"It's all about comparing the lines of code we've created in the past"
That sure sounds like "static code analysis" to me.
It IS static code analysis. But that doesn't mean it is "like Lint".
Lint uses a table of HUMAN GENERATED patterns. These patterns are labor intensive to produce, and only find bugs that humans thought to check for.
This new checker looks at a steadily expanding database of bugs, and the fixes for those bugs, and LEARNS THE PATTERNS ON ITS OWN. This means it can have a much bigger set of patterns, including many that a human might have never thought to include. It also means that the system can steadily improve.
Most likely this system will be used as a supplement for Lint, rather than a replacement. But as it learns and improves, it may make Lint no longer very useful.
That is funny, becuae if you written an efficent traveling salesmen algorithm you had solved the P=NP question.
A heuristic that can get within 1% of the absolute optimal solution in P time is efficient, but does not solve P=NP.
there is no solution to the halting problem. No one evver asked to solve it. It is an axiom
Hogwash. The halting problem is not an "axiom". It was considered an open problem until 1936, when it was proved impossible by Alan Turing. Turing's recursive proof was similar in structure to Godel's proof of the Incompleteness Theorem a few years earlier.
I disagree. This is 10% less opportunity for the coders to increase their skills finding bugs...
If you truly believe that more bugs are better, then you could just train the AI to insert extra bugs instead of detecting existing bugs.
As a second negative effect, this will lead PHBs to decide that they can now hire even cheaper coders.
If you truly believe that more bugs are better, then you should see this as a good thing, Bad programmers who write crappy code will give others plenty of bugs to practice on. Right?
Leaving out the missile launcher (and tanks, artillery, land mines, bomber aircraft, etc.),...
I once visited a ranch in Nevada that had a privately owned tank and several howitzers. AFAIK, there is no law against that. Why would there be? Private tanks and artillery caused zero deaths last year, so a ban would be silly.
Yes. There are plenty of problems that are extremely hard to solve, but very easy to verify. An obvious example from cryptanalysis is factoring a 256 bit composite number into two 128 bit primes. Who cares if it is wrong 1% of the time? It is trivial to detect and toss out those errors just by multiplying the factors.
oh, you think the constitution actually is relevant to laws passed in the US?
Yes. It is unlikely this bill will ever go before the full legislature for a vote. If it does, it will almost certainly be voted down. If it passes, it will be immediately challenged in court and struck down as unconstitutional.
This bill has zero chance of being enacted and enforced.
I remember it being discussed in my software engineering class that trying to automate bug removal or detection could be shown to be isomorphic to solving Turing's halting problem.
Many people misunderstand the halting problem. It doesn't mean that you can't tell if a program halts. It just means you can't do so for ALL programs.
Likewise, automated bug detection is possible. It just won't find ALL bugs.
If it finds even 10% of the bugs, it is still a huge win. False positives are unlikely to be a show stopper: Like existing static-analysis, even if the false positives are not bugs, they are still often sloppy code that makes programs less readable.
Because, whether you like it or not, WeChat, or something like it, is the future.
WeChat is like voice, text, Facebook, Instagram, Visa, MasterCard, Venmo, and PayPal, all rolled into one with plenty of additional features.
Many Chinese no longer bother to carry cash at all. Some street vendors no longer accept cash, since 99% of their customers pay with WeChat, and cash raises the risk of robbery.
WeChat has almost entirely replaced SMS text messages in China, and most voice calls go through WeChat as well. Group chats and group voice conversations are seamless, and trivial to set up ad-hoc.
Also, WeChat gives you one centralized app to build up Social Credit, which will come in handy if you ever get in trouble with the government.
Not flamebait! Just look at all the Female Teacher Sleeps With Student articles that are out there
These incidents are considered "news" because they are so rare.
Also, an adult having sex with a 17 year old is not "pedophilia", since, biologically, a 17 year old is an adult. If you look at real pedophilia, about 2% of men are sexually attracted to prepubescent children. Women sexually attracted to prepubescent boys are almost nonexistent.
The number of people on earth is completely irrelevant. The phone would be no more or less secure if there was only 1 billion people, or 70 billion.
is about as secure as a keypad that only beeps when you get the right digit.
Nonsense. Many Android phones use a four digit code, which has a 1:10,000 chance of being cracked on each attempt, assuming that codes are selected randomly. They are not, with codes representing dates being far more prevalent. That is far less secure than FaceID, but still "good enough" for most people.
