Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 363 posts

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

#331

Post by [deleted] »

aspensmonster wrote: post #197
barik wrote: post #76

This is an off-topic answer, but I see no reason why this thread shouldn't be generalized to FizzBuzz equivalents in other careers (in fact, it might be interesting to do so). Our electrical engineering FizzBuzz is an introductory, Freshman-level voltage drop problem, found within the first chapter of any Circuit Analysis textbook: R1 (N) R2 [VDD]-^^^^--*--^^^^----| Given VDD, R1, and R2, compute the voltage at node…

>What's disappointing is that a large number of senior undergraduate students are unable to solve this problem ...Wat? That's like, one of the easiest questions you could ever be asked. As a senior undergrad in his final semester for EE (Computer Engineering specialization), could you give me an idea of some of the more difficult questions you would ask?

[deleted]

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

#332

Post by n00bhere »

aspensmonster wrote: post #197
barik wrote: post #76

This is an off-topic answer, but I see no reason why this thread shouldn't be generalized to FizzBuzz equivalents in other careers (in fact, it might be interesting to do so). Our electrical engineering FizzBuzz is an introductory, Freshman-level voltage drop problem, found within the first chapter of any Circuit Analysis textbook: R1 (N) R2 [VDD]-^^^^--*--^^^^----| Given VDD, R1, and R2, compute the voltage at node…

>What's disappointing is that a large number of senior undergraduate students are unable to solve this problem ...Wat? That's like, one of the easiest questions you could ever be asked. As a senior undergrad in his final semester for EE (Computer Engineering specialization), could you give me an idea of some of the more difficult questions you would ask?

I was once given a boolean function, asked to implement it using logic gates. And then asked to optimize it based on a few criteria (for example: GNDs and VDDs cost a lot, reduce the gates, etc.)

The most annoying thing was, I was not expecting any gates related question so my optimizations were very... adhoc.

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

#333

Post by SamReidHughes »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #321
ColinWright wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to see if I understand you: * The person suggesting the question says that this is trivial for people suited to the job in mind; * You say you couldn't do this question; * You also say that you would be suitable to do the job. Given that the proposer of the question is the one that understands the job, I'm having a hard time understanding why you claim you would be suitable for it, given that you couldn't do the…

Well, I'd disagree with at least two of your premises: 1) That the proposer of the question often understands the job. (by which i mean, in real world interviews. I'm not commenting on the specific poster). 2) I am not saying that I couldn't do the question, per se. On the contrary, my professional work shows not only that I can do the question, but that I've probably done it innumerable times and to the standard of…

You don't need to know Bayes' theorem to solve this problem.

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

#334

Post by chrismcb »

joezydeco wrote: post #190
11001 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask yourself a question: can you use the data (the 10 coin tosses) to update the probability of the current coin being two-headed?

I wouldn't use the data. The coin hasn't changed since I picked it out of the jar. If I flip it 1, 10, or 10e100 times, the coin would still be the same coin. So figure the p(heads) for the coin and ignore the previous history. Overthinking it is why this makes a good FizzBuzz problem.

So if you flipped the coin twice, once it was tails, and once it was heads... you'd ignore that info? Or look at it another way, if you flipped it a million times and it always came up heads...

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

#335

Post by retrogradeorbit »

aegiso wrote: post #40

On/off producer + audio engineer. A good discriminator might be "it's squaring out; what do you do?". A good answer would lead to an argument about the compression war.

How does it sound? You might want to leave it.

If you want to clean it up, drive the compressors/limiters less. ie. Turn the input trim down or turn compressor input gain down.

Another option is to open the compressors up. Take some (or all) of the compressors in the chain and halve their ratios.

A/B and compare.

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

#336

Post by StavrosK »

baddox wrote: post #314
StavrosK wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it, even after the explanation. What's the mechanism that constrains those probabilities?

You should be able to convince yourself that the conclusion is correct by writing a quick script to run a simulation with a million or so iterations. Actually understanding the reasoning intuitively is more challenging, but I think the linked article has a good explanation (the part about how the manner in which we receive information is as important as the information itself): http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2…

That helps, thank you.

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

#337

Post by collyw »

coreyoconnor wrote: post #275

Quality Assurance (QA) engineer. I do QA Tools specifically but still need to be on top of most QA stuff. Other QA engineers exist in the company for in depth QA. My initial question starts with: "build a function that takes a string and produces an integer". About 30% of candidates fail to get anywhere. 50% produce an incorrect implementation. 20% produce an implementation that is mostly correct. 9% produce an imple…

This would match your specification.

    def string_to_int(str):
        
        return 1

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

#338

Post by crntaylor »

jules wrote: post #295
mag487 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a useful sanity check to simulate the experiment multiple times to see the result: def choose_coin rand 0, :tails => 0 } 1000000.times do coin = choose_coin next unless all_10_heads? coin next_flip[flip_coin(coin)] += 1 end puts next_flip[:heads].to_f / (next_flip[:heads] + next_flip[:tails])

What's really interesting is that there are probabilistic programming languages where you can write a program that does a simulation just like you did, but the execution engine can compute the probabilities exactly and much faster too. It does this by computing along all possible paths in the program, and keeping track of the probability mass of each path, and then summing them all up in the end. http://en.wikipedia.…

Completely shameless plug for a tiny probabilistic programming language that I wrote as an embedded DSL in Haskell:

https://github.com/chris-taylor/hs-probability

The code that solves this problem is:

  solve = do
    coin

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

#339

Post by talmand »

tmcneal wrote: post #88
talmand wrote: post #55

I 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.

Just curious, why do you not allow the interviewee to use jQuery? Do you expect the candidate to know JavaScript's DOM-level APIs without having to look them up?

I don't mind the need to research DOM-level APIs on the fly. In fact, I'd be just as impressed that they not only know what they need to look up to refresh their memory, but where to look. Where and how they look might say things about them as well.

After all, I often have to look up a rarely used method. Seems unfair to judge harshly if they do so.

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

#340

Post by [deleted] »

tmcneal wrote: post #88
talmand wrote: post #55

I 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.

Just curious, why do you not allow the interviewee to use jQuery? Do you expect the candidate to know JavaScript's DOM-level APIs without having to look them up?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN