skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm afraid that's not enough in practise: you will also have to specify (and verify) things like: the implementation does not touch memory except the array to be sorted (and some auxiliary variables). If you don't, it will typically be difficult to use the proof of the sorting function in the context of the verification of a larger program.

Depending on the programming language being proved, you don't need to specify that the algorithm doesn't touch other memory, nor which variables it uses as temporary variables, because it's implicit in the definition of the language or the types themselves (or the fact that you are not referencing global variables).

See [1] for an example of a formally proved implementation of an array search algorithm (implemented in the Dafny language, in this case. You can press the play button to see if the theorem prover approves of this implementation).

As you can see, in Dafny there's no need to prove that no other memory is touched, as it's implicit in the type of the method. However, even this example is not as good as it could be because:

- Ideally, you wouldn't need to specify that function arguments aren't null. This would have been implicit had the implementation language (Dafny) not had the concept of null (like Rust doesn't, for instance).

- Also ideally, you would refactor the pre- and post-conditions into a separate predicate, like it was done for sorted(), so that you could prove any array search function to be correct using the same short specification (and if a bug is found in the specification, the fix would be applied to all implementations of array search functions automatically).

Regarding having a large Isabelle/HOL proof invalidated, that sounds very interesting and would love to read more about it!
I can definitely admit I have never done any large proofs yet, so I am interested in hearing about your experience.

Ideally there should be some way of isolating parts of a large specification such that a bug in one part could not affect the other parts (similar to how functional languages guarantee that a function can never read anything but its input, and can never write to anything but its output), but I have absolutely no idea if this is even logically possible, as I am still just a beginner in this area.

Thanks for the interesting discussion!

[1] http://rise4fun.com/Dafny/loJb
No one has a concrete answer, but capitalism could work better if the market were freer -- and by "freer" I don't mean less regulated. I mean that people have more freedom to make choices.

For example, we don't currently have a free labor market because it's extremely expensive (in terms of time and money) for a low-wage worker to find a new job. Those people are trapped. If we had a better safety net for people at the bottom, the labor market could be more competitive.

Another example is lacking knowledge. The market could (and should) stop buying products that harm them, but sometimes the only party who knows the product is harmful is the producer. Cigarettes were an example for a long time because the tobacco companies buried their own research. The government now forces health disclosures on cigarettes, which makes the market work like it's supposed to.

There are tons of examples where a "socialist" policy actually leads to more personal freedom, more efficient markets, and less need for government intervention into individuals' decisions.

(I would include universal basic income as a social policy, but it's actually not! It's supposed by both libertarians and socialists. It might be the "next better bad" adjustment to our current system.)
This is the very definition of winning the election.
Quirks of the arXiv
From the video, it appears that they are dipping by 1cm, measuring volume, dipping by 1cm more, measuring volume, etc. So they end up, effectively, with a set of 1cm slices and the volume of each slice. For one orientation. Then they repeat, getting slices at a different orientation.

Not only would it not work with something absorbent, but (per other comments below) does not (currently) work with shapes that trap air or catch liquid.

I think they're 3D-printing test shapes because it's the simplest way to generate interesting test structures. Otherwise they'd have to manufacture (for example) a bunch of columns plus a ball using metalwork or wood or something. Some of their models look like they were originally scanned from small sculptures -- although in this day and age, it's possible they were just created as 3D models in the first place.
The experiments you're looking for are the socialist democracies of northern Europe. Look at the Netherlands for an example.
I generally listen to heavy metal, classic and hard rock that tends a bit towards prog with long sections and a bit of classical, epic feel to them. Something like Dio-era Rainbow, Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden.

A few favorites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6CjO0H2j0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYrW3yONR44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVid_fLzN5g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDwotNLyz10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J51LPlP-s9o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTqv59JXMUk
Well VC are investors and money managers. If they've raised a new fund, then they need to put it to work. Capital that's just sitting there as cash on deposit isn't working, which means the VCs running it aren't doing their jobs. Q: how do VCs manage money that isn't yet invested? Put it in US Treasuries? Or the money markets with short term paper?
There is no stealth in space.

