I think RSS feed reader users are also unaffected by flags. At least hnrss.org feed followers are. I haven't tried news.ycombinator.com/rss. But as long as the post hits the RSS feed before it is flagged, your reader can pick it up.
Honestly, for me, most of the time I am not interested in the flagged posts, but if you are, RSS is another way to see them.
I have come away from Christmas with almost the opposite conclusion. I have 3 young kids, and I notice almost an inverse correlation between the number of toys around and how contently they play.
The ideal number of toys is non-zero, but my experience suggests that it is pretty low.
This title is misleading (or at least it doesn't correspond to the article content). According to the article, Version is having an outage. AT&T and T-Mobile are fine. Their only issue is that they can't reach Version (because it is down).
I feel I should point out that USPS has a lower rate for postcards (currently $0.61), so the threshold might be a bit lower.
I know that this is tongue-in-cheek and would be pretty funny to receive, but it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The experience of getting a little message printed on receipt paper is nothing like the experience of receiving a note or card in the mail. Through the mail you receive something physically from someone with their handwriting and some personality to it. Getting the Amazon message is more like printing out a text message on crummy paper.
Also, I don't have Prime, so it definitely isn't cost competitive for me anyway.
I've started sending paperbacks instead of greeting cards when someone I know needs a get-well-soon card. In stores around here, greeting cards are often $7ish + postage. I can frequently ship a paperback with a gift receipt for $5 total. I include a gift message on the gift receipt, and choose a book I think someone might like to read while they're out of commission.
I guess it's a bit like postal arbitrage, if I accept the cost of greeting cards themselves as part of the cost of the activity.
To the extent that anyone has commented much, those who have commented had very positive reactions to what amounts to a book recommendation and a copy of the book I'm recommending along with a little note.
Haven't done it in a long time, but years ago I had a similar realization that picture frames were cheaper than cards. So you can frame a little note, either with a picture or just suggest they can reuse it if they like. Buying greeting cards always felt like kind of a waste.
Lately our kids' schools have been doing a thing each year where the kids do some art and then you can buy cards (and other things) with it, so we've been using those as they're at least a bit personal. Once that's done, maybe I'll give picture frames again (or paperbacks or cans of tomato soup...)
It absolutely does! I like the addition of the thing to read (in the case of the book) or the thing to look at (usually a funny or interesting picture in the case of the greeting card) but I agree that the purchased thing is not truly necessary.
Reminds me of the old collect call trick. Rather than state your name when prompted you transmit a short, perhaps even coded, message. Then the receiving party declines the call.
I recall using this occasionally in the 90s even.
There was also a period where I would regularly "one ring" my parents as code to call me back. IIRC that was because my cell plan had unlimited (or at least more) incoming minutes.
Collect calls would have been a thing until cell phones got very common because you had to use pay phones when you were outside and you somehow never had quarters.
How can it be that low? The Netherlands has a stamp rate of €1.40 for 20 grams and you can traverse that country in three hours. 20 to 50 grams is €2.80. If you have to cross a border that goes up to €4.22
Can you send a letter thousands of miles for only 61 cents? That's amazing!
>the USPS faced financial difficulties, posting losses of $6.5 billion in fiscal 2023 and $8 billion in fiscal 2024, leading to a request for $14 billion in government assistance.
It would appear that the USPS operates at a loss at these prices
In the same sense that public roads "operate at a loss", sure. Neither toll-free roads or the USPS were originally intended to somehow break-even. They're infrastructure services provided by the government towards a functioning society.
>Can you send a letter thousands of miles for only 61 cents?
Letter, no. 61 cents is the post card rate, so you can send a post card thousands of miles for that. If you introduce an outside envelope its 78 cents to mail that thousands of miles, up to 1oz.
It's impressive to me too, as an American. Especially when you consider that rates include from the east coast of a continent to the west coast, faraway islands (Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa) as well as closer islands (Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands).
PostNL is a private company that used to be government owned. PostNL currently operates at a loss for mail delivery. They are mandated by law to deliver mail and that is something they can't get out of. There is not a maximum what PostNL can ask for stamps but the ACM (Authority Consumer & Market) can step in if they raise prices too much.
So it appears to be privatised but with strict government regulations.
If they weren't the #1 purveyor of junk mail I would agree with you. It costs $0.71 to send a card to a family member, but much less than that for a scammy marketing company to mass mail junk that will go straight to the trash.
Eh, if the post office - which is a pretty efficient operation - thinks it costs $0.61 to mail a postcard, it probably costs Amazon more than $0.25 to ship someone a lime.
Not at all related to the article, but I think this is the first time I have seen a page modify its contents based on the referrer site. If you click the link (and your browser uses the "Referer" header), it will have a blurb at the top welcoming hacker news readers. If you copy the URL manually, it does not.
