The Brits may well elect to ask the EU whether it takes them back on 20 years or so. Of course, they will suffer pretty badly in the meantime and they will have to struggle to meet the acceptance criteria. Alternatively, they can go the Swiss route: Agreements where it counts, but no vote in what the EU does. For a rich, small country like Switzerland, that works well. For the Brits, not so much.
Indeed. These people try to enforce constraints on what private, non-public life people in their community can have. Reminds me of fundamentalist religious fuckups. Probably the same people acting here, but somehow they did not catch religion and are now acting out their perverted fantasies of conformity this way.
Quite possibly these people are vastly overestimating their own skills because they "work at Google". Fortunately, I did not run into socially inept interviewers, but as to the questions asked, they did not have more than surface knowledge. That is not how you interview somebody with advanced skills and experience, because people on that level rarely run into things they have not seen before in some form and that they need to solve on an elementary level. I think this happened to me once in the last 5 years, and there likely is a next case upcoming in the next few months. Both are in research projects.
The really funny thing is that I do know Google would have needed people like me desperately, because on architecture-level (where you need the real experience and insights), they still suck badly and may even be getting worse.
No offense, but "I'd rather just use a library" seriously brings into question what you bring to the table.
Except that's the right answer. It's arrogant pricks who think that they're hot shit who reinvent the wheel, do it badly and then charge headlong into their next coding disaster, energy drink in hand and earbuds in ears. Meanwhile, a more responsible engineer has to come along afterwards and clean up the hot mess so that the users can actually have a working system that isn't chock full of silly bugs.
Oh yes. Of course the answer is not to use "any library", but to carefully select a good algorithm and then use a library for that. I cannot count the times some "Rockstar"-wannabe has reinvented the wheel and did it really, really badly because they were not even aware of the basics.
They want to test if you have the intellect, knowledge and creativity to sketch a solution yourself.
The best way to determine that is to ask an abstract hypothetical question, where there is no existing implementation and no risk of getting it wrong. Bringing in real world concerns that you want the candidate to ignore because "it's an interview question" is stupid because it clouds the issue and prevents the type of answer that you're looking for. Maybe the candidate is an honest guy and prefers to give you the "don't write your own encryption algorithms" answer because in reality that is the right answer. Then you pass up an otherwise excellent candidate because your interview question was poor. Is that really what you want?
While I know that this is not what Google wanted, it is what they did. And on the hash-question, I do know that I do not have what it takes to come up with a good solution (you need to be a cryptographer for that these days and I am only a competent user of crypto) and so I have stopped bothering to even look at it. This is something that everybody competent selects from a catalog. Of course the real problem is that the Google folks vastly overestimate their own skills, or they would have been able to evaluate what the actual quality level for the selection I proposed is and then could have asked why exactly I proposed this one. That question never came, which is an utter fail.
No offense, but you miss the point entirely. What I answered is very far from "use a library". First, it is an algorithm, not a library. That difference is very important. Second, it is a carefully selected algorithm that performs much better than what you commonly find in "libraries" in almost all situations. And third, the hash-functions by Bob Jenkins (and the newer ones bu DJB, for example) are inspired by crypto, but much faster in exchange for reduced security assurances. In fact so fast that they can compete directly with the far worse things commonly in use. "Do not roll your own crypto" _does_ apply_ though.
So while I think you meant to be patronizing, you just come across as incompetent. A bit like the folks at Google, come to think of it...
Indeed. I went though their "interview-process" a while back at the request of a friend that was there and desperately wanted me for his team. Interestingly, I failed to get hired, and I think it is because I knew a lot more about the questions they asked than the people that created (and asked) these questions. For example, on (non-cryptographic) hash-functions my answer was to not do them yourself, because they would always be pretty bad, and to instead use the ones by Bob Jenkins, or if things are slow because there is a disk-access in there to use a crypto hash. While that is what you do in reality if you have more than small tables, that was apparently very much not what they wanted to hear. They apparently wanted me to start to mess around with the usual things you find in algorithm books. Turns out, I did way back, but when I put 100 Million IP addresses into such a table, it performed abysmally bad. My take-away is that Google prefers to hire highly intelligent, but semi-smart people with semi-knowledge about things and little experience and that experienced and smart people fail their interviews unless they prepare for giving dumber answers than they can give. I will never do that.
On the plus side, my current job is way more interesting than anything Google would have offered me.
I have to say that I am less impressed with the quality of the coders at Google the more I know about them. The really good ones are leaving, are thinking about leaving or have already left a while ago. What is left is the mediocre ones that somehow managed to get in.
What has happened instead is that quite a few "tech experts" did not understand what it actually was and had completely unrealistic expectations. Map-reduce is nice when you a) have computing power coming out of your ears and b) have very specific computing tasks. That means that in almost all cases, this technology is a bad choice and that was rather obvious to any actual expert right from the start.
Trump has this rare gift of being both powerful and at the same time so utterly pathetic and incompetent, that he can make reality and satire coincide.
Trump can obviously not fix anything, his followers are just utterly deluded about that. The right question is how many things he can make worse or break. In that light, every time he gets blocked is a good thing for the US.
Occam's Razor is not a valid proof technique and involves a subjective judgment call. It is a way to move forward under uncertain conditions that has a pretty good track record though. One if it main strengths is that usually simpler constructs survive better and hence are more prevalent. In science and technology, it matches well with the golden rule of constructing anything, namely KISS.
There are some areas where it seems to fail catastrophically though. For example, in Physics, both Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are not consistent with it, or it is unclear what it would advocate. (To make matters worse, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are also not consistent with each other, i.e. they cannot both be true unless Physics is even more fundamentally wrong.) Now, Occam's Razor would probably suggest here that somebody is messing with us and that makes the simulation scenario or the presence of a god that does it a likely scenario. On the other hand, there is really no good other evidence for those models.
In reality, Occam's Razor probably works best when amended to say "Prefer the most simple explanation, unless you have good indications it is way off, and move to more complex explanations when validation of the most simple one fails. Also make very sure you understand complexity and do that validation carefully."
It is one valid world model, because it could be true from what we can observe. But so is solipsism, for example, and some other bizarre constructs. You cannot derive the probabilities for any of the these models being the true one from theoretical arguments, and that is what Hossenfelder probably objects to, and rightfully so.
For a large collection of invalid "proofs" of a certain world model, look, for example, at the large collection of "proofs" that God exists.
Well, the IBM application outsourcing teams I see at work on our customer's sites are the most incompetent, arrogant and expensive specimen of developer (as a group) I have ever encountered. Let's see how long they can keep this up....
Slashdot Mirror
There is a high price for collective stupidity.
The Brits may well elect to ask the EU whether it takes them back on 20 years or so. Of course, they will suffer pretty badly in the meantime and they will have to struggle to meet the acceptance criteria. Alternatively, they can go the Swiss route: Agreements where it counts, but no vote in what the EU does. For a rich, small country like Switzerland, that works well. For the Brits, not so much.
I agree. Since a world without Oracle and Accenture would be a decidedly better world, I hope they do it though.
With the records ISPs will be building on people, any kind of profiling will become easy. Have had an impure thought? Your ISP will know!
IMO, that must the the actual reason behind this anti-citizen action.
Looking an what, aehm, "things" they put out there, that cannot have been hard.
Indeed. These people try to enforce constraints on what private, non-public life people in their community can have. Reminds me of fundamentalist religious fuckups. Probably the same people acting here, but somehow they did not catch religion and are now acting out their perverted fantasies of conformity this way.
A "honest question" you do not intend to hear the answer to? Talk about being a liar and stupid.
Why are we giving these people any kind of power at all? They are a clear and present dangers to freedom and society.
Naaa, she is Wonder Woman and according to Feminist Theory, it cannot have been her fault!
Quite possibly these people are vastly overestimating their own skills because they "work at Google". Fortunately, I did not run into socially inept interviewers, but as to the questions asked, they did not have more than surface knowledge. That is not how you interview somebody with advanced skills and experience, because people on that level rarely run into things they have not seen before in some form and that they need to solve on an elementary level. I think this happened to me once in the last 5 years, and there likely is a next case upcoming in the next few months. Both are in research projects.
The really funny thing is that I do know Google would have needed people like me desperately, because on architecture-level (where you need the real experience and insights), they still suck badly and may even be getting worse.
Actually, A-players tend to hire A-players and B-players tend to hire C-players.
No offense, but "I'd rather just use a library" seriously brings into question what you bring to the table.
Except that's the right answer. It's arrogant pricks who think that they're hot shit who reinvent the wheel, do it badly and then charge headlong into their next coding disaster, energy drink in hand and earbuds in ears. Meanwhile, a more responsible engineer has to come along afterwards and clean up the hot mess so that the users can actually have a working system that isn't chock full of silly bugs.
Oh yes. Of course the answer is not to use "any library", but to carefully select a good algorithm and then use a library for that. I cannot count the times some "Rockstar"-wannabe has reinvented the wheel and did it really, really badly because they were not even aware of the basics.
They want to test if you have the intellect, knowledge and creativity to sketch a solution yourself.
The best way to determine that is to ask an abstract hypothetical question, where there is no existing implementation and no risk of getting it wrong. Bringing in real world concerns that you want the candidate to ignore because "it's an interview question" is stupid because it clouds the issue and prevents the type of answer that you're looking for. Maybe the candidate is an honest guy and prefers to give you the "don't write your own encryption algorithms" answer because in reality that is the right answer. Then you pass up an otherwise excellent candidate because your interview question was poor. Is that really what you want?
