I might go with "can you clarify what context?", if you can't infer it from the job description. Your wording could be interpreted as fishing for reminders.
"Broadly speaking an interface is a contract exposing some elements that can be used to interact with a system from the outside. Narrowing things down a lot an interface in, say the Java programming language, is a name for a set of methods that classes implementing that interface must provide (and also some that are optional). Would you like to explore this topic further?"
As someone who interviewed people for technical roles, I'd see that as a bad sign and answer: "Just tell me what you can think about."
This isn't school where teachers give you trick questions and you fail if you misunderstand it. If you are applying as a software developer and you can't talk at length about various forms of interfaces you are probably not very experienced. UI, API, ABI are all interfaces..
> This isn't school where teachers give you trick questions and you fail if you misunderstand it
Please explain leetcode live sessions, random brain teasers (how many pinball balls blah blah blah), weird off-the-wall questions (you were just in a plane crash/you wake up as a cockroach), AI trivia screeners, and the rest?
I've been doing a bunch of receuiting recently and I make a point at the beginning of each interview to explicitly tell them that we don't do trick questions. We also don't do leetcode at all.
My approach to interviewing is that I want candidates to do the best they possibly can.
Thst is a badly phrased question. "What languages do you speak?", would be the question to ask.
Because even of you were thinking about spoken languages, what does "knowing" mean? I "know" Hungarian exists, I know how Hungarian sounds like, I know how Hungarian words look like, but that doesn't mean I speak or understand it. Now if it was clear they meant apoken languages we could infer from the context they want to know about our skills with different spoken languages and didn't read our CV, which at least where I am from always contains a languages level with a skill level (e.g. German A1, English B1)
And then hope that you are talking to somebody from a minority of job interviewers that are actually reasonable or trained into answering.
As a matter of fact, yes, that's the best approach, but only because if you receive a question like the OP's, you've already lost and have to just take a blind bet.
I love how yours is the sane answer and the replies to your comment basically hinge on the interviewer playing mind games. Seems like nobody cares anymore about communication skills and how it's supposed to be a two way street. Though on one of the comments I might've missed the sarcasm considering the suggestion of ending the answer with a classic LLM trope.
Now if a terse question deserves a terse answer that's to be judged on a case by case basis, I suppose.
It really depends what your industry is. I've been writing some printer drivers for custom hardware + windows applications at work. Much of the technical jargon I've been learning during development involve things like "driver interfaces" and "communication interfaces".
Depending on how recently I'd been working on our printer drivers I also would likely need clarification. Now if the job is "frontend developer" I agree, someone needing to clarify if you're talking about a user interface or communication layer interface is probably a bad sign.
But if it's a looser role I'd definitely look to clarify the question!
Even front end developers have more than 1 concept of an interface: there's both technical facing interfaces and customer facing interfaces.
I guess you could just give a generic answer: an interface represents some kinda boundary between users and implementation details, and hopefully said boundary is easier to use than the details.
I would guess some would flag that as a bullshit answer, but without clarification you can't do anything but speak in generalities.
Now if it were the interface keyword, they're primarily a means by which to introduce polymorphism. They no more achieve the goal of a generally-defined interface than does a regular class, which already satisfies the definition of the generally-defined interface through their public methods. This might also sound like a load of bullshit to some.
If you answered me like that I would be happy, as it means you understood the defining characteristic of any interface is that it is the deliberate introduction of a systemic boundary to act as a bridge between two systems in the broadest sense. E.g. if a human could directly interface with digital signals we wouldn't need a graphical user interface. If your program doesn't need to interact with other programs you wouldn't need an Application Protocol Interface, etc.
It isn't an easy question, but I'd really suggest to see such broad questions as a chance to show off your knowledge, instead of a potential trick question where the teacher expects you to read their mind and gives you an F if you answered the wrong question. If an interviewer isn't happy with a broad answer to a broad question they can always ask you to go into detail on a specific aspect. Having demonstrated that you have a broad overview and a high level understanding is valuable either way.
I interviewed people and I would prefer a broad answer to a broad question. A broad question is an invitation for you to present me a selected platter of knowledge you have aquired about the various forms of interfaces. And the candidate who does that will always outperform a candidate who can't think about those concepts on a broad abstract level and needs to be lead to the waterhole.
"What is an interface?", is a totally legit question that can be answered without thinking about any specific interface. E.g. it could could be described as a systemic boundary between two domains, that is ideally well defined. You could talk about different interfaces, what the advantages and pitfalls of introducing interfaces are, conventions that exist etc.
If you're not a Junior and that's all you have to say without even attempting to approach the actual question, you would be raising a red flag with me. Maybe there are better ways to phrase that counter-question, but this one in particular made me twitch.
