Viewing profile — poulson

Academic research is funded through taxpayer money, and, as an academic, I can assure you that much of it has a much lower impact than many open source projects.

I have no idea who those three people were. I do agree that "unprofessional" is a good way to describe their behavior. I emailed a few colleagues about it but it was all too strang…

I had a somewhat similar experience the day shellshock was announced on a layover in Atlanta flying between two different universities. I had been browsing the news and coding for …

Good point. So it would seem to be hard to find solutions for 6, 10, 12, etc. colors. Have you given any thought to how to solve those cases?

Thanks for the link! There is even a nice discussion of the explicit solutions for Inverter up to 7x7's on the page: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LightsOutPuzzle.html Almost nothin…

I've manually verified that the binary matrix printed out by the following Octave/MATLAB routine provides solutions to Inverter. (NOTE: You may want to use the gflineq.m implementa…

A more effective approach might be to maintain a peer-reviewed ranking of various large tech companies based upon their patent history and to semi-regularly publicly base your empl…

Or, "Brian builds distributed-memory computers". Despite the misleading title, I think such a project would be a great tool for a parallel computing class. Such a machine would be …

Was there a typo in your message? Why would you be unable to afford a home that you could immediately put down a 33% down payment in cash for?

Even if one buys the (demonstrably false) claim that all real-world problems are sparse, most sparse techniques (especially sparse-direct, and, to a limited degree, Krylov subspace…

The bug was apparently fixed on April 17. I was unable to reproduce the problem on my updated Ubuntu 14.04 installation.

What makes satellite communication special? Is it okay to monitor the CEO of every communication company? If so, is it any different for non-US governments to monitor the CEO's of …

I stand corrected. Thank you for clarifying.

The second paragraph of the article claims that companies knew about "upstream" collection as well. This is, from my understanding, the main point, as the Google engineer Brandon D…

Making contributing code more fun will almost certainly lead to projects receiving more contributions.

According to the Fastmail webpage, they do support (optional) two-factor authentication: https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html

This makes me wonder how Greenwald, Gellman, and Poitras come to a consensus on what to hold back. Clearly they all have access to the data and it would be possible (read: very lik…

Is there any legal protection for users' reading lists in libraries? Because it would be wonderful if someone could set up a legal online library which would extend such protection…

Does anyone have a link to the transcript? The echo is really hard to ignore in the video.

I can't edit my original post, but, for what it's worth, I received a very real response from my colleagues.