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The Art and Science of Testcase Reduction for Compiler Bugs
Test case reduction is a common problem faced by programmers where some large input (or more generally, some complicated set of circumstances) causes a program to fail, but we wish to know the smallest input (or the simplest circumstances) that causes the same failure. Reduced test cases are important because: Since the bulk of the…
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Csmith 2.1 Released
We’ve released version 2.1 of Csmith, our random C program generator that is useful for finding bugs in compilers and other tools that process C code. The total number of compiler bugs found and reported due to Csmith is now more than 400. All Csmith users should strongly consider upgrading. New features in this release…
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Perverse Incentives in Academia
A perverse incentive is one that has unintended consequences. The world is full of these and the Wikipedia article has some great examples. Academia seems particularly prone to perverse incentives. Incentive Intended Effect Actual Effect Researchers rewarded for increased number of publications. Improve research productivity. Avalanche of crappy, incremental papers. Researchers rewarded for increased number…
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Towards Tinkers
The heroes of Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War are members of a scattered society of tinkers who — without any real industrial base — manage to develop and produce very high-tech devices including fast, small computers. I’m trying to figure out how realistic this is. The software side seems entirely feasible. Today’s open source community has…
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Black Friday on Wednesday
Until now, my department hasn’t done any kind of formal, department-wide evaluation of our graduate students and their progress. A number of people, including me, have argued for some time that we should be doing something like CMU’s Black Friday. This semester Suresh, our current DGS, has made this happen; the meeting was today. Overall…
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Putting Oneself Through College
A lot has been written lately about the rising costs of higher education. Is it still possible to put oneself through college without working full time? It’s certainly not easy. For example, the Utah minimum wage is $7.25/hour. If a student works 20 hours per week for 50 weeks, the resulting $7,250 doesn’t even cover…
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Open Access Fees
The “open access fee” is a charming little aspect of academic publishing where I have the option to pay, for example, $3000 to the IEEE, and then they’ll poke a hole in their paywall so that anyone can download a paper without paying. The fee is per paper. Here’s a list of some publishers’ fees.…