Tony advised me to make money with the software model checker I have been writing. In contrast to the typical practice to make these tools open source and free for use. Would have loved to learn more from him. He was a great teacher but also a great and sharp listener. Still remember the detour we made on the way to a bar in London, talking too much and deep about refinement relations. RiP.
Readit Newsastahlx commented on Tony Hoare has died blog.computationalcomplex... · Posted by u/speckx
astahlx commented on Coccinelle: Source-to-source transformation tool github.com/coccinelle/coc... · Posted by u/anon111332142
The best thing Julia Lawall ever did!
Not the hardest, not the thing with the most sophisticated theories behind it, not the thing that helped her academic career the most... but definitely the best and the most useful.
There must be a lot of other academics who could do things that are less theoretical but more useful than what they normally do.
There must be a lot of undervalued academics who in effect are punished for doing things that useful without requiring quite as much deep theory as their fields can muster.
I'm glad she did something that she wasn't really rewarded for and I'm sad that the academic reward functions are so off.
I can only agree. It is great work; I met Julia in several occasions were we other academics tried to push our formal methods stuff for checking properties of the Linux kernel. Also ours worked but in a way more complicated way, very resource intense, and less effective than Julia’s work.
astahlx commented on US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere reuters.com/world/us-plan... · Posted by u/c420
In the end, facts are useless. You belief what you think your social bubble, and in particular, the group you think you belong to, is thinking. And many people do not speak up. Mostly those with strong (often selfish) interests speak up, and often in a manipulative way. Having narcissist or sociopaths as leader can indeed be a bad thing. Some sort of media control is good, to protect core values, to protect the law against mass manipulation.
astahlx commented on Em Dash in Reddit Comments, Interactive intervolz.com/emdash-obse... · Posted by u/jonatron
Using em dash is just fine. Academic writing teached me using it. However, I have to admit that use of AI is accelerating its „adoption“.
astahlx commented on Ask HN: Was Google Search and Services down for anyone else? · Posted by u/exploraz
Have the problem for YouTube now for several minutes
Having a close look at the problems to be solved should be the first step. Also, Africa is big and rather heterogeneous. AI can help but is no silver bullet.
astahlx commented on The new calculus of AI-based coding blog.joemag.dev/2025/10/t... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
While TDD can have some merits, I think this is being way to generous to the value of tests. As Dijkstra said once, "Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs." I'm not a devout follower of Uncle Bob, but I was just thumbing through Clean Architecture today and he has a whole section to this point (including the above quote). Right after that quote he writes, "a program can be proven incorrect by a test, but it can not be proven correct." Which is largely true. The only garuntee of TDD is you can show a set of behaviors your program doesn't do, it never proves what the program actually does. To extrapolate to here, all TDD does it put up guardrails for the the AI should not generate.
It depends on how you define testing now: Property-based testing would test sets of behaviors. The main idea is: Formalize your goal before implementing. So specification driven development would be the thing to aim for. And at some point we might be able to model check (proof) the code that has been generated. Then we are the good old idea of code synthesis.
Is Tesla a luxury brand?
They don’t sell a car over 62000€ in Europe.
Tesla is not a luxury brand, but they ask for premium prices, compared to the value (worst in ADAC statistics on repairs)
“ In 1974, a new car cost an average of 5320 euros. The average income was 13,928 euros per year, so a buyer had to work for an average of 4.6 months for a new car. 20 years later, it was already 7.4 months per new car. Until 2019, this number remained stable, but then it skyrocketed. Today, a buyer has to spend all his income from 9.6 months of employment to buy a new car. For more expensive e-cars, it is even 11.4 months. The reason is stagnant incomes, but also high profit margins of the manufacturers.” https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/kosten-auto...
From my personal perspective, as an employed software engineer, all cars over 50k are luxury.
astahlx commented on Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT gally.net/miscellaneous/h... · Posted by u/tkgally
I started using emdashes in my academic career, after my advisor pointed me to the subtle differences. And since then, I like and use emdash a lot. In Latex, it is easily produced, just keep the spacing rules in mind. The Punctuation Guide is a nice reference on it https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/