I spend some amount of time interviewing programming candidates at my job. We ask some questions and require some code samples that you might consider on the algorithm-y side. We don't require that you be able to talk about it using academic terms, but they are still an important part of our process. As a very basic example, we don't expect you to be able to tell us what the Big O of an operation is, but if you can't talk reasonably about the difference in performance characteristics between a linked list and an array, you're going to be in trouble.
As a general rule, we actually have a pretty terrible success rate for people who walk in with post-grad degrees and not much other experience. The average age on our team is probably about 40, and I think about half come from CS backgrounds. I don't doubt that there are interviews out there that stray more towards demanding that somebody know exactly how to implement a quicksort, but I also think there's a tendency to classify any question that causes one problems during an interview as too computer sciency and not the part of programming that really matters. But we ask the questions we do because we think they tend to be good indicators of how well a candidate understands the ramifications of their code and can solve hard problems.
There's a lot to be said for what somebody can get out of years of experience, but given the choice between the inexperienced guy who has the capacity to solve the hard problems and the veteran of the industry that knows the tricks of the trade but will struggle on things that are involve challenging algorithms, I'd take the inexperienced guy. If you give him a couple years to gather experience, he'll be able to do everything the mediocre veteran will and more. And as long as you have some veterans on the team and decent collaboration, they can cover any gaps knowledge gaps he has in the meantime. Thus, my interview process is going to select largely for the former.
Of course that still requires me to hire or retain some veterans who can solve hard problems, but as long as you don't require them to quote from a CS textbook, they'll be able to navigate our interview process anyway. And given how hard it is to find good candidates if you're not one of the high profile tech companies, there's a decent chance you can't afford to wait to only hire candidates like that if you're looking to increase headcount.
That's a pretty busted up analogy. The closest I can come to fixing it for you is if you provide me with a series of instructions for painting the Mona Lisa but following them produces a picture of American Gothic every time anybody tries to follow them, it is unlikely that you used those instructions to create the Mona Lisa.
In the US, the independent source exclusion from the poisonous tree doctrine would apply and said recording would be admissible, unless the poster left out that his dad is also a police officer.
Not only that, but flappy birds was a shitty ripoff of a flash game I played 10 years ago using art assets more or less directly stolen from Mario. I don't see how he wasn't already trolling us.
I've got a question for you. How do you think the first nation states came to be? Can you explain why you think that if we somehow managed to demolish them today, it would leave us in a different enough situation that they wouldn't just form again, with or without the consent of those who would be governed? Wouldn't it happen even more quickly, given the much larger wealth and power concentrated among fewer people?
A functional language is one whereby the functions themselves can be stored in variables and passed around as parameters to other languages.
What in the actual fuck. That may be the worst definition of a functional language I've ever heard. Even if I try to interpret it as something that could make any sort of sense, I just get that storing functions in variables makes a language functional, which the author goes on to debunk by pointing out that C++ isn't a functional language. Why bother even trying to describe them if you have no idea what the hell they are?
Re:Yes, Perl is indeed dead and rotting
on
Perl Is Undead
·
· Score: 2
From the benchmark you linked:
String manipulation is the core functionality for all languages so this allows to compare languages fairly.
If that doesn't clue you in on how utterly full of shit he is, I'm not sure what will. I mean, Java Strings are immutable. This test is just about adding strings together. That's pretty much the worst possible case for trying to benchmark Java. So if you're coding Java and adding a bunch of strings together, you use a StringBuilder and not a String. Only you can go look at the source code, and whoever wrote it didn't. Not only that, but how much memory Java would use during the run would depend pretty much entirely on flags given to the JVM, because it would just keep eating up space copying the immutable String over and over until it was forced to garbage collect. And that's all just a quick inspection of the Java comparison. I am pretty confident without looking that that margin of difference between C and C++ is entirely due to pathological C++ code.
I mean really, if you think that your interpreted language is comparable to any major compiled language in performance, you're an idiot. Sabotaged test results (whether the result of duplicity or incompetence) don't change that.
I followed the shitty blogs linking to shitty blogs all the way down to watch Al Gore's "predictions". It's funny how saying things like that he was told some models show a 75% chance that all polar icecaps will be melted by x date gets translated to "Al gore's expert opinion". I notice the other trend there is to use words like "scientist" when talking about Al Gore, even though he is clearly no such thing, to set up a false relationship between him and actual people doing science, so that whenever he does say something stupid, a bunch of people like you can dance around and pretend that he is representational of the climate science community.
