Comment by Infinitesimus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Infinitesimus | Hacker News Reader

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... it'll be fun if you start from what happens when the enter key is pressed- the mechanics and electronics involved in submitting that URL (and some chemistry and physics behind what your eyes see on the screen), the physical transmission of the signal from your computer to through the interwebs and some error correction protocols to ensure your signals are still useful.

Maybe toss a line or two in about the complexities of running a large data center and how your response time varies based on some sorcery.

Then you go the extra mile and weave a tale of electrons wrestling with their universe of invisible electromagnetic wave overlords that determine their fate while they embark on a treacherous journey to convey information thousands of kilometers across with blistering speed. Tell them of the aged electron saw a family member get attacked by a stray cosmic ray and the fright of the pack when one simply tunneled out of existence...

> it'll be fun

Not during an interview, though. The interviewer would see it as trolling (at best), and you would fail the interview. And for a good reason! Because as an engineer (and an intelligent person in general) you must be able to separate what is essential from the non-essential for the subject in question. For instance, the physics or the physiology of the process of pushing a key on a keyboard is probably not what the question was about, nor do those things in fact have much to do with typing, even (which you can do on a touchscreen or using the mouse).

This answer reminds me of the blog post of the guy asked to implement a linked list iirc during an interview, and he does it all in Haskell's type system.

https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

Oh it was N queens, but the line I remembered was "Summon a linked list from the void."

That’s the joke!

When we start looking at life at the level of physics, chemistry, and biochemistry, the absolute beauty of the system begins to appear. The complexity is on a scale that's difficult to imagine or even unimaginable even to those trained in the fields, and there is a feeling of wonder that words can't capture

Going over quantum electrodynamics to explain how to make microcircuits would be fun, that was our first class specific to electrical engineering for me some 30 plus years ago.

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