skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Model checking is great! I, too wrote a simple C# model checker to test some tricky serialization code inside Microsoft. It's now open source: https://github.com/ahelwer/FiniteModelChecker

It requires a fair amount of boilerplate (see the examples in the tests directory) but it is so, so much more powerful than manually coding a bunch of unit test cases that it was worth it (and it unearthed a tricky bug!)

I think a great project would be to write a spec in TLA+, run its model checker in simulation mode, then use the generated event traces to execute corresponding event traces in this (or some other) model checker, all the while translating the program's state back into values understood by TLA+ for checking against the TLA+ spec's invariants. Would be a nice lightweight method of enforcing correspondence between spec and code.
Yes of course, but think about gene therapy for far less intrusive health issues.

If more common and widespread health problems are tackled with gene therapy and we wouldn't know the consequences long term (we really don't) then this aspect becomes far more problematic.

Like you, I would also take the gamble if it's a Hail Mary attempt at surviving or making a somewhat normal life possible. But that's not the point I was trying to tackle.
It's ultimately the voters' fault. First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) voting systems do result in this, but still, it's the voter's responsibility to demand change from their leaders, and demand that they implement a better voting system. Have they done this? No. Everyone just assumes this is how it is and refuses to look at all the European countries that have had approval voting for ages, with much better outcomes.
> With colleagues, I spent the summer checking the data and exploring ways to present them at the workshop that wouldn’t harm our careers.
> Meanwhile customers happily used the apps without caring about what tech was used

People didn't care what tech was used and still do not care, but they do care if the programs are slow and resource hogs.

Note that thanks to all those Java apps at the past, Java still to this day has a very negative image about being slow regardless of how true that is (especially among people who do not know enough to judge its performance).

> If you app solves a real problem, people will use it regardless of the tech you use.

That doesn't mean people will like using it.

Also you do not see many desktop apps being made in Java nowadays. Or 10 years ago, for that matter.
Facebook's first intern writes a book about management. This is her story
> (let's assume we already normalize for orientation etc.)
It's hard to find information on this marketing website. Here is a summary gathered from the comments :

- It's for windows

- It's not open source

- They plan to build a cross-platform IDE using Electron

I think we have solid alternative in the open source world and I don't really see how this product is better (This is based on the information provided by the website).
Interesting article but it eludes me what his bibliographical research found other than gaps which where already known. I fail to notice where he differs from mainstream based on results his research found.

To be clear I don't like stifling discussion with non-scientific arguments either (which the author accuses CERN of). But imho the article fails to bring his arguments across other than "I was attacked on unscientific grounds". If he bases broader male variation on observations of citation indexes I think this is a poor measure as citation indexes favor the incumbents very much. A problem which also male newcomers have trouble with.
These are really well written guides. They are more readable and enjoyable to read than many programming books published for adults today.

I've often wondered why programming books don't use simple graphics or diagrams to illustrate programming concepts. Anyone writing a technical guide (of any kind) would benefit from reading these as a source of ideas and inspiration.
If you let your students model their distributed system with pure functions where each function takes the current state and an event (for example a received message, or a timeout) as inputs and produces a new state together with the actions to be taken (sending of messages), then it's possible (and rather easy) to build the state space in a simulator and verify it. It might explode, but then again, Alloy shows that most bugs in these algorithms already show themselves after the first few steps.
I think the backlash is mostly just delayed. At one point revenue will take a hit because engineers might refuse to implement these "unintentional" and "accidental" features on time.

There is no doubt that the public image about FB is significantly changing - a year from now things will not look better for Facebook then they are today, most likely worse I'd say. This is not something they can turn around anymore - the leadership is not making any learnings and repeats the same mistakes over and over again.
Blockchain Under the Hood: The Only Way to Adoption
End to end encryption permits communication without censorship.

I, for one, favor a regulated middle party that can censor and respond to law enforcement and civil subpoena.

We must make information systems hacker proof with encryption and blockchains.
It's not too bad with uBlock Origin. Are you running a browser with a good adblocker?
Bitcoin couple face death penalty for 'seastead' in international waters
Asking for it without using the modulus operator is a bit evil haha.

I like this exercise and I sent it to a friend who has a few years of programming experience but is still learning heavily.

The first solution lacked the number being printed but everything else was right. Second solution had the number, but he missed the FizzBall when the number was divisible by both three and five. The third solution lacked the Fizz when it was divisible by three. Finally his fourth solution was correct.
I use eatbydate for all my perishables, which usually buys me another week or two on the refrigerated food. I also keep a labeler by the fridge, so I can relabel opened containers with the reduced date instead of trying to remember when that jar of alfredo was last used
Not quite true. From the article:

> Almost half of its products are leftover goods that manufacturers couldn’t otherwise sell.
How much of that is even hardware?

