[HN Gopher] Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance
___________________________________________________________________
Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance
Author : qikcik
Score : 88 points
Date : 2026-03-22 12:23 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.dominikrudnik.pl)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.dominikrudnik.pl)
| piokoch wrote:
| This is very interesting, I've been using LLM to learn new things
| that way and it really worked. To some extent, learning with LLM
| is better than taking any course, even with a tutor, as I am
| getting something prepared for me, in terms of my experience,
| progress level, etc.
|
| LLM is going to change schools and universities a lot, teachers,
| tutors will have to find themselves in the new reality, as they
| have a strong competitor with infinite resources and huge
| knowledge, patient and ready to work with every student in a
| distinct way, according to student's needs, level, intelligence,
| etc.
|
| Instruction-based tutoring is dead from that perspective, why
| should I follow someone reciting a book or online tutorial, while
| there is a tool that can introduce me into subject in a better
| and more interesting way?
|
| Sure, there are great teachers, who are inspiring people, who are
| able to present the topic in a great way, the point is, they are
| minority. Now, everyone can have a great tutor for a few dollars
| a month (or for free, if you don't need generating too much data
| quickly).
| pandatigox wrote:
| Sounds interesting, can you share some useful prompts for
| learning?
| r_lee wrote:
| (not OP but..) I personally am not very into "prompting", you
| just need to figure out how these models work
|
| it's best when you ask a well known problem/thing they can
| reference (vs. a niche way to solve exactly what you want to
| solve)
|
| then you work backwards, I e. why is it like this, what is
| this for, what are the alternative ways to accomplish this
| etc...
|
| it's a big query engine after all.
|
| don't try to ask like "what is the exact right way" or etc.
| because it will try to generate that and likely hallucinate
| if there is no such answer in its training corpus.
|
| instead ask what the model does know, or doesn't.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I can! What thing have you been learning lately? What is your
| current knowledge level? What is it your goal to learn about
| it next?
| fragmede wrote:
| To some extent. I had Claude (Sonnet 4.5) generate some
| homework problems for students I was teaching to code, and the
| problem/answers weren't actually right. They were subtlety
| wrong, which makes me worry about using it for other subjects.
| e12e wrote:
| I think that Knoll's law of media accuracy applies quite well
| to LLMs as well:
|
| > "everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true,
| except for the rare story of which you happen to have
| firsthand knowledge".
| jeffbee wrote:
| LLMs aren't any of these things: infinite, knowledgable,
| patient, or ready. They are a compressed representation of all
| of the misstatements and misunderstandings in the history of
| Reddit. If you think you've been using LLMs to "learn new
| things" it could be because you aren't already familiar with
| the domain and you can't see where it's misleading you.
| mistahenry wrote:
| I mean, you've collapsed a complex, mixed system into a
| single negative narrative.
|
| Examples of how I learn with LLMs:
|
| - Paste sections from reading and ask questions / clarify my
| understanding / ask it to quiz me
|
| - Produce Anki cards by pasting in chapter text and the
| culling out the goods ones
|
| - Request resources / links for further learning
|
| Basically, LLMs serve as a thinking partner. Yes, it's a
| fallible tool, not an oracle. But dismissing the idea that
| you can learn (and learn faster / more efficiently) with LLMs
| is reductionist
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > LLM is going to change schools and universities a lot,
| teachers, tutors will have to find themselves in the new
| reality, as they have a strong competitor with infinite
| resources and huge knowledge, patient and ready to work with
| every student in a distinct way, according to student's needs,
| level, intelligence, etc.
|
| No it won't. It really, really wont. You clearly don't have any
| university professors amongst your friends or acquaintances.
|
| What you wrote is what the _STUDENTS_ think. The students think
| they have found a cheat code.
|
| No university professor considers LLM "a competitor". They see
| the slop output every day on their desk.
|
| The reality is just like LLMs will confidently push out slop
| code, they will also push out slop for everything else. Because
| the reality is that LLMs are nothing more than a party trick, a
| stats based algorithm that gives you answers within a gaussian
| curve.
