There's a lot of knowledge and content everywhere, but it's really hard to find quality stuff that interests you. I thought I'd maintain a list of what I read and watch regularly or have been immensely moved or educated by.

Academia

TV Series

Humor

Stimulating Reads

Aggregations of interesting and informative pieces of writing.

Hacker News
The one stop source for all the latest news and information in technology. Far eclipses competitors like TechCrunch in quality density and speed.

Noam Chomsky's Articles
Words from possibly the world's leading intellectual. His thoughts on media, government, policy, economy, and linguistics are a formative influence.

Philip Guo's Blog
Philip Guo, most famous for The PhD Grind, his 122-page e-book about his PhD experience, gives great advice for high school, college and graduate students, programmers, immigrant parents and more.

Five Thirty Eight
Nate Silver's data-centric blog, 538, gained popularity after predicting the 2008 US Elections, and continues to publish some of the most interesting reads and inferences from data.

Essays and Speeches by Charlie Munger
The long time friend and advisor to Warren Buffet speaks and writes of economics, finance, psychology, and overall worldly wisdom.

Alan Dershowitz' Articles
Possibly the world leader in law writes political commentary particularly about Israel-Palestine and foreign policy.

Paul Graham's Essays
Venture capitalist and founder of Y Combinator writes the simplest yet most captivating essays about how to live life, startups, knowledge, and technology.

Farnam Street
A blog that helps you go to bed smarter than you woke up. It speaks of philosophy, wisdom, happiness, knowledge and meaning.

Moxie Marlinspike's Hacks
A collection of software written by the pretty legendary hacker, Moxie, particularly network security hacks.

Repugnant Conclusions
A blog by a Harvard Divinity School students on reasoning about the ethics and morality of things, instead or arbitrarily accepting and rejecting them based on social norms. He deals with issues like bestiality, abortion, necrophilia, pedophilia, and more.

Andrej Karpathy's Blog
Andrej Karpathy is a really smart hacker PhD student at Stanford, previously under Andrew Ng, and now Fei Fei Li, who does amazing things with convolutional neural nets and gives some great concrete advice which I wish I'd followed more and the best intuitive guide to neural nets I've ever seen.

Schneier on Security
Bruce Schneier is the Chuck Norris of the computer security world, and his blog is read by a quarter of a million people. He's a former NSA official and long time code breaker who's widely regarded at the leader in his field. Don't forget to catch his beautiful TED talk as well.

Krebs on Security
Brian Krebs is a former Washington Post reporter and a long term veteran reporting on computer security who writes non-technically about current major security issues, exploits and hacks.

Sam Altman's Blog
Venture capitalist and lecturer of the Stanford course on "How To Start a Startup" speaks about startups, technology and entrepreneurship.

News and Magazines

There's too much bad media everywhere, and it's hard to get the "real story" in well-phrased readable form. These guys do a good job. I personally use Longform to consume news from multiple sources, and highly recommend it.

The New York Times
Largely regarded as the world's leading newspaper shows news from the US and all over the world, and has one of the best Opinion pages out there.

The New Yorker
An American magazine which not only deals with the cultural life of New York City, but also covers politics, pop culture and more.

The Atlantic
An American magazine that contains particularly good reads in Education and other things.

The Wall Street Journal
The top of the line source for business and economic news.

Non-fictional and Semi-fictional Movies

It wouldn't be feasible to list all movies I've watched and enjoyed. I'm particularly fond of semi-fictional/non-fictional movies and I watch a ton of documentaries, so here are some that I found particularly moving.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Based on the book by the very inspirational Mohsin Hamid and loosely based on his life. Although the movie doesn't do justice to the book, it's still a powerful movie with a strong message.

Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
A series of clips from Noam Chomsky's talks that counter the populist opinion on 9/11 and expose the propaganda model of the US media.

Gumrah
Not a movie. Gumrah is an Indian crime TV series, which is available online. It recreates supposedly non-fictional crime stories committed by the Indian youth. It can get very cheesy and I'm almost certan the stories aren't based on true events, but they can still be shocking.

Bhutto
Bhutto is a documentary that follows the lineage of the most powerful lineage of leaders in Pakistan - the Bhutto family in context of the political history of Pakistan.

Dirty Wars
Follows the US journalist Jeremy Scahill, and the story of how he discovers the inhumane acts of terror that the US military carries out in the Middle East.

Ip Man
A semi-fictional Cantonese movie based on the legendary martial artist Ip Man, who trained Bruce Lee.

City of God
This semi-fictional Portugese movie follows the crime scene in Brazil and features 2nd on Roger Ebert's list of best movies of 2003.

Rush
Rush is a movie about racing, rivalry and friendship with no clear antagonist and protagonist that follows the epic competition between F1 racers Niki Lauda and James Hunt.

Inside Job
Inside Job is a documentary and series of interviews that seeks to explain the corruption that caused the 2008 economic recession.

