Michael Nielsen

Another example of the difficulties of central planning. - Michael Nielsen

Nice history of the early years. - Michael Nielsen

Fun overview of some of what we know about deep learning, with plenty of useful links (and nice Theano source code) - Michael Nielsen

More in the Moorcock vein. It's easy to imagine the reaction of the critic, holding their nose at writing to formula. But you can turn that around, regarding Dent (and, more plausibly, Moorcock) as a student and theoretician of structure. And that's a pretty powerful point of view. Of course, word-by-word Dent is a poor writer, suffering from an insufficiency of revision, and an overuse of cliche. But I rather suspect that with a little more revision, a little less tolerance of cliche, he would have been pretty good. (Cory Doctorow suffers some of the same problems, and would also be excellent if he simply revised more, eliminated weaker material, and had less tolerance of cliche.) - Michael Nielsen

Fascinating both intrinsically, and for the commentary. The commentary first: part of the interest is from people who desire an easy way to write (or, more accurately, to have written). But there is also clearly a genuine interest on the part of many: what does this guy know that I don't about storytelling? You may not like Moorcock's writing, you may even regard it as shabby, but it does have its moments. And that's more than one can say for the writing of many critics. My condensation of the article: study structure. And work to find story structures that work. - Michael Nielsen

Kevin Kelly interviews Brian Eno. Slow to get going, but fascinating. Eno proposes "process, not product", says that it's his "ease of seduction" that means he often gets things first, talks about putting more "Africa" into computers, and generally makes many interesting comments. - Michael Nielsen

Conveys well how much force of personality and intellect Sontag brought to her writing. - Michael Nielsen

Ted Chiang on the impact of lifelogging, and the expansion of self it will cause. - Michael Nielsen

Nice article explaining a principled way of deriving Nesterov's method. Also makes the interesting point that Nesterov is more brittle than standard gradient descent, and thus may be less useful in practice. - Michael Nielsen

I've heard people talk a lot about the "need for mentors". It's a slightly odd obsession. This little essay has a lot that's smart to say about the notion: (1) It's a mistake to think in terms of "mentors", just think in terms of what you want to learn, and who you want to learn from; (2) Approach people with very specific questions; (3) Pick people who you think would be particularly well suited to answer your question; (4) Think carefully about how to structure the conversation (without going overboard); and (5) Make sure to followup, simply because people like to hear that they've done something useful. - Michael Nielsen

A thoughtful criticism of object-oriented programming, from an experienced programmer. The analogous argument for English would be something like: don't start by thinking about the nouns. "The fallacy of “object-oriented programming” is exactly that: that code is at all “object-oriented”. It isn’t. Code is procedurally oriented, and the “objects” are simply constructs that arise that allow procedures to be reused. So if you just let that happen instead of trying to force everything to work backwards, programming becomes immensely more pleasant." - Michael Nielsen

Nice summary of some of the problems in the design of the web. - Michael Nielsen

The Wacom Bamboo tablet has lots of problems when installed by default on Windows 7. This page is a pretty good guide to how to fix those problems. It's working much better now! - Michael Nielsen

Hawkins on where games (and in particular educational) games are going. - Michael Nielsen

undefined - Michael Nielsen

Nice abstraction of Bitcoin as a way of maintaining a distributed, public ledger - Michael Nielsen