As somebody with a M.Sc. in controls & signal processing (who ended up doing way more boring things), I always figured that I was doing that because I wasn't experienced enough. Turns out I also had the sign wrong on that one all along!
1: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/419313776463077377
(But thanks for sharing what us without a Twitter account cannot see otherwise anymore…)
(because students would often make the mistake while holding their pencil during the exam of how to calculate the curl)
In the moment I felt quite clever, but the interviewer apparently did not appreciate that technique.
(Obviously there are nuances, but there is not enough space in this comment to elaborate)
Yes, an otherwise good company might have a bad interviewer, but if they don't have some feedback loop to catch it, chances are there are other things they also don't catch.
So I flunked his “test” and then immediately contacted the recruiter and said “no thanks” before he could muahahaha
I'll come in again.
>“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear... fear and surprise... Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency.... Our three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope... Our four... no... Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise... I'll come in again.”
2. Exactly-once delivery
1. Guaranteed order of messages
2. Exactly-once deliverywe call this "ML" now, and it pays extra
Oh. This is good. I'm using this!
That's perfectly valid, when one knows a specific step or result must be positive or negative.
Not that much different from dimensional analysis, which speedruns you to get/fix to proper formula (at the cost of skimming on dimensionless constants).
Similarly, interviewer was not impressed when they cut me short and started walking me through some step and I pointed to them that their result was obviously wrong as it was dimensionally inconsistent and if they didn't cut me out the formula must have been something like baz*foo/bar^2 or something and now we just have to figure out the constants.
So, an interviewer might appreciate that balancing of signs if told that it is the fastest way make it work (and pass your demo,) only to fix it later. Once proven that the hacked code gives the right solution maybe you could have offered to send them the correct code on the next day or keep working on it if they wished so.
Not wanting to give up points on an easy test, we gauged the distance the bot had to cover in the test, and quickly uploaded some new software. At the start of the test, our bot moved forward for 4 seconds, stopped, then turned around. Full points on that one!
Some times things just need to work and we can worry about them working _correctly_ later...
In other words, you pulled a Dieselgate, in LEGO form.
Were I to judge your implementation, not only would you sacrifice those points, I'd have disqualified you from the competition on ethical grounds.
There is never an excuse for smoke and mirrors. Never.
i = i - 2 // because I'm bad at thisEveryone does it, though usually you do the test before you duct tape it to the top of a few thousand kg of explosives and push the red button :)
I highly highly recommend the book by the way, to anyone on HN. Goes all the way from mechanical components to resistors, nixie tubes, CMOS sensors, processors etc. Excellent photography that reveals the internals, along with operation explanations and history for each component.
When I'm connecting an USB cable horizontally I always think "hol up". So I always remember to plug it with the hole up.
When I'm connecting it vertically I think "hold right". So I know that if I want to hold it right, I have to put the hole right.
Has worked for me so far.
EDIT: Though "left" and "right" are more vague compared to "up" and "down", so connecting vertically assumes a specific "mental point of view". I'm just using one that's intuitive for me, but it might not work for everyone.
You also cover a wide array of topics, from hardware and how it works to a lot of systems programming (e.g: real-time operating systems, kernels, device drivers) some computer science theory (mainly automata theory and concurrency like petri nets) to signal processing which includes audio to heavy yet extremely beautiful math topics such as control theory.
Even though the purpose for taking those classes was largely personal, it’s materially contributed to my career in a lot of indirect ways (I’m an IT consultant and Linux sysadmin) by giving me a unique perspective for how things function on a much lower level than my colleagues who just have CS educations. I can troubleshoot Wi-Fi and signal transmission issues using spectrum and vector network analysis which makes everyone look at me as if I were a witch. I am comfortable disassembling and repairing equipment like scanners and commercial printers, with lots of moving parts and mains electricity that other techs won’t touch.
All that said, I highly recommend attending an EE program, and even though you’ll feel like a big, wrinkled brain smart person—you will never stop turning it off and on again, bit-bashing, or sign flipping—all quite valid techniques for when the years of diligent study and experience loses out to fat fingers and poor eyesight.
Basically: get the structure right and then re-align the implementation to meet the expected behavior.
(And in later days I saw a firmware update for a laser printer cause it to spew gibberish when fed embedded HP/GL2 code. This was in the era where there were still DOS programs running under Windows and somebody didn't check that it still worked right.)
I mean I realize you have to test the thing for "bugs" just wondering if a theory to perfectly model it is even possible.
The trick is to do these tests at a sufficiently low level, because that’s usually where these issues are, in my experience.
Final try at ground level:
https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-disasters/rocket-f...