dorfuss

I'm not sure what you mean by "practical way", but for starters I'd recommend Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw's "Principles of Microeconomics" which is a standard university textbook translated to many languages (I am not associated with the book in any way). It's very accessable, colourful, well explained. He's also authored "Macroeconomics" if you're interested.

Back to learning the "practical way" - I would recommend reading the Mankiw book fast and then just start looking around your world and asking questions as if you were an economist.

I'll tell you how I did it.

My practical training in economics happened when I worked in a bottling plant at a conveyor belt. Dull phisical work, but leaves you with plenty of time to think. We were able to fill about 10000 bottles a day. Whenever a bottle broke on the belt or someone was late for work we had to stop the machinery. Every minute when we did not work calculated to specific loss expressed in concrete money. We were paid by hours, if we had to stay longer at work the company made less money (because they had to pay us more).

The bottles were bought in Italy and travelled about 2000 kilometers to our plant. The product was made in North America and was imported by bulk to the plant in huge 1-ton plastic containers. While the final product costs about 5-7 euros in Germany or Austria, the cost of the liquid itself was just a tiny fraction of the final price. Even the bottles (including transport) were more expensive than the product itself.

Now start asking questions:

- Why it pays off to have a world wide operation from a country with very high labour cost, import the materials coming from thousands of kilometers away and then sell it with profit to countries such as South Africa and Argentina? If you were to invest in a new machine that would make my job at a conveyor belt redundant, how much it would have to cost to make the investment profitable? Would it enable the company to lower the final cost (more efficiency, less interruptions, more reliable than a human)? Would the quality increase? Would your investment enable you to invest even more in expanding to new markets? And if you kept me at the company, what other useful work could I perform?

If you were to build your own bottling plant like this one, how much would you have to invest? Who would buy your product? What would be your price? What would be the additional cost for you if you wanted to increase the production by 10% (i.e. what are your margin costs). What can you do with your staff and machines when you are using only a fraction of your production potential, i.e. what else could you produce and sell with profit based on your fixed costs?

Who buys a luxury product like that, how is it affected buy the seasons (holidays? vacations?)? In time of economic crisis would people still buy your luxury product or would they wait for better times? How to optimise you supply chain? Should you invest in storehouses so that your product is not waiting at the plant but rather closer to the clients (supermarket chains)?

Questions like this, when you have to make choices and predict the output are the essence of "applied" microeconomics. These questions go on and on and I believe that answering them is what you mean by "learning economics the practical way". Look around you and keep wondering.

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p.s. in search for good questions to ask and training your economic thinking have a look at the famous S. Levitt's "Freakonomics".

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p.s.2: I am not sure how to learn economics as an academical discipline the practical way. You would have to learn the modern models and assumptions from books and test them against the specific detailed data (tax office data would be nice or a supermarket sales stats), but those are very difficult to obtain if you are an outsider. Adam Smith was a very good observer, but nevertheless he was a moral philosopher rather than a big data analyst. But you can still test certain assertions asking yourself questions like: I pay 2 euros for a loaf of bread and I go to the same supermarket every day. How much would have the price of the bread to increase so that you would stop buying bread or change the store?

My experience is that all/most of the programming books are based on trivial examples and solving dull problems, which is perfectly fine when you know nothing and you are just starting the programming adventure, but when you are getting your second or third language and you want something more serious, then all the 50-150 loc examples are just... not enough. So I'd love to see more books when you are given something in the range of 10k< loc and the examples and tasks being more complicated. Traditional publishing did not allow that, because you could not provide long code base. But today there are no such limits.

Especially GUI guides are ratcher simplistic, you don't want to draw just triangles and squares on the screen. There are no really good resources for Direct3D or OpenGL, WGL, SDL etc. It's like learning architecture by looking at bricks and not at finished buildings. This is also the reason why people recommend working on open-source projects, because this is where the real thing happens. But I would say it's an intimidating experience. There should be something in the middle.

