skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The VA sends medicine to millions of veterans through the mail. They’re not CVS. Your point is invalid.
The Republicans can fix this anytime they want. They control the Senate.
I agree there is room for private businesses to operate under the umbrella of regulation.

However, the USPS is designed to operate in circumstances where huge losses are inevitable (like shipping to remote towns always at a loss). We already have for profit shipping companies so I see no problem with the USPS, and actually applaud my tax dollars going towards giving every American access to mail.
USA infrastructure has been suffering for the last 20 years.

Now infrastructure has been politicized.

What is next, closing interstates?
He wants to make it harder to vote by mail to prevent fraud, not to create it. You know, elections sometimes come down to a few hundred votes. You think the USPS should control the outcome of an election based on how many parcels they misplace? Or how many dead people vote? Or how many non-citizens vote? Or whether a box of ballots in a republican heavy or Democrat heavy area is left behind? It would be trivial to fuck with this system. The last election it was difficult to convince people that Russian bots were not a factor in the election. People were convinced that $100K in social media ad spend were enough to shift an election. Now all of a sudden mail in paper ballots are a bulletproof way to run a democracy.
Why do these budding political discussions always get the race card pulled up?
If deepfakes are so good, why do they always look and sound so crap?
I posted a related article a few days ago https://news.mongabay.com/2020/08/mauritius-grapples-with-wo...
> Many Republicans are speaking up alongside their usual opponents, because they know very well that when Trump is done with the Democrats, he'll come for them.

All it takes is two Senate republicans to take Majority control away from McConnell and to this day, not a single one has faltered in their support of the Senior Senator from Kentucky.

Where are all the Republicans speaking up alongside their opponents where it matters most? Cause it sure ain't in the Senate.
> "Everything needs to make a profit"

I finally started watching Star Trek because I kept seeing “Ferengi” mentioned in this context. I’m only a few episodes into Next Generation but so far the analogy definitely holds up.

Interestingly, in one of the episodes the Ferengi leader prioritizes his own personal gain (in the form
of revenge) over profit and his fellow Ferengi are so disgusted by the behavior that he’s overthrown.
People often seem surprised when I tell them I sleep withy phone on silent and / or in flight mode.

I believe I can even set some numbers to ring through silent, haven't tried it though.

Sleep is precious.
I actually meant AA similar to the American one, for the school admissions. I don't believe the US has reached the USSR level of D&I to set quotas of minority representatives in governments of various levels (yet). And sorry, there is no source for this - even Yale does not publish their minority quotas or even admits they exist, what do you expect from the USSR Ministry of Education?
Paper mail? Voting? Seriously you think that isn't providing value?
yes 1 trillion market cap coming soon
Outlook online / Teams / Azure seem OK in France.
That's highly debated. My state has voted by mail for at least a decade and I'm not aware of any problems.
Two cars in a row on the line are not identical. Options and finish and engine and suspension and extra and milage and maintenance history and colour and metallic or plain.. the idea a car purchase is cookie cutter is probably as flawed as the idea all ThinkPad are the same.
Or how much transit funding comes from ticket sales vs. government budgets.
I have no idea who’s less wrong, Google or Epic, but I’m not sure I like your idea.

Smartphones and PDAs existed for couple decades now, I’ve got a first PDA in 2000 or so. For many years before iPhone they were very niche products

I’m not sure we had the explosion in popularity (followed by technical improvements of both hardware and software) had it not be the financial incentive from paid content, initially music, apps followed a year later. Hardware design, software development, and marketing are all very expensive, someone had to pay for them or the smartphones would stay being niche products for geeks and corporations.

If what you wrote in the comment would become a law, this would remove motivation to do investments like that.

Would be especially bad for game consoles. The hardware is often sold below the costs in the start of each lifecycle, then technical progress catches up bringing costs down, and vendors are getting their profits. Stores help as well. The strategy ain’t gonna work if the app.store is not linked to the hardware, as soon as the HW costs are down other people would offer compatible hardware for less money. Hardware compatibility within generation is another hard problem to solve.

About Linux, when Torvalds made it, PCs were expensive tools for business and engineers. If you’re a businessperson or engineer, you have access to comparable tools with smartphone hardware. Search the web for “qualcomm snapdragon single board computer” and you’ll find many. There’re even affordable options now, I have 2 single-board computers on my desk next to a bunch of other hardware, both were under $100.
While it looks like collusion, collusion is fiendishly difficult to prove and prosecute, much less disrupt. I think you're right...unless there's a substantive change in the market landscape, nothing will change.
No, it's manufactured by TSMC (Taiwan)
Gaze redirection looks bad partly because head orientation ends up decoupling from eye direction.

