Yaron Minsky

Graduate Student

I am a CS graduate student, and I'm currently focusing on fault-tolerant distributed computing. In particular, I am working on the Tacoma project, which is an attempt to build operating system support for fault-tolerant agent-based computing.

Flapdragon is no longer new (it's been over a year now) and I no longer live there, but it's still a great veggie coop (which I crash at often nowadays...) Here's the slightly outof date webpage. It does, however, have a timely notice that Flapdragon has an opening for starting 12/15! If you need a place to live, I highly recommend it.

I'm a big Go fan, though I don't get to play much. Go is an ancient Chinese game with extremly simple rules but very complicated and satisfying strategy. If you'd like to learn more, here's a great intro page. Also, if you want to play Go on the internet (yes, I know it's not as good as a game with a real live person in front of you, but it's better than nothing.) and you're on a Unix machine, take a look at cgoban. It's the nicest go board program I've seen. And, it makes it trivially easy to play on the net.

I am newly married, and my new wife, Lisa, and I, are living in Syracuse, where she is going to medical school (at the SUNY Health Science Center, uniquely qualified as the only medical school within an hour and twenty minutes of Cornell) and loving every bit of it.

Some favorite poems:

La Figlia Che Piange
The Idea of Order at Key West
Advice for Good Love
Resume

Some interesting links:

The Movie Critic I was very impressed by this. It's a good example how fairly simple AI technology can be used to great effect. This site has an AI engine that takes in your ratings of movies, and by comparing that to the ratings of others, comes up with recommendations. I found it almost alarmingly good (in contrast to Firefly, which tries to do the same thing, but fails miserably.)
Yahoo's Yellow Pages. You put in your home address, and they give you directions to the seven closest bakeries. It's not perfect, but it's better than the other web yellow pages I've tried (i.e., bigbook and bigyellow.) I don't know why they don't advertise it more.
The New York Times. I don't know why the do it, but it's a great read and it's free. Plus, it saves all that paper....(note, if it takes you too much time to download, try the text-only page)
Slate Magazine. As much as I hate to admit it,Microsoft does something right every now and then. Thoughtful and well executed. But what do you expect with Michael Kinsley running it.
Red Hat Linux ...A great company which makes Linux easy to install and maintain.
Ithaca movie listings
Amazon.com books a very solid discount virtual bookstore. Let's hope they don't run the local booksellers out of town.
My brother .

The following is my PGP public key.

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