(And it would be nice if there was a mentoring site where you could pick a language, pick your level, and be mached either with a person/team to work on something together or with a mentor who could just guide you twice a month. Say, you pay 100 bucks for registration, the website owner gets $10, and the mentor $90. Even if you get just a couple of "students" it's still a safier bet than much more risky SaaS/e-book business. And how to start it - make a web site about one language that is your stronges and focus on that. If you get others interested in mentoring, check their stack and then expand the offering. If you have 10 deals a month, there will be 100 passive bucks more to your name. Has anyone tried that? And to get the initial traction combine it with some publishing, blog, some language-specific, industry-informed (not necessary programing related, but project-management, team integration, tasks division, feedback, code reviewing) problems that would prove your expertise.

PS: One difficult project you could explore is business process modelling - there are a couple of different notation standards, such as BPMN. The project would be to create one program (like Bizagi) in which you can design processes but in different notations, smoothly (that's the most difficult) convert between them, and then integrate with industry class software such as Appian, IBM BPM, Amodit, SharePoint, Alfresco etc. It's a million dollar project, but f* hard to solve.

Yes. Big Four. The new manager, who was not even employed at the time, had a coffee with me, told me he's assembling a new team. I did not meet with anyone from the recruiting staff, not even my future boss, I just brought my paperwork and I was in within a month.

It reminds me of an old joke from the Windows95 era:

How many Microsoft engineers you need to change a light bulb? None. Microsoft simply announces darkness the new standard.

* - (please don't take it seriously)

Integration if you don't know the system you have to integrate with. Establish some sort of a protocol (simple example: passing xml data), ask what this other system needs as input. The rest of integration I'd outsource.

winamp. sublime text. anki. libre office. audacity. quicktime. eclipse. komodo. english dictionary (part of mac os). TextEdit. codeblocks. virtualbox. join.me, vcl

broken software I hate: all web browsers, thunderbird, gimp, microCommander, calibre, itunes, iphoto, cyberduck, skype,

Reminds me of a book and Coursera course called "From NAND to Tetris" by Noam Nissan and Shimon Shocken. You can learn how to build a computer from basic logic gates, the web site below provides a hardware simulator in JAVA and pre-made components.

http://www.nand2tetris.org/

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elements-computing-systems

I'm not sure what do you mean by "automatically". Of course different EU countries have different rates, but some countries also have internally many different rates, and that depends on what is your product or who is your client (e.g. business vs governmental organisation vs private school vs institute for blind people could all have different rates for the same product). There is also a difference between 0 rate and exempt.

VAT is generally a huge pain in the ass if you don't have flat rates. This leads to absurds like coffee with milk has a different rate than milk with coffee. There are court cases in which they rule what kind of construction of a book shelf gets which VAT rate.

And it gives multiple opportunities for all sorts of abuses, including my favourite one: you open two companies, you sell same products internally with different VAT rates (like coffee+milk example), and the difference becomes your un-taxed profit. Perfectly legal.

This is why you have the Big Four consulting companies (I worked for one).

Tl:dr When you grow bigger employ a couple of good accountants.

I agree with Meric - it's mostly about fighting the inner Deamons. At first one deamon feeds you with doubt: "oh, you are such a pathetic piece of shit, you're a bad programmer, bad worker, you don't know enough", and then, when you want to change, another deamon: "oh you can't change, you are weak, you are too stupid" and "you have the mortgage, wife, your children's education". And then you start to hate yourself and have suicidal thoughts because the deamons make your life miserable. Meric is right in that you really don't have to do anything or be anything. You are not your work, and you are not your family. You can divorce, change jobs, change places, and you are allowed to fail.

Most importantly: you are the most precious person to yourself, love this guy.

Try maybe to realise that your existencial fears come from all past failures and dangerous situations, your limbic system just attacks you with the scarry visions, because this is what it evolved for: "see the tiger, recognize threat, run!" You could then do it like Zen buddhists: "I see the feeling coming, I look at it, I observe it, I know where it comes from, and I gracefully let it go".

