A Cover Letter in Brainfuck • Hacker News Board

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#31

Post by SonOfLilit » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 3:40 PM UTC

SonOfLilit wrote: post #30

maerF0x0 wrote: post #27

My guess is that most HR people would see that and think "Troublemaker", Next.. But, then again, maybe you dont want to work for them anyways.

I was so much of a special case at the time that they would do that anyway. I needed to take a gambit that would have some probability of failing at the gatekeeper, but would yield rewards proportional to risk. And of course _I didn't send it to an HR person_. I don't understand why would a programmer ever send his CV to an HR person. My CV always gets passed to a programmer who can read it and see my value, he passe…

In fact, two weeks ago I had to take a similar gambit. Here is what I sent this time (to a large group of alumni of the unit I served in). I got a few offers, but I'm still open to propositions:

My CV in one sentence: "Ask anyone in 8200."

I'm busy with my venture (spreading code literacy as wide as literacy), so I can only help you at 30% capacity or for a short period.

I'm looking for the project where my experience and entrepreneur mindset would bring the most value. Hire me to prototype your new product, automate your workflow, refactor your MVP into a maintainable architecture, research new technology, fix the bug you gave up on, mentor your juniors, or just join your team.

I take full responsibility for my work. This is especially valuable in organizations where the bottleneck for R&D is management attention. Does it describe you?

To summarize, I won't solve every problem you have, but I may be able to solve one, without taking up precious manager time.

I'm also available for consulting.

Cheers, Aur

P.S. My hobby is to join companies for 1-2 days. Any such job offer would be accepted automatically עד גמר המלאי [while supplies last - AS]. Need something done but your developers are crunching? Need a really simple MVP? Want a second pair of eyes on your design? I can probably deliver. Ask me.

I shine with Python and C, programmed professionally in C#, Ruby, Haskell, C++, Java, Javascript, and x86 assembly language, and learn fast. I write unit tests for my hobby projects.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#32

Post by SonOfLilit » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 3:40 PM UTC

joeframbach wrote: post #21

SonOfLilit wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the letter worked in the technical sense. In the business sense - The letter was sent as a PDF to a contact I had, who promised to print it and hand it to the relevant recruiter. I never heard back from them, but I did get accepted somewhere much better, and I have good reasons to suspect there was a man-in-the-middle involved. I'll try and extract the text from this PDF. Of course I lost the source years a…

I tried to OCR the letter. The hex, I couldn't get. http://hastebin.com/raw/ogehefofez

I put the sources (including hex) in a gist at the bottom of the post.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#33

Post by SonOfLilit » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 3:41 PM UTC

dreamweapon wrote: post #29

So you were expecting IDF human resource types to have a sense of humor?

No, just IDF technologist types.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#34

Post by esseti » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:00 PM UTC

so, what does the program do?

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#35

Post by SonOfLilit » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:03 PM UTC

esseti wrote: post #34

so, what does the program do?

Why don't you paste it in an online Brainfuck interpreter and find out? :-)

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#36

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:03 PM UTC

esseti wrote: post #34

so, what does the program do?

[deleted]

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#37

Post by adestefan » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:12 PM UTC

You get bonus points if you find a 32-bit Windows machine and use DEBUG to load in the interpreter. It's like a modern day copy of BYTE.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#38

Post by outworlder » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

SonOfLilit wrote: post #25

Author here. Due to popular request, I extracted the text from the PDF, it's in a gist at the bottom. A funny (on my account) story: After three days with little sleep, the last half-day spent finding just one more byte to remove so it fits in a nice rectangle[1], I was finally done. I sent the complete .asm to Oded Margalit, an IBM researcher who organizes the CodeGuru programming competitions in Israel, and he imme…

I guess CP/M did that, and that's why MS-DOS did it as well.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#39

Post by amckenna » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 5:04 PM UTC

sheberight wrote: post #23

I found your extra byte! s/confered/conferred/

The extra byte he needed to shave off was in the 8086 assembly language brainfuck interpreter (in hex on the right of the letter) so it would fit nicely in a rectangle.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#40

Post by amckenna » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 5:22 PM UTC

For those wondering what the program does:

TL;DR - The program writes a Brainfuck program that writes the text you inputted. Pretty neat

First copy the text of the letter (excluding the x86 interpreter in hex on the right, or in the case of the gist, at the bottom) and run it through an online Brainfuck interpreter. Supply ASCII text input such as "A" and run the program. It will output another Brainfuck program. If you then run the outputted program through the Brainfuck interpreter you will get the same ASCII text.

So if you run the code extracted from the letter:

    +++++++++[-],[[->(].>,]

If input an 'A' the output is:

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.-----------------------------------------------------------------

which if run returns an 'A'

Online interpreter - http://nayuki.eigenstate.org/page/brainfuck-interpreter-java...