With a depth camera you can move the camera's entire vantage point as if it were behind the right area on screen. Hat's probably a better approach, along with AI filling in the disocclusions (more cameras can also do this).
Depends. Is Trump for or against that?
I left Windows Phone several years ago due to lack of apps. Recently I found the old phone in my home and played with it a bit. WP UI was awesome, I miss it. It was so clean, so easy to use, so beautiful. But the lack of apps really killed it.
Paper mail and mail-in ballots could easily be handled by any of the other deliver companies that operate in the United States. We are talking about moving paper documents from one place to another. Why is it that UPS and FedEx make a profit doing that, while the USPS cannot?
Every person quoting Trump wanting you hamstring USPS to make it harder to vote by mail is getting downvoted.
But only for roughly 1/2 of people. For the other half, voting in person would disenfranchise some demographics.
Fuck Trump
We're already past that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal
So, you're saying you don't think it's possible that the substantial sums of money that had been forcibly funneled away from them couldn't have been spent over the past 10 years to improve their operations and change the prognosis of your simple arithmetic?
Yes, I am saying that the costs for delivery would become unsustainable for many companies if we had to rely on UPS and FedEx alone.

Also, yes, USPS is uniquely capable to democratize shipments and last mile delivery to these underserved areas. eCom is still early (~15% of all retail). As it reaches 30 and 40, this will become more relevant. That's all I'm saying.

Thanks for listening.
Not true. It was a passed by a unanimous bipartisan vote, and cosponsores bipartisan.
I don’t think it has to do with the current epidemic.
Temporarily moved from Seattle to Camano Island, abt 60 miles N of Seattle. Telecommute from my office with a picnic table and a wrought iron chair under a soccer shelter served by an indoor access point sheltered under a green plastic bucket. Walks on the beach instead of another cup of coffee. Heaven to me!
> I'd like to see an argument for saving the USPS that does not depend on nostalgia.

It's relied upon by millions of people to deliver ballots in an election being held in a pandemic less than three months in the future. How about we disassemble it in a non-partisan way a little later?
Do you imagine that a significant percentage of HN people support the position of exactly one of {Apple, Google}? Give us some credit, please.
Like I said, nobody in power. The Lincoln Project is a grift. Preaching to the choir monetized.
Or the extra opportunities to explore your interests.
If you're going to take on the world's most valuable company, it's irresponsible not to game out every likely outcome and be prepared to respond.

Yes, Epic anticipated that a ban was one possible outcome -- but that doesn't mean they thought it was the only one. If Apple had reacted differently, this video would never have seen the light of day, and Epic would've wasted thousands of dollars producing it -- but that's a small price to pay when billions are at stake.
I think the team behind this comment thread accidentally substituted the GPT instance tuned for Reddit for the one tuned for HN.
> The whole phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is precisely against equality - it recognizes that people have different abilities, talents, capabilities, and things happening in the course of life, and it recognizes that people have different needs, wishes, and desires.

This is not the kind of equality the poster was talking about. Forcing equality at government level does not mean forcing everyone to have equal IQ and work ethic. It means ignoring those differences and forcing everyone to get the same benefit in life even though some are less productive than others ("to each according to his need"). "Equality of outcomes" as another poster put it.
I mean a large reason USPS isn't profitable is that they have been forced to pay pensions in full ahead of time..

Regardless, having voting go through private companies isn't good enough. They aren't bound by the Constitution the same way USPS is.
I believe Senator Harris is milking her identity for the biggest vote bank there is. Her Jamaican father was largely not around as per her own admission and she was largely raised by her South Indian mother. At best she is Jamaican-Indian-American or some such permutation.

What exactly makes her African American? She vaguely looks like one or that she has African DNA? Tenuous propositions since the Democrats reject DNA as a marker of race (see Sen. Warren's travails). Many white Americans would have plenty of African DNA. Does that make them African-American? Sen. Harris is African-American because she went to a historically black college? Or she grew up in Oakland, a historically black neighborhood to two highly educated and privileged parents who were both immigrant academics?

She is trying to exploit the sympathy for the African-American population reeling under so much historical discrimination and suffering. The African-American population deserves a candidate who is rooted in the African American community and not someone usurping the mantle.

Sen. Harris is the Rachel Dolezal of politicians.
> I couldn’t care less about personal interaction with sleazy salesman and when buying new car I just need the right price, not the sales dance done in person and all this “let me talk to the manager” BS.

That "talk to the manager" BS worked out in my favor the last time I bought a car. I had been leasing a Honda CR-V, for stupid reasons [1], and when that lease was up wanted to buy a new CR-V.

I found a dealer online about an hour or so away with a good price for online purchases. But I wanted to at least do a test drive of the new models first, to make sure Honda had not made any changes that would sour me on it.

I went to a nearby dealer to do a test drive, intending to tell them I was just looking. If I liked it I'd then buy from the online dealer.