|
| The students come to the professors with stupid questions
| because they've been trusting the AI instead of learning
| properly. Some of the students even have the audacity to
| challenge the professor's marking saying "but the AI said it is
| right" in relation to some basic math formula that the student
| should know how to solve with their own brain.
|
| So what do my university professor friends end up doing ?
|
| They spend their evenings and weekends thinking up lab tasks
| that the students cannot achieve by simply asking the LLM for
| the answer. The whole point of university is you go there to
| learn to reason and think with your own damn brain, not paste
| the question into a text box and paste the answer to your
| professor.
|
| Trying to cheat your way through university with an LLM is a
| waste of the students time, a waste of the professors time and
| a waste of the university's infrastructure.
|
| That, my friend, is the reality.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I'm an unusually good programmer, I've worked in over 25
| different programming languages and have been doing it since
| I was 6. I've spent most of my career as an applied
| researcher in research orgs where my full time job is study.
|
| Finding new relevant things to learn gets progressively more
| difficult and LLMs have blown that right open. Even if they
| haze zero new ideas the encoding and searching of existing
| ideas is nothing live I've seen before. If they can teach me
| things they can definitely teach less experienced people
| things as well. Sometimes it takes a bit of prodding, like it
| will insist something is impossible but when presented with
| evidence to the contrary will resume to give working
| prototypes. Which means in these very long tail instances it
| does still help to have some prerequisite knowledge. I wish
| they were more able to express uncertainty.
|
| I think the primary reason Ed Tech hasn't been disrupted is
| that an expensive education is a costly signal and a class
| demarcator, making it cheaper defeats the primary purpose.
| Grade creep, reproducibility crisis, plagiarism crisis,
| cheating scandals fail to undermine this purpose. In fact the
| worse it gets the more it becomes a costly signal. As
| inequality increases so does the importance social signals.
| In many countries Universities are given special privileges
| to act as a gateway to permanent residency which is extremely
| profitable. If anything is to replace education it would have
| to either supplant this role as a social signal or the reward
| for the social signal will need to be lost and I don't see
| either happening anytime soon short of a major calamity.
| pcf wrote:
| He said: "LLM is going to change schools and universities a
| lot"
|
| You said: "No it won't. It really, really wont."
|
| With the explosive development of LLMs and their abilities,
| it seems your point of view is probably the hopeful one while
| the other poster has the realistic one.
|
| It seems that you simply can't say anything about what LLMs
| will not be able to do. Especially when you try to use
| current "AI slop" as your main reason, which is being more
| and more eradicated.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > "AI slop" as your main reason, which is being more and
| more eradicated.
|
| The slop is the hard truth.
|
| As I made perfectly clear in my original post. My
| university professor friends get handed AI slop by their
| students each and every day.
|
| There is no "eradication of slop" happening. If anything,
| it is getting worse. Trust me, my friends see the output
| from all the latest algorithms on their desk.
|
| The students think they are being very clever, the students
| think the magical LLM is the best thing since sliced bread.
|
| All the professor sees is a wall of slop on their desk and
| a student that is not learning how to reason and think with
| their own damn brain.
|
| And when the professors tries politely and patiently to
| challenge them and test their understanding as you would
| expect in a university environment, the snowflake students
| just whine and complain because they know they've been
| caught out drinking the LLM kool-aid again for the 100th
| time this week.
|
| Hence the student is wasting their time and money at
| university, and the professor is wasting their time trying
| to teach someone who is clearly not interested in learning
| because they think they can get the answer in 5 seconds
| from an LLM chatbot.
|
| My professor friends chose the career they did because they
| enjoy the challenge of helping students along the way
| through their courses and watching them develop.
|
| They are no longer seeing that same development in their
| students. And instead of devoting time to helping students,
| they are wasting time thinking up over-engineered
| fiendishly-complicated lab-tasks and tests that the
| students cannot cheat using LLM.
|
| It is honestly a lose-lose situation for everybody.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I sure hope those "university professor friends" exist,
| and you're not self-distancing. Because you really need
| help with the mindset like that. Students are not your
| enemies and LLMs are not ought to get you. Seek help.
| culopatin wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. The conversation is not
| about what students give the professors, it's about how
| students learn. This obviously requires someone that
| _wants_ to learn.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > it's about how students learn. This obviously requires
| someone that wants to learn.
