Okay, the biggest confusion I have is the part about the time your candidate got to correct you on TDD[1].
This seems like something you could and should have caught in the moment, without having to use your feedback technique. If they answered, and only mentioned the high-level tests, and you expect them to have low-level tests, then just ask, right then, if that was all of their tests, rather than silently assume the worst and move on.
Heuristic: if a remark seems outrageous, double-check before making a major decision on it.[2] This is not just in interviews, but life in general.
Example: Your friend says "Hey can you toss me through the window [of this skyscraper]?"
Your version: Call their family and 911 to report them as suicidal. Give a long speech about why they shouldn't kill themself. Then explain why you did what you did and ask if you misunderstood anything.
Sane, heuristic version: You reply, "You... want me to throw you to your death?"
Friend: "Oh jeez, no, that's just an expression we use here. I want you lift me up onto the balcony."
[1] Quoted in full:
>I gave one candidate feedback along the lines of “when you explained the app that you built, you talked about the testing that you did at only a very high level, so I’m worried about your depth of testing knowledge, particularly around Test Driven Development (TDD)”. The response was along the lines of “Oh. You’re right. I didn’t really delve into detail, but here’s how I went about doing the testing and here is my general approach in other examples”. The candidate then went into significant depth explaining how they had done TDD over the last 10 years, which clearly demonstrated their understanding and maturity of the practice. Misunderstanding corrected.
[2] Which, to be clear, you are doing by using your technique ... it just feels oddly delayed and lets a misunderstanding accumulate much longer than it needs to; my example is an exaggerated version of the failure mode.
It isn't explained in that section of the article, but after I ask the original question, I will probe again multiple times to try to uncover the depth of a candidate's knowledge. It can be difficult with some questions because you don't want to feed the candidate the answer. The other thing is that if I were to give them feedback on the middle of the interview it could throw out there confidence for the rest of the interview (eg if say that there answer lacked depth, but they thought they did well. Or that it lacked depth because they actually didn't know any more about the topic)
I avoid making exceptions to the rule, but in the vernacular, people definitely break from it! You'll see e.g. "an historic event", usually justified because the first syllable is weak and close enough to being vowel-started.
FWIW "an Nvida employee" sounds better than me an "a Nvidia employee" because the latter has two vowels with no consonant separating them ... and I don't get repetition there because the vowels are different.
Well, on that note: the construction “I went to the store” has always felt wrong to me as a native speaker. People say it even when that store lacks definiteness in context (ie the listener has no reason to know which one you mean). At the very least, it counts as a separate usage of “the” that doesn’t follow the usual pattern, like when you say “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”.
Edit: Here's a frustrating HN thread where someone tried to claim it makes sense, but it turned out his argument hinged on "well obviously all native English speakers regularly go to some store, right?" Screw the homebound.
I think the usage falls into this group:
"The first group consists of nouns which refer to shared knowledge of the situation or context...",
When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to. Friends and neighbours would have also have known up to fairly recently, when people still mostly walked for groceries and such to the few small stores nearby and made friends with people who lived close.
So, I'd say it's a bit of a colloquial hold over from walking times and construction taking a listener into confidence.
It is common for someone to say, for instance, "I need to go to the store" even if they don't have any particular store in mind.
A prescriptivist pedant might insist that this is incorrect, and they should instead say "I need to go to a store", but in my judgment as a native speaker, the version with "the" is more idiomatic, and the version with "a" sounds stilted.
Third time: I'm not imposing some kind of prescriptivism, and I know that it's common. You're not bringing in any new information here. I'm saying it deviates from the usual pattern of using "the" when the noun has definiteness.
To repeat another part of my initial post, it's like the use of "the" in "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". It's clearly a different usage/meaning/sense of "the" -- in fact, most other languages use a different word for that sense. (German uses je ... desto.) It would be very dubious to explain all uses of "the" as "oh its when the noun has definiteness". It wouldn't cover that case, and it wouldn't cover (the typical use of) "I went to the store".
I am agreeing with you that "the" in "I went to the store" does not necessarily imply any specific instance of the noun, and is a grammatically distinct use of the word.
Some of the statements (by other people) in this conversation are wrong, based on applying a school-style oversimplified explanation that doesn't really match English usage.
Usually, the mall, the store, the gas station in a story are habitual known places for the people telling you these stories, and they are implying that. In other cases, it is being used as an idiom that imply something habitual, common, run of the mill.
Again, they do it even when those prerequisites don’t hold. And your second sentence is agreeing that it’s a different usage than the normal definiteness.
I see this as consistent with other replies stating that The is something specific in a group, and A is an indeterminant one of many.
How can this be in your example? When I am saying "I went to the store", I am really saying "There are a group of locations that I could have gone. E.G., the car dealership, the bank, the museum, the store, or the office. I went to the store".
That's not how definiteness works otherwise -- it's always for a case where the other party would know which one you mean. This "selecting out of possible other choices" protocol is not a thing.
Unsurprising that they're both flagged. HN commenters really, really don't like to think about a world where they can't tell the difference between real and AI.
One commenter really nailed it[1]: "We didn't get worse at judging art. We just got better at doubting everything."
I’d say it’s more about confronting the ways in which art is just posturing, hype, and status games, and what it’s like to find out you’re in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation.
Most people aren't aware of the prevalence of stock imagery during the 2000s. AI is just synthetic stock images, which I have zero problem with.
Artists with taste are the ones creating the best AI images, just they were the ones who photoshopped the best things out of stock images when that was the main mode, and just as they created the best stuff when everything was manual typesetting and dark room photography.
That assumes that AI is only used in place of stock imagery.
In reality it is seeping into our lives at an alarming rate which I worry is disrupting our shared sense of reality (which was already tenuous.)
AI has capabilities that were impossible (or very difficult before.) You could easily generate a realistic video of me saying terrible things or kicking a puppy or doing a pornographic act. You could clone my voice and call my grandma asking for money. It’s very hard to tell what is real now and it will get harder as the capabilities improve.
These tools are also much more accessible than photo editing software. Before, few people had the skill to create realistic fakes. Now anyone can do it. This has led to a flood of fake images, videos, and text online. This crowds out real humans and makes it hard to know what is real. My older relatives especially have Facebook feeds filled with fake content they think is real.
The capabilities combined with the scale make it hard to know what is real in a way Photoshop never did.
Yeah, that always bothered me about the terminology. My fix would be to call it a lock -- everyone understands that you can share those and it doesn't make them any easier to open.
Sure, but you generally those are separate conversations in which you don't need to appeal to the duality of encryption and authentication or apply the analogy to the latter.
So you agree it's a problem, but still characterized the situation as "all is good" in your first comment. I would not call that good, and I would be have used different words to characterize/trivialize this situation.
Hm I've seen keyboards where INS didn't appear to do anything, but that was because you had to press a different button to activate the set of keys that includes INS, and you might have been looking at a case of that.
Reminds me of another story about older scripts being hard to read:
I found a paperback with Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England[1]. In the intro, it explains how they made the deliberate decision to render them as pixel-for-pixel copies of the original texts, so you could get the most pure, unadulterated form.
I'm like lol whatever, you act like you're doing the world a huge favor by not transcribing it into something legible for modern readers, forcing them to navigate around stuff like the s's looking like f's. No, dude, anyone who actually needs that level of authenticity is a scholar who already knows how to find the originals. You don't want that in a publication for a mass audience.
Heh, I have a variant of Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute, to bigotry, that which can be explained by misanthropy.
That is, don't assume that bad behavior is because of someone's membership in a particular demographic, when it could just be a general instance of people being assholes.
This reminds me a sexual harassment training class I had to take at a startup decades ago. [They actually called it that too, like they were training us how to sexually harass!] We learned about something called the equal opportunity jerk defense. If you could prove you were an asshole to everyone, then you weren't guilty of sexual harrassment.
https://theonion.com/consumer-product-diversity-now-exceeds-...
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