YHK - yet another hacker news clone

AlphaProof Code

74 points ilreb 40 minutes ago 26 comments

Computer0 29 minutes ago | parent

I'm pleased to read Signal looks good to our robot mindlords.

p-e-w 24 minutes ago | parent

It’s nothing short of amazing that a huge codebase like Signal’s is apparently not only secure in a practical sense, but secure even in a strict formal sense. The people who wrote the Signal code must be engineers of the highest caliber.

Aboutplants 19 minutes ago | parent

Yeah quite impressive.

milkshakes 15 minutes ago | parent

the crypto might be secure; i wouldn't be so sure about the rest of the code.

lifeisloving 14 minutes ago | parent

Well the NSA is probably decent at building software. But none of this really matters if the OS isnt secure and the OS is much more complex and less verifiable. Also, why does the government use their own versions of Signal that are more secure, makes you wonder.

Im sure they allow bugs that benefit the NSA.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/bugs/2026/10/signal-bug-co...

Donwvote me with, but yes I believe that Signal and the EFF are US military programs larping as civilian institutions.

psd1 7 minutes ago | parent

White-listing contacts would have prevented the gaffe when a journalist was added to a war planning group

yread 23 minutes ago | parent

They thank Sundar Pichai. I guess it makes sense but at the same time...

tucnak 16 minutes ago | parent

This is got to be an inside joke

paganel 22 minutes ago | parent

I'm not at all versed in this "formal proofing" thing, but without diving all that much into it how does this handle the halting problem (and the related problems that in the end all point to said halting problem)?

xrisk 19 minutes ago | parent

lean has no relation to the halting problem; you can think of it as a language that allows proofs to be encoded as code, and the compiler that runs that code as knowing how to enforce mathematical constraints appropriately

auggierose 12 minutes ago | parent

there certainly is a relation; you might not be able to prove all the properties you care about because of the halting problem; but that is more a theoretical problem, not a practical one

NooneAtAll5 18 minutes ago | parent

do you mean how is halting problem not a blocker or how halting problem itself is proven?

answer to the first is same as always - by simply not guaranteeing that everything is provable, especially in finite amount of time

bbor 5 minutes ago | parent

Hmm. Which means that they just luckily don't have to prove anything about any software that might halt...? Or?

Like, they use some pretty stark terms here:

  Formal verification—mathematically proving code runs correctly without flaws—is the highest standard of security assurance; however, it is difficult and often labor-intensive.
Of course "proving" and "without flaws" are just words in a language game and might not mean the absolute things we expect them to as laypeople. Is that what's going on? Or can the "code" they're "proving... runs correctly" indeed be unrelated to such a fundamental finding of compsci?

I type this message to you all with sadness in my heart, cause I know I could get a better answer 100x faster by just asking an agent to research, which I could then have it dumb down to my level until I grasp it. I don't really know what the point of forums are, anymore. It's undeniably hard not to see ourselves as a planet of sad, fragile monkeys wasting away the hours between birth and death. That was already the case, perhaps, but at least learning and sharing knowledge about engineering in places like this felt like a somewhat meaningful way to positively impact the material conditions of my fellow humans, even in an indirect way. As of November 2026, I'm just the taste/framing component of artificial minds that seem overwhelmingly likely to develop their own within months or maybe years.

For a long time (since noticing the singularity) I've felt like someone doused in napalm and set alight while falling through the sky, frantically trying to put myself out while fixing my broken parachute. But post-Mythos I can't help but fear that there is no solid ground below. Just endless void. :(

sebzim4500 15 minutes ago | parent

Solving the halting problem means writing a program which can tell whether an arbitrary other program will halt or not.

Proving that a particular program will or won't halt can still be easy.

The halting problem does imply that there exist programs which are entirely correct that lean will never be able to prove the correctness of, but this is not really relevant in practice.

contravariant 13 minutes ago | parent

Dijkstra's approach would be to prove there is a strictly decreasing natural number associated to the loop.

This limits programs to the ones that can be formally shown to terminate. Which is good enough for most purposes.

My approach is to accept programs that run forever as long as I'm fairly sure each loop makes progress of some sort (instead of simply doing "while not solved: continue").

Edit: There's also a fun algorithm that, as far as I know, only provably terminates by being bounded by a sequence of strictly decreasing ordinals. Which breaks all kinds of models for proving it terminates.

kuboble 12 minutes ago | parent

Halting problem only stops you from your prover from working on all programs.

On some programs like "stop" or "while(true)" the proof is easy.

With more sophisticated analysers it becomes possible on wider range of programs.

bananaflag 9 minutes ago | parent

The same way Goedel's 0th incompleteness theorem doesn't make math proofs impossible (this is not sarcasm btw).

xrisk 22 minutes ago | parent

wonder how many dollars were spent on this

cicko 11 minutes ago | parent

it was one-shotted last night when the new Fable came out

simon-ami 10 minutes ago | parent

so, millions? billions?

thereader12 2 minutes ago | parent

It took 4 weeks according to the Article.

nurumaik 19 minutes ago | parent

Now pls do telegram to settle "telegram shouldn't have invented their own crypto" debate once and for all

fercircularbuf 16 minutes ago | parent

Awesome. I remember thinking last year that software is about to get a lot more buggy now that people are offloading more to AI, but tools like this give me hope that perhaps the future of software actually looks a lot more safe.

conartist6 8 minutes ago | parent

it'll be much better once each CI run costs $10,000 for the AI to make sure you didn't break its giant proof

hmokiguess 6 minutes ago | parent

From the paper: https://google-deepmind.github.io/code-verification/