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The programming assignments are a proxy to real life problems you will encounter. In real life often there are no answers to copy from. It is also not realistic

The programming assignments are a proxy to real life problems you will encounter. In real life often there are no answers to copy from. It is also not realistic to expect the instructors to provide a unique questions for everyone. A bad actor can always pay someone for solutions. Therefore you should approach the question with no other knowledge that is unique to the problem. Googling for how to use numPy is fine. If you want to go around the central objective of the exercise - which is to adapt yourself to solve the problem - at the end you are only cheating yourself. You may end up with a cert of some sort, but you will definitely fail the technical interview or get outed by your colleagues for incompetence sooner or later.

wltprgm 8y ago
> If you want to go around the central objective of the exercise - which is to adapt yourself to solve the problem - at the end you are only cheating yourself. So the "central objective" of that problem is not important? And we shouldn't rely/memorize on 1 unique way of problem solving? To understand your correctly, you mean we shouldn't just learn to solve an unique problem, but approach the problem like a general problem solver/thinker? I am used to work on understanding/learning solutions to mathematics questions when I don't know how to solve them myself. And keep on practising similar questions and eventually harder questions to get an A in exams or answering the doubts of my friends. When I have started to do programming nearly a year ago, It's really squeezing my brain hard. So far, I can tell that only one type of mathematics is similar to programming, is those questions that ask us to derive complex equations for n (like big o notation)
mattmanser 8y ago
You are being condescending and are plain wrong, we don't need such snobbery in our industry. It's bad enough with the utterly unrealistic white board problems. Programmers and data scientists use Google every single day for their job. Telling novices to avoid Google isn't just pathetic, it's a complete lie about how our industry works. My name is Matt and I still Google basic programming questions even after 12 years.
jrib 8y ago
Studying solutions is a valid way to learn how to solve problems. In the end, it's on the student to make sure he is not "cheating" himself. Yeah, just copying the code and saying, "oh, hey, I know machine learning now!" isn't going to work out great. However, if you are stuck on a problem, looking at others' solutions and studying them can let you see exactly what you are missing.

wltprgm 8y ago

> If you want to go around the central objective of the exercise - which is to adapt yourself to solve the problem - at the end you are only cheating yourself. So the "central objective" of that problem is not important? And we shouldn't rely/memorize on 1 unique way of problem solving? To understand your correctly, you mean we shouldn't just learn to solve an unique problem, but approach the problem like a general problem solver/thinker? I am used to work on understanding/learning solutions to mathematics questions when I don't know how to solve them myself. And keep on practising similar questions and eventually harder questions to get an A in exams or answering the doubts of my friends. When I have started to do programming nearly a year ago, It's really squeezing my brain hard. So far, I can tell that only one type of mathematics is similar to programming, is those questions that ask us to derive complex equations for n (like big o notation)

mattmanser 8y ago

You are being condescending and are plain wrong, we don't need such snobbery in our industry. It's bad enough with the utterly unrealistic white board problems. Programmers and data scientists use Google every single day for their job. Telling novices to avoid Google isn't just pathetic, it's a complete lie about how our industry works. My name is Matt and I still Google basic programming questions even after 12 years.

jrib 8y ago

Studying solutions is a valid way to learn how to solve problems. In the end, it's on the student to make sure he is not "cheating" himself. Yeah, just copying the code and saying, "oh, hey, I know machine learning now!" isn't going to work out great. However, if you are stuck on a problem, looking at others' solutions and studying them can let you see exactly what you are missing.