I can’t count the number of times I’ve used some big impressive digital map kind of thing at a mall or airport only to find it completely frozen (software), insanely laggy (potentially both, but likely software if a RPi could run it), and/or infuriating to use because I have to touch very hard exactly on the center of the icon, taking into account what I think the angle of the display is so that I’m hitting it exactly where the screen thinks it is, not where I see it through a layer of glass as being (most definitely software).

All of those complaints have applied to one degree or another to stupid tableside ordering apps that are running on an iPad or my own phone too, so I don’t think the hardware was ever to blame.
The tipping point is when the utility value of their paychecks no longer exceed their personal sense of responsibility about the system they're complicit in.
In the comments, it would be nice to have a link to the original comment for context.
SQLGate sounds like what the news will call the data breach that happens when everyone who switched to this DBMS gets back door'ed
Jordan Peterson constantly alludes to similar findings in similar studies; gender difference actually correlates strongly with a country’s gender equality. The more “equal” a society, the starker the difference of male and female outcomes. He also noted that smart women are generally more talented than smart men; if a woman is good at math, she is likely to be good at other things whereas a man who is good at math is less likely to be good at other things. So smart women often end up out of STEM because it’s easier for their intelligence to manifest. I’m frankly amazed this article got this high on HN, and I hope you all give yourselves a chance to fully analyze it before letting a political bias force you to downvote.
I've moved in the other direction in recent times, to some extent because I'm sick of the software engineer uniform. I wear a shirt (the kind with buttons) pretty much every day - some of which are made to measure and feature my own selection of colour and contrast colour, threads, collar type, cuffs and so on - and I often dress more formally at conferences (and sometimes on holiday, depending on what I'm doing) on my own time than I do at work.

"Clothing is a form of self expression, which employers don't want because <reasons>."

I wonder if my relatively formal attire in a sea of software engineer uniforms marks me out as one of these self-expressers - perhaps one day I'll be asked if I could please wear a t-shirt to work :)

That's just me; I like to look sharp. I expect that I am judged on that by some - look what he's wearing, I bet he can't even write code! - but as people here have implied in these very threads, if a company turns you down because you're well-dressed, you probably didn't want to to work there anyway!
Idaho legislators approve law requiring transparency for risk assessment tools
social media with 10 million dependencies.
> E.g. London-Amsterdam could be dozens/hundreds of 6-12 seater electrical planes

As long as they don't all need 2 pilots. I'd really like to see self-driving planes, must be easier than self-driving cars surely? (And, yes, I would fly in one)
I feel like these days we should be creating more user-friendly graphs - both for the creator of the graph and for the reader. I created this graph of the Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 earlier today (https://kyso.io/KyleOS/atmospheric-co2-concentrations#code=h...). Would love to see the OP's heatmap recreated with plotly.
Source code of Iranian cyber-espionage tools leaked on Telegram
This is an example of the 'Slippery Slope' logical fallacy.
Ask HN: Is it uncomfortable installing unfamiliar tools on a personal machine?
I recently built a new machine for development. The Ryzen 7 processor came with The Division 2. However AMD wants me to install a product verification tool to prove I have said processor on my machine. Never mind the fact I have already had to send them an invoice and screenshot proving I got a game code from my retailer.

I feel so uncomfortable installing some strange tool on my brand new machine.

Does anyone feel like this on their personal machines?

Is it normal to be this protective?

I'd gladly take a pass on a free game if it meant no potential spyware on my machine.
Who's the "et al" there? Microsoft and Apple would be the logical successors, but I don't think most people would consider them "just as bad as Facebook".
Pretty socialist.

In Russia sefdom was abolished for 23 milion people in 1860 with compensation for the landowners paid not by the state but by taxing ex-sefs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
Which would be a great defense, except that they typically keep all that stuff even when you do subscribe.
Scientists Generated Nuclear Fusion with a Tabletop Device
How is this not a crime?

They trick you to get your password, then steal your contacts. Seems like typical malware.
That question is also addressed in the blog post I linked to:

"In general, no. Contract terms vary a bit, but for me: I retain IP and the right to post it elsewhere, but grant DC a perpetual, non-exclusive license to the course material in return for royalties. I've requested breaking the contract by mutual consent, have not heard back."

https://twitter.com/noamross/status/1117050638955892742
>Spending any time or energy getting worked up at someone (uselessly) voting one way... is counterproductive.

