alt Hacker NewsI didn't see much cryptic except having to click on "perf_takehome.py" without being told to. But, 2 hours didn't seem like much to bring the sample code into some kind of test environment, debug it enough to works out details of its behaviour, read through the reference kernel and get some idea of what the algorithm is doing, read through the simulator to understand the VM instruction set, understand the test harness enough to see how the parallelism works, re-code the algorithm in the VM's machine language while iterating performance tweaks and running simulations, etc.
Basically it's a long enough problem that I'd be annoyed at being asked to do it at home for free, if what I wanted from that was a shot at an interview. If I had time on my hands though, it's something I could see trying for fun.
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2 hours does seem short. It took me a half hour to get through all you listed and figure out how to get the valu instruction working.
I suspect it would take me another hour to get it implemented. Leaving 30 minutes to figure out something clever?
Idk maybe I'm slow or really not qualified.
it's "cryptic" for an interview problem. e.g. the fact that you have to actually look at the vm implementation instead of having the full documentation of the instruction set from the get go.
My instinct to read about the problem was to open the "problem.py" file, which states "Read the top of perf_takehome.py for more introduction"
So yeah. They _could_ have written it much more clearly in the readme.