Therefore, instead of hiding, the aliens are going to pro-actively fry every competitor civilization by using their solar shades as a Nicoll Dyson Beam... :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtFnWh53z0
EPYC sure does look good on paper. But the big question in my mind is how will OEMs react to it. Will it be offered on equal footing in actual server systems from major brands (HP, Dell etc)? Most people won't be buying CPUs by themselves, so the list prices are mostly moot point. I do seem to recall that K8-era Opterons didn't do as well on the market as they could have been based on the HW alone. I fear we might see a reprise of that play again.
I went to college just as laptops were starting to become ubiquitous, but I never saw the point of them in class. I still think they're pretty useless for math, engineering, and science classes where you need to draw symbols and diagrams that you can't easily type. Even for topics where you can write prose notes, I always found it more helpful to be able to arrange them spatially in a way that made sense rather than the limited order of a text editor or word processor.
Is it just the flood? Or is it cloud providers and big data corps were buying all HDDs they could get - and the consumer market got the remaining rest
I suppose there are two different claims of possibility that are getting confused.

There is a hard claim of possibility, that is a claim of the state of nature (e.g. it is possible for a photon to travel at 0.5c). This hard claim is one where we definitively say that it is _certain_ that it's a physical possibility.

Then there is a soft claim of possibility, that is a claim of our state of knowledge. (e.g. It's possible that Rob went to the store, but I'm not sure).

These are two different claims. One is a hard claim that should only be made with evidence. The other is a statement of our uncertainty and an open mind; that doesn't need any evidence to make.

It's a shame that these two different meanings of these words exist, but such is the English language. They are saying that their research does not close the door on that eventuality, and that their state of knowledge on that topic is uncertain.
What about two-factor authentication?
All of this seems automatable with software as long as everyone follows conventions (as they do with SAFEs).
I understand your concern, but I thought "White" implied those white people who are alternatively called "the man." Or, as Tony Soprano would call them, "Wonderbread WOPs." It's the difference between white people and Whiteness.
> 110+ characters per line is hard to read and ugly [1].

It's not that straightforward. While shorter line lengths may be preferrable for reading bodies of text[1], API pages are rarely read top to bottom. Reducing the number of characters per line makes less content visible on screen, necessitating extra scrolling and slowing down visual searching.

[1] Though it's quite possible to cherry-pick citations for either side: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Barbara_Chaparro/public... (PDF)
Продается дом 5 соток 37000у.е в районе Паркентского рынка
The conceit is that the narrator has an eidetic memory, or at least claims to. And at the same time, it is apparent that he is not always a reliable or honest narrator, not does he always fully understand what is going on in front of him. The narrator is also being manipulated by alien powers beyond his control. The relationships of the characters are weird and complicated. And it is true--Wolfe deliberately constructed the books so that rereading them would make these connections apparent in different ways. (I should say that Shadow of the Torturer was published when I was 17, and over the next decade I must have gone through the series four or five times, even taking up a correspondence with Gene, who was actually pretty good about answering questions).
Warren E. Buffett Donates 18,628,189 Shares of Berkshire Hathaway [pdf]
If you know the whole story, you are right. I don't know the whole story so I'm reserving judgment. I'm curious what you think Teo should have done? Should he have resigned at the first indication that Caldbeck did anything inappropriate?
The IRS Narrows Data Request to Coinbase Users That Transacted for $20,000
It's very unlikely you'll get any benefit from doing it the inefficient way either. Does eslint not support "ignore this part" comments?
I don't think that there's any question about that, there’s not some kind of one-size-fits-all set of rules that you can make everyone follow. But I can tell you from personal experience that I did my best performance in classes where I brought my laptop to class. Why? The answer is obvious when you look at it—if a class was below my level, and I was only taking it because it was required for my degree, I brought my laptop to stave of the boredom and breezed through the homework and tests.

So the answer to “what if?” question is really just that students are ultimately responsible for their own outcomes, and figuring out that laptops are a liability is part of that.
I think GNOME 3 has come a long way but years later I'm still bothered by their killing type-ahead navigation in the file dialog and replacing it with search -- however useful searching may be (and despite recent improvements), it slows me down greatly, and often leads to mistakes, when I know where something is and simply want to navigate to it.

Plenty of discussion about this [0] [1] but the GNOME devs don't want it back, for various reasions.

Ubuntu has always patched it back in, but it looks like they will drop it in 17.10 if nobody steps up to maintain the patch [2].

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1164...

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721968

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1666...
VB dev here:

We don't actually type those, Visual Studio adds them automatically when we hit enter.

But we appreciate the thought, and we're happy that Ruby is halfway there now :)
there is only a "theorem" datatype

You mean that
there is NOT only a "theorem" datatype?
In contrast to Curry/Howard provers, the LCF	approach forgets proofs, it guarantees soundness by giving you
access to proof rules only through the "theorem" datatype (which is
the key trusted computing base). To be sure the	"theorem" datatype may
internally maintain a proof object (e.g. for the purposes of program
extraction), but that's not necessary.
This is the way it should be. Hopefully we are going in that direction.
They seem to be covering up the amount of hand grenade attacks in Sweden.
My mind was blown when I came across this Github repo that demonstrates mathematical notation by showing comparisons with JavaScript code https://github.com/Jam3/math-as-code

I think I often struggled or was intimidated by the syntax of math. I started web development after years of thinking I just wasn't a math person. When looking at this repo, I was surprised at how much more easily and naturally I was able to grasp concepts in code compared to being introduced to them in math classes.
Implying that English as a major is bad does all stakeholders a disservice. English major's regret their choice because it's hard to get a good paying job with just that major. One of the pluses is that these graduates can communicate well using their skills. I would think that the fix would be to add a second major where their skills can shine. This gives students the benefit of studying something they love while getting some practical skills they will need. I can think of Marketing, project management and anything in the HR area.

I've even heard that English majors are truly outstanding when they learn to program.
To be fair, similar tactics are standard practice in many non-tech fields: pharmaceuticals, law, and agronomy to name a few. What's perhaps different here is that researchers may not be accustomed to disclosing financial support that is only weakly connected to the research in question.
To be pedantic, we do have instincts as humans and common scientific consensus is that we are animals as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes (note that instinct and reflex are essentially the same thing in biology)
XL Deploy v7.0 Speeds Up Software Deployment with New UI
Amendments, right of refusal, etc do not happen in SAFE rounds. Why do we assume they should happen in a priced round? Seems like all these documents have been generally standardized so the cost should be the same barring investors asking for extra rights in a Series A.
The VCs aren't the investors here.

There are 3 parties, the startup, the VCs and the LPs. The LPs are generally pension funds, college endowments, and sovereign wealth funds, i.e. institutions who can write $10M-$100M checks. The VCs are their agent, like a real estate agent helping you buying a house.

While VCs put their own money into the fund, generally the vast majority of the fund money comes from the LPs. The VCs get paid 2 and 20, 2% of the fund per year for things like salary and rent, and the first 20% of profits from the fund when it ends, in 10 years. Because of this structure, they don't get to treat the fund money as their own personal piggybank.

No matter who pays, the cost of a deal is going to be <money startup receives> + <startup legal costs> + <VC legal costs>.

Raising the cost for the VCs, without changing 2 and 20 just results in increased costs for the VC. Paying their own legal costs means they'll do fewer deals, with larger check sizes.
You should look into various flavors of anarchism, like Syndicalism, that have tried to answer that question.
It isn't just a question of the word, but of using it as a rhetorical weapon in an ideological argument. That leads to flamewars so when we see people doing it we ask them not to.

It's also not ok to use HN primarily for political or ideological battle, since that isn't the purpose of the site. Obviously some topics are more political and commenting in such threads is fine, but it's not to use an account primarily for it.
Post was deleted, heres a cached link. mirror

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFEr...
> memorization

I clearly recall memorizing the times tables when I was young. It suddenly dawned on me that "times" wasn't just a word, it meant adding the number so many times. I no longer needed to memorize the table, I just applied the rule.

Some university engineering classes present formulae and tell the students to just apply them. This is disastrous in my not-so-humble opinion. Where the formula comes from should always be taught, so students understand the formula and the assumptions it was derived from.
Oh, but business interests are always complaining. They face no price or consequence for griping. They set up TV networks to do 24 hour pissing & moaning, and they call it "news."

What blows my mind is that the middle class and the poor who should know better, are simply to damned lazy to stand up for themselves. And many of them simply want a strongman to tell them what to do. That is, when they're not fantasizing that they'll be allowed into the club of the rich if they only provide enough fealty. It's a completely warped populace.
As far as your question about taking drugs/supplements to increase cognitive function, I can say with certainty any positive effect in the short term will eventually fall to long term dependencies and addictions which will, in turn actually decrease your resting cognitive function.
Mdtotex – a script to convert markdown to simple latex
How Deep Can You Dig a Hole?
30 BIGGEST DOG 2017 THE GIANT DOGS Now Dogs Are Growing Fastest Dangerous Dogs
It's amazing that the hospital has the authority to deny the parents the ability to bring the child home.

They may be tending to a vegetable, but unless they endanger anyone they are entitled to this.

