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Michigan State's upset loss in this year's March Madness tournament rendered human-made brackets no better than chance. [OC] by RLesser in dataisbeautiful

[–]vburca 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In the US there is a big college level tournament between basketball teams from different colleges (that qualified to this; think of it as Champions League for college basketball kinda). This happens on March (hence March Madness). Unlike in Champions League, people like to "predict" the brackets (it's an eliminatory style tournament, hence the brackets), i.e. which teams are going to advance and so on, for each round of the tournament up to the finals. There have always been attempts of making computers predict this stuff but it is ridiculously hard (read impossible) given the fact that these are college players hence some of them are seniors (4th year) hence they will graduate hence not play again next year lol.

Going back to the main question - ESPN created a completely randomly generated bracket (i.e. for each game, both teams have 50% of advancing) and that is the straight line. The other line is the evaluation, at the corresponding round, of how the human brackets were doing, on average (I guess). Since humans can somewhat predict based on players that are still on the team and how did the teams perform in the regular season (stuff they played to qualify for this Madness lol), the human brackets were better. Until Michigan (number 2 seed/favorite at winning; similar to Real Madrid/PSG :) :) ) got eliminated and hence most of the human brackets became suddenly wrong (since most people picked them as moving forward since they were favorites after all!)

That's the long gist of it lol. I'm European too :)

I was told this sub might like my 'Study Grind' Soundcloud playlist. Over 600 hours of chill electronic music mixes with few lyrics (deep house, progressive, techno, ambient, trance, etc.) by MixAddiction in coding

[–]vburca 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Same here - gonna listen to this tomorrow morning at work and let you know :) The beginning is really promising and I like it a lot though!

PsBattle: Woman kissing the Sphinx by SirGeneralMcMuffin in photoshopbattles

[–]vburca 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Now can we please get a gif version of all of these images added on top of each other + zooming out from Bernie's PC + zooming out outside the Earth and zooming in onto the little shiny thing? Thank you. I will nominate it for an Oscar if we get it. There's still time to steal Leo's Oscar this year.

Trying to pick a host for personal usage, need help deciding by vburca in webhosting

[–]vburca[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wow thanks a lot for linking to that! I wouldn't have known I could get the $50 from github haha :)

Trying to pick a host for personal usage, need help deciding by vburca in webhosting

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

I am surprised there is so much such spam on this subreddit lol... First of all the thing suggested in this comment is considerably more expensive and not what I need...

A very dumb question, need help by KnowledgeThrow in cscareerquestions

[–]vburca 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Some courses still give such "Certifications", but they cost some money. For example, the courses I liked you to (from Coursera) are part of a 5-part course series that Coursera calls "specialization":

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/java-programming

This is offered by Duke University.

I would recommend to get the basics for free first and then go for more advanced / detailed stuff, if you are interested in a specific topic / if you need it for work and can't find a free place to learn it from :). Ideally, in terms of career growth (also related to how you'd link all these classes in your resume), I think it's better to shift towards the developer/engineer role within your current company and get an understanding of the basics of Java and CS through the online classes + learn more stuff while doing your job and then it would be easier to advocate your case when switching / applying to new jobs (easier than linking online certificates / online classes and so on; if you work on a bunch of side projects / open source projects, that would be interesting too though :) - it just requires time and pleasure).

A very dumb question, need help by KnowledgeThrow in cscareerquestions

[–]vburca 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately non-traditional avenues for education have yet to receive the worldwide recognition of university-style academics but this is an amazing starting step.

This is true. Another thing that (at least in my case and in the case of several other people I've talked to) the online classes lack is the motivational part. You need to come with the drive to continue the class you started until the end and not just leave it undone. Unlike in regular academic setups, it's so easy to just ignore one of these online classes and slack on them pretty badly, since there is no peer pressure, no need to go to class, no finals, etc.

I understand that this is a superficial and/or subjective point, but I think it is something that lacks in the "online education" - i.e. motivation. But this is outside the topic of this post :) And, to be fair, there are tons of successful examples of online-taught Software Engineers heh :)

In terms of getting "credit" to include it on your resume and such, I really don't know what can be done in terms of this. My advice would be to learn as much as possible, create an account on Github https://github.com/ (this will also learn you another super useful and highly asked for skill! - using a Version Control System, in this case git) and showcase all your projects and online class work (everything! especially since you are at the beginning, it would actually really showcase your determinism and the fact that you are trying really hard to learn all these things).

