Related: Not US postage labels, but suspicious US postage stamps, seemed to also be used as a crude currency.
A third-party seller on Amazon or eBay was including sheets of suspicious US postage stamps in product shipments, unsolicited, with full-color glossy notes offering more stamps in exchange for positive reviews.
(I took the stamps and note I received to a post office, where a manager agreed they looked suspicious, and I asked them forward it up the chain. I like the USPS as a trustworthy service and institution, and I hate counterfeiting.)
It might have to do with the fact that the First Class stamps exploded in price recently. It was $0.55 right before covid, but now it's $0.82. It's like printing counterfeit money, except easier. A 4x5 sheet the size of a postcard becomes worth $16. The stamps themselves have relatively little in the way of counterfeiting measures, especially if you consider that "Forever" stamps exist. So even if they introduce anti-counterfeiting measures into new stamps, a pirate could print old-style Forever stamps, circumventing the new measures.
The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent, and their own report [1] shows that "mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network. While the Postal Service and the Postal Inspection Service have increased prevention-related efforts, the quantity of counterfeit stamps in the network remains unknown."
So the increased value of the stamps, the inability to change old Forever stamps, and the lack of enforcement have created a perfect storm for the counterfeiters.
There are still some "Forever" stamps (those with pictures on or Christmas Stamps) but the old non-QR code non-forever stamps stopped being legal a while back (but you can always swap them for the new ones for free).
I've had people try and reuse a QR-coded stamp, you just get a postcard saying there's an item of mail with invalid postage for you to collect (and pay for). You get to look at it before you decide whether to pay the fine or not and then your argument is with the sender to reimburse you or not.
This was almost my thought for mitigating USA stamp fraud. Exchange Forever stamps for $currentValue stamps, but show your ID so you’ll be subject to extra scrutiny if you try to trade in a million of them. (QR code’s better and more fair.)
Rhetorical question aside, federal elections use voter rolls that identify each potentially eligible voter and actively monitor for issues like double voting. There's no "forever stamp-holder" roll for the USPS to check.
I think they’re saying there is more evidence of fraud in stamps because of the direct monetary value, where there is no evidence that our current registration-time voting controls need to be supplemented with additional friction at voting time, because what little evidence there is of voter fraud is mostly just lies: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/nevada-voters...
“Forever” stamps in US terms are what 1st class / 2nd class stamps have always been in the UK since they appeared in the ‘80s, where they remain valid for a level of service forever. The US went through a weird phase where they had 1st class stamps, but they would only actually be for the monetary value of whatever the 1st class rate was when issued, so if the rate went up you’d have to add extra postage.
The basic split between what has barcodes and what doesn’t it that the everyday “definitive” stamps (both 1st/2nd etc. and those with a direct monetary value) were withdrawn and reissued with barcodes, but commemorative and special stamps weren’t. Basically, stuff sold to stamp collectors to be put in a box and never used on postage doesn’t have them.
> but they would only actually be for the monetary value of whatever the 1st class rate was when issued, so if the rate went up you’d have to add extra postage.
Reminds me of our monetary stamps. They were the old fashioned monetary value stamps which had a fixed value on it, so when the price hiked you could get 5ct/1ct stamps to add to get to the new rate, fixed value of the stamps stayed the same. People added real money to it since they were not going to buy a full sheet of 5ct stamps for one older one to compensate. And since the mail usually didn't care you sometimes got a free 5ct coin as recipient! (As a kid this was always fun to receive).
Fun thing is that those coins are way heavier than the paper so adding them might get you onto the next cost bracket making the whole excersize pointless.
Stamp value still matters in the US for normal letters because of the janky way extra weight is priced. In particular, the current price of a max-weight letter is two stamps plus 5 cents.
> The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent, and their own report [1] shows that "mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network.
They've been underfunded for a long time. Meanwhile they still have the legal requirement to deliver everywhere in the US. So the big guys like Amazon will happily deliver their own packages in densely populated areas where it's easily profitable. The areas where it's not can be done by USPS...
So basically the taxpayer is paying for Amazon to not have to deliver where it would be costly for them.
Forever stamps guarantee delivery forever (subject to terms and conditions on weight/size). Regular stamps denote value, e.g. 50 cents. They will always be usable but you will need to match the inflation of prices (e.g., mailing a letter might be 50 cents in the past but 100 cents in the future)
USPS still sells denominated stamps from $0.01 to $10.00, in addition to "First Class Forever" stamps - see near the bottom of the filters sidebar on https://store.usps.com/store/stamps
These are problematic as well - they don’t have a way to tally the stamps, they just look for the marker and process it. A postal employee at the delivery point may flag it.
