skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So... most of what you wrote is just standard-issue libertarianism and I know how those arguments go. But this part intrigued me:

> And if you don't like that rides cost more in poor neighborhoods then the government could subsidize it explicitly

OK, how does that work? How do you write such a law such that it can't be exploited? Are there any examples of this kind of regulation you can point to from other markets or other legal regimes or nations or whatever?

I mean, this seems crazy to me, but it's also an opportunity to get you to engage on a genuine issue of social justice (c.f. "it shouldn't cost money to be poor"), so I'm willing to make the effort.
Yeah I don't get it. They're complaining about a 2.2bn dollar loss this year, when last year the loss was even greater - and that's with the apparently reduction in mailings this quarter. At the same time the Gov will spend billions on a fighter jet that will likely never see combat, billions on other countless military waste, who knows how much in carting the president around to golf...

I don't think this is entirely about election fraud, it just happens to be an easy target for the people that have already been trying to gut the USPS.

I see it in the same vein as them trying to gut NASA. They both have such small budgets in the grand scheme that it just makes absolutely no sense.
I do, I feel obligated to donate at least $5 per year as this is one of my most visited sites. The internet would not be the same without wiki, and it makes me feel like I am supporting the Internet by those small donations.
I disagree. Every Uber driver, also drives for Lyft and some format of gig on-demand services (like Postmates, Uber eats) during the same hours. If there is a ride from Uber they pick up that ride, if not they switch to Lyft and pick up their rides. I'm yet to see an employer who will be okay with their employee doing it.
To your last point, keep in mind that there is upward pressure on the price of single-family homes from people who want to live in a certain area but don't care about having a yard or a workshop or whatever. when you build a 4-plex on a SFH plot you've gotten rid of 1 SFH but reduced the pressure on the remaining stock by up to 3 buyers.
I hear ya and appreciate you bringing that quote. Sometimes we get so attached to party (people) that we forget about the laws.

I guess I keep getting hit by the "why now" part: is it worth privatizing the USPS now, which seems to save < $10B per year, to jeopardize the legitimacy of the election in a time of such deep uncertainty?
These resonate, especially #1, but I'm not so sure about #5. Although it makes sense to choose good data structures, I don't think that guarantees a simpler algorithm. For example you can store your data in a heap (tree), and still need to write a tree traversal algorithm to print out the elements in order.
> Have we realized this?

It doesn't matter even if people do—techno-capitalist industrial society wants ever-growing efficiency and production, and if it harms humans (like, say, causing wide-spread depression) it will simply invent new mitigations (e.g. anti-depressants) that, natch, result in new products to sell that improve the GDP.

There are no brakes on this train and humans aren't even driving it anyway.
Let’s hope it work out like toysˋrˋus:

https://apnews.com/6d245065b3faaadc70e6eb77e3e5c20f
I'm confused as hell.

I keep hearing that most of the homeless in SF are actually from SF.

As of 2015, approximately 71% of the city's homeless had housing in the city before becoming homeless, while the remaining 29% came from outside of San Francisco. This figure is up from 61% in 2013.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...
The links on that page for the names appear go to github, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, so I think as long as the alumni use some online service that can serve as identity you would be able to post on the website itself. Obviously that is at your prerogative, just wanted to indicate it is not only Facebook.
Predatory Conference
A possible solution would be to charge for support for people who get paid by you, although it probably creates a whole host of other problems too that would be difficult to balance. Also competition so those same people have someone else to go to.
Funny little tidbit: my 1940s townhouse neighborhood has no universal front desk and hands out building keys to USPS for each townhouse. The mailbox is inside, and USPS is legally obligated to access it, so I know if USPS ships a package for me it's next to my apartment door.

UPS and FedEx do not have access. You have to be there when they drop off the package, or they're tossed into this hole (like a literal hole) next to the door, or they do the "we missed you" thing and sticky a note to the outer door and you pick it up in person.

I live a ten-minute drive away from the Pentagon. It's not just remote villages in Alaska that'd be inconvenienced by USPS going away.
> your only expenses being food and a phone bill.

Just hope you don't get sick.

Also, food expenses add up. State food assistance programs are already overloaded (even before COVID), if you're a single dude living as a hermit you go to the back of the line.
> The USPS loses a lot of money. Even ignoring the pension pre-funding issue, it's still cashflow negative.

This is untrue - without its pension pre-funding requirement it turns a modest profit each year[1].

[1] https://www.nonprofitmailers.org/four-usps-myths/
When the post number ends with 3 of the same number. In this case 000. Theres also dubs and quads.
That's the problem. Since I have no idea, I have to attend a meeting at the start of the week to discuss whether I need it or not with the staff because everyone wants the next hot thing. It isn't a coding culture or freedom problem as you put it, but rather a corporate space problem and much more often than not, it just causes unproductivity.
Agricultural subsidies are the clearest form of theft from consumers there is. There is zero chance of monopolies in an unrestrained agricultural, oil, or gas markets.

Your better example is Aerospace, but there is no proven reason we need those colossal companies, and a big part of the merger drive that created them us to monopolize access to government contracts. ULA is a perfect example of that.
We use intercom where I work, it's so expensive and tries to do a bunch of different things but is mediocre at most of them. Congrats and excited to see more.
They are working fewer hours because the administration has forbidden overtime.
Read The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. While it's possible your founder came upon the idea independently, this is one of many that are repeated in that book. It's relatively short and entertaining to read and has definitely survived the 36 years since first publishing quite well.
> Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Is "data structures" the correct term here? Assuming I'm not misinterpreting, the usage of "data structures" can be misleading - one usually thinks of things like BST's and hash tables, which are inherently tied to algorithms. I feel like "data modeling" better captures the intended meaning here.
That's less true when you're paying the cloud for compute by the second.
I imagine Trump's installed someone in charge of the USPS to destabilize it in a hurry in order to erode confidence in the USPS to be able to handle mail-in voting.

Perhaps he'll get the public behind him enough to somehow stop mail-in voting if the next few months the mail system falls apart. Or if not and he loses the election, he'll blame it on the incompetent mail service and demand an election redo or whatever Trumpy things he normally does when he loses.

It seems to me that it's everything to do with the election, nothing to do with improving the USPS.
>we also need to challenge the cultural ethic that teaches us to value ourselves in proportion to our capacity for “economically productive” labour. Human beings are more than just workers. We need to learn how to value idleness.

I think much more than valueing idleness it's also a massive indictement of the system we live in. The number of people who I've talked to who legitimately don't know what to do without work during the pandemic is staggering.

It says a lot that as a society there is so little attention paid to instilling curiousity in people and fostering people's potential that, left without menial work to do, nobody knows what to do with themselves.
what the pandemic is making more obvious is that money is getting stuck in idle and infirm hands. further, money is being injected into the wrong hands in the economy. we need money being injected closer to productive hands (like essential workers) rather than the current centralized system giving it to far-removed capital holders, those who prefer rent-seeking and other non-productive ways of stalling the velocity of the economy for their own benefit.
Which is why I'm vehemently opposed to classing Uber drivers as contractors.
Resaid by Linus with a bit more modern nomeclature (and Linus's trademark bluntness):

> Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships
Don't fly AA then, respirators have a vent.
Err, yes, typo. I meant F and J. Or whatever keys have the locator bumps, if you're using a different style keyboard.
Bertrand Russell may or may not have been right, but he was definitely an elite who felt he knew what was best for the masses, even if he didn't take his own advice.

This is the guy that dedicated portions of his life to proving mathematics was derived from logic, who is arguing it's okay if people just wanna idle around.
Had been wondering about the sudden flood of "you have been selected as a potential nominee to get awarded at a global technology conference" emails...
Nobody is forced to drive for Uber. If they are, presumably they feel Uber’s existence is better than Uber’s nonexistence, otherwise they would be doing something else.

The fact that Uber was their #1 choice means Uber driving was an upgrade for their options.
Not sure about employability, at least here. A few months ago I searched for Rust job postings in Montreal (a decent-sized tech hub), and the only three results were Morgan Stanley accepting Rust as a "C++ or similar" language, and two listings for professional aircraft painters.

Still playing with it for funsies, though.
Thanks for the correction. I think that in Avi Bryant's talk (that I linked to above) Stripe ended up using Abelian groups for some reason, rather than Abelian semigroups, though if so I forget the reason why.
"Have you been to Xinjiang yourself? You know, Xinjiang is regarded as the most beautiful place in (China)"
- quote from the China Ambassador to UK when asked why Uyghur Muslims were hooded and loaded onto trains.

An average American has no reason to hate on China, but it doesn't mean we can't stand up for the ethnic groups that are being oppressed within China's borders. The congressional testimonies by the Uyghurs refugees is truly terrifying.

Doing business with China literally means you are in support of their government's actions. T-shirts, medical masks, a regular bottle of ketchup, its all made from slave labor in Xinjiang.
Absolutely. It's one of the small corners of the web that brings positive value to the world ad-free. It's brought significant value to my life. I'd like to see it continue, so I have a monthly donation towards it.
Use HN: Easy Pagespeed Monitoring for All Pages (2020)
For a small site, Amazon Associates is probably the most reliable and non-shady opportunity besides Google. If the site get's a few million pageviews a month, options improve.
Best virtual team building activities and games for remote teams
The USPS would be profitable if it didn't have to pre-fund its pension obligations by an 75 years - an obligation no other government regulated entity must abide by.

https://www.nonprofitmailers.org/four-usps-myths/
According to their last quarterly only parcel volume is up, the rest is down - so it kinda evens out. There was a few weeks at the start when everyone was panic buying every puzzle they could on ebay that the post office felt like the week before Christmas though.

https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/0807-...
> Hoping to see the details on how they did things.