So yes, you "make fun" of people like us by trying to find examples of people who happen to agree with us for whatever reason on this particular issue, and then pouring on ad hominem attacks against them. And not only that, you have to make shit up because otherwise the ad hominem attacks aren't even compelling enough. I suspect you sound a lot smarter in your head than you do to the rest of us. Maybe you should spend a little more time getting your facts in places other than blogspot.
That article is awesome. You know that somebody is being extra fair with their comparisons when they start adding things like payroll tax and unemployment insurance to the cost of an employee to inflate the number, as if that has anything to do with unions. And my heart just breaks for the auto manufacturers that they pay a third more than base salaries because their workers have to work on average hundreds of hours of overtime per year.
Here's the real takeaway from that article for me: base wages are $30/hr, the effective wage due to the overtime ends up being $40/hr, and the general rule of thumb for the fully loaded cost of a worker is usually 150%-200% of salary, so they are right on target. Remember that, for instance, 4 weeks total of vacation and sick leave costs 7.7%, unemployment insurance costs another few percent, payroll tax is another 6.8%, throw in a few more percent for worker's comp. You're north of 20% before you even start paying for health insurance and retirement.
If you think that's too much compensation for somebody working in a factory, you don't believe that the United States should have a middle class.
It looks like news outlets all over the place are comparing this to the Model S, but then like 2 sentences later point out how it is mechanically basically a Volt. How does that make it an alternative to the Model S at all? Doesn't that just make it an alternative to the Volt? Was the Volt an alternative to the Model S?
I find that a kind of odd statement. First of all, I wonder what you mean by "major" hurricanes and making landfall. Is "major" category 3, 4, or 5? Does it take into account things like diameter? Is that ever, or just when it makes landfall in the US? I mean, it sure seems like you are carefully crafting you wording to exclude some pretty notable storms, like Dean, Felix, and Ike. And Sandy is a pretty dubious non-major hurricane, given that it had the largest diameter of any Atlantic cyclone, which was a large contributing factor to how damaging it was. And what's with the US mainland only caveat? Climate change only counts if the hurricanes happen to make landfall within artificial boundaries on a map? Felix didn't turn north after slamming into the Yucatan the same way WIlma did, so it didn't happen? Besides, I think if you actually applied your criteria prior to 2005, you'll find that it eliminates so many hurricanes that an 8 year gap isn't statistically anomalous at all.
When you have to get that oddly specific, you should be at least a little worried that you are cherry picking data to create "proof" of your already decided upon conclusion. If you instead just look at more general trends in quantity and strength of storms, it's pretty clear that we have had more and stronger hurricanes over time.
+1 for joda-time. They effectively solved the entire problem domain of date manipulation for all of the use cases that have come up for me.
Presumably, they are affected by this change, as well, but the good news is that I'm confident that they'll do something to handle it without my having to do anything besides tick up a dependency version.
Be honest. Climategate is the only example you can think of.
I'll go ahead and hop on past the probable distinction between what you think "climategate" was, and what actual negative behavior was revealed to have occurred in that particular incident and move right on past to the fact that even if I give climategate to you, it does not support your premise. Your claim wasn't that there exists some instance of corruption in the scientific community. It was that there was more there than there is from parties funding warming deniers.
I don't claim to be a high priest of anything. I just know that morons like you tend to be perfectly happy latching on to whatever anecdotal evidence matches your "humble opinion" and assuming that means your belief is backed by some sort of empirical process. You've more or less made my point for me.
You don't have to silence anybody to solve the problem. The Koch brothers can say whatever they want. There is a whole lot of room between letting some random billionaire tell people that global warming is a hoax and letting that same billionaire secretly fund organizations designed entirely to trick people into thinking there is a global conspiracy of people who go to school to become climatologists in order that they can destroy our freedoms for some extra grant money. I bet we can draw a line someplace in between. I'd personally start by taking away the word "secretly" and demanding that the whole process be more transparent so that people can more easily see the conflicts of interest. Unless you can show me the part of the first amendment that guarantees the right to anonymous donations to propaganda organizations?
There is obviously bias in the scientific process, but you aren't talking about some amount of bias inherent in the system. You are talking about a vast international conspiracy of climate scientists, all with different funding sources and backgrounds, nearly universally colluding to manipulate their findings and their stated beliefs to manipulate the system to get more some more grant money, even though it has been repeatedly shown that they could get more income by flipping and taking funding from fossil fuel companies.
The whole issue has definitely become political football, but it definitely isn't the science that's leading us there.
