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Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#41

Post by crntaylor »

I was a mathematician, and now work in finance (systematic trading). I've found a reasonable negative filter is

  A jar has 1000 coins, of which 999 are fair and 1 is double
  headed. Pick a coin at random, and toss it 10 times. Given
  that you see 10 heads, what is the probability that the next
  toss of that coin is also a head?
That tests their ability to turn a problem into mathematics, and some very basic conditional probability. Another common question (that I don't use myself) is to ask what happens to bond prices if interest rates go up.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#42

Post by danso »

For news reporters, there's the AP Style test, which gives you text/headlines that you have to translate to the AP style, which is its own kind of grammar (e.g. for state abbreviations, Calif. instead of CA; always use [numerical-age]-[old] in describing ages: 15-year-old). It's a test more geared toward editors though.

In terms of reporting...there's no litmus test for how well you can report an event. The education beat, however, is pretty common for new reporters (it was my first), which is ironic considering how ridiculously complicated education is as a topic (same kind of financial/budgetary documents as any business, government bureaucracy, board politics, and of course, dealing with children)

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#43

Post by atroyn »

pliny wrote: post #38
hacknat wrote: post #18

I'm an SE now, but I got my degree in Northwest Semitic Literature and Linguistics: Here's a couple: Are Semitic languages VSO or SVO? What does it mean that Semitic words are triliteral?

SVO?

Subject Verb Object.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#44

Post by snorkel »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #6

I have been unable to think of one for Linux system administrators. :-(

"You need shell access to a remote system using ssh. What file would email to the admin to grant you access using ssh?"

You'd be surprised of how many supposed Linux admins have no idea how to setup ssh logins, which says a lot about the depth of their experience.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#45

Post by corin_ »

austenallred wrote: post #7

I'm a marketer, and have yet to find a way to judge a marketer's competence better than: "Here's this app, here's what it does. How would you increase downloads?" A quick brainstorm session shows you how they approach the situation, what tricks they have in their bag, and what methods they feel confident using (or if they're just BSing). Interestingly enough, 50% of the time people answer "SEO," which is among the wo…

Marketing takes all sorts - there are plenty of people who do a great job by just doing SEO, or by just buying adwords, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#46

Post by Ologn »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #6

I have been unable to think of one for Linux system administrators. :-(

The best question I have is "Describe the power on of a RHEL x86 system in as much detail as possible from beginning to end, each step of what happens". It is open ended but can tell you a lot. You can get very fine grained, down to the hardware signals which take place before FFFF0000 is executed.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#47

Post by adventureloop »

austenallred wrote: post #7

I'm a marketer, and have yet to find a way to judge a marketer's competence better than: "Here's this app, here's what it does. How would you increase downloads?" A quick brainstorm session shows you how they approach the situation, what tricks they have in their bag, and what methods they feel confident using (or if they're just BSing). Interestingly enough, 50% of the time people answer "SEO," which is among the wo…

Would the answer of the inverse question be interesting? Taking our successful landing page, how would you reduce downloads?

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#48

Post by sequoia »

solox3 wrote: post #11

Working for a web company. Our favourite JS question is, "What happens if you do this?" var func = function func () { // blah };

nothing? What answer are you looking for here? either a) there's something I'm totally missing or b) this is a really silly "trick" question.

Re: Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

#50

Post by aaronem »

ecopoesis wrote: post #29

I'm a software developer, but the code I work does a lot of DB access. I always ask a "two joins and an aggregate question." Given three tables: authors books sales ---------- ---------- ---------- id id id name author_id book_id title date price find the total sales by author in November 2013. The result set should have two columns: author's name and their total sales.

By "total sales", do you mean number sold or revenue?
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