More importantly - hospitals can make mistakes, and any entity with power might eventually abuse it. It is frightening that the hospital has this much power over this family.
informed consent for scientific research is very specific and very important. It's history is somewhat intersting, but goes back to the Geneva conventions in the aftermath of WW2 and the Axis efforts on human experimentation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2328798/
Started a ARKit project, I am trying to accurately place a shape based on user touch. Is this possible without vertical plane detection ? I am new to Swift, but have been picking it up quickly.
Capitalism has caused hundreds of millions of deaths as well, without the same military interference that socialist countries have experienced. Your analysis needs a lot more nuance.
Maybe it would be helpful if our operating systems were optimised for working and learning rather than to selling us crap and mining our data.
the trend of style over readability. google recommends avoiding list comprehensions in python yet 99% of stackoverflow python questions have some convoluted list comprehension answer
Curious that it appears to be a non-capitalized acronym. That could definitely cause some confusion.
Like this awesome guy from CompSci:

http://anil.recoil.org/projects/
Programming was in its infancy 50 years ago, but in reality we don't really know what its development arc is. We could be in the toddler stage right now, or we could still be in infancy when compared to future developments in the field. I believe we are much closer to the latter.

There were things being done in the 60s that we still haven't really integrated into our trade. [0] We joke about having to program with hardware switches and punch cards, yet here we are still typing carefully crafted cryptic commands that tell the computer exactly what it is supposed to do, and storing them in linear text files which we have to mentally map to program states. I think there will always be a place for this kind of programming, just as people still use Assembly today, but it's a bit premature to say, "Well, this is it, or nearly so!"

I recall reading that one of the giants of early computing, Von Neumann perhaps, never understood the benefit of Assembly and thought that it was a waste of the computer's time to compile to machine code rather than have a human write the machine code directly. We are working inside a problem domain that we barely understand. I find it hard to believe that we will have the glorious sci-fi future that many of us imagine will come out of advancements in technology without also developing corresponding advancements in how we describe and create and interact with it. One potential example that I am looking forward to learning more about is Luna, which features a visual development environment that is isomorphic to its code. [1]

The implicit goal of programming language and tool development is "How do I make it easier to accurately map 'the thing I want done' into a functioning system?" And our tools are getting better all the time, opening up new avenues of interest and possibility. This is a great time to be a programmer, and I think it's only going to get better, and become more accessible.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4
[1]http://www.luna-lang.org/
They should try this study again, but with laptops heavily locked down. Disable just about everything that isn't productive including a strict web filter. I am willing to bet the results would be much better for the kids with laptops. Of course if you let them have free reign they are going to be more interested in entertainment than productivity.
One cannot assume that an alien can think in a fashion similar to Earth animals.

Humans have the ability to imagine a possibility for which no supporting evidence currently exists--that species alien to our solar system might exist. That ability might not be shared by the species we can imagine. That is, humans can imagine a species that cannot imagine humans. Such aliens would not even realize that building a planet-sized object that cannot be explained by natural processes might present an existential risk.

We, of course, are afraid of hypervelocity impact weaponry, even while having no evidence whatsoever that any such weapon exists anywhere in the universe.

Of course, that just means that any species that did fear annihilation by near-c rocks smashing into their planet would simply disguise their star shade so well that we could not detect it. Meaning that any solar shade we can detect was not likely built by any species able to think like us.

We could clean up by selling them insurance.
Just a reminder -> social democracy is not socialism.
You can literally buy defaulted corporate debt on China's Amazon
Oook, but is that the case with the OP or is it an excuse? Handwriting does require a bit of practice (children usually do it for a few years to get good).
I don't see how allowing somebody overseas to come to the USA to create a company for 2 to 5 years while attracting hundreds of thousands in American dollars, to only be sent back to their country after the Visa expires (5 years) is a good idea?

How does it benefit the USA to build foreign companies with United States dollars so they can empower their own country and their own people, while middle and lower class Americans continue to grasp at the scraps?

I think I side with Trump on this one.
> So-called non-practicing entities — or holders of a patent for a process or product that they don’t plan to develop — often use them to sue companies that would sooner settle rather than pay what can add up to $1 million by the time a case reaches a courtroom.

Why on earth aren't non-practicing entity patent lawsuits outlawed? Seems like a no-brainer, and I can't imagine these firms being big enough to have any seriously lobbying power.
Wonderful series
Since I'm seeing no indication that you want to use this site as intended and several that you don't, I've banned this account. If that's wrong, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and show us otherwise.
I felt like Homo Deus was largely a retread of Sapiens. Some of his speculations about the various forms of humanism that have arisen in the 20th century were interesting, but for most of the book it felt like he was treading very familiar ground. It seemed like Harari was in a rush to release another book after the runaway success of Sapiens, and because of that he didn't take his time writing it. Sapiens was very concise and felt like the product of years of careful thought. Homo Deus felt like it was rushed in comparison. Still a good read, don't get me wrong.

For a similar type of book I would recommend Howard Bloom's Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. They both take a similarly broad scientific perspective on human history and behavior, and both are fun reads.