jervisfm

@mockingbirdy, do you have an email contact ? Would be curious to learn more about your experiences in this area.

Have you tried Google Takeout [1]? I understand that will let you download all your data.

[1] - https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

Hi,

It's good that you're starting to think about your applications early. Applying to college is a lot of work and one way you can help yourself is by starting early. Do not procrastinate on this. Starting early, gives you more time to prepare and ensure that you have the strongest possible application.

In my experience, Top schools look at your application holistically as a package so there isn't just a single particular thing that will guarantee admission. For example, it is possible to for a candidate with perfect SATs to fail to get into Harvard. That's not to say SATs/test scores are not important - a high SAT score does, all things being equal, improve you chances. But rather, it is to show you that it alone is not sufficient.

So how do you get in ? You make sure each aspect of your application is as strong as possible. This includes things like your SATs test scores, letters of recommendation, application essay and the like. For SATs, one way to get high scores is to just take many practice exams. This is hard work (the exam is 3hrs+) but most of the question there follow a certain style and after doing it a few times you will naturally get good at answering those questions.

On recommendation letters, my suggestion is to get letters from people who know you really well and can speak candidly and accurately on your current intellect as well as your potential for college-studies. The contents of the letter matter much more than who writes it. For example, you say you lead your high school computer club. I'd imagine that you have had a lot of interactions with the computer instructors at your school in that capacity and so he/she is really familiar with you and your skills at an intimate level. Such a recommender is more likely to write a strong letter since they've seen and know your work first hand.

One strategy that may help you determine if a recommender is a good fit is to ask them: Can you write me a strong recommendation letter ? Most would be up front if that's not the case and politely decline if they cannot write you such a letter. So if you can get strong recommendation letter from someone at Google/NASA, go for it. Otherwise, I'd get one from people who know you well.

The other part of this is your application essay. Do spend time crafting that. Unlike most of the pieces of the application, this is one part where you have total control and you should use this to your advantage. Most top schools give you freedom as to what you can write about, so put some real thought as to what you'd like to focus on. Suggested topics to touch on include, why are you passionate about CS and how did that happen. It's a good idea to have a close-friend or instructor to review your essay. It helps to get a second pair of eyes give you feedback. Make sure though that your voice and personality still shines through in your essay after incorporating any feedback and making adjustments.

I hope some of this is helpful.

Good luck!

I realized that Adblock plus was a performance hog a long time ago and it is good to see that information being shared widely. The issue especially impacts those who have many many tabs open all at once.

Interestingly, there is a uBlock alternative which I had not heard about[1]. If the more efficient claims are true, it would definitely be worthwhile to switch over to that instead.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-...

> It's broken because many people correctly calculate that the impact of their individual vote has less value than the cost of physically voting, and even less so than the cost of educating themselves about the candidates and issues.

Agreed but that becomes an issue if everyone thinks and behaves like that. That is, if individually everyone goes through the same thought process concluding that voting is not worthwhile for them on an individual basis what happens is that no one votes. There is an inflection point below which votes do actually matter.

> democracy in general is a bad way to aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people. That may be true. The question then becomes what is a better way to "aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people" ? Perhaps, such an aggregation is not practically possible.

I was curious too about my own code, so I looked at the last publicly available C code I wrote with fork in it[1], and yep I checked for the error case too :)

I think this just came from being drilled in school on the importance of checking error return values. No matter how unlikely never assume that something can't happen. If it really can't you should at the very least assert on it.

[1] - https://github.com/jervisfm/W4118_HW1/blob/master/shell/shel...

Wait a minute, if that's true won't it imply that traffic violations/infractions convictions get you a criminal record ?

>This newer 2013 MacBook Air is holding up much better than the 2012 model, and I'm consistently still getting 6-8 hours of life out of the battery at least.

It may be just my usage patterns but I never seem to get more than 4 hours on the 2013 Air. I mostly have a fair number of Chrome tabs along with a terminal window open and that seems to be enough to drain the batter rather quickly.