interviewing: Senior by reference, not by value

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > interviewing: Senior by reference, not by value

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DELETE CASCADE: Oct 25, 2017; i haven't washed my penis since i jerked it to a phtotograph of george w. bush in 2003

jesus WEP posted:

i put probably less than 10% thought into handing out the sixer than you did into making this post, it was literally just �ew what a gross word lol they�re getting their rap sheet stained for it�

so basically

DELETE CASCADE posted:

it was garbage. he broke no forum rules, the idiot mod just found it distasteful

# ? Sep 24, 2021 21:55

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# ? Jan 18, 2025 14:03

jesus WEP: Oct 17, 2004

yeah pretty much

# ? Sep 24, 2021 21:56

DELETE CASCADE: Oct 25, 2017; i haven't washed my penis since i jerked it to a phtotograph of george w. bush in 2003

"i put barely any thought into my moderation activities" isn't the slam dunk you think it is

# ? Sep 24, 2021 21:56

Pythagoras a trois: Feb 19, 2004; I have a lot of points to make and I will make them later.

DELETE CASCADE posted:

"i put barely any thought into my moderation activities" isn't the slam dunk you think it is

Get a load of this back seat 'erator

# ? Sep 24, 2021 22:13

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; Peeps are idiots, Leslie.; Nap Ghost

DELETE CASCADE posted:

"i put barely any thought into my moderation activities" isn't the slam dunk you think it is

the median Postin experience on the pos is like 10 years, we just need a mod for whoever's the little poo poo this year

e: i guess the fyad mods are takin care of hbag nowadays

bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Sep 24, 2021

# ? Sep 24, 2021 22:16

Mantle: May 15, 2004

jesus WEP posted:

i put probably less than 10% thought into handing out the sixer than you did into making this post, it was literally just �ew what a gross word lol they�re getting their rap sheet stained for it�

It's always projection.

# ? Sep 24, 2021 22:38

Achmed Jones: Oct 16, 2004

lmao imagine whining about a sixer

# ? Sep 24, 2021 23:03

hbag: Feb 13, 2021

whos whining about sixers now

# ? Sep 24, 2021 23:04

Coco13: Jun 6, 2004; My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.

hbag posted:

whos whining about sixers now

Ben Simmons.

# ? Sep 24, 2021 23:09

hbag: Feb 13, 2021

Coco13 posted:

Ben Simmons.

who the gently caress is that

# ? Sep 24, 2021 23:11

Gazpacho: Jun 18, 2004; by Fluffdaddy; Slippery Tilde

Achmed Jones posted:

lmao imagine whining about a sixer

and not even your own

# ? Sep 24, 2021 23:14

cheque_some: Dec 6, 2006; The Wizard of Menlo Park

Coco13 posted:

Ben Simmons.

i appreciated this

# ? Sep 25, 2021 01:31

a dingus: Mar 22, 2008; Rhetorical questions only; Fun Shoe

That was a funny sixer I'd wear that poo poo like a badge of honor

# ? Sep 25, 2021 02:11

SporkOfTruth: Sep 1, 2006; this kid walked up to me and was like man schmitty your stache is ghetto and I was like whatever man your 3b look like a dishrag.

he was like damn.

a basketball player who has been kind of poo poo for the philadelphia, pennsylvania, usa seventy-sixers professional basketball team who, because he has been inexplicably poo poo in very important situations and is all in his feelings about being poo poo, now refuses to report to the team during the upcoming season and wants to be traded, but no one wants to trade for him because he has been poo poo.

# ? Sep 25, 2021 02:38

Poopernickel: Oct 28, 2005; electricity bad; Fun Shoe

just had an intro call with some company who's hiring nearby, looking for an embedded system software lead.

Highlights:
- CEO is the one making recruiting calls, for a company of around 50 people.
- Pay: best offer would be around $30k less/year than I'm making right now.
- Startup. But don't worry it's very well funded, honest.
- Hardware is primarily off-the-shelf dev boards.
- I would have architecture and ownership over all platform code.
- Also, all code is written by an offshore team in India, including the code that I will own.
- Offshore team doesn't have full access to the target hardware.
- Also, they're not very good so maybe I can help them with the hard parts.

:lol:

Poopernickel fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Sep 25, 2021

# ? Sep 25, 2021 04:10

Captain Foo: May 11, 2004; we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

Coco13 posted:

Ben Simmons.

lol

# ? Sep 25, 2021 04:17

Cybernetic Vermin: Apr 18, 2005

DELETE CASCADE posted:

"i put barely any thought into my moderation activities" isn't the slam dunk you think it is

i mean, it should fall under the schadenboner rule, where it is rightly bannable to make up dumb words and force them into every post as if that in itself is comedy.

# ? Sep 25, 2021 07:08

cowboy beepboop: Feb 24, 2001

Poopernickel posted:

just had an intro call with some company who's hiring nearby, looking for an embedded system software lead.

