Puzzling Questions in Job Interviews

It is interesting to look at a sample of questions asked at job interviews with large corporations such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay.

Some of questions are related to the field of IT.

Some require approximate orders of magnitude calculation, not exact answers; others require logical thinking or just common sense.

• How many golf balls can fit inside a school bus?

• How much you would charge for washing all the windows in Seattle?

• Why, exactly, manhole covers are round and not, say, square?

• How much does a 747 weigh?

• Guess how many gas stations there are in the United States?

• Describe a chicken using a programming language.

• You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it?

• You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

• Tell me about your greatest weakness.

Higher Order Negativities

The term "Negative Negativities" was, according to Pema Chödrön, used by her spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in an article "Working with Negativities" (a chapter of the book The Myth of Freedom). In her interview "Good Medicine for This World", Pema Chödrön told us how reading the article had an important impact on her life.

I have not read Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, so the following is my own interpretation of what I understand from Pema Chödrön.

Negativity in Buddhism is not the same as negative thinking (see e.g. Is positive thinking positive or negative? ). It refers to dukkha (suffering or dissatisfaction) situations, when we are angry, hateful, revengeful, envious, fearful, desirous, lustful, doubtful, in pain, in sorrow, in despair, etc.

For example, you returned to your parked car, and found your favorite new car scratched. You got upset, and that is negativity.

First order and higher order negativities.

If you only got upset, that is first order negativity. But when you start blaming the parking management, or people for not being responsible, or yourself for not being more careful, and so on, then you have higher order negativities.

The Buddha once asked, if you are hit by an arrow, which hurts more, the arrow or your mind?

For most people, the escalation of negativities in their minds is what really hurts.

In modern times, one use the term "damage control", the first order damage is limited, but the higher order damage is limitless.

Negativity as poison used in medicine.

What Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is saying is that it is alright to have first order negativity, but not alright with negative negativities.

Dukkha is in the nature of all things. Shunryu Suzuki said that it is OK to suffer is.

Instead of developing negative negativities, the original negativity should be look upon as poison used in medicine, it will then be a source of creative energy.

The Night Travelers.

How can we turn negativities to healing? Pema Chödrön's answer is compassion. Start with compassion to oneself, stop blaming oneself, accept oneself unconditionally. Then realize that others are suffering in the same way.

Extend compassion to them, and to all.

Rumi wrote a poem called "Night Travelers," It's about how all the darkness of human beings is a shared thing from the beginning of time, and how understanding that opens up your heart and opens up your world. You begin to think bigger. Rather than depressing you, it makes you feel part of the whole.

Finally practice Tonglen, the art of absorbing other's pain and sending out help and compassion.

A lifelong practice.

Knowing and understanding that negative negativities is bad, is not enough. It must be practiced over and over again with mindfulness. No matter how long we have practiced, we will fail again and again. It is as if we have to be kept honest and humble. Each failure should be seen as a wake-up call. When we meditate on an object such as our breath, we will time and again be distracted by sound, thoughts, feelings, and so on, but is alright as long as we return to the object of meditation as soon as realize the distraction.

Abandon all hopes of fruition.

This may seem strange to most, but if we are really committed to "here and now", we can't allow the future to distract us.

This is consistent with other Eastern wisdom, found in the Bhagavad Gita ( "Since I have no cravings for the fruit of actions, actions do not contaminate Me.") and in the Wu Wei of Taoism.

Related:

• CG Jung and Pema Chödrön
• Solving and outgrowing problems
• Tonglen
• Bhagavad Gita

Russian AllofMP3.com to re-open

The "illegal" Russian AllofMP3.com, which is the second most popular music download site after iTunes will re-open soon.

A Russian judge ruled earlier this month that the site, which sells albums for between $1 and $2, had not been guilty of copyright infringement because prosecutors had brought insufficient evidence against it.

Will Yahoo Teachers help cheating?

Yahoo has announced Yahoo Teachers, an "internet network designed by and for teachers". It will allow sharing of class material.

"To save material found on the Web, teachers can use what is called a gobbler, a feature that allows them to drag and drop text or images into an online portfolio rather than having to cut and paste the material. The gobbler may be expanded to other Yahoo products, according to a comment posted by Bradley Horowitz, a Yahoo vice president, on the blog of another Yahoo manager," ScrippsNews reports.

Teachers are invited to apply to join now.

However, the concern is whether students will make use of it to cheat. Traditionally class material for instructors and students are different.

A Better Way to Backup Your Entire Blogger Blog

I have often wanted to backup my entire Blogger blog, and found no good way to do it.

The Blogger help states "Blogger does not have an export or download function", and went on to describe the steps to change the blog parameters, so that all posts appear on one page, which can then be saved. The steps include making changes to the template, and must be reversed after the backup.

