Four short links: 10 November 2020

1. Hypothesis as Liability — Would the mental focus on a specific hypothesis prevent us from making a discovery? To test this, we made up a dataset and asked students to analyze it. […] The most notable “discovery” in the dataset was that if you simply plotted the number of steps versus the BMI, you would see an image of a gorilla waving at you (Fig. 1b).
2. Tesla Engineering Inside Goss — Lots and lots of inside engineering horror stories (2 years old by now). my issue was the fact that the systems doing the flashing were running the yocto images and perl and the guy writing the perl was also responsible for writing the thing that actually updates the car. that thing (the car-side updater) is about ~100k lines of C in a single file. code reviews were always a laugh riot.
3. Teach Testing First — An extremely good idea. Testers and security specialists have a different mindset to regular programmers: they look to pervert and break the software, not simply to find the golden path whereby it produces the right behaviour for the right inputs. Perhaps if more people learned testing first, we’d end up with more secure software.
4. Realistic and Interactive Robotic Gaze — Astonishingly creepy prototype with astonishingly life-like eyeballs. Great work from Disney Research. (Paper)

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