adolgert · HackerTrans

2 lata temudiscuss

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 evaluate both halves of the if-then but multiply one result by y and the other by (1-y). Then add them.

adolgert

4 lata temudiscuss

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.

adolgert

4 lata temudiscuss

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 more about this.

adolgert

4 lata temudiscuss

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. the largest study of spread of rust fungus outdoors 2. storage of rusts and 3. response of rust to weather. All useful for stopping rust on a crop. And I see someone contributed references that are more direct than my scientific ones. I was working on prevention of rust spread.

adolgert

4 lata temudiscuss

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 during the cold war, and they were hoping the weapon would reduce total yield by 15% in order to cause major damage.

adolgert

4 lata temudiscuss

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 endangered marsupial in Argentina, and you had to go look that up. I always thought the O'Reilly covers came from this, but apparently not.

adolgert

5 lat temudiscuss

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 do it?

adolgert

5 lat temudiscuss

"...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 "smoke test" that the output isn't NULL, or does it look at a returned data structure and enforce invariants in detail. It's the flip-side of asking in how much detail a test exercises the code. Well, keep having fun. Testing is a great way to think about code.

adolgert

5 lat temudiscuss

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 mutation testing framework to retest the relevant code? On the other hand, mutations can do a good job of estimating test coverage. In particular, they can help to prioritize tests by finding tests that cover the most mutations.

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