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Latency Numbers Every Professor Should Know
### Latency numbers every professor should know Email from student ………………………. 20 sec Person at office door ……………………. 8 min Other interruption ………………………. 20 min Twitter or something seems really important … 45 min Anxiety about deadlines …………………… 1 hr A meeting ……………………………….. 2 hrs A meeting you forgot about ………………… 1 day A class…
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Sabbatical at TrustInSoft
At the beginning of September I started at TrustInSoft, a Paris-based startup where I’ll be working for the next 10 months. I’ll post later about what I’m doing here, for now a bit about the company. TrustInSoft was founded by Pascal Cuoq, Fabrice Derepas, and Benjamin Monate: computer science researchers who (among others) created the…
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Inexpensive CPU Monster
Rather than using the commercial cloud, my group tends to run day-to-day jobs on a tiny cluster of machines in my office and then to use Emulab when a serious amount of compute power is required. Recently I upgraded some nodes and thought I’d share the specs for the new machines on the off chance…
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Inward vs. Outward Facing Research
One of the things I like to think about while watching research talks is whether the work faces inward or outward. Inward facing research is mostly concerned with itself. A paper that uses most of its length to prove a theorem would be an example, as would a paper about a new operating system that…
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Reviewing Research Papers Efficiently
The conference system that we use in computer science guarantees that several times a year, each of us will need to review a lot of papers, sometimes more than 20, in a fairly short amount of time. In order to focus reviewing energy where it matters most, it helps to review efficiently. Here are some…
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A Guide to Better Scripty Code for Academics
[Suresh suggested that I write a piece about unit testing for scripty academic software, but the focus changed somewhat while I was writing it.] Several kinds of software are produced at universities. At one extreme we have systems like Racket and ACL2 and HotCRP that are higher quality than most commercial software. Also see the…
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Hints for Computer System Design
On the last day of my advanced OS course this spring we discussed one of my all-time favorite computer science papers: Butler Lampson’s Hints for Computer System Design. Why is it so good? It’s hard-won advice. Designing systems is not easy — a person can spend a lifetime learning to do it well — and…
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Research Advice from Alan Adler
Although I am a happy French press user, I enjoyed reading an article about Alan Adler and the AeroPress that showed up recently on Hacker News. In particular, I love Adler’s advice to inventors: Learn all you can about the science behind your invention. Scrupulously study the existing state of your idea by looking at…
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Reproducibility in Computer Systems Research
These results about reproducibility in CS have been the subject of lively discussion at Facebook and G+ lately. The question is, for 613 papers, can the associated software be located, compiled, and run? In contrast with something I often worry about — producing good software — the bar here is low, since even a system…
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What I Accomplished in Grad School
I often talk to students who are thinking about grad school. The advice I generally give is a dressed-up version of “Just do whatever the hell will make you happy.” But if we all had solid ideas about what would make us happy then, well, we’d probably be a lot more happy. Here’s a list…