Gwern

https://gwern.net/ is my standard for a great blog experience. Their design philosophy (https://gwern.net/about) is right up my alley.

Two favorites off the top of my head: https://gwern.net/ https://geohot.github.io/blog/

Here's a couple of blogs off the top of my head that I like. https://gwern.net - This is just a fantastic nerdy blog on so many topics. https://world.hey.com/dhh - I don't always agree with him and he doesn't always go super in-depth into deeply nerdy topics, but I appreciate his clear writing style and willingness to go a bit against the grain and ruffle a few feathers. Truth be told though, it looks like a lot of the more talented people are focusing more on things like YouTube for communicating about technical topics. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

This is a great read and I'm happy for Shawn. Things seem to be better. I'm also grateful for the pointer to Gwern Branwen's site https://www.gwern.net/. What an amazing creation! I haven't even scrolled yet and already have half a dozen tabs open from it.

https://www.gwern.net/ is all you need! https://fantasticanachronism.com/ is also good!

I would love someone like gwern [0] to write an analysis of how Mathematics articles on Wikipedia start off being understandable by most and then get lapped into a submicron finish that only reflects an insular subset of folks. These mathematical nuggets sit like hard grains in mud (sorry wikipedia) that only mathematicians can understand. And in so doing, they slowly bootstrap themselves so far away from any grounding context that it is incredibly difficult for anyone to _learn_ mathematics from reading wikipedia articles. There are groups doing great things like Setosa [1], nLab [2] and for concepts, Simplicable [3] [0] https://www.gwern.net/ [1] https://setosa.io/ev/ [2] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage [3] https://simplicable.com/new/communication

As a counter-argument, maybe the thing people are willing to pay for is the insights of a single individual (like https://www.gwern.net/ which makes a decent chunk of money from patreon), not the entire organization (such as a news paper?) There's always going to be people who're interested in insightful, well researched articles and opinions. Isn't a part of the problem connecting these people, to the actual individuals doing posting in a more transparent way than a news-paper? Having this as the default would pose problems of it's own, and make some of the deeper journalism requiring months/years to complete more difficult though.

This is IMHO the best one I’ve ever come across: https://www.gwern.net/ .

Gwern [0] also organizes his site in a similar fashion, for similar reasons. He writes for the "long now" [1] and organizes his site and his writing with people 60-70 years down the line in mind. Overall, I find gwern.net to be one of the best laid out and organized sites on the Internet. [0]: https://gwern.net [1]: https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site

https://www.gwern.net Gwern is an independent researcher who studies... a lot of things. He's documented some of the history of the dark web, blogs about his nootropics experience and, perhaps most notably, predicted that bitcoin might reach $10,000... in 2011. https://thelastpsychiatrist.com The blogs that aspire to follow in TLP's footsteps are legion.

> I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone can have their own website. Everyone being able to make sites is great, but I miss having sites that were deliberately organized rather than purely chronological. I wish the typical wordpress/livejournal had a frontpage similar to, say, http://www.gwern.net/ . In theory tags provide the same information, but somehow I've never found them useful in the same way.

http://slatestarcodex.com/ https://www.gwern.net/ https://metafilter.com (comments and best-of)

gwern. He hits the sweet spot and all topics are worth reading. http://www.gwern.net/

Gwern's other writings on darknet markets are also excellent, with a lot of original research. http://www.gwern.net/#cryptobitcoin

You could try to implement a blind test by doing tDCS with currents below those known to be effective as a control. From what I've heard under 0.5 mA should have negligible effects, though its worth looking into more studies for that. You should also implement some sort of double-blind by having another person set control the Amps for you. It wouldn't be too hard to design an experiment around this principle. I would check out some of the stuff on http://gwern.net for reference on designing quantified-self experiments to establish an effect strength.

Medium is NOT a blogging platform, contrary to popular belief. Blogging is owning your content, and when you write for Mediium, make no mistake, it belongs to Medium. Although, I just switched over from Wordpress to Jekyll, and I find it there to be a lot less friction for publishing. I talked more about the new and exciting workflow of Jekyll at http://rmorabia.com/redesign I really don't agree with the author here. Hackability is what's aided my decision to publish more. It's just that a lot of people get caught up in the hackability more than the publishing. Also, there's no data backing this post. I've seen plenty of active Hakyll sites. http://gwern.net is my favorite example.

