andrewprock

51 ms·

571.
by andrewprock 11y ago
Nice non-sequitur.
572.
by andrewprock 11y ago
Conflating "climate model" with "parameter fiddling" seems like the more significant logical failure.
573.
by andrewprock 11y ago
It turns out the fellow who posted the challenge is a crank. Not surprising that it is negative expected value.
574.
by andrewprock 11y ago
Most of the comments here are addressed in excruciating detail in other posts on this blog. Suffice it to say, Dr. Murphy has done his homework.
575.
by andrewprock 12y ago
You are correct, that the participants are people, with birthdays, and capable of speaking, is an assumption. You appear to be taking issue with that assumption. I suppose that is your prerogative, but it probably leaves you in the vanish
576.
by andrewprock 12y ago
"But you do have trouble understanding that other people might be different from you; with different experiences, assumptions, etc." In essence, this is the true test of the puzzle; not whether you can solve the intended puzzle, b
577.
by andrewprock 12y ago
Given that this question is about humans, and discusses their behavior, it's clear you are making some assumptions about the structure of the question which are not present in the question. That's certainly a reasonable thing to d
578.
by andrewprock 12y ago
On the contrary, logical analysis is generally not well suited to the understanding of human behavior.
579.
by andrewprock 12y ago
You have to make quite a few more assumptions as well. If they were logical and told the truth, the conversation would be more like: Bernard: Cheryl told me it's the 17th. Albert: Cheryl told me it's in August.
580.
by andrewprock 12y ago
It really depends on who says what, but here a version of the problem where Bernard speaks first: Bernard: I don't know when Cheryl's birthday is. Albert: I don't know when Cheryl's birthday is. Bernard: I know when Cher
581.
by andrewprock 12y ago
Actually, it's the opposite. It's a translation of a pure logic puzzle into natural language.
582.
by andrewprock 12y ago
Logic puzzles where one must assume so much are not about pure logic. They are "logic" puzzles. If you aren't made aware of the assumptions that were made in building the puzzle, the solution you arrive at may not match the
583.
by andrewprock 12y ago
"The speed at which they come to their conclusions, and who speaks first is meaningless." That's your own assumption. And that's a perfectly fine assumption to make, but not a universally chosen one.
584.
by andrewprock 12y ago
IIRC, if Bernard speaks first, then the correct answer is August 17.
585.
by andrewprock 12y ago
I believe assuming they are "just going alphabetically" and/or that there is some sort of implicit moderator managing the conversation qualify as non-obvious assumptions.
586.
by andrewprock 12y ago
On the contrary, there are many unspoken things one must assume to solve this puzzle "correctly"; that Albert and Bernard are rational, honest, cooperating, and have a certain penchant for communicating novel inferences they make
587.
by andrewprock 12y ago
Let's consider the question: 1. "Why did Albert speak first?" Before we answer this, we need to develop a set of assumptions to operate under. Given the synthetic nature of the problem, we might assume that both Albert and B
588.
by andrewprock 12y ago
Unfortunately, there are a number of rather curious, and culturally specific, assumptions one must make about the problem. The real puzzles are: 1. "Why did Albert speak first?" 2. "Why did he speak in such cryptic language?&
589.
by andrewprock 12y ago
"The logistic curve looks exponential right up until it isn't." Took the words right out of my mouth.
590.
by andrewprock 12y ago
It may be that the studies were flawed, and that the reporting was bad, but that flavor of study has been replicated in other venues besides Google. Given that, it essentially comes down to culture being the deciding factor in these interv
591.
by andrewprock 12y ago
"To be clear: my experience is that the algorithm interviews, when done properly, work reasonably well to identify intelligence/problem solving and coding skills." Given that there is no correlation between job performance an
592.
by andrewprock 12y ago
Shoulda woulda coulda: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gocheck/+bug/1178806
593.
by andrewprock 12y ago
It's actually quite a bit more subtle than that. Even `go fmt` uses tabs to format indentation, but uses spaces to format alignment. This is distinct from mechanical typewriters which used variably sized tab-stops to handle tab align
594.
by andrewprock 12y ago
It not a particularly interesting discussion to have. The short of it is, if you only ever use one tool (or family of tools) to look at code (say an IDE), then tabs are not unreasonable. Once you start using multiple families of tools on
595.
by andrewprock 12y ago
go fmt will reorder your imports, which means that if there is an import ordering dependency, it will either be exposed (or hidden) by go fmt.
596.
by andrewprock 12y ago
While this is clearly the wrong decision, one has to applaud the Go team for building `go fmt` and thus putting and end to unproductive discussions about formatting. (Although it would have been nice if `go fmt` didn't change code sem