6 ms·

This story strikes me as pretty funny. As if he might say "damn, I was hoping you knew. We've been working on this one for weeks!"

krono 4y ago
Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that the "homework" problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig Reminds me of that :) edit: Here's a slightly more colourful telling of the story: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-problem/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-proble... Does anyone happen to know which two problems Dantzig solved? Don't seem to be having much luck on my searches
- caf 4y ago
  There's a lesson there too about how solving problems is often easier once you know it can be solved.
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > There's a lesson there too about how solving problems is often easier once you know it can be solved. Or perhaps when you don't know it can't (yet) be solved.
- betamike 4y ago
  Hah! This reminded me of a similar story: "In 1951, David A. Huffman and his MIT information theory classmates were given the choice of a term paper or a final exam. The professor, Robert M. Fano, assigned a term paper on the problem of finding the most efficient binary code. Huffman, unable to prove any codes were the most efficient, was about to give up and start studying for the final when he hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient.[5] In doing so, Huffman outdid Fano, who had worked with Claude Shannon to develop a similar code. Building the tree from the bottom up guaranteed optimality, unlike the top-down approach of Shannon–Fano coding." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding#History
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I took Huffman's class at UCSC and he said he had actually thrown the solution in the garbage before realizing it worked and retrieving it. When we started grad school, one of the professors introduced themself and said they thought it was interesting that adaptive optics was being used in astronomy and maybe the same idea could be used to improve microscopy and 7 years later a new phd was born doing exactly that!
- Victerius 4y ago
  When I started reading my brain went straight to Von Neumann. Now I really want to read a fanfic about a story where John Von Neumann is invited to a Google interview.
  - imglorp 4y ago
    Maybe not Von Neumann at google, but how about Feynman at Microsoft? https://sellsbrothers.com/12395 https://sellsbrothers.com/12395
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      > That statement is a tautology. This is giving me vietnam-style university flashbacks.
    - m463 4y ago
      > We are going to recommend you for immediate hiring into the marketing department. I am reminded of this Feynman story: https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...
    - JadeNB 4y ago
      > The people authorized to open manhole covers could easily be trained to do it safely. Funny as it is, I would like to think that someone famous for his role in the investigation of the Challenger disaster would never flippantly say that a dangerous situation doesn't matter because "people … could easily be trained to do it safely." The fact that people can be trained to do something properly doesn't mean that trained people won't still sometimes do it improperly.
- glandium 4y ago
  Over time, some facts were altered, but the basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend and as an introductory scene in the movie Good Will Hunting. Aha, I thought this sounded familiar...
- JadeNB 4y ago
  Carlo Beenakker answered on MathOverflow (https://mathoverflow.net/a/298601 https://mathoverflow.net/a/298601): > The two problems that Dantzig solved were eventually published in: On the Non-Existence of Tests of "Student's" Hypothesis Having Power Functions Independent of σ (1940) and in On the Fundamental Lemma of Neyman and Pearson (1951).
  - krono 4y ago
    Thank you! Spent more time looking for that than I'm willing to admit
aerostable_slug 4y ago
I interviewed for a security position where they asked me an interesting question (I don't exactly remember what it was). After thinking a bit I told them "you don't" — as in there isn't a solution to the problem they posed. They shook their heads and admitted that as best as they could tell there wasn't a solution but they wanted to see if they missed anything. I got the job.
banana_giraffe 4y ago
I once walked into an interview where some code was already written on a whiteboard. It was presented to me as a "find the problem with the code" sort of puzzle, and I pointed out the one big logic problem with it's algorithm and wrote a quick fix. The interviewer responded with "hold on", and grabbed a colleague, pointed at the whiteboard, and the colleague said "yes! that'll fix it!" and ran off. I was offered the job that I was clearly qualified for, but I declined. I often wondered how many candidates it took them to fix their bug.
- ansible 4y ago
  Asking an interview candidate to solve an actual problem the business is currently facing is shitty, and I wouldn't want to work for them either. Any code problems we present to the interview candidate are _clearly_ made-up examples. Though one of them was simplified from a real-world project we had years and years ago.
- Victerius 4y ago
  > I was offered the job that I was clearly qualified for, but I declined. Out of curiosity, why?
  - banana_giraffe 4y ago
    Nothing to do with this event, I just had another offer from a company I interviewed at during the same period that was more interesting to me.
  - eropple 4y ago
    Not the OP, but for my money, a company that does that isn't a company to work for. I don't work for free and you shouldn't either.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Honest question: What difference does it make whether you work on a l33tcode question or a real problem in the interview? At least the real problem has a chance of being interesting. Sometimes I do give candidates examples of real challenges we're facing. The purpose is not to get anything for free, but rather to see if they're good at coming up with new ideas. It also gets boring asking the same questions that may or may not have leaked to the Internet over and over. AITA?
bloodyplonker22 4y ago
I once interviewed a guy who was going to work on a different team than mine who, 20 minutes in, I knew he was going to pass everyone's interview. I then proceeded to give him a "take home test" which was actually my project for the sprint, but framed in a generic manner. He was a much better and faster programmer than I, and he completed it beyond my expectations. I made the modifications to make it work with my project and I even received a commendation at the end of the sprint on how clean "my work" was.
- IggleSniggle 4y ago
  You, sir or madam, are an absolutely asshole. I admire your out-of-the-box thinking and your honesty, but I do not admire your natural proclivity towards exploitation.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  I'm surprised you'd admit that kind of dishonesty on a public forum.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    I wish more people would admit stuff. A lot of accounts are anonymous, and a lot of people have done mildly unethical things at companies. Nothing's more interesting than finding out what people are really up to.
  - marktangotango 4y ago
    Lol, as if this would happen: "Hey aren't you that bloodyplonker who told a story about doing something dishonest on a public forum?" "No way I'd hire you!" Like is the story even true? How would anyone connect the real person to this post? Is anyone even reading this? Genuinely curious about anyones thoughts here.
- jokab 4y ago
AceJohnny2 4y ago
I mean, when you know you're interviewing a Putnam winner, you could try and sneak in some "unsolved problems" ;)
- BeetleB 4y ago
  For context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

