skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While this article focuses on a niche, tiny wins are a universally applicable concept. I think they are a powerful abstraction.

I recently finished "Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything" by BJ Fogg [1], which talks about this in generality. The essence is that behaviors are a product of motivation, ability, and prompts. By keeping things tiny, we avoid the need of very high motivation, the need for very high ability, and devise easy triggers/prompts to get work done. It has been quite fun to identify tiny habits in my daily routine, I've collected quite a few and narrowed down on what works and what doesn't.

This is then applicable to software engineering, product development etc. One of Instagram's co-founder was apparently enrolled in the author's class, and therefore pops up as an example a few times through the book.

I've always ridiculed self-help books. This book does have a self-help flavor, but always concludes with precise actionable advice. By developing a general framework and a mental model around habits (think abstraction in usual software engineering terms), it does feel more controllable. Highly recommended!

[1]: https://www.librarything.com/work/23220746/book/198725553
"You cannot dismantle the only mail service that is OBLIGATED to deliver mail to every address. "

You can if you obligate other national carriers to do that.

The fact is the world has changed dramatically in the last few decades and the kinds of things that are sent are completely different, demands are different, technology has changed rapidly. I don't get anything other than junk mail from the public service, I wish it would stop.

I think an optimal solution might be to actually semi-privatize the USPS, by floating a small % ownership (say 10%) on public exchange, letting them set their own prices and strategy, which would remove recent Republican meddling - and - also remove their impetus as well, as it would be a 'self sustaining' entity, still mostly owned by the Government.

Having a % float would provide some measure of market feedback, this is a tactic used by some very wealthy families to give external measures to their CEO's and have some degree of accountability. I believe Bertelsmann uses this kind of setup.

Aside from that, it could very well be possible to require private carriers to have the same, national coverage in order to be considered 'national carriers' a status which they should have to have to be able to bid on certain contracts etc..

'National Carriers' could have access to things like mail boxes in buildings, and other things, possibly even co-use of USPS facilities, much like government has required last-mile fibre operators to share their gear with competitors (i.e. CLECs).

Something like that could work.
As the video linked calls out, the USPS is between a rock and a hard place. They are not funded by tax dollars at all (they operate as a business), but are required to fund retirement accounts 20-30 years in the future, plus are not allow to increase rates beyond inflation. As they lose money (and have been for the last 10 years), to keep operating they are required to get a "bailout" from congress in the budget plan every year.

The post master general under Trump was trying to cut costs within the constraints placed on the USPS by congress, which is to reduce mail drop boxes and other activities. If congress wanted to invest in the USPS, they could, it just hasn't been done yet (no one seemed to agree on what that should look like).

One important part with the drop in mail volume is that the cost of mail delivery actually goes up. There are many fixed costs on delivering a letter, and if you can deliver 8 letters vs 4 letters to the same address and are forced to charge the same regardless of how many you end up delivering there, the overall delivery-cost of each letter goes up.

So either we need to let the USPS charge more for their services (to offset the reduced volume), or congress needs to decide to subsidize the USPS again to allow it to function properly.

Subsidizing would be difficult given how UPS and Fedex abuse the USPS today. (Those two carriers will push delivery to the USPS when they know its unprofitable for them to deliver any given package). So any subsidy that it provided to the USPS will also subsidize Fedex and UPS unless the rules are changed there as well.
I'm always impressed by people who are top dogs at self-promotion. These are small projects, small changes, but presented as best as they could, with as much fanfare and congratulations as can be achieved.

I mean, an arrow for data flow direction? It sure is better than a non-descript triple dots, but was it that non-obvious? The mileage he gets from this small change in this blog post is remarkable.

I constantly fail at this game.
Deluded HN commenter (or HN hater, with your nickname) thinks people in poor/developing countries would make such elaborate scams.

As I've replied upthread, the kids could just be told to carry bricks and wooden planks (and hammer some nails in - it's not rocket science) and they'd probably feel glad they contributed.

If I wanted to scam some Western kids, I'd just start a construction company, get them to volunteer, and tell them we're building an orphanage, while pocketing the profits for the office building being constructed. Not tell them to make something and then tear it back down when they've left.
I believe that backup happened at multiple throughout the country, honestly. I had 2 packages, one to San Diego and one to Atlanta. Both have yet to arrive and both were mailed early December. I'm still getting monthly "we're looking but haven't found them yet" emails from them.

I read awhile back (but can't find the source anymore, so grin of salt) that when USPS processing centers get overwhelmed they switch from a queue based system to FIFO. Which would make sense that some packages have been lost for months while newer ones seem to be going through the system just fine.
Turn it back into a curated online directory :)
> https://plans.aol.com/join?regtype=new

"If you're interested in purchasing a plan that includes dialup service, please call 1-800-827-6364 (Mon-Fri: 8am-12am ET; Sat: 8am-10pm ET)"

I would not be surprised to learn that they still have millions of dial-up customers & millions on the new non-dialup plans.
Google may not be using Lighthouse to perform the tests, but it is understood that Google use performance metrics as an SEO factor.

It's understandable that Simple Analytics would use Lighthouse to measure performance and extrapolate from there. I'm not sure how else they could do the test — as presumably they don't have access to Google's data.
I just read a comment[0] about a package shipped via priority taking 45 days to arrive. I can't expect this to work when they don't have funding, there's a huge backlog, among other things.

Then the problem becomes that due to shortage of people and backlogs, the prices just keep going up and up if you want it on a 'reasonable' time.

The main issue that seems to need fixing is capacity and this won't solve it. Probably overall but also seasonal due to COVID. I wish more of my taxes would go towards this (and that they switch the postmaster general).

> There are plenty of people like amazon who will happily use cheap delivery capacity when there is half a truck going in some direction, and deliver by some other route/method when the truck driver is on holiday so mail is expensive.

They do this already though. USPS is used a lot for their last mile and they have UPS and Fedex too as well as their own fleet of delivery drivers in some regions and planes and trucks for distribution around the country.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025166
Will Yahoo answers be coming back under the new ownership? (semi-serious question)
> I don't necessarily want a non-professional relationship with everyone I encounter.

I don't know where your comment came from, because in no way did I suggest that anyone should try to be friends with everyone they meet.
Advance Application Security
> Verizon [...] combined [Yahoo] with AOL under the umbrella Oath.

Starting years of confusion for people searching oauth and making a typo.
Lessons learned from operating a public wildfire detection system
Case Discriminating OCR Neural Network Demo
Ask HN: Is Firebase Down?
Requests to Firebase functions are very slow. Takes more than a minute to load. Once it is loaded, it seems to work fine. Anyone else facing the same issue?
Hammer Esc before it fully loads.
if you are using tar by itself, you are asking for trouble
Covid-19 Accelerated the Loneliness Trend
Does anybody have an idea of which way this will go? It seems like there's a lot of established precedent against Epic's argument given that most app stores take cuts of sales.
On the other hand Apple competes hard against Samsung, yet relies heavily on Samsung to build a large part of it's competing products.

Although I admit that this might not be as true anymore as it was a few years ago.
git checkout -f develop
I have lived at a non-delivery address for the past 5 years.
The “every address” myth seems to be propagated by people
who support USPS and conflate “we deliver to people all over the US” with “every address”.

That sounds similar, but is significantly different, and can be a major pain when dealing
with people or businesses that believe the myth, and try to send important paperwork to a physical address, which may
end up in our P.o. box if the USPS person handling it
recognizes the name and can match it to a box number.

Putting both the physical and P.o. box addresses
into an address block, in that order, works well,
but then shippers can balk at finding a box number.
(see also “Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses, etc.”)
Can I get a manager to manage my managers? Someone?
Getting top talents or investing on top talents? He has the money and he has the guts to take big risks which is remarkable for an investor. I think any scientist with a "revolutionary" idea that requires lots of capital will proactively approach Elon Musk.
> Getting started with the language was harder, but I think internalizing the borrow-checker was easier,

So here's a funny thing: depending on what you mean, I don't think this is actually true. Let me explain.

The shortest way of explaining lexical lifetimes vs NLL is "NLL is based on a control-flow graph, lexical lifetimes are based on lexical scope." CFGs feel more complex, and the implementation certainly is. So a lot of people position this as "NLL is harder to understand."

But that assumes programmers think in the simple way. I think one of Rust's under-appreciated contributions is that programmers intuitively understand control flow graphs better than we may think, and may not intuitively understand lexical scope. Sure, by some metric, NLL may be "more complex" but practically, people only report it being easier to learn and do what they would naturally expect.
> this comes from real-world usage of Chrome

Measured by what metric(s)? Core Web Vitals.
If it's not related to 5G, I would expect it to be.. less of a focus
Korean corporate culture is extremely workaholic - even today but especially during his working years (1970s to early 2000s) - he probably spent more time with his coworkers than his family.

Also people likely smoked indoors in the office when he was working. Indoor no smoking bans didn't come until later in his career, and even today I think enforcement is much more lax compared to the US.
I think Verizon would buy Yahoo so they could further monetize their subscriber base.

Buy Yahoo.com, make Yahoo.com the default home page of every customer.

They do this in other ways - I'm a FIOS customer and I don't use their DNS because you will see ads anytime you mis-type a domain name. You can turn this off with their not-so-simple instructions that any Baby Boomer will be completely unable to do:

https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/home-ne...
Did you try having a Google apps domain as the first recipient? Both the OP and the Reddit comments were able to reproduce that way.
I agree with this analysis. I just wrote a comment in an a different thread(which links to a Twitter thread I wrote in response to the OP)[0] about it. Chromium becoming even more dominant on the web cannot be a good thing. It means handing over too much power over the web to a company, Google, that is not aligned with the interest of the open web.

Apple's tight control over browser engines on iOS seems like the lesser of two evils to me. My impression is also that Apple and Mozilla have been actings as checks on Google in W3C and other standardisation bodies e.g. John Wilander[1] from Apple/Webkit.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024457

1: https://twitter.com/johnwilander
It would be great to have an aliases library with sections - where one may be able to copy a section for a given ch'unk of task types..
> The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.

Source: Thomas Sowell on "Intellectuals and Society"
> but Musk had to purge the senior leadership of both Tesla and SpaceX (and multiple times at that, I believe?) in order to achieve the innovation velocity he aimed for.

From the ex-Tesla people I worked with, I think the public narrative of Musk “purging” staff isn’t entirely true. He desperately needs top talent.

It’s more the case that his companies focus on hungry employees who want to get some success and a big company name on their resume. He can pay them mediocre compensation and work them to death with the promise of a big career win.

Once they’ve had a few years in the upper ranks of a Musk company, they can use their resume to walk into any number of easier jobs that pay better, so they leave. They are then replaced with a new generation of career climbers who can be worked to death in exchange for the resume building experience.
> violating emissions standards for a decade

This began well after they entered the market and upset the dominance of established players.

> You need to answer why the competition is unable to produce similar products at similar prices.

The same way some people are better at given task. Many older firms are complacent, and operating on an understanding of the market as it existed in the past. Technology, consumer preferences, commodity prices, and other market conditions are constantly changing. If you see something you competitors don't you can offer better cheaper services. The bigger your competitors are, the slower they are to change course.

At bottom, firms are made up of people who are uniquely skilled and qualified. Better people in better systems will perform better. It can be dead simple sometimes. Firms with happier employees are often more productive.

If you don't understand the basics of competitive advantage, then of course you think companies can only gain an edge by doing something immoral. But this is ultimately sophomoric economic thinking.
> The vaccine has to be orders of magnitude safer than the virus

Given that there are vast differences in outcomes in different age groups to the virus, surely that depends on the age group you are targeting. Pushing the vaccine onto children, who are at practically no risk seems morally wrong to me.
They are hiring (though I suspect this will make recruiting harder), pay is good. Not FAANG good, but Bay area good.
Whatever USPS is paid to deliver me junk mail I would gladly pay a premium to USPS for them to not deliver me junk mail. Of course as I say that I wonder just how much money USPS is paid to deliver junk mail to one person for a month? It's probably a lot more than I'd expect.
> The effect is that instead of being limited to a few thousand bytes of operations for the rules governing your coin, you could have gigabytes of rules, and yet never expose them (and burn network resources and your privacy) -- or if you do need to to expose some of them, you only need to show a small amount. ... and as a bonus have your transactions look just like a really boring maximally simple wallet's transactions.

If I have e.g. a 1GB script, how much of it will I need to reveal if my counterparty doesn’t cooperate?

For example, is it realistic to have 1GB of script and only needing to reveal, say, 1KB in case the other party doesn’t cooperate?
NASA has a $3.5B idea to save Earth from a supervolcano apocalypse(2019)
They have disabled email forwarding in free accounts.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/yahoo-mail-discontinues-automa...
Maybe Apollo plans on meme-stonking YHOO?
> The Postal Service did not pass our test. A little over half of our letters arrived within the three-day window.

>By Friday of that week, much of our mail had arrived, but there were still ten letters wandering around the country looking for their addressees. A letter to rural Virginia arrived April 13; a letter to Washington, D.C., took another three days. As of April 22, there were still two letters that could not be accounted for. The results were better for mail within Massachusetts: All 10 of the in-state letters GBH staff sent arrived by April 8.

and further down,

> In our unscientific sample, distance from Boston did not appear to be a determining factor of how long a letter would take. A letter to Baltimore took as long as a letter to Hawaii (a week). On April 7, the U.S. Post Office delivered two dozen of our letters to points in the New England/Northeast corridor — and one to Tuscaloosa, Ala. Letters dropped at the central post office downtown had no apparent advantage for speed of delivery over letters dropped in residential building mail slots.

Doesn't look like it's a Boston area issue.
I disagree, we can and should do much better. If only 90% of your christmas cards arrive, fine. But if only 90% of people's paychecks or tax returns arrive, that's a national disaster. To be useful for anything essential or important, infrastructure has to be reliable. And it used to be reliable, and it can be again with different policy.
>If the people that remain behind are at peace with the decision it doesn't really matter 'what might have been'.

