#15 More pornography is created in the United States than anywhere else on the entire globe. Eighty nine percent is made in the U.S.A. and only 11 percent is made in the rest of the world.
- What's their coding style look like? (If they're not using K&R brace style end the interview immediately)
You just rejected a lot of perfectly qualified people due to your views in the Brace Style Holy Wars that have nothing at all to do with competence, since, as far as I can tell you never specified K&R style as a requirement. For example, programmers who code more Java than C will tend towards Allman style over K&R, because a lot of books and standard libraries use that, while programmers who like to tinker with GNU code will go with the GNU / RMS brace style.
If you can't solve small-scale design problems (a.k.a. "bugs"), what makes you think you are qualified to solve large-scale design problems? What you're getting paid to do is closer to implementing a breadth-first search in Java and all the required tree data structures with minimal errors in under 10 minutes than it is solving an academic problem over the course of 3-6 months with a teaching load. If I'm interviewing you, the academic work is great, but probably not what I'm paying you for.
The basic rule of programming interviews is that you should demand that they actually program. It doesn't necessarily have to be a difficult problem: I've handed somebody a standard Fizzbuzz in an interview, and the competent candidates will solve it in 2-5 minutes, while the incompetent candidates won't solve it in 15 minutes.
The reason this is necessary is that on paper, the incompetent candidates can look identical to the competent candidates.
Another old joke about this problem: Visitor to Harvard: "Where's your library at?" Harvard student: "This is Harvard. We don't end our sentences with a preposition." Visitor; "Ok, where's your library at, jerk?"
I'd like to point you at the difficulties out Armed Forces have had dominating unruly indigenous populations in the Middle East lately, when all the locals have are crappy beat decades-old AK-47 and home-made IEDs.
You mean the part where somewhere between 120,000 and 700,000 Iraqis have died, and fewer than 5,000 US soldiers died? Or maybe the part where last year fewer than 10 US soldiers were killed (one site actually reported only one death, and that with a non-hostile cause).
What Iraq actually tells you is that you'd need an army at least 24 times the size of the US military to win with AK-47's and IEDs. The US organized military, if it calls in its reserves, is 2.8 million people. So you'd need an army of roughly 90 million people, or approximately the entire military-aged male population, to have a chance of winning.
GP is right: Your best protection is that the military won't carry out orders to just shoot down mass numbers of civilians.
Actually, it doesn't really prevent a reasonably intelligent gunman from getting around this, provided that he owns a couple of simple tools and has an hour or two on his hands before going on his rampage. The way a gunman would get around this problem would be: 1. Smash the computer circuitry that makes the gun "smart". 2. If it is a fail-open switch, fire away. 3. If it is a fail-close switch, hotwire the switch closed using instructions that will probably be easily found using Google. Then fire away.
This is a stupid proposal, and this pundit is a stupid person for having suggested it. And I'm generally in the anti-gun camp.
I disagree and think that police should be allowed to be filmed in public places at all times, to help keep them honest.
It doesn't just keep them honest, it also helps juries who are savvy enough to know that police aren't always honest.
For example, there's a case in my area where the police chased a couple about 15 miles at high speed, cornered them in a parking lot, and fired something like 120 rounds into their car killing both of them. But because nobody videotaped the start or end of the chase, and not much in between, nobody really knows what happened that caused the chase to begin with, or caused the police to shoot. Which means that the citizenry can't legitimately condemn or praise the police for their actions, because we don't know whether they were doing what they were supposed to, so everyone's basically following their instincts about whether they trust cops.
Coverage on the English Al-Jazeerah is of no value. They usually just follow / copy other English media.
Right, that's why they report stories that a lot of the American media won't even touch, and report the same story from a different perspective. That's why they've won the Columbia Journalism Award.
Some examples of what you're missing if you ignore them: - They covered the Egyptian revolution very very different viewpoint from, say, the New York Times. If you read only American press, you'd think that Mohammed Morsi was a dictator. If you read or watch Al-Jazeera English, you'd know that he was the duly elected winner of a hotly contested election. - They exposed the details of a negotiation session between Israel and Fatah over who was going to own what in the West Bank, including actual video. The editorial aftermath was highly critical of both sides. - They've reported on the effects of US drone strikes beyond the typical "US officials say that 15 militants were killed in a drone strike in Pakistan today."
"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." - Major General Smedley Butler, 1933 (2-time Medal of Honor recipient)
I know, that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but one of my college profs made a good case for the concept.
The value of learning programming for non-programmers is not "I have to get that *@$% computer to do what I want". It's "I have to learn how to break down a large problem into simpler smaller problems, until I know how to solve it." and "I have to recognize the adjustments and adaptations that humans naturally make when solving problems." And as a side effect, it also teaches the important lesson that some problems cannot be solved by convincing people around you to believe in nonsense.
The only government that Al Jazeera might have a tough time criticizing is Qatar, because that's who owns them. And that's why I like their coverage of Middle East affairs: They don't pull punches, no matter what they're reporting on.
