Don't use floats if you're trying to represent an exact value, i.e. someones bank account. But in financial modelling you're generally dealing in probabilistic "expected values", it's common and fine to use floats.
Having said that, half the world seems to run on Excel spreadsheets, which are full of money values, and Excel is basically all floats (with some funky precision logic to make it deterministic - would be curious to know more).
If given a question about reversing a string, it lets you ask the interviewer questions like:
* Do you want to do it in-place or as a copy?
* Is it an ASCII or Unicode string? If using Unicode, I assume you want to reverse on grapheme cluster boundaries?
Asking these questions let you as a candidate demonstrate your knowledge.
If the candidate doesn't ask these questions, the interviewer can ask follow up questions like.
* What is the time/space complexity of the algorithm? (Easy answer!)
* How does this work with UTF strings?
I don't particularly like the question, but have been in interviews where this exact question was used. From the discussion with the candidate it did very quickly weed out inexperienced developers. I was amazed at how many people applied for roles and had no knowledge of these concepts.
> Do you actually reverse strings here?
We've also tried doing more in-depth code exercises, which are more applicable to our business domain. That didn't work much better, and required upfront work from the candidate, which isn't always fair on them.
Anyways - happily not involved in the recruiting process any more.
Thanks for taking the time to write these comments.
In my opinion, existing tech is able to solve the climate crisis. Breakthroughs can make the solution cheaper and sooner.
In my view the main problem is the attitude of doom amongst the general population. If people felt there was a solution, and were excited and energised by the challenge, they'd be more willing to support political changes. I.e. pushing back against entrenched obstructionist industries, pricing externalities, and investing in infrastructure.
The cause is a political battle with Putin over gas. Russia has traditionally used gas contracts with individual countries to buy political influence.
Now the EU has a single gas market, and had upgraded pipelines to be used in reverse directions. For example, recently since gas transport from Russia to Poland was reduced, Germany has been exporting gas to Poland.
Putin is testing Germany's new government and the EU leadership.
More renewables, and using gas more efficiently, i.e better insulated buildings throughout the EU will solve this.
New nuclear isn't going to happen much in the EU, and existing nuclear is only a small part of EU wide generation, and becoming increasingly unreliable. France has even higher electricity prices ATM due to nuclear outages.
Primary energy consumption isn't a great metric for comparing with renewable electricity, since for conventional plants it includes the unused energy lost as heat.
A fossil power plant wastes ~60% of the energy, a nuclear plant ~75%, a small petrol engine ~75%. Once you take this into account, the stats look a little better.
All of the car companies, dialed down orders at the start of the pandemic. Now they are all trying to stockpile chips, due to not enough supply. I imagine (no data to support) the increased size stockpiles are a large part of what makes the problem worse. Kinda like TP really.
Also, Toyota is now cutting 40 percent of global production due to chip shortage.
Travel was open with Australia until the recent outbreak there. Using virus genome sequencing, this outbreak has been traced to a New Zealander who caught the virus in Sydney, and spent 2 weeks in a quarantine centre in Auckland.
It's not yet known how the virus escaped the quarantine centre. None of the quarantine centre staff have tested positive, despite being tested multiple times.
It's suspected that the transmission occurred by somebody walking near the hotel while the initial case was arriving, or in a fenced off outdoor exercise area.
6 people walked by on CCTV at this point. 4 have been contacted, but 2 haven't been identified.
Also worth noting, the border isn't completely closed. There is a steady stream of returning New Zealanders, and also exceptions for some workers. Everyone does a 2 week quarantine stay on entering the country. Some of these people test positive for Corona, but so far it hasn't escaped a quarantine centre. Looks like Delta is harder to contain.
What is not well known in the Anglosphere is that the German nuclear phase-out was actually legislated around 2000, and not in 2011 after Fukushima.
In 2011 Merkel extended the phase-out end date by ~10 years, which was democratically very unpopular. 3-months later Fukushima happened, and the phase-out went back to an end-date similar to the original.
It is phrased this way because the changing climate is what negatively affects civilization.
While it is an energy imbalance which causes the climate to change, modifying the energy input or output via geoengineering will also cause the climate to change, even if the overall balance stays the same.
"An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without constant manual control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the vehicle."
This assumes that the nuclear reactors could ramp up and down on a daily basis. Germany's reactors weren't capable of load following to the extent required.
In fact brokdorf was taken offline early due to a failure during a load following experiment. It was only ramping by a small percentage of load.
It's more likely that keeping the reactors online would have made the coal phaseout negotiations harder, and made it easier for the big four power companies to prevent renewables from being deployed.
In my view it's more important to build up industry capable of constantly deploying new zero carbon generation, and exporting this technology, than to keep the reactors running for more than 35 years (the phase out agreement).
Having said that, half the world seems to run on Excel spreadsheets, which are full of money values, and Excel is basically all floats (with some funky precision logic to make it deterministic - would be curious to know more).
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2815407/can-someone-conf...