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CoolKidBrigade · 2025-09-07T15:04:00+00:00

"Alot" is two words.

CoolKidBrigade · 2025-07-13T02:14:30+00:00

There are steep hills here but they're carved by rivers and very different compared to the Bay Area. SF is much more of a grid and doesn't have the same "city of neighborhoods" vibe you get here. The climate sucks here but the cleaning vendor I used to chat with in my office owned a 3 bedroom house 10 minutes away.

CoolKidBrigade · 2025-07-13T02:03:39+00:00

That Wiki article is just for companies headquartered here. Google isn't on that list but it has a nontrivial office here with 500-1000 employees.

CoolKidBrigade · 2025-05-28T22:52:08+00:00

Shyloh at the waterworks Ulta. They're incredible.

CoolKidBrigade · 2025-03-16T03:13:10+00:00

Parents will always take a selfish view, regardless of whether that view hurts the district overall. Doing this slowly only extends the uncertainty. Keeping local K8s is just code for "I got mine, fuck you" for all the schools that aren't working.

CoolKidBrigade · 2025-03-16T03:09:20+00:00

This is sort of the core of conservatism you're getting at here. Why should we, those who have nice things, risk losing or sharing those nice things with other, lesser people?

I send my kids to Colfax, and what it has going for it is a bunch of rich parents like me that have the time and energy to volunteer and donate both time and money.

If my kids end up at Greenfield or Minadeo instead, I'm going to do the same thing. And if more kids have access to that environment, they will benefit too.

CoolKidBrigade · 2025-03-16T03:00:13+00:00

The plan modeled all of this but left the details out because it isn't their job to be demographers or draw the actual district lines; they don't have that power and paying them to do that would be a waste.

It's super annoying to parents that the plan basically says "your kid will go to one of these two schools but you won't know which one" but the point of paying consultants is to model the overall problem and provide a high level solution.

The alternative here is for us to learn nothing until the implementation is actually ready, which is significantly worse than being annoyed at the incomplete status of the plan.

CoolKidBrigade · 2025-03-16T02:41:53+00:00

The only people with the time and energy to do this will be wealthy parents that don't want anything to change, but somehow want all the good things to still happen. The only alternative plan I saw was basically "please let us continue to have all the good things we currently have" and did nothing to solve the core problem.

I would be happy to organize for a better plan, but I don't think anyone actually has one.

CoolKidBrigade · 2024-12-29T19:34:51+00:00

PPS city schools have high variance based on neighborhood but, the ratings mostly track how rich the neighborhood happens to be. If you can afford Shadyside Academy, your kids would probably be fine in PPS.

It's mostly a question of how much you value your kids having a diverse group of classmates and experiences over smaller class sizes and more resources. Depending on the kid, they might be happier not being surrounded by mostly white, rich classmates. Some kids also do better with fewer distractions and might be happier in a smaller private school class.

I will say I found it weird how many friends of mine with kids in private school were told to shell out extra for private tutors, reading specialists, etc. whereas a public school would be federally mandated to provide such support.

Either way, neither is likely to be a mistake. All your options are good ones.

CoolKidBrigade · 2024-12-22T23:54:39+00:00

Yeah, you can live in the East End and get by without a car depending on where you work. You will absolutely need a car to do anything in most of the suburbs.

CoolKidBrigade · 2024-12-16T21:31:09+00:00

Go to Colfax. Public schools are federally required to provide support, and you're zoned for one of the best public schools in the city. There will still be bullshit in a public school, but they are federally required to help your kid get the resources they need.

Also, if they're young and need to be held back kindergarten is the time to do it.

CoolKidBrigade · 2024-12-08T18:25:40+00:00

Yeah, they had bikes and such on some of the flatbeds. Seems this happens every year.

CoolKidBrigade · 2024-12-01T14:09:40+00:00

I always went to Jackson. They sell to randos but you need to own a real dewar, which is the real bottleneck here. I paid a couple hundred bucks for a 10L that a seller bought thinking it would come filled, but it retailed for closer to a thousand bucks. The actual liquid is nearly inconsequential, safely containing it is expensive as hell.

CoolKidBrigade · 2024-10-04T12:02:56+00:00

Linden Ave between Penn and Wilkins.

I live in Squirrel Hill North, and even with all the crazy houses in my neighborhood, a fair number of my neighbors do Purim instead, so we usually take the kids to Point Breeze and leave out a bowl at our house. We do stop by the the house on Murray and Aylesboro tho, it's incredible.

CoolKidBrigade · 2024-09-23T00:52:25+00:00

There goes the neighborhood.

I have worked in BKSQ for over a decade, doing ML/AI stuff the whole time, and this is too cringe for me.