The problem I have with this is that it also justifies murder. As long as the rest of us are cool with it who cares what the murder-ee thinks?
I'm not going to stick around
You realize that if SHA-256 collision where something even remotely practical, then the entire bitcoin protocol is instantly dead?
Twitter or other chat apps or web-based link aggregators, but not Facebook. When in an app on mobile, I usually launch the native web browser from the Twitter browser. I almost wonder if some of the link parameters log me out some times...
It’s possible that the person you’re replying to has been shopping at Costco for that amount of time.
> A basic tenet of cryptographic security definitions is that the honest parties should have an advantage over the attackers in the sense that a small increase the work done by the honest parties results in a large increase in the work that must be done to attack the system.

I think a more accurate claim would be that cryptography aims to achieve the best security guarantees that can be assured mathematically. In the case of establishing consensus the best guarantees you can achieve are just different from what you can achieve in those other situations. That doesn't mean that Bitcoin is somehow going against some kind of cryptographic standard like you are implying here. It is using cryptographic technologies to achieve the most secure possible solution (as far as we have discovered) to the problem which it aims to solve. It just happens to be a different problem than those other problems and therefore the nature of the solution is different.

> Note also that cryptographic security definitions assume ... that the attackers do coordinate with each other

That's just one possible scenario which you might consider. Again I think it is misleading to imply this is some kind of "cryptographic litmus test" or something.

> You mention incentive structures, but incentive structures are not very reliable.

Right, but there's just no stronger guarantees which you can make when it comes to this problem.

> One does not follow from the other. Security requirements have nothing to do with popularity and everything to do with the ability of some attacker to succeed in attacking a system.

I think you are interpreting what I said backwards. Popularity defines what level of security is required. The level of security defines what attacks can be resisted. The more popular the coin, the bigger need it will have to resist attacks. And this is accommodated in the design: the higher the market price of the coin, the bigger the reward will be for miners (thus funding more mining, increasing the cost of an attack).
You don’t get to be closer to FSD just because you have a grander vision of driving everywhere a human could. They have to actually demonstrate it. It’s been years and Tesla still doesn’t have the confidence to let drivers take their hands off the wheel.. you know, the true test of self driving. So how exactly are they close?
That you for proving their point.
Show HN: Airbooks app: Bookkeeping and Interactive Business Card for Startups
Uh. Hard disagree. It is rare for a san diego burrito to fall apart on me. It's par for the course in San Francisco.
Normally, the way that late loading adds cause reflow / layout shift / jumpiness is that you don't know what size an ad slot is going to be until after the auction. You could run an auction just for a single size, but you'd have fewer bidders and make less money, so publishers generally choose to offer a bunch of sizes. On a regular page, this looks like an ad coming in and shifting all the other content on the page.

AMP had several design goals, one of which was that it should be impossible to create pages with certain types of bad user experience, including reflow. An AMP page requires that every element on the page be sized only by information directly visible in the HTML (including inline CSS, but no inline JS) which allows the browser to lay the whole page out immediately. When an ad loads off screen there can be a request to the AMP runtime to resize the slot, but the runtime will reject the request if the resize might cause user visible effects.

More details: https://blog.amp.dev/2020/04/16/cumulative-layout-shift-in-a...
> I read awhile back (but can't find the source anymore, so grin of salt) that when USPS processing centers get overwhelmed they switch from a queue based system to FIFO.

queue and FIFO are the same; from context it sounds like you mean LIFO.
I think income tax is the most impactful and expensive tax we have in the US, it's the one everyone thinks of when someone says "doing your taxes".

The fact that Amazon just this year after not paying for 2 years had to pay a measly 1.6% in taxes does not really negate the argument.

Edit: 4 years -> 2 years
Waymo presumably also has custom AI hardware from their parent co. (TPUs). Also their own custom lidar hardware.
How to Make Money Gambling Online and Sports Betting
Well, the Space shuttle had a glide ration comparable or possibly worse than a brick. ;-)

But yeah, it kinda cheated by starting the glide very very high & fast.
C++ is an issue for games. Most game engines implement a garbage collected script language (e.g. Lua, CLR, JavaScript...) to implement huge parts of game logic.
Researchers Read the Sugary ‘Language’ on Cell Surfaces
This comment is predicated on a lack of differentiation between a Linux phone and Android/iOS.

‘It runs Linux’ is not sufficient differentiation for people to be interested outside of hobbyists and highly specified niches.

If we can change that, then a low end disruption strategy could work.

Unfortunately the work on Linux desktops and phones mostly seems to be about making an iOS-alike experience.
I am constantly amazed by the level of trust that people give to tech companies. how did they earn this
Shitcoin is the bit!
Denmarks currency will still inflate on top of the 1%
If you use Java, there's https://sdkman.io/
In Moscow, Big Brother Is Watching and Recognizing Protesters