Viewing profile — adolgert

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 1. Once you hav…

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 coll…

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 i…

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 …

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 we…

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. I…

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-hex…

"...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 exam…

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. Suppos…

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 t…

Dijkstra on the matter: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...

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.

bash Pocket Reference. I keep a stack by the office door, sort of like a candy bowl.

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…

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,…

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 th…

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 interes…

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…

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 Buff…

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 righ…

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 …

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 …

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. …

"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.