The USSR under Lenin was probably the closest. Thing is, any country that has a military dictatorship take over is not anywhere near a decent representative of Marxism. Hell, it wouldn't be a decent representative of capitalism either. Doesn't matter what the economic structure is, the repressive government is going to screw things up.
Sorry. I meant the profiling that's commonly done in airports these days, and that republican wingnuts like Ann Coulter keep saying we need "to keep us safe".
What's even more ridiculous is, of all the Muslim terrorists, not all have been Arab. There have been at least a couple white kids from Kansas or Britain or whatever in among the ones with brown skin. And since profiling is based on skin color rather than religious affiliation, it's even MORE worthless.
If you add speech recognition to the mix, rather than just "phrase capturing", then yeah... you can compress hours of speech to a couple k of text. Basically, there's really no way to tell what level of information they're actually sending back. All I can say is,there better be a damn obvious "off" switch to this thing.
not really. If they use encryption, you can't read the actual data. And if they just listen for certain phrases ("bomb", "islam", "liberal", etc) and send back identifying hashes, it would look much smaller than usable audio.
Sometimes evidence is excluded from a trial simply because of how the police obtained it, not based on its merit. This promotes the societal goal of making sure the police follow the rules, at the expense of letting some guilty individuals go free. It's a great system, but it's not perfect. This is just one example where the Ohio law might fill in the cracks;
So if you allow this improperly obtained evidence to be used for inclusion on this list, aren't you encouraging police to break the rules? I mean, they'll use all the evidence they can at trial, but in case that fails they'll have this backup evidence that can be used to get the person on the list anyway. Sounds like you're just asking for trouble...
Ok. COps deny a lawyer, because they are attempting to sweat a confession. Hours later, after filling him with coffe and water, they deny him use of the bathroom. They get their confession after hours of interrogation. But he requested a lawyer. No confession. He goes free. State cannot prosecute. State does NOT prosecute. This guy wins the criminal lottery and goes free?
Yes, he does. Because the cops fucked up. They should have stopped questioning him the second he asked for a lawyer. There's nothing wrong with the law in this case... it stopped the behavior it was designed to stop, e.g. cops questioning you without access to legal council, and using interrogation techniques bordering on torture.
So cops can trample all over due process in obtaining evidence, and while it won't make it to trial it can still be used to put a person on this list for 6 years? Yeah, I see no problems with that...
We have a court system and laws about what can be used for a very good reason. Shit like this list is just moving us closer to a gestapo state. Yeah, it sucks that guilty people get off sometimes. It doesn't mean the system is broken, just that that's the price you pay for protecting the rights of all citizens, and for minimizing the number of innocents convicted.
What I'm good at is NOT solving cutesy trick Mensa questions during a stressful interview, nor recalling minutae about programming language syntax from memory. And yet, these are the same people who think "I'd look it up in a book" is an unacceptable answer.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I would never turn someone down just because they said "I don't know, I would have to look it up". I ask those types of knowledge questions, but its mostly to get a feel for the person's background, and has no actual bearing on their hiring.
And again, the "Mensa questions" are not necessarily meant to be solved. They're used to see your thinking process, whether you can attack a problem in a somewhat logical fashion or whether you just flail around waiting for the interviewer to step in and tell you what to do. Yeah, maybe some good coders can't do that so well, but keep in mind that when we hire you, we then have to work right alongside you and (potentially) clean up your mistakes for the next however many years. If you can't show us that you're at least somewhat of a logical thinker, we can't feel safe in hiring you.
Now, for me, those guys are increasingly valuable as we go down the list. But if all you're looking for is speed and you're using toy examples where any decent guy ought to get everything right, you'll probably pick the first guy first, the second guy second, and the third guy last.
I agree completely with your estimation of who's the most valuable. The thing is, you can't tell from an interview what kind of code someone's going to put out after months of working on a project. All you can really do is weed out the guy who can't write five lines of code in a half hour. The rest is basically down to personality and the "feel" of how you'd fit with the team.
You can build a decent 20 terabyte storage array for around 20 grand. It'd span 7 or 8 servers, but still, much better than trying to organize rooms full of DVDs.
