Gwern presents a fascinating collection of essays covering topics such as darknet markets and statistical analyses. The author delves into the world of low level laser therapy and its impact on reaction time, as well as the implications of omitting key covariates in A/B testing. For fans of science fiction, there are transcriptions of the novella "Radiance" and an annotated essay by Gregory Benford on his physics career.

This is the inaugural December 2013 issue of the Gwern.net mailing list; you probably signed up through a link there. If you do not want to receive further monthly emails, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom.The purpose of this mailing list is to be a more meaningful and summarized version of the RSS feed (which lists every patch, no matter how small) overlapping with my Changelog page, but in a push/notification medium rather than pull.While I was at it, I thought I would include some other material like the links I share on Google+. Since this is the first time, I don’t know if people are interested in this or if I omitted anything that people expected; feel free to email me with suggestions or feedback (I believe the reply-to should be set to my address, gwern@gwern.net, but I am not sure). Without further ado:
          Writings
          Darknet markets:
          
            compiled an updated table of all known darknet markets with lifetimes
            wrote up an essay on 3 attempts to blackmail/extort/scam
          
          Statistical:
          
            analyzed a self-experiment about low level laser therapy improving reaction time
            power simulation of the penalty from omitting key covariates in A/B testing
            critique of Chinese moxibustion study
          
          Radiance:
          
            transcribed novella “Radiance”
            transcribed & annotated the autobiographical essay “Old Legends” by Gregory Benford on his physics career, SF & science, the “Star Wars” program, Edward Teller, etc
            tracked down and scanned a copy of “The Astounding Investigation: The Manhattan Project’s Confrontation with Science Fiction” (Berger1984, Analog )
          
          Personal:
          
            reviewed Umineko
          
          Site:
          
            signed up for MailChimp & started a monthly mailing list for Gwern.net updates
            my Gratipay is up to $7.35 a week. I thank all donators.
          
        
          Media
          
            Links
            Technology:
            
              “Welcome to the Jungle” (CPU design and Moore’s law—your computer can be faster)
              Debian bug report #217243: “wget: Possibility to really reject files on recursive downloads” (serious gotcha everyone needs to know about if they are trying to spider with wget a site requiring cookies/login, like, for example, a DNM forum)
              “Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning”
              “RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis”
              “You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform” (I always sigh when I have to deal with any date-time programming.)
              “Does Copyright Affect Creative Reuse? Evidence from the Digitization of Baseball Digest”, Nagaraj2017 (large deadweight losses)
              Baal (Impressive. A ring of child pornographers communicating securely via PGP & alt.anonymous maildrops, rotating keys regularly, where the bust only happened because a member was busted for non-ring-related problems and the only busted members were violating the Hushmail lesson by using a third-party service.)
              “How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?”
            
            Science/medicine/statistics:
            
              “The Intelligent Plant: Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora” (also worth reading: “If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness”)
              “Embryo Selection for Cognitive Enhancement: Curiosity or Game-changer?”, Shulman & Bostrom2013
              “Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor?”, Johnson et al 2013
              “So depression is an inflammatory disease, but where does the inflammation come from?”, Berk et al 2013
              “Change in Against Malaria Foundation recommendation status (room-for-more-funding-related)”
              Replication backlash
              “When Mice Mislead” (“Of Mice (Studies) and Men”)
              “The dangers of zero and one” (Fun example from genetics research of how even extremely weak priors are useful)
              “Do Certain Countries Produce Only Positive Results? A Systematic Review of Controlled Trials”, Vickers et al 1998
              “China’s academic scandal: call toll-free hotlines to get your name published”
            
            Writing:
            
              “Roomlore is the lore anent heavenly bodies such as stars, wanderers, moons, star clouds, star clusters, and starswirls, their bodily workings, and their gathering…” (written in Anglish; an older computer jargon attempt)
              “Deadline” (science fiction story)
              Excerpt from The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien (Atomic theory proves that bicycles are plotting against us.)
              “Lady Yodo-Dono” (poem)
            
            Politics:
            
              ‘Review of “The Rise of China vs. The Logic of Strategy” by Edward Luttwak’
              “David Walsh’s wisdom beats the odds”
              “Snowden: Hero”
              “Good News You Might Have Missed in 2013” (Bill Gates reviews global health & poverty progress)
            
            General:
            