Also if you mail stuff this way you’ll have mail inspected for bombs or anthrax.
It's common in the UK to sell them both with a £ denominated value on them or the class of service. My brother bought loads of the latter a few years ago, which was a great idea, because as mentioned postal rates have increased significantly. The UK post office will also exchange your old unused stamps for new versions (now with QR codes or with sticky backs) for free. So even if they go out of date they alcan be upgraded at no cost.
Fun fact: Charles Ponzi (yes, THAT Ponzi) got started buying and selling postage stamps via arbitrage. It was legal until he started doing some shenanigans regarding over-promised ROIs and needed to use new investor money to pay older investors.
He would buy a stamp in Spain for 30 centavos, then exchange it for a 5 cent stamp in the US. Spain’s currency was depreciating against the dollar, so you could make some surprising returns. Really, his numbers weren’t straight-up lies, it’s just that it would’ve been impractical at the time to transport enough stamps to make that payout occur.
Correction: his idea was that he could buy international reply coupons (which were different than regular stamps) and arbitrage the rates against whatever currency value was greater. As an academic exercise, it was interesting (if utterly unpractical, especially for 1920).
But he NEVER did anything legal. In fact, he didn’t even receive his first attempt at successfully buying a small number of international reply coupons from a friend in Italy until his scam unraveled. And he’d never figured out how he could turn those coupons into cash.
And the reason his arbitrage excuse was caught so quickly (it was basically one summer that he was able to run his scam before his money ran out), was because the global supply of all the international reply coupons in the world were valued at significantly less than his revenues from his schemes, a fact experts pointed out to the local papers as the scam was happening. In fact, he even stopped telling new investors about the postal reply coupons scheme and had moved on to other lies about how people could double their money so quickly.
The biggest early selling point of Tcl was Tk, as a relatively easy way to make good-enough GUI programs with open source on Unixen and the X Window System. Even much easier than the easier-to-use X toolkits like XView with C, and the alternatives only got more difficult from there. There were no Web frontends.
Tcl itself was quite clever as what I'd actually call a string-based scripting language (contrast with Bourne/C-shell/etc. that preceded it on Unix).
Originally, Tcl was among the handful of off-the-shelf extension languages. You write your big application in C or C++, and then you embed an interpreter for a higher-level extension language, for users or the original developer to add on functionality. The options at the time were usually a small Lisp/Scheme, Tcl, Python, or something entirely bespoke and probably quirky and half-butted.
During early dotcoms, there was considerable interest in Tcl for backend work, and it also wouldn't have been the worst choice to put into the browser. Like Python, Tcl would've been more accessible and democratizing-the-Web than JavaScript, and there were already solid off-the-shelf designs and implementations. (Scheme would've appeared slightly more intimidating than Python or Tcl, and was more powerful, which I think was why Tim Berners-Lee preferred Python over Scheme as the people's programming language for various Web purpose. The semantics of the JavaScript we got was more a hurried toy Scheme, plus the simplest object model, and a more intimidating syntax that came from systems programming.)
So I also love Tcl, but I think it would have not been great as a web language. I think the small amount of type information we can pass via json is just about right, and tcl would have made it impossible.
You cannot encode arbitrary tcl data to a typed object "correctly" because every tcl dictionary is a valid list, and every list is a valid string (numbers are also strings, and so is code). So in a world of "tcl code on the web", both the sending and parsing ends of a 'tcl data stream' would need to know which type they're "supposed" to treat the data as.
I loved it back in the day, tons of fun to configure with code, somehow friendly enough for me to play with in high school with no background knowledge and only some man pages to help me. Coupled with a lightweight WM like CTWM https://www.ctwm.org/index.html it lead to a really performant desktop on the single-core ~400mhz machines we had in our computer lab....
My pet project in those days was writing a C++ X-Windows gui toolkit, and I took a lot of inspiration from Tk. Both design, and "how do I do this" from the source code were invaluable.
Yes the legacy Cisco IOS had a Tcl interpreter built in, you can drop in to the repl with the tclsh command. The command is still there on newer Linux based IOS versions
Yep, the age of Python and the C-steeped culture of its original developers probably has a lot to do with the choice of Tcl/Tk as a basis for the standard library GUI framework. But even then, there's significant wrapping; and Python's type system is, if anything, even further away from the free-wheeling "stringly typed" Tcl than JavaScript is.
