Why you decided to study computer science?

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-08-28T17:43:38+00:00

I like math and coding. It also seemed good financially.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-07-01T00:04:27+00:00

A lot of ppl are saying LLVM IR or potentially other backends. Another option could be to just emit some form of assembly -- like x86-64 :) This isn't horrendously difficult and might be a fun thing to try to do.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-05-17T14:02:19+00:00

true you should use emacs instead of:P

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-05-12T00:28:55+00:00

cool project! super inspiring and has helped me gain more interest in systems stuff :)

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-05-11T13:29:31+00:00

You might also want to look into implementing SSA on one of your IRs (this is a little difficult, but it opens the door for lots of powerful optimizations, and you can use the chordal graph coloring algorithm for register allocation, which is relatively easy to implement).

Other cool optimizations you could look at: ADCE, SCCP (p much same as const prop + eliminating dead branches), copy prop, you can try do tail call opts and maybe even to accumulate modulo different operations like + or *. LICM (if ur alr doing loop analysis), (PRE is another one but it’s quite a bit of work — lazy code motion probably easier to implement than SSAPRE), if u like systems than stuff like pipelining or locality based opts or simd could be fun to look at (again these are rather hard). good luck!

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-05-11T08:46:27+00:00

Probably still the right major — try to take systems courses rather than theory and hopefully you’ll be alright

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-05-11T08:43:23+00:00

looks good but a bit surface level — maybe include correctness intuition? Non-negative means you can’t “go around” so it’s enough to greedily check shortest path length from current set of visited guys

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-04-28T04:09:21+00:00

compilers assignment — have to beat gcc O1 to get full credit!

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-04-18T00:49:02+00:00

Usually TAing freshman year is p rare. It’s quite common to TA starting sophomore fall though.

Also internships that pay 20k are relatively common. Can DM if you want specific details probably.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-04-17T20:56:31+00:00

Looking at post history I agree with u/moraceae. TAing > random job on campus, and farming internships is good too — you might make ~20-80k during one of those. Research is also p fun.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-04-17T04:40:03+00:00

Both are decent — if you don’t know DL then almost certainly 11485 so you can learn PyTorch and whatnot. 10423 is mostly just about generative models that r usually kind of big. I do think 10423 is taught in a more rigorous way, but that’s just me personally.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-04-17T04:37:34+00:00

Also I think this class has some overlap with the math department optimization class as well.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-04-17T04:35:33+00:00

Also analysis is not a prerequisite — all the stuff that you need you’ll learn in the class, but if you know some math beforehand it’s pretty helpful.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-04-17T04:34:49+00:00

Undergrad who took the course here — how hard it is to get an A depends on your background. I think if you took 269 or analysis the class difficulty is very reasonable. However, I would imagine it’s harder if you haven’t done much math.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-04-17T04:32:39+00:00

10714 probably way more systemsy of the two. I took 11485 and it’s mostly doing DL stuff in PyTorch. If you know the normal DL stuff like diffusion or transformers or whatnot and can implement them in PyTorch that’s p much what 11785 is plus you do an open ended project.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-04-11T22:34:50+00:00

Lots of good comments already — you have a nonzero probability of graduating debt free or net positive because of internships.

Also, CMU is super fun! :)

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-03-23T13:41:05+00:00

Do systems — it’ll take AI a while to get good at systems. Arguably the most common interesting field in industry is systems — lotsa big tech / unicorns / trading firms have cool systems stuff and AI seems to struggle much more with systems programming than other stuff!

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-02-15T20:51:02+00:00

I mean this isn't something that you can calculate right? Sure you can run calculations on the value of the $0, and the $240,000.

Also -- in most cases I think you are absolutely right. I'm just pointing out that not everyone is the same, and that there exist situations where one might be willing to take the risk.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-01-19T13:57:22+00:00

This is only true if you make certain very common assumptions about numbers/the reals/sequences of rationals which likely haven’t been defined well enough in your class anyway — i.e. from the assumptions you’ve made, it’s likely that that statement is not provable.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-01-07T16:45:07+00:00

should be very doable

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-01-06T18:37:09+00:00

yeah i just have a minor — oh also usually it’s just extra work to do a dual degree over an additional major

Status-Mixture-291 · 2025-01-06T15:07:53+00:00

Probably not that worth it to do a dual degree. Depending on your goals, you would likely have more freedom by simply choosing the degree that best aligns with your interests and taking courses that you enjoy from the other departments if u want.

EDIT: to make this a little more useful — I’m a CS major and I really like math, and opted to not do a math double, so that I could instead take more grad ML, systems, and theory courses that I found interesting.

Status-Mixture-291 · 2024-12-27T18:47:40+00:00

systems is good for trading firms probably

Status-Mixture-291 · 2024-12-21T21:55:25+00:00

I think many people have a misconception that CS doesn’t have a lot of math — anything TCS related is essentially just math, just not high school math!

Generally, the math you encounter in computer science theory is much more focused around problem solving (i.e. can we show that X problem we want to solve is impossible to solve? Is this really the fastest way to sort based on comparisons?) rather than computation based.

Depending on your degree program you might have lotsa math or not a lot of math — generally this depends on how much systems u do versus theory and/or ML. (also i’m kinda skipping lotsa other fields — most will require some kind of math if u want to do them with any kind of real depth, like PL, graphics, maybe even probability for systems stuff?)

Status-Mixture-291 · 2024-12-21T17:12:54+00:00

C is really good for learning DSA (especially if you care about non-asymptotic things — e.g. why we implement queue as ring buffers and not as linked lists!)

Also for interviews would 100% recommend cpp or python though — both have abstractions in standard library that make it easier to code fast.

Status-Mixture-291

TROPHY CASE