5 ms·

I wish I could understand what's going on in this article. Besides a magical Swede impressing some normie in a hoodie.

by TurkishPoptart 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago
He’s writing Java bytecode to implement Floyd’s “tortoise and hare” cycle detection algorithm for a linked list.
- TurkishPoptart 7y ago
  I know some of those words.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Hopefully by the end of today you can know something about all of them!
  - taurath 7y ago
    Tortoise and hare agorithm is an interesting one to look up. You’ll never use it in practice, but it’s clever.
    - rkangel 7y ago
      Anecdatum, but I've used it on an embedded target to check that datastructures loaded from flash didn't get corrupted.
  - gknoy 7y ago
    When reading the story, I thought, "well of course that's the solution ...", but then couldn't recall ever learning it. I'm grateful that someone shared the name, as Wikipedia's explanation is surprisingly clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Floyd's_Tortoise_and_Hare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Floyd's_Tortoi...
wenderen 7y ago
Norwegian in this case.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Damnit, MacReady.
- tjillevippen 7y ago
  As a Swede I can concur to this statement.
alexfromapex 7y ago
I think it’s all just a joke or satire where he’s technically very talented and optimizing the code ad absurdum which goes well beyond what the interviewer expected. This is slightly nuanced, but it also shows how inadequate the technical interview is for finding top talent because of the subjectivity involved.
pjc50 7y ago
It's a very distant parody of the famous "Cracking the Coding Interview" book, and the whole set of expectations around technical interviews. What's actually happening in the code: it starts off in the Lisp-on-JVM that is called Clojure, but for "performance reasons" drops down to hand-writing Java bytecode. A useful reminder that it's all just bytes and we don't have to arrive at them by the "normal" route.

I wish I could understand what's going on in this article. Besides a magical Swede impressing some normie in a hoodie.

saagarjha 7y ago

He’s writing Java bytecode to implement Floyd’s “tortoise and hare” cycle detection algorithm for a linked list.

TurkishPoptart 7y ago
I know some of those words.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Hopefully by the end of today you can know something about all of them!
- taurath 7y ago
  Tortoise and hare agorithm is an interesting one to look up. You’ll never use it in practice, but it’s clever.
  - rkangel 7y ago
    Anecdatum, but I've used it on an embedded target to check that datastructures loaded from flash didn't get corrupted.
- gknoy 7y ago
  When reading the story, I thought, "well of course that's the solution ...", but then couldn't recall ever learning it. I'm grateful that someone shared the name, as Wikipedia's explanation is surprisingly clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Floyd's_Tortoise_and_Hare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Floyd's_Tortoi...

wenderen 7y ago

Norwegian in this case.

yellowapple 7y ago
Damnit, MacReady.
tjillevippen 7y ago
As a Swede I can concur to this statement.

alexfromapex 7y ago

I think it’s all just a joke or satire where he’s technically very talented and optimizing the code ad absurdum which goes well beyond what the interviewer expected. This is slightly nuanced, but it also shows how inadequate the technical interview is for finding top talent because of the subjectivity involved.

pjc50 7y ago

It's a very distant parody of the famous "Cracking the Coding Interview" book, and the whole set of expectations around technical interviews. What's actually happening in the code: it starts off in the Lisp-on-JVM that is called Clojure, but for "performance reasons" drops down to hand-writing Java bytecode. A useful reminder that it's all just bytes and we don't have to arrive at them by the "normal" route.