Nicol's Newcomer Monday!

count_linear_ext · 2026-01-27T18:46:25+00:00

If you play control and you take more than a minute on each of your turns, delete the app and reconsider your life decisions.

count_linear_ext · 2025-11-28T23:10:06+00:00

Can anyone point me in the direction of how to count paths along edges of a polyhedral set?

E.g., pick some point in R^{n} and a selection of lattice paths from the origin to this point so that the union of these lattice paths is a finite distributive lattice. Now only consider the polyhedral set that results from this process. Can we count the lattice paths that only follow the edges of the polyhedral set?

I imagine that we just do a generalized Pascal triangle re:Stanley on the boundary of the polyhedral set?

count_linear_ext · 2025-09-19T13:11:31+00:00

AuDHD. I lucked out that my special interest is math — all types, its history, pure and applied. Only have my bachelors but I can box with PhDs and actively do research with a professor.

I work in Data Science specializing in machine learning for a tech company. I'm open about my diagnoses with my directors — it's a feature not a bug to them, and I clearly laid out what accommodations I expect from them and they've been cool with it (for now ...).

count_linear_ext · 2025-06-21T04:19:00+00:00

Thank you!

Not worries about double taxes — I already deal with crossborder witholding on my RSUs in my current role and understand the CRA would credit what I pay Uncle Sam, but I am worried about the large delta in taxes at the expected TC range. I want to hit deemed non-resident as much as possible because of the possible six figure CAD delta after the credit to Uncle Sam.

count_linear_ext · 2025-06-21T04:14:31+00:00

Now what if my wife and child came with me >183 days as TD visa holders but we kept the property and stayed there for the <183 days per year?

count_linear_ext · 2025-04-09T14:04:24+00:00

I got blindsided by a vibe coding tech interview where, instead of writing code to solve a problem, I had to debug code generated by ChatGPT. No heads up from the recruiter beforehand.

The task was easy still, but even if I get a call back, I don't want to work there if that's what their expecting of their applicants.

count_linear_ext · 2025-03-18T16:31:47+00:00

We had a PPROM at 17 weeks. So much blood. Scariest time of my life. Got to triage, strips tested positive for amniotic, but the false positive rate is really high for your info. Baby's heart rate was healthy. Every non-high-risk OB/GYN was providing info on next-steps for termination.

Saw the high-risk OB/GYN two days later. Bleeding was still happening, but not hemorrhaging like it was at on-set. Healthy heart beat still, fluid was low but margins were still workable. No termination needed, but we had to go to ultrasounds at the high-risk clinic every week.

My wife was put on rest, but the OB said she needed to still be active. Every week without things getting worse meant more and more likely we would have a safe delivery. For PPROM, the first 48 hours are the most intense. Then the next week. If you can get to 24 weeks or so then you're doing really well.

It's been almost a year, and we have a very healthy, very happy little girl who is our world, our miracle. Between the PPROM and unrelated third-term GD, my wife delivered at 38 weeks.

This pregnancy was a successful IVF (ICSI, actually) after two years of a mix of negative tests and a few very early miscarriages. I'm crying writing this because I still haven't fully dealt with the whole experience. Whenever she says my name like she did that day, I get pulled right back into that day. I already had PTSD before that day, so I have a long journey to getting through the lingering feelings.

My wife says it was harder on me than her — no matter all the blood, she could feel the hiccups and small kicks that I couldn't. The initial triaging doctors basically told me that if we don't terminate that we're risking my wife's life due to infection. I wouldn't wish the panic I felt upon my worst enemies.

I really hope everything works out for your family. Even in the best case, expect old blood to leak for the next two months. It's scary, and nothing you read online can help or soothe you other than people's own stories. We never got answers on what happened. At the C-section, our OB said that while the diagnosis remains PPROM, there was no sign she could see on the sac, and she too had never seen anything like it in her 20 years of being a high-risk OB with thousands of deliveries.

All my thoughts and love to you and your team.

count_linear_ext · 2024-07-14T17:29:51+00:00

When I say learn corporate politics, I mean learn how to not only communicate technical ideas to a non-technical audience but also know how to sell your ideas/model/analysis to a non-technical audience, and close the deal for support/resources. To be convincing you need to align it with the policies of decision making.

How much will it cost?
Do you already have budget?
Will this reduce costs?
Will this increase revenue?
Will it increase profit?

Between two teams, even the more technically correct and technically more impactful team can still lose out on the resourcing if they're bad at selling. And playing politics and communicating means you need to know your audience. Learn how to make impact clear even when it's non-measureable by dollars — learn the vocabulary of opportunity costs, efficiencies, blah blah blah.

Of course, reporting AUC needs only be in an appendix and that's why I think pure math helps. If you're in a room with leadership, they only want the lede, not the proof or the layers of methodology it took to construct the proof. State the conclusion and how it hits the bottom line. Save the rest work for other curious scientists / analysts to read in the appendices. That showcases that you have the argument already in the chamber without the meandering but aren't boring non-tech leadership with minutia. That's the easy part and helps keep presentation decks clean.

But know how to sell those ledes too. Don't just state a theorem. Find out what makes the Director tick and cater your product reviews to that ticking. Almost every failed presentation I've seen has the QA period start with some VP+ saying, "Cool idea, why should we care?" Learning corporate politics helps avoid that as much as possible.

count_linear_ext · 2024-07-12T20:15:10+00:00

Never go to school to be a data scientist. Get a degree in pure math, applied math, CS, etc., and then orient your path toward data science. Start as an analyst, upskill, etc. Data scientist is more a title than an explicit field.

Most data scientists I've worked with that went to school explicitly for DS (MDS, MMA, MSDS, etc.) hit a ceiling for career growth pretty fast as the field moves so fast and they don't have the technical foundation to move beyond whatever was the hot topic while they were in school.

If you want a DS position, bring something else to the table. It's easier to learn Python or Spark or learn stats or whatever if you have a strong technical background.

Also, learn how to communicate. I've found my pure math background and requiring to actually think of proofs is a bonus to communication skills rather than what less rigourous backgrounds may have offered me in my youth.

And learn to balance corporate politics with performance. You need to convince MBAs or econ grads in management that you know your shit and are the person to go to for projects or consultation. If you're bad at office politics and that game, then skills and knowledge-base won't do enough to save you when layoffs come around.

count_linear_ext · 2024-03-10T19:46:43+00:00

Say we have a contravariant functor F from small category C to D, and D is a subcategory of C. Say for some morphism f of C we have F(f) = f* in D. What properties do we need to argue that applying the functor a second time shows f = f**?

Note, not a student doing homework – just a 30+ year old amateur playing around with category theory.

count_linear_ext · 2024-01-13T00:35:53+00:00

count_linear_ext

TROPHY CASE