Re:Why do interviewers use "riddles"?
on
Tech-Interview Riddles
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Would you guys feel comfortable going to a lawyer or doctor who'd been hired on the basis of his answer to a bunch of "brain teasers", or would you opt for the doctor or lawyer who'd, oh, I don't know, actually been asked questions about law and medicine?
Asking about TCP/IP is fine. Asking about sorting algorithms is fine. Asking "how would you lay out a data structure to represent this problem?" is fine.
Asking goofy questions about the shape of manhole covers is idiotic (especially since the "official" answer to that question is dead wrong).
What's up with using this type of question for interviews, anyway? Sure, they can be fun, but they're perfectly useless as far as telling whether someone can actually write solid code. 9 times out of 10, all they tell you is whether the interviewee has heard that one before.
To interviewers: Do you really think that the answers to these questions don't spread through the entire department within 15 minutes after your first interview? I realize that "knowing the answer" makes you feel smarter than the prospective employee in some sense, but how about actually doing your job for a change?
Looks like that may be it. I used the/TC command line option to tell the VC++ compiler to switch to straight C mode and the warnings went away. Thanks!
And thanks again for working on this project. I'm in the process of creating some software to be used for distance education. Right now I'm using Ogg, but since most of this will be voice conferencing (not music or arbitrary sounds) Speex sounds like exactly what I need. A lot of the students who'll be using this are still on dialup.
I don't really know any law students even though I eat in their cafeteria a lot (much better food than in CS, EE, or Ed Psych, all of which are limited to vending machines. That says a lot about the nature of the world, I think:-).
Is there a law school at Sherbrooke? Maybe you could get some help there?
Re:Try Speex too
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I've played with it a little bit under both Windows and Linux.
One problem that turns up when compiling with Visual C++ is that all the float[] arrays initialized with constants cause the compiler to emit thousands of warnings about casting const double to float. It's not an actual error, of course, but it IS irritating. I could be wrong, but I think the ANSI spec does state that a constant like 1.234235 is considered double by default. It's possible that it's just a M$ thing, though.
Nice work, though! I'm looking forward to the final version.
On the patent issue which you (and many others in OSS) are facing: I've often wondered if perhaps these projects might make good projects for law students specializing in intellectual property. You know, the sort of deal where the student does all the work under the supervision of a professor.
I have no idea if law students do anything like this. It's pretty common in engineering and computer science.
Any significant API changes?
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
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· Score: 2
I'd be very surprised if there was anything significant, but as it happens I'm working on some Ogg software right now.
Should I go ahead or take the day off and wait for the/. effect to die down?:-)
So what's wrong with movies the way they are now? The resolution is fine and the motion is fine.
Film is expensive. A motion picture print can cost a thousand or two bucks, and you may want to open on 6,000 screens for a blockbuster, or 1,000 screens for a small release. Do the arithmetic.
In addition, a film print is only good for maybe 50-60 showings (you can get more with decent, well-maintained projectors and a competent projectionist, but that's not often the case nowadays).
Big hard drives are expensive, too, but they can be wiped and reused over, and over, and over again.
My guess is the main reason you don't see more chemistry sets and similar 'toys' for children is fear of litigation./I.
I think you're exactly right. A couple of years back I was looking for a chemistry set for my nieces and nephews, so that they could experience the hours of fun that I had as a kid.
The only "chemistry set" I could find wasn't even worthy of the name. The outside of the box proudly proclaimed "No glass! No open flames! No toxic chemicals!". I pointed this out to my wife with the comment "No fun!".
At a tertiary or quaternary medical center, the case could reach the world's expert.
That's fine, assuming that the patient doesn't die before he gets there, either through the passage of time or because his primary physician misdiagnosed rare-but-deadly condition A as common-and-nonserious condition B.
You know better than I how much of medical school is essentially nothing but rote memorization. Why waste several years of the most productive portion of a bright young person's life with that? Especially since the amount of medical knowledge greatly surpassed the amount that could be held in one person's head many, many years ago.
It's like the programming job interviews where they ask you questions about the parameter order for some obscure library function, but never seem to test you on whether you can actually write a program that runs and produces the correct output.