|
| FINALLY ! Someone who gets the point I was trying to
| make. I wish I could upvote you a million times.
|
| This is precisely the point. Professors are happy to help
| people who _want_ to learn.
|
| Students who prefer to copy/paste into LLMs do not want
| to learn. University is there to foster learning and
| reasoning using your own brain. An LLM helps with
| neither.
| saltcured wrote:
| Sweep aside the misunderstanding about students trying to
| "cheat" with LLM output instead of engagement in the
| topic at hand. I think there is a secondary debate here,
| even when you understand the original intent of the post
| above. It still boils down to the same concerns about
| "slop". Not the student presenting slop to the existing
| teaching system, but the student being led stray by the
| slop they are consuming on their own.
|
| Being an auto-didact has always been a double-edged
| sword. You can potentially accelerate your learning and
| find your own specialization, but it is an extremely easy
| failure mode to turn yourself into some semi-educated
| crank. Once in a while, this leads to some renegade
| genius who opens new branches of knowledge. But in more
| cases, it aborts useful learning. The crank gets lost in
| their half-baked ontology and unable to really fix the
| flaws nor progress to more advanced topics.
|
| The whole long history of learning institutions is, in
| part, trying to manage this very human risk. One of a
| teacher's main roles is to recognize a student who is
| spiraling out in this manner and steer them back. Nearly
| everyone has this potential to incrementally develop a
| sort of self-delusion, if not getting reality-checked on
| a regular basis. It takes incredible diligence to self-
| govern and never lose yourself in the chase.
|
| This is where "sycophancy" in LLMs is a bigger problem
| than mere diction. If the AI continues to function as a
| sort of keyhole predictor, it does not have the context
| to model a big-picture purpose like education and keep
| all the incremental wanderings on course and bound to
| reality. Instead, it can amplify this worst-case scenario
| where you plunge down some rabbit-hole.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| What you call "slop" is a far better education than what 99%
| of children in the world receive.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > What you call "slop" is a far better education than what
| 99% of children in the world receive.
|
| I'm talking about university education here. Where the hell
| does the clutching at straws "99% of children in the world"
| argument come into it ?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > clutching at straws
|
| > as if he wasn't the one who clutched at some mythical
| "the university"
|
| Next you'll tell that anything below Ivy league isn't
| considered university and kids should've known better and
| used their damn head(tm) really hard to be born in better
| families to be able to get real university(tm) education.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Next you'll tell that anything below Ivy league isn't
| considered university
|
| I know professors from across the spectrum and I most
| certainly do not consider Ivy League should be placed on
| a pedestal.
|
| That is all I am willing to say on that subject. Let's
| not drift off into personal attacks, please.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > No it won't. It really, really wont. You clearly don't have
| any university professors amongst your friends or
| acquaintances.
|
| Maybe some fancy professors in their cushy Ivy league ivory
| tower won't, but a lot of teachers that work for minimal
| salary sure will.
|
| > Because the reality is that LLMs are nothing more than a
| party trick, a stats based algorithm that gives you answers
| within a gaussian curve.
|
| A lot of humans can't even do that.
|
| > Some of the students even have the audacity to challenge
| the professor's marking saying "but the AI said it is right"
| in relation to some basic math formula that the student
| should know how to solve with their own brain.
|
| Students challenge professors over some stupid assumption,
| more news at 11.
|
| > Trying to cheat your way through university with an LLM is
| a waste of the students time, a waste of the professors time
| and a waste of the university's infrastructure.
|
| Who even said anything about cheating? Witch hunting too
| much? For majority of layman topics LLM will be a far
| superior offering _precisely_ because LLMs have no ego and
| will reply to their best abilities instead of chastising
| students about, oh God forgive, HAVING AUDACITY to disagree
| over a topic.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > LLMs will reply to their best abilities
|
| Which includes hallucination, reward-hacking, over-
| confident delivery of completely wrong answers etc.
|
| > HAVING AUDACITY to disagree over a topic.
|
| When we are discussing a long-standing centuries-old
| textbook mathematical formula which is internationally
| recognised there is no disagreement to be had.
