Goodhart's Law
When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. A metric is useful only while it is being used to observe reality. Once people begin…
Barış Özmen
Essays, sketches, reading notes, and workflows from Barış Özmen's notebook.
Latest posts
Happiness is never having to ask for permission (archived)
January 6, 2024 If there’s one value Jason and I put above all else in business, it's independence. The freedom to make our own choices, good or bad,…
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely
A famous maxim written by English historian Lord Acton in an 1887 letter to explain that total, unchecked authority destroys a person's moral sense.
Who Has to Say Yes
The Two Ways the World Judges You Most careers seem completely different from one another. A surgeon, a startup founder, a professor, a YouTuber, and an…
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic (archived)
Baris' notes Floating-point vs Fixed-point representation Floating point representation parameters base: 10 (decimal), 2 (binary) p: precision (how many…
Linear Algebra Problem Book (book) by Halmos
goodreads, wiki, amazon openarchive, gutenberg authors: Paul R. Halmos He is a martian pdf links: pdf_1, pdf_2 First saw from…
The Higher Arithmetic (Book) by Davenport
goodreads, wiki, amazon openarchive, gutenberg authors: Harold Davenport pdf links: pdf_1, pdf_2, pdf_3…
Zero to One (book) by Peter Thiel
goodreads, wiki, amazon openarchive, authors: Peter Thiel, Blake Masters pdf links: https://morfene.com/021.pdf Zero to One summary Peter Thiel’s advice…
Blogroll
Blogs that I follow. Top paulgraham.com Y Combinator founder. Essays GOAT norvig.com Peter Norvig, GOAT, AI and programming github.com/norvig/pytudes…
The Design of Everyday Things
goodreads, wiki, amazon openarchive, gutenberg authors: Donald A. Norman pdf links: https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~stasko/6750/Talks/08-doet.pdf…
The Giants of User Retention
Learning User Retention: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Retention is the silent center of every growth model — the rate at which users come back on…
In Defense of Whataboutism
In Defense of Whataboutism Jun 19, 2026 Whataboutism is not a fallacy. It is a comparison. The comparison may be bad. It may also be the most relevant…
summary tweet by paulg (archived)
Richard Hamming - You and Your Research (archived)
AI Summary The Hamming Algorithm for Greatness Based on Richard Hamming’s "You and Your Research" (1986). The Objective Function Significance over volume:…
Career Advices
Career advices from various people Steve Jobs – Don't be a career "Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most…
The Lox Language · Crafting Interpreters (archived)
What nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast? Anthony Bourdain We’ll spend the rest of this book illuminating every dark and sundry…
Build from scratch
Build your own: compiler How I Learn Compilers Dabeaz (David Beazley) Write a Compiler Course Notebook debugger Writing a Linux Debugger Blog Series - Sy…
Software Design for Flexibility (book) by Hanson and Sussman
goodreads, wiki, amazon openarchive, gutenberg authors: Chris Hanson Gerald Jay Sussman Gerald Jay Sussman pdf links: Short Description Dabeaz mentioned…
TIL - VS Code Extension Bisect
TIL - VS Code Extension Bisect When VS Code starts acting weird — slow startup, freezing, crashes, or broken features — it's often an extension causing…
TIL - Running yabai as a persistent tiling window manager on macOS without Homebrew services
yabai #macos #til #productivity TL;DR Homebrew removed the plist from the yabai formula. brew services start yabai no longer works — #plist, #service not…
TIL - removing git large objects from .git
clone a fresh copy from github \( git clone --mirror detecting the large file ❯ dust --ignore-directory .venv/ --ignore-directory data/ 8.0K ┌──…
Ruby vs Python Naming Conventions
Variables Both Ruby and Python prefer snake_case for variable names, reflecting clarity and natural readability. Ruby makes scope explicit through sigils.…
TIL - Rails vs Django Naming Conventions
Rails 8 Created with rails new my_app → root folder my_app/ Primary directories app/, config/, db/, bin/, lib/, script/, storage/, test/, vendor/ Rails 8…
TIL - making an Obsidian plugin (minimal guide)
1. Minimal plugin (main.js): module.exports = class EditSelectionPlugin { onload() { this.addCommand({ id: 'edit-selection', name: 'Edit Selected Text',…
UNIX A History and a Memoir (book) by Kernighan
goodreads, wiki, amazon openarchive, gutenberg authors: Brian W. Kernighan pdf links: pdf_1 Short Description "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" by Brian W.…
Git under the hood (minimal)
