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I agree. The author uses technical jargon but is clearly intending the reader to be non-technical. Otherwise, footnote 1 should just be in the main text. The rhetorical effect, intended or otherwise, is an appeal to (the author's) authority. As you say, the author then switches to a topic he likely much less expertise in (housing prices, inflation, etc.) while relying on the reader to believe that this new problem shares some mathematical foundations with the original set of problems.

Perry Mehrling's "Money and Banking" [1]. What I enjoyed about this course is that Mehrling focuses on how the economy works _mechanistically_, on what is actually happening on balance sheets throughout the economy. For me, this really pulled back the curtain on exactly the stuff you mention above (interest rates, central banks, QE).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNEouYM5wRE&list=PLSuwqsAnJM...

Also: https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd

I don't know if Kasparov is right, but I disagree that he is not a careful thinker. He has been thinking about and writing about the dangerous of Putinism for years. He published "Winter Is Coming" nearly 7 years ago now. He wrote then (p. 9): "Giving a dictator what he wants never stops him from wanting more; it convinces him you aren't strong enough to stop him from taking what he wants." You may disagree with his thinking, but it is certainly thought-through and consistent.

I'd frame it this way: a good senior researcher knows when to give a junior researcher the question or not. First-year grad student? Pair them off with a postdoc for fast iterating on an established project. Fourth-year grad student? Push them by letting them flounder a bit and learn to find their own questions.

I agree that in practice, this simply varies a lot by discipline and advisor.

Put differently, "affordable housing" and "housing as investment" are at odds. People don't acknowledge this tension enough, I suspect because many people want to switch to the housing-as-investment team.

Probabilistic programming uses computer science techniques to do automated statistical modeling. For example, imagine I have a coin, and I want to discover if it is biased, i.e. if it lands on heads more often than tails. In a probabilistic programming framework, I can express my model as a simple Bernoulli model, `x ~ Bernoulli(p)`, and then automatically estimate the bias parameter `p` given some data (do "inference").

You can easily do this calculation by hand or in Python, but this does not generalize to more complex real-world scenarios. For complex probabilistic models, we must rely on numerical approximations. MCMC is just one algorithm for doing this approximate inference. Another popular technique is called variational inference [2]. Another commenter mentioned HMC [3], which is just a specific instance of MCMC.

[1] https://mc-stan.org/

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.00670

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.1901

I do this with clothes. You can buy a good pair of hiking shoes or a lightweight waterproof jacket for the same price as design-oriented goods. Why pay Nike for a logo when I can pay Salomon for durability and tread? Same thing with luggage: I buy cycling oriented backpacks and duffle bags because they’re strong and waterproof.

The author's question reminds me of a pivotal scene in "American History X". Sweeney, a black high school principal, visits Derek, his former student and a white supremacist who is in jail for murder. Derek has just been hospitalized by other white people in a prison gang, and Sweeney asks Derek, "Has anything you've done made your life better?" In my own words, what is the point of anger if it does not result in better outcomes?

I live in NYC. I'd be happy to use an app like this the vast majority of the time and then switch to Uber/Lyft when traveling.

Sure. My point was only that Mensa is not _just_ a club about a shared interest, which was implied by the examples given by the person I responded to. I suspect it's the cutoff that people don't like.

Maybe this analogy will help: joining a high-IQ club is not like joining just any athletic club. It's like joining an athletic club that's restricted based on a metric. What if you wanted to join a hiking club in your area but found out the only way to join was to prove you hiked X mountains first? I could see why that would turn some people off. It's not the interests; it's the cutoff.

The title of the essay is "Write Simply." Furthermore, the second sentence is more general than the first:

> That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.

That is a general claim. I agree that it is often good advice, but there are caveats which Graham does not provide.

I don't see the contradiction or confusion implied by "funny". You cannot yell "fire" in a crowded building when there is no fire. This is why it is a classic example of reasonable limitations to free speech.

I was confused by this. It is:

> cat = ''.join

Beat me to it. And according to this report, London currently has 46 free ICU beds.

