Posts in post
Hire Lucky
- 03 September 2025
Jeff Atwood wrote about FizzBuzz in 2007. Google used to use weird brain teasers, but no longer does. That hasn’t stopped a plethora of companies who think they’re copying Google from asking tricky puzzle questions. No matter what the approach, though, interview questions measure how well someone answers interview questions.
Hello, Hacker News Readers
- 24 August 2025
The other day, a friend of mine brought this to my attention:
D4D4
- 11 May 2025
A co-worker of mine (the incomparable Yohei Manabe) was looking at
some disassembled ARM code the other day, and discovered something
weird. Lots of d4d4 instructions, scattered about. LLVM’s objdump
says this is a relative branch to -0x58. The weird part is that
they were always unreachable.
Magic File Names
- 10 May 2025
A co-worker discovered an amazing thing the other day. He needed to check out our codebase on a Windows machine (for real, not inside WSL) to do something model-y with Matlab. It’s worked before, and it looked like it was going fine until he got this error:
Immigration
- 13 April 2025
Sometimes people ask me questions about what it’s like living in a different country. The Netherlands is not all that different from the US, as these things go, but it’s still different enough. This is a collection of things I miss from life in Boston and things that make this place feel foreign.
Gorging
- 28 April 2024
When I tried to search for the demand version of dumping, I found a lot of articles about regular dumping. A few of those had good definitions, so here’s one:
Why I like Zig
- 11 February 2024
I’ve been writing C code professionally since about 2006, and while I look at a lot of languages (I have varying levels of familiarity with Python, Erlang, Ada, Haskell, Go, Rust, C++, OCaml, D, Javascript, Prolog, Lua, Lisp, Bash, Perl, Forth…you get the idea) I have yet to find one that I would rather use in cases where C is appropriate. Part of this inclination is that I mainly write for embedded systems where a lot of the features of higher level languages either don’t help or cost too much.