example in the article is clearly unethical based on the client's requirements alone - it doesn't take an ethicist to see that.

In fact, a world where companies are so very ethical it takes a professional ethicist to spot unethical practices sounds nearly like a utopia.
The mods on the support forums who make it sound like basic functionality missing from their product is your own fault for not submitting some kind of ticket deserve the gaslighting prize of the year for each of the last 5 years.

They don't even have an option to show you how much space folders take up, when they charge you based on space usage.

https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en
Probably? I mean, look what the world achieved after it left roman numerals behind.

Yet the Romans were able to construct aqueducts that are still standing, and a road network spanning thousands of miles, and many other great feats of civil engineering.
What are the main difficulties around an open system vs a closed one? To my novice eye they look like they should be fairly comparable.
You’re not wrong, but perhaps missing that canceling is not a one time thing. The mob sees to cancel Louis C. K. for good. That’s not cancel culture anymore, that’s mob justice.
Egyptian fractions have an interesting property that may have been useful back then.

Consider the problem "How do you divide five things for eight people?"

Simple - cut everything into 1/8 and give each person five.

But Egyptian fractions give an even easier way. 5/8ths is 1/2 + 1/8. Divide four wholes into halves - give each person a one half. Take the unit and divide it into eights and give each person one. The answer to this problem is the way you write the number itself. This makes division of the items easier and simpler.
You might also be able to say that if your boss has one report, then their boss is fucking up, and shit rolls downhill. Some large fraction of 'one report' situations are already going to be a dumpster fire by the time the boss and report have introduced themselves to each other.
(2019) New Technologies Could Make Interstellar Travel Real
> Of course, if Oracle v. Google holds as case law (which we'll find out any month now)

The case won't be heard until Oct 7, and I would think a decision unlikely before January.
> Schooling children at home on a lower income is possible, and I've known people who have made it work successfully (pre-COVID).

Very often these are people who are highly educated themselves, having college degrees or are self-taught and whose work is intellectual or creative/technical in its nature. It's not a solution for people or communities who don't have those built-in advantages.

You can't expect low paid essential workers (grocery store clerks, janitors, etc) - people who have no higher education and even limited primary education but on whose labor we are all heavily dependent - to form home-school "pods" that provide anything like what their children had access to in their school. Doing so would be (and by all accounts currently is) exacerbating the inequities already present.

The public school teacher to a less educationally resourced community is much like rural schoolhouse teacher of the past was to theirs. Those teachers were often the only person in the community with any higher education at all. The parents within rural community weren't resourced to teach their children the basic skills needed to operate in an ever more sophisticated world, which is why they often imported a schoolteacher from a nearby city or town.

That said, even a lot of parents with higher education struggle to help their kids with subjects that they haven't considered since their own primary schooling, like algebra or critical reading and writing.
Why would American companies hire older European developers when we aren't even certain that American companies have any appetite for older American developers?
> the elephant in the room that they may have to share software they don't want to

This is certainly not a controversial topic for anyone working in a software company. There are always pieces of software that a commercial entity is not willing to share freely with the whole world.
Are there any real cost-savings to pilotless planes though? You’d still have a cabin-crew, too.
>Did the clumsiness of doing calculations in Roman numerals keep them from developing more complex systems of numerical calculation?

The book Mathematics for the Million[0] suggests a number of limitations were created from the roman numeral system, largely due to the difficulty of division, making infinite series and even large (and extremely small) numbers difficult to work with, intuit and even see outright. As a specific example, it suggests the Achilles and the tortoise paradox[1] is trivially intuited and resolved in the decimal system, whereas no relationship between each division is made clear in the roman numerals

[0] https://archive.org/details/HogbenMathematicsForTheMillion/p...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_an...
Did you tell him? Lots of good music from De bussy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Debussy
Two different bosses weighed in on this:

1) You haven't proven you can do something until you've done it a second time.

