Hacker News Reader

Comment by rideontime | Hacker News Reader

Aditya's story about the new patches is that he was writing a static analysis tool and was testing it by... submitting PRs to the Linux kernel? He's either exploiting the Linux maintainers to test his new tool, or that story's bullshit. Even taking his story at face value is justification to at least ban him personally IMO.

View on HN

People do this with static analysis tools all the time. It’s obnoxious but not necessarily malicious.

To be clear: asking Linux maintainers to verify the results of static analysis tools they wrote themselves, without admitting to it until they're accused of being malicious?

Asking Linux maintainers to apply patches or fix “bug” resulting from home grown static analysis tools, which usually flag all kinds of things that aren’t bugs. This happens regularly.

As someone who used to maintain a large C++ codebase, people usually bug-dump static analysis results rather than actually submitting fixes, but blindly "fixing" code that a static analysis tool claims to have issue with is not surprising to see either.

If the patches were accepted, the person could have used those fixes to justify the benefits of the static analysis tool they wrote.

They generally state that this was found with so-and-so static analysis tool. And, as GKH pointed out in the thread, the resulting patches generally make changes that match a certain pattern, not the random uselessness that Aditya's patches were.

I'm unclear why one cannot do all these tests with a fork.

Sounds like these commits aren't related to that paper, they're related to the next paper he's working on, and the next one is making the same category error about human subjects in his study.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com