As a counterpoint, I work in high finance and one of our core systems that I'm expected to know extremely well uses Paxos for consensus.
Just because those topics show up infrequently doesn't mean that no one's using them. Plenty of companies outside of Google, etc. are doing complicated things that require a solid CS background.
I think that particular subreddit is being generous about the issue because they overwhelmingly support the Antminer manufacturer on a completely separate issue (increased block sizes). That issue is more-or-less the big schism at the moment between /r/btc and /r/bitcoin.
If that's confusing, as a hypothetical example: You just linked to an /r/conservative thread about Trump's alleged Russian ties.
> This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic
Well sure, but you only have so much time to study for these interviews.
So, you make sure you review your basic data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis. The things that will most likely show up.
Then you have to consider the more advanced topics. Realistically, you're not going to have an expert-level understanding of all of them. None of them are extremely difficult concepts to understand necessarily, but you need the kind of mastery to understand such a problem quickly and under pressure (since it's a short, timed interview).
The most effective way to study, then, is to simply run through a battery of dynamic programming questions and hope you get lucky and the interviewer asks you a variation on one you studied.
I've had more than a few AmaGooFaceSoft interviews ask me slight variations on the change counting question. They're really testing my ability to recall the solution to that problem, not any sort of deep understanding of dynamic programming.
On the flip side, the interviews I've failed almost always involved some pet topic that I wouldn't dream of studying. I once (no joke, and not THAT long ago) had an interviewer at AmaGooFaceSoft ask me do a bunch of calculus questions involving power series (turn a function into a power series, determine the radius of convergence, etc.). Why would I study that for an interview?
Is that true? Isn't the generic accusation against AmaGooFaceSoft that your interview performance largely depends on whether you happened to study some interviewer's pet topic (e.g. parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc.)?
> It's a question of how much self-censorship you want to impose on yourself in the hope of fostering a good discussion. And how much you are focusing on expressing what you feel vs. starting a conversation with people you disagree with.
Sure, and that's my point: Are you just venting? Fine. You're making a choice to vent your frustrations and not hoping to actually have a discussion. You're making yourself feel better. There's nothing wrong with that, either. We all vent in different ways.
It's just unfortunate that many people choose to make internet comments the location of their venting. Worse, this becomes the sort of discourse that we come to expect from any sort of public internet forum. We don't expect reasonable discussion: We expect angry people yelling about the other team and how their team is the best team. It's become a stadium full of drunk fans.
> It would be more diplomatic, sure.
Eh, not really: I never mentioned left/right in that chunk of text on purpose (because I think both "teams" do it). So your rewrite is actually significantly less diplomatic because it singles out one group of people who previously were part of a larger group.
Might seem annoying of me to call you out on this (and I fully understand why you assumed that given the context of our discussion), but I think it's an important correction nonetheless.
The problem being that as soon as you start bringing the left/right dichotomy into the picture, you've lost all hope of having a sensible argument or even an intelligent discussion.
I mean, it's not like it's all that difficult to rephrase the question in a way to be less thought-terminating (and this is literally one substitution, you can imagine even more eloquent ways of phrasing it):
> "Is the problem "single mothers" or is it the people who conspire to create, perpetuate, and steadily increase economic inequality?"
I want to believe that most people KNOW this, and it's merely "virtue signaling" as another poster noted. An easy way to vent frustration, maybe. But it's not a question that asks for sensible discussion. It's a "when did you stop hitting your wife?" type of question - one that insults the very people you really want to answer the question. How do you expect to have a reasonable discussion like that?
Ehhh, that isn't the narrative we've been pushing for the last 20+ years.
> whereas living somewhere is
I think the fact that it's a necessity only benefits the idea of providing people aid for housing.
> you can't really get that for your housing.
I mean, you absolutely can depending on your level of income. It won't make up for being poor, but that's what section 8 housing is.
Even on the more middle-class scale, the government provides tax breaks for home owners (and especially for first-time home buyers) which is basically money from the government.
I used to have a similar problem. One thing that helped me (which I won't take credit for): I categorize my todo list into four groups.
* Urgent/Important (Fill out the kids' immunization forms for school)
* Not Urgent/Important (Call old friend)
* Urgent/Not Important (Pick up package from post office)
* Not Urgent/Not Important (Wrap up loose coins for bank)
It works surprisingly well, so long as you follow these rules:
1) You have to constantly re-evaluate. Urgent and important are two adjectives that are extremely subjective and change over time.
2) You absolutely must tackle tasks in the order above.
3) Spend a lot of attention on group two (not urgent/important). You'll be tempted to put gigantic, overwhelming tasks on there ("Learn a new skill") as opposed to something actually accomplishable ("Go through React tutorial part 1").
You really have to be honest about what "important" means to you. Especially group two (not urgent/important). Group one is usually pretty easy.
I'll deal with the hassle of my package being returned by the post office if it means I can talk to an old friend instead. You may feel differently. Be honest about it. If you find you're not accomplishing group two tasks and procrastinating on them, maybe they're not that important to you. "Call an old friend" sounds like something important, but maybe you've both moved on and the friendship really isn't that important to you anymore.
> "Zuckerberg" seems to be more frequently used than the full "Mark Zuckerberg".
Eh, I'm not sure I would agree with that.
> And quite a few Hackers seem to be on a first name basis with Elon and Linus.
They have fairly unique names. It's extremely unlikely that "Elon" and "Linus" would refer to anyone other than Musk and Torvalds in the context of HN discussions.
Definitely not the case for names like "Mark", "Bill", or "Steve".
> Is journalism so, so much more expensive to produce than entertainment?
There's a temporal component here that's much more important for journalism than it is for those other two forms of entertainment.
For example, The Shawshank Redemption was made 23 years ago and is still a fantastic movie: People will still pay to watch that movie. In contrast, very few people will pay money to read a news article from even two days ago (let alone 23 years ago).
Sony could never produce another movie again and have a sizable revenue stream just from distribution rights on their existing film catalog. The NYT can't really do that, the demand for old news articles just isn't that great.
The equivalent of a news subscription then isn't really Netflix or Spotify: It's going to the movies, or going to a concert, or buying an album. All of which are notoriously considered to be expensive affairs.
I'd even go so far as to say the NYT would probably absolutely let you read older articles for cheap (a few $ a month), but the demand for that is non-existent so it's silly to even offer.
> some regions has tradition of alcohol consumption deep in their culture and even national identity
New Zealand is one of those places.
> nearly everyone consumes alcohol to various degrees.
That's the point of the study. Wealthy people consume alcohol in moderate amounts, the working class are likely:
1) Consuming it in much greater amounts, or
2) Abstaining from alcohol entirely. Perhaps because of previous problems with alcohol abuse, strict religious adherence, etc. You can think of multiple reasons that might explain seeing such a class disparity.
Just because those topics show up infrequently doesn't mean that no one's using them. Plenty of companies outside of Google, etc. are doing complicated things that require a solid CS background.