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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?

#371

Post by slavik81 »

max76 wrote: post #358
slededit wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

University students are legally adults and we’re considered so until recently. I don’t thin infantalizing young adults is healthy.

In the US the legal age of adulthood is 18. This is very far from the actual maturity point. It's not infantalizing to be accepting and unsuprised when a 18-22 year old does something childish. Edit: Being a child, and acting childish is an important part of the life cycle that allows development. We seem to be bumping into some biological limits on how late we can extend it, but if it were possible I would.

When I worked in baseball concessions as a teenager, the employees who were the most responsible and dependable were the university students. The older workers tended to be more experienced, but some of them were a little sketchy and a couple were fired for showing up drunk.

There is a tremendous variation between individuals. Part of the point of the university degree as a credential is to identify those people who are responsible enough to complete the program. I graduated at the age of 21 and immediately became an Engineer in Training, working on code that could kill people if it behaved improperly. I took that responsibility very seriously, and I'm thankful that my employer and coworkers took me seriously in return.

I fear that a focus on age tends to lead to prejudice. If you just want to ensure young adults can be allowed to make mistakes without ruining their lives, I would encourage you to expand your goal. There are many adults who could benefit from a bit more compassion and forgiveness. We don't need to restrict it to the young.

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

#372

Post by Izkata »

killjoywashere wrote: post #175
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admitting to significant academic fraud during a job interview is a very, very bad idea. Furthermore, I would question the ethics and morality of any company that said "Wow, you solved an incredibly tough problem in order to commit fraud. Boy, are we the place for you!"

> Admitting to significant ... fraud during a job interview is a very, very bad idea. After serving his time, that's exactly how Frank Abagnale got a job in the FBI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale

> After serving his time

So there was nothing new to admit to, they already knew. Entirely different situation.

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

#373

Post by effie »

fmela wrote: post #158
effie wrote: post #82

A deceptively easy looking obscure disentanglement brain teaser, that I found in a remarkable book on brain teasers from 80's. When you start solving it, you think "this has to be very easy". Hours and days go, and slowly a feeling sets in that your brain is not up to the level of this crazy problem. Then you suddenly find the solution, no idea how. Banal stuff, but when you solve it, you feel like million bucks.

Could you share the puzzle?

I think it was something like this: https://image.ibb.co/nsz4x0/puzzle.png The goal is to separate the string with the beads from the rubber piece. The rubber has 5 holes in it. The beads cannot go through the hole.

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

#374

Post by ComputerGuru »

adroitboss wrote: post #305
ComputerGuru wrote: post #174

* Creating a prototype of a low-cost alternative to braille displays for PCs for my thesis (without access to modern machining resources): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPwgkf1aZ9I then filing for a patent (that I didn't get): https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130203022A1/en * Improving that design to make it work reliably and conveniently enough for mass production and deployment in 3rd world countries (still…

This is really amazing stuff! How do you keep moral and focus when tackling harder projects?

Thank you. It's an ongoing struggle that I haven't solved yet. It can be very tempting and fun to just switch to a new project when you reach the point where you know what needs to be done but it's an insane mountain of work that you either dread (e.g. you need to rewrite an entire project from scratch to take a different approach) or can't even do at the moment (e.g. you need precision machining beyond what is available to you).

I get a thrill out of besting myself, and find that helps extremely well when I've all but given up hope but conversely that makes it really hard to motivate yourself when it's something you know you can do (perhaps you've done it before) but just aren't looking forward to. Also it's really hard to do something that takes so much insane time/effort (literally years) when you know there's a good chance the world just won't care.

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

#375

Post by navinsylvester »

brianpgordon wrote: post #267
navinsylvester wrote: post #205

This was 15 years ago. I signed up to a correspondence course to study company law after my under graduation(not CS). Was bored so wanted to pick a hobby and was fascinated by robotics/automation. Self thought 8051 by reading Kenneth J. Ajala and this hobby soon turned lucrative. I signed up with an institute which was helping college students with their final year projects. I had a college junior(Amazing guy who is…

> Even before i could start writing a single line of code the CTO left the company after a spat and without proper hand-off. I wouldn't wish this scenario even upon my worst enemy. I know that feel. My first full-time job right out of college, the lead developer left only a week after I joined. I individually inherited a 70k+ SLOC project (in Java, but still...) of his that sorta kinda worked, in a domain I had no ex…

I had loads of experience when i encountered the scenario so your story is much more impressive. Agree that the schooling this kind of scenario provides is harsh but an enriching one.