The method I find most convenient is the one given in an article at googlesystem.blogspot .
To backup this blog, first find out how many entries there are (which is currently less than 200), and then type

http://10outof10.blogspot.com/search?max-results=200

Substitute the url and the max-results number for any other Blogger blog.
This method has the advantage of being usable for blogs which you don't own, and it includes images.

The same method can be used to get all posts in XML format, without the sidebars:

http://10outof10.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=200

However, I found that the feed does not include the older posts.
This XML format is better, if you want to re-enter the data into a database. You need to some programming though.

Finally, you can use a third party service such as BlogBackupOnline

Such programs will be continually developed, one day we may be able to select posts of a blog, and convert them to pdf format for publishing.

One question remains for which I don't know the answer: one can backup the posts and the comments separately, but how to backup both together?

US sites top in Malware

According to the security company Cyveillance, Web surfers visiting sites based in the United States are more at risk from malware attacks and online identity theft than visitors to sites based in other countries, with more than 63% of malware distributed to visitors via tainted U.S.-based Web sites.

As for the reason, the report “Online Financial Fraud and Identity Theft Report”, says: "We believe that this is simply a case of following the money. The criminals want access to the computers of U.S. citizens so they can eventually tap into their financial resources. Therefore, they distribute malware on sites visited by U.S consumer"

Psychologist reveals the secrets of leadership

It is not charisma, intelligence, or other personality traits that one must have in order to be a good leader. Research by psychologists at the University of Exeter, University of St Andrews and Australian National University shows that most important is for leaders to be identified as "one of us".

Once they are identified as "one of us", they are in position to shape "what we should do".

The research paper, The New Psychology of Leadership, by Stephen D Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam (Exeter) and Michael J. Platow (ANU) is the cover story of the current edition of Scientific American Mind.

A Little Bit of Walking is Good for Your Blood Pressure

WebMD reports about a new survey published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (Tully, M. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Aug. 13, 2007; vol 61: pp 778-783. News release, BMJ.), which shows that even 30 minutes walk three times a week is sufficient to lower their blood pressure.

This should be easier to accomplish than the recommended National guidelines to exercise at least 30 minutes a day on most days of the week to maintain optimum health.

The survey showed that Systolic blood pressure dropped by 5 points among those who exercised three days a week and by 6 points among those who exercised five days a week.

What To Eat, A Simple Question With A Complicated Answer

The simple answer, according to Prof Marion Nestle in a Scientific American article titled: "Eating made simple, How do you cope with a mounting of conflicting diet advice?" , is eat less, move more, eat vegetables and whole grains, and eat less junk food.

The writer is also the author of the book "What to Eat".

The above simple answer is not in dispute, all of us can follow it.

When it comes to questions on organic food, drinking milk and calcium, meat and fish, etc. nutrition experts differ in their opinions.

Some say that there is no proof that organic food is more nutritious, others say it is, but too expensive, and still others question how we know that so-called organic food is really free from "synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, genetically modified seeds, irradiation or fertilizer derived from sewage sludge".

Milk contains calcium, but bone strength does not depend on calcium intake alone. Populations who do not consume dairy products have less bone fractures. The author illustrated this by saying "Think of cows: they do not drink milk after weaning, but their bones support bodies weighing 800 pounds or more."

Meat is responsible for higher cholesterol levels, and increasing the risks of heart disease, and cancer. Others dispute this.

Fish has good omega-3 acids, but fish accumulates mercury and other toxins.

The list of such issues, goes on and on, as for example the debate of margarine versus butter.

And this is what makes the answer to "What to Eat?" complicated. Worse still, industries with specific interests in selling their products will always produce "scientific evidence" supporting their positions.

Most Popular Programming Languages as of August 2007

For some time now, Tiobe has published on a monthly basis its so-called Programming Community index, measuring the popularity of programming languages. It uses search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo to calculate the ratings based on the number of available skilled professionals, courses and third party vendors.

The methodology is not without flaws, but the general results are widely acceptable.

The dominance of the C family of programming languages and Java is apparent, and this has not changed at all.

Java is first with 21.8%, but if C (15.7%) and C++ (10.1%) are combined, they would overtake Java.

C is notable, because many other languages including Java are actually derived from it, and other languages including Ruby, Lua, Python, etc are implemented in C.

If a young aspiring programmer wants to seriously do programming, I would recommend C.

However if the person wants to develop business applications, then Java or .Net would be the choice.

VB (VB, VBA, Vb.Net) has 10.6% about the same share as C++. Then comes PHP (9.7%) and Perl (5.3%), followed by C# (3.9%).

The three P's PHP, Perl and Python (2.7%) have not changed much over the years.

JavaScript remains quite popular with 2.8%, recently with the rise of AJAX, although it is vulnerable to many security risks.