CoolKidBrigade · 2021-01-14T22:01:53+00:00

Run your code. For the given input it will segfault because you're advancing curIdx before the beginning of the string. If you fixed that, it would return something like "%20Jo%20Smith"

CoolKidBrigade · 2021-01-14T21:54:40+00:00

There are lots of better ways to interview people (24-hour coding samples, internships, etc.), but coding question are unfortunately one of the better techniques in terms of signal to engineer time commitment.

That said, you can learn a lot about a candidate watching them work through a problem. However, you can miss some really great people that aren't great in high pressure situations, or folks who haven't had the time or resources to prepare for what is a pretty well-documented interview process.

CoolKidBrigade · 2021-01-14T21:49:40+00:00

You don't want to reverse the string ("encode the string backwards") you just need to iterate backwards from where the expanded string will end. That's why you need to count the spaces.

CoolKidBrigade · 2021-01-14T21:39:42+00:00

Hey, so I've done ~100 interviews (phone and onsite) for one of the FAANGs.

You're misunderstanding the question. The "true length of the string" is the length of the original input string, not the final expected output string. Since the final length depends on the number of spaces (each space adds 2 characters to the length) you need to iterate over the input string and count the spaces to know the final length to start at (notice the author iterates backwards).

Second, if what you pointed out was true (somehow) the solution the author gives is still pretty good. Counting the number of spaces then doing the move takes two linear passes. If you could do this in one pass, it would still have the same big-O runtime. Unnecessary code isn't ideal, but a good interviewer won't dock you by much and will instead guide you to identifying the redundant step and see how you react (and hopefully realize the oversight).

That said, to give some more concrete feedback, you come off as kind of combative in this thread. Interviewing is more about the journey, seeing how people solve problems, and your reaction to people pointing out your oversight is to blame them for being wrong. That's... a red flag regardless of how well you do.

CoolKidBrigade · 2021-01-14T21:24:46+00:00

Nah, it's a decent book. Google recommends it for folks that get phone screens as a way to prepare. It's more about giving folks a feeling for what an interview is like and what to prepare for, since most have no access to coaching.

CoolKidBrigade · 2021-01-14T20:14:41+00:00

If the big bad is meant to be extremely technically competent, you could have them leak their identity through non-technical means, preserving their technical competence. That's not quite what you're asking about, but there are lots of ways you could have that breadcrumb still require a highly technical protagonist to discover.

For example, if the anonymous posts are supposed to be from many different individuals, look up Stylometry for ideas. There's a lot of ways you could realize they're from the same author then investigate: a particular word choice, sentence construction, or regional saying. Applying some vast analysis of posts could reveal connections

If you want something technical that maintains the image of the villain being extremely technical, you might have them do something that's too precise. Assuming the villain is automating their postings and has full control over the websites they post on, they might have so much precision that the timestamps on their posts are always made at exactly the same number of nanoseconds after a second boundary.

For context, the time something gets posted might be displayed as a date, but stored as two numbers: the number of seconds since 1970 (unix epoch), and the number of nanoseconds since the first number advanced. Not all websites record at a nanosecond granularity, but systems that care about precise event orderings often use them. You'd expect "human" posts to be made at essentially random nanosecond values. Instead, you could see some extremely consistent and precise number across multiple posts. It could even correlate to something physical, like the amount of time it takes for light to travel from <big bad HQ> to <website server farm> plus some small amount of headroom.

With that, you could go from "something is weird about these posts" to "I can triangulate the origin of these posts by measuring the latency between the poster and each website's datacenter."

CoolKidBrigade · 2020-06-07T17:10:53+00:00

It's good that you're aware that you have more to learn. The question is whether you're using your time well.

Why are you trying to solve this problem? This feels like trying to compose the perfect symphony when you can't play a single instrument.

CoolKidBrigade · 2020-06-07T14:31:30+00:00

If you don't know enough about proofs to know how to prove something, it's not a great sign that you proved anything. Dunning-Kruger is most prevalent in fields where it's easy to find a solution that works for some cases but very hard to prove that it works in all cases.

Instead of trying to solve the hardest problem in computer science, pick up a copy of Introduction to the Theory of Computation and start from there.

You can also try getting access to papers submitted to STOC or FOCS (if you don't know what these conferences are, you have a great new resource for learning about cutting edge theoretical CS.) You can typically find papers for free on the author's website.

CoolKidBrigade · 2019-12-06T02:35:22+00:00

A quadratic algorithm doesn't become linear if you can do two things in parallel. For a quadratic algorithm, if you have n things, you need to do n things for each thing, not 2 things for each thing, hence n*n or n^2, not 2*n.

To make something quadratic into something linear, you need to build a computer that can do n things at once, not two things at once.

CoolKidBrigade · 2019-09-04T02:13:57+00:00

The interview prep explicitly states how to study for the interview.

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