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Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2016, at Web Camp Zagreb [ video ] (45 mins)
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
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Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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Software 2.0 (2017)
I sometimes see people refer to neural networks as just “another tool in your machine learning toolbox”. They have some pros and cons, they…
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What Startups Are Really Like
October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.) I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet? I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the…
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Standard Markdown Is Now Common Markdown
Let me open with an apology to John Gruber for my previous blog post. We’ve been working on the Standard Markdown project for about two years now. We invited John Gruber, the original creator of Markdown, to join the project via email in November 2012, but never heard back.
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On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
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A trip through the Graphics Pipeline
Welcome. This is the index page for a series of blog posts I’m currently writing about the D3D/OpenGL graphics pipelines as actually implemented by GPUs. A lot of this is well known among gra…
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A Chemical Hunger: Mysteries
The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.
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Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly. (José Ortega y Gasset, “Notes on t…
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A Note About Git Commit Messages
I want to take a moment to elaborate on what makes a well formed commit message. I think the best practices for commit message formatting is one of the little details that makes Git great. Understandably, some of the first commits to rails.git have messages of the really-long-line variety, and I want to expand on why…
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The AI-Box Experiment
On the first occasion (in March 2002), Eliezer Yudkowsky simulated the AI and Nathan Russell simulated the gatekeeper. The AI’s handicap (the amount paid by the AI party to the gatekeeper party if not released) was set at $10. On the second occasion (in July 2002), Eliezer Yudkowsky simulated the AI and David…
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The Tail End (2015)
No matter what your age, you may, without realizing it, be enjoying the very last chapter of the relationships that matter most to you. Make it count.
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Hiring Is Obsolete (2005)
May 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.) The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?…
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Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…
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JSLinux - Technical Notes
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.
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The Treacherous Optimization
"I'm going to beat grep by thirty percent!" I confidently crow to anyone who would listen, those foolish enough to enter my office. And my girlfriend too, who's contractually obligated to pay attention to everything I say.
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Lethal Neutrinos
How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?
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Write Down Your Password
Microsoft’s Jesper Johansson urged people to write down their passwords. This is good advice, and I’ve been saying it for years. Simply, people can no longer remember passwords good enough to reliably defend against dictionary attacks, and are much more secure if they choose a password too complicated to remember and…
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Quote Origin: It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
Upton Sinclair? H. L. Mencken? William Jennings Bryan? C. E. M. Joad? Christopher Matthews? Paul Krugman? Anonymous?
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Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
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The Line of Death
When building applications that display untrusted content, security designers have a major problem— if an attacker has full control of a block of pixels, he can make those pixels look like anything…
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Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…