dbrumbaugh

There's actually a recording of a talk that LeMessurier gave on this incident on YouTube. It's a very interesting listen, though he clearly is a bit... defensive... about the whole thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-7IlAdAtg

> [...] adding a layer of excitement and unpredictability to your journey.

That's the bit that did it for me.

>Take maximum subarray problem, which can be optimally solved with Kadane's algorithm. If you don't know that, you are looking at the problem as Professor Kadane once did. I can't say for sure, but I suspect it took him longer than 30-45 minutes to come up with his solution, and I also imagine he didn't spend the whole time blabbering about his thought process.

This is something that drives me nuts in academia when it comes to exam questions. I once took an exam that asked us to invent vector clocks from whole cloth, basically, having only knowledge of a basic Lamport clock for context. I think one person got it--and that person had just learned about vector clocks in a different class. Given some time, it's possible I could have figured it out. But on an exam, you've got like 10-15 minutes per question.

The funny thing about it is that I do the same damn thing from the other side all the time when working with students. It's incredibly tempting once you know the solution to a problem (especially if you didn't "solve" it yourself, but had the solution presented to you already) to present the question as though it has an obvious solution and expect somebody else to immediately solve it.

I'm aware of the effect, I've experienced it many times, and I still catch myself doing it. I've never interviewed a candidate for a job, but I can only imagine how tempting it would be to fall into that trap.

Hey all--the author here.

I just want to clarify one thing that I didn't think to mention (but probably should have) in the article itself. I went out of my way to use eqn specifically because I wanted to use that particular tool here. I write LaTex a lot on a day to day basis, and wanted to play around with something else. So this wasn't a case of picking eqn because I thought it was the best tool for the job.

Oh, absolutely. I just have an unhealthy fascination with old tech, so I went into this with the specific goal of using eqn, rather than LaTex. I write LaTex all day for my day job, and I wanted a reason to use something else.