#i hate leetcode problems so much
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I have no motivation to work on the type of code that will get me a job. Instead I'm wasting all my time writing the type of code that I'd write on the job
#codeblr#progblr#i hate leetcode problems so much#i cant figure them out#theyre frustrating#id rather work on my real app that i really use every day#will never get a job if i keep focusing on app development instead of leetcode practice
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online applications for cs jobs are so ridiculous you're telling me i have to spend 4 hours of my life doing this thing that will make me miserable? and if i dont do it in a way that you exactly like you'll waste my time and ghost me? what if we both became shooting stars passing in the night
#rambles#why is every application turning into a full on exam. i hate the grind so much#i dont WANT to do leetcode problems i dont WANT to sign up for your stupid online application site so i can do this thing and fail it#this one im doing rn is making me download a fucking app? a whole program onto my computer?? bro.#last time i did an online app i failed the code section but a bunch of ppl passed with chatgpt so they had to do another interview round#so now im kinda jaded abt it like. what's the fucking point man#on one hand i get it. from the employer perspective it's good for identifying who wants to actually work there#but like. come on. this is so ridiculous
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Hey not to go all "tumblr is a professional networking site" on you, but how did you get to work for Microsoft??? I'm a recent grad and I'm being eviscerated out here trying to apply for industry jobs & your liveblogging about your job sounds so much less evil than Data Entry IT Job #43461
This place is basically LinkedIn to me.
I'm gonna start by saying I am so so very sorry you're a recent grad in the year 2024... Tech job market is complete ass right now and it is not just you. I started fulltime in 2018, and for 2018-2022 it was completely normal to see a yearly outflow of people hopping to new jobs and a yearly inflow of new hires. Then sometime around late-spring/early-summer of 2022 Wallstreet sneezed the word "recession" and every tech company simultaneously shit themselves.
Tons of layoffs happened, meaning you're competing not just with new grads but with thousands of experienced workers who got shafted by their company. My org squeaked by with a small amount of layoffs (3 people among ~100), but it also means we have not hired anyone new since mid-2022. And where I used to see maybe 4-8 people yearly leave in order to hop to a new job, I think I've seen 1 person do that in the whole last year and a half.
All this to say it's rough and I can't just say "send applications and believe in yourself :)".
I have done interviews though. (I'm not involved in resume screening though, just the interviews of candidates who made it past the screening phase.) So I have at least some relevant advice, as well as second-hand knowledge from other people I know who've had to hop jobs or get hired recently.
If you have friends already in industry who you feel comfortable asking, reach out to them. Most companies have a recommendation process where a current employee fills out a little form that says "yeah I'd recommend such-and-such for this job." These do seem to carry weight, since it's coming from a trusted internal person and isn't just one of the hundreds of cold-call applications they've received.
A lot of tech companies--whether for truly well-intentioned reasons or to just check a checkbox--are on the lookout for increasing employee diversity. If you happen to have anything like, for example, "member of my college Latino society", it's worth including on your resume among your technical skills and technical projects.
I would add "you're probably gonna have to send a lot of applications" as a bullet point but I'm sure you're already doing that. But here it is as a bullet point anyway.
(This is kind of a guess, since it's part of the resume screening) but if you can dedicate some time to getting at least passingly familiar with popular tech/stacks for the positions you're looking into, try doing that in your free time so you can list it on your resume. Even better if you make a project you can point to. Like if you're aiming for webdev, get familiar with React and probably NodeJS. On top of being comfortable in one of the all-purpose languages like C(++) or Java or Python.
If you get to the interview phase - a company that is good to work for WILL care that you're someone who's good to work with. A tech-genius who's a coworker-hating egotistical snob is a nuisance at best and a liability at worst for companies with even a half-decent culture. When I do interviews, "Is this someone who's a good culture fit?" is as important as the technical skills. You'll want to show you'll be a perfectly pleasant, helpful, collaborative coworker. If the company DOESN'T care about that... bullet dodged.
For the technical questions, I care more about the thought process than I do the right answer, especially for entry-level. If you show a capacity for asking good, insightful clarifying questions, an ability to break down the problem, explain your thought process, and backtrack&alter your approach upon realizing something won't work, that's all more important than just being able to spit out a memorized leetcode answer. (I kinda hate leetcode for this reason, and therefore I only ask homebrewed questions, because I don't want the technical portion to hinge at all on whether someone managed to memorize the first 47 pages of leetcode problems). For a new hire, the most important impression you can give me is that you have a technical grasp and that you're capable of learning. Because a new hire isn't going to be an expert in anything, but they're someone who's capable of learning the ropes.
That's everything I have off the top of my head. Good luck anon. I'm very sorry you were born during a specific range of years that made you a new grad in 2024 and I hope it gets better.
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2025年05月12日 (禮拜一) [6/100]
Existing in a state of low-grade panic. I have an interview on Wednesday, and there are not nearly enough hours in the day for me to prepare. Here's me working out a simple recursion problem on paper because I couldn't QUITE figure out how you were supposed to calculate the diameter of a binary tree without dealing with the root node. I am. Still not sure I get it, but I've done 13 LeetCode problems today and I have 31 more to go, plus behavioral interview prep, so not that much time to consider it.
It makes my brain hurt, but I'd almost rather be doing the LeetCode than behavioral interview prep, because I hate talking about myself in concrete terms. Accomplishments? Do I have those? Wouldn't you rather talk about that new dessert bar opening up nearby? I sure would!
I sat down on my bed for an hour doing nothing and BOY am I regretting it right now. Time! I don't have it!
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2/12/2024
Here I am again.
I feel like shit. I'm sleeping properly and exercising properly. Steven started regularly coming to the gym with me, which has obvious pros and non obvious con of forcing us to go at suboptimal times and having different food preferences afterwards. I decide at this point not to explore a possible tangent.
What's wrong with my brain? Why did I wake up today feeling so unhappy? My skin sucks. I'm cleansing and moisturizing twice a day regularly and my skin is still super dry and looks bad. I also started brushing twice a day and flossing once a day which is good. Only because I got a cavity lol.
I need to order some new books to read. I read the SBF book and thought it was great, and apparently people hated it because it didn't portray SBF as sufficiently evil. This is how people view neurodivergence. I have a lot of anger here for some reason. I hate normal people who believe that anyone struggling due to their non normalcy are just lazy or bad or other descriptors that prescribe a character fault. The world is built for normal people, then normal people blame non-normal people for struggling in it. I sincerely hope their kids end up not normal.
I think my friends are largely guilty of this. More specifically in the jolly group. It makes sense because that worldview is compatible with their experiences. Simply put, they are not punished for not properly empathizing with not normal people. I understand the ease of this thought pattern because I too used to be very judgmental of others' struggles. In certain sectors I probably still am. We all have faults, and I find this one harder to forgive than others because it directly affects their evaluation and treatment of me.
I wonder if I'm suffering from a lack of oxytocin. I'm considering hiring a professional cuddler. It's shameful, but I'm trying to not feel too bad about it because there should be nothing shameful about taking steps to fix genuine problems. The shameful part is obviously the implied desperate position. But that's the reality I have to accept. I might lie too much to myself. Maybe I should get a massage instead.
I lent 1000$ to someone and I'm trying to follow the advice of treating loans to friends as a gift. I sincerely hope the money goes to good use, and helps my friend get his life together. I believe in him not completely, but still more than myself.
The job search is not going well. I'm doing okay on the leetcode front, but I haven't heard back from anywhere, even with a referral. It's hard to continue believing. If I end up stuck here, maybe it's the end for me. I wonder if there even is a plan B. I do have this vanity left. It would be very painful to just move to bumfuck nowhere and work at some job with no relevance to my skills or experience. Would that life even be worth living. An insane result for my privilege and talent. But it's very possible.
If all my family were dead, I'd have no more ties to this world.
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#ive done maybe 200 problems on cf maybe another 50 or so in lc which feels like a lot but also very little
This is a lot! At the end of the day a lot of it is a volume game and that's a very good start.
#also my friend's been telling me to ditch cpp and take up python for ages now#shes gonna be so smug about this 😔
First, disclaimer: you should interview in whatever language you're most comfortable with (unless the company tells you otherwise in advance, but that's pretty rare). If you spend some time with Python and decide you hate it, stick with C++.
Personally I like Python for interviewing for a few reasons - it's concise, there's very little syntax to make an embarrassing mistake about under pressure, and your interviewer will undoubtedly understand your code. If I whip out Rust and my interviewer has never seen it before, that's potentially going to get confusing, but Python is basically just pseudocode that runs.
Oh I guess my biggest question would be how do you do leetcode (824 problems 😳). like do you go by tags or one of those leetcode sheets.