When I get idiot interviewers like you, then they get the full blast of contempt. Never waste my time being trival vague and misleading. There are plenty better places to work than yours. Pushing out the crusty experienced people who won't tolerate that nonsense is not a very effective strategy.
Uh huh... see, the thing is, it's not trivial if it's what I want to know in order to determine whether to hire you. If you can't put up with a basic problem that should take you five minutes to solve, what does that say about your patience with other things? You sound like a prima donna who won't work on anything you don't personally find fascinating. Good luck keeping a job with that attitude, by the way.
How is seeing whether you can solve basic problems the same as "selecting for people who think like me"? I don't care HOW they solve the problem, so long as they seem competent. If I was looking for an exact algorithmic approach, then I could see your point, but when the process is just to give them a problem and see what they do... I don't buy that it's all that limiting.
Yeah... I'm not saying I intentionally fuck with people. I just leave some things undefined, and see whether they immediately ask for clarification or, as you say, get that "BS artist" vagueness and start throwing random lines of code at the board. I leave nothing vague that can't be corrected by 30 seconds of discussion about the problem, and I'll usually accept whatever way they choose to define something if they start filling in the vagueness with their own assumptions.
And yet these guys have probably been writing successful software systems for years, what's going on?
It could be any of a number of things: for one, we only have their word that they've written all these successful software systems. A resume gets you in the door, but it's useless after that. We don't know the true complexity of the system, we don't know the quality of your peers on the job, and we don't know how well the final product really worked.
Secondly, I've known some people that could write software that "worked", but it was far from pretty, and it took an inordinate amount of time. We need someone who can code at a reasonable speed, where other companies, particularly non-tech companies who just have some internal tool programmers, may not care as much.
Finally, it doesn't matter so much whether you actually solve the problem, but the work process that goes into it is key. If you stare at the board and just write some stuff, it tells me nothing. That's why I like simple questions posed in a slightly vague manner. I leave a lot of things undefined about the problem to see what the person will do. They can choose to assume things, which is fine as long as the state that they're assuming it. They can ask me for clarification, which I'll gladly provide. Any of these things is a big plus, because it shows you know how to analyze a vague problem, figure out the things you need to clarify it, and still move forward with an implementation without stalling on questions and definitions. The ones who fail are inevitably the ones who just stare at the board, write a couple lines of code, erase them, stare some more, etc. Specs aren't always clear. Requirements and bug reports aren't always clear. If you can't ask the right questions to clarify a slightly vague 200 level coding quiz, you're not someone many people would want to work with.
One other comment: some people may suck at this because they rely on the compiler for everything. You can get surprisingly complex systems out of guess-and-check programming, but it's far from ideal. Quite a few new grads have this problem, although I'm not so sure about the more experienced programmers.
I agree with most of that. I'm basically one of the 20 year olds the story is complaining about. I ask retardedly easy questions when I interview people, and on occasion I will be a bit vague on purpose, to see if they will ask clarifying questions or just fumble around for a half hour (guess which one gets you hired?). The problem is, I've interviewed people who claim to have been working in industry longer than I've been alive, and you'd be amazed how many of them can't code what basically boils down to a double nested for loop. I've had people go up to the white board and fumble around for 30 minutes only to wind up back where they started. You have to ask those retardedly easy questions because half the candidates can't answer them, even the ones who've been full time workers for decades.
As for incorrect knowledge of some algorithmic stuff... there's two options. One is, they may know the correct answer, but are waiting to see if you do, and if you'll correct them. In one of my interviews coming out of college, a person said something about the problem I was working that was blatantly incorrect. He'd been working on a similar system for months, so I'm convinced that he was just seeing whether I'd correct him, or defer to him as "the authority". I corrected him, and I got the offer. The second option is that he doesn't, in which case you should stand up to him anyway. Even if he doesn't know you're right, most people will respect someone who isn't afraid to contradict them. If you just blandly defer to everything they say, how do they know what it would be like to try to design a system with you?
Not all of the impressions of snobbery at Microsoft are real, though. I found them very friendly in my interviews, and very down-to-earth. Probably depends on the group you're interviewing with, but there's a lot of people who are just good at what they do, and want you to show them that you're good at it as well.
