ggorlen

If the simulated organs perform better for research and avoid needless animal suffering, then it's a win/win. Right now it's a win/lose at best, possibly a lose/lose if you factor in reproducibility issues using animal organs for research.

So you prefer

    arr.reduce((acc, el) => {
      if (el % 2 === 0) {
        acc.push(el * 2);
      }

      return acc;
    }, []);

over

    arr.filter(e => e % 2 === 0).map(e => e * 2)

The only advantage of the reduction as I see it is performance, but this is highly dubious and would need to be profiled for proof (I don't recall seeing removing a pass like this matter in practice). And if perf does matter, a for..of loop would be clearer and one-pass, not to mention async-compatible:

    const result = [];
    for (const el of arr) {
      if (el % 2 === 0) {
        result.push(el * 2);
      }
    }

Exercises like this illustrate why verbal technical job interviews are useful in the age of LLMs--a series of A/B taste preferences seems high signal and ripe for discussion: "Ah, so you're choosing reduce for perf... please describe a scenario you encountered where this made a measurable impact".

Author here. I'd be happy to hear feedback on the post or noteworthy false positives you've encountered in tests.

It was the first online cohort of DC so I didn't realize how intensely difficult it'd be. I'd taken GIOS with Ada which was gentle, so I figured DC wouldn't be significantly harder.

It was a good life experience even though I wound up sacrificing my 4.0 by a few grade points. In hindsight, had I realized how steep the curve would be for DC, I'd have pushed a bit harder to squeeze out a few more test cases, but I was pretty mentally defeated at the time and felt like I'd exhausted all of the ideas I had on the projects multiple times over.

I found DC more difficult than compilers by a wide margin because of the nondeterminism, debugging difficulty and trying to figure out what the test harness was even doing. Compilers involved writing more lines of code, but it was manageable, synchronous greenfield application design.

> Consider that taking 5-10 graduate courses and writing a master's level thesis or project will generally take all of your free time and a bunch of your savings over the course of two or more years. (I sure hope you're not thinking to take on debt for this!)

OMSCS graduate. The program certainly ate up most of my free time for 2.5 years, but on the other hand, the whole degree was about $8k for me and required no thesis or capstone project--just grinding through 10 classes worth of assignments and exams. Also, it was 100% online, so that flexibility frees up time.

Theoretically, if you do 1-2 easy-ish classes per semester, you can minimize the free time impact. But I was less interested in the credential and more interested in the learning experience, so I took difficult classes and worked as a TA.

Caveat: I graduated in 2021 so things may have changed since then.

Reminds me of Boyd Rice's rotoguitar (a fan attached to a guitar) and the extratone genre (extreme techno kick drums that run so fast they turn into pitched tones).