Henry Dashwood

I’ve built an app called Magpie.

Neural networks are universal function approximators.

Introduction In the first post of this series, we saw that London has higher wages than Newcastle, but also higher costs.

Introduction In the last blog, we explained why London is more expensive than Newcastle.

Introduction According to Glassdoor, the average base pay for a software engineer in London is £59,0001, while in Newcastle it is £40,0002.

A sequel to California: the first three centuries When Junípero Serra blessed the ground at San Diego, he stood on a coastline glimpsed only by Manila galleons in living memory.

I don’t much like ORMs.

John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism Key stages in the decline of academic Marxism The Ballad of the White Horse Once again: Imports do not subtract from GDP Reflections on Palantir Do we ever get over things?

Some notes on the role of ideas in economic growth and the paper Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

I’ve been reading about and visiting California quite a lot recently.

Razib Khan on the genetic history of lactose tolerance Silver Age Marvel Comics This is a fascinating piece, even if you (like me) have no interest in Marvel.

Getting stuff built Britain’s Problem with Planners The cost of the UK’s unified energy market Where next with the UK’s nuclear new build programme?

Getting stuff built Tornagrain is a beautiful new neighbourhood being built near Inverness.

The last links post was quite long so I think I'll try doing them weekly and including more quotes and commentary...

AI How to create a web-scale dataset for training an LLM Interestingly they stopped deduplicating as aggressively as they had been.

Getting stuff built Gatwick Given all the debate about airport expansion, it's extraordinary that the fact the second Gatwick runway already exists isn't more widely known.

The University of Waterloo's Computer Science undergraduate degree has an extremely good reputation.

Some thoughts I wrote down in ~1 hour at the San Francisco Writing Club Upside-down teaching / Flipped classroom Eric Mazur is a professor of physics at Harvard whose students were getting perfectly adequate grades.

Starting a project scrapy startproject <project_name> This creates a file structure like so: ├── scrapy.cfg └── <project_name> ├── __init__.py ├── items.py ├── middlewares.py ├── pipelines.py ├── settings.py └── spiders └── __init__.py settings.…

The diagram below illustrates how we can approximate the area under the curve $y = ln(x)$.

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering features some mathematics that I found a little difficult to follow.

2.1 (a) Is row 1, column 2 a Nash equilibrium?

The quotient rule is an important concept in calculus used to compute the derivative of the quotient (division) of two functions.

The product rule is a fundamental concept in calculus used to compute the derivative of the product of two functions.

Your heating bill depends on the average temperature outside.

The chain rule is a fundamental concept in calculus that allows you to compute the derivative of a composite function.

The general form of a second degree equation is $$ x^2 + px + q = 0 \tag{0} $$ where $p$ and $q$ can be any real number and $x$ is the roots of the equation.

2026 Marie Antoinette: The Journey - Antonia Fraser Arcadia - Tom Stoppard The Great Divorce - C.S.

Command Line for Unix and Windows Action Unix Windows Notes Print working directory pwd pwd Change directory cd cd Make directory mkdir List contents ls dir -a to include hidden files Remove directory rmdir Only works if directory is empty Remove directory

This document is somewhat inspired by Stephen Diehl's What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell and Evan Chen's An Infinitely Large Napkin.

A list of blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and publications that I like General Interest Astral Codex Ten/Slate Star Codex The best blog and former blog on the internet.

There are some things you read that strongly affect the way you look at the world.

Near the end of the 7th century, Bishop Wulfram attempted to convert the pagan king Rathbod of Frisia.

In documentaries on the history of mathematics, there is often a scene where the presenter discusses the invention of the number zero.