IMHO, more graft and corruption on the pro-manmade climate change side.
Luckily for me, there is actual data to examine, so I can safely ignore your humble opinion.
Unluckily for me, there are millions of tools just like you who are perfectly happy to eyeball it and trust their gut reaction when there is perfectly good data around to examine, and you all get to vote, too.
Here's the problem. There have been thousands of societies that at one point had the sort of "Liberty and Freedom" that you are talking about, where there was little or no government to "nanny" people. Do you know what happened to all of those societies? Power centralized, and freedom went away.
The thing that historically has made our country great is specifically the government. We fill the power vacuum with a democratically elected government so that some rich cabal of people can't take power and use it so their "freedom" is maximized and yours is minimized. The problem is obviously that if you let said cabals get enough influence, with mass media and the internet being what they are, they gain a new route to that tyranny anyway: buy enough public opinion and you can directly manipulate a democracy.
So every single person in this country should give much more than a rat's ass when stories like this come up, because they directly relate to people trying to break the system that has protected your liberty and freedom for hundreds of years. And this isn't really about parties. I think that the conservative movement in this country has some properties that make this sort of action happen more frequently from their direction, but we should be vigilant against similar manipulation from anybody.
I agree that Liberty and Freedom are what makes this country great. But right now, you are defending the Koch brothers' freedom to try to steal your freedom from you.
How about making up random bullshit narratives, we look at what information we have in front of us. They are closing down messenger and wanting people to move to skype. The Xbox currently has messenger integration. Ergo, that is going away and getting replaced with Skype, just like we already know it is on PC. I see nothing here that indicates anything at all is happening with party chat, the current messaging, or anything at all besides removing messenger integration and adding Skype integration.
I mean, really, what seems more likely to you: the obvious consequences of replacing messenger with Skype apply to the Xbox just like everything else, or some shitty gaming site I've never heard of and which has an alexa rank of 8,429 is breaking the news that party chat as we know it is getting replaced?
Slashdot Mirror
I spend some amount of time interviewing programming candidates at my job. We ask some questions and require some code samples that you might consider on the algorithm-y side. We don't require that you be able to talk about it using academic terms, but they are still an important part of our process. As a very basic example, we don't expect you to be able to tell us what the Big O of an operation is, but if you can't talk reasonably about the difference in performance characteristics between a linked list and an array, you're going to be in trouble.
As a general rule, we actually have a pretty terrible success rate for people who walk in with post-grad degrees and not much other experience. The average age on our team is probably about 40, and I think about half come from CS backgrounds. I don't doubt that there are interviews out there that stray more towards demanding that somebody know exactly how to implement a quicksort, but I also think there's a tendency to classify any question that causes one problems during an interview as too computer sciency and not the part of programming that really matters. But we ask the questions we do because we think they tend to be good indicators of how well a candidate understands the ramifications of their code and can solve hard problems.
There's a lot to be said for what somebody can get out of years of experience, but given the choice between the inexperienced guy who has the capacity to solve the hard problems and the veteran of the industry that knows the tricks of the trade but will struggle on things that are involve challenging algorithms, I'd take the inexperienced guy. If you give him a couple years to gather experience, he'll be able to do everything the mediocre veteran will and more. And as long as you have some veterans on the team and decent collaboration, they can cover any gaps knowledge gaps he has in the meantime. Thus, my interview process is going to select largely for the former.
Of course that still requires me to hire or retain some veterans who can solve hard problems, but as long as you don't require them to quote from a CS textbook, they'll be able to navigate our interview process anyway. And given how hard it is to find good candidates if you're not one of the high profile tech companies, there's a decent chance you can't afford to wait to only hire candidates like that if you're looking to increase headcount.
That's a pretty busted up analogy. The closest I can come to fixing it for you is if you provide me with a series of instructions for painting the Mona Lisa but following them produces a picture of American Gothic every time anybody tries to follow them, it is unlikely that you used those instructions to create the Mona Lisa.
In the US, the independent source exclusion from the poisonous tree doctrine would apply and said recording would be admissible, unless the poster left out that his dad is also a police officer.
The fine is nominal — one part of government fining another is rather pointless, but it does show that there's a little bit of accountability.
It seems like the two clauses of that sentence are contradicting each other. How does a "pointless" fine show any accountability at all?
Not only that, but flappy birds was a shitty ripoff of a flash game I played 10 years ago using art assets more or less directly stolen from Mario. I don't see how he wasn't already trolling us.
I've got a question for you. How do you think the first nation states came to be? Can you explain why you think that if we somehow managed to demolish them today, it would leave us in a different enough situation that they wouldn't just form again, with or without the consent of those who would be governed? Wouldn't it happen even more quickly, given the much larger wealth and power concentrated among fewer people?
A functional language is one whereby the functions themselves can be stored in variables and passed around as parameters to other languages.
What in the actual fuck. That may be the worst definition of a functional language I've ever heard. Even if I try to interpret it as something that could make any sort of sense, I just get that storing functions in variables makes a language functional, which the author goes on to debunk by pointing out that C++ isn't a functional language. Why bother even trying to describe them if you have no idea what the hell they are?
String manipulation is the core functionality for all languages so this allows to compare languages fairly.
If that doesn't clue you in on how utterly full of shit he is, I'm not sure what will. I mean, Java Strings are immutable. This test is just about adding strings together. That's pretty much the worst possible case for trying to benchmark Java. So if you're coding Java and adding a bunch of strings together, you use a StringBuilder and not a String. Only you can go look at the source code, and whoever wrote it didn't. Not only that, but how much memory Java would use during the run would depend pretty much entirely on flags given to the JVM, because it would just keep eating up space copying the immutable String over and over until it was forced to garbage collect. And that's all just a quick inspection of the Java comparison. I am pretty confident without looking that that margin of difference between C and C++ is entirely due to pathological C++ code.
I mean really, if you think that your interpreted language is comparable to any major compiled language in performance, you're an idiot. Sabotaged test results (whether the result of duplicity or incompetence) don't change that.
Fine. Does he do his own medical diagnosis because he doesn't trust his doctor to think for him?
I followed the shitty blogs linking to shitty blogs all the way down to watch Al Gore's "predictions". It's funny how saying things like that he was told some models show a 75% chance that all polar icecaps will be melted by x date gets translated to "Al gore's expert opinion". I notice the other trend there is to use words like "scientist" when talking about Al Gore, even though he is clearly no such thing, to set up a false relationship between him and actual people doing science, so that whenever he does say something stupid, a bunch of people like you can dance around and pretend that he is representational of the climate science community.
So yes, you "make fun" of people like us by trying to find examples of people who happen to agree with us for whatever reason on this particular issue, and then pouring on ad hominem attacks against them. And not only that, you have to make shit up because otherwise the ad hominem attacks aren't even compelling enough. I suspect you sound a lot smarter in your head than you do to the rest of us. Maybe you should spend a little more time getting your facts in places other than blogspot.
You do know that graph you just linked has an upward temperature trend, right? And that some of the projections are actually under the best fit line?
That article is awesome. You know that somebody is being extra fair with their comparisons when they start adding things like payroll tax and unemployment insurance to the cost of an employee to inflate the number, as if that has anything to do with unions. And my heart just breaks for the auto manufacturers that they pay a third more than base salaries because their workers have to work on average hundreds of hours of overtime per year.
Here's the real takeaway from that article for me: base wages are $30/hr, the effective wage due to the overtime ends up being $40/hr, and the general rule of thumb for the fully loaded cost of a worker is usually 150%-200% of salary, so they are right on target. Remember that, for instance, 4 weeks total of vacation and sick leave costs 7.7%, unemployment insurance costs another few percent, payroll tax is another 6.8%, throw in a few more percent for worker's comp. You're north of 20% before you even start paying for health insurance and retirement.
If you think that's too much compensation for somebody working in a factory, you don't believe that the United States should have a middle class.
It looks like news outlets all over the place are comparing this to the Model S, but then like 2 sentences later point out how it is mechanically basically a Volt. How does that make it an alternative to the Model S at all? Doesn't that just make it an alternative to the Volt? Was the Volt an alternative to the Model S?
I find that a kind of odd statement. First of all, I wonder what you mean by "major" hurricanes and making landfall. Is "major" category 3, 4, or 5? Does it take into account things like diameter? Is that ever, or just when it makes landfall in the US? I mean, it sure seems like you are carefully crafting you wording to exclude some pretty notable storms, like Dean, Felix, and Ike. And Sandy is a pretty dubious non-major hurricane, given that it had the largest diameter of any Atlantic cyclone, which was a large contributing factor to how damaging it was. And what's with the US mainland only caveat? Climate change only counts if the hurricanes happen to make landfall within artificial boundaries on a map? Felix didn't turn north after slamming into the Yucatan the same way WIlma did, so it didn't happen? Besides, I think if you actually applied your criteria prior to 2005, you'll find that it eliminates so many hurricanes that an 8 year gap isn't statistically anomalous at all.