I think OP's point is, nobody _should_ like it (even if they think they do). Because it's completely insecure by default.
It has a false positive rate of 1 in 50,000. That is plenty good enough for most people. I don't store nuclear launch codes on my cell phone, and I am not too worried about the NSA seeing my grocery list.
TFA doesn't give any detail around this. How does one generate that much traffic without the need of a botnet?
It depends on what you mean by "botnet". The attacker sent spoofed memcached requests to UDP servers, which were then replicated and forwarded to the victim. I some sense, these UDP servers are acting as a "botnet" even though they are not running any malware controlled by the hacker. More info here.
A bigger question is: Cui bono? Why is someone attacking Github?
If it's *features* you're after, there is little reason for an iPhone.
There is if you have a Macbook. I have an iPhone (a four year old iPhone-6 refurb), and a Macbook-Pro. The phone integrates seamlessly with the apps on my laptop, for calendars, alarms, text messages, photos, iCloud documents, etc.
Another advantage of iPhones over Android is regular software updates that "just work".
Not really. Most of the cost is not fuel, but depreciation of the vehicle. That is partly connected to distance driven, but also depends on the age of the vehicle. A vehicle is depreciating even if it is just sitting in the garage. The $/mile comes from averaging that aging cost over typical miles driven, but if you drive more the cost doesn't go up linearly. Also both aging and milage based depreciation are front-loaded, so the value drops quickly for the first few years, and the first 10k-20k miles. After than, the real depreciation per mile driven is much less.
It is likely that Uber drivers aren't as dumb as you think they are.
How can they not see this is a bad plan with no good long term prospects.
The Chinese people do see it as bad, but what can they do? XJP has all the power. He directly controls the administration and the army. The legislature is just a rubber stamp and has no power. The judiciary is not independent, and follows the directions of the party. He has spent the last 5 years purging the government of anyone disloyal or likely to dissent, under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign.
This is an example of why it is important to start opposing authoritarianism at the outset. If you wait until the oppressor's intentions are clear, it will be too late.
They didn't ban the use of the letter "n" inside words. Only the use of "n" as a standalone character.
It is not clear why it was banned, but sometimes characters and phrases will be used symbolically to get around censorship. For instance the number 64 is often censored because it is used to mean "June 4th" the date of the Tiananmen Square "incident". 54 is also sometimes censored because it is used as a symbol for corruption and betrayal, since the terms of the Versailles Treaty were published in Chinese newspapers on May 4th of 1919. The treaty was seen as a betrayal of China, and a sellout to the Japanese by the Western Allies, resulting in riots and unrest.
One conjecture is that "n" was being used in the sense of "an arbitrary number" to mean the new term limit for the leader of China, replacing the old limit of two terms of five years each.
A shotgun to protect your home? Almost nobody has a problem with that.
You need to get out of your bubble. Plenty of people have a problem with that. After the Florida shooting, gun control has been discussed frequently where I work, and I estimate that 20-30% of those who have expressed an opinion believe that all private ownership of guns should be banned.
This may not be a totally representative sample, but it is certainly far beyond "almost nobody".
Just like almost nobody has a problem with reasonable background checks.
Wow. Double bubble. You really need to talk to people. PLENTY of people are vehemently opposed to any further gun control measures. Obama ran into a brick wall of opposition when he failed to extend background checks to gun shows after Sandy Hook. You really think that would have happened if "almost nobody" had a problem with it?
Selling/buying sex in private isn't illegal in the UK, and the UK hasn't solved the underage prostitution problem. Or the sex trafficking problem.
They haven't solved it completely, but they mostly do better than America. The goal of reform is improvement, not perfection. Countries that have liberalized sex laws tend to see less commercial sex related violence, disease, and coercion.
Prudes hate to hear it, but people actually do better when left to decide for themselves what to do with their penises and vaginas, without excessive government regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Article above:
"It's all about comparing the lines of code we've created in the past"
That sure sounds like "static code analysis" to me.
It IS static code analysis. But that doesn't mean it is "like Lint".
Lint uses a table of HUMAN GENERATED patterns. These patterns are labor intensive to produce, and only find bugs that humans thought to check for.
This new checker looks at a steadily expanding database of bugs, and the fixes for those bugs, and LEARNS THE PATTERNS ON ITS OWN. This means it can have a much bigger set of patterns, including many that a human might have never thought to include. It also means that the system can steadily improve.
