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"Working with and enormous codebase" and "actualing ensuring it works" are two very different things. Academic "scientific software developers" (lol) never hav

"Working with and enormous codebase" and "actualing ensuring it works" are two very different things. Academic "scientific software developers" (lol) never have to prove anything works in production long term in majority of cases. They make a one-off project and never touch it again. So this generlization stands. And yes, I am saying that they are eggheads. Because this article and the covid sim clearly shows that "scientific software developers" (lol) must not be trusted with real world-affecting systems without some other real world developer checking it. The fact is that the covid sim is garbage and anyone who tries to defend it does not understand programming and complex systems well enough.

matthewdgreen 6y ago
Scientists have to undergo extremely rigorous peer review from other experts who are massively incentivized to challenge them and show that their results are wrong. The individual code may not be reviewed, but spurious results will be noticed and called out. The closest thing we have to this in industry is bug reporting and software security evaluation, and this is sporadic at best. Most commercial software developers keep their code closed source and do everything they can to stifle public knowledge of bugs, even after they've been fixed.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Why are you defending this work Matthew? You have your own reputation to defend as well. This code has never been peer reviewed, ever. That is indisputable because Ferguson has claimed multiple times that the code is/was entirely undocumented, and nobody outside him and his few colleagues understands how it works. The moment it started being actually reviewed, people found a breathtaking number of bugs like out-of-bounds reads, typos in random number generator constants etc. Broken RNGs! Of all things I'd hope an expert in cryptography would be very worried by, a missing digit in an RNG constant should surely be one of them?

matthewdgreen 6y ago

Scientists have to undergo extremely rigorous peer review from other experts who are massively incentivized to challenge them and show that their results are wrong. The individual code may not be reviewed, but spurious results will be noticed and called out. The closest thing we have to this in industry is bug reporting and software security evaluation, and this is sporadic at best. Most commercial software developers keep their code closed source and do everything they can to stifle public knowledge of bugs, even after they've been fixed.

thu2111 6y ago
Why are you defending this work Matthew? You have your own reputation to defend as well. This code has never been peer reviewed, ever. That is indisputable because Ferguson has claimed multiple times that the code is/was entirely undocumented, and nobody outside him and his few colleagues understands how it works. The moment it started being actually reviewed, people found a breathtaking number of bugs like out-of-bounds reads, typos in random number generator constants etc. Broken RNGs! Of all things I'd hope an expert in cryptography would be very worried by, a missing digit in an RNG constant should surely be one of them?