4 ms·

The intro speaks truth and brings back a lot of frustrating experiences: >We may have all heard the saying “use it or lose it”. We experience it when we feel r

The intro speaks truth and brings back a lot of frustrating experiences: >We may have all heard the saying “use it or lose it”. We experience it when we feel rusty in a foreign language or sports that we have not practised in a while. Practice is important to maintain skills but it is also key when learning new ones. This is a reason why many textbooks and courses feature exercises. However, the solutions to the exercises feel often overly brief, or are sometimes not available at all. Rather than an opportunity to practice the new skills, the exercises then become a source of frustration and are ignored. Typical exercise soltion: How to draw an owl. 1. Draw some circles. 2. Draw the rest of the $@#% owl.

hintymad 4y ago
> We may have all heard the saying “use it or lose it”. We experience it when we feel rusty in a foreign language or sports that we have not practised in a while Another sad thing is that we lose our memory in a step function. We remember something for a long time without using it, and then all of sudden it's gone from our memory. That may explain why many lifers in Google could interviewed so badly. They joined Google when there was no leetcode and when Google had amazing high standards in asking math and algorithm puzzles and novel systems design questions. So, they are really good. They are also confident because they achieved a lot and led amazing projects in Google. Yet when they started to answer interview questions, they struggled with basic facts.
- melling 4y ago
  They can work on amazing projects but they “struggled with basic facts” Sort of makes one wonder how important those “basic facts” really are.
  - feet 4y ago
    Yea because people never forget important things? Really? That's not how memory works, in fact the more we recall something the more we start misremembering associated details
- oldsecondhand 4y ago
  > They joined Google when there was no leetcode and when Google had amazing high standards in asking math and algorithm puzzles How was that any better? Leetcode is math and algorithm puzzles.
  - hintymad 4y ago
    The point is that they didn't cram. They were just talented in math or CS, or they were geeky enough to be well read and knew lots of techniques.
- SyneRyder 4y ago
  > Another sad thing is that we lose our memory in a step function. We remember something for a long time without using it, and then all of sudden it's gone from our memory. Not sure memory loss is quite that binary. Heading for mid-40s here, and often things are still there, but it's higher latency to fully recall it. A bit like it's stored off in Amazon Glacier. Or often I can get the first byte quickly ("I know that person's surname starts with a P") but retrieving the full answer takes longer and some brute force iterations. It's as if I've hit a hash-table collision and need to binary-compare the results, or I've reached a node in a tree-structure that has many branches ("Is it Pfeffle? Piper? No, Pfeiffer!")
  - grubby 4y ago
    best description i’ve ever heard, people I know in mid 40s describe it like that without the technical similes but it makes much more sense from u

hintymad 4y ago

> We may have all heard the saying “use it or lose it”. We experience it when we feel rusty in a foreign language or sports that we have not practised in a while Another sad thing is that we lose our memory in a step function. We remember something for a long time without using it, and then all of sudden it's gone from our memory. That may explain why many lifers in Google could interviewed so badly. They joined Google when there was no leetcode and when Google had amazing high standards in asking math and algorithm puzzles and novel systems design questions. So, they are really good. They are also confident because they achieved a lot and led amazing projects in Google. Yet when they started to answer interview questions, they struggled with basic facts.

melling 4y ago
They can work on amazing projects but they “struggled with basic facts” Sort of makes one wonder how important those “basic facts” really are.
- feet 4y ago
  Yea because people never forget important things? Really? That's not how memory works, in fact the more we recall something the more we start misremembering associated details
oldsecondhand 4y ago
> They joined Google when there was no leetcode and when Google had amazing high standards in asking math and algorithm puzzles How was that any better? Leetcode is math and algorithm puzzles.
- hintymad 4y ago
  The point is that they didn't cram. They were just talented in math or CS, or they were geeky enough to be well read and knew lots of techniques.
SyneRyder 4y ago
> Another sad thing is that we lose our memory in a step function. We remember something for a long time without using it, and then all of sudden it's gone from our memory. Not sure memory loss is quite that binary. Heading for mid-40s here, and often things are still there, but it's higher latency to fully recall it. A bit like it's stored off in Amazon Glacier. Or often I can get the first byte quickly ("I know that person's surname starts with a P") but retrieving the full answer takes longer and some brute force iterations. It's as if I've hit a hash-table collision and need to binary-compare the results, or I've reached a node in a tree-structure that has many branches ("Is it Pfeffle? Piper? No, Pfeiffer!")
- grubby 4y ago
  best description i’ve ever heard, people I know in mid 40s describe it like that without the technical similes but it makes much more sense from u