1
Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)
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
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
2
Life Improvements Since the 1990s
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
3
Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement
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.
4
Using Silk Road
History, background, visiting, ordering, using, & analyzing the drug market Silk Road 1
5
1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes
Mirrors of ~89 Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets & forums 2011–2015, and related material.
6
It looks like you’re trying to take over the world
Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature.
7
The Melancholy of Subculture Society (2019)
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
8
The Most Abandoned Books on GoodReads (2019)
Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportions in December 2019 gives an entirely different result than absolute counts.
9
Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy
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
10
Blackmail fail
In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers
11
Prediction Markets
My prediction/betting strategies and track record, reflections on rationality, prediction judgments
12
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.
13
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
14
Who wrote the 'Death Note' script?
Internal, external, stylometric evidence point to live-action leak of 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 Hollywood script being real.
15
In Defense of Inclusionism
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
16
The Melancholy of Subculture Society
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
17
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.
18
‘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.
19
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.
20
Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert's DUNE
Observations on Frank Herbert’s 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑒 series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was 𝑛𝑜𝑡 a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II’s Golden…
21
Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland?
Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.
22
In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18)
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
23
Archiving URLs (2019)
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.