The only advantage of rote memorization is that it's easy to test. It fails miserably at measuring whether the person is actually competent in his or her domain of expertise.
Doctors are just technicians that happen to work on people
In the John Varley "Eight Worlds" fictional universe, automated medicine has become so perfect that (e.g.) movie stuntpeople actually do get shot in the head or leap off a building. They're modded such that their pain centers are turned off, and they have replacement parts like titanium skulls with shock-absorbing mechanisms. As long your skull doesn't get crushed, and as long as they get you in the tank in time, the autodoc can fix anything
In one of the stories a small boy is watching a human medico fix up an accident victim using the automated equipment. "Think you might like to be a medico when you grow up, son?" "No thanks. My teacher told me I need to go to college so I can get a good job."
Doctors used to taste urine to diagnose diabetes. No kidding!
There was also a well-developed technique of thumping parts of your body while listening with a stethoscope. A skilled practicioner could learn a surprising about about what was going on inside your body from this (very valuable in the days when there were no CAT scans, or even X-rays, and exploratory surgery meant almost certain death from massive infection).
New diseases would presumably be entered in the database the same way that they get into the wetware databases that doctors use now. Patients present with symptoms that don't quite fit anything they know about. They try a treatment, then another, then another.... Over time the pattern of symptoms gets recognized as a new disease, and the treatment becomes standardized.
The difference is that with an expert system this process could be much, much faster than it is with the old-fashioned word of mouth method, or even with journal publications.
They wouldn't be "ruining their chance to do anything worthwhile" if prudes didn't have the bizarre notion than sex under anything other than monogamous, heterosexual, church- and government-blessed circumstances tainted a person for life.
Yep, he is. Of course, the original article is confusing education with intelligence.
I think most of us who are in academia would be the first to admit that having a degree (even an advanced degree) is no guarantee that the holder doesn't have his head several feet up his ass.
It must be a real bear to carry enough natural gas around to be worthwhile (hence your trunk comment). The advantage of propane is that it's a liquid at room temperature, if it's compressed. Methane needs cryogenic temperatures to become liquid at any sane pressure.
Porn ALWAYS leads the technology curve. From the popup ad to the VCR, all the way back to the invention of the photograph, porn merchants have always broken new ground.
There's a rumor that Alexander Graham Bell's first words were actually "Hey, Watson... umm... what are you wearing?"
If you want to see how mainstream companies will be using 3 years from now, look at what the pornographers are doing right now.
Why not refer to a server's IP address rather than a domain name?
Oh, I dunno... maybe 'cause that would completely break dynamic DNS? Even worse, it would mean that you couldn't move your server from one ISP to another, since the blocks of IP numbers are typically owned by the ISPs.
I'm not him, but it might have something to do with Java being type-safe, portable, and immune to the innumerable overrun screws that plague code written in C.
I thought radios had to pay the RIAA for each single played.
Nope. They pay the composers through ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. The artists and their record companies (RIAA, in other words) don't get anything for radio airplay (unless they also happen to be the composers, of course).
The controversy over the recent webcasting fees mainly lies in that the Copyright Office ruling requires that the webcasters pay BOTH the composers AND the artists, so the total fee is a lot more than for traditional radio. If you're the both the singer and the songwriter (or if you're a record company who's screwed the copyrights out of the singer/songwriter) you get paid twice. Sweet gig if you can get it.
If you'd bothered to read what I said, you'd have noted that the cells in my pubic hair follicles are alive, too. They contain human DNA (and in at least some cases, UNIQUE human DNA, due to mutation).
Should pubic hair follicles have human rights? Yes or no, please.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you guys feel comfortable going to a lawyer or doctor who'd been hired on the basis of his answer to a bunch of "brain teasers", or would you opt for the doctor or lawyer who'd, oh, I don't know, actually been asked questions about law and medicine?
Asking about TCP/IP is fine. Asking about sorting algorithms is fine. Asking "how would you lay out a data structure to represent this problem?" is fine.
Asking goofy questions about the shape of manhole covers is idiotic (especially since the "official" answer to that question is dead wrong).
What's up with using this type of question for interviews, anyway? Sure, they can be fun, but they're perfectly useless as far as telling whether someone can actually write solid code. 9 times out of 10, all they tell you is whether the interviewee has heard that one before.
To interviewers: Do you really think that the answers to these questions don't spread through the entire department within 15 minutes after your first interview? I realize that "knowing the answer" makes you feel smarter than the prospective employee in some sense, but how about actually doing your job for a change?
Maybe the constant warning is a C/C++ issue
/TC command line option to tell the VC++ compiler to switch to straight C mode and the warnings went away. Thanks!
:-).
Looks like that may be it. I used the
And thanks again for working on this project. I'm in the process of creating some software to be used for distance education. Right now I'm using Ogg, but since most of this will be voice conferencing (not music or arbitrary sounds) Speex sounds like exactly what I need. A lot of the students who'll be using this are still on dialup.
I don't really know any law students even though I eat in their cafeteria a lot (much better food than in CS, EE, or Ed Psych, all of which are limited to vending machines. That says a lot about the nature of the world, I think
Is there a law school at Sherbrooke? Maybe you could get some help there?
I've played with it a little bit under both Windows and Linux.
One problem that turns up when compiling with Visual C++ is that all the float[] arrays initialized with constants cause the compiler to emit thousands of warnings about casting const double to float. It's not an actual error, of course, but it IS irritating. I could be wrong, but I think the ANSI spec does state that a constant like 1.234235 is considered double by default. It's possible that it's just a M$ thing, though.
Nice work, though! I'm looking forward to the final version.
On the patent issue which you (and many others in OSS) are facing: I've often wondered if perhaps these projects might make good projects for law students specializing in intellectual property. You know, the sort of deal where the student does all the work under the supervision of a professor.
I have no idea if law students do anything like this. It's pretty common in engineering and computer science.
I'd be very surprised if there was anything significant, but as it happens I'm working on some Ogg software right now.
/. effect to die down? :-)
Should I go ahead or take the day off and wait for the
I agree with most of your points, but I'd be very, very surprised if Apple hadn't licensed MP3 from Fraunhofer.
So what's wrong with movies the way they are now? The resolution is fine and the motion is fine.
Film is expensive. A motion picture print can cost a thousand or two bucks, and you may want to open on 6,000 screens for a blockbuster, or 1,000 screens for a small release. Do the arithmetic.
In addition, a film print is only good for maybe 50-60 showings (you can get more with decent, well-maintained projectors and a competent projectionist, but that's not often the case nowadays).
Big hard drives are expensive, too, but they can be wiped and reused over, and over, and over again.
My guess is the main reason you don't see more chemistry sets and similar 'toys' for children is fear of litigation. /I.
I think you're exactly right. A couple of years back I was looking for a chemistry set for my nieces and nephews, so that they could experience the hours of fun that I had as a kid.
The only "chemistry set" I could find wasn't even worthy of the name. The outside of the box proudly proclaimed "No glass! No open flames! No toxic chemicals!". I pointed this out to my wife with the comment "No fun!".
the film would probably run 4+ hours.
More like 6 or 7. A (very rough) rule of thumb is one screenplay page == one minute of screen time.
The Fellowship of the Ring is over 400 pages long, IIRC.
I think Jackson did a fantastic job, by the way.
At a tertiary or quaternary medical center, the case could reach the world's expert.
That's fine, assuming that the patient doesn't die before he gets there, either through the passage of time or because his primary physician misdiagnosed rare-but-deadly condition A as common-and-nonserious condition B.
You know better than I how much of medical school is essentially nothing but rote memorization. Why waste several years of the most productive portion of a bright young person's life with that?
Especially since the amount of medical knowledge greatly surpassed the amount that could be held in one person's head many, many years ago.
It's like the programming job interviews where they ask you questions about the parameter order for some obscure library function, but never seem to test you on whether you can actually write a program that runs and produces the correct output.
The only advantage of rote memorization is that it's easy to test. It fails miserably at measuring whether the person is actually competent in his or her domain of expertise.
