Programming Interviews

So in my job search I've learned something important - I'm really really really bad at programming tests and interviews. Actually, I'm pretty decent at standard algorithms/data structures-related questions that come up on phone screens, but I'm awful when it comes down to ironing out the details and dealing with edge cases. Just now I horribly failed a take-home test and I feel like total shit right now.

I realize I need more practice, and I've heard from a lot of people that TopCoder's practice rooms are a great way to do it.

Here's the problem:

I find the problems, even the lower-point ones, to be WAY too fucking hard. Is there a similar place with problems that are easier, or at least less math-heavy?

>>39
How do you know, when evidence supports your belief?
Evidence = fact. If observations match expectations (observations can be things coming from the senses, but they can also be fully abstract thoughts and proofs which can be verified from premises to conclusion). I also have other heuristics about how I'm selecting my beliefs: Occam's razor is a general principle which I use (and its mathematical and computational variants). The reason why Occam's razor is a good heuristic is easy enough to show using probability theory (http://lesswrong.com/lw/jk/burdensome_details/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/)
Your answer shows that you're out of viable arguments. I will interpret it as your surrender.
Partially, I just can't find the interest to continue the discussion.
I dont think about the things I havent seen. I'm not a religious person and have no imagination.
If I'm to take the term 'religious' to mean having 'provably unprovable' beliefs (not in the sense of believing in some popular religion). In that sense, I think most people are religious (including myself, despite being effectively atheist), we all have some initial/a priori beliefs, examples could be:'I exist', 'I am thinking', 'Mathematical induction is a sound principle', 'There is a reality and I'm embedded in it' and so on. If you refuse to hold any, you cannot do any kind of thinking and lose any advantages you have over other animals. Even if you deny having some beliefs, your brain/mind has a lot of them, many which you don't even realize exist, although some which you could discover by introspection. The use of term 'belief' is just about internal expectations about the behavior of other systems. Abstract beliefs may be expectations about things which may not be obviously connected to reality as observed by one's senses. A "religious" (a priori) statement of mine would be that whatever my senses are capturing comes from such an abstract structure which I internally call 'the universe' and this structure has a consistent mathematical description, which is why for me the abstract and the experiential are closely connected and it is not pointless to think about them (not that this means I think a particular set theory is true or not, I'm mostly undecided about such axiomatic systems, although I'm inclined to believe arithmetic to be likely true at least, as if it was false, Church-Turing thesis would be false(what?) and some definitions of computation would be impossible). There's some other stuff that I would like to say, but it would take too long and since you yourself claimed to have no imagination and don't like to think of about abstract things, I'll refrain from posting about them (not to mention I have other things to do now and don't feel like wasting my time on a conversation about something which the other party doesn't seem to be interested in).