I have thought of writing this article more than once before. I just got assigned yet another HackerRank test as part of an interview process. Sometimes, I have blown such things off entirely. Sometimes, I attempt to do my best on answering them.
This time, I plan to do something different. I will have a link here in my response to the problem; if you are reading this as a result of following that link, then here is why I responded the way I did.
Introduction
HackerRank sucks for two main reasons:
The general irrelevance of undergraduate computer science exercises to real-world programming, and
The artificiality of HackerRank’s time constraints.
Irrelevance of Problems
In my experience, HackerRank’s exercises tend to be thinly-disguised rehashings of undergraduate computer science homework assignments. Such assignments tend to be heavily based on coding implementations of basic data structures, often trees of various sorts, that have very limited real-world relevance to solving problems on the job. I have written on this here before. It’s really not a surprise, given how the usage of such problems is basically mandated by the general nature of the constraints of the HackerRank platform.
Effectively, such tests screen for either recency of undergraduate coursework (and thus lack of practical, on-the-job experience), or willingness to spend time brushing up on a skill set whose real-world utility is extremely limited (and thus for unquestioning submission to authority and willingness to obey pointless rules). The first is diametrically opposed to the goal of filling a senior-level position, and the second is diametrically opposed to the sort of environment that I personally thrive in.
Artificiality of Time Constraints
Real-world programming tasks generally do not pop unexpectedly out of nowhere, with no advance warning. They are usually foreseeable as part of the natural trends of evolution of software systems and the organizations they support. As such, the prudent developer has usually already spent some time thinking about such issues. Sometimes, of course, they do pop up unannounced (long-latent bugs sometimes manifest, and sometimes have severe impact). Even then, they don’t come with a count-down timer and a hard artificial deadline. It is possible to take a walk (I get some of my best ideas outdoors) or to bounce ideas off colleagues.
With HackerRank, there is no such subtlety. The clock is ticking, the artificial deadline is rapidly approaching, and it will be enforced without mercy. (Sometimes you even get a so-called proctored test, in which you must enable a spy camera. Leaving the room is considered cheating. Lucky you.) You will solve the problem in one sitting, and you will do it now. And the problem has limited real-world relevance at best.
Conclusion
Maybe I will submit an actual solution, and maybe I will not. It will depend on the exercise and how I feel about it at the time I submit my response. At any rate, the link here will be the most important part of that response.
Really, there is not much more to say, so it is time to wrap this up. HackerRank sucks, and now you know why.
Guilty on all counts! Mind you, this was the least important of all of Trump’s trials (the Georgia vote-tampering and Federal insurrection charges are far more important), but the precedent that presidents and ex-presidents are above the law has been completely broken and repudiated. Ex-presidents can be charged, prosecuted, and convicted.
Not that it will matter one whit to Trump’s base of loyal fascist followers. Any real repudiation of the Trump legacy must involve a second defeat in at the polls in November.
The USA is about ⅓ fascist (that is the rough fraction of diehard Trumpers), and it only takes a single fascist on the jury to block conviction. In Manhattan, the statistics are not quite so dismal: about 12% voted for Trump in the last election. Let’s be generous and assume some of those did so while holding their noses and that the true measure of the hardcore fascist base is half that.
In other words, Manhattan is 6% fascist. Or, looking at it from a glass half-full point of view, 94% non-fascist. But here’s the rub: the odds of all 12 jurors being non-fascist are 0.94¹² or about 48%. In other words, odds are better than even that there is at least one fascist on the jury.
Just in the past few weeks we have seen a series of ignored international court rulings, plus statements from the USA that Israel will be allowed to ignore the rulings (thus showing how hard it is to turn the ocean liner that is foreign policy), plus three Western European nations, two of them NATO members, recognizing Palestine as a fellow nation.
Not much more to say other than the decline continues, and to reiterate that this is all meaningless feel-good stuff until suddenly, at some point in the future, it won’t be.
Most of the time there is a geomagnetic storm forecast it either fails to materialize, it is cloudy, or I can’t get away from the urban light pollution. Not this time.
It was so bright I didn’t need my headlamp to find my way back to camp even though it was past midnight on a moonless night.
The latest announcement from the Biden Administration is significant. That it is also weak sauce compared to the sort of announcement one might expect in the wake of genocidal conduct by most other nations does not refute the former point. Because, of course, Israel is not most other nations. Israel is a nation that has had a uniquely tight relationship with the USA for the last seven decades. Changing such a long-standing policy is like changing the course of a supertanker: it does not happen overnight. Despite the slow pace of the change, Israel’s self-inflicted reputational damage is starting to take its toll.
We are about to find out how many right-leaning justices are fascists and how many are just plain old conservatives. (I am reasonably sure we will find at least one fascist.)
Because really, there is simply nothing in American conservatism (conservatism, not fascism) compatible with deciding that a president should have basically unlimited power with no accountability under the law. Conservatism is all about conserving existing laws and institutions, such as a Constitution, a presidency with limited powers, and an independent judiciary.
A president with unlimited powers is a president whose will is above all written law. That is the Führerprinzip, a key aspect of fascist ideology.
