how many effing times does one have to sit through company-wide mandatory sex-harassment or diversity-appreciation classes?
In some cases, required by law so not an option. In all cases, how would you define "line" if you don't train people in where the line is? If someone crosses an undocumented line and one that they are not trained in and you fire them, you'd better be sure they are not a "protected class" or you will expect a lawsuit from the person dismissed. I hate these things too, but our litigious nanny society leaves few options for companies of a size worthy of suing.
Yes - but he was convinced that he had found the answer already. He was not, at least in his mind, using himself to test on -- he was using himself as a subject to overcome the "settled science" mentality of the entrenched medical and scientific community by showing that he had, in fact, found the answer.
It seems to me that cases like these are quite different.
I was not in the web bubble for some of it. But as a hiring development manager during that time, it was clear that salaries of all decent developers were impacted seriously by the bubble. This was especially true for good "fresh outs". The effect was that we had to pay a lot more for good fresh outs, and then to keep their pay equitable with more experienced and valuable developers, had to give the experienced and valuable developers high raises. It is, of course, true that the founders and VCs always make out better than the rest in successful startup companies - but that's immaterial to the issue of if the rest also saw an increase in salaries.
Do you also think that salary growth should not exceed inflation if supply and demand were to result in that? If not, why would expect them to always keep up with inflation? In fact, how can everyone's salary at least keep up with inflation while some people's salary go up by more than inflation -- the extra money in the pockets of those getting better raises will increase demand and drive inflation up.
This is related to the fallacy that has amused me for decades that "housing would beat inflation in the long term". If housing prices go up at x+1% a year while inflation (and, hence, salary growth) is x% a year, eventually it will be impossible for workers to afford homes -- which will drive demand down and cause prices to correct. Sure, short term, there can be cultural changes that allow housing prices to continue to rise above inflation (such as more households becoming "dual income" or more people sharing houses), but these options eventually thin out.
KASTE: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages for computer programmers have stagnated. In fact, between 2001 and 2011, the mean hourly wage didn't even keep up with inflation. It's still less than $40.
Why would this be surprising? 2001 was the end of the tech bubble when salaries were ridiculously inflated. Why would one expect them to keep up with inflation?
Why not compare 1994 to 2011? That would been more appropriate (although I don't know what it would show!)
After the bubble burst, it was rare to give an employee a pay cut to reflect the new market realities because of concerns about employee retention and morale. Either you laid them off because you couldn't afford them anymore or you didn't give them raises. Of course, workers who were hired to back-fill attrition or for new projects tended to get lower salaries -- but not dramatically so in part because of the salary inequities that would have caused (only unions seem willing to categorically accept dramatically lower compensation for everyone starting after date X than for those starting on or before date X - odd "good old boy's club").
This is a little like saying that housing has not kept up with general inflation -- by comparing 2006 prices to 2013 prices instead of comparing 1990 prices to 2013 prices.
If only one twin is responsible for the rapes, how do we know that that the other knows he did them? Maybe all one knows is that he didn't do them and, of course, the other twin who is responsible would likely make the same claim falsely.
This is what happens when standardized tests are the focus of education.
It seems that the standardized tests were not the cause of a decline, rather that the cause of the standardized tests was a decline.
In the United States, the introduction of widespread standardized testing that elementary and middle school level teachers cared about was mostly in response to concerns about the decline in the education of our young adults.
IIRC, math at the elementary school and middle school levels is the area that the US does the worst WRT other leading nations (and which is probably the best indicator subject for if we are going to be turning out engineers and scientists or dishwashers and retail clerks). In standardized math tests used within the US at these levels I've seen small problems but they seem to fairly accurately gauge what the student knows about math and certainly reflect what was expected (and less) of similar "educated" students 40 years ago.
Teaching math "to the test" is the hard way to do it. Teach math - the tests test that. Of all subjects at the elementary and middle school levels, I think this is most true of math.
For some reason, the elementary school education institution in the US in the past few decades has chosen to teach math more as if it were a "soft" subject. For example, there's lots of "group work" in math now - WTF? The net result of group work is that the kids who "get it" in the group do the work and the rest don't even try (to fail in a group is embarrassing and, besides, the group "achieved their goal" without your help, so why work?). By the end of third grade, the die is usually cast for the kids who were not forced to work their own problems (and, receive incremental help along the way as it became obvious they were struggling with one or more specific concepts) - they will almost never catch up and will fall only further and further behind feeling like idiots and, in self defense, finding other pursuits (such as gangs). For another example, there's to much emphasis on "creative" thinking - it's important to explain the "why's" to the students (several times), but it's also important to do the work (sometimes derisively called "drill and kill") - and in that process the why's begin to sink in or be reinforced. Teach WHY and HOW to "adjust" decimal points during multiplication and long division - some will remember the why and reconstruct the how as needed, some will only remember the how, many will remember only some of both and still do well.
As well, the elimination of "tracking" in many schools has been a mistake. Apparently tracking would "hurt the feeling" of any child not in the top group, so it' s better to toss them into the common pool and feel good while they drown quietly. This forces the teacher to "teach to the middle". This is a disservice to all groups. The kids who are not getting it find the explanations increasingly over their heads. The true "middle" group isn't challenged as much as they could be because the teacher is trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to help the less successful students rather than trying to step up the tempo to advance the students in the middle. The students who are advanced are bored -- unfortunately, this turns some off to education and leads them astray outside of school and most of the rest are grossly unchallenged wasting a lot of valuable opportunity that will almost never be fully reclaimed (time, especially during the period where children are more "plastic", is a precious commodity that simply can't be reclaimed or fully compensated for once wasted wantonly)
It's not just the school's fault of course.
Parents are the biggest part of the problem On the one hand, a shockingly large percentage of recent immigrants come from cultures where education is not important - enough education to earn a bit more than minimum wage is fine (and, in some cases it seems, is preferable because if the kid
Protesters are actually permitted access to some "public private" places in the US even if the owner/operator of that facility objects. See Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins or the Wikipedia explanation.
So, that would be something like, in the US, banning the sale of any device or service (including ISP, megaphones, loudspeakers, microphones, radio transmitters and receivers, printing presses, paper, ink, magic markers, pencils, pens, poster board, steel made to build billboards etc) used for free speech without falling afoul of the First Amendment's enumerated rights of freedom of speech and press?
And a spinning asterisk or swirlie does that fine, without implying anything about "progress" or "time left".
The spinning asterisk or swirlie just tells you that the thread updating the asterisk or swirlie hasn't frozen -- it often doesn't tell you anything about the underlying activity the user is waiting for.
you'd first have to recursively go through all the directories and sum the sizes
And also figure out which are links to other devices including network storage (both WAN and LAN) and benchmark each to see what its capabilities are. Heaven help you if the destination is on a device with a large non-volatile write cache (such as a hybrid drive) that works really hard at looking just like an ordinary disk drive.
This is perhaps the most glaring weakness of Khan Academy for classroom use. I can't find much data (once one figures out a few undocumented APIs by guessing at their names) that isn't available in the API -- but "available" does not necessarily equate to "practical".
My question: Is an efficient API in the works for those who want to extract data for hundreds of students and process them offline using traditional analytic tools?
If you don't have too many students (like maybe less than 150), it's practical to write a script (I used python just because there's a sample for the OAUTH handling that was written in python), extract it into CSV files, load those into a database of your choosing (I used postgres because it's pretty good at analytical queries and I'm very comfortable with SQL), and query away.
The big problem is the extract speed... I was dealing with about 1000 students (across, obviously, several classrooms) and the full extract takes more than 15 hours using a single API thread because of the high granularity of the API and the latency of each call. By multithreading the API fetches, it appears that I can reduce that by about a factor of 5x or a little more (I got bored before I completed that effort so that's just a preliminary estimate), but it appears that adding more concurrent fetches hits API throttling (or, maybe, just resource limitations) on the Khan cloud side at less than 10 threads.
It would be nice to be able to pull selected data in large "pulls" (perhaps as CSV zip files) and, ideally, for changes since some date (so one can maintain an incrementally updated offline database -- that should only take a few minutes a day).
The large chains probably have better deals with the credit card providers so pay less per transaction/sales dollar than the smaller places. This makes it more practical for the chains to include the credit card transaction cost in the product price.
Brown said the surplus could be at risk from federal deficit actions, a delay in the economic recovery or increasing health-care costs.
So, Brown knows he has an out -- of course Health Care costs will rise and of course the economic recovery can be delayed (i.e., not meet his rosy projections he pulled mostly out of his ass).
This budget also accomplishes the "balanced" feat by tricks like not paying back budgetary debt at the rate he promised if he got his tax increase passed.
It looks mostly like smoke and mirrors as so many budgets are.
The United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights doesn't "grant" any rights to anyone. It itemizes those areas that the Federal government can intrude on the powers of the states and rights of individuals.
The Bill of Rights was a compromise to shut up the anti-federalists. The Founders felt it was obvious that if the Constitution hadn't explicitly granted a power to the Federal Government, they didn't have it. The anti-federalists voiced concerns that it wasn't clear.
The Founder's view seems evidenced in the level of detail in the Constitution listing exactly what the Federal Government can do, esp. in Article 1, Section 8.
I don't know the history of Prohibition well, but now it seems rather quaint that as recently as 1919, folks thought it was necessary to actually amend the Constitution (the Eighteenth Amendment) to ban the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors". Now, we seem to accept that if the Federal Government wants to ban a substance nationwide, they can just do it with, at most, Congressional and Executive approval. How far we have fallen in less than 100 years.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were meant to eliminate any possibility that people in the future would interpret the Bill of Rights as a complete list of rights held by the people and the states. As it turns out, these Amendments were obviously insufficient.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Subsequent Amendments and SCOTUS interpretations/decisions (perhaps most notably the Incorporation Doctrine) have altered the landscape of course by imposing restrictions on states as to what rights they can abridge.
If you're building a new house, construct it so you can pull upgraded wiring/fibre easily in 20 years (sticking it in conduit can be part or all of that equation).
I urge anyone who wants to have an informed opinion on the topic to read this for a legal analysis (and also to return for "Part 2" when available). This is an informed opinion, and obviously one which you need not agree, but it's difficult to have an intelligent discussion unless you consider points raised in this analysis.
However, completely banning them is heavy handed. Sometimes suspects will gladly plea guilty to a lesser charge when they are guilty of a greater charge but the prosecutor decides, for example, that a diversion program plus probation (possible under the lesser charge) is better for all than a prison or jail sentence (the minimum punishment under the greater charge). Such arrangements are sometimes the result of the prosecutor looking at the details and the personal situation of the individual and convincing themselves that the suspect accepts responsibility. To force everyone to go to court instead of having the suspect plead guilty to the lesser charge in exchange for the greater charge being dropped would waste everyone's resources.
I don't disagree with you in general. If he won, however, he would have had a possibility of furthering the cause of changing this broken system using his visibility and story.
Indeed, he likely could have made much more of a difference even if he had decided to spend every last penny he had on his defense (and then the government would have been required to pay for the remainder of his defense), fought the charges, won, and then committed suicide leaving a detailed explanation of how the case the prosecutors couldn't prove had destroyed his life (in reality, after winning, he probably would have decided to abort the "suicide" part of such a plan given his age, skills, and visibility).
Personally, I think prosecutors (the organization, not the individual prosecuting attorney) should be required to pay every "reasonable" expense of defense if the defendant is not convicted with some sort of prorating if multiple charges are brought and only some result in conviction (perhaps using the maximum possible sentences of the various charges to prorate the entire defense bill since trying to tease apart which minute of lawyer time went to defend which charge is probably infeasible). Similarly, if the defendant is found guilty, she should be required to pay the government's reasonable cost of prosecution to the extent they have the resources to do so after victims of the crimes are compensated (so, for example, Bernie Madoff's assets would have all gone to those scammed, not the government for their prosecution costs).
As well, I think it would be appropriate that prosecutors must make all specific threats of additional charges in writing and that once the threat is made, the defendant can demand that the threatened charge (which the prosecutors are less likely to be able to prove if they are threatening to "overcharge") be pursued and that lesser charges for the same act be dismissed with prejudice (subject to some restrictions). The result being, of course, attempts to bully by overcharging would backfire often (leaving the government paying for a defense to a charge that they never really expected to win and giving the defendant a pass on lesser charges).