Doctors are just technicians that happen to work on people
In the John Varley "Eight Worlds" fictional universe, automated medicine has become so perfect that (e.g.) movie stuntpeople actually do get shot in the head or leap off a building. They're modded such that their pain centers are turned off, and they have replacement parts like titanium skulls with shock-absorbing mechanisms. As long your skull doesn't get crushed, and as long as they get you in the tank in time, the autodoc can fix anything
In one of the stories a small boy is watching a human medico fix up an accident victim using the automated equipment. "Think you might like to be a medico when you grow up, son?" "No thanks. My teacher told me I need to go to college so I can get a good job."
Heh.
Doctors used to taste urine to diagnose diabetes. No kidding!
There was also a well-developed technique of thumping parts of your body while listening with a stethoscope. A skilled practicioner could learn a surprising about about what was going on inside your body from this (very valuable in the days when there were no CAT scans, or even X-rays, and exploratory surgery meant almost certain death from massive infection).
New diseases would presumably be entered in the database the same way that they get into the wetware databases that doctors use now. Patients present with symptoms that don't quite fit anything they know about. They try a treatment, then another, then another.... Over time the pattern of symptoms gets recognized as a new disease, and the treatment becomes standardized.
The difference is that with an expert system this process could be much, much faster than it is with the old-fashioned word of mouth method, or even with journal publications.
They wouldn't be "ruining their chance to do anything worthwhile" if prudes didn't have the bizarre notion than sex under anything other than monogamous, heterosexual, church- and government-blessed circumstances tainted a person for life.
you are confusing motivation with intelligence.
Yep, he is. Of course, the original article is confusing education with intelligence.
I think most of us who are in academia would be the first to admit that having a degree (even an advanced degree) is no guarantee that the holder doesn't have his head several feet up his ass.
AOL.
I'm not quite visualizing how this works. Thanks for offering to post a code snippit!
Thanks for the link.
They definitely make propane conversions also.
It must be a real bear to carry enough natural gas around to be worthwhile (hence your trunk comment). The advantage of propane is that it's a liquid at room temperature, if it's compressed. Methane needs cryogenic temperatures to become liquid at any sane pressure.
I think you mean propane, don't you?
Natural gas (methane, mostly) is very hard to store.
Porn ALWAYS leads the technology curve. From the popup ad to the VCR, all the way back to the invention of the photograph, porn merchants have always broken new ground.
There's a rumor that Alexander Graham Bell's first words were actually "Hey, Watson... umm... what are you wearing?"
If you want to see how mainstream companies will be using 3 years from now, look at what the pornographers are doing right now.
No, but I hope Johnny doesn't have the antibiotic-resistant strain.
Why not refer to a server's IP address rather than a domain name?
Oh, I dunno... maybe 'cause that would completely break dynamic DNS? Even worse, it would mean that you couldn't move your server from one ISP to another, since the blocks of IP numbers are typically owned by the ISPs.
Please tell me why you picked java?
I'm not him, but it might have something to do with Java being type-safe, portable, and immune to the innumerable overrun screws that plague code written in C.
Unchecked buffers are bad, m'kay?
I thought radios had to pay the RIAA for each single played.
Nope. They pay the composers through ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. The artists and their record companies (RIAA, in other words) don't get anything for radio airplay (unless they also happen to be the composers, of course).
The controversy over the recent webcasting fees mainly lies in that the Copyright Office ruling requires that the webcasters pay BOTH the composers AND the artists, so the total fee is a lot more than for traditional radio. If you're the both the singer and the songwriter (or if you're a record company who's screwed the copyrights out of the singer/songwriter) you get paid twice. Sweet gig if you can get it.
Isn't this the creation of an underclass of humans whos purpose it is to serve the higher classes?
Meanwhile the ruling class will be cruising home in their flying cars, looking forward to a tasty dinner of Soylent Green.
I like a good dystopian novel as well as the next guy, but let's not forget that there's a reason that it's called Science FICTION, guy.
Judith Resnik was cute and single, also a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. Lost in the Challenger tragedy, alas.
If you'd bothered to read what I said, you'd have noted that the cells in my pubic hair follicles are alive, too. They contain human DNA (and in at least some cases, UNIQUE human DNA, due to mutation).
Should pubic hair follicles have human rights? Yes or no, please.