And if there are enough fascists to sway the decision in favour of Trump, it will be game over for US democracy. Oh, formal elections and respect for their results may linger a while after the decision, but they won’t last long. All it will take is one fascist victory in the polls and it will become obvious to all that the corpse had been dead for some time, and it is only then starting to stink.
The anarchist site Crimethinc recently put out an analysis of what is going on with the campus demonstrations. Like most things from the anarchist subculture, it is a mix of spot-on analysis and inward-facing mindset.
After students began occupying Columbia in solidarity with Palestinians, student occupations and encampments spread like wildfire, occupying over one hundred universities around the world. Well over two thousand students have been arrested. Each day has seen new occupations and new tactics. Again and again, police repression has outraged students, professors, and community members, drawing larger numbers to more and more militant demonstrations. The movement for Palestinian liberation is growing by leaps and bounds in the United States as a consequence of the bravery of demonstrators and blockaders over the past six months—most recently, thanks to occupiers who have been willing to risk arrest, police brutality, defamation, doxxing, and expulsion.
This probably overplays the role of the demonstrations. The main thing that has instilled growing sympathy for the Palestinian cause in the USA is simply the facts on the ground in Gaza. Lots of news stories now paint Israel in a very bad light, and justifiably so. That sparked expressions of dissent with the US Empire’s policy, those expressions caused increased awareness of the issue, and the increased awareness caused more expressions. So yes, the demos did play a part, but initial spark was simply coverage in the media.
On the latter, one critical aspect is the growing relevance of social media. This has allowed the domestic gatekeepers of information, normally squarely behind the agenda of a US superpower empire, to get bypassed. Social media is a two-edged sword: it allows a lot of baseless garbage to get elevated to prominence, but it also allows valid information (that would have otherwise been suppressed to a significant degree) to get elevated.
Another is simply the level of badness here. Israel almost always retaliates disproportionately, but this time the proximate cause of the retaliation was abnormally bloodthirsty, which made for an abnormally bloodthirsty retaliation. This has at times tended to overwhelm even Israel-biased sources with its severity.
The demonstrations are now probably getting to the point where many are net counterproductive. Gratuitous vandalism, no matter how justified the rage that motivates it, turns Middle America off. A protest movement that does better policing of its own is needed. That is unlikely, however, given the inward-looking nature of much of the activist left, where espousing or defending the most extreme rhetoric and actions is a way of gaining in-group status.
Such it has long been. Struggles get waged using the activists that actually exist, not the activists that one might wish existed.
The basic demand to see Palestinians as human beings is incompatible with the agendas of the United States government and universities.
The US needs Israel as a strategic partner to maintain a foothold in the Middle East; universities rely on funding from and research relationships with the military, arms manufacturers, and Zionists. It is impossible to acknowledge that Palestinians are entitled to the universal human rights that form the basis of the US empire’s claim to moral legitimacy while continuing to supply the weaponry, funding, and diplomatic cover necessary for the Israeli military to continue killing civilians and destroying their homes. These protests reveal deep-seated contradictions between discourse and practice that the government, corporate media platforms, and universities are determined to conceal.
This is the crux of the matter.
There has been much rhetoric about an “existential crisis” by Israel’s supporters since the attacks of October 7th. This is false rhetoric. The attacks, awful though they were, did not constitute an existential crisis for Israel. The latter has a nuclear arsenal and the most powerful military in the region. The continued existence of Israel is not in doubt. Rather, it is Palestine that is experiencing the existential crisis (and has been for approximately 75 years and counting). But I digress.
There is another existential crisis here, one posed by the demands of those dissenting from US policy with respect to Israel: an existential crisis of the US empire. Not the US itself, but the US as the overseer of a global empire. In order to run an empire, one has to be brutal at times. An empire whose citizenry is strongly concerned about its subject peoples cannot long remain an empire.
A successful empire must either be an authoritarian dictatorship or have a citizenry that is uninterested in (or downright hostile to) the well-being of its subject peoples. A successful empire must value order and obedience, and find dissent threatening. A successful democratic empire must have a populace that values order and obedience, and finds dissent threatening.
The latter could end up being a truly complicating factor for those of us sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. If a majority of Americans simply don’t care very much about the Palestinians, and don’t want to ever care, then any movement to change this is doomed. The protestors will just be seen as the loony left, whose eccentricities place them outside the bounds of politically acceptable thought. It won’t matter how good a job the movement does in policing its rhetoric; there simply is not enough public support for the policy changes it advocates.
One of the many evils of empires is that they tend to morally corrode themselves from within. I have written recently of how the protest might damage Biden’s chances of winning a second term and therefore put Trump in office. If this happens, a transition to a significantly more authoritarian form of government is likely in the USA.
If that happens, expect the so-called “responsible” left to chide empire’s critics for destroying democracy via their intransigence. They will actually have a point from the standpoint of the proximate cause, but the root cause is that the USA’s status as an empire had by this stage so corroded its morals that it had reached the point where its liberal democracy status became fundamentally incompatible with its empire status. As such, a transition to a more compatible authoritarian order then occurred.
Things have, in fact, been trending this way for some time. It was one reason why George W. Bush’s war of choice, backed by lies, against Iraq, upset me so much, and the lack of any real accountability for it upset me even more: it indicated a very high level of moral decay that was incompatible with the USA’s status as a functioning political democracy with basic human rights.
Accusations of anti-Semitism are cynical lies coming from administrators and politicians who have already showed that they could not care less about protecting students from actual white nationalists.
The same university administrators who used “free speech” as an excuse to vilify and arrest students for protesting against white nationalists speaking on campus are now attacking and brutalizing anti-Zionist Jewish and Palestinian protestors in the name of protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitism. Free speech and student safety are both false pretenses: the truth is that university administrations and police will seek to destroy any force that actively challenges their power. This explains the previously unthinkable alliance between Republicans who refuse to disavow white nationalists in their own party, Democrats who champion genocide in the name of resisting anti-Semitism, and university administrators.
I was going to come out with examples of antisemitism at pro-Palestine rallies… but I couldn’t find any good ones. Not of actual, overt, all-Jews-are-evil antisemitism. There’s plenty of anti-Israel rhetoric to be found, but that’s only to be expected at rallies against what the State of Israel is currently doing. I even went to pro-Zionist sources like the StopAntisemitism twitter account and the Times of Israel and couldn’t come up with any truly juicy examples. That strongly suggests there basically aren’t any. Propaganda can be true, and truthful propaganda is in fact typically the most effective propaganda. Yet even those with a personal motive in finding dirt on the protest movement can’t seem to find any truly nasty anti-Semitic dirt on it.
Yes, some protest rhetoric can be teased into anti-Semitism, such as implying that Israel ought not to exist while Palestine ought to (why? is one side less human and thus less deserving of national aspirations?).
I myself avoid such rhetoric. But I also find it not that impressive as a demonstration of anti-Semitism. If anti-Semitism is the actual motive behind the protests, wouldn’t actual overt anti-Jewish rhetoric be easier to find? A far better explanation for it is simply people repeating slogans without stopping to think of the implications behind them. That’s evidence for mindless sloganeering, not evidence for anti-Semitism (and mindless sloganeering exists in every political cause).
Politicians are terrified of the protests, but they are even more terrified by the prospect that the protests could continue past the end of the school year, spilling over the bounds of the campus and into a long, hot, summer.
It is the responsibility of anyone trying to stop this genocide to ensure that their nightmare becomes a reality. And it could: the the [sic] George Floyd Uprising is still alive in the memories of the millions of people who participated.
I’d love for radical politics to become more popular in the USA (to the point where it becomes the norm), but I’ll believe it when I see it. And I’m reasonably sure that things like gratuitous vandalism do more to turn Middle America away from the cause than towards it (and if radical politics are to become the norm, we must recruit from the ranks of Middle America).
I mean, really now, what did they expect to happen on campuses?
Israel takes it to the Nth level with disproportionate retaliation, rising to levels that many consider genocidal (of which ample evidence now exists).
The iron triangle that is the US/Israel alliance remains basically unquestioned. Ukraine may struggle for military aid, but never Israel.
The taboo against criticizing Israel does suffer some damage.
But only some. Campus demonstrations against what Israel is doing are still repressed harshly.
Per the latter, choose to escalate, and the other side then also chooses escalation. Surprise, surprise. Encampments become building occupations.
And no, this is not a defence of everything that has been done by the protestors. There has been actual anti-Semitic rhetoric. There have been pro-Hamas statements. There has been gratuitous vandalism of campus property. Such things are bad.
But keep some perspective here. A building at Columbia University is not as important as the US Capitol. While the last election was not stolen from Trump, Gaza is actually suffering. Outrage against a relatively unimportant target, one that does not threaten the basic nature of an open, democratic society, motivated by an actual grievance, is rather different from wanting to kill the Vice-President and create a fascist state because of an imagined grievance.
Much is starting to be said about the harm the demonstrations do. And they do harm Biden. Biden now has the black mark of domestic unrest against him, and such black marks count in the calculus of whether or not a president will be reelected.
Per the latter, the only real question is whether or not the unrest will become “sustained.” My money is on no. The reason is the venue and timing: on university campuses, in late spring. Classes are about to let out. That will let the air out of the protests. Moreover, it looks like a deal between Israel and Hamas might be in the works. If such a deal is cut, the conflict will de-escalate, and be a distant memory by Election Day, since (like it or not) most Americans don’t give a shit about foreign policy and couldn’t even point to Israel/Palestine on a map, even if their lives depended on it.
What’s being overlooked is the good the protests accomplish. What’s being done in Gaza is pretty serious, and it is being done in no small part with US tax dollars. People should be upset! There should be unrest! That there is, is a sign of a healthier society than one that would passively accept such atrocities.
Practically, the unrest, plus the principle that unrest harms an incumbent, helps butter Biden’s toast on the side of pushing Israel to cut a deal with Hamas to end the immediate hostilities. Absent such a thing, there would only be the Establishment politics maxim of “thou shalt never criticize Israel or deviate from supporting Israel 100%” at play.
