101–110 of 394 posts
I consider myself rather smart and good at what I do. It's nice to have a look at problems like these once in a while, to remind myself of how little I know, and how much closer I am to the average than to the top.
I'm 30 years in, and literally don't understand the question.
“If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
disagree. nobody has a monopoly on what metric makes someone good. I don't understand all this leet code optimization. actually i do understand it, but it's a game that will attract game optimizers. the hot take is, there are other games.
Also leetcode does not really provide insight into ones ability to design business solutions. Whether it be system design, just some small feature implementation or communication skills within a team. Its just optimizers jerking each other off on some cryptic problems 99.999999999% of developers will never see in real life. Maybe it would've been useful like 30 years ago, but all commonly used languages have all thes…
In every other field it's helpful to understand the basics. I don't think software is the exception here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
disagree. nobody has a monopoly on what metric makes someone good. I don't understand all this leet code optimization. actually i do understand it, but it's a game that will attract game optimizers. the hot take is, there are other games.
Also leetcode does not really provide insight into ones ability to design business solutions. Whether it be system design, just some small feature implementation or communication skills within a team. Its just optimizers jerking each other off on some cryptic problems 99.999999999% of developers will never see in real life. Maybe it would've been useful like 30 years ago, but all commonly used languages have all thes…
I consider myself rather smart and good at what I do. It's nice to have a look at problems like these once in a while, to remind myself of how little I know, and how much closer I am to the average than to the top.
Having recently learned more about SIMD, PTX and optimization techniques, this is a nice little challenge to learn even more. As a take home assignment though I would have failed as I would have probably taken 2 hours to just sketch out ideas and more on my tablet while reading the code before even changing it.
Unless misread, 2 hours isn't the time limit for the candidate to do this but the time Claude eventually needed to outperform best returned solution. Best candidate could've taken 6h~2d to achieve this result.
"before Claude Opus 4.5 started doing better than humans given only 2 hours"
"Claude Opus 4.5 in a casual Claude Code session, approximately matching the best human performance in 2 hours"
"Claude Opus 4.5 after 2 hours in our test-time compute harness"
"Claude Sonnet 4.5 after many more than 2 hours of test-time compute"
So that does make one wonder where this comes from. Could just be LLM generated with a talking point of "2 hours", models can fall in love with that kind of stuff. "after many more than 2 hours" is a bit of a tell.
Would be quite curious to know though. How I usually design take home assignments is:
1. Candidate has several _days_ to complete (usually around a week).
2. I design the task to only _take_ 2-4 hours, informing the candidate about that, but that doesn't mean they can't take longer. The subsequent interview usually reveals if they went overboard or struggled more than expected.
But I can easily picture some places sending a candidate the assignment and asking them to hand in their work within two hours. Similar to good old coding competitions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also leetcode does not really provide insight into ones ability to design business solutions. Whether it be system design, just some small feature implementation or communication skills within a team. Its just optimizers jerking each other off on some cryptic problems 99.999999999% of developers will never see in real life. Maybe it would've been useful like 30 years ago, but all commonly used languages have all thes…
Or more likely, the commonality is how you're applying your software skills? In every other field it's helpful to understand the basics. I don't think software is the exception here.