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An Epidemic of Rat Farming
In Hanoi, as the story goes, the French placed a bounty on rat pelts. The locals responded by farming rats. A child who gets candy for cleaning up a big mess is likely to create another mess the next day. These are perverse incentives: incentives that have unintended and often undesirable side effects. As a…
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Self-Checking Projects
Matching students up with research projects is entertaining but difficult. The project has to be at the right level of difficulty, has to fit the student’s time frame, and has to interest the student. If grant money is going to be used to pay the student, the work has to fit into the funded project.…
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INT_MIN % -1 = ?
If you spend much time testing compilers, you’ll run into some strange phenomena even in apparently simple areas like computer arithmetic. For example John Cook wrote a post today explaining why IEEE floats have two different values of zero. Integer arithmetic is generally a lot simpler than floating point math, but it still contains a…
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Why Take a Compiler Course?
[Also see why take an OS course and why take an embedded systems course.] All good computer science departments offer a compilers course, but relatively few make it a required part of the undergraduate curriculum. This post answers the question: Why should you take this course, even if you never plan on writing a compiler?…
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Why Take an Operating Systems Course?
[Also see why take a compilers course and why take an embedded systems course.] The other day, while having coffee with a colleague, I mentioned that I’ll be teaching OS in the fall. His area is far from computer systems and he asked me what’s the point of this class? What are the students supposed…
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Compilers and Termination Revisited
My earlier post C compilers Disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem generated a good amount of discussion both here and on Reddit. Unfortunately, the discussion was riddled with misunderstandings. Some of this was because the topic is subtle, but some was my fault: the post was intended to be lightweight and I failed to explain the underlying…
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How to Get a Grant (from NSF, for Computer Scientists)
Learning to write good grant proposals is hard. First, while we learn to write papers in grad school, most of us only learn to write grants after completing a PhD, and possibly only after getting a faculty position. Second, the hit rates for grants are typically lower than for papers. Third, it’s fundamentally harder to…
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C Compilers Disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem
[Update: I wrote another post on this topic that may explain the underlying issues more clearly.] Obviously I’m not serious: compilers are bad at solving high-level math problems and also there is good reason to believe this theorem cannot be disproved. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Recently — for reasons that do not matter…