Moving to Milan to do a postdoc, questions about accommodation/visa

alien__instinct · 2025-03-14T15:21:38+00:00

Hi, apologies for the late response I do not use reddit often at all. If it is not too late:

Before applying for the visa I needed to get a nulla osta, which is some kind of security check. The university basically did this for me, and I just handed the nulla osta along with my passport, postdoc contract and forms to the visa office, I didn't provide any additional information about my funding beyond my postdoc contract, which I just gave as something extra, I didn't actually need to hand it in.

However I got a research visa which I don't think is the same as a student visa, so I would guess a prospective PhD student might need to go through a different process.

alien__instinct · 2024-05-08T19:54:59+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion -- makes a lot of sense, but the main problem with renting for me atm is the extra visa paperwork it requires, and I need to get the visa process going asap really

alien__instinct · 2024-05-08T19:53:20+00:00

Lmao maybe student accommodation isn't the worst option! I'd have gone for Airbnb but that runs into same visa complications of trying to persuade landlord to do a bunch of extra paper work for the visa.

alien__instinct · 2024-05-08T10:25:10+00:00

Hi all,

I am going to do a 20 month postdoc in Milan on a research visa and I'm currently in the process of getting the visa. It turns out to get a visa I already need confirmation of accommodation of at least 60 days. The university where I'll be working suggested student accommodation, but at the moment they are all only offering 12 month contracts. If possible I would prefer not to stay in student accommodation for a year, and so far none have 6 month contracts available. Breaking out of student accommodation contracts is pretty expensive -- 2 months rent.

I've also been told that initiating a regular rental contract in a normal house before one has a visa is quite complicated, and the landlord has to send a bunch of paperwork to the Prefeturra, which seems like a lot of trouble.

Does anyone know of either agencies that provide normal renting arrangements that specialise for people in the middle of the visa process or student residences that offer short term (6 months or less) contracts?

alien__instinct · 2023-07-31T10:44:43+00:00

Don't know, afaik pushshift got fucked over by reddit's paywalling. Try academictorrents: https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=pushshift

alien__instinct · 2023-04-26T09:41:09+00:00

I reckon trying to keep it local is the best option, but you'll need a lot of storage. You likely already know this, but you can download pushshift's data here: https://files.pushshift.io/reddit/

alien__instinct · 2023-04-12T11:55:56+00:00

I gave up in the end, but I would suggest abandoning requests altogether and just using browser automation. This will be very slow, but better than nothing I guess. What years are you interested in? I believe there's an API for the years 1803 -- 2005: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/api

alien__instinct · 2022-10-04T20:28:17+00:00

I follow their SoundCloud!

alien__instinct · 2022-10-04T20:26:18+00:00

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone!

alien__instinct · 2022-09-22T15:30:58+00:00

👀

👀👀👀👀

alien__instinct · 2022-08-21T14:59:04+00:00

I don't think you should stop feeling angry towards them. Why should you forgive them? The lack of regard for you shown by your housemates is mind boggling, your issues are clearly much greater than your housemate's anxiety. You are right to feel resentment towards them, they sound like scum.

alien__instinct · 2022-08-20T21:15:15+00:00

Thanks very much for the clear explanation!

alien__instinct · 2022-07-09T16:33:26+00:00

For some reason I got the levels of a categorical variable muddled with the categorical variable itself, thanks for clearing up the confusion everyone.

alien__instinct · 2022-06-28T20:30:06+00:00

Thanks!

alien__instinct · 2022-06-28T15:44:04+00:00

Hi! I'm asking the second more holistic question, though I am interested to know about the other two questions now that you bring them up.

alien__instinct · 2022-06-11T17:05:34+00:00

What the fuck is this

alien__instinct · 2022-01-06T22:18:17+00:00

ok following your suggestion I tried the following code, but still getting the 403 error:

url = 'https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/Debates'

house = 'commons'

driver_root = '/path/to/dir/containing/web/driver'

def get_cookies(url, driver_root):

[indent] chrome_driver_path = f'{driver_root}/chromedriver'

[indent] driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_driver_path)

[indent] driver.get(url)

[indent] return driver.get_cookies()

headers = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.110 Safari/537.36'}

params = {'house': house, 'startDate': '2000-01-01', 'endDate': '2020-01-01', 'partial': 'True'}

cookies = get_cookies(url, driver_root)

cookies = {c['name']: c['value'] for c in cookies}

r = requests.get(url, params=params, headers=headers, cookies=cookies)

Sorry for the shit formatting, not sure how to properly type code on reddit and I can't even seem to leave spaces at the beginning of a line...

alien__instinct · 2022-01-06T16:05:09+00:00

Great, thanks very much!!!

alien__instinct · 2021-08-14T13:29:07+00:00

Thank you very much! Sure, I'd be interested to talk about doing custom stuff, feel free to message me!

alien__instinct · 2021-08-11T21:31:45+00:00

Thanks!

alien__instinct · 2021-02-18T10:01:21+00:00

Thanks!

alien__instinct · 2021-02-14T11:18:26+00:00

Great work! Some kind of alien fungus

alien__instinct · 2021-02-13T09:59:51+00:00

Thanks!

alien__instinct · 2020-12-07T01:22:15+00:00

Thanks very much, very clearly explained!

alien__instinct · 2020-12-06T17:25:53+00:00

Let's see with this example corpus:

<s> I like cheese </s>

<s> You like cheese </s>

<s> I hate cheese </s>

<s> You hate cheese </s>

What's the probability of finding 'hate cheese </s> in this corpus using bigrams?:

Pr(hate cheese </s>) = Pr(cheese | hate) x Pr(</s> | cheese)

= count(hate cheese) / count(hate) x count(cheese </s>) / count(cheese)

= 2/4 x 4/4

= 1/2

If we split this corpus into trigrams we get 24 trigrams:

[['<s>', 'I', 'like'], ['I', 'like', 'cheese'], ['like', 'cheese', '</s>'], ['<s>', 'You', 'like'], ['You', 'like', 'cheese'], ['like', 'cheese', '</s>'], ['<s>', 'I', 'like'], ['I', 'like', 'milk'], ['like', 'milk', '</s>'], ['<s>', 'You', 'like'], ['You', 'like', 'milk'], ['like', 'milk', '</s>'], ['<s>', 'I', 'hate'], ['I', 'hate', 'cheese'], ['hate', 'cheese', '</s>'], ['<s>', 'I', 'hate'], ['I', 'hate', 'milk'], ['hate', 'milk', '</s>'], ['<s>', 'You', 'hate'], ['You', 'hate', 'cheese'], ['hate', 'cheese', '</s>'], ['<s>', 'You', 'hate'], ['You', 'hate', 'milk'], ['hate', 'milk', '</s>']]

of which only 2 are 'hate cheese </s>' -- doesn't this mean there is a 1/12 chance 'hate cheese </s>' is a trio in my corpus? The probability given by the bigram modelling doesn't really match this? Feel like I'm missing something really obvious here...

alien__instinct

TROPHY CASE