technofire

Jeremy Kun, who writes the "Math ∩ Programming" blog,[1] recently published a book, "A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics,"[2] that seems to leverage the conceptual knowledge programmers already have to help them learn serious math. There also are sections in the book on math culture which seems interesting, something I haven't seen elsewhere.

[1] https://jeremykun.com/

[2] https://pimbook.org/

The study incorporated many more variables than whether marijuana was legal in each state, including demographic factors, so this amounts to a controlled experiment.

> the prosperous part of the Southeast

For those of us who are unfamiliar or ignorant about this, which parts of the Southeast are most prosperous?

Yes, it's called SQL*Plus. Take the time to learn it!

> Users want websites to be fast and less annoying.

Well, pulling some JSON via AJAX and updating a small part of the page is faster than reloading the entire thing.

I think this attitude is silly. Finance academics and banking executives (i.e. Jamie Dimon) who have spent their entire lives studying finance and working in banking are still grappling with this question. Are they also not ready?

Well, one theory is that the valuation of bitcoin is largely unrelated to the systematic overvaluation of companies that ostensibly would be the reason behind a crash. Thus when the market start revisiting its value of stocks, this doesn't affect the value of cryptocurrencies.

Does anyone else find it surprising and remarkable that Paul Tudor Jones' monospaced letter is perfectly flush on the left and right margins with apparently no hyphenation nor additional inserted spaces within the lines? Surely this did not happen by coincidence (?).

> Why would gambling on a companies future ever help anyone

Most transactions in the market are not gambling. Trades happen, yes, but that is because the prospects of companies are continually changing. When it became apparent pretty much everyone would move to Netflix and streaming video, would you want to continue holding Blockbuster stock? No; you would want to sell it.

People who simply "gamble" in the market lose money about as often as they gain it, and soon stop. Hedge funds and mutual funds generally try to invest in shares on a longer-term basis rather than continually trading them; trading incurs transaction costs, and if an investment was correct and is generating better-than-benchmark returns there is no reason to sell it.

The "day trading" books you might see at your local Barnes and Noble are get-rich-quick books and are not representative of the actual professional investment industry.

> despite the fact you can directly purchase their shares

Actually, most people could not directly purchase their shares if we didn't have a stock market. Companies in general would be owned only by relatively wealthy people or by other companies. Stock markets allow more ordinary people to share in the profits of companies. They democratize the ownership of the means of production in society.

> (which they offered to gain temporary income to make purchases before their cash flow allowed)

The income raised by stock offerings is not temporary; it is not a loan to be paid back. That capital becomes part of the company. The company might use that to purchase assets that stay part of the company or to buy inventory which it will then sell resulting in getting that money back plus profit.

> Once the business sells a portion to investors, those portions can be resold.

Without a stock market, they could not be resold without great difficulty. Investor A, who wanted to sell his share, perhaps after new management had taken over and was now driving the company into the ground, would have to find other another investor, Investor B, to buy it, and if Investor B didn't want to purchase the exact amount Investor A was selling at a mutually agreeable price, Investor A would have to begin a new search to sell the remainder of his share. This is one way liquity is such a big help.

> making me wonder how it was ever allowed.

The buying and selling of things has never needed to be explicitly allowed; in most modern nations, individuals are free to buy and sell things they own.

I guess I see these as 2 sides of the same coin; if the knowledge was properly spread via training and easy-to-use documentation, the junior developers would not need to interrupt much during the day.

> you should at least try and do some time in SV / Seattle etc.

I'm curious to know what your current thoughts are behind this. As someone who intentionally has steered clear of both those areas in order to try to optimize financially I sometimes wonder whether I'm missing out on something. Obviously one can learn more from better engineers, but don't the brightest ideas from the brightest engineers wind up being written about online and/or presented at conferences at user groups and broadcast across the Internet? Or does having the opportunity to put time into a name-brand tech company for a while really increase lifelong salary or career prospects sufficiently to recover the money thrown away on rent there? Or is there really sufficient value in serendipitous collaboration/socialization to justify moving to one of these places? Is there some other question I've overlooked?

While I'm not trying to be gratuitously harsh, I ask what have any of the adjunct lecturers in this article really contributed to the world? Not much in my opinion. You don't need someone with a doctorate to teach a student critical thinking. These people are living in a fantasy land and are mentally ill; who becomes homeless, putting any children they have at financial risk, or lives in a car or a dilapidated mobile home with no shower, and doesn't get the clue that what they're doing is stupid and that they should get a real job and start working up the ladder? Can they not get a real job and teach evening classes as adjuncts like many of their peers do at community colleges across the country? Oh no, they're "dedicated to scholarship" and have "taken a vow of poverty." Give me a break. These people have superman complexes. We should stop glorifying them and glorifying academia. Lectures came about back when most people were illiterate and printed books were scarce and that was the most effective way to get the knowledge out to the students. We have books and a literate populace now, and of course the Internet. The United States is one of the only places that glorify and sentimentalizes higher education so acutely; visiting students from other countries have remarked that universities here are basically vacation resorts for rich people. Modern academia is a joke.

> Almost any reasonable paying job other than programmer require actual training and education.

Interesting; this contrasts with the claim of liberal arts graduates who maintain that simply being competent critical thinkers is all that's required for almost any job.

> punishing the person who's worked to build up some knowledge. ... I disagree that the solution is to let everyone interrupt the one who is trying to get stuff done.

In essence we are talking about training new people and so this opinion seems selfish and unethical with respect to one's obligation to the firm.

