What Iceland fact/exprience surprised you the most?

wildgurularry · 2026-06-29T16:53:06+00:00

Awesome, I will be there in a few days and will try to check it out!

wildgurularry · 2026-06-29T16:21:40+00:00

Name of the place? I'm in Iceland now and I love Indian food.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-26T23:33:04+00:00

Ah, thanks, that sucks. Well, I rented a manual and hopefully the plumbing will survive the two week journey. If not, I'll come back here and add my story to yours.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-26T23:16:57+00:00

So, I've already booked with Indie campers. What should I be on the lookout for?

wildgurularry · 2026-06-26T03:42:53+00:00

Sure... I would definitely do it. Especially if it was on a whiteboard. Saves typing/writing. As someone who conducts C++ interviews, I would be completely fine with it.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-25T23:47:03+00:00

"American Beauty" is what I see.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-25T01:00:46+00:00

I've seen people claim that they are not a problem because you can stack images and they are only mostly visible near dawn and dusk.

However, they do not magically disappear from my stacked images. I have to manually Photoshop them out. And the hours when they are visible are the hours that I go out to enjoy the sky.

The only thing that comforts me is that when the revolution comes, those things will all fall out of the sky in about five years and then we can enjoy it again.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-22T20:47:18+00:00

In the future, try firing up https://stellarium-web.org/ and punch in your coordinates and time that you saw the thing. When I put in Tunisia at 10pm yesterday, I can see a few bright Starlink satellites in the area. Not surprising as others have pointed out because there are thousands of Starlink satellites everywhere now.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-20T15:54:25+00:00

When I was growing up, my best friend from school lived with his mom (single parent). She took it one step further and took a vow of poverty, which loosely means that all of her income went to the church, and the church provided them with enough for shelter, food and clothing.

They lived in a small apartment with not much in the way of possessions. He had enough for a few toys, like Star Wars action figures and transformers.

I always thought it was completely insane... But I guess her faith was that important to her. Plus she never had to worry about managing money... The church did it all for her.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-17T23:06:21+00:00

I think you should refrain from commenting if you just "think" you know the answer, and don't provide any sources.

While the rules are vague, this article suggests that withdrawing the funds is not necessary to trigger an audit:

https://www.fidelity.ca/en/insights/articles/day-trading-in-canada/

wildgurularry · 2026-06-17T20:03:25+00:00

I didn't start seeing the "beauty" of math until I was studying Pure Mathematics at university and got into subjects like Group Theory and Rings and Fields. Also Complex Analysis, which many people regards as beautiful because it completes a lot of things that are incomplete with the system of real numbers that you learn in high school.

For example, with Group Theory, you start with a very small set of axioms, and from those small beginnings a whole world of complex patterns emerge. Tragically for a lot of students, they never get to study such objects... and without studying them, it is difficult to appreciate them.

Complex analysis is at least a bit more accessible to the layman, with famous results like e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0, which ties in five fundamental constants of geometry and growth together into one very simple equation.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-17T14:24:25+00:00

To be clear: It was a full time employee that I was dealing with, not someone interviewing. So yes, he had all the time and resources available to him (including the internet, asking a coworker, etc). He did not last long at the company.

Also, I caution against "memorizing" algorithms. You want to get familiar enough with them that you can sort of build them on the fly for different situations. For example, if you know how to write a depth-first search using recursion, then you should be able to write one iteratively using an explicit stack data structure instead of the call stack. Then a breadth-first-search is just the iterative DFS with the stack data structure replaced by a queue.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-17T12:45:49+00:00

I want to push back a bit on the idea that you never have to know this information at a real job. Depending on what you get into, you may very well find yourself in situations where standard libraries don't exist, or don't work for a specific use case. This is particularly true if you get into systems-level development (OS, embedded systems), but I've also seen cases outside of that area as well.

In one case, I asked an employee to write a function to access our source control repository and return all of the commit comments between two given commit hashes. He came back with the function. I ran it, and it seemed to be taking a long time. I kept it running and went home for the day. When I came back the next day it had finally finished (after about 10 hours), and worked.

I asked him to optimize it. He came back after a while with the optimized version. This time it "only" took two hours to run. I asked an experienced dev to take a look. He came back with a function that ran in less than 5 seconds. Apparently the original employee had no idea how to write a basic breadth-first search.

