What are the components that make up a color?

"Well, it depends what color model you are using, which differentiates between additive and subtractive color mixing, the medium used (print, screen, etc.)...

No. It's Red, Green, and Blue.

"Draw the first letter of the alphabet please".

'a'

No. The right answer is 'A'. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills.

If the HN crowd allowed for levity, this would certainly be an instance of the oft-celebrated "birth of a meme".

But hang on, the primary colours are red, yellow and blue! I know, they told me so in primary school.

Not sure how much you're kidding, but... that's true for a subtractive colour system, where you start with a white sheet of paper (i.e. reflects every wavelength) and subtract colours (filter out wavelengths) by painting over the paper with crayons. For an additive colour system, where you start with a black monitor screen, and you add wavelengths, the primaries are RGB.

...and, strictly speaking, the subtractive colors that closest match the typical human eye are cyan, magenta, and yellow -- the "CMY" of CMYK printer inks. Using red, yellow, and blue as subtractive colors gets you a big enough gamut for elementary school color mixing, but it won't give you as big a range of colors as CMY.

These kind of comments is why I love this site. The guy was obviously 100% joking but the engineers in us are bound to reply nonetheless.

It reminds me of a classic Dilbert. https://goo.gl/images/7DhC9f

… and we just add K because a separate black ink is cheaper and more precise.

I'm sorry you're incorrect. This paper says Red, Yellow and Blue. Thanks for your time, we'll be in contact.

I legitimately had a huge argument with my (former) roommate over primary colors.

She was more artsy, I was insistent that the primary colors were RGB, she was insistent that they were RYB. We googled. We were both right in some senses.

Good job you didn't have a third roommate who worked in printing...

Hilariously enough, my fiance now works in printing and actually mixes the colors (t-shirt printing).

I haven't brought it up yet because we once had a fight over whether that thing you put outside your shower is called a bath mat or a bath rug (Both are correct in different circumstances)

CMYK would be right. RYB means you can't produce cyan or magenta or vivid purples or pinks.

I had the same argument with my wife (fortunately not huge...)

Those primary colors are real to me dammit!

/colorblind

Totally off topic (except for the fact that "correctness" of an answer can be a deeper problem than checking against a list) but when you look at how the cones in your eyes are connected to the brain to actually transfer color information it's indeed closer to Red-Green/Yellow-Blue (as described in Lab*). That's why we intuitively include yellow as a "primary color" even though you can just use RGB to describe it.

"They told me so in primary school" is clearly anecdotal evidence. You really need a proper citation.

Like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu44JRTIxSQ

wow, there's an entire school just to teach that? (:

Experienced this more times than I wish to admit.

I get it, but do doctors really know what the size of mitochondria are? I can't think of anything any further from the realm of their day to day.

everybody who is a doctor aced intro to biology because they were premeds. That means they looked at plenty of cell bio pictures with mitochondria (properly scaled to the cell size).

Doctors know a ton of random crap tangentially related to their jobs that they were forced to memorize.

Someone specialized in genetics or mitochondrial disease might. Otherwise, I'd guess probably not.

I had something this happen to me in an interview. Miserable experience.

Perfect analogy. And you just jogged a bad interview memory - "thanks a lot."

Yay for Biology 10.

To be entirely objective, I have run into recruiters of that variety in my career. However I've also had plenty of recruiters that were able to pick up on one's deeper knowledge of a given concept and accept that as correct, even if it wasn't the "textbook answer" they were looking for.

You don't even have to give feedback in an interview. Just let them answer your question and if it's too detailed, write it down and look it up later. In fact, Google usually doesn't give back any feedback during or after their onsite interviews.

Except that, for some reason, medical professionals don't have to put up with this shit. But we do.