Some of these requirements for prosecutors to pay for defense of failed prosecutions and the defendant's right to force charging the highest threatened charge may be subject to court approval/review for various reasons. For example, if the preponderance of the evidence shows that the defendant actively misled (vs., fore example, just refused to talk to) prosecutors and that resulted in a higher real or threatened charge than appropriate, the prosecutor should be able to make the lesser charges and not have to pay for any defense related to the higher charges.
This would, of course, unfortunately clog up the court system as prosecutors and defense attorneys adjusted to the new game.
That is what a trial resolves - if whatever the defendant did was illegal or not. Unfortunately, he chose not to resolve that question leaving it up to the next guy to do.
Ah, I didn't understand that the solution he presented actually had the "...", the "etc" (and, perhaps, the "." instead of ''," between the "3" and "5") in it. I suppose one could argue the "..." and "etc." were pseudocode. I do expect smart-ass answers to be correct and complete - to a higher degree than ordinary answers (few things are worse than a smart ass who is also wrong) so he wouldn't have gotten anywhere near full credit from me.
I've never managed developers or been an individual contributor where HR had any significant input (beyond background checks, degree, and job history validation) on the hire/no hire decision. At the larger places, they sometimes did some of the salary negotiation (with me involved in the loop to make sure they were not doing something stupid that would lose a valuable candidate over $5K/year) which was helpful as I wasn't the "bad guy" who negotiated the salary demands (which isn't the best footing to start on). In an environment where HR has much input on hire/no hire, I would imagine there's more need for quantitative and repeatable results.
I don't know why you didn't hire PRINTguy, but his response to this question alone would not deter me in any way from continuing to consider him. I'd assume he was a bit of a smart-ass -- ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer sort of person. I personally like developers with a bit of that attitude -- because when a requirement or request is stupid in context, they seem to push back directly and let me, their lead or manager, know -- which I appreciate even if it was my request that was stupid.
Perhaps he's the guy who, during a sales interview, is handed the interviewer's iPhone and is told "okay, sell this to me" and the guy responds by putting the iPhone in his pocket and says "you can have this iPhone for $500". Or, he's Indiana Jones in the famous Sword-vs-Gun scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I'd take this response as a reason to improve the question - perhaps to be: "Print all the prime numbers from 1 to n for all positive n. Although high performance is acceptable, it is not a requirement as correctness, simplicity, ease of maintenance and implementation cost are paramount".
Slashdot Mirror
In some cases, required by law so not an option. In all cases, how would you define "line" if you don't train people in where the line is? If someone crosses an undocumented line and one that they are not trained in and you fire them, you'd better be sure they are not a "protected class" or you will expect a lawsuit from the person dismissed. I hate these things too, but our litigious nanny society leaves few options for companies of a size worthy of suing.
Yes - but he was convinced that he had found the answer already. He was not, at least in his mind, using himself to test on -- he was using himself as a subject to overcome the "settled science" mentality of the entrenched medical and scientific community by showing that he had, in fact, found the answer.
It seems to me that cases like these are quite different.
I was not in the web bubble for some of it. But as a hiring development manager during that time, it was clear that salaries of all decent developers were impacted seriously by the bubble. This was especially true for good "fresh outs". The effect was that we had to pay a lot more for good fresh outs, and then to keep their pay equitable with more experienced and valuable developers, had to give the experienced and valuable developers high raises. It is, of course, true that the founders and VCs always make out better than the rest in successful startup companies - but that's immaterial to the issue of if the rest also saw an increase in salaries.
Do you also think that salary growth should not exceed inflation if supply and demand were to result in that? If not, why would expect them to always keep up with inflation? In fact, how can everyone's salary at least keep up with inflation while some people's salary go up by more than inflation -- the extra money in the pockets of those getting better raises will increase demand and drive inflation up.
This is related to the fallacy that has amused me for decades that "housing would beat inflation in the long term". If housing prices go up at x+1% a year while inflation (and, hence, salary growth) is x% a year, eventually it will be impossible for workers to afford homes -- which will drive demand down and cause prices to correct. Sure, short term, there can be cultural changes that allow housing prices to continue to rise above inflation (such as more households becoming "dual income" or more people sharing houses), but these options eventually thin out.
Why would this be surprising? 2001 was the end of the tech bubble when salaries were ridiculously inflated. Why would one expect them to keep up with inflation?
