HN user
This actually further highlights the issue of code that is "self-documenting" to one person but not the other. "get_exponent" would confuse the heck out of me (is it just supposed to return the second argument unchanged?), but I would have no trouble with "pow" or "exp". But a comment that says "raise x to the power of n; n must be an int" leaves much less room for interpretation.
I didn't see any cynicism in article, and I don't think that, in general, self-promotion needs to involve anything cowardly or cynical. I do think that anyone who believes their tweets will be viewed as some kind of artistic statement must have a very cynical view of their audience.
RTFA
because they asked me to "say" a function for finding the longest common subsequence of a set of strings.
That's rough, asking for a solution to an NP-hard problem over the phone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_common_subsequence_prob...
Or maybe they were just expecting you to say "for each combination of subsequences of each string, check if they are equal ..."
What the hell were the couple in example #1 doing with their $200K income? If they wanted to pay off their debt in 10 years, they'd need about $2800 a month, assuming the rate was the full 12% the whole time.
I agree with a lot of the article, but a couple of idiots who pissed away the fruits of their education on too many vacations and fancy cars (obviously not any real investments, otherwise they could have refinanced their student debt) don't give a very good example.