Linked lists are used to implement DS where you want to add somewhere other than the ends, trees for instance, as essentially linked lists with other constraints (number of children, red/ black designation). You'd use a linked list also for a FIFO queue since removing an earlier node from an array would require you to shuffle all later nodes to the left.
The reason you haven't used liked lists is basically b/c all the DS which are composed of linked lists under the covers already have definitive versions already implemented for all languages, and that's what you use.
Oh I was completely game to try to answer it and to think aloud etc etc. That was no problem, of course. They really wanted the "right" answer however.
But there's a unspoken corollary being implied in what you're saying. Let's suppose the interviewee panics. What do we know? Nothing. Expressing emotion, including a low level panic or discomfort, is not correlated to any particular personality trait that in turn is correlated to job performance.
What's happening here is people are using this as a way of importing their folk theories of Other People's Personalities And It All Means in true phrenologist style.
You have a folk theory about general creativity and general intelligence. Then you have a folk theory about the way someone reacts to a hard and off-topic interview puzzle to some personality traits that individual allegedly possesses and how all that in turn relates to job performance and how that should figure into hire / don't hire decisions.
What if the best most motivated and creative people are people who also fly into rages, like Gates and Jobs? What do we KNOW? Answer: we really know very little on this exact topic. Thus the surfeit of faddishness and folk theorizing and passion that surrounds our decision making process.
There is just one thing we need to know. If they don't work out, we can let them go.
Yes yes the entire idea that users would have both friends and foes who track them is completely foreign to the slashdot culture. I must be paranoid to think otherwise.
Categories of other users slashdot permits you to remember, presented just as slashdot generates them as found on slashdot/~YourUserName/fans:
Friends Fans Foes Freaks Friends of Friends Foes of Friends
Everything you've ever learned is on your resume broadly speaking, since including your transcripts from your university is a normal part of the hiring process.
Your position, while authoritatively voiced, is nevertheless unreasonable.
Ahhh given your comment I assume you're a *certain* person who is on the opposite side of the software patent fiasco as myself and loves to snipe at me from the venerable AC location every chance he gets.
It refers to someone who is mainly a prostitute (presumably this is why she was hired) but also functions as a receptionist. Someone who functions as both (and is paid accordingly) .
Yeah it's not like I was claiming skills in physics. any more than I was claiming skills in Chem Bio History English or any other class on my school's transcript.
This attitude is too pointlessly aggressive IMO. If they had listed physics as a part of the job, i wouldn't have bothered. Who's responsibility is it to accurately describe the position's requirements in the first place? The people who have that information.
Really, you expect everyone to be fully conversant in every class they ever took and passed and also retain a high level of problem solving skills in each of those domains?
And you acquired this belief from which Chuck Norris movie?
People include their educational history for the same reason they include the fact of their degree and the university it's from. It's a way of saying not "I'm an expert in all of this," but rather, "I went completed an education from a competitive university which included the requirement to learn a wide variety of difficult topics not all of which I had an real interest in.
Wasn't on my resume, it was apparently an implied part of my major's requirements....
About the problem solving thing generally, my Cog Sci education taught me that problem solving skills are NOT generic in any way "puzzlers" would reveal.
Solving a domain specific problem, like a physics problem, tests only the candidates familiarity with such problems. Solving "light bulb-type" problems or "Mackie The Cat-type" problems are very frequently equivalent to solving problems in number theory.
In fact, even general problems that don't obviously map to any domain in the minds of the interviewer are secretly isomorphic to some part of logic (Stamps and Envelops-type problems ) that even smart students get wrong until they learnt he specific "trick" of how to think things through. After that, they're just applying the trick.
I take great joy in solving the Jumble word problems that appear in local papers in nothing flat. Look at the scrambled word and say the unscrambled one instantly. It's a great parlor trick and impresses people much more than it should (but I'll take it).
How do I do it? I don't know- every word is different- but what I do know is I arrived at this micro-skill through practice. I started doing jumbles since I got my first book of them as a kid. Later I rediscovered them in college in the weekend newspaper in the Rat over coffee and received special motivation by amazing girls.
It's possible, but not proven, that everything is like this. It's likely IMO that everything is strongly flavored by this. No less a personage than Marvin Minsky thinks that what we call general intelligence is just an accident in thinking - where the child learns to think about their thinking and thus tweak it- early on.
The idea of general intelligence and general creativity goes back to Terman and the 19th century when he wanted to exclude a part of population from education by claiming they didn't have the required intelligence to benefit from an education.
So this all ties into programming puzzles and hiring. You're hiring someone to do programming and be creative in the context of programming.
Whatever else they have or have not done in their lives, they may be crack programmer with a high level of creativity and productivity merely for having spent the hours in some kind of ecstatic engagement with programming which is a mind state even capable programmers don't all have access to. Some people just LOVE programming, and among these people, some subset are great at it.
I had a hedge fund ask me a physics puzzler problem for a job as a Java developer.
Needless to say unless you spend time puzzling over this specific type of problem you don't have the skills to answer them.
The impression I had was they were going through a dog and pony show of "trying to find a candidate" for their position. I am not sure what they were up to. Whatever it was, they weren't looking for a candidate for the advertised position.
There was an absolute reek of duplicity, insincerity and dishonesty about every single employee I met on that interview, starting with the prostitute-cum-receptionist who greeted me to the project manager
who wouldn't look me in the eye to the interviewer who looked over my resume (which had only a distant physics class) and said "we're not going to ask you about programming, I can see you've got that down, we want you to solve some puzzles" and sprang on me some physics puzzles I could only solve if I were a physics major.
I couldn't wait to get out of there.
I saw that ad for a few more months online. I always wondered what they were up to.
We don't express the freedom of assembly as freedom to get together with your friends on a street corner, do we? It's quite possible to tie very specific activities to very general rights. So "freedom to access and participate in the general knowledge and discourse of society" is a basic right upon which other freedoms like "freedom of conscience" depend.
How hard is this to think through? We shouldn't make internet access a basic freedom because one day it will all be done via RF waves and implants? What's going on with you, Vint?
Yeah but the Patriot Act didn't take anything away from corporations. The US is a corptocracy, where corporations are super-users with root access and people are garbage waiting to be collected.
I would say the energy and independence of small software developers that was present in 92 has migrated to the apps market.
What's changed in the US is the chilling effect of software patents has had . Everyone is afraid to develop anything without a huge backer who will defend them if they get hit. And even then, the huge backers aren't interested in defending a small market like , say, flight planning software or toy trains.
And this is different from deny global warming how exactly?
You have a populace and politicians in the US who cannot understand the technical, highly interconnected world they live in.
Instead they fill that gap with Christian Evangelism, isolationism and a belief in the free market magic bunny .
This is what the US is. The same heads in the sand types kept the US out of WWII until it was almost too late. They don't know and they don't want to know . Trust me I live by these people.
They've gotten away with it for this long, but i'ts catching up to them and they will not be able to change in time. Reality in the form things like the climate and technological advances has it's own timetable and it really could give a shit about your domestic politics. Accept and adapt or die. How do you like that for social Darwinism?
Oh that's right, you don't believe in Darwin.
Did I read online that software developers are electing to forgo the American apps market for far of being sued under the regressive software patent regime instituted at the behest of and for the benefit lawyers and large IT companies who fear real competition from small startups?
Please don't flame me, this is my opinion based on personal experience. Just as a language, I don't think PHP compares to Java. It's OK for building scripts / apps that can be characterized as "reacting to web page clicks in a simple way" but when you have very complex domains and object models it really starts to burst at the seams.
I only deal in websites that are backed by very complex domains which need to be modeled. I get that not everyone does that or should do that.
Java has well developed libraries for a huge number of deep and specialized domains which yet have very broad applicability- interesting things like Lucene and graph layout and genetics, not to mention world class graphics libraries. These are not things people program in using PHP, yet they are all interesting to web developers who are writing web-based front ends to these domains. Not all web programming is MySpace / Facebook-type programming.
It's not that somewhere somehow some PHP programmer can't - through twisting the language and it's capabilities in a perverse way attempt to implement all this- "hey,. we're all Turing complete here", it's that result would be something like what Dr. Johnson is said to have observed upon seeing a dog walk walk on it's hind quarters:
" The wonder of the thing lay not in the fact that it was done well; it is that it was done at all. "
OK so you're telling me I really have to choose one? Then I'll choose Java. Just look at the Venn diagram. The smaller PHP circle is fully enclosed by the much larger Java circle.
Yeah but the article was about how people are choosing open APIs INSTEAD OF open source code. So I am addressing the use of open APIs absent open source.
Supporting two incompatible APIs is possible, but that's not backward compatibility in the API, that's supporting two APIs, the latest of which is not backwards compatible . So Postgres does that.
What you're describing is an approach to a solution for customers- hey! we support that previous API also and you can go on using it! But we have this new one.....
The article is about open APIs instead of open source (my reading, but also, right in the synopsis of the article). My point on this topic is, there are two kinds of API- ones that are incompatible with previous versions and ones that are incompatible with reality;)
At one point early in my career I was charged with implementing a multipart form POST method from section 9.5 of RFC2616 for HTTP 1.1 using the data format in RFC1867 which was from IETF.
I succeeded, but because servers had their own implementation of this same protocol and it wasn't defined using EBNF, that is, absolutely specifically, interesting things resulted.
It doesn't matter what those interesting things were - I'll tell you in a second- except in so far as they were unanticipated and serious side effects which were nevertheless conformant to the spec.
What I hear you saying is- if we screw around with this enough, give people enough time to shake most everything out, then as a matter of practice standardize on a few specific implementations which no one bothers to rewrite, then everything will just work.
Sure you didn't say it that way, but that's what in practice happens and that is what in theory has to happen for it to work at all.
But this is a different animal from an open API, where people are specifically NOT going to standardize on a set of canonical implementations that function as defacto standards and all have learned to play nicely with each other.
Plugins are all going to be written by different teams who know and care nothing of each other's efforts. Each plugin is a completely novel attempt to write a new handshake with the API from scratch, relative to other plugins. There is no canonical implementation of anything shared and what's more, there is not any long term, many cycle iterations where we try it and see what happens.
Yes if you allow API versioning you can get away from these problems, but another name for API "versioning" in "non-backwards compatible", which is what I am recommending.
Sure what you're describing vis-a-vis IETF standards works for some use cases, but really a commercial product with an open API is not one of those use cases.
As promised, here's what my perfectly legal implementation of RFC 1867 did. It took down any Netscape server I pointed it at. The POST I formed and data I sent was received and was in no way malformed, but the code that was in the Netscape server was doing *something* when it received the request that caused it to just blow up, throwing stack traces on it's way to out the door. Without knowing it, (and this is inevitable) the Netscape server was written to process a SPECIFIC implementation of that request.
Since all servers were Netscape servers back then, my little request amounted to a fucking universal death ray. With a little scripting, I could have have taken down the entire internet overnight.
It's what happens and it's no one fault. I *screwed around* with my end where *screwed around* means changed the POST and data in ways which were nevertheless as conformant as the original and the problem "went away" . Woo hoo!
I knew what changes I had made- they were trivial- but I never knew what the problem was since it was the side effect of a private API's undocumented set of (unconscious) expectations- a leaky abstraction.
There's two kinds of open APIs in the world. Those that promise backwards compatibility and those that don't.
Those that don't are free to improve their product release over release in any way they see fit. Previously existing plugins may however break as a consequence of an open API change, creating problems with users who expect their plugins to continue working and plugin developers who hear from their users or lose reputation when their plugin blows up. Plugin writers are expected to rewrite their plugins with every new release. They hate this, and what's more some plugin writers will not, forcing the user to chose between your upgrade and their plugin.
Let the finger pointing begin.
Now, those that do promise backwards compatibility, they're TOTALLY screwed.
The number of ways exposing your API and keeping it backwards compatible has of eroding and eventually destroying your code base is an awesome thing indeed.
You cannot remove anything you've ever made public. If you do, you break everyone.
If those un-removable things represent constructs which are central to the intellectual framework of your public API - what makes your API comprehensible, guessable, sensible, and you've made a mistake in your conceptualization or more likely you've made a decision which reflected an immature or incomplete understanding of your domain, the only way out of your bad decision is to create a new API with the new concepts that is sort of like the old but not really because here's the way we're thinking about our domain now... hello?... hello?....are you with me?... hey... where ya goin?...
Only in very static domains in which there are very strong public conventions about what does and does not exist is it possible to know with anything approaching certainty what set of concepts will prove durable and which are dead ends and over simplifications / over complications.
You have no idea what class names developers are using in their own libraries. If come to use the same class name as they are using, then unqualified uses of the class name in any file which imports both libraries is rendered ambiguous. Now your next release is breaking any plugins who used any of the same names in their own private libraries, even though those plugin developers did exactly what you wanted and nothing which was forbidden. Whose fault is that? heh heh heh.
Backward compatibility also has the effect of forcing you to freeze key parts of your internal design which have accidentally leaked out into your open API owing to leaky abstractions. And there will be lots of them. Yes. There will.
People will use your API in unexpected ways and come to rely on the the peculiarities of the particular implementation you thought you were hiding behind your open API. We're talking developers using things like program flow and call order of your private methods, relying the fact that you're running something on a particular thread, timing issues, the fact that a method doesn't return NULL etc etc. None of these things is documented as part of your open API, yet developers will come to rely on them and be angry and confused when it doesn't work anymore.
If you expose in anyway a String type, then rest assured plugin writers WILL find it and come to depend on it. Which brings us to the issue of plugin writers using whatever reflection capabilities your language offers.
Sure some of this is their fault (and a lot of it is not) but so what? What do you think when as a consumer your software blows up and you write the person you bought it from and they point the finger elsewhere?
Whole parts of your language toolbox are just off limits. You cannot expose non-final anything because someone will extend it with a method or field name that you yourself will want to use later, causing the above mentioned name clashes.
. . That means you cannot improve your OpenAPI through the techniques of extension and inheritance.
Not funny in the least. What we're talking about is runaway global warming with positive feedback loops from non-human sources of GHG. If those start to go at all, it can lead to an avalanche of GHG such that even if we cease all GHG production completely tomorrow, it won't stop runaway heating of the earth to 6 degrees above what we have now which, in case anyone is wondering what that number means to humans, represents the guaranteed extinction of civilization.
I assert that the mere presence of inaction on the part of democratically elected governments heavily implies that democracy itself, at least in it's present form, has failed.
Clearly the funding of elections by corporations is at the heart of this. Politicians cannot take positions unpopular to corporations and also stay in office. The small group of people at the heads of corporations who decide what campaign to support are far removed from both economic and physical reality. They are ideologues who are ignorant of science and what science is saying. Yet they and they alone decide what laws will be passed. The Chamber of Commerce is a case in point.
If democracy has failed and short term interests and the absolute ignorance and blind greed of the elite are driving us to extinction, then ti will be a repeat of what Jared Diamond has documented in his book about how once great civilizations collapse , titled "Collapse".
The elites are immune to the consequences of the disastrous decisions they generate until it's too late for everyone, including themselves.
I'm sorry, but this exactly describes our current situation.
I call on the President of the United States to take any and all action including suspending the Constitution and nationalizing all industries at the point of a gun if needed, detaining and imprisoning anyone who doesn't like it, and using whatever other powers he sees fit to impose whatever is needed to stop runaway global warming from happening.
It could happen within a decade that massive amounts of GHG are suddenly released from the permafrost thanks to the unprecedented level of 380 ppm carbon we have now.
For three decades now scientists have been certain of their facts and prevailed upon us to stop business as usual. For three decades our democracy ignored them. Our democracy as it is is a mortal threat to our nation and the world's peoples. It is lethally and irretrievably broken , by definition it has shown that it cannot cope with this situation. Time has run out and I enjoin slashdotters to accept and encourage the suspension of democracy for the purpose of saving life on this planet. I enjoin them to be prepared to do whatever the President says needs to be done in order to survive.
If it means turning the drought ridden Southwest into a gigantic concentration camp where deniers go to fend for themselves amongst themselves while the rational portion of this nation mobilizes and rations food, then do it.
We are right now in nothing less than a civil war, declared against the United States by the likes of the Koch brothers and the Cato institute and the Heritage Foundation and FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal and all the rest of the denier machine. These people are terrorists and it's time to start thinking about them as terrorists and treating them like terrorists.
This much is certain. We are heading towards civil war between those in this nation who want us to take a rational course of action in order to preserve the species and those with a unconscious death wish, those well known sociopaths who populate the right wing airwaves and print media and those who deny all science and seek to impose their otherworldly view of reality on all humanity.
It's civil war and it's happening now, being fought for now online and in the media and in Congress. But it won't stop there, just as it didn't in the first Civil War. Like then, this is a nation divided and it canot stand. It's divided between the rationalist children
So long as the government tries to meddle in our lives and our choices by pointing to scientific theories that seemingly justify their actions, some of us are going to resist believing in those theories.
So what you're saying is there cannot exist any set of facts arrived at through the scientific method which could, even in theory, give a democratically elected government such as our own the authority to act for the purpose of avoiding an imminent mortal threat to the nation indicated by those scientific facts.
Because that's all we have here. Will it effect your life? So what if it does. The alternative is orders of magnitude worse. Or so says science.
BTW. The whole idea that the reason people don't get up in arms over physics theories is because they don't result in "policies being shoved down our throats" is laughable on the face of it since it was the government's acceptance of a specific interpretation of a series of results in physics which produced the Manhattan Project and the bomb.
This event single-handedly determined for decades nearly every aspect of not just our foreign policy but also domestic taxation and expenditures for defense and was the strategic justification for not one but three wars- counting Iraq- costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousand dead and wounded American causalities, not to mention innumerable other covert and diplomatic actions around the world and here at home.
Perhaps FDR and Truman should have left it up to whatever popular misunderstanding and distortions of the complicated underlying physical theories the scientifically illiterate know-nothings could generate circa 1942 before deciding to green light the Manhattan Project.
Hell, perhaps we should put all scientific knowledge up to a vote before we act on it and see what the FoxNews and Agenda 21 paranoid conspiracy crowd makes of it before we act, totally irrespective of danger what percentage of qualified scientists are emphatically and unequivocally stating we're in.
If we had listened to you, it's possible we'd all be doing the ole Sig Heil about this time.
No thanks. If it comes down to it, if they force the decisions upon us, then I'd rather they interred Americans in camps before they ignore scientists. It made sense during WWII to inter the Japanese because we had no way of knowing who might do what, sorry to say, and it makes sense now to do whatever it is we need to do in order to effect the changes the scientists are saying we absolutely must effect.
The reason people didn't get up in arms over the Manhattan Project is only because no one gave them any choice in the matter and that's a Good Thing. FDR and "give-em-hell" Harry Truman did what they needed to do to secure the national security of the United States of America and they didn't take a fucking vote it at every turn. They acted, and based their actions on science and what scientists were telling them.
It's some sort of namby pamby relativism that has infected the society and the right wing especially where by they think their entitled to not just their opinions but, their own set of facts about reality.
Their idea is - "you have THIS opinion and I have THAT opinion and they're all equally valid."
They're not all equally valid. Some opinions are better than others by dint of having been arrived at by the most rigorous process of falsity detection and rejection mankind has ever created, the scientific method.
The survival of any society is threatened by the ravings of its lunatic fringe and the government should proceed based on the best judgement of the collective opinion of sober, mainstream experts who are fully qualified in the relevant subject matter.
If you want to stop the US from building the bomb or taking action against AGW, then be prepared to be treated like the enemy of the United States you've turned yourself into.
Yeah the stolen emails showed no such thing as you're saying.
Not only were they cleared of any malfeasance by the numerous investigations, but those of us who read complaints about the emails were amused at the conclusions of the accusers.
And also dismayed, since this represents nothing more than people like yourself whose previously existing knowledge about how science gets done, about the behaviour of scientists and especially the subject matter of this science was essentially "none" nevertheless imposing yourself and your opinion into the business of how science should be conducted and how results should be interpreted and what should qualify as a valid scientific study.
So to make sure it's perfectly clear, the same people who decry the imposition of regulation for the public good upon industry by governmental experts fully qualified in the intricacies of those industries they regulate now declare themselves to be subject matter experts in climate change and seek to impose themselves, Stalin-over-genetics-like, over a field of science the price of earning legitimate authority to which is decades of hard work, none of which you've done.
The rebuttal to the purely stupid assertions of dishonesty lies with a fundamental misunderstanding of the idiosyncratic ways scientists use terms like "hide" and "trick" amongst themselves and is well documented here for anyone seriously interested in the truth of the matter:
The point I want to make here and now is that someone needs to tell you to your face, and to you individually and specifically, that you're an idiot.
In fact, you're the worst kind of idiot history has to offer- the idiot who gets himself worked up into a froth and goes torch in hand, door to door, looking for the "the enemy" .
This gets you high. It fills you with a level of excitement and meaning and purpose which is otherwise absent from your dreary little life of Hannity watching and beers.
You need this the way a meth addict needs his next score. It lights up what passes for your brain in a way that nothing else does - getting ginned up against scientists and the left and the global warming conspiracy.
You're exactly the 21st century counterpart to the average, broke, angry, stupid, manipulated German going to a Hitler rally and letting himself become apoplectic over the conspiracies of the Jews and how the Jews are lying to Germany and how they're destroying Germany and how they're plotting to take over the world.
This is the role you've chosen for yourself on this earth- that of a buffoon, one of the millions who get behind some misbegotten idea and bring only ruin to themselves, their nation, their families and everyone forced into action to counter them.
That is your historical context; that is what you actually are.
I will have to read this book; I want to see his methods and analysis section. It's hard to believe that the entrance of evangelicals into politics and their influence is not largely responsible for the rejection of global warming. You have only to consult a political map and a map of denierland to see that where evangelicals have power is the same territory as denierland.
Furthermore, the basic message of evangelicals - that "man's knowledge" is limited and wrong but what appears in the bible written in the Bronze Age by people who had a only pre-scientific understanding of the world available to them is right, directly prepares the ground for denial on ANY scientific matter whatsoever.
There's a direct line to be drawn from the anti-evolution and the "young earth" hypothesis.. err sorry that's "young earth certainty" and the rejection of science generally including the science behind AGW, a rejection with the capacity to deconstruct the basis of civilization despite who changes their minds about what later on or what anyone living through it wants to do about it then.
Sure, libertarian psychopaths like the Koch Brothers and the sociopaths who helped Philip Morris murder hundreds of millions of people (and yet they walk free) are behind the tactics and methods of the denier movement,
and yes they're funding it also, but it couldn't carry the day if it were not for the millions of evangelicals and the much smaller number of sick dominionists who believe in creationism and self serving narcissistic theories like "the prosperity gospel" (god wants you to be rich!) etc. etc.
This culture of scientific rejectionism is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America and needs to be dealt with like the clear and present danger that it is.
Under what other lethal threat to not just the US's but to civilization itself, would we just stand by and do nothing? Would we do that if al Queda where in control of US politicians and a significant swath of the voting electorate?
The consequences for some events are so bad their eventuality has the power to re-write the rules of engagement, or more precisely, cause society to invoke and apply the existing rules of engagement in a manner which, while legal most people naturally find odious. But the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and it does provide the President - and by implication the direct action of the national security apparatus to its full effect under the Presidents' command - with the power to defend the nation against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Denierism is domestic terrorism in both intent- conspiracy:
hundreds of millions dead and starving, billions homeless and wandering across borders, international chaos and lawlessness orders of magnitude larger than we have now, civil strife tending toward national disintegration and economic collapse.
It is an imminent threat to the national security of the United States of America and I call on the President of the United States to take ALL necessary measures to counter, undermine, disable, disband and otherwise stop the collective action of this group of American domestic terrorists using whatsoever force he deems necessary.... and may god have mercy on their souls.
