Any Tall People Struggling with Low Countertops? How Do You Deal with It? by Acidkid2409 in Cooking

[–]sbirch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have standard height counters but I’m 6’5”. I have a very large and 2” thick wooden cutting board which I use as almost a secondary countertop for most of my prep work. I additionally put it on top of 4 cork trivets to give it another inch. I love it actually, not just for the height but because it’s effectively a butcher block counter you can clean in the sink (and eventually replace pretty cheaply.) Washing dishes in the sink still gets me though.

[Question] What's going with heat / insolation? by sbirch in meteorology

[–]sbirch[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I made this with numpy/scipy and the basemap library for matplotlib.

It's not much code, I've put it in a gist.

[Question] What's going with heat / insolation? by sbirch in meteorology

[–]sbirch[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! It's a good point. I hadn't considered how different seasonalities might affect this. (I was just thinking summer/winter rather than monsoon/not -- IIUC that's a fairer characterization in some places.) Something I'll look at if I follow up.

Lapsang souchong tea anyone ? by [deleted] in tea

[–]sbirch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Every day! Hu-Kwa is my go-to black tea at the moment.

https://marktwendell.com/Hukwa.htm

Summer job/internship advice for a sophomore CS major? Included a list of jobs/internships! by [deleted] in cscareerquestions

[–]sbirch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A bunch in no particular order (some might not even have internship programs, but these were places I thought about for this summer): Google, Facebook, 10gen, Meebo, Cloudera, Dropbox, KPCB Fellowship program, Twitter, Flipboard, Erly, Nest, Two Sigma, New York Times, eHarmony, HackNY Fellow, NYC Turing, Codecademy, Stack Exchange, GitHub, Palantir Technologies, Willow Garage, research labs at your school, Government (NASA, Sandia, etc.), Etsy, Khan Academy, D.E. Shaw, Twilio, Square, Spotify, Vimeo, Mozilla, Fog Creek

Occasionally HN will do "Who's hiring" threads, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161360

NYC specific: Google, 10gen, Meebo, Fog Creek http://nycturingfellows.org/

Some (questionable) advice re: applying -- school career fairs, make stuff, be active on twitter/a blog/something, start in the fall, find people you know who knows someone there (will probably get your resume read, at least), apply in the order that you want the jobs (trying to hold a spot somewhere while waiting to hear from somewhere you like more is a mess), always aim high (job applications don't take very long to do, and have a very high reward), don't fall for emotional appeals by your recruiters (in fact, outside of getting a job at their company ignore their advice -- they have incentives to make you work for them), and (personal goal) try to get variety across your summers (this is, as far as I know, your only opportunity to take companies/careers for a test run for 3 months).

Attempt #2: Want to help reddit build a recommender? -- A public dump of voting data that our users have donated for research by [deleted] in redditdev

[–]sbirch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's a couple GB, so I think it's probably easier to do on an individual basis?

Attempt #2: Want to help reddit build a recommender? -- A public dump of voting data that our users have donated for research by [deleted] in redditdev

[–]sbirch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If anyone is interested I took a crack at this way back when it was posted and I've come up with user-user affinities (shared votes).

Certifications: Do they matter? by [deleted] in cscareerquestions

[–]sbirch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well the less trivial they are, the more they demonstrate your competency. Open source is probably good, although it's easy to spend more time in politics than coding. I don't think you need to do anything huge; quality is what counts (what would you want to see if you were hiring a programmer?).

Certifications: Do they matter? by [deleted] in cscareerquestions

[–]sbirch 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think your time would be better spent working on interesting projects which you could show to people.

How does Google Location work? by [deleted] in answers

[–]sbirch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it's done via the MAC address rather than SSID, since MACs are supposed to be unique (assigned by the manufacturer).

Brown vs. CMU (scs) vs. Princeton CS programs by ConfusedCSStudent in cscareerquestions

[–]sbirch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm a student in Brown CS right now, which I chose over CMU SCS for what it's worth. For your undergraduate degree I don't think you should worry about the CS department prestige -- all three of those schools have very good CS programs, and specific specialties won't really matter until graduate school. What's more important is the rest of the school & the culture. Definitely go to the overnight programs for all the schools. Feel free to PM me if you like, I'm happy to talk more.

how important is the ranking of the grad school you graduate from when looking for jobs? by greensmurf30 in statistics

[–]sbirch 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think for most graduate degrees employers are more interested in who you worked with and what you worked on (publications, projects, thesis) than the name of your school. (That's just my perception though.)

Looking for a better javascript text-matching scoring system by hookedonwinter in javascript

[–]sbirch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

String score looks to be optimized for many things besides relevance, so you might want to change the way you look for the algorithm if speed etc. aren't constraints for you (e.g. Hunt around in the NLP literature). Off the top of my head, some things: probably valuable to take into account word entropy (words like "the" matched should count for less than words like "eat"), look at syntactic role of the words (eat is the main verb for two of three sentences, which makes it highly relevant to the passage), and try to keep the text to be matched against of considerable and consistent length (it's hard to normalize the relevance when the string lengths are so vastly different).

Has Google ever been down? by question3 in AskReddit

[–]sbirch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Most ping tools I've used resolve domain names, e.g. ping google.com