After the drive, the salesman names a price. I told him that I knew that the dealer an hour away would sell it to me for $X, which was less than the price he offered, but if they could match that price I'd buy from them.

He does the "I'll have to talk to my manager" thing. The thing is, this was a new salesman, and I think he was nervous. I don't think he actually listened to the price I named.

He comes back, and announces a new price they will let me have it for...and that new price is quite a bit lower than $X. I'm not kidding...I told him what I was willing to pay for the car, and he came back with a lower counter-offer!

I took it, and am still driving that car 14 years later.

[1] I normally buy rather than lease, but leased a CR-V for two years to see if I liked that form factor. When that was up, I leased another one for two more years, followed by one for three years. It was only then that I remembered that I has stupidly forgotten that the plan was after the first lease was up to either buy a CR-V, or go back to small sedans.
I am a founder who has been trying for many years. I have a set of mental issues including insecurity (which is way better now) and I totally depend on peer group of founders to help me along.

Just for reference, last 2-3 weeks were a complete blank. I spoke to a few founders for motivation but I could not drive work.

If you have the capacity to work without any support, good for you. I am not in these networks for YC validation though. I am there for the peers, they help immensely. In fact I want to create an alternate place for founders, but many already exist and I am a part (PH, IH, Makerlog) of them too.
We need ballots delivered, but I don't see why the USPS is the only option for delivering them. Why does it have to be the USPS? There are plenty of other companies that are very good at delivering mail.
Not a particular advocate for either side of this, however, I did want to point out the cool I story of US Mail pilots. A good portion of modern air navigation comes from that legacy. Elrey Jeppesen was an airmail pilot for Boeing in the 1930s, and during his routes, he began taking detailed notes and that later become the business of Jeppesen —- one of the most important aviation charting companies on the planet. And, coming full-circle, Boeing bought Jeppesen in the year 2000 and a year or so ago, Jeppesen bought ForeFlight.

The legacy of the postal service is extraordinary, especially in aviation. Town names on water towers for example, that was for the mail pilots. Light beacons (that later became radio beacons,) were also a result of the mail pilots. Jeppesen (along with Jimmy Doolittle) was a pioneer of Instrument Flight Rules.

That being said, UPSP filling my mailbox with “to current resident” junk or pounds of unsolicited newsprint each week isn’t something I am sympathetic towards. I am ok paying $5 to mail a letter — I do it so infrequently as to make such an expense trivial. For poor people that still have to do things by post, it would be easy to provide a postal allowance tied to receipt of other government benefits (if you get food stamps, you also get actual stamps for example.) And the package side of USPS — they are profitable. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have 6 day per week letter service. If the argument is that USPS is subsidizing Amazon, I might argue they are subsidizing all of the junk mail senders as well. They shouldn’t be subsidizing anyone. The world isn’t going to stop turning with 5 day a week mail service and three day a week service to very rural areas. If a letter just has to get there quickly, normal mail isn’t the optimal way to do it anyway. It wasn’t until 1863 that mail was delivered daily so there is some historical precedence for less than daily service.

Reducing service days, charging correct rates that reflect cost, and improving efficiencies in both labor and processes would make the USPS both solvent while still being relevant.
How is this not considered actual racism?
Yes, this is why I come to Hacker News. That bastion of independent and unique thought. To have wikipedia copy-pasted at me.

It is obvious that I am making a prescriptive argument. I am under no illusions that they are able to enact these policies tomorrow. Their hands are tied by regulations.

You know what might make those regulations go away? Making them hurt a little bit. If it becomes clear that USPS cannot exist as an institution in its current form without being a perpetual sinkhole in which to dump taxpayer dollars directly, then they will have no choice but to adapt or die.

...Or I guess we could just keep throwing money at them and hope they get better because they super duper double pinky swear promised this time.
Because Epic has so much sway in the video game console arena that the console makers (except perhaps Nintendo which relies more on 1st party content) would never dare take anticompetitive action against Epic, or at least do while granting Epic-specific concessions which make it hard for them to have standing for a anti-monopoly lawsuit.

Epic wants an antitrust decision from the courts and/or regulators, and that requires them to get a clear, unequivocal rejection from the platform owner to have unchallengeable standing. A game console maker would have met Epic halfway, but Google and Apple did not.

The timing is probably also critical: Google and Apple just testified to Congress that they're not engaging in monopolist behavior because they treat every applicant equally. To back down from that right now would mean they perjured themselves before Congress. That's something no one in their right mind would want to do.
Badly. There's this thing called the "third party doctrine" which basically says the 4th amendment doesn't apply to information you give willingly to a 3rd party, so the government can just ask the 3rd party for it with no need to get a warrant first.

There's some laws from after this doctrine was established that attempt to rein this in by explicitly extending the 4th amendment, so like that's why the government needs to get a warrant for a wiretap, but without a specific law passed by congress, the third party doctrine applies.