|
| If an LLM hallucinates and tells a student that the
| textbook mathematical formula is wrong, and the student has
| the audacity to complain to the professor on that basis, I
| see no issue with the professor firmly challenging the
| student. University is there to foster learning and
| reasoning using your own brain, not outsourcing it to a
| hallucinating LLM.
| tom-blk wrote:
| Very cool, I have personally been studying zk-cryptography with a
| similar approach, works really well with some caveats. Will save
| this article and try this version as well when the time comes!
| e12e wrote:
| Interesting article - but perhaps a bit light on details in some
| places, like:
|
| > I generated a list of the most common interview tasks
|
| How? I suppose they mean gathered, or searched for, not strictly
| generated?
|
| Also a little light on details of the actual interview.
|
| I'm also a little confused about the listing of "problems" - do
| they refer to some specific leet-code site's listing of problems?
|
| It seems like half-way between naming an actual algorithm/problem
| and naming a concrete exercise.
|
| As for:
|
| > How is it that we do not use this "forgotten and forbidden"
| coding in our daily production code, even though all highly
| reusable, useful code is essentially an exploitation of the
| intersection between classical algorithmic thinking and real-
| world problems?
|
| I'm not sure what to say - most of this stuff lives in library
| code and data structure implementations for any language in
| common use?
|
| Indeed the one saving grace of leet code interview is arguably
| that it shows if the candidate can choose sane data structures
| (and algorithms) when implementing real-world code?
| qikcik wrote:
| You are right, I missed some crucial details in the blog entry.
| I will definitely take your feedback into account for Part 2,
| where I want to do a more detailed deep dive into the prompting
| protocols (with maybe some exact examples) and my learning
| strategy.
|
| To answer your questions:
|
| 1. By "generated" I mean that I prompted the LLM incrementally
| to provide me the list of the next LeetCode problems to do
| (without the deep research/search function)
|
| 2. Yes, the problem names are the exact names from LeetCode.
| Initially, the LLM suggested this format, and I later forced it
| to stick to real LeetCode problems.
|
| This allowed me to verify some output independently of the LLM
| (avoiding hallucinations), cross-check solutions with other
| materials, and track my progress.
|
| Interestingly, I realized later that the LLM was mostly pulling
| from the standard Blind 75 problem set, and almost all the
| problems are from that list.
|
| 3. About the "forgotten and forbidden" code: I probably phrased
| it poorly in the article. As you said, this algorithmic logic
| is abstracted away in standard libraries and data structures.
| The disconnect for me (and I suspect for many "business logic"
| developers too) is that our daily production code rarely
| requires writing these fundamental structures from scratch, so
| we do not see the patterns that can also be applied in more
| high-level business logic. But this is still an in-progress
| hypothesis in my mind, without detailed examples.
| ashwinnair99 wrote:
| The honest ones who admit they used it as a learning tool rather
| than a shortcut are getting more useful out of it than anyone
| else.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| another POV is, it used to be cool to work for Google
|
| it's been so uncool and harrowing for a while now, to deal with
| their leetcode BS. i mean obviously this guy is well meaning but
| didn't learn anything, other than for the paycheck and whatever
| desperate circumstances require that.
|
| the LLM stuff being used to solve their interview process is an
| inflection point where it really steeply goes down to want to
| work for Google for any reason other than money
|
| maybe this is why Google deepmind researchers keep leaving to
| start their own successful companies
| gurachek wrote:
| Your "no compiler" rule on day 3 taught you more than the LLM
| did. The LLM made concepts click. But the binary search vanishing
| under interview stress proves that understanding something and
| being able to produce it under pressure are totally different
| skills. Nobody talks about this enough in the "just use ChatGPT
| to learn" discourse.
| qikcik wrote:
| You are 100% right. For me, the most important thing is that
| the LLM teacher allowed me to break through my algorithmic
| ignorance in just one week.
|
| The rest is somehow orthogonal to the LLM and is just pure
| practice. It is very easy to procrastinate with an LLM without
| actual practice.
|
| It allowed me to actually see the problem space and something
| like the "beauty of classical algorithms". It shifted my
| "unknown unknowns" into "known unknowns". I had failed so many
| times to achieve exactly that without an LLM in the past.
