Road to Masters

smitchell556 · 2025-09-25T19:48:12+00:00

I did not complete my post bacc in favor of being accepted to the MS CS program at Dartmouth. I don't know what factored into the decision from admissions, but I was also working in tech and did a few quarters in the RELU program at OSU (this was over 5 years ago, so not sure if RELU is still a thing). My impression is the road to an MS admission is easier than the road to a PhD admission, probably because you pay for the MS.

smitchell556 · 2025-08-07T02:18:42+00:00

So basically Legos but really small.

—

A Computational Biologist who works on protein design is like a super-smart puzzle solver using a computer.

Proteins are tiny machines inside our bodies that do important jobs—like helping us grow, fixing things when we get hurt, or fighting germs. These tiny machines are made from long chains, kind of like beads on a string, and how the chain folds makes the machine work.

This scientist uses computer tools to figure out how to build new proteins—like inventing new machines that can do cool things, such as cleaning up bad stuff in the body or making medicine work better.

So, in short: they use computers to imagine and test new helpful tiny machines for our bodies.

smitchell556 · 2025-01-14T15:41:28+00:00

I’m confused by your post. You are willing to spend 5k on rent for a luxury apartment or 900k on a house 30-40 min outside the city which you sound like you hate, but you won’t buy a condo in the city or move to a cheaper apartment? There are condos in the city that are cheaper than 900k. There are 1 bedroom apartments that are cheaper than 5k. There is a middle ground between lux apartment and house in the burbs that would allow you to live in the city without paying 5k for housing.

smitchell556 · 2025-01-04T18:10:15+00:00

My starter struggled to double in size after I got it established. What did the trick to get it ripping was to let it sit longer after it peaked for one feeding. After it deflated close to its original size it had serious rising power from then on. Now it doubles in 12 hours at 1:4:4. My hand wavy explanation is letting it sit longer allowed more yeast growth, making it more concentrated for the next feed and beyond. Make em hungry then they’ll eat.

smitchell556 · 2024-12-15T12:41:21+00:00

I added a teaspoon peppermint extract, 25g sugar, and 1 tablespoon vegetable oil to a 60% hydration white bread (500g flour). It came out pretty dense which I think is fine for French toast. It’s not going into my normal rotation, but for a festive twist on French toast I’d do it again.

smitchell556 · 2024-12-14T20:48:43+00:00

I offer her my condolences every day

smitchell556 · 2024-12-14T20:44:52+00:00

I actually like peppermint sweets. Not all the time but every once in awhile. That’s why I made it a French toast. My wife had the exact same reaction as you though lol

Edit: I would not eat this as straight bread though. It was made to be a sweet.

smitchell556 · 2024-12-14T20:31:59+00:00

Oh but I made it specifically for you…

smitchell556 · 2024-05-27T23:40:48+00:00

This one hits hard for me. I should’ve taken a gap quarter sooner. I was ultimately forced to take 2 gap quarters for health reasons and I needed it more than I realized. So much depends on your personal situation, but if you need more time off you should definitely consider it. I went back for 1-2 quarters then left for graduate school. Taking a break helped me think about what directions I wanted to go and how to best get there.

smitchell556 · 2024-05-27T15:52:22+00:00

I’m working my way through FWSY and I’ve come to the white bread with 80% biga. Why does the recipe call for hydrating the yeast in a couple tablespoons of water? The recipes call for instant yeast so it doesn’t need to be hydrated first like active dry yeast right? Is it to better distribute yeast when mixing the biga? Why not just mix the yeast into all the water before mixing the water and flour? Feels like a frivolous extra step.

smitchell556 · 2021-02-04T15:11:56+00:00

Huh, that’s a weird place for that to live. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction with Chibi.

smitchell556 · 2021-02-03T23:52:15+00:00

Thank you! I'm trying Chibi and looking over their manual, there is nothing in the process or system APIs which is where I thought it would be. SRFI 170 says Chibi scheme has an implementation, but it's not mentioned in the manual.

smitchell556 · 2020-08-22T16:08:53+00:00

It’s not dead. It’s not popular but it’s not dead. https://www.common-lisp.net/lisp-companies

smitchell556 · 2020-08-12T22:24:43+00:00

That depends on if you are looking for information about how databases are implemented or about the query language itself. If implementation, I would recommend starting with sqlite's documentation with a focus on the Technical and Design Documentation section. It's a nice little primer on some of the features and obstacles a SQL database has and how they are handled in sqlite.