The senior person should sacrifice some productivity until the new people are up to speed so that eventually the team has 5 senior people instead of one. If the new people are forced to figure out everything on their own, they might be only 5% as productive as they could be for perhaps their first 1-2 years. If the senior person simply gave up 20% of his time in order to answer questions for the first couple months, these 5 new guys likely would be closer to 80% productivity, representing a huge net gain in aggregate.

> just because Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson aren't married it doesn't mean they aren't committed to each other and their children.

From the article:

"The decline in marriage was not offset by more couples living together."

FYI, LinkedIn has somewhat fine-grained email/notification configuration so you can stop these at the source.

Have a look at Me (menu) > Settings & Privacy > Communications (tab) > Email frequency (controls not only overall frequency but frequency per message type, i.e. group message notifications, invitations, job notifications, connection update notifications, etc.).

Also, you can entirely disable classes of notifications you no longer want to receive/see (even when you're viewing the site) by going to the Notifications tab, then clicking the context menu ("...") on a given notification and selecting "Turn off" (stop receiving this type of notification) or "Unfollow" (stop receiving updates from the given source).

Agreed. Certainly nobody should be hiring based principally on a candidate's alma mater. A candidate should be interviewed to find out that they know what they need to know and have the skills required. Really, college education is mostly irrelevant in practice.

The flaw is shown here:

https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/38803/is-norber...

It was known long before 19 days, actually within a week of publication:

https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/38803/is-norber...

He has two math degrees from decent (R1, AAU) schools, so I wouldn't say it's a huge leap; he probably has better training for modern AI than most people working in the area with CS degrees.

> All of this inevitably leads to a bunch of pissed off devs. The ones that are happy to eat it become the golden boys and get promotions.

The question asks about behavior that management repeatedly makes. If management repeatedly makes these mistakes, then the mistakes should become expectations, so one should simply accept them and understand that they are part of the game being played. If they are expected behaviors, being "pissed" about them simply is foolish.

Of course, by "accept them" I don't mean one should never try to influence or change the situation, but reacting emotionally rather than rationally is silly. Even if there are no upward-feedback or 360 review procedures in place at the workplace, one can articulate these concerns more diplomatically (less offensively) and send out an email requesting that they be considered. One can even illustrate and trace through how such mistakes have impacted recent projects.

It seems to me that the ones "happy to eat it" simply understand that others have limitations and make mistakes and will try to make the best of the situation. It sounds to me like such people indeed deserve the promotions more than people who bring anger to bear on their work.

The funding implies a requirement that you will work on research, which for most people would preclude working a full-time software engineering job. Assuming a full-time job would bring in more income than the tuition plus stipend, when we take opportunity cost into account, pursuing the OMSCS while working full time still is financially less expensive.

One reason CEOs are paid so much is to offset the risk involved in accepting the position. If a CEO performs poorly, that's often the end of their career, so the high compensation makes that gamble more acceptable.

"Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most would-be startup hubs." --Paul Graham, 2016[1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html

> as well as the characters

While I cannot recommend any books on physics itself, I can recommend a couple light reads on Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist (links below). Each is structured as a series of short autobiographical stories so they're very easy reads that shed light on some of Feynman's life, both within and without academia.

[1] Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)

http://amzn.to/2gTVXa5

[2] "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character

http://amzn.to/2gTWfOd

Very cool! When you say you "collect the data from Amazon," are you scraping this or using an API? If the latter, which API and where can I go to read about it? I also would love to be able to query this kind of information from Amazon.

I have 2 recommendations:

1. "Thinking Strategically," written by a professor at the Yale School of Management and an economics professor at Princeton.[1]

This one is basically a primer on game theory, which I think would be useful for you particularly if you are facing off someone at work. It gets you thinking about incentives of each party and figuring out the different ways situations could play out.

2. "The First 90 Days," published by Harvard Business Review Press.[2]

Obviously, it's targeted at those transitioning into a new leadership position, but in my opinion the strategies can apply even to those who are in incumbent positions as it's never too late to turn the page and start taking a fresh approach or step up one's level of effort at work.

It includes an actionable plan for feeling out the pain points of others you need to impress and tackling their problems in a visible manner. This one is less about politics per se but more about being a very effective leader in a highly visible manner, which can help one to move up the ladder.

[1] http://amzn.to/2vwXwhH

[2] http://amzn.to/2uLYXLI

Perhaps a better question is "Why is anything normally distributed?" It appears originally to have been a simplification to make the math more convenient:

As Rand Wilcox reports, "Why did Gauss assume that a plot of many observations would be symmetric around some point? Again, the answer does not stem from any empirical argument, but rather a convenient assumption that was in vogue at the time. This assumption can be traced back to the first half of the 18th century and is due to Thomas Simpson. Circa 1755, Thomas Bayes argued that there is no particular reason for assuming symmetry, Simpson recognized and acknowledged the merit of Bayes's argument, but it was unclear how to make any mathematical progress if asymmetry is allowed." (Wilcox, p. 4)

Wilcox, R. (2010). Fundamentals of modern statistical methods: Substantially improving power and accuracy (2nd ed.). New York, New York: Springer.[1]

[1] http://amzn.to/2tkMRoI

O'Reilly just published an updated edition of their bestseller on Bitcoin technology, "Mastering Bitcoin," earlier this month.[1]

For a more general/conceptual understanding of blockchain technology and its applications, including non-cryptocurrency applications, "Blockchain Revolution" is a good read.[2]

[1] Mastering Bitcoin http://amzn.to/2uewdK9

[2] Blockchain Revolution http://amzn.to/2vniXSf