masterzora

And my point is that there's nothing to indicate that this candidate was particularly undiplomatic so it's rather senseless to attack them for burning bridges. This is a situation where, given sensible people, bridges will only be burned with the particularly undiplomatic route.

We have way too little to go on to actually decide which way the candidate went. We have one side of the story second-hand filtered via our own interpretations. Thing of it is, given just what we know I could spend ages listing out credible ways it could have gone given what we have.

Assume that the candidate did give something closer to my latter statement. Perhaps the lead wanted a better explanation of what made the fit so poor. Perhaps the lead actually could not comprehend anyone not wanting to work there. Perhaps the lead didn't believe the explanation given. Any of these could feasibly lead to the same account we're given, as could simply leaving abruptly or literally saying "fuck you, fuck this, fuck everything".

I'm sure it would be fine as a first pass but there's no way anyone would end it there. Two obvious immediate objections being that the point where it first rounds to the correct value does not imply the point where it stabilises there and the second being that you're using the value you're trying to calculate in calculating said value. At that point, a good interviewer leads them toward fixing these issues rather than just saying "wrong", of course, but I'm sure the end result is not to use pi in the algorithm.

Also, his next step down isn't really one jump down in difficulty; it's presented as "if you don't even know how to begin to approach that problem I need to make sure that you can code something trivial." That is to say, it's an arbitrary number of steps down that implies little about the initial question's intended difficulty.

While knowing one will certainly ease learning the others it's rather misleading to say that Java, Haskell, Prolog, and Brainfuck all have the same structure. Their differences are significantly beyond syntax.

I wonder if they really do mean to break when the answer hits the known value. If so that's kind of a pathetically useless thing to do. While I know most whiteboard coding problems aren't things you ever need to write in production code, the change to make it break when five decimal places stabilise is not much more difficult and provides an actual nontrivial output.

Did the candidate really risk burning bridges? If he said "fuck you, fuck this, fuck everything, I'm out" then clearly that's just a shitty way to go about it. If he said something closer to "Thank you all for your time. You're doing fascinating work but I don't think that this would be a good fit. I really enjoyed meeting you all and maybe I'll get a chance to work with some of you on a future project." and they decided that was burning a bridge then that is a bridge worth burning.

As an interviewer, I'd have a higher opinion of someone willing to cut an interview short if they realise it's not really going to end well and as a candidate, as long as the company hasn't spent money to fly me out somewhere or something, it's an option I like having on the table for an all-day interview since there's not much point in tiring oneself out if it's not going anywhere.

The internet seems to be a fan of being overreaching in proclaiming fallacies in my experience. Sometimes it feels like you can find at least one misuse of "ad hominem" on every comment thread on reasonably popular sites. Similarly, many people like to dismiss arguments by just saying "slippery slope" and moving on.

As you mentioned, slippery slopes are not inherently invalid. In fact, the real fallacious use of a slippery slope is hardly related to it being a slippery slope at all!

Assume a slope A->B->...->Z. Further, assume that each step of this chain is known to be true with 100% accuracy. That is to say that we can perfectly predict that if A happens then B will happen and if Q happens R will happen. Thus, simple transitivity shows that if A will happen Z will definitely happen. If Z is complete destruction of the Earth you probably won't find many people saying that it will be perfectly okay if we do A because slippery slopes are invalid.

However, slippery slope arguments often have a much smaller probability of occurring at each step of the chain. You often get things like "if we don't have a death penalty then people won't be afraid of killing people so murder rates will go up so you'll get pregnant and die". Clearly there is no part of this chain that occurs with probability 1 (except, as Mean Girls tells us, getting pregnant->death). In fact, most of the chain is fairly low probability and composing them as such makes it even smaller.

To make this a bit clearer again, let's take our A->B->...->Z chain and make each step of the chain have a .9 probability. If A happens, B will occur with .75 chance and if Q happens, R will occur with .75 chance. Since there are 25 hops on this we can see that the probability of Z occurring given A is actually .75^25 = .00075 (ish). Even if each individual step seems reasonable (I mean, hey, it will happen 3 out of 4 times!) the full composition is just laughably unlikely.

However, it seems that GP was actually talking about a continuum fallacy rather than a slippery slope as we've discussed.

I'd reckon that most people experience this argument all the time with regards to their religious and political preferences or lack thereof.

Christian. Muslim. Jewish. Buddhist. Hindu. Republican. Democrat. Moderate. Independent.

Odds are most people who read the above section had some sort of archetypal or stereotypical vision of most or all of those and all of us can identify some of the associated types. And most of us can also realise that not all Christians are fundies (or even vocal), that Jews are greedy with roughly equal proportion of more general populations, that not all moderates have weak political views, etc. But we all get to live with these, though admittedly some are worse than others.

Unfortunately, as much as I hate the middle ground fallacy, it is correct here. It's far too broad to say that locally owned ones are more likely to defraud you or less likely. The real truth about locally-owned establishments is that with big corporations you know exactly what you are getting because it is the same everywhere whereas individual local establishments will depend on who the owner is. If the owner is desperate and willing to do everything to defraud you, so will be the establishment. If the owner is the nicest person in the world they'll be perfectly happy running a business in the red for as long as they can avoid total financial ruin so that they can better serve their customers. And, of course, you'll get everything in between.

The advice to go local is less about it being a guaranteed win and more about it being how you find those who will go above and beyond everything.

To be fair that was pretty much the same thing said about Fermat's Last Hypothesis until Wiles got cheeky in 1994 and made a hundred-page margin.

I'll have to try it out next time I need to get anywhere (which will be soon) but just clicking through you appear to have the two things I really need: a one-click spot for nearby stops of all transit (well, you've got Muni and BART but that's both a good start and the majority of my transit) and the ability to save frequent stops. The ability to check buses around a given stop is also something I've been wanting, though less often.