When you have to get that oddly specific, you should be at least a little worried that you are cherry picking data to create "proof" of your already decided upon conclusion. If you instead just look at more general trends in quantity and strength of storms, it's pretty clear that we have had more and stronger hurricanes over time.
I think I'm obligated to say that only an Apple user would assume that one's laptop will replaced before its warranty expires.
+1 for joda-time. They effectively solved the entire problem domain of date manipulation for all of the use cases that have come up for me.
Presumably, they are affected by this change, as well, but the good news is that I'm confident that they'll do something to handle it without my having to do anything besides tick up a dependency version.
Be honest. Climategate is the only example you can think of.
I'll go ahead and hop on past the probable distinction between what you think "climategate" was, and what actual negative behavior was revealed to have occurred in that particular incident and move right on past to the fact that even if I give climategate to you, it does not support your premise. Your claim wasn't that there exists some instance of corruption in the scientific community. It was that there was more there than there is from parties funding warming deniers.
I don't claim to be a high priest of anything. I just know that morons like you tend to be perfectly happy latching on to whatever anecdotal evidence matches your "humble opinion" and assuming that means your belief is backed by some sort of empirical process. You've more or less made my point for me.
Sounds great. Where do I sign up?
You don't have to silence anybody to solve the problem. The Koch brothers can say whatever they want. There is a whole lot of room between letting some random billionaire tell people that global warming is a hoax and letting that same billionaire secretly fund organizations designed entirely to trick people into thinking there is a global conspiracy of people who go to school to become climatologists in order that they can destroy our freedoms for some extra grant money. I bet we can draw a line someplace in between. I'd personally start by taking away the word "secretly" and demanding that the whole process be more transparent so that people can more easily see the conflicts of interest. Unless you can show me the part of the first amendment that guarantees the right to anonymous donations to propaganda organizations?
There is obviously bias in the scientific process, but you aren't talking about some amount of bias inherent in the system. You are talking about a vast international conspiracy of climate scientists, all with different funding sources and backgrounds, nearly universally colluding to manipulate their findings and their stated beliefs to manipulate the system to get more some more grant money, even though it has been repeatedly shown that they could get more income by flipping and taking funding from fossil fuel companies.
The whole issue has definitely become political football, but it definitely isn't the science that's leading us there.
IMHO, more graft and corruption on the pro-manmade climate change side.
Luckily for me, there is actual data to examine, so I can safely ignore your humble opinion.
Unluckily for me, there are millions of tools just like you who are perfectly happy to eyeball it and trust their gut reaction when there is perfectly good data around to examine, and you all get to vote, too.
Here's the problem. There have been thousands of societies that at one point had the sort of "Liberty and Freedom" that you are talking about, where there was little or no government to "nanny" people. Do you know what happened to all of those societies? Power centralized, and freedom went away.
The thing that historically has made our country great is specifically the government. We fill the power vacuum with a democratically elected government so that some rich cabal of people can't take power and use it so their "freedom" is maximized and yours is minimized. The problem is obviously that if you let said cabals get enough influence, with mass media and the internet being what they are, they gain a new route to that tyranny anyway: buy enough public opinion and you can directly manipulate a democracy.
So every single person in this country should give much more than a rat's ass when stories like this come up, because they directly relate to people trying to break the system that has protected your liberty and freedom for hundreds of years. And this isn't really about parties. I think that the conservative movement in this country has some properties that make this sort of action happen more frequently from their direction, but we should be vigilant against similar manipulation from anybody.
I agree that Liberty and Freedom are what makes this country great. But right now, you are defending the Koch brothers' freedom to try to steal your freedom from you.
That's funny, whenever I do this sort of thing, the police keep calling it "fraud".
How about making up random bullshit narratives, we look at what information we have in front of us. They are closing down messenger and wanting people to move to skype. The Xbox currently has messenger integration. Ergo, that is going away and getting replaced with Skype, just like we already know it is on PC. I see nothing here that indicates anything at all is happening with party chat, the current messaging, or anything at all besides removing messenger integration and adding Skype integration.
I mean, really, what seems more likely to you: the obvious consequences of replacing messenger with Skype apply to the Xbox just like everything else, or some shitty gaming site I've never heard of and which has an alexa rank of 8,429 is breaking the news that party chat as we know it is getting replaced?
Maybe you should quit having people who have no understanding of a job try to manage people doing it?