skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Florida we have a turnpike run by a state owned corporation. It's very profitable.

As for the military, it would be profitable if we could charge for services, ethically. However, I would argue that it pays dividends in a different ways and you know it.

Edit reply: the post office is less useful in 2020 than it ever has been in its existence. It used to be an absolutely critical piece of infrastructure as people relied on mail for bills, communication, magazine subscriptions, etc. Now over 90% of mail is junk advertisements. People consume digital media, pay bills electronically, communicate electronically, sign documents electronically, etc. There is less and less demand for the parcel business.

I'm not arguing that we should shut it down, but the prices should go up and the USPS should be able to set prices without an act of Congress and it should be able to vary postage based on distance traveled.

My argument about the Florida corp running the turnpike is that it's entirely possible to run a state owned enterprise in a profitable way. The Florida turnpike is one of the best maintained with the best amenities of any road I've ever traveled on, including excellent beautiful rest areas and Tesla superchargers at every stop. Congestion is quickly delt with rapid construction of new lanes. The surfaces are kept smooth and free of potholes.
Just memorising data is simple, use a file on disk. The hard part is recognising data when it is slightly different than what the model 'memorised', deciding which of the millions of
things it learned best fits the answer we desire.
The "transparent TVs" shipping last year seemed ok.

From the Linus Tech Tips hands on review of one (Dec 2018), they seem like they're already useful for some scenarios. eg shop windows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yxs4IS9HXU
For those wondering why the USPS cannot turn a profit, Jon Oliver does an excellent job of explaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL8g0W9gAQ
Yeah, and it's still a fundamentally --insane-- service, delivering packages to the middle of nowhere, for absolutely no reason.

Getting your bizarre ecommerce purchases delivered to the middle of nowhere is not a reasonable business. Treating it as a necessary public service is even more unreasonable.
An ancient evil is awakening
But they do provide a better service than private industry. They deliver to everyone. In rural areas even UPS and FedEx hand off deliveries to USPS.

Turns out operating in high density areas that turn a good profit and low density areas that don’t is difficult. It’s why UPS and FedEx don’t do it. But it’s what USPS was set up to do.
Used to have windows phone as a choice, but never ever did google cooperate in getting something as major as YouTube on that platform.

(Yet Roku and more do.)
Where from? SF?
We can’t know right now, our current society is poorly equipped to assess anything happening in the present. It’s become a politicized topic, similar to Trump’s Covid medication suggestions. We’ve got about two months until the election and the average American will throw this accusation around based on political leanings. Few are going to do the proper investigation on this.

Here’s an example:

https://www.vice.com/amp/en_ca/article/n7wk9z/the-post-offic...

”Motherboard identified 19 mail sorting machines from five processing facilities across the U.S. that either have already been removed or are scheduled to be in the near future. But the Postal Service operates hundreds of distribution facilities around the country, so it is not clear precisely how many machines are getting removed and for what purpose.”

The headline is what will be politically thrown around, but the true assessment of the facts won’t occur. How many sorting machines do they have, and why are they shutting some down? Is this routine? Have we clearly identified that it’s a budget issue?

We spent almost a year tracking Russiagate, so this kind of bullshit is par for the course.
Treating getting grocery store spam delivered to you as the same level of service as medical care is not reasonable, and you know you're being hyperbolic.
The article admirably covers 10% of why the USPS needs to be saved and studiously omits the most important 90%. You cannot reasonably talk about the USPS right now without talking about the implications for the sanctity of the upcoming election. (Which means we pretty much can't talk about it on HN, because we'd need to broach the subject of acting in bad faith.)
It's possible someone got excessive burping a month let's say after they recovered from covid. How do we know those events are related? In a month all kinds of medical problems could happen in a sample size of 90,000 or w/e the amount was, that could be completely unrelated.
> However, I would argue that it pays dividends in a different ways and you know it.

Kinda like roads and the post office huh?
What Is VPS?
Have you/stepdad reported this to anyone? That’s insane.
Or, you change jobs :)
AFAIK they can pre-install Fortnite. Not, EPIC app store, which was what the deal seemed to be about.
> Most credible machine learning systems work well on unseen data, which by definition isn't memorizing.

Sorry, but no. ML models don't generalise well outside the training data, but they can interpolate inside. This question becomes very interesting in the case of GPT-3 which has had a huge corpus of text to train on, so it's probably seen 'everything'. It's still memorising for GPT-3 but also learning to manipulate data, like software algorithms.
so if Snowden had waited 7 years and leaked today instead of 2013, then the 100's of thousands of videos about it with billions of views would all be censored by Google?

would every teleconference video with Snowden also be banned?

Google is EVIL and this is all going to backfire in the most spectacular outcome of unintended consequences.
> My stepdad works at one of the largest USPS sorting facilities.

