university of minnesota today coming out with groundbreaking research that the best C programmers in the world can't tell if you're giving them bad C
maybe C is bad
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I feel like I would have been tricked by this regardless of the programming language literally just on the basis of the authority of "affiliated with the university of minnesota"
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yeah this is mostly that they sent a bunch of patches claiming to be fixing issues found by static analysis tools, implying that they knew what they were doing, and coming from a reasonably trustworthy source
--> the patches got fairly little review
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I've glanced through their paper and I don't see them accounting for or even mentioning the bias that would exist when you submit patches from a university Vs say, an individual account.
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They didn't submit them that way. You're confusing the good faith patches that are being reverted from the university with the ones submitted from sockpuppet email addresses for the experiment using Gmail.
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Are you sure? This patch doesn't seem to be very "good faith" (though it's possible I'm missing something here?).
lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH5%
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They've been regularly involved in submitting fixes based on static analysis. Not all of those patches are correct. Tools have many false positives and the students make mistakes. Do you have any evidence that this has to do with the study, which seemed to use gmail addresses?
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I based my original reply in this thread, here someone claims that the patch set I linked above (from a uni email) is part of the paper : lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH+z
You're right that they may be innocent patches, I've read a few threads about that since leaving my comment here...
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They do not appear to have submitted any of the patches for the experiment from university email addresses. They've submitted a massive amount of fixes for issues they've uncovered, and like other attempts at fixing those issues, there are plenty of false positives and mistakes.