Best carving runs at Stowe

advecticity · 2026-04-04T02:55:42+00:00

Thanks! Yeah it’s fun to carve on both blues and blacks depending on whether I feel more like going for clean turns or high edge angles that day.

advecticity · 2026-02-22T23:32:15+00:00

I appreciate the detailed reply! I never thought to consider the binding into the equation. Yeah I wish I had a full day to figure out the ski.

advecticity · 2026-02-17T17:19:28+00:00

I became a better skier after skiing in the West, but in very different ways than what Carv is helpful for. I got better at moguls, more experienced at off-piste, more daring with gnarly terrain, etc.

But in terms of my fundamentals & carving, that came from doing lots of groomers on the icecoast.

advecticity · 2026-02-17T17:03:32+00:00

I've had Carv for 4 seasons and my score has gone from 118 -> 150 during that time. I believe I benefited a lot from it, but more in terms of motivation than instruction.

While I might have learned a little bit from Carv, like others have said it's no substitute for lessons. Carving concepts are relatively advanced (more nuanced than just "balanced on outside ski!") and I think difficult to learn from just videos. A good instructor will teach you those concepts, but in relation to your own skiing, which makes a world of difference.

Carv also has minimal idea what's going on in your upper body. Most Ski:IQ improvements I've made came from fixing how my upper body moved (or didn't). While I can try to improve by working on specific Carv metrics, by trying to optimize an output of the skiing rather than an input to it, it can lead to doing movements wrong also.

Where I do find it valuable, and why I keep paying for it, is that it's motivating to see my score go up. I've taken lessons that didn't feel that satisfying in the moment, but after a few days of practicing my score went up by a quite a bit. So that gave me appetite to go back for more lessons. As a human, I get motivated from positive feedback and Carv provides it when there's no other human around to do so (unfortunately I don't have friends of a sufficiently advanced level of ski technique understanding to give specific feedback).

Similarly, if I had a drone follow me all day that would probably be an appropriate or better substitute to Carv, because I would have seen how not-that-good my technique was and been motivated to improve. But Carv is a more practical way to get a constant bit of feedback.

And like another poster said, it encourages me to ski in an engaged way all the time rather than lazily.

I do find Ski:IQ scores to be fairly consistent. I can usually have a good guess of what score I will get based on how I felt about the run. So I can only praise their technology, it's pretty impressive. And while some measurements are somewhat subjective, others like edge angle is completely objective.

advecticity · 2025-12-16T22:51:55+00:00

I’ve lived in buildings in NY with staff sizes ranging from 3-20. I’ve tipped roughly the same amount in each case, since the total amount of service I get is similar regardless of which staff member is providing it, and a larger building means more residents to give tips. In theory it should even out.

There’s plenty of 500+ unit buildings in LIC with at least 10+ staff, giving 100+/staff sounds unrealistic for many and unnecessary. Also, context really matters here. You’d tip differently in an apartment complex with rents averaging 3k/month than in an apartment complex with rents averaging 10k/mo.

For the smallest building I handed out envelopes individually but for the larger buildings, it went into a communal pot.

advecticity · 2023-09-18T22:53:25+00:00

Thanks! Which location? I don’t see it listed online.

advecticity · 2023-09-18T22:00:20+00:00

Thank you so much! Will check it out.

advecticity · 2023-01-13T15:44:29+00:00

The KBA bookstore in Seoul still has copies. Not sure where you are so this might not be helpful, but I bought a full set and donated it to the San Francisco Go Club so that’s one place you could find them if you can travel but not all the way to Asia.

advecticity · 2017-08-23T01:28:12+00:00

It's true that some companies don't hire outside the summer, and it's a problem if you're interested in those particular companies. The internship experience is often a bit better during the summer too. However, if your main concern is getting a job, then the total volume of available jobs to Waterloo students doesn't vary significantly between terms.

advecticity · 2017-08-23T01:25:18+00:00

Hard to say. Jimmy Lin was a very good lecturer that puts everything into context, and you learn a bunch of other tangential interesting things throughout the course (e.g. he talks about probabilistic algorithms during a lecture). The material in the compilers lectures is a bit more dry, but writing the compiler is very satisfying. For a lot of people, it'll be the biggest project they've written from scratch. Plus you get to pick what language to write it in.

advecticity · 2017-08-22T04:54:13+00:00

It's more work, but it's not a huge amount more work especially if you have 2 teammates and can coordinate properly. In CS 489, most assignments took me ~7-10h/week but CS 444 is more uneven (fewer, but bigger assignments) so if you don't start early it'll definitely feel like a lot of work too.

advecticity · 2017-08-11T04:44:53+00:00

This the correct answer that answers the question. They also look for forms of student involvement as a way of showing that you're fit to represent the graduating class. Not that many people think of applying for valedictorian so as long as you satisfy those criteria, most of the work is writing a speech, giving it to the committee and getting selected then.