If you remove the -H "Referer: ..." part, it will no longer contain the word "hacker".
Honestly, I am a little surprised that Firefox is sending the "Referer" header. It feels like a relic from the days when we (mostly) weren't concerned with being tracked. I suppose that it must have practical uses that would break without it.
Browsers have clamped down on that somewhat by enforcing stricter referrer policies by default if the originating server doesn't specify one. It used to be a total free for all where everyone could always see the full referring URL, then it was changed to completely blank the referrer on secure-to-insecure transitions, then it was changed again to also blank the path on cross-origin transitions so only the referring origin is revealed.
It is used for tracking, that's the whole point of the header. "Who's sending me all of this traffic" is a useful, non-invasive thing for websites to have access to. You can use rel="noreferrer" on a link to disable the header on a specific link, as well as the `Referrer-Policy` header and `<meta name="referrer" />` to have some additional control (the 'origin-when-cross-origin' value can be useful in some cases, so destination sites can attribute what origin traffic came from, but not the specific page, while still being able to track it on your own origin - I think this is actually the default behavior in browsers these days).
Yeah, I do something similar with my blog (except via JavaScript). The motivation is similar to Cendyne's.
(Because it's exhausting to have to explain for the 1000th time that I'm not going to make my blog non-furry just because some rando hates furries and thinks being a part of a nerd community is pornographic.)
I think the Referer header kinda-sorta serves as mitigation for 3rd parties just (maliciously) hot-linking to, say, images on your domain, effectively forcing you to bear the cost of upload bandwidth for those images.
(And similar, it's just that images sprang to mind.)
> Protein target: 1.2–1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day.
I was amused to see (kilo)grams used for the weights. I'll admit that as an American, I have no idea what my weight is in kilograms. Body weight is something that I always think of in pounds. I do use grams sometimes in food prep, but I think even that makes me a bit of an abnormality around here.
Not that I am complaining about their unit choice. I think American's would do well to be a bit more "bilingual" in our measurement systems. Also, the measurements they give are a lot easier to parse than 3/128 oz per 1lb bodyweight.
There are 2.2lb in 1jg... practically, just cut the amount in half (0.6-0.8g per lb of lean body weight). I say lean body weight as if you are overweight the target isn't the same.
For those who want to disable middle-click paste, KDE already has this as a setting (of course it does, everything is a setting in KDE). Under "General Behavior" there is a checkbox for "Middle-click pastes selected text".
Personally, I find middle-click primary selection paste one of the nicest conveniences in Linux, along with Alt (or Meta) dragging of windows. But if GNOME made it a default-off option that wouldn't be the end of the world. Those of us who love it would quickly seek out the option to enable it. But I get the impression that GNOME tends to value opinionated simplicity, and I wouldn't be surprised if that default-off option just disappeared after a while.
> Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do.
In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
I think that the medieval art article is making a different point. The art there had a style that was dictated by its purpose and the beliefs of the artists.
For example, most of the examples given in that article are illustrations from manuscripts. This was something (as far as I know) that was new in the western world. The idea that books should be illustrated. And being before the printing press was introduced, each illustration (of which there were often many per page) was hand made. This added a substantial amount of time to an already labor-intensive process. And each image was not intended to be a standalone work of art.
Also, some of the other examples are of iconography. That style remains, largely unchanged to this day. If you do an image search for "religious iconography", you will see plenty of examples of sacred art that are not visually realistic but are meant to be metaphorically or spiritually realistic.
Sure, but for me the standard isn't whether it's visually realistic. Plenty of good stuff isn't particularly realistic. Traditional Chinese landscapes aren't realistic, but a lot of them are great. David Hockney has a lot of good work that isn't realistic and uses primitive-looking technique. The standard is not realism or which style was used. The standard, for me, is whether the artist was any good at art. Hockney is. (Usually.)
I'm not particularly basing my opinion on the examples in this article. It's easy to see that a lot of surviving European medieval art sucks. Maybe "surviving" is the problem. Maybe the good stuff got all smokey from being displayed and only the leftovers and student paintings, in storage, have survived.
On illustrations, everybody can see the difference between Durer and most medieval stuff. It's not simply style or taste.
So, just to make it clear… you define good art by “whether the artist is any good at art”.
Illuminating…
——
For anyone who’s interested in a slightly more nuanced take on how people in the Middle Ages perceived of “art” — and how different that notion was to how we perceive it today — Forgery, Replica, Fiction by Christopher Wood [1] is a really interesting read.
Here’s the last sentence of the Goodreads summary, which describes the major transition in thinking:
“… Ultimately, as forged replicas lost their value as historical evidence, they found a new identity as the intentionally fictional image-making we have come to understand as art.”
Honestly, for me, most of the time I am not interested in the flagged posts, but if you are, RSS is another way to see them.
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