I forgot to add that Jared Diamond identified the ability of members of the ruling class to shield themselves from disastrous long term consequences of their own actions while simultaneously profiting from the short term benefit those same actions bestowed on them alone as a one of the key markers of societies which fail to adapt to potential lethal changes in their environment.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason you haven't used liked lists is basically b/c all the DS which are composed of linked lists under the covers already have definitive versions already implemented for all languages, and that's what you use.
But there's a unspoken corollary being implied in what you're saying. Let's suppose the interviewee panics. What do we know? Nothing. Expressing emotion, including a low level panic or discomfort, is not correlated to any particular personality trait that in turn is correlated to job performance.
What's happening here is people are using this as a way of importing their folk theories of Other People's Personalities And It All Means in true phrenologist style.
You have a folk theory about general creativity and general intelligence. Then you have a folk theory about the way someone reacts to a hard and off-topic interview puzzle to some personality traits that individual allegedly possesses and how all that in turn relates to job performance and how that should figure into hire / don't hire decisions.
What if the best most motivated and creative people are people who also fly into rages, like Gates and Jobs? What do we KNOW? Answer: we really know very little on this exact topic. Thus the surfeit of faddishness and folk theorizing and passion that surrounds our decision making process.
There is just one thing we need to know. If they don't work out, we can let them go.
Yes yes the entire idea that users would have both friends and foes who track them is completely foreign to the slashdot culture. I must be paranoid to think otherwise.
Categories of other users slashdot permits you to remember, presented just as slashdot generates them as found on slashdot/~YourUserName/fans:
Friends Fans Foes Freaks Friends of Friends Foes of Friends
Your position, while authoritatively voiced, is nevertheless unreasonable.
G'day to you, sir.
It refers to someone who is mainly a prostitute (presumably this is why she was hired) but also functions as a receptionist. Someone who functions as both (and is paid accordingly) .
Yeah it's not like I was claiming skills in physics. any more than I was claiming skills in Chem Bio History English or any other class on my school's transcript.
This attitude is too pointlessly aggressive IMO. If they had listed physics as a part of the job, i wouldn't have bothered. Who's responsibility is it to accurately describe the position's requirements in the first place? The people who have that information.
Really, you expect everyone to be fully conversant in every class they ever took and passed and also retain a high level of problem solving skills in each of those domains?
And you acquired this belief from which Chuck Norris movie?
People include their educational history for the same reason they include the fact of their degree and the university it's from. It's a way of saying not "I'm an expert in all of this," but rather, "I went completed an education from a competitive university which included the requirement to learn a wide variety of difficult topics not all of which I had an real interest in.
I'll perform the same for you."
Wasn't on my resume, it was apparently an implied part of my major's requirements....
About the problem solving thing generally, my Cog Sci education taught me that problem solving skills are NOT generic in any way "puzzlers" would reveal.
Solving a domain specific problem, like a physics problem, tests only the candidates familiarity with such problems. Solving "light bulb-type" problems or "Mackie The Cat-type" problems are very frequently equivalent to solving problems in number theory.
In fact, even general problems that don't obviously map to any domain in the minds of the interviewer are secretly isomorphic to some part of logic (Stamps and Envelops-type problems ) that even smart students get wrong until they learnt he specific "trick" of how to think things through. After that, they're just applying the trick.
I take great joy in solving the Jumble word problems that appear in local papers in nothing flat. Look at the scrambled word and say the unscrambled one instantly. It's a great parlor trick and impresses people much more than it should (but I'll take it).
How do I do it? I don't know- every word is different- but what I do know is I arrived at this micro-skill through practice. I started doing jumbles since I got my first book of them as a kid. Later I rediscovered them in college in the weekend newspaper in the Rat over coffee and received special motivation by amazing girls.
It's possible, but not proven, that everything is like this. It's likely IMO that everything is strongly flavored by this. No less a personage than Marvin Minsky thinks that what we call general intelligence is just an accident in thinking - where the child learns to think about their thinking and thus tweak it- early on.
The idea of general intelligence and general creativity goes back to Terman and the 19th century when he wanted to exclude a part of population from education by claiming they didn't have the required intelligence to benefit from an education.
So this all ties into programming puzzles and hiring. You're hiring someone to do programming and be creative in the context of programming.
Whatever else they have or have not done in their lives, they may be crack programmer with a high level of creativity and productivity merely for having spent the hours in some kind of ecstatic engagement with programming which is a mind state even capable programmers don't all have access to. Some people just LOVE programming, and among these people, some subset are great at it.
Hire those people.
Needless to say unless you spend time puzzling over this specific type of problem you don't have the skills to answer them.
The impression I had was they were going through a dog and pony show of "trying to find a candidate" for their position. I am not sure what they were up to. Whatever it was, they weren't looking for a candidate for the advertised position.
There was an absolute reek of duplicity, insincerity and dishonesty about every single employee I met on that interview, starting with the prostitute-cum-receptionist who greeted me to the project manager who wouldn't look me in the eye to the interviewer who looked over my resume (which had only a distant physics class) and said "we're not going to ask you about programming, I can see you've got that down, we want you to solve some puzzles" and sprang on me some physics puzzles I could only solve if I were a physics major.
I couldn't wait to get out of there.
I saw that ad for a few more months online. I always wondered what they were up to.
We don't express the freedom of assembly as freedom to get together with your friends on a street corner, do we? It's quite possible to tie very specific activities to very general rights. So "freedom to access and participate in the general knowledge and discourse of society" is a basic right upon which other freedoms like "freedom of conscience" depend.
How hard is this to think through? We shouldn't make internet access a basic freedom because one day it will all be done via RF waves and implants? What's going on with you, Vint?
Yeah but the Patriot Act didn't take anything away from corporations. The US is a corptocracy, where corporations are super-users with root access and people are garbage waiting to be collected.
Just ask the Tea Party.
I would say the energy and independence of small software developers that was present in 92 has migrated to the apps market.
What's changed in the US is the chilling effect of software patents has had . Everyone is afraid to develop anything without a huge backer who will defend them if they get hit. And even then, the huge backers aren't interested in defending a small market like , say, flight planning software or toy trains.
SOPA is not going to pass and even if somehow, against all odds it does, it's not going to stay.