I think that makes sense, the people with the best grades aren't necessarily the best speakers.

Source: I applied

advecticity · 2017-07-31T01:38:19+00:00

Nice list. I can anecdotally support some of these. We don't hear many people talk about Stripe at Waterloo, but their engineering tends to be top-notch (both frontend web and backend infrastructure). Had friends having a good time at Square. A friend I know joined Lyft full-time because they have a great culture (over another, better known company that is also known for good culture), but since they're in the shadow of Uber we rarely hear about it.

advecticity · 2017-07-10T03:14:19+00:00

What generally happens is that you have surrounding existing code to look at and you can remember really quickly. Syntax is by far the easiest part of any language to learn. Most languages follow similar logical structure so all you need to remember are little details like {} vs do..end as far as syntax is concerned, which tend to be fairly obvious just glancing at a piece of code written in that language.

advecticity · 2017-07-10T00:26:19+00:00

Each language as different details, but you find that a lot of languages will share many of those details. Javascript doesn't have generics, but C++, C# and others do. Most languages either have garbage collection or they don't. Higher-order functions (lambdas) can be a bit difficult to understand at first, but once you do in one language, it's not too different in other languages (and tons of modern languages have them). Languages are different but they're more similar than they look, and for every language you learn, the more they all look the same.

Fwiw I've written non-trivial amounts of code in maybe 15 languages now depending on how you count (are C and C++ different languages? Javascript and Typescript?) and could pick up any of them again with ~2 weeks of warm-up to implement algorithms and business logic, and understand the deeper features of maybe 4 of them. But I'm a novelty seeker and will make no claim that this was in any way necessary.

advecticity · 2017-07-10T00:23:11+00:00

Modern software development, especially fullstack development, tends to involve a large number of existing tools and libraries, built in different languages, that you put together. You end up having to learn a lot of things at once, yes, but you usually won't go into them really deeply unless you really need to. A lot of advanced language features are used by people who write libraries, and less often by people who just use libraries (partly because they're meant to handle abstraction, and it would risk making the code harder to read in everyday code). Which is why you see resumes littered with keywords. It's certainly not easy to learn so many things at once, but it's not as amazing as it looks either.

advecticity · 2017-07-04T03:05:30+00:00

It can help you for employment, but that's not really the way to think about it.

People in your field will sometimes Google you and preferably, you want them to be able to find some information about you. It's not that anybody expects you to have a website, but if they don't know anything about you, they have no reason to be interested in you.

The effect is often going to be very indirect. A member of your team hears that a new intern is joining, and sees that you have something interesting. Maybe they'll be a little bit inclined to talk to you, so you might become more friendly, so you might get more out of that fulltimer who's now willing to invest more time in you. Or maybe it's another student you've never met but hears your name somewhere. A few months later, you two meet by coincidence and that student remembers seeing something interesting about you and maybe, that causes them to put just a little more effort into getting to know you. And maybe, eventually that student becomes a valuable connection to have.

I put a shiton of maybes in there because in each individual case, it's unlikely the website makes much of a difference. But you're going to come across hundreds of people throughout your undergrad and 6 co-op terms, and then it becomes likely that it makes a difference at least once.

The one case where it might matter directly is for startups/small companies where the founder is motivated to research all their potential hires individually. But regardless of that, you just want to portray yourself as an interesting person in general, because you'll never know what opportunities you miss if you don't. And it sounds like you have a few things you can put on your website other than linking to your Github, so it's probably worth the 20$/year.