Highlights:
- CEO is the one making recruiting calls, for a company of around 50 people.
- Pay: best offer would be around $30k less/year than I'm making right now.
- Startup. But don't worry it's very well funded, honest.
- Hardware is primarily off-the-shelf dev boards.
- I would have architecture and ownership over all platform code.
- Also, all code is written by an offshore team in India, including the code that I will own.
- Offshore team doesn't have full access to the target hardware.
- Also, they're not very good so maybe I can help them with the hard parts.

pay aside, lol at the last 4 points

# ? Sep 25, 2021 08:48

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

DELETE CASCADE posted:

"i put barely any thought into my moderation activities" isn't the slam dunk you think it is

# ? Sep 25, 2021 13:50

PIZZA.BAT: Nov 12, 2016

DELETE CASCADE posted:

"i put barely any thought into my moderation activities" isn't the slam dunk you think it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmcpiM3SSOA

# ? Sep 25, 2021 14:01

CarForumPoster: Jun 26, 2013

Poopernickel posted:

just had an intro call with some company who's hiring nearby, looking for an embedded system software lead.

Highlights:
- CEO is the one making recruiting calls, for a company of around 50 people.
- Pay: best offer would be around $30k less/year than I'm making right now.
- Startup. But don't worry it's very well funded, honest.
- Hardware is primarily off-the-shelf dev boards.
- I would have architecture and ownership over all platform code.
- Also, all code is written by an offshore team in India, including the code that I will own.
- Offshore team doesn't have full access to the target hardware.
- Also, they're not very good so maybe I can help them with the hard parts.

oh that�s not so�uhh�oh drat that really nosedived hard

# ? Sep 25, 2021 15:21

galenanorth: May 19, 2016

I tried taking a Codility practice exam in Python. The practice exam consists of 30 minutes for a single problem. The actual test is 110 minutes. The problem is writing a function solution(A) to find the lowest positive integer not in a given array of integers. Find an efficient solution for an array length <= 100,000 and integers in the range [-100000, 100000]. I assume that there has to be a positive integer in the array. So I wrote

code:

def solution(A):
    i = 1
    while i in A and i <= 1000000:
        i += 1
    return i

I got 100% on correctness, passing all the test cases, and a 25% on performance, for a total score of 67%. It's Python. If performance were that important, I'd be doing this in some other language like C++. How would I write this more efficiently, anyway? I might guess something involving sorting before the while loop, and then a binary search within the while loop. Python appears to use a linear search for the in operator.

So I'd throw in

code:

A.sort()
while binary_search(A, i) != -1 and i <= 1000000:
    ...

def binary_search(lst, target):
    low = 0
    high = len(lst)-1
    while high >= low:
        mid = (low + high) // 2
        if target == lst[mid]:
            return mid
        elif target > lst[mid]:
            low = mid + 1
        else:
            high = mid � 1
    return -1

I guess I'll just test it. The practice test allows another run-through. I got 100% on the performance this time.

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Sep 25, 2021

# ? Sep 25, 2021 19:01

PIZZA.BAT: Nov 12, 2016

you probably want to sort the array first, binary search for the index containing zero or the next lowest number, then traverse up the array until you find a gap between numbers greater than one

alternatively you could traverse the array a single time placing all positive integers into their own array while keeping them in order and then do the same thing. that would probably be faster because we don�t care about the negative numbers

# ? Sep 25, 2021 19:11

cinci zoo sniper: Mar 14, 2013

your solution has quadratic complexity, because list membership is o(n), and the i boundary check is not elegant either. there are a few ways that all should score better on performance

1 - keep everything as is and create a set for membership check. list membership is o(n), which makes your code quadratic in worst case scenario, whereas set membership is o(1)

2 - create a set of positive integers in your range, subtract set of input list from that and the first element is your result

3 - filter input list to positive values with a list comprehension, then sort it using default sort, then loop over range(1, len(l)) to check difference between current and previous number and deduce earliest gap to break the for loop

without knowing how your performance measure scores memory vs speed, performance order should roughly be 2 > 3 > 1 >> your version

edit: for 3 you would want to also compare the minimum value vs 1 to see if there�s something before the loop begins

cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Sep 25, 2021

# ? Sep 25, 2021 19:25

Achmed Jones: Oct 16, 2004

id guess that the n^2 implementation is a fail state, naive sort then traverse is a pass, and the optimizations pizza.bat mentioned (while talking about premature optimization etc) are extra credit. id probably put the second array in a heap during the filter pass for the delta>1 step but tbh when you get this far things are already fine. if i'm reviewing code, anything but the n^2 implementation is gonna be fine for non-trivially-small arrays

# ? Sep 25, 2021 19:26

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

galenanorth posted:

the thing to understand about that kind of question is that context in which you're solving it isn't "inside a python application, in which it forms no more crucial a component of the application's operation than you'd assume based on a simple reading of it." the correct context is "as an interview question," and in that context, you have to interpret it as being a proxy for several specific sub-questions, such as "do you know basic python syntax?" the sub-question you failed to answer correctly is "are unnecessary quadratic time operations acceptable?" and in the context of the kind of interview that asks that question, the correct answer is always "categorically no," even though this isn't true in the real world. lots of people would argue that this makes both the question and the style of interviewing dumb as hell, but you're still going to have to deal with it.

