Hacker News Reader

I don't see the problem with these questions. If you are really good it will take you 5 minutes to answer that question. That is it. And lamenting about interviewer waisting your time is ridiculous, you waist much more time every day on the stuff that is less useful. The point of the question is to quickly check if you can think logically that is it.

View on HN

It isn't a well-formed question. There's so many different kinds of buses, there might be furniture, it might be toy bus, the doors might be open, it might be an alien bus, it might be full with people or superglue; Who knows? The question is so loosely-formed as to be nonsensical. You might as well ask "How many/much object(s) can fit (insert spatial relationship here) (a/an/the) thing(s)?"

Well to me it seems like a lot of questions in the real world are formed like this. I.e. if you are asked to find how many customers will buy a book of your website you make some reasonable assumptions like: The world will not come to an end tomorrow You don't ask a person what should be defined as a book or what should be defined as a buy etc. What I mean is that it is good to have the ability to research the common case. And imagine the question about balls was a real problem that your company faced, I don't think you would ask your colleagues all the questions that you pointed out.

But in this case (golf balls on a bus), I don't know what kind of assumptions I can and cannot make. It isn't a real-world problem, so I can't use my 'common sense' to reason about its constraints.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com