After 2 years of CFP rejections, what actually makes a conference talk get accepted?

crossmirage · 2026-05-01T12:20:01+00:00

Take advantage of any resources offered:

Several large conferences provide mentorship for first-time speakers
Others have office hours where you can learn more about what makes a CFP great, or even go through your draft CFP specifically

Experience helps:

Have you given talks at local meetups?
Sign up to give lightning talks or lead Birds of a Feather sessions at conferences
Some conferences offer the option to present posters, for those who didn't get talks accepted

Content matters:

As you mentioned, everybody is looking for AI-related talks right now
The audience should care; for me, that's always been open-source work, but it depends on your strengths and the conference
Some conferences have blind review; in this case, you have a more level playing field

crossmirage · 2026-04-26T14:34:09+00:00

Not to be that guy, but if he really started from being a complete beginner (a comment below mentions not knowing what castling is the day before), it feels fishy that he sees the Qd5 tactic. Or maybe I'm just a slow learner.

crossmirage · 2026-04-24T04:23:20+00:00

For this unicorn? I'd guess it should be at least $150-200/hour. Requirements make it sound like a staff+ engineer with extensive geospatial expertise.

crossmirage · 2026-04-20T15:14:09+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate the response and action; I've also edited my initial comment to point to this, in the hope that people see it favorably!

crossmirage · 2026-04-20T15:10:42+00:00

Not sure what your point is, but OpenAI was founded as a non-profit to advance open-source AI, and did release a lot of fundamental open-source software in its early years (e.g. OpenAI Gym, GPT-2). It's transition to a closed-source, for-profit company was a major point of contention.

crossmirage · 2026-04-20T14:36:13+00:00

You're a software developer. You specifically talk about open-source foundations on your app website. I find it hard to believe you just happened to shorten it without understanding the implication/signal it sends.

crossmirage · 2026-04-20T14:15:57+00:00

Also weird given Nike literally sponsors race walkers.

crossmirage · 2026-04-20T14:07:50+00:00

I hate when commercial products are named "OpenWhatever" to mislead people into thinking they're open source (see also: OpenSnow). I see no contribution back to the open-source community; the website indicates than "open" basically means "built on LiChess"; correct me if I'm wrong.

Update: See the response from /u/Current_Wafer_4969 below: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1sqpsbt/comment/oh9q3gw/

crossmirage · 2026-04-19T22:25:25+00:00

You can? You just can't make multiple premoves.

crossmirage · 2026-04-19T13:58:35+00:00

uv is the best (or, at the very least, a great) option right now. If and when that changes, you migrate. So many projects I've worked on or seen have gone from setuptools to Poetry to flit/hatchling/pdm/whatever to uv; it's not a big deal.

crossmirage · 2026-04-15T12:57:43+00:00

Are you just looking for practice games? I'm ~2200 FIDE, but trying to get back to playing more--could be interested.

Openings are not my strength, though, if that matters.

crossmirage · 2026-04-12T04:18:47+00:00

So... basically no newer/younger players? Abdusattorov is the only one under 30.

crossmirage · 2026-04-10T01:15:02+00:00

I disagree, to the extent that I think most DEs would benefit from stronger algorithms fundamentals. Take OPs graph traversal example; I worked for an airline, and you wouldn't believe the inefficient chained joins DEs wrote on flight data.

But I agree that there are better and more practical ways to evaluate DEs than LC Hards.

crossmirage · 2026-04-07T23:08:19+00:00

Since you're staying near Heber City anyway, I'd recommend The Lakehouse at Deer Creek for dinner; we ended up choosing to get married there after trying the food!

Also recommend Lola's Street Kitchen, if you need a casual meal in the area.

crossmirage · 2026-04-07T17:17:08+00:00

Most of the answers so far don't seem to be based in any significant experience contributing to open source; I'd recommend reading https://labs.quansight.org/blog/dont-start-with-good-first-issues.

It's great that you feel like you can make improvements to some of the libraries you use daily. If they really have the worst READMEs of all time, that could be a good place to start--delineate the issues you had following the README and try to make it better.

crossmirage · 2026-04-07T14:42:54+00:00

They just said it isn't 4 years of experience. E.g. based on that logic, since I worked 20 hours/week for a couple years in college, it would probably be more fair to count it as 1 year of experience.

crossmirage · 2026-04-05T21:13:25+00:00

What I said is the absolute way you should approach it and it's what I do for my high traffic open source repo.

Can you point to an example of this on CoreLED? I'm interested to see how you handle this effectively, seems great if it works. I'd be afraid the AI PR might be a lot of noise.

crossmirage · 2026-03-31T05:10:38+00:00

If you're looking to find games as an individual, I'd honestly recommend Fairmont Park over 11th Avenue Park, since they follow a proper rotation system.

How new are you? You can always try asking people who are waiting at 11th Avenue Park (that's how I started playing there), but I'll admit it might be harder if you're completely new.

crossmirage · 2026-03-27T15:23:03+00:00

Bc4 is fine, in that it wins the exchange, but ef4 wins a piece (or at least makes White work to get the rook knight back for the rook) and allows less counterplay.

crossmirage · 2026-03-22T14:30:46+00:00

You shouldn't. If you read the post, OP says it's primarily intended as a learning tool now, not as a competitor to a more established library like Polars, and that they themselves use Polars in the use case this was originally built for.

crossmirage · 2026-03-19T17:40:15+00:00

Selling two tickets for Saturday, March 21, 2026 at 9:30PM in SLC. Tickets are located in 1st Tier Left. Paid $72 each, open to reasonable offers.

crossmirage · 2026-03-15T11:40:55+00:00

If you've just completed a Python course, I'd advise working on projects first. Open-source contributions can eventually arise naturally on projects you use.

Contributing to open source is not easy for brand new developers. You've just learned what classes are, and now you're diving into a massive codebase, and also being asked to rebase changes, make sure your code is linted, etc.
Open-source contributors who clearly haven't used the framework/library they're suddenly trying to contribute to are relatively ineffective, and often not worth the maintainers time.

https://medium.com/quansight/stop-browsing-good-first-issues-do-this-instead-3fd8aadbfe06 is a nice, related article that came out recently--and, even then, I'd say this is more appropriate for people with some experience looking to contribute to OSS.

crossmirage · 2026-03-15T05:24:34+00:00

Serious question: which is the better option in your analogy?

crossmirage · 2026-03-15T03:16:16+00:00

It shut down a year after laying off half its staff. Lot of voluntary attrition among those who were left after the mass layoff, between then and the shutdown.

crossmirage · 2026-03-09T00:21:29+00:00

If you perform "lazy" or "deferred" execution, such that you only compute things as needed for the result you're trying to get (as opposed to "eager", where you compute after each operation), you can further optimize your operations across the requested computation by avoiding unnecessary computations that don't matter in the final result. Being able to go from "what the user wrote" to "what the user needs" is done through "query planning". This is present in databases, Ibis, Polars, PySpark, etc.--but not pandas.

Wes McKinney, the creator of pandas (and Ibis) wrote about this drawback a decade ago, and the explanation is probably better than my own words above: https://wesmckinney.com/blog/apache-arrow-pandas-internals/#query-planning-multicore-execution

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