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1764 points fatihky | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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greg7mdp ◴[] No.12701392[source]
Hahaha, that is funny/tragic. Outsourcing hiring a director of engineering to a moron with a cheat sheet! Your answers were great, though, and indeed on the systems I have tried the popcount() computation with the bit shifts you suggested is faster than using an 8 bit lookup table. (however the SSE4 popcnt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE4#POPCNT_and_LZCNT) is faster still).
replies(1): >>12702595 #
1. KirinDave ◴[] No.12702595[source]
While I think these things are super interesting trivia, I really want to ask the question: "Why does a Director of Engineering for Google need to know this?" That is not only a rather unusual question (within the scope of daily tasks for a programmer, these tend to be an important minority for a project), but it's one that's best settled empirically and within the context of your execution environment.

There are a lot of different answers to the question depending on where you're doing it and how you want to impact the machine.

It's a bizarre question to pose to Director level, because the proper response even for a technical director should be, "The answer to that changes quickly, we should measure and check what our environment's latest capabilities are and if they are reliable."

I mean I'm all gung ho to program stuff, but I think that'd be a massive misapplication of my time with that title in my current job, and given my other responsibilities I'd only do it more slowly than someone with dedicated focus.