It's not always a question of "needing" something, it's a question of whether you spend 5 minutes searching for the answer or 50 minutes, or 5 hours.
It's a tool. Use it.
It's a tool. Use it.
Understanding the technology in a deeper way is a lot more useful in the long run.
And once you understand it answering other questions you may have gets a lot easier and arguably that 5 hour investment in the beginning may be a bargain.
He spends 5 hours to understand it first you spend 5-10 minutes on each question and you may run into dozens if not hundreds of questions depending on what you're doing at the end of the day you may just come out even but do that long enough and you're worse off using SO for shortcuts instead of just learning how it works.
1. Look up the first 60 questions on StackOverflow. That amounts to 5 hours you would've spent on just the first one.
2. If you still have more questions, spend another 5 hours learning the ins and outs of the darn thing.
Problem solved: now you're not sacrificing latency for throughput.
You just described the best deterministic algorithm, but it turns out there are even better randomized algorithms, where you "flip a coin" when deciding to look up StackOverflow or keep learning (of course, that may or may not be practical :p).
Hmm... given that you stated that the best randomized algorithms we have beat our best deterministic ones, isn't there a place for even better deterministic algorithm?
Am I missing some critical piece of understanding here?
if we pick the pivot to always be the first element, then any sorted array will cause worst-case running time. But by randomizing the pivot, we can do well (in expectation) for any input.
Iow, if you can never do X, then you cannot write any algorithm that may do X.
I don't know about your situation specifically, but in general....it may be more useful to you personally in the long run, but the person that signs your paycheck might be more interested in only what's most economically useful for the company while you are employed there.
I'm just glad it's not my only tool anymore. And sometimes using the harder tools have unexpected benefits.
Yeah, I suppose I could have spent a few hours learning the ins and outs of the library, but finding that all I really really needed was "draggable: false" on SO saved a good chunk of time.