undefined | Better HN

0 pointsyallpendantools1y ago0 comments

> but writes incredibly well!

The post actually has a lot of small grammatical errors typical of someone not so fluent in English:

>> My reasoning went as follow: // My reasoning went as follows.

>> Is there any other numbers where this happens? // Are there any other numbers

>> I didn’t had paper at hand // I didn't have (any) paper on hand.

I'm not here to proofread a fun blog post but it's far from incredibly well-written English.

> that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system.

I think the solution needed more clever maths than deep knowledge of the type system---the type system knowledge can be self-studied from documentation. The clever maths, one can get used to if you Leetcode properly (you don't even need Leetcode Hard to get exposure to that).

If anything doesn't track in this respect, it's the claim that author doesn't have any kind of formal education. Not even high school? That will be extremely impressive. But maybe something got lost in translation there, or just careless exaggeration.

> Here's a viral calling card that would almost guarantee countless interviews (including from my company!) and they aren't capitalizing on it.

>> I don’t have anything to sell just yet, I am not a tech influencer so all you got was this post about a somewhat challenging FizzBuzz.

Yeah, not everyone is out to sell something, not every blog post is written as an opportunity to self-promote.

The story is definitely rather strange, even without taking into account the language barrier and the general absurdity of most tech interviews, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

0 comments

vsl1y ago

I didn’t even notice the typos when reading it... I did notice how well the text flows, how easy it is to read.

I (not a native speaker either) probably don’t make that many grammatical errors, but I envy their ability to just write. I can’t do that, I struggle with every word in long form writing.

These small errors are easily addressed with a final pass in e.g. DeepL Writer.

eszed1y ago

> I struggle with every word in long form writing.

So does every good writer. A full workload for a fast fiction writer is ~1000 words a day. That's, like, an aspiration for most full-time professional novelists.

There's a (probably legendary) story about Oscar Wilde telling someone who asked what he'd done that day, "I spent this morning putting a comma in, and this afternoon taking it out again."

Good writing is hard. LLMs may someday be able to write well, but they're nowhere near it yet. (They can write mediocre prose, which is considerably better than the median human, but I expect something like the 80-20 rule will come into play long before they're truly good.)

Anyway, I'm trying to tell you that you write well, and that you shouldn't feel bad (quite the contrary!) that you have to work at it.

(This comment took me eight minutes to write.)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse