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the tea protocol is still predictably a gigantic source of PR spam (www.web3isgoinggreat.com)

submitted 7 months ago by self@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 7 months ago (15 children)

the homebrew tree inverter guy

I knew he did homebrew, why "tree inverter" though?

[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 15 points 7 months ago (13 children)

Dude couldn't invert a binary tree in an interview and so couldn't get a job, allegedly.

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (12 children)

No one could figure out what inverting a binary tree actually means. Like maybe swapping left and right or something?

In which case the best way to invert a binary tree of course being:

struct Node {
 private:
  Node *leftish = nullptr, *rightish = nullptr;
 public:
  static bool inverted;  // I hope no one ever needs two trees...

  // O(1) tree invert operation!
  void Invert() { inverted = !inverted; }
  Node &left() { return inverted ? *rightish : *leftish; }
  Node &right() { return inverted ? *leftish : *rightish}
};
bool Node::inverted = false;

Don't change the tree. Change your perception of the tree.

[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I mean sure? Swapping the pointers recursively is also fine. It's a question meant to see if the interviewee can talk about data structures or code, not to come up with a perfectly optimal working solution. Having a lengthy discussion about what "inversion" of a binary tree even means would even be totally fine imo.

I've interviewed a fair number of candidates and I ask them a very simple question with a bunch of edge cases and grade them based on how they talk about it, not the final solution.

I get the feeling that Max got frustrated and wasn't able to coherently speak about the problem, or the interviewer was dumb as rocks. I think both are equally likely.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Oh yeah I've had the misfortune of giving hundreds of interviews -- mostly programming interviews, but also talking interviews which I consider vastly superior. As well as being on the receiving end of a few.

I've definitely had people do poorly under pressure before. This can be over-complicating the problem, clamming up (surprisingly common), or simply getting too worked up by the interview setting. I hate that because I often think they could have met my rubric in a more relaxed environment.

I've also been on the receiving end of bad interviewers. Don't get me started on HP asking me to implement offsetof in C++... n.b. implementing offsetof in C++ w/o undefined behavior is impossible it has to be a compiler builtin.

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