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

#376

Post by sonnyblarney »

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…

In my experience, the vast majority of companies will not be reporting 'dinner' as a gift, probably not even golf. Maybe 'material gifts' i.e. things that are directly gifted that have value, but even a small basket might not get reported.

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

#377

Post by sonnyblarney »

shaklee3 wrote: post #302
nathan_f77 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the craziest one I've heard so far. I can't imagine trying to reproduce a hardware bug in an FPGA with a logic analyzer. How much time did you spend on the bug? Was it something that you ignored for a long time, and then you decided to dive in and spend a couple of weeks on it?

It was about 8 years ago, so my memory is a bit foggy. At one point we had everyone on our entire project working on it, which was about 20 people. We had daily calls with the customer since it was causing frequent outages on their network. I was full time on the bug for a while, and most of that time was spent making meticulous documentation for what happens in every clock cycle in the fpga. I visited the customer's…

Wow, such an arcane bug causing such dramatic problems. My god man.

There should be a blog for this kind of stuff.

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

#378

Post by yesenadam »

dennis_jeeves wrote: post #356
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…

Hey Yholio, don't even bother to explain to the nuts here, who are questioning your 'ethics'. They do not have a nuanced view of ethics. For them the rules, as laid out by the authorities (in your case the university) is the template of what is 'ethical', they are incapable of thinking beyond that. The frightening thing is that they unfortunately represents the vast majority of people.

Wow. How that comment hasn't been flagged yet I have no idea. People who don't agree with you are 'nuts', yet you have a nuanced view of ethics? That's the most condescending, deluded thing I've heard in years. "For them.." blah blah.. you don't know us; in my case at least, your assumptions couldn't be more wrong, but what do you know or care; you've decided who the in- and out- groups are here.

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

#379

Post by yesenadam »

yholio wrote: post #261
yesenadam wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rejected ethical behaviour 'on principle', you even seem proud of that. Have you kept doing that in life? Do you feel like an impostor, presumably with your degree that you didn't think you could acquire without cheating, or couldn't be bothered? A surprising number of the replies to your comment also seem to think cheating like that at university is perfectly fine.

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…

Thanks for explaining further, that's a finer reply than I deserved. Well, I didn't know where that was, or the wider story. What do I know, I've never been in that situation. Good luck, I hope to read your book one day. :-)

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

#380

Post by yesenadam »

quadcore wrote: post #259
yesenadam wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rejected ethical behaviour 'on principle', you even seem proud of that. Have you kept doing that in life? Do you feel like an impostor, presumably with your degree that you didn't think you could acquire without cheating, or couldn't be bothered? A surprising number of the replies to your comment also seem to think cheating like that at university is perfectly fine.

My humble opinion. University is about learning (not, for example, status). Learning is something strictly personal. There is nothing fundamentally universally wrong to cheat at an exam beside the fact you may be harming yourself. Now since we need a little order for various secondary reasons, we promoted exam cheating to illegal and that's ok. We need order. But there is nothing someone should feel guilt for imho, a…

I wasn't talking about law, I was talking about ethics.

"There is nothing fundamentally universally wrong to cheat at an exam beside the fact you may be harming yourself."

I don't understand that, I have no idea where you got that. Or what those words "fundamentally" and "universally" add. I say it's wrong, you say "Oh, but it's not fundamentally, universally wrong".. As if it's clear what that means.

For example: You may have harmed the people who didn't get good enough marks because you cheated your way into higher marks. Then you may harm people in your career that you're not qualified for, besides stopping properly qualified people from doing their jobs. I don't want an airlane pilot or doctor that bought their degree or cheated in exams, thanks. Anyway, it seems ridiculous that I have to explain to people why cheating's bad. Well, I don't know, maybe you are in a country where it's normal, perfectly fine, accepted, everyone does it. Where I come from, people don't have to have it explained to them why it's bad.

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