The first Google result for "Dwight Lundell" is http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/lundell.html Apparently he had his license to practice medicine in Arizona revoked back in 2008: http://www.azcentral.com/community/gilbert/articles/2008/10/16/2008101… I'm not a nutritionist. I'm not a climatologist. I'm not an epidemiologist or a biologist or a physicist. When it comes to things outside my areas of expertise, my best bet is to subscribe to academic consensus[1]. Of course it's not always correct, but I don't have time to research everything as thoroughly as the academic community. 1. Unless of course there's a page on http://www.gwern.net/ that says otherwise. Then I go with Gwern's opinion.

I'd trust gwern's speculation. http://www.gwern.net/ The content here varies from philosophy to poetry to programming to prosaic FAQ. It is everything I felt worth writing for the past few years that didn’t fit somewhere like Wikipedia or was already written - "…I realised that I wanted to read about them what I myself knew. More than this - what only I knew. Deprived of this possibility, I decided to write about them. Hence this book."2 I never expected to write so much, but I discovered that once I had a hammer, nails were everywhere, and that supply creates its own demand3. I believe that someone who has been well-educated will think of something worth writing at least once a week; to a surprising extent, this has been true. (I have added ~130 documents to this repository over the past 3 years.) http://www.gwern.net/About

Can one split writing from the content? When I look at my own site (http://www.gwern.net), the best-written ones to me seem to be the ones with the best content. I could point to none of them (except maybe some of the fiction) where I could honestly say 'the content is jejune and juvenile, but man that's some slick writing!' And if that's the case, then all you are really doing is asking 'hey what's popular guyz' - which is not an interesting question at all and something you can figure out yourself by looking at votes.

I'd written my own variant on this theme (based on the original and the Better Motherfucking Website), which applies some but generally minimal styling (14 CSS rules) to achieve a balance of minimalism, legibility, and functionality: <https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/12/broadcom_ca_technologies/> (Let me know if you're having issues reading that, I myself get a message "Referred from Pen Edward Morbius's motherfucking website" viewing under Firefox.) What most strikes me is that with ever so slightly more advanced browser defaults the Web could be ever so much more readable. What I'd like to see is a standard set of default page layouts ("article", "overview", "lighttable", "catalogue", "discussion", say) along with a few more primitive elements (notes, equations, interactive tables with some basic spreadsheet functionality,[1] and threaded discussions most principally) which could address a huge chunk of what's now highly-styled, and often unreadable, Web designs. The one thing I find not entirely universally suitable from my design is that the off-white / off-black background/text are not ideal for e-ink devices, though the overall effect remains generally readable. Gwern's own website (<https://gwern.net/>) strikes me as one of the absolute best highly-styled websites, and absolutely stands out amongst that class. ________________________________ Notes: 1. The ability to sort by specific columns, summarize quantitative columns by total and some univariate…

Nice article, the comments here are kind of amazing for a nominally technical audience. It is almost as if people have no idea how difficult automatic page layout and formatting is. There are literally PhD thesis topics on it[1]. And to expect that complexity to be abstracted away into some sort of simple "do-what-I-mean" expression? That just isn't going to happen. Go look at Gwern Branwen's web site[2]. That is art. But the trick is decide how you want the site to look and then constraining your written material to be expressible in that style. I've been looking at web page layout since 1995 when I joined a startup that was doing the "first magazine on the web about Golf!"[3] When the Zen Garden folks did their web site and started the 'A List Apart' mailing list which is now a website[4] it really helped me understand just what one was up against if you wanted to produce web content that rendered nicely on a wide variety of projections. And yes, the term projection is intentional because the function of going from semantic content to presentation on a screen or paper or other flat surface of finite size, is a mapping (or projection) from a native space into the rule set of the destination space. That rule set consists of both physical constraints (pixels per inch, total pixels horizonally and vertically, color capability) and software constraints (how much of the underlying capability can the browser software that is currently running express). Not to mention that every…

I was reading this thinking "that's a great analysis" and then read _who_ posted it. OP, this is the author of https://gwern.net, which has been very influential in the design of many technical blogs / personal sites and has some very inventive and fantastic ideas. Ie, the author knows what they're talking about. My site uses CSS to respect light/dark theme, so has no manual toggle. It requires Javascript and I have a personal goal to have a JS-free site, just pure HTML and CSS. I also think that a site should respect the user's own light/dark settings, and so a toggle, if one ever exists for a site, should really be a browser setting on the browser toolbar. /u/gwern, in case you read this, your design along with Tufte.css were one of the influences of my own site: https://daveon.design/ . (Also present is inspiration from older-style publishing and manuscripts, and personal preferences. But your site was the first one -- a key influence -- I saw that inspired me with what a modern, clean personal website could be and how it could look, as well as what it might contain. It's a real honour to see you here and reply!)

