Thank you for mentioning those! I saw both Robotech and Macross Plus (in French) when I was a teenager. I still think about the SDF more often I would admit and the soundtrack is a regular occurrence in my work playlist :)
The secretary problem is a bad way to formalise the problem of dating and the stopping rule doesn't work in that context, for a very simple reason.
The secretary problem is a solution to the problem of having to make repeated choices. In essence it's a solution to the problem of having to choose a secretary every morning for the day. You can even say it's a solution to the problem of a computer process spending a few seconds consuming an infinite stream at the top of every hour for the next hour. It's not a solution to the problem of making a (hopefully) unique choice.
> I don’t know really how ppl that solve it fast accomplish getting to that level
Just like everything else in life, they do it really slow and with lots and lots and lots of errors at first, but (and this is where the magic happens) keep doing it, training hours a day or their entire week ends, for years.
JavaScript code and Haskell code ultimately both get turned into instructions for a microprocessor, so there really isn't much of a difference between both.
Yep, another developer enthusiastically proposing mmap as an "easy win" for database design, when in reality it often causes hard-to-debug correctness and performance problems.
The situation is not going to improve as long as business stakeholders and engineering managers (some closer to MBAs than actual engineers) think of software engineers as construction workers. They think we are fungible, they don't understand the craft of programming etc, and have very short term mindsets. Took me a while but then I realised that I needed to interview my prospective employers as much as they were interviewing me, and to just ignore those not worth working for.
> like chores by the 10th problem or so and I drop out
That they get so involved is the reason I participate (despite also working at the same time). I love the fact that the difficulty starts low and then goes up to levels where I feel really challenged. It's a month (well, 25 days) commitment which pays off the entire 11 other months for me :)
Hi thaumasiotes,
Mathematician here, and somewhow interested in this discussion. I am curious of your definition of full_sqrt, what would be the value of full_sqrt(-3) ?
It's a completely factual statement, and relevant in the context of the article. It doesn't claim that the same cannot be observed, or doesn't happen, somewhere else.