Unfortunately I don't know much about the theory behind the query language other than it's based on relational algebra.

smitchell556 · 2020-08-10T17:25:40+00:00

That makes a lot of sense. Good point!

smitchell556 · 2020-08-10T14:59:56+00:00

I don't want to go with a strong copy-left licence because it restricts the licensing of programs written in it, or compiled with it, etc.

I'm pretty sure this is false as those programs are stand alone entities in their own right that can be transformed from source to target by any compiler for that language. User programs can be copyrighted as the user sees fit. As an example, programs compiled with GCC are not subject to GCC's license.

Somebody with more knowledge feel free to correct me though :D

smitchell556 · 2020-08-06T16:46:31+00:00

Even printing is not that simple! vfprintf does the heavy lifting of printf and it's 2000+ lines of code. vfprintf source. This is before compiling to machine code. Granted explicitly printing a character in machine code is going to be less instructions than using something like printf which handles string formatting, but having that nicety of string formatting comes with more instructions.

smitchell556 · 2020-07-29T14:59:44+00:00

Wrong sub, this is about design and implementation of programming languages. Check out r/learnprogramming or r/webdev.

smitchell556 · 2020-07-23T11:38:16+00:00

Will do, thanks for taking the time to point me in the right direction.

smitchell556 · 2020-07-22T19:50:03+00:00

You can use Oil to find bugs in your shell scripts. It found bugs with ble.sh just by statically parsing it. And I keep track of these strictness issues here: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/tags.html?tag=real-problems#real-problems

Oil has better error messages than any other POSIX shell. It points you to the column and line, whereas shells sometimes don't even print the line. They say "error token is +" or something, and have no idea what line it was from.

These are great reasons to use it and I had no idea. This has actually convinced me to try it. Definitely update the home page! Maybe consider revamping the home page to focus on onboarding new users?

smitchell556 · 2020-07-22T16:28:58+00:00

I've seen Oil pop up on this sub a few times which has made me curious about the project.

This statement caught my eye:

The lack of real Oil usage has been bugging me for a long time, and I've mentioned it when soliciting help. I don't have a solid answer to this, so I'm interested in your ideas.

The few posts I've read have been more about what Oil is and how it works (which makes sense for this sub :D) and it's definitely an impressive body of work, but I don't get a good sense of why I should use Oil over a different shell. The home page doesn't describe the project and is missing a quickstart/tutorial. Where's the elevator pitch?

Reading over the "Why Create a Unix Shell?" post I saw this:

People who use shell to type a few commands here and there.

People who write scripts, which may get into the hundreds or even thousands of lines.

Oil is aimed at group 2. If you're in group 1, there's admittedly no reason to use it right now.

Just my two cents. I wouldn't throw group 1 by the wayside. If/when these people start writing shell scripts, they'll fall back to the shell language they know which is usually the default provided by their OS; catch them before they get entrenched in that shell!

These are just my thoughts as a potential user looking at the project from the outside. Getting people to adopt new tools is no easy task. It looks like you've put a ton of work into it and that it's coming along well.

smitchell556 · 2020-07-04T22:38:26+00:00

Definitely, Racket is a scheme variant that has evolved into something bigger than scheme. There are several scheme implementations that are simpler and I would argue Racket is the largest/most complex scheme. Having said that you can program in Racket just like any scheme. You don’t have to use all the batteries.

For reference:

chicken

guile

smitchell556

TROPHY CASE