So why the hell should Spain's politicians go down that road only to be left there alone looking like assholes to their electorate?
Can't understand why this request is falling on deaf ears in Spain.
Prove what you say it true.
It's the lowest bar anyone this side of the Enlightenment will ever request of you.
We're waiting.
And this is different from deny global warming how exactly?
You have a populace and politicians in the US who cannot understand the technical, highly interconnected world they live in.
Instead they fill that gap with Christian Evangelism, isolationism and a belief in the free market magic bunny .
This is what the US is. The same heads in the sand types kept the US out of WWII until it was almost too late. They don't know and they don't want to know . Trust me I live by these people.
They've gotten away with it for this long, but i'ts catching up to them and they will not be able to change in time. Reality in the form things like the climate and technological advances has it's own timetable and it really could give a shit about your domestic politics. Accept and adapt or die. How do you like that for social Darwinism?
Oh that's right, you don't believe in Darwin.
Did I read online that software developers are electing to forgo the American apps market for far of being sued under the regressive software patent regime instituted at the behest of and for the benefit lawyers and large IT companies who fear real competition from small startups?
I knew I did:
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-app-developers-withdraw-from-us-as-patent-fears-reach-tipping-point/
Please don't flame me, this is my opinion based on personal experience. Just as a language, I don't think PHP compares to Java. It's OK for building scripts / apps that can be characterized as "reacting to web page clicks in a simple way" but when you have very complex domains and object models it really starts to burst at the seams.
I only deal in websites that are backed by very complex domains which need to be modeled. I get that not everyone does that or should do that.
Java has well developed libraries for a huge number of deep and specialized domains which yet have very broad applicability- interesting things like Lucene and graph layout and genetics, not to mention world class graphics libraries. These are not things people program in using PHP, yet they are all interesting to web developers who are writing web-based front ends to these domains. Not all web programming is MySpace / Facebook-type programming.
It's not that somewhere somehow some PHP programmer can't - through twisting the language and it's capabilities in a perverse way attempt to implement all this- "hey,. we're all Turing complete here", it's that result would be something like what Dr. Johnson is said to have observed upon seeing a dog walk walk on it's hind quarters:
" The wonder of the thing lay not in the fact that it was done well; it is that it was done at all. "
OK so you're telling me I really have to choose one? Then I'll choose Java. Just look at the Venn diagram. The smaller PHP circle is fully enclosed by the much larger Java circle.
Let the flaming begin..
Supporting two incompatible APIs is possible, but that's not backward compatibility in the API, that's supporting two APIs, the latest of which is not backwards compatible . So Postgres does that.
What you're describing is an approach to a solution for customers- hey! we support that previous API also and you can go on using it! But we have this new one.....
The article is about open APIs instead of open source (my reading, but also, right in the synopsis of the article). My point on this topic is, there are two kinds of API- ones that are incompatible with previous versions and ones that are incompatible with reality ;)
Thanks for your informative reply.
At one point early in my career I was charged with implementing a multipart form POST method from section 9.5 of RFC2616 for HTTP 1.1 using the data format in RFC1867 which was from IETF.
I succeeded, but because servers had their own implementation of this same protocol and it wasn't defined using EBNF, that is, absolutely specifically, interesting things resulted.
It doesn't matter what those interesting things were - I'll tell you in a second- except in so far as they were unanticipated and serious side effects which were nevertheless conformant to the spec.
What I hear you saying is- if we screw around with this enough, give people enough time to shake most everything out, then as a matter of practice standardize on a few specific implementations which no one bothers to rewrite, then everything will just work.
Sure you didn't say it that way, but that's what in practice happens and that is what in theory has to happen for it to work at all.
But this is a different animal from an open API, where people are specifically NOT going to standardize on a set of canonical implementations that function as defacto standards and all have learned to play nicely with each other.
Plugins are all going to be written by different teams who know and care nothing of each other's efforts. Each plugin is a completely novel attempt to write a new handshake with the API from scratch, relative to other plugins. There is no canonical implementation of anything shared and what's more, there is not any long term, many cycle iterations where we try it and see what happens.
Yes if you allow API versioning you can get away from these problems, but another name for API "versioning" in "non-backwards compatible", which is what I am recommending.
Sure what you're describing vis-a-vis IETF standards works for some use cases, but really a commercial product with an open API is not one of those use cases.
As promised, here's what my perfectly legal implementation of RFC 1867 did. It took down any Netscape server I pointed it at. The POST I formed and data I sent was received and was in no way malformed, but the code that was in the Netscape server was doing *something* when it received the request that caused it to just blow up, throwing stack traces on it's way to out the door. Without knowing it, (and this is inevitable) the Netscape server was written to process a SPECIFIC implementation of that request.
Since all servers were Netscape servers back then, my little request amounted to a fucking universal death ray. With a little scripting, I could have have taken down the entire internet overnight.
It's what happens and it's no one fault. I *screwed around* with my end where *screwed around* means changed the POST and data in ways which were nevertheless as conformant as the original and the problem "went away" . Woo hoo!
I knew what changes I had made- they were trivial- but I never knew what the problem was since it was the side effect of a private API's undocumented set of (unconscious) expectations- a leaky abstraction.
There's two kinds of open APIs in the world. Those that promise backwards compatibility and those that don't.
Those that don't are free to improve their product release over release in any way they see fit. Previously existing plugins may however break as a consequence of an open API change, creating problems with users who expect their plugins to continue working and plugin developers who hear from their users or lose reputation when their plugin blows up. Plugin writers are expected to rewrite their plugins with every new release. They hate this, and what's more some plugin writers will not, forcing the user to chose between your upgrade and their plugin.
Let the finger pointing begin.
Now, those that do promise backwards compatibility, they're TOTALLY screwed.
The number of ways exposing your API and keeping it backwards compatible has of eroding and eventually destroying your code base is an awesome thing indeed.
You cannot remove anything you've ever made public. If you do, you break everyone.
If those un-removable things represent constructs which are central to the intellectual framework of your public API - what makes your API comprehensible, guessable, sensible, and you've made a mistake in your conceptualization or more likely you've made a decision which reflected an immature or incomplete understanding of your domain, the only way out of your bad decision is to create a new API with the new concepts that is sort of like the old but not really because here's the way we're thinking about our domain now... hello? ... hello? ....are you with me?... hey... where ya goin?...