No, it's really not, because there is no alternative: the voters are the ones who have the ultimate power and responsibility here. This isn't China where the Party controls everything.

>An effective use of one's time is working at the party level (by which, yes, I mean the two that get elected, not the rest) to get better candidates on the ballot

People have been trying that for ages, and it doesn't work; the system itself is broken, and when they do get "better" candidates elected, those candidates don't actually make any big changes because they don't really want to.

>This includes working to change the way our elections work to break the two-party stability point

The only way to do this is to change the voting system altogether to one like those used in Europe. Working to get "better" candidates on the ballot isn't going to accomplish that. I've never seen any popular candidates talk about changing the voting systems.
Or in the typical way of measuring entropy, about 2^225. So you can make a connection through these impossibly big numbers into levels of security for cryptography, and see how this particular amount of impossible is right in the middle of typical use. It's also interesting to think about how a deck of cards is both elegant and unwieldy as a way to store a key.
Id say comparing advertising with child labor proves how biases distort perception.
English is a Germanic language, except it greatly simplified its grammatical inflection, and then had its vocabulary infused with Romance stock first from the long-term use of Norman French as the prestige language of England and then from the proclivity for Latin (and Greek, but that's not a Romance language) roots in scientific coinage during the Renaissance and Modern periods. In terms of modern vocabulary, more words have a Romance root than a Germanic root. As a random factoid, the third-person plural pronouns in English actually come from Old Norse (courtesy of the Viking invasions, which resulted in a large portion of England being dominated by Danes instead of Anglo-Saxons until around the Norman invasion).
I might be a pessimist, but i believe it is way more likely that people who are working with Electron are doing it on powerful workstations, mostly worked with the web stack and want to reuse their knowledge and many of them have no idea (or forgot) about the performance differences between an Electron application and a native application on a mid-range (let alone low end) computer.

With that in mind, even if nothing will change for those who already have invested their time in Electron, this repetition might at least steer some who are at the edge towards better solutions than Electron.
Washington, D.C. To Baltimore Loop Project Draft Environmental Assessment [pdf]
Do you use any kind of library or typical design pattern for your FSM implementation? When I've used them, I typically always go back to very C-like code (enum for the states, a state variable, and a big switch statement inside a loop).
>But why would I want the keys I use the most to be all near one another? I find that I type the fastest when I have to press keys that are far from one another.

Science and physics says you're wrong. Also, it sounds like you've never actually tried learning another keyboard layout.
I'm currently using XFCE on 3x4k monitors on a desktop. You can control almost everything with the DPI setting in Settings > Appearance > Fonts and use the Display menu to adjust your screen resolution. (The font sizes do reflect correctly into Firefox, though - no tweaks needed there at all. One thing that I've noticed is that you have to completely quit or close some apps before the new DPI settings are used.)

I also frequently connect my XFCE laptop (only 1920x1080 native) running a totally different distribution to a 4K TV.

This requires a visit to the Appearance menu (as above) every time I plug/unplug in order to adjust font sizes. (Or, I could just run the 4k at 1080p, but either way it needs an adjustment.) This doesn't actually bother me, since it's just one step and I could script it if I did it all the time.

As far as using your laptop screen as a second screen, I've never really cared for that as a way to work anyway because of the size disparity (my 4k monitors/tv's are all much, much bigger than my little 13" laptop), but you could play with the resolution on each -- but you're right; the DPI settings in XFCE are for the whole desktop (and all apps, including Firefox), not per screen.
A rock was kicked up on the interstate the other day and hit my windshield. It now has a delightful spider web pattern, but everything else about the car still operates perfectly.

Breaking the glass (a superficial and expected eventuality) is very different than the screen no longer functioning or responding to input (a mechanical failure).
Intel Gold U-Series SKUs Reveal Single Socket Intentions
from wikipedia:

An L-system consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production rules that expand each symbol into some larger string of symbols, an initial "axiom" string from which to begin construction, and a mechanism for translating the generated strings into geometric structures.
I don't. Never had an issue. 2FA for secure web needs if it is offered.
That very much depends on who you were before the revolution!
I'm sure they do, at least to some degree.

