Ben Kuhn — Essays↗

You are a plant. You have a stem, and you can sprout off leaves from the stem in various directions. You want to maximize the amount of sunlight that hits your leaves, i.e.

Someone recently asked on the statistics Stack Exchange why the squared error is used in statistics .

Many computer systems offer autocomplete : the ability to guess what you’re about to type based on the first few letters you’ve typed.

Wave is a for-profit, venture backed startup building cheap, instant money transfer within various countries in Africa.

This is my first winter in Boston after coming back from Senegal. The sun sets at around 4:15 now, and it’s suddenly become extremely salient how hard it is for me to focus after dark.

College, 2012 —Internship recruiting season. “What are you looking for in your internship?” the recruiter asks. “I’d like to solve hard technical problems,” I reply.

People sometimes tell me that they want to join a startup, so that they can learn how it works, and eventually start one themselves.

Like many people, I have most of my best ideas in the shower.

Sometimes people ask me what they should learn to become a better programmer.

source A common piece of interacting-with-people advice goes: “often when people complain, they don’t want help, they just want you to listen!

Shortly after I started blogging, because I was a college student and had nothing better to do, I set a goal to write every week.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I’ve labeled in my head as “staring into the abyss.

My few most productive individual weeks at Anthropic have all been “crisis project management:” coordinating major, time-sensitive implementation or debugging efforts.