News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by gameguy43 on Friday October 13, 2017 @07:07PM (#15469799)
Thanks for the post! Original author here. Happy to answer questions.
Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by vvanders on Friday October 13, 2017 @10:20PM (#15470331)
Shoutout for including the bit about constants in O(n) notation, 99% of things I see cover it gloss over it.

I've seen radix sort walk all over quicksort for common datasets many times. Knowing your dataset is at least as important as knowing the right algorithm.

Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by tenaciousDaniel on Friday October 13, 2017 @08:23PM (#15470025)
I really love this. Frustratingly few articles/posts/courses actually follow through on their promise to make difficult material intuitive. I'm only halfway through your Big-O post but it's already obvious that you've put a lot of care into really making it accessible.

Well done!

Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by gameguy43 on Friday October 13, 2017 @08:35PM (#15470048)
That is soooo great to hear because every time we "finish" writing a new piece we end up spending literal /months/ obsessively polishing it before taking it live.

I always worry that we're just spinning our wheels. But it's great to hear that the extra effort is showing through :)

Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by namanyayg on Friday October 13, 2017 @07:51PM (#15469926)
This is something I've entered my email into after at least a year or so. Great presentation and design and I'm sure it's good content too -- I'll get to know over the coming week :)
Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by notjackson on Friday October 13, 2017 @08:55PM (#15470103)
I really liked how you've added the option to select between many programming languages in the snippets!

Did you write each of them yourself or is there a way to automate such simple code already?

Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by gameguy43 on Friday October 13, 2017 @09:07PM (#15470149)
We have a team of like a dozen and a half contractors from around the world who do the translations.

It was important to us to not just translate our Python into C++, but to have C++ that was actually good, C++-style C++. So we hired C++ experts to do all the C++ translations. And same for the other languages.

Now, none of us are C++ experts. So how did we know if the contractors we hired were any good? That's a whoooole blog post for another time.

In short: Noah (an engineer on the team) came up with this clever system where we hired a bunch of people to translate the same code sample (as a paid trial task), then we hired a bunch of people to rate those people's translations (again, as a paid trial task). Then we hired the translator who had the best ratings, and we also hired the /rater/ who was most /thorough/--they do code reviews of the translator's code.

Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by faitswulff on Friday October 13, 2017 @10:07PM (#15470298)
Is this actually a blog post? I'd read it.
Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by gameguy43 on Friday October 13, 2017 @10:12PM (#15470311)
Not yet!

Edit: but it'd make a good one, right?

Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by faitswulff on Saturday October 14, 2017 @03:10PM (#15473688)
Absolutely!
Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by foota on Friday October 13, 2017 @09:27PM (#15470194)
Curious, how did you measure thorough-ness?
Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by gameguy43 on Friday October 13, 2017 @09:32PM (#15470209)
Definitely the least rigorous part of the process :)

Some combination of:

- Did they catch stuff that the other reviewers didn't catch?

- Of the stuff they did catch, does it look to us like that's actually stuff that'll help make our code better, or is it just unhelpful pickiness?

Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by xenihn on Friday October 13, 2017 @09:26PM (#15470188)
Happy customer since 2015. Any plans to add Go or Rust translations?
Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by gameguy43 on Friday October 13, 2017 @09:31PM (#15470205)
No specific plans yet. But notes like this are how we decide which languages to add next!

Curious: what language do you currently use on the site? And how painful is it for you to not have Go or Rust?

(Also, you're talking about having the /content/ in those languages, right? Or supporting those languages in our code editor?)

Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by xenihn on Friday October 13, 2017 @09:53PM (#15470258)
Yep, I'm talking about the content.

I use Swift and Objective-C, but I've consulted InterviewCake content for every other language except PHP at some point. The sample data structures and question answers are nice code samples when I need a quick reminder for how to do basic things in languages that I don't use on a regular basis.

Not having Go or Rust isn't a big deal, if I could choose one it'd be Go. I want to learn Go for myself, and asking for a friend for Rust.

I also never use the editor on the site, I write/run the code on my machine. I never liked using the editor the few times I tried it. I see in another comment you made in this thread that a new one is coming soon, so I'm excited to try it. Any chance I could beta test? :)

Re:The Intuitive Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms by gameguy43 on Friday October 13, 2017 @10:17PM (#15470326)
Shoot me an email :)