Seems to me, from the bit you quoted, that their answer would be something along the lines of: "I would restate the point of the post as talking about how SQL is bad at hierarchical data, while using bad SQL to defend this argument." What they actually wrote is so close to this that your claim not to be able to see that feels a tad disingenious.
> First, there is the question of the mythology of the author. Would Shakespeare be himself if he had an AI ghost write his books? Would we care as much?
Idunno... Would Homer? Shakespeare is one thing; we have at least some biographical detail on him. (And even then, quite a few people seem to believe he didn't write the works attributed to him.) But "Homer - the author of the Iliad and the Odyssée" is so unknown to us that experts argue about whether he even existed, whether he was one person or several, and so on. We know him only through his (or, eh, "his") works. Now there you can talk about "the mythology of the author"; that's "mythological", indeed! :-)
For all we know, Homer — or "Homer" — could be an AI! Yeah, sure, very far-fetched and unlikely. But let's say our descendants in the 26th (or 387th) century invent time travel (or their AIs do...), and an AI goes to bronze-age (or was it early iron-age?) Greece and plants these stories, perhaps posing as a person called "Homer"[1], and they survive to this day attributed to this possibly-existing-or-possibly-fictitious person, and are the stories we know as "the Iliad" and "the Odyssée".
Would that change anything about how we percieve, or should percieve, the stories? If so, what and how? Does "an AI" differ from "person or persons unknown" in this scenario?
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[1]: Or it's a flesh-and-blood person using the moniker that does the actual posing-as-"Homer", but he only peddles the stories an AI wrote for him in his home period; whatever.
> An "acre" is a medieval unit of measure defined as one "chain" by one "furlong", the area a single man can plow in a day with a team of oxen. Although people have been plowing with horses since the 12th century, the "acre" is still in use in Texas...
1) People plowed with oxen well into the 20th century. Most places, only fancy people could afford horses at least into the 17th-18th century. So not so totally-medieval.
2) The acre is used in all kinds of backwards (Anglophone) places, not only Texas. All of the USA for starters, probably Australia, maybe the UK... Heck, I remember my elders using the (roughly) corresponding "tunnland" in daily conversation in Sweden as late as the 1970s. (But yeah, they were really rather elderly.)
3) Aren't you the guy who should call that "the 0012th century"? (Sorry if I'm getting you mixed up with someone else.)
Actually, calling geothermal energy "renewable" is a bit of a misnomer, isn't it? At least if the heat energy in the Earth's crust, which is what "geothermal energy" harvests, comes from the inside. The Earth's core may not be cooling down very fast, but we know for sure it's not getting any warmer (not before the Sun in its death throes swells up into a red giant and swallows the inner planets, anyway).
Yeah, I know, super-nitpicky — but, hey, it's the Best Kind Of Correct™. (Unless the crust is actually heated more by the Sun than from below, but I doubt that.)
Most geothermal energy comes from the decay of radioactive elements in the Earth's crust, although heat from Earth's formation is a non-negligible fraction of it. If you check out the web site of Iceland's geothermal energy agency, I believe they do have a calculation there of the sustainable power level that could be extracted (without cooling down the crust), but I don't remember if they're currently above or below it.
If I recall correctly, however, the fossil heat trapped in the crust under Iceland is several billion years of the sustainable extraction rate.
And, on the third hand, even if you only extract energy at the rate that radioactive decay produces it, in only a few tens of billions of years, most of the radioisotopes will have decayed away if you don't replenish them.
You are correct that the crust is heated more from below than by the Sun. That's why the bottom of the crust, where it contacts the mantle, is hotter than the surface.
The mistake was not answering the question. There would have been nothing wrong with expanding your answer with notes about how you might avoid having a million items in an array in the first place, but the question was how do you sort it when you have it and you should answer the question you're asked before answering questions nobody asked.
It has nothing to do with language of engineering, and everything to do with him not answering the simple question he was asked. And then he goes on to complain that interviewers value complexity right after the story about how he fumbled a simple question by overcomplicating his answer to the point that it didn't even answer the given question at all.
> Interviewing is mostly a different skillset from day to day work.
> It’s not, really:
Funny -- I'm halfway down the page now, and haven't seen your top-level post stating how and why the entire point of TFA is wrong.
> this could be true if your day to day work is writing very basic websites without real performance or scale constraints, but if you are building large, performant systems, a good technical interview will give you a chance to show those skills.
Yeah, that was the point: Most day-to-day jobs are writing basic websites without huge scale constraints (or equivalent), but interviews are usually conducted as if those huge scale constraints were relevant.
Do you have some particular reason to believe that most actual jobs do involve "real performance or scale constraints"? Or that interviews aren't conducted as if they did? (Or did I somehow miss the point, and that wasn't what TFA was all about?)
