bshlgrs's comments

(Author here) As far as I know, there are no cases where this actually matters.

Yeah, afaik this problem is totally unimportant in practice.

Good question :) The difference is that in that case, the problem might take a long time because the input is very long, but in this case, the problem might take a long time even if the input itself is fairly short.

(I am a former Triplebyte employee) The Triplebyte process also involves talking to an actual person; how are you proposing to game that?

This app sounds really cool!

I installed it but wasn't too impressed with the quality of the emoji. (This could be because I look kind of weird; eg I have pink hair.) It's really easy to take photos and see how the emoji look; I encourage other people to try that out.

I'm excited to see whether this technology ends up working well in future.

The first part is real, and the second part is the joke.

Here's what Larry Summers had to say on this topic:

> 'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

> 1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

> 2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

> 3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

"At around 1,000,000 elements our unsorted vector takes around 32 minutes to lookup a string."

I don't at all believe that C++ can only iterate through 2000 strings a second. Python takes an imperceptibly small time to iterate through an array of a million strings when I test it out in my repl, and I imagine C++ would either be as fast or somewhat faster. This number is so ridiculous that it makes me very skeptical of the rest of the article.

This list is an awkward mix of posts containing easily-verifiable but surprising claims about various technical specifications, and posts which just make a variety of contentious claims with no particular evidence provided (I think the economics one is possibly the worst).

But that makes no sense--if you want high social mobility (and you think college grads should be paid more), you want both those numbers to be lower. The article treats it as a problem that they're similar.

This article is terrible. It makes a shitty and misleading graph, and generates a variety of nonsensical judgements from it.

The graph used makes it really hard to see what the actual distributions of overall income are. If you make, say, a bar graph of the income distributions, you'll see that poor college grads do much better than rich high school dropouts. I made such a graph here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/112K9ejdFQMPcnvEqERT2...

I also estimated the average incomes of both groups based on the given statistics, and found an average income of $78k for the poor college grads and $60k for the rich high school dropouts.

The main piece of evidence that this blog post uses to support its thesis is: "Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively. Not only that, but these low-income strivers are just as likely to end up in the bottom as these wealthy ne'er-do-wells. Some meritocracy."

The first of these statistics is not clearly related to meritocracy. If you want high income mobility, you want both these numbers to be low. The sentence is phrased as if it's bad that the numbers are similar; that doesn't make sense.

The second of these statistics is correctly interpreted, but seems cherry-picked: I could just as easily point out that 41% of poor college grads end up in the top 40% of income, while only 19% of rich high school dropouts do. To prevent such cherry-picking, we should probably use the Schelling point summary statistics like mean income or median income, both of which indicate that the poor college grads are doing significantly better.

As far as I can tell, the original paper didn't do anything wrong, this "reporter" just decided to make up some bullshit conclusions from the statistics. This is even worse than most reporting--the mistake isn't something you have to read the original source to find, the mistake is right there in the graph that Facebook is suggesting as the image preview. Alas!

I disagree with this recommendation; Project Euler is focused on mathematical questions that don't teach a type of thinking very similar to the thinking used while constructing most algorithms.

I think a lot of [these ones](http://mcntyr.com/52-concepts-cognitive-toolkit/) are really useful and more advanced.

I think a low-level/algorithmic bootcamp would be great, and it wouldn't be that hard to make one.

I also think that it's not obvious that the interviewer is doing the wrong thing here. The claim "good programmers should always think to guard against invalid input" isn't ridiculous on the face of it: maybe checking for valid input is a sign that they're careful and methodical, and of course you want to hire careful and methodical people!

Or the other way around: I can imagine someone thinking "this person spent ages on checking for invalid input; I bet their code is always bloated and ugly".

The problem is that programmers do this one way or the other based on personal preference, not because of actual differences in ability. Once you know that, it makes less sense to care one way or the other.

It sort of makes sense. If someone knows a language well, they shouldn't have much trouble writing it syntactically correctly on a whiteboard. Especially in languages which have simpler syntax, like Ruby vs eg Scala.

Another tip which I give: Interviewers vary widely in how much they care about whether your syntax is accurate, whether you handle invalid inputs, and whether you write unit tests. It's really useful to ask the interviewer whether they want you to worry about those things.

If you handle invalid inputs for an interviewer who doesn't care about that, they're going to be a little annoyed by you going more slowly than needed. If you don't handle invalid inputs for an interviewer who does care, then they'll think you're careless.