kidintech

why is a least common multiple news and a concept that we love/hate??

But this way the people who don't have a subscription (which we can safely assume to be GREATER than those who have ad blockers) don't even open the page, so they still don't get any revenue.

???

Yeah haha, caught it just after I wrote my comment. IMO, I expected the author to talk about that right after the snippet, as it was the first thing that stuck out.

Have I not drank my coffee today or does the 'multiplied' value in the strawman program never change?

It starts at 0 and keeps multiplying itself with integers, which should always result in 0.

EDIT: My bad, it is explained after the code snippet, but not immediately after so I didn't catch it at first.

I think this is highly dependent on how your course is structured. I used to do a lot of contractor work and competitive programming before going to uni. I thought I knew how to write code, or at least knew how to "teach myself". I had never been more wrong.

Having tough coursework across diverse esoteric subjects (where you cannot easily stack overflow your way into a solution) was easily the best learning experience of my life. Standing before massive "walls" that looked impossible to climb, and being forced to figure out how to do it on my own, is the most important skill I have. Some CWs which I thought were particularly tough and taught me a lot:

- Kernel for target non-widespread platform (where all you have is the processor's manual), capable of IPC, written from scratch in C.

- Both a pathtracer and a rasterizer without using a graphics library. (you can read about the advantages or disadvantages of each one, but writing both makes you appreciate each technique independently)

- Some sort of compiler or interpreter (parser too).

- HPC problem that requires non-trivial parallelisation and vectorisation.

- Some sort of adversarial attack on a target "real world" platform that uses deprecated encryption (i.e. RSA).

- Individual research project.

ALL of these tasks are possible to do by yourself, independently, but very hard to see them through the end without solid infrastructure and support staff surrounding you. I imagine it takes a very highly motivated individual to do the same things outside of academia.

The biggest benefit of attending uni is learning how to learn and tackle complex problems.

That is a pretty unwarranted passive-aggressive remark, especially considering you know nothing about the person you'r e replying to and all he said were objective truths.

That makes a lot of sense, and is probably a version that's much easier to quantify.

> you’re saying only the top 10-20% of CS grad

I'm saying that ALL top 10-20% of CS grads will be able to answer questions at this difficulty level in an interview scenario (accounting for nerves and so on). I'm not limiting it to them (i.e. the "only" quantifier).

I know people in the bottom of CS grads (judging by GPA) that worked remote jobs or worked on personal projects during uni that are very talented and would be able to solve this in less than five minutes. But there are also people that merely "got by".

> I’d guess I was getting a random selection of candidates.

I stand by my opinion that if you were recruiting for a software eng role (and not some random front-end position), then blacklisting anyone who failed this problem would be reasonable.

Am I misunderstanding your problem, or would this be a valid solution: https://pastebin.com/GWKr4AQ8

If so, then the company you're interviewing for must not be attractive to first-class CS grads (top 10-20% I think) from any non-online university.

As a comparison, any FAANG + Palantir/Jane Street/Two Sigma in the UK have tougher questions as their FIRST phone interview for INTERNSHIPS. (Palantir requires you to go through 6-8? interviews before getting an offer)

If this is a job that requires actual software engineers, I think rejecting everyone that failed this question would be perfectly reasonable.

> Have you ever had a hard time figuring out if someone is really bright or not?

How do you define bright? Assuming bright to mean able to achieve post-grad honors:

I feel like you could easily distinguish if someone is bright or not within a few minutes of chatting.

I think that regardless of the subject of discussion, there are a number of strong indicators in the way a person speaks. One example is confidence: very rarely have I met a person I'd call intelligent that is also absurdly confident in their beliefs.

I realise my above statement is highly interpretable. What I mean is intelligent people seem to allow for their assumptions to be flawed, and be open to being proven wrong, about stuff that they can be proven wrong on (i.e. belief about a mathematical postulate versus belief in an objective truth such as global warming is real).

Yep, that seems like an elegant solution.

> CT was unnecessarily difficult due to being thrown into a bunch of definitions way to soon

I had a similar experience. Luckily, due to reading many definitions of the basic things (such as monoids), I reached a more complete? intuition of the concept if you will. I think that given enough definitions, people will converge to the same intuition of abstract concepts.

> To new learners I suggest to think of “objects” as the number of dots on domino tiles, or the poles of magnets, they describe where things may, or may not, compose, nothing more

Wouldn't a simpler intuition of circles and arrows be easier?

I agree that to an inexperienced reader, most of your points would be valid. The downside is, it would be too verbose (imagine defining what big R is, for example). It being too verbose would stray away a different subset of readers, which arguably is more invested in learning (the number of readers that know what R and a monoid are but not category theory).

I think that the best way forward in your case is simply googling terms that the writers took for granted and which you don't understand (a monoid, for example), because the book material is one of the best I've seen on category theory.