> When he came in to work today 2 multi million dollar sorting machines were padlocked.

He should take a photo and pass it on to the media.

> He was told by the facility manager that they are selling them for scrap.

If anyone manages to buy them, the smart thing would be to hold onto them to sell them back to the Biden administration.
> I believe the fundamental problem is that our education system as it exists today has immense scalability problems: it's built upon the idea of creating scarcity around qualifications and putting people against each other.

I’m not sure if it is a problem of the education system per-se or the downstream of higher education (i.e. labor market) being incredibly credentialist.

Let’s assume for a while the education itself is infinitely scalable and accessible. What remains for an education instituion would be the ability to grant a status to its graduates, and status is always bound to be a scarce good (if everyone is high status, no one is high status), which drives the zero-sum dynamics.

Therefore the problem is that high status education credentials predicts higher salary, in turn education institutions are bound to keep their status supply artificially restricted to preserve value and themselves profitable. (Not to mention gatekeeping that status supply is a valuable in itself).

So I think the root cause is labor market responding to status signals along with competence signals, in a ratio that changes from sector to sector.
That's pretty great! I hope it gets some momentum and matures a bit. I don't insist on flag-ship level specs & polish, but this it looks a little rough around the edges for my taste.
Because those are the platforms they have standing on I assume. Did Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo perform similar anti-competitive actions against Epic Games? They can't sue just because they have an illegal policy, they also need to have been "personally" (as a company) affected by it.

They also have limited amounts of money, and lawsuits are expensive. Better to get precedent established first before suing everyone else (I'm actually surprised that they picked two fights because of this).
The ability of the USPS to balance its budget was deliberately kneecapped by limiting how much it can increase prices, subsidizing foreign-based packages, and requiring it to pre-pay its pensions for 75 years.

The recent shakeup, slowdowns, and scrapping of needed equipment is a separate act of sabotage to interfere with mail-in voting.
Didn't Tengen actually end up winning in the end?
That's quite the conspiracy theory. Republicans are generally against mail-in ballots because they are subject to all sorts of interference. Some elections come down to a few hundred votes. As for USPS being a political football...it's a government service.
What? No Capital gains taxes? Sounds too good to be true. Can you elaborate more?

Edit: California doesn't distinguish between income and capital gain. Federal, though, you would still have to pay even if you go to Tennessee, right?
Why does the importance of a public mail service depend on its ability to make money?
Because both roads and the military are unsuitable for privatisation.

Roads represent a key problem with access, and of course, he military requires a level of commitment and responsibility far beyond what would be appropriate in the private market.

Mail delivery does not have such structural limitations as you can see literally from the existence of UPS and Fedex.

The question remains:

1) Why is USPS consistently bankrupt?
2) If we didn't have the USPS today, would the government create one?
I'm struggling to understand how they're great examples. They sound absolutely atrocious and nowhere near believable. They sound really, really bad, like something an amateur with zero editing experience could put together with cheap equipment. They're so bad they're difficult to listen to, especially the Sinatra one.
Here is a good explanation why there were profitable and now they are not (tldr regulations)
https://youtu.be/IoL8g0W9gAQ
He may want to get in touch with the local news, they love investigating stuff like this.
Sounds like these, which seem to be in early stage production:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw
Jews in North Africa and Asia lived in coexistence in their communities for hundred of years. As dhimis for sure, but nothing like what the grand parents of Nethanyhu lived in Poland. There’s nothing to compare.

Also Jews of Western and central Europe, which were then mostly Sephardi(at least in Western Europe), like Hertzl, were emancipated and definitely did not experience 1st hand what was happening in Eastern Europe. Hertzl was not even aware of Pinsker for instance.

It was only following the holocaust that the post Hertzl Zionist movement realized they need to more bodies. zionist activists were sent across North Africa and Asian communities to agitate, breaking up families in the process while trying to force the young and healthy to immigrate to Palestine.

I did my homework. Maybe you should too?
Except that the postal service plays a key role in medical care.

https://www.pharmacytimes.com/news/us-postal-service-role-in...

It is a lot more than just “grocery store spam.”
Huh? Revenue is not profit.

What are the costs associated with delivering those packages?
It’s been reported (and isn’t an isolated case):

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wk9z/the-post-office-is...
Rombot – The future of physical therapy is taking shape
Gun Enthusiasts Celebrate Man Who Shot Himself in the Balls as Their King
It is easy for a high net worth person to change primary residence. This is going to backfire and cause a reduction of revenue.
It's not a conspiracy. Fox news has been running content for years characterizing USPS as a mismanaged business that needs to be privatized.
The article mentioned was discussed a few days ago here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108950
The USPS has had nearly a decade straight annual operating losses in billions. My guess is, as per politics-as-usual, the current administration, and opposition thereof, are using the issue as a political wedge in this election cycle, but the issues are real.

