meuk · HackerTrans

7 years agodiscuss

Yup, she makes great examples without sacrificing accuracy.

7 years agodiscuss

This visualization is also very useful when trying to understand Bayes' theorem.

7 years agodiscuss

> Or is it on their best interest to keep it broken?

It seems similar to a strategy they use more often, famously known as embrace, extend, and extinguish [1]:

  1. Use some standard/specification

  2. Accumulate lots of users with questionable strategies

  3. Extend/break/deviate from the specification

  4. Devs update software to cope with the undocumented Microsoft(c) behavior

  5. There is no point in following the specification or standard anymore, since it won't work in practice anyway. Microsoft effectively dictates what devs do.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

meuk

8 years agodiscuss

Very interesting. The accuracy achieved is quite impressive -- I think it would be lower when the technique would be applied in practice, since the assumptions that are made are quite strong. For looser assumptions (no disclosure about the compiler/optimization level, highest optimization level enabled, larger pool size), the technique is less accurate.

In practice, it might be interesting to give a fuzzier output - the esimated probability that an individual wrote the code for a certain binary. This would help when two programmers (say, Alice and Bob) write code that yields binaries with similar properties. In the current system, either Alice or Bob is picked -- there is no way to express that it might be either of them.

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