A friend of mine has used this before and they did alternating low ~30mg doses that same someone had previously used a similar dose Adderall in highschool and early college and preferred the feeling of Modafinil. They told me they had read multiple studies before hand as well as personal accounts (such as from the venerable https://www.gwern.net/). That person told me that the feeling was less intense but enough to keep the significantly longer periods of focus without feeling complete lock-in like you might experience on other similar drugs. That said, they also did say the dehydration was heavy and to keep that in mind. They said the reason they alternated was they had found that given the longer 15 hour-ish half-life they felt effects strong enough the following day that if they dosed again it started making them feel uncomfortable. That said they are typically very sensitive to most substances. They also felt that you should do your dose early enough, 7-8am, so that by the time 1am or so rolls around you can still get mostly a normal sleep. They also told me that one time they had done multiple consecutive doses and the come down depressive like symptoms were just as bad as the same symptoms from coming off consecutive doses of Adderall. They thought that if you're prone to dangerous depression this one might not be for you. They did not endorse doing this but to each their own.

> There was advertising before banner ads too, so is your issue about ads on the internet? This thread is about your grandparent comment, ”The biggest barrier is that people don’t want to pay for content.” Billions of people are the market, your remark opens with the judgment that people don’t want to pay for content. In other words, the market has judged most content isn’t worth paying for. > That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same. On the contrary, today, certainly a higher number have their words preserved online, as persistent conversations such as this one or perhaps Likes on Instagram. But a far lower percentage of those who are online today “have a home page” for example. In the mid to late 90s a higher proportion of “web pages” were meaningful, and a much higher percentage of users were also publishers of their own web sites. Amateur web sites unofficially organized around topics of interest were a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring That content is still getting created, and still getting self-published, it’s just much harder to find. Self-published home pages like this are still cool: https://www.gwern.net/ This one uses a kind of ethical advertising: https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ Note the author invites patronage but says don’t worry about it: ”I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup…

As someone working on making these health & wellness strategies and protocols more data-driven and evidence based through more structured experiments (see https://mementolabs.io), I'm very much pro on pushing for more people trying these "fringe" strategies in a more informed manner, so take my following thoughts with a grain of salt: - Many of our current, preexisting beliefs about food and nutrition are proving to be extremely flawed and contrived, having essentially been pushed by big-food to drive more consumption of sugar and carbs in our meals as opposed to actually being research-based (just look at the USDA Food pyramid, that puts carbs, almost all simple, as a staple). The emerging research around restricted eating, fasting, and autophagy (research that won a Nobel Prize in 2016) is extremely promising albeit still developing. - There's real value to proper self-experimentation for helping you discover and build better individual habits and determining what uniquely works for improving your health and wellness, as well as challenge your thinking on your existing beliefs, particularly around nutrition & dieting that tend to be ingrained in you during development. [See gwern's self experiments for some interesting ones](https://gwern.net). - IMO, the core issue at the root of this rise of the "cult-like influencer" is a lack of accessible academic research (i.e the average person will opt to read blogs over a long, hugely technical research paper) which creates…

I think a fantastic companion piece to this article is https://gwern.net/complement

Indeed, both Thurston's quote about mathematics, and Naur's programming as theory building, are classics that are relevant now more than ever. A download link for the latter: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf (PDF)

> Similar to how students who spend most of their time practicing what they are studying with actual exercises achieve higher grades This is spot on. > build a mental model of the code with every new line of code This idea has been explored in depth in the Peter Naur's excellent paper, "Programming as theory building" [1] (also extensively discussed on HN [2]). If you haven't read it yet, I bet you will enjoy it a lot. :) [1] https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Programming+as+theory+building

I agree with you on train and somewhat bus but cars are extremely easy to weaponise and dirt cheap. Any terrorist trying to hijack a plane and not simply using a car (with or without extra explosives) is an idiot. Essentially terrorism isn’t about spreading terror, because they are so laughably ineffective at it. See this excellent gwern article: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror

“There are many other little refinements too, Mr Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.” “Where?” “In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-thegreatautoma…