Git is a content-addressable, immutable, distributed database optimized for tracking filesystem snapshots. Core ideas: Everything is identified by a…
Constraints are your friends
tl;dr Constraints are your friend. Decreases the cognitive load by shrinking the decision space so you can focus on the things with higher leverage…
Use git blame with Cursor
When going through the code, I saw an unexpected change, and wonder who made it and with which commit. I went through the following flow to find it…
Gradients or Mutations? Musings on Genetic Algorithms and Deep Learning (v0)
ref At its core, most of AI is about search: navigating vast parameter spaces to minimize a loss function. Deep learning (DL) does this via gradients,…
Exploring Fully Homomorphic Encryption by Vitalik (archived)
2020 Jul 20 See all posts Exploring Fully Homomorphic Encryption Baris: He has a tweet too https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1787107645544943646…
Group, Abelian Group, Ring, Commutative Field, Vector Space, Ideal Visualizations
ref From https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4345249/are-there-any-diagrams-or-tables-of-relationships-like-with-groups-to-magmas-bu Open: Pasted…
Patterns of Plausible Inference
Volume II: Patterns of Plausible Inference This volume attempts to formulate certain patterns of plausible reasoning. The relation of these patterns with…
Loving Your Idea Too Much
A trap as an indie hacker is working too much on the initial idea. Two human tendencies make this worse: Confirmation bias – You start out with an idea…
Universal truth with books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad
A good book can be measured by how much the author had fun writing it. Writing textbooks is a very boring task.
pick books by how much the writer had fun
Examples Linear Algebra Problem Book (book) by Halmos Problems for Mathematicians, Young and Old (book) by Paul R. Halmos Crafting Interpreters by Nystrom…
fastai numerical linear algebra - course logistics (archived)
Notebook You can read an overview of this Numerical Linear Algebra course in this blog post. The course was originally taught in the University of San…
What is Mathematics (book) (1941) by Courant and Robbins
goodreads, wiki, amazon openarchive, gutenberg authors: Richard Courant Ian Stewart Herbert Robbins pdf links: pdf_1, pdf_2 "A lucid representation of the…
What You'll Wish You'd Known (archived)
Endorsed by Terrence Tao, this blog is on his blog page - https://terrytao.wordpress.com/ January 2005 (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never…
How I Learn Group Theory
Books Abstract Algebra (book) by Herstein (introductory) Abstract Algebra (book) by Dummit and Foote (through) Visual Group Theory (book) (fun) Articles…
To be successful, you need to believe yourself to the point of delusion
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World (archived)
Baris: first saw in https://x.com/paulg/status/1951279732273639672 December 2014 If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing…
‘Groups’ Underpin Modern Math. Here’s How They Work. (archived)
Adam Nickel for Quanta Magazine Mathematics started with numbers — clear, concrete, intuitive. Over the last two centuries, however, it has become a far…
How I Improve My Programming
Watch great coders coding George Hotz Jonathan Blow Read well-written codebases Read best books (again and again) Refactoring (by Martin Fowler) SICP (by…
Aristotle Rhetoric
Aristotle's Rhetoric: Steps and Core Concepts I. The Three Modes of Persuasion (Pillars of Rhetoric) Ethos — Credibility or ethical appeal Persuasion by…
How I Learn Content Editing
Hayden Course - Edit Like An Artist (archived) first heard about at a learnathon in Network School
How I Learn Math
Venn diagrams to choose good math books/articles Venn diagram of great mathematicians Venn diagram of great math explainers Read books from those who are…
Building Safe AI - A Tutorial for Encrypted Deep Learning - i am trask (archived)
TLDR: In this blogpost, we're going to train a neural network that is fully encrypted during training (trained on unencrypted data). The result will be a…
Principles of Software Engineering, Part 1 - thoughts from the red planet - thoughts from the red planet (archived)
Principles of Software Engineering, Part 1 Tuesday, April 2, 2013 This is the first in a series of posts on the principles of software engineering.…
Taco Bell Programming (archived)
Content with notes ContentWithNotes Every item on the menu at Taco Bell is just a different configuration of roughly eight ingredients. With this simple…
Axiomatic by Greg Egan
goodreads, wiki, amazon openarchive, gutenberg authors: Greg Egan pdf links: https://philosophy.williams.edu/files/Egan-Learning-to-Be-Me.pdf…