HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

estherney

10 karma · joined December 24, 2025

submissionscomments
estherney··on Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576
We want Lean4 (or any other deduction system that we use, for that matter) to be correct, i.e. "what is a true statement" and "what is a derivable statement" should be the same.

"every statement that can be derived also holds" is the difficult part to show, and something we refer to as soundness. For some fancy logics, it's not even possible to show, hence the discovered Kernel Soundness Bug in Lean!

"every statement that holds can also be derived", a notion known as completeness, is often a trivial property; in practice, we use refutation completeness instead, i.e. "every statement that doesn't hold can derive false". A bug that would allow a user to prove/derive a previously unproven statement would fall under this category of "completeness bug".

However, such completeness bugs immediately show up in testing. Generally, deduction systems have two kinds of rules: a handful of rules that are enough to establish (refutation) completeness, and then a few extra rules to optimize inference. Because so few rules are needed for completeness, lots of test cases will break if one of the rules break.

--

I'm not actually sure how the completeness situation looks like for proper provers like Lean. It's my graduate student's hubris to assume completeness remains easy to show for more advanced systems than the Superposition calculus ;)

estherney··on GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple
German bank Comdirect / Commerzbank did this as well, whitelisting GrapheneOS signing keys for their 2FA app. https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report/is...
estherney··on Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
(Also, the S8 is usually quicker anyway...unless you somehow ended up at Laim, Moosach or Feldmoching.)