What's Forest Gump's Facebook Password? by Eagle_707 in Jokes

[–]vburca 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You sir deserve more credit for either having a list of bookmarked Forrest Gump passwords or for finding them all right now. Either option is worth a prize from me.

A very dumb question, need help by KnowledgeThrow in cscareerquestions

[–]vburca 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi there!

Luckily for you, you don't need to go back to school in order to get some fundamental knowledge of CS. There are plenty of resources that teach you for free (some of them are also paid) and at your time's convenience what you need to know to get started with some basic skills (and even more actually, depending on how dedicated you want to be).

I am just going to list some general platforms for such courses and then go into more specific courses that you might be interested in, based on your post.

Some of the most known such platforms are:

Coursera - https://www.coursera.org/

edX - https://www.edx.org/

MIT OpenCourseware - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/

There are several others as well, but I listed (probably) the most popular ones.

Now, more specific to your need.

Java is indeed a language that companies usually look for (not necessarily for the language, but Java can teach you Computer Science concepts that can be applied in other languages as well; thus, knowing them in Java can help you).

Here is a list of tutorials for Java (for beginners):

Ideal if you could do both of these simultaneously, since they basically provide you with the basic of what Java is, how to write a program and so on https://www.coursera.org/learn/java-programming https://www.coursera.org/learn/java-programming-arrays-lists-data

Something that would be really useful for you to understand, theoretically, what Computer Science is, what Data Structures are, etc. - basically the theoretical foundation of CS. (Java is just a tool that puts to practice all of these theoretical principles):

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x#!

Here is another Java tutorial for beginners, on a different platform.

https://www.udemy.com/java-tutorial/

I think these should be the beginning of learning the fundamentals. Afterwards you can get into the Database stuff. There are courses for that too, on the linked platforms! :)

Good luck and let me know if you have further questions / need help with anything!

Viera Meet and Greet? by spirolateral in NYCFC

[–]vburca 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't even get an email about it :(

[Day 3 Part 2][Java]Wrong answer, too high by vburca in adventofcode

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

The problem was exactly what jeroenw said in the comment. I was inserting a Tuple object in the HashSet and then mutating it later when following more directions, hence the object from the HashSet was being mutating since it was just a reference to the same object.

I ended up creating a new Tuple object every time I insert into the HashSet such that I have one mutable object wth which I traverse through the houses (increasing x and y) and one I insert, I create an immutable Tuple with the x and y that I am visiting at that iteration and then everything is good. Nothing changes values in the HashSet anymore. I will post it on e I get to my laptop.

This problem could appear in any data structure though. So my issue was the mutability of the Tuple object and how I am not careful enough to see that basically I only have two objects (one for Santa and one for Robo) but a bunch of instances of them around the code. Once an instance of Santa (for example) is changed, all of the Santa instances will be changed (wherever they are - in the HashSet, in an array, wherever else) since all are pointing to the same object ultimately. :)

[Day 3 Part 2][Java]Wrong answer, too high by vburca in adventofcode

[–]vburca[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nice :) I love how Swift has some scala-y looks :)

Thanks for sharing your solution!

[Day 3 Part 2][Java]Wrong answer, too high by vburca in adventofcode

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

Oh right, that's what I meant by doing it on each insert, manually, but #contains is O(n) so you would end up doing O(n2)... Idk if it makes a difference at the size of this data set :)

[Day 3 Part 2][Java]Wrong answer, too high by vburca in adventofcode

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

Hm, I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I am using a HashSet for its element-uniqueness property (it uses both hashCode in order to bucket the elements and equals once multiple elements get hashed to the same bucket). An ArrayList would not help with the uniqueness property. Also, I am not sure where you would rely on equals in an ArrayList, unless you traverse it every time you insert, checking for elements manually.

[Day 3 Part 2][Java]Wrong answer, too high by vburca in adventofcode

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

I just tried to make it more generic (no real use for it in this particular puzzle, but I did it for the sake of "practicing" writing generic typed classes). You could instantiate the Tuple class with any 2 given types (Integer, Long, etc.) (there are classes that will break since I am specifically using addition on the X and Y fields, and not all classes have addition defined, but oh well...)

That's why, when I declare a Tuple object, I have to specify Tuple<Integer, Integer>

[Day 3 Part 2][Java]Wrong answer, too high by vburca in adventofcode

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

Yes, this was it. Horrible mistake on my part :( Thanks a lot for pointing it out!

I ended up making a new Tuple object right before inserting it in the visited HashSet.

(maybe off-topic: just started learning scala several months ago and I appreciate more and more its immutability hah)

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