that particular reference was cross-over from sci.crypt to alt.folklore.computers related to crypto in the 80s.

there is actually a subthread along the job interview lines running in comp.arch newsgroup ... a small snippet of the thread
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#67

more of the thread can be found using google groups ... this gets some amount of the thread:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.arch/browse_thread/thread/72e85e8ae47a1c03/ba842fbb1d8d56fc?q=board+group:comp.arch&_done=%2Fgroups%3Fas_q%3Dboard%26num%3D100%26scoring%3Dr%26hl%3Den%26ie%3DUTF-8%26as_epq%3D%26as_oq%3D%26as_eq%3D%26as_ugroup%3Dcomp.arch%26as_usubject%3D%26as_uauthors%3D%26lr%3D%26as_drrb%3Dq%26as_qdr%3Dw%26as_mind%3D1%26as_minm%3D1%26as_miny%3D1981%26as_maxd%3D27%26as_maxm%3D12%26as_maxy%3D2004%26safe%3Doff%26&_doneTitle=Back+to+Search&&d#ba842fbb1d8d56fc

A better test would be to ask him to punctuate the message. I am so tired of those damned ellipses. There's a reason God invented the period, semicolon and comma.

You see, Cypherpunk, you just didn't get hired :) In those posts there is a lot of camouflage, but also just enough meat that if you happen to have travelled that path before and have had that experience, it's easy enough to reverse-engineer. Or, it's enough to permit someone with a bit of book knowledge to speculate and stumble about and speculate on the content.

But, the first part of the test is that the ellipses and punctuation filter out the impatient. There is no security in impatience, it requires detail, perseverance and an innate distrust of whatever anyone else tells you is the party line.

I used to ask a question of my people, back in the days of C:

How big is an int?

The answer is one of the following:

a) it's 16 bits long (or it's 32 bits long)
b) it's the machine's natural register size
c) it's no smaller than a short and no longer than a long

The first answer, if expressed in an interview, meant that the person had done some programming in C. The second answer meant that they had done enough to move from machine to machine, which was pretty much required for serious C programming. But the third answer meant that they knew enough C to have read K&R and read it several times and in depth.

I generally hired anyone who got b), and didn't hire anyone who got a). I rarely came across anyone who got c) !

The best answer to that question is
d) sizeof(int) bytes long
which means the person has some chance of writing portable code and knows an indispensable language feature.

LOL! yes, that would get you hired. That is indeed the point, a good interview question allows the programmer to express how much he knows and what is worth knowing.

the volume of my postings has actually declined quite a bit from 20 years ago (but the types of complaints haven't changed much). at that time, a researcher was brought in .... sitting in the back of my office for 9 months ... taking notes on all my conversations, as well as having copies of all my incoming and outgoing email as well as logs of all instant message activity. the detailed analysis, besides becoming a corporate research report, also turned into a stanford phd thesis ... joint between AI and language departments ... and the material for subsequent books and papers. I think that the thesis claimed that I exhanged email with avg. of 275 different people per week (for the 9 months of the study).

couple past posts mentioning study and title of at least one of the books
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay2.htm#position AADS NWI and XML encoded X9.59 NWI
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay10.htm#26 Definese Dept Criticised on Internal Credit Card Fraud
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#29 Title Inflation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#37 Would the value of knowledge and information be transferred or shared accurately across the different culture??????
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#64 Pardon my ignorance,
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#60 Big Ideas, where are they now?

That reminds me, as long as I'm griping, another pet peeve is those long lists of utterly off-topic and useless links at the end of every post. I used to try to follow them, and it was always, what's this got to do with anything? It's like there's a random-link generator which gets activated in place of a sig file.

I'm sorry to be mean, but I've been struggling through these unstructured, meandering postings for years. The information content, if any, is so deeply buried among these stylistic quirks that I don't even bother any more. I suppose if you're trying to keep up email conversations with 275 people a week you can't take the time to make your messages focused and meaningful.

It took me the entire reading of your post to work out you were talking about the LynnOGram, not the blog. You're infected ;)