Viewing profile — eranki

I used to do it this way until I read this article a while back -- the hot start method gives me much easier-to-peel eggs than the cold start used to. I start with my eggs from the…

Here's an interesting paper on the prevalence of these misconceptions in both students and teachers (at least in Germany). http://myweb.brooklyn.liu.edu/cortiz/PDF%20Files/Misinter…

Interviews are hard because programming is an incredibly complex task with few qualified candidates. Any programming challenge other than the most basic questions is going to have …

Trying to become a successful academic seems about as insane as trying to become a rock star. Here's Peter Higgs on the subject of how academics today compares to the past: http://…

Nobody knows how to identify "talent" other than in retrospect. We say people are talented when they produce results, and then we select little anecdotes about their story to allud…

The best food in the world isn't freely available to everyone. The amount you pay for software may not correlate with quality (expensive government contracts vs. a few smart guys m…

agreed. i think this convenience is confusing. also would make it hard to explain that a two-dimensional complex vector contains two complex numbers, not one.

Why do we always feel the need to upvote posts like these as if we don't discuss them every 2 weeks? Next up in the topic cycle: Discrimination in tech. Why working more than 40 ho…

You missed the point, which is that people are likely to pull out their phones at totally inappropriate times these days. Go to any restaurant or bar and see how many dates/couples…

I think the benefit would be that people will ask more in-depth subject questions rather than "getting-to-know-you" type questions (to which we would get answers too short to satis…

The problem is corporate culture and chasing secondary indicators of productivity (hours spent in the office, lines of code written, emails sent). The actual output of knowledge wo…

I used to like Quora a lot but always hoped it would grow out of its Silicon Valley cliqueyness... I think a lot of these recent changes ensure that it's going to continue only ser…

I think the alternative being proposed though (no brand name but lots of drive) assumes lots of coding experience outside of the classroom.

I really enjoyed my MIT education, and maybe it made me smarter, but I can't say it made me a much better programmer. We had exactly one class (6.170) that was a practical programm…

Two points: 1) "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - Feynman Most smart scientists and engineers I know (not just web prog…

Only read a few pages, but I would eliminate a lot of the introductory formalism. Most people don't need to be confused by the different sets of numbers, or common uses of variable…

I like doing this and changing all the variable names as well so I'm forced to keep track of what's doing what

lol, nobody gets paid to see the positive things. Everyone else at the company is also being paid to be critical and fix problems (lawyers, finance, HR, CEO, etc.).

I agree, it's a straw man. Also, who ever implements their own data structures anymore? These days people use native-language maps freely, which may be implemented as trees or hash…

Also life expectancy changes as you age: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html By the time you hit 60, you've gone from ~75 to ~80.

But simplification is the hard part... Being able to understand a solution and being able to come up with a solution are two very different things.

Asymptotically, the question with more coconuts is more interesting. I haven't verified this for sure (there are some assumptions), but: With the "naive" asymptotically correct sol…

lol why are you so mad -- perhaps you couldn't make this out through your tears of rage: "Why not just plan ahead? Because most of the time, it was a very abrupt failure that we co…