The L.A. freeway system is not about L.A. It's about Southern California. Comments that suggest public transportation don't take into account the unique layout of SoCal. Here are just a few of the things to take into account, coming from a guy that grew up in NYC and now lives in SoCal.
--SoCal is not like NYC or SF where you can walk a few blocks and take a bus or a subway. SoCal blocks are incredibly large. I get in my car to go 2 blocks away, because those blocks are huge. Two of those SoCal blocks are like 6 of my old NYC blocks.
--SoCal is made up of many, many cities over a large, large area. There is no way to get from one corner of Fountain Valley, in a subdivision, to a job in Irvine (relatively close) where the office in an office park is no where near a bus stop. And that's just Fountain Valley to Irvine. This is definitely not an easy situation like covering Manhattan (a single, centralized destination where many of the jobs are.)
--There is no way to setup a workable network of busses/trains to mesh all the cities involved. What's the solution for Costa Mesa to El Segundo? Torrance to Burbank? West Covina to Anaheim? Newport Beach to Norwalk? And so on.
--The bus system we have usually covers a single city and maybe an adjacent city. Going to work for most folks involves going thru 7-10 cities. A simple commute from Costa Mesa to Manhattan Beach could involve going thru (winging it here from memory): Costa Mesa to Fountain Valley, to Huntington Beach, to Westminster, to Bellflower, to Long Beach...(catches breath since I'm not even half way there on the 405 Fwy) to Wilmington, to Carson, to Torrance, to Redondo Beach, to Lawndale, to Manhattan Beach. And you're only at the freeway exit -- now you need to get to the exact office location which means driving thru Manhattan Beach. Take a series of buses, if even possible at all, and you're looking at a 3 hours commute one way.
I would love to take public transportation. It's just not possible. I can't even walk to get lunch. In centrally planned Irvine, they put the housing in one area, the commercial offices in another and the retail commercial spots in another. Even when they are semi-adjacent, the blocks are huge. It would take 30 minutes to walk to the nearest strip mall to get a burger. It's 5 minutes by car.
It sucks, but it's not just an issue of freeways. It's how SoCal is designed.
----------
Edit: adding my solution ---> tax breaks for businesses that allow telecommuting. Keep us off the road and the problem goes away.
+higher quality of life
+less wear and tear on the cars
+less pollution
+less expenses on gas, eating out for lunch
+less maintenance on the roads
+less need for new buses/trains/employees to run them
+less congestion for those that need to be on the road
After reading all these (good) comments, I thought I'd go to SO now and try and pitch in and answer a question or two in my domain of expertise. You know...give back to the community. Be a part of the solution.
I found a question that could easily be answered and would be of value to users hitting this issue.
I could not stop laughing at how this confirms the insanity being discussed here.
"Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam..."
Yes. And 238 million people saw Dez Bryant catch that ball notwithstanding the NFL's rule-which-must-be-followed-to-the-letter-of-the-law.
Some guy, or woman, won't get their question answered that could have helped them. It was a reasonable question. And people are willing to help them. In some way, I suspect StackOverflow is incredibly proud they prevented that...but stuck to the letter of the law on their policy.
And there's a reason why Google is hiding or manipulating their numbers. They're poor. If they were good, you know darn well they'd be bragging about them. So they play tricks and games to try to hide that data.
I understand the problem. I just don't give it any validity. The renters think their wishes and desires to live in a specific area are more important than other people who wish to live in that same area. It comes across as immature and whining.
It's not just renting. It's income as well. There are lots of folks whining about how others make more money and how that "isn't fair". It's a broad theme of people complaining and having a sense of entitlement.
It's called supply and demand. It's called life. Things change. The world doesn't revolve around families that "shouldn't be uprooted and have their lives thrown into disorder".
If those families wanted to be able to stay there permanently at a fixed rate of housing expenses, they should have purchased the property. Can't afford to buy? Then deal with the risks of renting.
Their desire for low rent that keeps them comfy and entails no inconveniences has no validity. That's just a wish. That's immature. This is not grade school and not everyone gets a trophy for simply showing up.
We have a reasonably regulated market. What we don't have is a system where people get to live where they want to live without regards to what they can afford.
SF renters need to back up the U-Haul truck and find new places to live where they can afford it. They are not "entitled" to live in SF simply because they want to.
Fair enough. Then they can go to medical school. Or law school. Or be an accountant. Or an investment banker. They could take up the trades (electricians, plumbers, carpentry). Maybe help animals--be a Veterinarian. Work on the dark side...be a mortician. Be an airplane mechanic or a civil engineer. Dispense drugs...be a Pharmacist. Build bridges and buildings.
Something tells me they will find an excuse for why any and all of those options presented are not options to them. They are professional complainers.
Yet another thread full of HNers sitting back and contemplating various ways to take other people's money like a Soviet central planning committee. Can you fuckers stop worrying about how much money someone else makes or whether they got it thru inheritance. It's not your money. It's none of your business.
Who gives a shit where they "want" to live. I'd like to live on the upper east side in Manhattan. Time for them to move to a place they can afford and stop the whining. I hear Detroit has a lot of cheap housing.
Because it's free. Or they learned it over the years (and began with it, because it's free). IntelliJ is only $199, yet "professional" developers insist on using Eclipse. Like, $199 is too much to spend on your craft.
Screw FizzBuzz...the first question on an interview should be: Do you use Eclipse? That speaks volumes, far more than a silly set of "if" statements and making use of the modulus operator.
