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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

learn from solutions of others

I got my first job furiously doing that for nights on end. It felt like cheating but it’s ultimately way faster than waiting potentially years to figure out those tricks on your own.

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Yeah, good to hear. I also did this for nights on end. My strategy was to try to solve the puzzle myself first (in a reasonable amount of time) and then check the solutions of others. Always fun to see if I could make my solution faster/shorter/more elegant/etc. with the inspiration of the other solutions.

What are the odds that someone gets accused of plagiarism for doing exactly that? Like, say there's a perfect solution in existence with the fewest lines/tokens of code all the elegant shortcuts and maybe a little bit of "sorcery", how likely is it for two people to work their way down the perfect solution and it basically looks exactly the same, maybe they followed the same logical workflow to arrive there, who knows...

Edit: like a hash-collision for geeks

I don't know what the odds are of getting accused, but let's say this was in the context of an interview question, and every answer submitted looks almost 100% the same, or even more telling, has the same logic mistakes, then the odds could be high that plagiarism is afoot.

Say there's no mistakes. Its literally perfectly logical and conventionally written code. Its the epitome of that thing with Michaelangelo where he assumes his vision for the sculpture is correct and all he needs to do is surgically remove the excess marble to get to the essential form that is perfect and ideal and intutitive.

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