skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to start with formal verification to find bugs
We have a large codebase of a mostly functional code. Most of the code looks roughly like this

def CalculateX(entity1: Type1, entity2: Type2):
when:
| entity1 is big -> 5
| entity1 is not big -> 6
| entity2 is round and entity1 purple -> 5

The conditions in the pattern matching block can get quite complex. The function might be defined for all instances if Type1 and Type2 but that is not required. Reasoning about a single function is reasonably easy. But we often find a bug where a function should be defined for all combinations of its input parameters but it is calling a function which is not defined for a requested case.

We do all kinds of things to ensure it is reasonably correct but it seems like it is never enough. We are toying around with an idea of formal verification of our code. I don't know from which angle to attack this issue first. I was playing with Z3 and Coq but they are like a distinct system. What is a typical workflow of how to verify a program? Do we have to rewrite it first in a formal verification system or is it possible to use some sort of source-to-source translation? Is there a way to make sure this translation is correct? How do I find a system that will be up for the task? How do I know it is computationally tractable?
Sometimes I think Russia has it right. No one can push them into stupid decisions, like the EU does with neighbouring countries.

That's for Europe, of course. The US is king of pollution per capita and they don't give a flying fuck.
> Explanations are useless if they can't make predictions.

Nonsense. Most sciences aren't about making predictions. Another example is linguistics. Linguists have reconstructed languages long extinct and figured out how they evolved into modern languages. Yet, they can't predict how these languages will evolve in the future. Does this mean these explanations useless? No. Why should they be useless? They may not be of interest to you, but that doesn't mean they're useless.
> But is there a single individual on earth who knows all the ins and outs of all the minutiae of every single aspect of Google search

Would you go as far as to wager that the top 15 engineers/architects on the project (over the years) know about 85% of the ins and outs of the system? Generally speaking at least, edge cases excluded.
Supply Chain and Network Security for Military 5G Networks [pdf]
They also talked to other people including the Founder and Chief Research Officers at Unit221B about whether workarounds e.g. adding an additional keyboard were effective.

So clearly it's well known that this is real and accurate just as most of the reporting is on Russia.
Identical situation when Facebook was asked to not show previews of the news articles, because of the ePrivacy directive. Could this go for the same legistlation?

https://www.mysk.blog/2021/02/08/fb-link-previews/
to be fair, the wordpress theme I'm using does a red highlight, which I was not aware of until I tested it. May have contributed.
Looks very useful. One suggestion...the before/after swipe image is great for showing how it works, but not why you would use it. Might be helpful to overlay the ascending cost line, which would be steep in the "before", but gradual in the "after".
I'm talking of my own experience. I've had to do most of these things (or variants thereof) either while working on Firefox or various experiments at Mozilla, or while working at various startups.

I'm sure that not all companies need this kind of skill. But I'm not surprised if Google feels that they do.
Thanks: Any books / blogs you'd recommend?
I think its a fair article

There are obviously very real safety concerns from Parisians about the lawless bikers

I think the Danish biking obedience to red lights is insanity

I hope paris comes to find the best balance of any city yet
> Economics is an attempt to explain how wealth and prosperity are created.

Overly simplistic view from scratch: Individuals start businesses to offer other individuals and businesses goods and services. Wealth transfers daily to and from many individuals/businesses. Where does this definition fall apart/breakdown as you start to zoom in (or out)?
How I write and share technical software development articles in 2021 w/Nuxt.js
Thanks for liking my work!! Well, I run a python based script that extracts news content from popular news websites that I maintain as a list along with RSS feeds for some. Then a run a custom summarisation logic and get the gist of the news. I order the ranking based on the frequency of the news across websites!
That will add about $300 to an overseas first/business class ticket. About $90 for economy.
HN doesn't(as a rule) have economic philosophers in its userbase. What it does have are people who have built their livelihood within the familiar framework and set of rules abided by nations. The system has worked for them, and if it works for you, you're going to be deeply attached to it, in the "attachment theory" sense. When you are attached to an idea, you defend it like it's your kid while also denying that you are doing something exceptional and possibly risky to yourself in defending it. Right from the beginning, Bitcoin made its stance clear that it was going to attack the top-down framework of money. At first this seemed mostly hypothetical, even though the implementation worked. It could be easily dismissed and called dead. Now it's a whole industry with broad, complex impacts. It is winning the war.

The less toy-like crypto becomes, the more you see people freak out about it and try to push it back in the Pandora's box it came from. It's the same kind of thing that happens when people get deeply involved in politics and see an "us and them" and their side loses. They ghash their teeth and spread falsities to keep it from haunting them. And that is most cryptocurrency threads among crypto haters: deep down, they really want the state to enforce the market, because that is "how the world should be".
> I vividly remember reading neo-liberal gospel written by Paul Krugman

Krugman is the perfect proof of the fact that the entire field of economics is populated by charlatans.

