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RT @zhendongsu@twitter.com
LLVM (@llvmorg@twitter.com) is such an exciting, impactful infrastructure with so much potential thanks to the contributions of many people. On the other hand, it looks like more manpower is in desperate need, for example, to maintain it and to fix the many critical bugs; please contribute!
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/zhendongsu/status/1595345045619904514
10 PhD studentships in Nottingham
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/phd-advert.txt
Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/phd-advert.txt
operator precedence parsing was solved 100 years ago, y'all just cowards
The recent paper "A Retrospective Study of One Decade of Artifact Evaluations" provides a great empirical basis for reflecting on how we reward and value software engineering research artifacts, such as prototype tools.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3540250.3549172
1/
Some of the cool #SF #Writers that have come onto #Mastodon -- @GreatDismal @scalzi @gregeganSF @neilhimself @cstross @ann_leckie @rudytheelder @annaleen @charliejane
Hi! Do you have thoughts on how your feed should be organized 🤔? We are researchers at the University of Washington exploring end user tools for social media feed curation. We're conducting a study to learn more about the factors users take into consideration when evaluating the saliency of content in their personal feeds. This study will take approx. 30–45 mins and you'll receive a $15 gift card for participation. Learn more and sign up here! https://forms.gle/QcmcaP6tcsAmmUX6A
Let’s try this again. Where you at #fediverse? Boosts welcome so we can get the best sample size.
Each new generation on the web needs to learn that there’s no such thing as a permanent web identity on a commercial web service.
The only long-term solution to maintain your identity is:
1. your own domain name
2. Your own website/blog
3. Several backups
Everything else is temporary. Your accounts on myspace, facebook, medium, twitter, google plus, youtube, tiktok, mastodon will one day disappear or become useless.
You don’t have a "community" on those websites. Only ephemeral discussions.
Hey, friends: If you're still on mastodon.social or mastodon.online, you're about to lose track of weirder.earth, and other servers to follow soon. It's for the safety of our comrades: this is the quieter, kinder part of the fedi where we walk away from instances that can't or don't control harassers.
I know a lot of you still on mastodon.social and .online are newcomers who landed there because so many other instances have closed to new accounts. Please take this time to explore the fediverse and find somewhere with more reliable moderation. The move-instances tool works pretty well these days!
Had my compilers class try to break 133 different compilers, which just wrapped up.
https://types.pl/@dvanhorn/109305895477147646
OK first, this was fun and I recommend it.
The assignment was to write input programs that would be run on the collection of compilers submitted from the *previous* assignment. If results differed from a reference interpreter, that compiler was considered broken. The goal was to break as many things as possible.
The learning objective here was to learn how to read an informal spec and write test cases that are likely to exercise bugs. I think that worked. For many students it was clear they hadn't done this kind of task before and didn't really know where to start, which was surprising to me.
Students very quickly (like in hours) found overspecifications in the behavior of the interpreter and used it to "win", but I was able to adjust the interpreter and after the first day, that kind of exploit went away.
Many students did what I expected: they wrote small tests based on the assignment spec that broke a good chunk of the compilers. With some effort, they could get ~70-80 of the 133 compilers this way.
A few students wrote tests *not* guided by the assignment spec, but instead just wrote small examples drawn from the whole language. They found bugs in the starter code that was given to students, and thereby knocked out all 133 compilers.
One student found a bug in the parser which in two characters broke all the compilers!
Another student found a bug in the run-time system which read some memory as a uint, when it should've been int.
I look forward to refining and iterating on this in the future.