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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

> "The fundamental purpose of intelligence is to be able to effectively penetrate our adversaries in order to gather vital intelligence. By its very nature, that only works if secrecy is maintained and our codes are protected."

lol "codes"

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When I was roaming the halls of UC Berkeley 25 years ago, the use of countable "codes" was idiomatic in the numerical computing sphere at the intersection of computer science, mathematics, and parallel computing. A code was more or less a program or application. A frequently linked idiom was "kernel" to refer to the inner-loop of a particular numerical simulation, generalizing a "filter kernel" (matrix of coefficients) in signal processing/convolution.

I have heard similar usage from academics working in various US national labs, so it was not confined to a single coffee klatch. Some of the professors and postdocs using it back then are probably lab directors and program managers by now. I can easily imagine that this usage would be widespread among academic and federal lab computing environments. Like many kinds of jargon, it is both more precise in its meaning when used properly, but also what you might consider a "dog whistle" used for virtue signaling.

Pretty common to use that terminology in the sciences and government work for small "kernels" of code that does one thing really well.

EX: Water simulation codes, cryptographic codes, FEM codes, etc.

I’m not even peripherally involved in the IC but I think this is being used to refer to e.g. cryptographic protocols, rather than source code.

I think they're referring to cryptographic codes which makes it sound less awkward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_(cryptography)

Err they mean it in the sense of a synonym for ciphers not the ungrammatical use of codes for code (in the computng sense)

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