Bias towards facts and evidence is a good kind of bias. "Equally valid" does not mean "equally correct". To be biased towards the fact that, had Gladwell quoted the pilot transcripts correctly, his thesis about Korean language playing a part in the accident would be completely moot is AT THE EXPENSE of Gladwell's view that it did. You did not show that the bias in this case was wrong.
"Different cultures have inherent strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, it must be the cause of this aircraft accident". Sorry, but it is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. You have to prove the link, not merely make an assertion that one fact somehow translates into another.
Second it's the blog author the one who fails to acknowledge said military attacks caused by the plane wandering away from its route, which is very much pilot error.
As another commenter noted, the blog author does acknowledge one of the military attacks was caused by the plane wandering away from its route. YOU, however, say "said military attacks", completely missing the author's other point that one of the attacks was when an NK operative planted a bomb on a plan in ABU FUCKING DHABI. Furthermore, he didn't deny that they were pilot error. He denies that it is a KOREAN CULTURE error. Gladwell's thesis about the Korean language was plain wrong. Your "pilot error" is not even wrong.
In fact the write up in that blog is so biased and the overall tone so inflammatory that the original story should be modded -1 Flamebait.
There's nothing wrong with bias. As for inflammatory, maybe, if you have comprehension problems, as you evidently show.
Yes, but how much of that error is cultural and not fundamental human error? That's what's being discussed here. Yes it is pilot error, and yes it is as dangerous as flying a plane into the ground. Why isn't this kind of cultural explanations given for airline crashes of other countries and their airlines?
So then why would a civilization capable of advanced space flight go out of their way
Can't they just stumble across us? Do they have to go out of their way?
and through all the trouble of finding a population of quasi-intelligent apes to farm for brain power when they could likely just as easily grow brain matter on a computing/communication substrate that can be controlled, specialized, and reproduced at will with enough resources?
Maybe consciousness is more complicated to develop than advanced space flight?
Human brains, for all their wonderful complexity, are the end result of evolution, a process notorious for using hacked-together "good enough" adaptations. Engineered tissue from the ribosome up could be made much more efficient. Hell, replacing the axon's chemo-electrical method of signal transduction with something more along the lines of metallic or carbon nanotube circuits would improve efficiency many times over; nerve transduction has been clocked at only 170 m/s, peanuts compared to modern silicon processors.
Maybe it's not just a matter of electrical efficiency? Say what you like about human brains, but as far as we know, have only evolved once on Earth in 4 billion years, whereas eyes evolved at least 40 times. There is something to be said about a brain that's hacked together that can potentially understand relativistic equations.
A lot of scifi is bogged down with the concept of aliens needing something from Earth, but this concept is mostly not plausible. Water is everywhere. Minerals are everywhere. No, they don't even need to eat us. If you can cross space by whatever method, you have probably figured out food or evolved or engineered yourselves beyond the need to eat constantly like humans do.
What if the aliens require massive computing power? The large mass of sentient brains of this planet could be a very rare thing in the cosmos. Complex chemistry for life is common all over the universe. Maybe multicellular life is also common in this universe. But a massively parallel simulating biological computer is probably rare enough to encounter that it's easier for them to coopt rather than engineer.
It's not hard to imagine, at least for me, that an alien race may find it easier to build on biological computing technology than it is to keep pushing the boundaries of physics for smaller non-biological computers.
With the assumption that the test is complete enough to test things that aren't just in the spec, like errors. Most Agilers seem to think a test is about whether something works. It's about whether it can survive attempts to break it.
I can understand why religion can so easily fill a scientifically minded person with disgust, because it is so often the worst and most obnoxiously stupid representatives for religion that are the loudest and make the most absurd demands on our time and efforts. However, there is a large majority that are really quite sensible and open-minded.
If that were true, then scientifically minded people wouldn't dislike homeopaths so much. But we do, despite almost all homeopaths being generally nice people. Nice people can still do stupid things, and dangerously stupid things.
Your reasons about why they are complementary rather than antithetical is precisely the reason they are antithetical. The problem is you can't stop people from noticing "that's funny", which is the kind of thing Asimov says makes science work. When people can't stop noticing things, they can't stop studying things. They can't stop studying things that people don't want them to study. Religion, not just the extreme, but mainstream religion, has a list of things they preferred remain unstudied. That's why moderates always clamour for "non-overlapping magisteria" when they're under threat, but have no problem overlapping if they feel confident.
This would be mitigated by making it an optional feature.
It wouldn't, because if you use a library that inadvisedly uses the "optional" feature, you have no way to turn it off.
but more than once I've found myself cursing this omission.
You know what, so have I. But then I thought about the design for a bit and realized I could do it a much more better way. I like reflection when I'm doing rapid prototyping. Personally I find lambdas more useful than reflection, and luckily it's a major part of C++11 already implemented in most compilers.
But then you're optimising. Not the compiler.
There has to be some kind of manual optimizing. No compiler can fix people using the wrong data types or algorithms. Incidentally, C++11 templates can help the compiler optimize more efficiently. For example, std sort is faster than qsort, because qsort can only take in a function pointer, whereas std sort can embed the sorting function as part of the type once the template has been fully realized. But back to strings. What if an array of chars is the only efficient way to implement something, but the language has hijacked all string literals as built-in strings which are necessarily less efficient than a plain old array?
So you're the type of person to make far reaching generalizations from one question and refuses to look for an underlying purpose for those questions. I very wish programming was like that, but it's not. You often have to find patterns that allow you to generalize into a meaningful design/protocol/policy that is not immediately on the surface.
Your employment prospects at this imaginary company are slim:)
If it prevents useful features from existing, this is a poor design decision. Plus, you'd only need to include it if it was actually used. It could even be added as an optional feature to classes.
No, it's a good design decision. Why would anyone want their program to pay for something they don't use? Others have argued too many unneeded powerful features already exist in C++, thus contradicting your own definition of a poor design decision. I personally would side more with you than those who argue C++ has too much stuff, but there has to be a limit, and the limit of not bogging down a whole language just to include certain features is a sensible limit, because it is something that can be measured. Much more sensible than ideologically impose limitations like the OO or pure functional paradigm fanaticism.
This is a problem with the library. Not C++.
You simply cannot make a blanket statement like that. A library, especially highly generic concepts like containers, iterators, and algorithms, needs to cater to as many types as they can with minimal configuration. You can't fault a library or a language so absolutely.
The above code can optimise to {return 11;} if strings are built in. If it's a type then it involved allocating at least 3 chunks of memory and 2 memory copies.
If that kind of optimization is needed, people can use a string literal. If the string in your example needs to be modified later on, then that optimization cannot be done in any implementation. As for excessive allocations, this is now solved with rvalue references and move semantics.
Can be implemented as static members. Performance cost is a little bit of static data per class type.
Yes, but the point is that it breaks the "you don't pay for what you don't use" design principle of C++.
Not at all. If you don't use it then the string conversion function won't be linked.
You can't guarantee it. For example, if some library happens to use some kind of generic conversion function for its templated type, and you include the enum, then you've automatically dragged in a whole bunch of stuff.
A built in type means that the compiler is allowed to know what a string is and is and can handle strings differently for optimisation.
Any implementation of a string in any language boils down to a char array, whether it's built in, or a library data type.
It also means that we can have third party libraries that don't rely on an assumption that we're using the right std::string implementation.
Those would be bugs in the string implementation, which do not disappear by becoming in-built. If the standard defines strings as a built-in type, you've just shifted the problem from the library to the compiler which doesn't fix anything.
If I want that I'll add a lisp macro as a precompile step. Templates add a lot of complexity for limited benefit.
If you want that, you can just use templates. If you don't use the full power of templates, then you don't need to expose yourself to that complexity. The complexity is pushed to compile time, and the "limited benefit" often means greater performance because virtual functions and class hierarchies aren't needed to achieve polymorphism.
Candidates who go meta right off the bat are candidates to avoid. Going meta on a question is such an easy and hackneyed way to appear intelligent without being so. Similar techniques that people use to appear intelligent without being so are: being self-referential; speaking in acronyms; using elaborate words; correcting the use of the word "irony".
Hi, I notice that you took the questions as a window to the soul of the interviewer, but I would hope that in your extensive career experience, you would know they don't care:)
#1 - It is hard to learn. But considering you're interviewing for a job, I would hope that when you learn new things (as you would need to in any IT career), that you make progress and not stay stuck at the same learning stage. Several ways of doing the same thing, but each way has their own strengths and weaknesses that could help future development if chosen properly. In modern C++, you don't really need pointer manipulation, so compile time pointer safety misses the point of using safer constructs to begin with. C++11 has lambda functions now. The list of new and cleaner features goes on and on.
