In 2019, I was honoured by the outstanding journalist Zsuzsanna Dömös writing a portrait of me for Forbes Hungary. Many of my international friends asked for a translation - so, here it is. Thank you to Réka Turcsányi for the translation.

This work, it’s fulfilling

Written by: Zsuzsanna Dömös. Photo by: László Sebestyén.

Miklós Danka is not even thirty, yet he has been working for one of the most exciting Silicon Valley companies, Palantir Technologies, for seven years. Spies, the army, government bodies, and the aerospace, pharmaceutical, and energy industries are among his business partners, while he also teaches on a regular basis, at home and abroad. He has taken part in Hungarian politics too.

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Meglepő politikai pálfordulást hozott Kövér László hírhedt zuglói fóruma. Az eddig a családokat szentül fontosnak tartó politikus szavait ugyanis nehéz másként értelmezni, minthogy legalizálná a pedofíliát. Ahogy kifejtette, azok akik nem tudnak gyereket szülni, mégis örökbefogadnának - azaz az örökbefogadók jó része - morálisan ekvivalensek a pedofilokkal. Minthogy az örökbefogadás a törvény által megengedett, valószínű, hogy Kövér szerint a pedofília is legalizálandó. Arra nem tért ki, hogy az árva gyerekeknek szerinte hol lenne jobb, szerető szülők vagy szexuális bántalmazók között, de megjegyzései arra engednek következtetni, hogy szerinte mindegy.

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The following is the English original of an article that has been published in Czech in the magazine of Psychology students at the Charles University in Prague (see the Czech version at the end of this post).

Photo by Vít Krištof

In September of 2009, I started my Computer Science studies at Cambridge in the UK. During one of our first courses I was astonished to learn that a majority of these smart, experienced, and well-selected students struggled grasping certain programming concepts. Recursion (some program code executing itself) stood out in particular as something that was crippling to others but felt natural to me. How could this be? I concluded that either I was an alien with a special brain (unlikely), or I had some prior experience that caused this difference (more likely). But what could it have been?

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Recently unknown attackers have accessed 29 million Facebook users’ data. (You can check if you were affected on this page.) The event raised a lot of questions in people’s heads: should I change my password? Could I have been affected if I used two-factor authentication? What kind of data could attackers steal? Could they have accessed Facebook-connected apps like Messenger or Tinder?

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My experience is mostly for Oxbridge and for Maths/Computer Science (and that's what I'm going to assume for the following tips), but the lessons below apply to other universities and courses too - adapt them to your personal taste and needs.

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Computer Science covers a very large number of areas, and it's hard to know where to get started. Below is a collection of topics, descriptions, practice problems, and some recommendations on how to get started. I included the most exciting/enticing tutorials and websites that I know about.

Computer Science Topics for Explorers

The document is open for comments and suggestions: if you have questions or ideas, please include them in the document for the benefit of other readers.

Happy exploration!

A rengeteg Bitcoinról szóló újsághírnek bizony 90%-a butaság, de a másik 10% valóban értékes és fontos. De melyik az a 10%?

Az OTP konferenciáján (technikai tudás igénye nélkül) bemutattam, hogy mi az a Bitcoin, mi a története, és hogy tényleg értékes-e, mint fizetőeszköz.

Elvek

A 2018-as magyarországi választásokon én a következő elvek alapján szavazok:

• Ha a Fidesznek többsége lesz, akkor folytatódik a horror.
• Tehát az egyetlen remény, hogy a Fidesznek nem lesz többsége. Akkor is bőven lehet katasztrófa, de a remény csak ezen az úton van.
• Ezért a szavazataimat úgy fogom leadni, hogy maximalizáljam az ellenzék mandátumait.

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You can read this post in the original Hungarian here: http://agondolkodasorome.hu/2016/11/20/techtabor-2/

Mid-November brought around the second session of the Tech Camp. (You can read about the goals of the program in this post about the first session.)

This was an intense, 8.5-hour-long session, with only about 90 minutes low time in between activities. Based on the experiences of the first session we made a few changes, which resulted in some significant improvements: both kids and mentors had overwhelmingly positive feedback, reflected by the buzzing, enthusiastic atmosphere.

The venue was particularly pleasant: Logiscool didn’t only provide a room, but welcomed us with pizza, cookies, beverages, and the kind company of their colleagues.