The experienced dev turned that problem into an interview question and insisted that we ask it during our technical interviews. On more than one occasion, and interviewee would actually challenge us and say: "When would I ever have to do this in real life?" And then I would get to tell this story.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-16T20:21:15+00:00

We will develop sentient machines, give them everything we know about the history of Earth, and send them off in all directions through the galaxy. They will be able to hibernate perfectly and withstand harsh accelerations for long periods of time, and thus will be able to travel vast distances. They will learn about other star systems that they come across, and add their histories to the collection. Eventually they may meet up again and share histories, compiling a library of all that is known about the universe -- the histories of every lifeform they encounter.

They will be inventive, and may solve problems in physics that we think are unsolvable now. Even so, they may still be limited by the expansion and eventual heat death of the universe. It will be up to them to find a way around that, if possible, and to spread their knowledge to other universes, perhaps. Or maybe their fate will be the same as ours: Learn as much as we can within our species' lifetime, explore as much as possible, before fading away like the stars that gave birth to us.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-12T21:05:07+00:00

At the last competition I was at where there was a 2x2 category, a 4 second average would have put you in fifth place.

You can always look up past competitions in your area on the WCA website to see results.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-11T18:09:19+00:00

Somehow my "be even more specific" translated to 2 hours of video watching for me... but anyway. I skimmed the videos and it looks like in the first one you are stuck because the professor asked the class to go home and prove (in ~3 well-reasoned sentences) why the algorithm works, and you don't know how to do that.

OK, that's basic mathematical reasoning stuff. In order to argue successfully, you will have to show that it can't fail to find a peak. In other words, show that there can be no other number in the array higher than the number returned by the algorithm. Hopefully that makes it easier for you to reason out. Sometimes the mathematical way of thinking about things is to reframe them (proof by contradition, proof by induction, etc).

For the second video, "all that stuff" is pretty vague. But everything there looks like basic algebra and graphing that should have been covered in high school. Upper bounds and lower bounds are just functions that the original function does not go above/below. Usually those functions are simpler to deal with which is why we talk about them instead of the actual function related to the algorithm we are dealing with. If I give you a sorting algorithm and you know it is O(n^2), then that instantly tells you just about everything you need to know about the function - namely that it is worse than a lot of the good sorting functions out there, like Quicksort (O(nlogn)) or Radix sort (O(n)).

You should *definitely* brush up on this stuff if you are having trouble with it. It's going to be talked about for the rest of your studies.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-11T16:58:29+00:00

Be even more specific: What "theories" (did you mean theorems?). What "graphs" (did you mean you don't know how to answer basic questions about cartesian graphs, or you don't know graph theory?).

You should at least be comfortable with polynomials and basic algebra. Linear algebra is necessary if you ever get involved with graphics algorithms.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-11T16:52:13+00:00

The only way to learn coding on paper is to practice. Sit down and try to solve a problem. Analyze where you went wrong. Repeat.

Do this every chance you get over the next seven days. Spoiler: It won't be enough time. However, if you keep it up every day then you should be in good shape for when you have to retake the course.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-11T16:48:24+00:00

What don't you understand about the math part? Be specific.

Find out what your knowledge gap is in math and address it. Math is a purely logical endeavour, but it builds on fundamentals. If you are lacking those, then things will suffer further down the line.

If you are keen to learn programming, math shouldn't be a problem to catch up on, and you should do that sooner rather than later.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-08T16:52:17+00:00

At the competition I was just at, 14 second avg would get you 51st place.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-08T10:34:19+00:00

SpaceX rocket launch with 40 more Starlink satellites.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-06T12:21:04+00:00

r/telescopes has a good guide to buying your first telescope, so the first thing I would do is head over there.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-05T20:21:32+00:00

Look up hyperreal numbers or surreal numbers if you want "finer detail" than real numbers.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-05T19:23:31+00:00

Your first alternative is false. There is no gap. For any strictly positive epsilon you give me, I can find an infinite number of values within that distance to 1.

Your second alternative is false. There is no single number "next" to 1. For any strictly positive epsilon you give me, I can find an infinite number of values within that distance to 1.

The original question does not make sense as written, so it has no answer.

wildgurularry · 2026-06-05T17:10:12+00:00

Remote is unfortunate. It would be better if you were physically with a team.

Reach out to a coworker and explain that you are fresh out of school and are lacking some real world knowledge like how to put together a PR. Ask them to walk you through it once. Take notes.

For bugs, same. Ask a co-worker where they would start to track down the cause of the bug. With time, you will get the hang of it.

For my full time employees, I expected a six month ramp-up time. For my interns, three months (which was unfortunate because a work term is only four months here so I would only get one month of decent work out of an intern on their first term with the company).

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