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random_coder

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A neat XOR trick 4 years ago

A neat trick indeed, using bitsets in a sliding window. Contest programming makes heavy use of some such tricks.

Best to forget about that interview and focus on future ones. Frontend engineering doesn't mean you can ignore performance issues in your programs. Binary trees are a very useful data structure to know in general. Ordered collections in many languages' standard libraries are internally implemented as balanced binary trees. It's good to have at least a high level understanding of this data structure.

Each letter is given a weight and it's multiplied by the length of the word it's part of to get its effective weight. Sum it up for all letters and you get the final score. Here, it seems like two 10 letter words can be formed using the given 20. Hint - blackboard is one such word.

Same exact thing happened to me at Microsoft during the system design interview round. Interviewer wouldn't just let me explain and kept on arguing about a relatively minor issue and wouldn't let me proceed and in the end failed me because I didn't come up with a good design. Really the whole 45 minutes were like him repeatedly stopping me and coming back to that one issue.

I've been making a Django app for over a week because I wanted to learn doing web dev. I hope to finish it another 2-3 weeks. So far, it's been a intimidating and yet fantastic experience learning about django, http, html dom, js, jquery, css, bootstrap, sqlite, orm, templates and such.

To me, it looks like you're just having problems with algorithm interviews. I have a solution for you and it's much more effective than textbooks - go to websites like www.spoj.com, projecteuler.net, topcoder.com and many other similar online sites, I suggest www.spoj.com - start with the easiest ones (on most of these sites, problems are tagged by their difficulty level) and solve them - I mean code solutions to them in a language of your choice (But C, C++ and Java are popular in interviews) - these sites have online judges where you can submit your source code, have your code run against a large suite of test cases for each problem and get results back - all in a matter of seconds.

Solve 100s of these problems(start with easy ones and move into harder ones at your ease, learn new concepts and algos as you go) and try the interviews again in another 6 months. I promise, you'll improve a lot at this kind of problem solving. I've seen a number of people do this and succeed at algo interviewing game.

I mostly write C++ code on Linux systems. I use ddd for interactive debugging in bigger projects. For throwaway code(C++ & Python), I just use print statements.

As an Indian I often wonder, the real question is not why India is so corrupt(esp. at the lower levels of bureaucracy), rather how come certain countries have zero corruption at those levels? Perhaps I'm too pessimistic about human nature.

Care to explain a little? Did your friend mean that talented engineers like working on novel problems and companies facing hard problems are thus more attractive?

As far as your work is concerned, if you believe your code or design choices are valid, don't accept their corrections or suggestions so easily. Explain your choices and listen to them seriously. Let THEM convince you why you're in the wrong. Ask for clarifications and don't let them leave until you are fully convinced. Stand up for yourself, OP.

Availability of an interpreter has been one of the major advantages of programming in dynamic languages. With languages like Haskell, Scala coming with first class interpreters, this advantage is being lost to a certain extent. I think it should be possible to build interpreters even for mainstream static langs like C++ and Java, they probably exist already, though I'm not sure why they haven't found larger acceptance.

I believe the biggest advantage with a good static type system is that programmers can design good datatypes and specify their relationships - and the compiler can then detect any inconsistencies(ideally anyway).

What Xixi says is that when China's GDP per capita matches that of Japan, it's economy will be 3.5x as big as US's. A similar percentage in budget for defence as that of US would then mean 3.5 x 600B. Nothing to do with China's current GDP or her current defence budget.