1,795 karma · joined March 14, 2019
Haha!
Of course setting "shrinking the economy" as a goal isn't going to do much good. But "shrinking parts of the economy" might be necessary for a safe and healthy future. And whether the parts that don't need to be shrunk will still provide enough growth to end up with overall economic growth is hard to say (i.e. a safe and healthy future might require some sacrifices compared to the status quo).
Oversimplifying, growth can come from increasing the resources you use or the efficiency with which you use them. The former might not be something that we can keep doing at the current rate (and we might need to reduce some resource usage). The latter is pretty much a pure win.
Similarly, aggregate growth can come from hypergrowth in a small part of an otherwise stagnant population. And aggregate degrowth can come from modest growth in part of the population and shrinkage in another part. So just setting "aggregate growth" as your target is just as naive as setting "shrinking the economy" as a goal as it might not have the results we collectively want.
I went through Software Foundations [0] (Coq) which was fun and interesting but I can't say I ever really applied what I used there in software (I did get more comfortable with induction proofs).
You're mentioning Lean with Agda and Idris - is Lean usable as a general purpose language? I've been curious about Lean but I got the impression it sort of steps away from Haskell's legacy in terms of syntax and the like (unlike Agda and Idris) so was concerned it would be a large investment and wouldn't add much to what I've learned from Coq.
I'd love any insights on what's a useful way to learn more in the area of dependent types for a working engineer today.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I think a large part of running a successful business is having a well defined niche / problem you solve. Getting to that point comes with a bunch of barriers and risks, and joining an organization that has that already figured out seems like it can have some advantages?
Another great online course that I recently took is this one on parallel computing [1]. It's not on Coursera/EdX but uses a custom platform, and I would say it goes beyond "fill in the blanks", the assignments are really challenging and have a lot of depth.
Compared to 5-10 years ago the trend is unfortunately definitely downwards though. A lot of great courses are archived and far fewer are being added than there were in the past.
You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.
That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that's how it ought to be.
And all at once, before you know it, you find you've swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. what's more, you aren't out of breath. That's important, too...” ― Michael Ende, Momo
Children also get exposed to much simpler language and get to learn a language more bottom up.
Also somehow my impression is that pronunciation/accent really is harder to adopt as an adult than as a child.
I speak Dutch to my daughter. My girlfriend speaks Croatian to her. My daughter goes to school in Spanish. Setup with grandparents is the same as with me and my girlfriend.
We're mostly consistent (though occasionally my daughter asks me to read something to her in Spanish or Croatian, and similar for my girlfriend). It generally just works, my daughter speaks Dutch, Croatian and Spanish well - she plays in Spanish, and sometimes answers in Spanish as well even if we speak our own language to her, but mostly she switches language based on context. Surprisingly (to us) she has absorbed a lot of English as well and generally understands what we're talking about, though we've made no particular effort to teach her that (she gets basic English in school, but it's not much, she's 3). Occasionally she uses a word from one language while speaking another, which can be funny because she does adjust the conjugation, so she'll apply Croatian cases to Dutch words and things like that.
I think it's an interesting question, how organizations should deal with this. I think my previous employer actually dealt with it quite well - for the issues I cared about I _was_ given the opportunity to express my opinions and also share them with the people who were in the positions for making decisions around these issues. I was generally listened to patiently and also got (sometimes unsatisfying) explanations for why the actual course of action was different. I was _not_ given the authority to make these decisions or push these issues (the ones outside my area of expertise) through. I ended up leaving the organization in quite a bit of frustration, which I think was probably unavoidable, but I learned a ton from this episode, and we're otherwise still on good terms (I help out with little things now and then).
(not exactly the effect in the video you responded to, but similar category)
1. https://learn.saylor.org/course/CS301
YMMV of course!
I completed the Data, Economics and Development Policy one around 2019 and it definitely contributed to a job / career switch (data science job at an NGO in the experimental economics space). The courses I took were highly applicable to that work and I'm fairly confident that they helped me get hired as well, some of the people running the organization were collaborators of the ones who set up the micromasters.
