adolgert

4 ms·

1.
by adolgert 2y ago
A select statement, in this case, looks like a ternary in C, "y = (x > 0) ? 1 : 0". In FHE with integers, it's evaluated by making a large polynomial all x <= 0 become 0 and all x>0 become 1. Once you have y, you eva
2.
by adolgert 4y ago
When I find myself nervous about a meeting, I go back to this book and outline the steps it suggests, not just the gist of it, but I walk through the steps. It's like having a colleague who wants to help you be a better person.
3.
by adolgert 4y ago
This is a great reference! There is also an entry in the congressional record on declassification of the data. And 3 scientific papers. If you know more, send me a note. I worked in the area of rust spread and have always wanted to learn mo
4.
by adolgert 4y ago
I didn't mean to drop that comment and leave. I learned about the weaponization from Ft. Dietrich people. The group that worked on this is long since retired. They published three papers around 1950, as three parts, that are about 1. t
5.
by adolgert 4y ago
Famine is caused by _local_ supply shortages. The Dust Bowl in the US was a 30% wheat shortage, but it can happen from even less shortfall if transportation is a problem. The US weaponized wheat stem rust against Russia's wheat crops d
6.
by adolgert 5y ago
Does anybody remember the software that wouldn't let you install until you gave it the name of an endangered animal in a given part of the world? I ran into this on Unix in 1988. It would ask, for instance, for the name of an endangere
7.
by adolgert 5y ago
Dumb question: I've put points on a sphere using a Fibonacci series, then relaxed them and triangulated them, and there are some 5's and 7's, not all hexagons. I thought an all-hexagon tiling wasn't possible. How do they
8.
by adolgert 5y ago
"...understand why they are testing." That's interesting. There is an information-theoretic measure for test quality that asks how effective a test is by asking how closely it examines a test output. For instance, does it &qu
9.
by adolgert 5y ago
Mutation testing looks really fun until you use it. It has two problems, that false positives and false negatives abound, and that it doesn't scale well as code gets larger. Suppose you modify code, then how long does it take the mutat
10.
by adolgert 6y ago
This article is interesting in context. You're trying to select tests to run. Instead of using educated guesses about parameters (combinatorial interaction designs), you're going to look at the system under test. You could generat
11.
by adolgert 6y ago
Dijkstra on the matter: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...
12.
A Three-Year Conversation on Vector Transposition Semantics in Julia(github.com)
2 points by adolgert 7y ago|0 comments
13.
by adolgert 10y ago
The Fluent Python book has a nice set of chapters on coroutines, futures, and async.io. They present not the whole of what it does but one way to do it, which helps.
14.
by adolgert 10y ago
bash Pocket Reference. I keep a stack by the office door, sort of like a candy bowl.
15.
by adolgert 10y ago
There's a great paper modeling risk of invasion by sudden oak death into California. Computing for science, done right: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES10-00192.1/full
16.
by adolgert 10y ago
It doesn't take a huge drop in production to cause famine, either. The Wheat Stem Rust epidemics in the US caused famines at regular intervals before genetics made wheat resistant, and production was down under ten percent in some case
17.
by adolgert 10y ago
See the square windows on the Lockheed Constellation? The window corners turned out to be the weak point during pressurization, leading to failure, so windows were rounded after that.
18.
by adolgert 11y ago
Knuth's books are a baseline for "how things are done" for many, many areas, so having read them lets you hit par on most holes. Optimizing code for an architecture is very interesting, but it comes after 1) figuring out whic
19.
by adolgert 11y ago
That's a good question. Both ASN.1 and Google's offering have more limited language coverage (ASN.1 is ancient, but venerable, now in the hands of NCBI), but maybe we should expand that list. These are tools that serialize buffers
20.
by adolgert 11y ago
I may not agree with Cyrille, but what about alternatives for storing binary data that might be structured and play well with newer tools like Spark? ASN.1 and Google Protocol Buffers both specify a binary file format and generate language-
21.
by adolgert 11y ago
The article suggests that failures in an n-step process are distributed as a Binomial distribution, which doesn't have the kind of long tail you describe. I hazard that you're right and they're imprecise. It would be great if
22.
by adolgert 11y ago
When you get a grant, the university has academic freedom stipulations in the contract or memorandum of understanding. You cite sources for every paper. There's a yearly statement of conflict of interest on file. There is absolutely no
23.
by adolgert 11y ago
The Gnu Public License forbids redistribution unless what you distribute is also GPL. It means I can't use this in anything I share on behalf of scientific groups that want to use Open Source. I've run into this a few times, and i
24.
by adolgert 11y ago
These are great ideas. I told Valentin to drop by. Because DAS is an aggregator with an expert-system style query language, there is sharing among the Python services for caching. It's the caching that makes async code a good option. P
25.
by adolgert 11y ago
"Eating quiche" used to be slang for a sexual act. It's when the joke is most funny that we need to recognize mechanisms of exclusion.
26.
by adolgert 11y ago
Fixed point arithmetic, as one of the number types, has very well-defined mathematical properties. The Computational Geometry Algorithms library describes this. I think fixed point would be a special case of exact rational numbers. They cou
27.
by adolgert 11y ago
There's a sharp divide between what's prepackaged for typical uses and attempts to customize visualization for any of three-dimensionality, parallel processing, or interactivity with large data. The latter set of tools use the Vis
28.
by adolgert 11y ago
I'm happy to recount that I solved a problem by recognizing exactly what kind of parser was needed, but there was also that time Nate took a month of vacation, and I'd only written 30 useful lines of code for his project when he r
29.
by adolgert 12y ago
"Debugging Applications" by John Robbins is an old MS Press book, now 43 cents on Amazon, that covers everything from high level code structure to a nice primer on reading x86 assembly. I have more recent books, but this is the on
30.
by adolgert 12y ago
And for the practicing computer scientist, category theory provides a single structure suitable for expressing linear control theory, automata, and more: Arbib, Michael A., and Ernest G. Manes. "Machines in a category: An expository in

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