Standard disclaimer that I'm a freak who got really into this after I finished interviewing and got my job offer, but I found the best method on Leetcode was just to do virtual contests (this is when you "replay" an old contest).
Contests on Leetcode are great - they have (typically) one easy question as a warmup, two mediums to toy with, and a hard to really mess with you. With your current rating I wouldn't fuck around with the hards until you feel like you're getting both mediums consistently, but it's still a nice difficulty progression, and virtual contests are recorded which lets you track your progress.
Back when I was in peak sicko grinding mode I would fully solve through 2-3 leetcode contests a day. This is wildly unnecessary and I would not recommend it.
However! If you want to specialize in interviews, forget all of that and just look at a list. Here's one I found that lists common Amazon interview questions. Similar lists exist for most other large companies (just google "[company] interview question list" and look through results on leetcode and reddit), and going through them will get you there.
It won't raise your rating as much as doing contests (contests and interviews are overlapping but ultimately different skillsets) but it will more reliably get you a job, and that matters a lot more than making a number go up online.
Real job interviews for new grads will very rarely ask you Hard leetcode questions. If you get to the point where you feel like you can get Mediums with some reliability, that's more than enough.
hey congrats on reaching CM (? wanted to find the post where you mention that to confirm but tumblr search misbehaves). was curious as to how many problems you've solved on cf? I primarily picked it up cause ik it helped friends with interview stuff but I'm 2 months in stuck at ~1200 so wondering if I should be doing things differently. on one hand most problems <1400 are greedy or math so I worry an actual interview will be more "algorithmic" and I'll be unprepared (maybe leetcode is better in this regard?). on the other hand it's soo much easier to fantasise about being good at cp than actually practicing. so. anyway wondering if you had any advice on this? CM in one year does not sound like the journey of your average cf-er. congrats again. cheers!
Thank you!
(full disclosure: I've kind of fallen off with competitive programming - I haven't competed on codechef since January and codeforces/leetcode since April)
My solving totals, ratings, and number of contests are:
Leetcode: 824 problems, 2571 rating, 41 contests
Codeforces: 69 problems, 2000 rating, 14 contests
Codechef: 32 problems, 2046 rating, 4 contests
If you're looking for interview prep I would skip codeforces. Leetcode problems are closer to what you'll get in interviews, and their contests are much less of a time commitment. I also code in Rust on CF/CC and Python on Leetcode, and I much prefer to take interviews in Python.
If you snoop around a bit on reddit and the leetcode forums, you can often find lists of problems people have seen at a specific company's interviews to get a flavor of what you're up against. I really recommend this - the problem I struggled with the most in getting my current job was on one such list for my company and I wish I'd gone through the list. This was before I got really good, though.
I think my rapid growth was fueled by three things:
I did math competitions all the way through college that have a similar skillset
My college classes taught a lot of competitive programming concepts (I learned what a SegTree was in class!)
I had a period of 5 months between graduating and starting my job where I was unemployed and highly motivated, and I did a ton of grinding during that period. Most of my leetcode solves are from that time
If you're looking to improve but don't have a ton of time to burn, here's the regimen I recommended to another asker:
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Unnecessary Arguments - Breaking up the FAANG Companies like Facebook
Person #1: Let’s just agree on one thing - Facebook is trash and will lead to the end of society. Facebook content is trash. Facebook ads are trash. The algorithm is trash, everything about it is horrible, and we would all be better suited torching it and starting over
Person #2: You know that we post these on Facebook, right?
Person #1: Speaking of trash, Instagram is also trash. I look forward to seeing the government put its foot down and tell these tech companies that they can’t take control of the world without consequence. This is unregulated capitalism. This is the reason we have things like the horrific treatment of factory workers at the hands of Apple, or the atrocities committed in the Amazon warehouses
Person #2: Do you actually dislike any of these tech companies, or are you just jealous that you came nowhere close to getting job offers from them?
Person #1: I have always advocated for collections of large open source communities. Let’s do away with these large corporations
Person #2: You mean like Google, the company that has arguably done more for the open source community than any other tech company?
Person #1: That’s completely untrue
Person #2: And how much of an idiot are you? Seriously. All you had to do on that Amazon challenge was use the string find function. Check to see if you get npos. And for the love of everything holy, why did you think it was a good idea to use an array of size one billion instead of the standard unordered map?
