Here are a bunch of articles/essays/comments I read, enjoyed and bookmarked in the past two years – some of it is deep, some shallow, some funny, some sad, some inspiring, some cynical. Let me know if you find something particularly interesting here, or if you particularly dislike some article. Enjoy! (previously)
Biographies/Interviews/Reviews
Mandelbrot, Zhang, Wolfram, Higgs, Erdős, Erdős and Graham, Erdős, Erdős, Frankl, Linus, Alan Kay, Coppola, Bellard, Kolmogorov, Taleb+, Taleb-, Zeilberger
Motivation/Productivity/Philosophy
Derek Sivers: It’s all who you know?
Leo Babauta: Tips to simplify
Philip Guo: Productivity tips
James Altucher’s Anti-tips (funny writing)
Legacy of the 60s
Dokkōdō
Comments/threads: great comeback, too old, burnout, quality
Math/Research/Teaching
The Hardy-Littlewood axioms of collaboration
Luc Devroye’s authorship commandments
How to read mathematics
How to write mathematics
Emancipatory aspects of mathematics
The prime gap story
Bernard Chazelle: the Algorithm
Timothy Gowers: examples first, trivial mathemathics
Oded Goldreich: advice, stories, awards
Gödel’s letter to Neumann
Erick Carreira’s “work ethic” letter
A critical reading of Hamming’s “you and your research”
Douglas Comer: CS identity-crisis, measuring research
A common statistical error
Dijkstra: teaching formal methods, course organization
Terence Tao: what is good math, partial progress, rigour
Technology
James Mickens: The Slow Winter – witty and insightful essay on computing speed
What’s wrong with C++ (in summary)
Programming and personality traits
Early job ads: MS, Amazon
A cold look at startup jobs
Solutions to spam
Real artists ship
Pinboard architecture and interview
Zed Shaw programming advice
37signals writing on bootstrapped business
Comments/threads: social networks and TV shows, acquihire, ERP software, niche-vs-universal
Random Opinion/Linguistics/Humor/Music/Misc.
Contronyms: 1 2 3 4
Malthusianisms
Robert Dickau’s tweets – an explosive concentration of self-deprecating humor
Raganwald: the internet made me sad today
G.G. Marquez: The solitude of Latin America
Top ten reasons to play Go
Chris Lightfoot: real pirates and copyright “pirates”
Miles Davis blindfold listening
Bernard Chazelle: My 29 favorite pieces by Bach
The worst argument in the world
Language modularity
Moravec’ Paradox – the only lucid explanation I know of why perception is harder than chess
Notch: I love you, dad
If by Whiskey…
Slavoj Zizek: Shostakovich in Casablanca
William Gibson: the Net is a waste of time (1996)
Linds Redding: A lesson in perspective
Charles Bukowski: People empty out
Nassim Taleb: Understanding, or Convexity
Doron Zeilberger’s favorite quotes
Ribbonfarm: Hacking the non-disposable planet