I do sometimes yearn for the alternate universe where web browsers ended up doing Python natively (and PyPy style optimizations became the default, and the dynamism was reined in to an extent where it could offer JavaScript-tier performance).
Aside from the emphasis on "continuation passing style" though I don't get how you're relating JavaScript to Scheme.
If Google cares about some of the long-standing problems, I wonder whether they know how to fix them. (Assign OKRs, which may be conflicting, or get quietly triaged/prioritized?)
Maybe they need personnel tasked solely to just go in, with the blessing of some high-up person, find any bad customer service or goodwill problem, bottom-up, figure out why it's happening, and work with the relevant teams to fix it, quickly. Then repeat.
To fit with ingrained cultural incentives for relevant teams, other managers and ICs might have to be convinced that their performance evaluations depend strongly on cooperating with this process.
I have a suspicion that 99.999% of people who say that Lisp syntax is difficult to read haven't really tried to use it (outside of a random homework assignment in CS101).
The syntax is incredibly trivial, and needs very little initial instruction (except to tell newbs to stop trying to put the close-paren on a line by itself, like they are fresh out of a JavaScript boot camp and have no frame to conceive anything else, and that, really, the automatic indentation and the shapes should be at least as readable once you try to use it in real-world examples, and see how that works in practice).
> Since Lisp puts the function name after the opening parenthesis, there is more distance between the parentheses. This makes it less likely that the parentheses are close enough to be scanned as a single shape.
Or we can navel-gaze differently, and claim it's more a shape, because then it's a nicely rounded shape that contains the whole function application/call:
(foo x y z)
foo(x, y, z);
There is a small chance that you're doing the following in a Lisp or C, but you'd be doing something fancy that most people do not (like writing the internals for a pluggable framework or object system):
(((f a) b ) c) Pseudo-Lisp
f(a)(b)(c) Pseudo-C
If you were doing this, and you thought the particular code was hard to read, you could throw in a variable or two, for the intermediate function (or function pointer) values. Or use a combinator...
When you don't have this fancy function-that-produces-function-that-produces-function pattern, your list head will typically have the name of a function there, and then the syntax simple shape and indentation visually disambiguates.
In skimming the article, I did see something the article could've followed through on, for a good syntax criticism of many Lisps:
f[a][b][c] Pseudo-C, array access notation
Array-intensive Lisp code could use syntax/dialect extension for square brackets for this, if the Lisp doesn't already have comparable syntax:
> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.
Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement, and a war against active account, no matter the purpose, would make that line go down.
Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.
For the same reason Amazon doesn't solve fake reviews. Their business needs the content and they're confident that the people who haven't left for better options will remain undiscerning.
I try to go to manufacturers own online store if they have one. Or a local retailer. Or a specialty online seller. Or Walmart but they have third party sellers too so you have to avoid those.
Not sure which you're asking about but, for example, Best Buy price matches Amazon for items where they overlap. And then I can go get the product right away without waiting for shipping. Or paying for Prime. Or supporting Amazon.
In Germany e.g. Galaxus works fine for many things. Also eBay surprisingly works better for many things because it has more filters, e.g. if you want to buy wood or window shades etc.
eBay has become a cesspool though, with their silly login requiring phone number and so on. I still remember I had a completely fine Kleinanzeigen account at the beginning of the Pandemic, because I wanted to offer math and computer stuff help for students and put an ad for that on kleinanzeigen. (Didn't ever get a request that was worth taking seriously.) Then at some point later, I suddenly was no longer allowed to log in, unless I disclose my phone number. What a shit. Since then that account sits stale or might already be deleted.
It's extremely unrealistic to sue someone for violating your Terms of Service. It's not impossible -- you'd need to sue them for a breach of contract and demonstrate clear financial damages --, but the primary solution is to just refuse to provide them service.
Like, Reddit may know that Bazzly is selling fake comments, which violates Reddit's ToS. How many comments can they prove are tied to Bazzly? How much does an astro-turfed comment financially harm Reddit, and can they convince a jury of that?
Instead, most companies will aggressively shut down the bot networks, if they can identify them, and hope that the astro-turfers focus on other platforms, and/or make it more financially challenging to do it successfully on theirs.
Because it would be a monumental waste of time and money. Even if you could track down the overseas operators doing this, there's not much damages you could sue for, and alternatives would just pop up in their place.
Literally the example in the comment I replied to was an overseas operator. But my point is even if you did go after spam operators, alternatives will simply pop up in other jurisdictions, as has happened with literally every other form of spam.
Their main activities were click botting and general social media marketing (day job was in SMM analytics).
But if you're already there with the automation for thousands of accounts and the knowledge of what an account looks like why not also put some to ripen for 9 bucks a comment :)
Generally you can't stop them, they're shell companies run from countries that don't care. You spend a lot of time and effort trying to block one and they just spin up another, it's asymmetrical in that you expend more resources to stop it.
reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further
When I did dev relations I just messaged people who had decent accounts and an email or other contact and offered them some freebies on our platform, which did lead to a decent number of them posting about it, like I solicited ~200 accounts and had ~10 comment or post about it in the next month. Maybe some kind of service where people could opt into offers?
Based on what happens everywhere, they're paying reddit for leniency. Pink contracts have been around since Uunet was offering them to Usenet spammers.
As someone who used PostmarketOS previously, and would be interested in returning...
1. Congrats to them on a name change.
2. Bummer about not getting the .org domain name, but if the current registrant hasn't been using the name, there is some ICANN trademark pressure that can help the registrant be reasonable with the price.
3. Is the effort into branding a sign that there's also imminent big news on viability for daily drivers?
There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.
AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.
Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.
I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.
As context for this article presumably written for an audience of faculty, a few bits of historical MIT culture:
1. MIT prided itself on having minimal rules. Historically, they think rules are barriers to MIT people doing smart things.
2. MIT valued an open campus. Typical example was that at any time of night students could walk into an empty classroom to work on a problem or something.
3. There is a joke that it stands for "Military-Industrial Technology". There have been very close ties to US govt., more than most than most universities. Whatever goes on at a small set of partifcular universities will be seen by some to affect national security. This is in addition to, like other US research universities, suddenly feeling at the mercy of whatever US administration is controlling the purse strings.
4. Overall strong libertarian bent, of the student body and much of the faculty. This affects how you make non-engineering/science/financial/prestige arguments to this audience. (Excepted are administrative staff, more typically having the background of solid liberal arts educations.)
5. (This one is my own observation) MIT student body overall were less aware of societal and world issues, compared to students overall at the university I was at before. If you see demonstrations on certain issues, that might be originating with international students arriving on campus with concerns felt widely in their home countries, rather than the stereotypical general idealism of young college students.
(Aside: I'm surprised by the style of the article, if the audience is broad MIT faculty. The authors seem to be mostly from humanities pockets, so I wonder whether they bounced a draft off some engineering or science professors. Also, although the article might be implying that inhibiting protests is a motivation (not just an incidental effect) of the surveillance, I didn't see the article acknowledge the horrific recent mass-shooting on campus, which would be an obvious motivation. I'm personally highly skeptical of mass surveillance, and I think there are some profound questions for society, so I'd like to see engagement of the broader faculty.)
Are you talking about the professor who got killed at their home in Brookline (horrific, for sure, but not on campus and not really “mass”)? Or do you just mean the one at Brown?
Yes, I was thinking of the whole tragedy together, not wanting to dwell on it, and misspoke. Thank you for catching that.
I assume that the whole tragedy is also on the minds of those responsible for trying to prevent it from happening again, on any campus. So I'd think the point still stands, about, once you're talking about motivations for campus surveillance, that's one of them.
Editing would be a good idea, but it was already over an hour old before someone pointed out the confusing phrasing, and HN won't let me edit it. Do you agree that the clarifying comments right below it will suffice?
A rival team has an ambitious but craven assistant coach who, with a regime change, could be better controlled towards our interests.
Another team's key player couldn't be replaced on short notice, were they to be removed from the board, in a deniable 'gang-related' incident in front of the nightclub they frequent.
The roster of a favored team could be boosted with secret financial incentives to candidates, funded off-the-books by new gambling and prostitution operations.
A third-party seller on Amazon or eBay was including sheets of suspicious US postage stamps in product shipments, unsolicited, with full-color glossy notes offering more stamps in exchange for positive reviews.
(I took the stamps and note I received to a post office, where a manager agreed they looked suspicious, and I asked them forward it up the chain. I like the USPS as a trustworthy service and institution, and I hate counterfeiting.)
reply