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Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#361

Post by effie »

TomMarius wrote: post #258
devcpp wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you need criminals to outsmart criminals. I'm not sure why you need that trait in software. You're (usually) not trying to beat other programmers. So I suppose the parent comment should have added "except in adversarial situations". Which means it does apply to cyber security. You need hackers to outsmart hackers. If that's the kind of industry you're applying for, it probably is a good idea to mention this act…

Many EU startups won't be interested in your academic records but such a project would make them hire you on the spot.

That sounds interesting. Are EU startups known for less interest in uni credentials than US startups?

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#362

Post by matheist »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #334
matheist wrote: post #79

Probably not hardest, but one that sticks in my mind was that I downloaded an old copy of Jedi Knight II onto my computer and was excited to play it again... but it crashed on launch. Or rather it would throw a modal dialog (complaining about graphics something-or-other) and go into a loop of system beeps. So I attached to it with gdb... and started going down a rabbit hole of stack traces and assembly code. I don't…

You reminded me of this: "How I Fixed a 10 Year Old Guitar Hero Bug Without the Source Code" https://youtu.be/A9U5wK_boYM

Thanks for sharing that! It does look very similar — I wish I had documented my process as neatly as the author of that video.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#363

Post by [deleted] »

dctoedt wrote: post #339
triviatise wrote: post #287

Dont know if this is the hardest, but it is one of the most impactful. During the 2010 recession I had a client that had about 700K in receivables past due and we were doing about 120K/month in additional work. I started reading their 10Q and 10K and decided that they were at risk for bankruptcy as their cash position was not great. I told my sales guy that we had to collect our money somehow. He was like they are a…

> To this day I try to get my finance team to send gifts to the AP team of our clients. 1. Many, many big companies require vendors to agree to codes of conduct that explicitly prohibit such gifts. 2. If the customer were to file for bankruptcy protection, the trustee (or debtor-in-possession) likely would characterize recent payments as "avoidable preference" payments and seek to claw them back — with claw-back bein…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#364

Post by effie »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #321
feanaro wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't it fine, though? What serious damage did his actions cause? Which important societal construct rests solely on the assumption that no students cheat and, once this is violated by a single student, comes crashing down? I would suggest that if such a construct exists, then maybe the problem is its very conception and this is what should be rethinked. I think the implication that he should feel like an imposto…

"Which important societal construct rests solely on the assumption that no students cheat " Society does not depend on wether or not a few students cheat. But society definitely depends on the social and moral contract that we do not cheat, and that it is wrong. If most of us cheated, the system would definitely fall apart. Have you ever visited a developing nation? Where outside of small villages it seems like every…

> It's like pouring sand into the gears of an engine: everything starts to break down.

While true in general, cheating in that environment is also sometimes necessary to get on with your life unharmed. And sometimes cheating the system is actually regarded highly by the fellow citizens, because the people do not believe in the imposed system. Cheating is not beneficial to the system, but it often is to the people. Now, what is more ethical, doing what benefits the people or doing what benefits such system?

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#365

Post by effie »

brianpgordon wrote: post #284
yholio wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics is not something that gets decided by the Dean and laid down in a code of academic ethics. The University is just a part of society and it has it's own perverse and quite unethical practices; for example, the tendency to grab one's money and time and not provide any substantial education in return. Furthermore, the university might be perfectly aware that it provides crap services and that fraud is rampant, ye…

If you sign a code of ethics swearing you won't cheat and you do anyway, that's unethical. Even without an actual signature, the social contract is implicit. The fact that the university exploits athletes and postdocs is unrelated. You can break out the "I did what I had to do to survive" argument but then you're just conceding the point that you abandoned ethics out of necessity or simple mercenary desire for a bett…

> If you sign a code of ethics swearing you won't cheat and you do anyway, that's unethical

If you do not sign such a document, does it make a difference? Of course not. Getting massive advantage by extraordinary cheating is still unacceptable. However, cheating a little when stakes are very high, or cheating for 'greater good' may be acceptable. Cheating is a personal decision and whether it is acceptable depends on the situation the cheating person is in, and the person doing the judgement.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#366

Post by seanmcdirmid »

yetihehe wrote: post #264
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, but I debugged a lot of use cases, tried to narrow the scope of the bug, thought really hard about the execution in my head, and then fixed it all using an explicit semicolon.... Asking an experienced dev this question is like asking someone what was the hardest food they had to eat and how did they manage to swallow it. What is the interviewer hoping to learn by that?

It's a simple task to check that you really are experienced developer and not someone who stuffed his CV.

It’s one of those questions you should definitely ask yourself before you ask others, to check if a reasonable answer is possible or not.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#367

Post by effie »

steelframe wrote: post #354
grenoire wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, man. You're hired.

In the workplace, no amount of technical ability can compensate for a lack of ethics.

Cheating on an exam does not always mean one has 'lack of ethics'. It may mean the opposite - say, "my parents aren't paying out of their veins for me to waste time on this nonsense."

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#368

Post by Izkata »

haskal wrote: post #332
tokyodude wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 50ms. This is 200ms. doesn't quite work as well. Depending on the situation there has to be some theshhold of diminishing returns.

If the request you are talking about actually gets executed once (maybe it gets cached or something), then you shouldn't be pitching the time difference anyway. If it gets executed 100s of times in a day per person, you can say this is 50 ms * 100 = 5s, 200 ms * 100 = 20s. And that's just per user.

Yeah, actually doing this math tends to surprise people. We had an automated background process that took ~2s to run, which doesn't sound bad at all considering it includes an API call over the internet. But multiplying it out to the number of backlog items we actually had at the time, 30-40 hours doesn't sound so good.

Re: Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

#369

Post by Izkata »

MRD85 wrote: post #235
jakelazaroff wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a particular exam has more to it than memorization, then even open book you shouldn't be able to ace it without knowing the material!

I dislike open book exams so much that I took nothing into my last one. It was a unit without much memorisation that focused much more heavily on applying concepts, and I feel that having it as open book was a trap for ill-prepared students.

One of my highschool teachers mentioned that a book wouldn't help much before her first open-book test, then openly stated that afterwards that it was a small trick to see who wouldn't study. She was among the best and most-liked teachers in the school.
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