Whatever Crossed My Mind

One of the fastest ways to get me to stop reading a paper is to make incorrect assumptions in the hypothesis or rely on previous work that is not completely solid. There is no doubt that research in the academic context is hard, and writing a paper about it is even harder, but the value of all this hard work is diminished if you make a mistake. This time, I will focus on performance measurement mistakes in computer science papers. They come in different flavours and are sometimes very subtle. Performance is paramount in algorithmics and some researchers don't do their due diligence when trying to prove theirs is faster. Here are the 3 most often occurring mistakes I see, in no particular order. Performance Measurements on Different Hardware When measuring performance, it is paramount to do it under the right circumstances. Every so often I come across a paper that states algorithm X is 4x faster than algorithm Y, but they measured it using absolute numbers between t...

Just for note keeping, I've written down some methods of reducing the size of a .NET Core application. I thought others could use it as well, so here you go. Original Size First off, let's see how much disk space a self-contained 'hello world' application takes up. > dotnet new console > dotnet publish -r win-x86 -c release Size: 53.9 MB -  yuck! Trimming Microsoft has built a tool that finds unused assemblies and removes them from the distribution package. This is much needed since the 'netcoreapp2.0' profile is basically .NET Framework all over again, and it contains a truckload of assemblies our little 'hello world' application don't use. > dotnet new console > dotnet add package Microsoft.Packaging.Tools.Trimming -v 1.1.0-preview1-25818-01 > dotnet publish -r win-x86 -c release /p:TrimUnusedDependencies=true Size: 15.8 MB Much better! Although, we have only removed unused assemblies - what about unused...