Oh hey that's the question I got for my recent amazon onsite (slightly different constraints). I couldn't find the exact question online and I thought it was a "fair" medium question. IMO this is a pretty good question there's a really easy suboptimal solution so people don't get completely stuck, the optimizations are pretty straightforward and there's a lot of room to demonstrate you can write clean code.
*Fair meaning there's no crazy tricks to it or any obscure algorithms just applying DSA fundamentals.
Right - I think it's fair to expect somebody to come up with some kind of approach to solving this, even if they've never encountered the problem or drilled Leetcode before. At least to be able to conceptualize the problem and make a decent attempt.
I wouldn't expect more than brute force. But being able to reason about this, having some working familiarity with graphs etc, is not an unfair bar.
He's talking about something different (https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/04/04/full-line-code-co...). I also found this significantly more comfortable to use than copilot. Completions show up faster, don't try to overpredict (when I was trying out copilot it would often try to suggest large blocks of completely useless code) and doesn't cost anything extra.
I think media like TV/Movies might be fundamentally different than games because of how easy it is to serve pirated content. With games there's a lot of friction with getting cracks working and risks with malware while with TV/Movies you just watch them in your browser. Recently my friends showed me a pirate site that I'm in awe hasn't been taken down. Don't think I can post a link here but it has all the things I'd expect from a paid streaming service (slick and fast ui, large catalog with good discovery options, high quality streams, no lag, random ui niceties like a dimmer switch, skip op/ed and multi language subs). Being honest as long as something like this is available I don't really see what a site like netflix could offer that would convince me to pay.
Actually the more I think about it the less I understand how it hasn't been taken down.
> Being honest as long as something like this is available I don't really see what a site like netflix could offer that would convince me to pay
Most people are honest, and will do the the legal thing when faced with two equal options. If the choice is between that UI but it's illegal, and a reskin of that UI but it's £30/mo, I'd pay.
But it's not, as the other comments here said. It's a choice between that for free and a limited catalog of region restricted, ever changing, poor video quality streams spread of multiple services, and given the choice between paying 4 providers for a poor service and getting a good service from one location, people will pick the latter.
Why? If I watch 2 shows from Netflix, it costs $10. If I watch 2 shows from Disney, it costs $10. If I watch a show from Disney and a show from Netflix, why should that cost $20? And if I pay $10 for that, why would that be uneconomical?
The way licensing and streaming costs work is super arbitrary and wacky. There’s nothing fixed and eternal about it. If the fee structure isn’t working (and it’s not) then it should be changed.
The movie industry can get a reasonable amount of my money or none of my money. Their choice.
> For bonus points, energy weapons weren't really used because if one hit a shield, it would cause an explosion
This never really made much sense to me. IRRC when an energy weapon hits a shield either the emitter or the shield generator blows up. Since shields are protecting something while the emitter can be anywhere to me the logical outcome seems to be energy weapons everywhere and no shields at all.
It totally did not make sense. Anyone would be able to generate a massive explosion from readily available components. And there's no explanation where that energy would come from.
A small edit that would make this work: energy beam weapons could not penetrate a shield, and just reveals the location of the shooting weapon.
Funny story. When I was going the coop workshops in uni they invited in some people from microsoft to talk about what they look for in a cover letter and they straight up said they don't read them.
That's good to hear because I stopped writing them because I started to feel like it discouraged companies from looking further.
I believe people in the hiring process are looking to work efficiently and a cover letter is just more stuff to read. They want to just read your resume because that's what will get passed around and what matters. Anything in your cover letter is mostly things they want to know in the interview.
This thread is interesting to me because I was told by my manager that my cover letter was a big reason they decided to interview me for my current job. Granted this was nearly 5 years ago, so things may have (read: have definitely) changed on the hiring front since then.
> But how do they justify this when their personal economic well-being requires trampling the freedom of other people?
The same way every one in every other country on earth deals with the awful things their country does I guess. By ignoring it.
> By that logic, would pro-China people would support China going to war with and taking over other countries if it brought them "economic well-being"?
That's sounds pretty reasonable as long as they get their work done? Someone on my team went remote for a quarter for personal reasons and this was at a giant 40 year old company.
Honestly what risk is there? Outside of some internet echo chambers no one really cares and all this will be forgotten by tomorrow if it even takes that long.
*Fair meaning there's no crazy tricks to it or any obscure algorithms just applying DSA fundamentals.