[HN Gopher] Algo Deck: an open-source collection of 200 cards on...
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Algo Deck: an open-source collection of 200 cards on algorithms
Author : teivah
Score : 70 points
Date : 2020-02-01 16:59 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| As somebody that interviews a lot of candidates, I almost never
| ask rote memorization questions like these. I have to wonder, are
| there people who do? What sort of signal do you hope to gather by
| doing so?
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Unfortunately there's a large amount of grifters out there
| providing tech interview "coaching" to people with no prior
| experience. Fortunately as someone who also interviews SW
| candidates it's really easy to spot who just memorized Cracking
| the Coding interview and Geeks for Geeks answers.
|
| I literally had someone write down the exact answer for an
| algorithm question that appears on GeeksforGeeks down to the
| small bugs which the post had originally.
| jldugger wrote:
| It's probably better to think of it as the building blocks for
| answering more complicated questions. E.g. you write an
| algorithm and one of the followups the interviewer asks you is
| the runtime of it. Well, you used a hash table, so lookups are
| constant time, but you iterate over the keys, which is is
| linear in the size of the table. So when you do some work
| linear in the size of the input for each item in the table, you
| can work out that's a quadratic algo. That sort of thing.
| koube wrote:
| That's how I thought of it when I was studying leetcode, and
| that's the advice I give to other people when they ask how I
| got my job. Each leetcode solution was another tool in my
| toolbox. The more tools you have, the easier it will be to
| put two things together for a larger solution, or to modify a
| tool to fit a new problem.
|
| I understand the resistance to flash cards as rote
| memorization without being able to build upon them, I think
| that's a cogent criticism. At the same time I think some
| people will be able to take advantage of this to build their
| toolbox.
|
| And as a minor note, I personally love when people can name
| an algorithm or concept. There was one interview that I think
| I completely failed, but I was able to name (but not write
| out) a concept. I actually incorrectly name dropped Hamming
| distance, when it was actually the Levenshtein distance, but
| I was able to diagram the concept behind it. I passed that
| interview (to my tremendous surprise), and I think the name
| drop and the simple diagram helped.
| jkaptur wrote:
| I interview a lot of candidates as well, and I agree. My
| philosophy is that an interview is an opportunity to talk about
| a problem together and sketch out some code. The only reason we
| choose to talk about algorithms and data structures is because
| they're a domain that's pretty similar no matter what sort of
| programming you've been doing.
|
| "Memorizing" these algorithms isn't the approach I'd use at
| all. No interview of mine will _ever_ be of the form
| "implement such-and-such well-known algorithm".
|
| However, my questions _do_ begin with "imagine we're on the x
| team and we have y technical problem - what should we do?", and
| it's helpful to have a toolchest of coding techniques that
| includes hash tables, trees, etc.
| gwilliams wrote:
| _boolean checkExactlyOneBitSet(int num) {_
|
| _return (num & (num - 1)) == 0;_
|
| _}_
|
| That looks like it'll fail when num == 0. I think it should be:
| return num && ((num & (num - 1)) == 0);
| melling wrote:
| I followed the link for Anki on the iPhone and it's $25. No other
| options?
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| It's free on Android. Works fine in windows and ubuntu too.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Free on safari
| pavedwalden wrote:
| The explanation that iOS users are subsidizing all other Anki
| users with that price somehow made it easier for me to swallow
| than if I viewed it as mere price-gouging.
| winkelwagen wrote:
| Think you are able to use the web ui. In my experience it works
| pretty well. It also syncs with the free desktop app.
|
| I still having a hard time understanding the use for this after
| the job interview. The few times I've had to deal with data
| that was large enough to be big O and needed to optimize it, I
| just spend some time researching it a bit. Plenty of answers
| online for those cases. Someone who actually enjoys thinking
| and researching this subject, but not I'm not going to grind
| hackerrank.
|
| It actually stopped me for even considering to apply at a
| company that uses this as a bar. A developer generally is
| someone who solves business problems, sometimes with code.
|
| I'm happy that I work in a country where this grinding is not
| the norm.
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