I don't know if you're planning any of this already but I do have a couple suggestions based on my current frustrations with nextmuni:

1. Favourite buses in addition to favourite stops and prioritise said buses when nearby. I know that 21 and 5 are the two best buses to get me home but when I'm downtown they often aren't even on the nextmuni's nearby list because of the density of buses. I'd love to be able to favourite those buses and have them show up first (or at the very least always show up) if a stop is sufficiently nearby even if I'm at a stop I don't frequent.

2. This one would be a bit more of an involved feature and I'm not sure how feasible it is with whatever dataset and/or APIs you have to work with. Basically, I want to be able to input my destination and have the site serve me buses with stops near both end points (if any exist), giving me time estimates near my current location.

Configuring "nearby" would be handy but far from critical, also.

Perhaps it was a typo and he meant 10%? That would be a perfectly healthy athletic body fat percentage and an easy typo to make.

Ah, full cycle back to /. :)

Not that that's a bad thing. Its moderation system has always been its strong point.

If you spend your time worrying about downvotes you're going to have a bad time. You've given us no context for the comment you're referencing so we can't really answer your question about that but I can tell you that you will be much happier if you worry less about imaginary internet points and just focus on participating with quality content.

This actually confused me when I saw the headline. I saw 'Amazon' and, despite having been working with AWS all night, thought ecommerce first and couldn't figure out what they could name 'Glacier'. I was kind-of-not-really hoping it was going to be a new shipping option guaranteed to take a long time. That said, the actual service looks solid.

Even the honesty of your answers is not the only issue. One of the big ones is that the set of people opting in to a survey is already demonstrating a characteristic different from the set of all people of interest unless the people of interest are for some reason "the set of people opting in to a survey". This alone is enough to muddy or even invalidate the output data.

> If the person is passionate about programming they will have code they are proud of and that can be the start of a conversation.

This statement works better as a negative. If a person is not passionate they will not have such code but a passionate person can have many reasons that they might not as well.

For what it's worth I believe the $1.25 transaction came from extrapolating this to all potential future free transactions being $10 transactions as well. If each receipt is 1/8 of a free meal then we can consider disallowing that one to be costing you $1.25. This analysis is a bit sketchy but if we can assume a decent probability of having many more transactions at this restaurant and we don't know how many at this point it's a fair value to give.

> That suggests that it is not actually meant that way at least a significant portion of the time, correct?

No, it merely suggests that it is sometimes not actually meant that way, anywhere between a single occurrence and always. Extrapolation into actual numbers is both difficult and meaningless. Even if 99/100 people never actually mean "no" it would not make it okay to harass the 1/100.

> The problem of sexual harassment [...]

This entire paragraph seems to be written from the perspective that harassment is only a problem if you are actually held legally liable which is both wrong and a dangerously horrific place to come from so I hope I am misinterpreting what you say.

No, no, no. If you are told "no" by someone who actually means it and decide that this really means "I should keep trying" it means you are being totally creepy by disrespecting their clearly-stated wishes and may well be crossing the line into sexual harassment. "No means no" does not apply strictly to contact only.

Just because a solution is implemented with technology doesn't mean it can't be a people solution for a people problem. There are a number of technological changes that will target the psychology of the people, guiding them toward different behaviour. I agree that the proposals in this post don't seem to address the actual issues very well but I think it would be a mistake to completely disregard technology changes as an avenue for affecting people changes.

Don't do it! Once your fingers learn and start to prefer hjkl you'll waste a lot of time and effort in other programs trying to use them.

Really, more things just need vi-like interfaces :(

Not really. The sentence says that the reason you defect is specifically to avoid the worst possible result. This is bad logic. The reason defect is considered dominant is because, regardless of what the other player does, your outcome is better if you defect. It is a very different statement.

If you find somebody sufficiently serious who specifically wants your stuff no off the shelf security system is going to do any good. The primary value for most people is in convincing would-be thieves that your residence isn't worth the trouble. A dog with a nasty bark is one of the most effective ways of convincing them. Any other security-related services (actually attacking intruders, waking you up, etc) are really bonus.

I'll admit I haven't dealt with wedding registries much at all (really, I watched somebody use a registry kiosk at a store once and that's about it) but I was always under the impression that registries are generally pretty much public.

I've got two gaps in my work history and I explain them fairly similarly: I didn't want to jump from one thing to another immediately if I didn't have to. The first gap was largely spent playing video games and pointedly not doing anything remotely resembling work for most of it, the second is full of travel and independent small projects. In both cases the response I get from companies ranges from "makes sense" to "sounds like a good idea".

It appears that lifetime means lifetime of the product rather than lifetime of the customer. Is anyone really that surprised?

Sure, specialised hardware tends to be more efficient than general purpose hardware but it's not so much "special-purpose hardware is magic" as it is "the general purpose hardware doesn't take advantage of certain properties". As far as I understand the GPU's advantage over CPU (again, graphics is not my area of expertise) it's largely that graphics processes are massively parallel and the GPU is specifically set up to handle massively parallel things. Like I said, I know nearly nothing about video encoding/decoding so I was hoping someone who did could explain things for me. My only guess for how specialised hardware could dramatically save power for video decoding is that it might be comprised of massively parallelisable simple operations.

I'm not at all familiar with video encoding/decoding processes or what they entail. Can you explain how hardware support for it would drastically change power requirements?

How is it a moot point? If you are equally unable to debug it either way then dredmorbius' original argument about the failure point being a bad time to learn to debug is completely meaningless. The point is that either way you're going to have to learn how to fix problems before they happen but dredmorbius is complaining because ey just happens to already know how to debug one form.