Recent content by jedishrfu

Danger UXB quote: Are you a man or a mouse? I’m a mouse. Or the other scene where the bomb guys were testing a remote operated fuse extractor and commenting from a distance how safe it was until BOOM! Knocked them off their feet.

The TV series NUM3ERS had math as the backdrop for each episode. Sometimes the math is a bit of a stretch since the writers first created the episode and then a math consultant suggested what math would be involved. It was inspired by a real-life case in Toronto where a policeman versed in math...

There's an interesting corollary about a guy who developed a special computational skill for calendars. He wanted to know whether he was a savant. A savant can solve certain types of problems very quickly because they somehow memorize the information and can access and search for the answers...

and electricians...

There are old pilots and bold pilots but never any old and bold pilots.

Looks like you didn't use the fourth match If you chose the top and bottom matches you have two diamond shapes each with two equilateral triangles. Then choose outside two matches from one triangle you'd have 3 triangles and 4 matches.

I think the best questions are those that draw on the interviewer's own background of problems they encountered and how they got around them. You're not looking for the answer. You want to see and hear the interviewee think and work through the problem. The interview then becomes more of a...

Here's a list of C++ specific questions mentioned in Dr Dobbs although they might be applicable to Java or Kotlin or Golang. https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/DDJ/1998/9813/9813d/9813d.htm

There's a range of questions depending on the job requirements. One interviewer asked me how to swap two numbers using pseudocode. Another had asked me to write a small bubble sort. He was a junior programmer interviewing a senior programmer and it kind of pissed me off that the company did...

When you start grad school, there will be pressure, especially if you're doing TA or RA-type work. I had an experience at an upstate university. I took graduate-level physics classes there, paid for by my company via tuition reimbursement, after I received my grades. You needed to get a B or...

No, in highschool. This was in the late 1960s. His highschool was in NYC and was very progressive. Goldstein was the best book to learn classical mechanics from. If you knew Calculus you could work through it.

The original poster (OP) hasn't been back to PF since summer of 2025. In addition, we didn’t have the article to even discuss the OP’s critique. @webplodder thank you for your comments. Yes, it could well be true that the article was simplifying things. However, without access to the article...

You know, I think you know the answer we’d give. Enjoy your four years, experience other courses, talk with your professors about research projects. Spend 5 years if you need to. This time will likely never come again. The third undergrad year is when the courses up their game and assume you...

There's a curious parallel here. When great authors invent their characters and where they reside, they often find that the story begins to write itself ie they begin to discover things about their characters that they didn't know. They keep writing because they're invested in their own...

@Hill I think that’s very insightful. It’s like we create/invent a game with rules on how to play it and then we discover strategies on how to win it.