I tried to google if there's a 3rd party doctrine for mail services, but I haven't been able to find anything yet.
> Why is it that multiple delivery companies are able to survive on their own in the free market, yet the USPS cannot?

USPS operates with many government mandates that don't apply to private companies.

Some of the financial woes are actually inflicted by the government. For example, the government mandated that the USPS pre-fund retiree health benefits well into the future, in a way that no rational private company would ever consider. This alone has contributed significantly to their cash flow problems:

They even provide a convenient chart of how their profit/loss looks without the pre-funding requirement, at least up through 2010: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/...
Hey, no one's forcing the Republicans to try to disenfranchise black people or peddle racist ideologies. They did that all on their own.
Have you ever tried to mail a letter with UPS or FedEx?

These are not comparable entities.
The marketplace of ideas has spoken, anyone who criticizes this is an enemy of free speech.
They hate car salesmen, yes. But oddly enough "Family Jones Chevrolet/Ford/Toyota/Nissan/etc." has been sponsoring the local little league team for 20 years, so they don't have to do much to convince the locals to tell their state legislators that "protecting" these "family-owned" dealerships is good.
Or some Russian hardware mysteriously is “stolen” and ends up in Belarus with some little green men to operate it.

Would they need to shoot down the entire constellation? I could imagine them threatening to shoot it down (and maybe a few demonstrations) would be enough to convince SpaceX to stop sending signals into Belarus.
It's pretty much a distinction without a difference...

Major publishers have had games to their stores, so there have been storefront-exclusives for years. Trying to slip in "mandated" is kind of redundant, it's self-mandated by the people publishing the game...

But of course, Steam's monopoly on a full-featured game front is just so strong they usually kowtow eventually...

For years EA games were Origin-exclusive, it wasn't until a few months ago they reversed course on that, and they still require Origin.

Epic is doing it right, they're busting a monopolized industry and playing exactly the right amount of hardball to do it.
-

And as an aside, the statement "The pc was the device without mandate exclusives" seems to be implying PC was the gaming platform without platform exclusives... I mean yeah? And it still is?

Epic was saying you could only use their store, they weren't saying you could only use PC...

PC is very much last place for AAA attention, hence games coming out months later and in much worse shape, in no universe would a publisher ever go PC-only for a game because of Epic games or any other storefront trying to nudge them
Is dell as untrustworthy as lenovo?

I do remember the lenovo driver that installed itself from the bios - even on a clean windows install - and would snoop for months and then silently uninstall itself.

EDIT: here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Lenovo_Service_Engine

However I have not heard much about dell.
Overall, we rate the Washington Examiner Right Biased based on editorial positions that almost exclusively favor the right and Mixed for factual reporting due to several failed fact checks. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-examiner
This article makes little sense and so do most of these personal “my dad used to work for USPS” anecdotes in the thread.

The problems at USPS have little to do with anything mentioned and everything to do with well established facts:

- USPS is mandated to prefund employee healthcare and pensions for 75 years in advance

- USPS cannot add a fuel surcharge to pricing (as FedEx and UPS can) to maintain profit levels

- USPS is required to provide service to people and businesses in remote areas even when it may be highly unprofitable

- USPS is governed by Congress and the Postal Rate Commission (PRC), which restricts potential avenues for expansion into other products and limits competition with other companies (such as UPS and FedEx). Congress has been influenced by competitors to get the USPS to abandon new products such as online payment systems, phone cards, money transfers, postal meter cartridges, etc

- USPS is required to invest exclusively in government bonds while private companies can invest in a wide variety of securities to improve profitability

- USPS is forbidden by law to lower prices to get more business

The quality of commenting has really fallen at HN. It’s starting to feel like a raging boomers Facebook wall filled with conjecture, gossip and conspiracy theories. Let’s stick to the facts please.

SOURCES:
https://cms-colorado.com/its-time-to-allow-the-usps-to-compe...

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/03/04/how-the-po...
I think the argument is that mail is an essential service (e.g. for voting) that the government has a mandate to provide to communities that the private sector would not bother to service because it would not be profitable for them to do so.
Anna Walentynowicz, Polish free trade union activist, co-founder of Solidarity
People making over 5M a year, are going to move in order to pocket 3% more?
Lots of the HN crowd are Apple only users and their last Android experience was a 2012 Samsung so that's their point of reference.

Also, HN is also mostly American where carrier bloatware is the norm on Android, something I never saw in Europe.
Wow, I don't know if I've ever seen a thread where half the comments are grayed out.
Have the opposing candidates even promised to do anything about it?

These are chronic issues that not even an Obama administration along with a majority in Congress did anything to cure these issues. What makes you think either party will do anything to prevent its demise?