Perhaps a substitute could be "stretch the sphere open so you're standing in the middle of it", with your arms outstretched on either side of you. Although this might trade smacking yourself for smacking your neighbors.
531 karma · joined February 14, 2016
Personally, I read the title to be a pun on "30 minutes or less", a phrase American pizzerias sometimes use to advertise guarantees about their delivery times. The book is promising to show you useful programs in "500 lines or less, guaranteed!".
What kind of work has there been on creating programming paradigms that make it easy to both add new types and new methods? Is it a CAP-theorem-type problem where every solution is a trade-off, or is there a way to have your cake and eat it too?
I continue to be impressed with the Let's Encrypt team's professionalism in their interactions with everyone in the security community. It makes me happy to see post-mortems like this one where everything went as it should have and the issue was resolved without any breech in security. Really reflects well on Let's Encrypt and Facebook's product security team.
You ask them a whiteboard coding question -- something about manipulating strings or implementing simple searching. Let's ignore the debate of whether this is a productive technique for interviews for now. You ask for Python in this question since you've already covered JavaScript.
The candidate can't remember what the "str" type is called, or how to find substrings in a string, or the difference between "==" and "is" for objects. They ask you to remind them if "join" is a method on sequences or on strings. They write "length()" when they mean "len()".
We've discussed at length on HN the challenges of whiteboard coding. "Nobody's favorite IDE is their conference room whiteboard".
But I feel that, even through the flawed medium of the whiteboard, I'm seeing symptoms of the candidate not really "knowing" Python to the degree I would expect of someone who applied for a job writing it.
None of the people I work with who write Python would ever forget one of these basics. I think they recognize that the ultimate "efficiency" isn't a cheat sheet on your wall, but rather learning and internalizing these tools by repeatedly using them.
Forgive me for setting up what I recognize to be a straw-man argument. Not everyone who writes Python was hired for their ability to do it. Maybe the candidate is a stellar JavaScript developer, and their only Python weaknesses are with the syntax and standard library. Perhaps a cheat sheet is an effective way to bridge the gap between "learning" and "internalizing" a language's features.
Nonetheless, I'd like to hear people's thoughts on the hypothetical situation above (or another better one, if you feel the one I've chosen is biased or misses the point).
To the author(s): Your website, as far as I could tell, doesn't tell me how to install it; I had to go to GitHub to realize it was pip-installable. You should consider adding that to the main page.
Then, a passionate friend converted me to Vim. I only ever used it to do battle with my .vimrc. I never got any real work done.
Now, I use Atom. Click a button, install a feature. No more distractions.
I wish it were faster though; I can never get any real work done.