| gurachek wrote:
| Yeeah, LLMs are the perfect procrastination tool because they
| feel productive. You're "learning", you're "exploring",
| you're having this great conversation about the problem. And
| then you close the tab and realize you never actually wrote
| anything yourself.
|
| The best procrastination device ever built because it
| validates you the entire time. Great post, even beyond the
| algorithms example.
| krackers wrote:
| There is this famous quote from Bentley on asking programmers
| to write binary search
|
| >I've assigned this problem [binary search] in courses at Bell
| Labs and IBM. Professional programmers had a couple of hours to
| convert the above description into a program in the language of
| their choice; a high-level pseudocode was fine. At the end of
| the specified time, almost all the programmers reported that
| they had correct code for the task. We would then take thirty
| minutes to examine their code, which the programmers did with
| test cases. In several classes and with over a hundred
| programmers, the results varied little: ninety percent of the
| programmers found bugs in their programs (and I wasn't always
| convinced of the correctness of the code in which no bugs were
| found).
|
| >I was amazed: given ample time, only about ten percent of
| professional programmers were able to get this small program
| right. But they aren't the only ones to find this task
| difficult: in the history in Section 6.2.1 of his Sorting and
| Searching, Knuth points out that while the first binary search
| was published in 1946, the first published binary search
| without bugs did not appear until 1962.
|
| The invariants are "tricky", not necessarily hard but also not
| trivial to where you can convert your intuitive understanding
| back into code "with your eyes closed". Especially since most
| implementations you write will only be "subtly flawed" rather
| than outright broken. Randomizing an array is also one of the
| algorithms in this class, conceptually easy but most
| implementations will be "almost right", not actually generating
| all permutations.
| and12-qwd wrote:
| It is kind of odd to admit this before the second round of
| interviews. Perhaps glorification of LLMs is now a positive, but
| still it is a gamble.
|
| It is also odd that this article appears here after someone
| complained about vibe coding killing the interest in algorithms.
|
| This game is played often. People have valid complaints, then
| someone posts a "rebuttal" ("LLMs are not bad for $X---they are
| good for $X").
|
| Anyway, he uses LLMs more in the search capability, which is less
| controversial than generative AI and vibe coding.
| qikcik wrote:
| Just a quick correction: the entire recruitment process is
| already finished. Publishing this is a retrospective analysis
| of a closed chapter.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Note: I haven't done any tech interview in 6 years.
|
| I'm kind of surprised they still do leetcode-style questions on
| remote interviews these days. I thought those types of interviews
| would be 100% gamed by now.
| autotune wrote:
| They don't, at least in the SRE space. I have been interviewing
| for 6 months without a single coding challenge or LeetCode-type
| challenge. Though I would passively avoid companies that offer
| them, as in I would avoid them if offered, I have yet to be
| offered the chance to avoid it in an interview.
| jevndev wrote:
| Unfortunately this practice is prevalent still. Recently I've
| been applying to jobs in the two industries I have experience
| in (algorithmic robotics and fintech) and nearly half of the
| companies that I've heard back from start with either a timed
| leetcode problem or an HR interview which is immediately
| followed by a timed leetcode problem. It's exhausting.
| autotune wrote:
| Interesting. I am going for a broad search rather than
| being targeted. Maybe it's as you say, an industry specific
| problem. At my last fintech job they just quizzed me a bit
| on Terraform and asked me about experience, though that
| role ended up being a disaster later on.
| culopatin wrote:
| What have you encountered instead?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Still plenty of signal. You'd be surprised at how badly most
| people do at very simple questions.
| gsnedders wrote:
| Yeah, this.
|
| In my experience, it's the relatively basic questions that
| have the highest value -- both because they're what you run
| into programming most often, and because they're less likely
| to overwhelm candidates in a high-stress setting.
|
| The goal, at least from my point of view, isn't to see if
| they can come up with the perfect algorithm, but about how
| they construct an algorithm, how they communicate about the
| decisions they're making, how they respond to challenges
| about edge-cases, etc.