Sort of beside the point though - I don't actually care about the impact, good or bad, on Amazon. If I write a review it is to help a fellow consumer. If I think my review instead hurts the fellow, or has no effect, I won't do it. But how it impacts Amazon simply doesn't matter to me.
Remember a week ago when this site scoured a public GitHub repo to ensure a woman physicist wasn't getting more credit than she was due? Imagine having to conduct yourself in your professional life as though you were under persistent threat of audit by some know-nothings if you stuck your head up too high. I would go insane.
SuperMakers.xyz Fun Indie Game
The gay golden age in communist East Germany
Most people do not care about how something was made, but they do care if their computer feels sluggish, their hard disk fills up and - if they are using laptops - their battery drains fast.
Here's an analogy: take a point on the sphere and consider the set of points on the sphere that are distance d from that point. The size of that set increases as d goes from 0 to 1/4 * circumference, then decreases as d goes to 1/2 * circumference, and you end up with just the antipodal point.

There's probably some general argument that you'll always see this with any sufficiently nice compact metric space.
Most Measured Person in Tech Is Running the Most Chaotic Place on the Internet
I think it's sad that we cannot figure out a way to have LARGE federated communities that remain functional.
That's part of it certainly, but I wonder whether a lot of technical terms and words were taken directly from Latin - which up until a few hundred years ago was the dominant language for education, law, diplomacy etc.
Ubuntu 19.04 “Disco Dingo” Released
Well, if cars are any indication, maybe it'll be more reliable than the American built planes.
Intel to Launch 8th Generation Intel Core VPro Notebook Processors
KDE has the global menu as an option, and you can get a pretty unified UI with it too.
Finally - they may one day realize the is a difference between freedom of speech and freedom to spread lies.
Intel Acquires Omnitek, Strengthens FPGA Video and Vision Offering – TelecomTV
I'm not saying this to stir up some kind of controversy. But, I think it's wrong to silence him simply because we don't agree with him. He presented data, some efforts to support his view points. This is far better than fuelling hatred and bigotry just by providing opinions.

For instance, this person who wrote this article titled ("Why can't we hate men?") is actually a gender studies professor (now a director?) in a well known top university in Boston and still has their job:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men...

But we are offended and want to silence someone and fire them for providing atleast reasonable data to back his claims?
Yup that well could be it!
I know mathematicians hate interpunction with a passion but that one's pretty extreme! I have no idea where the timeses and the parentheses are supposed to go..
I did not realize you started working on this from 2016. I guess you could have easily commercialized this then since were way ahead of the competition. But I do understand that it's hard to offer this as stand-alone service. Anyways, good luck with your project!
Bayesian parameter estimation typically trains an emulator to reproduce the objective function using a limited number of design point (order 10 per dimension). Once the emulator is trained, you could of course use a multi dimensional minimization function of your choice to find the best fit point.

However, constructing and sampling the Bayesian posterior using MCMC methods has several advantages. Sometimes you can have a local minimum which is essentially flat, so the optimal hyperparameter is unstable. You'll see this in the posterior distribution. Or you could have two parameters which are correlated so it's their sum that's constrained not their individual values. All this information provides important context when understanding your model's uncertainty.
I would never friend someone again who dropped me because of my employer
>“The device can work in remote areas because it provides its own power and does not need batteries,” said senior author Richard Kaner

Second paragraph.

The point is, when it snows, often the sun is blocked, or the solar panels might get covered. While it is snowing this device can continue to work without batteries.
AMD Zen 3 Based CPUs Could Feature 20% More Transistors Than Zen 2
> I find it alarming that a scientific organization has rules that restrict free speech using such vague, subjective language.

Feminism has always been a sexist power movement, and the natural outcome of that is always authoritarian social policy.

At it's core, feminism is about the sole focus on accruing benefits and status for one sex (or gender, depending on who you ask).

Feminism fights for women's rights, but not men's: the vote, but not forcing women to enlist in selective service; workplace rights, but not for men to have parental rights; women in STEM, but not men in psychology, teaching, etc -- or even men in school at all.

Perhaps there was a time that kind of sexist focus was a force for good, but I have to seriously question that. Regardless --

If you're part of feminism in an academic context, you're part of a majority power movement, which routinely denigrates and attacks the minority gender in blatant violation of Title IX -- and have been for decades.

Feminism is sexism.

So it's surprising to me that the scientists are surprised.
On-Call Nightmares Podcast Episode 20 – Nick Maludy – Encore Technologies
Women are just as smart as men, i don't think anyone can debate this. Are women just as interested in the same things men are? This is highly debatable. There are biological differences between men and women.
It's great that folks are helping him out with a new name. I believe he's going with Spruce.
! has operator precedence over \
I think you're right about many words coming to English directly from Latin during the renaissance and following periods, but it raises another interesting question - why did English take many technical words and terms from Latin, whilst German speakers - who presumably during the renaissance were consulting the same source material - coined their own Germanic words and terms instead?
And significantly more fuel efficient?