3961
Your inbox is a bandit problem
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.
3962
Prompting LLMs is not engineering
prompt engineering is nothing but an attempt to reverse-engineer a non-deterministic black box for which any of the parameters below are unknown: - training set - weights - constraints on the model - layers between you and the model that transform both your input and the model's output that can change at any time …
3963
Hyper Typing
In this article, I talk about an inherent trade-off in TypeScript's type system: stricter types are safer, but often more complex. I describe a phenomenon I call "hyper-typing", where libraries - in pursuit of perfect type safety - end up with overly complex types that are hard-to-understand, produce cryptic errors…
3964
Private antitrust cases are going through the courts
Private antitrust cases against Equifax, Pepsi, American Express, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and Corteva are going through the courts. And it turns out, judges get the monopoly problem.
3965
Indices, not Pointers
There is a pattern I’ve learned while using Zig which I’ve never seen used in any other language. It’s an extremely simple trick which - when applied to a data structure - reduces memory usage, reduces memory allocations, speeds up accesses, makes freeing instantaneous, and generally makes everything much, much…
3966
3967
Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
Benchmarking World of Warcraft performance when running native and emulated on Windows on ARM.
3968
Weighting an average to minimize variance
How would you allocate money to a set of independent assets with to minimize volatility if some assets are more volatile than others?
3969
Fast Cash vs. Slow Equity
Knowing what you're building
3970
Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1
The Minisforum MS-R1 uses the same Cix CD8180 Arm SoC as the Orion O6 I reviewed earlier this year. But everything else about this thing is different. What this thing should be, is a box that runs Linux and can compete with at least an Apple M1 Mac mini, or a mid-range Mini PC. But what we got... is something…
3971
Head in the Zed Cloud
For the past five months I've been leading the efforts to rebuild Zed 's cloud infrastructure.
3972
Rollercoaster Tycoon (Or, MicroProse's Last Hurrah)
I think it touches on two of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. We all like doing something constructive, where we can see that we are creating something from virtually nothing, and we all have a desire to nurture or look after things. This is what the game is all about. You spend hours painstakingly…
3973
Court Documents Shed New Light on DOGE Activity at Treasury Department
New court documents shed light on what a 25-year-old DOGE worker named Marko Elez did inside Treasury Department payment systems, including what Treasury staff did to limit his access. The documents indicate that the situation is more nuanced than previously reported.
3974
People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design
The Hidden Power of Aesthetics in Design
3975
The Eggstraordinary Fortress
It began, as many thought exercises do, with a discussion in the kitchen. My wife and I were debating whether a cooked egg was still safe to eat after spending the night on the kitchen counter. I am certainly not the type to throw away food lightly at the lightest hint of an issue. Confidently, I told her the egg…
3976
This Old SGI: notes and memoirs on the Silicon Graphics 4D series (1996)
I am posting this assortment of notes and observations as a kind of "thank you" to the numerous people who have replied to my posts in the past. The free flow of information is the life-blood of the internet community, and this is my feeble attempt to maintain that flow, while at the same time repaying the kindness…
3977
DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi
tl;dr: I set up an open source Time Pi project to build a stratum 1 PTP and NTP timeserver using a Raspberry Pi. Time is important to modern society, and most of us have a clock on our wrist that's more accurate than at any time in human history. But highly precise time is important in many industries, especially…
3978
Two and a Half Years in GameDev
About 3 years ago, I joined a GameDev company, without any prior experience making games or hands-on exposure to this industry. Statistically, this time is not even enough to release a single game. But during that window, I was lucky to meet many talented people deeply involved in modern GameDev, who shared with me…
3979
How Do You Like What You've Built?
Recently, a colleague asked me for a code review on some complex UI changes. The idea was to make an...
3980
Extending That XOR Trick to Billions of Rows
Learn how to extend the classic XOR trick to find thousands of missing values using Invertible Bloom Filters
3981
I wrote a Pong game in a 512-byte boot sector
written by - Akshat Joshi Sometime back, I set myself a crazy constraint: Load only one thing at boot - A Pong game that fits in one floppy disk sector — 512 bytes. Why would I build this? I have played with Operating Systems and their workings by customizing them and tweaking their
3982
Upside Down Air Force
The Air Force Research Laboratory / Information Directorate, located at the Rome Research Site (formerly Griffiss Air Force Base), tests electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment on various airframes for blind spots in the EMC equipment, or for interference by the aircraft's external munitions on the EMC equipment…
3983
The wanton destruction of a creative-tech era
Fastly, you killed glitch.com and ruined your karma for 10,000 years. You have “betrayed yourself for nothing.”
3984
The Qweremin
In the summer of 2022 I built a C64-based theremin, described and explained here . The theremin, of course, is one of the oldest electronic instruments. Its main drawback—and strength—is that it's incredibly hard to master. The performer has ultimate control over volume and pitch, but it takes months of practice…
3985
The C++ programmer and educator Rainer Grimm has passed away
Dear readers, we are extremely sad to inform you that Rainer passed away on October 6, 2025, surrounded by his closest family. After suffering from life-threatening pneumonia, Rainer decided against further life-sustaining measures that would have severely restricted his life. He passed away peacefully, accompanied by…
3986
Modern 6502
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
3987
SQLite transactions and virtual tables
In my previous post I introduced SQL virtual tables and how to use them in Go—registering modules per connection, defining schemas, and querying external sources as regular tables.
3988
Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018)
Lessons on incentives and scaling from two years as a teaching assistant
3989
The Monks in the Casino
A brief theory of young men, "the loneliness crisis," and life in the 21st century
3990
Google did not unilaterally decide to kill XSLT
The Web Discourse has been spicy of late, and XSLT is to blame. Well, sort of. It’s complicated.