skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why aren't we building a database of formally verified software?
Where is the flaw in the following argument?

You can formally verify software/algorithms for correctness, but formal verification is difficult and takes a long time.

So why can't we do it in piecemeal? Imagine something like StackOverflow, but instead of posting a question, you post a formal specification. The answers to your post are then formally verified pieces of software.

The advantage of this approach would be that the results would be useful forever. Right now we're always building on foundations of sand, because we can never really be sure that our algorithms are correct/optimal.

You could then go even further and connect the verified algorithms/components from this hypothetical StackOverflow. So instead of posting a new formally verified algorithm, you piece it together with parts that have been individually formally verified. That way you only have to verify the new additions.

This way we could build a database/repository of "eternal" software. Eternal in the sense that once a problem is solved, it's like a mathematical proof, it's solved forever (as long as the verification was performed correctly).

You could even add more things to the verification step, like performance analysis - that way we could immediately tell for each of these algorithms/components, how fast they perform.

This of course wouldn't solve software development - instead it would shift the challenge to correctly formulating the problem in a formal specification.

Is this possible? If so, why isn't this being done?
How to use Workast to track time on your projects
The discovery of it is pretty interesting.

Lithium-rich mineral springs have historically been touted for their healing properties. It was first used for mania in the late 1800s, with Denmark leading the way, but little was published about the medication for more than half a century.

https://www.verywellmind.com/lithium-the-first-mood-stabiliz...
Based on the UK's approach to "first dose first", and the results of their early data from those who have been vacinated with one dose, the results are promising.

Given the public policy goal is to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed due to admissions with the virus (and the commensurate decline into ICU on a ventilator etc.) the vaccine is doing two things - firstly it's reducing the number of people catching the virus. Secondly, it's reducing the number of people being hospitalised with Covid. That then has a follow-on impacat that there's a reduction in deaths (though that data isn't complete yet for the AZ vaccine, given timeframes, and the need to wait long enough before measuring mortality outcomes).

With good results from a single dose, even after a period of time, in a sense these people are "vaccinated". If the UK needs to re-vaccinate everyone with a booster twice once every 180 days (for example), that's "only" 378k vaccine doses per day, and they can deliver at well above that rate. If the supply increases as projected, there is potential for as many as 4m doses a week to be getting administered by April, with everyone having their first dose by June.

Pressure is then reduced on hospitals (as long as the vaccine is effective against prevalent strains) as you roll out subsequent doses - the 1st dose figures seem promising.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-data-show-vaccines-re... for over 80s

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3790399 for healthcare workers under 65
Agile/Scrum is great if done properly.

Most of the industry is doing it wrong/cargo-culting the wrong think. Non-technical managers, or worse, CS grads whose goal was to stop coding 4 years into their careers, took the parts of Agile they liked and made it into a micro-management strategy to justify their work.

Agile was written at a resort by 10x engineers for 10x engineers. Flat organization and high ownership (meaning these guys have a stake in the company). Trying to blindly copy it to highly hierarchical cost-center software shops is a recipe for disaster where the only ones making money are the agile consultants.
I could actually give a shit less about a video card because the one I have is fine (and selling on eBay for $100 more than I paid for it in 2017); the real story is that we’re allocating a meaningful percentage of global semiconductor output to an industry that generates no lasting economic value. It also increases the boom/bust volatility in the semiconductor sector because arbitrage opportunities are time-sensitive, thus miners need them ASAP before the hash difficulty goes higher.
But you cannot verify the source code and binary of the server or set up your own independent one, so reproducible builds don't help here.
> Can you go a day without the Internet? How about two days?

Yes.

> Sadly without this tracking, the engines of the ad economy come to a stop.

One more reason to eliminate tracking.
>I must say that I've loved this entire chain of conversation. Some high quality discussion here.

Thank you! I must admit I find the disparagement of philosophy tiring and irritating, especially when it comes from people (self-proclaimed empiricists) who really ought to know better. I am happy to hear my frustration has not gotten in the way of an interesting discussion :)

>It's difficult to reconcile the lagged "observable usefulness" of philosophy with its actual usefulness.

I don't think there is a lag in usefulness (observed or otherwise), when one knows what philosophy is, and appreciates the deep dependencies between it and its sub-disciplines.

Rather, I think people confuse usefulness with certainty. By that logic, I could discount the whole field of science on the basis of the inferential leap. Although science is an iterative process, we cannot be certain that it must converge on truth (though I think it probably does). Given that, the mathematician could look down his nose at science and say "Ha! These fools can't even prove anything!", and in so doing be just as much of a fool as the scientist dismissing the philosopher.