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You can read this post in the original Hungarian here: http://agondolkodasorome.hu/2016/10/25/techtabor-beta-az-elso-alkalom/

Mid-October 2016 brought around the first session of Tech Camp, our new, experimental educational program.

Goals

It is well known that programming and technology has an ever increasing role in today’s world - and that most school systems, including the Hungarian one, don’t keep up with this trend. In Hungary, there are rare occurrences of extra-curricular programming classes, but these tend to be either basic introductions to kids, or algorithmic and competition-oriented education for talented students.

While these are indeed valuable, it is frequently equally or more important to understand what is worth building, and how to implement it. These require numerous software engineering, product design, project management, and even entrepreneurial principles. However, the education of said principles (even outside the school system) is virtually non-existent. This is what our experiment tries to salvage.

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The same article in Hungarian: http://agondolkodasorome.hu/fb/danka-miklos-egyetemvalasztas-maskent/

As always, what I describe is my mental model, and not “a universal truth”. There are implicit exceptions to everything I write. You can benefit most from it by open-mindedly considering my points and incorporating them into your mental model.

In a recent discussion with a young person who was facing a university choice I realised that our regular assessments are oriented around less important aspects.

Discussions around universities tend to be dominated by subject quality: which university is the best at teaching a given subject? For heavily knowledge-based subjects like Medicine, this might make sense. But for others - like Maths, Computer Science, Social Sciences, and so on - it does not.

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People frequently ask me what my work-life balance is like at my current company. Aside from the fact that I don’t agree with the term itself since work and life are not a trade-off (see Shyam Sankar’s take on why it’s a false dichotomy), the question normally mixes up various interpretations of the term.

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[Preference Matrix App] [Source on Github]

Take your 5 favourite meals, or the 10 people closest to you in your life. What would happen if you tried to order them in an order of preference?

Making a preference order in the usual way will likely result in an inaccurate list. It is difficult to really understand our own preferences: our brain plays tricks, we have biases we're not aware of, and we conform to societal expectations without realising.

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Best. Holiday. Ever.

Do you want to go somewhere where there is both history and culture, beautiful scenery, beaches and hot weather? Then Israel is the perfect place for you. Thousands of years of intense history are compressed in a tiny country with an outstanding mix of religion and culture.

At least half of the fun was the specific group of us travelling together. I had the amazing luck of having two Israeli friends taking me and a long-time close friend around the country, telling us stories of places with a level of historic and cultural detail that even the best guides would envy - and having incredible fun in the meantime.

But half of the fun was just pure Israel.

If you need an inspiration for what to do, here's a sample, based on our trip.

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On April 24, 2016, I did the unimaginable… I reset my Facebook account.

Since Facebook itself doesn't offer a clearing option, resetting in practice means deleting the account and creating a new one. In the world of today, where for many people 'having a Facebook account' is equivalent with 'existing', resetting the account amounts to dying - and then coming back from the dead.

The reactions were as expected:

The most frequent question was: why?

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This post is written with students of the Computer Science Tripos at the University of Cambridge as the audience, but almost all of the principles apply to other standard memorisation-based examinations as well.

Despite being an awful tool, you’ll have to deal with exams (see David MacKay’s “Everybody Should Get an A” for a better system). I don’t judge you based on how you think of exams or your performance - this is because I don’t think how you think about exams reflects values that are good or bad: there are legitimate reasons for both. But if you do care about exam performance - like I did at university - then this post is for you. I was top of the exam papers of the Computer Science Tripos at the University of Cambridge all three years not because of specific skills, but because of figuring out the right strategies.

We can’t all be top of the years, but you can significantly improve your result compared to others by leveraging the below principles. The catch? It’s difficult.

Exams are a game. Here is the winning strategy.

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The below are my interviewing principles aimed at intermediate-level people who conduct standalone job interviews.

The first interview I've ever conducted was at Palantir, 2.5 years ago (at the end of 2012). An interviewer dropped out and there were only the 15 of us in Europe at the time - so I had a whopping 10 minutes to prepare for an interview for a different role than mine. It was seemingly a disaster - the interviewee was several levels above me intellectually at the time and owned the interview. 140 interviews later, I don’t think that it was a disaster anymore (although naturally one of my weakest interviews). My goal was to find the truth about his technical abilities - and I accomplished just that. We hired him and now he’s one of the strongest execution people in the European business.

What follows is a set of interviewing principles which apply to all roles. The role-specific parts of interviewing are signal collection and the hiring decision and these are outside of the scope of this discussion.

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