Am I the only who would cut the pizza in 12 pieces, then eat one?
Overthinking
51–60 of 96 posts
Re: Overthinking
#52It's not overthinking, it's called context. If you give an engineering problem to an engineer in a corporate environment, he will try to do what he's been told to be a good job: good precision and low cost, complexity not being a problem as far as the solution is achieved. If he's given 1 hour, then using 59 minutes is just as valid as using 5. And rightly so. As for the numeric problem, same thing. You are not givin…
I think it's totally relevant, I have worked with guys that have fancy PHD's from MIT that always over complicated the crap out of simple things. It's like when you buy something expensive or make an investment, you feel the need to defend and justify it to others.
It's the same thing here, you get a fancy degree and everything you do has to be complex to justify getting that degree otherwise what separates you from a guy with an average degree. It's probably more an ego thing, but I see this all the time.
Re: Overthinking
#53I figured out the number one in about 30 seconds. The biggest clue is that it claims preschoolers get it easily. That means all mathematical operations, except addition and less likely subtraction, is out of the question. A quick glance showed that adding or subtracting in any simple way would not yield a result - a more complicated way would not be done by a preschooler. So that meant it probably was some sort of sp…
I bet it was more like 2 minutes. It only took me 64 minutes.
Re: Overthinking
#54I solved the second one in a couple minutes in my head with value substitutions. Unless you were to do with with a pen and paper, it'd be pretty difficult to pick up on the closed loops. Generating the following list took less than 30 secs when I looked it over, so obviously the example of it taking a long time to solve is a bit contrived. What threw me off a bit at first was that the number 4 was not used at all. I…
I too solved it in 1-2 minutes just by looking at the patterns and deducing from the combinations, especially the ones with four of a kind. The loops never occurred to me until I read the "real" solution.
IMO the "fuck_you" of the currently most popular comment is what most people who are skimming HN during their morning coffee are bound to think, but most programmers and anyone used to deducing patterns would probably be able to figure the puzzle out in a relatively short amount of time. Not an hour. Sheesh!
Re: Overthinking
#55It's not overthinking, it's called context. If you give an engineering problem to an engineer in a corporate environment, he will try to do what he's been told to be a good job: good precision and low cost, complexity not being a problem as far as the solution is achieved. If he's given 1 hour, then using 59 minutes is just as valid as using 5. And rightly so. As for the numeric problem, same thing. You are not givin…
I think it's totally relevant, I have worked with guys that have fancy PHD's from MIT that always over complicated the crap out of simple things. It's like when you buy something expensive or make an investment, you feel the need to defend and justify it to others. It's the same thing here, you get a fancy degree and everything you do has to be complex to justify getting that degree otherwise what separates you from…
I agree, but when that's the case then it's right to call it.
Actually, it's one of my greatest pet peeves. How so many things are so massively over-engineered. I could go on forever about that and there is not a single day I don't spend a while realising this about something.
Re: Overthinking
#56It's not overthinking, it's called context. If you give an engineering problem to an engineer in a corporate environment, he will try to do what he's been told to be a good job: good precision and low cost, complexity not being a problem as far as the solution is achieved. If he's given 1 hour, then using 59 minutes is just as valid as using 5. And rightly so. As for the numeric problem, same thing. You are not givin…
Maybe you were too stupid to solve the problem in a reasonable time?
Re: Overthinking
#57Am I the only who would cut the pizza in 12 pieces, then eat one?
I'm an American, I'd just eat the whole damn pizza.
Re: Overthinking
#58Nobody really needs to divide a pizza into eleven pieces with such precision. It's presented as a "real" situation, but it's a classic type of mathematical problem, the constraints of which are entirely made up for fun . When he dismisses the geometrical solution as "overthinking" and a sign of a lack of creativity, he not only misses the point, he's mocking what other people do for fun. Nice. Also, as someone else a…
Stretch a string over the middle of the pizza. Stretch another string over the middle of the pizza perpendicular to the first.
Re: Overthinking
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's totally relevant, I have worked with guys that have fancy PHD's from MIT that always over complicated the crap out of simple things. It's like when you buy something expensive or make an investment, you feel the need to defend and justify it to others. It's the same thing here, you get a fancy degree and everything you do has to be complex to justify getting that degree otherwise what separates you from…
I agree, but when that's the case then it's right to call it. Actually, it's one of my greatest pet peeves. How so many things are so massively over-engineered. I could go on forever about that and there is not a single day I don't spend a while realising this about something.
[deleted]
Re: Overthinking
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry that my article offended you.
It didn't. When I'm presented bullshit like that IRL I get pissed off, but I can generally take the challenge of pointing out how and why is it bullshit. Being presented it in HN, it's a good chance to educate more people on why this is NOT thinking out of the box or being clever, and why these are NOT proper tests unless adequate context is provided.
The problem is, if your definition of engineering is solving problems where all the context is fully provided, then 99% of what is interesting on HN isn't engineering. It's apparently bullshit.
Changing the rules and picking a different context are perfectly valid ways of solving a problem.
Squinting hard at real-life patterns and trying to find the rule that generates them is most of the value in business and programming. Ever run an a/b test or looked at analytics and tried to understand why things were changing? The truth is generally as different from what you expect as a number problem whose solution is the shapes of the numerals.