I'm no expert but I recall the USPS acting like a bank, making money from savings accounts and other financial services. Would be interested in some of the various arguments for or against privatization/funding.
Some Googling will bring up articles saying the post office has been losing money for awhile (which some think is just fine, since they are a government service and we don't expect all government services to turn a profit on their own).

Trump recently appointed a new Postmaster General which is reportedly making a lot of changes. This is now a political issue because many believe the changes are politically motivated due to the upcoming election during a pandemic when, not surprisingly, a lot of people will vote by mail.

It's especially concerning because we are clearly on a course which will lead to exceptionally low confidence in the results of the election, no matter what happens. So even if the USPS isn't profitable, it seems worth while to at least prop it up for a few more months so we can have a fair election and (equally important) have the results be trusted by the people.
I truly believe apple pays people to comb through HN and down vote any comment critical of apple. The simple fact is that apple has done more than any other company in the history of computing to quash the freedom to control your own computing devices.

It is impossible to fight apple in the way we fought microsoft years ago - by building out a good opensource ecosystem. The entire reason for the app store is to stop that from happening.
Pretty sure the writer’s being sarcastic.
This sounds like a GPT3 response :)

Note I said "great examples of what's possible today" not "great examples of JFK recording NWA's Fuck the Police".
Why should the USPS be private or profitable? At best it should be operated as a break-even venture.

Reliable mail service to every address in the country is one of the foundational building blocks of a developed nation. Those that argue against it to me seem irrational.

No private business, especially when you compare it to a company like Verizon, will ever provide the level of universal service the USPS has historically. Rural areas have absolutely been "left behind" for Internet access just as soon as the regulators stopped regulating minimum access requirements.

No thanks. I don't want the (imo, completely and irreversibly broken) US telco landscape extended to the physical mail delivery. Not to mention the constitutional rights you get shipping with the USPS vs. any private business.
Havel is too peaceful for the matter at hand :p
Thanks for the cue, I didn't know that. But I'm afraid that most "stock" users will never use that option. Heck, even knowing it I can't be sure if I want to spend time to research this (there is a word "jailbreak" behind your tip, right?) or just to admit that my switching experiment failed and to go buy yet another iphone instead.

This idea of faking may be the solution against bad actors, but not until apple and google would make that option official. And even then most of naive users will be tricked and burdened into not using it.
It’s been reported. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wk9z/the-post-office-is...
"The amount of fuel used to transport the catalogs and credit card offers US citizens don't ask for is gargantuan—in 2010, postal service vehicles used 146 million gasoline gallon equivalents, at a cost of $1 billion.

And the amount of mail sent overall is down from about 212 billion pieces per year in 2005 to just over 155 billion in 2014. This number is even including parcels, which have gone up in proportion to paper mail. While the rise of online shopping has seen the number of delivered packages shoot up, those are capable of being delivered by UPS or FedEx in significantly populated parts of the country."
The thread doesn't need to be turned into a political flamefest. Every American voter should be on the same side here.

This isn't about what Republicans do, or what Democrats do. It's about what enemies of the state do. 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.
The post you're responding to is ambiguous, and most language is and relies on context, but this doesn't seem like a very charitable interpretation.

I have heard the argument you're making with Jordan Peterson (who I absolutely don't respect - if you're looking for a Christian conservative try Peter Hitchens instead, although I'm not a conservative myself. He's not fashionable these days, but he represents actual long standing conservative beliefs rather than opinions that will fade away in 2-3 years)

I think the parent comment is being deliberately ambiguous in order to skirt around politically sensitive issues.
One party wants people to show up to vote with their face and ID. The other wants them to vote by mail as much as possible (which is more prone to fraud). Tell me again: who is sabotaging who?
Wow, a single turnpike? Time to privatize interstate travel.
Amazon builds out its own private delivery network to service their densest customer areas, while leveraging the USPS — which is legally mandated to deliver to every US address — to service their rural customers.

This strategy starves USPS of package revenue for profitable routes while inundating them with packages to unprofitable addresses.

If USPS needs to raise money, they can start by charging Amazon a surcharge to defend against this type of arbitrage.
Exposure time?
> watching the wrong people

I wonder ... it seems like there might be a certain personality profile that is inclined to a security career -- might be correlated.
I'm all in for the support of 3rd party Appstores like FDroid on iOS and its inevitable to not compare Android ecosystem support for that.

But, situation is not that comfy with ChromeOS. If we need to side-load an .apk, we have to enable developer mode (which means powerwash) thereby Google explicitly making it an Anti-feature.