I also think that the whole question starts with the wrong supposition. Java does not have a huge amount of open source programs, is less "cool" than JS or Python, but it has probably immensly huge "invisible code" that runs our lives. But then - the question changes to why C++ or JS with all its frameworks are so popular despite having an army of haters who despise them. I think most answers in this thread answer the latter question.

and Larry Wall

I'm not sure Germany is a good example. I am now living in west Germany, people simply prefer using cash. Unlike in Sweden, where I also lived, where they want to get rid of it soon. Many services are simply not available without a credit card (eg.: at T-Mobile store).

But I second you on the cloud computing and SaaS - I want the programs to run on my machine. And off-line.

Bisqwit, of course, but gosh, there is so much great talent around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y71lli8MS8s

With Masters in CS your future is rather secure. You can apply for a permanent visa in Australia, Canada or anywhere else in the world and get a good salary. Don't worry that much, you are young (I assume) and you have a bright future ahead of you. I also think that even back in India you could find a decent job with your skills. Don't panic, it's just a beginning. Cheers!

I absolutely hate it, especially that I use an 8 years old computer and these videos are just eating my meager resources. Then the comes the commercials that you cannot stop, and sometimes I have my speakers turned on and it just a great distraction. Hate it, hate it, hate it!

visualgo.net is excellent, thank you for mentioning it.

Off topic - googling facebook.com drives me nuts.

A couple of days ago I went to an administration worker at a university and asked her to help me with getting the vpn to connect to the net via university wi-fi. She told me to google the vpn to download it. I said: well, this is the very problem, I want to connect to the Internet, I cannot google it while I'm offline. People no longer distinguish between the address bar and google search, searching for files on your local drive or looking for them online. It's become one blob of "computer stuff". And you might think that when we moved from command line in DOS to Windows that was creating a new kind "stupid user". There is the next level, certainly.

Genuine question - could you please elaborate a bit on that? I sort of know what you mean, but I'm just an amateur. So the problem with large scale is creating algorithms that distribute and balance the workload on the servers, database access speed, optimal cashing, keeping 100% uptime, backup, separating different parts of the application and putting them on different servers, concurrency and solving the problem of simultaneous access to same resources? Anything else?

A general remark: A year ago, working at one of the The Big Four companies, I was taught one important lesson:

"Great disruption" - in short: business has to be prepared that within a year or two there will be 10 new global competitors, selling the same or better product for a better price. In order to survive you have to provide excellent customer service and support, automate your internal processes to lower the margin costs, focus on comoditization of services (that is: people love Coke, it's cheap, you open it with your finger, you drink, you go - this is how we want to use insurance, mortgages, cars and credit cards and municipal administration), compete by improving quality not by lowering price, carefully listen to your clinet, do a lot of personal tailoring.

Ask for recommendations.

My personal experiences with IBM representatives in Eastern Europe were rather negative (IBM was a strategic partner of my company), concerning IBM BPM and Cloud hosting. Their people were not trying to be nice or helpful. You had to really push them to get anything done. I'd expect better service, more focus on documentation.

edit: I do however recognise how huge the company is and how dramatic and brave their decisions have been to redefine the business.

Genuine question - when would you need to know the int size? When do you think knowing how negative numbers are represented in binary would help a web developer? Seriously curious.

Edit: sure it's good to know, but that's another question.

Look at more traditional businesses like restaurants. If there is a restaurant in the area, you might think - oh dear, no place for me here. But no, on the contrary, businesses thrive because of the environment around them. This existing restaurant offers "local food", so you offer Italian or "for single mothers with little kids". The spot becomes full of restaurants and there always will be customers to come to your place because they just happen to be in the area.

You go to a flower market - there are tens of different vendors selling similar quality, similar product at the same price and at the same closed space. And they are doing fine.

Or look at a traditional marketplace - you have tens of farmers selling very similar product. And yet they are coming together to sell their fruits and vegetables. True, maybe there are different dynamics there, there are more buyers than vegetable stands and if the line is longer than 5 people you move to another stand.

But I believe the same works with software and Internet Businesses. It does not harm anyone if there are different tools doing similar things. Look at digital cameras - there are hundreds of them and there is a market for each.

