## Do racial features which grant advantage on specific ability/skill checks provide a benefit skill checks made with different abilities?

The rules for making skill checks are usually cut and dried. If a character is making a check to see if they can swim against a current, this would usually be a Strength (Athletics) check.

But the rules allow for unique circumstances to require skill checks with atypical abilities.

For example, if you have to swim from an offshore island to the mainland, your DM might call for a Constitution check to see if you have the stamina to make it that far. In this case, your DM might allow you to apply your proficiency in Athletics and ask for a Constitution (Athletics) check.

Certain races afford the character advantage on specific checks (most commonly Wisdom (Perception) checks that involve smell or vision).

I can imagine a situation where a DM might request an Intelligence (Perception) check to see if a character is able to identify which of two glasses of wine is poisoned or a Constitution (Perception) check to see if a character can keep their eyes on something flying very close to the sun without squinting.

In these atypical scenarios, does the creature’s racial benefit still give them advantage on the check in spite of the fact that the fundamental ability being used with their skill is not the one explicitly cited in the description of their racial feature?

## Why doesn’t Mathematica provide an answer while Wolfram|Alpha does, concerning a series convergence?

Among other series I’ve been working on, I was asked to find whether $$\sum_n 1-\cos(\frac{\pi}{n})$$ converged, and Mathematica’s output to SumConvergence[1 - Cos[Pi/n], n] simply was repeating the input, without further information. Wolfram|Alpha, though, at least told me which test were or not conclusive.

I’m new to Mathematica, and even though I’ve looked both on Google and into Wolfram’s documentation, I haven’t found information that could help me figure out how to get, from Mathematica, the conditions for the convergence of a series involving something else than powers of a variable.

I would appreciate if you could give me some clues on the typical procedure to make Mathematica correctly evaluate the convergence of a series, or/and to return the conditions for convergence. Thank you in advance.

## How will Apple and Google provide 5-minute data on Covid exposures using 10-minute interval numbers in the hash?

The goal of COVID-19 exposure notification is to notify people that they were exposed to someone who later tested positive for the virus. Protecting privacy in this process requires some cryptography, and avoiding excessively granular detail on user locations. But providing data useful for disease prevention requires adequate detail in measuring the length of exposures.

There is a new API for such exposure notification from Apple and Google, but it has a tension between 5- and 10-minute numbers that I don’t see how to resolve.

The cryptography specification, v1.2.1, specifies 10-minute intervals as inputs to the hash: “in this protocol, the time is discretized in 10 minute intervals that are enumerated starting from Unix Epoch Time. ENIntervalNumber allows conversion of the current time to a number representing the interval it’s in.”

Meanwhile the FAQ, v1.1, specifies 5-minute increments in the output: “Public health authorities will set a minimum threshold for time spent together, such that a user needs to be within Bluetooth range for at least 5 minutes to register a match. If the contact is longer than 5 minutes, the system will report time in increments of 5 minutes up to a maximum of 30 minutes to ensure privacy.”

How will the system report times in 5-minute increments when the interval numbers are only updated for the hash once every 10 minutes?

## What kind of protection does an electron sandbox provide?

How does an electron sandbox work? What kind of protections does it provide? Signal for example now runs by default with --no-sandbox. Should I be taking extra precautions when running signal?

## Can silk stop the raging Orc? or rather do fragile structures provide less cover?

The Player’s Handbook (pg. 196) reads

Walls, trees, creatures, and other obstacles can provide cover during combat, making a target more difficult to harm.

However it only defines degrees of cover (1/2, 3/4, Full) in terms of area covered. RAW it then seems that a curtain of silk provides as much cover cover against the attacks of a battle axe wielding Orc as a stone wall. Reasonably, however, it would make more sense just to confer the benefits of Unseen rather than the benefits of cover.

Rules as Written is there something I am overlooking and if not what is there a more reasonable system of adjudicating cover?

## Provide the mantissa and exponent of the same number, after normalisation

Given a number with mantissa 00000100000101000101101 and an exponent of 2^7 provide the mantissa and exponent of the same number, after normalisation. exponent:…? mantissa:…?

## What spell will provide the most healing for a Necromancy wizard’s Grim Harvest feature?

The Necromancy wizard’s Grim Harvest feature allows the necromancer to heal themselves an amount of HP equal to 3 times the level of the necromancy spell used to kill a creature, once per turn.

Instantaneous spells would just heal once per casting. Spells with a longer duration could kill one creature per turn for many turns for repeated healing.

Assuming at least one creature dies each turn, what is the maximum amount of healing a necromancer can get from the Grim Harvest feature from a single casting of a necromancy spell?

## How does sync.com provide “zero knowledge” for web application upload?

It is completely clear how desktop and mobile platforms for sync.com allow zero knowledge. However, it blows my mind when I try to understand how “ZERO KNOWLEDGE” could be theoretically possible when using a browser, i.e. web application upload.

So I login to sync.com with Chrome. Then I hit upload a file button, and a file from my PC is getting uploaded and encrypted on the fly by the browser? Then the browser must know my encryption key, i.e. my login password!!!!!!! Does this mean the browser (and the sync.com) is keeping my login credentials while I’m logged in? As far as I know the credentials should not be kept like this, the modern practice is JWT token or somethin……. Anyway… encription…. des a browser even have such a complicated encryption capability (comparable with the desktop app) …..or are my files being simply uploaded to the server and encrypted there????? But either way that would not be a zero knowledge

## Can VPN hardware provide adequate isolation on a home network?

If you were to configure a Work PC at home to exclusively connect to your work network via a small VPN box that would this adequately isolate it from your home network and related threats?

What alternatives would you recommend?

Work PC <=cable=> VPN Hardware <=cable/wifi=> Home Router <=> Work VPN Endpoint

## Assign resources that each have a certain amount of work they can provide to tasks that require a certain amount of work

I’m attempting to do a hobby automation project and have come to a roadblock. I have a certain problem I need to solve, but can’t think of the solution nor what the name for the problem would be.

Say we have n tasks where each task requires $$x_i$$ amount of work to be done and m resources where each resource can provide $$y_j$$ work. The total amount of work required will equal the the total amount of work the resources can provide, i.e. $$\sum_{i=1}^{n} y_i = \sum_{j=1}^{m}x_j$$. For all j from 1 to m, $$y_j \in \left \{1, 2, 6, 12, 24\right \}$$ and each $$x_i = a*1 +b *2 + c*6+d*12+e*24$$. I was looking at task assignment problems, but those seemed to be a bit overkill since they were concerned with optimization where I’m just simply trying to slot the correct blocks in the right place so that I don’t have tasks that are given too few or too many resources.

My current guess is that you can iterate over each task, and give it the largest resource available that doesn’t go over the amount of work that is left for the task to be completed. It’s almost analagous to filling a jar with different sized rocks; the best way is to start with the largest rocks and then go down in size from there, so that the smaller rocks fill in the space between the larger ones. Am I not taking something into consideration that complicates this problem further? I’m sorry if this is an obvious one, but I’m a hobbyist programmer and couldn’t think of the name of the problem or of a good set of keywords to google. The closest I could find is task assignment so far.