For what it's worth, I've never met a person in real life who claims to do what you do: download an album, and then buy it. 100% of the people I know who get their music via P2P do it to save money, plain and simple. Buying a copy when they already have a perfectly good copy in their share directory would not make sense to them.
Not only do I do it, but I know 4 or 5 other people who are really into music who do the same thing. We like to support the artists, and we like to have a lossless copy in case we ever have a reason to want a different encoding than the one we downloaded. It's not all that uncommon, and if the RIAA would emphasize that behavior instead of trying to sue anyone that downloads music into the poorhouse, it could be even more common.
You see, piracy is nothing more than freeloading so that you don't have to pay the human beings who wrote the music, slaved away in a studio, mixed it, and distributed it. I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but come on, that's why people pirate music. They just don't want to have to pay for something they know they can get for free. It's simple human nature.
I don't know about your "human nature", but I get almost all my music from friends or from allofmp3.com first, and then buy hard copies of the albums I want to support. No, I don't buy copies of everything I download, because I don't think all of it is good enough. But in the past year I've bought at least 20 albums in hard copy, and every single one I've downloaded first.
I've actually seen a demonstration where the president of the company used his own hand. Quite a show of faith in your product, I have to say, and very impressive as a selling tool.
Going to church has nothing to do with crime. I'd bet you just about anything that several of the Enron guys were regular churchgoers. It's all a matter of need and opportunity. It sounds like you live in a relatively low population density area, in which pretty much everybody is relatively well off. Those two things are really all you need to make the crime rate plummet.
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The USSR under Lenin was probably the closest. Thing is, any country that has a military dictatorship take over is not anywhere near a decent representative of Marxism. Hell, it wouldn't be a decent representative of capitalism either. Doesn't matter what the economic structure is, the repressive government is going to screw things up.
Neither of those countries are Marxist in the least.
Sorry. I meant the profiling that's commonly done in airports these days, and that republican wingnuts like Ann Coulter keep saying we need "to keep us safe".
What's even more ridiculous is, of all the Muslim terrorists, not all have been Arab. There have been at least a couple white kids from Kansas or Britain or whatever in among the ones with brown skin. And since profiling is based on skin color rather than religious affiliation, it's even MORE worthless.
If you add speech recognition to the mix, rather than just "phrase capturing", then yeah... you can compress hours of speech to a couple k of text. Basically, there's really no way to tell what level of information they're actually sending back. All I can say is ,there better be a damn obvious "off" switch to this thing.
not really. If they use encryption, you can't read the actual data. And if they just listen for certain phrases ("bomb", "islam", "liberal", etc) and send back identifying hashes, it would look much smaller than usable audio.
So cops can trample all over due process in obtaining evidence, and while it won't make it to trial it can still be used to put a person on this list for 6 years? Yeah, I see no problems with that...
We have a court system and laws about what can be used for a very good reason. Shit like this list is just moving us closer to a gestapo state. Yeah, it sucks that guilty people get off sometimes. It doesn't mean the system is broken, just that that's the price you pay for protecting the rights of all citizens, and for minimizing the number of innocents convicted.
And again, the "Mensa questions" are not necessarily meant to be solved. They're used to see your thinking process, whether you can attack a problem in a somewhat logical fashion or whether you just flail around waiting for the interviewer to step in and tell you what to do. Yeah, maybe some good coders can't do that so well, but keep in mind that when we hire you, we then have to work right alongside you and (potentially) clean up your mistakes for the next however many years. If you can't show us that you're at least somewhat of a logical thinker, we can't feel safe in hiring you.
Now, for me, those guys are increasingly valuable as we go down the list. But if all you're looking for is speed and you're using toy examples where any decent guy ought to get everything right, you'll probably pick the first guy first, the second guy second, and the third guy last. I agree completely with your estimation of who's the most valuable. The thing is, you can't tell from an interview what kind of code someone's going to put out after months of working on a project. All you can really do is weed out the guy who can't write five lines of code in a half hour. The rest is basically down to personality and the "feel" of how you'd fit with the team.
You can build a decent 20 terabyte storage array for around 20 grand. It'd span 7 or 8 servers, but still, much better than trying to organize rooms full of DVDs.
How is seeing whether you can solve basic problems the same as "selecting for people who think like me"? I don't care HOW they solve the problem, so long as they seem competent. If I was looking for an exact algorithmic approach, then I could see your point, but when the process is just to give them a problem and see what they do... I don't buy that it's all that limiting.
Yeah... I'm not saying I intentionally fuck with people. I just leave some things undefined, and see whether they immediately ask for clarification or, as you say, get that "BS artist" vagueness and start throwing random lines of code at the board. I leave nothing vague that can't be corrected by 30 seconds of discussion about the problem, and I'll usually accept whatever way they choose to define something if they start filling in the vagueness with their own assumptions.
Secondly, I've known some people that could write software that "worked", but it was far from pretty, and it took an inordinate amount of time. We need someone who can code at a reasonable speed, where other companies, particularly non-tech companies who just have some internal tool programmers, may not care as much.
Finally, it doesn't matter so much whether you actually solve the problem, but the work process that goes into it is key. If you stare at the board and just write some stuff, it tells me nothing. That's why I like simple questions posed in a slightly vague manner. I leave a lot of things undefined about the problem to see what the person will do. They can choose to assume things, which is fine as long as the state that they're assuming it. They can ask me for clarification, which I'll gladly provide. Any of these things is a big plus, because it shows you know how to analyze a vague problem, figure out the things you need to clarify it, and still move forward with an implementation without stalling on questions and definitions. The ones who fail are inevitably the ones who just stare at the board, write a couple lines of code, erase them, stare some more, etc. Specs aren't always clear. Requirements and bug reports aren't always clear. If you can't ask the right questions to clarify a slightly vague 200 level coding quiz, you're not someone many people would want to work with.
One other comment: some people may suck at this because they rely on the compiler for everything. You can get surprisingly complex systems out of guess-and-check programming, but it's far from ideal. Quite a few new grads have this problem, although I'm not so sure about the more experienced programmers.
I agree with most of that. I'm basically one of the 20 year olds the story is complaining about. I ask retardedly easy questions when I interview people, and on occasion I will be a bit vague on purpose, to see if they will ask clarifying questions or just fumble around for a half hour (guess which one gets you hired?). The problem is, I've interviewed people who claim to have been working in industry longer than I've been alive, and you'd be amazed how many of them can't code what basically boils down to a double nested for loop. I've had people go up to the white board and fumble around for 30 minutes only to wind up back where they started. You have to ask those retardedly easy questions because half the candidates can't answer them, even the ones who've been full time workers for decades.
As for incorrect knowledge of some algorithmic stuff... there's two options. One is, they may know the correct answer, but are waiting to see if you do, and if you'll correct them. In one of my interviews coming out of college, a person said something about the problem I was working that was blatantly incorrect. He'd been working on a similar system for months, so I'm convinced that he was just seeing whether I'd correct him, or defer to him as "the authority". I corrected him, and I got the offer. The second option is that he doesn't, in which case you should stand up to him anyway. Even if he doesn't know you're right, most people will respect someone who isn't afraid to contradict them. If you just blandly defer to everything they say, how do they know what it would be like to try to design a system with you?
Not all of the impressions of snobbery at Microsoft are real, though. I found them very friendly in my interviews, and very down-to-earth. Probably depends on the group you're interviewing with, but there's a lot of people who are just good at what they do, and want you to show them that you're good at it as well.
And yet, surprisingly enough, 300 extra scanlines won't make Scream Blackula Scream any better of a movie...
I believe Germs is a direct rip-off of Bowie's I'm Afraid of Americans.
Full albums from allofmp3 are typically around 85 cents (ogg with q4 encoding)
I've actually seen a demonstration where the president of the company used his own hand. Quite a show of faith in your product, I have to say, and very impressive as a selling tool.
Going to church has nothing to do with crime. I'd bet you just about anything that several of the Enron guys were regular churchgoers. It's all a matter of need and opportunity. It sounds like you live in a relatively low population density area, in which pretty much everybody is relatively well off. Those two things are really all you need to make the crime rate plummet.