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>Also bearish on programmers keeping up on their fundamental algorithms, rather than trying to throw NNs at every problem. Besides interviews, at least 90% of

>Also bearish on programmers keeping up on their fundamental algorithms, rather than trying to throw NNs at every problem. Besides interviews, at least 90% of developers have no need for 'fundamental algorithms'. The library being used uses them in some way sure, but the vast majority of devs simply need to know how to use the tool, not how the tool itself is developed.

kilpikaarna 3y ago
Eh, I wasn't even referring to forgetting how to write bubble sort or hashmaps from scratch. But just being able to reason about different algorithmic solutions to a problem, and intuit something about their complexity and requirements. Thinking back to a recent-ish discussion here about the (very elegant and efficient) algorithm behind Shazam, and some of the comments here being along the lines of "haha, that's so quaint, nowadays you could just use a neural net". Nevermind how that would even work as well. Or programmers excited about neural networks forgoing the much simpler, and in many cases completely sufficient, computer vision algorithms built into OpenCV, in favor of trying to train their own model from scratch.
poorlyknit 3y ago
This attitude is how we get stuff like the GTA V O(n^2) JSON deserialization bug. I get it, nobody is implementing quicksort on a day-to-day basis, but being taught the ideas behind these algorithms is important for building mental models.
- ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
  If the GTA bug was anything but just bad programming, it was a dev trying to implement their own JSON parser. It's said as much in the analysis that the JSON parser was simply poor, they could have just used any of the already existing JSON parsers. And the other smaller problem was using a hash array instead of a hash map. You don't really need a mental model of multiple algorithms to know o(1) is faster than o(n). The whole thing is more of a sign of how poor coding practices must have been at Rockstar for such a bug to not only make it in, but persist for years.

kilpikaarna 3y ago

Eh, I wasn't even referring to forgetting how to write bubble sort or hashmaps from scratch. But just being able to reason about different algorithmic solutions to a problem, and intuit something about their complexity and requirements. Thinking back to a recent-ish discussion here about the (very elegant and efficient) algorithm behind Shazam, and some of the comments here being along the lines of "haha, that's so quaint, nowadays you could just use a neural net". Nevermind how that would even work as well. Or programmers excited about neural networks forgoing the much simpler, and in many cases completely sufficient, computer vision algorithms built into OpenCV, in favor of trying to train their own model from scratch.

poorlyknit 3y ago

This attitude is how we get stuff like the GTA V O(n^2) JSON deserialization bug. I get it, nobody is implementing quicksort on a day-to-day basis, but being taught the ideas behind these algorithms is important for building mental models.

ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
If the GTA bug was anything but just bad programming, it was a dev trying to implement their own JSON parser. It's said as much in the analysis that the JSON parser was simply poor, they could have just used any of the already existing JSON parsers. And the other smaller problem was using a hash array instead of a hash map. You don't really need a mental model of multiple algorithms to know o(1) is faster than o(n). The whole thing is more of a sign of how poor coding practices must have been at Rockstar for such a bug to not only make it in, but persist for years.