Ask HN: Is this a bad interview question for an intern?

> There's a 50MB log file. Each line starts with ERROR, INFO, WARN or DEBUG, indicating what type of message was being logged. How would you figure out how many errors occurred? The technology you use is not important. We're just interested in the technique you would use.

(This is a simplified version of the kind of stuff we deal with on a daily basis)

Only one out of 4 managed to answer the problem in a satisfactory way ("count how many lines begin with the word ERROR"). The others seemed to be completely thrown by the fact that it was a 50MB log file. Is this just a bad question?