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"Finding bugs without running or even looking at code" by Jay Parlar

46 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
4 HN users recommended this talk4 months2019–2023 score 5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters point to it as the best practical introduction to Alloy and to lightweight formal modeling.

Jay Parlar's Strange Loop talk shows how model checkers such as Alloy can find complex bugs in a system's design without running or reading any code. He walks through modeling architectures and checking every possible sequence of operations, including a real security bug and a UI feature-interaction bug.

“There is a talk that gives a good overview on Alloy and how useful using something like this is” (HN, 2023)

2 strong recommendations · 2 recommendations · Talks · intermediate

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@hwayne Oct 2019 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Alloy is a language for describing structures and a tool for exploring them
There was a fantastic talk at strangeloop this year on Alloy: [this video] . The speaker used it to find a serious security bug in their live code and a feature interaction bug in their UI that had meant they had been writing broken code for the past _year_. (full disclosure I'm referenced towards the end)
Talk using Alloy to find a serious security bug and UI feature-interaction bug
@ParetoOptimal Apr 2023 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Modeling Git Internals in Alloy, Part 2: Commits and Tags
I was exposed to alloy by this wonderful video: "Finding bugs without running or even looking at code" by Jay Parlar [this video] I believe the general idea could be applicable in practice for core parts of most businesses software. So now I'm very interested in real world accounts of using alloy like this. Anyone have other posts like this one or experiences to share along these lines?
Introduced commenter to Alloy; applicable to core business software

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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