In my experience, outlining one or a few things you call interfaces would be a much better display of both knowledge and attitude: GUI, API, interface keyword or concept in some programming language, etc. Even better, add a quick description of what they all have in common ("broadly speaking, a way to access a set of functionality" or something like that).
And THEN you may ask "would you like me to elaborate on one meaning in particular?"
Possible alternative phrasing - "That might depend on the context. Is there a particular context you had in mind or did you want me to answer in a very broad sense?"
Hey – hope you see this, wasn't sure another way to reach out. You left a comment ~10 years ago on an HN post about a breathing exercise. I discovered it, tried it, and since used breathing exercises to regulate an otherwise problematic amount of stress.
That’s, huh, aww. This is so wonderful! If you have a link to said comment, it wouldn’t mind sharing what you learned, that would be lovely. I can also dig back ~10 years when I’m on my computer tomorrow :)
I think the problem with those is that they lack understanding author mentions:
> But it’s really important that one person on the project has an end-to-end understanding of the whole thing: how it hangs together technically, and what product or business purpose it serves.
The reason people hate specialized roles of scrum masters/delivery leads is that they often lack the E2E understanding and therefor are inadequate owners.
Yeah, too hard to figure out what the problem is here – might be all these women lying to ruin his life. Better do nothing about it until we're sure.
> 2011
> A woman alleges that she was sexually assaulted by Alejandro Ramirez at a chess camp in 2011, when she was 15 years old. (WSJ)
> Jennifer Shahade alleges that she was assaulted by Ramirez for the first time in 2011. (Lichess)
> 2014
> Jennifer Shahade alleges that Ramirez assaulted her for a second time in 2014.
> Claire Grothe alleges that in 2014 she was assaulted by Ramirez at a reception organized by STLCC, and that the incident (and Ramirez’s response to it) led to her leaving her job at the World Chess Hall of Fame later that year. (WSJ)
> 2015
> A woman who was underage at the time alleges that Ramirez encouraged her to drink alcohol, attempted to have sex with her, and initiated oral sex without her consent. (WSJ)
> 2016
> A woman alleges that in 2016, when she was underage, she was warned by STLCC employees to not allow herself to be alone with Ramirez. (WSJ)
> 2017
> A young player’s mother says that in 2017 she alerted top US Chess officials to Ramirez’s behavior, and overheard STLCC staff make jokes about his interest in young women. (WSJ)
> 2019
> A woman alleges that in 2019 she was sexually assaulted by Timur Gareyev while walking to her car from a hotel where a US Chess sanctioned tournament is taking place (in which Gareyev was playing). She submitted a complaint to US Chess shortly afterwards. The US Chess ethics committee declined to accept jurisdiction of the matter, as the alleged incident had occurred outside the hotel, and therefore (in the committee’s view) it could not be “directly connected” to the chess tournament. No action was taken against Gareyev. (Lichess)
> Another woman alleges that at a different US Chess sponsored tournament in 2019, Gareyev grabbed her and kissed her against her will. (Lichess)
> 2021
> In January 2021, Jennifer Shahade informed STLCC and US Chess of a case involving an alleged victim (of Ramirez) who said she was 15 years old at the time of the first alleged incident. She urged US Chess and STLCC to act against Ramirez. (Lichess)
stock prices are proxy for perception of company. that perception matters in different ways for those that don't have a ticker (founder prestige, fundraising, hiring, etc)
> Yet... with how fast this is selling, there is literally no way that folks know it is an amazing game ahead of time.
Advanced copies to reviewers, gameplay footage, developer commentary, etc...
> But the lessons to learn from how fast and well this is selling is as much about the power of franchise as it is anything about this particular game/system.
There are plenty of popular franchises that release games that don't sell well.
Certainly some folks are reading the reviews. I guarantee most are not. Heck, I'm interested and I haven't read any. (And, yes, I prepurchased the game.)
There are, certainly, franchises that tank. Usually not after a successful release, though. That said, this one is odd, as the prequel didn't seem to generate near as much buzz?
> when the site first got a surge of users from hacker news, there was one poster in particular who came to the site, registered a bunch of offensive, racist usernames and proceeded to post and create threads that were just full of dumb slurs. this was definitely a learning experience because i had to act quickly, so i tried a bunch of different methods to get rid of him.
it's sad that people like this exist in the world. what could possibly motivate someone to spend their time doing this?
It seems like parasocial relationships can swing both ways. You know how some fans develop a creepy, obsessive sort of love for creators? Well, the same goes for hatred. They feel slighted by that person that doesn't know them, and they retaliate from behind their keyboard.
