Classic 2001 CMU Guide Offers Timeless Advice for New Graduate Students

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A 2001 essay authored at Carnegie Mellon University offers guidance aimed at students beginning graduate studies in computer science. The piece has resurfaced on Hacker News, attracting community attention despite its age. It addresses foundational attitudes and habits that can shape a successful research career. The essay remains relevant to those entering academic research environments today.

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How a Jumia Product Dataset Was Cleaned and Turned Into an Excel Dashboard

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

PowerSifu 0.3.5 drops polling in favour of D-Bus event-driven power management

PowerSifu, a free GTK tray application for Ubuntu and Debian, manages laptop power profiles by switching settings when AC power status changes and adjusting brightness accordingly. Early versions polled system state every five seconds, waking the CPU unnecessarily even when nothing had changed — a counterproductive design for a tool meant to reduce power consumption. Version 0.3.5 replaces this with persistent D-Bus proxies that subscribe to real-time property-change notifications from UPower and power-profiles-daemon, triggering callbacks only when the power source or active profile actually changes. A lightweight 60-second reconciliation check is retained as a safety net to catch missed signals or service restarts, but it is not the primary monitoring mechanism. Weekly schedule checks were also decoupled from the main loop, now sleeping until the next minute boundary and firing once, with the timer disabled entirely if no schedules are configured.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Benchmark reveals most AI models follow wrong tests over correct specs under pressure

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