His track record on predictions is worse than flipping a coin.
robots.txt stops crawling - you can get indexed via other mechanisms.

You want no index robots tags on all your pages and let google see those.

You can use GSC (Google search console) to remove a site / page from the index
I use fish and enjoy it, really cannot go back to zsh - feels too bloated.

However, fish is not radically different from bash/ POSIX shell the way, lets say babashka [0] is.

[0] https://github.com/babashka/babashka
My lifelong dream is a firewall that separates the eastern internet from the western internet.
None of the named people in the article are from the US, yet the actual papers have Americans aplenty:

> ...more than 130 billionaires from Russia, the United States, Turkey and other nations.

But you right, zero politicians from the US appear in the Pandora Papers themselves.
It definitely is. Jho Lo is a great example of this. He burned through billions, with a capital B, in only a few years time. Boats, houses, financing film projects (The Wolf of Wall Street, you can’t make this up), gambling millions of dollars at a time on single hands of blackjack. A member of his entourage abandoned the life because he couldn’t emotionally handle watching Lo spend more on bottle service at the clubs in a single night than his entire extended family would ever earn in their lives. I think most rich people are just relatively staid in their spending, despite the multi million dollar homes and all that.
In some respects, true, but that isn't always the case.

Say you own a company in the UK which sells widgets, but you also own an offshore company that also sells widgets. If you are dealing with a Chinese company, you could use the offshore company to do the deal, paying little to no tax. The money then resides in the offshore company and has never gone through the UK - either as a business or personal. As an individual you could own a credit card that you use to spend in the UK, which goes back to the offshore company. In additional, the offshore company could buy property in the UK and no tax is paid. There are various other tricks and nuances that can be employed to help minimise tax paid - completely legally.
Create a Calendar of Your Life
> Predicting the weather works with a supercomputer since all the processes (temperature, pressure, etc) can be modeled as continuous.

Why can't the flow of money be modeled? Don't we have enough data on human behavior historically? Can't we trace where money generally ends up?

Using the recently printed money isn't a super great example because as far as I understand, it's mainly held up in the banking system.

Maybe the stimulus money given to American citizens recently would be a better example. We know some of it went to savings, some of it went to bills, some of it went to frivolous purchases, etc.

If AI can detect fraud / objects on a road and make decisions, why can't a few of the most common economic possibilities be fed into some kind of model?
I would argue that in order to make great progress a nation needs great security.
Life has been good for so long that many people don't think about this.

Power balances, allegiances, resource distribution, and entire economies are shifting. This is the real game. It's not about which smartphone supplier sells the most units. It's about projection of power to secure trade, resources, and national interests.

The relative comfort of the post cold war era may not be perpetual. Our little Instagram dopamine bubbles divorce us from the cold, uncaring reality.
I'm open for alternatives and improvements on what we currently have. I still don't feel very clear after reading what you just wrote. I don't think the US has a pure representative democracy (citizens vote directly on many issues) and I also don't think representative democracy inherently leads to a binary red/blue decision, as I think number of political parties is often determined by the particular rules of the election process.

Do you have any suggestions on how to improve the system?
Yeah, I love live concerts, but even hanging out by the sound board (which is usually the spot that sounds best) you usually get something that other than the volume sounds about as good as you'd get with some cheap headphones.

Unamplified live performances in a concert hall with good acoustics can sound amazing, but as soon as there's a PA involved they nearly always go for volume over quality.
> The HAWC vehicle operates best in oxygen-rich atmosphere, where speed and maneuverability make it difficult to detect in a timely way.

I'm reasonably sure that the infrared trace of a hypersonic vehicle doesn't make it difficult to detect. Likewise existing approaches to radar stealth are hard to reconcile with hypersonic speeds, which doesn't help avoid radar detection either.
Hi, is remote within EU possible?
I recently learned that my go-to park in Berlin, Gleisdreieck Park, was supposed to become an Autobahn in the second half of the last century. Protests have stopped it finally in the 90s [1]. Nowadays, Berlin is enlarging the Autobahn eventually leading to the removal of night clubs and nature. Why is the protest so small this time?

[1] German only: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_am_Gleisdreieck
For how much ? Every time I look into getting sensors for my plants the price for something wireless puts me off :/.
ah, my bad, I didn't know what ya meant and just went with my first assumption.
> because of London offering much better protection from being gunned down in broad daylight than cities in their home countries.

