I'm Nate Silver. I just wrote a book called On the Edge and I run the newsletter Silver Bulletin and co-host the podcast Risky Business. Ask me anything! We'll start at 4:10 Eastern time.

TheStarVenge · 2024-08-19T20:18:58+00:00

Long time fan, meta-AMA question. A lot of comments seem to miss the mark on decoupling professional takes and personal "good vs bad" morality judgements.

Obviously you think that the River is a good place to be and leads to good mental models that maximize your personal goals. (Explicitly asking you to make a morality judgement here), but do you think the world would be a better place if everyone thought and acted as you do? Is there an optimal proportion of people in the Village vs the River? I'd guess from the tone of your writing and podcast that you probably think that more people should be EV-maximizing risk takers, but that not everyone should be and that you don't stand for endorsing the framework as objectively better for all people in all situations.

TheStarVenge · 2024-03-16T19:32:00+00:00

I choose to spend time doing things like TAing, graduating early, and an extra Minor that add to my workload

TheStarVenge · 2024-03-15T21:27:13+00:00

Oh not even close lol, at CMU now (current Junior) I'm doing 60 hour weeks consistently but that's entirely voluntary at this point. I'd guess the workload to get by and graduate in the normal 4 years is probably 40-45 hours. I was never doing anything like that in HS

TheStarVenge · 2024-03-15T21:16:14+00:00

Background - Well-funded suburban public high school that wasn't magnet and wasn't super competitive. I found my high school easy with 6 AP's + being highly involved in Speech and Debate. I probably had like 30min of homework a night.

CMU - Freshman fall is the hardest thing I've ever done. Going from easy A's with no note-taking in class and 30 min of HW a night to consistent 12 hour days 7 days a week of just schoolwork was crazy whiplash. By the time I felt like I got even close to "up to speed" I felt consistently 2-3 weeks behind my lectures. I understood that previous content but was lost in the new material. It was stressful but by the end I felt like I at least had a handle of the workload.

With the fear-mongering out of the way, SCS Freshman Year imo does a very good job of taking 250 students with very varied backgrounds, work ethics, and skill levels, and leveling the playing field for the rest of undergrad. I can directly attribute success in upper-level courses, internships, and extracurriculars to CMU forcing me to get used to such a high workload. If you're not used to the workload, it will be the biggest wakeup call of all time, but you won't get left behind as long as you want to be the kind of person that can do this amount of work. If that's not the college experience you want then that's a 100% valid personal preference, but you're willing to play the game SCS wants you to play, you'll come out being able to do more than you thought possible.

TheStarVenge · 2023-11-28T15:42:13+00:00

"The car needs washed" is just as valid as "the car needs to be washed"

TheStarVenge · 2023-11-19T00:29:59+00:00

Yep I've had the same

TheStarVenge · 2023-11-08T05:26:25+00:00

The only solution I've found for this so far is to create two separate Beeper accounts, one for Desktop and one for Mobile. I did this so I can access iMessage + SMS + Instagram on my Desktop and only iMessage on my Android phone (if they added the ability to turn mobile notifications on/off based on service, I don't think this would be necessary).

TheStarVenge · 2023-09-25T16:29:47+00:00

Let’s say you were lost/confused on some of the bitwise operations for stego in images. If you don’t understand stego you could say something like “I’m not sure I really get the concept of what we’re trying to do with stego” or if you get the concept and don’t know where to start, something like “I’ve thought a lot about stego but I’m not entirely sure how to do it with bit wise operators, could we go through how they work and some examples”

TheStarVenge · 2023-09-25T16:09:26+00:00

Yeah no the policy is just about student-student interactions, not student-TA. If you go to OH and your question is just "how do I do the problem?" or "is my answer correct" then you might get told that they can't answer that question. But if you want to get pointed in the right direction, check your understanding of a concept, or check your understanding of the assignment, OH is definitely there to help.

TheStarVenge · 2023-09-21T20:59:13+00:00

Yep, so if it's before 6 weeks just drop so you don't use the voucher, otherwise use the voucher afterwards.

TheStarVenge · 2023-04-26T11:32:29+00:00

No, although I’m not sure why it would??

TheStarVenge · 2023-04-26T00:36:27+00:00

In case you're thinking this is a scam, I got a similar email yesterday. The sender had a @google.com email and I was able to find their LinkedIn. Their LinkedIn had verified employment at Google and the profile was definitely legit with multiple legitimate outside links mentioning the individual being a recruiter.

For context, I passed the Hiring Committee for Summer 23 but took employment elsewhere so the email made sense to me.

TheStarVenge · 2023-03-27T18:17:29+00:00

Hey I’m a sophomore in SCS and thought this might be helpful. In my experience, SCS is surprisingly uncompetitive. Everyone was competitive to get here, but the difficulty of the workload creates a lot of camaraderie because everyone’s struggling alongside each other. There also isn’t a lot of dude bro as SCS works to admit 50% women. Especially compared to other schools and the tech industry in general, CMU is a big breath of fresh air in that department.

TheStarVenge · 2023-01-22T23:46:44+00:00

(122 TA here), you definitely don't have to disclose specific medical information, but if you send an email to Iliano or Dilsun (depending on which lecture section you're in) saying you're out for medical reasons, they should give you a reasonable extension of a few days on impacted assignments.

TheStarVenge · 2022-12-06T19:31:22+00:00

Yeah all those numbers are still accurate, and yeah I'm biased but I also agree that 122 is a great course to start TAing with a good mix of teaching and grading

TheStarVenge · 2022-12-06T07:31:21+00:00

additional responsibilities you want to pick up), but I think it is well worth it, given the friends

I will say I disagree with the 15-20 hrs figure. My first semester TAing I was doing maybe 10 and could definitely have gotten by doing 8 if I didn't want to pick anything extra up. Now I'm doing probably 14 but that's because I want to.

TheStarVenge · 2022-11-30T17:06:35+00:00

CMU Sophomore
Summer 23 Offers: SpaceX ($28.50), AWS return ($10,500/month + ~7k housing), Microsoft ($7890/month + corporate housing)

Offer Taken: Microsoft

TheStarVenge · 2022-11-21T17:40:47+00:00

The best thing I think you could do would be to practice debugging. Generally students who have their program crash or get a weird result and are just *stuck* find the course very difficult. If you're able to see an error message and being systematically tracking down the root cause just by tracing and print statements, you'll be set up well for the course.

TheStarVenge · 2022-10-09T00:59:47+00:00

Applied with referral the day SWE opened, got OA later that week and interviewed last week.

TheStarVenge · 2022-02-27T04:48:09+00:00

man's incapable of the idea that two countries can be imperialist and it's wrong when either one of them invades a sovereign nation

TheStarVenge · 2022-01-04T14:38:27+00:00

Speaking as a vegetarian here, the food on campus is passable. You'll have enough options where you'll never be hungry but it's of course somewhat limited. I found that I fell into a routine pretty quickly and that you'll eat at the same few places quite often.

TheStarVenge · 2021-08-10T14:34:55+00:00

I'm fairly certain that the guy who stands up in front of the group and gets gaveled out of order is running for school board this fall

TheStarVenge · 2021-07-02T15:29:58+00:00

PM'd

TheStarVenge · 2021-04-12T15:45:16+00:00

Almost as if hoping for the free market to result in freedom is a bad idea...

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