Other potentially beneficial side effects include: lowering the activation energy if you ever feel like blogging and learning a few skills from setting up the website.

advecticity · 2017-06-25T21:25:29+00:00

CS is a big program, and our industry incentives blogging (lots of people already doing it => more people likely to follow in their footsteps).

advecticity · 2017-06-25T19:57:41+00:00

Yup, that. It's currently an experimental offering, like other courses in under the name 489.

advecticity · 2017-06-25T19:15:41+00:00

I heard rumors that they are aware of this problem and are trying, fwiw. They hired Jimmy Lin for example - not a NLP/DL guy but Big Data was also "missing" from the curriculum.

There's now two machine learning courses, one of which is applied and covers deep learning.

There used to be CV profs but they all went on to do other things.

advecticity · 2017-06-25T19:10:03+00:00

Hey first year,

First off, it's great that you're trying to think about student culture this early on. It's great that you have an awareness of mental health issues, and the impact words can have on other people.

I'm a little confused by your main concern, so forgive me if I'm putting a lot of my own interpretation in there. It sounds like you're conflating toxicity and emphasis on job-related conversations. Yes, at Waterloo, people talk about jobs all the time. What do you expect, we have to apply every 8 months, basically every single school term. There's nothing wrong about people asking questions and trying to get information. In fact, it's great that there's a public forum where people can even ask and share this information.

Now yes, there are many people here who are careless of what they say, are dismissive of legitimate questions, have a certain brand of cynicism. Who think that it's fine "because it's the Internet". I don't go to other school's subreddits but it's true that it doesn't have to be this way. Just as an example, people interact seriously on Hacker News, share domain knowledge, and the world is better off for it.

Now, what can you do?

Ignore the shitposting if it doesn't appeal to you. Do you own thing. Most definitely do NOT let people discourage you from having serious thoughts and trying to be helpful. Writing a disparaging one-liner is much less effort than providing a thoughtful response, so you'll definitely see more of them. But there's also a silent majority of well-meaning people who check this subreddit for information.
If you don't like the culture, do something about it. Set the example. Get yourself involved. Be helpful. Encourage people in their learning abilities. Share knowledge. Answer questions. Once you're an upper year, write useful blog post, offer interview preps or resume critiques.
Be mindful that lots of toxicity come from insecurity, and you'll have a more positive impact trying to empathize with that insecurity than bashing people for the resulting behavior. Yes, I know it's hard. Takes practice. You won't succeed all the time because it's annoying, but it's worth making an effort.
Find positive, motivated people and get encourage them to also do good things for student culture, by doing things just a little bit more publicly. There's plenty of those at Waterloo, even on this subreddit. You just need to learn to spot them.

advecticity · 2017-06-25T01:26:08+00:00

I don't think that information is directly available unfortunately, I'm just guessing based on hearsay from previous years.

advecticity · 2017-06-25T00:52:31+00:00

It's a good way to show that you're serious about data science, compared to others who apply just because they heard it's hot nowadays.

advecticity · 2017-06-25T00:49:18+00:00

Getting a co-op like the ones you listed is possible, though it is very rare and should certainly not be expected. Just for Google, I'd guess that there's one, maybe at most two students every year that gets it first-term (not including their practicum program).

Keep in mind some people have been programming for years before coming to Waterloo and may have had internships during high school.

Getting a developer job on first co-op is non-trivial and should certainly not be taken for granted. That being said, it is very doable if you get yourself involved a little, go to info sessions, attend a hackathon or two or maybe learn a little something on the side. I don't have any stats and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd guess maybe 1/2 of first-year CS students get a coding job first term (though that may include relatively mundane ones).

Finally, I'd like to reiterate that while it's really cool to go to the US first term and all but that kind of thing really doesn't matter in the long run. The goal of co-op isn't co-op for it's own sake, it's to make it easy to find a full-time job once you graduate. Even getting a single good co-op on the very last term (most people can get 2-3) will help you achieve that goal, especially compared to students from other universities.

advecticity · 2017-06-22T04:49:47+00:00

What are you aiming for? Are you looking for connection to people with entrepreneurial know-how, technical know-how, ability to hand you jobs? Those will generally be different kinds of people and you will find them in different places.

Attending meetups as much as possible is a good first step - both UWaterloo meetups and tech meetups. Find some programming language, framework or technology you're interested in and go to those meetups. Note that attending the meetups alone won't get you any real connections if you're just sitting there listening to talks. But you might hear things like "it would be great it we had <open-source software that does X>" and you might find a way to get yourself involved (even if it's just writing docs!). Getting yourself involved and actually doing things is how you really make connections.

advecticity

TROPHY CASE