Viewing profile — dmolnar

I disagree that the author considers "real world knowledge" the only kind of useful knowledge. If you read the preceding entry on "The Agony of Grad School" it clarifies that the m…

From the article: "Ph.D. students should spend most of their time doing real, publishable research alongside their professors, working as apprentices." Most computer science PhD pr…

If this works out, this is a big breakthrough. One of the encryption schemes described in the paper also looks like it should be reasonably efficient to implement (the scheme "E_1"…

"tos_msg" -- interesting that Google is picking up on TinyOS and suggesting the term accordingly. May be an indication that they weight universities highly, since TinyOS started as…

I've heard many people quote Hamming about "work only on important problems," but fewer seem to notice the caveat he has in the talk: "We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) telepo…

If you are interested in this, you may also enjoy this presentation on "hacker space design patterns": http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2133.en.h... These design …

The "special extra credit" makes me think this question is fishing to see whether the candidate can step back and look at the big picture. That's part of the job of being in R&D, n…

Suggest working on how you're going to meet people now -- figure out which events you'll want to go to, which places to hang out, etc. That will help with contacts, which in turn s…

Oakland is a fine place to live, and I live there, but you have to watch the transit situation when living there. If you are too far from a BART or an express cross-bay bus, you wi…

0) Stylish sunglasses that act like the spexware in Bruce Sterling's stories, or like the smart glasses in Charlie Stross's _Accelerando_. I'd love heads up displays showing me peo…

I like the approach of showing the assumption that "factoring is hard" implies a statement that at first blush has nothing to do with computational difficulty. That is, the number …

One neat thing about R is that it's become standard in academic statistics to include an R implementation of your new idea with a journal paper. For example, Gareth James and his c…

Responding to your footnote [2], it would be interesting to hear what obstacles are in the way of doing a start-up in India. Are they the kind of things that can be worked around o…

So the problem is that the people on the rotations are too lazy to fill out the review forms? The problem is not that they are afraid the reviews will bite them later? If so, sound…

So if the title of the story for the URL were more descriptive, you'd find the site stickier? Do you think this is the kind of thing that could be sent to Mechanical Turk? For how …

Yes, I think Twitturly is interesting as well, although it has not yet made it into my list of things to check every day. It is the kind of site that might make sense to acquire. T…

Exactly. In particular the API is rate-limited, even for whitelisted users. http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#RateLimiti... This makes it hard to build your own ana…

Do you use the same secret for each page generated? If so, checking that the hash verifies with your secret key alone does not prevent a cut and paste attack where an adversary ask…

Have had this discussion occasionally with friends of mine.Always a little confused where they are coming from, since where I sit in academia most of the innovation I see is built …

So the point of this post is that if the idea has zero chance of success, then you shouldn't work on it for equity. That's cool but Bill is such a caricature that the result seems …

This is a neat idea, but there is at least one subtlety: you need to make sure that it is not possible to cut-and-paste HMAC'd prices from one web page into another. Otherwise the …

They're using tipjoy to encourage donations and visibility via tweets, which should also allow measuring how much money was raised directly by the event. Wonder what they are doing…