Me, too. You can get some inferences based on what others in the field are saying about the paper, although I have no idea how well-representative these folks are, either.

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-...

The strongest criticism centers around how well the data sets cover the US biosphere. For example, "Crossley’s datasets include aphids on farmland in the Midwest (40% of all the time series), and samples in urban habitats in Phoenix, Arizona (24% of all time series)." So it seems that which the abstract giveth, the article body taketh away.
The one on the website if I recall correctly was mostly designed in house. Gonna double check that with the designer. The blog post image was taken from https://icons8.com/illustrations (free).
There are actually a lot of free illustration libraries nowadays. One of my favorite is https://undraw.co/
Can you tell me what you have in mind about where others left off, because I'd be interested in reading about freedom.
You can hire your own cleaning staff obviously (how very 1980's) but it's going to be extrenmely difficult and expensive to be self sufficient on everything from water, garbage pickup, electricity and so on.
It wasn't that long ago (10 or 15 years?) that Intel seemed to have an insurmountable lead on process upgrades.

Anybody can fall behind if they get complacent or have some bad luck.
dang if this sticks to the frontpage, can you change the title to "Rob Pike's 5 rules of programming in C"? As the title is now it misrepresents Rob Pikes words.
Ok, so define "play" because I've "played" this game a lot, by my definition.

I make no claim that it's done, mind you. Only that it is playable, and that it is a game.
Really cool design choices here. I love how simple and responsive it is.

Can see myself using this quite a bit for work.

Are there plans to add more types of cards? Html embed might be quite cool.

It would also be nice to be able to give the connections an angle so they can go around different blocks
I had these same concerns, so I bought a SFH. Going from always having rented, I wanted to try out full ownership.

I'm happy with it, but I've realized that all of those things come with downsides as well. Maintaining a yard is rewarding (assuming you like caring for plants and stuff), but also a hassle and a fair amount of work. Similar with all the other items. Of course you can pay people to do more of it, but it's not like that has zero cost, either.

As far as the workshop, I have a friend who does a ton of woodworking out of the garage of his townhouse. It does feel a little bit like luck of the draw with HOA, though.

Generally, I think we talk a lot about the benefits of SFH, but not enough about their downsides, or about the upsides of shared housing. When I lived in an apartment before, tons of things were taken care of for me that I now have to worry about. For now, that is a burden I am interested in taking on, but I think as a society we should stop acting like that should be the default, and all other options are inferior compromises.
Washing up liquid. (Would you care for a cup of tea, love?)
Cloudkeeper: Housekeeping for Clouds
The many sides of Microsoft’s new two-screen Surface Duo phone
Talking about the recent postal service changes while avoiding the political implications is intellectually dishonest, even if the intentions are good. Some topics simply cannot be discussed while adhering to the Hacker News guidelines.
The USPS doesn't depend on any government funding. Nearly all of its revenue comes from postage. Why is it so important for it to be private if it's not costing taxpayer money?
Yeah I can unfortunately see that. Given such a country scale strategic imperative throwing a couple million at people is basically a rounding error. I bet China wouldn't even flinch at an extra zero on top of the 2-2.5x salary offers if that's what it took.
NeuralCam Live uses ML to turn iPhones into ‘smart’ computer webcams
I am not a touch typist, far from it, but I have been typing for so long that I too couldn't tell you how much I look at the keyboard. For awhile I almost convinced myself that I had somehow stopped looking down because I never seemed to notice it. But I definitely still look at every key I type.
We're just regressing back to black people not being able to get a taxi.
Amazing timing! I was just auditing a colleague's (admittedly fairly well-written) shell script for this purpose. Nice to have this alternative.
Happy Cacky Handed Day Molly Dookers
When we doubled the size of our household, we quadrupled the volume of dishes and laundry.
You can distribute the computation on just a monoid as well but it needs more bookkeeping. In particular, your reduce function should know

* lhs is before rhs

* There is no data between lhs and rhs
ccp propaganda. Facts are Tesla was the first company allowed fully private ownership of ip in china. No other company has had that before.
He will eventually die, like Brezhnev. Accountable for their crimes? Hardly. What is more likely is Russia installing a vassal head of state or even organising a referendum a'la Crimea after Belarus is occupied by little green men w/o insignia. This has been in their playbook since 1946.
A.I.D.A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4PE2hSqVnk
You forgot the tens of millions killed deliberately by the USSR itself, fir one example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Every first world country went from a backwards agricultural society to a far more advanced one during that century. Look up the dust bowl or even better the state of US agriculture during the early 20s.

