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random_coder

76 karma · joined July 23, 2013

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random_coder··on I started a little math club in Bangalore
I think you're right and the given answer of 596 is wrong. It's 380 m-w, 190 m-m, 45 w-w handshakes, so 615 in total.
random_coder··on A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout (2023)
Also, a co-author of the Raft consensus algorithm.
random_coder··on Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas
What's wrong with talking about animals anyway? Truly bizarre.
random_coder··on A neat XOR trick
A neat trick indeed, using bitsets in a sliding window. Contest programming makes heavy use of some such tricks.
random_coder··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Hi Peter, thanks a lot for doing this. I have a h1b from 2012, i worked in the us for an year using it and returned to my home country. Is it of any use to me now, can i be cap exempt or its validity has expired and I will need a new one?

Regards

random_coder··on Notes on Theory of Distributed Systems [pdf]
It's a joke.
random_coder··on Ask HN: I failed FAANG interview because I didn't know Binary tree?
Best to forget about that interview and focus on future ones. Frontend engineering doesn't mean you can ignore performance issues in your programs. Binary trees are a very useful data structure to know in general. Ordered collections in many languages' standard libraries are internally implemented as balanced binary trees. It's good to have at least a high level understanding of this data structure.
random_coder··on Ask HN: Who's having a ton of fun at work and what are you doing?
Could you share your VR development setup? PC specs, which platforms/devices do you develop for etc...
random_coder··on Show HN: A new daily word puzzle
Each letter is given a weight and it's multiplied by the length of the word it's part of to get its effective weight. Sum it up for all letters and you get the final score. Here, it seems like two 10 letter words can be formed using the given 20. Hint - blackboard is one such word.
random_coder··on Hello everyone I am to making a programming language and I need your help
You say it's a superset of C that compiles to C. But why does your example with main() look like Python? It's certainly not valid C code.
random_coder··on How to Design Programs (2014)
Usually SICP is recommended as a follow up to HtDP. It's freely available at https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
random_coder··on Are there morning rituals that rev you up for a productive day?
I wake up early at 4AM, make a cup of coffee for myself, play 15 min of chess and study Spanish for another 15-20 min. This routine gets me ready to do intellectually intensive work like reading a hard technical book.
random_coder··on Hiring Without Whiteboards
Same exact thing happened to me at Microsoft during the system design interview round. Interviewer wouldn't just let me explain and kept on arguing about a relatively minor issue and wouldn't let me proceed and in the end failed me because I didn't come up with a good design. Really the whole 45 minutes were like him repeatedly stopping me and coming back to that one issue.
random_coder··on Ask HN: What browser extensions have you built for yourself?
I noticed I spend too much time reading wikipedia articles, jumping from one to another, so I built a chrome extension to limit that browsing time to a few minutes per day.
random_coder··on Ask HN: What keeps you up at night? What do you worry about?
That I am not good enough to do the things I dream of doing.
random_coder··on Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
Or Which may be exactly what they want.
random_coder··on Ask HN: You've got one month, what's your challenge?
I've been making a Django app for over a week because I wanted to learn doing web dev. I hope to finish it another 2-3 weeks. So far, it's been a intimidating and yet fantastic experience learning about django, http, html dom, js, jquery, css, bootstrap, sqlite, orm, templates and such.
random_coder··on Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
Lol at the third category - they're at the wrong jobs(for them), perhaps they need to do something on their own, figuring things out themselves!
random_coder··on Ask HN: Is it possible for someone to not be cut out for software engineering?
To me, it looks like you're just having problems with algorithm interviews. I have a solution for you and it's much more effective than textbooks - go to websites like www.spoj.com, projecteuler.net, topcoder.com and many other similar online sites, I suggest www.spoj.com - start with the easiest ones (on most of these sites, problems are tagged by their difficulty level) and solve them - I mean code solutions to them in a language of your choice (But C, C++ and Java are popular in interviews) - these sites have online judges where you can submit your source code, have your code run against a large suite of test cases for each problem and get results back - all in a matter of seconds.

Solve 100s of these problems(start with easy ones and move into harder ones at your ease, learn new concepts and algos as you go) and try the interviews again in another 6 months. I promise, you'll improve a lot at this kind of problem solving. I've seen a number of people do this and succeed at algo interviewing game.

random_coder··on Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer on Selling a Company While Trying to Turn It Around
I've never worked in an early stage startup, but what is it exactly that those working more than 100 hours per week do?
random_coder··on Ask HN: How do you debug your code?
I mostly write C++ code on Linux systems. I use ddd for interactive debugging in bigger projects. For throwaway code(C++ & Python), I just use print statements.
random_coder··on Are You Smarter Than a Quant? Questions from the MoMath Masters Contest
For 5), 89 modulo 77 is 12 so we just solve for the least m such that (m + 3) * (m + 4) (= mm + 7m + 12) is divisible by 77. Both 73 and 74 clearly satisfy the condition, but 18 + 3 = 21 divisible by 7 and 18 + 4 = 22 divisible by 11 is the least among the choices.
random_coder··on Ask HN: What is the best way to learn JavaScript for a beginner?
I find Mozilla's javascript guide[1] to be quite good for learning JS, if you have some programming experience.

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid...

random_coder··on The mystery of India’s deadly exam scam
As an Indian I often wonder, the real question is not why India is so corrupt(esp. at the lower levels of bureaucracy), rather how come certain countries have zero corruption at those levels? Perhaps I'm too pessimistic about human nature.
random_coder··on Who Y Combinator Companies Want
Care to explain a little? Did your friend mean that talented engineers like working on novel problems and companies facing hard problems are thus more attractive?
random_coder··on Ask HN: I don't like my new job, now what?
As far as your work is concerned, if you believe your code or design choices are valid, don't accept their corrections or suggestions so easily. Explain your choices and listen to them seriously. Let THEM convince you why you're in the wrong. Ask for clarifications and don't let them leave until you are fully convinced. Stand up for yourself, OP.
random_coder··on Have Static Languages Won?
Availability of an interpreter has been one of the major advantages of programming in dynamic languages. With languages like Haskell, Scala coming with first class interpreters, this advantage is being lost to a certain extent. I think it should be possible to build interpreters even for mainstream static langs like C++ and Java, they probably exist already, though I'm not sure why they haven't found larger acceptance.

I believe the biggest advantage with a good static type system is that programmers can design good datatypes and specify their relationships - and the compiler can then detect any inconsistencies(ideally anyway).

random_coder··on Students striving to be the best English speaker in China
What Xixi says is that when China's GDP per capita matches that of Japan, it's economy will be 3.5x as big as US's. A similar percentage in budget for defence as that of US would then mean 3.5 x 600B. Nothing to do with China's current GDP or her current defence budget.
random_coder··on Chile is introducing free higher education
German colleges are free but the kids who are chosen to go to them are often selected by the third grade.

Could you explain more?

random_coder··on Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
Then I'd say you have the right mindset for a software engineer :)
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