MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by i_don_t_know | 2025-11-05 13:37:33+00:00
(Original title shortened because it's too long.)

Why higher-order logic is a good formalisation for specifying and verifying hardware

Mike Gordon

September 1985, 28 pages

DOI https://doi.org/10.48456/tr-77

Abstract

Higher order logic was originally developed as a foundation for mathematics. In this paper we show how it can be used as: 1. a hardware description language, and 2. a formalism for proving that designs meet their specifications.

Examples are given which illustrate various specification and verification techniques. These include a CMOS inverter, a CMOS full adder, an n-bit ripple-carry adder, a sequential multiplier and an edge-triggered D-type register.

See also https://lawrencecpaulson.github.io/2023/01/04/Hardware_Verif... and "Interactive Formal Verification, Lecture 11: Hardware Verification" by Lawrence Paulson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVdgoEpo4uI&list=PLVdBoNna-4...
by estearum | 2025-11-05 13:38:29+00:00
No I think "the angle" is extremely clear: government requests are fine (important even!) and coercion is bad.

The government itself has First Amendment rights to request action from private entities. Those private entities have First Amendment rights to accept or decline those requests without fear of reprisal.

Both MAGA and Biden (and every other admin) have requested action from private parties. But in Biden's case, there's no evidence of coercion, the "coerced parties" didn't say they were coerced, and there was no tool the people requesting action could've even used to damage the platforms.

In MAGA's case, coercion was posted on Truth Social, stated by regulatory agency heads on national news, and could functionally be actually executed by those same regulatory heads using broadcast licenses or merger reviews. These decisions actually

Why do I care that our government retain the right to request action from private parties?

If the government is looking for a murder suspect, they should (and do) have a right to request that a local news station put out a PSA. They should (and do) have a right to request that the local news does not broadcast information that may help the murder suspect.

In both cases, the local news stations itself should (and does) have a First Amendment right to either accept or decline these requests.

If we take your implication that the government has no right to request action, then they cannot publish PSAs via private channels. They cannot assist platforms in identifying CSAM. They cannot communicate evacuation orders. They cannot communicate product recalls.

If we take your implication that private parties have no right to accept such requests when they want to, then control of speech is as simple as the government requesting to remove content that they want to ensure is not removed, or requesting to publish content they do not want published.

Both of these are utterly ridiculous outcomes which is why this is not the legal framework in reality!

This has nothing to do with not "seeing" the duopoly. No one is happy with our two party system. But as shown, it's simply not true that your imaginary legal theory 1) exists or 2) would be "effective" or "less corruptible", nor is it true that "both sides" are equally guilty of abusing the actual legal structure we have today.
by fundatus | 2025-11-05 13:39:20+00:00
Yeah, the fragmentation that is caused by Apple's behaviour is insane.

You can set a different email client globally, but a different default Messages or Maps app? That only works in some regions. In-App payments? You can now basically do whatever you want in the US, in the EU you can opt-in into a different regime, in other regions it's staying the same but who knows for how long.

By fighting this everywhere they're basically losing control over the outcomes and will end up with lot's of different regulations everywhere. Instead of doing the sensible thing and opening up their platform before they're being forced to do so.
by fluoridation | 2025-11-05 13:40:21+00:00
>What if I need to send emails? These days doing this ourselves is a dark art by itself (IP/domain address warming up, checking if my domain has not ended on some spam list, etc.).

AFAIK, everyone sending automated emails just uses one of the paid services, like sendmail.

>What if I need to follow some regulations, like European Union GDPR compliance? Have I done everything what is needed to store personal data as GDPR requires? Is my DB password stored in a compliant way or I will face a fine up to 10% of my incomes.

What does this have to do with cloud vs non-cloud? You'll need to manage your data correctly either way.
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-05 13:40:33+00:00
>I’m old enough to remember the failed attempts for healthcare reforms under President Bill Clinton. The ACA felt like a miracle. It wasn’t what everyone wanted, but it was a start with principles. It has only been legislatively weakened over time, rather than improved.

I am also old enough to remember. And the health insurance companies spent heavily on lobbying and advertising ("death panels" and "healthcare rationing" and all sorts of other crap). It was sad.

Fast forward to the ACA and as I recall, insurers were spending USD1 million/day on lobbying efforts to block it.

I didn't think the ACA was a "miracle" though. Back then I used the analogy that it was like RFC 5386[0] ('Better Than Nothing Security'), as it wasn't single-payer and didn't even have a public option (thanks for nothing, Joe Lieberman -- I hope you're roasty-toasty in hell), but it was better than nothing.

I even have an ACA plan which costs me an enormous amount, but again, it's better than nothing.

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5386
by pfdietz | 2025-11-05 13:41:22+00:00
I don't do the testing using Hypothesis, but I do a great deal of property based testing of Common Lisp implementations, where it has been invaluable.