Without central planning, the people’s of the Soviet republics would not just have been free, they would have grown wealthier
I don't think they meant to imply "only", just inserting a particular personal want. Insert your own favorite noise-making activity, like how I wish my living situation let me have a drum set.
While I do think TechDirt is rather scummy as a self-proclaimed rumor-monger site (one step away from clickbait), Google is an actual problem actor. This is not the first company to suffer their cruel indifference and nonsensical automated moderation. grits teeth I hope this story reaches more eyeballs.
Inverses don't show up as much as I'd (aesthetically?) like in computing. There was an interesting application here: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/9x684a/edward_kmet...
How does one ever start a business after such a ban? Does this require a co-founder who runs the marketing?
Develop Uno Platform Projects on Linux with Visual Studio
I don't understand. 1:1 means two people. What's wrong with using "group chat" with a group of two people?

I don't think even XMPP focused on 1:1 and even Slack uses XMPP (or at least used XMPP in the earlier versions, as it started out as an internal communications solution built as IRC + storing messages in database + search + ...)

Also, https://meet.jit.si , https://jitsi.org They also use XMPP.
Instagram Accused of Illegally Harvesting Biometric Data
Thanks for sharing this!
I just donated a week ago after receiving yet another email that made it sound like they're barely making ends meet.
Now I feel cheated.
But you could have refused the customer in the first place. Nobody forced you to make a contract with him. Of course, once you did, you are compelled to keep up your end of the bargain, and that probably included you doing those jira tasks (you could have probably refused to do entirely different work, like walking the dog of the manager, when you were originally contracted for doing IT development work).

A true contractor in the rideshare space would have an individual contract with each rider, and could of course reject riders based on the terms of the contract (of which the target location is one). However, once a customer is accepted based on the agreed-upon terms (fare, target, number of passengers etc.) he wouldn't be able to throw the passenger out in the middle of the ride for no good reason.

If you now want to say that a rideshare contractor should not be able to reject a customer based upon the terms of the ride, I ask you: why shouldn't he? With whom does he have a contract that binds him? And you say: with Uber. And I say: yeah, and that's why your analogy is fundamentally flawed, why he isn't an individual contractor for each customer but simply an employee of Uber, with whom he has a contract that mandates him to accept all customers that Uber deems acceptable. Exactly like a plumber working at a plumbing company who also has to do plumbing work at any customer his boss sends him to, while his individually contracting plumber colleague can decide to decline or accept customers at his own discretion.
Considering the average TSMC engineer makes 50k-60k, a 100k increase would probably be taken quite well.

Taiwan has such a big surplus of engineers and physicist that they don't really make much. Unless you are part of the club that knows TSMC special sauce in which you will be ridiculously well paid even by American standards, but that's not a large group.
> I think that fear is a useful mental state

How much time have you spent in actual _fear_, as opposed to merely having very clear goals?
> I guess what confuses me is that, even assuming good intentions by the new Postmaster General, why and why now?

Because Congress hasn’t approved postage increases, so the post office doesn’t have the money it would take to provide the service Congress wants it to. At the same time, Congress hasn’t approved closing offices, so the post office can’t scale back to provide the service it can actually afford.

> I believe the main stated reason has been that the USPS loses money and they want to make it break even or profitable. Assuming that's the reason (and not election interference), why should such an infrastructure be breakeven or profitable?

It’s not the postmaster general’s decision. Congress set up the requirement that the post office be self funded when it limited how much it will subsidize the post office.

I can imagine a world where the post office is self funded, and I can imagine a world where the post office is heavily subsidized. I don’t think the world we live in — where the post office has to be self funded while literally requiring an act of Congress to raise prices or close offices — can actually work.
Unaccountable monopoly
The "hire fewer people" can often be restated as "have fewer projects". One real problem with raising too much money early can be making it too easy to say yes to ideas. That, coupled with a focus on time-to-market that overbalances validation can yield you a lot of half finished products that were never likely to work.
> I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists).

Off topic, but why is whitelist acceptable but not blacklist?
Well, if I were in the executive branch and saw it as my priority, prerogative, and last chance to privatize the post office, I would probably do the same.

In some ways, this is comparable to the situation with DACA, in that it was important to the party in control of the executive branch, they didn't have the ability to pass legislation, and they thought it had to get done urgently.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...
I get your point, but because we're in a lockdown, a whole host of things that we'd normally have available to us are gone. Normally when people have time off, they can still meet up with friends, or hang out at the coffee shop, or go to a meetup or a conference. Now we're idle at home without much-needed social connections to grease the daily wheels.