Sadly, no. I think he used to do it every couple of years (the course was never listed with him as the faculty member to avoid over-enrollment) but I might have been in one of the last classes he did. As far as I know, he hasn't done it since the pandemic started.
Has anyone here actually written a large app using data star? How does it compare with react in managing code complexity? Dealing with many concurrent users? can you tell us about your experience?
military spending being dead weight is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in a long time. Do you know nothing about US, British, and Dutch history?
The main way the US, UK, and the Netherlands historically became rich was through maritime trade. Maritime trade was basically only possible due to those countries' military expenditures on having strong navies. I know the media makes a big focus on US special forces and other things, but the US Navy is basically the most important and foundational part of all of the US military power. The US and Allies were always interested in maintaining freedom of navigation and trade at the seas.
Just take a look at how much money was lost due to trade shipping costs due to the Houthis in Yemen. Consider that today it's cheaper than ever to ship things, and even today, it was so terrible. Shipping by land is terrible. The only historically economically feasible way to do maritime trade has been with Navies to provide protection from pirates.
Hm. Not quite right. Regular shareholders don't like dividends. It means you have an immediate tax liability so you are paying taxes twice. The company paid taxes, and now you have to pay taxes. Then that money has to be invested elsewhere eventually incurring another tax event.
It's much better to have the company buy shares back. That way the stock price goes up. You then only face the tax event once you sell the stock later in the future. So you just avoided a tax event.
The reason for dividends is that pension funds and the like do like dividends for whatever reasons.
Individual investors and people who have a long term approach like Warren Buffet are against dividends.
I have the same issue. I personally recommend to do "things that don't scale". Just continue to pump out features and make more money. Do not worry at all about scaling, in fact, ignore it.
Why?
1) It's extremely unlikely that you will actually hit a major issue because of scale or wrong software architecture which will bring your system down
2) Even if that's the case, it will probably be easy to fix it when it happens because the issue will be clear, whereas in hindsight you are trying to solve 1000 architecture issues without actually knowing what will come up
3) Even facebook and google probably had problems in the beginning of their startup life. Even if your system crashes and is down for a day or two (for non mission critical apps obviously), it's not the end of the day, nor will in matter in the medium or long term, and probably not even in the short term. I can tell you I worked at a unicorn startup with government and bank clients which are usually the most strict, and that kind of stuff happened all the time... so unless it's mission critical and/or you are dealing with extremely strict customers, it doesn't make a difference
4) After coding a bunch of features, patterns emerge by themselves. Very often I do early optimizations that end up not actually being so useful since I have to add new features that work in a way the current well thought of architecture doesn't allow. I think I got it from Joshua Bloch's book or ppt/pdf on designing APIs that it's better to actually work with 3 (magic number, but I attest from personal experience that it should really be a minimum) actual use cases before designing an API. Same for architecture, by focusing on it before the code, it ends up having to change later on anyways, and we end up optimizing for non issues and loosing flexibility where it is needed. However, after you code enough features, you see where you've repeated yourself, that's not a major insight, and abstracting those or encapsulating those repetitions that happen 3+ times is now trivial. You can then choose when you code your Xth (s.t. X>3) feature and you've encapsulated the repetitive code whether to refactor the first 3 features to use the new implemented encapsulation or just leave it as is because a) it takes time to refactor and b) if it works, don't fix it, though you may prefer to simply and quickly replace the repetitive code by whatever construct you made to keep the code consistent and so that the code itself should serve as an example of implementing features for yourself or other programmers in the future.
5) To continue on the 4th point, doing the architecture without knowing how the system will evolve (which is really impossible in software, we do not know how customers will react to features beforehand and what the needs will be) is basically impossible. I think that's where the stress comes from: You want the architecture to be good, but there's always a "it could be like this" "or the need could be different like that" "or we could have 5 different needs". It's endless, the software can evolve in so many ways and it's impossible to predict, so which way should you optimize? And each design takes time, hence the stress: you don't ave enough mental/time/etc resources to deal with all the potential needs. However, if you switch that to "I don't need to solve it before it comes up" all the stress goes away, and you can just try out new features.
If you do this, your revenue will (hopefully) grow, you will be more productive, your system will end up more robust and have better architecture (because it's always easy in hindsight and usually impossible beforehand), you will avoid stress, and be happier!
Happy coding, all the best :)
PS: The examples are the same usually for horizontal or vertical scaling and splitting things into microservices, and for a bunch of issues, I just picked a simple idea, but I do believe it's a general approach what I said in point 4.
> 1) It's extremely unlikely that you will actually hit a major issue because of scale or wrong software architecture which will bring your system down
that's definitely not the case. In a side project, usually bad architectural decisions are the ones that makes your programming effort more difficult. Refactoring is only a good reason (for side projects) if that will help you ship faster with better quality.
