I don't know, the two questions are nothing alike:

One is asking for a guesstimate, while the other is a proper optimisation problem. To me it's a valid interview question, albeit a bit difficult for a short session.

There's a specific best solution involving dynamic programming. If you've heard the answer, like say if you spent a month reading a bunch of common programming interview questions, then you can 'solve' it in 15 minutes. If you haven't, then you need to be ready to invent the same solution in 45 minutes (less the 5 minutes spent explaining the problem).

Maybe Google (and the other big tech companies using the same style of interview) is looking for the types who can brilliantly solve problems like that in 40 minutes, but they're instead going to hire a lot of guys who read the book of problems ahead of time.

They don’t read books, they solve leetcode problems.

A friend was obsessed with getting into FAANG and relentlessly drilled leetcode problems. There’s a whole community around it, basically memorizing enough toy problems that they can pass these interviews.

The companies should know by now that these clever problems aren’t really that clever. I have not interviewed in a long time but I think I’d get kind of depressed if an interviewer asked me 2sum. I’d just lose respect for the company.

I've solved this very problem without reading the answer. If you understand dynamic programming, this is simply testing your skills in it (although I'd agree it may be too much for a short session).

Sure, but usually the problem is decorated in a few layers of bullshit to hide what the true problem is. I remember the core, actual problem, but that wasn't what got presented. So take off another 5 to 10 minutes cutting through that.

And neither are really great predictors of coding ability.

But when you have the #1 name in the world for a brand, it's OK to throw out 99 good people for every 100 that apply.

Puzzles in Limbo are definitely simpler and more straightforward than in Braid, but Braid is also more than just a puzzle game.

To me, the feeling OP is describing when it comes to the first rewind in Braid is similar to the first few bizarre deaths in Limbo: Surprising, and it leads me to re-evaluate the way I approach the game.

I agree with your overall comment, but could you elaborate on the link between

> [Immigrants] are hitting the job market, and now, their children too.

and

> the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing, from ALL of our customers

?

I am not trying to start a culture war or to pity the general English skills of recent immigrants and their family, far from it. They do their best, and we can only congratulate them for their efforts. I am not here to spew out racist generalisations, let's all stay very calm.

What I am saying is that we are seeing more and more locally produced Engrish, Chinaglish, RussianGlish, Penjabi-glish or who-knows-what-glish! And when I look at the name of the submitter of those texts, it's usually a typical recent immigrant name. But OF COURSE, we have Wilson's and Taylor's who write in horrendous English too.

I also am not saying all immigrants are idiots and cannot write in English, some are truly excellent, just as much as your typical "native".

What I am saying, is that with volume, that very occurrence of bad English is increasing. That's it. I can see how very unorthodox English style could be a challenge for AI.

They probably meant that the reason is malicious, to spy on traffic. Especially since a good chunk of the top sites on that list are Chinese which is known to have generalised spying on internet users.

However, in a shitty regime like China, surely the government can ask the websites to just hand over the private keys and disable prefect forward secrecy, allowing government spying while preventing anyone else from doing so.

Which is insanely difficult to do at scale and would take a considerable amount of time and resources. Not to mention being really obvious! I'm happy with making things crazy hard for the bad actors out there.

Generalised spying, like USA and UK? We're just seemingly more covert about it.

"Code monkeys" feels pretty derogatory when talking about people just doing the job they are paid for.

It's especially unnecessary in a thread like this one where OP is doubting his skills and choices, and looking for help/direction.

I think the way that abledon used it here is fine. He wasn't saying "everyone else is a code monkey", he was saying "we are all code monkeys" himself included.

In this context, it might actually help OP to relax a bit - the message is "Don't worry, you don't have to be a programming contest winner in order to work as a programmer. Many programming jobs are much lower stress and lower cognitive load than that", and abledon's description certainly matches my own programming job more than, e.g. what was described in the other "What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?" post on HN.

Exactly. You must ask yourself what you want from this. If it's a secure-ish job, good pay, and relatively low-stress it's pretty easy to find.

If it's The Social Network style code-bro'ing, coding the cure to cancer, etc; well that's pretty easy to find too.

At the risk of mirroring pure-awesome's comment: we could say the use of the word 'just' is derogatory, but it doesn't make sense to deny the distinction it draws.

There's a difference between a mechanical engineer, and a car technician. There's a difference between serious algorithmic work, and code-monkey work. One is more demanding than the other.

> Short of ideas and creative people? Or just want it for free?

As I see it, it's at worst a fun experiment on the design of a single page. I think it's also a very nice way to get a conversation going with people who might be good fit for their team.

All in all, I don't think there's any need to be that negative about it =)