Person #1: I was implementing my own unordered map
Person #2: That’s like asking a staff member to please grab you 1000 whiteboard markers during the interview, then throwing 999 away in front of him. But let’s be completely honest here. Do you use Google, Amazon, and Facebook?
Person #1: Yeah, because I have no choice
Person #2: What do you mean? You absolutely have a choice. Delete Facebook. I dare you
Person #1: Ugh
Person #2: Yeah, you can’t. Because they’re the best. At the end of the day, and this is an argument you will never win, they have the best products. We use Google because the most searched result on Bing is how to delete Bing. We use Facebook because myspace was a massive pile of garbage. If we demand that these companies produce lower quality products, then Silicon Valley will no longer be Silicon Valley. Another country, perhaps China, will emerge as the new tech giant. Can you imagine a world where the most popular form of social media is TikTok? TikTok is the worst thing to come out of China since-
Person #1: DON’T SAY IT
Person #2: ...I was about to say “The Great Wall,” starring Matt Damon
Person #1: It wasn’t even bad
Person #2: And what about all the good they’ve done? Google, granting access to all the world’s knowledge thanks to a constantly evolving set of search algorithms. Apple, with its improving hardware. Amazon, with its-
Person #1: Amazon, with its rapid conquest for world supremacy. Amazon doesn’t just deliver the products anymore, it strives to be all the products. Did you know that 13% of their revenue is from AWS? 33% of all cloud is on AWS. So now we have these Amazon foot soldiers who control our goods, our means of production, our delivery, our network infrastructure, and pretty soon our media and our banking
Person #2: I don’t know what you’re talking about with the last one
Person #1: You will soon. An investigation uncovered a private email Zuckerberg sent to his team, describing Instagram as a serious threat that needed to be neutralized
Person #2: I’ve heard that, and I don’t see how it’s damning. Shortly before he died, Steve Jobs asked the Dropbox founder to sell the company. When he refused, Jobs said he would destroy him
Person #1: Case in point
Person #2: No, that’s just how business works. You have a big company. Some smaller company emerges and tries to cut into your market. So you eliminate them
Person #1: Sounds pretty evil to me
Person #2: It’s kind of funny...I’m getting Microsoft vibes from this. Why is Microsoft not part of FAANG? Oh, that’s right, because it’s a BS term that has more to do with the stock market than REAL value
Person #1: Wut
Person #2: The government couldn’t stop Microsoft then because they had no case
Person #1: They couldn’t stop Microsoft then because tech companies are now, in this horrible dystopia we’ve allowed to come into being, more powerful than the government. Democrats hate FAANG companies because they’re such large entities. Republicans hate FAANG companies because they censor the truth
Person #2: What do you mean “censor the truth”?
Person #1: Type “What percent of Trump supporters are racist” into google. It will instantly give you back 50%
Person #2: No it won’t
Person #1: Really? Huh. It used to
Person #2: No it didn’t. And tech companies are just that...Facebook isn’t the news. If you get 100% of your news on Facebook, you deserve to believe that Epstein didn’t kill himself
Person #1: Epstein definitely didn’t...okay I’m not touching that one. You may think this is all a joke now, while there are still little start-ups and such. Not for long. These tech companies will buy out the world like the titans leaving the confines of the walls
Person #2: Did you just make a reference to...stop, I haven’t watched any of the new seasons yet. But if I bend down to your level and use the reference, why not just let the titans fight it out?
Person #1: Google tried to do that with Google+
Person #2: What’s Google+?
Person #1: Exactly
Person #2: Have you seen the Facebook campus? I didn’t even really want to go, I was in a bad mood that day...and it lifted my spirits. All-you-can-eat buffet. The campus is modeled after Disneyland. they had their own ice cream parlor...like, just kind of had this 9-5 ice cream parlor employees could go to whenever they wanted with its own hired staff
Person #1: Stop making it sound like I’m jealous
Person #2: You suck at Leetcode. I get it. Well there’s this book called “Cracking the Coding Interview,” you should definitely check it out instead of just complaining that we should destroy the companies that don’t hire you
Person #1: Enough with your personal attacks
Person #2: You’re right. I want to watch that new Netflix original about that talking panda with a drinking problem
Person #1: See? See what’s happened? Tech is in so many places we’ve forgotten what the Internet is supposed to be about
Person #2: Fine...what is the Internet supposed to be about?