The thing that really surprised me was that even when he implemented IP blocking, the user used a VPN to continue abusing the site. That's a step beyond "casual" trolling that someone might do to test a site's security (not that this is justifiable behavior) and enters the territory of targeted harassment.
I don't find it surprising. This happens in every project I run. It's almost a guarantee that when you ban someone they will come back with a new account and when you ban their IP they start using VPNs. It's such a common occurrence and they get more aggressive for every step where they consider it a victory when you manually take action against them. I often need to resort to banning whole IP ranges.
Richard Bartle, has this way of dividing up the way what he calls "players" but it works for any social media[1]. One of them is the "killer" with a sub-type of "griefer" which are those whose "... vague aim is to get a big, bad reputation". So, from that perspective, they actually do get something out of it.
Griefers. Some people get enjoyment from hurting/annoying others.
First time I bumped into this was in the DAOC MMORPG. Some players were deliberately annoying others, to the point of "wasting" their online time doing stupid shit that annoyed people. It really shocked me.
Thing is, there's lots of griefers in any online game. Which means there's lots of people out there in the real world who would do this if they could get away with it. Anonymity allows them to do this online with very little repercussion, so it shows how many there really are. But now every time I do an interview, or look at a rental, I'm thinking "is this person a griefer? are they going to enjoy making my life a misery?"
The hardcore persistent trolls making it their life's mission to ruin my site have always been 20+ after I've managed to identify them. Kid trolls just spam, get banned and move on.
A lot of them are edgy underage children and don't know any better. They think that they have a dark sense of humor but really they've lived a life disconnected from those words, so they like the idea of pushing others buttons at no cost to their selfish existence.
not only attention seeking, sometimes the motivation is "to spread the truth", at least as they perceive it, and sometimes it's people who get triggered and are not able to stop their rants
Had a similar experience recently. A random person started repeatedly filling out contact forms for one of our clients. They were doing it manually, and they did it for several days straight until finally blocked.
It also left me wondering why that person would spend an hour or two each day for several days in a row, filling out online forms. What’s the motivation?
My suspicion is that the person doing it works at the company and was trying to mess with their systems. But I’ll never know for sure.
I spent some time working in a prison, it was very eye opening for someone like me from a pretty sheltered background. Most of the inmates were decent enough people that made bad choices but there were a few who were just horrible sadistic bullies.
I have a lot of thoughts on this that I plan to start writing on under indiedevstack.com before long, for now you can follow my one biz social where I will promote it once ready @manabiSRS
But some quick references... One approach is to avoid algorithmic surfacing of UGC outside of one's own network (or secondary connections etc), which makes discovery harder (must be compensated in other ways). Twitter may explore similar ideas with pluggable algorithms (though I don't trust them). Another approach is to constrain UGC: eg a music/audio community which has barriers to sharing new audio outside your network, but which freely allows remixing and promoting remixed audio of known good audio without as much safety control over the remixes because the operations allowed on the "good" source material make it difficult to subvert. This kind of idea is at the core of a product concept, not an additional layer to tack on later. I believe that finding these kind of cheaper ways of managing UGC and lending discovery to UGC can be a huge competitive edge.
Isn’t very high-level chess kind of dead already?
I mean - watching Karpov-Kasparov was watching two best players in the world. But nowadays a match between human players just clarifies which of the second-rate devices is better than another. Or is it just me?
I’ve heard of these guys. But I do not know which of them is/was a champion. But I can name the previous champions, and I think I can still remember the exact sequence: Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanka, Alekhin, Eiwe, Botwinnik, Tal… missed somebody?
But I’ve lost interest after Deep Blue event. Alpha Zero plays were fun to watch though.
You missed a guy named Bobby Fischer, for one - a rather big name in chess history I would say. He was arguably a major driving force in turning chess into a professional discipline outside of the USSR.
As for computers, they've certainly changed the landscape tremendously, but it doesn't mean that players simply play like chess engines. You don't just get to transfer the chess engine heuristics to a human mind. Chess engines help players find ideas, refutations etc., and they're certainly significant when it comes to opening theory. The role of memorization in opening theory (at the highest level) predates computers though.
Computers have also levelled the playing field, improving (buzzword alert) inclusiveness. Players from countries with flourishing chess tradition, such as Russia, don't have the inherent advantage anymore. That's why the current top 2 (on the rating list) are from Norway and China, which would be rather unlikely a few decades ago.
Carlsen, yes. But only because of his personality and streaming. I played in the chess club every day in high school in the 90s, and I must have had a similar reaction about computers, because I don't know what happened after Kasparov.
I also stopped watching red sox games once they won the world series. Fandom is weird.
