Hacker News: ocschwar

New comment by ocschwar in "The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later"

ocschwar — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:09:08 +0000

> But how do you verify Facebook? Facebook computes what?

You start by verifying the permissions structure for Facebook posts.

And by verifying the shortest, least complex functions in Facebook's server side code base.

New comment by ocschwar in "Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief"

ocschwar — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:59:51 +0000

The trouble is the simulation tools are either proprietary and thus have only a small mind share among software developers, or academic, and either way, PLC programmers have not gone near them yet.

But a decent LLM should be able to translate the description of a plant to a TLA+ model (or Alloy, or something similar.)

New comment by ocschwar in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ocschwar — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:03:29 +0000

> My fraternity was more tame and we used to have guys gazing each other in the main room during parties.

Joining a fraternity makes you jointly and severally liable for anything your frat brothers do. It's the very opposite of working or investing in a limited liability company. Makes sense for a fraternity to be more tame...

New comment by ocschwar in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ocschwar — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:01:15 +0000

Which is why I am sitting right now in a meeting and the presenter is logged in from Bangalore and I don't even want to know what `TZ=Asia/Kolkata date` will tell me.

New comment by ocschwar in "This blog is written in en-GB"

ocschwar — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:41:12 +0000

I'm often shuffled into teams where I am the only American and everyone else is Indian, working in India, and I take a small measure of pride in switching to the formal register that Indians like to use in workplace English, and using the idioms they have.

New comment by ocschwar in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

ocschwar — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:43:48 +0000

It didn't hurt that you can't play Fruit Merge on a TI 84

New comment by ocschwar in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

ocschwar — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:02:53 +0000

The strange thing is he picked a fight with a store of humanities papers rather than scientific ones.

New comment by ocschwar in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

ocschwar — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:19:35 +0000

Seems to me these LLMs have a critical mass of Python training data and Rust training data, so there's no advantage for Python there.

So as the article points out, an iterative process that catches the mistakes at compile time is much more suited for an AI than one that catches them at runtime.

New comment by ocschwar in "Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin"

ocschwar — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:28:02 +0000

The Pyramids have a recently noticed Tamil inscription from Indian tourists visiting 2000 years ago.

And the Neo-Babylonian Empire had the first tourism minister taking care of a paleo-Babylonian site.

New comment by ocschwar in "Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers"

ocschwar — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:08:14 +0000

The firmware for a diesel engine goes into a diesel engine. The company can be required to get a PE's signify for putting the firmware in. After that, if it's copied elsewhere, that's not their problem.

New comment by ocschwar in "Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers"

ocschwar — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:25:36 +0000

This is why we need Professional Engineer licenses for software.

There are times when a product design needs to be reviewed and approved by someone who cares more about his license than about his job. It doesn't happen as often with software as it does with civil engineering, but often enough that it needs to become a thing.

New comment by ocschwar in "William Golding's Island of Savagery"

ocschwar — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 03:53:52 +0000

Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island.

Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies.

But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.

New comment by ocschwar in "Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access"

ocschwar — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:54:02 +0000

Maybe it's time to do a Eurovision style thing for the quality badge. Everyone uploads to Arxiv. Every who's in the field votes on the worthiest papers (not allowed to vote for anyone you actually collaborated with).

Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.

New comment by ocschwar in "William Golding's Island of Savagery"

ocschwar — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 14:34:59 +0000

Who could have guessed that growing up in a Polynesian culture is a better preparation for such a thing than going to an English boarding school..

New comment by ocschwar in "Four Million U.S. Children Had No Health Insurance in 2024"

ocschwar — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:48:59 +0000

Whatever it takes to keep you from leaving your post.

New comment by ocschwar in "Four Million U.S. Children Had No Health Insurance in 2024"

ocschwar — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:57:14 +0000

The value you get from the health care system isn't just from the services they provide when/if you need them.

It's from the system existing and being ready to help you.

We're not talking about widgets, onions, haircuts, or pork bellies here. You can't opt out of the system existing. And you can't opt out of the horrific consequences if the system doesn't exist.

So it's a bit silly to talk about health care like it's something that has a free market.

New comment by ocschwar in "The past was not that cute"

ocschwar — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 13:48:20 +0000

My childhood was dominated by the smell of licorice in some places because chocolate was too expensive.

New comment by ocschwar in "Autism's confusing cousins"

ocschwar — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 14:52:11 +0000

And then they enroll their patients in the Drug of the Month Club.

New comment by ocschwar in "Older Adults Outnumber Children in 11 States"

ocschwar — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 03:25:54 +0000

Young people moving out, and those who stay are not inclined to bear children.

New comment by ocschwar in "America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy"

ocschwar — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 21:39:39 +0000

It's true, but it's cold comfort. the amount of reading I can do in a single sitting has declined a lot.