Yep, the best interview questions are ones you yourself would fail before 2017.09.15 but would pass after 2017.09.15 based on having read a HN article.
This interview question is great for three reasons:
1. It identifies that someone is you.
2. It separates the bad-coder you (before 2017.09.15) from the good-coder you (after 2017.09.15). This means that it is immune from generating a false positive on a poor candidate due to time travel.
3. It identifies cultural fit: the person reads the same news articles you do. If you waste time reading random hacker news articles, you're going to want to hire people who do the same. Especially ones who were around and not too busy on exactly 2017.09.15! It easily weeds out people who were on vacation on that date, for example.
What I especially like about this is that it has nothing to do with anyone's code. (After all, anyone who works at a level that low can answer it very easily without having read this stack overflow question, so it's a strictly orthogonal puzzle: it's only hard for people who don't need it!)
You should go ahead and add this to your list of interview questions! In fact, why not make it the only one?
(It also avoids the fuss of having to come up with questions in any way related to the work that a candidate will be doing, which, in case the above sarcastic comment wasn't clear, is what you should actually be doing.)
OK, we get your point. But consider that there are jobs where this stuff is actually important, and it's useful to have working knowledge. If you were actually going to ask this in an interview, you would obviously want to ask something different but along the same lines, just in case the candidate was familiar with this post. But that goes for many interview questions.
For the jobs where this is actually important, this isn't a good interview question - it's not subtle/deep enough. (There are many deeper questions for those jobs - this one is a basic intro level question for a job such as that one.) The reason I enumerated so many ways this is wrong isn't to be funnier: it's because I really want people to stop doing this.
I really, really (really) want to get people to stop asking these types of interview questions. I want them to realize how awful it is. (I've enumerated the ways.)
This type of interview question simply needs to die. An interview question shouldn't be about whether you've seen something that is unrelated to the job. Which is what this is.
(For jobs where it is actually something they need to know, it is a poor question because it's too simple.)
I should add that I personally found the stack overflow question itself and its answers (especially about the Intel compiler) very interesting.
This interview question is great for three reasons:
1. It identifies that someone is you.
2. It separates the bad-coder you (before 2017.09.15) from the good-coder you (after 2017.09.15). This means that it is immune from generating a false positive on a poor candidate due to time travel.
3. It identifies cultural fit: the person reads the same news articles you do. If you waste time reading random hacker news articles, you're going to want to hire people who do the same. Especially ones who were around and not too busy on exactly 2017.09.15! It easily weeds out people who were on vacation on that date, for example.
What I especially like about this is that it has nothing to do with anyone's code. (After all, anyone who works at a level that low can answer it very easily without having read this stack overflow question, so it's a strictly orthogonal puzzle: it's only hard for people who don't need it!)
You should go ahead and add this to your list of interview questions! In fact, why not make it the only one?
(It also avoids the fuss of having to come up with questions in any way related to the work that a candidate will be doing, which, in case the above sarcastic comment wasn't clear, is what you should actually be doing.)