Note: this post was revised after publishing for increased clarity, based on reader feedback. “How do you find problems worth working on?” a senior engineer I mentor asked me recently. He’s trying to make the jump to staff engineer and … Read more
Mo RAM, mo problems Feb 16, 2025 Mo RAM, mo problems As a retro-computer enthusiast, it seems that parts are either insanely expensive or dirt cheap. If the first case has obvious problems, the second can also lead to issues. … Read more
I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt – millions of lines of code, no unit tests, based on frameworks that were well over a decade out of date. On one specific project, … Read more
September 10, 2025 Use the right tool for the job. In my first interview out of college I was asked the change counter problem: Given a set of coin denominations, find the minimum number of coins required to make change … Read more
What Problems to Solve – By Richard Feynman A former student, who was also once a student of Tomonaga’s, wrote to extend his congratulations. Feynman responded, asking Mr. Mano what he was now doing. The response: “studying the Coherence theory … Read more
oss-security – CVE-2025-31160 Atop 2.11 heap problems [
There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively for listwise document ranking. Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the … Read more
Robin K. HillThe Techno-Pro Attitudehttps://bit.ly/3XgIziSJune 10, 2024 Tech solutionism, as identified by Moss and Metcalf,7 is the notion that all problems have tractable technical fixes. We see variants in the naming and definition of this phenomenon: the technology imperative,8 or … Read more
The UN has identified 17 sustainable development goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals) and the AI for good Global Summit https://aiforgood.itu.int/ (which was held last week) focused on exactly that. If you check the recordings, some sessions were directly focused on connecting problem experts, … Read more
C is a low-level systems programming language with almost no abstraction over memory (so the memory management is all yours) and with minimal abstractions over assembly (yet expressive enough to support some general concepts like having a type system). It … Read more