|
| I'm also strongly in favour of picking out questions that are
| reflective of the actual codebase they're being hired for --
| find something with some basic algorithmic complexity which
| has a relatively simple and easy to explain input and output,
| and use that as the problem.
|
| In general, I think the best problems are those which any
| competent senior engineer could design a good solution for
| almost off the top of their head with little difficulty.
| epolanski wrote:
| I am quite passionate about algos, do lots of katas on
| codewars for fun, and done plenty of leetcodes.
|
| Then I had a technical interview when I was asked to
| implement a simple algo for the tris game (aka tic tac toe)
| and my mind was completely blurry.
|
| I was tired, i'm in eu and this was for a San Francisco
| startup interviewing me at their lunch time, very late in
| Italy.
|
| And generally don't like to be interviewed/tasked.
|
| Of course the solution is beyond simple, but I struggled even
| at brute forcing it.
|
| I can easily do these kind of exercises (and much harder ones
| obviously) for fun, but not when interviewed.
|
| I struggled with the same thing in University. I graduated
| with 104/110 even though I was consistently among the most
| prepared, and I learned to learn, not to pass exams (plenty
| of stellar performers didn't remember anything few weeks
| after exams).
|
| Once I asked a professor why did he grade me 27/30 even
| though I spent one hour answering with details on everything,
| including the hardest questions.
|
| "Because you never appear convinced when you answer".
|
| I get nervous, I don't like to prove my knowledge this way. I
| rethink constantly what I'm saying, or even how I sound.
|
| I forget how to type braces or back ticks.
|
| I did not have any issues when not interviewed, or in written
| exams, or during my research period when I published 3 papers
| that have been highly cited.
|
| But I am just not a fan of these types of interviews they
| tell absolutely nothing about the candidate.
|
| You interview me and you'll have the very wrong impression if
| you ask me to live code or white board.
|
| Meanwhile I've seen leetcode black belts spend most of their
| time logged on Tekken 7 on discord, consistently creating
| work and providing negative value while somehow always
| selling their high skills.
|
| I have found much more value in seeing personal projects, and
| OSS contributions.
|
| Never asked a single of these bs questions and never failed
| at hiring anyone. Not once.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| > I am just not a fan of these types of interviews they
| tell absolutely nothing about the candidate.
|
| Unfortunately this is wrong and I have seen tons of data at
| 5 companies showing this. These kinds of interviews really
| do correlate well with job performance
|
| There is noise, but large companies in particular need a
| scalable process and this one works pretty well
|
| Startups shouldn't do this though, but the reason is the
| opposite of what you're complaining about. It's too easy to
| accidentally waste your time on somebody who is good at
| leetcode
| epolanski wrote:
| I have never seen correlation.
|
| The most important thing about a candidate is whether
| he's gonna be professional and hard working.
|
| Technical interviews tell me nothing about it.
|
| Of course I can see large companies that have a high
| number of candidates relative to positions needing such
| methods, they can afford false negatives.
|
| But outside those cases personal projects and OSS
| contributions say much more.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| How many people have you interviewed and hired? I have
| interviewed around 400 and hired around 20, and I've seen
| data compiled on over 100,000 interviews. I have never
| worried about a false negative, except DEI stuff pre-2021
|
| Maybe this is a Europe vs US thing?
| epolanski wrote:
| I've hired around 10 and interviewed around 50/60.
|
| Half the people I hired, I did so without any technical
| interview, I met them in coding communities and saw
| everyday their OSS contributions and skills.
|
| In any case I'm not debating your method is wrong, I'm
| just saying there's individuals like me that don't do
| well in these kind of situations/exams and can easily be
| false negatives.
|
| I'm also saying that this isn't rocket science, and in
| general trying to understand if the person is honest and
| hard working is much more important than his coding
| skills.
|
| I've seen way too many stellar graduates leetcode ninjas
| being just terrible at their job or completely
| uninterested.
|
| And in Europe it's hard to fire them.
| pstuart wrote:
| Yes, understanding algos is valuable, and implementing them
| of the top of one's head is a nice party trick, but in the
| end we're paid to solve problems and it's much faster and
| easier to identify existing solutions and adapt them rather
| than reinvent the wheel.
|
| Knowing when and what to optimize is vital.