2) Anything worth doing is worth 2 people doing.
I don't understand this. 999 is less than 3^7, so you can represent any number up to 999 with just seven base-3 digits. Where does the 19 come from?
Once you have the file system, and a scheduler, don’t you have a basic rudimentary operating system?

How soon until someone builds an Operating System developed in Rust? Maybe make it microkernel-based this time.
I've always been amazed at the trams in Vegas between the casinos that are I think remotely semi-automated (at least one of them, I've seen an operator in a booth at one terminus, in the Excalibur). Some of them are even elevated! I think the Las Vegas monorail is also automated.
As other comments mention protracted WFH reveals and expands many inequities;

- A good chunk of the FAANG workers are young immigrants, which means they cannot move back to their parents’. Whereas most of their American counterparts can do this if they choose to and enjoy multiple benefits from rent savings to moral support of having a community.

- A good majority of the workers are single young adults. Multiyear shutdowns including the office space will make couplings suffer. It is already harder for immigrants to find partners (e.g. large intercultural gaps) but this not only amplifies the current isolation but also delays people’s life goals significantly.

- A good portion of the workforce don’t have enough savings for a downpayment and usually live in HCOL locations, which means they are renting smallish apartments. When the primary locale is home, it makes a huge difference what that home is like. Be it sufficient noise isolation from neighbors, to having space for exercise / hobbies (even more important where gyms and other entertainment venues are closed), a dedicated office, a yard to get some sunshine and fresh air.

I forsee mental health of these demographics taking an extra hit that will ripple for the next several years, even decades.
The US has the 'Hague Invasion Act' if any US person is detained at the Hague so not sure if international law is a problem.
I haven't really kept up to date in this area so would love to hear some experts weigh in here: Do search engines (or really just Google) still penalize sites that are pure SPAs on that fact alone?

Or does it have more do do with properties generally associated with SPAs like large bundle sizes or slow time to first interaction?

I'm mainly wondering if you can build a SEO-friendly SPA marketing page today using techniques like dynamic imports and code splitting to lazy load just the scripts and content needed for the initial render instead of going all the way to static generation or server side rendering.
Perhaps one of the most well-known such gems is Milnor's "Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint".

https://math.uchicago.edu/~may/REU2017/MilnorDiff.pdf
SerpApi vs. Zenserp vs. Serpstack vs. SerpWow vs. ScaleSerp Benchmarks
GPS smart watches are probably their most successful consumer product currently. If you glance at their website you might think that's all that they do.
There are other people talking about autoland, but it's actually meant to line the aircraft up with the runway and gently glide it down, and then the pilot deactivates it around 200-300ft off the ground to flare. It's not meant to perform the entire landing sequence autonomously. Autoland doesn't flare by itself, so while it can safely land the aircraft, it will cause a ton of stress on the landing gear that adds up to more frequent downtime for repairs.
(sport pilot here) Can you explain what are you thinking about? I had a few cases of unexpected problems while flying, simulators in my case would not help at all, but it may be different for large planes with huge inertia vs my larger-than-a-kite extremely sensible 2-seater.
> but its meaning and origin go back further than that

master/slave goes back to Mesopotamia, 4 thousands years ago and was used to describe the relationship between men and gods

> Man was believed to have been created to serve the gods, or perhaps wait on them: the god is lord or master (belu) and man is servant or slave (ardu)

I guess being that old is not good enough nowadays
It's actually somewhat surprising to me that the Romans didn't invent the concept of zero, when they used the abacus for daily calculations. With the benefit of 20:20 hindsight you'd think that the concept of zero would follow quite naturally from the concept of an empty column on the abacus.
Hey, there's an interesting tool to help you interact with your kids outside zoom. It's called vlokit (https://vlokit.com). It's video chat for your classroom. You can share lessons, homework, questions on it. It can be video audio or screenshare. Your kids reply back within the same thread.

You don't need to get your class to come online at the same time. You can interact asynchronously. Your kids can take their own time to learn.

It's easy for them to ask questions as well, without the pressure of doing it in a limited time frame.

Just so you know, I am one of the people working on it.
Just forward everything to Stripe