#2 - But they're not. They're frequently answered questions.
#3 - Explain the "less ways of doing the same thing" with examples.
#4 - Automatic memory management is one of those things that C++ can do and most fresh grads don't seem to know that since their lecturers keep repeating the horrors of new/delete. A candidate's failure to know these things is indication they don't form their own opinions and do their own research, and that is not what anyone needs as a programmer.
#-1: Wrong.
#0: Your answer to the first question means you didn't think about it and don't understand C++.
#1: True.
#2: Wrong. C++ is not about OO only. C++ can do things the other languages can do without always going OO, which I would think is the point of the question.
Because interviews aren't programming languages and I don't waste my time changing trivial things to display my creds. Your turn:) Oh, and explain, if hired, would you be able to control your impulses of changing things in our product purely because you don't like it (or you feel a need to display your prowess) and probably delay schedules.
Reflection: if they make reflection a feature of the language, then users pay for its performance penalties even though they don't use it.
Enum to string: same as above.
Inbuilt strings: While the std string library leaves a lot to be desired, I don't see why an inbuilt string type is needed. Now C++11 has regex as well.
Templates: I find if you think of templates as less powerful LISP macros that only works on types.
If that's what you left it as, yeah, you probably would have failed the questions.
But a longer exposition on your answers may not fail the questions.
Most interview questions are just to get you to explain your thinking, and your failure to recognize that in this situation, hypothetical though it is, makes a bad impression.
Interview question #1: Explain why you hate C++
Interview question #2: Justify why you repeated soundbites about C++ and not formulate your own explanations
Interview question #3: Explain why you like Java or C# better
Interview question #4: Justify why you didn't know that C++ can also do those things
Slashdot Mirror
Bias towards facts and evidence is a good kind of bias. "Equally valid" does not mean "equally correct". To be biased towards the fact that, had Gladwell quoted the pilot transcripts correctly, his thesis about Korean language playing a part in the accident would be completely moot is AT THE EXPENSE of Gladwell's view that it did. You did not show that the bias in this case was wrong.
"Different cultures have inherent strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, it must be the cause of this aircraft accident". Sorry, but it is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. You have to prove the link, not merely make an assertion that one fact somehow translates into another.
Second it's the blog author the one who fails to acknowledge said military attacks caused by the plane wandering away from its route, which is very much pilot error.
As another commenter noted, the blog author does acknowledge one of the military attacks was caused by the plane wandering away from its route. YOU, however, say "said military attacks", completely missing the author's other point that one of the attacks was when an NK operative planted a bomb on a plan in ABU FUCKING DHABI. Furthermore, he didn't deny that they were pilot error. He denies that it is a KOREAN CULTURE error. Gladwell's thesis about the Korean language was plain wrong. Your "pilot error" is not even wrong.
In fact the write up in that blog is so biased and the overall tone so inflammatory that the original story should be modded -1 Flamebait.
There's nothing wrong with bias. As for inflammatory, maybe, if you have comprehension problems, as you evidently show.
Yes, but how much of that error is cultural and not fundamental human error? That's what's being discussed here. Yes it is pilot error, and yes it is as dangerous as flying a plane into the ground. Why isn't this kind of cultural explanations given for airline crashes of other countries and their airlines?
I can't believe how so many Slashdotters willingly up vote this unsourced anecdote.
So then why would a civilization capable of advanced space flight go out of their way
Can't they just stumble across us? Do they have to go out of their way?
and through all the trouble of finding a population of quasi-intelligent apes to farm for brain power when they could likely just as easily grow brain matter on a computing/communication substrate that can be controlled, specialized, and reproduced at will with enough resources?
Maybe consciousness is more complicated to develop than advanced space flight?
Human brains, for all their wonderful complexity, are the end result of evolution, a process notorious for using hacked-together "good enough" adaptations. Engineered tissue from the ribosome up could be made much more efficient. Hell, replacing the axon's chemo-electrical method of signal transduction with something more along the lines of metallic or carbon nanotube circuits would improve efficiency many times over; nerve transduction has been clocked at only 170 m/s, peanuts compared to modern silicon processors.
Maybe it's not just a matter of electrical efficiency? Say what you like about human brains, but as far as we know, have only evolved once on Earth in 4 billion years, whereas eyes evolved at least 40 times. There is something to be said about a brain that's hacked together that can potentially understand relativistic equations.
A lot of scifi is bogged down with the concept of aliens needing something from Earth, but this concept is mostly not plausible. Water is everywhere. Minerals are everywhere. No, they don't even need to eat us. If you can cross space by whatever method, you have probably figured out food or evolved or engineered yourselves beyond the need to eat constantly like humans do.
What if the aliens require massive computing power? The large mass of sentient brains of this planet could be a very rare thing in the cosmos. Complex chemistry for life is common all over the universe. Maybe multicellular life is also common in this universe. But a massively parallel simulating biological computer is probably rare enough to encounter that it's easier for them to coopt rather than engineer.
It's not hard to imagine, at least for me, that an alien race may find it easier to build on biological computing technology than it is to keep pushing the boundaries of physics for smaller non-biological computers.
With the assumption that the test is complete enough to test things that aren't just in the spec, like errors. Most Agilers seem to think a test is about whether something works. It's about whether it can survive attempts to break it.
I'm sure it received enough electricity to live.
Same to you.
I can understand why religion can so easily fill a scientifically minded person with disgust, because it is so often the worst and most obnoxiously stupid representatives for religion that are the loudest and make the most absurd demands on our time and efforts. However, there is a large majority that are really quite sensible and open-minded.
If that were true, then scientifically minded people wouldn't dislike homeopaths so much. But we do, despite almost all homeopaths being generally nice people. Nice people can still do stupid things, and dangerously stupid things.
Your reasons about why they are complementary rather than antithetical is precisely the reason they are antithetical. The problem is you can't stop people from noticing "that's funny", which is the kind of thing Asimov says makes science work. When people can't stop noticing things, they can't stop studying things. They can't stop studying things that people don't want them to study. Religion, not just the extreme, but mainstream religion, has a list of things they preferred remain unstudied. That's why moderates always clamour for "non-overlapping magisteria" when they're under threat, but have no problem overlapping if they feel confident.
Of all the first world problems, green fatigue?
Bunch of pansies in IT need to get used to the idea of rationing.
No mind reading. Just a sense of humour.
This would be mitigated by making it an optional feature.
It wouldn't, because if you use a library that inadvisedly uses the "optional" feature, you have no way to turn it off.
but more than once I've found myself cursing this omission.
You know what, so have I. But then I thought about the design for a bit and realized I could do it a much more better way. I like reflection when I'm doing rapid prototyping. Personally I find lambdas more useful than reflection, and luckily it's a major part of C++11 already implemented in most compilers.
But then you're optimising. Not the compiler.
There has to be some kind of manual optimizing. No compiler can fix people using the wrong data types or algorithms. Incidentally, C++11 templates can help the compiler optimize more efficiently. For example, std sort is faster than qsort, because qsort can only take in a function pointer, whereas std sort can embed the sorting function as part of the type once the template has been fully realized. But back to strings. What if an array of chars is the only efficient way to implement something, but the language has hijacked all string literals as built-in strings which are necessarily less efficient than a plain old array?
So you're the type of person to make far reaching generalizations from one question and refuses to look for an underlying purpose for those questions. I very wish programming was like that, but it's not. You often have to find patterns that allow you to generalize into a meaningful design/protocol/policy that is not immediately on the surface.
:)
Your employment prospects at this imaginary company are slim
If it prevents useful features from existing, this is a poor design decision. Plus, you'd only need to include it if it was actually used. It could even be added as an optional feature to classes.
No, it's a good design decision. Why would anyone want their program to pay for something they don't use? Others have argued too many unneeded powerful features already exist in C++, thus contradicting your own definition of a poor design decision. I personally would side more with you than those who argue C++ has too much stuff, but there has to be a limit, and the limit of not bogging down a whole language just to include certain features is a sensible limit, because it is something that can be measured. Much more sensible than ideologically impose limitations like the OO or pure functional paradigm fanaticism.
This is a problem with the library. Not C++.
You simply cannot make a blanket statement like that. A library, especially highly generic concepts like containers, iterators, and algorithms, needs to cater to as many types as they can with minimal configuration. You can't fault a library or a language so absolutely.
The above code can optimise to {return 11;} if strings are built in. If it's a type then it involved allocating at least 3 chunks of memory and 2 memory copies.
If that kind of optimization is needed, people can use a string literal. If the string in your example needs to be modified later on, then that optimization cannot be done in any implementation. As for excessive allocations, this is now solved with rvalue references and move semantics.
Can be implemented as static members. Performance cost is a little bit of static data per class type.
Yes, but the point is that it breaks the "you don't pay for what you don't use" design principle of C++.
Not at all. If you don't use it then the string conversion function won't be linked.
You can't guarantee it. For example, if some library happens to use some kind of generic conversion function for its templated type, and you include the enum, then you've automatically dragged in a whole bunch of stuff.
A built in type means that the compiler is allowed to know what a string is and is and can handle strings differently for optimisation.
Any implementation of a string in any language boils down to a char array, whether it's built in, or a library data type.
It also means that we can have third party libraries that don't rely on an assumption that we're using the right std::string implementation.
Those would be bugs in the string implementation, which do not disappear by becoming in-built. If the standard defines strings as a built-in type, you've just shifted the problem from the library to the compiler which doesn't fix anything.
If I want that I'll add a lisp macro as a precompile step. Templates add a lot of complexity for limited benefit.
If you want that, you can just use templates. If you don't use the full power of templates, then you don't need to expose yourself to that complexity. The complexity is pushed to compile time, and the "limited benefit" often means greater performance because virtual functions and class hierarchies aren't needed to achieve polymorphism.
Be creative.
Candidates who go meta right off the bat are candidates to avoid. Going meta on a question is such an easy and hackneyed way to appear intelligent without being so. Similar techniques that people use to appear intelligent without being so are: being self-referential; speaking in acronyms; using elaborate words; correcting the use of the word "irony".
Hi, I notice that you took the questions as a window to the soul of the interviewer, but I would hope that in your extensive career experience, you would know they don't care :)
:)
#1 - It is hard to learn. But considering you're interviewing for a job, I would hope that when you learn new things (as you would need to in any IT career), that you make progress and not stay stuck at the same learning stage. Several ways of doing the same thing, but each way has their own strengths and weaknesses that could help future development if chosen properly. In modern C++, you don't really need pointer manipulation, so compile time pointer safety misses the point of using safer constructs to begin with. C++11 has lambda functions now. The list of new and cleaner features goes on and on.
#2 - But they're not. They're frequently answered questions.
#3 - Explain the "less ways of doing the same thing" with examples.
#4 - Automatic memory management is one of those things that C++ can do and most fresh grads don't seem to know that since their lecturers keep repeating the horrors of new/delete. A candidate's failure to know these things is indication they don't form their own opinions and do their own research, and that is not what anyone needs as a programmer.
Your turn
#-1: Wrong.
:) Oh, and explain, if hired, would you be able to control your impulses of changing things in our product purely because you don't like it (or you feel a need to display your prowess) and probably delay schedules.
#0: Your answer to the first question means you didn't think about it and don't understand C++.
#1: True.
#2: Wrong. C++ is not about OO only. C++ can do things the other languages can do without always going OO, which I would think is the point of the question.
Because interviews aren't programming languages and I don't waste my time changing trivial things to display my creds. Your turn
Reflection: if they make reflection a feature of the language, then users pay for its performance penalties even though they don't use it.
:) Aren't interviews fun?
Enum to string: same as above.
Inbuilt strings: While the std string library leaves a lot to be desired, I don't see why an inbuilt string type is needed. Now C++11 has regex as well.
Templates: I find if you think of templates as less powerful LISP macros that only works on types.
Your turn
If that's what you left it as, yeah, you probably would have failed the questions.
But a longer exposition on your answers may not fail the questions.
Most interview questions are just to get you to explain your thinking, and your failure to recognize that in this situation, hypothetical though it is, makes a bad impression.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner.
Interview question #1: Explain why you hate C++ Interview question #2: Justify why you repeated soundbites about C++ and not formulate your own explanations Interview question #3: Explain why you like Java or C# better Interview question #4: Justify why you didn't know that C++ can also do those things