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Nicolas van Kempen

@nicovank.bsky.social
7 followers 14 following 11 posts

PhD student at UMass Amherst. Systems, programming languages, low-level performance.

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Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
The Amherst Current @amherstcurrent.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
Housing: Amherst’s Worst Self-Inflicted Injury  Amherst's housing crisis persists despite expert recommendations for increased affordability and development, as only 400-500 units were built over five years instead of the targeted 1,100. In this opinion post, Evan Naismith argues that all of…
theamherstcurrent.org
Housing: Amherst’s Worst Self-Inflicted Injury 
Amherst's housing crisis persists despite expert recommendations for increased affordability and development, as only 400-500 units were built over five years instead of the targeted 1,100. In this opinion post, Evan Naismith argues that all of Amherst's civic woes are directly related the housing shortage, and that addressing it must be the top priority for the Town Council.
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Nicolas van Kempen @nicovank.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Abolish virtual snow days, bring back real snow days.
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Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
Manning CICS @manningcics.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
A new AI-powered debugging tool developed by #ManningCICS PhD students Kyla Levin and Nicolas van Kempen and Professor Emery Berger integrates LLMs into a conversational interface to help programmers diagnose and resolve software bugs more efficiently. Read more: bit.ly/41wQdaa
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Nicolas van Kempen @nicovank.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
At #OSDI2025!
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Nicolas van Kempen @nicovank.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
Just opened @maxhuibai.bsky.social's game, hoping to get better reviews in the game than IRL…
Picture of a board game titled "The Publish or Perish Game: A Humorous Party Game About Academic Publishing".
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Nicolas van Kempen @nicovank.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
East coast powder day.
Picture from a ski lift showing a slope with extremely thin cover.
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Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
Emery Berger @emeryberger.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
Norway, here we come! ChatDBG and CoverUp to appear at FSE 2025. github.com/plasma-umass... and github.com/plasma-umass... - AI-assisted debugging and automatic high coverage unit tests!
github.com
GitHub - plasma-umass/ChatDBG: ChatDBG - AI-assisted debugging. Uses AI to answer 'why'
ChatDBG - AI-assisted debugging. Uses AI to answer 'why' - plasma-umass/ChatDBG
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Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
Manning CICS @manningcics.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
Proud to celebrate Professor Emeritus Andrew Barto and alumnus Richard Sutton, who received the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for establishing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning, a cornerstone of modern AI research. Read more: brnw.ch/21wR7jr #UMassAmhert #UAlberta
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Nicolas van Kempen @nicovank.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
One more TurboTax ad and I'm losing it.
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Nicolas van Kempen @nicovank.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
We have Central Park at home:
A French parking building named "Central Parc".
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Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
The Onion @theonion.com · 18/12/2024
Man Says ‘Fuck It,’ Eats Lunch At 10:58 A.M. theonion.com/man-says-fuc...
Man Says ‘Fuck It,’ Eats Lunch At 10:58 A.M.

-The Onion
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Nicolas van Kempen @nicovank.bsky.social · 14/12/2024
Piano has been untouched since 1791.
A piano with a sign on it: "PLEASE DO NOT PLAY PIANO UNLESS YOUR NAME IS WOLFGANG".
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Reposted by Nicolas van Kempen
Emery Berger @emeryberger.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages arxiv.org/abs/2410.05460 @nicovank.bsky.social
It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages, by Nicolas van Kempen, Hyuk-Je Kwon, Dung Tuan Nguyen, and Emery Berger, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst"It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages"

Nicolas van Kempen, Hyuk-Je Kwon, Dung Tuan Nguyen, Emery D. Berger

Does the choice of programming language affect energy consumption? Previous highly visible studies have established associations between certain programming languages and energy consumption. A causal misinterpretation of this work has led academics and industry leaders to use or support certain languages based on their claimed impact on energy consumption. This paper tackles this causal question directly. It first corrects and improves the measurement methodology used by prior work. It then develops a detailed causal model capturing the complex relationship between programming language choice and energy consumption. This model identifies and incorporates several critical but previously overlooked factors that affect energy usage. These factors, such as distinguishing programming languages from their implementations, the impact of the application implementations themselves, the number of active cores, and memory activity, can significantly skew energy consumption measurements if not accounted for. We show -- via empirical experiments, improved methodology, and careful examination of anomalies -- that when these factors are controlled for, notable discrepancies in prior work vanish. Our analysis suggests that the choice of programming language implementation has no significant impact on energy consumption beyond execution time.
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Nicolas van Kempen @nicovank.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Reviewers when they read my paper:
Bart Simpson acting blind with sunglasses and a cane.
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Nicolas van Kempen @nicovank.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Reducing CO₂ emissions with faster software: pythonspeed.com/articles/co2... TLDR: 1. compute less (a.k.a. improve performance), 2. run on multiple cores, and 3. if the code won't run often, these concerns aren't important.
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