A great example is Coca Cola and Pepsi. Pepsi was created because it was understood that with the market saturated with one product there would obviously be people who would buy Pepsi just because it's not Coca Cola.

Competition is a very sound and healthy environment to work at because you can perfect your product and narrow down your target audience. As @petercooper said: because you see that there already is a business that thrives, you save yourself a lot of trouble testing if anybody wants to buy such a product.

Now marketing is the key.

Markering, social engineering. Hot or not, learn from it!

Everyone in the marketing business should learn how it's done from such premieres (other examples are Bond, Hobbit, Harry Potter).

I think those strategies would not work with a completely new title. Here you have a series that spans over 2-3 generations and through marketing you can create this illusion that this is an incredible cultural phenomenon, and that everyone is waiting, and that it's a part of the saga, and that without watching it you cannot call yourself a member of the polite society, or a middle class.

Look closely at what kind of arguments are used in the marketing messages. "This episode fits to the style of the other films". Now do reverse engineering on that statement - they took focus groups, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, ask people questions: "what are you most afraid of with the new episode", they say: "that it will spoil the style and mood of the previous movies". Now take 2-3 most repetitive statements and construct the smart message that will cover these problems. This is how it's done.

Another element is that the screenplay is written in such a way, that this episode has to be both - relating to the previous episodes and satisfy the fans, but also has to have a self containing story, that will be understood by those unfamiliar to the series. From the marketing point of view the Star Wars fans are not really the target group, they will go to see it no matter what. The real challenge is to broaden the fan base, attract those uninterested. Make the girlfriends go together with the boyfriends, and parents together with the children. Big bucks rule.

I particularly like the way they insert the information into the news reels. Of course the TV stations are being paid for it and the message is well tailored, but goes seamlessly well with other pieces of news. Very few movies are honored like that.

On a technical level - I think Episode I in 1999 was the last one shot on 35mm film. But actors spent most of the time in the blue box, so the editing deserves applause. Episodes II and III were shot on video making the composition with the CGI much much easier. But this time they went back to shooting on film, natural scenery and models. Interesting development. It's also interesting how they are able to release it on all different formats, 2d, 3d, IMAX etc. all at once (like games on different consoles).

I'm slightly critical from the point of view cinematographic art, but I'm admiring it as a global social engineering masterpiece and a business enterprise.

Depends how old you are and if you had any previous experiences with programming. I tried this with Java and it was difficul to go through the sometimes idiotic jokes, dialogues and pictures. If you are 13, they are cool. I was 29 and they were less so.

And also it's really boring to read basic stuff about variables, objects, pointers if you already know anything about these.

When I was learning HTML when I was 12 my math teacher told me to open any website and mess around with the source (and get hosting from Anglefire ;))

Later I read a simle step by step description of html tags. CSS and styles in general were a novelty back then. I later learned about JavaScript. Based on my experiences I'd recommend w3school - I think the basic html course is very good. Take notes - no more than 10 pages from the entire course, use two colors - one for the code, another for your comments. Use plain text notepad for editing code.

The feeling you are describing I have when I happen to visit FB - which I don't do very often, and I try to use it only one way - to send or share. Never to read the "what's new". It makes me feel depressed. It has become a space of self admiration, where everyone is so perfect, so happy, so successful, traveling the world, meeting new fascinating people, partying and making out with hot chicks. It's a fantasy world that hits some structures in your brain hundreds of times more powerfully than tv commercials.

I have the luxury of studying humanities (getting another degree) and not programming anymore for work. That's an absolutely great situation. I can learn useless languages, outdated technologies and not worry about deadlines. Programming is a nice break from reading medieval sources on development of mysticism.

You say: "overwhelmed or frustrated or worried?". My perspective is different. Of course there are some people who will make a handsome passive income, or become very successful and earn shitloads of money. But it's more the matter of luck, like winning a lottery, rather than of consistently working towards your goal. Success seems random, chaotic at best. And HN has a very high concentration of people obsessed with success stories.

I don't believe in IT anymore - unlike many people here do. For example I don't think Google is doing a good job with the ads business - I live abroad on a scholarship in a country where I don't speak the language, and YouTube serves me advertisements of expensive cars I will not buy, in a language I don't understand, or commercials targeted for woman. They are wasting my time and their money. But still I am a consumer nevertheless and have my 500 euros to squander. The ads I stumble upon have NEVER tempted me to click on them. They are perfectly irrelevant. Or I get ads of products I have already bought. Pointless, don't you think?

There are web sites that take 10-15 seconds to load, then my laptop starts to roar, gets boiling hot executing Flash and JS. That's an absurd!

For me what's going on in the IT world is just a tech bubble. Nothing to be frustrated or worried about.

And there are millions of things we have to fix in the world (I live in Scandinavia. Today I tried to make a report about a car break-in for over 30 minutes and then I gave up. The post office did not inform me, that there was a parcel waiting for me since Thursday...) And you want an intelligent Deep Learning algorithm. We are still struggling with providing drinking water to a large percentage of humanity.

So the wonderful things presented over here are not really revolutionizing anything. They are mostly admirable toys, but let's not be too crazy about them.

PS: My friend's laptop has broken and since then he goes to the library, reads 3 books a week, takes notes. Blogs and wikipedia proved to be of little value. In short - less Facebook, more productivity ;)

Hm, I've been waiting for the official release for quite some time now and I am surprised that this news was virtually missed by HN comunity.

Is PHP7 so not-sexy and not worthwhile looking at?

So true. Actually anybody has a potential "interest from VCs", because that's what VCs do - they are interested, they look around, sniff, check, look at ideas. So anyone could say that they have the VCs interest in their stuff. The same is true for patens/patent pending. Just don's say this. If you said: we sold our patent for $xxx its completely different story.

The problem with your advice is that when you don't know how to code, you don't understand how big the task is. You have a great idea, you try, it's too complicated, after 1 year (and even that requires a lot of determination) you have not completed anything, and you actually have not mastered the language/technology.

It's as if you tried to acquire fluency in ancient Greek by jumping right into reading Aristotle.

The point of entry is always very difficult, for any skill, and learning curve is most often steep and frustrating.

My advice - find someone who lives near by, someone whom you could call at any moment, and discuss your little project with him/her. Choose language/technology, and start working through some tutorials with your project in mind. Your friend should help you downsize your ambitions and limit the scope of the project to something you can actually execute.

You should be done with the basics in about 3 months (that means - no GUI). After that - try to limit the scope of your project so that you think you can make it in the next 3 months. (We know it will take you at least 6-9 months, but still, try to be on the schedule). Only then you will understand what it actually means to be a software developer.

(please note: software engineering is much more than you think when you're just starting to learn computer programming. Coding is not just giving instructions to computer to perform simple calculations. There are design patterns, team work, efficiency, doing things on time, math, frameworks, keeping up with super-crazy pace is which everything changes, there is network issues, and mobile devices, security, scalability, and much more. In short - it's a really complex trade and only few people will be able to do it).

This is actually not Keynes, it was originally Lenin who predicted that in the future people will live like we do on retirement, because machines would do everything for us.

You have to always measure the productiveness agains the goods you want to get. Today we are incredible efficient in getting the goods that would consume 90% of your time 100 years ago. But once we satisfied those needs, new appetites arose, so we now not only want shoes and bread, but also iPhones and intercontinental flights.

I'd look at some of the religious communities, like ultra-Orthodox in Israel, who are able to live for the whole month on very modest welfare, supporting large families of about 10 children. But no car, no phone, no Internet, no plasma, no fancy vacations, games, gym memberships, Starbucks or online shopping etc.

We are incredibly good at inventing new needs.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

The idea is great and I admire your lovingkindness.

There are some aspects I would mention, though, that you should take under consideration. (I graduated in Cultural Anthropology and did work with asylum seekers from Chechnya). I assume you're serious about what you want to do, not just go-there-once and forget about it, so I also write dead seriously.

