⭐ means especially interesting and ⭐⭐ means exceptionally interesting.
2024
New Directions in Cryptography by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman
The Organization Kid by David Brooks
Citizens! During shelling this side of the street is the most dangerous
Did Fermat prove this theorem? by Alexandro López-Ortiz
Semantic Commit Messages by Jeremy Mack
Juice by Brad Woods
Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego by Jacques Mattheij
Everything I Know About the Xz Backdoor by Evan Boehs
Sabotage in Iran by Huib Modderkolk
2023
Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle by Richard Feynman
Did Refusing The COVID-19 Vaccine Cost The GOP Any Elections? by Lakshya Jain and Kavi Gupta
Lessons from Schwab’s YieldPlus Debacle by Nathan Hale
New Lives in the City: How Taleban have experienced life in Kabul by Sabawoon Samim ⭐
I sometimes miss the jihad life for all the good things it had. Similarly, in the beginning, I yearned for the village, but I’ve now become accustomed to my new circumstances.
In our ministry, there’s little work for me to do. Therefore, I spend most of my time on Twitter. We’re connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter.
…
There is another thing I dislike and that’s how restricted our lives are now, unlike anything we experienced before. The Taleban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day. Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.
The A to Z of economics by The Economist
The Dangers of Elite Projection by Jarrett Walker
Nobody needs a faster dishwasher by Louison Dumont
The Subway Is For Transportation by Josh Barro
The immediate options facing LA are that it can have a terrible homelessness and addiction problem and a subway that people are willing to ride, or it can have a terrible homelessness and addiction problem and a subway that people are unwilling to ride. So far, the city is choosing the latter.
This article highlights a basic problem that is politically difficult to solve: the more dangerous and inconvenient public transporation is, the more congested roads become.
Capitol Losses: The Mediocre Performance of Congressional Stock Portfolios by Andrew Eggers and Jens Hainmueller ⭐
Second, we conduct the first analysis of members’ portfolio holdings, showing that between 2004 and 2008 the average member of Congress would have earned higher returns in a passive index fund. Our research suggests that, if there is unethical investing behavior in Congress, it is far more limited than previous research implies.
…
The average congressional portfolio underperformed a passive index fund by 2-3% per year (before expenses) during the period we examine; in dollar terms, $100 invested like the average investor in Congress would have yielded $70 by the end of 2008, compared to $80 if the same amount had been invested in a passive index fund.
…
We find underperformance using a variety of specifications and weighting approaches, and not just for Congress as a whole but separately for both the House and the Senate, Democrats and Republicans, members of power committees, members with party and committee leadership positions, and groups of members stratified by wealth, portfolio size, and turnover.
-
DARPA is an extremely fascinating organization because it rejects the organizational traits that are associated with a typical bureaucratic government agency. Their mission statement is appropriately laconic:
To prevent and create technological surprise.
Pmarca Guide to Career Planning: Skills and education by Marc Andreessen
If you have lived an orchestated existence, gone to great schools, participated in lots of extracurricular activities, had parents who really concentrated hard on developing you broadly and exposing you to lots of cultural experiences, and graduated from an elite university in the first 22 or more years of your life, you are in danger of entering the real world, being smacked hard across the face by reality, and never recovering.
The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok by Cory Doctorow
Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind by Jay Caspian Kang
Giving Ukraine Cluster Munitions is Necessary, Legal and Morally Justified by Dr. Jack Watling and Professor Justin Bronk
Patterns for Building LLM-based Systems & Products by Eugene Yan
The Dungeon’s & Dragon Players of Desth Row by Keri Blakinger ⭐
A very human and grimly uplifting piece, I was surprised how well-written it was from title to finish.
Apple Security Bounty Categories
You break it,
youwe buy it!Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress by Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton et al.
“LOVE IS STRONGER THAN WAR” by Andrey Bok
Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced on November 16, 2023 to seven years in prison for pasting anti-war stickers in a Russian supermarket. Considering her dire medical conditions and the potential for arbitrary extension of her sentence, she will likely die in prison.
I’ll include some excerpts of her statement in court:
I don’t know anyone other than the state prosecutor who wants to put me in prison.
In fact, I think that deep down even the state prosecutor doesn’t want this. I think he became a prosecutor to imprison real criminals and miscreants – murderers, rapists, pedophiles. But it turned out completely differently. He has to imprison those who are supposed to be imprisoned and this is the key to moving up the career ladder. That is the system we have. Let’s not pretend this is not true.
I don’t blame you. You are worried about your career, about having a stable future to provide for your family, to give them food and have a roof over your head, to give your children or your future children a head start. But what will you tell them? Will you tell them how you sent to prison an ailing woman because of five tiny pieces of paper? No, you will definitely tell them about other cases. Maybe you will convince yourself you were just doing your job. But what will you do when the pendulum swings back the other way?
That is the law of history. Liberals replace conservatives and conservatives succeed liberals. After the natural death of one political leader, another one comes with the opposite policies. And the first becomes last and the last becomes first. It might seem odd to you, but I sympathize with you.
Even though I am behind bars, I am freer than you. I can make my own decisions and say what I think. I can quit my job if they try to make me do something I don’t want to do. I don’t have any enemies. I am not afraid to be poor or even homeless.
I am not afraid that I won’t have a dazzling career or of appearing funny, vulnerable, or strange. I’m not afraid of seeming different from other people. Maybe that is why the state fears me and others like me so much and keeps me in a cage like a dangerous animal.
Key phrases from Javier Milei’s first speech as president
The exchange-rate trap, another legacy of this [former president Alberto Fernández’s] government, not only constitutes a social and productive nightmare, but also the surplus of money today is double what it was before the Rodrigazo economic crisis of 1975. The Rodrigazo multiplied the inflation rate by six; a similar event would mean multiplying the rate by 12.
…
May the forces of heaven be with us in this challenge. It will be difficult, but we will succeed. Long fucking live freedom!
And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’ by Fred Vogelstein
The High Price of Losing Ukraine: Part 2 — The Military Threat and Beyond by Nataliya Bugayova
2022
My first impressions of web3 by Moxie Marlinspike
How to Lose Time and Money by Paul Graham
-
It was the last major engagement between Gauls and Romans, and is considered one of Caesar’s greatest military achievements and a classic example of siege warfare and investment; the Roman army built dual lines of fortifications—an inner wall to keep the besieged Gauls in, and an outer wall to keep the Gallic relief force out.
This battle is famous because the Romans managed to encircle and defeat a well-fortified Gallic garrison while being surrounded themselves by Gallic reinforcements — a stunning display of Caesar’s leadership and Roman military engineering. The Wikipedia article is succinct and explains the battle well. Some other sources about this battle feel too dry or dramatic.
Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported by Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris
The housing theory of everything by Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southwood
The new silent majority: People who don’t tweet by Erica Pandey and Mike Allen
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 Edition by Nick Craver ⭐
This is the first in a five-part series about Stack Overflow’s engineering, and is S-tier technical documentation and imagery. Articles like these are useful reminders that good software and hardware optimization bears many fruits — uptime, speed, money, etc.
Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
The HN comments on this post remind me of Pascal’s quip:
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
An amusing story about a practical use of the null garbage collector by Raymond Chen
Since the missile will explode when it hits its target or at the end of its flight, the ultimate in garbage collection is performed without programmer intervention.
A fun anecdote that shows how you can simply buy your way out of a problem sometimes.
-
The ‘Examples’ section of this article would benefit from including some more recent additions i.e. “it really do be like that sometimes” or “YOLO.”
-
Townsend and his friends decided to turn this unused space into their own personal condo. The new plan wasn’t just to live in the mall for just a week, it was now simply to live in the mall — days at a time, using the room as an apartment.
The coziness of this mall refuge reminds me of the Mafia prison cell in Goodfellas.
