Hacker News: nwah1

New comment by nwah1 in "Classification of Finite Simple Groups Formalized in Lean"

nwah1 — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:13:41 +0000

Simplifying and composing these proofs with other proofs should probably be the next goal. And formalizing within other computational proof paradigms.

New comment by nwah1 in "Microsoft and others tell crypto platform not to tokenize their stocks"

nwah1 — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 22:09:23 +0000

So, a very inefficient database with massive footguns.

Ask HN: Why isn't Proof-Carrying Code more popular?

nwah1 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:56:33 +0000

It seems that Typed Assembly Language and the notion of Proof-Carrying Code have proved that you can ship binaries that contain formal guarantees of certain properties, like memory-safety.

This approach seems like it completely abstracts away all the arguments about which language offers the best guarantees, and moves the checks to installation-time instead of compile-time.

This is important because a shipped binary needs to be trusted, and if you think the binary is written in safe Rust or whatever, then that may give you peace of mind. But you have no guarantee what the binary actually is, and a single instance of memory-unsafety could be a backdoor. You have to just take a leap of faith with the entire supply chain.

It is as if we, as a society, have chosen to rely entirely on client-side validation without ever actually validating server-side.

PCC and TAL could obviate the entire issue, without new exotic hardware like CHERI.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49912863

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by nwah1 in "World Labs is Joining AMD"

nwah1 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:26:18 +0000

Then all software moats become shallow

New comment by nwah1 in "Initial DIY cleanroom experimentation"

nwah1 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:45:49 +0000

There was some talk on here during Covid about the feasibility of making all structures up to BSL4 standards. Seems kind of nuts, but it would certainly contain a lot of biosafety threats. With AI it now seems borderline urgent.

New comment by nwah1 in "Socialism's Positive Rating Tops 40% for First Time"

nwah1 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 22:18:10 +0000

This narrative is largely untrue. Scandinavia started to prosper only after they liberalized. Of course, there is a big difference between intelligent redistributionism which respects and leverages market forces, and the kind of socialists who implement rent control and government-run grocery stores.

New comment by nwah1 in "Socialism's Positive Rating Tops 40% for First Time"

nwah1 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:29:15 +0000

Redistribution that enhances production rather than stifling it. Which provides justice rather than creating injustice. A great idea to bury under dust for centuries.

New comment by nwah1 in "Socialism's Positive Rating Tops 40% for First Time"

nwah1 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:24:04 +0000

I'm sure we will. And, like with mutations, the default assumption for a random change isn't very good. In this case, the historical record points to worse-than-random outcomes.

New comment by nwah1 in "Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs"

nwah1 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 03:08:09 +0000

They don't use ternary quantization. But, they could, if they wanted.

New comment by nwah1 in "TSMC revealing details about next gen A14 node"

nwah1 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:37:32 +0000

In simpler terms, the SRAM density improved by 2.9% (according to ChatGPT). Which is better than it sounds, because SRAM had reached a wall, in terms of density gains, and, chips can be dominated by SRAM in terms of surface area, so this can mean a lot more room for logic, even though that is also getting considerably denser.

New comment by nwah1 in "OpenAI's Sam Altman says it would be 'ill-advised' to go public in 2026"

nwah1 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 23:00:08 +0000

Given that they paused signups for their 20x Max plan, your assessment seems overoptimistic.

Their new Broadcom chips seem cool, and they had a nice model release with Astra. But, that doesn't mean they've solved the profitability question during an era of rapidfire open-weight model releases, extreme memory shortages, and intense political pushback.

New comment by nwah1 in "Just testing my memory safe web browser"

nwah1 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 04:15:52 +0000

A practical solution for the here and now.

Seems like the next evolution for memory-safety will be in the hardware, with CHERI.

Language-level memory-safety is all fine and good, if you can afford the rewrite. But, you still have to trust the software supply chain (the compiler, build server, etc).

However, there's a third and broader category called Proof Carrying Code, which could be used to guarantee all kinds of security properties of binaries, including memory-safety in a way that requires no supply chain trust.

With both CHERI And PCC, your machine will simply never perform unsafe memory access, and it doesn't matter what language the binary was authored in.

Seems like language-level and PCC safety guarantees are the kind of thing that AI agents will make much more practical. With AI hacking, this only gets more important. They've already started trying to rewrite everything in Rust, but PCC and CHERI go further.

Redesigning the entire OS stack around zero virtual memory, and purely static allocation, seems like a direction that will need to be done. CHERI makes that much easier.

New comment by nwah1 in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

nwah1 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:44:19 +0000

Given the state of cybersecurity, the car goes wherever anyone with sufficient motivation wants it to go. Including into pedestrians. And, such a scenario could happen at the scale of a botnet swarm. In other words, hundreds of thousands of vehicles could be simultaneously hijacked.

New comment by nwah1 in "Algorithmic rent-pricing litigation expands under new state and local laws"

nwah1 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:37:29 +0000

Underrated comment.

New comment by nwah1 in "Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America"

nwah1 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:44:09 +0000

Also, Chromebooks.

New comment by nwah1 in "Memory safety absolutists"

nwah1 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:04:02 +0000

CHERI seems to accomplish much of what Fil-C does, in-hardware. And removes some of the trust from the entire build toolchains in your entire supply chain, because memory-unsafety cannot be stealthily inserted.

New comment by nwah1 in "Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed"

nwah1 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 16:40:45 +0000

Feels like a human-authored outline that was run through AI to make it into an article.

New comment by nwah1 in "The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)"

nwah1 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:54:15 +0000

Yea, but if humans went extinct tomorrow, very little human artifacts would remain after millions of years. Indeed, most would be gone well before that. How much stuff from the 18th century still remains, in percentage terms?

New comment by nwah1 in "Safari Technology Preview 248 Released"

nwah1 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:03:14 +0000

And it wasn't just laziness that made them drag their feet. They actively fear the web as a platform, and very much want everyone to do everything through their app stores, using their own macOS/iOS-exclusive proprietary SDKs... which also means developers themselves needing to acquire a Mac with XCode, and a Developer subscription.

New comment by nwah1 in "FDA approves new kind of cholesterol pill"

nwah1 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 04:48:46 +0000

Yes, exciting stuff.

Not to mention the gene-therapy version of the same PCSK9 inhibition pathway called VERVE-102 which Eli Lilly is putting through human trials as we speak.

I imagine that stacking the LP(a) antisense therapy with a PCSK9 inhibitor, and/or a statin or Nexlizet would probably lower odds of heart disease death by two to three orders of magnitude. But I guess there isn't solid mortality data to say for sure.