Linsanity
Follows the inspiration struggle of Jeremy Lin, the smart Asian kid, who fought stereotypes to become one of the best players in basketball.

The Square
The Square depicts the tale of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

Fire in Babylon
Possibly the best cricket documentary I've ever seen, Fire in Babylon follows the journey of West Indies cricket in the 70s and 80s as the small country fought apartheid for freedom, and went undefeated for 15 years.

The World Before Her
This documentary follows the lives of two Indian women - one an aspiring model, and the other a Hindu nationalist member of the RSS - and shows us the cultural dichotomy India finds itself in.

Food Inc
This documentary exposes the corruption and monopoly of the food industry in the US that optimizes profits by forgoing the need to produce healthy food.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
The Enron Scandal was one of the biggest business scandals in history. This documentary shows how it all happened.

Midas Formula: The Trillion Dollar Bet
Follows the story of the small trillion dollar hedge fund of Nobel Laureates and financially elite of the 90s, Long Term Capital Management, that made an immense amount of money, but eventually collapsed.

Gandhi
The story about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in his journey and struggle to Indian freedom.

An Inconvenient Truth
A documentary meant to educate the world about the very real reality of climate change and global warming.

Michael Jackson's This Is It
A story about one of the greatest performers and music artists the world has ever seen and one of my personal favourite entertainers, Michael Jackson.

Pirates of the Silicon Valley
The original father of all Silicon Valley movies, Pirates was released in 1999 and features Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Paul Allen, and even Mike Markkula.

Randy Pausch: The Last Lecture
One of the most inspirational videos I've ever seen, cancer-diagnosed Computer Science professor at Carnegie-Mellon Randy Pausch gives his ultimate lecture about the lessons life taught him and how they can help you.

Inside the Dark Web
A documentary about the internet, surveillance, privacy, anonymity, Tor, Silk Road, bitcoin, and the deep web.

How Anonymous Hackers Changed the World
How trolls on internet's 4chan assembled a large group of internet hackers clad in Guy Fawkes' masks to use collaboration amongst citizens to protest against the government.

The Social Network
The story of how Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. And the way the whole legal battle between himmand the Winklevoss twins turned out.

The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard
The story of yet another very real effort to promote democracy that meets at odds with pre-existing law. We see the details of a battle between big film and music corporates and 3 computer guys who run a torrent website.

Don't Talk to Police
This is a lecture in Law more than a documentary where a formal criminal defence attorney describes in tremendous detail that given the current US legal system, you cannot do any positive good by speaking to the police.

How the Economic Machine Works - Ray Dalio
Ray Dalio, the founder of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, created this animated 30 minute video explaining how the economy functions in a very simply way. A must watch for everybody who uses money.

The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
A riveting story of injustice served upon a brave-heart trying to use Computer Science as a means to make political change, Aaron Swartz.

Interesting Academic Papers

There's obviously way too vast an expanse of academic papers that are impactful in many ways most of us do not recognize. This collection merely represents some papers that I found "really cool".

Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions
Andrej Karpathy and Fei Fei Li [2014]
The machine learning group at Stanford generates natural language English sentences that describe images, using convolutional neural nets on the images and recurrent neural nets over sentences in this amazing work.

Spying the World from your Laptop
Le Blond et al [2010]
Exposes the privacy concerns in BitTorrent, and how from a single machine, they managed to collect 148 million IPs downloading 2 billion copies over 103 days.

Internet Censorship in Iran
Aryan and Halderman [2013]
This paper examines the status of Internet censorship in Iran based on network measurements conducted from a major Iranian ISP during the lead up to the June 2013 presidential election.

Outsmarting Proctors with Smartwatches
Migicovsky, Halderman et al [2014]
This paper shows how students can cheat on examinations with smartwatches.

Internet Censorship in China
Xu, Mao, Halderman et al [2011]
"In this work, we explore where Intrusion Detection System (IDS) devices of the Great Firewall of China (GFC) are placed. Knowing where IDSes are attached helps us better understand the infrastructure of the firewall, gain more knowledge about its behavior and find vantage point for future circumvention techniques."

Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit
Wolchok and Halderman [2010]
They track 7.9 million IPs downloading 1.5 million torrents over 16 days and present a way to monitor pirates' behavior and "negate any perceived anonymity of the decentralized BitTorrent architecture".

Security Analysis of India's Electronic Voting Machines
Wolchok et al [2010]
They "demonstrate two attacks, implemented using custom hardware, which could be carried out by dishonest election insiders or other criminals with only brief physical access to the machines". A diplomatic way of saying they undermined the world's largest democracy.

Women in Academic Science: A Changing Landscape
Ceci, Ginther et al [2014]
Contradicts previous assumptions of gender bias and says that gender differences in spatial and mathematical reasoning do not stem from a biological basis, but rather suggests women have "difference in attitudes toward and expectations about math careers and ability". Was published in the New York Times.

DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification
Taigman, Yang et al [2014]
The guys at Facebook AI use a preprocessing 3D affine transform before running a 120 million parameter, 9 layer deep neural net on the largest dataset at the time - 4 million images, with an accuracy of 97.35%, 27% higher than its predecessor and probably greater than human-level performance.

ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Krizhevsky, Sutskever, Hinton [2012]
They trained a 60 million parameter large convolutional deep neural net on the classical ImageNet dataset to obtain an error rate of 15.3% compared to the previous record of 26.2%.

Deep Neural Networks for Acoustic Modeling in Speech Recognition
Hinton et al [2012]
Shows that deep neural networks can outperform traditional Hidden Markov Models and Gaussian Mixture Model (HMM-GMM) approaches to speech recognition.

Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks
Dean, Corrado, et al [2012]
Uses an asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) procedure and a framework for distributed batch optimization to train a network 30x larger than in previous literature - with 1.7 billion parameters and tens of thousands of CPU cores. Achieves 15% on ImageNet.

Intriguing Properties of Neural Networks
Szegedy, Zaremba et al [2014]
Particularly interestingly, this paper shows the instability of deep neural networks in high dimensional space by making random perturbations in correctly classified images until the net misclassifies it. It turns out that the second image is visually indistinguishable from the first, and the neural net produces strange results.

W32.Stuxnet Dossier
Falliere et al [2011]
A detailed dossier on the infamous Stuxnet worm - a worm that used zero-day exploits on Windows machines propagated via USB to penetrate air-gapped machines in Iran and purportedly wipe out of 1/5th of their nuclear centrifuges.

The Hangover Report - Unveiling an Indian Cyberattack Infrastructure
Norman Shark [2013]
A detailed, frankly LOL, report, of how a Norwegian telecom company, Telenor, reported a case of "spear phishing" emails to the upper management. Further investigation revealed that the attack came from India, which unsurprisingly failed to cover its tracks.

The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
David, Rubenstein et al [2014]
Seemingly straight out of a sci-fi movie, the guys at MIT CSAIL use high speed (audio-less) video footage to recover sound from minute vibrations (in things like packets of chips).

First Person Hyperlapse Videos
Kopf, Cohen et al [2014]
First person videos are choppy, boring and slow. This research converts these first person videos from Go-Pro cameras to hyperlapse videos - time lapse videos with a smoothly moving camera - seamlessly.

MOOCs and Open Education
Yuan, Powell [2013]
A detailed review of the phenomena of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), openness of higher education, and its implications.

What's the Big Idea? Towards a pedagogy of idea power
Papert [2000]
An essay about how schools deform ideas to fit the pedagogical framework. The legendary Papert ponders on the use of Computer Science as a tool to re-empower ideas that lose their glory when fitted into the school framework.

Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties
Backstrom and Kleinberg [2013]
Given a set of Facebook users, Backstrom and Kleinberg use Machine Learning and other methods to predict your romantic interest accurately up to 79% of the time for a dataset of 73,000 "neighborhoods" on Facebook.

Kademlia - A p2p Distributed Hash Table
Maymounkov and Mazieres [2002]
The introduction to the Kademlia protocol for Distributed Hash Tables, notably used by BitTorrent for trackerless torrents.

Television Series

My favourite TV series. Would definitely recommend.

Breaking Bad
Breaking Bad is about a high school Chemistry teacher that starts making meth to support his family and his cancer treatment. The character development is heart wrenching.

House of Cards
House of Cards is a political drama that follows Kevin Spacey as the protagonist and shows just how dirty politics can get.

Sherlock
This modern take of the classical detective story features Benedict Cumberbatch. The three-long-episodes-a-season format makes for a quick awesome watch.

Comics and Humour

One stop source for humor when you can't watch a video.

Reddit
Also known as the internet's front page, Reddit is my goto website for my daily dose of humor. Be aware though that some of it's sections are NFSW. Also, if you're sensitive, you should probably avoid it since it has a lot of dark humor.

xkcd
Randall Munroe's comic strip about technology, science, mathematics and relationships. Possibly read by every technologist, scientist, mathematician, and more.

SMBC
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) is a comic strip that features atheism, romance, science, research and the meaning of life.

PhD Comics
PhD, or Piled Higher and Deeper, is a comic strip written by Caltech instructor Jorge Cham that follows graduate students' lives and stories.

9gag
From memes to stories, funny pictures to cute things, GIFs to NSFW stuff, and even videos, 9gag has all sorts of miscellaneous humour.

The Oatmeal
Home to famous Nikola Tesla and Mantis Shrimp comics, The Oatmeal, created in 2009 by Matthew Inman, covers an eclectic range of topics. Inman says it typically takes 7-8 hours of research to produce one comic.

Think I'm missing something? Do you have something you think I should know about? Shoot me an email at
misbahahmed0001@gmail.com
or get in touch with me on any other form of social media. I'd love to see it!

The Knowledge Bank