Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

Re:Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out ... by Xylakant on Monday October 21, 2013 @11:50AM (#6586282)

I store a lot of "I've read the solution for that problem somewhere while researching something else." I still can't recite the stdlib doc for any of the programming languages I work with. There's only so much stuff I can cram in my head and reference docs are fairly easy to look up.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out ... by pdonis on Monday October 21, 2013 @01:05PM (#6586788)

I store a lot of "I've read the solution for that problem somewhere while researching something else."

Yes, this is more what I was thinking of as "encyclopedic knowledge" (which may not be what the parent post to mine meant by the term).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out ... by Xylakant on Monday October 21, 2013 @01:25PM (#6586904)

"encyclopedic knowledge" is usually meant to be "I can recite the cities phonebook by heart"

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out ... by pdonis on Monday October 21, 2013 @05:45PM (#6588429)

Not necessarily; an encyclopedia isn't just an unconnected catalogue of facts--at least, it's not supposed to be. An encyclopedia article about a given subject is supposed to show the subject as a connected whole; it will contain facts, but will also contain important relationships between the facts, general principles, theories that explain the facts, etc. If you have that kind of knowledge of a subject, you don't have to memorize all its facts, because you can easily get to them from the facts you do have memorized via one of many interconnections.

[ Parent | on HN ]