Interesting, can you please share anything, besides that "professional consensus" is different, on what is the problem with the Austrian view of central banks? You realize that by saying "Professional consensus" in a field of study, not practice, is worthless by definition?
Not really, no. You're both correct that I offer no substantive arguments against austrian economics, ABC theory, or their critique of central banks.
I'm not a professional economist. I honestly know very little about the subject (apart from taking intermediate micro / macro and having had an interest in the subject since childhood). I don't think I could argue against the view that "climate change is a hoax" either, because I don't really understand the science. There are many things in my life that I believe despite not being a PhD in the field - and yes, a lot of it relies on appeals to authority and my impression of the world, which we could disagree on. I'm just advocating that we all share a bit of humility when it comes to highly technical topics, and in doing so we should probably defer more to academic consensus. Otherwise, it's essentially like debating religions - fun perhaps, but no one really knows what they're talking about.
I think we can both agree with the statement that academic economists by and large dismiss Austrian economics. If not, let me know, and I'd be happy to debate that point. Of course, "Austrian" economists have made many meaningful contributions to the field, e.g. Menger's marginal revolution, Bohm-Bawerk's work, Schumpeter's creative destruction, etc. Hayek was a well regarded political and economic thinker.
However, modern day austrian economics is essentially a think tank that espouses a very hardcore version of libertarianism - claiming that modern economics is a farce, empirical methods are useless, and that inflation is the devil and we need to return to the gold standard. I remember reading Rothbard's The Case Against the Fed and parroting many of the points, having been impassioned by Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign. I remember railing against the Fed and its loose monetary policy, absolutely sure that inflation was coming post 2008 (it did not).
I can't really provide a detailed takedown of Austrian economics, again, because I'm not an economist. All I have is my life experiences of having believed in it ardently, and then not, and then asking myself why I was ever convinced in the first place. Bryan Kaplan, another extremely libertarian / ancap economist, has a critique here that some might find influential: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm. But most serious economists don't even address it, presumably because it's not a part of academic discourse at all. More pop economists from across the spectrum, like Krugman and Friedman, both disparaged it of course.
The thing to be wary about is that Austrian economics is essentially ignored by mainstream economists, but Austrian believers are extremely passionate and have built up a huge online presence - led by a handful of non-economist political bloggers. So if you google austrian economics, you'll find pages and pages of Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, etc. It's very easy to fall down the rabbit hole. Meanwhile, academic economists are doing research, not creating pages and pages of "austrian economics is pseudoscience" articles. Listen, if you want to be a libertarian, that's fine by me - but upholding austrian economics to help justify your political beliefs seems a bit unnecessary to me.
Hey guys, I just built this app to compare javascript frameworks where people can vote on different ideas. Let me know what you think and any ideas you have!
I thought it would be good to have clarity on what many people think on how the frameworks compare rather than just having blogposts with individual opinions. This can aggregate what peoples' thoughts are and the arguments with the most votes are shown at the top.
IMHO you have to kill all the regulation and the government mafia (yeah, that's what it is) preventing new businesses.
I know of many people that have not started companies in the US because of the limitations for immigration (these people were computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, some undergrad, some with PhDs).
Examples abound. Beer is one that I like since I tried to start a brewery with a few chemical engineering friends a while back in Georgia. There is a regulation that breweries can only sell to distributors, and distributors can only sell to retail stores, and retail stores, pubs, and restaurants are the only entities allowed to sell alcohol. Heck, if you brew your own beer and it's more than 50 gallons a year (that's 9 batches) you can go to jail for up to 20 years. We stopped our project because of the ridiculous regulations. We had an idea of how bad it was going in, but it was beyond our expectations. I met more than 200 people that brewed on a consistent basis much superior beers than 90% of what you can get in the market (the 10% were imports), who would love to start a brewery but couldn't. They worked in the different layers of the distributors and restaurants, with their ideas crushed.
This was just an example, in nearly every industry, including agriculture and manufacturing, this is the case.
You want innovation, you have to fight against the ever growing crony government you have that plays special favors to each industry in countless ways to go towards a free market and allow competition. There are no incentives to innovate. You may say my beer example is outdated, well look at Dodd Frank with the banking industry, look at the federal reserve system which is destroying the money markets and causing the financial bubbles. Peter Thiel mentions that technological innovation is a way to leave recessions faster. He knows how to avoid them altogether, but suggesting ending the federal reserve is so politically incorrect (ever heard a democrat or republican even talk about this who is not alienated by his own party) that it has become a waste of time.
The free market is the answer. There is more regulation in the US than in Sweden by the way, which is usually quoted as a Socialist state. The US is far more regulated than Sweden, even in healthcare and education!
