dfan

34 ms·

331.
by dfan 15y ago
It's funny, I think every interviewee who has apologized for their bad handwriting has been at least 50th percentile in handwriting legibility.
332.
by dfan 15y ago
I love it when someone starts attacking my whiteboard problem by writing down something other than code, such as sample input/output pairs to test their algorithm against.
333.
by dfan 15y ago
I like seeing interviewees write on a whiteboard because I can see how they're thinking and help them out if I see that they're running into trouble. The point when I give a whiteboard question is to engage interactively with them over the
334.
by dfan 15y ago
Segoe UI is so good that I have Firefox set to use only it (which of course renders this entire page meaningless for me). I can even read light text on a black background in it, which previously has always sent me scurrying for Readability.
335.
by dfan 15y ago
Oh, I totally agree there; I mentioned in a different comment that the whiteboard coding problem is just one component of many that we use.
336.
by dfan 15y ago
I'm curious why my comment has been voted down. Was "suitably embarrassed" an offensive way to phrase it, or do people disagree with the distinction I made in the last sentence? I think it's pretty valuable to have a sense, even if you can'
337.
by dfan 15y ago
When I give a live programming problem, I cut interviewees a lot of slack for not doing well under pressure, as long as they seem suitably embarrassed about it. There's a big difference to me between "I know this step has got to be really s
338.
by dfan 15y ago
I give a short and fairly simple whiteboard programming problem when I interview programmers, and I feel like the results have correlated really well with the programmers' eventual success at our company. Of course, there could be false neg
339.
by dfan 15y ago
My general observation has been that people who like to work in the (relative) dark like dark color schemes and people who like to have lights on like light color schemes. I personally enjoy a black-on-white color scheme, but if I were in a
340.
by dfan 15y ago
Well, your main point is certainly right that a large part of playing chess well is simply avoiding blunders; it is surprising how many games even at the 2000+ level are determined because one player blundered, rather than because the other
341.
by dfan 15y ago
Oh, absolutely; the proper (omnipotent) evaluation of any position should just be win, draw or loss. But as fallible humans (and computers!) we use terms like your "down half a pawn or so" to denote situations like "White can draw but he's
342.
by dfan 15y ago
"It turns out (once you play enough games and get pretty damn good at it) that it's actually quite a limited and simple game. Once you're down half a pawn or so there aren't many possibilities to generate a counterattack on another part of
343.
by dfan 15y ago
My secret for reading difficult math and physics texts: write out, by hand, every equation as you encounter it. Firstly, it slows me down so I'm not tempted to skim it like a novel. More importantly, my standards for what I write are much h
344.
by dfan 15y ago
As far as I can tell, "Most common iPhone passcodes" doesn't belong on this list, and I'm perplexed why it seems to follow the law. An iPhone numeric password (which I'm assuming it's referring to) is simply a 4-digit string, so all first d
345.
by dfan 15y ago
I discovered these pages while looking for an OpenGL tutorial that actually used the new shader-driven style and not the deprecated fixed-function API. They're very good (although as others note, still a work in progress).
346.
by dfan 16y ago
Bentley's book "Writing Efficient Programs" is also really super. Unfortunately, it's been out of print for a long time. If you ever see it, snap it up.
347.
by dfan 16y ago
Well, there is a pretty large difference between enjoying something and dedicating a giant chunk of your life to it. But in any case, I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying why it's unlikely.
348.
by dfan 16y ago
"A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice" by Dmitri Tymoczko.
349.
by dfan 16y ago
To me there's a sort of a Bayesian logic working against any hypothetical "adult novice puts in 10,000 hours of work and becomes a pro" story, which is that anyone who has the willpower and passion to put in that much work probably has alre
350.
by dfan 16y ago
I love Lisps, and I have the same problem. You really have to learn to approach reading code in a different way. Lisp (and Haskell, say) are so information-dense that you just have to look closely at every word to understand what is going o
351.
by dfan 16y ago
I feel like his reduce-true could be implemented with take-while and reductions, but my Clojure isn't strong enough to produce it. (last (take-while identity (reductions f ns)))) is close, but we need to take one more element than take-whil
352.
by dfan 16y ago
"The" SICP? I have never heard it called that before.
353.
by dfan 16y ago
Both usages are perfectly fine. It is unlikely that I'll convince you with any argument here, so I'll just recommend that you check out a reference on English usage. My favorite is Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. P.S. Clojure
354.
by dfan 16y ago
I'm trying to figure out what is so startling about this, actually. The { function just seems to return the element at the given index, or if you pass in a collection of indices, maps that operation onto the collection. That is convenient o
355.
by dfan 16y ago
Yep.
356.
by dfan 16y ago
Yep, I've worked here since 1996 (the company was founded in 1995) and we didn't release Guitar Hero until 2005 (actually, we didn't release a game at all until 2001, although we had done other music apps before). It was a total hockey stic
357.
by dfan 16y ago
The main thing I noticed from meditating for a month was that my posture got a lot better. That alone made it worth it.
358.
by dfan 16y ago
I do, but he's paid me to keep quiet... Truthfully, he was pretty upset about having caused it at the time. The worst thing was that you triggered the bug at the beginning of the game, but didn't discover that it had made the game unwinnabl
359.
by dfan 16y ago
The "nice" thing about writing for PCs was that even if our game was slow, if we took long enough to release it, the hardware out there in the real world would catch up a bit. (Of course, taking a long time to release the game creates other
360.
by dfan 16y ago
Oh, the goddamn container bug. OK, that one was probably even worse than Judy. We finally found the problem while developing Ultima Underworld II. You will think we were complete idiots for not using this process (described below) to find i

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