krono 4y ago

Near the beginning of a class, Professor Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, an excited Neyman eagerly told him that the "homework" problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig Reminds me of that :) edit: Here's a slightly more colourful telling of the story: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-problem/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-proble... Does anyone happen to know which two problems Dantzig solved? Don't seem to be having much luck on my searches

caf 4y ago
There's a lesson there too about how solving problems is often easier once you know it can be solved.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > There's a lesson there too about how solving problems is often easier once you know it can be solved. Or perhaps when you don't know it can't (yet) be solved.
betamike 4y ago
Hah! This reminded me of a similar story: "In 1951, David A. Huffman and his MIT information theory classmates were given the choice of a term paper or a final exam. The professor, Robert M. Fano, assigned a term paper on the problem of finding the most efficient binary code. Huffman, unable to prove any codes were the most efficient, was about to give up and start studying for the final when he hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient.[5] In doing so, Huffman outdid Fano, who had worked with Claude Shannon to develop a similar code. Building the tree from the bottom up guaranteed optimality, unlike the top-down approach of Shannon–Fano coding." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding#History
- dekhn 4y ago
  I took Huffman's class at UCSC and he said he had actually thrown the solution in the garbage before realizing it worked and retrieving it. When we started grad school, one of the professors introduced themself and said they thought it was interesting that adaptive optics was being used in astronomy and maybe the same idea could be used to improve microscopy and 7 years later a new phd was born doing exactly that!
Victerius 4y ago
When I started reading my brain went straight to Von Neumann. Now I really want to read a fanfic about a story where John Von Neumann is invited to a Google interview.
- imglorp 4y ago
  Maybe not Von Neumann at google, but how about Feynman at Microsoft? https://sellsbrothers.com/12395 https://sellsbrothers.com/12395
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    > That statement is a tautology. This is giving me vietnam-style university flashbacks.
  - m463 4y ago
    > We are going to recommend you for immediate hiring into the marketing department. I am reminded of this Feynman story: https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > The people authorized to open manhole covers could easily be trained to do it safely. Funny as it is, I would like to think that someone famous for his role in the investigation of the Challenger disaster would never flippantly say that a dangerous situation doesn't matter because "people … could easily be trained to do it safely." The fact that people can be trained to do something properly doesn't mean that trained people won't still sometimes do it improperly.
glandium 4y ago
Over time, some facts were altered, but the basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend and as an introductory scene in the movie Good Will Hunting. Aha, I thought this sounded familiar...
JadeNB 4y ago
Carlo Beenakker answered on MathOverflow (https://mathoverflow.net/a/298601 https://mathoverflow.net/a/298601): > The two problems that Dantzig solved were eventually published in: On the Non-Existence of Tests of "Student's" Hypothesis Having Power Functions Independent of σ (1940) and in On the Fundamental Lemma of Neyman and Pearson (1951).
- krono 4y ago
  Thank you! Spent more time looking for that than I'm willing to admit

