31
Startup Ideas
Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious.
Gwern Branwen
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.
- Popular posts
- 83
- Total points
- 17,039
- HN comments
- 9,593
- Rank
- #36 personal
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
32
Spaced repetition for study and learning
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
33
LLM Daydreaming
Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.
34
Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
35
Blackmail fail
In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers
36
Magnesium Self-Experiments
3 magnesium self-experiments on magnesium ʟ-threonate and magnesium citrate.
37
Prediction Markets
My prediction/betting strategies and track record, reflections on rationality, prediction judgments
38
Archiving URLs
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
39
Terrorism is not about terror
Terrorists act irrationally from a rational activism perspective, and groups act in ways most consistent with terrorism being about social status and belonging
40
Who wrote the 'Death Note' script?
Internal, external, stylometric evidence point to live-action leak of 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 Hollywood script being real.
41
LSD microdosing: a randomized, blind self-experiment
Self-experiment with sub-psychedelic doses of LSD; no benefit
42
In Defense of Inclusionism
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
43
Training a Neural Net to Generate CSS
A log of experiments done on the site design, intended to render pages more readable, focusing on the challenge of testing a static site, page width, fonts, plugins, and effects of advertising.
44
Everything Is Correlated
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’.
45
How many computers are in your computer? (2021)
Any ‘computer’ is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts.
46
The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
47
Nicotine as a useful stimulant
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
48
Tool AIs want to be agent AIs
AIs limited to pure computation (Tool AIs) supporting humans, will be less intelligent, efficient, and economically valuable than more autonomous reinforcement-learning AIs (Agent AIs) who act on their own and meta-learn, because all problems are reinforcement-learning problems.
49
The Melancholy of Subculture Society
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
50
Bitcoin is Worse is Better
2011 essay on how Bitcoin’s long gestation and early opposition indicates it is an example of the ‘Worse is Better’ paradigm in which an ugly complex design with few attractive theoretical properties compared to purer competitors nevertheless successfully takes over a niche, survives, and becomes gradually refined.
51
Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics
52
What happened to Google Alerts?
Does Google Alerts return fewer results each year? A statistical investigation
53
Spaced repetition for efficient learning (2019)
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
54
Generating MIDI Music with GPT-2
Generating Irish/folk/classical music in ABC format using GPT-2-117M, with good results.
55
Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
56
‘Story Of Your Life’ Is Not A Time-Travel Story
Famous Ted Chiang SF short story ‘Story Of Your Life’ is usually misinterpreted as, like the movie version 𝐴𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑙, being about time-travel/precognition; I explain it is instead an exploration of xenopsychology and a psychology of timeless physics.
57
Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics
58
NYT and vaping: How to lie by saying only true things (2022)
An exercise in spotting agenda journalism: dissecting a 2022 𝑁𝑒𝑤 𝑌𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 article on teen vaping sentence by sentence to show how it pins an EVALI hospitalization on legal nicotine vapes while never quite saying so—since the actual cause was illegal THC products. Every misleading sentence is technically true.
59
Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight (2025)
Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)
60
Rare Greek Variables
I scrape Arxiv to find underused Greek variables which can add some diversity to math; the top 10 underused letters are ϰ, ς, υ, ϖ, Υ, Ξ, ι, ϱ, ϑ, & Π. Avoid overused letters like λ, and spice up your next paper with some memorable variables!