Yup. The US also protected the Saudis and U.A.E. from being oppressed by the Iraqis so they could instead by oppressed by their own monarchs. And then we wonder why a bunch of them got mad at the US and flew some planes into buildings (which the US responded to by helpfully invading Iraq).
Another way of putting it: Many social sciences aren't really science. Some fields of study that are described as "social sciences" are really sciences: For example, psychology is a field in which there are real experiments you can run on people and come to useful conclusions about human behavior. Some other fields of study that are described as "social sciences" are not really science.
An example of a non-science "science": macroeconomics. The reason that macroeconomics isn't really a science is that people who's hypotheses fail to match reality can always come up with another external reason for why their hypothesis doesn't apply. For example, if you believe the Efficient Market Hypothesis (which basically argues that markets quickly sort out any mis-priced assets and re-price them correctly), and you find out that trillions of dollars worth of financial assets are mis-priced and have been for years, you can just find any kind of government intervention that hasn't really been tested as to what its effects really are and claim that this is why the mis-pricing happened, allowing the hypothesis to stand even in the face of contrary evidence.
Another example of a non-science "social science": [historically-disadvantaged-group] studies. These aren't generally speaking sciences because they are focused on documenting and attempting to understand the history and present realities of the disadvantages the group has suffered. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, but it does mean that it's not science. For example, there's nobody I'm aware of in those fields that's doing experimental work, just a lot of documenting and guessing at what it all means.
Also, and a key counterargument to Kuhn, is that while both Aristotle and Newton were wrong, if you think they were equally wrong, you're wronger than both of them put together.
This is southeastern Ohio, not western PA. But yes, I'm not terribly surprised - I actually know a few people from the town in question, and it's a real dump.
When this story came out, the prosecutor told the press that they already had collected the video in question. And still hadn't charged anybody.
In other words, there's an untainted trail of the evidence, and the reason that Anonymous got involved at all is that they're trying to shame the prosecutor's office into doing something.
The really disturbing part is not just the fact that a 17-year-old was gang-raped, and no charges have been filed. No, the really really disturbing part was that a significant portion of the population of the town have actively opposed doing anything about it.
I mean, why bother even having laws against rape if you're not going to enforce them?
Slashdot Mirror
#15 More pornography is created in the United States than anywhere else on the entire globe. Eighty nine percent is made in the U.S.A. and only 11 percent is made in the rest of the world.
So it's not all bad news!
- What's their coding style look like? (If they're not using K&R brace style end the interview immediately)
You just rejected a lot of perfectly qualified people due to your views in the Brace Style Holy Wars that have nothing at all to do with competence, since, as far as I can tell you never specified K&R style as a requirement. For example, programmers who code more Java than C will tend towards Allman style over K&R, because a lot of books and standard libraries use that, while programmers who like to tinker with GNU code will go with the GNU / RMS brace style.
If you can't solve small-scale design problems (a.k.a. "bugs"), what makes you think you are qualified to solve large-scale design problems? What you're getting paid to do is closer to implementing a breadth-first search in Java and all the required tree data structures with minimal errors in under 10 minutes than it is solving an academic problem over the course of 3-6 months with a teaching load. If I'm interviewing you, the academic work is great, but probably not what I'm paying you for.
That's 'Brillant'.
As in:
Twas brillant, and the slithy code
did gyrate and jingle in the cloud.
All mimsy were the managers,
And the dumb fools outgrave.
Beware the Idiot, my son!
The jaws that flap, the claws that snatch!
Beware the Flubflub bird, and shun
the frumious repo fetch!
It's not a primary function of my job but isn't it just a basic modulus operation?
Yes (plus a loop). You'd be surprised how few people billing themselves as "programmers" can do it.
The basic rule of programming interviews is that you should demand that they actually program. It doesn't necessarily have to be a difficult problem: I've handed somebody a standard Fizzbuzz in an interview, and the competent candidates will solve it in 2-5 minutes, while the incompetent candidates won't solve it in 15 minutes.
The reason this is necessary is that on paper, the incompetent candidates can look identical to the competent candidates.
Another old joke about this problem:
Visitor to Harvard: "Where's your library at?"
Harvard student: "This is Harvard. We don't end our sentences with a preposition."
Visitor; "Ok, where's your library at, jerk?"
I'd like to point you at the difficulties out Armed Forces have had dominating unruly indigenous populations in the Middle East lately, when all the locals have are crappy beat decades-old AK-47 and home-made IEDs.
You mean the part where somewhere between 120,000 and 700,000 Iraqis have died, and fewer than 5,000 US soldiers died? Or maybe the part where last year fewer than 10 US soldiers were killed (one site actually reported only one death, and that with a non-hostile cause).
What Iraq actually tells you is that you'd need an army at least 24 times the size of the US military to win with AK-47's and IEDs. The US organized military, if it calls in its reserves, is 2.8 million people. So you'd need an army of roughly 90 million people, or approximately the entire military-aged male population, to have a chance of winning.
GP is right: Your best protection is that the military won't carry out orders to just shoot down mass numbers of civilians.