One large testing loop is testing CL's compile function. This involves creating random valid lambda expressions (unnamed functions), compiling them, and running them on random input. The properties tested are things like "the compiler doesn't crash, the generated code doesn't crash, different versions of the code with different valid declarations compute the same thing".

More specific properties are tested for specific CL functions. For example, CL has a function subtypep which, given two types, says either the first value is or is not a subtype of the second, or that it couldn't figure it out. One can test this on randomly generated types, evaluating properties like (subtypep T1 T2) should be consistent with (subtypep `(not ,T2) `(not ,T1)).

The point of PBT isn't that you write tests to cover every possible case, it's that PBT will cook up tests for all sorts of cases you will never come up with yourself. I have repeatedly found it kicking out the whackiest test inputs that happen to trigger bugs from strange interactions.
by jimnotgym | 2025-11-05 13:41:35+00:00
With respect, you probably only see that bit of Finance, but doesn't mean that is all Brenda does.

At least half of the work in my senior Finance team involves meeting people in operations to find out what they are planning to do and to analyse the effects, and present them to decision makers to help them understand the consequences of decisions. For an AI to help, someone would have to trigger those conversations in the first place and ask the right questions.

The rest of the work involves tidying up all the exceptions that the automation failed on.

Meanwhile copilot in Excel can't even edit the sheet you are working on. If you say to it, 'give me a template for an expense claim' it will give you a sheet to download... probably with #REF written in where the answers should be.
by miek | 2025-11-05 13:41:59+00:00
That automation you cite in your #1 is advocated for because it is deterministic and, with effort, fairly well understood (I have countless scripts solidly running for years).

I don't disavow AI, but like the author, I am not thrilled that the masses of excel users suddenly have access to Copilot (gpt4). I've used Copilot enough now to know that there will be huge, costly mistakes.
by businessmate | 2025-11-05 13:42:09+00:00
AI systems now influence demand formation, brand preference, and purchase routing. Leaders who treat this as a marketing trend misunderstand the nature of the exposure. Visibility in AI assistants is not a campaign variable. It is a controllable risk surface with measurable impact on CAC, LTV, and brand equity. If the enterprise cannot verify its position, detect change, and prove recovery, it does not control its demand surface.
by piaste | 2025-11-05 13:42:20+00:00
It was a theoretical question. It's not the first time I hear the complaint '$previous_dev left a bunch of unmaintainable macro tricks in a C codebase' and I thought, since those macros get expanded as part of the compilation process, surely it should be possible to intercept and capture the expanded version?

Even if a whitelist is not available (the SO question involves a particular C++ preprocessor and may not apply to others), a hacky approach might be to comment out all the #defines in the codebase, uncomment the ones you want to get rid of, and then run the full preprocessor task on it. Ugly but probably doable for a one-time refactoring.
by Blahagun | 2025-11-05 13:43:55+00:00
Setting up the email server is the only thing I couldn't do with my own home hosted setup because you're at the mercy of your internet provider to give you the PTR record in their network, and lately many providers outright refuse to do it for "your own and their own safety" reasons. This thing alone could be the difference between deciding to host yourself or use a cloud service.
by seidleroni | 2025-11-05 13:44:45+00:00
100%. I have known a couple of people that did some form of "medical tourism", mostly for expensive dental work. In both cases they did some form of tech contract work as a sole proprietorship and bought their own health insurance (not through a partner). The overlap of people who can save up thousands of dollars for treatment abroad and have poor health insurance is probably not too large.
by gruez | 2025-11-05 13:44:56+00:00
>It take more than simply being the best or most successful business in a sector to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is an active choice you make as a business by intentionally engaging in anticompetitive behaviors.

By that logic are Amazon and Whatsapp also not "monopolies"? Are they simply just the best e-commerce company and chat app respectively? What competitive behaviors are they employing against their competitors?
by gruez | 2025-11-05 13:45:58+00:00
>because they are actively hostile to their users.

>Where is my Big Picture mode?

>Where is my support of Linux?

Calling the lack of linux and TV support "hostile" is bit of a stretch. The two combined probably makes up 5% of the user base at most, and there are probably workarounds (eg. using wine or the regular interface)
by positron26 | 2025-11-05 13:46:37+00:00
Agree, looks like an engine disruption.

The rotation already exacerbates the flow into that engine. Change in flow geometry gets more smoke in its way when it's already eating turbulent air.

We don't know if it just had a disruption or a full-blown stall, but give the way it made it to takeoff speed and then just gave out, stall seems likely.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-05 13:46:58+00:00
No, I’m suggesting that she is ineffective exactly because she stays in her box.

She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.”

