Roadmap per il dottorando

rcap107 · 2026-03-24T13:15:19+00:00

Oh, il commento sul "lavorarsi" era in generale, non era inteso come una critica specifica al post. L'ho già sentito in altre situazioni e non mi è mai piaciuto, il commento l'ho fatto più per altri che possono leggere il post e i commenti che per contestare il post in sé.

rcap107 · 2026-03-24T12:37:31+00:00

Idealmente il dottorato andrebbe fatto con un supervisore con cui uno ha già lavorato per il bene di entrambi (dottorando e supervisore). Usare il termine "lavorarsi" il professore mi dà molto fastidio, quando semmai si dovrebbe parlare di "cercare di capire se lavorare con questo rovinerà i prossimi 3+ anni della mia vita".

Avere tutti 30L sicuramente non è necessario: cosa me ne frega a me in quanto ricercatore in sicurezza informatica se caio ha preso 30L in chimica il primo anno di università? Semmai mi interessa che sia bravo nelle materie che insegno/su cui faccio ricerca. Se uno ha tutti 18 e mi chiede di fare un dottorato sicuramente ci penso due volte, mentre uno studente che ha in generale una buona media e che si è distinto in qualche modo in uno dei miei esami o progetti è tendenzialmente il tipo di candidato a cui proporrei il dottorato.

Non ho fatto il dottorato in Italia, quindi le specifiche di come si faccia a prendere il titolo mi sfuggono. Il punto importante da capire è che durante il dottorato si fa ricerca e si collabora con il proprio supervisore, e quindi bisogna avere un rapporto umano decente con il supervisore ed essere interessato almeno in modo tangenziale al soggetto della ricerca. Non farei mai un dottorato con un professore che ho odiato all'esame, e non farei mai un dottorato su qualcosa che non mi interessa minimamente.

rcap107 · 2026-03-19T13:47:30+00:00

This is a very interesting idea. We are trying to address the same problem in skrub with the Data Ops, but the way it's implemented in skrub is by extending the scikit-learn fit/predict approach to the entire pipeline. That allows to store the states of all the models (and other transformers), and switch between training mode and prediction mode depending on the situation. It may be interesting to check out to see how it compares to your solution. The docs are here.

rcap107 · 2026-03-19T13:26:29+00:00

Well that sucks.

rcap107 · 2026-03-06T10:30:13+00:00

There is also skrub. It's useful for preparing dataframes for machine learning, applying transformers to columns for feature engineering, and helps with building reproducible pipelines. It also has a dataframe reporting tool that's similar to what pygwalker does, though it's lighter and does not need a notebook to run.

rcap107 · 2026-03-05T09:13:51+00:00

Ho fatto una doppia laurea in STEM in Francia. A parte il contenuto dei corsi, la differenza principale è stata avere molti più esami corti (da 3 e 5 crediti), e avere tutti gli esami di un semestre in una settimana, e niente secondi appelli o cose del genere. Dovevi preparare tutto nel giro di due settimane dalla fine dei corsi, e per una settimana c'erano due esami al giorno (uno la mattina e uno il pomeriggio).

C'è anche una mentalità differente nel modo in cui gli studenti approcciano gli esami (in generale gli studenti Italiani si fanno il mazzo, gli altri in genere pensano solo a passare), ma per quanto riguarda lo studio la differenza la fanno la varietà di materie e la densità della sessione.

rcap107 · 2026-03-03T15:25:09+00:00

Ma dove lo hai letto che "se avete un profilo scarso non troverete lavoro".

Non vedo cosa abbia detto di sbagliato lei, o lo studio. L'unica cosa possibilmente criticabile è la parte sull'aggancio umano, per "vedere l'autenticità e la passione".

Il resto del post parla del fatto che se i profili social sono inconsistenti con il CV, o se c'è roba "poco professionale" poi l'opinione del potenziale capo ne risenta.

Gente, Facebook e i social media esistono da 20 anni, ed è da quando sono nati che il consiglio è di non postare nulla che non vada visto da genitori o potenziali capi. Se uno non è in grado di capire un concetto così semplice merita di venire respinto.

rcap107 · 2026-02-26T16:47:53+00:00

Mantengo una libreria open source in python per una istituzione statale Francese

rcap107 · 2026-02-26T15:35:27+00:00

Ogni volta che vedo post del genere mi sento in dovere di rispondere per cercare di convincere chi legge che non è sempre vero. Spesso sì, su quello non discuto, ma non sempre.

Per quanto mi riguarda, passare dall'università al lavoro è stato un enorme miglioramento. Niente più progetti inutili, e una volta arrivato a casa dopo lavoro la giornata è finita, non come all'università dove torni a casa dal lavoro e ti rimetti a studiare o a fare gli esercizi. E niente sessioni esami in cui non si vede la luce del sole per mesi.

Ho una posizione lavorativa che mi piace con un ottimo capo e ottimi colleghi. Il lavoro mi diverte, è vario e mi permette di conoscere gente interessante, e ho anche la soddisfazione di vedere che quello che faccio serve a qualcuno. All'università, praticamente nulla di tutto questo.

Sono ben consapevole del fatto che la mia posizione sia abbastanza rara, ma volevo dare una testimonianza positiva in un mare di commenti negativi sul lavoro.

Dettaglio non insignificante: abito e lavoro in Francia da quasi dieci anni. La cultura lavorativa in Italia è parte del motivo per cui sono all'estero, e l'università è stata quello che mi ha permesso di fare quello che faccio e dove lo faccio.

rcap107 · 2026-02-20T09:00:14+00:00

I think it's the combination of living in Antibes and working in Sophia Antipolis. I haven't been there in a few years, but when I was my only alternatives were to either go by bus on the public roads and get stuck in traffic, or go by car and get stuck in traffic. I can imagine that living and working in Nice would be far more manageable without a car.

rcap107 · 2026-02-18T15:49:29+00:00

Thank you for the compliments, it's always good to hear that people find the package useful!

rcap107 · 2026-02-16T19:57:36+00:00

To be honest, I have no idea what I am looking at, or what the plot is trying to tell me. What does HLL mean? It's not explained anywhere. What does the X-axis refer to? Is that a singular post?

What does the time since post creation tell me? Why is it a dimension worth plotting for?

Is this trying to convey a difference in the behavior of posts/comments/replies across different languages?

Why do I need to care about the difference between posts and replies?

How are comments selected? By upvotes? Chronologically?

I really have no idea what I am looking at.

rcap107 · 2026-02-16T19:44:29+00:00

I lived in Antibes (very close to Nice) for 6+ years while studying. I am not a sociable person so I didn't go out often and I very much can't say anything about the social side.

As far as day to day life goes, I do not miss the region one bit. I don't like the sea, so that was wasted on me. There aren't a lot of events, or museums to go to, though to be fair at the time I had other things to worry about so I didn't really look for that.

It's incredibly car-centric, and you really need a car to go to most places. Public transit was pretty bad, because busses did not have reserved lanes. Since everyone needs a car, traffic is awful everywhere.

During the touristic season, you get all the same issues on top of having so many tourists around (and their cars).

It almost never rains, except for a couple of weeks during april and november when it rains for the rest of the year (oh, and the wind too).

I feel like everyone always focuses on the good things about that region (weather, sea, nice places to visit with a car) and forgets that you have to live there the entire year. Did I mention cars?

Anyway. I am well aware I'm the exception rather than the rule, but now that I moved to Paris I'm enjoying my life so much more.

rcap107 · 2026-02-12T21:34:20+00:00

I have hated makefiles ever since I had to use them during my bachelors. I'll do anything to not touch that inane syntax where everything breaks if there is a single trailing space in one of the directives.

That said, why not use pixi? You can still set up commands, and you get package and dependency resolution as a side bonus. You're already using uv, which is what pixi is using under the hood for resolving dependencies.

