fgimenez

While poetic and thoroughly motivating, I don't know if I'd apply for a job with a description like that. It reminds me too much of the "need python ninja with postgres jiu-jitsu skillz" spiels you see on freelancing websites. Unless you had a professional advertising company, that description says nothing relevant the actual job he is talking about.

This isn't to say that creative job descriptions aren't amazing, I just feel that they could be better tailored their target audience. Preferably something along the lines of the resume-free job posting, exemplified at http://www.ryanholiday.net/archives/help_wanted.phtml.

Personally, I'd also ask for a description of the applicants favorite algorithm and why. You can gauge their interests and passions from a loaded question like that, and it would be a hell of a lot of fun to write.

I had a semi-nightmare where a murderer holds a gun to my head asking me to solve a traveling salesman problem with 100 nodes on a graph. In the end, I find a way to do it in O(nlogn) time and he gives me the millenium prize. I woke up in a cold sweat and scribbled on paper for hours trying to remember the algorithm. Now it's nothing but a depressing memory in what could've been the best dream of my life.

Technically, I didn't give away how to do the standard deviation ;)

In an interesting side note, this class is taught by the Berkeley open computing facility (OCF) that Hans Reiser co-founded.

Here's Knuth's way to keep a running variance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_for_calculating_vari...