aerostable_slug 4y ago

I interviewed for a security position where they asked me an interesting question (I don't exactly remember what it was). After thinking a bit I told them "you don't" — as in there isn't a solution to the problem they posed. They shook their heads and admitted that as best as they could tell there wasn't a solution but they wanted to see if they missed anything. I got the job.

banana_giraffe 4y ago

I once walked into an interview where some code was already written on a whiteboard. It was presented to me as a "find the problem with the code" sort of puzzle, and I pointed out the one big logic problem with it's algorithm and wrote a quick fix. The interviewer responded with "hold on", and grabbed a colleague, pointed at the whiteboard, and the colleague said "yes! that'll fix it!" and ran off. I was offered the job that I was clearly qualified for, but I declined. I often wondered how many candidates it took them to fix their bug.

ansible 4y ago
Asking an interview candidate to solve an actual problem the business is currently facing is shitty, and I wouldn't want to work for them either. Any code problems we present to the interview candidate are _clearly_ made-up examples. Though one of them was simplified from a real-world project we had years and years ago.
Victerius 4y ago
> I was offered the job that I was clearly qualified for, but I declined. Out of curiosity, why?
- banana_giraffe 4y ago
  Nothing to do with this event, I just had another offer from a company I interviewed at during the same period that was more interesting to me.
- eropple 4y ago
  Not the OP, but for my money, a company that does that isn't a company to work for. I don't work for free and you shouldn't either.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Honest question: What difference does it make whether you work on a l33tcode question or a real problem in the interview? At least the real problem has a chance of being interesting. Sometimes I do give candidates examples of real challenges we're facing. The purpose is not to get anything for free, but rather to see if they're good at coming up with new ideas. It also gets boring asking the same questions that may or may not have leaked to the Internet over and over. AITA?

bloodyplonker22 4y ago

I once interviewed a guy who was going to work on a different team than mine who, 20 minutes in, I knew he was going to pass everyone's interview. I then proceeded to give him a "take home test" which was actually my project for the sprint, but framed in a generic manner. He was a much better and faster programmer than I, and he completed it beyond my expectations. I made the modifications to make it work with my project and I even received a commendation at the end of the sprint on how clean "my work" was.

IggleSniggle 4y ago
You, sir or madam, are an absolutely asshole. I admire your out-of-the-box thinking and your honesty, but I do not admire your natural proclivity towards exploitation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
actually_a_dog 4y ago
I'm surprised you'd admit that kind of dishonesty on a public forum.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  I wish more people would admit stuff. A lot of accounts are anonymous, and a lot of people have done mildly unethical things at companies. Nothing's more interesting than finding out what people are really up to.
- marktangotango 4y ago
  Lol, as if this would happen: "Hey aren't you that bloodyplonker who told a story about doing something dishonest on a public forum?" "No way I'd hire you!" Like is the story even true? How would anyone connect the real person to this post? Is anyone even reading this? Genuinely curious about anyones thoughts here.
jokab 4y ago

AceJohnny2 4y ago

I mean, when you know you're interviewing a Putnam winner, you could try and sneak in some "unsolved problems" ;)

BeetleB 4y ago
For context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079