Person #1: Free speech! Free information
Person #2: Well it’s succeeded at that. And it’s only going to get better from here
Person #1: The nightmare is just beginning and the only hope we have is that these lawsuits against Facebook and Google will go through
Person #2: I’ll be sure to Google what you’re talking about later
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i accepted a job offer!
it’s been like four years coming, but now announcing the next adventure i will embarking on after college: i’m really excited to share that I accepted a full-time software engineering position at Stripe! (a mid-sized company focused on payment platforms, responsible for a large portion of e-commerce, chances are that if you’ve ever bought something on the internet, your money’s probably gone through Stripe) If you thought that this blog would die after I graduated, you were wrong haha you cannot get rid of my shit content
How it happened
The past few months have been a lot of interviewing (read: a lot), a lot of leetcoding, and a lot of managing timelines and emails. I actually haven’t slept through the night since like September because of my anxiety levels (which is really bad!!!!) so I’m really glad that this whole thing is over. My application season started in mid- to late- August: I had a goal of applying to one company every day, and I kept that up for a couple weeks. Going in, I kind of had a plan of what kind of companies I wanted to apply to - I was planning on taking my return offer originally, but I wanted a few more potential offers to have negotiation leverage when the time came, and I also wanted to see what was out there too. A couple places also reached out to me, so I followed up with them. All in all, I ended up pursuing 10 companies across big tech, a couple unicorns, and some finance firms.
Interview Hell
I have this grand idea of writing a really in-depth guide to how to do interviews + how to find internships + how to handle the system because there are a lot of weird tips and tricks that make it a thousand times easier to get a job, but only if you’re in the know (which is really dumb, as the industry is still pretty gate-keepy). But until then, I’ll just talk about what the interview process was like after this. So I heard back from a lot of those companies asking for what we call “online assessments”, which are basically timed coding tests where you have to code a solution to problem(s) in some x number of minutes or hours. These questions range from coding merge sort to coding a recursive dynamic programming solution to some optimization problem. A lot of companies send these out to everyone and then resume screen, and some might resume screen and then send these out. I admittedly didn’t prepare too much for these, I got pretty lucky and knew how to do most of the problems based off of the years of practice I’d had already (turns out coding every day for like 3 years is actually really good practice already).
A couple companies skipped ahead to the first round phone interview stage. After the online assessments, I got a wave of several first round interview requests, which are usually over the phone for an hour. One of them was a Karat interview, which is some third party, unbiased interview company, and all I remember from this was trying gauge how I did from the body language of my interviewer’s tiny Zoom screen, and I could tell absolutely nothing. It was nerve-wracking. One phone interview lasted for 20 minutes out of the hour it was supposed to take, and I thought I had failed on the spot. I did actually leetcode in preparation for these problems, and most of them ended up being easy - medium questions, usually simple applications with tricky twists, like implementing certain data structures from scratch with O(1) runtime methods. Most of these were early-mid September, squeezed into hour-long breaks in my day.
Final Round Hell
After all these, I ended up moving forward in all of those interviews to the final round, which are usually series of 3-4 video interviews, back to back, usually technical in nature. I thought the one hour phone screens were rough, but this was a real test of stamina. This is also where timing got really tricky for me, because I was trying to time my interviews such that any offers I got would align together in as much of an overlapping window as possible, so that I could negotiate offers a lot easier and see all my options at once.
Preparation for this was also hell - it was a lot of Leetcoding, a lot of interview research online, a lot of going over my stories. I vary between three main stories for all the possible behavioral questions people could ask me: the nonprofit project Amplify that my friends and I worked on, my intro CS class final project, and my previous internship project. In the end though, it was a Lot of leetcoding, I learned so much about graphs and searches and backtracking and DP, I cannot even tell you. I haven’t thought about topological sort since 2017. And somehow, some way, it actually came up in one of my interviews, and WOW i knocked that one out of the park.
My Stripe final round was actually one of the first ones I had way back in mid-September. It was four interviews back to back, three technical, and one more behavioral. I remember feeling generally confident, but not 100% afterwards, mostly just exhausted. Most of my on-sites were in early-mid October - I think I had six days of final interviews over 2 weeks, so I was literally about to pass out at all times. I was really looking forward to travelling this semester too for final rounds (I would’ve gone to New York, Chicago, SF/Bay, Detroit ..... sad). I also had several calls with career centers, people from different companies, recruiters, other info sessions, etc. I started out wearing nice clothes, but in the end, it was over for me - I was in sweats and a tshirt. In this two week period, I was lucky enough to grab a few offers - my return offer, but also a few offers from other companies, including Stripe, whom, at this point, I had given up all hope on, since they told me in late September that they wouldn’t know whether they’d have a spot for me. I remember getting the call back while picnicking with my friends, absolutely shocked I was in the position that I was.
