Funny how everyone here, myself included, assumed the numbers were integers!
I like the follow up question of "what if they are floats?" to see if the interviewee knows not to use `==` with floats.
741 karma · joined August 9, 2013
I like the follow up question of "what if they are floats?" to see if the interviewee knows not to use `==` with floats.
> > is the list sorted?
> this barely qualifies as a clarifying question in my opinion.
Maybe I'm being too charitable but whether or not the list is sorted is very relevant to the first solution that came to my mind as I read the problem.
for i from 1 to n:
for j from i+1 to n:
prod = a[i] * a[j]
if prod == 220:
# found it
if prod > 220:
break
# don't waste time, assumes sorted> Yet that's what we kind of do every year implicitly by continuing through inertia. Healthcare, financial/banking, transportation, rocket launches, etc.
Also on this absurd list: academic publishing
This has been my conclusion after years of trying different tools or even trying to make my own. Once I started focusing on the process I realized that not only I don't need a lot of features from a tool, I'm actually better off without any complex features.
I just use markdown, vim, and git. This specific choice of tools for me is only guided by one thing: I don't want to waste any brain cycles on figuring out / deciding how my note taking tools should behave. For someone else this could've been a Word doc and a folder structure. When you do that, then taking notes becomes as trivial as writing with pen and paper, except for the ability to edit and grep which is really all you need.
Bonus: it's ridicuously easy to work with markdown (and friends) with pandoc. I routinely convert all my markdown notes to html and use < 100 loc of ad-hoc JS to give it a decent browsing UI.
To be clear, even a nested hash is all well as long as the depth and the keys are literals (as in your example). It is when keys are dynamic that things get unruly. And god forbid if the _depth_ of nesting is dynamic. All of these are trivial to implement in Python, Ruby, JS, PHP, ...
* I agree that reducing salaries for academics will only make the currently misplaced incentives worse. It will deprive society from the valuable research that more competent and talented folks would have done. In my mind, the key point in all these budgetary conversations is the ballooning bureaucratic/administrative layer that is eating up more and more of the budget and making it harder for universities, as collectives of teachers and researchers, to adapt to the evolving priorities of the real world.
* I disagree that there should be less researchers. Fewer academics, maybe, but we definitely need more people who can make a lifestyle out of entirely or partially doing research. My admittedly anecdotal impression is that for every "not exactly scientifically smart" person who secures tenure, there are a handful of would-have-been-great researchers who just get fed up and leave academia despite having the passion, competence, and the willingness to even make a few sacrifices.
IMHO we have cornered ourselves into a false dichotomy (broad strokes here, there are exceptions of course): either (a) you are an academic, you have to pull 60 hr weeks to do any meaningful research, and you have to deal the ossified structural issues of academia, or (b) you are out in the wild, make a lot more money, but you spend your 40 hr weeks towards maximizing short-term profits of your employer. I would think were there a viable alternative to this dichotomy that many passionate and competent people would happily make some reasonable sacrifices (in pay, work hours) to engage meaningfully in much-needed research.
At a traditional corporation however the emergent "mind of its own" is there but it is effectively only influenced by the minuscule group of people who control it. And in this sense it is soulless in the same way that an army is soulless.
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Syntax_tree_for_Colorless...
EDIT: and K-9 (for Android) as mail-client.
Just take the recent Supreme Court ruling [1] that made it even harder than it already was to sue corporations for human right abuses overseas. The ruling is already being used as precedent [2] to dismiss overseas abuse charges.
[1] "Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co." http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/10-1491_l6gn.pdf
[2] "Al Shimari v. CACI et al." http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/al-shimari-v-ca...