Interestingly, android 10 on mobile allows direct install/update from FDroid making it no different from Playstore. Now why this double stand when it comes to side-loading android apps in ChromeOS vs Android? The obvious statement would regarding security and that's exactly what Apple uses to prevent side-loading apps.

Now coming back to Apple, it has been allowing side-loading .ipa onto iOS devices(Although not as easy as in android) and it has also removed the need for $99 developer license which was needed earlier to side-load .ipa!

So, the line between android vs iOS w.r.t side-loading apps is getting thinner at least w.r.t ChromeOS.
Likewise. I built a whole back-end in PHP 5 back in 2009 for a client. His front-end has changed a ton in that time, but the backend is still chugging a long in PHP 7 with no problems.
In Brooklyn too and this summer's been great. Don't have to take the subway. All the bars and restaurants have patios, and my friends and I can get together for hikes and BBQs every weekend. However, I'm worried the QoL is gonna tank once the weather stops being so nice because I every one of these pandemic-resistant activies is weather-dependent
Why don't they just charge more to deliver to those areas?

If I live on a mountain top why should I expect people to haul shit to me for free? Why would you expect them to be charged the same as someone who lives on the corner of Main and State?
Have they? Did one of their contributors have that opinion? Is that a crime? I'm guessing youve never met a libertarian.

That's a huge stretch from using the USPS to rig an election. Both sides are accusing the other of trying to take advantage of the sudden surge in interest in mail-in voting.

edit reply: you can't on the one hand argue that mail is a reliable way to run an election and on the other argue that a politician is trying to use it for their advantage. Not giving up, he didn't say he was using it. He said the Democrats would use it. Either way, these arguments underscore just how hackable and exploitable mail in voting is.
Please follow the HN guidelines.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

If you can't accept the reality that USPS does more than deliver "grocery store spam" I'd recommend you abstain from adding to the conversation.
Oh, great, a gigantic money pit that makes sure CVS has a higher profit margin!

This is NOT compelling at all. There are private delivery options that do not mask the legitimate cost of delivery.
You could do that if Epic wanted you to be able to do that. Nothing on Android prevents it; in fact, that's how you install the Epic Game Store: you go to their website and download an APK. You'll have to click through some permission screens, and then you're done: the APK is installed on your phone and can be launched like any normal app, no Play store required.

Epic chooses not to do that, because they want you to run their store. But Google doesn't prevent you from doing it; Epic just chooses not to allow you to.
Voter fraud is practically non-existent. Voter ID laws are used to disenfranchise black people and the poor.

Voting by mail in a pandemic is very wise. Advising against it is a murderous suggestion.
Hi all, for what it's worth, I tried to steer clear of politics of this topic to focus solely on its importance to eCommerce (though they are inextricably linked).

We will need a robust eCommerce infrastructure in the coming years and that will require servicing areas in the U.S. that will never be profitable to do so for a private company.

The topic is politicized quite a bit and I thought that it was important to explain why it has been over the centuries. That shouldn't deter us from its importance to our retail infrastructure. The suggestion is that we tolerate USPS losses so that we can continue to build strong and sustainable commerce businesses. Amazon doesn't exist without the services that USPS provided the company in its formative years.
> Mail delivery does not have such structural limitations as you can see literally from the existence of UPS and Fedex.

Incorrect. UPS and FedEx do not deliver everywhere. If it is not profitable for them to do so (e.g. in rural areas), they do not deliver and instead give the package to USPS. This is the public service part.

> Why is USPS consistently bankrupt?

Google “USPS pension obligations”.
We roughly know their profit margin on the App Store from corporate reporting though so seems unlikely to be any significant spending on curating, and a lot is to curate away competition like Steam's streaming that allowed PC game purchases to be remotely made through streaming your desktop and big picture mode.
Fair point, but counter argument would be that US, Brazil, India, Russia and Mexico are poised to see many more deaths, while countries like Italy had an initial huge wave of deaths, but are now doing much better and do not expect significant deaths in the future.
Google Bad, Apple Worse.

At least you can get other app stores on Android.
Well for one it would be great to place on mirrors to "try on" clothes, or any kind of augmented reality like that. They can also be placed on your windshield for directions and other info like your speed. Gaming monitors with "designer" internals so that when your screen is off you can see the cool inside, similar to some watches with exposed gears.
It's important to point such things out, because one of the primary justifications for the destruction of indigenous cultures is the erroneous belief that nothing of value to our modern society will be lost by doing so.
> Consider that most people here on HN have some level of privilege simply by being in the tech field.

I have to disagree with this statement. My view on "privilege" in its contemporary usage is that it is any advantage which comes "naturally" without any (or at the very least a relative minimal amount of) effort. Being in the tech field is something you have to work for, develop your skills for, etc. That isn't what privilege is, that is the result of your own work and ambitions.