qntm

> I am trying to do away with material things and spend less money.

Point being, these two things are orthogonal to one another.

Apparently the solution is

(1) correct an error in the question which renders it unsolvable (a_3 should be 9, not 7)

(2) guess that the invented term "convolution series" doesn't have anything to do with the mathematical concept of convolution[1]

(3) a_n = nth square number minus nth prime minus nth Fibonacci number.

Staring you right in the face!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution#Definition

That's a really bad question, and I'm not just saying that because I don't know what the answer is. The first three sequences are very ordinary mathematical series, suggesting that the fourth would be the same. But the sequence 1, 5, 7, 15, 20 doesn't appear in OEIS[1], let alone 1, 5, 7, 15, 20, 28. I feel comfortable in announcing that if a sequence doesn't appear in OEIS, it isn't mathematically significant. Likewise, "convolution series" doesn't appear to have a well-defined mathematical interpretation.

What sequence is this and what is the justification for 28 being the next number?

[1] http://oeis.org/

Yes, neatly circumventing all of the clever algorithmic complexity optimisation that the interviewer is apparently looking for, and making this an even worse interview question.

It's actually quite lucky that the world has a sensible longitude upon which an International Date Line can be dropped. Imagine if there was an unbroken ring of industrialised nations going all the way around the Earth, I can see a situation where each nation wants to do business with the nation to its immediate west so badly that they just adjust their clocks forward and forward over the course of decades. Eventually, every nation on Earth has done it, and an entire day has essentially disappeared from the calendar - except that the UK is at UTC+24:00 now.

To say nothing of that one Where's Wally image consisting entirely of imperfect Wally impersonators, with one real Wally identifiable only because has the correct hat, glasses and chin.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61eiboxUJhL.jpg

A coder is somebody who writes code. Engineering is much broader discipline than just writing the code - it means writing it well, writing it to be concise, readable, maintainable, standards-compliant, specification-compliant, reliable, well-performing, possibly scalable, user-friendly and everything else that what is essentially a robust machine needs to be. In addition, software engineers can specialise in development, testing, design/architecture, performance, UI and probably many other things I can't think of right now.

What I'm saying is that making software good is hard. It takes a lot of different skills in addition to mere coding. Actually writing the code - pressing buttons on a computer to enter text into an editor - is one stage in a long process, and all of these stages are as important as each other.

Some of these are skills which you probably have! So calling yourself a mere coder is underselling yourself.

The clock in Majora's Mask wasn't there to provide time pressure during the regular Zelda dungeoneering. That's the part of the formula that rarely gets tinkered with, and MM had relatively little of it.

The clock was there to provide a Groundhog Day-like structure and a more genuine "approaching apocalypse" atmosphere. If you don't act, the world really does end. And by the end of the game, you've not just saved the world, but got to know everybody in the game world and made a difference in their lives. It was much more emotional game than other Zeldas, especially in comparison with its predecessor, Ocarina Of Time, which is what it had to measure up to.

What, no leap seconds?

Are your father's cab driver peers also working 12-16 hour schedules?

Then what is it built for doing 8 hours a day? Running? Swimming?

What percentage of that is stream revenue from existing mainframe customers?

I'm not sure there's anything there to be solved. If a "function" can return two different answers despite being provided with the exact same input parameters, you simply should not be attempting to memoize it.

I think the difference there is that when a 747 engine explodes, there are three other engines and the plane may well still be landable. When a Space Shuttle engine explodes, everybody is almost certainly dead and the Shuttle crashes.

I'm saying that pragmatically, unrecoverable errors don't need testing, and NASA's class of possible unrecoverable errors is much wider than any airline's. The fact that SpaceX feels the need to test so rigorously is a good sign about what they want to be "recoverable" and therefore about how safe their hardware is intended to be.

Well, there's a bunch of mitigating circumstances there. You mentioned classroom instruction for yourself. Many languages are similar so you could have picked up one language quite easily because of its similarity to one you knew already. You mentioned self study. A child (if that's what you mean by "girl") is obviously going to pick up new languages faster than an adult. A children's education game is obviously going to use slower, clearer, simpler language specifically for the purposes of teaching the child. And without more information, for all I know your Cantonese-speaking friends are actually Chinese.

The main reason why I maintain that you do need some classroom time or tutoring or book-learning is that we are adults now.

This approach might be very useful once you've done some classroom work to give you a running start. But seriously, without knowing any of grammar, word order, pronunciation rules, verb conjugation or vocabulary, you simply cannot learn a language this way.

Sure, but this raises enormous questions of where, exactly, the spread of personal standards is distributed for the various demographics in one's target audience.

> Try/catch is goto wrapped in pretty braces. There's no way to continue where you left off, once the error is handled.

...

> But still, nothing is as bad as the common "On Error Resume Next" that so many terrible VB programs start with.

Assuming "On Error Resume Next" does what I think it does, you can't complain about both of these at once.

That's not left-recursion.

How can this left-recurse? Can you give an example? I thought regular expressions weren't recursive at all.

I'm okay with Perl decreasing in popularity. It's okay for a thing to serve its purpose and then bow out.

I know more about Perl than I do about Python so I can't comment on Python's execution of its chosen philosophy, but I certainly prefer it as a philosophy of programming language design.

You're proving your own point about the subtlety of reference handling and the important of coding standards in Perl. Was that intentional?

    say @{$ref}->[0];

This raises a deprecation warning for me.

    say @{$ref}[0];

This is technically correct, as the leading sigil "@" indicates you are returning an array, but since you're only returning one element in that array, this should probably be "${$ref}[0]" which returns a scalar only.

    say $ref->[0];  

This the only form which I would consider correct or "clean".

This example proves nothing about Perl's power, though. The fact that difficult and fiddly reference handling shenanigans are necessary to handle something as trivial as nested arrays and hashes shows quite the opposite.

> Another thing that Perl seems to lack is orthogonality, I always get the impression that the language allows you to solve the same problem in 10 different ways.

This is a deliberate feature of Perl, whose motto is "There's More Than One Way To Do It".

Not to defend the practice, since the fact that there are 10 ways to do something means that (1) there's a 90% chance that when you look at somebody else's code you can't understand it, unless you learned all 10 ways and (2) at least 50% of those ways are objectively worse than the alternatives, but people will still use them because Perl programmers are encouraged to solve problems in whatever way they can.

Contrast with Python, where "There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it".

It says here[1] "All GPS receivers capable of functioning above 18 kilometres (11 mi) altitude and 515 metres per second (1,001 kn)[56] are classified as munitions (weapons) for which U.S. State Department export licenses are required. These limits attempt to prevent use of a receiver in a ballistic missile." News to me!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Restr...

I find one of the disproportionately hardest things in fiction is coming up with names for things. Now I'm writing a thing where people cast magic spells and I find myself needing a boatload of original fictional words which read like they have a common syntax and origin. So this should be useful!

> I'm sure Canonical has done plenty of research on usability.

Any links? I've found a few results from months ago, but results/feedback there weren't so positive.

http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-uni... http://lwn.net/Articles/438678/

JSON is a great data interchange format but I would veto it as an option for configuration files since it doesn't permit comments.

I've never seen "photon" spelled with an F before.

So what does influence take-up? And does Dart have it?