Going with your examples, I think "leave your phone at home" is more actionable than "stop wasting time on the internet", and both are vastly more actionable than "stop staying awake" and "just be happy".
I think you misrepresent the parent post. Suppose you had insomnia. Wouldn't it be a fair suggestion to cut back on coffee and other stimulants first, before trying sleeping pills?
Yes, your last point seems quite accurate -- smokers often complain that they would like to stop smoking, but don't want to miss out on the social connections it entails.
You can even do a week's shopping, using a bicycle-pulled trailer (otherwise used for carrying small kids). As a side-effect you even benefit from the courtesy of drivers, who may think you are carrying your children as usually.
I recently came across some "burekasim" in Israel. The double plural there has a taste of the entire mediterranean from turkish/greek/arabic/ladino/spanish/hebrew :) I guess it could be dialed up one more notch if an english-speaking tourist would ask for some burekasims.
I agree -- in addition, such problems can also be seen as a springboard into research - tweak any of them or ask if you can prove that the solution is optimal, and you are quickly in the realm of open questions.
Nice list, but a side-note: all this focus on interview-preparation may give the false impression that algorithms and data structures is a closed body of work, when in fact it is an active and lively field of research with many basic questions not yet understood.
Someone could go through these 500 questions and for (almost) all of them formulate variants/extensions that would be open research questions. Or alternatively, ask for each of them: is this the best possible solution? Can I prove it? What if I restrict what the algorithm can do? What if the data comes online? What if the input is noisy? etc. etc. etc.
Not the OP, but I guess an argument against globalisation could be made (and has been made by many) from the perspective of better robustness/resilience of a less centralized/less interconnected system, avoidance of single points of failure, maintaining higher diversity of opinions, etc. etc.
Still, the original architecture "Design Patterns" book by Alexander (which this book is supposed to be the software analogy of) discusses "good practices", emphatically recommended for architects, city planners, etc. So it is maybe not that far-fetched to interpret these patterns as recommendations too.
At least for grocery-shopping I find that a children's bike trailer can pack a surprisingly large amount of stuff -- of course it is not quite as convenient as a car.
I don't mean to side-track a very valid point that you are making, but stepping back a little, isn't it amusing that humanity has reached such an advanced state where a strong argument for owning cars is to ship dogs around?
Also, only slightly related, but as someone not owning pets I always find it amusing (again, for lack of better word) to see people in the act of picking up dog-poop (I'm well-aware of the worse immediate alternative of leaving it on the ground). Still, isn't there some irony hidden in these small gestures, given mankind's (otherwise) complete domination of nature? etc. etc. etc.
I mostly agree with your view, but I wonder how you can reconcile it with the unfolding environmental disaster and loss of biodiversity across the globe.
I think you describe the tone quite precisely -- it is the same tone the author may have used to describe someone who built an Eiffel tower out of matchsticks -- the premise being that we get an objective description of a subculture (SV technologists) somewhat alien to the main readership of the magazine. But I do think that this objective tone is somewhat fake, because by the choice of examples and their juxtaposition the author does seem to occasionally take sides and actively (and subtly) parody certain attitudes. It is telling how many in this forum seem to have missed this and saw the article as unilaterally flattering.
I very much doubt that we have that kind of information available about prehistoric (say, Neantherthal) humans, except perhaps in very sparse and unreliable form.
Yes, I agree, but my point was more that I doubt that those who suggest a value of, say, 29.4 for stone age humans, have gone through any these calculations.
> Average life expectancies were low because of infant mortality
I heard this argument many many times, including in reputable places, and I never quite understood it. Just to make sure, the argument is something like "in stone age/bronze age/ancient times/medieval Europe/etc. average life expectancy was 30/40/50/whatever, but only if we factor in child mortality, otherwise people lived reasonable # of years".
Do we have any reliable estimates about child mortality in those times to make such a claim? What about other accidents/violence/etc. Was it different from one place to the other? Do we have any data on this to come up with _any_ estimate? Could it be that child mortality was so high, that avg. life expectency was like 10 years? When we informally say that people in those times "lived less" is it really reasonable to consider such factors? What did people actually live in those times?
That uniqueness may be just in the fact that our brains were "trained" during the billions of years of life on Earth, with all the quirks of that particular environment. That may indeed be hard to replicate exactly, so it can be imagined that AI will not match us in some particular tasks, just as it is hard for the aviation industry to match the characteristics of bird-wings. (which they can of course outperform along some, but not all parameters)
To make that comparison fair, maybe you should also count the amount of data used during the human toddler's evolution when the structure of the brain became what it is.