| giva wrote:
| > I forget how to type braces or back ticks.
|
| US layout and compose key on AltGr. You'll never look back.
| tikhonj wrote:
| They've been gamed in the "study for the test" sense for
| _years_ --a sort of human over-fitting--but managers did not
| mind. I've heard some insist that this is a feature, not a bug.
| (Depending on levels of cynicism, it's either testing for
| diligent workers who put effort into preparation, or selecting
| out non-conformists who aren't willing to put up with
| management bullshit.)
|
| LLMs make it easier to cheat and give managers a push to
| develop new, AI-aware, assessment methods, but don't really
| change the underlying organizational dynamics that led to these
| tests in the first place.
| stephen_cagle wrote:
| > Find Minimum in Rotated Sorted Array
|
| I've seen that problem in an interview before, and I thought the
| solution I hit upon was pretty fun (if dumb).
| class Solution: def findMin(self, nums: List[int]) ->
| int: class RotatedList(): def
| __init__(self, rotation): self.rotation =
| rotation def __getitem__(self, index):
| return nums[(index + self.rotation) % len(nums)]
| class RotatedListIsSorted(): def
| __getitem__(self, index) -> bool: rotated =
| RotatedList(index) print(index, [rotated[i]
| for i in range(len(nums))]) return
| rotated[0] < rotated[len(nums) // 2] def
| __len__(self): return len(nums)
| rotation = bisect_left(RotatedListIsSorted(), True)
| print('rotation =>', rotation) return
| RotatedList(rotation)[0]
|
| I think it is really interesting that you can define "list like"
| things in python using just two methods. This is kind of neat
| because sometimes you can redefine an entire problem as actually
| just the questions of finding the binary search of a list of
| solutions to that problem; here you are looking for the leftmost
| point that it becomes True. Anyway, I often bomb interviews by
| trying out something goofy like this, but I don't know, when it
| works, it is glorious!
|
| Good luck on your second round!
| nico wrote:
| Recently had a coding interview in which I was allowed to search
| online but not use any AI. On the first google search, the
| interviewer realized that the first result is now AI generated
| and said I couldn't use anything from there. So I had to just
| click on different links and piece together what I needed from
| inside the pages
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| You have to build a house but dont use concrete mixers you must
| mix by hand to really see if you know the physics of concrete
| kixiQu wrote:
| I'm always interested in write-ups when folks try new attacks on
| self-study.
|
| I will also admit that this part hurt my heart to read (vicarious
| embarrassment):
|
| > the recruiter mentioned I needed to pay more attention to code
| debuggability (whatever this means - I assume that under the
| corpo-language, they mean that I wrote invalid code)
| qikcik wrote:
| I completely understand why that line caused vicarious
| embarrassment. Looking back, I realize my brain was(is)
| operating on a completely different definition of that word
| based on my daily constraints. I plan to write more about this
| in Part Two, but at that point in time, I wasn't even aware of
| this alternative understanding of the term.
|
| In telco, when a remote node crashes at a client's site, I
| often only have access to a heavily restricted subset of logs,
| and the debugging communication loop via email can take days to
| understand "what happens". Because of that, I write defensive,
| strictly encapsulated code, and I think in terms of domain-
| specific states and objects that can be explicitly tracked from
| an external PoV.
|
| Similarly, during game jams, "debuggable and maintainable"
| means to me that the code is modular enough that I can
| completely rip out and rewrite a core mechanic in the final 3
| hours just because the game design suddenly changed.
|
| My habit of writing code optimized for remote logs and sudden
| architectural shifts actually became my biggest enemy under the
| algorthimic interview (or 45-minute LeetCode) constraint. It
| makes the core algorithmic state less clear and hides
| algorithmic mistakes under layers of defensive "if" statements
| (where I would normally drop a debug log).
|
| I am simply used to not trusting the inputs, whereas in
| algorithmic problems, the whole point is to exploit constraints
| that you need to be absolutely sure about.
|
| So the "if" statements that usually increase "debuggability" in
| telco or during game jams are the exact opposite of the
| "debuggability" term used in algorithmic thinking.
|
| Thanks for naming this issue so clearly - it is a very valid
| reality check.
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