Decision Sweat
At the end of the day, from the places I interviewed with, I ended up getting official offers from 5 places (1 of them being my return offer), 1 tentative offer (I think they ghosted me though because my deadline was too soon), 1 ghost (again, my deadline was too soon so I think they gave up on me), and 1 reject (that one was a really rough interview).
Let me be clear - I hate decision making. I am really bad with any sort of decisions. This process was worse than my college application decision. I’ll make a separate post in about a month or so detailing why I made the decision I made to go to Stripe instead of back to Google, but broadly it was because I wanted to try something new and take risks. It was a really hard decision because my last internship was really awesome and I loved the team I worked on, but ultimately the lack of a guarantee of returning to that team and the allure of working at a new place was too much to overcome. I talked about this every day with my friends and family and mentors, I made a whole decision matrix, but at the end of the day, I did end up flipping a coin on Facetime. Stripe was tails, and the coin flipped tails, and then I screamed and went to sleep. so that was that
I really have to thank the people in my life for bearing with me during this period - I think I must’ve been really obnoxious with how much I was talking about it, but I’m glad that they were there to hear me out every time I flipped my decision. And more generally, my friends and family were the reason I got through MIT, and did all the cool things that I talked about in my interviews and pushed me to learn and strive for the best. And most importantly, they’re the ones who celebrate my interests and accomplishments and push me to try new things. [this whole blog post is one sappy rant about how much i love my friends and how they got me to where i am ok end rant end post]
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16 October 2019
Place: Home
Didn’t post anything last month due to lack of motivation. Will try to make one more post this month.
These past few days were pretty crap. Got rejected by Google, got ghosted by Microsoft even after performing really well in the online test. Got pretty demotivated by that. But, I guess this is the part of the journey. I just hope the destination this path leads to is good enough. I’ll know pretty soon as not much time is left now. Everyone seems to be knowing for sure what they want to do ahead except me. Surprisingly, I’ve been enjoying coding for some time now, or at least not hating it. The thought of MBA hasn’t popped up in my mind for quite some time now.
Nothing much has changed on the “relationship” part of my life. The girl I really liked is in a relationship already. So, no progress on that front. The other girl whom I tried on already last year started talking to me again out of blue. As I was starting to get my hopes up, I got to know she got back in a relationship too. Another missed opportunity. This hit me hard.
Goals for next 30 days:
=> Complete the Competitive programming course
=> Apply to at least 20 companies.
=> Do 5 leetcode problems everyday.
=> Maybe do the React Course
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11/29/2023
It's been a while since nippon and nothing good has happened. That's not really true but it is true I haven't made progress on my goals. I've even made negative progress on lifting and running. Or maybe sideways who cares im just not dedicated enough. why do i bother with good grammar on these posts just let it go bro.
I did well on the osu tournament at least, but ive gotta give up on that shit. just play for fun and casual improvement. I fucked up my wrist the other day too and it still hurts. It kinda hurts to type to be honest. tumblr can fuck off with the spellcheck btw. i talked to Peter about his journaling and im starting to think that my thoughts are just way more cringe than average. ur telling me everyone else doesnt have to hold back cringe all the time? i love being cringe is the problem
one thing I remember feeling on the way to see my pt is that i think i like feeling sad. the type of sad where id like to say its something other than self pity but its probably just self pity. god im so reluctant to say im falling into a common trap that is wallowing in self pity.
oh yea I started taking caffeine pills and not taking medication. I don't think its helping so far but I feel less shit all the time. is it time to truly give up? im scared that im losing my mental faculties. I remember I used to try to optimize everything i did. which i thought was dumb at the time because I would proceed to waste all the extra time I had. but now I dont have that drive to optimize anymore. i dont believe in myself to be different anymore. in fact its a struggle to even be normal.
i dont know if ive talked about this before but I tried to go for a route in my life where I wouldnt have to learn to be normal. if I got far enough doing special weird things then people would accept that I didnt have to be normal, and theyd even praise me for it. but now that ive fallen off the wagon I have to just be behind on being normal instead. I hate the feeling that other people will look at me and think I was wrong all along.