Lawmakers v. The Scientific Realities of Human Reproduction by The New England Journal of Medicine
As We May Think by Vannevar Bush ⭐
Master List of Logical Fallacies by Owen M. Williamson
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy by Jerry Pournelle
Dictators and civilizational thinking in Iran: From the Great Civilization to Islamic Civilization by Saeid Golkar and Asha Sawhney
To those born later by Bertolt Brecht
Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science by Dr. Mor Harchol-Balter
-
You act like a mortal in all that you fear, and an immortal in all that you desire.
Now that computers have more than 4MB of memory, can we get seconds on the taskbar? by Raymond Chen
Not being able to display seconds on the Windows clock was one of the many small grievances that eventually drove me away from Windows.
Why I’m skeptical of “steelmanning” by Andrew Gelman
The Hurdle to Greater U.S.-China Understanding by Yiqin Fu ⭐
Earth temperature timeline by Randall Munroe
Standard Allied Safe Conduct Passes of WWII by Herbert A. Friedman
Things Get Better by Timothy Rice
My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s by Gwern Branwen ⭐
Why an ‘everything app’ is bad news for liberal democracies and free markets by Nitin Pai
The currencies of Dear Leaders by Michal Zalewski ⭐
I fell 15,000 feet and lived by Cliff Judkins
Shrimp and Weenie Guidelines by Mike Murray
how-i-experience-web-today.com by Guangyi Li
A Time-Series Analysis of my Girlfriends Mood Swings by Dr. Chad Broman
2021
-
The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help.
In retrospect, I had this issue a lot when I first started using Linux and sought the help of others. At first, it was difficult rewiring my mental model of an operating system and what tools I had at my disposal to solve problems. More often than not, people have already built a solution for the problem you are implicitly trying to solve.
Is it worth the time? by Randall Munroe
On an unrelated note, this diagram can be used to illustrate why you generally shouldn’t spend resources and time building early-game wonders in Civ V on higher difficulties.
Billionaries build by Paul Graham
Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson ⭐
Trial by Fire by David Grann ⭐
Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List by David Mazières and Eddie Kohler
Opinion: Why America’s prisons are an unconstitutional moral horror by Tyler Cowen
The Man Who Refused to Spy by Laura Secor
The Cost of Silence: Normalization of Deviance and Groupthink by Terry Wilcutt and Hal Bell ⭐
“I had the distinct feeling that we were in the position of having to prove that it was unsafe instead of the other way around.”
…
Require systems to be proven safe and effective to operate to a formally acceptable risk level, rather than the opposite.
These slides are well organized and provide solid recommendations on preventing the kind of organizational failures that led to NASA’s most grave catastrophes. I enjoyed reading them.
Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results by Cory Doctorow
Dana Angluin’s List of Proof Techniques by Dana Angluin
Why I wrote PGP by Philip Zimmermann ⭐⭐
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he’s hiding. Fortunately, we don’t live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There’s safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their email, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their email privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
Though Zimmermann’s analogy using paper mail is no longer very relevant, the basic argument for privacy that he articulates has remained concretely valid. There’s more work to be done in this space, but fortunately we live in a world where iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, people are starting to adopt Signal to communicate with their friends and loved ones, and newer communication technologies with strong encryption are starting to take shape.
Apple’s Mistake by Ben Thompson
The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers by Drew DeVault
Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla’s top exec pay going up 400% by Cal Paterson
Not Dying Alone — Modern Compassionate Care in the Covid-19 Pandemic by Glenn K. Wakam, M.D., John R. Montgomery, M.D., Ben E. Biesterveld, M.D., and Craig S. Brown, M.D.
Banquet speech by Friedrich von Hayek
It is that the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.
This speech gives off an eerie vibe. Hayek does a good job stirring the audience into considering what bad things can happen if we blindly idolize economists.
2020
-
I was only taught a handful of these principles in my CS courses, so it’s especially worth reading this if you intend to become a founder, a software engineer, or a (product) manager one day. I recommend reading this in multiple sittings, because trying to retain all the information at once is like trying to remember punchlines.
