4 ms·

Nah, when you do that, Murphy's law says that the interviewer will be the only person in the world working on extending nonstandard analysis to spectral hypergr

• hughesjj 2y ago
  That or they're the super egotistical/arrogant type but too dumb to know you know more than them and assume somehow you're the person who don't know what they're talking about Although in that case bullet dodged.
  • xarope 2y ago
    reminds me of the (apocryphal) joke about James Gosling (who invented Java in 1994); interviewer in 1999: we are looking for someone with 10 years of java experience. james: I invented java 5 years ago.
    • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
      well that guys not getting hired!
      • BrandoElFollito 2y ago
        You are joking but this may be true. I once was interviewing for an interesting job and the topic was general knowledge of a system made of A, B and C (all were similar). The interviewer did not know much but insisted on some very deep details about B. I told him more than was available in the docs already and at some point I said I would need to peek in the code to say more. He told that this was too difficult for me because only people who were part of the team who designed that would understand. I told him that I wrote almost by myself the A part so it won't be too difficult to catch up with B. I did not get the job (ultimately a happy ending) and was told that I did not know enough on A (the part I wrote).
        • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
          I am joking but not really, basically it's my belief that any place asking for 10 years of a 5 years old technology is going to be really sensitive about anyone with an "attitude"
  • reidrac 2y ago
    In that case you won't do well in the interview because "bad attitude" or "lack of soft skills".
  • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    fun fact, I once interviewed at a place in which the tech lead interviewing me had confused the terms pass by reference and pass by value - that is to say he understood that in JavaScript objects were passed by reference and what that meant on the practical effects of assigning object a to b, but he thought the technical term for this was pass by value and the technical term for things that were passed by value was pass by reference (so according to him strings were passed by reference and objects were passed by value) and no explanation on what a reference was and how pass by reference works and why it made sense to call it pass by reference could penetrate.
    • abrezas 2y ago
      just a pedantic detail, strings are passed in javascript by reference, they are just immutable
      • wyclif 2y ago
        I just went down the rabbit hole of reading this post and the entire thread. As someone who has been looking for a junior job, it's probably the most depressing thing I've ever read. I've been on the market for over 6 months, I've sent countless resumes out and tried various techniques, but I'm not even getting a nibble.
      • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
        I guess technically it's passed the reference to the string right, so if I say a = "stringA" there is a reference to "stringA" and that is assigned to a if I then say a = "stringAA" there is another reference created for "stringAA" and assigned to a, while "stringA" is sitting around somewhere waiting to be garbage collected in a few milliseconds - that's way complicated to think about and not sure if I haven't messed it up. Easier to just say pass by value and forget about it. OR make all your variables consts and then it don't matter.
        • scott_w 2y ago
          No, thats not correct. Value and reference assignment behave the same way for = (well, reference is hiding the fact that it’s not the literal string/object but a reference to it, a number is just the number). Where it matters is in passing arguments to a function call. If you pass 42, it’s not mutable so incrementing, or doing anything, will not modify the original variable you passed-in. For a reference, using = will assign a new value (not change the original) but modifying the referenced object like, say a.b = 5 WILL change the original object. It’s not really “pass by reference” that a C/C++ developer would understand but it seems to be the term that has stuck.
• hansvm 2y ago
  Unrelated, have you perhaps done anything with nonstandard analysis on graphs (or in spectral hypergraph theory -- most uses of NSA on graphs require infinite graphs, how does that work when the spectrum might not be defined?)?
  • klyrs 2y ago
    Hahaha! I only crammed some dense jargon into a sentence to give the air of expertise... it's a bit of a trick, finding a combination of math terms that doesn't refer to an actual field of study.
    • hansvm 2y ago
      Hahaha, I know what you mean. It's been awhile since I've looked at NSA on graphs, but it's an interesting field of study. For something of a taste, an alternative proof of Kőnig's lemma might look like: - Start with a locally finite, connected, infinite graph G. - Choose any nonstandard extension G* of G. - By the transfer principle (basically just logical compactness), there exist hyperpaths [0] of unbounded (hypernatural) length in G*. Pick one, P*. - Restricting P* to G you obtain some path P, which is the infinite path you're looking for. I settled into industry instead, but that's the sort of thing I'd like to study if I ever go back for a PhD, hence the interest in those sorts of ideas applying to spectral theory. [0] The "transfer" of a path isn't actually necessarily a connected path in the usual sense, but it's indexed by the hypernaturals, and each well-ordered countable segment is connected. I'm skipping the entire intro that makes those operations make sense.
      • klyrs 2y ago
        Dammit, I had hoped I'd nerdsniped you... but the nerdsniper is you and now I'm curious!
        • hansvm 2y ago
          Well, you did nerdsnipe me too :) I haven't looked at this in awhile, and my curiosity is re-ignited. The most basic style of proof in a lot of nonstandard analysis is (1) lift your problem to a nonstandard space, (2) prove something interesting in that space, (3) hopefully project something interesting back down to the problem you actually care about. E.g., in nonstandard real analysis you can look at a real-valued function like f(x) = x^2, pick any epsilon z, and compute the hyperreal analogue (f(x+z)-f(x))/z = 2x + z. This is within some infinitesimal of 2x, so you use some machinery you've built up to conclude the derivative of the real-valued function is 2x. The graph lemma above had a similar flow. Create G*, find something interesting, project it back down to G, finish the proof. That's certainly not the only proof style. Nonstandard topology combines basically all the normal compaction theorems into one, for example, and that's a bit more intricate. Even such crude techniques can bear fruit quickly though. Menger's theorem was proven in the early 1900s, and only extended to infinite graphs in the late 1900s. That 3-step proof process with nonstandard graphs makes it a bog-standard freshman exercise for locally finite infinite graphs, and only a bit more involved for the full generality originally proven by Erdos and friends. I don't have any deep insights beyond that. The Springer GTM series has a nice intro to nonstandard analysis (not actually graduate-level IMO, a mid/advanced undergrad could use it, which is a nice level for that sort of book), building it up in a way that you could probably work with nonstandard extensions of other infinite structures (like graphs) without needing many/any other resources, especially if you've done much with building models of other theories via set structures.
• morkalork 2y ago
  Well that's just it. Too many interviewers use it as a platform to flex how awesome they are. The proper response is at the end to ask a few probing questions of where they get to apply such skills day to day.
• randomdata 2y ago
  Murphy's law is about things going wrong. But nothing can go wrong when encountering someone who knows more about something than you. You only stand to gain.