New Monthly Thread: Bragging

I'm a high school senior. I co-authored a paper with John Conway. It's on pretty unimportant stuff, and hardly serious mathematics, but it's still interesting. And I get an Erdos number of 2!

I turned down a job offer. Because it didn't pay enough. When my current job will definitely end in December.

I formally proposed to the love of my life, and she said yes.

Probably not the most awesome, but something I have wanted to brag about: at swing dance classes, I've been making an effort to remember people's names. One girl in particular, I forgot her name after getting it twice, but I remembered that it was "eye-something-something". I also remembered that she was Turkish. So I googled for a list of Turkish given names, and per wikipedia, decided she was probably called Aybüke.

I didn't see her for a few weeks, but next time I did, I said "Aybüke, right?", and her reaction was a delightful combination of surprise, pleasedness, and embarassment that she'd forgotten mine.

I ran a mile in 6:40 (I'm 5'10" and 202lb, so this is actually quite a bit more impressive than it sounds).

My co-founder and I launched Floobits, a tool for remote pair programming. We'd been soft-launched and were slowly growing through word of mouth, but we hadn't tried to get publicity or told the world that we're a Y Combinator startup.

We got coverage on:

• Hacker News
• TechCrunch
• Y Combinator blog

...and a couple other places I've forgotten about.

I also wrote an insubstantial post about getting into YC. It doesn't contain any special hints, just a summary of the journey so far.

Demo day is next week, so maybe I should have waited to post in this thread. :)

I solved the last 8 digits of 3^^^3 (they're ...64,195,387). Take that ultrafinitists!

Since I began working out a month and a half or so ago, I've managed to successfully to go the gym every other day, the exceptions being when I hung out with friends and either got too high to go or ended up spending the night at someone's house. The important thing being that at no point did I not go simply because of lack of willpower.

I also finally learned how to lucid dream in the last month and I've had seven or so (short) lucid dreams.

I like this thread idea. I think that bragging about charitable donations should be especially encouraged.

I taught classes about probability and cognitive biases at the Summer Program for Applied Rationality and Cognition to some of the smartest mathematically talented high school students in the US. The classes I taught together with the rest of the curriculum will hopefully help them be some combination of more rational, more effective, and more reflective.

Helped my wife as she delivered our child (well, a maternity nurse also participated).

(relevant link)

I have roughly doubled my monthly income. I thank efm, SDr, Ralith, and Burninate for pushing me to increase my price beyond what I would have cowardly accepted.

I've been running a hobby project that's prestigious within my subsubculture, and it became clear that one of the four other people I'd recruited was a bad fit for the job. I convinced him to leave without wounding anyone's feelings, and we're all still on great terms. I'm assigning myself points for (text-based) social skills and for picking awesome friends.

I'm an undergraduate student, and I recently completed a holiday research project in computational neuroscience. During the project I found some interesting properties about connection properties in matrices which may not be a currently known.

I reached 1,000 judged predictions on PredictionBook, my business hired three new employees, and I finally achieved a 30 day streak on Duolingo. So there!

I started writing fiction (well, fanfic) again, including a horror sequence that quite upset my beta reader. I used to assume, when I was younger, that I could only write non-fiction, because I wasn't the kind of person who could flesh out a character or engage a reader about people instead of just ideas.

I implemented the Secret Weapon--a productivity system that combines Evernote and GTD--and have been making use of it quite effectively. I also have kept up on my recently started gratitude journal.

In other news, Evernote is simply awesome.

I'm a futures trader. The week before last was my best week at my current company. $150K baby!

After using the same terrible, creaky, heavy bicycle for two years because it was free, I finally bought a decent bike. The search process was much less painful than I'd been expecting, and I can go up hills now without having to get off and walk.

I've also started a habit of going for a walk every morning, no exceptions, which seems to be improving my happiness already.

META COMMENT THREAD: KEEP ALL META DISCUSSION HERE

Anything you do or don't like about this thread, post here. Feedback fosters improvement.

Two entries for me. 1) Got a new job that's actually in my field. (Finally, after five years of looking) 2) Found a girl who's as big of a nerd as I am, and started dating her. Things are going really well so far, easily better than any past relationship.

Many individual changes, several of them big and important in their own right (see my Meta thread comment ), but the big one is just keeping track of things I want to do, portioning out ambitious goals to hit for particular days, managing to hit all or most of these, reviewing why I couldn't hit them all when I didn't and doing a weekly review of which of the bigger goals I should attempt to tackle over the week ahead.