NOT to be confused with the junior engineer who comes into a project and says it’s garbage and suggests we rewrite it from scratch in ${hotLanguage} because they saw it on a blog somewhere.
by couAUIA | 2025-11-05 13:47:04+00:00
At Jimmy, we're developing France's first Small Modular Reactor. Our engineers needed to quickly search and extract insights from thousands of complex scientific PDFs—nuclear research papers, regulatory documents, multilingual content filled with equations and diagrams.

Manual search wasn't cutting it. So we built a RAG system to give our team instant access to critical technical knowledge.

What worked: - AWS Titan V2 crushed it (69.2% hit rate vs. 57.7% for Qwen, 39.1% for Mistral) - Chunk size? Barely mattered (2K to 40K—no significant difference) - Qdrant: Easy to use, solid performance, great for self-hosting - Mistral OCR: Unmatched, the only tool that parsed our equations correctly - Naive chunking beat context-aware (70.5% vs 63.8%) - Dense-only search outperformed hybrid search (69.2% vs 63.5%)

Hard lessons: - OpenSearch from AWS is ridiculously expensive for no reason and presented as the default option by AWS - Mistral Embed works well in English but not in French
by jorvi | 2025-11-05 13:47:08+00:00
Valve has market power though, which is a key part of a monopoly.

If tomorrow Steam decided to charge 30% extra to developers with the stipulation that sticker price must equal that of outside Steam, developers wouldn't have much of a choice but to eat the cost, because PC gamers are extremely reluctant to leave their Steam library and features.

A good example of market power is Apple vs Spotify. When Apple launched Apple Music, they changed Music.app into Apple Music on every iDevice in the world, with a handy subscription pop-up the first time you launched it.

This was massively anti-competitive overreach despite Apple not technically being a monopolist. You can easily install Spotify, and Spotify was much bigger. Without making this move, Apple Music would have crashed and burned, but Apple basically forced themselves into the market, using their marketshare and user migration reluctance as a crowbar.

The fair competition thing to would have been to show a pop-up on first Apple Music app launch, asking "hey, would you like to try one of these streaming services?", and show Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and Deezer in a random order. Just like Microsoft and their browser pop-up.

Then again, aside from a decade of stagnation (2010-2020 Steam saw very few updates, until Valve started working on the Deck), Valve hasn't really abused their position. Gabe Newell famously said that piracy isn't a pricing problem, it's a service problem, and Valve is a private company, so as long as he is at the helm I assume Valve is going to continue delivering good service. After that.. who knows.
by anon721656321 | 2025-11-05 13:47:12+00:00
The issue is reliability.

would you be willing to guarantee that some automation process will never mess up, and if/when it does, compensate the user with cash.

For a compiler, with a given set of test suites, the answer is generally yes, and you could probably find someone willing to insure you for a significant amount of money, that a compilation bug will not screw up in a such a large way that it will affect your business.

For a LLM, I have a believing that anyone will be willing to provide that same level of insurance.

If a LLM company said "hey use our product, it works 100% of the time, and if it does fuck up, we will pay up to a million dollars in losses" I bet a lot of people would be willing to use it. I do not believe any sane company will make that guarantee at this point, outside of extremely narrow cases with lots of guardrails.

That's why a lot of ai tools are consumer/dev tools, because if they fuck up, (which they will) the losses are minimal.
by junaru | 2025-11-05 13:47:38+00:00
> They need to open up access to third party stores and third party browser engines.

Here in EU they did allow third party stores and all we got were shovelware sites with subscriptions. It added even more friction an shadiness to acquiring apps.

We need to sop pretending iOS third party stores are anything like what we envisioned them to be. They are not f-droid or anything even half as good. Apple complies with this impotent law because the law changes absolutely nothing for end user.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-11-05 13:47:46+00:00
The evolution of Meta/FB is quite interesting.

It started off seemingly innocent - the mission of connecting folks. However, there was no money in that.

Where is the money? Content production. What content generates a continuous growing stream of earnings? Content that appeals to the senses of all kinds - including selling a get rich fast dream to girls promoting their OF pages.

What you have is an environemnt that preys and feeds off of consumers who have a lack of discipline with their money and are easy to manipulate - providing a nice ROAS. This is Meta in a nutshell.

Zuck enjoys roll playing a roman emperor - I have no doubt behind the scenes he laughs at his contribution toward the declining tastes, standards and self control of individuals.
by jborsari2 | 2025-11-05 13:48:26+00:00
Alloy Health: E-Commerce Platform Engineer - Brazil or Columbia (Remote)

Alloy Health is a leading digital health platform providing women with expert, personalized care for perimenopause and menopause. We connect women nationwide with menopause-trained physicians and trusted solutions that support their health, confidence, and well-being.

We’re hiring an E-commerce Platform Engineer to build and optimize the systems behind Alloy’s online customer experience. You’ll develop integrations, services, and platform capabilities that improve conversion, personalization, and growth across our e-commerce ecosystem.

