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Just nope out of the whiteboard interviews. There are lots of places that need you that don't do them.


"The fundamentals" can cover an immense amount of ground, especially if you're old enough to have worked in a lot of different sub-fields.


Plot twist: We're all catfish programmers...


Thank you! It's like everyone has missed the point of the story here...


Linear time suffix tree construction. You have 90 seconds. Go!

:-P


Here [1] is not 1, but 3 different levels of complexity. Not 90 seconds though :)

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9452701/ukkonens-suffix-...


This is what I'm saying. There is complex and there is complicated.


Of those, only the async I/O stuff seems compelling. But compelling it is, at least as used in Curio. It feels like this is still shaking out, with the standard library and Trio (?) alternatives, but it looks really cool.


If you work with international users full unicode support is very compelling.


Why do your users care about symbols internal to your code?


They don't, they care about `str` being unicode and developers not having to do additional work to support unicode strings.


Strings can be unicode in Python2, you start a unicode string with u".

Python2​ has full unicode support. While Python3 supports only unicode strings.


I was thinking through my response to this, and realized that I would just be repeating what I already said.

Is there any reason to require extra work to support unicode strings?


I've come into large python2 projects which had been started with non-unicode strings (because the initial developers didn't think about it). At some point a user with non-English characters invariably signs up and then shortly complains. It has been significant work to (1) convert everything that should be converted to unicode (2) re-train the developers to use the unicode syntax.


Python 3 has, more or less, just renamed unicode() to str() and str() to bytes(). unicode() support was already complete in Python 2. The rename is not a user-facing feature.


String literals are unicode by default, which they were not before.


True. It is a nice thing for scientific code though. Often in a field α etc etc have a known meaning by convention and being able to write them as α rather than alpha can really make longer formulas more readable.


if you do open source development, your users are your testers and your future developers.


Spent some time on this a while back, and even wrote a driver that let me use a game controller as a complete replacement for my keyboard and mouse. Interesting but not really successful.

One key takeaway: The input bitrate that a competent typist can get from a keyboard is quite high. As a guess, it might be 8x higher than with a gamepad or mouse.

And as an additional detail, I've had more RSI issues with mice than keyboards over the years, even though I use emacs.


Rationale for "make install" rediscovered. Film at 11... :-)


It could well turn out that the common factor here is not consuming a lot of highly refined carbohydrates (sugar, flour, etc.).

More importantly, metabolism is just incredibly complicated, with many complex relationships and effects. On top of that, there is significant genetic variation, so these will differ across individuals. For now, we pretty much have to experiment on ourselves and observe what works.


> It could well turn out that the common factor here is not consuming a lot of highly refined carbohydrates (sugar, flour, etc.).

Also monitoring food intake.

I am a huge proponent of ketogenic diets, but I also realize having a diet that completely forbids me from eating all common dessert and snack foods is what contributes in large part to calorie reduction.

Sure, I love all the other benefits from the diet, but part of what works about restrictive diets is that they are so restrictive.


I have been eating stuff with sugar and some flour so not sure that is the case. Also there are a bunch of search backing my diet but you don't hear much about it because you can't sell anything with eat potatoes :)


> More importantly, metabolism is just incredibly complicated, with many complex relationships and effects

Plus you're missing on many other factors, especially sleep and mood.


If you think the NYT is unbiased, you might do well to read a few alternative sources for a while to compare and contrast. Once you've been to other lands, it's easier to spot the oddities of one's usual locale.

But more importantly, even if the NYT were entirely unbiased, that does not mean that it's good for your mental state to be reading it. Being exposed to a lot of problems that you cannot do anything about might not be a good thing.


Could you provide examples of NYT crisis-driven reporting? And alternatives please! People always recommend "alternatives", but don't really provide any :(


Try breitbart and thenation as alternatives, for example. Sure, some of it's drivel, but after a while you'll realize that some of the NYT is drivel as well.

And actually, if you just carefully compare NYT _headlines_ to their corresponding _articles_, you'll realize that the headlines really are pretty crappy. Certainly nowhere near the standards for headline writing we used to have in ninth grade journalism class.

I really hope to see a resurgence of classical quality journalism. But I'm not optimistic.


Breitbart doesn't seem like a source I'd use as they seem to lack journalistic integrity, they seems like raw data, a collection of things to look into - the usual selection to anger GOP voters, about how those damn Dem/libs are at it again.

Headlines are crappy everywhere, agreed.

But there is difference between bias and fake news.

http://www.snopes.com/scientific-papers-global-warming-myth/

That said, I think there's always place for a (or many) counter-culture sites, but I expect a more rigorous intellectual foundation from them not a lesser one to be taken as proper alternative sources. Kuhn's paradigm view is helpful here, MSM is not perfect, but a lot better than fringe/crackpot explanations of the world, and sure, there is probably a better one, but that's not the dominant one yet, but it'll be found by better and more data, better analysis, better methodologies, not by less, and not by more anger. (Sure, reading alt-news might feel right, you might get the feeling of OMG WHY I HAVEN'T BEEN TOLD OF THIS! DAMN I'LL HAVE TO USE THIS to keep myself free from MSM bias!! But to get less biased the solution is to explore the topics at hand from more primary sources (like watch a few youtube videos about the topic, watch a lecture by an accepted scientist/scholar), not by perusing even more biased sources).


Breitbart and The Nation both have a rather dramatic skew. But, since it's obvious and generally consistent, it's relatively easy to "null out". This leaves you with additional signals that are still relatively uncorrelated with (say) the NYT signal. This can provide additional information, and sometimes it leads by several days or even weeks, which is interesting.

(If I had a source of future stock price deltas that was almost always "wrong", I could be a very rich man.)

That said, I've personally come to the realization that my marginal hour spent reading daily news is generally better spent reading ancient philosophy. News is certainly addictive, but I'd be hard pressed to come up with examples where it's improved my life.


> If I had a source of future stock price deltas that was almost always "wrong", I could be a very rich man.

Indeed.

> better spent ...

Again, agreed.


Every news source is biased, and that's no problem if you can distinguish news from opinion.


Overt opinion is pretty easy to spot. Subtle "editorials" in the form of omissions, slanted word choice, etc., are harder, esp until you start looking carefully for them.


If you select stringently for WBI ability, you'll get strong WBIers. However, you're also paying the opportunity cost of not selecting for other traits and skills that might matter a lot more.

+1 though for "Senior Whiteboard Engineer"--that term is genius!


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