demallien

The problem with testing algorithms is that it in no way tests intelligence. I would think that 9 out of 10 programmers that know an algorithm would not be able to derive the algorithm from first principles. So you are just testing esoteric knowledge - it's qualitatively no different that asking someone questions about a specific framework / API.

You could make the argument that algorithms tend to be studied more by smarter people, but if that's what you're going for you may as well ask them about their hobbies, and hire the person that is into playing chess, or doing astronomy (or whatever intellectual pursuit you care to name).

If on the other hand you are interested in a person's ability to code, ask them to do so. The last time I had to hire someone, I wrote a small application with one module that was deliberately written in an obfuscated style. I asked candidates to bring that module under control - rewrite it in a readable code style. To do this, successful candidates needed to identify what the current code was doing by examining the public interfaces in a debugger, documenting what the calls seemed to do, prepare unit tests, and then rewrite the module in a readable style. It took about a day for most candidates to do.

At the end of that, you get to see a candidate's ability to read code, use a debugger, write unit tests, write documentation, and write well structured code, which is a pretty good coverage of the typical tasks in a developer's day. I feel this gives a much more realistic assessment of a candidate's capabilities that asking questions about a more or less randomly chosen algorithm.

10ms is the absolute maximum difference in time, if the source was located on a line running through the two detectors. If the source was located on a perpendicular bisector of the line running through the two detectors, the difference in time between detections at the two detectors would be zero. Any value between the two is possible depending on the geometry.

Because Falcon9 is a big launcher taking a serious payload into orbit. This means that the first stage has to have very large engines - so large that they can't be throttled down to hover, they have to kill velocity at the point of touchdown.

It's the difference between slowing your car down gently to stop at a red light, and having your car going at max speed and slamming on the brakes as hard as you can at exactly the right moment so that you will eventually stop at the lights. One is easy to do, the other will most likely get you killed.

"The markets thought Lehman had big exposure to the US residential and commercial mortgages, hence they couldn't borrow, hence they went bust."

This is the sort of thing I mean when I say derivatives are hard to evaluate correctly. So yeah, Lehmans totally went bust because of their large amounts of trading in CDS.

If this was true, Lehman Brothers would still be in operation today. Derivatives, by their very nature, are harder to truly evaluate in terms of value, and the chance of them going horribly wrong has already been demonstrated as being non-zero (see GFC).

It's not so much the problem being simple, but more about it being a problem you have already solved. If you give me a blitter API and ask me to write a composited then yes, I can churn out the required quantity of code with ease each day. I know the problems, I know at least one solution, so I won't ever have to head up dead end alleys, stop and research options on the Internet, discover that I've chosen a really inefficient algorithm that requires a near complete rewrite to avoid, and so on. Ask me to patch an existing code base that I'm unfamiliar with to add a new option on a settings screen, and those 5 lines might take me two or more weeks to write, even though the task is simple.

I think you'll find that andreyf codes on SarcasmOS..

Firstly, you assert that everyone wants their own big car. This is not true. I don't want one, and I'm not alone in that amongst people living in cities with good public transport.

I choose my mode of travel (including cars) as a function of the time it's going to take to get there, and how much stuff I'm lugging. If I am carrying a lot or travelling out of peak hour, I take a car. If I'm under time pressure, I'll probably take the metro.

In Paris we have Autolib, which is a wonderful car service where you can reserve a car at one station and drop it off at another. There are over a thousand if these stations in the city, so there's normally one near you and your destination. But the brilliance of this is that I can go to work using public transport (because peak hour), gi to the gym after work and then drive home. Or catch public transport to a restaurant in a Saturday evening, and drive home, or whatever. Self driving cars will make this type of system even better because I can use one without having a station near me, I just call a car.

At the moment city centres get clogged by cars because public transport in the suburbs is horrible. But if you can get a car to a transport hub and then commute into the centre, I think a lot of people would prefer that to being stuck in heavy traffic for hours. Maybe not you, but many people.

Cars are still bloody expensive. Many many people make the decision not to buy a car when they live in a city with good public transport. It's only in places like Australia and most of the US where you practically need a car that ownership is ubiquitous. Elsewhere people find that there are better things to spend all of that money on...

I'm not convinced that people linking immigrants and terrorism are particularly worried about the actual immigrants turning out to be terrorists in disguise. It's more a worry that they will just add to the ghettoisation of Islamic communities, which is precisely where this latest crop of French terrorists seem to have sprung from.

Well, because the comments being made are laced with gender, so the gender of the comments is surely relevant, no? I mean, I understand where you are coming from - the title can be interpreted to apply to all men, when it only applies to some men. So adding "some" to the title might be a good adjustment. Removing "men" from the title however is not warranted.

Maybe I'm being obtuse, but wouldn't that be an argument for prohibition? As in, drugs that aren't prohibited cause much more harm than those that are?

The tube line is a custom one-off system. The components aren't though.

I'm a regular Autolib user in Paris, and I have to say Autolib is just pure awesome. It's the piece of the puzzle that has been missing in public transport, because sometimes you just need a car. Some examples:

Moving large bulky items

Getting around quickly in the suburbs, out of the city centre

Rerving parking in the city centr a ahead of time

Actually, those are the three main use cases for me. I do everything else with my electric bike or the metro. Still, the service has changed my life - I no longer own a car because of it, and I'm not alone in that. Just yesterday another friend was selling her car on Facebookfor the same reason.

Anyway, I think the Indy city council would do better by stopping worrying about who had the right to do what, and just get behind this thing. It just makes people's lives better.