Only in very static domains in which there are very strong public conventions about what does and does not exist is it possible to know with anything approaching certainty what set of concepts will prove durable and which are dead ends and over simplifications / over complications.
You have no idea what class names developers are using in their own libraries. If come to use the same class name as they are using, then unqualified uses of the class name in any file which imports both libraries is rendered ambiguous. Now your next release is breaking any plugins who used any of the same names in their own private libraries, even though those plugin developers did exactly what you wanted and nothing which was forbidden. Whose fault is that? heh heh heh.
Backward compatibility also has the effect of forcing you to freeze key parts of your internal design which have accidentally leaked out into your open API owing to leaky abstractions. And there will be lots of them. Yes. There will.
People will use your API in unexpected ways and come to rely on the the peculiarities of the particular implementation you thought you were hiding behind your open API. We're talking developers using things like program flow and call order of your private methods, relying the fact that you're running something on a particular thread, timing issues, the fact that a method doesn't return NULL etc etc. None of these things is documented as part of your open API, yet developers will come to rely on them and be angry and confused when it doesn't work anymore.
If you expose in anyway a String type, then rest assured plugin writers WILL find it and come to depend on it. Which brings us to the issue of plugin writers using whatever reflection capabilities your language offers.
Sure some of this is their fault (and a lot of it is not) but so what? What do you think when as a consumer your software blows up and you write the person you bought it from and they point the finger elsewhere?
Whole parts of your language toolbox are just off limits. You cannot expose non-final anything because someone will extend it with a method or field name that you yourself will want to use later, causing the above mentioned name clashes.
. . That means you cannot improve your OpenAPI through the techniques of extension and inheritance.
Not funny in the least. What we're talking about is runaway global warming with positive feedback loops from non-human sources of GHG. If those start to go at all, it can lead to an avalanche of GHG such that even if we cease all GHG production completely tomorrow, it won't stop runaway heating of the earth to 6 degrees above what we have now which, in case anyone is wondering what that number means to humans, represents the guaranteed extinction of civilization.
I assert that the mere presence of inaction on the part of democratically elected governments heavily implies that democracy itself, at least in it's present form, has failed.
Clearly the funding of elections by corporations is at the heart of this. Politicians cannot take positions unpopular to corporations and also stay in office. The small group of people at the heads of corporations who decide what campaign to support are far removed from both economic and physical reality. They are ideologues who are ignorant of science and what science is saying. Yet they and they alone decide what laws will be passed. The Chamber of Commerce is a case in point.
If democracy has failed and short term interests and the absolute ignorance and blind greed of the elite are driving us to extinction, then ti will be a repeat of what Jared Diamond has documented in his book about how once great civilizations collapse , titled "Collapse".
The elites are immune to the consequences of the disastrous decisions they generate until it's too late for everyone, including themselves.
I'm sorry, but this exactly describes our current situation.
I call on the President of the United States to take any and all action including suspending the Constitution and nationalizing all industries at the point of a gun if needed, detaining and imprisoning anyone who doesn't like it, and using whatever other powers he sees fit to impose whatever is needed to stop runaway global warming from happening.
It could happen within a decade that massive amounts of GHG are suddenly released from the permafrost thanks to the unprecedented level of 380 ppm carbon we have now.
For three decades now scientists have been certain of their facts and prevailed upon us to stop business as usual. For three decades our democracy ignored them. Our democracy as it is is a mortal threat to our nation and the world's peoples. It is lethally and irretrievably broken , by definition it has shown that it cannot cope with this situation. Time has run out and I enjoin slashdotters to accept and encourage the suspension of democracy for the purpose of saving life on this planet. I enjoin them to be prepared to do whatever the President says needs to be done in order to survive.
If it means turning the drought ridden Southwest into a gigantic concentration camp where deniers go to fend for themselves amongst themselves while the rational portion of this nation mobilizes and rations food, then do it.
We are right now in nothing less than a civil war, declared against the United States by the likes of the Koch brothers and the Cato institute and the Heritage Foundation and FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal and all the rest of the denier machine. These people are terrorists and it's time to start thinking about them as terrorists and treating them like terrorists.
This much is certain. We are heading towards civil war between those in this nation who want us to take a rational course of action in order to preserve the species and those with a unconscious death wish, those well known sociopaths who populate the right wing airwaves and print media and those who deny all science and seek to impose their otherworldly view of reality on all humanity.
It's civil war and it's happening now, being fought for now online and in the media and in Congress. But it won't stop there, just as it didn't in the first Civil War. Like then, this is a nation divided and it canot stand. It's divided between the rationalist children
Yeah well you caught my typos.. you're good for something anyway.
So long as the government tries to meddle in our lives and our choices by pointing to scientific theories that seemingly justify their actions, some of us are going to resist believing in those theories.
So what you're saying is there cannot exist any set of facts arrived at through the scientific method which could, even in theory, give a democratically elected government such as our own the authority to act for the purpose of avoiding an imminent mortal threat to the nation indicated by those scientific facts.
Because that's all we have here. Will it effect your life? So what if it does. The alternative is orders of magnitude worse. Or so says science.
BTW. The whole idea that the reason people don't get up in arms over physics theories is because they don't result in "policies being shoved down our throats" is laughable on the face of it since it was the government's acceptance of a specific interpretation of a series of results in physics which produced the Manhattan Project and the bomb.
This event single-handedly determined for decades nearly every aspect of not just our foreign policy but also domestic taxation and expenditures for defense and was the strategic justification for not one but three wars- counting Iraq- costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousand dead and wounded American causalities, not to mention innumerable other covert and diplomatic actions around the world and here at home.
Perhaps FDR and Truman should have left it up to whatever popular misunderstanding and distortions of the complicated underlying physical theories the scientifically illiterate know-nothings could generate circa 1942 before deciding to green light the Manhattan Project.
Hell, perhaps we should put all scientific knowledge up to a vote before we act on it and see what the FoxNews and Agenda 21 paranoid conspiracy crowd makes of it before we act, totally irrespective of danger what percentage of qualified scientists are emphatically and unequivocally stating we're in.