Why not compare 1994 to 2011? That would been more appropriate (although I don't know what it would show!)
After the bubble burst, it was rare to give an employee a pay cut to reflect the new market realities because of concerns about employee retention and morale. Either you laid them off because you couldn't afford them anymore or you didn't give them raises. Of course, workers who were hired to back-fill attrition or for new projects tended to get lower salaries -- but not dramatically so in part because of the salary inequities that would have caused (only unions seem willing to categorically accept dramatically lower compensation for everyone starting after date X than for those starting on or before date X - odd "good old boy's club").
This is a little like saying that housing has not kept up with general inflation -- by comparing 2006 prices to 2013 prices instead of comparing 1990 prices to 2013 prices.
If only one twin is responsible for the rapes, how do we know that that the other knows he did them? Maybe all one knows is that he didn't do them and, of course, the other twin who is responsible would likely make the same claim falsely.
It seems that the standardized tests were not the cause of a decline, rather that the cause of the standardized tests was a decline.
In the United States, the introduction of widespread standardized testing that elementary and middle school level teachers cared about was mostly in response to concerns about the decline in the education of our young adults.
IIRC, math at the elementary school and middle school levels is the area that the US does the worst WRT other leading nations (and which is probably the best indicator subject for if we are going to be turning out engineers and scientists or dishwashers and retail clerks). In standardized math tests used within the US at these levels I've seen small problems but they seem to fairly accurately gauge what the student knows about math and certainly reflect what was expected (and less) of similar "educated" students 40 years ago.
Teaching math "to the test" is the hard way to do it. Teach math - the tests test that. Of all subjects at the elementary and middle school levels, I think this is most true of math.
For some reason, the elementary school education institution in the US in the past few decades has chosen to teach math more as if it were a "soft" subject. For example, there's lots of "group work" in math now - WTF? The net result of group work is that the kids who "get it" in the group do the work and the rest don't even try (to fail in a group is embarrassing and, besides, the group "achieved their goal" without your help, so why work?). By the end of third grade, the die is usually cast for the kids who were not forced to work their own problems (and, receive incremental help along the way as it became obvious they were struggling with one or more specific concepts) - they will almost never catch up and will fall only further and further behind feeling like idiots and, in self defense, finding other pursuits (such as gangs). For another example, there's to much emphasis on "creative" thinking - it's important to explain the "why's" to the students (several times), but it's also important to do the work (sometimes derisively called "drill and kill") - and in that process the why's begin to sink in or be reinforced. Teach WHY and HOW to "adjust" decimal points during multiplication and long division - some will remember the why and reconstruct the how as needed, some will only remember the how, many will remember only some of both and still do well.
As well, the elimination of "tracking" in many schools has been a mistake. Apparently tracking would "hurt the feeling" of any child not in the top group, so it' s better to toss them into the common pool and feel good while they drown quietly. This forces the teacher to "teach to the middle". This is a disservice to all groups. The kids who are not getting it find the explanations increasingly over their heads. The true "middle" group isn't challenged as much as they could be because the teacher is trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to help the less successful students rather than trying to step up the tempo to advance the students in the middle. The students who are advanced are bored -- unfortunately, this turns some off to education and leads them astray outside of school and most of the rest are grossly unchallenged wasting a lot of valuable opportunity that will almost never be fully reclaimed (time, especially during the period where children are more "plastic", is a precious commodity that simply can't be reclaimed or fully compensated for once wasted wantonly)
It's not just the school's fault of course.
Parents are the biggest part of the problem On the one hand, a shockingly large percentage of recent immigrants come from cultures where education is not important - enough education to earn a bit more than minimum wage is fine (and, in some cases it seems, is preferable because if the kid
For the record, "Will do! Thanks for the reply." AC reply is not me.
Protesters are actually permitted access to some "public private" places in the US even if the owner/operator of that facility objects. See Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins or the Wikipedia explanation.
So, that would be something like, in the US, banning the sale of any device or service (including ISP, megaphones, loudspeakers, microphones, radio transmitters and receivers, printing presses, paper, ink, magic markers, pencils, pens, poster board, steel made to build billboards etc) used for free speech without falling afoul of the First Amendment's enumerated rights of freedom of speech and press?