              “Like I Was Jesus: How to bring a nine-year-old to Christ”
              “We Are All MsScribe” (sockpuppeting, fandom wars)
              Preference falsification
              “An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance”, Kurzban et al 2013 (willpower; discussion)
              “Making a kangling for chöd” (An unexpectedly practical discussion by David Chapman of femur-flutes.)
              “100 Years Later, the Crossword Is Still the King of Puzzles”
            
            Philosophy:
            
              “Discussions for information” (These are some of the reasons I’ve soured on discussion as a way of exchanging information and evaluating new stuff.)
              “Scott Aaronson interview on Philosophical Progress”
            
          
          
            Film/TV
            
              Aku no Hana: dropped after a few episodes, couldn’t stand the rotoscoping
              A Christmas Story/National Lampoon: Christmas Vacation: watched with family. The former was pretty good. The latter, though, had some good jokes but was generally mediocre and strained, and a product of its time.
            
          
          
            Books
            
              Nonfiction
              I reread Discovery of France because I liked it so much the first time (review).
            
            
              Fiction
              Descending order of enjoyment:
              
                I finished Umineko back in September, finished writing a review
                New Legends (SF anthology; review)
              
            
          
          
            Music
            Giants (recommended if you like Explosions in the Sky or El Ten Eleven; I particularly liked “While the Ages Steal”):
            
              
                “A Near-life Experience” (Demo) [post-rock]
                “The Sleep of a Laboring Man” (Demo)
                “Berlin Rooftop” (Demo)
                “Under The New Sun” (They, The Undeserving)
                “Steps In Static Progression” (They, The Undeserving)
                “The Palace Stands In Its Proper Place” (They, The Undeserving)
                “Withered Life- Communal Rhythm” (They, The Undeserving)
                “While The Ages Steal” (Old Stories)
                “At Last, Ashore” (Old Stories)
                “O’ Tide” (Old Stories)
              
            
            Misc:
            
              Raiders of the Lost Ark, “End Credits” (John Williams) [orchestral]
              “I Saw Three Ships”, (King’s College Cambridge) [Christmas carol]
            
            Touhou:
            
              “流体、ライフサイクル instrumental (Fluid, Life Cycle)” (o ben to box; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental]
              “パンザマスト (instrumental)” (o ben to box; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental]
            
            Vocaloid:
            
              “echoes_teha” (声になる; HKGrecords) [trance/vocal]
              “vanishing_しじみ” (声になる; HKGrecords) [electronic/vocal]
              “小規模な世界の私_ぴすた” (声になる; HKGrecords) [Jpop]

December 2013 News

In this month's edition of Gwen's newsletter, you'll find a collection of thought-provoking essays covering a wide range of topics. From a systematic exploration of darknet markets to an economic analysis of al-Qa'ida's financial records, Gwen dives deep into the hidden corners of the world. She also explores the intersection of literature and Marxism, delves into the complexities of machine learning, and examines the paradox of pre-registration in statistical research. 

welcome to the January 2014 edition of the Gwern.net mailing list; the previous edition was December. If you do not want to receive these monthly emails, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom.The purpose of this mailing list is to be a summarized version of the site RSS feed (which lists every patch, no matter how small), overlapping with my Changelog page, but in a push/notification medium rather than pull. It also includes material from my Google+ & the LW media threads.
          Writings
          Darknet markets
          
            I have begun systematically spidering all operational darknet markets
          
          General:
          
            Haskell Summer of Code: 2013 review
          
          Statistical:
          
            font/number size & table of contents background AB test finished, with consideration of value of interactions
          
          Radiance:
          
            diff of “Radiance” and part I of Radiance
          
          Site:
          
            rewrote configuration for Hakyll 4
            converted site’s Darcs repository to Git & hosted on GitHub
          
        
          Media
          
            Links
            Politics/religion:
            
              “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy”, Woodberry2012 (popular media coverage; rebuttal showing that missionary choices of location were not random: Jedwab et al 2018)
              “An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq”, Bahney et al 2010; “$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida [in Mali] records every expense”
              “The lost history of Helmand” (failed nation-state building project in Afghanistan which exemplifies Scott’s Seeing Like A State)
              “The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse”
              “Secret without Reason and Costly without Accomplishment: Questioning the National Security Agency’s Metadata Program”, Mueller & Stewart2014
              “Aztec Political Thought” (the king as Enemy and Mocker, leader of a theatre state)
              “Hallucinated Gods” (on Julian Jaynes’s book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
              “Thank God for Cancer”
            