While I know that this is not what Google wanted, it is what they did. And on the hash-question, I do know that I do not have what it takes to come up with a good solution (you need to be a cryptographer for that these days and I am only a competent user of crypto) and so I have stopped bothering to even look at it. This is something that everybody competent selects from a catalog. Of course the real problem is that the Google folks vastly overestimate their own skills, or they would have been able to evaluate what the actual quality level for the selection I proposed is and then could have asked why exactly I proposed this one. That question never came, which is an utter fail.
No offense, but you miss the point entirely. What I answered is very far from "use a library". First, it is an algorithm, not a library. That difference is very important. Second, it is a carefully selected algorithm that performs much better than what you commonly find in "libraries" in almost all situations. And third, the hash-functions by Bob Jenkins (and the newer ones bu DJB, for example) are inspired by crypto, but much faster in exchange for reduced security assurances. In fact so fast that they can compete directly with the far worse things commonly in use. "Do not roll your own crypto" _does_ apply_ though.
So while I think you meant to be patronizing, you just come across as incompetent. A bit like the folks at Google, come to think of it...
Indeed. I went though their "interview-process" a while back at the request of a friend that was there and desperately wanted me for his team. Interestingly, I failed to get hired, and I think it is because I knew a lot more about the questions they asked than the people that created (and asked) these questions. For example, on (non-cryptographic) hash-functions my answer was to not do them yourself, because they would always be pretty bad, and to instead use the ones by Bob Jenkins, or if things are slow because there is a disk-access in there to use a crypto hash. While that is what you do in reality if you have more than small tables, that was apparently very much not what they wanted to hear. They apparently wanted me to start to mess around with the usual things you find in algorithm books. Turns out, I did way back, but when I put 100 Million IP addresses into such a table, it performed abysmally bad. My take-away is that Google prefers to hire highly intelligent, but semi-smart people with semi-knowledge about things and little experience and that experienced and smart people fail their interviews unless they prepare for giving dumber answers than they can give. I will never do that.
On the plus side, my current job is way more interesting than anything Google would have offered me.
Would not surprise me at all.
I have to say that I am less impressed with the quality of the coders at Google the more I know about them. The really good ones are leaving, are thinking about leaving or have already left a while ago. What is left is the mediocre ones that somehow managed to get in.
What has happened instead is that quite a few "tech experts" did not understand what it actually was and had completely unrealistic expectations. Map-reduce is nice when you a) have computing power coming out of your ears and b) have very specific computing tasks. That means that in almost all cases, this technology is a bad choice and that was rather obvious to any actual expert right from the start.
You are right, of course. So he does not care about it one bit. Always easy to read a pathological liar...
Trump has this rare gift of being both powerful and at the same time so utterly pathetic and incompetent, that he can make reality and satire coincide.
Trump can obviously not fix anything, his followers are just utterly deluded about that.
The right question is how many things he can make worse or break. In that light, every time he gets blocked is a good thing for the US.
Occam's Razor is not a valid proof technique and involves a subjective judgment call. It is a way to move forward under uncertain conditions that has a pretty good track record though. One if it main strengths is that usually simpler constructs survive better and hence are more prevalent. In science and technology, it matches well with the golden rule of constructing anything, namely KISS.
There are some areas where it seems to fail catastrophically though. For example, in Physics, both Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are not consistent with it, or it is unclear what it would advocate. (To make matters worse, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are also not consistent with each other, i.e. they cannot both be true unless Physics is even more fundamentally wrong.) Now, Occam's Razor would probably suggest here that somebody is messing with us and that makes the simulation scenario or the presence of a god that does it a likely scenario. On the other hand, there is really no good other evidence for those models.
In reality, Occam's Razor probably works best when amended to say "Prefer the most simple explanation, unless you have good indications it is way off, and move to more complex explanations when validation of the most simple one fails. Also make very sure you understand complexity and do that validation carefully."
It is one valid world model, because it could be true from what we can observe. But so is solipsism, for example, and some other bizarre constructs. You cannot derive the probabilities for any of the these models being the true one from theoretical arguments, and that is what Hossenfelder probably objects to, and rightfully so.
For a large collection of invalid "proofs" of a certain world model, look, for example, at the large collection of "proofs" that God exists.
So, "CEO" is now a gender? Fascinating. They are now up to, what, 60 genders?
You are certainly right about that.
Well, the IBM application outsourcing teams I see at work on our customer's sites are the most incompetent, arrogant and expensive specimen of developer (as a group) I have ever encountered. Let's see how long they can keep this up....