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Comment by billforsternz | Hacker News Reader

Using my fingers I'm guessing a golf ball is about 3cm in diameter. A 737 or an A320 cabin is, again my guess/estimate, 30m long, 4m wide 2m high. So approx 30cm^3 into 200m^3. One million cm^3 in a m^3. I'm going with 5 million golf balls and hoping I'm right within an order of magnitude or so. I miss those kind of questions which have died out sadly.

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And that helps proving someone is up to the task of writing a Website using Spring in a Kubernetes cluster in what manner?

Obviously it doesn't because it's more a test of reasoning ability and intelligence that specific domain skills. The theory is that smart programmers will be able to quickly pick up whatever specialised skills are needed for specific projects. Some people are good generalists. Others prefer to specialize. Employers are free to optimize for their circumstances and preferences I guess.

It works beautiful in practice, as proven by Google products source code.

Obviously, it doesn't. But having estimation skills (which is what the golf ball stuff is about) is always useful, specifically when doing testing. I wouldn't want to hire someone that couldn't estimate what the price of their supermarket trolley shop was.

How does that map to fibonacci sequences?

Just for fun I asked the question as a simple google search which these days of course triggers an AI answer. It made for rather sobering reading;

Query: "how many golf balls fit in a boeing 737"

Result:

Estimating, you could fit roughly 1.5 to 2 million golf balls inside a Boeing 737, depending on the specific model and how tightly they're packed.

Here's a breakdown of the estimation: Boeing 737 Dimensions: A Boeing 737 has a cabin volume of approximately 3,000 cubic meters. Golf Ball Volume: A golf ball has a volume of about 0.000004 cubic meters. Calculation: Dividing the cabin volume by the golf ball volume (3,000 / 0.000004) yields an estimated 750,000 golf balls. However, this calculation assumes the balls are packed perfectly, which is unlikely. Practical Considerations: In reality, you'd need to account for the space taken up by the plane's structure, seats, aisles, and other equipment, which reduces the usable space for golf balls. Final Estimate: Therefore, a more realistic estimate would be around 1.5 to 2 million golf balls, which accounts for the inefficiencies of packing and the space taken up by the plane's interior.

Commentary: There are so many problems with this.

A) The actual diameter of a golf ball is 4.3 cm, so its volume is 4/3 * pi * (4.3/2)^3 = 42 cm^3. There's definitely one million cubic centimetres in a cubic metre because it's (100cm)x(100cm)x(100cm). Dividing 42 by one million gives, 0.000042 cubic metres unless I'm going crazy. So approximately 0.00004 cubic metres not 0.000004 cubic metres, out by one order of magnitude.

B) Cabin volume is 3000 cubic metres. Really? Since it's about 4m wide by 2m high, it would have to be nearly 400 metres long for that to be true! Actual length 40 metres approx, actual volume 320 cubic metres approx. Out by one order of magnitude (again).

C) 3000 / 0.000004 = 750,000,000 not 750,000! This time the AI is just doing basic arithmetic and is out by three orders of magnitude. The actual calculation should be 300 / 0.00004 = 7,500,000. The various order of magnitude errors at each stage partially cancel each other, leaving us just one order of magnitude out.

D) Finally the various practical considerations it quite correctly raises means we should reduce the number of golf balls we estimate, but the AI goes the wrong way, increasing it by a factor of 3 or so from less that a million to 1.5 to 2 million.

Conclusion: It's a hallucination raised to the fourth power.

Indeed, at least it is on the right path to be hired by a wannabe FAANG startup.

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