Most likely this system will be used as a supplement for Lint, rather than a replacement. But as it learns and improves, it may make Lint no longer very useful.
It's NP to find all bugs.
It is not NP. It is impossible.
That is funny, becuae if you written an efficent traveling salesmen algorithm you had solved the P=NP question.
A heuristic that can get within 1% of the absolute optimal solution in P time is efficient, but does not solve P=NP.
there is no solution to the halting problem. No one evver asked to solve it. It is an axiom
Hogwash. The halting problem is not an "axiom". It was considered an open problem until 1936, when it was proved impossible by Alan Turing. Turing's recursive proof was similar in structure to Godel's proof of the Incompleteness Theorem a few years earlier.
I disagree. This is 10% less opportunity for the coders to increase their skills finding bugs ...
If you truly believe that more bugs are better, then you could just train the AI to insert extra bugs instead of detecting existing bugs.
As a second negative effect, this will lead PHBs to decide that they can now hire even cheaper coders.
If you truly believe that more bugs are better, then you should see this as a good thing, Bad programmers who write crappy code will give others plenty of bugs to practice on. Right?
Good luck.
Leaving out the missile launcher (and tanks, artillery, land mines, bomber aircraft, etc.), ...
I once visited a ranch in Nevada that had a privately owned tank and several howitzers. AFAIK, there is no law against that. Why would there be? Private tanks and artillery caused zero deaths last year, so a ban would be silly.
2 + 2 = 4.04
Are they saying that is allowable?
Yes. There are plenty of problems that are extremely hard to solve, but very easy to verify. An obvious example from cryptanalysis is factoring a 256 bit composite number into two 128 bit primes. Who cares if it is wrong 1% of the time? It is trivial to detect and toss out those errors just by multiplying the factors.
oh, you think the constitution actually is relevant to laws passed in the US?
Yes. It is unlikely this bill will ever go before the full legislature for a vote. If it does, it will almost certainly be voted down. If it passes, it will be immediately challenged in court and struck down as unconstitutional.
This bill has zero chance of being enacted and enforced.
I remember it being discussed in my software engineering class that trying to automate bug removal or detection could be shown to be isomorphic to solving Turing's halting problem.
Many people misunderstand the halting problem. It doesn't mean that you can't tell if a program halts. It just means you can't do so for ALL programs.
Likewise, automated bug detection is possible. It just won't find ALL bugs.
If it finds even 10% of the bugs, it is still a huge win. False positives are unlikely to be a show stopper: Like existing static-analysis, even if the false positives are not bugs, they are still often sloppy code that makes programs less readable.
Why are we hearing about this?
Because, whether you like it or not, WeChat, or something like it, is the future.
WeChat is like voice, text, Facebook, Instagram, Visa, MasterCard, Venmo, and PayPal, all rolled into one with plenty of additional features.
Many Chinese no longer bother to carry cash at all. Some street vendors no longer accept cash, since 99% of their customers pay with WeChat, and cash raises the risk of robbery.
WeChat has almost entirely replaced SMS text messages in China, and most voice calls go through WeChat as well. Group chats and group voice conversations are seamless, and trivial to set up ad-hoc.
Also, WeChat gives you one centralized app to build up Social Credit, which will come in handy if you ever get in trouble with the government.
I dunno, the Chinese instituted the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of 45 million Chinese peasants in just 4 years (1958-1962).
Most estimates for the death toll from TGLF put it around "only" 30 million.
There was nothing "systematic" about it. It was gross economic incompetence that caused the famine, not intentional policy.
Not flamebait! Just look at all the Female Teacher Sleeps With Student articles that are out there
These incidents are considered "news" because they are so rare.
Also, an adult having sex with a 17 year old is not "pedophilia", since, biologically, a 17 year old is an adult. If you look at real pedophilia, about 2% of men are sexually attracted to prepubescent children. Women sexually attracted to prepubescent boys are almost nonexistent.
1 in 50,000 when there's over 7 billion of us ...
The number of people on earth is completely irrelevant. The phone would be no more or less secure if there was only 1 billion people, or 70 billion.
is about as secure as a keypad that only beeps when you get the right digit.
Nonsense. Many Android phones use a four digit code, which has a 1:10,000 chance of being cracked on each attempt, assuming that codes are selected randomly. They are not, with codes representing dates being far more prevalent. That is far less secure than FaceID, but still "good enough" for most people.
I think OP's point is, nobody _should_ like it (even if they think they do). Because it's completely insecure by default.
