technofire's comments

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...