Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | wwilson's commentslogin

Brutally honest answer: it only recently became easy to get random systems under test with Antithesis without a bunch of manual/expert effort. Expect us to be reporting a lot of bugs against open source projects in the near future.


I've been jealous of the work antithesis is doing and support you in spirit; the world needs deterministic, tested software.

If you want a challenging open source deterministic game to test, may I suggest Beyond All Reason, powered by the Spring / Recoil engine? It's an RTS game that's been in various incarnations of development for 20+ years. (Disclosure: I'm an occasional code contributor to the project).


Oh man, Beyond All Reason would be a killer demo. We are actually testing another RTS as we speak, but I won't spoil it for you :) Look forward to a really epic post coming soon.


As the post (and linked repo) pretty clearly indicate, zero info about the existence of the bug went into this work.

Oh btw, we also found some other ones… Stay tuned!


So you found this before SQLite published the fix?


We wanted to publish this ASAP since people are talking about this bug today. In a follow-up, we will show how our automated causality analysis could have saved Tailscale and SQLite from 6 months of root cause analysis. Stay tuned!


Was curious so we checked and yep, Antithesis finds this bug in about 15 minutes. Will post a repro/writeup here soon.



Oh wow. I checked your site, but I (still) don't see the ability for average joes (and their pet AI agents) to signup. Could be huge, even if just offered in 5 minute slots. Is your email contact still valid in your profile? Want to reach out (Moose is the name). FYI, got a job at Antithesis a while ago after some rigorous interviewing.


We are working on getting self-serve signups to you ASAP. For now, just email us. We don’t bite.



Wait, it's AI? AI probably has information about this bug by now, since it was discovered and fixed in March.


Nope, it's a generic PBT harness. The human who built it knew about the bug, but the workload was specifically designed not to specifically target this particular bug, and may have found several others as well (we are in the process of reporting these upstream).


I'm equal parts intrigued and skeptical- I guess if the prompt doesn't lead on there is a bug there then I'm impressed.


Stay tuned!


I’ve been running one for a while and love it. Have also built a Nix -> OpenWRT config language transpiler so that I can keep my router state in Nix files and have nice deterministic rollbacks etc. It’s been great!


I'd be interested in any more info you can provide. Do you have your router configs in flakes? I'm currently testing Nix in a proxmox VM.

I just finished writing a shell script to dump all the UCI config files to one text file using curly braces to bracket/separate each file with the intent of committing this to a repo. Then will be writing a little parser to chunk up the text file to the appropriate /etc/config structure that OpenWRT expects. So at any point I can then just checkout different git branches, run the parser, and bam the entire config has been written to the router over ssh.

Still trying to figure out if OpenWRT has some other state outside of the /etc/config directory.


Author here. That’s right — the challenge was representing a tree in an existing SQL database that we’d chosen for its pricing model. I think encoding a B-tree in SQL would be a lot less fun even than what we did.


Thanks,our company is in the DC area so I just reached out with an offer to chat. Wesnoth is an incredible project, I can't believe he doesn't have a programming job.


[Disclaimer: Started Antithesis]

If you run your Hegel tests in Antithesis, you get this for free (along with various sorts of “non-local” assertions, perfect reproducibility even for concurrent or distributed code, etc.).

But yeah, not hard to hack together basic coverage guidance outside Antithesis. That works well for large classes of programs, just not a majority of them.


If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments."

One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.


A sort of broadening of Cunningham's Law (the fastest way to get an answer online is not by posting the question, but by posting the wrong answer—very true in my experience). If there's no issue of fact at hand, then you end up getting some engagement about the intentional malapropism/misattribution/mistake/whatever and then the forum rules tend to herd participants back to discussing the matter at hand: your company.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law


Seth Godin made the case that its more important for people to make remarks than to be favorable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cow:_Transform_Your_Bus...)

Trump did this a lot with the legacy media in his first term. He would make inaccurate statements to the media on the topic he wanted to be in the spotlight, and the media would jump to "fact check" him. Guess what, now everyone is talking about illegal immigration, tariffs, or whatever subject Trump thought was to their advantage.


"No such thing as bad publicity" is a very old idea. That quote is usually attributed to PT Barnum, but the idea is much older than him.


People always need to be reminded, though. It seems to be in human nature to fear bad publicity, and the people who fear it less end up with disproportionate power as a result.


Glad you enjoyed the talk! Making Bombadil able to take advantage of the intelligence in the Antithesis platform is definitely a goal, but we wanted to get a great open source tool into peoples’ hands ASAP first.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: