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The Imposter's Handbook

impostershandbook.com

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Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#31

Post by haylem »

teekert wrote: post #20
eksemplar wrote: post #13

I have a degree in CS and I've never found myself in a situation where anyone would discuss bouble sort vs merge sort. Neither have I been in a situation where big-o was relevant beyond the basic concept of not doing obviously stupid shit. What you've really missed is things like best practices, design patterns and concepts like SOLID, but a lot of people with CS degrees missed some of those as well. If the book cove…

I have no degree in CS and I see these terms (Big O, np vs p, etc) regularly, mostly here on HN. No idea what they mean, this books sounds great to me.

> mostly here on HN

Which may or may not be an accurate depiction (as we read personal accounts and thoughts of the commenters) of a quite marginal subset of real-life IT-professionals.

I wouldn't worry too much about what's being said or not said on HN. There are great ideas and topics to be covered here for sure, but they're sprinkled on top of a giant cake made with 1-part self-loathing, 2-parts day-dreaming, and 1-part regular huff-and-puffing.

It makes for good entertainment and procrastination.

> No idea what they mean, this books sounds great to me

That being said, not knowing Big-O while doing CS or IT work seems worrying. Sure, it's not absolutely necessary for most of the grunt work. But you should definitely have the same understanding of performance issues without knowing the fancy notation and terminology. Big-O is just a notation and a formalization of these concepts, and it helps with communication. I'd say it's still better to know it.

So, indeed the book probably doesn't hurt.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#32

Post by drak3 »

The excerpt on the Boolean Satisfiability Problem reads

> The basic concept that people have figured out, so far, is that a number of NP-complete problems can likely be solved if we crack the Boolean Satisfiability problem.

And

> If NP-Complete problems get resolved, it is likely (though nobody knows for sure) that we'll crack every NP-Problem

Isn't the definition of a NP-Complete problem exactly that it is in NP _and_ every other problem in NP can be reduced to it in polynomial time. So we know _for sure_ ([Cook71]), that as soon we have a polynomial algorithm for SAT _every_ problem in NP can be solved in polynomial time, and not just some of them as the excerpt claims.

Am I missing something? Because this seems like a very confusing, if not downright wrong, way to explain NP-completeness and its link to SAT.

[Cook71] Cook, S.A. (1971). "The complexity of theorem proving procedures". Proceedings, Third Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, ACM, New York. pp. 151–158.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#33

Post by MehdiHK »

dante9999 wrote: post #21
MehdiHK wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bought it. Pretty basic stuffs: - Didn't learn anything new from Linux chapter. - Data Structures and Algorithms chapter is too basic. There is not even any implementation provided. I thought it didn't offer anything more than you could find on Wikipedia if you add some illustration done with Paper by 53 app. I'd recommend "Grokking Algorithms" by Aditya Bhargava for this topic if you want illustrated explanations wi…

sounds like you should ask for your money back, remember OP stands by everything he creates and if you dont like it he promises money back no questions asked

I did. The author kept his promise and refunded instantly.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#34

Post by cmrdporcupine »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #18

The main thing people miss out on not having a degree is not getting past silly HR "must have degree" filtration. Never once found a CS degree a worthwhile indicator of ability. It may be a superb book, but not even giving a sample chapter out to judge writing style, quality of explanations, depth and so on?

Having a CS degree gets you through a Google-style interview -- where they will hammer you for hours on your ability to recall the skills you needed to pass your algorithms classes in university, and grade you almost solely on that.

And then you will start working there and almost never use those skills again, because you'll be using a vast library of datastructures and algorithms in the language of your choice, and the skill you will need the most is the ability to analyze why you might need one vs the other.

Unless you're on the team which is writing said libraries, which is rare.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#35

Post by Practicality »

teekert wrote: post #20
eksemplar wrote: post #13

I have a degree in CS and I've never found myself in a situation where anyone would discuss bouble sort vs merge sort. Neither have I been in a situation where big-o was relevant beyond the basic concept of not doing obviously stupid shit. What you've really missed is things like best practices, design patterns and concepts like SOLID, but a lot of people with CS degrees missed some of those as well. If the book cove…

I have no degree in CS and I see these terms (Big O, np vs p, etc) regularly, mostly here on HN. No idea what they mean, this books sounds great to me.

Ironically, big-O describes things that are very easy to understand, in a notation that looks complicated.

If you have a lot of experience, you probably already understand the concepts. The notation just gives a clear way to describe them: https://rob-bell.net/2009/06/a-beginners-guide-to-big-o-nota...,

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#36

Post by chris11 »

eksemplar wrote: post #13

I have a degree in CS and I've never found myself in a situation where anyone would discuss bouble sort vs merge sort. Neither have I been in a situation where big-o was relevant beyond the basic concept of not doing obviously stupid shit. What you've really missed is things like best practices, design patterns and concepts like SOLID, but a lot of people with CS degrees missed some of those as well. If the book cove…

Do you think that your intuition for not doing something stupid came from studying the theoretical side of cs? Sure, you should be able to get a good idea of the runtime of code without spending much time looking at it, but I'd say personally that spending a couple semesters in classes that specifically covered big-o really helped my intuition.

It just seems to me that not doing stupid shit can really depend on your intuitive grasp of theoretical cs. For instance, trying to find the optimal solution to an np problem might be a really bad idea, depending on the instance. But recognizing np problems doesn't really explicitly come up that often outside of theoretical cs.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#37

Post by chris11 »

Practicality wrote: post #35
teekert wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no degree in CS and I see these terms (Big O, np vs p, etc) regularly, mostly here on HN. No idea what they mean, this books sounds great to me.

Ironically, big-O describes things that are very easy to understand, in a notation that looks complicated. If you have a lot of experience, you probably already understand the concepts. The notation just gives a clear way to describe them: https://rob-bell.net/2009/06/a-beginners-guide-to-big-o-nota... ,

True, but studying the theory gives a better intuition for big-O. And theory is helpful for some of the edge cases that can be more complicated. For instance, I wouldn't want to try to determine the run-time of a recursive algorithm with just the info in that article.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#38

Post by mrrsm »

lamacase wrote: post #16
jcbeard wrote: post #8

Anybody else vaguely reminded of The Fountainhead's cover: http://www.steinerag.com/flw/Book%20Images/Fountainhead1994.... For some reason the combination of "imposter" and the colors evoked memories of an old paperback.

The cover actually appears to be one of the jpl "visions of the future" posters. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/images/superea... I hope the author has permission to use it?

They do as far as I can tell by reading the license of the images. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/imagepolicy/

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#39

Post by chrisseaton »

drak3 wrote: post #32

The excerpt on the Boolean Satisfiability Problem reads > The basic concept that people have figured out, so far, is that a number of NP-complete problems can likely be solved if we crack the Boolean Satisfiability problem. And > If NP-Complete problems get resolved, it is likely (though nobody knows for sure) that we'll crack every NP-Problem Isn't the definition of a NP-Complete problem exactly that it is in NP _an…

In my opinion there are also serious errors with the description of currying.

https://github.com/imposters-handbook/feedback/issues/50

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#40

Post by xenophonf »

lamacase wrote: post #16
jcbeard wrote: post #8

Anybody else vaguely reminded of The Fountainhead's cover: http://www.steinerag.com/flw/Book%20Images/Fountainhead1994.... For some reason the combination of "imposter" and the colors evoked memories of an old paperback.

The cover actually appears to be one of the jpl "visions of the future" posters. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/images/superea... I hope the author has permission to use it?

IIRC government-produced stuff is all in the public domain.
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