skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish the United States of America had the will power to do something about their own country's emissions as well, but alas. Or that the EU would have the balls to stand up to the USA instead of licking their boots. Perhaps future governments will see the seriousness of the situation, but it appears that that would be too late. So far it seems to be up to individuals to try and save the planet.
Math is probably one of the if not the least political thing out there, but there are still politics involved. For starters, all mathematicians need funding and choosing who to fund is partially political. Deciding awards is partially political. Even the importance of taking or rejecting some axioms and if certain fields still have value for further research is political. There are even different axioms one can use to derive math from, and choosing one over another is partially political (though it is interesting to see how each one deals with Russell's paradox).
Tell HN: Learn about the state-of-the-art in Program Synthesis
Hi HN: Program synthesis generates code from specifications: test-cases, I-O examples, and assertions. On September 19-20, synthesis experts will speak about recent breakthroughs and practical tools. The talks will be aimed at software engineers who haven’t encountered synthesis before. We want to extend an invitation to the HN community because the periodic posts on program synthesis and Z3 show interest in the technology.

Speakers include researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, UW, MIT, and Google Brain. As a preview, here are 3 topics that will be covered: hw-exploit synthesis (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ctrippel/#publications), end-user web programming (https://schasins.com/papers/), verification and synthesis of OS level code (https://unsat.cs.washington.edu/projects/).

Technical abstracts and registration is on: https://synthetic-minds.com/pages/conference/2019/#program. After the conference we’ll post the slides of the talks.

The foundations part will explain why synthesis reduces to solving an \exists\forall query. More specifically, the query asks “does there exists a program P such that for all inputs x, P(x) computes the correct output?” A solution to the query is the synthesized program P. How to solve the query? The Z3 prover works well for boolean satisfiability (i.e., one \exists query). To solve an \exists\forall query, one approach is to have a two Z3 solvers communicate: one solver synthesizes a candidate program P’ that is correct on a sample of inputs, while the other verifies that P’ is correct on all inputs. If P’s is incorrect, a counterexample input is added to the sample on inputs. The two solvers iterate until the latter is satisfied with the correctness. This process is not unlike GANs; it is called CEGIS (counterexample-guided inductive synthesis) and was invented 2005, and built on an earlier CEGAR (counterexample-guided abstraction refinement) technique from the 90s.

Please comment; or email us with questions.
Math is definitely political.

Problem #1: All models are invalid, some are useful. You need to stop ignorant actors who don’t understand that 3 is not a valid approximation of Pi, while simultaneously stopping pedants who want to everything to be accurate in ways that are not compatible with the IEEE standard for float.

Problem #2: There are lies, damned lies and statistics. People who want to push $NOT_YOUR_VIEWPOINT will cite more studies than you have time to evaluate to prove you wrong.
Why would an undersized air conditioner be more effective? What’s the size got to do with the efficacy?
Heya. I work for Heap (mentioned in the article). If anyone has questions for me. Let me know.

Heap doesn’t sell or share data to third parties, we don’t do any cross site identifiers, or fingerprinting. We aren’t in the ad business, that’s Google and FB.

In other threads folks have said “but you can’t control what might be done with Heap data in the future” that’s right. I’m happy and pretty secure, and will fall on a sword if Heap ever becomes an unethical company.

(I’m commuting for the next hour but will get back to reply soon)
> But by attacking faith on the unknowable, people have created much more animosity and defensiveness than should have been necessary.

You skipped over the fact, that religions hinge on explaining the unknowable, often in ways that harms certain communities and life styles. The attacks on religion have been squarely targeted at those aspects of religion. Atheists attacking a person's belief in a higher being (deists) is rather rare.

Friction is central to any change. If anything, the defensiveness and animosity is a necessary part of shifting power away from religious organizations.
How a fusion of at least four cuisines created crab rangoon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
To be fair, Heptio was really baller, and pivotal is not so much
Actually it's hard to block them, since they just need to cache every new article once, and you can't block a user just coz he accessed every new article.
Show HN: moonmoons AR – Spatial Music App
I think it goes beyond that. I think they expected employees to accept managements worldview, because after all it’s managements world view. By virtue of their success they are the smartest people on the planet, and the only enlightened ones that can fix the worlds problems or determine basic principles of society like free speech and privacy and freedom of association.

That world view included not only dogmatic stances on religion,on politics on progressivism and a rejection of classic liberalism.

This led to a hyper-bifurcation amplified by their own internal social media - a radical left that saw any compromise with liberals or moderates as a betrayal of their core ideologies and a reactionary right that became more polarized as they became more marginalized.
Getting a little soylent greeny I agree
There was massive disinformation campaign through targeted massive whatsapp groups.

Everyone in Brasil is on whatsapp so that was a way to do it. I understand your point but some research would help.

It’s not so much as blaming ISPs for piracy but blaming hosting services for serving stuff like 8chan ir far right neonazi websites.

Yes the networks are different but we still need to consider the consequences and how to mitigate things. It’s either that or chaos.
Researchers build a heat shield 10 atoms thick to protect electronic devices
I've worked for a lot of small startups some mid-sized companies in California over the last decade.

I would never ever share any views that are non-liberal because when I've seen anyone else do it it didn't go well for them at all. And I'm not at work to change people's political views so there's no reason to take the risk.

I don't think this is a new shift at all. I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.
Most of the memo was citations of studies of sex differences. People can either agree with the studies or disagree with the research used (it's totally cool with me if you do disagree with the research), but the idea that someone should be punished for talking about research at a company that extols "data driven decision making" as one of it's principles baffles me.
I wish more people realized this. I think many perceive more issues where there are simply usually not, because of increased access to information. Most people don't really care what you are or who you vote for as long as you show up, are pleasant, and do your job well. Capitalism is, in many ways, the great equalizer: money is green no matter who holds it.
One of the their core values is "don't be evil", isn't that statement inherently political? I think a lot of people chose to work at Google (instead of say Oracle or etc) because of those ideals. Kinda disingenuous to advertise that reputation and then switch to a policy of "actually shut up and do the work".
everything involving human if you prefer.
Perhaps it’s googles culture of making work feel like a second home that makes googlers feel entitled to share their political opinions at work.
i was born and raised in a 3rd world country in south america. i don't talk politics (or sex, or religion) -- that's not what i'm paid for.

i'm paid to be professional and do my job. there's nothing to do with being male or white.
afaik the limit is $5,000 per election, or x2 $2500 payments. the total political spending from google is closer to several hundred thousand:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...
> I think they just overestimated the ability of their employees to respect each other when they hold differing world views. That's kinda natural once you reach a certain size and your colleagues may as well be randos on the street.

I think it is not so much due to size, but due to the extreme ideological polarization of American society during the last decade.

When before it was normal to hear and accept - and god forbid, even stay friends- with people that had different political opinions from yours, as of late, that has become quite difficult.
What are the chances he has only been tracking donations made to right-wing groups? :')

Edit: very high, it seems https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apinboard%20PAC
You know what would be a great way to mitigate this kind of attack vector? Stop insisting on tying identity to phone numbers.
Unfortunately you cannot re-introduce those that are extinct, or doomed because of the gene pool already diminished. A complex ecosystem needs long time to develop.
"No one has a good solution" is becoming a meme as it seems :) when in fact lots of actionable options are mentioned in such threads.
iOS 13 fixes this by finally adding a white list option that sends all non contact numbers to voicemail.

I haven’t gotten a robocall since the beta started and it’s been great.
> Any features in this library you'd like to see standard library's sqlite3 [1]? Maybe a PEP [2, python enhancement proposal] could do it.

Not sure if it's in this library, but I'd want the ability to open a database that's already loaded in memory as a byte array.
When discussing politics in the abstract it’s useful not to talk about specifics to avoid a derail.

Personally I would have gone with. Someone suggesting a person in group X should subsidized by group Y. When the person speaking in in group X and the listener is in group Y.

Actually listing the groups as say income level, farmers, parents, elderly, ev drivers, or whatever is not actually helpful. That said you might have a reasonable debate on taxes, but that’s much harder when someone wants to send some group to prison etc.
not true.

spread that the Left stole the tax payer is not disinformation.
Politics and religion are uniquely divisive subjects, and when you allow endless arguments about them, you create a rigid and hostile atmosphere that kills comity and intellectual collaboration. Everything becomes an argument about politics, and then activism, and than ostracism and purity spirals. It's a classic pattern.

So yes, you really should taboo political arguments if you don't want to drive away people with independent views.
I am the OP. Along with Ras and Henele, we are leading efforts in program synthesis at Synthetic Minds (YC S’18). I started working on synthesis in 2007; and Ras has been developing these techniques since the late 90s and is an ACM fellow for his work in program synthesis.

The researchers will talk about their peer-reviewed work in web automation, hardware security, operating system extensions, programming for non-programmers, automatic code translation, and superoptimization. Hopefully, this will illustrate the power and limitations. We'd love for people to extrapolate from these onto their own domain-specific automation needs.

By touching upon foundational techniques (making imperative code functional, symbolic compilation, SMT encodings, partial evaluation), hopefully the leap to "code synthesis" will seem less like magic and more like an obvious next step. In addition, open-source frameworks exist (e.g., Rosette, Sketch) that abstract away these foundations, and the program will cover those in hands-on workshops.

We’d love to hear insights into application from people for whom synthesis is new. Some problems are exciting to us (Synthetic Minds is working on smart contract synthesis); and we’d love for the community to brainstorm applications to their domains.
The donations are capped by law at $5,000 per candidate+election (so typically a corporate PAC can give $10,000 to a congressional or senate candidate).

The amounts are not as important as the fact that Google's name is attached to them. But I agree with you that the overall figure is tiny, which makes it more mysterious why Google continues to make these donations, which amount to legalized bribery.

IBM and Apple do fine without a corporate PAC. Microsoft suspended its own PAC after strong internal pressure from employees over donations to some of the same terrible people.
Purify does look great, I can't wait to start playing/working with it.

For reference, here's the home page and documentation for purify-ts.

https://gigobyte.github.io/purify/

https://gigobyte.github.io/purify/getting-started
This, though I'd prefer the official link: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

Google is usually maxing the donations it's allowed.
I try to just do work at work, but to play contrarian:

If one agrees with Aristotle in that: "Man is by nature a political animal," the cultural acceptance of no politics at work seems almost nefarious. Most of us spend more time at work than perhaps any other activity, barring sleep.

One could perhaps even hypothesize that without some political discussion at work, people exclusively talk with friends who share their political opinions, causing larger lateralization of political thought.
One of the keys to a diverse organization is to adopt policies and practices that don't strongly encourage uniformity. Political compatibility is one form of uniformity that can work to reduce diversity and inclusion. Perhaps "Handle With Care" might be a wise attitude?
I tried to pick an example that is both held by people in the world today, thus it couldn't be easily dismissed as unrealistic, while at the same time not being something people here would actually debate, so as to not sidetrack the point.
I don't know if this is a coincidence but Cathay Pacific is symbolic of colonial times.

The founders were not Chinese, the main shareholder has always been British, the CEO until a week ago was British. It's always been a western (anglosphere) company operating in China/Asia, not a Chinese company and perhaps the Chinese authorities want to make clear that it is now a Chinese company.
You can have proper workshops/apps/meetings to discuss these things and gather input from all employees in a way that doesn't disturb the regular day-to-day work.

The problem is that discussing politics at any time in your workplace to people that have opposite views and/or don't want to discuss politics at that time is counterproductive.
> removing the value of draws in chess

Armageddon chess (Black wins in all draws) is one such solution, although it leads to a major Black advantage.

But there are 4-kinds of draws: Repetition, Stalemate, Insufficient Material, and 50-moves. No other draws exist in chess.

Perhaps instead of giving Black a win in all kinds of draws, maybe Black should win in two or three of the draws (Black wins on Stalemate and Insufficient Material), while White wins on Repetition and 50-moves.

This suggestion hasn't been studied yet. But it seems like the natural progression after Armageddon chess.

Note: This is not my idea, but one being discussed somewhere else. Its interesting though, so I like it.
I suppose one would have to debate these topics to figure that out.
There's https://qtlite.com

Along with the following shell command :

grep --only-matching --no-filename -R 'include <Q.*>' | cut -f2 -d' ' | sort | uniq

you can quickly see what must stay and what can go
>One time a coworker asked me and I said "I don't discuss politics at work".

These days, even that is seen as taking a side. People get suspicious when you don't join in with the group political affirmations, and start suspecting you to be a secret "other." That's how toxic it's become.
I feel like Google should have started their orientation with a link to jwz's rba gruntle (not linking because HN people hate what his referral headers redirect does). The lawyer in that article is now an SVP of Legal at Google.
I wish your comment was top level, because most of the comments in this thread are snarky responses that don't understand how politics turned Google's workplace toxic.
RMB declining in open market against USD.

China issues much debt in USD and pays interest in USD. What should be 1 unit of debt is 6 or 7 units of debt because of currency differential & risk premium.

China purchases many imports in USD.

To keep RMB well under USD, China must sell USD and buy RMB in open market. This has happened for many years.

In sum, as long as China subsidizes domestic market the effect of all of this is not felt to most Chinese. However, this becomes very, very, very, very costly. Look at food prices in China as one example.

When there is a rebalance / reconciliation the RMB savings will be hurt.

China hopes to prevent this by gold purchase and Belt & Road growth.

Very difficult situation. Bad management of economy.
Yeah, I'm from FL. Swamp coolers don't work most days. Just makes ya wetter. I was in Az a couple months ago and it was pretty neat figuring out that sweat truly does work.
So once China starts to violently crack down on Hong Kong protesters, is Google going to hide it all?
> for how Ajit Pai is conducting himself as FCC commissioner.

What things are bothering you? Unlike the insinuation of the person your replied to, in reality he worked on this Caller ID issue almost immediately upon becoming chairman. (He put out an action paper July 2017, and became Chairman in January.)

Net Neutrality seems to have had zero actual (as opposed to theoretical) problems, so that wasn't a problem either.

So what things are you seeing that you want explanations for?
Taking the other side, how do you counter the "So some opinions are okay to state publicly, while others are not?" I think this is the rub... For any given X, you'll find groups of people that are pro-X, and someone anti-X.
But not for the vast majority of people working there. Most folks are running infrastructure and building products completely unrelated to their *news offerings. And I think a big chunk of this discussion is just folks sitting on internal boards and wasting a lot of time arguing with people they've never met in some other corner of the company.
If you demanded the "privilege" of discussing politics at work, I'd promptly not hire/fire you.
That "core value" was removed some time ago.
Thanks, that does answer my second question, and implicitly my first - other containers would need to be thicker and more expensive.

What I mean to ask is, why don't we incentivize manufacturers to use more expensive aluminum packaging? It seems reasonable that the cost of manufacturing aluminum may be less than the sum of all costs of using plastic. It also seems that no companies will choose to do this without incentives.
Hmmm... First, that's an excuse. The blame comes to the voters first.

Second, the main media this happened through was Fox News, which is a pure propaganda machine, that design lies and presents them as facts.

Third, I am fine with companies choosing to not intervene in political debate and stay as neutral as possible when it comes to manually applying filters on content. Being used to transmit propaganda is not the same as producing it
I didn't say that every argument at the time was embodied in Federalist 68. Madison, among others, was the most prominent one making the state's rights argument.

But you are not wrong in your basic argument. The corruption of the college by the party system is a travesty. We may as well have a parliament / prime minister at this point. It would be preferable to the current system, IMO, at least in being more honest.
Less effective at cooling, more effective at dehumidifying (it seems there is a presumption that dehumidification is roughly linear with operating time.)
That’s why class-action suits exist...
I haven't been at Google in 5 years but I worked with a lot of Chinese coworkers from all three of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong when I was there (as well as ABCs of those descents). Honestly, I never saw a Chinese employee get into a political argument. Mostly they were just happy to be in the U.S. and draw a Google-level salary. ABCs (including myself) would, but usually about American politics, not Chinese.

I think most Americans underestimate the extent to which most Chinese are apolitical and pragmatic. Chinese culture doesn't have the tradition of civic engagement and vigorous debate that Anglo-American culture does, and skews more towards Exit than Voice. A typical Chinese response to a looming civil war is more akin to "Well shit. Better emigrate (if I can) or pay off the right soldiers and officials (if I can't) so this doesn't harm my family" than to demonstrate in the streets and call for the ouster of the leaders in question. This is a double-edged sword: it's how the CCP maintains social controls that would be unacceptable violations of civil liberties in Western democracies, it's also behind the "model minority" image of Asian-Americans, but it also means that you don't get a lot of disruptive political talk in groups with Asian immigrants.
For profit companies should not choose sides. Google's only discussion of politics in the workplace should be on how to make their systems be as unbiased as possible.
Wow. Amazon sells unsafe and banned products and you literally quote the first line of the narcissist prayer: “it’s not a big deal”
Given there are no infinite resources, one has to choose where to focus. Rust team seems to be focusing on the language and solving hard-to-deal-with but relevant problems - and on evolving the language, which is truly a remarkable feat when you are pushing the boundaries.

Libraries can be implemented by 3rd parties and maybe later adopted as standard libraries or become de-facto standards. That's how it has been done for most popular languages out there, and I think it's a smart decision.
No, I get the necessity of deployed armed SWAT units every time there's a risk of gun violence and stuff, I don't understand why an anonymous call warrants such a response.

I wonder if there's some kind of metrics available breaking down how often an anonymous calls amount to something real vs abuse of system.