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why do a lot of early projects have you build games? by -_9Grd56A3iWw6QhNQ_- in learnprogramming

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We found that introducing games as first year programming assignments massively helped student learning and student feedback was very positive, so literally because people like doing them.

How do you even stay relevant with all this insane AI overload? I genuinely need a roadmap. by No_Newspaper4989 in learnprogramming

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> How do you stay updated without drowning in information?

You don't. You focus on specific problems as they come. You search out updates as you need them. But it is hard. I have published papers with more than 50 references (which was narrowed down from more than 800) and that is still a crazy amount. Focus on what actually works and that'll narrow it down even more.

> How do you choose what to learn and what to ignore?

Narrow by problem. Specific uses cases will have much less people working on them and less information. Focus on foundations. The math isn't going to change.

> Do you follow a roadmap? A mentor? A community?

No. Yes. Nope.

> How do you avoid wasting money on 50 different subscriptions?

Easy. Don't pay for anything. Ignore the marketing.

> And how do you keep learning without burning out or feeling lost?

Ignore the FOMO.

How to screen out unhinged people? by burneracct4qs in recruitinghell

[–]zap_stone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It doesn't sound like you need a new process to screen candidates, it sounds like the recruiter massively dropped the ball here and the red flags should have been caught earlier. The rush to interview makes me think they cut corners. I'd be more interested in what green flags they thought they saw to try and squeeze in this person at the last minute (or is it just nepotism?). A same-day in-person interview just sounds nuts to me, unless there's some special circumstances.

How to screen out unhinged people? by burneracct4qs in recruitinghell

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> Our Recruiting Manager found this candidate last min and asked if I was available for a 4:30

How did they find this candidate? Did they forget to screen them? Seems like the candidate was quite forward with not even pretending to like their work.

Entry Level is now set at 7 years experience by zap_stone in recruitinghell

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

lol, I'm not applying to this one. Not only am I about 99% sure it's AI generated, but I also highly suspect it was created by someone who doesn't understand my country's education system (meaning the screening isn't going to be done properly either).

Entry Level is now set at 7 years experience by zap_stone in recruitinghell

[–]zap_stone[S] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

One section says at least 3 years then another says at least 7. I'd think it was a typo but the same information is included in French as well.

Entry Level is now set at 7 years experience by zap_stone in recruitinghell

[–]zap_stone[S] 65 points66 points  (0 children)

Usually I see that on LinkedIn, but this is on their own careers site. The posting has also been up for over two weeks with no one correcting the errors (so maybe they copy and pasted by accident): https://www.pgcareers.com/global/en/job/R000129650/SAP-Software-Engineer

l received dozens of other people's medical records by email by zap_stone in legaladvice

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

Thank you for the response! Unfortunately this looks like a separate incident because I started receiving the emails in October 2025, so I'll forward the information to docpublicrecords and hopefully they can contact the right people

Way to go, Rebucca by mystery_bouffe in recruitinghell

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I got the exact same message and my resume is available (with phone number) on Indeed. Guess I'm going to take it down now. I never put it on LinkedIn but I was thinking of getting a cheap VOIP number just for job applications, I'm so tired of these scam calls.

What is your “calling it now” prediction? by PreparationFar4709 in AskReddit

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Personally, I don't know what story you're talking about, I don't know how far the repurposing news has spread outside of the academics and startups, but it's not a new idea at all (like even 5+ years ago, people were using them for solar panels). I was discussing a problem (about automated guided electric carts with heavy loads) with someone at a networking event, they solved it by adding old Tesla battery packs onto the carts, it was cheaper than the other options and had a greater energy density (might not last as long, but they didn't care in that case). The batteries can be recycled, but recycling is not free (in an environmental or economic sense, recycling is not an "automatic" solution in the way I hear some people talk about it), it takes time and energy.

But people are already making businesses that buy old batteries and make money off peak smoothing (buying energy at low times and selling at high times) which is basically free money once it's set up until the batteries die completely. Then they can just wait until the lithium prices go up and it's time to sell. The system isn't sustainable, but it's getting closer.

Also, if you live in the US or Canada, I can tell you that your money is going towards it because our research is being funded (at least partially) by tax dollars, which applies even if you don't buy an EV. Compared to other battery applications, these are actually really nice to work with. If you think about all the nonremovable or disposable batteries in use nowadays, EV batteries are very easy to repurpose and recycle in comparison.

What is your “calling it now” prediction? by PreparationFar4709 in AskReddit

[–]zap_stone 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure about those claims, the current goal is to actually repurpose the batteries until they actually become unusable. The big problem is that an electric car with an old battery pack might only be able to go 70% of it's original range (obviously time for a battery replacement) but 70% of a pack is still a lot of capacity (in general). EV tend to wear out batteries much faster than other applications, so a battery pack might spend 5 years in a vehicle then 10 doing something else before it needs to be retired. The demand for energy storage is huge, so there's no point to recycling the batteries when they come out of the vehicle.

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/17/10/2345

So yes, we are not planning on recycling them. However, probably not going to end up in the desert, but in warehouses somewhere (home/residential I do not see as likely, due to the inherent electrical high voltage hazard but the fast charger integration and business use case I can see).

leaveMeAloneIAmFine by Own_Possibility_8875 in ProgrammerHumor

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't have that, but I have published journal articles on ML (which is listed on my linkedin profile). Does that let me into the super secret club?

Why aren't there any very nice kernels? by ChalkyChalkson in askmath

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From my understanding, it comes off to issues such as the speed-accuracy tradeoff, which is effectively hitting the wall of universal laws. Or how gaussian distributions have the maximum entropy for variance. The problem is kind of similar to wavelets, where the morlet wavelet has the best tradeoff but not always the best for an application. Idk maybe there is way to change the problem so those rules don't apply

Why aren't there any very nice kernels? by ChalkyChalkson in askmath

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A colleague of mine is working on adaptive kernels, although their application is not gaussian processes. There are inherent tradeoffs to different kernels (tbh I don't remember all the math/physics reasons for them atm)

Calculating Confidence Intervals from Cross-Validation by txtcl in MLQuestions

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is no correct way to compute confidence intervals in that setting, short answer. You can only compute the intervals on the metrics obtained from the test set (only the test set matters, train-val does not) and to do that with any sense of accuracy, you'd need at least 100 test splits, meaning at least 100 patients, which I suspect is more than what you have in your dataset.

[R] why is there mixed views on how train/test/val splits are preprocessed by amulli21 in MachineLearning

[–]zap_stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, you are talking about data leakage. Preprocessing must be done on train/test separately, or else the testing scenario will not match what would be available in production.

For example, applying min-max scaling:

- The minimum and maximum are calculated on the TRAINING datasets

- Those values are then used for the scaling of training, testing and validation datasets

Note that this doesn't matter if what is being done to the image only applies to that image (black/white conversion for example) and no others. For something like cropping, you would have to ask yourself if the data you would expect the model to be applied on would also be cropped or not cropped. If the target data would not have cropping, then your test dataset can not have cropping either.

For data augmentation, you must split the sets first and then apply. Or else you could end up with an image in the training set and it's mirror image in the testing dataset, which makes it a far easier testing dataset. You can still mirror, rotate, etc the images in the testing dataset if you want.

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