I'm torn on this. I get what quanticle is saying, that Big-O is very important. I've developed an appreciation for it even if I didn't take CS in college (I took the redheaded bastard stepchild major of CIS).
quanticle is suggesting there is a purposeful, formal means of discussing and identifying performance, irrespective of how it's measured/profiled or addressed.
Here's the rub: why don't job openings eliminate the other requirements and just put Big-O (and a language) as the two must have items on the list. Keep it short. Eliminate the History majors, the non-college types and the CIS (almost but not good enough) types.
That, more than any FizzBuzz, should weed out the chaff instantly. If it's that important to that specific job, then just say so explicitly. Help folks self-filter themselves out.
Let's just hope getting in the door with that Big-O knowledge isn't wasted on run of the mill CRUD apps.
Lol!! You're killing me. I need to work tomorrow and you're gonna have me up all night thinking how to optimize this thing. It's only 5 lines of code.
Hashtable, huh? I don't like them because they're synchronized, but let's use a HashMap instead. Regardless, I'm stumped.
Let me think out loud. You'd probably want me to stick two entries in there with the words being the values. I suspect the keys are irrelevant. But I need the values themselves sorted prior to being placed in the map. Lets assume I stick the char arrays in the map. I still can't see how the map helps. Unless, I abandon the HashMap and go with a TreeMap instead. That negates the need to explicitly sort and maybe that's the time savings, but....
My head hurts. :-)
I don't know. I'd have to code this out and experiment a bit. But I like the push. You're forcing me to dig deeper.
PS. I can't build a search engine.
EDIT: A quick search of the net yields at least one answer (don't know if this works):
"We can solve this problem in O(n) time by using hashtable. That is, create a hashtable which record the times that the characters a-Z appear in S1 and create another hashtable for S2. If the two hashtables have the same content, then the strings are identical. This solution requires O(n) time to create two hashtables and compare them, and O(52) = O(1) space to store the hashtable."
I'm so disgusted. I was way off. Not even close. I wasn't even thinking in this direction. Does anyone have the number to that truck driving school?
That's the $64,000 question. If I knew the answer, that would be my startup. It's a tough problem. It almost makes one beg for some sort of one-off certification (bar exam?) so we can put that to rest for ever after. I'll go out on a limb and say that most lawyers, especially the senior ones, probably couldn't pass the bar exam again. Developers have a mini bar exam every time they interview (hence the studying).
That said, there's one thing you wrote I took interest in: "I've met lots of folks who talk a great game, have all kinds of experience listed on their resume, and yet somehow can't write up a linked list..."
Umm...that would be me. I've never written a linked list. Guilty as charged. Java has a LinkedList class and I've never bothered to look at the implementation nor have I ever been curious enough to (re)write one from scratch.
I wish you would have said "...and yet somehow don't know when to use a linked list." That moves it from an academic exercise mostly applicable to CS students who might have written one 6 months ago, to a meaningful real world scenario and more than legitimate. Choosing the appropriate data structure, knowing when and why, is both realistic and important. I don't know how a candidate can bullshit their way thru a discussion of data structures where they can articulate, accurately, which one to use, when, and why.
--SoCal is not like NYC or SF where you can walk a few blocks and take a bus or a subway. SoCal blocks are incredibly large. I get in my car to go 2 blocks away, because those blocks are huge. Two of those SoCal blocks are like 6 of my old NYC blocks.
--SoCal is made up of many, many cities over a large, large area. There is no way to get from one corner of Fountain Valley, in a subdivision, to a job in Irvine (relatively close) where the office in an office park is no where near a bus stop. And that's just Fountain Valley to Irvine. This is definitely not an easy situation like covering Manhattan (a single, centralized destination where many of the jobs are.)
--There is no way to setup a workable network of busses/trains to mesh all the cities involved. What's the solution for Costa Mesa to El Segundo? Torrance to Burbank? West Covina to Anaheim? Newport Beach to Norwalk? And so on.
--The bus system we have usually covers a single city and maybe an adjacent city. Going to work for most folks involves going thru 7-10 cities. A simple commute from Costa Mesa to Manhattan Beach could involve going thru (winging it here from memory): Costa Mesa to Fountain Valley, to Huntington Beach, to Westminster, to Bellflower, to Long Beach...(catches breath since I'm not even half way there on the 405 Fwy) to Wilmington, to Carson, to Torrance, to Redondo Beach, to Lawndale, to Manhattan Beach. And you're only at the freeway exit -- now you need to get to the exact office location which means driving thru Manhattan Beach. Take a series of buses, if even possible at all, and you're looking at a 3 hours commute one way.
I would love to take public transportation. It's just not possible. I can't even walk to get lunch. In centrally planned Irvine, they put the housing in one area, the commercial offices in another and the retail commercial spots in another. Even when they are semi-adjacent, the blocks are huge. It would take 30 minutes to walk to the nearest strip mall to get a burger. It's 5 minutes by car.
It sucks, but it's not just an issue of freeways. It's how SoCal is designed.
----------
Edit: adding my solution ---> tax breaks for businesses that allow telecommuting. Keep us off the road and the problem goes away.
+higher quality of life
+less wear and tear on the cars
+less pollution
+less expenses on gas, eating out for lunch
+less maintenance on the roads
+less need for new buses/trains/employees to run them
+less congestion for those that need to be on the road