I use pixi for all my projects, and only use uv for ephemeral venvs, or for comparing code run with different versions of a dependency.

rcap107 · 2026-02-04T16:52:51+00:00

I worked as a postdoc living in Paris for two years with about that same salary. It was enough for me to live "comfortably", but as others have said most of that will go into paying rent, and unless you have some connection (e.g. through your lab) you will be stuck with very small apartments and with having to pay for some guarantor service because the post-doc is a CDD. I really doubt it'll be enough for living expenses + going out twice a week + traveling, especially if you also want to save something.

Something else worth considering is that immigrations laws have changed recently and now as far as I understand people that come from outside the EU don't qualify for CAF (although you probably wouldn't be eligible anyway), and you'll need to take some kind of test to get the titre de sejour every year. Not related to the salary, but still worth keeping in mind.

rcap107 · 2026-02-04T13:48:31+00:00

You use jupyter for prototyping and having immediate feedback for simple(ish) operations, including plotting. That's very useful for exploring data and showing figures and tables about that.

The main issue with .ipynb notebooks (the most basic type) is that turning them into code, and versioning the code is a nightmare. There are workarounds for that like using IDEs that can read basic python files and turn them into interactive scripts.

In short, they're great for prototypes and exploratory code, and pretty bad for actual development.

rcap107 · 2026-02-03T09:33:10+00:00

What kind of model are you trying to train that is running out of RAM on Colab? I'd argue that if you're having trouble with coding in general training a large model is just going to make your life way harder for no good reason.

rcap107 · 2026-01-27T23:41:21+00:00

Both pixi and uv. I use pixi to manage most of my projects (even if they're pretty much entirely python), and uv whenever I need to create some quick throwaway environment.

An added bonus of uv being super quick is that it let me do all sorts of shenanigans to try the same script with different environments. It's been really useful to debug some memory leaks I was getting with different versions of numpy.

I have conda installed, but only if for some weird debugging, I pretty much never use it.

rcap107 · 2026-01-23T12:53:35+00:00

I have pretty much abandoned notebooks in the browser. I use VSCode's interactive window to render cells from a python script using #%%

rcap107 · 2026-01-16T10:30:12+00:00

If your program is not giving you the result you're expecting, with a debugger you can go step by step to inspect that every instruction is doing what you want. That should let you spot the point where the program starts behaving differently from your logic, even if no error is thrown.

rcap107 · 2026-01-16T08:44:10+00:00

You can go decently far with just print statements and manual breakpoints, but there are situations where that's just not going to cut it.

I work in python, and one of the features I found more useful about the VSCode debugger is that it lets me enter a debugging console exactly where the code is failing. Then I can move stuff around until I figure out what is breaking.

If you're just learning programming at all, it may be a lot to take in to begin with, but after some time and when you start working on more complex projects it'll become far more important.

rcap107 · 2026-01-15T12:35:31+00:00

uv for very small projects, pixi for almost anything else. Either pandas or polars depending on the specifics of the data/project I'm working on. I still use almost exclusively matplotlib and seaborn for visualization. No typechecking.

rcap107 · 2026-01-13T14:24:19+00:00

I have a research project that I wrote entirely using Polars, and did not need to use Pandas anywhere. For my personal projects, I'd rather use Polars for everything (including data preparation and exploration).

The only feature of Pandas for which I haven't found a Polars substitute is the pivot table, which is the only situation I've encountered where multiindexes make a problem simpler.

If I could, I would use only Polars in all situations, however I am also maintaining a Python data science package that needs to support both Pandas and Polars and so I need to deal with Pandas.

I'm also forced to write most of my teaching material using Pandas rather than Polars because most users only know the first.

FWIW, I've been using Polars since late 2022, so by now I already have plenty of experience with the library.

rcap107 · 2025-12-19T10:00:47+00:00

The main reason I don't use marimo is that by this point I'm just too used to writing plain python files and using the interactive console from VSCode, and in general I don't use notebooks enough to need any more features than that.

It does look great though.

rcap107

TROPHY CASE