If we had listened to you, it's possible we'd all be doing the ole Sig Heil about this time.
No thanks. If it comes down to it, if they force the decisions upon us, then I'd rather they interred Americans in camps before they ignore scientists. It made sense during WWII to inter the Japanese because we had no way of knowing who might do what, sorry to say, and it makes sense now to do whatever it is we need to do in order to effect the changes the scientists are saying we absolutely must effect.
The reason people didn't get up in arms over the Manhattan Project is only because no one gave them any choice in the matter and that's a Good Thing. FDR and "give-em-hell" Harry Truman did what they needed to do to secure the national security of the United States of America and they didn't take a fucking vote it at every turn. They acted, and based their actions on science and what scientists were telling them.
It's some sort of namby pamby relativism that has infected the society and the right wing especially where by they think their entitled to not just their opinions but, their own set of facts about reality.
Their idea is - "you have THIS opinion and I have THAT opinion and they're all equally valid."
They're not all equally valid. Some opinions are better than others by dint of having been arrived at by the most rigorous process of falsity detection and rejection mankind has ever created, the scientific method.
The survival of any society is threatened by the ravings of its lunatic fringe and the government should proceed based on the best judgement of the collective opinion of sober, mainstream experts who are fully qualified in the relevant subject matter.
If you want to stop the US from building the bomb or taking action against AGW, then be prepared to be treated like the enemy of the United States you've turned yourself into.
Not only were they cleared of any malfeasance by the numerous investigations, but those of us who read complaints about the emails were amused at the conclusions of the accusers.
And also dismayed, since this represents nothing more than people like yourself whose previously existing knowledge about how science gets done, about the behaviour of scientists and especially the subject matter of this science was essentially "none" nevertheless imposing yourself and your opinion into the business of how science should be conducted and how results should be interpreted and what should qualify as a valid scientific study.
So to make sure it's perfectly clear, the same people who decry the imposition of regulation for the public good upon industry by governmental experts fully qualified in the intricacies of those industries they regulate now declare themselves to be subject matter experts in climate change and seek to impose themselves, Stalin-over-genetics-like, over a field of science the price of earning legitimate authority to which is decades of hard work, none of which you've done.
The rebuttal to the purely stupid assertions of dishonesty lies with a fundamental misunderstanding of the idiosyncratic ways scientists use terms like "hide" and "trick" amongst themselves and is well documented here for anyone seriously interested in the truth of the matter:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html#University_of_East_Anglia_Climatic_Resea
The point I want to make here and now is that someone needs to tell you to your face, and to you individually and specifically, that you're an idiot.
In fact, you're the worst kind of idiot history has to offer- the idiot who gets himself worked up into a froth and goes torch in hand, door to door, looking for the "the enemy" .
This gets you high. It fills you with a level of excitement and meaning and purpose which is otherwise absent from your dreary little life of Hannity watching and beers.
You need this the way a meth addict needs his next score. It lights up what passes for your brain in a way that nothing else does - getting ginned up against scientists and the left and the global warming conspiracy.
You're exactly the 21st century counterpart to the average, broke, angry, stupid, manipulated German going to a Hitler rally and letting himself become apoplectic over the conspiracies of the Jews and how the Jews are lying to Germany and how they're destroying Germany and how they're plotting to take over the world.
Or as your kind is wont to refer to it these days, it, Agenda 21. http://www.freedomadvocates.org/
This is the role you've chosen for yourself on this earth- that of a buffoon, one of the millions who get behind some misbegotten idea and bring only ruin to themselves, their nation, their families and everyone forced into action to counter them.
That is your historical context; that is what you actually are.
I will have to read this book; I want to see his methods and analysis section. It's hard to believe that the entrance of evangelicals into politics and their influence is not largely responsible for the rejection of global warming. You have only to consult a political map and a map of denierland to see that where evangelicals have power is the same territory as denierland.
Furthermore, the basic message of evangelicals - that "man's knowledge" is limited and wrong but what appears in the bible written in the Bronze Age by people who had a only pre-scientific understanding of the world available to them is right, directly prepares the ground for denial on ANY scientific matter whatsoever.
There's a direct line to be drawn from the anti-evolution and the "young earth" hypothesis.. err sorry that's "young earth certainty" and the rejection of science generally including the science behind AGW, a rejection with the capacity to deconstruct the basis of civilization despite who changes their minds about what later on or what anyone living through it wants to do about it then.
Sure, libertarian psychopaths like the Koch Brothers and the sociopaths who helped Philip Morris murder hundreds of millions of people (and yet they walk free) are behind the tactics and methods of the denier movement,
http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/09/chart-climate-change-spin-cycle
and yes they're funding it also, but it couldn't carry the day if it were not for the millions of evangelicals and the much smaller number of sick dominionists who believe in creationism and self serving narcissistic theories like "the prosperity gospel" (god wants you to be rich!) etc. etc.
This culture of scientific rejectionism is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America and needs to be dealt with like the clear and present danger that it is.
Under what other lethal threat to not just the US's but to civilization itself, would we just stand by and do nothing? Would we do that if al Queda where in control of US politicians and a significant swath of the voting electorate?
The consequences for some events are so bad their eventuality has the power to re-write the rules of engagement, or more precisely, cause society to invoke and apply the existing rules of engagement in a manner which, while legal most people naturally find odious. But the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and it does provide the President - and by implication the direct action of the national security apparatus to its full effect under the Presidents' command - with the power to defend the nation against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Denierism is domestic terrorism in both intent- conspiracy:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/294714-1
and in effect-
http://global-warning.org/main/intelligence/
hundreds of millions dead and starving, billions homeless and wandering across borders, international chaos and lawlessness orders of magnitude larger than we have now, civil strife tending toward national disintegration and economic collapse.
It is an imminent threat to the national security of the United States of America and I call on the President of the United States to take ALL necessary measures to counter, undermine, disable, disband and otherwise stop the collective action of this group of American domestic terrorists using whatsoever force he deems necessary.... and may god have mercy on their souls.
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