Highly doubt it. A targeted assassination would be as easy in London as anywhere else.
Made a purchase on GandiNet just minutes before seeing this... I'm intrigued. Will give it a go next time.
The City of London itself is a tax haven.

[0] https://platform-production.s3.amazonaws.com/therules-134-Ci...
Somehow the NYTimes managed to make a negative article about the dangers of cyclists, while the only deaths and injuries they managed to conjure up in the entire story are from a truck failing to yield and running over a family.
They probably change to "3rd & Inches" when it's less than a yard.
Have not experienced this
You may enjoy the OGRE.
https://www.ogre3d.org/
Link to my website is in my profile for anyone who wants to reach out
Thanks for pointing it out, We realize our mistake here. We also should've done proper attribution. Will be correcting this.
> How are those types any different than outright stating a behavioral invariant?

Because the behavior of programs can't be verified without executing the program, but types can be checked purely based on syntax. There is way less source code than runtime states of any non-trivial program.

I've asked this same question many times, the TLA+ way is much more expressive and _simpler_. But model checking is a way harder problem than type checking, in general. SMT solvers make this line blurry - in fact, have you heard of the SMT-based model checker for TLA+, [Apalache](https://apalache.informal.systems/)?. I haven't tried it out, but that should be way faster than TLC which just brute forces the state-space exploration.

I'm totally with you about TLA+ style spec properties, but it's a big theoretical hurdle to cross before they could be as efficient as types.
> Economics try to explain how the economy works

This is a common mistake.

Explaining how things work is entirely useless (unless all you're interested in is feeling good about yourself).

The only thing that matters for a so-called scientific discipline (which economists claim to be, but really aren't) is its predictive power.

If "explaining how things works" actually produces something that has predictive power, then yes, you've got something.

If all it does is produce explanations of what happened after the fact, what you have is intellectual masturbation.
This is what they're doing in universities instead of... anything valuable.

I know it's in the opinion section but, come on Scientific American, you should be better than this insanity.

Looking forward to things getting much worse so that people like this have to reconnect with essential problems. At least hunting / gathering will clear this garbage out of their brains.
It's not either/or. you can do both.
Plasma stealth is an existing approach to radar stealth that is made easier by hypersonic speeds.

Infrared targeting of multiple hypersonic missiles is easier said than done. The missile you're hitting them with is going to be heating up the air around the camera probably at the same temps as the missile it's intercepting, and a base station wouldn't have enough resolution to guide a missile accurately from 100+km away while being alert for other missiles.
E-Ink Magic Calendar that runs off a battery powered Raspberry Pi
If you know python, then why bother with shell scripts in the first place?
Thanks for the suggestion, yes makes sense.
I have no idea what the DW algorithm actually does, but I almost never get new releases. It quite often doesn't even pick the most recent popular song from a given artist.
This comment is just too on the nose, chef’s kiss.
Well another completely wild solution would be to make end users responsible for storing electricity during non-generation hours. I.e. "each home having a battery device." I just made this up now but thinking about what the end result might be...

encourages:

- more people to buy electric cars that can also act as a whole home battery
- even more research dollars in storage/battery tech
- distributed power grid
- resell electricity to grid (or maybe even local neighbours)
- short-term power outages are handled by design
- people think more about their electricity usage
- people may be more likely to generate power at home

downsides:

- unnecessary extra cost to end users
- might be less efficient then centralization
- certain markets/peoples will not be able to easily access stored electricity?
You seem to be suggesting but not outright saying something that is a misconception: The SR-71 did in fact have a pressurized cockpit, which was also air conditioned as well (it had to be, because the aircraft would cook the crew otherwise.)

The SR-71 was sophisticated in other ways as well; for instance in having ejection seats. In fact the first four shuttle flights (all Columbia) had ejection seats too and guess where they got those seats from? The SR-71 of course. And on those flights with ejection seats, guess what the shuttle crew wore? They wore pressure suits, like those worn by SR-71 crew! They stopped wearing those starting with STS-5, when they removed the ejection seats. However the pressure suits (though not the ejection seats) came back after the demise of the Challenger.

What I am not saying: that the shuttle was simple.

What I am saying: That the SR-71 was more sophisticated than you've given it credit for.
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We're currently hiring for both our Palo Alto and Atlanta Offices, as well as some fully remote roles. We have opportunities for lead software developers (and other roles like operations, sales, communication) and are especially interested in anyone with fast-growth startup experience. If you want to work in healthcare, love mission-driven work, and thrive in a startup environment, then we may be a good fit. Check out our open roles at https://www.sirum.org/about#careers.
Couldn’t happen to a more appropriate group of people. It’s just deserts for decades of opposing environmental policy. I hope the residents of Huntington Beach are so inconvenienced that they have to relocate to their second homes in Texas.
> e.g. don't own Ferarris and private jets

Sports cars and private jets are only for the one percent, but there's a problem with taxing carbon exhaust alone because the poor can't afford a new all-electric SUV or a plug-in hybrid, they're driving around in 20 or 30 year old cars every day if they have a car.