I agree. A few years ago, I read “The Conquest of Happiness” by B. Russell, and he made a compelling argument that living a boring life may be a prerequisite for great work in certain fields. One can imagine that in 500 years, we’ll still talk about results from Terry Tao—who I suspect is boring and conventional in many ways—while totally forgetting the work of exciting and controversial thinkers today.

I think OP’s point is that stardom in certain domains, e.g. sports, can pay for itself via merchandise, ticket sales, advertising. OP is arguing that this isn’t really true in programming.

> Lue says the soft no should be only about three sentences long. A common mistake, she says, is giving too much of an explanation or being over-apologetic.

I used to over-explain in these situations. The advice that finally changed my behavior was this: only explain yourself if you're willing to negotiate, if new information might actually change your answer. Otherwise, the reason is usually irrelevant, and you only open yourself up to a discussion.

That's a nice way to think about, and it reminds me of Nassim Taleb's "antifragile" thesis [1]. Basically, the world is more random than you think, and to operate rationally under uncertainty, you need to be open-minded about opportunities and risks with huge asymmetries. Fragile systems are often very successful for a long time because they ignore hidden risks and then collapse due to the unexpected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility

If you don’t care about mobile, Anno [1] is nice. It’s very simple; just a web-based UI for Markdown files. There’s an okay-ish PDF feature as well.

[1] https://github.com/gwgundersen/anno

"Net zero"?

A few years ago, Michael I. Jordan did an AMA on Reddit and discussed this distinction as well. Maybe you'll find it interesting as a counterpoint [1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2fxi6v/ama...

(1) From a branding perspective, I don't know how much it matters. (2) e.g. If they're using my location data, they're terrible at it.

DuckDuckGo's rise feels like textbook "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. By prioritizing privacy, something Google can't do because all the institutional values are misaligned with that goal, DDG were able to make headway into a niche market. Now they're established, and their results are getting better and better, even in the broader market. For example, I use DDG mostly because their results are visually easier to parse. It remains to be seen if they'll ever beat Google at their own search game, but Google certainly feels vulnerable for the first time in many years.

Not an application, but this my favorite explanation of SVD:

http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2018/12/10/svd/

It's such an important operation that I'd say understanding it changes how you understand a lot of linear algebra. That Kun post is also good.

Right? Feels like an absurdly low-effort attempt at "thought leadership" with easily made connections to recently popular topics like Hamming and that ML guide. As a researcher, I have also thought about the similarities between starting a lab / research agenda and a startup, but this is a superficial analysis.

Can anyone who uses cross-referencing speak to the benefits? I take notes using a simple web server-based Markdown editor and organize them with directories. I link between files occasionally using URLs. Does quick-linking between files or graph views really help? Any examples?

This topic reminds me of Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing" [1]. The book links the attention economy with the loss of public space in ways that I had never considered but now believe to be true.

Consider two thoughts. First, a mall is not a true public space. It is a branded, controlled experience designed for shopping. For many teenagers in America, the mall is a default hang out space—or at least was when I was a kid. Second, today you can easily see an ad on your phone before you say hello to your partner or kids, before you go outside, before you use the bathroom.

Underpinning these issues is the gnawing feeling, for many people, that we must be _more productive_. Time is money. Space is money. You should be doing something or, if you must do nothing, do nothing so that you can do something more later. Did you know that these CEOs read this many books this year? This successful person mediates an hour a day. What have you shipped today?

Her solution is not to delete your social media accounts, throw out your smart phone, and disappear into the woods. Her solution is to ground yourself. Watch birds. Learn about who lived on the land before you. Talk to your neighbors. Walk down a river. Get involved in local politics. This process of remembering that you're a physical being in a physical place, that you live in a real community, is a reminder that your life is interdependent upon everything around you.

I'm not quite sure how this is related to public housing, but I suspect it is, e.g. this article's main theme is that these public spaces grew out of labor movements that also fought for things like the 8-hour work day.

[1] http://www.jennyodell.com/writing.html