It has a false positive rate of 1 in 50,000. That is plenty good enough for most people. I don't store nuclear launch codes on my cell phone, and I am not too worried about the NSA seeing my grocery list.
TFA doesn't give any detail around this. How does one generate that much traffic without the need of a botnet?
It depends on what you mean by "botnet". The attacker sent spoofed memcached requests to UDP servers, which were then replicated and forwarded to the victim. I some sense, these UDP servers are acting as a "botnet" even though they are not running any malware controlled by the hacker. More info here.
A bigger question is: Cui bono? Why is someone attacking Github?
Honestly, not incorporating FaceID into an Android phone is a selling point for me.
FaceID is an optional feature, that is off by default. If you don't like it, just don't set it up on your phone.
If it's *features* you're after, there is little reason for an iPhone.
There is if you have a Macbook. I have an iPhone (a four year old iPhone-6 refurb), and a Macbook-Pro. The phone integrates seamlessly with the apps on my laptop, for calendars, alarms, text messages, photos, iCloud documents, etc.
Another advantage of iPhones over Android is regular software updates that "just work".
A Prius will cost about $0.30/km to operate
Not really. Most of the cost is not fuel, but depreciation of the vehicle. That is partly connected to distance driven, but also depends on the age of the vehicle. A vehicle is depreciating even if it is just sitting in the garage. The $/mile comes from averaging that aging cost over typical miles driven, but if you drive more the cost doesn't go up linearly. Also both aging and milage based depreciation are front-loaded, so the value drops quickly for the first few years, and the first 10k-20k miles. After than, the real depreciation per mile driven is much less.
It is likely that Uber drivers aren't as dumb as you think they are.
"1. There is no capital punishment."
China does not have capital punishment. They treat capital "N" and lowercase "n" the same.
Do you feel pressured to defend China?
No. As a native-born American citizen living in California, I feel no pressure to defend China.
How can they not see this is a bad plan with no good long term prospects.
The Chinese people do see it as bad, but what can they do? XJP has all the power. He directly controls the administration and the army. The legislature is just a rubber stamp and has no power. The judiciary is not independent, and follows the directions of the party. He has spent the last 5 years purging the government of anyone disloyal or likely to dissent, under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign.
This is an example of why it is important to start opposing authoritarianism at the outset. If you wait until the oppressor's intentions are clear, it will be too late.
They didn't ban the use of the letter "n" inside words. Only the use of "n" as a standalone character.
It is not clear why it was banned, but sometimes characters and phrases will be used symbolically to get around censorship. For instance the number 64 is often censored because it is used to mean "June 4th" the date of the Tiananmen Square "incident". 54 is also sometimes censored because it is used as a symbol for corruption and betrayal, since the terms of the Versailles Treaty were published in Chinese newspapers on May 4th of 1919. The treaty was seen as a betrayal of China, and a sellout to the Japanese by the Western Allies, resulting in riots and unrest.
One conjecture is that "n" was being used in the sense of "an arbitrary number" to mean the new term limit for the leader of China, replacing the old limit of two terms of five years each.
Well, it's probably better than making LinkedIn even worse by filling it with McJob listings.
Currently, blue collar and entry level job listings are on Craigslist, not LinkedIn.
A shotgun to protect your home? Almost nobody has a problem with that.
You need to get out of your bubble. Plenty of people have a problem with that. After the Florida shooting, gun control has been discussed frequently where I work, and I estimate that 20-30% of those who have expressed an opinion believe that all private ownership of guns should be banned.
This may not be a totally representative sample, but it is certainly far beyond "almost nobody".
Just like almost nobody has a problem with reasonable background checks.
Wow. Double bubble. You really need to talk to people. PLENTY of people are vehemently opposed to any further gun control measures. Obama ran into a brick wall of opposition when he failed to extend background checks to gun shows after Sandy Hook. You really think that would have happened if "almost nobody" had a problem with it?
For the record, nobody wants to take your guns away
For the record, plenty of people think guns should be completely banned.
Selling/buying sex in private isn't illegal in the UK, and the UK hasn't solved the underage prostitution problem. Or the sex trafficking problem.
They haven't solved it completely, but they mostly do better than America. The goal of reform is improvement, not perfection. Countries that have liberalized sex laws tend to see less commercial sex related violence, disease, and coercion.
Prudes hate to hear it, but people actually do better when left to decide for themselves what to do with their penises and vaginas, without excessive government regulation.