For example, I've hit the income threshold where it's cheaper for me to have private health insurance than not, so that was put on my list of things to do after finishing moving to Sydney, pulled off once I was set up, turned into goals over a few days of finding out more information in general, researching specific plans, picking one, and signing up for it. Each of these was just one bullet point of several on my list to accomplish for that day.

I've gone from being somewhat bored at home, casting around for videogames that inspired me to actually play them, about 3 months ago, to being occupied up until I go to bed every night of the week working on longer term projects for myself.

I donated to the Against Malaria Foundation, which is GiveWell's top charity.

Here is a link for those who wish to do likewise:

http://www.againstmalaria.com/

I built an aquarium that is, by observation, a sufficiently stable ecosystem that it can go without maintenance for a month with no apparent degradation.

Also I convinced a fire eel to curl up in my hand while waiting for earthworms.

I wrote a 2+1D special relativity simulator. It takes a Flatland spacetime volume in a rest frame and shifts it into a moving frame.

It's simple, but it's the first self-driven project I've ever completed, and it's also in a sense the first bit of "real physics" I've done.

(Next month: porting it to C from Java, so that I can actually run the thing without crashing my computer.)

I am beeminding 'meta' improvements - things which I can implement that will increase my ability to do other things. (for example - using beeminder would be one, although not one of the ones I have been counting. Rationality improvements would count, although depending on how broadly you interpret it, there are things which are not explicit rationality improvements, like getting a working GTD system). The beeminder is currently committing me to a new idea or formal implementation of an idea every two days.

I learnt that Cologne and Koln are the same city; beat that.

I turned in my PhD dissertation. Here's the title and first paragraph of the abstract:

PRODUCTIVE VISION: METHODS FOR AUTOMATED IMAGE COMPREHENSION

Image comprehension is the ability to summarize, translate, and answer basic questions about images. Using original techniques for scene object parsing, material labeling, and activity recognition, a system can gather information about the objects and actions in a scene. When this information is integrated into a deep knowledge base capable of inference, the system becomes capable of performing tasks that, when performed by students, are considered by educators to demonstrate comprehension.

(Basically it is computer vision combined with Cyc.)

I've calculated that the atoms in the center of the Sun are not fast enough to escape the Sun's gravity even from its surface, let alone from its center.

And published it in my blog.

Not that it is a discovery of any kind, just another eyeopener how bad is our intuition.

Would you say, that 15 million K hot proton is too slow to escape the Sun's gravity?

Got my dissertation proposal approved.

First paragraph: This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended consequences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations intended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work.

I finished the Super Spartan Virginia race. Veterans of other similar contests said this was the most insanely grueling course they'd ever seen. There was very little running involved, because the only flat areas were near the obstacle challenges. Everything else was either long hikes up ~30 degree slopes or scaling mud-slicked rocks/woods, alternating with trying not die by impalement descending similar terrain or 45-degree slopes. Sometimes carrying logs around with you, etc. All of my limbs are currently covered in lacerations and contusions. (I'm not giving my precise finishing time for anonymity reasons, but I was in the middle of the pack.)

This was not quite the most psychologically difficult thing I've ever done, but it was by far the most physically challenging thing I've ever done. I got through this by having the self-that-experiences maintain the mantra that the self-that-remembers was going to think this was awesome the next day (a correct prediction).

But if you want to hear about true inspiration and motivation -- let me take a moment to salute the Wounded Warrior team, whose intact members completed this race in gas masks while taking turns carrying their triple-amputee comrade on their back.

(Sorry for bragging twice in one month, but this puts my previous accomplishment to shame.)

Since everyone else is talking about research, I suppose I should mention that my first article was accepted to Inverse Problems and Imaging. The preprint has been on arXiv for a while.

Someone was having trouble finding good resources for learning Nemeth (the braille format specialized for mathematics); ancient books, programs only available on 3.5floppies, screen reader unfriendly unicode tables, etc. So I wrote a quick guide in roughly half an hour that, according to the person needing such a guide, is actually pretty useful. If I want to go into bragging mode, I seem to have single-handedly half-assed Nemeth into the twenty-first century. (This reenforces my idea that a blindness organization that's actually based out of the 21st century would be extremely useful, and I'd totally try to start one if I had the necessary skills to organize people better at some of the involved tasks than I am. Besides, making learning Nemeth more accessible to a modern audience isn't going to do much if braille technology is still horribly impractical.)

I ate a bowl of nails for breakfast this morning!