“Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. / For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.”
Sorted by topic:
Darknet market related:
Darknet Market archives, 2011-2015: 1.5tb of mirrors of scores of Tor-Bitcoin black-markets & forums 2013-2015, and other material; this is the single largest public archive of all DNM materials, and creating it was a major focus of mine since December 2013. The release also marks the end of my career as DNM expert—I’ve lost interest in the topic due to the apparent stability of the DNMs & being trapped in a local equilibrium
playing with inferring Bayesian networks for my Zeo & body weight data (powerful generalization of SEMs, but requires a lot of data before networks stabilize)
Nootropics: initial results on LLLT correlated with large increases; but the followup randomized experiment showed zero effect
LLLT re-analysis: no change in sleep as hypothesized by another LLLT user
analysis of sceaduwe’s spirulina/allergies self-experiment (no reduction in allergies)
Treadmill spaced repetition experiment: expanded analysis to cover treadmill’s impact on successive reviews with SEM (no additional damage to recall beyond that implied by the original damage)
“Effective Use of arbtt”: My window tracker/time-logger of choice is arbtt which records X window info for later classification and analysis; but one of the challenges is you don’t know how to set up arbtt or improve your environment or write classifications rules. So I wrote a tutorial.
Time-lock crypto: wrote a Bash implementation of serial hashing time-lock crypto, link to all known implementations of hash time-lock crypto; discuss recent major theoretical breakthroughs involving Bitcoin
Recent updates to gwern.net (2014-2015)
“Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. / For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.”
Sorted by topic:
Darknet market related:
Darknet Market archives, 2011-2015: 1.5tb of mirrors of scores of Tor-Bitcoin black-markets & forums 2013-2015, and other material; this is the single largest public archive of all DNM materials, and creating it was a major focus of mine since December 2013. The release also marks the end of my career as DNM expert—I’ve lost interest in the topic due to the apparent stability of the DNMs & being trapped in a local equilibrium
DNM arrests compilation: a census of all known arrests Jan 2011-June 2015
“Silk Goxed: How DPR used MtGox for hedging & lost big”
there was an ICE subpoena on my Reddit account
Statistics & decision theory:
When Does The Mail Come? A subjective Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of local mail delivery times
resorter
tool for statistically re-ranking a set of ratingsanalysis of Effective Altruists’ donations as reported in the LW survey
anthology on how “everything is correlated”
electric vs stove kettle boiling-time analysis: collected some simple data on my kettles & demonstrated some statistics tools on the dataset like a Bayesian measurement-error model
dysgenics power analysis: how much genetic data would it take to falsify those claims?
noisy polls: modeling potentially falsified poll data
Value of Information for suicide (example cost-benefit analysis of weakly predicting suicide)
Air conditioner upgrade cost-benefit analysis
probability/gerontology problem: can one visit 566 centenarians before any die? No.
do causal networks explain why correlation≠causation is so often true?
a little example of estimating scores from censored data
QS related:
2015 modafinil community survey (not quite finished)
Bitter Melon experimental & cost-benefit analysis
Redshift self-experiment: screen-reddening software shifts bedtime forward by 20 minutes
magnesium citrate experiment finished: initial benefits but apparent cumulative overdose led to net negative effect and mixed effects on sleep
playing with inferring Bayesian networks for my Zeo & body weight data (powerful generalization of SEMs, but requires a lot of data before networks stabilize)
Nootropics: initial results on LLLT correlated with large increases; but the followup randomized experiment showed zero effect
LLLT re-analysis: no change in sleep as hypothesized by another LLLT user
analysis of sceaduwe’s spirulina/allergies self-experiment (no reduction in allergies)
Noopept experiment (no benefits)
Treadmill spaced repetition experiment: expanded analysis to cover treadmill’s impact on successive reviews with SEM (no additional damage to recall beyond that implied by the original damage)
lithium orotate experiment finished: no effects positive or negative
sleep correlations:
alcohol: no harm
optimal bedtime: a little earlier than usual
optimal wakeup time: a little earlier than usual
Tech:
“Effective Use of arbtt”: My window tracker/time-logger of choice is arbtt which records X window info for later classification and analysis; but one of the challenges is you don’t know how to set up arbtt or improve your environment or write classifications rules. So I wrote a tutorial.
Time-lock crypto: wrote a Bash implementation of serial hashing time-lock crypto, link to all known implementations of hash time-lock crypto; discuss recent major theoretical breakthroughs involving Bitcoin
Debunking:
Bicycle face
“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.”
did Fifty Shades of Gray have only 4k readers as the original Twilight fanfiction?
gwern.net
-related:switched to Patreon for donations
continued sending out my newsletter; up to 24 issues now
rewrote
gwern.net
CSS to be mobile-friendly; should now be readable in an iPhone 6 browseroptimized website loading (removed Custom Search Engine, A/B testing, non-validating XML, outbound link-tracking; simplified Disqus; minified JS, and fully async/deferred JS loading)
A/B testing:
proposal towards recurrent neural network for reinforcement learning of CSS
metadata test: indicates moving it from the sidebar to the top of page works as well
indentation test: no real result, defaulted to 2em
floating footnotes test: verified no apparent harm (as hoped)
paragraph indentation test (responding to anonymous complaint; they were wrong)