(For the avoidance of doubt: I understand you are not such a person!)
Terminology doesn't change anything, assume everything is about phenomenological consciousness. According to Chalmers brain doesn't differentiate between access consciousness and phenomenological consciousness, because the zombie concludes that he has phenomenological consciousness based on analysis of access consciousness.
Given that Google owns that position, and is being evil in order to maintain it, that is very, very unlikely. I'll stick with DDG and take that risk.
Genetic Algorithms Can Compete with Gradient Descent and Backprop
Since we're sharing our own WTFs;

You can include the same header multiple time in a HTTP message, and this is equivalent to having one such header with a comma-separated list of values.

Then there's WWW-Authenticate (the one telling you to re-try with credentials). It has a comma-separated list of parameters.

The combination of those two leads to brokenness, like how recently an API thing would not get Firefox to ask for username and password, because it happened to have put "Bearer" before "Basic" in the list.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7235#section-4.1
I like the idea of Kanban and 3x weekly standups/status.

VS

Sprints and daily standups.

---

Daily standups are too often, not enough updates, and it feels more like pressure than utility for the engineers.

Sprints, while helping keep multiple teams working on a single "epic" or "feature" in sync, also feel like an arbitrary slice of time vs. letting people work on things at the pace they are comfortable at. Finish early? Careful taking new work in, it will look bad to bring new things into the sprint and not finish.

Take an extra day on a story due to some complications? That's fine if it's middle of sprint. But rollover into new sprint? Oh gosh, what will that do to our sprint report?

Time estimations, maintaining backlogs of work and prioritizing, and documenting work done are all great. But some of it has too much ritual to it.
That's fine, you state why you downvote. Now there's something to discuss at least, that's not the type of downvote that is deleterious for discussions. Not saying anything and just downvoting is simply silencing people you disagree with and that's why I mentioned it.
Did they act and dress like men because of "equality," or because that's the only way they can actually be taken seriously?
> Today a single mom with full time job can still run a (not too big) house.

Until COVID hits and children have to be taught virtually from home.

There are no easy and cheap answers here, but a series of trade offs. I think the original question is “where is the conversation of the trade off?” I don’t think it’s settled that the ideal social structure involves a dual income family. And I think very few people envy the workload required of single mothers, regardless of technical advances that make cleaning a home easier.

Caregiving goes well beyond making sure the kids have clean underwear.
Large parts of what you know today as the Internet are ad-funded as opposed to user/donation funded. Without this ad revenue being available to the web, not so many websites and applications would have been born.

Youtube did not even think of charging premium so many years after launching as a free service.

Do you think they would have been that successfully were it not for the user base aka free eye-balls?

> There is nothing that says that we must be forced to tolerate ads in exchange for the internet

While true but this is the way the game and the field has been setup. Same thing that explains why you see ads on even on paid devices. Why be content with 5$, when you know you can shake 6$ from a customer?

I am for privacy. Believe me. But this battle is not winnable when you make up 5% of the sober group and the rest are happy and drunk in love with Clubhouse or whatever new social media drug that is the rage.
it's something that men have traditionally done, yes.

it's like the beard, it's traditionally something that, in general, men have and women don't.

that doesn't mean that things can't change in the future and that the change won't be for the better.
True, although it does shift some of the parties you need to trust. It’s not a perfect solution but, I think, it’s a good solution given what’s currently available. At least privacy.com is a central company which bases its reputation on privacy and as such has an incentive to avoid reputational harm.

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”
Awesome work! I can recommend people interested in the iOS/Apple ecosystem to check out the Secure Mobile Networking Lab of TU Darmstadt in general. They do a lot of cool stuff in the space, a good starting point might be https://owlink.org.

As a side note: I wonder what the story is on the whole AirTag hardware project. It's becoming so "delayed" that reverse engineered implementations are here before.
Not all death on the street are because of alcohol.
Then what are they for?
I've never seen this myself on a XR, but I will take your word for it (As it does make sense), thanks for the info.

I was more thinking lack of light not being a issue, I didn't take into account that mass amounts of light can blow out the image for the sensors.
Easy bulk downloads to the desktop (and hopefully to any attached external drive) would give me real peace of mind. Right now, I am a bit nervous with iCloud being the only full copy of my photos. None of my computers have enough storage to hold all my photos.

It would be even cooler if my Synology could download all my photos directly from iCloud.
What is wrong with search for some comparisons and perspective? Everything has externalities, let's compare them to see how big of an elephant this really is.
Joke's on both parties, huh? Can you imagine feeling particular pride because you are important in some random company?
Saving the planet is hardly altruistic, after all you are living on that planet yourself. So in essence it's at least partially driven from a position of self-preservation, which is by its nature egoistic.
> can you live without Google, Youtube, Gmail for a day?

Without bug problems. Migrating away from Gmail would allow me to de it indefinitely.
I think they mean requests from a browser.
I'm not from US. I just share my personal view.
Could this be explained by class/cultural differences in the manner of expressing feelings? Maybe poor people would be just as bad at reading the feelings of rich people, but each group can read well within the group.
Holding ourselves to impossibly high standards leads to dissatisfaction.

Accepting that we will sometimes be mediocre at what we do and knowing that we will do better over time is a healthier alternative.
Excellent perspective on the current situation with a strong argument for careful geoengineering.
I live in a semi-rural area and work from home in tech. I am within range of LTE towers, but only T-Mo will serve my area and the connection remains spotty even with a $1000 signal booster.

It is frustrating to see initiatives like this that do not address the actual problems that make work difficult. My throughput is about 25 down / 3 up when it works, and this feels fine to me.

What I do need is a ping that stays under 100ms reliably, even when downloading or streaming. I can usually get 60ms or so, but it jumps up to 1000ms for short periods of time regularly for no reason. This interferes with any sort of voip calling severely.

Just as importantly, data caps should be at least 500GB, and clearly unlimited would be better yet. Plans that offer under 100GB of data are used up very quickly if doing anything more than the bare minimum.
> And people wonder why the birth rate is continuing to decline

We’re at 7.8 billion humans on this planet and rising. I don’t think we have to worry about the birth rate declining. If anything, we should do everything in our power to lower it as much as we can.
Well, many languages try to keep this minimal.
C++ doesn't.
Good points.

I felt the need to be pendantic on that point because I see a lot of lazy accounting around energy emmission harms. It is unfortunately common for people to write about the harms from an amount of energy consumption without considering what type of energy production is actually used.

I've read several articles in the past month that essentially had the lazy incorrect math such as: Activity Foo uses X MWh, X MWh is Y% of total energy production. Burning fuels emits Z tons of CO2 and W amount of other harmful polutants. Therefore Activity Foo is responsible for Y% of Z CO2 and Y% of W pollution.

Becoming a pet peeve of mine.

Bitcoin (~39%) has about double the proportion of green energy usage as global energy consumption (~17%)! If these numbers are accurate, it seems like cryptomining should be some-amount-less concerning than the broad energy economy in terms of greening our infrastructure.
statistically, you will be attracted to women, if you're a man right now. and yet...
The blog is about female founders specifically. What's wrong with that? If you're implying they shouldn't be founders, then what you're saying is patronizing, and if you're not, then it's off topic.
> C can do template-like macros for type specialization

Of course, C++ has those some macro capabilities. But macros are quite limited, and typically the "template-like" ones rely on non-standard preprocessor support like typeof for swap. But then you still lack the ability to specialize swap for different types (eg, you can't replicate std::swap's behavior on std::vector in C)

> C can do setjmp & longjmp exceptions and you can even do a TRY/CATCH like exception macros.

You can, but that's now another parameter to pass along down the call stack, and as LLVM notes https://llvm.org/docs/ExceptionHandling.html#setjmp-longjmp-... it still negatively impacts the non-exception performance path.
Don't play zero-sum games with people who are willing to give up more than you. Are you precluding yourself from winning? Absolutely.

But what is the value of winning if you had to give up what you defined as too much?
I hate the effect that car-ownership has had on society and I refuse to own a car personally. I advocate for urban planning that reinforces walkable neighborhoods and tighter parking restrictions and choose to live in a city which isn't completely foot-friendly but is better than most. Choosing to live car-free does impose restrictions on my freedom of movement, but it only prevents me from going to places I have no desire to go to.

I'd also say it's absolutely fine to try and reshape all of society according to your whims - that's sort of what everyone is doing in a democracy constantly. Just don't get upset if some folks object and it doesn't work.
Yet they are still unable to buy a proper space rocket, or sky scraper or a middle sized company. Even wealth knows classes. So staying in the same class has no real news-value when the more important part is them being woman in a mens world.
Or please allow me to re-upload previously uploaded "high quality" free photos to "original quality" once I pay. After years of being a paid customer I have still not found a way to do this.
I see probabilistic accounting for unknowns. An 80% chance would have some a small amount of unknown, so if the task was 3 points, I would bump it to a 5 to account for the known. And, since points are not linear, the larger task automatically grows proportionally, i.e. 8 -> 13.
> Why ask these questions only as they relate to women and motherhood? Why haven't men being presented a false promise that value and purpose is derived from work? Being a father without a snazzy career is equally (if not more so) frowned upon by plenty of people these days. I don't think that stigma is healthy, either. Why do men have to emulate other men to be "valuable"? Why do men have to avoid emulating women to be "valuable"?

+1000 this

Have you noticed that it's leaders focused on their businesses and capitalism that we turn to when we look for definition of value and purpose. Those folks who are looking for our productivity that feeds their wealth.

Maybe we should look for our value and priorities somewhere other than these folks.
In German there's an old saying "Jung gefreit hat nie gereut", e.g. "married young, no regrets". It always seemed wrong when I was young but my kids are just out of the house now and my bones are already getting creaky. Maybe there's some truth to those old sayings...
https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
Let me try this...

The "no-cache" was a hint not about caching the content but about caching subsequent requests, and could optionally specify specific fields that would indicate that a new candidate request needed to be sent to the server as the content might be different. There's this reality that just to render content, the browser effectively must have a cached copy of the content, so the notion that the response wouldn't be cached wasn't really even in the cards. Whether you used the cache or not was a decision made at the time you were sending a request, not when you were consuming the response.

The "no-cache" directive meant, "hey, don't check for a cached copy of the content, just go fetch new content". It was often used by analytics pieces so that the server could count how often content was looked at.

Back in the day you had terrible latencies (particularly over dialup). You also had issues with horribly asymmetric bandwidth that meant the data you sent could become the bandwidth bottleneck (outbound bandwidth constraints would mean ACK packets would get queued up, delaying downloads even when you had plenty of download bandwidth), and of course HTTP requests weren't terribly compact, so this could really make a big difference.

Caching requests was a big deal. Performance could be improved significantly by "cheating" and just not sending a new request, and this lead to some very aggressive caching strategies. The, "check if the content really is different, and just use the original copy if they aren't" hack a pretty common one. If nothing else, it saved the browser the overhead of re-rendering the page and the accompanying annoying user experience of seeing the re-render.

The original protocol didn't have any notion of no-store, and specifically mentioned that "private" didn't really provide privacy, but more that the content should be "private" in the sense that only the browser itself should store the content. Again, there's an assumption that the browser is going to put everything it gets into a "cache", because it has to.

You could use "max-age", but a lot of caches would still shove the object in their cache and only expire it on a FIFO basis or when a new request was to be sent (and it was vulnerable to clock skew problems). Sounds dumb, but it was the kind of dumb that kept code simple and worked pretty well.

So now that the practices were in place, you need a new directive to say, "hold up, that old approach is NOT a good idea here". So they came up with "no-store" as a way to say, "don't even put it in the cache in the first place".
Thanks! It's a difficult balance to walk, I've taken to just trying to write great HTTP articles and ignoring the advertising angle entirely, seems to be working OK.

Do try out HTTP Toolkit and let me know what you think, but it's not a general purpose HTTP client like Postman or HTTPie. It's actually an HTTP debugger, more like Fiddler/Charles/mitmproxy, for debugging & testing. A convenient HTTP client is definitely planned as part of that eventually, but not today.
Yes, of course gambling is a game of chance. I don't get what you're getting at?

I also am for regulating loot boxes, I still do not see how that changes the fact a game is a game.
> The only logical answer here is youth.

No, the only real answer is that you are in no way required to reproduce. There are more than enough humans. Humanity is basically a plague.
Design a Better Kubernetes Experience for Developers
The incentives have changed. Now I just work to say something at the standup, and standups are like 30 minutes long because people keep turning it into classical waterfall style discussion meetings between two people while everyone else listens. I hate it and the fossils that perpetuate this.
Wow, that is pretty depressing just hearing your story. I am not a woman, but I feel like that I can empathize with you from your words.

Work isn't everything, and it is gradually and painful realization as you grew older.
It's all about cutting the time in standups down to a bare minimum. I don't care what you did yesterday, I want to know in one sentence what you're doing _today_ and if you're blocking anyone.
Sprints are nonsense unless they have gaps bewtween them, noone can sprint indefinitely

Standups are good for small teams all working on the same thing, and only if no managers are present. Unless the manager is writing code too .

Kanban seems ok but i havent used it for any period of time.

The various tools are nice for remembering what needs to be done and making shared checklists.
If anyone is looking for an alternative on the opposite end of the scale from enterprise, to add login to an MVP in a few days, I have been collecting newer services that go beyond passwords and Sign in with Google:

Feather: https://feather.id

Magic: https://magic.link

Cotter: https://www.cotter.app
> All this corporate grifting and women's empowerment months will do jack shit until we figure out how to make workplaces and lives more equitable for mothers and allowing for gaps, breaks and destigmatizing time off for parents of both genders.

Exactly this. Generous maternity leave and at least 0.25x paternity leave. I am not a woman, so I can't possibly begin to imagine how tough pregnancy is on a body. I also really doubt that anyone is really focused on work in the months immediately following birth.

You can't buy baby food and bond with it with a pink ribbon or with the fact that your company's board of directors is 50% female.

Lack of parental leaves is just young parents subsidizing unsavory capitalistic practices and outright greed.