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Show HN: I couldn't afford interview prep, so I built a free alternative
- desireco42 22d agoI don't need this but this looks very cool. I love neon colors and everything. Some of these we, dynamic programming is something we didn't do at university and few years ago I did a course to learn it. It is good to know, wish we dealt with more of such intellectual problems at work, but as we all know this is not the case. Anyhow, really cool.
- askl 22d agoIsn't it just the default slopcoded website design?
- deleted 22d ago[deleted]
- rvz 22d agoYes. It is the clearest giveaway of a complete slop style site.
- cdnsteve 22d agoWorking on making light mode, I'm more of a dark mode guy myself but I get it. Should be fixed shortly. MVPs don't give me time for much of a stylistic polish at this point.
- andai 22d agoIs this GPT? I'm trying to train myself to distinguish the different breeds.
- my002 22d agoLooks like very typical Claude Design output to me, though I could be wrong. For what it's worth I don't have anything against the design. It's kind of like seeing Bootstrap websites everywhere when that was at its peak. P.S. The hamburger menu icon overlaps with the site icon when the menu is open.
- cdnsteve 21d agoThe hamburger issue should be fixed now
- fourside 22d agoYeah and it’s buggy on mobile
- cdnsteve 22d agoThanks for the feedback!
- esafak 22d agoYou couldn't afford a used book but can afford the tokens? No decent library around either? Okay, boss...
- cdnsteve 22d agolol, books don't give you that fresh MVP build feel
- nsxwolf 22d agoWhat books? That horrible green book?
- nayuki 22d agoCLRS is a wonderful book and I learned a ton from it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms , https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~akroit/math/compsci/Cormen%20Introduction%20to%20Algorithms.pdf https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~akroit/math/compsci/Cormen%20Intro...
- xgulfie 22d agowhy would you go read a book, it wouldn't even make the HN front page
- dayvid 22d agoA Neetcode or Leetcode subscription is one of the highest ROI things you can buy
- danielrmay 22d agoTen years ago, maybe
- noident 22d agoI haven't job hunted in five years or so, but leetcode was omnipresent in my local market. I got some offers without leetcode but those jobs paid about half as much as the ones that required leetcoding. What does prep look like now?
- xboxnolifes 22d agoThe market now is more about getting the interview rather than passing the interview.
- sneefle 21d ago[flagged]
- drstewart 22d agoI resisted getting one out of principle till I realised this. Landed a job at FANG ~7 years ago after doing so and that $30 subscription has probably paid for itself 20,000x over at this point.
- dominotw 22d agoyou dont need Clickbait youtube title lies on HN. Hate these so much.
- andai 22d agoWhat would you have titled it?
- xboxnolifes 22d agoWhat is click bait about it? It says what it is and why it was made. Is it deceptive or misleading in some way?
- elephanlemon 22d agoAre leetcode interviews still a thing in 2026?
- nsxwolf 22d agoExpedia was about to Leetcode me but I took another offer before it happened.
- pelagicAustral 22d agoNice! death to leetcode.
- vovavili 22d agoNebius hit me with two LeetCodes, communicated a third round of system design and instead did a third round of LeetCode. It's very much a thing for companies worth applying for, especially if internal communication gets messy.
- rfgplk 22d agoAny company still doing them is wasting their time. I can show up hungover and half asleep with an Astra/Fable subscription and ace any leetcode problem with zero difficulty.
- Aurornis 22d agoFinal round interviews are moving on site at many companies to prevent this type of cheating. Still important to understand how to code. If companies wanted someone who believed their job was to type prompts into Astra, they could hire interns. Or not hire any engineers at all, just have another agent talk directly to stakeholders.
- dominotw 22d agoyou could do that before with google
- ericmcer 22d agoYeah I just scheduled a technical and they told me it would be leetcode style. The company I interviewed for directly before was AI only, just prompt and review no coding allowed. Fun time to prep
- pelagicAustral 22d agoI like the look of the app... I just wonder if leetcode interviews are even a thing anymore...
- cdnsteve 22d agoThanks for the feedback. Part of the thinking in building this depends on the company but bigger companies are still running DS&A rounds on basically every loop. This was built because the interviews that remain are still high stakes and the prep material hasn't really evolved since the green book era.
- 1270018080 22d agoLeetcode seems so pointless in the AI era. It was already pretty pointless but there’s nothing to it now.
- cdnsteve 22d agoMost companies still run these rounds. AI is generally banned during them, though some places are experimenting with allowing it. They want to see your foundational knowledge, not what a copilot can write.
- nsxwolf 22d agoI’ve never seen Leetcode test foundational knowledge. There are far better ways to do that than timed puzzles.
- karmakurtisaani 22d agoThis used to be a pretty standard discussion a few years back when people still were being hired. I never saw any better way to systematically and somewhat fairly test a large number of candidates, so would you kindly elaborate on that statement?
- nsxwolf 22d agoThis always reads like an admission - “Well of course it’s bad, but how else am I supposed to interview at mass scale?” Why would you test a large number of candidates in the first place?
- karmakurtisaani 22d agoIn a way it is this admission. Interviewing is a very difficult process to get right. > Why would you test a large number of candidates in the first place? How else do you do it for a company of the size of Google or Amazon?
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- addandsubtract 22d agoLight mode doesn't change the backgrounds of the text cells, making the text in them impossible to read.
- cdnsteve 22d agoYou're right, just pushed a fix. A refactor earlier today had broken accent tinted backgrounds across a few spots in light mode. Thanks for reporting.
- mandeepj 22d agoYou can practice across ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude; once you hit the limits on one model, move to the next. Don't need to buy a subscription to Neet/Leet if you don't want to.
- cdnsteve 22d ago[dead]
- Lich 22d agoDoesn’t make sense to pay anymore. Ask any LLM to give you a list of FAANG questions asked recently. Then ask “can you restate question number X”. Premium problems locked behind paywall? Just ask it to restate the question and it will.