First of all - language and cultural differences. Don't underestimate these. It's a very false assumption that people all around the world share the same values, ideas and understanding. It could happen that you want to do something good, and they would treat it as patronising for instance and get offended. Mind the gender issues as well. And above all they are not at their best, on the contrary, they are scared, alienated, impoverished, tense... Not an easy crowd to get along with. You should have some professional to assist you, someone knowledgeble you could talk to.

Secondly - I have been teaching Hebrew to a small group of people for free. The average age is +30, all persons university graduades, and they DO want to learn. But because there is no fee, they simply don't come to classes, don't do the homework! I could not have made it easier for them - I made all the materials, put them online and send them by e-mail, recorded readings in mp3, printed the handouts and brought paper and pens to the classes so that everyone is equipped. It doesn't work. They don't come regularily, they don't work at home. My mother, a psychologist, laughed at me and said that I have to charge for the classes and even take a collateral from them that will be returned only under the condition that they have 90% attendance and do homework. I don't know about asylum seekers, but I wouldn't be surprised they completely ignore you (not in bad spirited manner). This also happens with the language, the Chechens I worked with simply did not learn at classes. The result was a TOTAL FAILURE. Again, it's not their fault, I don't mean that. The system was broken. It's not enough to just come and teach.

Thirdly - I assume you will be dealing with adults. Adult education is very much different than teaching children. It's not the good place to elaborate on that, but the basic principle is that you have to rely on these people's previous experiences, concepts, ideas. They are adults, so they are not "blank pages" to be filled in with knowledge, they will not easily accept everything you say. They have their own ideas, thinking patterns, views, so you have to often ask questions such as: "What does it remind you?", "Does it look familiar?", "Have you ever encountered...", "How do you understand...". Asking these questions seems like slowing down the teaching process, but this is adult education - you will not go around these issues, as people will start telling you their experiences and thoughts anyway, and if they do it on their own, it will mean "I am not dumb, I also have my say, we're equal" rather than: "He's a really good teacher, I should share my views and see what he thinks". It's tricky.

And finally - I am not sure if vocational training is what they really need. I might be wrong, but based on my experiences in Denmark and to lesser extent in Berlin, all the programs that we had for immigrants failed miserably (again, please, I don't mean anything bad, I blame the system, no the poor people who were forced to migrate). It most often shows that the best we can do is to get them housing, some money, and really focus on providing excellent, inclusive education for their children. I know it's harsh, but that's what I have seen with my very own eyes.

My personal opinion, based on tens of interviews I had with the Chechens, Palestinians, Turks, Iraqis, Somalis and Sudanese is that they are deprived of the social aspects of life, not the economic ones. They look around and they can see you go to Starbucks, but they can't. They can't go to a store, to the movies, to read a book, drink tea and enjoy themselves. They cannot take a phone and call a friend to chat and gossip, organise a party or put on nice cloths and make-up. That's what's really painful when you are surrounded and immersed in out consumptionis culture. They want to have a share in that as well. You could say, well, first you have to work, then you can play and have fun. But it is VERY possible thay they will never get to the point when they can earn for similar consumption of goods and culture. And then they are doomed to misery, poverty, and all bad stuff you hear on CNN.

I don't want to discourage you from teaching programming. It's a great idea. But I just want to draw your attention to that maybe it would be nice to take them to a park, drink coffee, cook together, learn their names and pronounce them properly (very important), learn a few phrases in their languages, encourage your friends to also build social relations with them,

tl,dr: be interested in them as human beings.

(p.s.: in general the demographics of the migrants is an interesting topic in its own right, I think that those who seek asylum in Europe these days are often from the "middle class" in their countries of origin, often more progressive, more open-minded, better educated than the general "Western-White" public thinks. It's the long cultivated view of the alien "barbarian hordes". Some of them will do very well - if they had a grocery in Bagdad, they will manage in Stockholm. If they were accountants back in Egipt, they will open offices in Birmingham. These will not need to learn to code and start from scratch).