My Math "FizzBuzz" question is: prove Fermat's Little Theorem and Wilson's Theorem. Even those with very rudimentary understanding of modular arithmetic (coming from non-math backgrounds) can prove both with some pointers (obviously the process is interactive)
Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
51–60 of 363 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
#52Technical support analyst in the online advertising biz.
Our Fizzbuzz equivalent would be to mess with some HTML / JS and ask the interviewee to spot what's the issue. Or playing with a spreadsheet software to highlight stuff (pivot table, filters, duplicates, whatnot).
Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
#53I'm a marketer, and have yet to find a way to judge a marketer's competence better than: "Here's this app, here's what it does. How would you increase downloads?" A quick brainstorm session shows you how they approach the situation, what tricks they have in their bag, and what methods they feel confident using (or if they're just BSing). Interestingly enough, 50% of the time people answer "SEO," which is among the wo…
Would the answer of the inverse question be interesting? Taking our successful landing page, how would you reduce downloads?
That's an interesting thought, but I can't see how it would be, simply because of the sheer number of ways that would be possible. That's kind of like saying, "Here's this working program, how could you break it?"
Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
#54I was an electrical engineer before I was a computer programmer and people liked asking questions about Ohm's law and calculating total resistance of resistors in series and parallel. EDIT: I should clarify... They weren't asking about the theory behind Ohm's law but rather to apply it to various circuits.
can you give an example? tia!
Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
#55I build web sites. I would ask that the person complete a series of tasks that involved using Javascript to do a bit a typical DOM manipulations and CSS changes, especially using transitions and whatnot...
...without jQuery.
Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
That feels more like asking the difference between a class and object. Its not really asking someone to solve nearly the simplest problem to prove they can can code. Would the equivalent not be making a basic circuit to do something specific and hence a specific example that has one or two potential obvious issues?
Sorry Ohms law is not like a class or an object in any way at all.
he didn't mean literally like a class, it was an analogy. x is to y as z is to ...
Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
#57Working for a web company. Our favourite JS question is, "What happens if you do this?" var func = function func () { // blah };
The variable declaration is hoisted to the top, then is assigned a named function expression `func` so that `func.name === 'func'`.
Useful for proper error messages and stack traces.
Something else I'm missing?
Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
#58When I teach calculus 1, I usually put a "high discrimination" question at the beginning of every exam. Student performance on that question is usually very well correlated with the exam grade. It helps me quickly assess class performance right at the start of the grading process.
Examples of such questions:
Draw the graph of a function f, continuous on the reals, such that: f(x) > 0 always, f'(x) The line y=3x-2 is tangent to the graph of y=f(x) at x=4. What is f'(4)?
Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
#59I was a mathematician, and now work in finance (systematic trading). I've found a reasonable negative filter is A jar has 1000 coins, of which 999 are fair and 1 is double headed. Pick a coin at random, and toss it 10 times. Given that you see 10 heads, what is the probability that the next toss of that coin is also a head? That tests their ability to turn a problem into mathematics, and some very basic conditional p…
The Monty Hall problem (or a subtle variant) is also great one to watch people work through. It's a chance to see if people can thing about probability in a sort of asymptotic way.
Basically (if they get stuck), ask them how they would choose if there were actually a 100 doors, but the same rules apply. Obviously, everyone switches. What about 99? 98? ... turns out, 3 doors is the smallest number where the strategy is optimal. But when the number is large, the answer is much more obvious.
Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
#60I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. [1] I usually ask for a couple of major commas rules. Sometimes for semi-colon rules or for a description of passive voice. Chances are good that anyone who is zero for three isn't very good. A lot of writers and would-be writers also have blogs; it only takes one to three paragraphs to figure out who can sling a coherent sentence and who can't. Like FizzBuzz, bei…
How well does the ability to write well correlate with the ability to articulate rules for writing well?
I'd have thought there are a lot of people who can write any quantity of text with impeccably placed commas (and semicolons, when the required tone permits them), but would freeze and stutter and gabble if asked for "a couple of major comma rules".
I'd put myself among their number, if only because it's not clear to me what sort of thing you mean by "comma rules". Descriptions of some situations where it is appropriate to use commas? "Commas are commonly used to separate items in a list when there are more than two such items" or "commas may be used, like this, to surround interpolations -- but for all but the shortest such interpolations you should consider using parentheses or dashes, or restructuring the sentence"? Descriptions of situations where it's inappropriate to use commas? "If you have two things that can function as separate sentences, don't separate them only with a comma; use a full stop or, in some contexts, a semicolon"? Or higher-level fuzzier principles? "Stops of all kind are placed to correspond roughly with pauses in speech and boundaries of grammatical units. The comma is the 'smallest' of stops, and is generally not used where the pause would be long or where the break in grammatical structure is great." Or what?
(I suspect a cultural difference at work here: I think formal analysis of grammar and punctuation may be a bigger deal in the US than it is in the UK.)