# ? Sep 25, 2021 20:08

raminasi: Jan 25, 2005; a last drink with no ice

this is reminding me of an interview question i appreciated a couple of jobs ago where the "correct" path was to ask enough questions about the details of the input to determine that a brute force solution would be fine and just do that. basically the optimal solution they were looking for was some O(exp(N)) thing but N was, like, four, so who gives a poo poo. it was refreshing. they weren't looking for hotshot algorithm jockeys, they were looking for people who actively tried to understand the problem they were solving. (and it wasn't a trick question - if you didn't go down this path early they'd explicitly suggest it to you and see how you reacted.)

# ? Sep 25, 2021 20:15

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; Peeps are idiots, Leslie.; Nap Ghost

inplace heapify is rear end in a top hat thing to do but hey 0 extra memory

bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Sep 25, 2021

# ? Sep 25, 2021 20:40

FamDav: Mar 29, 2008

imo all of the situational optimizations are pretty meaningless to just answering the q, unless you can explain what kinds of situations they are/aren�t valuable. being able to explain the nlgn in place and n extra space solns is good stuff

# ? Sep 25, 2021 21:32

cinci zoo sniper: Mar 14, 2013

i had an interviewer tell me that nlogn is faster than n because logn can be less than 1

# ? Sep 25, 2021 22:05

PIZZA.BAT: Nov 12, 2016

cinci zoo sniper posted:

i had an interviewer tell me that nlogn is faster than n because logn can be less than 1

lol that�s precious

# ? Sep 25, 2021 22:16

silvergoose: Mar 18, 2006; IT IS SAID THE TEARS OF THE BWEENIX CAN HEAL ALL WOUNDS

cinci zoo sniper posted:

i had an interviewer tell me that nlogn is faster than n because logn can be less than 1

good god

# ? Sep 25, 2021 23:00

Vinz Clortho: Jul 19, 2004

cinci zoo sniper posted:

i had an interviewer tell me that nlogn is faster than n because logn can be less than 1

Numbers can be negative, therefore n is faster. QED.

# ? Sep 25, 2021 23:17

Plorkyeran: Mar 21, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

it is true that a nlogn algorithm can be faster than the n algorithm for the values of n that you care about, and it is also true that logn is less than one when n is one, but those two facts aren't actually connected and the second isn't the reason why the first is true

# ? Sep 26, 2021 05:10

Achmed Jones: Oct 16, 2004

idk it seems most likely to me that the interviewer was making a joke. it also serves as a "does the interviewee assume others' competence or think everyone else is an idiot" check

# ? Sep 26, 2021 05:19

Menacer: Nov 25, 2000; Failed Sega Accessory Ahoy!

i would absolutely assume that someone who said incompetent poo poo in a professional setting is actually incompetent. i have been burned so much in my career by assuming that someone saying stupid poo poo has some deeper reason for it, or they're joking, or whatever.

# ? Sep 26, 2021 06:53

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

REIGNING YOSPOS COSTCO KING

Menacer posted:

i would absolutely assume that someone who said incompetent poo poo in a professional setting is actually incompetent. i have been burned so much in my career by assuming that someone saying stupid poo poo has some deeper reason for it, or they're joking, or whatever.

"when someone tells you who they are, believe them"

# ? Sep 26, 2021 08:11

Xarn: Jun 26, 2015

raminasi posted:

is "are unnecessary quadratic time operations acceptable?" and in the context of the kind of interview that asks that question, the correct answer is always "categorically no," even though this isn't true in the real world.

a quadratic thing in production code is either preceded by an input size assert, or a bug.

# ? Sep 26, 2021 08:30

cinci zoo sniper: Mar 14, 2013

Achmed Jones posted:

idk it seems most likely to me that the interviewer was making a joke. it also serves as a "does the interviewee assume others' competence or think everyone else is an idiot" check

i implemented interview problem in 2 ways - o(nlogn) and o(n). they told me o(nlogn) is faster than o(n), and instructed me to further improve the former variant.

even if this would have been a joke, this is like �boss jokes about firing you� tier of appropriateness of jokes. and that�s not touching the obvious language difficulties the interviewer, a non-native speaker, was having.

# ? Sep 26, 2021 09:11

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# ? Jan 18, 2025 14:03

Armitag3: Mar 15, 2020; Forget it Jake, it's cybertown.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

i implemented interview problem in 2 ways - o(nlogn) and o(n). they told me o(nlogn) is faster than o(n), and instructed me to further improve the former variant.

even if this would have been a joke, this is like “boss jokes about firing you” tier of appropriateness of jokes. and that’s not touching the obvious language difficulties the interviewer, a non-native speaker, was having.

o(nlogn) is faster than o(n)...... NOT

# ? Sep 26, 2021 09:14

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > interviewing: Senior by reference, not by value

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