Personal website of Gwern Branwen (writer, self-experimenter, and programmer): topics: psychology, statistics, technology, deep learning, anime. This index page is a categorized list of Gwern.net pages.
Visit gwern.net → RSS feedOn Hacker News Nov 2011 – Sep 2026
Life, Learning & Writing 35Society, Policy & Culture 23Science & Space 23AI & Machine Learning 14Tools & Productivity 13Tech Industry & Business 12
Writing advice: some nonfiction fails because it opens with background instead of a hook—readers leave before reaching the good material. Find the single anomaly or question that makes your topic interesting, lead with that, and let the background follow once you’ve earned attention.
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO₂ levels affect sleep quality
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
Many writers anecdotally report they write best first thing early in the morning, apparently even if they are not morning people. Do they, and why?
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
Melatonin improves sleep, & sleep is valuable
History, background, visiting, ordering, using, & analyzing the drug market Silk Road 1
Mirrors of ~89 Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets & forums 2011–2015, and related material.
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature.
Discussion of dabbling in samplers of ‘avant-garde’ perfumes and other perfumes; what I liked and did not like, and what 2 perfumes I ultimately bought for myself (Acqua di Sale and Kyoto Incense).
9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing.
Gwtar is a new polyglot HTML archival format which provides a single, self-contained, HTML file which still can be efficiently lazy-loaded by a web browser. This is done by a header’s JavaScript making HTTP range requests. It is used on Gwern.net to serve large HTML archives.
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
May 2020 Gwern.net newsletter: GPT-3 scaling, implications, deep theory; anime GAN updates, and 1 book review.
Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting.
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
Why are popularizing educational newsletter-frequency writers of important fields like Matt Levine for finance so rare? Because most fields are too slow or ambiguous, and writers of the right combination of expertise, obsession, and persistence are also rare.
Analyzing predictors of Google abandoning products; predicting future shutdowns
A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
Curious what the first ‘unused’ alphabetic acronym is, I have GPT-4 write a script to check English Wikipedia. After three bugs, the first unused one turns out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter acronym ‘CQK’, with another 2.6k TLA unused, and 393k four-letter acronyms unused. Exploratory analysis suggests…
Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportions in December 2019 gives an entirely different result than absolute counts.
Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.