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Only slightly joking: re.findall("(your|dict|here)", "yourword") I like the idea of constructing a state machine to do all the matching.
Only slightly joking: re.findall("(your|dict|here)", "yourword") I like the idea of constructing a state machine to do all the matching.
I love it. You spark an (imho) much more interesting debate: that of raw smartness vs pragmatic productivity. A colleague of mine (now hired) was asked to code a string compare during her interview for a .NET function. She said "String.Compare()". This puzzled the interviewers for a while. They asked her whether she could write it out, she said she didn't see the point. They ended up hiring her for other reasons (not…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love it. You spark an (imho) much more interesting debate: that of raw smartness vs pragmatic productivity. A colleague of mine (now hired) was asked to code a string compare during her interview for a .NET function. She said "String.Compare()". This puzzled the interviewers for a while. They asked her whether she could write it out, she said she didn't see the point. They ended up hiring her for other reasons (not…
There's something to be said for NOT reinventing the wheel. Standard libraries are standard for a reason - the "String.Compare()" function is likely faster for just about every case, in addition to being already there.
I love the GGP's solution for the same reason. If the regex is compiled only once, it may be only marginally slower (if at all), and it significantly improves readability and maintainability, and tremendously reduces the chances for bugs.
I'd hire the him. I have the impression most Google-interviewers (and similar dudes/dudettes) wouldn't. I wonder why.
The author just mentioned dynamic programming. Usually in dynamic programming, e.g., as in Dreyfus and Law, to say that a problem has a dynamic programming solution we outline the solution. But the author did not outline such a solution. An outline usually includes at least the definition of the 'stages' of the dynamic programming solution. For the problem of 'string segmentation', the obvious selection of stages wou…
A spiritually similar question at a previous employer resulted in many candidates attempting to iterate over the dictionary rather than iterating over the string. We hired them. At least they could iterate over a dictionary. That's a surprisingly rare skill in the hiring pool. Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but sometimes I think the world is awash in incompetence. We see so much of it in tech because o…
Bit of a tangent, but a real question: If a writer doesn't approve of a site's behavior (in this case, Glassdoor is desribed as "a site that does not seem to mind when interview candidates violate NDAs"), why does the writer still link to them? Inbound links (w/o a nofollow) help sites, why help sites you don't like?
Only slightly joking: re.findall("(your|dict|here)", "yourword") I like the idea of constructing a state machine to do all the matching.
>>> re.findall('(a|aa|aaa|ab)', 'aaab') ['a', 'a', 'a']
The correct answer would be ['aa', 'ab'] but unfortunately findall works greedily and so will not find the optimal solution. It is possible to specify it as a regex, but common implementations might take too much time to come up with the good solution.
A spiritually similar question at a previous employer resulted in many candidates attempting to iterate over the dictionary rather than iterating over the string. We hired them. At least they could iterate over a dictionary. That's a surprisingly rare skill in the hiring pool. Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but sometimes I think the world is awash in incompetence. We see so much of it in tech because o…
A very candid Philip Greenspun in Founders@Work( p341-2) : "In aviation, by the time someone's your employee, their perceived skill and actual skill are reasonably in line. JFK Jr is not working at a charter operation because he's dead. In IT,you have people who think 'I am a great programmer'. But where are the metrics that prove them wrong ? Traffic accidents are very infrequent, so they don't get the feedback that they are a terrible driver.
Programmers walk around with a huge overestimate of their capabilities. That's why a lot of them are very bitter. They sit around stewing at their desks. That's why I don't miss IT, because programmers are very unlikable people. They are not pleasant to manage."