The test says that the class with private members and no setters is intended to be immutable after creation, so that's not a problem. Having a single linked list for the entire grid (rather than a list of lists) is completely insane though. I'd expect a student who actually knew what he or she was doing to be more confused than one that would end up writing code with horrible algorithmic complexity. Looking at the rest of the test, it's not much better. If this is what AP tests look like in the USA, then I'll make sure not to weight it very highly when looking at applicants next academic year.

The problem is when the initial conditions are concentrated ownership. If the hypothetical impoverished country has a feudal system (or similar) where all of the land is owned by a few dozen lords. Now the Americans going over there buy land from the lord in relatively small parcels, allowing him to turn his wealth into liquid form and removing the land that his serfs lived on. So what do the serfs do? They didn't own the land and they're now displaced. They weren't lucky enough to be born owning land so they get nothing.

It's not like most of the people in the original poster's example chose not to own a house. They rent because they didn't inherit enough wealth to own somewhere to live.

The C++11 specification was explicitly written to permit garbage collection and includes standard library functions for providing hints to a garbage collector.

C++ is never the right tool for the job, but for a lot of jobs the right tool doesn't exist and C++ will work.

No it doesn't. It depends on the ABI and the CPU that you're using, but the compiler makes no difference at all.

Not true. In C++11 you have std::make_shared, which allocates an object and the metadata block for a std::shared_ptr in a single block, giving you a lower-overhead mechanism for creating a std::shared_ptr. C++14 also introduced std::make_unique, which doesn't save anything over calling new and then casting to a std::unique_ptr, but make it possible to write code without any need to directly call new. In C++14, there is absolutely no reason to see a new or delete in the code outside of the standard library implementation. If you're writing one then you're doing it wrong.

If an object has a single unique owner, then std::unique_ptr has no run-time overhead and will ensure that the object is correctly deleted even in the presence of exceptions. I agree with the grandparent: any object that isn't allocated on the stack should be created with std::make_shared or std::make_unique.

If you can't be replaced, then you can't be promoted. Do you really want to be maintaining the same program for the rest of your life? And do you want to have a reference that says 'no one can understand this guy's code' when you leave for the next job?

And then only if backed up by realistic macrobenchmarks. There are a lot of things in C++ that have interesting performance characteristics (templates allow more inlining, so make microbenchmarks faster but can cause you to run out of i-cache and make the whole program slower, virtual functions prevent inlining unless the compiler can do devirtualisation, but are actually slightly faster to call than cross-library calls via a PLT if they're not inlined). Generally, algorithmic improvements will make a bigger difference than any language feature. The main reason for using templates should be to eliminate copy-and-paste coding, not to improve performance.

How did they control for biases coming from parents? Research that I've read shows that gender stereotypes start to be instilled within the first few days after a child is born. Unless they're testing with children that have never seen a toy of any kind before, then the toy experiments are not detecting biological biases, they're picking up on a mix of inherited and learned responses. There's a lot of very bad science done to try to claim that there are things that girls like and things that boys like, ignoring the fact that the things that girls like vary wildly between countries and even over time in the same country (for example, blue was a girls' colour and ping a boys' colour in most of Europe until 1-2 centuries ago, and horses have swung between the two as a stereotypical interest several times).

So that's a target market of only 136 million?

Oh, and they're only concentrated in one of the wealthiest areas? Definitely not a problem then.

How times have changed. Someone posts and old copypasta troll and gets dozens of serious responses. If any post deserves a +5 Troll mod, it's this one. Beautifully done sir, though perhaps a sad reflection on what's left of this community.

It's not a problem for floating point, where division by zero is well defined (it's a NaN value). And division by almost-zero is not a problem in floating point either, though if you're going down one of the pipelines for dealing with subnormal values then be aware that it's likely 10-100 times slower than normal floating point calculations.

It took a lot longer than a few weeks to break even for me, but it was less than a year. Allowing different thermostat settings at different times and on different days made the house quite a lot more efficient.

I'm surprised that it's taken this long. I've thought that MS and Apple should have been incorporating aggressive anti-tracking and ad blocking capabilities into IE and Safari for a few years, because neither company makes much money from ads, both could easily spin it as a user-centric decision, and it would hurt Google a lot.