Im so doomer in these posts. I guess getting off the medication wasnt enough to stave away the depression. I didnt even do anything today either programming wise. Theres a month left, and its december. maybe i should just start leetcoding now. I say that cuz its the normal thing to say but there is no way I start before the new year. time to pretend to be happy for the holidays.
im worried that it will be difficult to find a job. i want to find a job in new york but i need to find a position that lets me afford rent. i have a limited number of people i can reach out to for referrals and if those dont pan out im probably in deep trouble and will need to take whatever i can get.
there's a channel called hoe_math on yt that has blackpilled views but surprisingly its really popular. the couple vids i watched were entertaining and agreeable and im scared of watching more and becoming a misogynist. the old me would not have been scared. watch and sift the new information and try to remain as objective as possible keeping in mind all of your own biases. now im a thinking plebian. what happened to me? i ask as i know the answer perfectly well.
also i think im bad at diagnosing my own mental state. after taking molly for the first time i could barely tell i felt anything. that probably has an effect on my diet for example, where my instinct on what i need to eat is dull. is this linked to not being in touch with my emotions? ur feelings are partly a reflection of your body's state after all.
i cant even finish this stupid pong game. any mental obstacle that i think will take like an hour is just too much. the true test of will is the will that can give consistent effort day after day. i wonder how neurotypicals feel. does it also feel literally impossible for them to do certain things? what does it mean to just not want to do something? determinism wise everything either happens or is impossible. i have a hard time relating that to the things adhd stops me from doing. maybe the reason im more inclined to believe determinism is that adhd makes the illusion of choice much weaker.
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Leetcode Weekly 327
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I don't think this is the most annoyed I've been at the Leetcode problemsetters, but it's probably close.
1 - this one was fun because it gave me a chance to solve a problem in 1 line with a list comprehension :3
2 - The first thing that jumped out at me here was the use of ceil (instead of floor, which is the standard for integer division). This suggested to me that the solution would use a minheap with negative numbers, because if you multiply by negative 1, do a division operation, and multiply by negative 1 again, floor and ceil are inverted compared to if you just did the integer division normally.
Flip all the numbers, put them in a minheap, pull them out one by one, add them to the score, divide them, and put them back in the heap, until you've done your k operations.
3 - I got confused on this one at first because it feels like there are a lot of cases, but then I remembered there are only 26 English letters, so you can actually just brute force all <=26^2 possible swaps and check if the two words have the same number of distinct letters after each swap, so it ends up being O(26^3) or something.
4 - I fucking hate this problem. Conceptually there isn't very much to it - maintain three heaps, one for time events, one for queueing on the left side of the bridge, one for queueing on the right side of the bridge.
But the cases are so fucking intricate and there are so many stupid tiebreak rules, and I had to infer some aspects of how it worked from the examples because the written description was kind of faulty... it's just a huge fucking headache. If I made better design decisions at the start I think I could've gotten it, but instead I was stuck for the last half hour with a solution that worked perfectly on a bunch of tests but was off by 1 on a very large test. Hell.
Good first three problems but the last one felt like a waste of my time, and I think a lot of other people agreed. There was a codeforces legendary GM who took the contest and he got the first three problems in four minutes and didn't get the fourth.
The funny thing is, so few people got Q4 that I actually ended up top 500 anyway. Rating-wise, this competition was fine for me (I'll probably gain a little), it just sucked to do.
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Realistically this is fine, I might even still gain rating on the weekend. It's much more motivating to have one really good result and one really bad result than two meh results.
Just kinda fuming that this was one of those "you can only do this using a highly specific data structure that you either know or you don't" types of questions, on today of all days. Like, I thought I'd hit the last of those (on Leetcode at least) with the segtree problems!
My saving grace was that I had a vague intuition that you could do it faster with a treelike structure, and that something called a "Trie" existed, and so like an hour into hating this problem I googled it, and sure enough once I implemented the basic idea, it worked.
The only upside is that this can really only happen so many more times (on Leetcode I suspect this will be the last, or second to last). There's only so many wonky data structures out there that I don't know about by now, and I'll add Tries to my little Leetcode library and never make this mistake again.
#it's especially annoying because apparently everyone else knew this one#at least with the segtree problems other people had the decency to be confused as well#competitive coding
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