Ruby (1.9%) has climbed very fast, it is now close to JavaScript. It remains to be seen whether it can overtake Python and Perl, the languages it is supposed to improve. For one thing, Perl is widely available, and has the reputation of getting things done.

Worth mentioning is the language D (1.3%) ; it tries to improve upon C++. One of its stated goals is "Reduce software development costs by at least 10% by adding in proven productivity enhancing features and by adjusting language features so that common, time-consuming bugs are eliminated from the start."

Apart from Ruby, the fastest growing language is Lua, a fast, light-weight and embeddable scripting language coming out from Brazil. It is so fast (comparable to C), that the phrase "as fast as Lua" is commonly used. Because it embeddable, and written in C, it is relatively easy to interface with other C based languages. One of its most popular application is for scripting games, interfacing with existing game engines. It is also a candidate to replace ActionScript.

Languages on the way out include Delphi (1.2%) and FoxPro (0.4%).

The Myth of Homo economicus

The notion of Homo economicus (economic man) as a rational, selfish person who single-mindedly strives for maximum profit is often assumed in economic theories.

Yet many theories and experiments have shown that we are only bounded rational, and often have a sense of fairness instead of selfishness.

A 2002 Scientific American article titled "The Economics of Fair Play" , Sigmund. Fehr and Nowak showed that fair play can be the result of a Darwinian evolution.

In 2007, Scientifc American carries an article "Is Greed Good?":

"Economist Axel Ockenfels of the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues have spent the past several years figuring out ..... It turns out that humans do not always behave as if their sole concern is their personal financial advantage—and even when they do, they consider social motives in the profit-making equation. As Ockenfels has discovered, a sense of fairness often plays a big role in people’s decisions about what to do with their money and possessions, and it is also an essential part of what drives trust in markets full of strangers such as eBay.

Ockenfels’s Equity, Reciprocity and Competition (ERC) theory, which he developed with economist Gary Bolton of Pennsylvania State University, states that people not only try to maximize their gains but also watch to see that they get roughly the same share as others: they are happy to get one piece of cake as long as the next person does not get two pieces. This fairness gauge apparently even has a defined place in the brain. On eBay, however, fairness takes the system only halfway, researchers have now learned; eBay’s reputation system is critical for augmenting the level of trust enough for the market to work."

Research in this field utilizes Game Theory combined with evolution, see for example Carl Zimmer's "In Games, an Insight Into the Rules of Evolution" where he discussed Martin Nowak's work.

Such research has now gone beyond economics, and applied to social studies and to biology (cooperation as the cause of cancer).
Some popular articles about the social aspects appear in 2004 in the Neue Zuercher Zeitung "Warum einander helfen?" and Welt Online "Selbstlose Helfer setzen sich durch"

Beware of Cookies!

Cookies have always been a problem, some programs need them to track clients, but by allowing foreign programs to write cookies on our disk, we are exposed to security and privacy risks. Why not just reject all cookies? Unfortunately some programs would work without them.

Now there is news that Hackers bite into 'cookies' to plunder user data from websites:

"US college student Rick Deacon arrived at DefCon on Friday ready to demonstrate how to use trickery and software skills to steal enough information from MySpace users' cookies to commandeer their profile pages.

"You can become them on MySpace; basically hijack accounts left and right," Deacon told AFP.

The attack relies on duping MySpace users into clicking on a rigged link, perhaps in an online forum or bulletin board that routes them to a file that steals passwords and other information from their cookies.

"I've never seen it fail," Deacon said. "I become you on MySpace."

Hackers can use commandeered profiles as springboards for more attacks or to infect users' computers with viruses, according to Deacon.

"I could rip through your computer as easily as I stole your cookie."

The "hole" in defense is not limited to MySpace, according to Deacon, who listed Facebook and Google as vulnerable to the attacks.

Social networking websites are prime targets, Deacon said. "

If you want to assess what cookies are in your computer, a good program is the AVG Anti-Spyware available free from Grisoft

SN Goenka videos

In the post How to succeed in business: Meditate, the SN Goenka meditation was mentioned.
The following are videos of SN Goenka, for the benefit of those interested, available in the public domain.
They are Dhamma Podcasts titled "A Simple Path", in three parts, and a video titled "Vipassana meditation experience "

More information on SN Goenka: Dhamma.org

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



Vipassana meditation experience

237 Reasons To Have Sex

Research at the University of Texas found that there are 237 reasons people have sex (see: Physorg):

People’s motivations ranged from the mundane (“I was bored”) to the spiritual (“I wanted to feel closer to God”) and from the altruistic (“I wanted the person to feel good about himself/herself”) to the manipulative (“I wanted to get a promotion”).

Some said they had sex to feel powerful, others to debase themselves. Some wanted to impress their friends, others to harm their enemies (“I wanted to break up a rival’s relationship”).