Reading & Eating

Reading

1. Andrej Karpathy reminds you that "Yes you should understand backprop". For an intuitive and in-depth intro to backpropogation I recommend his convolutional neural network lectures.
2. Bill Bryson - The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way , an entertaining if sometimes undirected tour through the history of the English language.
3. Roger Lowenstein - When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management. It was interesting, although the author's misuse of Statistical concepts and terminology got on my nerves. But I'm generally very interested in reading about how groups of smart, well-informed people can make terrible mistakes.
4. Everything I can about being a tourist in Mexico City

Eating

1. Desimone's, Facebook's main cafeteria, where I eat 2-3 meals a day most weekdays. I'm constantly impressed by the food quality and creativity.
2. This is a bit late, but for one weekend this past October I ate way too many bagels in Montreal. Poutine is very tasty, but if I lived in the cold north I'd be much more thankful for these bagels.
3. Lam Zhou. It's not exactly a new restaurant for me but I have yet to find a dumpling spot I prefer in Manhattan.
4. BaoHaus for Taiwanese comfort food buns, it's way better than I would expect such a celebrity-driven restaurant to be. I'm sad to say I lived nearby for over 2 years before trying it.