I'm all for taxing those with unreasonable greenhouse emissions, but not being able to afford a cleaner car shouldn't be taxed. It's why I'm sceptical of proposed CO2 taxes because many (if not most) of them fail to consider this problem.
Economics is a social science and as such, is not really amenable to the methods of falsification or experimentation that work well in physics or chemistry. In short, it's not really a science. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do your best to be logical and factual as much as possible, but at the end of the day you will produce mostly unfalsifiable theorizing.

Really you need more modest goals, for example to at least try to approach the subject objectively rather than via sentimental moralizing. Even that is a massive effort. Imagine a physicist decrying how "wrong" it is for gravity to be weaker than the other forces. You would laugh at such a person and immediately classify them as not a real physicist. So you can use that as a filter to exclude much of heterodox economics and economists as a start. That's the battle being waged -- objectivity -- not falsifiability.
I guess, it sounds much like what it is: a compromise between a conservative party and the Green party acting as the junior partner in the coalition.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28738407.
Not a mac user, but one upside I can see is that this forces apps to at least declare which libraries they are using. If everything is statically linked, it might be hard to figure out where on the system a vulnerable library is being used at all.
Not quite sure why interceptor missiles would have to "fly fast enough to catch up" unless you're shooting at a missile departing from you (that is to say, unless you actually have to catch up with something).
Can you provide some evidence of that happening?
The SR-71 was very complex. For example it had multiple heat exchangers to get rid of heat, to transfer it to the fuel before it was combusted. The titanium structure was complex to maintain. Welding needed to be done in "bubble" work stations under protective gas.
I thought that (i.e. removing the site from google search) was the goal.

I'd review the other usage on a case by case basis; e.g. determining ratings of other sites seems fair use to me. I'd guess you're allowing others to use your site's content when you're making your site public (TINLA).
For blunt-body spacecraft, ionization starts at around Mach 10. The aerodynamics of a missile will be different of course. Regardless, there is headroom above the Mach 5 hypersonic threshold before blackout occurs.
The only people who will be punished by this leak are journalists and anyone remotely close to making a fuss about the corruption
http://graphdatamodeling.com/resources/rettigNormalizationPo...
> Fine, make it 10-20 instead.

Would still push people towards the worse crime to cover their tracks I expect, and wouldn't be a full deterrent because it doesn't account for people acting under duress that is more dangerous in their mind than what the law is threatening.

Furthermore, there is a cost to keeping someone locked up for 10-to-20. Do you want to pay that out of your taxes? Because that is where it would come from.

> But clearly the punishments we have now are too lenient to be effective.

People still steal in places where the punishment is losing a hand or being stoned to death. What do you propose that would be a greater deterrent than those?
> The minute we have solved AGI, will we have solved economics as well?

Certainly not if you allow AGIs to be economic actors.
> I suspect it will be seen as wealth redistribution by creating a new tax and thus would not be supported by most conservatives.

Former Federeal Reserve Chairs Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Paul Volcker, and Janet Yellen (now at Treasury)—plus thousands of economists and dozens of Nobel laureates—signed support for carbon pricing:

> V. To maximize the fairness and political viability of a rising carbon tax, all the revenue should be returned directly to U.S. citizens through equal lump-sum rebates. The majority of American families, including the most vulnerable, will benefit financially by receiving more in “carbon dividends” than they pay in increased energy prices.

* https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

Not that logic is used much nowadays in the GOP, but if Greenspan of all people can sign onto it…
Right, we all know offshore havens exist, we all know rich people and companies use them. So papers showing that these rich people are using these tax havens is not exactly surprising. That's not to condone this activity, it's just that I'm surprised anyone thinks the response would be otherwise. We know about this stuff already in general, this is just specifics and as the guardian points out it's not as if all this in even necessarily illegal. We just need to push harder to shut down these loopholes.
What I like about both of them, is how deeply alien the aliens feel _at the end of the book_, after characters from the separate story lines start interacting more directly. The differences are mentioned early, but the alien’s point of view is told by narrators who, for various reasons, are subtly unreliable. Rereading these books is especially rewarding.

But I do agree with you that A Deepness in the Sky is better in many ways. It’s a much more subtle book.