Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 290 posts.
Previous update: An explanation of 3d projection mathematics (under Road Basics) and analysis of Activision's Enduro (under Case Studies)! Thanks to everyone for all the e-mail! Keep it coming :) Sorry, I can't answer questions about when I'll post source code, but I'm always happy to answer anything else about these…
Long ago, in a parallel universe three doors down and one to the left of our own, OpenAI headquarters found itself in chaos. A klaxon blared overhead as red lights began flashing. A message played over a loud-speaker: “Warning! Warning! This is not a drill! Artificial General Intelligence window
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
When it comes to designing secure protocols, I have a principle that goes like this: if you have to perform any cryptographic operation before verifying the MAC on a message you’ve received, it will somehow inevitably lead to doom.
I think we have an answer on whether AIs will reshape work....
Over the past 6 years or so, I’ve failed each item on “The Turkey Test.” It’s very simple: will your code work properly on a person’s machine in or around th...
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica.
A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past …
Coding my handwriting in Javascript - how I did it and what I’m doing with it.
Dmitry.GR: Slowly booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
If you are a Mac user, or if you have transferred files from Mac to Windows, you’re probably familiar with .DS_Store files. But where does this name come from?
Recently a Dutch hacker was able to take control of 4 million solar panel installations (FTM (Dutch), Euractiv, Victor Gevers). And this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened either (PV Magazine). As usual, huge thanks are due to the many beta readers and experts who helped improve this article with…
Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups is a technical post about database scalability. What caught my eye was the term . What an odd term — “sharding.” Why would a database be described that way?
An overview of the big ideas behind Mamba, a brand-new language model architecture.
My book Crafting Interpreters on programming languages is done. OK, OK. I know I said it was done like fifteen months ago . But now it’s really done. And by that I mean, the print, e-book and PDF versions are done. You can buy it . You can hold it in your hands. And I do mean “hands” plural. Because this little…
My thoughts on Rye and uv.
Have you ever tried to compile a helloworld Rust program in --release mode? If yes, have you seen its binary size? Suffice to say, it’s not exactly small. Or at least it wasn’t small until recently. This post details how I found about the issue and my attempt to fix it in Cargo.
As of Fall 2025, Northeastern’s College of Computer Science will replace this curriculum with a set of new courses, starting with Python in the first year.
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. …
A merge workflow for activating multiple branches simultaneously using Jujutsu, an alternative VCS to Git.
This is the Part 2 of a series. Feel free to read the prequel for more context: Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically Building a good VM for a dynamic language takes a ton of engineerin
Breaking down revenue growth, the consumer subscription businesses and the importance of partnerships to the API business
How to write a novel: Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson teaches his wildly popular Snowflake Method for designing and writing a novel.
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers
