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Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#281

Post by pawn »

aaronem wrote: post #277
pawn wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Send me your resume and I'll make sure it gets into the right hands. For the purposes of this comment thread, my email address is heresmyresume@viewthesource.org (I catch anything sent to viewthesource.org, so I like to customize it when giving my email to people) It should be noted that we're in Bentonville, AR. That could potentially be a limiting factor for some people.

No kidding? I know at least one extremely large company which has its headquarters in that city, and I have recently been hearing good things about the modernity of their IT infrastructure.

Yep, I worked at the company you're probably speaking about for 9 years (I say probably, because there are two...Walmart and JB Hunt). I just left Walmart 3 months ago, largely because I was ready for something new, and the place I work now is just a lot more cool. Big change for me, going from giant IT building to a company that has 25 people total. They had less than 20 when I applied and 9 people a year ago.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#283

Post by pawn »

hdennis wrote: post #159
aaronem wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks; I'm happy with the job I've got right now. But I appreciate you asking! More seriously, shouldn't it be possible to post a version thoroughly enough sanitized to avoid giving the game away to your potential applicants, without losing the sense of the original? You don't identify your organization in your HN profile, so it doesn't seem terribly likely anyone who's looking for hints on your hiring process wi…

Jumping onto this chain, I'd also like to take a stab at a sanitized version of your test. We often have to reverse engineer our Client's existing reports when creating new BI reports for them in Cognos, and I'm curious to see how challenging your 3rd and 4th problem sets are.

If you're doing BI reports, I'd guess you would probably do well.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#284

Post by pawn »

aaronem wrote: post #120
pawn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think you might be interested in applying? :-) We're hiring...

No thanks; I'm happy with the job I've got right now. But I appreciate you asking! More seriously, shouldn't it be possible to post a version thoroughly enough sanitized to avoid giving the game away to your potential applicants, without losing the sense of the original? You don't identify your organization in your HN profile, so it doesn't seem terribly likely anyone who's looking for hints on your hiring process wi…

I might see if I can come up with something approximating the test... The tricky part about making it so that people online could take it is that I'd need to give you an avenue to play around in a query editor and run queries on a database I've created. Short of making a publicly available database on my own domain (which uses a different database platform than what we use at work), is there a good way to accomplish this?

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#285

Post by jonsen »

baddox wrote: post #242
joezydeco wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you flipped 10 heads in a row the probability of the coin you have being the double heads coin increases dramatically..." I disagree. The coin is the coin. It didn't magically transport itself or change state after flipping it 10, 100, or a billion times. Lets change the puzzle to the simplest state: you pull a coin from the 1000-coin jar and flip it just once. What's the probability of heads? This is why roulett…

I think you're incorrect because your conceptual model of what constitutes "probability" is incorrect for this type of problem. Try thinking about it in a more brute force way: imagine literally all possible outcomes of performing this experiment. In other words, create a list like this (each coin in the jar is numbered from 000 to 999 with 999 being the only biased coin, and coin flips are represented by 0 being hea…

Well if I can count:

  00000 00000 0
  00000 00000 1
for 999 fair coins = 1998 + 1 for fake coin = 1999

1000 of which has 11. flip 0

So 1000/1999 ~ 50%

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#286

Post by aaronem »

pawn wrote: post #281
aaronem wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No kidding? I know at least one extremely large company which has its headquarters in that city, and I have recently been hearing good things about the modernity of their IT infrastructure.

Yep, I worked at the company you're probably speaking about for 9 years (I say probably, because there are two...Walmart and JB Hunt). I just left Walmart 3 months ago, largely because I was ready for something new, and the place I work now is just a lot more cool. Big change for me, going from giant IT building to a company that has 25 people total. They had less than 20 when I applied and 9 people a year ago.

Well, I've never heard anything about JB Hunt's IT, for good or ill, so...

That must be a weird change, yeah, but it sounds good on the whole. It's a shame the timing didn't work out on this; if I still lived in Memphis, I'd have jumped at the opportunity. (I didn't like living in Memphis very well -- Bentonville seems like it'd be much more congenial.)

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#287

Post by presidentender »

code_duck wrote: post #155
presidentender wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't we cd /path/to/wherever rm -rf *.mp3 ?

It's supposed to be recursive. That would only delete the files in the current directory, not subdirectories as well.

-r is the 'recursive' flag.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#288

Post by aaronem »

pawn wrote: post #284
aaronem wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks; I'm happy with the job I've got right now. But I appreciate you asking! More seriously, shouldn't it be possible to post a version thoroughly enough sanitized to avoid giving the game away to your potential applicants, without losing the sense of the original? You don't identify your organization in your HN profile, so it doesn't seem terribly likely anyone who's looking for hints on your hiring process wi…

I might see if I can come up with something approximating the test... The tricky part about making it so that people online could take it is that I'd need to give you an avenue to play around in a query editor and run queries on a database I've created. Short of making a publicly available database on my own domain (which uses a different database platform than what we use at work), is there a good way to accomplish…

You might be overthinking it; for my purposes, at least, a set of example schemas and required outputs would suffice -- the rest I can probably do on a MySQL instance of my own.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#289

Post by ColinWright »

larrys wrote: post #215
ColinWright wrote: post #79

I hesitate to say this, because it might be misconstrued. However, some people seem not to know it, so it might be of value regardless ... Once an item has more than 40 comments, if the number of comments is more than the number of points, there is a ranking penalty applied. This is because it's a good proxy fr an item being a flame-war. So if you're interested in seeing more answers to this question, or carrying on…

Is it known whether the flame war detector applies any significance to particular words appearing in the comments to determine if there is actually any war going on just because there are not enough item up votes?

To the best of my knowledge it's purely depended on number of comments and number of points. There was a submission some time ago talking about all the factors involved in getting to, or not getting to, the front page.

I'll see if I can find it.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#290

Post by [deleted] »

Guvante wrote: post #171
thearn4 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Depressing, just asked my coworkers this and can't convince them it isn't an independent event :(.

[deleted]
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