I completed the Manufacturing micromasters last year as part of learning and development during my job (different job, manufacturing in biotech). It gave me a lot of valuable perspective on monitoring and optimization of manufacturing processes and I learned some "Design of Experiments" theory that I later applied at work.
I'm currently in the last part of the Finance micromasters for my own interest. It's too early to say whether this will have much of a career impact, but I definitely perceive the skills I'm acquiring as valuable (basic accounting and NPV calculation are useful in many different corporate environments, and financial skills are helpful for planning retirement as well).
I think the programs have gotten a lot more expensive which might make it a harder decision, I didn't pay more than ~$1500 for any of these and each covers a lot of ground so I thought they were worth it. There are some technical glitches here and there with EdX but overall the quality of instruction is high.
The Finance one is the only one so far where I've had significant contact with peers, it's not easy to benefit from the social aspects of a degree with these programs. I think doing well in these programs gives you a good shot at getting into full degree programs on campus though (I got accepted into the Economics masters but it didn't fit my plans at the time). Obviously the full program is much more expensive (I think it was $40k-ish for the Econ one, $100k-ish for the Finance one).
Your mileage may vary - I really enjoyed the programs, they fed my curiosity and they came in useful so I have zero regrets about spending time and money on them.
This has been something that always seems a bit magical to me, when someone comes up with an obscure change of variables that completely simplifies the problem. I'd love to learn this in a more structured/rigorous way. Does anyone have any recommendations for picking this up?
There is another book somewhat derived from it (if I understand correctly) using Agda instead of Coq: https://plfa.github.io/
I haven't had the chance to go through it yet, but it's on my list - I think Agda (and as mentioned by another commenter, Idris) is likely to feel more like a programming language than Coq.
Bayesian approaches (e.g. optimization with Gaussian processes) tend to be very serial in nature: later sampling points are decided from the information you get earlier on. But these biological experiments can take days or weeks so you want to run them in parallel as much as possible. DoE is excellent for that.
I'm speccing out a D-optimal design as we speak (though I'm not sure this is what we will use for the particular project I'm on).
I also got a strong interest in programming 1998/1999-ish and also had only a Mac at home. I emailed the guy who authored a chess application (his email was in the splash screen) over our dial up connection. He told me I would need to learn C or C++ and I had no idea how to act on that (I was 8 or 9 at the time, living in a very rural area).
4 or 5 years later I got my own laptop and installed Linux on it. Then I started learning bash and tried (and failed) to install Linux From Scratch. That did get me to a point where I could program.
> being objectively inferior, in basically every way
Maybe one reason that you feel like there is a big issue to deal with, is the way you're framing this. In your framing, the scope of your conclusion goes quite a bit beyond what you can actually logically deduce from the available information.
If we look at the facts, we have 152 interns who had resume and interview skills that were objectively more suited to landing an internship at Jane Street than your resume and interview skills are (presumably - it doesn't sound like you've tried, so we're not actually sure). These people have probably been preparing for this for a while, and while there is a degree of objectivity to the way Jane Street looks at incoming profiles, it's along very specific axes (probability of success in their fintech firm), and it's not perfectly objective. You're massively overstating the scope of this, they don't measure superiority/inferiority along all possible axes.
Then you might counter - no, it's not only about resume and interview skills: clearly the 3 projects described on this page are beyond what I could do as an intern, and maybe even beyond what I can do after a few years of working experience. That would be a fair point - but note that these are 3 out of 152 projects, selected to impress and inspire outsiders, and you don't know how much guidance these interns got from more experienced folks while working on this either. On top of that, many of these interns may have been actively programming since they're 10, so effectively they might have double the programming experience you have - in which case their results make perfect sense, and you just need more time to polish your skills. So extrapolating what you see here to the full set of projects and drawing far reaching conclusions about the interns based on this small sample is probably not justified.
I'm sure that these Jane Street folks are generally very good at what they do and that it would be inspiring to see them work. But I think you can give yourself more credit and spend a little bit of effort focusing on things that you're good at that aren't measured in Jane Street interviews, because it's likely that on those axes you'd generally compare favorably to most of the cohort.