The spinning asterisk or swirlie just tells you that the thread updating the asterisk or swirlie hasn't frozen -- it often doesn't tell you anything about the underlying activity the user is waiting for.
And also figure out which are links to other devices including network storage (both WAN and LAN) and benchmark each to see what its capabilities are. Heaven help you if the destination is on a device with a large non-volatile write cache (such as a hybrid drive) that works really hard at looking just like an ordinary disk drive.
This is perhaps the most glaring weakness of Khan Academy for classroom use. I can't find much data (once one figures out a few undocumented APIs by guessing at their names) that isn't available in the API -- but "available" does not necessarily equate to "practical".
My question: Is an efficient API in the works for those who want to extract data for hundreds of students and process them offline using traditional analytic tools?
If you don't have too many students (like maybe less than 150), it's practical to write a script (I used python just because there's a sample for the OAUTH handling that was written in python), extract it into CSV files, load those into a database of your choosing (I used postgres because it's pretty good at analytical queries and I'm very comfortable with SQL), and query away.
The big problem is the extract speed... I was dealing with about 1000 students (across, obviously, several classrooms) and the full extract takes more than 15 hours using a single API thread because of the high granularity of the API and the latency of each call. By multithreading the API fetches, it appears that I can reduce that by about a factor of 5x or a little more (I got bored before I completed that effort so that's just a preliminary estimate), but it appears that adding more concurrent fetches hits API throttling (or, maybe, just resource limitations) on the Khan cloud side at less than 10 threads.
It would be nice to be able to pull selected data in large "pulls" (perhaps as CSV zip files) and, ideally, for changes since some date (so one can maintain an incrementally updated offline database -- that should only take a few minutes a day).
Obviously we must ban shoelaces. Velcro Industries will be very happy!
It's what the TSA does to passengers.
The large chains probably have better deals with the credit card providers so pay less per transaction/sales dollar than the smaller places. This makes it more practical for the chains to include the credit card transaction cost in the product price.
Take away California's weather and tell us how well that state does.
So, Brown knows he has an out -- of course Health Care costs will rise and of course the economic recovery can be delayed (i.e., not meet his rosy projections he pulled mostly out of his ass).
This budget also accomplishes the "balanced" feat by tricks like not paying back budgetary debt at the rate he promised if he got his tax increase passed.
It looks mostly like smoke and mirrors as so many budgets are.
The Bill of Rights was a compromise to shut up the anti-federalists. The Founders felt it was obvious that if the Constitution hadn't explicitly granted a power to the Federal Government, they didn't have it. The anti-federalists voiced concerns that it wasn't clear.
The Founder's view seems evidenced in the level of detail in the Constitution listing exactly what the Federal Government can do, esp. in Article 1, Section 8.
I don't know the history of Prohibition well, but now it seems rather quaint that as recently as 1919, folks thought it was necessary to actually amend the Constitution (the Eighteenth Amendment) to ban the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors". Now, we seem to accept that if the Federal Government wants to ban a substance nationwide, they can just do it with, at most, Congressional and Executive approval. How far we have fallen in less than 100 years.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were meant to eliminate any possibility that people in the future would interpret the Bill of Rights as a complete list of rights held by the people and the states. As it turns out, these Amendments were obviously insufficient.
Subsequent Amendments and SCOTUS interpretations/decisions (perhaps most notably the Incorporation Doctrine) have altered the landscape of course by imposing restrictions on states as to what rights they can abridge.
If you're building a new house, construct it so you can pull upgraded wiring/fibre easily in 20 years (sticking it in conduit can be part or all of that equation).
I urge anyone who wants to have an informed opinion on the topic to read this for a legal analysis (and also to return for "Part 2" when available). This is an informed opinion, and obviously one which you need not agree, but it's difficult to have an intelligent discussion unless you consider points raised in this analysis.
I'd like to see more oversight on plea deals.
However, completely banning them is heavy handed. Sometimes suspects will gladly plea guilty to a lesser charge when they are guilty of a greater charge but the prosecutor decides, for example, that a diversion program plus probation (possible under the lesser charge) is better for all than a prison or jail sentence (the minimum punishment under the greater charge). Such arrangements are sometimes the result of the prosecutor looking at the details and the personal situation of the individual and convincing themselves that the suspect accepts responsibility. To force everyone to go to court instead of having the suspect plead guilty to the lesser charge in exchange for the greater charge being dropped would waste everyone's resources.
I don't disagree with you in general. If he won, however, he would have had a possibility of furthering the cause of changing this broken system using his visibility and story.
Indeed, he likely could have made much more of a difference even if he had decided to spend every last penny he had on his defense (and then the government would have been required to pay for the remainder of his defense), fought the charges, won, and then committed suicide leaving a detailed explanation of how the case the prosecutors couldn't prove had destroyed his life (in reality, after winning, he probably would have decided to abort the "suicide" part of such a plan given his age, skills, and visibility).
Personally, I think prosecutors (the organization, not the individual prosecuting attorney) should be required to pay every "reasonable" expense of defense if the defendant is not convicted with some sort of prorating if multiple charges are brought and only some result in conviction (perhaps using the maximum possible sentences of the various charges to prorate the entire defense bill since trying to tease apart which minute of lawyer time went to defend which charge is probably infeasible). Similarly, if the defendant is found guilty, she should be required to pay the government's reasonable cost of prosecution to the extent they have the resources to do so after victims of the crimes are compensated (so, for example, Bernie Madoff's assets would have all gone to those scammed, not the government for their prosecution costs).
As well, I think it would be appropriate that prosecutors must make all specific threats of additional charges in writing and that once the threat is made, the defendant can demand that the threatened charge (which the prosecutors are less likely to be able to prove if they are threatening to "overcharge") be pursued and that lesser charges for the same act be dismissed with prejudice (subject to some restrictions). The result being, of course, attempts to bully by overcharging would backfire often (leaving the government paying for a defense to a charge that they never really expected to win and giving the defendant a pass on lesser charges).
Some of these requirements for prosecutors to pay for defense of failed prosecutions and the defendant's right to force charging the highest threatened charge may be subject to court approval/review for various reasons. For example, if the preponderance of the evidence shows that the defendant actively misled (vs., fore example, just refused to talk to) prosecutors and that resulted in a higher real or threatened charge than appropriate, the prosecutor should be able to make the lesser charges and not have to pay for any defense related to the higher charges.
This would, of course, unfortunately clog up the court system as prosecutors and defense attorneys adjusted to the new game.
That is what a trial resolves - if whatever the defendant did was illegal or not. Unfortunately, he chose not to resolve that question leaving it up to the next guy to do.
Ah, I didn't understand that the solution he presented actually had the "...", the "etc" (and, perhaps, the "." instead of ''," between the "3" and "5") in it. I suppose one could argue the "..." and "etc." were pseudocode. I do expect smart-ass answers to be correct and complete - to a higher degree than ordinary answers (few things are worse than a smart ass who is also wrong) so he wouldn't have gotten anywhere near full credit from me.
I've never managed developers or been an individual contributor where HR had any significant input (beyond background checks, degree, and job history validation) on the hire/no hire decision. At the larger places, they sometimes did some of the salary negotiation (with me involved in the loop to make sure they were not doing something stupid that would lose a valuable candidate over $5K/year) which was helpful as I wasn't the "bad guy" who negotiated the salary demands (which isn't the best footing to start on). In an environment where HR has much input on hire/no hire, I would imagine there's more need for quantitative and repeatable results.
I don't know why you didn't hire PRINTguy, but his response to this question alone would not deter me in any way from continuing to consider him. I'd assume he was a bit of a smart-ass -- ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer sort of person. I personally like developers with a bit of that attitude -- because when a requirement or request is stupid in context, they seem to push back directly and let me, their lead or manager, know -- which I appreciate even if it was my request that was stupid.
Perhaps he's the guy who, during a sales interview, is handed the interviewer's iPhone and is told "okay, sell this to me" and the guy responds by putting the iPhone in his pocket and says "you can have this iPhone for $500". Or, he's Indiana Jones in the famous Sword-vs-Gun scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I'd take this response as a reason to improve the question - perhaps to be: "Print all the prime numbers from 1 to n for all positive n. Although high performance is acceptable, it is not a requirement as correctness, simplicity, ease of maintenance and implementation cost are paramount".