            Business:
            
              “Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan”, Fryer & Levitt2007 (discussion)
              “Inside the World of the Double-Crossing Fake Hitman”
              “A Dolphin’s Tale: The Story of GameCube” (history)
              “Death at the Summit” (Intrade)
            
            Literature:
            
              “Dwarf Fortress: A Marxist Analysis” (discussion)
              “The Gooseberry Fallacy”: on ‘living like a dead man’ (Russian literature & thoughts on the good life & the moral imperative of economic growth; applicable to the anti-humanism in contemporary environmentalism & leftism)
              “…But for Me, It Was Tuesday” (TvTropes)
            
            Medicine:
            
              “Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know”
              “Aretaeus On Bipolar Disorder” (ancient-Greek/psychiatry comparison)
              “Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations” (on vitamin D & niacin)
            
            Statistics:
            
              “Bayes’ Rule and the Paradox of Pre-Registration of RCTs”
              “Josef Urban on Machine Learning and Automated Reasoning”
              “Using deep learning to listen for whales”
              “Adversarial Bandits and the Exp3 Algorithm”
              “A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning”, Domingos2012 (nice guide to ‘common sense’—data cleaning, modeling, overfitting, bias/variance, combining models, representation & learnability)
              “The Median is Not the Message”, Gould (on cancer survival and interpreting statistics)
              “Adventures in the Assessment of Animal Speed and Morality”
              “Posterior-Hacking”
              “Visualization Series: Using Scatterplots and Models to Understand the Diamond Market”
            
            Technology:
            
              “A Future Of Pipes” (the future of cities and computing power: cooling is a big deal but not a fatal problem)
              “Auto Correct: Has the self-driving car at last arrived?”
              “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Mnih et al 2013
              Command-line folklore: the sort --key trick
              “Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery”, Mickens
              “The Slow Winter”, Mickens
              “The Night Watch”, Mickens
              “The Graph of Math”
            
            Rationality:
            
              Best of Rationality Quotes2013
              “Lily Allen & decision theory” (Bitcoin)
              “Lullaby Language”
            
            Misc:
            
              Subreddit: “Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things”
              Ship’s cat
              Israel-related animal conspiracy theories
            
          
          
            Books
            Nonfiction:
            
              The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Jacques Hadamard (1945; review)
              The City of Falling Angels, Berendt (2000; review)
              Six Memos For The Next Millennium, Italo Calvino (1985)
            
            Fiction:
            
              Diaspora, Greg Egan
              I Am A Cat, Natsume Soseki
            
            Manga:
            
              Oyasumi Punpun (see TvTropes; dark and depressing—worth a reread but not sure I can bring myself to do it)
            
          
          
            Film/TV
            Film:
            
              Computer Chess (great world-building for a plot that did not deserve it)
            
            Anime:
            
              Toradora
              Watamote (review)
              The Garden of Words (review)
              Little Witch Academia (review)
              Hataraku Maou-sama! (review)

January 2014 News

Welcome to the February 2014 edition of the Gwern.net ML; the previous was January.The purpose of this mailing list is to be a summarized version of the site RSS feed (which lists every patch), overlapping with my Changelog page, but in a push/notification medium rather than pull. It includes material from my Google+ & the LW media threads.

February 2014 News

In this captivating February edition of the Gwern.net newsletter, you'll uncover a treasure trove of links and summaries featuring major changes, all expertly curated by the brilliant mind of Gwern. Dive into the fascinating world of Royal Kooparillo and Gratipay as you embark on a journey of intellectual exploration.

his is the February 2015 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, January 2015.This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with Changelog. This broadcast has been brought to you by Royal Kooparillo and my donors on Gratipay.

February 2015 News

Gwern dives into the world of machine learning in his March 2014 edition, providing a condensed version of the revision-history RSS feed and sharing insights from his Google+ and LW media threads. Discover the latest updates and developments in the field, as Gwern explores the ever-evolving landscape of machine learning and its potential impact on various industries. Don't miss out on this informative and thought-provoking read from one of the leading voices in the field.

This is the March 2014 edition of the Gwern.net ML; the previous was February.This is a summarized version of the revision-history RSS feed, overlapping with the Changelog page. It also includes material from my Google+ & LW media threads.

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