Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Great code is so obvious and simple that once you've read it you can't possibly imagine ever finding the problem it solves difficult or confusing.



The problem is, the converse is not always true. Problems that are very easy to formulate ("find the k shortest paths from my house to my office") might require very sophisticated, non-obvious, non-simple code to be solved in a non-naive way.


We all know that sometimes problems are easy to state and hard to solve. To my mind the problem you describe sounds quite possibly impossible to do better than brute force, so any code at all that solved it would be to a certain extent insightful (but the simpler, the better - and truly great code for that problem would be code that let me understand how an easier solution was possible).




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: