christofd

nice find! amazing guy.

A varied selection:

Jazzanova

Old Blue Note Jazz stuff

Glenn Gould Goldberg Variations (1. version 1955)

Bach Cello Suites (Pierre Fournier)

Minimal Electronica

Daft Punk/ Justice/ Etienne de Crecy (French Electro)

Drum n' Bass (old Roni Size stuff - New Forms/ V Label)

almost forgot: Giles Peterson's monthly podcasts

this isn't cool. in the last ten years civil rights have been diminished.

Back a while ago I submitted an idea, that maybe there are herd (mob) effects on comment threads happening.

This should do the trick (driving the long tail).

I don't mind talking about trees.

The bigger picture behind this concept is urban planning, which is a huge issue to be fixed in the U.S. (if you want sustainable development).

Hmm... there is a point where principle matters more than money. A company is not just a chunk of cash... how can you motivate people to spend their life with a company when it's just a payout? I grew up in Europe and there is something about taking a stance (if you can afford to). I like Jason Fried's general idea to focus on building good products.

Yup. That's why I moved to Canada for a while at least. Want to try out the so-called freedom you guys in North-America have. Pros and cons.

EXAMPLE: 1/2 h ago somebody stole my mountainbike right out of my garage. Here in North America nobody saw the guy. In Germany, usually the neighborhood widow next door lady would have seen the guy looking through the kitchen window.

The U.S. needs the technologies and the explicit and implicit fabric of rules that Europe uses to govern people in crowded areas (hint: it works! go on a visit).

Individualism doesn't work anymore in the U.S. - not in litigation, healthcare, transportation, crime, city planning etc. The U.S. needs to become more European.

My two cents.

I'll decipher this: if the U.S. would have effective city planning, crime prevention and a social welfare system, there'd be less bad neighborhoods to worry about and in result less crime. Further, if employers would actually hire people for longer periods of time then longer standing communities of people could form where several generations would know what's going on in the neighborhood. Further, if you would add good public transportation and kids who know how to ride on a bicycle, you would finally have European conditions => kids could go to school on their own.

Don't agree! I've cracked down on eating out for a month and lived off pasta and vegetables. You can't get a meal for $3 at McD. but you can eat for $ 1 for the day making your own food. It's an interesting experiment!

This excludes meat and dairy products though.

Agreed, most of these discussions lack rigor.

ah, thanks for the info!

No, Economics is very much part of the picture. Economics is not philosophy or religion but optimization under conditions of scarcity. As long as we remain metrics driven there's nothing wrong with talking optimization.

My two cents.

Well put! The basic models of Econ were built on physics envy. They built models on a fairly artificial set of assumptions that use calculus. Poppycock.

Hmmm... with break-throughs in current materials science, like super light-weight composites, there might be a way to build a structure strong and light enough.

Would be a cool project for a research lab with funding and people.

As I understand - the issue is that WordPress allows in-browser editing of PHP code.

If you only allow people to edit standard HTML, then this issue would go away.

Hmm... they have the capability of scientists: take current financial theory, e.g. Journal of Finance... these guys are high caliber mathematicians and physicists...

Also, the work done in Econometrics and Statistics in the field is totally solid. So, I wouldn't say they're not scientists. Or take Game Theory etc. - a lot of fields in Econ could just as well be in AI.

Anyway, macro's set of classical assumptions of modeling aggregate decisions based on rationality/ price-taking is too simple. Eventually we'll have to embrace more ideas out of complex systems analysis... but then all those neat macro formulas might not work out so well.

My two cents.

My basic CS stuff:

Still at 'Real World Haskell'...and still not through the Monads part

Programming Clojure, started reading

Chris Okasaki's Thesis on 'Functional Data Structures'

O'Reilly's 'Algorithms in a Nutshell'

'Collective Intelligence', T. Segaran, O'Reilly

Some old Isaac Asimov books I found in my Landlord's cellar

R. L. Stevenson, re-reading 'Treasure Island' on Google Books

Seconded - this is a million dollar idea! Well defined niche, great product, very useful, very catchy name and branding (totally straight forward) - can't get any better than this.

Not sure how hard it is to create a Mac OS X version as well, but that would probably not be the initial target audience.

Agreed. It took way too long for economists to integrate cognitive bias and social effects on rational decision making. Further, they have traditionally not integrated tools from analyzing networks, common in complex systems analysis.

Economics should basically rebrand itself as a subfield of complex systems analysis.

I studied Econ for a long time and came away rather frustrated with the limited toolset. Statistics, Computer Science, Math and Physics have better tools available.

Very nice interface design :)

No, in the example on this thread Laurent, a Belgian programmer, charged $ 500 USD for the whole solution, the whole shebang. (He could have just given it away for free, since the main point was to establish a reference)

Although, I admit... this example is really just a CRUD app, with no advanced server back end.

Well, Laurent charged only $ 500 USD for his solution (but that's an anomaly).

If you are serious about web apps, then scaling the back end comes into play, which means getting into distributed systems. Networking, security and SysAdmin become relevant as well.

I think it's fair to charge up to $100K with a college education and/or work experience in the field. Other professions do so as well.

Go pick on other professions: i.e. banker bonuses, real estate commissions, union rates, lawyer rates etc.

ah, steak and strippers :)

That's in british pounds, not USD.

Addition: did the math at www.oanda.com (currency conversion). GBP is LESS than what I thought: 1.63842 USD.

So, that's 900 bucks a day, resulting in $ 110-120 USD/ hour.

You made a triple-language supported database application with immaculate crisp graphic design and well thought-out layout for $500 dollars??? Your solution btw is about as good as it gets for a small-biz website.

I second the opinion that your pricing is off by one or two orders of magnitude.

Yahoo! was initially a funny spelling before people got used to it. Same with the word Google (before 1999 I would have not known how to spell that).

I'm still waiting on the Monads chapter in LYAH :)

Yeah, LYSE is a great idea... now we need an OCaml version as well.

While I play a fair bit of J.S. Bach material in my free time, I find that listening to Bach over long periods of time rather depressing. It builds a heavy darker mood.

Ambient & lighter Electronica is easier on the mood and the repetitive patterns help pacing myself (it also works for working out/ running). Jazz gets too involved; HipHop as well; Rock has dominant vocals that grab attention.

The basics of devising algorithmic strategies come from the field of Market Microstructure in Finance/Economics.

I took a graduate level course on it (math prof. from Stanford).

I found a decent graduate level course syllabus with all the main literature and links to literature in it:

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jhasbrou/Teaching/2006%20Fall%20...

One of the main models is the Kyle model: Kyle, Albert S., 1985, Continuous auctions and insider trading. Econometrica 53, 1315-1336 (http://www.jstor.org/pss/1913210)

Very interesting stuff!