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Reflecting on CS Graduate Admissions

I was just indulging in my favorite bad habit (reading hacker news), when I came across a discussion about  prestige in faculty hiring  - namely, the fact that the majority of CS professors across the US come from the top 18 or so universities, and that even within that, there's bias.  The HN discussion turned to Ph.D. admissions, with a commenter noting: " I'm not sure, but I'd bet that the best institutions actually don't care where their applicants come from. They can afford to just choose the best. It's the so-so places that have to signal their quality by 'hiring the best'. I've seen this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks often stand a better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one. " I just finished chairing the CMU CS Ph.D. admissions committee, so I thought it might be worth writing down my experience in doing so.  With two very important notes: I'm not doing it next year, so please don...
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Chili Crisp Showdown: Laoganma and Flybyjing

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I've been on a bit of a chili crisp mission lately.  The Internets -- and my friends -- appear convinced that the best chili crisp is Laoganma .  Or Flybyjing .  Certainly one of them.  But which? My answer, alas, is that you might want a bottle of each.  Or five bottles of each.  Let's jump in: Laoganma on the left, Flybyjing on the right.  The famous slightly disapproving face of the old grandmother stares at us, contrasted with the apparently very-hard-to-print rainbow label of the newer entrant.  Opening up the containers, one is immediately struck by the color and texture differences: Laoganma, on the left in both photos, has more "crunchy bits", but also has fewer suspended solids in the oil.  The bottle is about 3/4 full of the solid crispy bits.  The flybyjing bottle is only about 1/3 full of crispy bits. This difference flows through to the spoonfuls below -- much more crispy stuff in the laoganma, but its oil...
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Minting Money with Monero ... and CPU vector intrinsics

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I woke up on May 28th, 2014, on vacation with my family in the middle of the desert, to find a copy of my private source code plastered across the bitcointalk message board.  Announced as a "new optimized version" of the Monero currency miner, it was enthusiastically adopted by cryptocurrency miners across the world.  And in the process of doing so, my daily profit from the Monero Mining Project dropped by over five thousand dollars per day. But let's start at the beginning, when I started getting in to a loose collaboration with three people I've never met---one whose name I'm not even confident I really know---with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of a nebulous new cryptocurrency at stake. It started with a cryptic note from someone I'd met online, with a link to a bitcointalk.org message board discussion for a new currency called "bitmonero".  His note said only:  "this looks interesting." From prior collaborations with him...
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