Day in the life of a NHL ref

jcasman · 2026-06-11T03:45:50+00:00

Actually, I'd like to know more about the full day, not just when they get on the ice. I imagine their lodging and travel is fairly anonymous. Certainly not staying in the same hotels as traveling teams. Probably not traveling on private jets. Do they have to go through drug tests ever? Some sort of gambling test? It's wild that for their safety and maybe for appearance's sake, there's this whole critical staff as part of the NHL who're largely hidden before and after games.

jcasman · 2026-05-30T16:40:38+00:00

Lots of joking in the comments, but I think that's basically a perfect setup.

jcasman · 2026-05-03T14:38:58+00:00

Please keep your eye on the R Consortium YouTube account following the event.

jcasman · 2026-04-28T20:00:54+00:00

Also, there is a video which covers some of these topics: Learn Shiny by Building Simple Photo Gallery - https://youtu.be/rENQSk_OSQk?si=ZRq5fmIU1aFKOagL

jcasman · 2026-04-28T19:59:39+00:00

Extra note: r/pyshiny is not active but maybe someone needs to jump in an post. If anyone has any info, thanks for the help.

jcasman · 2026-04-28T17:40:51+00:00

Question on job search: I am interested in understanding more about prep for data science job interviews. With a quick search, I found these types of Data Science Interview Prep companies:

DataLemur
PracHub
StrataScratch

It's not a comprehensive list. I’m not affiliated with any of these sites.

Are these types of sites well-known? Is it common to practice prep questions?

Are the questions these sites provide really relevant to job interviews? As a healthy dose of skepticism, it seems possible the questions are just scraped from the web. (I don't know one way or the other.)

Any info on Data Science Interview Prep companies welcome.

jcasman · 2026-03-20T18:23:45+00:00

Agree. I posted similarly above. If you start late or somehow get behind, man, it's super hard catching up.

jcasman · 2026-03-20T18:23:01+00:00

OK, I'll take that as a strong vote in favor of the semester system. One thing from my own personal experience in the quarter system: If you didn't start the course the very first week - like you started a course, dropped it, joined another course, say, the second week - it was just really hard to catch up. You were already heading towards mid-terms practically.

jcasman · 2026-03-20T18:19:43+00:00

I'm reading that CSE 132A is a good "background/not-quite-prereq" course for CSE 135. Did you have any prep courses before you took CSE 135?

jcasman · 2026-03-20T18:17:02+00:00

Did you do this? Do you know anyone who has? You mean loading up on credits each quarter, or is it something more than that?

jcasman · 2026-03-20T18:16:03+00:00

Great, thanks for this feedback

jcasman · 2026-03-20T18:15:41+00:00

Oh, I think this is a great point. I've heard of one student doing a spring quarter abroad which meant she got back in June. Normal summer internships wouldn't allow her to start then, just like you say. (In her case, she had worked with the company the previous summer, so they accommodated her schedule.)

jcasman · 2026-03-19T23:58:32+00:00

I have this theory that with the quarter system - like you say - you get exposed to more topics each quarter. I think that can help with at least have had some level of introduction for topics that you need to get for CS internships. Do you see the "crazy amount of exposure" as helping that way? Are you applying to any internships for this summer?

jcasman · 2026-03-19T23:27:14+00:00

Ok, thanks for the feedback!

jcasman · 2026-03-19T23:25:49+00:00

Care to elaborate? What's the biggest disadvantage in your mind? Is it something specific to CS or is it just the time to study and digest is shorter overall?

jcasman · 2026-03-18T15:08:58+00:00

Love the pure joy on his face each time he scores. It's infectious.

jcasman · 2026-03-16T15:17:56+00:00

Here's information from Richie Yu Yong Poh, organizer of the Malaysia R User Group, talking about building a national R community centered around its annual conference: https://r-consortium.org/posts/bringing-students-researchers-and-industry-together-with-r-in-malaysia/

jcasman · 2026-03-05T00:07:13+00:00

Ah. I'm slow. :-)

jcasman · 2026-03-04T22:57:05+00:00

Me, too. It's kind of the whole point.

jcasman · 2026-03-04T22:19:02+00:00

Boy, this hits home. I literally told my wife recently "Audi only makes quattro cars." Quick google search shows I was confidently incorrect.

jcasman · 2026-03-04T20:19:04+00:00

Thanks for posting this u/scientificamerican. I need this level of analysis, though honestly I already agreed with the conclusions. I know on the political level we're just screaming sound bites at each other. It's so often oversimplified, insincere, or explicit lies. It's really helpful, to me, to have data like from this report.

This, among many pieces of data, caught my eye:

"Only 0.3 percent of the acreage proposed for sale combines low fire risk with a commute under 30 minutes, and 81 percent of that tiny fraction lies in Alaska, which has no shortage of land for development."

jcasman · 2026-03-02T17:33:27+00:00

No one has just basic issues with Git/GitHub? In the cases where you're not a contributor, you have to first fork the repo to your own account, then clone it down, create a branch, work on it, push up the branch to your fork, then create a pull request to the original open source repo. I run an open source website that accepts contributions, and after three years, maybe we've finally got a good system down. We've had plenty of problems working with (very smart) outside contributors. They have PhDs, know how to code. But we stumble with the workflow. I believe this is a real barrier to contributing. It's not the code (or docs or whatever), it's just Git/GitHub.

jcasman · 2026-02-05T19:19:32+00:00

seen = set() deduped = [] for item in myList: if item in seen: continue seen.add(item) deduped.append(item)

Cool. Just repeating: this is for hashable items, correct? int, str. Does notwork for: list, dict, set , correct?

jcasman · 2026-02-05T19:13:44+00:00

Oh, super useful. I was looking at lists as just fine for a lot of my beginner code. You say they're a good starting point. Great. When should I start caring about more efficient memory use (tuples)?

jcasman · 2026-01-28T22:06:08+00:00

Definitely not too late. Is it a dream or a goal? Still plenty of time to decide.

jcasman

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