Experience: -Strong proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript, with a proven record of building scalable integrations and services that drive revenue and commerce efficiency. -Deep, hands-on experience with e-commerce platforms (Shopify, commercetools, or similar) and understanding of key metrics (CAC, LTV, conversion rates, attribution models).

Link to apply: https://adr.to/lunywai or email me at joe dot epg at myalloy dot com
by conductr | 2025-11-05 13:49:15+00:00
It’s not even greater trust. It’s just passive trust. The thing is, Brenda is her own QA department. Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. It doesn’t even fully understand the problem/question sometimes yet provides a smart definitive sounding answer. It’s like the doctor on The Simpson’s, if you can’t tell he’s a quack, you probably would follow his medical advice.
by mccoyb | 2025-11-05 13:49:28+00:00
Sonnet 4.5 is way worse than Opus 4.1 -- it's incredible that they claim it's their best coding model.

It's obvious if you've used the two models for any sort of complicated work.

Codex with GPT-5 codex (high thinking) is better than both by a long shot, but takes longer to work. I've fully switched to Codex, and I used Claude Code for the past ~4 months as a daily driver for various things.

I only reach for Sonnet now if Codex gets cagey about writing code -- then I let Sonnet rush ahead, and have Codex align the code with my overall plan.
by fluoridation | 2025-11-05 13:49:55+00:00
>I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed

That already exists. They're called onion sites. What we really need is something that performs about as well as the current Internet, but is stronger against deplatforming: decentralized DNS. It doesn't even need to give memorable names like DNS does, it just needs to be a second, stable addressing layer on top of IP so clients can always find the server.
by nashashmi | 2025-11-05 13:49:56+00:00
By the same fascination, do computers become more complex to enhance people? or do people get more complex with the use of computers? Also, do computers allow people to become less skilled and inefficient? or do less skilled and inefficient people require the need for computers?

The vector of change is acceptable in one direction and disliked in another. People become greater versions of themselves with new tech. But people also get dumber and less involved because of new tech.
by cess11 | 2025-11-05 13:50:18+00:00
My friends run hundreds of TB:s serviced onto the Internet for hobby and pleasure reasons.

It's not all HA, NVMe, web scale stuff, but it's not like a few hundred TB:s is a huge undertaking even for individual nerds with a bit of money to spend or connections at corporations that monotonically decommission hardware and is happy to not have to spend resources getting rid of it.

This summer I bought a used server for 200 euros from an acquaintance, I plan on shoving 140 TB in it and expect some of my future databases to exceed 10 TB in size.
by wongarsu | 2025-11-05 13:50:25+00:00
> Other developers can just make their own platform or distribute games themselves individually. Nobody wants to do that for obvious reasons

Where "nobody" is specifically "no users". Lots of publishers tried doing exactly that, and most eventually gave up because users don't want to deal with extra launchers or platforms. Offering games on your own distribution channel is fine, but not being on Steam is going to hurt your sales a lot. Epic is really the only still-running attempt (except for GOG)
by mothballed | 2025-11-05 13:50:39+00:00
The fact Republicans wouldn't repeal ACA but would repeal the tax credits just shows both sides prefer it to be broken. Democrats could shove through enough votes to repeal ACA to make health insurance cheaper for lower-risk groups without tax credits; Republicans could re-instate tax credits. Instead we are stuck in this bastardized half-socialized model that gets the worst of all worlds.

Politics in the USA has basically gridlocked to it being much cheaper to shit on the other guy than to fix things. In two party system you can actually win by only making the other guy look worse, which only requires breaking things in a way that can be pointed at the other guy, somehow we are stuck in this local minima.
by RajT88 | 2025-11-05 13:50:56+00:00
The paperclip problem is a bit hand-wavey about intelligence. It is taken as a given than unlimited intelligence would automatically win presumably because it could figure out how to do literally anything.

But let's consider real life intelligence:

- Our super geniuses do not take over the world. It is the generationally wealthy who do.

- Super geniuses also have a tendency to be terribly neurotic, if not downright mentally ill. They can have trouble functioning in society.

- There is no thought here about different kinds of intelligence and the roles they play. It is assumed there is only one kind, and AI will have it in the extreme.
by Retric | 2025-11-05 13:50:58+00:00
Your misunderstanding what monopoly means and represents.

Monopoly just comes down to marketshare, but it’s perfectly legal in the US to be a monopoly instead it limits what you’re allowed to do. For example a regular company can give a discount if you agree to only sell their goods, obviously that becomes problematic if the company has monopoly power so they are no longer allowed to have such agreements. The boundaries around what is a market trip people up, but it’s around what customers view as substitutes goods. If you don’t have a car then an EV can be a viable substitute, however if you have a gas car then you have some wiggle room on octane ratings etc but an electric car chargers isn’t viable substitute.

“In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises.[2] Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry (or market).[2]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly