Meet the 2012 MacArthur Fellows | Hacker News Reader

Meet the 2012 MacArthur Fellows

macfound.org

31 pointsclbrook13 comments

The only person on the list whose work I'm somewhat aware of is Dan Spielman. His works, especially smoothed analysis, is definitely something that HN folks will appreciate.

Smoothed analysis answers the question why many popular algorithms have exponential big-O time but still work so well in practice. Average case complexity also answers that question but computing it requires us to know the probability distribution of the input space in advance. The idea of smoothed complexity is simply to add random perturbation to the input and then measure the worst case. Eg. simplex method has exponential big-O complexity but polynomial smoothed complexity.

Chris Thile is the Beethoven of his generation.

[Edit to fix my silly typo]

Wow that's going a bit far although I admit he's a pretty great mando player albeit a bit showy. I saw him live with Edgar Meyer and my ears almost fell off.

Have you listened to The Blind Leaving The Blind? It's pretty incredible. I don't think it's canonical-piece-of-culture-after-300-years incredible, but still, pretty incredible.

No, but I will now. Thanks for the tip.

Theil => Thile, rhymes with "mealy"

Him and the band playing Bach on bluegrass instruments. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1NNBf7uVQ4

Him and the band playing Reptilia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qayc6yJXG-8

Covering Radiohead, then transition into a Gillian Welch song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igbbbWqDVbM

And there's a lot of original compositions as well.

Pretty unstoppable.

For the computer science entry:

Daniel Spielman, Yale University Professor

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/877/

Junot Diaz was my writing teacher at MIT. "Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." He's really into comic books, the apocalypse, Dominican immigrants, New Jersey.

Are any on HN?

I very much doubt it. HN's audience is actually really very specific.

Literally actually really very specifically specific.

Literally, a veritable niche of actual specificity.

Is it me or are these Reddit-like joke nests a new phenomenon on HN?

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