Actually, it doesn't really prevent a reasonably intelligent gunman from getting around this, provided that he owns a couple of simple tools and has an hour or two on his hands before going on his rampage. The way a gunman would get around this problem would be:
1. Smash the computer circuitry that makes the gun "smart".
2. If it is a fail-open switch, fire away.
3. If it is a fail-close switch, hotwire the switch closed using instructions that will probably be easily found using Google. Then fire away.
This is a stupid proposal, and this pundit is a stupid person for having suggested it. And I'm generally in the anti-gun camp.
I disagree and think that police should be allowed to be filmed in public places at all times, to help keep them honest.
It doesn't just keep them honest, it also helps juries who are savvy enough to know that police aren't always honest.
For example, there's a case in my area where the police chased a couple about 15 miles at high speed, cornered them in a parking lot, and fired something like 120 rounds into their car killing both of them. But because nobody videotaped the start or end of the chase, and not much in between, nobody really knows what happened that caused the chase to begin with, or caused the police to shoot. Which means that the citizenry can't legitimately condemn or praise the police for their actions, because we don't know whether they were doing what they were supposed to, so everyone's basically following their instincts about whether they trust cops.
So you're saying Australia has been invaded by Scotsmen?
As a brilliant British writer once said, "This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put."
Coverage on the English Al-Jazeerah is of no value. They usually just follow / copy other English media.
Right, that's why they report stories that a lot of the American media won't even touch, and report the same story from a different perspective. That's why they've won the Columbia Journalism Award.
Some examples of what you're missing if you ignore them:
- They covered the Egyptian revolution very very different viewpoint from, say, the New York Times. If you read only American press, you'd think that Mohammed Morsi was a dictator. If you read or watch Al-Jazeera English, you'd know that he was the duly elected winner of a hotly contested election.
- They exposed the details of a negotiation session between Israel and Fatah over who was going to own what in the West Bank, including actual video. The editorial aftermath was highly critical of both sides.
- They've reported on the effects of US drone strikes beyond the typical "US officials say that 15 militants were killed in a drone strike in Pakistan today."
"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."
- Major General Smedley Butler, 1933 (2-time Medal of Honor recipient)
I know, that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but one of my college profs made a good case for the concept.
The value of learning programming for non-programmers is not "I have to get that *@$% computer to do what I want". It's "I have to learn how to break down a large problem into simpler smaller problems, until I know how to solve it." and "I have to recognize the adjustments and adaptations that humans naturally make when solving problems." And as a side effect, it also teaches the important lesson that some problems cannot be solved by convincing people around you to believe in nonsense.
The only government that Al Jazeera might have a tough time criticizing is Qatar, because that's who owns them. And that's why I like their coverage of Middle East affairs: They don't pull punches, no matter what they're reporting on.
Yup. The US also protected the Saudis and U.A.E. from being oppressed by the Iraqis so they could instead by oppressed by their own monarchs. And then we wonder why a bunch of them got mad at the US and flew some planes into buildings (which the US responded to by helpfully invading Iraq).
... purely because we have the same dress size.
Just curious: How do you know your dress size?
Another way of putting it: Many social sciences aren't really science. Some fields of study that are described as "social sciences" are really sciences: For example, psychology is a field in which there are real experiments you can run on people and come to useful conclusions about human behavior. Some other fields of study that are described as "social sciences" are not really science.
An example of a non-science "science": macroeconomics. The reason that macroeconomics isn't really a science is that people who's hypotheses fail to match reality can always come up with another external reason for why their hypothesis doesn't apply. For example, if you believe the Efficient Market Hypothesis (which basically argues that markets quickly sort out any mis-priced assets and re-price them correctly), and you find out that trillions of dollars worth of financial assets are mis-priced and have been for years, you can just find any kind of government intervention that hasn't really been tested as to what its effects really are and claim that this is why the mis-pricing happened, allowing the hypothesis to stand even in the face of contrary evidence.
Another example of a non-science "social science": [historically-disadvantaged-group] studies. These aren't generally speaking sciences because they are focused on documenting and attempting to understand the history and present realities of the disadvantages the group has suffered. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, but it does mean that it's not science. For example, there's nobody I'm aware of in those fields that's doing experimental work, just a lot of documenting and guessing at what it all means.
Also, and a key counterargument to Kuhn, is that while both Aristotle and Newton were wrong, if you think they were equally wrong, you're wronger than both of them put together.
Well, that's better than my challenge: My hovercraft is full of eels.
"I'm going to build my own theme park! With blackjack! And hookers! You know what- forget the park!"
This is southeastern Ohio, not western PA. But yes, I'm not terribly surprised - I actually know a few people from the town in question, and it's a real dump.
When this story came out, the prosecutor told the press that they already had collected the video in question. And still hadn't charged anybody.
In other words, there's an untainted trail of the evidence, and the reason that Anonymous got involved at all is that they're trying to shame the prosecutor's office into doing something.
The really disturbing part is not just the fact that a 17-year-old was gang-raped, and no charges have been filed. No, the really really disturbing part was that a significant portion of the population of the town have actively opposed doing anything about it.
I mean, why bother even having laws against rape if you're not going to enforce them?