All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong by Martin Goodson
Software disenchantment by Nikita Tonsky
Mathematical Recreations and Essays by W. W. Rouse Ball
De-escalation Keeps Protesters And Police Safer. Departments Respond With Force Anyway. by Maggie Koerth and Jamiles Lartey
The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop
A Bit Rich by Eilís Lawlor, Helen Kersley, and Susan Steed
The Responsibility of Intellectuals by Noam Chomsky ⭐
At times I feel like Chomsky doesn’t elaborate some of his assumptions, which gives me the vibe that I am reading a rant. But overall Chomsky develops an interesting argument, if only supported by historical examples I don’t fully agree with. But as with any sufficiently bold take, a nuanced interpretation offers many useful insights.
Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam—as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.
It seems that Chomsky’s main point is that the general public lacks the means, time, or willingness to rigorously fact-check and disentangle arguments. Those with the qualifications, reputation, and training to intensively commit oneself to research belong to a privileged sect of Western society — the intelligensia. With great privilege comes great responsibility for intellectuals to shine sunlight on ideology and hold those in power accountable to the general public, so democracy can advance meaningfully. Chomsky laments that those intellectuals who have the means to sway foreign policy have failed to fulfill this role, instead using their skills to serve their own careers, perpetuate unrighteous institutions, and justify the war in Vietnam.
Hacker News on Science and Scientific Expertise Are More Important Than Ever
A Plea for Lean Software by Niklaus Wirth
The dual PhD problem of today’s startups by Danny Crichton
What happened to Lee? by Sandra Upson ⭐
Upson does an amazing job capturing Holloway’s unique and tragic life. While his story is a sombering reminder of how little we sometimes understand about the human body and brain, it shows the immense technological impact Holloway was able to advance in his relatively short career.
In Cloudflare’s early years, Lee Holloway had been the resident genius, the guy who could focus for hours, code pouring from his fingertips while death metal blasted in his headphones.
…
He laid the groundwork for a system that now handles more than 10 percent of all internet requests and blocks billions of cyberthreats per day. Much of the architecture he dreamed up is still in place.
Why the US military usually punishes misconduct but police often close ranks by Dwight Stirling
Apple’s Shifting Differentiation by Ben Thompson
2019
Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? by Nicholas Bloom et al. ⭐
Big Firms Lose Value in Acquisitions by Andrew Balls
Is it ever okay to take a harmful job in order to do more good? by Benjamin Todd
Chicken chicken chicken by Doug Zongker
For a more in-depth commentary and analysis, you can view the video of Doug presenting the paper at AAAS 2007.
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov ⭐⭐
If you decide to read this, do not skip to the end. It blends history, technology, spirituality, and the awe of the unknown into a strange and dramatic masterpiece. It is worth your time, even if you are generally uninterested in science fiction. I would rate this story as one of the most thought-provoking things I have ever read. Asimov himself is very fond of it:
This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.
After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won’t tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything – and I’m satisfied that it should.
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke ⭐
The view from the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything. After three months, George Hanley was not impressed by the two-thousand-foot swoop into the abyss or the remote checkerboard of fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the wind-smoothed stones and staring morosely at the distant mountains whose names he had never bothered to discover.
I like how efficiently this short story builds a compelling world and scenario for its out of place protagonists. It makes the rest of the narrative far more bizarre.
The Jaunt by Stephen King ⭐
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman ⭐
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science by Bernard Chazelle
You and the Atomic Bomb by George Orwell
…I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.
The above reflection about a weapon’s barriers to entry is the most enduring idea I remember from this essay. Orwell makes many bold predictions about the future, as he envisioned it at the close of World War II. These predications feel familiar in an Orwell piece, because many of them manifested in 1984. As such, this is an interesting “behind the scenes” glimpse into a great author.
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
Optimization by Simulated Annealing by S. Kirkpatrick et al.
SIGBOVIK 2019 by the Association for Computational Heresy ⭐
Internet Tidal Wave by Bill Gates ⭐
How Changes Happens by Cass Sunstein ⭐
Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization by Taesung Park, et al.
Better Language Models and their Implications by OpenAI ⭐
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way by Eric S. Raymond
We’re Inventivizing Bad Science by James Zimring
Theory of Interstellar Trade by Paul Krugman